She diverts briefly to the war. She thinks that Joe will want to know there is fighting near Richmond, but the city hasn’t yet fallen. Five thousand seven hundred and thirty-nine Union dead—our dead, Mother says, leaving no doubt as to her loyalties—and Philadelphia flooded with the wounded. Then this is how she closes: “Joe says I treat him as if he were still a baby. He don’t think that I love him just the same as if he were.”
Joe isn’t quite on London time and Edwin never sleeps. Mary goes to bed with a kiss for each, and he and Joe settle in to make a night of it. It’s raining now, a steady patter and, in spite of the lovely day, they are feeling London’s chill damp. Edwin builds a fire and they pull two chairs up to it. The red light flickers over Joe’s thin face; his cheeks, once so cherubic, have sunk. He stretches his legs, sits low and curved in his chair. All is quiet except for the fire, the occasional sizzle of a drop falling through the chimney onto the coals, and the clock ticking on the mantel. Edwin produces some brandy and the two share family stories. It begins lighthearted, but turns quickly otherwise. Soon Joe is running, piece by piece, through a carefully curated argument in favor of himself as the most aggrieved, the most abused of the Booth siblings.
“When I was at Mother’s, I met Asia’s friend Lizzie Markson,” he tells Edwin. “And do you know what she said to me? She said she never knew there was a brother younger than John. Not the first time this has happened, mind you. Half your friends don’t even know I exist. They know of all the rest of you.”
Edwin has no ready excuse, but it doesn’t matter because Joe is moving on. “Whenever you all were together,” he says, “I was off at school. Even when John and I were at school together, he came home nights and I was boarded away.”
“Did it ever occur to you that you were the better off?” Edwin asks. “I always envied you your schooling—nothing to do but study and be with your friends.”
“I didn’t have friends,” Joe says. “I didn’t have friends and I didn’t have family. I was the loneliest boy in the world.”
Edwin will not give up his own status as most put-upon Booth without a fight. He’s astonished to hear Joe talk about his golden path to riches, the sunny idyll that has always been Edwin’s life. He tries to set Joe straight, telling him about the loneliness of the years on the road with Father, the way Father’s death still haunts him, how, brandy in hand, his current life is one long struggle with drink.
Joe reminds him that, at seventeen, he’d had so many teeth pulled, he’d had to wear a horseshoe-shaped wooden brace in his mouth for more than a year to preserve the shape of his jaw.
To this, Edwin has no answer. Asia, hearing some version of this evening later, tells June that they quarreled, because it suits Asia now to imagine people are quarreling with Edwin. In fact, it was all quite cordial. They just didn’t in the end agree about the rank of their suffering.
Edwin turns to trying to talk Joe out of Australia. “Why not go to June in San Francisco?” he asks. “You want a family? You have one. San Francisco is just as wild as Australia.”
This is advice Joe will take eventually, but only after Australia fails to magically manifest his dreams.
June writes to Edwin:
I would not say so to Mother but I am afraid [Joe] is not sound in his mind . . . I do not say positive insanity but a crack that way . . . which I fear runs more or less thro’ the male portion of our family myself included . . . I recd a letter from Asia pleading in Joe’s behalf & excusing his conduct, putting it down as sensitiveness and innate modesty, but I am afraid my surmise is nearer the truth . . .
I am sorry you & Asia are not on more loving terms—but I feel Asia has a little of the family taint . . .
The actual subject of this letter is the fact that June owes Edwin nineteen hundred dollars, some of which he has lost in mining speculation and some of which he has spent on a house, but none of which he can repay. He’s explaining his profligate and unsanctioned use of Edwin’s money. Not guilty by reason of hereditary insanity.
iii
In September, Edwin and Mary return to New York after an absence of nearly a year. Edwin finds the war simultaneously present—few untouched by loss and grief—and strangely absent. The city is as full of gaiety as it’s ever been. The theaters and restaurants are thriving, the bars boisterous, the streets bustling. In the midst of death we are in life, Edwin thinks. Although he once enjoyed this same disconnect, it now seems unfathomable that things can simply be going on as before.
The Prince and Princess move back into their rooms in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, with the Princess now in Parisian gowns and the royal child with a Parisian nanny. One of the splendors of the Fifth Avenue Hotel is its bathrooms. Claw-footed tubs and flushing toilets! Edwin goes immediately to fill the basin with cold water and soap his cheeks for a shave. He’s only half done scraping his face when he hears a cry from Mary. She’s at the bathroom door, holding a letter in her hand. Her sweet face has gone white, her eyes big and shining like glass. “Oh, Ned,” she says. “Oh, my darling! Your friend Dick is dead.”
Richard Cary, the first of Edwin’s friends to enlist, had been killed back in early August and the letter informing Edwin has been waiting here these weeks. Richard was shot in the leg at the Battle of Cedar Mountain. The wound was not instantly fatal, but his men were unable to transport him to the field hospital before he bled out. The letter is from his sister, who also writes that an unfinished letter to Edwin was found in his pocket. Richard Cary was twenty-six years old, two years younger than Edwin.
Edwin feels the whirlwind rise around him, the deafening sound of his own blood. “Mollie,” he says, dropping the blade and groping towards her. She puts her arms around him, rocking and petting him, and he cries without restraint or control, slightly embarrassed when he straightens up to see that he’s left the bodice of her dress soaked with suds and tears.
Edwin will never experience a loss free from guilt. He remembers the letters he’d written to Richard, which seem now egotistical, as if Richard, facing one battle after another, could possibly be interested in the advancement of Edwin’s career. He writes a letter of condolence to Richard’s wife and then, having sent it, immediately writes another. But what, really, can be said?
A second letter is also in the pile, this one from Adam Badeau, all about the horrors of the Battle of Antietam. At first this seems strange—Adam is still in Louisiana and nowhere near Maryland. But James Harrison Wilson was there. Adam has fallen in love. “I can tell no one but you, dear Ned,” he writes. By God’s grace, Wilson is not among the twenty-three thousand dead.