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.”
As if any one of them can substitute for John! As if even all together they can conjure half of Mother’s love for him! As if he doesn’t know that he’s consigned Rosalie, for the rest of her life, to try to be enough for Mother and to fail.
The second letter is addressed To Whom It May Concern. “This country was formed for the white not the black man,” John says.
And looking upon African slavery from the same stand-point, held by those noble framers of our Constitution, I for one, have ever considered it, one of the greatest blessings (both for themselves and us,) that God ever bestowed upon a favored nation. Witness heretofore our wealth and power. Witness their elevation in happiness . . . no one would be willing to do more for the Negro race than I, could I but see a way to still better their condition . . .
* * *
—
Like Mother, Edwin finds it impossible to sleep alone. His friend William Bispham shares his bed at night. During the day, Edwin stays inside, afraid to be seen in public. After dark, he walks the streets with Bispham and Aldrich. Everyone who loves him is afraid that he will drink, but he doesn’t.
He speaks often of the day he saved Robert Lincoln at the train station. The story, which he’d hardly remembered, has become one of his great comforts.
He tells Bispham he doesn’t know when it all went wrong for John. He was a loving child and so full of fun. They’d all adored him. He wonders what Father would have said. June writes with his usual stolid pragmatism that he expects they all will recover in time with the exception of Mother, who will clearly never recover.
At the suggestion of Thomas Aldrich, Edwin writes an autobiography of his childhood as a gift to Edwina, who has been with Asia since before the assassination. This fills a few days. As soon as he finishes, he destroys it.