Moments ago, she and Mother and Asia were all in the kitchen together, washing their hair. They use rainwater, which they collect in basins and save for the weeks between washings. It’s a major undertaking and the boys, if any are around, are shooed from the house for the duration so the women can proceed in their undergarments. Today is warm and the upstairs bedroom actually hot. Rosalie is in no hurry to put her skirts back on and she wants the tangles gone from her hair before it dries.
Asia was talking, as usual, not even stopping when Mother poured a pitcher of water over her head. Rosalie was toweling the ends of her own hair when she heard Asia say something that began, “When we’re all in Philadelphia . . .”
All, she had said. We all. All of us. Rosalie was so surprised she missed the rest of the sentence.
“Are we all going to Philadelphia?” she’d asked.
Mother rubbed the rainwater through Asia’s hair. “We wouldn’t keep this big house just for the two of us. The boys are hardly here now and when Asia goes . . .”
The minute Mother says this, Rosalie sees how inevitable the move is. And yet it hadn’t occurred to her. Her eyes had suddenly filled so she’d left the kitchen as inconspicuously as she could and come upstairs to be alone and cry. But somewhere on the stairs, the tears had vanished without falling, her eyes parched and stinging instead.
She’s never loved Baltimore, but this is where her life is. She has friends—the Cole sisters, Nelly Morgan, Kate Greene—and she gets together with them every couple of weeks to gossip and sew shirts and aprons for charity. Maybe she doesn’t really care for Nelly, but she likes the Cole sisters.
She’s lived with Asia, they’ve shared a bedroom, for the whole of Asia’s life, but always under Mother’s roof. In Philadelphia, Rosalie will be a permanent guest in Asia’s house, an intruder on the young couple. Efforts will be made to make her feel welcome and Asia will make sure that she sees those efforts. Rosalie will feel a constant pressure to be both out of the way and useful. She will never feel that the house is hers.
Rosalie knows better than to imagine she’ll be given a room of her own. She’ll be sharing with Mother now, the widow and the spinster. She can see how it all will go.
But she can also see that nothing else makes sense. Unhappy as she is, she can’t come up with a single argument in favor of the expense of remaining in Baltimore.
A timid knock on the door, and Mother enters. Water has dripped down the front of her chemise, soaked into the shelf of cloth over her heavy breasts. Her graying hair is wrapped in a large white rag. “I guess we took you by surprise,” she says. “I didn’t mean to. I thought it was obvious.”
“It is,” Rosalie says. “I don’t know why I was surprised.”
“Philadelphia is a wonderful town. Sleeper says he’d much rather live there than here. So much to do!”
“I’m sure I’ll get used to it.” Rosalie can’t say out loud, not to anyone, but certainly not to Mother, how much she dreads the daily witness of Asia ruling her little kingdom. It puts her in mind of those novels in which the younger married sister leapfrogs in status over the older unmarried one.
Sleeper’s visits have been hard enough. You can’t enter a room without seeing the two spring apart, Asia’s face flushed, hair in disarray. But probably once Asia is married that will stop. Mother and Father had a baby every two years like clockwork, and yet there had been no canoodling for Rosalie to interrupt.
Mother takes the comb from Rosalie’s hand and stands behind her. Her pale face floats in the pocked mirror above Rosalie’s own. Rosalie’s hair is thick and combing it out requires patience. Mother’s being much gentler than Rosalie, untangling the knots at the ends first, only making the long strokes from the scalp when there is nothing left to snag on. “You know I’ll always take you with me, wherever I go,” Mother says. “You know that you’ll never be left alone and uncared for as long as I’m alive.”
Ever since the deaths of Mary Ann and Elizabeth, Rosalie has believed that her job was to care for Mother. Perhaps she’s been waiting all those years to hear just this, that Mother is caring for her. Now the tears come and this is not because she’s unhappy over the move, which she is, but because Mother is there, with a face full of love, combing out Rosalie’s hair as if she were just a little girl.
xi
Eleven years after Edwin first made the offer, John has finally agreed to be Henry, Earl of Richmond, to Edwin’s Richard III. They appear together, one night only, at Baltimore’s Holliday Street Theatre, recently bought by John T. Ford. Mother, Rosalie, and Asia are all in attendance. Joe makes a show of demanding their tickets.
A box has been reserved for them, with three rocking chairs threaded with ribbons and a good view down to the stage. They’ve dressed in their best—Asia in a violet silk and Rosalie in dove gray. Mother is sticking to her widow’s black, but has dabbed her wrists and neck. The powdery scent of Héliotrope Blanc, a gift from Edwin, floats through the air along with the hum of the audience settling into their seats.
All three are determined to love both performances in absolutely equal measure, but this is complicated by the fact that they must wait so long for John to arrive onstage while Edwin is everywhere, and playing Father’s old role. The more he deviates from Father’s delivery, the more Mother whispers that she can’t help but feel that he’s doing it wrong. She just knows Father’s version so well. She could do it herself. Pause here. Sweeping hand gesture.
Edwin falls to his knees. “?‘Take up the sword again, or take up me.’?”
Rosalie hears Asia whispering the answer along with Lady Anne. “?‘No! Though I wish thy death, I will not be thy executioner.’ I did that scene in school once,” Asia says, “after the first time I ever saw Father perform. I got a spanking. At home, not at school.”
“I remember,” Mother says.
Rosalie wishes they would stop talking. Edwin’s voice is so intense. “?‘Then bid me kill myself, and I will do it.’?” It’s romantic, or it would be if Mother and Asia would be quiet, if Richard weren’t so evil and Edwin not her little brother.
Finally, finally John appears. “?‘Thrice is he armed that has his quarrel just; And he but naked, though locked up in steel, Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted: The very weight of Gloster’s guilt shall crush him . . .’?”
Rosalie hears Mother catching her breath. She thinks she knows why. “He looks so much like Father,” Rosalie whispers. The resemblance is so strong as to be startling.
But Mother says no, he looks like Edwin. So very much like Edwin.
This isn’t true. John is taller. John is handsomer. The handsomest man in America, some are saying. A woman in the audience compares him to a new-blown rose, its petals still beaded with the morning dew.
* * *
—
In future, it will be a rare review that doesn’t make these comparisons: Edwin to Father, John to Father and Edwin. Few argue for the sons over the legend of the father, but between the brothers things fall out more evenly—Edwin the better elocutionist, John with more fire. Edwin with more poetry, John with more passion.
Of course, Edwin is working under the handicap of so often performing drunk.
* * *