Rosalie is beginning to wonder if Edwin has feelings for Mary Devlin. No one in the family has met her yet and nothing Edwin says is truly suspicious. But her name comes up more often than Rosalie would expect. She thinks they might be writing to each other.
She’s not the only one wondering. One day at dinner, when they are all gathered around the table with only John missing, and even Joe home now that his schooling has finished, Edwin mentions that Miss Devlin says that Romeo and Juliet now makes her think about what a romance between a girl from the North and a boy from the South might look like in these fractured times. The play seems particularly pertinent. But there are always factions. Perhaps it’s always pertinent.
Asia waves past the politics. “Is she pretty?” Asia asks. “This Miss Devlin of yours?”
“More sweet than pretty,” Edwin says, “and hardly mine.”
“But you do like her?”
“Don’t tease your brother,” Mother says.
“I wasn’t.”
The factory whistle blows. A horse and cart go clattering by. Mrs. Murphy, the new cook, a well-worn woman with hands like spatulas, banks the fire and pretends she isn’t listening.
“She’s a good girl,” Edwin says. “And very talented. But I would never marry an actress, you know that. She’s like a sister to me.”
“You have a sister,” Asia says.
“Two,” Joe reminds her.
Maybe Asia’s been persuaded. Rosalie has not. But why shouldn’t Edwin fall in love? Rosalie only wants to see him happy, a condition he rarely achieves as he has no gift for it. And, after all, hasn’t Asia done the same? She’s certainly been performing the part—rushing for the post, sighing over songs of lovers parted.
The kitchen smells of chicken and ham. Since Father’s death, meat has become commonplace at dinnertime and Mrs. Murphy likes to put ham in everything, pile one meat on top of another, frying them together. Rosalie has had more trouble getting used to meat than the others. She looks down at the drumstick on her plate and thinks how very much like someone’s leg it still looks. She takes a sip of tea, which she has secretly sparked up with a bit of gin. Mrs. Murphy is the Booths’ third cook, the last one having been dismissed for drinking on the job.
Edwin changes the subject. “So, Joe, what are your plans now that school is done?”
“I don’t know,” Joe says. His knife clicks against his plate as he saws off a great hunk of meat. He lifts it to his mouth, but before it goes in, he says, “I haven’t thought.”
Joe’s less handsome than his brothers, still growing into his nose and ears, his cheeks still plump and cherubic. He’s a dreamy, indolent boy of whom a friend will later say that he was either stupid or else had a wonderful knack for counterfeiting stupidity. He’s currently working as a ticket taker at the Holliday Street Theatre.
He and Rosalie remain close. She remembers how he used to climb into her lap, the weight and warmth of him on her legs. She remembers the dusty smell of his hair when he was a little boy, how his grubby little hands would snake around her neck. What Rosalie and Joe share is a sort of outsider view of their own family—Rosalie the oldest, since June is never around, and Joe the youngest. What they share is that neither of them is Edwin or Asia or John.
Since Joe appears to have nothing more to say concerning his future, Edwin changes the subject again. Like many melancholics, he can tell a funny story. He describes a recent performance of The Merchant of Venice. He was playing in some backwater—a place so small that Edwin can’t even remember the town’s name, just that the theater held perhaps forty people, so even though every seat was taken, few people were in attendance.
Edwin was Antonio and they were nearing the end, halfway through the trial scene, when they heard the steamboat whistle. If they missed the boat, they’d miss their next engagement. Edwin saw Uncle Ben in the wings, gesturing wildly for Antonio and Shylock to wrap things up, quick as they could.
“So I said to Shylock, ‘Would you take ten ducats and a fine pig?’ and Shylock said, ‘I guess that’s as good an offer as I’m going to get,’ and Portia said, ‘How about we all dance the Virginnie Reel then?’ and we dropped the curtain. The audience had heard the whistle; they all understood. We left them laughing and legged it to the docks just in time to board.”
“Who was playing Portia?” Asia asks.
ix
Edwin’s obsessed with a guilt-induced plan to put up a grand new marker for Father’s grave, an expense he can only manage with an exhausting season. Uncle Ben has booked him everywhere. The year is 1858.
Edwin’s chosen the sculptor Joseph Carew of Boston, the same man who, with his brother, designed the beautiful monument for the Reverend Charles T. Torrey, an obelisk with Torrey’s likeness in bas-relief on one side and a grieving woman at the base. If you didn’t know to look for them, you might miss the shackles on the woman’s feet. Torrey had been jailed in Baltimore for helping fugitive slaves and died a martyr in the prison there.
Arguably, Edwin has hired the lesser of the Carew brothers.
It’s his only economy. Father’s tombstone will also be a marble obelisk, only bigger, almost twenty feet high, with the name BOOTH also unusually large and, on the far side, an epitaph from Julius Caesar:
His life was gentle, and the elements
So mix’d in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world—This was a man.
Edwin lays out all these plans as he makes them. Rosalie sees how much he wants Mother to be happy. “You’re such a good son,” Mother assures him, reaching over to pat his hand. Privately, to Rosalie, she worries about the expense.
Rosalie has her own plans. In a quiet moment, she asks Edwin, could the bodies of Frederick, Mary Ann, and Elizabeth be moved from the farm to the Baltimore cemetery? “Father loved them so,” she says to Edwin. “I know he’d want them gathered about him.”
Edwin is instantly agreeable, even enthusiastic. Yet nothing is done to make this happen. He continues to talk about Father’s stone which he plans to unveil on Father’s birthday, and never mentions the lost children. It seems to Rosalie that he forgot his promise the moment he made it. Perhaps it was a mistake not to have had Mother there as witness. Rosalie refuses to nag, but a little worm of anger eats at her. Let Edwin meet a ghost or two and see how soon he forgets them.