June doesn’t escape a scolding. Ann Hall is mortified by the dinner she’s cooked, which is now too simple and contains none of his old favorites. Mother is appalled not to have a room ready so that poor, exhausted Hattie can immediately lie down. Rosalie has a grip on June’s arm that shows no sign of loosening. Asia takes the baby.
Asia loves babies. Marion’s face crumples at the sight of her and she sobs for her mother, but Asia’s not discouraged. She peeks from behind her hands, sings songs, waltzes Marion about the room, determined to make herself a favorite. She can’t wait to give Marion a bath. Right now, Marion smells of urine and spoiled food. Her dress is stained and clean cloths will have to be found to diaper her since the ones Hattie brought, including the one she’s wearing, all need a desperate washing. And yet, she’s adorable, lots of hair and big brown eyes.
Asia’s feelings for Hattie, who also has hair and eyes, are more complicated. On the one hand, Asia hardly knows her. On the other, Asia’s awed by this woman, only a few years older than Asia herself, who’s already traveled so far and seen so much.
The dinner hour is filled with stories of San Francisco, stories that center on theaters and culture rather than the brothels and murders for which the city is also famous. The notorious Catherine Sinclair has been performing there, often with Edwin as her romantic lead, though she’s sixteen years his elder. Catherine Sinclair is a beautiful woman, but her success is due mostly to her divorce from the far more famous Edwin Forrest. Affairs were alleged on all sides, the newspapers all but eaten by the scandal for days on end. That’s the woman people pay to see.
“And what do we know of Laura Keene?” Mother asks. Edwin has recently left with Keene to tour Australia.
June doesn’t understand what’s being asked. “Promising, but unseasoned,” he says.
Hattie does a better job of cracking Mother’s code. “A complete professional. Edwin is safe with her.”
This is the answer Asia wants, but she resents Hattie being the one to have it. Hattie can have June if she likes: Asia doesn’t care so much about this brother who left the house before she was quite old enough to know he was in it. But Edwin is hers. She doesn’t want to hear that he and Hattie are close.
That night Asia asks across the darkness between their beds if Rosalie doesn’t find it a little strange, how June and Hattie showed up with no warning.
“Clementina is divorcing him,” Rosalie says, which Mother must have told her and not said to Asia. Mother and Rosalie have no secrets between them. It’s just Asia left on the outside as if she’s still a child. “He needs it done quietly. You know that he’s already married Hattie?”
Despite the overabundance of evidence to the contrary, Asia thinks well of actors. For actresses she has nothing but contempt—those women who make public love to men for money. She would never go onstage herself, has never even considered it. Hattie retired from the profession when June pretended to marry her and somehow Asia finds that narrow throughway that allows her to excuse her bigamist sister-in-law while remaining thoroughly shocked by the behavior of Catherine Sinclair.
“Have you ever wanted to travel?” she asks Rosalie. “Just take off and see the world?”
“Never,” Rosalie answers immediately, as if she doesn’t even have to think about it.
* * *
—
June’s visit is a brief one. Three weeks later, his divorce in motion, he returns to San Francisco with his family. Saying good-bye proves hard, especially on Mother. “How many years before we’re together again?” she asks. Her eyes are a watery red. She holds the squirming Marion tightly against her breast. “How big you’ll be when I see you next! You won’t even remember me.”
John will ride his horse alongside the carriage into Bel Air and say his good-byes there. Having his older brother around was a wonderful respite for John. The two men had an instant, comfortable rapport, June preferring this younger brother to the other one.
Edwin’s drinking is worse than ever, though June never says so. Neither Catherine Sinclair nor Laura Keene had a successful run in San Francisco and in both cases, reviews laid much of the blame on their leading man. Edwin might at least bother to memorize his lines, critics suggested.
June had listened with interest to John’s feelings about slavery and the South, which encouraged John to lay them out at some length. Suddenly politics dominated the supper table, the women quiet, the men electrified by all the areas of agreement they find. They both support the South, but they also support the Union. They both support the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Although not actually working out as planned, still they both believe it was a step in the right direction. June believes this because he is temperamentally a moderate on all things, John because he sees the abolitionists as the primary problem, with their righteousness, their intolerance, their intransigence. They won’t be happy until every slave in the country is free! Such talk is common around Bel Air, such sentiments widely held. But Asia has not heard this before from John, at least not in this detail. She wonders if Mother minds the implied rejection of Father. She looks to her mother’s face and sees there only the joy of having two of her boys together at the table where she can see and hear and touch them.
June remembers his own miserable days of farming here and is deeply sympathetic to John’s desperation. “It’s a terrible property,” he says. “Always was. Father was mad to ever lease it.” He must see what is plain to all, that they are not thriving. Yet he returns to San Francisco having offered little in the way of assistance.
xi
Then it’s Halloween, season of pranks and prophecy.
The house is filled with friends—Miriam Thatcher, George and Charlotte Mattingly, Edwin’s old friend Sleeper Clarke, William and Michael O’Laughlen, but not their sister Kate, who has never liked Asia, not even when they were little girls playing in the street together, and stayed behind in Baltimore to show it.
The moon rises, pouring its yellow light over the hushed world, and the women send the men away. They unpin their hair, which falls in ripples to their waists. They leave the house, moving as silent as ghosts （though if anyone asked, Rosalie could tell them ghosts are anything but silent）， except for the leaves crackling beneath their shoes. Asia leads the way to a hollow tree stump. A recent rain has left small caches of water in the indents of wood. The women wet their fingertips and draw the moisture in a cross on their foreheads. Then they stand in a silent circle and wait for an apparition of the man they will someday marry.
This is all in good fun, and yet there is some magic in the trees and the spots of moonlight under their branches, in the quiet and the cold, in the sense Asia has of being on the verge of a pregnant moment. Asia begins to tremble, and she clasps her hands together to hold them still. Charlotte, to her right, gasps suddenly and then falls silent again. Asia’s hair is heavy down her back. She breathes in the clean smell of pine, the dusty smell of the Lombardy poplars. She hears a horse in the lane. The dive of a hawk, the brief interrupted cry of prey. She’s committed to an unmarried life and yet she’s disappointed when no vision appears.
Back at the house, only Charlotte claims to have seen something, a tall indistinct stranger bending towards her. Asia thinks she’s made the whole thing up. “Nothing?” Sleeper asks her, his gaze so intense she can’t meet his eyes.