Edwin and Sleeper have gone into business together. They’ve bought the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia and then, adding in a third partner, the manager William Stuart, they’ve taken the lease on the Winter Garden in New York. Asia is becoming very rich as a result.
She’s also seeing more of Edwin, hearing his adventures and triumphs. She’s desperate to return to the old intimacy they once had when he was the brother she loved the most. Mary’s been dead for months. There’s no reason the rift should continue.
But Sleeper is always about, behaving as if Edwin has come to see him. When Sleeper leaves the house, Edwin usually goes along. They are planning on purchasing a third theater in Boston. They are full of plans. “I can’t give Edwina back her mother,” Edwin says. “But I can make her an heiress.”
Although he talks of money, Asia can see that the Winter Garden is a labor of love. For too long, the New York audiences have been fed the thin gruel of Laura Keene’s melodramas when they need the hearty nutrition of Shakespeare. Edwin’s planning to do Hamlet, and the theater is undergoing a long and expensive renovation, scenery and costumes commissioned by real artists, floating footlights, velvet seats, until it becomes the perfect setting, from tip to toe, from greenroom to gallery. Sleeper is mostly focused on the Walnut. The Winter Garden is for Edwin. Neither suggests including John in these profitable ventures.
* * *
—
As Edwin rises, John sinks. He is drinking heavily, fighting with people in saloons, whorehouses, and onstage. He’s getting a reputation as volatile and violent, and it’s harder for him to get bookings. There are several actors, Edwin Forrest among them, who refuse to perform with him.
He takes a tour to Leavenworth, Kansas, in the middle of winter and is trapped by a blizzard on his way back East. Forced to travel for four days by horse-drawn sleigh through frostbite weather, he becomes seriously ill. In Louisville, Kentucky, he collapses mid-performance.
He recovers, but his general condition is weakened. Specifically, he’s left with a persistent bronchitis, which some are whispering will mean the end of his stage career. It’s possible that, though he can still manage a single performance, his voice will never again survive the night after night after night. I’ll be fine either way, he tells Asia. The theater has never mattered to him the way it does to Edwin. Besides, he can make more money elsewhere. He’s started his own enterprise—the Dramatic Oil Company—and is buying up oil wells.
* * *
—
Asia should have known it would be Edwin to raise the Booth name again. Look at him, the coveted guest of the most consequential men in Washington, admired by the president himself.
Look at her, married to his business partner and closest friend. She begins to make frequent visits to the house in New York, intent on reestablishing her own centrality in the family. She’s a Booth through and through and no one should forget it. It’s insupportable that Rosalie should know more about family matters than she does.
ix
June has left California for good, selling his house and quitting his theater. His finances have forced him back on the road—he’s been touring since May. He, too, makes many visits to the New York house, one of the family again after so many years away. His daughter, whom they call Molly, is a lively addition. A hoyden, a handful. Asia adores her niece. She reminds Asia of Asia.
These visits, with her children （all but Joe） and her grandchildren under the same roof, may be the happiest time in Mother’s long and difficult life. She loves to walk into a room and find a group there, planning an outing or laughing about something one of the children has said. Edwin’s house comfortably holds them all and they’re gathered there one day in August of 1864, expecting John, who is late.
When he finally arrives, his condition is shocking. He staggers through the door and faints dead away in the entryway, his head hitting with a bang on the gleaming wooden floor. June picks him up too easily. He’s thinner than Asia has ever seen him.
Edwin runs for the doctor while the rest of the family crowds around his bed. Asia thinks that he looks like a beautiful marble statue, a gravestone angel. This image takes strong hold of her—her brother’s pale, dead face. Since she’ll never actually see him dead, this is the picture she’ll carry. It will come to feel later as if she saw his ghost while he was still alive.
When he comes to, he’s in terrible pain. He’s suffering from an infection—St. Anthony’s fire, or erysipelas—in his right elbow as a result of one of his vigorous sword fights. “For God’s sake, die!” his exhausted opponent, Richmond to his Richard, had told him. “Either you die or I will!” His arm is a bright, angry red, the skin raised. He’s running a high fever, has chills and shakes. The doctor comes and cuts his arm open to allow the pus to drain. The doctor doesn’t say so, but the possibility of amputation is on everyone’s mind.
Instead, under his mother’s care, John improves quickly. Soon enough, it’s clear that both his arm and he will survive. Still he’s weak and bedridden for another three weeks. Asia enjoys visiting the sickroom, seeing John turn into the little boy he once was. She reads him plays and poetry, makes him lemonades and teas, keeps his cut clean and dry.
Now he’s the sun around which the family revolves, everyone acutely aware of how close they came to losing him again. He seems tired, but contented, two states he seldom visits. He’s always had an easy, comfortable friendship with June, and Edwin is anxious that everything that can be done is done. His sisters make a pet of him, his nieces crowd his room for as long as they’re allowed. A rocking chair is brought into the bedroom for Mother so that she can sit in the dark, watching him sleep. Such a rare gift to know exactly where he is.
The day he comes down to breakfast is celebrated with constant fussing at him to eat more. He used to be so hale.
He spends his first day of returned health writing letters to various young women who have probably missed hearing from him. It takes the whole of the day and much of the night as he wants these to rhyme. June is amused by his agonies of composition until John wakes him for help with spelling and word choice. But in the light of morning, even that seems funny. All goes swimmingly for three whole days. And then John and Edwin have a terrible fight.
It starts at breakfast with everyone there to witness it. John’s chair has been pushed into a little puddle of sunshine as Mother wants him to put some color back in his cheeks. He blinks sleepily. Molly has begged the cook for a bread pudding with currants and the kitchen is filled with the familiar smell of scalded milk. They are all tucking in when Edwin mentions that he plans to vote for Lincoln’s reelection. He’s never voted in an election before. He’s proud of this remarkable display of civic responsibility.
John’s response is immediate. “You’ll see Lincoln crowned king and have only yourself to blame.”
Edwin started the fight. John escalates it.
“That baboon has no right to the presidency.” John is already shouting. He’s not well enough for such passions. Asia puts a hand on his shoulder and he slaps her off. “His pedigree, his coarse, low jokes, his vulgar similes . . .”