* * *
—
In March, Johnny visits a gypsy encampment, seven covered wagons and a tent, in a field near his school. The field is full of pussytoes in first bloom and knee-high Indian grass. Three beautiful red horses lift their heads to stare at him. Chickens scatter. Pigs grunt. Black pots hang over cooking fires. Skirts and trousers hang over bushes. A small girl with braids so long she could sit on them stares from inside a wagon.
A man in a battered hat takes his pipe from his mouth to nod at him. He points to the tent with the stem, blows a long stream of smoke into the air.
The palmist is tiny and old, her hair all gone to seed, her blouse soiled at the collar and cuffs. Her hands are rough, her eyes bloodshot, one front tooth is gone. A key hangs from a chain around her neck, a key so large and heavy looking, Johnny wonders it doesn’t unbalance her. Nothing in the tent would require such a key and he wonders about that, too.
The palmist looks at Johnny’s hand for a long time before speaking. As soon as he leaves her, he writes down, word for word, what she said. Memorizing speeches has never come as easy to him as to the other sons of Junius Booth, but this one is hard to forget.
Ah, you’ve a bad hand; the lines all cris-cras. It’s full enough of sorrow. Full of trouble. Trouble in plenty, everywhere I look. You’ll break hearts, they’ll be nothing to you. You’ll die young and leave plenty to mourn you, many to love you, too, but you’ll be rich, generous, and free with your money. You’re born under an unlucky star. You’ve got in your hand a thundering crowd of enemies—not one friend—you’ll make a bad end, and have plenty to love you afterwards. You’ll have a fast life—short, but a grand one. Now, young sir, I’ve never seen a worse hand, and I wish I hadn’t seen it, but every word I’ve told is true by the signs.
He reads this later to Rosalie and Asia. “I asked if she really expected me to pay her for this, but she took the money all right.”
His sisters rush to reassure him. “What tittle,” Asia says. “Sheep bleatings,” says Rosalie. They honestly don’t believe in this prophecy, but they feel sorry for him all the same. I wouldn’t want to get that fortune, they each secretly think, as if Johnny’s fate is entirely his own and nothing to do with them.
“She said I’d better become a missionary. She said she was glad not to be a young girl or she’d follow my pretty face anywhere,” Johnny says.
He carries the paper with her words on his person for a long time. At least it will be grand, he tells himself.
* * *
—
In April, the divorce is granted, with Father conceding that all of Adelaide’s accusations are true.
Also April. Father is performing in New York City. Waking from a nap, he refuses to go to the theater and be Richard III yet again. “You do it,” he tells Edwin. “I’m sick of it.”
Lacking an alternative, the manager sends Edwin onstage in his father’s hump, his father’s outsized costume. No warning has been given the audience, whose applause falls away into a puzzled silence. Edwin begins tentatively. He tries to imitate his father’s inflections, his gestures. To his horror, his boots squeak loudly on the wood planks. The audience laughs.
He performs his first scene rooted in place, just when his father would be striding the stage. He can think of nothing but that squeaking. Or maybe quacking. His boots sound like a duck. A stagehand meets him when he exits, standing in his stocking feet, holding his own boots out to Edwin. They don’t fit the period, they don’t fit his feet, but at least they are silent.
Onstage, the actors nearest him provide every possible support. Those offstage crowd the wings, watching in friendly, nervous sympathy. He can see their eyes, the way they clasp their hands together as if praying for him. The audience, too, begins to pity the young boy, so obviously out of his depth, drowning in his own sleeves. Edwin can feel the change when it happens. He can feel the moment they start wanting him to succeed. He rides that change; it lifts him.
He has them on the edge of their seats, wondering if he’ll get through his next line, his next scene, his next thrust, his next parry. The play ends with Edwin’s first ovation. He won it merely by surviving.
* * *
—
In May, on Johnny’s thirteenth birthday, Mother and Father marry. Afterwards Edwin, Asia, and Johnny pretend to forget that Adelaide ever existed. They do their best to insist that the rest of the world do the same.
* * *
—
June, like his father before him, has abandoned his wife to run away with a younger woman. In July, he and Harriet run all the way to San Francisco, where they’ve been booked by the indomitable Jenny Lind Theatre. Destroyed repeatedly by fire, the Jenny Lind is being rebuilt yet again, even as they make their way to it.
During this same month, June’s nine-year-old daughter, Blanche, is sent from the chaos of her father’s abandonment to stay with the Booths in Baltimore. Blanche adores her grandmother. Her grandfather frightens her with his temper, his violence, his casual cruelty. One night, when the whole family has gathered for dinner, he suggests that Blanche isn’t really a Booth, that Clementina was already pregnant when she tricked June into marrying her. No real Booth was ever so stupid as this one, her grandfather says, waving a spoon in Blanche’s direction. He doesn’t even say this to Blanche herself. The comment is made across her to her gorgeous teenaged uncle Johnny.
* * *
—
In August, Edwin and John Sleeper put on an evening’s performance at the Bel Air Courthouse. The early program is high-minded, consisting of several Shakespearean soliloquies from Macbeth and Hamlet, but the audience prefers the minstrelsy that ends the evening—Edwin on the banjo, Sleeper on the bones, both of them singing Negro songs with their faces corked.
The response is so positive, they repeat the performance on a second night.
* * *
—
One of Johnny’s friends at school is a boy named Thomas Gorsuch. The Gorsuch plantation, Retreat Farm, is near the school and Johnny’s been a frequent guest there, eaten supper at that table, spent the night. He greatly admires Edward Gorsuch—“the finest of men”—so sober and prosperous, so little like his own father.
Two years earlier, four enslaved men had fled the Gorsuch plantation. Gorsuch fancies himself a kindly master. He tells everyone that they will return of their own accord.
He gets tired of waiting.
In September, Edward Gorsuch travels with a posse of seven white men plus his eldest son to Christiana, Pennsylvania, where he’s heard that the men are being sheltered by another escaped slave, the abolitionist William Parker. Gorsuch confronts Parker on Parker’s doorstep.
Parker orders Gorsuch away.
Gorsuch answers that he’ll breakfast in hell before he leaves without his property. The white men attempt to force their way into Parker’s house. They have warrants and a sheriff with them. The law, they say, is on their side.
Parker blocks their entry. He says if they take another step, he’ll break their necks.
Meanwhile Parker’s wife, Eliza, has opened a window on the second floor. From it, she sounds several loud blasts on a tin horn. The first shots are fired at her.
Neighbors hear the horn. They come at a run, they are armed, and in the subsequent conflict, Gorsuch is killed and his older son, Dickinson, badly wounded.