. . . write me all that you do & hear & above all things love me dearly . . .
* * *
—
Edwin’s grief is a terrible thing. It devours him. He spends the first night locked in the bedroom alone with Mary’s body, lying next to her, feeling how cold and heavy she’s become. He weeps and prays to die himself. He weeps and remembers his strange dream. He begs her for just one more of those ghostly kisses.
* * *
—
Edwin will live a good many more years. He’s far from done with tragedy and grief.
But two things he is done with. One is the Stoddards. This doesn’t happen quickly. In the aftermath of Mary’s death he depends on them completely. Richard arranges the funeral. Edwin writes daily heartbroken letters to Elizabeth, castigating himself for his sinful nature—a drunkard by eighteen, a libertine by twenty.
But then, among Mary’s things, he finds a letter. Elizabeth had written to Mary telling her that, sick or well, she must come to New York at once.
Mr. Booth has lost all restraint and hold on himself. Last night there was the grave question of ringing down the curtain before the performance was half over, lose no time. Come.
Edwin believes that worry over his drinking hastened Mary’s death. Her disappointment in him was so profound as to be fatal.
Two people are to blame for this: the man who drank and the woman who told. He sends an angry letter to Elizabeth. She responds with an equal measure of wrath. The friendship is at an end.
The other thing he’s done with is liquor. Never after February 21st, 1863, will anyone ever again see Edwin drunk. “To take a drink—it would be as if I killed Mary all over again,” he says.
Rosalie
v
Every winter seems unusually bitter in these days of war. Edwin stays in Dorchester, snow packed deep around the little house, chilled in his heart and his spirit. Mother, Sleeper, and John attend the funeral, where Mary, never to be older than twenty-two, lies like Ophelia surrounded by flowers. She wears a painted miniature of Edwin’s face on her breast.
Everyone is worried about Edwin. So Mother stays on, which means they give up the rental in Philadelphia, which means Rosalie goes back to Asia’s.
Asia would have liked to attend Mary’s funeral with her brothers and husband, but given her unrelenting animosity towards the deceased, it was unthinkable. She seems to Rosalie to be moping. Of course, it’s terribly sad, she tells Rosalie, but all things considered, Mary’s lucky to have died. Since Edwin has returned to his old wild ways, nothing but misery lies ahead. Mary’s better off out of it.
“Don’t say that to Edwin,” Rosalie says. She’s thinking of a memorable line only recently read—’Tis better to have loved and lost. She believes it.
“I’m not an idiot,” Asia tells her.
By May, Edwin has decided that Dorchester is too quiet to drown out his reproachful, mournful thoughts. He and Mother make a plan to settle in New York City. Edwin will buy a large house, one that can accommodate the whole family and be a real home for Mother, Rosalie, John, and also Joe, should they ever see him again. “Strange, wild, and ever moving,” Edwin says about his youngest brother. “He causes us all some degree of anxiety.”
While Edwin looks for a suitable place, the publisher George Putnam offers his fully furnished house as a rental. This beautiful home is on 17th Street, in the fashionable and prosperous Gramercy Park neighborhood.
Once again, Rosalie is being cast upon the winds. Just shy of forty years old and she still has no say in where or how she lives.
Probably if she’d kicked up a fuss, she could have remained with Asia. She’s grown very fond of Asia’s children—Dolly and little Eddy. But she misses Mother. And Edwin will let her go her own way without comment—that’s appealing. She thinks there will be plenty of liquor in the house. About this, she is mistaken. She packs her things.
Any resentment vanishes when she walks through the door of the Putnam home. She’s never lived anywhere half so magnificent. She has a room to herself on the second floor, a blue room with a window seat for reading, soft rugs, a high bed, and a wardrobe with forget-me-nots painted on the china knobs. She writes her letters on the very desk where Washington Irving once wrote “Rip Van Winkle.”
Edwina is a dear little thing, gay as a flicker for all the tragedy about her. And one child in the household is ever so much easier than two.
Marie, Edwina’s Parisian nurse, turns out to be good with hair. One day, she offers to do up Rosalie’s and the results are so pleasing, Rosalie asks her to do this every morning. Edwin gives Rosalie the name of one of Mary’s dressmakers and soon she has three new dresses in the same deep blues and reds that Mary favored. “You look so elegant!” Mother tells her.
A letter soon arrives. Asia is pregnant again. Rosalie has had a very narrow escape.
Edwin’s friends are desperate to keep him occupied. They visit often, so the house is filled with interesting and accomplished people, famous people, important people. Rosalie is too shy to speak, but now that she feels presentable in her looks, she likes to sit and listen to the politics and the gossip. She’s never wanted to be at the center of a story, not even her own, but she likes very much being near the center. If she stays seated, no one sees her awkward gait. Her life is suddenly interesting. Also, the brandy comes out. Edwin does not drink himself, but he won’t deny his friends.
One evening Julia Ward Howe, a frequent visitor, brings a friend from Boston, the Unitarian clergyman James Freeman Clarke. Clarke takes the seat beside Rosalie, introducing himself. She knows who he is. She’s read his sermons in The Atlantic Monthly.
Like Mrs. Ward, Reverend Clarke is a prominent abolitionist. Rosalie thinks he has a comfortable, likable face, his beard streaked with gray and neatly trimmed, his hair long, white, and unruly as if he combs it only with his fingers. “I met your father once,” he tells her immediately. Perhaps he took the seat beside her for just this purpose. She stiffens slightly. “When I was a young man in Kentucky. Just starting in my first posting. He asked me to officiate at a funeral for some pigeons.”
Rosalie hears Grandfather’s voice. Is there no end to your freaks? Is there no end to the Booth children being reminded of them? “I believe he was arrested,” she says just so she can be the one to say so.
But Reverend Clarke pats her hand reassuringly. “He was such a lovely, gentle man. He read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to me. The power of his voice—uncanny. He wrote me a letter afterwards forgiving me for refusing. I wanted you to know that it’s a memory I treasure.”
The group around him has been growing and next, at Mrs. Ward’s request, he begins to describe their delegation to President Lincoln, shortly after his inauguration, back in 1861. He and Mrs. Ward and several of the other abolitionists had gone to urge complete emancipation. They’d come away disappointed. Lincoln had evaded their requests with his meandering stories. His high-pitched voice, his rustic accent—an unsophisticated bumpkin, they’d thought, too small for the moment he finds himself in. “Never have we so misjudged a man,” Mrs. Ward says.
Reverend Clarke leaves then for a group at the dining table. What she can hear of that conversation is all about the war. Edwin brings her a sweet tea. He doesn’t know how much she wants something stronger. They suffer sobriety together, she invisibly, he by continual smoking. His voice has taken on a rasp, but it doesn’t matter as he has no desire to return to the stage. “It would choke me,” he says, “to deliver one of Shakespeare’s speeches.”