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In the summer of 1858, Ned and Ad, Romeo and Vagabond, take a trip to Tudor Hall, which has stood empty since the Booths returned to Baltimore. This trip is Adam’s idea. Edwin will show him the farm where he grew up. He’ll share stories of his childhood and his famous father. Adam will turn the whole thing into an essay for Noah’s Sunday Times. It will feed the public appetite for backstage stories about actors. It will remind readers who Edwin’s father is. It will solidify his position as a rising star.
Their departure is delayed by Mother’s insistence on serving Adam breakfast and keeping him talking around the table. Keeping Adam talking is the world’s easiest task. “We have a long drive ahead,” Edwin says finally, as if his family doesn’t know exactly how long it takes to get to Bel Air. Even that doesn’t bring the gab to a close. Edwin swallows his annoyance with his third cup of coffee.
They don’t get on the road until noon and then they encounter a series of further delays. A harness breaks and has to be knotted together with shoelaces. A wheel gets stuck in a puddle and Edwin must hand the reins to Adam, by far the better dressed of the two, and leap down, add his shoulder to the work of the horses. Now his boots are muddy as well as laceless. Edwin begins to feel that the whole trip has been a mistake, as if he cannot run faster than the earth turns and will end farther from his destination than he began.
But when one of the horses loses a shoe, the whole adventure tips to comedy. What can they do but laugh? “A farrier, a farrier, my kingdom for a farrier,” Edwin says. The sun is hot and high and the horses’ backs show dark streaks of sweat. Edwin’s shirt is damp and soiled.
When they drive at last through the trees on the long approach to the house, the temperature drops. In that coolness, Edwin feels his welcome. “Your foot is on your native heath,” he hears his father say. These woods, these streams are home to him.
A man comes to take the horses. “Master Edwin,” he says. “It surely is good to see you,” and Edwin returns the pleasantry, hoping he’s managed to conceal the fact that he can’t, for the life of him, remember the man’s name. He retrieves his shoelaces.
The old cabin is now occupied by the Hall family, but no one has lived in the main house since the Booths left. The windows are dark and reproachful, the grass entirely gone to weed, sedge, and bramble. Rosalie’s mint has escaped its bed and spread over the path, turning their steps to perfume. Edwin picks a dandelion, closes his eyes, opens them, and blows the stem clean. The seeds float away. “What did you wish?” Adam asks.
“No ghosts,” says Edwin. “Did I ever tell you I was born with a caul?”
“I wasn’t,” Adam says. He’s taken his glasses off to clean them. His bared eyes are intense, making Edwin acutely aware that they are spending the night together. “You’ll save me from drowning. I’ll protect you from ghosts.” He hooks his glasses back over his ears.
“We used to have a lawn,” Edwin tells him, but Adam has held up a finger, hushing him. He seems to be listening to a dove, calling over and over in its three-note song. “Dactyl,” Adam says. And then he tells Edwin that everything is perfect, that it’s all beautiful, that he prefers the wildness of weeds to the most beautifully planned and maintained gardens. No better landscaper than nature.
The sun is setting. The frogs come out. Edwin unlocks the door.
They walk through cobwebs. The air is stale and still. Adam wants nostalgia for his article, but Edwin lived only a few weeks in this house; he struggles to provide it. This is where his family lived without him. This is what happened while he was in California. He can’t wipe the feel of cobwebs from his skin. This is Father’s dream house empty of dreams.
That turns out not to be true. In every closet and cupboard treasures have been left behind. Books in many languages, some with corners turned, passages circled, others with the leaves uncut. Plays familiar and unknown. Lope de Vega, Jean Racine, Byron, Shakespeare, the Koran, and the Bible.
They’ve come equipped with candles but not with candlesticks.
As it grows dark, Edwin finds a basin in which to prop one candle, an old shoe for another. Adam produces two cigars and they pass the shoe to light them, breathe in the dank smell of tobacco.
In the wavering light, their excavations continue. Asia appears to have left much of her research here. Edwin finds drawers of Father’s playbills and even some letters and journals. He picks up one of these and realizes that what it advertises is the first time Father and Edmund Kean appeared on the same stage. Decades ago and miles away. He can so clearly imagine the curtain call, the audience in thunderous applause and all of them, every person in every seat, now dead. In his mind, he watches as they go, one by one, winking out of existence. The last left is a pale woman with rouged cheeks and a feathered hat clapping heartily as she ages before his eyes.
Adam and Edwin sit on the floor together, flicking the ash from their cigars into the basin with the candle, passing their discoveries hand to hand, exclaiming over every find. They’d bought sandwiches on the road, but have forgotten to eat them. Suddenly Edwin is too tired for food, his exhilaration turning in a moment into exhaustion. He takes his watch from his pocket, reads it, and then claps his hand over its face. “Guess the time.”
“Ten,” says Adam, his round face swimming in candlelight, but it is half past two.
Time for bed. They carry the candles up the stairs and find an old mattress in John’s room. The antlers still hang on the wall, empty now of their armory. Edwin opens the window and the breeze is cool and smells of cedar and ash. He finds some moldering bits of costumes in a closet. He gives Adam Macbeth’s cloak, keeps Lear’s for himself. They blow out the candles and lie together. Edwin is nervous and unsure so he keeps on talking.
“One time,” Edwin tells Adam, “one time in Boston, I was resting in the room, when my father came running in, dropped to the floor, and rolled under the bed. ‘I’ve gone out!’ he told me. Seconds later there was a knock on the door. I went to get it and the sculptor Tom Gould was standing outside. Gould had once done a bust of Father and adored him, but Father found Gould tedious. ‘Father’s out,’ I said, but he walked in past me, sat on my bed to wait for his return. I took a seat above Father. Now I was the one stuck with making conversation and I’ve never been good at that. Soon enough I’d run dry. It made for a long silence, which Father misunderstood. I heard his voice, singing out from under the bed. ‘Is that old bore gone?’ he asked.”
“Marvelous,” Adam says softly. He yawns, a great, cracking yawn that makes Edwin yawn, too. Adam shifts to his side, his back to Edwin. Edwin is looking up through the moonlit forest of antler tines.
“Did I ever tell you about my trip to Hawaii?” he asks. “We performed there on our way home from Australia. We were only men then. I’d been drunk and stupid and the women had all quit us and gone back to California. We tried to talk the captain’s wife into taking a role, but she just stood on the stage and laughed hysterically the whole time, though it might have been sobbing; it was hard to tell. So we made Lars Roy our leading lady instead. He was a little man with a beard he refused to shave so he wore a scarf across his face like a lady in a harem. Which he had! He married three of the island women and we left him behind. I think about him sometimes. Wondering how paradise worked out for him.