The fire is dying so she goes to put more wood into it. A splinter drives into her palm and when she pulls it, a drop of blood sits like a bead in her hand. Her blood. Booth blood.
She sees Father seated, right there, in his special chair with its cushion of yellow flowers and winding blue stems. They fight over this chair when he’s gone, the only chair in the parlor with arms. He’s reading to them from the paper. The bits he finds funny he reads in the crude accents of the comic character John Lump. The bits he finds sad he gives high polish. He lowers the paper and looks directly at her. “Are you sure that we are awake, Asia dear?” he says. “?‘It seems to me that yet we sleep, we dream.’?” And then grief finally arrives, so that there is no speaking through her sobbing throat and all she can do when Rosalie returns with the boys is to dig out the telegram, streaked ever so lightly with blood, and fling it at them.
* * *
—
At seventeen, Asia has a strong and stormy nature. These are the things that matter most to her: the Booth name and reputation, her brothers Edwin and Johnny, and beauty. Asia wants everything in her life to be beautiful—the objects in her home, her clothing, her thoughts. She gets Rosalie to help her cover the parlor wallpaper with white drapes in anticipation of the arrival of Father’s body. She removes every object from the room except for a statue of Shakespeare. It’s a stark set. Father’s final performance.
The body arrives with Mother. Asia and the other children meet her carriage, watch it carried in. Mother lifts her veil, her round face sagging with exhaustion. Asia has come outside without her shawl. She shivers and her breath clouds the air. A trembling anxiety overtakes her, peaking when she looks through the glass lid set in the coffin over Father’s face. She turns to Johnny and sees that his thoughts are the same as hers. Her blood begins to pulse wildly. This isn’t what a dead body looks like. “He’s not dead!” Asia says. Her voice is rising. “Let him out! Wake him up! He’s not dead.” She’s the one screaming, but Johnny is the one Mother goes to, so ashen and shaking that he might topple into her arms.
Asia can’t calm herself. She runs upstairs, slams the door, and yanks her crinoline off so desperately that it tears. She collapses onto the bed, undone by grief or maybe terror. For the longest time, no one comes after her. When she finally stops shaking, she’s too exhausted to move again. She tries to take a deep breath and discovers that she can’t.
The door opens, but it’s only Rosalie. “Mother sent for Dr. Smith. He’s here now. He says Father is dead,” Rosalie tells her. There’s something in the tone of Rosalie’s voice that Asia doesn’t like, but she can’t say for sure what it is. Rosalie has a gift for the seemingly innocent insult.
Dr. Smith enters the bedroom. He takes Asia’s hand, feels her wrist. His fingers are cold and damp. “Your father has passed,” he says. “There can be no doubt of this.” The lenses of his glasses are so filthy she wonders that he can see.
He pours something brown and bitter into a small metal cup. He makes her drink it all though the taste is horrid. Then he leaves. Rosalie helps her out of her dress, which falls to the floor and remains there, a small hill of rumpled black wool flung over the crinoline.
When Asia wakes, it’s nighttime. Sweat, or maybe drool, has stuck her hair to her cheek. Rosalie’s bed is empty and the house is quiet. She rises, wraps herself in a shawl, and moves through the dark to the downstairs. Mother’s door is closed. The coffin has been moved into the pure white room and moonlight streams through the window. The stage is set for ghosts, but thankfully none appear.
For three days, visitors pay their respects. Asia avoids the parlor she worked so hard to make beautiful. She never sees her father’s face again.
* * *
—
The Struthoff sisters bring cakes and cordials from their grocery so Mother has something to offer the mourners. The neighbors on the other side are the Brownes. They’ve never been friendly, but they also come, a couple in their seventies, Ann Browne dressed in a severe, unornamented black, her husband, Elisha, whiskered and wizened.
Something about the way Mr. Browne holds his arms, rubs his hands, has always reminded Asia of a fly.
“Fetch your mother,” he tells her. The Brownes bring no food or flowers. They won’t enter the parlor, won’t sit at the dining table. Asia leaves them standing in the entryway, staring past her into the hallway, where a large doily drips from a small table and a painting of Niagara Falls hangs on the wall.
Asia gets Mother. The hand rubbing begins. “I’ll get right to it,” Mr. Browne says, his voice high, his lips cracked inside the nest of his beard. “Your loss is the price to be paid for sin. This has been a sinful house.”
His wife is looking down at the rectangle of light cast on the floor by the transom and never lifts her eyes. “We’ve come here as Christians,” she says.
Asia had assumed they’d come to pay their respects. Her anger has always been a dark turbulence, quick to rise, slow to dissipate. She feels it taking hold of her and Mother must feel that happening, too, because she reaches over, takes Asia’s wrist in her hand, and tightens her grip. Asia is quietly being told to be quiet.
She tries. She shakes her mother off, steps away into the hall to look at the painting of Niagara. It’s a wilderness without people. The water is translucent, green with white foam; the trees are bright with autumn colors—red, gold, brown. When Asia was little, when she was upset (as she so often was, as she still so often is) she used to imagine herself into that painting, that cathedral of nature and peace. She tries to recover her gift of transportation now. She surrounds herself with nature’s beauty.
“Rejoice,” Mr. Browne says. He licks the corner of his mouth, his tongue flicking quickly out and back again. Maybe not a fly, after all. Maybe a snake. “God has given you a second chance. Renounce your sinful ways and beg His forgiveness.” Mrs. Browne takes a pamphlet out of her reticule and hands it to her husband. He passes it on. “There’s help here if you only open yourself to it. Repent. God loves a sinner.”
It’s a Methodist tract. Mother returns it. “We’re Episcopalians.”
Asia turns back. “We will never need your help,” she says, her voice sharp. Mr. Browne looks at her. Asia looks back, though she knows he’ll think her bold for doing so. If she had the power to match her feelings, he would burst into flame. He’s the one to first look aside.
In fact, courtesy of a few years at a convent school, Asia is leaning towards Catholicism. She finds God in the silver candlesticks, the light filtered through stained glass, the murmured hush of the Latin Mass. If she were Rosalie, she’d take the veil, marry Christ. None of this is any business of the Brownes. Nothing about her family is any business of the Brownes.