But keeping his spirits up is hard work. Keeping him sober is harder work. Had she only known it, her life bears some slight similarity to that of the boy Edwin, the Edwin who followed his father through the moonlight, trying to keep him out of bars. But with less resentment and more gratitude. Mary knows that she’s lucky. Still, on occasion she feels the same loneliness as that sad boy.
His growing success has one unexpected outcome—it brings Edwin Forrest out of retirement. Forrest would never admit that he’s competing with this younger Edwin, as he sees nothing there worthy of competition. “Good voice, good eyes, and his father’s name,” Forrest says.
They perform in New York City on the same nights, Forrest at Niblo’s and Edwin at the Winter Garden. They both play Hamlet. They both play Richelieu. Forrest goes to see Edwin in Macbeth, although if asked he would have said he was there for Lady Macbeth, being now portrayed by the great Charlotte Cushman. This is the role Abraham Lincoln once told Cushman he most wished to see her play. But Cushman and Edwin make an almost comical pair—she so much older and bigger than he is. It takes all their skill to move the audience past this visual and Edwin is sometimes unable to forget it himself. He tells Adam that when Cushman urges murder on him, he’s tempted to say, Do it yourself. You’re much bigger and stronger than I. He refers to Cushman as the Colonel.
Forrest is fully alive to the comedy of it. He laughs when Cushman says: “?‘All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.’?” Cushman’s hand is as big as a cod. And as to Edwin, why does he scuff along the ground like that as if he’s looking for some coin he dropped?
The critics are split in their judgments. One who favors Edwin says that Forrest represents “the biceps aesthetic; the tragic calves; the bovine drama; rant, roar, and rigmarole.” Later, when Edwin’s Hamlet is described as slightly feminine, Edwin will be pleased. That is just what he was going for.
Meanwhile, in Columbus, Georgia, moments before John is to go onstage and play Hamlet, Matthew Canning, his new manager, shoots him.
xix
John’s relatively short career as an actor is replete with accidents and illnesses. His energetic sword fighting will regularly result in injury, either to his opponent or himself. In the course of a single play, he will stab a fellow performer and fall on his own sword, bleeding copiously but continuing his scene.
He will suffer a voice-threatening bronchitis, a life-threatening streptococcal infection, and a large tumor on his neck. His extremely active love life will occasion bouts of venereal disease, and one lover, cast aside for her own sister, will slice open his face. And he will carry always the bullet from Canning’s gun in his body.
Asia first learns of the accident when she reads about it in the paper. One of the peculiarities of the Booth family is how often they communicate via article and review. The article has a winking sort of quality, a certain delicacy in the wording. Asia gathers that John has been shot in the buttocks. In fact, the bullet is in his thigh.
By the time she rushes to Mother with the news, Edwin has already wired. He’s expected to live, Edwin says consolingly, but rather than calm Asia down, this alarms her. Nothing in the article suggested the injury was ever anything but humorous. She understands now that it’s much worse than she’d thought.
How exactly it happened remains unclear. Either John or Canning was careless with Canning’s gun. Either John had taken the gun from Canning’s pocket and it had fired as Canning tried to recover it, or Canning was laughingly threatening the whole troupe to perform well or else, and had inadvertently hit the trigger. Or something entirely different. Accounts vary. Accounts vary wildly.
John was lucky that the bullet missed the femoral artery. He had an excellent doctor, who decided against removing it; it had gone too deep for that. The doctor cleaned and bandaged the wound, had John transported to his bed with instructions to remain there. The show went on, with John’s understudy playing Hamlet. John’s recuperation lasts several weeks.
A couple of months pass, and he goes to his mother’s house in Philadelphia, still not entirely recovered. He visits Asia, who sees a cautiousness in the way he moves that tells her he’s still in pain. He’s lost weight and is less energetic than usual. But he’s gratifyingly delighted with Dolly. She’s crawling now. The knees of her clothes are always gray with dust and betray the fact that Asia’s not stayed on top of the housekeeper.
Dolly is at an enchanting age, with round cheeks, four teeth, and a smile like a jack-o’-lantern. She laughs hysterically when John pops up from behind his hands, sobs when Becky comes to take her away. John dines that evening with Asia and Sleeper, then Sleeper leaves to go perform. John’s feelings towards Sleeper have not changed. He’s barely civil.
He’s expected back at Mother’s. Instead, much like that wintry evening many months ago, they take up positions on the sofa. This time, he’s the one stretched out; she’s the one with his feet in her lap, the smell of his socks faint in her nostrils. She’s stirred the fire into a blaze and it cracks and snaps and sighs. She has a dull, underwater feeling. The wind outside tosses the tree branches. Their shadows wave like seaweed on the walls.
He tells her a little about the end of his tour. While he was still bedridden, the company moved on to Montgomery, Alabama, where slaves are building a new theater for Canning and his players. John caught up two weeks later, on his feet, but not at his best.
His arrival happened to coincide with a rally for Stephen Douglas, one of four men currently running for the presidency. Douglas’ candidacy is bitterly opposed by William Lowndes Yancey, who controls the Democratic Party in Alabama. Locals call Yancey the prince of the Fire-Eaters. “We want Negroes cheap and we want a sufficiency of them,” he says.
Politics in Montgomery are at a rolling boil—book burnings, bonfires, and effigies, militias arming and training. Yancey is demanding war. It took considerable courage for Douglas to come. He’s pelted with garbage on his way to the venue, and lucky the missiles weren’t something worse.
At this time, John’s still loyal to the Union, his fury split, though not equally, between the abolitionists and the secessionists. Neither, he believes, has the right to threaten the nation, and one night, at a popular bar, he says so. The bar is crowded and smells of hops and ale, tobacco and sweat. John has to speak loudly to be heard. His words occasion a brief silence, then the hubbub of a dozen conversations resumes.