viii
What is it like to love the most hated man in the country? Loving John is something the world simply will not have. Not loving John is something Rosalie and Asia simply cannot do.
Edwin tries. For many years, John’s name is forbidden in Edwin’s presence. A young actress asks him one day how many brothers and sisters he has. She realizes her mistake the moment she makes it by the sudden hush that falls over the room. But Edwin is kind. “Let’s see,” he says, and he counts each name on his fingers. John is not among them.
He blames John for the complete and final crushing of their mother’s spirit. He blames John for the damage to their father’s name. He blames John for the death of the president he loved and for all that the country suffered as a result. All of it down to John.
But as often happens, the years pass, and his memories move backwards. He remembers John as the only family member to attend his wedding, so filled with happiness over Edwin’s happiness. He remembers their game of dueling Shakespeare: The skies are painted with unnumbered sparks; They are all fire, and every one doth shine.
Younger still: He remembers their summers on the farm, digging for Indian treasures, knocking together rafts that last only long enough for a single go. He remembers the high-spirited boy with a head full of quixotic dreams, dashing about with his wooden sword.
Still younger: He remembers fireflies and tadpoles, clouds of pigeons, trees to climb and streams to cross, and John begging to come, tagging along behind, running to keep up. “He was my brother,” Edwin reminds an intrusive reporter who seems to have forgotten this.
ix
Eventually, Rosalie reads the many newspaper accounts of Lincoln’s death that Mrs. Aldrich has so kindly given her—as if she might make a scrapbook!—accounts she’s wanted to burn, but been unable. Eyewitness accounts.
They tend toward the lurid. They read like a play, a melodrama. Rosalie is an excellent reader. She sees it all vividly. John and Edwin both always preferred to play the villains.
There was a standing ovation for Lincoln when he and his party arrived, somewhat late. Was John already there? No one says so.
Third act. The theater must not have been very dark, because now John is seen at the back of the parquet by one of the actresses onstage. She recognizes him, all in black, she says, his face as pale as death. Moving towards the stairs, but then she has a line or two to deliver and stops watching him.
People in the dress circle take up the story. He ascended the steps and wove through the seats. He’s well known to many. No one thinks it’s odd that he’s there. He’s heard to be humming.
Two army officers are in his path, but move aside for him. The president’s guard has gone out for a drink, but his messenger, Charles Forbes, is near the door to the president’s box. Helen DuBarry, seated nearby, overhears John tell Forbes he has a communication for the president. He gives him the card of a US senator, quite likely the father of Lucy Hale. Forbes recognizes John. He waves him on, a decision he’ll regret the rest of his life.
John makes it to the president’s box, then stops. He removes his hat and stands for a few minutes, leaning against the wall.
Then he takes the final step down, pushing the door open with his knee. The shot comes instantly, sound and smoke. He shouts something as he shoots. He muddles the line; the audience disagrees as to what he said, but Major Rathbone, the president’s guest in the box that night, says it was sic semper tyrannis.
Rathbone’s turn with the story: The assassin is preparing to leap from the box to the stage, when Rathbone seizes the back of his coat. Suddenly there is a bowie knife in the assassin’s hand. “Let me go or I’ll kill you,” he says. He stabs Rathbone in the arm, a deep cut; Rathbone’s own blood sprays into his own eyes. The assassin jerks free.
The single actor on the stage—Harry Hawk—has fallen silent mid-speech and, like everyone else, is looking for the president. The audience belongs to the assassin now. Most of them think this is part of the play, though they hadn’t known Booth would be performing that night.
He vaults from the rail, but Rathbone makes one final grab that throws him off balance. The spur on his boot catches in the festooning that decorates the box and he crashes onto the stage. He’s up in an instant, staring into the face of the bewildered Harry Hawk.
Hawk hears him speak. “I have done it,” he says. “The South is avenged.” He’s moving towards Hawk with a bloody knife above his head and an odd, stagey gait.
“I ran,” Hawk says simply. For this, for quite some time after, he will have to live under an assumed name.
One more person is injured, the orchestra conductor, shoved out of the way with the blade of the knife.
The assassin has hired a fast Thoroughbred, a spirited mare, now circling the reins. He makes it to the alley, but she can’t be mounted; she’s too excited. It takes another full minute to bring her under control. Mrs. Lincoln is screaming, and all is pandemonium until soldiers arrive and clear the theater with their bayonets. No one knows where the killer has gone.
The president is carried to a boardinghouse, where he’s pronounced dead at 7:22 a.m. Ten thousand federal agents begin the largest manhunt in the history of the country. Reading this, reading one account after another, makes Rosalie frantic with grief, no escape, stuck in this horror like a fly in molasses. How happy, how rich her life once was! John has murdered them all.
* * *
—
For more than a year, before she sleeps, Rosalie will replay this scene, stopping right at the moment when John takes off his hat and leans against the wall. People say that he was waiting for a particular line and the laugh he knew would follow it; he was waiting for noise to cover his shot.
But in Rosalie’s version, he’s changing his mind. After that pause, she makes him turn, thread his way back through the dress circle and out into the alley where his horse is waiting. For more than a year, Rosalie tells herself this bedtime story. She can only sleep if she believes as hard as she can that he’s on his way home. That he loved them enough to change his mind.
That pause is the last place she can find her brother. All she has to do now is begin again from there, begin the rest of her life at that pause, when John is still John, Rosalie still Rosalie, and the world has better things to do than notice either one.
x
In 1883, Rosalie will see Major Rathbone’s name again in the newspaper. He had been serving the Arthur presidency in Germany when he suddenly attacked his wife, Clara. She dies protecting the children from their father. He then stabs himself five times in the chest.
He will spend the remainder of his life in an asylum for the criminally insane. He was never the same, friends will say, after the assassination. One more entry in John’s account.
xi
Mother won’t admit it, but she can’t forgive Edwin for throwing John from his house. She believes that this was the moment, the turn. If John had only been supported by his family, loved and welcomed, how differently everything might have gone. After Asia leaves for England, Mother takes Rosalie to live with Joe, who is between wives and finishing his medical degree. Joe has a house in New York City and also a cottage in Long Branch, New Jersey. The women live sometimes in one and sometimes in the other until Mother’s death in 1885.