“My God, but Lars Roy was the ugliest Juliet you ever did see.”
Adam says nothing. Perhaps he’s asleep. Edwin lowers his voice. “I mistook what they eat for breakfast for paste and used it to put up the playbills. Worked just fine,” he says. No answer.
Edwin can’t calm down. He feels rattled and jangled and aroused. Adam smells of cigars and also sweat, and also the mildew of the cloaks. An owl calls. A dog barks. Edwin remembers the great black dogs of his childhood. They were his first horses. Rosalie would set him on their backs and hold him by the arm so he didn’t slip off. He remembers the bullfrog, realizing there’d been no sound of it this evening. Perhaps its reign of terror has ended. He wishes he were in the cabin instead of this house, in his real bedroom where the sound of the streams was his original lullaby. They can’t be heard from John’s room. How can he sleep without that?
He thinks about Father’s playbills and about time passing and how the things you can keep really only serve to remind you of all that you’ve lost. He feels the permanence of trees and stars, his own life galloping by. He thinks about Mary Devlin, her brown eyes, her soft hair. Adam accepts Edwin’s drinking. He understands that the price of Edwin’s friendship is forgiving and forgetting the things he says and does while on a toot. Mary is not so resigned. Promise me you’ll be a good boy, she says. Promise me. Promise me.
Edwin should be the one wrapped in Macbeth’s cloak. Edwin is the one who’s murdered sleep.
* * *
—
From Adam’s essay:
I warrant you, some of his fair admirers would not have slept, so long as he talked, and doubtless they envy me my snooze on his arm. But ’twas dark, and I couldn’t see his eyes; besides I had seen them all day.
* * *
—
Mary Devlin:
The first time Edwin and Mary met, sparks flew. He spoke up to her balcony and her lovely voice drifted down to him. Although he insists otherwise to Asia, she’s uncommonly pretty. Usually when Edwin acts, there’s a part of him standing aside, critically watching his own performance. Suddenly, he was too immersed in hers to think about himself. His heart raced giddily in his chest, he felt all of Romeo’s agony should his love not be returned.
“You were wonderful,” she told him at the curtain and he stumbled through returning the compliment.
She reminds him a little of June’s wife, Hattie. Same abundant brown hair. Same pink-and-cream complexion. Same sympathetic manner. The next morning, he’d bought an expensive turquoise bracelet and given it to her after their final show. “I want you to remember me,” he’d said. She’d come out from her dressing room, fully dressed, her hair only half-pinned. He would have given anything to bury his hands in that hair, but a bracelet won’t pay that toll. He wrote to his mother—“I’ve met a young woman who could almost make me forget my vow to never marry an actress.”
Mary’s family had produced more children than they could afford to keep, so when Edwin first meets her, she’s the ward of the actor Joe Jefferson and his wife, Margaret. Jefferson knows Edwin and likes him. He also knows Edwin’s reputation for bedding, in the words of Adam Badeau, “singing chambermaids,” and that he does not like. He makes Mary return the bracelet.
Edwin takes it from her hand, their fingers touching. “It’s still yours,” he says. Her eyes are big and brown. “I’m just keeping it for you.” And soon she has it back again, in a package in the post containing two bracelets, hers and an identical one for Jefferson’s wife. “I hope you will both accept these as they are intended,” Edwin writes, “a sincere expression of admiration and friendship.”
He’s gone by then, less dangerous. Mary is allowed to keep the gift.
And then the sparks flicker out of their own accord. The two fall out of contact and Edwin does nothing to change that. He’s preoccupied with his family’s finances and his career. He thinks of Mary constantly, and then less, and then hardly at all.
* * *
—
Mary started acting at age twelve. By seventeen she’s a leading lady at the Marshall Theatre in Richmond, Virginia, the same company John’s just joining. Most of the Devlin family lives in Philadelphia, where her father works as a tailor and makes costumes for the Arch Street Theatre, the company John’s just left. Both her parents are Irish immigrants.
An engagement to the wealthy lawyer R. S. Spofford is expected and encouraged by her family and friends. Edwin tells some people that she’s already spoken for. To others he says, Don’t believe in this marriage; it will never happen. To all he says, She’s like a sister to me.
Mary doesn’t have Adam Badeau’s education nor his flashy brilliance. Everything about her is muted, not a swan, but a sparrow. And yet, in her quiet way, she’s as smart as he is. She has her own feelings about the new naturalism. She, too, loathes the old histrionics, the ranting, the railing.
But she also feels that naturalism can go too far. No one wants to pay for a performance of everyday life, scenes from the supper table. Her ideal is an elevated naturalism. Lines with cadence, not overpowered by their delivery, but allowed to echo in their own intrinsic power. Scenes and situations with weight and moral significance.
Gorgeous tragedy. Art that inspires. Art that feels like art.
The prejudice against actresses remains strong. Coarse and forward—if not actually prostitutes, they bring prostitutes to mind. Asia, herself about to marry a low comic, is convinced that any association between Edwin and Mary will destroy the good name of the family. It will remind everyone of the days in which Mother was called a whore.
She needs constant reassurance that nothing of the sort will happen, which Edwin is happy to provide. But after a long interval, he appears with Mary again. And then again after that. Now they are corresponding. Still he promises Asia she has nothing to worry about.
There’s nothing coarse about Mary. Her manners are delightful, her innocence palpable. In temperament, she’s Edwin’s opposite—the incarnation of sunshine. Edwin feels the sweetness of that sunshine whenever he sees her. Still his determination not to marry her is unshaken, for her sake if not his own. Would her bright spirits survive his violent melancholia? He can’t think so. Marriage to him would only destroy her happiness.
Such selfless abnegation is irresistible. To Mary, Edwin’s melancholia is one of his most attractive features. In the long tradition of young women and wounded heroes, she aches to heal him with her steadfast love. The poor Byronic lamb.
On some level, Edwin must know this. He’s no fool.
Lincoln Running
I suppose the institution of slavery really looks small to him. He is so put up by nature that a lash upon his back would hurt him, but a lash upon anybody else’s back does not hurt him.
—Abraham Lincoln describing Stephen Douglas
The Lincoln-Douglas debates continue throughout 1858. Douglas is still advocating for popular sovereignty with regard to slavery; he’s been neither converted nor silenced. He argues that this is what the Founders intended, a claim Lincoln devastatingly rebuts, one signer of the Declaration of Independence at a time.
They also clash repeatedly over the Dred Scott case, which denied citizenship rights to freed slaves in perpetuity. “Lincoln thinks he knows more of the law than Chief Justice Taney,” says Douglas, or words to that effect. Applause. Laughter. “Lincoln has declared war on the Supreme Court.”