Reporters swarm the little town of Bel Air, which seems to have been and still be Copperhead country. Yet it is possible to find many who do not like John Wilkes Booth. Mr. Hooper, whose dog John once shot, is interviewed. Their old neighbors the Woolseys divulge his penchant for killing marketable fowl and lying about it. Mr. Hagan recounts being beaten near to death.
Some friends remain. Aunty Rogers tells Mother that, while John was on the run, she’d kept a hamper of food for him on the front porch. A reporter found Ann Hall to ask, if John showed up wanting her help, would she give it? “I’d give him anything he needed. I’d give him anything I have,” she’d said, and closed the door.
When as a child Asia had learned of her father’s bigamy, she’d protested the unfairness of it reflecting on his children. “It’s not as if we did anything wrong,” she’d said. She tries to hold that same conviction now, but it’s more difficult. In their hearts, each Booth must be asking: What did I do to cause this? What did I not do to stop it?
Asia’s guilt is more specific. Should she have read his letters? Should she have told Edwin about them and the nighttime visitors? Yet who could ever have suspected this?
Finally unable to bear it longer, Asia moves to England. But no one leaves unhappiness behind so easily. She never grants Sleeper his divorce, though he ceases to pay the marriage any mind, behaving in all ways as a single man. He treats Asia with the disrespect he feels her family name deserves. She loses another child at two and a half months. “I am, like my mother, getting hardened to sorrow,” she says.
For a year or so, she enjoys being away from America. She feels she can breathe again. But her husband is a philanderer, her mother is an ocean away, and her favorite brother is the dead one. She can’t make new friends—her heart’s a poor soil for it—and she finds the English people impossibly self-satisfied. Everything they do is the best way to do it, she writes Jean, now married without Asia’s permission, but still her steadfast friend. No one can tell them anything. This is particularly hard on Asia, who likes telling people things.
She busies herself by finishing the book she’d long planned about her father. She writes a second about Edwin. These focus primarily on their theatrical achievements.
But then she writes a third book, without telling Sleeper or anyone else. Her secret book about John is much more personal. She doesn’t try to publish it. She knows she can’t. It remains unseen and unread until fifty years after her death when G. P. Putnam finally brings it out. Although she decries her brother’s great crime in principle, on the page, she makes him the hero he thought he was.
She blames Lincoln for having gone to the theater that night.
With Richmond so recently fallen, the surrender so raw, the suffering so great, surely he should have been in church instead. To go out for a vulgar entertainment suggests a callous indifference Asia cannot excuse. The theater! The devil’s den. It desecrates his death.
She writes:
There is no solidity in love, no truth in friendship, no steadiness in marital faith . . . Those who have passed through such an ordeal—if there are any such—
. . . they never relearn to trust in human nature, they never resume their old place in the world, and they forget only in death.
vii
Edwin’s determination to leave the stage wanes. First he vows never to return. Then his retirement must last at least a year. Then, nine months later, in January of 1866, he appears at the Winter Garden as Hamlet again.
He has too many people to support and too little to do to relieve his mind. No one can promise him safety. The letters still come. They will come for years.
I am carrying a bullet for you.
Your life is forfeit.
We hate the very name Booth.
Your next performance will be a tragedy.
At least one local paper is outraged. “The blood of our martyred President is not yet dry . . . still a Booth is advertised to appear!”
Once again crowds are gathered in the street before the theater opens. Some are supporters of Edwin, but many are not. The police anticipate violence and are on hand in numbers to prevent it. Some without tickets manage to force their way as far as the lobby before they’re ejected.
The play begins. From his dressing room, Edwin Booth knows when the ghost has made his entrance. Marcellus: Peace, break thee off! Look where it comes again. And then Bernardo: In the same figure like the King that’s dead. Edwin can’t actually hear the words. He knows the lines from their stress and inflections. He knows the moment of them. He knows exactly how much time remains until he takes his place for the second scene.
Edwin leans into the mirror to stare past his own painted face into the space behind him. On the wall to the right of the small dressing-table mirror is a coat rack, so overwhelmed with hats and capes that it looms over the room, casting the shadow of a very large man. Swords of all sorts lie on the tabletops, boots on the floor, doublets and waistbands on the chairs.
A knock at the door. His old friend, dear Old Spudge, has come to beg Edwin to reconsider. What is out there, he says, what is waiting for you is not an audience so much as a mob. Yet Edwin can’t hear them at all. It seems they sit in a complete, uncanny silence.
No one in his family dared to come. His daughter, Edwina, arriving home under police escort, is now safe in her bed, unaware that this Hamlet is different from any other. He’s called for the second scene, but finds he can’t make his legs move.
Now he can hear the audience, stamping their feet, impatient at the delay. William Stuart knocks a second, a third time. “Ned? We’re waiting.”
“I’m coming,” Edwin said, and having said so, he’s able to rise. He leaves the dressing room and takes his place on the stage. The actors around him are stiff with tension.
One of the hallmarks of Edwin’s Hamlet is that he makes no entrance. As the curtain opens on the second scene, it often takes the audience time to locate him among the busy Danish court. He sits unobtrusively off to one side, under the standard of the great Raven of Denmark, his head bowed. “Among a gaudy court,” a critic had written of an earlier performance, “？‘he alone with them, alone,’ easily prince, and nullifying their effect by the intensity and color of his gloom.” On this particular night he seems a frail figure, slight and dark and unremarkable save for the intensity and color of his gloom.
The audience finds him in his chair. Claudius is already speaking when someone begins to clap. And then someone else, and then someone else. The audience comes to their feet. The next day’s review in The Spirit of the Times reports nine cheers, then six, then three, then nine more. The play cannot continue and as they clap, many of them, men and women both, begin to sob.
Edwin stands and comes forward into the footlights. The audience sees that Edwin, too, is weeping. It makes them cheer him louder. It’s as if he’s taken on all the suffering of the nation and is carrying it for them, along with the heavy share that is his alone.
Few actors, if any, have embodied so much and been so beloved. His fellow players gather tightly in, clapping their hands.
Hamlet has his father’s ghost, so why not Edwin? In the midst of the applause, he smells his father’s pipe and his father’s whisky and beyond that, the forest of his childhood home. He hears his father’s voice beneath the clapping, low but close and clear. “There, boy,” his father says. “There, boy. Your foot is on your native heath.”