Edwin changes the subject. “So, Joe, what are your plans now that school is done?”
“I don’t know,” Joe says. His knife clicks against his plate as he saws off a great hunk of meat. He lifts it to his mouth, but before it goes in, he says, “I haven’t thought.”
Joe’s less handsome than his brothers, still growing into his nose and ears, his cheeks still plump and cherubic. He’s a dreamy, indolent boy of whom a friend will later say that he was either stupid or else had a wonderful knack for counterfeiting stupidity. He’s currently working as a ticket taker at the Holliday Street Theatre.
He and Rosalie remain close. She remembers how he used to climb into her lap, the weight and warmth of him on her legs. She remembers the dusty smell of his hair when he was a little boy, how his grubby little hands would snake around her neck. What Rosalie and Joe share is a sort of outsider view of their own family—Rosalie the oldest, since June is never around, and Joe the youngest. What they share is that neither of them is Edwin or Asia or John.
Since Joe appears to have nothing more to say concerning his future, Edwin changes the subject again. Like many melancholics, he can tell a funny story. He describes a recent performance of The Merchant of Venice. He was playing in some backwater—a place so small that Edwin can’t even remember the town’s name, just that the theater held perhaps forty people, so even though every seat was taken, few people were in attendance.
Edwin was Antonio and they were nearing the end, halfway through the trial scene, when they heard the steamboat whistle. If they missed the boat, they’d miss their next engagement. Edwin saw Uncle Ben in the wings, gesturing wildly for Antonio and Shylock to wrap things up, quick as they could.
“So I said to Shylock, ‘Would you take ten ducats and a fine pig?’ and Shylock said, ‘I guess that’s as good an offer as I’m going to get,’ and Portia said, ‘How about we all dance the Virginnie Reel then?’ and we dropped the curtain. The audience had heard the whistle; they all understood. We left them laughing and legged it to the docks just in time to board.”
“Who was playing Portia?” Asia asks.
ix
Edwin’s obsessed with a guilt-induced plan to put up a grand new marker for Father’s grave, an expense he can only manage with an exhausting season. Uncle Ben has booked him everywhere. The year is 1858.
Edwin’s chosen the sculptor Joseph Carew of Boston, the same man who, with his brother, designed the beautiful monument for the Reverend Charles T. Torrey, an obelisk with Torrey’s likeness in bas-relief on one side and a grieving woman at the base. If you didn’t know to look for them, you might miss the shackles on the woman’s feet. Torrey had been jailed in Baltimore for helping fugitive slaves and died a martyr in the prison there.
Arguably, Edwin has hired the lesser of the Carew brothers.
It’s his only economy. Father’s tombstone will also be a marble obelisk, only bigger, almost twenty feet high, with the name BOOTH also unusually large and, on the far side, an epitaph from Julius Caesar:
His life was gentle, and the elements
So mix’d in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world—This was a man.
Edwin lays out all these plans as he makes them. Rosalie sees how much he wants Mother to be happy. “You’re such a good son,” Mother assures him, reaching over to pat his hand. Privately, to Rosalie, she worries about the expense.
Rosalie has her own plans. In a quiet moment, she asks Edwin, could the bodies of Frederick, Mary Ann, and Elizabeth be moved from the farm to the Baltimore cemetery? “Father loved them so,” she says to Edwin. “I know he’d want them gathered about him.”
Edwin is instantly agreeable, even enthusiastic. Yet nothing is done to make this happen. He continues to talk about Father’s stone which he plans to unveil on Father’s birthday, and never mentions the lost children. It seems to Rosalie that he forgot his promise the moment he made it. Perhaps it was a mistake not to have had Mother there as witness. Rosalie refuses to nag, but a little worm of anger eats at her. Let Edwin meet a ghost or two and see how soon he forgets them.
She’s at the cemetery one day, talking to Father about this, when she sees a pale, thin man she thinks she recognizes as her half-brother, Richard Booth. He’s walking in her direction, but veers away at the sight of her. She wonders if he was also visiting Father’s grave.
She’s surprised to think he might do this, as she’s never seen him there before and, really, he has good reasons to be angry with Father. The way Father had taken him on tour, shown him a fatherly regard and affection, only to snatch it all away the minute Adelaide arrived. How hurtful that must have been. And then those years when they all lived in Baltimore without Father taking the trouble to see him, find out how he was doing. She can almost understand why he fought so hard to take Father’s estate away from them.
But that evening, just before she goes up to bed, Mother tells her Adelaide has died, so it must have been his mother, not his father, who brought Richard to the cemetery. Mother’s voice is colorless when she delivers the news, poking at the fire with her back turned so her face is hidden. Her posture makes it clear that there will be no conversation regarding this matter.
Although Rosalie has vivid memories of the harridan who followed them, spitting and shouting through the streets, the news of her death softens Rosalie. There’s no denying that Father treated his first wife abominably. What a sad life Adelaide led. She wonders if Mother feels guilty about it. Rosalie has no reason for guilt herself, but she’s ready to acknowledge blame on all sides.
This generosity of spirit vanishes the first time she sees Adelaide’s gravestone. It reads:
Jesus Mary Joseph
pray for the soul of
Marie Christine Adelaide
Delannoy
Wife of
Junius Brutus Booth tragedian
She died in Baltimore
March the 9th, 1858
Aged 66 years
It is a holy and wholesome thought
to pray for the dead
May she rest in peace
Wife of Junius Brutus Booth, indeed! The fact that this stone rests only a short stroll from Father’s own grave, in the same cemetery, under the same poplars, adds to the insult. Here lies Adelaide, reaching out from beyond the grave to spit on them one last time. Her claim to Father is apparently deathless.
So Rosalie’s enmity will be the same. She decides that she will not be praying for this particular soul.
Old Spudge sends them her obituary as it ran in New Orleans under the quite mistaken assumption that they’ll be amused.
No less than three persons died, at Baltimore on Tuesday of disease of the heart. Mrs. Mary Booth, a divorced wife of the celebrated tragedian Booth, aged 65 years; Mr. Joseph Lokey, a messenger at the Mt. Clare Station, rather advanced in life; and a man unknown, apparently 50 years of age, who fell dead in the street.
The obituary goes on to identify Father and “Mary’s” only surviving child as Edwin.
* * *
—
On a sunny afternoon, Rosalie sits in the Exeter kitchen with Joe Hall. They are both drinking coffee—his with two big spoonfuls of sugar, hers with a splash of gin. Joe has stopped by with some of the spring produce for Mother—slender carrots and pale radishes and green onions—but Mother and Asia are out ordering wedding clothes. Rosalie tries to talk Joe into staying until they return, but he says he can’t. He says that Ann would fret. He just has time for the coffee.