School is school and everything there seems quite ordinary and all as it should be. The fact that Edwin smells like pig shit is remarked on. Perhaps as recompense, Miss Hyde asks him to read aloud “The Wreck of the Hesperus.” She finds his performance surprisingly lethargic, notes the shadows under his eyes, and sends him back home.
As he turns onto North Exeter, he sees a woman ascending the steps of his house. The brim of her black silk bonnet is so old-fashionedly large, it entirely hides her profile. He watches her knock. No one comes. He slows his footsteps rather than encounter this woman at his own front door. She’s leaning across the railing now, looking through the window into the parlor, which is very nosy of her and something he thinks she shouldn’t be doing.
Harriet Struthoff is standing in the doorway of her next-door grocery, her hair falling from its pins, burlap apron over her shirtwaist. She calls his name as he passes. “Why aren’t you at school, young master?”
“Miss Hyde sent me home, because I wasn’t feeling well.”
“You’ll find the house empty,” Miss Struthoff says. “Your mother took Rose and Joe to the farm this morning. She told me to tell you all not to worry. Everything is fine. But will you be all right on your own?”
“Are they coming back?” Edwin asks.
Harriet’s older sister is calling for her. “Of course,” Miss Struthoff says. The calling is more insistent. “Only I don’t know when. Now, you come right over here if you need any little thing. Milk or bread or something sweet.” She disappears down the steps into the store.
All this time, the other woman, the woman in the black bonnet, has been walking towards him. “You’re Junius Booth’s boy?” she asks.
Edwin admits to it.
He’s never seen this woman before. She’s old, but not elderly. Under the shadow of her bonnet brim, deep lines frame her mouth and cross her forehead. The bit of hair the bonnet doesn’t cover is the color of rusty iron. Her accent is almost British, but with something mixed in. Edwin practices reproducing her accent in his head. He’s good at mimicry. “Are you from England?” Edwin asks the woman. “I went to England once.”
The woman responds with a sharp inhale of air. “When was this then?”
“I was a baby,” Edwin says. The woman stares at him in a way that makes him nervous, so he goes on to say something he wouldn’t have offered ordinarily. “My brother Henry died there.”
“I hear you have a lot of brothers,” the woman tells him, as if Henry was someone he could easily spare. She is still pinning him with those gimlet eyes. “I was hoping to speak to your mother.”
Edwin makes it past her and up the steps. “She’s gone to the farm.” It’s a relief to shut the door.
He forgets about the woman. Being alone in his house is so unusual he’s not sure it’s ever happened before. He walks from room to room, seeing how it feels to be alone in each of them, and sure enough, it feels different in the kitchen than it does in his parents’ bedroom, different in the parlor than it does upstairs. He has a sense not so much of being alone as of being invisible, an intruder in his own body. As if, when no one is watching, he ceases to be.
He lies down on the settee and the last words he thinks before he sleeps are
“O father! I see a gleaming light, Oh say, what may it be?”
But the father answered never a word, A frozen corpse was he.
He wakes when Asia and Johnny return from school. They’re as perplexed as he by Mother’s sudden departure. “Something must be wrong on the farm,” Asia says. “Maybe something happened to the Mitchells?” But whatever is wrong made Rosalie cry and she wouldn’t cry over the Mitchells. Edwin thinks it must be Ann or Joe Hall. Perhaps Rowland Rogers has sold away one of their children. That would certainly account for the tears. But it wouldn’t be a secret, no reason to keep it from the rest of the family, so this answer doesn’t really work either.
* * *
—
Nothing matters more than family, Father always says. Edwin makes a private vow to find Asia and Johnny less annoying in future. This lasts barely an hour, which is when Johnny calls him into the backyard. He’s grinning, the sun hitting his dark hair and turning it into golden shine. On the bench in the gazebo is a lumpy, jumpy, snarling flour sack. From it, Johnny carefully withdraws two cats. He’s tied them together in such an ingenious way that if either one struggles, it will slash the other with its claws. One of the cats is gray and starving, the skin between its ribs sunk as deep as Edwin’s finger. The other is black, plumper, a cared-for cat. Both are spitting and yowling, scrapping and bleeding. Father’s rule, that no creature is ever to be injured, is less clear in the city than it was on the farm. It’s less clear to Johnny than it is to Edwin.
Johnny is discriminating. He loves dogs. He hates cats. He loves horses. He hates squirrels. He sings sometimes to the frogs on the farm, but they all do that—“A Frog He Would A-Wooing Go,” which Mother taught them, or, from Ann, “Down by the Riverside.” An image from the time Johnny’s horse Blackie bit him rises in Edwin’s mind, Johnny’s face so full of his hurt feelings. When Johnny loves, he expects to be loved in return. Edwin has no such expectations.
“Let them loose,” Edwin says, “or you’ll see Father’s belt.”
“Only if you tell,” Johnny says, but he cuts the string with his pocketknife. The cats bolt, leaping the fence (the black one), climbing a tree (the gray).
Father appears briefly at dinnertime, but only partly as Father, and partly as someone midway between Edward Mortimer and the Stranger. He seems unsurprised by Mother’s absence, speaks very little, only saying wistfully that the big cherry tree on the farm will soon be budding and how sad it will be to miss that. If they were Japanese, they would go to the farm as a pilgrimage. So many things would be different if they were Japanese, Father says despondently.
Edwin waits to hear what these different things would be, but Father is apparently done with the Japanese. There are still traces of his stage make-up, particularly in the creases around his eyes. His eyes appear widened by it, as if he’s painted a kind of shock onto them. “We should all go to the farm,” Father says. “We were safe when we were on the farm.”
Then he heads to the theater again, leaving the children to manage their bedtimes for themselves. Staying up late in the sad quiet house has lost its allure and they don’t do it again.
* * *
—
Mother, Rosalie, and Joe return two days later. That evening, when Mother has shut herself in her bedroom, and Father is facing the opening curtain, Rosalie gathers the older children into the girls’ room to finally tell them as much as she knows. The important point is this one: Adelaide Booth, Father’s wife, has arrived from England and is hell-bent on destroying them all.
v
The children had always assumed that Mother was Father’s wife.
vi