On April 28th, 1859, Asia and Sleeper are married at the old St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, in Baltimore, Maryland. The church has been recently rebuilt in the soaring Italian style after a fire damaged the original. Asia’s family is all there, minus only June, to witness the union. Asia’s wearing a new dress, a pale rose silk, the bodice covered with Brussels lace. Edwin thinks she looks very beautiful, her cheeks pink with excitement, her dark hair carefully curled around her temples.
She’s borrowed Mother’s Byron brooch, perhaps not the smartest token to wear to your own wedding. Edwin guesses Rosalie never talked to Asia about Byron the way she once talked to him. He can feel how keyed up Asia is. She’s so nervous she thrums with it. There’s no need. Sleeper is no Byron. She’s perfectly safe.
John had to ride through the night to attend. “I’m bringing so little to the marriage,” Asia says. She’s waiting between her brothers, trembling on Edwin’s arm, on John’s arm, between the sandstone columns of the portico. Above them, light flashes suddenly off the stained-glass window of the risen Christ.
“He’s the world’s happiest man,” Edwin tells her.
“You’re bringing the Booth name,” John says, “which is dowry enough and the only thing he wants from you. You’re just a professional stepping-stone to him.”
John seems tired. Perhaps from the overnight ride, perhaps from his persistent ill health. He’s pale and his eyes are shadowed. But he can’t be allowed to spoil Asia’s wedding day. Edwin won’t have it. “You’ve never liked him. I’ve never understood why.”
“You don’t know him the way I know him.”
“I’ve known him for years.”
“Please,” Mother says. “We won’t send Asia off with a quarrel.”
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Two months later, Mother moves to Philadelphia to live with Sleeper and Asia. Rosalie and Joe follow soon after. Edwin and John arrive when the summer heat has closed the theaters. So they are all there together in August when they learn that June’s wife, Harriet Booth, has died in childbirth along with the baby. Asia’s already suffering through the earliest stage of pregnancy—the days of exhaustion and nausea—so the news carries a special horror.
Mother’s and Rosalie’s sorrow seems to settle on poor bereaved June and little Marion. “They’ll have to come here,” Mother says, and if Sleeper has just a moment in which he wonders how to fit ever-increasing numbers of Booths into his house, who can blame him?
Edwin is the only one who really knew Hattie and the loss lays him low. He remembers her courage on the trip over the Isthmus, her kindness to him after Father’s death. He’d found her an ideal wife, mild-tempered and yielding, and now that June is so unenviable, he’s able to admit having envied him. The way his family is talking, as if she’ll be missed only as a wife and mother, is adding to his grief. He leaves the house to walk with his own memories, grieve in his own silence. He sits on a park bench in the shade of a maple tree. Above his head, a breeze moves with focused precision through the branches, fluttering one green leaf and then another. Squirrels dash about the grass, halfway up the trunks and down again, engaged in a game whose only goal is quickness. He opens his flask, thinking of his wild California days, his days among the dunes and saloons. He wonders if Hattie was disappointed in him. She never said so, but how could she not have been? What would Mary think if she knew half the things he’s done?
He leans forward, elbows on his knees, head in his hands. He closes his eyes. He hears birds, the murmured stream of conversations, children laughing as they run. It’s a peaceful scene, offensively so. He rejects it, this thin skin of happiness over the dismal world. Say good-bye to it, Hattie, and go straight to God. I’m going to need you there, making me coffee and toast, when my turn comes.
When Edwin lifts the flask, his hands are shaking like leaves.
* * *
—
Loss follows loss. When he hears, through a rumor he thinks reliable, that Mary is to wed Spofford after all, the news destroys him. He’s performing Richelieu in New York, so drunk he falls onto the stage like his father before him. The problem, he decides, now that humiliation has been added to heartbreak, is that he’s not drunk enough. He goes to work on that in earnest. Eventually Uncle Ben has to roll him to his hotel and into bed, where he rouses himself sufficiently to have another couple of drinks.
The night passes, the sun is stretching its afternoon fingers into his room, and Mary Devlin is laying a cool cloth onto his forehead with a gentle pressure to the temples. He seizes her by the wrist. “If you marry anyone but me, Mollie, I’ll die,” he says. He might die anyway. He feels awful. His teeth ache.
He likes her less when she refuses to get him another drink. The horrible sobering begins.
Later, he remembers proposing, but dimly. He thinks she accepted. But maybe he was hasty, maybe she was. He takes a cold, deliberate look at his wishes. He finds them unchanged.
When he asks again—neither thinks the first time counted—his offer is conditional. He’s decided that her background on the stage is actually an advantage to him. She’ll understand his life as no other woman could. But he hasn’t changed his mind about marrying an actress. If she wants to be his wife, she must give up her career.
His second condition is that she go into nine months of seclusion, nine months in which she will better herself with lessons, reading; she will improve her musical talents; she will learn French. Under Badeau’s tutelage, Edwin is now an acceptable addition to the more elevated parlors. Mary must undergo this same polishing. It’s an insulting offer, should Mary take it that way.
She does not. She’s seventeen years old and desperately in love. She writes to Spofford.
She writes to Edwin.
Everything will I study, to charm and interest you, and although a brilliant education, has never fallen to my lot, I am sufficiently well-informed to appreciate the good, and beautiful—the rest will come, I doubt not. Forget if possible, as I shall, that the Stage, ever claimed me as its votary—and any love I may have had for the Art I transfer to you—
Coincidentally, the time of her seclusion is just the amount Edwin needs to complete a course of medication for venereal disease.
* * *
—
Not everyone is pleased with the engagement. Adam Badeau is extravagantly miserable. “I have seen for some time growing evidence enough not only of her importance, but also of my own eclipse. I wish to God I’d never seen you. It’s a frightful thing to live out of one’s self; to be buried alive in somebody else.”
And from Asia: “I’d like to write a letter on her face with this pen . . .”
Asia
xv