Edwin starts to respond and John raises his hand. He’s not done yet. He will not be interrupted. “And he’s a mere puppet of the North. Greater minds than his play on his overweening vanities. People who want to crush out slavery by any means—robbery, rapine, slaughter, and bought armies—makes no difference to them. People without honor and goodness.” It’s a speech. Clearly he’s given it before.
Rosalie rises and takes Molly and Edwina out of the room. They do not go silently. “No,” Molly says firmly, “I want to see,” but Rosalie has the sleeve of her dress gripped in her hand and is not stopping. “No!” says Molly.
Edwina echoes her. “No! No!”
“You’re distressing Mother,” June says to his brothers. He’s the oldest, but he’s been away so much. It’s Edwin’s house and he’s used to being the oldest, Rosalie clearly not counting. John is the only son here with no standing beyond the power of his conviction.
“I so love having you all visit,” Mother says, her voice trembling, her eyes red. Her gray hair hasn’t been done up yet this morning. She looks disheveled, an elderly waif. “We’ve had such a lovely time.”
That should have been enough to stop them, but Edwin and John don’t even seem to notice. They’ve risen from their chairs and stand, staring each other down. John is still holding his fork. He points to Edwin with it. The tines circle menacingly in his hand. “？‘Tis the time’s plague when madmen lead the blind,’？” he says.
“？‘The fool doth think he is wise,’？” Edwin answers.
Edwin’s never been a brawler. But John’s only barely able to use his right arm. Asia can’t guess how this will end. However it does, it won’t be good. She is a mother of three. Breaking up fights is practically her profession.
She moves into the space between her brothers, forcing them apart. There is a momentary tableau. She sees the stubble on Edwin’s chin, the shadows under John’s eyes. She smells the stale smell of sickness still on John’s breath. Then John drops his fork onto the table, where it hits his plate with a loud crack and bounces onto the floor. He leaves the room.
Asia wonders what just happened. Surely John would never have stabbed Edwin. Suddenly her intervention seems unnecessary and she wishes she hadn’t done it. It’s almost as if she doesn’t trust her brothers. Everyone sits back down and pretends to go on eating. No one speaks.
Whatever pretense of peace was achieved proves temporary. Later that morning, the quarrel starts again. Asia hears it, the voices, not the words, rising from the parlor. By the time she’s downstairs, Edwin has ordered John from the house. In an instant, John’s packing his bag. In an instant, he’s out the door.
June runs after him. Asia watches from the window. They’re three houses down, talking together, June’s arms in constant motion, John hunched stubbornly into himself.
The weather is changing, the air dry, but crackling with electricity. Asia feels her hair lifting, on her arms and neck. In the distance, lightning stretches in large white sheets. She can smell a storm coming. There’s a yowling right under the window, that strange unearthly call of a cat in heat. It feels all portentous to Asia, but of what she couldn’t say.
John walks away. June comes back to the house.
Asia meets June at the door. “He says,” June tells her, “that if it weren’t for Mother, he’d never set foot in Edwin’s house again. He says he’s going to leave the North entirely and live in Virginia. He says that he knows none of us agree with him, but he really can’t bear having his dearest principles denounced as treason inside his own family. He says every day here is a new stab in his heart.
“And he’s finished with anyone who takes Edwin’s side.”
Asia won’t take Edwin’s side. But she won’t side against him either. There must be a way she’s allowed to love them both.
* * *
—
John doesn’t go live in Virginia. Weeks pass. He and Edwin put a flimsy patch on their wounds. He continues to visit his mother, saying as little to Edwin as possible. Edwin tries to reach him with talk about acting, a subject on which Edwin can be encouraging, even admiring. “You’ll do great things,” Edwin tells him. “You’ve got the true grit.”
John’s not interested. “It’s not in my stars,” he says.
x
Edwin comes to play Philadelphia and he and Asia finally have the intimate, private conversation she’s been longing for. Edwin has met a woman here. A woman so sweet, he tells her, that he can only imagine Mary has sent her.
Perhaps he’s feeling guilty. Mary’s only been dead a year and a half. Asia’s the last woman to defend Mary, but really! Wasn’t that the world’s great love affair?
The new woman is Blanche Hanel. Her father is a wealthy shipping agent and a patron of the arts. She’s tall for a woman, about Edwin’s height, and blond, which is new for him. He asks Asia to call on her, which Asia does. Blanche has none of Mary’s disqualifications. She also has none of Mary’s sharpness of mind.
She makes up for being less smart by being more rich.
A flirt, is what Asia thinks, but good-hearted and obviously smitten. Asia won’t risk opposing another of Edwin’s choices. If she makes him happy, then Asia has no objection. Edwina should have a mother. It will probably work out very well.
Edwin’s old friend and new enemy Elizabeth Stoddard is not so generous. Having written passionate odes to Mary’s death and Edwin’s grief, having called him a noble soul and sensitive genius, she feels she’s been made a fool. She writes that she pities the woman he marries next, whomever she is, as Edwin is incapable of fidelity and sincere feeling. Only when drunk, she says, did he manage to be even half a man.
* * *
—
Around this same time, Edwin has a curious adventure. He’s in the depot in Jersey City, waiting for the train to Philadelphia, when he sees a young man inadvertently jostled off the platform into the space between two moving train cars. Edwin is able to grab the young man by the collar of his coat and hoist him back to safety before there is any injury.
The young man recognizes him. “Thank you, Mr. Booth,” he says, with a bit of an awestruck stammer. “That was a narrow escape.”
“Not at all,” Edwin tells him and then his train arrives and he boards it. It wasn’t, Edwin thinks, really a narrow escape as the train was moving so slowly. He gives the matter no further thought.
xi
In late November, the Booths are all back in New York again. The three brothers are to appear together at Edwin’s Winter Garden Theatre in Julius Caesar. This has been long scheduled, but after the Great Fight, Asia worried John would back out.
It’s to be a one-night-only event, a benefit performance. All profits will go to a fund to raise a statue of Shakespeare in Central Park. They’ve never all been onstage together before. They never will be again.
Asia comes to the brownstone, bringing her three children, Dolly, Eddy, and Adrienne, and returning June’s daughter, Molly, after an extended visit. Molly’s little cousins are mesmerized by her. Those who can walk follow her everywhere—raids on the kitchen and rampages about the house. It’s lucky they’re no longer at the Putnam place. The potential damage to Washington Irving’s desk is dreadful to contemplate.