“You’ve said what you came to say,” Mother tells them. “You can go now.”
They leave the pamphlet behind. Asia burns it in the kitchen stove.
* * *
—
The funeral takes place on December 11th at the old Baltimore Cemetery. The burial will have to wait for warmer weather and softer ground. More than a thousand mourners, young and old, black and white, join the family and the coffin as they move through the icy streets. The size of the crowd is a relief to Asia. Father was so respected. A great man. How many people will come to Elisha Browne’s funeral?
She’s freezing. Even with a cape, her black dress is too thin for the weather. She reaches out for Johnny’s hand with her gloved fingers. She’s lost the feeling in her thumbs. She thinks that she’ll never be warm again. Father was the fire that warmed them all.
The cemetery paths have been shoveled, but snow covers the ground and lies in hillocks on the graves. Tombstones rise from the white drifts. A marble angel spreads its wings over the frozen world. Midway through the service, snow begins to fall again, thick, wet stars that land and melt on hair and hats, gloves and Bibles. At a distance, a local band plays a dirge composed for the occasion. The music is soft and faraway.
The coffin is set on a bier in front of the mausoleum. The reverend begins. “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” Asia huddles between Johnny and Joe. Rosalie holds on to her mother. All are sobbing. Asia’s handkerchief is a sodden ball.
The black mourners must watch from outside the cemetery walls, the white crowd the paths inside. Some say later that they saw Adelaide Booth, standing at a distance, silent as a statue and heavily veiled. Others insist she was never there.
* * *
—
Edmund Kean had his Samuel Coleridge, but Junius Booth his Walt Whitman. Thirty-six years after Booth’s death, Whitman will still be mourning. He will write:
The words fire, energy, abandon, found in him unprecedented meanings . . . For though those brilliant years had many fine and even magnificent actors, undoubtedly at Booth’s death . . . went the last and by far the noblest Roman of them all.
ii
Life without Father begins with Mother going mad. Rosalie moves into Mother’s room and for several weeks Asia sleeps alone. Rosalie has been through Mother’s grief before. Asia hasn’t and is horrified to see it. It’s so unrelenting in its need for compresses, teas and soups, kisses and quiet. She can’t take physical care of Mother since Rosalie has that role tightly wrapped up. She can’t take emotional care of Mother; only Johnny can do that and he and Joe are already off at school.
Her own feelings of loss seem to hardly count in the face of Mother’s extravagant grief and (even though she’s just lost her father!) no one is paying her any attention at all. Hours go by without anyone saying a word to her. She eats her solitary meals, the sound of Mother’s weeping coming through the wall.
The boys come home for one final, cheerless Christmas in Baltimore and then, in the thickest part of winter, they remain to help with the move to the farm. They can’t all fit in the cariole, and Johnny and Joe must ride alongside. The women’s skirts fill the carriage, dishes and lamps squashed between the hoops and petticoats, the valises and blankets.
It’s full dark by the time they arrive. The wind rustles through empty branches. No stars show, just one bit of bright cloud pulled like a curtain over the moon. Something dashes across the lawn at the front of the house. Asia thinks it’s a rabbit, but it’s gone before she really sees it. The snow crust crunches underneath her shoes as she steps down from the cariole. A black child she doesn’t recognize unhitches the horse, takes the reins from Johnny and Joe, and leads the horses away, clucking softly. “Thus begins the winter of our discontent,” Johnny says, for Asia’s ears only.
She finishes the quotation in her head. Made glorious summer by this son of York. Why leave off the hopeful part? The windows of Tudor Hall glow yellow with lamplight. Someday this will feel like home, Asia thinks, and then how welcome a sight that light will be.
The Halls have already unpacked for them and made it comfortable, fire in the fireplace, tapers on the tables, lamps in the windows. Furniture in the rooms, dishes on the shelves, clothes in the wardrobes. The walls and floors are clean and new and every room smells of freshly sawn wood.
Ann Hall and Aunty Rogers are waiting with a supper Asia is too tired and too sad to eat. She watches as the two women hug her mother, each holding on long enough to bring Mother to tears. “It’ll be all right,” they tell her. “Everything will be all right,” but they, too, are crying even as they say it. They hug the children next, all except for Joe who ducks away, hightails it up the stairs before anyone can lay a hand on him.
“What a beauty you’ve become,” Aunty Rogers tells Asia, as if she hasn’t said this same thing to Asia every time she’s seen her for the last two years. Most recently, at Father’s funeral.
Aunty Rogers holds her at a distance for a better look, then pulls her close so that Asia’s skirt flattens at the front, bells out over its hoop behind. “You’ve got the Booth eyes. Same as Edwin.” Aunty Rogers has doused herself liberally with a fashionable scent—bergamot and lemon. Ann smells of butter and sugar and cinnamon and is warmer to the touch.
Asia feels Father’s absence here as acutely as she feels it anywhere. Even though he never set foot in the finished house, he’s a tangible, erroneous emptiness. She remembers his excitement as Tudor Hall began to rise. “The only way I could ever be happy in a city,” he’d once told her, “is if we didn’t have to share it with anyone else. If we had the whole place to ourselves and no one ever knew we were there.”
Later that night, the wind picks up outside. Asia hears it gusting around the house, whipping the trees, rattling the windows. But she’s in her new bedroom, under the covers, warm and dry and safe inside the house her father had built. Rosalie is back in their shared bedroom, at least until Mother needs her in the night.
Asia speaks to Rosalie across the darkness between their beds. “Do you think we’ll be happy here?”
At first Rosalie seems to be asleep; she takes that long to answer. Finally the whisper comes. “I doubt it,” Rosalie says. “I can’t think why we would be.” So, as is often the case with Rosalie, Asia is sorry she asked. The effort of countering her family’s continual gloom is exhausting. Tudor Hall is Father’s last dream, his last gift. She decides to love it. Rosalie can do as she likes.
* * *
—
Asia and Rosalie: