Edwin has no ready excuse, but it doesn’t matter because Joe is moving on. “Whenever you all were together,” he says, “I was off at school. Even when John and I were at school together, he came home nights and I was boarded away.”
“Did it ever occur to you that you were the better off?” Edwin asks. “I always envied you your schooling—nothing to do but study and be with your friends.”
“I didn’t have friends,” Joe says. “I didn’t have friends and I didn’t have family. I was the loneliest boy in the world.”
Edwin will not give up his own status as most put-upon Booth without a fight. He’s astonished to hear Joe talk about his golden path to riches, the sunny idyll that has always been Edwin’s life. He tries to set Joe straight, telling him about the loneliness of the years on the road with Father, the way Father’s death still haunts him, how, brandy in hand, his current life is one long struggle with drink.
Joe reminds him that, at seventeen, he’d had so many teeth pulled, he’d had to wear a horseshoe-shaped wooden brace in his mouth for more than a year to preserve the shape of his jaw.
To this, Edwin has no answer. Asia, hearing some version of this evening later, tells June that they quarreled, because it suits Asia now to imagine people are quarreling with Edwin. In fact, it was all quite cordial. They just didn’t in the end agree about the rank of their suffering.
Edwin turns to trying to talk Joe out of Australia. “Why not go to June in San Francisco?” he asks. “You want a family? You have one. San Francisco is just as wild as Australia.”
This is advice Joe will take eventually, but only after Australia fails to magically manifest his dreams.
June writes to Edwin:
I would not say so to Mother but I am afraid [Joe] is not sound in his mind . . . I do not say positive insanity but a crack that way . . . which I fear runs more or less thro’ the male portion of our family myself included . . . I recd a letter from Asia pleading in Joe’s behalf & excusing his conduct, putting it down as sensitiveness and innate modesty, but I am afraid my surmise is nearer the truth . . .
I am sorry you & Asia are not on more loving terms—but I feel Asia has a little of the family taint . . .
The actual subject of this letter is the fact that June owes Edwin nineteen hundred dollars, some of which he has lost in mining speculation and some of which he has spent on a house, but none of which he can repay. He’s explaining his profligate and unsanctioned use of Edwin’s money. Not guilty by reason of hereditary insanity.
iii
In September, Edwin and Mary return to New York after an absence of nearly a year. Edwin finds the war simultaneously present—few untouched by loss and grief—and strangely absent. The city is as full of gaiety as it’s ever been. The theaters and restaurants are thriving, the bars boisterous, the streets bustling. In the midst of death we are in life, Edwin thinks. Although he once enjoyed this same disconnect, it now seems unfathomable that things can simply be going on as before.
The Prince and Princess move back into their rooms in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, with the Princess now in Parisian gowns and the royal child with a Parisian nanny. One of the splendors of the Fifth Avenue Hotel is its bathrooms. Claw-footed tubs and flushing toilets! Edwin goes immediately to fill the basin with cold water and soap his cheeks for a shave. He’s only half done scraping his face when he hears a cry from Mary. She’s at the bathroom door, holding a letter in her hand. Her sweet face has gone white, her eyes big and shining like glass. “Oh, Ned,” she says. “Oh, my darling! Your friend Dick is dead.”
Richard Cary, the first of Edwin’s friends to enlist, had been killed back in early August and the letter informing Edwin has been waiting here these weeks. Richard was shot in the leg at the Battle of Cedar Mountain. The wound was not instantly fatal, but his men were unable to transport him to the field hospital before he bled out. The letter is from his sister, who also writes that an unfinished letter to Edwin was found in his pocket. Richard Cary was twenty-six years old, two years younger than Edwin.
Edwin feels the whirlwind rise around him, the deafening sound of his own blood. “Mollie,” he says, dropping the blade and groping towards her. She puts her arms around him, rocking and petting him, and he cries without restraint or control, slightly embarrassed when he straightens up to see that he’s left the bodice of her dress soaked with suds and tears.
Edwin will never experience a loss free from guilt. He remembers the letters he’d written to Richard, which seem now egotistical, as if Richard, facing one battle after another, could possibly be interested in the advancement of Edwin’s career. He writes a letter of condolence to Richard’s wife and then, having sent it, immediately writes another. But what, really, can be said?
A second letter is also in the pile, this one from Adam Badeau, all about the horrors of the Battle of Antietam. At first this seems strange—Adam is still in Louisiana and nowhere near Maryland. But James Harrison Wilson was there. Adam has fallen in love. “I can tell no one but you, dear Ned,” he writes. By God’s grace, Wilson is not among the twenty-three thousand dead.
Edwin, newly sensitive to the danger Adam is in, writes back that he’s praying for the God of Battles to spare his Ad. He consults with Julia Ward Howe as to what he can do for the war effort and she proposes charity performances, the proceeds going to medical supplies or to the Union’s indigent widows and orphans. He does several of these.
He can’t seem to go to sleep at night and he can’t wake up in the morning. Mary often brings Edwina, freshly bathed, to do the deed, so his day can begin with the pressure of her tiny hands, levering herself up and over the rumpled bedclothes, up and over his body. He opens his eyes and she’s inches away, staring intently into them, her sparse hair haloing her head. When she sees him looking back, she grabs for his nose. She smells of milk and powder. He holds her, kicking and laughing above his head. It’s so easy to make her happy. It’s all he wants to do.
Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation
This government cannot much longer play a game in which it stakes all, and its enemies stake nothing. Those enemies must understand that they cannot experiment for ten years trying to destroy the government, and if they fail still come back into the Union unhurt.
—Abraham Lincoln, 1862
Abraham Lincoln writes a short statement threatening to free the slaves in the Rebel States. He reads it to his cabinet. Some in the room have been waiting years for these words. Still they are stunned to actually hear them. This will change everything. The war will no longer be fought to restore the old Union, but to establish a new one. The end of slavery will be, henceforth, the primary purpose of the Union forces.
William Seward, once his rival for the Republican nomination, now Lincoln’s Secretary of State, advises him. A move so momentous must not be seen as an act of desperation, a last throw of the dice by a losing army. Lincoln should announce it only after the Union has won some substantial victory.
Lincoln agrees. He waits.
The Battle of Antietam is a horror. More men are killed on this single day than the fatalities in all of America’s other nineteenth-century wars combined. The dead cover the ground like grass. The mud turns red.