Asia has finished throwing all of Edwin’s boats and stones into the water. She turns in his direction a face shining with triumph, but immediately clouds over with the realization that Edwin hasn’t been watching. She steps towards them and Rosalie shifts Edwin to her other side so he can’t be pushed about. His knees soften until he’s sitting in her lap. Asia comes to do the same, crowding into Rosalie’s arms, taking up as much room as she can. Heat pours off her. Rosalie feels Edwin becoming smaller.
“Do you want to hear about you?” she asks him. He does. It’s his favorite story.
“On the night you were born,” she says, “Father was in New York being Richard III.”
Rosalie remembers it as a terrifying night, but that’s not the way she tells it. She skips the difficulties of the birth, Mother’s agony, the moment the midwife told June to ride for the doctor. She skips the icy ground and her fear that June was riding too fast and the horse would lose her footing, or not fast enough and the doctor would arrive too late. Mother had had six other children and never needed the doctor before.
Rosalie tells Edwin instead that there was a shower of stars that night, lasting more than an hour. How, just as June was leaving, a great meteor exploded over Baltimore—Rosalie throws open her hands to show the explosion—and June rode on while the sky above him rained down stars.
She says that Edwin is the family’s seventh child and that he arrived with his caul still over his face. The caul has been saved in a small box in her mother’s cupboard. It has the feel of a well-worn handkerchief. Edwin has been shown this, but he won’t be allowed to touch it until he is older.
All these things, Rosalie says—the stars, the caul, the number seven—they mark Edwin as extraordinary. “This child will see ghosts,” the midwife had said when the doctor had gone and she was again in charge. “He will never drown. Men everywhere will know his name.” She took Edwin and swaddled him more tightly. There was something reverential, ceremonial, in the way she handed him back.
Before, Rosalie has always left out the part about seeing ghosts. Today she forgets. She feels Edwin stiffen at this news. So far, he’s shown no evidence of greatness. He’s an inactive, fragile, anxious boy.
The ten-year gap between Rosalie and Edwin is where all the dead children are.
ii
The Dead
Frederick was the first to die. He died away from home, off in Boston where Father had gone to try his hand at managing the Tremont Theatre. Mother had joined him there, taking Frederick, who was too little to leave behind. Ann Hall, their farm manager’s wife, and Hagar, a servant with no last name that either she or anyone else knew, cared for the rest of the children in their absence.
In November, only a few months past Frederick’s first birthday, he died. Rosalie hadn’t seen him since the summer. She missed his first words and his first steps. She desperately missed her mother. She was five years old.
The how and why of Frederick’s death have never been made clear to Rosalie—an accident, but nobody’s fault, is what she gathers, or maybe an illness. Father’s experiment at management had lasted only two months and then, when he’d gone off to New York to perform again, Mother had remained in Boston with Frederick for another few weeks, arranging the move back. When Mother finally came home, she came home alone.
Father followed soon after, bringing Frederick, or at least a little coffin and everyone said Frederick was inside. Rosalie remembers how Mother hardly spoke for weeks, how she no longer appeared at bedtime to check the cleanliness of their hands and necks, or to kiss the children she still had. She remembers Mother’s grief as peculiarly listless. There were no bouts of uncontrollable weeping, only an endless silent stream of tears. It was as if Frederick had taken her spirit along with him when he went, leaving only a Mother-shaped husk behind.
Rosalie remembers the exact moment she first understood that she was responsible now for Henry and for Mary Ann. She shared a bed with Mary Ann and one night, as Rosalie was crying quietly to herself, Mary Ann also began to cry. She was only two years old and didn’t have the words to tell Rosalie why, except that she said that everyone was always crying.
“I’ll stop,” Rosalie told her and made an unpersuasive, gulping attempt to do so.
“Mama,” Mary Ann said, crying harder than ever. “Mama.”
Rosalie understood, or else she imagined, that Mary Ann was crying because there were no more good-night kisses. She rolled Mary Ann towards her and kissed her on the forehead, exactly as Mother used to do, though wetter. Then she got up, moving quickly through the cold room to kiss Henry, too, because apparently this job now fell to her.
She remembers another time, when she was sent outside with Henry and June to play quietly in the winter air and not be underfoot. She’d laid her red mitten on the trunk of the large sycamore, only to have it stick to the iced bark, vivid as a wound there. Her hand slipped out, leaving her staring at her pale, naked fingers. There’d been five of them: June, herself, Henry Byron, Mary Ann, and Frederick, but now there were four. They were no longer a full hand.
She missed Frederick, who was a lovely baby with dimpled elbows and two sharp teeth. When he crawled about the cabin, his little bottom swung merrily from side to side. Rosalie would hear him in the mornings, babbling quietly to himself. He never woke up crying as Edwin and Asia now often did.
But the way Rosalie missed him was not the way Mother and Father missed him. She was shocked that he could disappear like that, right into the ground. She was more unsettled by the information his absence contained than by the absence itself. If it could happen to Frederick, what was to stop it from happening to her?
A large family graveyard was built around his grave, railed in with wire and planted with althea and jasmine. Even a five-year-old could see that plenty of room had been left for all the rest of them.
Three years later, Elizabeth was born, bringing the number of children back to five. But Elizabeth was never as hearty as Frederick, and it worried Rosalie. Her nose was always running and often scabbed under the nostrils. Rosalie decided not to become too attached.
This turned out to be wise. One dreadful February both Mary Ann and Elizabeth died. Father was off in Richmond performing Hamlet. He told them later that a prankster had taken out the skull usually used for Yorick and substituted a child’s skull instead. As soon as his fingers touched the tiny head, Father said, he was nearly felled by a premonition of doom.
Two days later, a messenger arrived at the stage, covered with dust and stammering in his haste. He told Father that Mary Ann was dead of the cholera and that the baby Elizabeth and eleven-year-old June had it, too. Father had run immediately from the theater, still in his costume and stage paint, packing nothing.
Meanwhile, Rosalie watched the household collapse into madness. She was now nine years old. June was ill and Elizabeth deathly ill. Mary Ann was dead and Mother deranged, defiant, suicidal. This was not the quiet defeat that accompanied Frederick’s death. This grief was a war against the world.
Aunty Rogers came every day to help Ann and Hagar with the nursing and consoling, but Mother couldn’t be consoled. “Let me die,” Rosalie heard her saying, every day, every hour. “Just go away and let me die.” Rosalie prayed for Father to come. Mother wouldn’t die if Father told her not to.