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.
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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.
Joe remains as he’s always been, argumentative and aggrieved. One day in New Jersey, while Rosalie is answering a knock, a brick is thrown at her head, missing her by inches and denting the doorframe. At the same time, handfuls of smaller stones are thrown by unseen assailants against the windows of the house, spattering against the glass like hail. She staggers, she scuttles inside as fast as she’s able, her back by now so continuously painful that only drink makes life bearable. She calls the servants, locks the doors, and hides like Randall in the basement until Joe’s return. She believes the vengeance of the nation has come for her at last.
But Joe says no. This was all aimed at him and nothing to do with Lincoln. Joe’s in the middle of suing his neighbors. He’s building a twenty-foot fence around his property over the outraged objections of all who live near him. He’s never been popular and he’s not about to start now. It will take more than a brick thrown at his sister to stop him!
Joe was the one who went to Washington to identify John’s body, Edwin having been rejected as too recognizable and June still in prison. John had been sewn inside two horse blankets, a thing no one tells Mother.
It then takes Edwin four years to get the body released from the Old Penitentiary, where it’s been warehoused. President Johnson finally agrees to turn him over on condition that no gravestone ever mark him. None does. Still, everyone knows where he is. He’s buried beside his father in Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore.
Rosalie succeeds at last in moving Frederick, Mary Ann, and Elizabeth to the same plot. They are mostly together there now—not Henry, buried in England, not Edwin, buried in Boston with Mary, and not June, buried with his third wife in Manchester-by-the-Sea, but all the rest. For once, Joe isn’t the one left out.
* * *
—
Asia left us her books. Rosalie left nothing but a few lines in the stories of her siblings. Edwin left the Players, a club and home for actors in which he lived the last years of his life.
He lasts long enough to see his style of naturalism become unnatural—too mannered, too formal, fossilized.
He dies on June 7th, 1893, at the age of fifty-nine. His funeral is held on June 9th. Joe, his only surviving sibling, is there and three of his nephews, along with his daughter, Edwina, and her husband. Joe Jefferson, Mary Devlin’s old guardian, attends though he’s been ill and looks it. New York’s judges and politicians and clergymen.
Artists and actors. So many actors.
At nine a.m. a huge floral tribute arrives with this banner: From brother actors of England. We all loved him. It wasn’t true in 1861. In 1893, it was. Good night, sweet prince.
The New York Times describes it as the most remarkable funeral ever held in New York City. Hundreds of men and women gather on the sidewalks outside the Players and around Gramercy Park to watch as his coffin is taken into the church, all of them reminiscing about how, on this night or that, they themselves were there to see the legendary Edwin Booth take the stage.
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More than a century has passed since they clapped and shouted and cheered him. All of them, every person in every seat in every theater, now dead. One by one, they go, winking out of existence. The enslaved . . . though only ten years old I sold for . . . and the free, the civilians, the soldiers . . . wherever they fired on our boats we burnt everything that would burn . . . the spies, the thieves, the overseers, the auctioneers, the nurses . . . I have forgotten how to feel . . . the clerks and the clergy, the critics, the poets and politicians, the profiteers, the postboys, the lion tamers, the pigeon killers, the mummers, the mourners, the farmers, the famous, the failures, the fortunate, the fallen, Frederick, Mary Ann, Elizabeth, Henry, John, June, Asia, Rosalie, Edwin, Joe. One by one, they go.
* * *
—
Are there ghosts?
How could there not be?
Author’s Note
I began thinking about this book during one of our American spates of horrific mass shootings. Among other things, like other writers before me, I wondered about the families of the shooters—how would such a family deal with their own culpability, all the if-only’s? Would it be possible to rejoin the devastated community? What happens to love when the person you love is a monster? This led me to the family of John Wilkes Booth. I knew he had brothers and sisters. I didn’t know much else.
Immediately, a conundrum. I did not want to write a book about John Wilkes. This is a man who craved attention and has gotten too much of it; I didn’t think he deserved mine. And yet there is no way around the fact that I wouldn’t be writing about his family if he weren’t who he was, if he hadn’t done what he did. The tension over this issue—how to write the book without centering John Wilkes—is something I grappled with on nearly every page.