He pours something brown and bitter into a small metal cup. He makes her drink it all though the taste is horrid. Then he leaves. Rosalie helps her out of her dress, which falls to the floor and remains there, a small hill of rumpled black wool flung over the crinoline.
When Asia wakes, it’s nighttime. Sweat, or maybe drool, has stuck her hair to her cheek. Rosalie’s bed is empty and the house is quiet. She rises, wraps herself in a shawl, and moves through the dark to the downstairs. Mother’s door is closed. The coffin has been moved into the pure white room and moonlight streams through the window. The stage is set for ghosts, but thankfully none appear.
For three days, visitors pay their respects. Asia avoids the parlor she worked so hard to make beautiful. She never sees her father’s face again.
* * *
—
The Struthoff sisters bring cakes and cordials from their grocery so Mother has something to offer the mourners. The neighbors on the other side are the Brownes. They’ve never been friendly, but they also come, a couple in their seventies, Ann Browne dressed in a severe, unornamented black, her husband, Elisha, whiskered and wizened.
Something about the way Mr. Browne holds his arms, rubs his hands, has always reminded Asia of a fly.
“Fetch your mother,” he tells her. The Brownes bring no food or flowers. They won’t enter the parlor, won’t sit at the dining table. Asia leaves them standing in the entryway, staring past her into the hallway, where a large doily drips from a small table and a painting of Niagara Falls hangs on the wall.
Asia gets Mother. The hand rubbing begins. “I’ll get right to it,” Mr. Browne says, his voice high, his lips cracked inside the nest of his beard. “Your loss is the price to be paid for sin. This has been a sinful house.”
His wife is looking down at the rectangle of light cast on the floor by the transom and never lifts her eyes. “We’ve come here as Christians,” she says.
Asia had assumed they’d come to pay their respects. Her anger has always been a dark turbulence, quick to rise, slow to dissipate. She feels it taking hold of her and Mother must feel that happening, too, because she reaches over, takes Asia’s wrist in her hand, and tightens her grip. Asia is quietly being told to be quiet.
She tries. She shakes her mother off, steps away into the hall to look at the painting of Niagara. It’s a wilderness without people. The water is translucent, green with white foam; the trees are bright with autumn colors—red, gold, brown. When Asia was little, when she was upset （as she so often was, as she still so often is） she used to imagine herself into that painting, that cathedral of nature and peace. She tries to recover her gift of transportation now. She surrounds herself with nature’s beauty.
“Rejoice,” Mr. Browne says. He licks the corner of his mouth, his tongue flicking quickly out and back again. Maybe not a fly, after all. Maybe a snake. “God has given you a second chance. Renounce your sinful ways and beg His forgiveness.” Mrs. Browne takes a pamphlet out of her reticule and hands it to her husband. He passes it on. “There’s help here if you only open yourself to it. Repent. God loves a sinner.”
It’s a Methodist tract. Mother returns it. “We’re Episcopalians.”
Asia turns back. “We will never need your help,” she says, her voice sharp. Mr. Browne looks at her. Asia looks back, though she knows he’ll think her bold for doing so. If she had the power to match her feelings, he would burst into flame. He’s the one to first look aside.
In fact, courtesy of a few years at a convent school, Asia is leaning towards Catholicism. She finds God in the silver candlesticks, the light filtered through stained glass, the murmured hush of the Latin Mass. If she were Rosalie, she’d take the veil, marry Christ. None of this is any business of the Brownes. Nothing about her family is any business of the Brownes.
“You’ve said what you came to say,” Mother tells them. “You can go now.”
They leave the pamphlet behind. Asia burns it in the kitchen stove.
* * *
—
The funeral takes place on December 11th at the old Baltimore Cemetery. The burial will have to wait for warmer weather and softer ground. More than a thousand mourners, young and old, black and white, join the family and the coffin as they move through the icy streets. The size of the crowd is a relief to Asia. Father was so respected. A great man. How many people will come to Elisha Browne’s funeral?
She’s freezing. Even with a cape, her black dress is too thin for the weather. She reaches out for Johnny’s hand with her gloved fingers. She’s lost the feeling in her thumbs. She thinks that she’ll never be warm again. Father was the fire that warmed them all.
The cemetery paths have been shoveled, but snow covers the ground and lies in hillocks on the graves. Tombstones rise from the white drifts. A marble angel spreads its wings over the frozen world. Midway through the service, snow begins to fall again, thick, wet stars that land and melt on hair and hats, gloves and Bibles. At a distance, a local band plays a dirge composed for the occasion. The music is soft and faraway.
The coffin is set on a bier in front of the mausoleum. The reverend begins. “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” Asia huddles between Johnny and Joe. Rosalie holds on to her mother. All are sobbing. Asia’s handkerchief is a sodden ball.
The black mourners must watch from outside the cemetery walls, the white crowd the paths inside. Some say later that they saw Adelaide Booth, standing at a distance, silent as a statue and heavily veiled. Others insist she was never there.
* * *
—
Edmund Kean had his Samuel Coleridge, but Junius Booth his Walt Whitman. Thirty-six years after Booth’s death, Whitman will still be mourning. He will write:
The words fire, energy, abandon, found in him unprecedented meanings . . . For though those brilliant years had many fine and even magnificent actors, undoubtedly at Booth’s death . . . went the last and by far the noblest Roman of them all.
ii
Life without Father begins with Mother going mad. Rosalie moves into Mother’s room and for several weeks Asia sleeps alone. Rosalie has been through Mother’s grief before. Asia hasn’t and is horrified to see it. It’s so unrelenting in its need for compresses, teas and soups, kisses and quiet. She can’t take physical care of Mother since Rosalie has that role tightly wrapped up. She can’t take emotional care of Mother; only Johnny can do that and he and Joe are already off at school.
Her own feelings of loss seem to hardly count in the face of Mother’s extravagant grief and （even though she’s just lost her father!） no one is paying her any attention at all. Hours go by without anyone saying a word to her. She eats her solitary meals, the sound of Mother’s weeping coming through the wall.
The boys come home for one final, cheerless Christmas in Baltimore and then, in the thickest part of winter, they remain to help with the move to the farm. They can’t all fit in the cariole, and Johnny and Joe must ride alongside. The women’s skirts fill the carriage, dishes and lamps squashed between the hoops and petticoats, the valises and blankets.
It’s full dark by the time they arrive. The wind rustles through empty branches. No stars show, just one bit of bright cloud pulled like a curtain over the moon. Something dashes across the lawn at the front of the house. Asia thinks it’s a rabbit, but it’s gone before she really sees it. The snow crust crunches underneath her shoes as she steps down from the cariole. A black child she doesn’t recognize unhitches the horse, takes the reins from Johnny and Joe, and leads the horses away, clucking softly. “Thus begins the winter of our discontent,” Johnny says, for Asia’s ears only.