—
Whenever he’s alone in New York, Edwin drinks. His friends are increasingly concerned. In February, at their insistence, he moves in with the Stoddards. Richard puts together a team to watch over him, a schedule so that he’s never left alone. Within a day, Edwin sees what they’re up to. They don’t know with whom they’re dealing!
Edwin’s been trained to give people the slip, trained at his father’s knee.
Richard reasons, remonstrates, pleads, and threatens. He takes hold of Edwin, but just say the word poet and the picture that comes into your mind will be Richard Stoddard. He’s a fragile, ethereal man. Edwin’s no head-knocker, but he can best Richard Stoddard.
He shakes loose and goes on a bender. By the time Richard finds him again, several hours later, he can hardly stand and it takes two men to lift him into the carriage. He’s dimly aware of a crowd of people watching. He tries to throw Richard off, but liquor has leveled the playing field. It makes Edwin furious, because who asked? Who asked for Richard to involve himself?
Attempts are made to sober him up for his performance—coffee inside, cold water out. He stumbles through Hamlet. One critic says: “It is to be regretted that in his present weak and nervous state he should attempt to act at all.” The disappointing performance is politely blamed on ill health.
* * *
—
February 19th: A telegram arrives from Orlando Thompkins, a family friend and manager of the Boston Museum theater. It says that Mary is improving steadily.
Another telegram, later that night: Mary continues comfortable. Dr. M says there is no need for you to come.
Edwin has passed out in his bed at the Stoddards’. He wakes in the dark with a strange fancy. Someone has just blown a puff of air on his right cheek and then another on his left. Ghost kisses, he thinks. He rises onto one elbow, but he’s still not sober. The room revolves around him, the furniture moving past, tipping and whirling like a carousel. He hears a woman’s voice, soft but distinct and full of desperation. “Come to me, darling,” she says, “I am almost frozen.”
By morning, he remembers this only dimly. A strange dream, he thinks. He can’t quite call it to mind. It hovers at the edge of memory, but will come back to him fully later.
February 20th: Mary no worse. Dr. M says you should come tomorrow, arriving in the afternoon. Stay on through Sunday.
Edwin prepares to cancel his Saturday performance. But then doesn’t, because a second telegram arrives. Mary doing better. No need to worry.
He’s already on his fourth bottle of porter in anticipation of a dry weekend. That seems to have been unnecessary, but what’s done is done. He’ll see Mary soon, and he’ll stop drinking then. He hasn’t forgotten his promises. This is just one final indulgence.
More telegrams arrive while Edwin is onstage playing a boozy Richard III.
Half of them express an urgency. Mr. Booth must come at once.
The other half reassure Edwin that Mary is improving and there is no need for alarm.
These aren’t given to Edwin until the play has ended. By then, he’s missed the last train of the evening. He and Richard leave at eight the next morning. The train moves slowly, makes many stops. Whenever Edwin looks out he sees an apparition of Mary in her shroud, floating over the snowy towns and fields. Eight in the morning is almost exactly the time that Mary dies.
In Mary’s last letter to Edwin, she writes of going to watch John and finding him more melodramatic than before. His great drawback, she says, is that he cannot transform. Her final words to Edwin are these:
The snow is falling beautifully to day: & the sleigh-ride you will miss. Babe talks of Papa—kisses his picture—& cries in her pretty half complaining style . . .
. . . write me all that you do & hear & above all things love me dearly . . .
* * *
—
Edwin’s grief is a terrible thing. It devours him. He spends the first night locked in the bedroom alone with Mary’s body, lying next to her, feeling how cold and heavy she’s become. He weeps and prays to die himself. He weeps and remembers his strange dream. He begs her for just one more of those ghostly kisses.
* * *
—
Edwin will live a good many more years. He’s far from done with tragedy and grief.
But two things he is done with. One is the Stoddards. This doesn’t happen quickly. In the aftermath of Mary’s death he depends on them completely. Richard arranges the funeral. Edwin writes daily heartbroken letters to Elizabeth, castigating himself for his sinful nature—a drunkard by eighteen, a libertine by twenty.
But then, among Mary’s things, he finds a letter. Elizabeth had written to Mary telling her that, sick or well, she must come to New York at once.
Mr. Booth has lost all restraint and hold on himself. Last night there was the grave question of ringing down the curtain before the performance was half over, lose no time. Come.
Edwin believes that worry over his drinking hastened Mary’s death. Her disappointment in him was so profound as to be fatal.
Two people are to blame for this: the man who drank and the woman who told. He sends an angry letter to Elizabeth. She responds with an equal measure of wrath. The friendship is at an end.
The other thing he’s done with is liquor. Never after February 21st, 1863, will anyone ever again see Edwin drunk. “To take a drink—it would be as if I killed Mary all over again,” he says.
Rosalie
v
Every winter seems unusually bitter in these days of war. Edwin stays in Dorchester, snow packed deep around the little house, chilled in his heart and his spirit. Mother, Sleeper, and John attend the funeral, where Mary, never to be older than twenty-two, lies like Ophelia surrounded by flowers. She wears a painted miniature of Edwin’s face on her breast.
Everyone is worried about Edwin. So Mother stays on, which means they give up the rental in Philadelphia, which means Rosalie goes back to Asia’s.
Asia would have liked to attend Mary’s funeral with her brothers and husband, but given her unrelenting animosity towards the deceased, it was unthinkable. She seems to Rosalie to be moping. Of course, it’s terribly sad, she tells Rosalie, but all things considered, Mary’s lucky to have died. Since Edwin has returned to his old wild ways, nothing but misery lies ahead. Mary’s better off out of it.
“Don’t say that to Edwin,” Rosalie says. She’s thinking of a memorable line only recently read—’Tis better to have loved and lost. She believes it.