John arrives soon after. He and Edwin do their best to avoid open warfare. From John’s perspective, there’s plenty of cause. Lincoln recently won reelection, the first president to do so since Andrew Jackson in 1832. Never in John’s lifetime have eight whole years been given to any one president. It’s unnatural. It’s a monarchy.
Adam Badeau, now fully recovered, has been promoted to Grant’s staff and is helping Grant conduct the Siege of Petersburg. This is very close to John’s beloved Richmond and a poor thank-you for John’s kindness to him.
And Edwin has taken the best part for himself.
He will be Brutus. June will be Cassius, and John, Mark Antony. Edwin Varrey, from the original cast of Laura Keene’s Our American Cousin, is playing Caesar.
This is the event of the season. The theater sells out instantly, some seats, having sold for the unheard-of price of five dollars, are scalped for as much as twenty. Several policemen are on duty to handle the crowd before the doors open. It’s all too much for Rosalie, who takes one look, says she feels ill, and goes straight back home in the carriage.
Asia has a seat in the orchestra. The theater is stifling, especially coming in from the New York November. People are crammed into every available space, some sitting, many standing, and Asia has to force her way forward, her cheeks burning.
She struggles out of her coat, so crushed on both sides that she strikes the hat off the elderly woman next to her when she shakes her arm out of her sleeve. While apologizing, she identifies herself as the Booth sister. It has the desired effect. “Oh, my dear, we’re just so excited about this evening,” the woman says. She’s wearing choking amounts of lilac perfume.
Mother is seated above in a private box. Asia can’t see her face, but there is her glove on the rail. The theater darkens and the play begins. The woman next to her is whispering and Asia is just about to ask her to stop when she does. Her brothers come onstage in the second scene, strolling in together. The play pauses as the audience shouts and claps. If only Father could have been here. He could have played Caesar.
John has shaved his mustache just for the performance. “He looks like a young god,” Asia overhears someone behind her say, someone with a strong Southern accent. She wonders if Edwin is feeling the challenge of comparison. At the end of the first act, her three brothers emerge from behind the curtain. They bow to the audience. They bow to their mother. The bravos are deafening.
Act 2 begins. Scene 2. Caesar’s House. Varrey has only just told the audience that a coward dies many times before his death when fire engines are heard outside. Although more than a year has passed since the riots, they’re in no way forgotten. The people around Asia begin to stir uneasily. No one can leave quickly, it’s much too crowded. Asia stands to look towards the door and when that doesn’t work, she climbs onto her chair. She can see a scrum at the back, like a school of fish trying to force its way through too narrow a channel. The smell of smoke penetrates the lilac.
The woman next to her has risen and is standing in front of Asia’s seat, blocking her from getting down. Onstage, Varrey steps forward. “Please stay calm,” he says. “All is well,” but how can he know that? “Please! Keep to your seats.” More people in Asia’s row are pushing past her into the crowded aisle.
“Please let me down,” she asks the top of the top hat now standing in her way. “I have to help my mother.” She has a vague plan to go onto the stage instead of towards the doors, find her brothers, exit with them. But Mother is in the wrong direction. She remembers Father talking about a long-ago theater fire in Richmond. Nearly a hundred people killed, most of them in the boxes and above as the cheap seats were nearer the doors.
The crush at the back has turned to pandemonium. Asia can see this clearly from her high vantage point, the shoving, the shouting. A theater critic is knocked to the ground and writes later of the forest of legs, the trampled furs and hats. Edwin joins Varrey on the stage. “There is no fire,” he shouts. “There is no fire.” His voice is loud enough in a silent theater. Not loud enough for this one. Asia thinks she’s the only one to hear him.
A man runs onstage with a large flat piece of scenery—a Roman column. On the back he’s written in enormous red letters Edwin’s exact words—There is no fire. He hoists it above his head. “Oi, Oi!” he shouts.
A squad of policemen have managed to hold their ground against the fleeing crowd. One of them calls out, “There’s no danger. The fire is already out. It’s only a drunken man! It’s only a drunken man.” His words are a pebble tossed into water. The panic subsides, first in the small circle around him and then in expanding rings. The words finally reach Asia. “Only a drunk. Only a drunk.”
It takes half an hour to completely restore order. Asia is far too hot now, sweating under her dress collar. The man in the top hat has helped her down. The people who made it to the aisle now step on her feet as they return. The play resumes.
Julius Caesar is not a play often performed. It’s widely thought to read better than it plays and it has an insufficiency of female roles. So when, during his most famous speech, Mark Antony adds a line, few notice. Sic semper tyrannis, Antony says. The motto of Virginia. It makes sense in the context. Asia doesn’t even wonder if that’s the way Shakespeare wrote it.
The applause at the end is thunderous. Asia claps until her palms sting. The Booths come back and come back again. They step forward individually. The applause for John is louder than that for Edwin or June. The Booths step forward together. They raise their hands towards their mother in her box and she, too, is applauded. The next day’s reviews will liken her to Cornelia, the Roman mother whose sons were her jewels. How proud she must be, the papers will say, with such jewels as these. No one will note how badly things went for Cornelia’s sons. Or that she also had daughters.
Two events mar the evening’s end, though Asia only hears of them the next day. William Stuart, the stage manager, is responsible for both. Stuart is the personification of bonhomie. Also of duplicity. First, he neglects to invite John or June to the after party. By the time Edwin realizes, June has already left, escorting Asia and Mother home. He begs John to come. An oversight, Edwin says. Please come.
But John leaves. William Stuart has never liked him and the feeling is mutual. He pretends to believe that Edwin is not behind this insult.
On the following evening, Edwin is due to begin a run as Hamlet. Stuart has posted the playbills all over the lobby. booth, they say. Edwin finds Stuart to object. “There are three Booths.”
“After your Hamlet, there will only be one,” Stuart tells him. In any event it’s too late. John and June have already seen them.
* * *
—
In 1867, the uninsured Winter Garden will be destroyed by fire, along with all the carefully commissioned sets and costumes. Edwin’s wardrobe alone is valued at sixty thousand dollars and all of it ash. “It gets me out of my contract with Stuart,” Edwin will say. “I won’t complain.”
* * *
—
From the newsboys that night, they learn that the fire in the Lafarge Hotel next to the theater was set by a Confederate agent. From the newspaper next morning, they learn it was only one of nineteen fires set that night in a plot to overwhelm the fire department and burn New York City to the ground. As a plot it was better in theory than execution. All nineteen fires were easily extinguished.