How quick Asia would have been to take Adam’s side if only she’d known. Her letters to Jean contain fantasies of Mary going under the Falls or taking a swim in the whirlpool. Every Hamlet needs his Ophelia. When down her weedy trophies and herself Fell in the weeping brook.
xviii
Asia tells herself that she’s contented with the small doings of her own establishment. Dolly is endlessly engrossing—she has two teeth and can pull herself to standing!—and Sleeper as attentive as ever. They go to the seaside. She revels in a trip to Baltimore to see old friends. She has trouble making new ones. My heart’s a poor soil for it, she says, and longs only for the dear old faces. She takes Dolly in her pram to see her aunt and grandmother. No one mentions Mother’s time at the Falls. No one speaks of Mary Devlin at all. Mary Devlin Booth.
Asia’s succeeded in driving Edwin and Mary from Philadelphia. Edwin decides he can’t subject Mary to her ferocious enmity and they never do occupy the house he’d rented, leaving it to Mother and Rosalie. Asia tells herself she’s glad of it, so very relieved, although there’s no real victory to be had from an opponent who simply quits the field.
Instead Edwin and Mary move into the new and opulent Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York City. Joe goes to see them and comes back with tales that, Joe-like, he seems unaware will cause her pain. The hotel is where the rich and connected stay. It has an enormous dining hall, lobby, and common rooms, all fitted out in deep green and red curtains, rosewood counters, white marble columns, and masses of gilt. In order to access the upper floors, guests ride in the astonishingly modern vertical screw railway, an elevator operated by a steam engine that rotates a gigantic screw to raise and lower the car.
Mary’s developed her own style, which Joe is unable to describe to Asia’s satisfaction, but he does say that her gowns are all in deep blues and wine reds, and that she has a lot of them. The hotel staff refers to Edwin as the Prince and Mary （the daughter of Irish immigrants!） as the Princess, a particular triumph since the Prince of Wales has also stayed there and been found insufficiently royal to take Edwin’s crown. Joe talks of glittering friends and grand parties.
It’s clear to Asia that Mary is living rich. She has no idea how hard Mary is working for this money. Mary’s taken the artistic advancement of Edwin’s career on as a calling. She makes notes on every performance. They discuss these over dinner. She is my severest critic, Edwin says, and therefore my kindest.
But keeping his spirits up is hard work. Keeping him sober is harder work. Had she only known it, her life bears some slight similarity to that of the boy Edwin, the Edwin who followed his father through the moonlight, trying to keep him out of bars. But with less resentment and more gratitude. Mary knows that she’s lucky. Still, on occasion she feels the same loneliness as that sad boy.
His growing success has one unexpected outcome—it brings Edwin Forrest out of retirement. Forrest would never admit that he’s competing with this younger Edwin, as he sees nothing there worthy of competition. “Good voice, good eyes, and his father’s name,” Forrest says.
They perform in New York City on the same nights, Forrest at Niblo’s and Edwin at the Winter Garden. They both play Hamlet. They both play Richelieu. Forrest goes to see Edwin in Macbeth, although if asked he would have said he was there for Lady Macbeth, being now portrayed by the great Charlotte Cushman. This is the role Abraham Lincoln once told Cushman he most wished to see her play. But Cushman and Edwin make an almost comical pair—she so much older and bigger than he is. It takes all their skill to move the audience past this visual and Edwin is sometimes unable to forget it himself. He tells Adam that when Cushman urges murder on him, he’s tempted to say, Do it yourself. You’re much bigger and stronger than I. He refers to Cushman as the Colonel.
Forrest is fully alive to the comedy of it. He laughs when Cushman says: “？‘All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.’？” Cushman’s hand is as big as a cod. And as to Edwin, why does he scuff along the ground like that as if he’s looking for some coin he dropped?
The critics are split in their judgments. One who favors Edwin says that Forrest represents “the biceps aesthetic; the tragic calves; the bovine drama; rant, roar, and rigmarole.” Later, when Edwin’s Hamlet is described as slightly feminine, Edwin will be pleased. That is just what he was going for.
Meanwhile, in Columbus, Georgia, moments before John is to go onstage and play Hamlet, Matthew Canning, his new manager, shoots him.
xix
John’s relatively short career as an actor is replete with accidents and illnesses. His energetic sword fighting will regularly result in injury, either to his opponent or himself. In the course of a single play, he will stab a fellow performer and fall on his own sword, bleeding copiously but continuing his scene.
He will suffer a voice-threatening bronchitis, a life-threatening streptococcal infection, and a large tumor on his neck. His extremely active love life will occasion bouts of venereal disease, and one lover, cast aside for her own sister, will slice open his face. And he will carry always the bullet from Canning’s gun in his body.
Asia first learns of the accident when she reads about it in the paper. One of the peculiarities of the Booth family is how often they communicate via article and review. The article has a winking sort of quality, a certain delicacy in the wording. Asia gathers that John has been shot in the buttocks. In fact, the bullet is in his thigh.
By the time she rushes to Mother with the news, Edwin has already wired. He’s expected to live, Edwin says consolingly, but rather than calm Asia down, this alarms her. Nothing in the article suggested the injury was ever anything but humorous. She understands now that it’s much worse than she’d thought.
How exactly it happened remains unclear. Either John or Canning was careless with Canning’s gun. Either John had taken the gun from Canning’s pocket and it had fired as Canning tried to recover it, or Canning was laughingly threatening the whole troupe to perform well or else, and had inadvertently hit the trigger. Or something entirely different. Accounts vary. Accounts vary wildly.
John was lucky that the bullet missed the femoral artery. He had an excellent doctor, who decided against removing it; it had gone too deep for that. The doctor cleaned and bandaged the wound, had John transported to his bed with instructions to remain there. The show went on, with John’s understudy playing Hamlet. John’s recuperation lasts several weeks.
A couple of months pass, and he goes to his mother’s house in Philadelphia, still not entirely recovered. He visits Asia, who sees a cautiousness in the way he moves that tells her he’s still in pain. He’s lost weight and is less energetic than usual. But he’s gratifyingly delighted with Dolly. She’s crawling now. The knees of her clothes are always gray with dust and betray the fact that Asia’s not stayed on top of the housekeeper.
Dolly is at an enchanting age, with round cheeks, four teeth, and a smile like a jack-o’-lantern. She laughs hysterically when John pops up from behind his hands, sobs when Becky comes to take her away. John dines that evening with Asia and Sleeper, then Sleeper leaves to go perform. John’s feelings towards Sleeper have not changed. He’s barely civil.