“I see,” Edwin says. Heat has flooded into his face and neck.
He holds the lamp away so as not to show that.
“Some critics would recognize Father’s costumes,” Rosalie says. “It might be better not to wear them.”
“That’s right,” says Edwin. He’s trying not to sound sullen. He leaves the room and goes back up the shadowed stairs. The lamp on the wall throws one shadow, the lamp in his hand another. The result is a misshapen creature, spiderlike, with four arms, four legs. Thunder rattles the windows on the second floor.
He sees Mother’s hands, the needle dipping and rising over Richelieu’s robes, white skin against the red velvet. Of course John should get the costumes. John didn’t kill Father.
My heart, he thinks, is a withered apple.
Asia looks up sleepily when he enters. “Are you all right?” she asks. “You look a little strange.”
“I’m flattered you think that’s a change,” Edwin says.
iv
Edwin and his manager arrive in New York. Uncle Ben’s promotional playbills lean heavily on the genius of the father born again in the son. He pushes Edwin to open with Richard III, Father’s most iconic role. Edwin’s instinct for his first night had been A New Way to Pay Old Debts, but he yields to Uncle Ben’s persuasion.
This is a mistake. Even those critics who never saw his father perform accuse him of superficial imitation. His voice is too nasal, his performance too halting. He has everything his father had, Walt Whitman says, excepting guts.
Edwin’s Lear, his Sir Giles Overreach, his Shylock and Richelieu find better reception and his booking is extended a week. Still, he feels discouraged. He’s getting little sleep as Uncle Ben shares his room, snoring loudly and arrhythmically through the night until Edwin, on the point of desperation, pours himself a drink and follows it with another. The spring weather turns bad—rain, wind, and an unseasonal chill. Perhaps this is why the theaters remain half full, the audiences torpid. But Father would surely have overcome the challenges of a small spring squall.
In the middle of his second week, two letters are delivered to Edwin. He’s recently risen, but wishing he were still in bed. His toast is burnt. There is a sour, stale taste in his mouth and a headache knocking dully about in his skull. He takes a sip of tea, which turns out to be cold.
One of the letters is from his mother. He opens the other. It’s from the critic Adam Badeau. Edwin knows Badeau by reputation. He publishes erudite essays on art under the pen name the Vagabond. He’s terribly sophisticated.
Badeau has sent Edwin his recent review. It begins:
I have been several times, of late, to see the young genius who is playing at Burton’s theatre . . .
The review does not suggest that Edwin has no faults. His acting is described as undeveloped, plastic, and chaotic. He sometimes mars the musicality of his voice by slurring his lines. But this is only to be expected in one so young. What is not expected—the moments of complete transcendence. These are the moments a critic like Badeau lives for. Everything wrong can be easily fixed. What’s right is beyond instruction. There is no Rubicon Edwin cannot cross with work and study. The review includes the usual paean to Edwin’s eyes.
A note accompanies the review. Badeau would like to meet while Edwin is in New York. Edwin need only name the time.
Edwin sets the letter aside and opens his mother’s. June has written Mother to say that he’s run out of money and Mother is writing Edwin to be sure that he has that same information. Hattie may be expecting again. June’s letter is unclear on this point.
Mother doesn’t come out and say that Edwin must now support June and June’s family along with everyone else. She merely wonders where money for June might be found.
As for John, the salary the Arch Street company is paying won’t even cover his cigars. She suspects he’s wishing he’d chosen a different profession. Apparently his time in Philadelphia has not been a triumph.
Edwin already knows this. Sleeper has written, complaining of John’s indolence. Everyone expected more of the son of Junius Brutus Booth, Sleeper says. Sleeper had told John it was time to apply himself and John had responded by moving out of Sleeper’s house.
* * *
—
The weather improves and Edwin goes out. He walks quickly through streets much wider than those in Baltimore, past buildings much taller. New York is an important city and knows it. Fewer pigs.
At Washington Square Park, he joins the crowd by the fountain. The sun is shining and the tulip trees just coming into green and yellow bloom. Children chase each other over the grass. A father is trying and failing to launch a kite. A mother is bandaging a skinned knee with her handkerchief. A small boy has stepped behind a tree to piss.
How much money will June need to find his feet beneath him again? Where will Edwin find that money? Edwin runs calculations through his head until the numbers turn sharp-cornered and begin to hurt.
* * *
—
The review Adam Badeau sent touches not only on Edwin’s performances but on the subject of American art in general. It references a painting of Niagara Falls done by Frederic Edwin Church. This painting is about to be shipped to Europe for various exhibitions, but is currently on display here in the city. According to Badeau, the painting and Edwin both represent something new in the world. American art need no longer mimic the tired forms and sentiments of the effete Old World. The painting is a testament not only to the magnificence of the Falls, but also to the wilderness through which the water first passed, the deep forests and wide plains of wild America. The singular men who will tame her.
Edwin decides to go and see it. There is a line and Edwin takes his place at the back, moving slowly past smaller works—dead pheasants draped over piles of fruit, women reading books in dark corners, ship masts against bloody horizons. When he finally stands in front of the canvas, he struggles to find the words for his feelings. He is so awed as to be undone.
The man behind him is explaining the painting to three young women, possibly sisters. All three have the same sharp nose, the same thick brown hair in braids down their backs. “Look at the energy, the motion,” he says. “The sunlight moving on the water. The rainbows rising. You see the power of the water, but you also feel the whole dark wilderness through which the water has moved. Wild America. The continent waiting to be tamed. The singular men who will tame her.” Clearly the man has also read Badeau’s review. He’s read about Edwin then, but has no idea he’s standing next to the genius of Burton’s Theatre.
He continues to talk, but Edwin ceases to hear him. He’s thinking of the painting in the Booths’ hallway. He decides that it’s too pretty, a bit sentimental. He’s ashamed of how much he’d liked it before. Now he’s aware of its fundamental lack of a dark and hidden wilderness.
At the same time, he’s so tired of always finding himself wanting. Standing before this magnificence of water and light and movement and color, he allows himself, for maybe the first time, to own the full range of his dreams. Somewhere in the city is one reviewer who thinks he has something in common with this extraordinary masterpiece.
There is no Rubicon Edwin cannot cross with work and study. He’s not thinking about money at all now. His ambition has arrived at last and it comes in a flood.