A: For several months. I was insane in Panama.
Q: On your return?
A: Yes, sir. That news made me insane.
* * *
—
Mother and Rosalie are in New York. For more than a week, bells have been ringing, horns blowing in the giddy city, and the celebratory noise is only now starting to subside. The war is over. All the boys are home or coming home. Mother says that Ann Hall will be united with her lost children at last. All of them free now! If only Joe Hall had lived to see it. She says that all any mother wants is to be with her children. They make plans for a visit to Tudor Hall.
The doorbell rings and the Aldriches are on the doorstep. Thomas Aldrich is an editor and writer, a man of sincerity and compassion. Rosalie has never liked his wife, an opinion shared by Mark Twain, who called her a dithering blatherskite and worse. “Lord, I loathe that woman,” Mark Twain says.
The Aldriches are friends of Edwin’s. “Edwin’s in Boston,” Rosalie tells them. She’s surprised they wouldn’t know that.
Mrs. Aldrich seizes Rosalie’s hands so tightly that her rings dig into Rosalie’s flesh. “We’re here for your poor mother,” she says. Through the open door, Rosalie hears the newsboy calling. “The President’s Death! The President Foully Murdered! The President’s Death!”
A moment of shock. “The president is dead?” she asks.
“Oh my dear,” Mrs. Aldrich says, still clutching her hands though Rosalie has tried to extricate them.
At least John will be happy, Rosalie thinks. She’ll remember always how that was her first thought just before she heard the newsboy call, “John Wilkes Booth arrested.”
She looks at Mrs. Aldrich, who has taken the time this morning before coming to the house to pin her best hat onto her head, powder her cheeks, and arrange the curls about her face. “Oh my dear,” Mrs. Aldrich says.
Mother has heard the cries from the street. She joins them at the door, white and faint. Mr. Aldrich steps forward to lend his arm, help her to the couch. Rosalie hasn’t seen the face Mother is wearing since Henry died. All those years ago, and yet she recognizes it immediately. Unspeakable sorrow mixed with madness. She always knew she’d see it again. “Mother, it’s a mistake,” Rosalie says. “You know John. He would never do this to you.”
“Of course, we all hope it turns out to be a mistake,” Mrs. Aldrich says, the doubt evident in her voice.
“We must wait and see,” Thomas Aldrich says.
More friends of Edwin’s arrive—the Osgoods, the Taylors. These people have never spoken two words to Rosalie before. She’s stiff with resentment. She sees through their postures of sympathy. This is the most exciting thing ever to happen to them, tourists to the land of grief. And she feels the insult to John, that anyone would believe such a thing. Worse, she can see that they’re persuading Mother.
The doorbell rings again along with the postman’s whistle. He’s delivering a letter from John. There is a terrible power in that letter arriving at that minute. Mother’s hands are shaking so that she can’t open it. She hands it to Rosalie. Rosalie wishes she and Mother were alone.
April 14th, two a.m.
Dearest Mother:
I know you expect a letter from me, and I’m sure you will hardly forgive me. But indeed I have nothing to write about. Everything is dull; that is, has been till last night. （The illumination.）
Everything was bright and splendid. More so in my eyes if it had been displayed in a nobler cause. But so goes the world. Might makes right. I only drop you these few lines to let you know I am well, and to say I have not heard from you. Excuse brevity, am in haste. Had one from Rose. With best love to you, I am your affectionate son ever,
John
Is that the letter a boy writes to his mother on the very day he means to murder the president? Rosalie doesn’t think so. She holds the paper out with an emphatic shake. The letter is passed from hand to hand until it comes back to her.
Mother is still sobbing on the couch. “Oh God, if this be true, let him shoot himself. Let him not live to be hanged! Spare us that at least, that disgrace to our name. Have that one ounce of pity, God.” Edwin’s friends are clustered around her, Thomas Aldrich kneeling at her feet.
Why is everyone behaving as if this is true? Rosalie’s conviction becomes agonized, defensive, less like conviction. She holds the letter against her bodice, as close to her heart as it can be. John’s own words in John’s own hand. Her proof of his innocence.
All day long, they hear the newsboys calling from the street that Abraham Lincoln is dead and John Wilkes Booth arrested.
* * *
—
Rosalie is right to think this is wrong. She’s wrong as to which part. John has not been arrested. He escaped the theater on horseback and is currently in Maryland at the surgery of Dr. Samuel Mudd, having the bone in his leg set. He’d broken it the night before, leaping from Lincoln’s box to the stage to deliver the most shocking conclusion Our American Cousin will ever have. It was a big scene, with blocking and a speech—sic semper tyrannis—and everything. He’d choreographed it carefully, all but the broken leg.
In his diary he writes: “Rode sixty miles last night with the bones of my leg tearing the flesh at every jump. I can never repent it, though we hated to kill . . . God simply made me the instrument of his punishment.”
ii
Edwin returns to New York on the 16th, anxious about his mother, but otherwise dead in his soul. He finds Mother in her bed, unable to rise. “I truly think this will kill her,” he tells his friends. “I think her heart is so broken, she may will it to stop altogether.”
Rosalie is once again her mother’s inadequate comfort. Perhaps there is some special love reserved for the child who has never given a moment’s worry. Rosalie doesn’t feel it. Her own grief is unacknowledged, submerged in her mother’s, but it does, from time to time, choke her unexpectedly as she tries to eat her breakfast, read a book, lie sleepless at her mother’s side. John’s face rises in her mind and she hates him as much as she loves him, in both cases, too much. “Remember him as he was,” Edwin tells her, but who was that? Did she ever really know him? Has she only just lost him or did that happen long ago?
* * *
—
John entrusted a friend with a manifesto he wanted printed in the papers. On hearing of the assassination, this friend opens, reads, and burns it. What does appear in the papers are the letters from Asia’s safe, the ones Sleeper gave the federal marshal. Rosalie tries not to look at them. She lasts three whole hours.
The first is to his mother. It’s odd to think that this was written many days before the letter they’d received at the very hour of the newsboy’s calls. This one is full of protestations of his deep love for his mother, the best, the noblest mother in the world. Still, he owes a duty to his country, he says. He complains, with no sense of irony, that he’s lived a slave in the North and can bear that no longer.
And here is the part that especially angers Rosalie: “And should the last bolt strike your son, dear mother bear it patiently . . . my Brothers and Sisters （Heaven protect them） will add my love and duty to their own, and watch you with care and kindness until we meet again.”