Next morning, while Edwin sleeps in after his late night, Asia, June, and John take the children out front to play in the snow. June and John pelt each other with snowballs. The children demand a snowman.
As they comply, June and John talk about last night’s performance. No one says so, but Asia feels an undercurrent of resentment that when all three are onstage together, Edwin is understood to be the star, even when John gets most of the applause, even when June is the novelty on the New York stage where Edwin is a fixture.
They get to the panic around the fire. June says, “If this were California, the arsonists would have been strung up without a trial.”
“They’re just trying to show Northern cities one fraction of what’s been done to cities in the South,” John says. “Little enough return for what’s happening right now in the Shenandoah Valley.”
The family is increasingly worried about John. He’s become monomaniacal. He rejects any news of Northern victories. “I haven’t heard that,” he’ll tell June when faced with evidence as if, since he hasn’t heard it, it can’t possibly be true.
“It’s a family quarrel,” June says. “North, South—we’re all still family. We quarrel, we make it up. Don’t drive yourself mad over it.”
Here’s the thing about John. You can talk to him. But you can’t make him listen.
Still since it’s June and not Edwin saying these things, there’s no reason to spoil the day over it. Asia goes inside to find a hat for the snowman. When she comes back, Molly is chasing John with a handful of snow, the other children shouting, laughing, and dancing like monkeys.
xii
The next night the Winter Garden Theatre sees the debut of Hamlet with Edwin in the title role. The play runs for two weeks, three, eight, until Edwin feels the exhaustion of playing the same part, night after night. He begs for a change, but Stuart says no, the play is still selling out. This run, which will last one hundred nights, is the final making of Edwin’s name. Ever after, he will be America’s Hamlet. Edwin refers to this as “my terrible success.”
It was a shame Shakespeare couldn’t see him, the critics write, he was so exactly what Hamlet ought to be. In outer aspect composed and gentle, inwardly filled with a fierce passion, Booth’s Hamlet inspired a sort of worship. It was more than a calling, almost a cult. One morning little Edwina is offered an omelet. “That’s my daddy,” she says.
The role of Claudius is played by Samuel Knapp Chester, the same man John credited with saving his life in Montgomery. Night after night, Chester stands onstage with Edwin, saying nothing beyond his lines. “？‘God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another,’？” Hamlet tells Ophelia, and no one knows better than Chester how true this is.
Unbeknownst to anyone else, John has made repeated attempts to enlist Chester in a plot he is forming against the president. It’s to be a kidnapping. Lincoln will be bundled into Richmond, Virginia, and held there until he can be traded for Confederate prisoners.
John has applied every pressure at his disposal on the frightened, but unyielding, Chester. Chester need only show up with the carriage. He never even has to see Lincoln. John is asking so little.
“I have a family,” Chester says, but so does John; this excuse holds no water. John insists. He cajoles. He threatens.
In the face of Chester’s intransigence, he’s sorry to have ever divulged his plans. He holds a gun under Chester’s chin. “If you mention this to anyone,” John says, “I will send Confederate agents after you. They will hunt you down. Wherever you hide, they will find you. And your family.” Chester feels the barrel of the gun pressing into his neck. He finds it persuasive. He regrets having saved John’s life, but cannot say even that to anyone.
* * *
—
Edwin gets a letter from Adam Badeau. Adam is in the middle of his second great heartbreak. His intimate friend, James Wilson, has cut him off, alluding to a single night Wilson now regrets. Adam blames jealous fate for this, “jealous fate which cannot bear that men should be so purely happy, and so happily pure—so nearly good . . . I’d give ten years of my life to annihilate one day and its consequences,” Adam writes to Wilson.
None of this agony is in his letter to Edwin. To Edwin he says that the young man Edwin saved on the train tracks a few weeks back was Robert Lincoln, the president’s son. Robert is also on Grant’s staff and has told them all the whole story. Grant would like to do something to thank Edwin. He may have saved Robert from serious injury.
It takes Edwin a moment to even remember this incident. Still, it is gratifying. He tells Adam that all he needs is for Grant to drive the nail straight into the Southern head.
Edwin tells Asia and Rosalie about the rescue on the train tracks.
He assumes they won’t tell John and they don’t.
* * *
—
In January of 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment passes, abolishing slavery in the United States forever.
* * *
—
In February, while Edwin struggles with exhaustion in the midst of his historic run, June arranges his schedule to spend a day with John in Washington, DC. Rosalie, Edwin, and June have had a tête-à-tête-à-tête about John.
Asia is home in Philadelphia. She is so much better informed on John’s activities than the rest of them. If she’d been there, if she’d been consulted, things might have gone differently. Or not. Asia is John’s most intimate connection to the family. Her instinct is to admire and support him.
The other three are concerned at the way his passion and febrile certitude are erasing every other thing he used to be. They’re not thinking about anything he might do so much as who he is becoming—Father’s madness without Father’s genius to excuse it. And how will he react when his beloved Richmond falls, as it surely will and soon?
June volunteers to go and talk to him, play the big brother. Obviously this task can’t fall to Edwin. John is currently in the capital so June meets him there at the Surratt boardinghouse. They sit together in the overstuffed parlor, full of geegaws, vases and candlesticks and figurines. June feels oddly spied on by Mrs. Surratt and her daughter, oddly unsettled by the ticking of multiple clocks. He suggests going out.
Twilight is just falling and they walk together along the darkening streets. They follow the lamplighter for a block or so, seeing the lamps flare, yellow and haloed in the misty evening. June’s trying to find a place to begin when John suddenly provides it. “Virginia! My Virginia!” he cries out tragically. He turns south, his face wet with tears.
Obviously, sober sense is in short supply here. “John,” June says. He grabs John’s shoulders, looks him in the eyes. “The North will win and there’s nothing to be done about it. You would do best to concentrate on your profession.”
He can see the condemnation in John’s face. “I’m not so bloodless as you,” John says.
June’s second attempt goes better. They find a bar and over whiskies, June learns two things he didn’t know. One: John’s been boasting for months of big profits from his oil wells. The truth is that he’s lost nearly everything. June scolds him affectionately for pretending otherwise. Time for him to recommit to the stage.