At night they debark to sleep, the men in a circle with Hattie in the protected space between them. As perilous as the trip is to the men, Hattie is that much more vulnerable. Edwin wonders about June’s willingness to subject her to it. Is San Francisco so dangerous that Hattie couldn’t have been left behind? When Edwin has a wife, he’ll take better care of her. He won’t ever let her get so dirty.
In spite of all the rain, parts of the river remain shallow, so they must frequently debark and go on foot, hauling the boat, which is as heavy as a tree. Their guides hold whispered conversations in languages Edwin doesn’t speak. He begins to distrust them, their sidelong glances, their moments of suspicious, untranslatable levity. Edwin could have been at home, learning poetry and history and science. Instead he will die here unschooled, his throat slit in his sleep, and it will be all Father’s fault. He only hopes Father survives long enough to regret what he’s done to Edwin.
At a small beach, the guides pull out and disappear into the jungle without explanation, which tunes Edwin’s terrors to a higher key. But they return with brandy that Father and Old Spudge immediately purchase. “Good for all that ails you!” Father says, his mood much improved, as if it no longer matters that they’re all about to die. “?‘I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys!’?”
Half an hour later, Father and Old Spudge are singing. They’d like to get us drunk, Edwin thinks. It’s all going according to plan.
Whenever Father passes him the bottle, he takes only a sip. A sip that size hardly counts as drinking. The brandy burns on his tongue, lights up his throat. He would like to take another sip, but doesn’t dare.
A small woman with braided hair and a pregnant belly appears with food, which they sit on the little beach to eat. “What’s this?” he asks June. He’s been handed a cluster of tubular yellow fruits.
“Bananas,” June tells him. “They’re good. You’ll like them.” A spider the size of a rat crawls out from between the stems. A log floating in the river opens its mouth. Its teeth are sharp and there are a lot of them.
Stew with a meat he can’t identify is given Edwin in a wooden bowl. It’s very chewy. Maybe iguana. He doesn’t ask. He slips behind a screen of trees to unbutton his pants, his vulnerability in that moment particularly vivid. What will get him first? The alligators? The fevers? The guides? He spends much of the journey with his insides knotted in cramps, his shit an acidic yellow stream.
The party, still alive, reaches Gorgona three days later. Gorgona is named for its many poisonous snakes. Hammocks are strung for them above a rocky terrain crowded with hasty graves, many quite recent. The rain has washed some of the crosses down to the riverbank. A few float on, continuing the journey for travelers who didn’t.
As the day moves into twilight, the high pitch of mosquito wings rises in volume. It’s their last day with the guides. Edwin watches them sharpening their machetes. “Stay awake tonight,” he tells June, and June says he will, but doesn’t. Father sleeps and snores. Old Spudge sleeps and farts.
“Edwin!” says June from his hammock. “You’re snoring!” which is ridiculous. Edwin is the only one who hasn’t closed his eyes. Below him on the ground, creatures he can’t see move purposefully about the gravesites.
In the morning, much to Edwin’s relief, their guides leave them. Then it’s onwards on mules, threading through the tight and towering gorges, up to their fetlocks in mud. June is comically enormous on his mule, but Father is just the right size. Edwin’s mount has a striped blanket for a saddle and a backbone sharp as a blade. Every step is an injury. He remembers, for the thousandth time, that he never wanted to come on this journey.
Such a joy to arrive in Panama City! Their first impression is glorious—a vista of red-tiled roofs and oyster-pearled cathedrals. On closer look, the streets are filthy, the walls rotting, the stench of the harbor unbearable, and the city crammed to bursting. They must share a room with more than forty other travelers. Hattie is separated from the men for the night, sequestered with the rest of the women, though Edwin can still see her, a red scarf over her hair, across the ramshackle wall of boards that segregates the sexes. The smell of sickness is thick in the air. They are right on the edge of cholera season, anxious to move quickly on.
At the harbor, they can only reach the canoe that will take them out to their steamship on the backs of locals who’ve been paid fifty cents apiece to carry them through the tepid water. Edwin is larger than the man he rides, which embarrasses him. He boards the California, his clothes stiff with salt.
But after the Isthmus, the flea-infested ship feels like floating opulence. They dine on cold salmon, broths, and crusty breads. Father takes a seat under the skylights in the dining salon and hardly moves from it. He tells stories. He recites poems. He drinks. Edwin spends most of his time napping or eating, or staring from the deck at the dolphins following them up the coast, the wonderful arc of their leaping. “You will be amazed by San Francisco,” Hattie says, appearing suddenly at his side. The ocean air has turned her cheeks pink, her eyes bright. Edwin looks at her briefly, looks away. She is with June. They are in love.
The voyage lasts another seventeen days, but the hard part is over.
xvi
A crowd meets them when they dock in San Francisco, a crowd made up mostly, but not entirely, of theater folk. The harbor smells of bilge water, fish, and fried oysters, and the bay is filled with the ghostly, decaying ships Hattie told him about. The California noses in beside a ship from China, its decks packed with more men than you would think could fit below.
Father’s reception is magnificent. A man in a plaid waistcoat lifts his top hat in an extravagant gesture. “Welcome the greatest actor in America!” he shouts as Father comes down the gangplank. The man leads the crowd in a cheer, as if conducting an orchestra.
Edwin follows, raising his eyes to the hills, past the shacks and mansions, all the way up to where white clouds coast across the sky. He turns to see the island of Alcatraz, all stone and scrub, the impossibly long-winged pelicans riding the air in great circles above it. The next thing he hears is his own name. “Welcome Edwin Booth! The most beautiful man in the city!”
There is no overstating how startled Edwin is by this. Startled first to be noticed at all. Startled second to be identified as beautiful. He’s been petted by women in the companies. He’s been told he’s pretty by women in the streets. This feels different. He’s both pleased and appalled.