Using only boxes and tree boughs, Edwin and Anderson have knocked up a small, rickety house out in the dunes towards the end of Mission Road. Edwin refers to this house as the rancho and himself as a ranchero. His letters home are filled with those amusing adventures that won’t distress his mother—pranks and pratfalls.
He’s having plenty of the distressing sort as well. Once, up in Sacramento, he wanders off drunk, falls into the river, and nearly drowns. A passerby almost doesn’t stop, mistaking him for a pile of laundry washing about in the current. Then he sees a hand floating at the end of a sleeve. He dives in, drags Edwin to the riverbank, and runs to a nearby saloon for help. Edwin’s missing caul comes to the rescue. After an anxious interval, he’s revived with slaps and shouts and brandy. More brandy is purchased to toast his narrow escape.
He’s working now in a new company June has formed. Mother is solaced to think of them taking care of each other. In fact, they’re seriously at odds. June has no patience with Edwin’s drinking. Having always been careful himself around alcohol, he has no intention of continually rescuing Edwin if he won’t be the same. June takes small roles, or no roles at all, in order to avoid comparisons, let his unseasoned little brother shine. When Edwin repays this by showing up late, unprepared, unsure of his lines, and unconcerned about any of it, June demotes him back to bit parts.
Edwin has a lot to learn, June thinks. June is very full of himself, thinks Edwin. How happy they are, think Asia, Johnny, and Joe. Those deserters. What lives they are leading!
Asia
i
For a brief time, a few hours though it seems much longer, Asia is the only member of the family who knows that Father is dead. The captain of the Chenoweth had telegraphed Mother to say that Father was very ill and she must come at once to Cincinnati to meet the boat. Mother departed immediately, leaving Asia and Rosalie to determine for themselves just how concerned they should be. Rosalie reminded Asia that there’d been many similar alarms over the years. Still, after a short period of dither and delay, Rosalie had decided that Johnny and Joe must come home from school. She’d gone off to fetch them.
So when the second wire arrives, Asia is the only one home. She reads it. She puts it on Father’s desk. She puts some of his other papers on top of it. For one mad moment, it seems like a secret she can keep. Maybe the rest of the family need never know. Father is so rarely home.
Even better would be not knowing herself. If only she’d gone with Mother, she’d be on a train right now, traveling in the same anxious ignorance the rest of them are enjoying. She’d be worried, but not much. She’d be assuring Mother that Father is indestructible, which is what she really believes, even now, even after the wire.
Instead she’s been left to deal alone with the fact that Father will never again walk in the door, bringing all the noise and excitement of the great world with him. In his absence, the house has always felt inconsequential to Asia, a place of petty concerns and niggling quarrels, no one in charge and someone’s feelings, usually hers, perpetually hurt by one careless remark or another.
Nothing will ever be the same, she thinks, which sounds more like a line from a play than something a person says, and yet how true it is. All is lost, she thinks next, which is less true but not untrue. She thinks that she’s performing grief rather than feeling it. What she feels is nothing.
She stands for a long time looking out the parlor window, where Father’s death has not changed the view. The clouds are low and unbroken, a gray lid set over the city. A strong wind is ripping the few remaining leaves from the trees, tossing them into the air, trapping them against the fences and the snowdrifts. A man passes on a plodding bay horse. Another, on foot, keeps his hat on his head with his hand. There was no reason for Mother not to have taken her along. Father would have been pleased to see her face.
She turns back to the room. The flocked wallpaper she’d always found so cheerful now seems dingy. She remembers how, shortly after moving in, an actress friend of Father’s came to visit. “This isn’t a house,” she’d said. “This is a home,” which pleased Mother so much that roses came into her cheeks. Asia sees that the house is shabbier now, a little worn, a little worn-out.
The fire is dying so she goes to put more wood into it. A splinter drives into her palm and when she pulls it, a drop of blood sits like a bead in her hand. Her blood. Booth blood.
She sees Father seated, right there, in his special chair with its cushion of yellow flowers and winding blue stems. They fight over this chair when he’s gone, the only chair in the parlor with arms. He’s reading to them from the paper. The bits he finds funny he reads in the crude accents of the comic character John Lump. The bits he finds sad he gives high polish. He lowers the paper and looks directly at her. “Are you sure that we are awake, Asia dear?” he says. “？‘It seems to me that yet we sleep, we dream.’？” And then grief finally arrives, so that there is no speaking through her sobbing throat and all she can do when Rosalie returns with the boys is to dig out the telegram, streaked ever so lightly with blood, and fling it at them.
* * *
—
At seventeen, Asia has a strong and stormy nature. These are the things that matter most to her: the Booth name and reputation, her brothers Edwin and Johnny, and beauty. Asia wants everything in her life to be beautiful—the objects in her home, her clothing, her thoughts. She gets Rosalie to help her cover the parlor wallpaper with white drapes in anticipation of the arrival of Father’s body. She removes every object from the room except for a statue of Shakespeare. It’s a stark set. Father’s final performance.
The body arrives with Mother. Asia and the other children meet her carriage, watch it carried in. Mother lifts her veil, her round face sagging with exhaustion. Asia has come outside without her shawl. She shivers and her breath clouds the air. A trembling anxiety overtakes her, peaking when she looks through the glass lid set in the coffin over Father’s face. She turns to Johnny and sees that his thoughts are the same as hers. Her blood begins to pulse wildly. This isn’t what a dead body looks like. “He’s not dead!” Asia says. Her voice is rising. “Let him out! Wake him up! He’s not dead.” She’s the one screaming, but Johnny is the one Mother goes to, so ashen and shaking that he might topple into her arms.
Asia can’t calm herself. She runs upstairs, slams the door, and yanks her crinoline off so desperately that it tears. She collapses onto the bed, undone by grief or maybe terror. For the longest time, no one comes after her. When she finally stops shaking, she’s too exhausted to move again. She tries to take a deep breath and discovers that she can’t.
The door opens, but it’s only Rosalie. “Mother sent for Dr. Smith. He’s here now. He says Father is dead,” Rosalie tells her. There’s something in the tone of Rosalie’s voice that Asia doesn’t like, but she can’t say for sure what it is. Rosalie has a gift for the seemingly innocent insult.
Dr. Smith enters the bedroom. He takes Asia’s hand, feels her wrist. His fingers are cold and damp. “Your father has passed,” he says. “There can be no doubt of this.” The lenses of his glasses are so filthy she wonders that he can see.