But the British press can’t be counted on for clarity or accuracy or nonpartisanship. He spends hours upset by stories that turn out not to be true. By now it’s clear that the war will not be short and that the suffering will be great. The Battle of Camp Allegheny. The Battle of Rowlett’s Station. The Battle of Dranesville. The terrible, terrible Trail of Blood on Ice. No sooner do they hear of one victory than the details of an agonizing defeat arrive. It’s impossible to know what to believe. It’s impossible to know who is winning. He has a terrible feeling it’s not the Union.
Mary is struggling to nurse Edwina and failing. The doctor diagnoses broken breast syndrome. She weeps over her breakfast of egg and sausage. “I know,” she tells Edwin, “that in the big world, this is such a little matter. I’m going to cry for three more minutes, and then I’m going to stop.” She’s as good as her word. Edwina goes onto the bottle.
Edwin travels to shows in Manchester, then Liverpool. Outside of London, his reviews are excellent, except for one Shylock and one Hamlet on consecutive nights. These two performances are described as truly painful, and the cause, the critic says obliquely, is both lamentable and reprehensible. Edwin has again taken to the stage drunk. But he sobers up, rights the ship, and is forgiven.
Everywhere he goes, he sees the vehement preference of the British for the South. He hadn’t expected this. Most of the British people oppose slavery. And yet it seems that their dearest wish is to see the South prevail and the Union dissolve. His fellow actors tell him that the North is not interested in destroying or confining slavery, but merely in continuing to participate in its profits.
I’ll get no justice here, Edwin thinks. And neither will my country.
Lincoln and Willie
He was too good for this earth . . . but then we loved him so. It is hard, hard to have him die!
—Abraham Lincoln on the death of his son, 1862
Edwin gains a child and Lincoln loses one.
On February 16th, 1862, Ulysses S. Grant won the first major victory for the Union, taking Fort Donelson in Tennessee and earning the moniker Unconditional Surrender Grant. Washington, DC, celebrated with bells and cannon fire. Lincoln immediately promoted Grant to major general. More celebrations were planned, but canceled due to the death four days later of Lincoln’s son. Willie is just eleven years old, dying at the same age as Henry Byron Booth, another golden child.
Willie has been sick since January, his condition improving and worsening capriciously, allowing his desperate parents to continue to hope. When his death finally comes, it’s more than his mother can bear. Mary never recovers. She clears the White House of everything that might remind her of Willie. She never again enters the room in which he died. She asks his friends not to visit, and since they were little Tad’s friends as well, Tad’s loneliness and loss are extreme. He begins to cling to his father. Lincoln conducts the war with Tad in his lap. Nighttime finds Tad sleeping, curled up like a cat, beneath his father’s desk, his head on his father’s shoes.
* * *
ii
In April Edwin receives a letter from Mother, the handwriting slanted with haste, the page often blotted. It seems that Joe has disappeared.
He’d joined the Union army, but left his post on learning he was not to be immediately made an officer. It’s a distinction not many can boast—to have deserted both the Confederate and the Union armies in less than a year.
He’d then come home to his mother, saying that he was troubled in his mind. When Mother’s ministrations began to annoy him, John took him off to New York to work as his personal assistant and valet. Joe didn’t actually do the tasks he’d been hired to do and, despite this, complained ceaselessly about the stinginess of his wages. John, he said, was a money-grabber. It ended in a terrible row and he’d stormed away.
No one has seen him since.
John has searched the hospitals, spoken to the police. Not a hair has been found. Mother is, of course, collapsing. She’d given him money, June had sent him fifty dollars, and he’d helped himself to the salary he felt he deserved from John so he’s not without funds. By the time Mother’s letter reaches Edwin, Joe’s been missing for more than three weeks. John writes that initially he’d feared suicide. Now he thinks Joe has gone to sea.
One morning, Edwin decides to see J. M. W. Turner’s final works. He stands for a long time before each one as others come and go, their voices hushed, their footsteps tapping on the marble floors. The critics have uniformly hated Turner’s whales and Edwin uniformly hates the critics so he’d hoped to see genius. Instead, he likes them no better than anyone else. All bosh and whitewash.
Springtime is here, the sun mild. He takes a long route home, through the park under an arch of greening plane trees. A line of carriages passes, a woman wiping her nose with a handkerchief, a man walking as he reads the paper, oblivious to the fact that Edwin has had to step around him. Somewhere in the city is an oak mentioned in the Domesday Book. He should find out where, go and see it. He should write to Rosalie and ask where Henry is buried. He should do a great many things. But it’s too late to love London now, he doesn’t want to. He came with an open heart and London has served him cruelly. So mostly what he should do is leave.
He and Mary will have a two-month holiday in Paris and then go home to New York.
Stepping through the door into the Fulham cottage, he has that familiar sense of shelter, for no other reason than that Mary is inside. Apparently she has a guest—he can hear the bustle in the kitchen, the murmur of voices. He hangs up his coat and hat and goes to see. There, at his kitchen table, Mary is serving tea to his brother Joe. “Hello, Ned,” Joe says. “I like your baby.”
Joe is on his way to Australia, having decided to make his fortune and buy a cattle ranch. He knows nothing about ranching, but he says he guesses he can learn it easy enough.
Edwin sends a hasty note to Mother: “Wandering boy sleeping in the guest room. Hale and hearty.”
Mother’s letter back is overjoyed. She hopes he’ll take Joe to Paris when they go. She hopes he won’t let Joe out of his sight. She tries to turn Joe’s flight into an impulsive lark. “I wish you all had money and could travel about,” she says. Yet she can’t stop herself from complaining that Joe hasn’t written himself.