Years later, when Asia feels quite desperate to hear someone, anyone, say something nice about John, she’ll discover a newspaper article in which Adam Badeau’s been asked about this time with the Booths, and about John in particular. John saved my life, Adam will say. He treated me with great gentleness. He gave no indication of deep Southern sympathies.
Reading this, Asia will manage to forget what John once told her about these same events—“Imagine me forced to save that Union soldier with my rebel sinews!” And also how they’d both disparaged Adam as a “deceptious mortal” on account of his homosexuality. In this article, Adam is being kind when Asia has all but forgotten what kindness feels like. It will make Asia weep for an entire afternoon.
* * *
—
Hiding his Southern sympathies is something John seems increasingly less inclined to do. Sleeper and John arrive in Philadelphia on the same train. The minute they enter the house, Asia can feel . . . something. Sleeper is curt. One quick kiss and he’s in the kitchen asking for something to eat. John is gay in his new feverish, unpersuasive way. Asia pretends not to notice this palpable tension.
That night while she and Sleeper are lying next to each other, he tells her that while on the train he’d made a joke about Jefferson Davis. John had seized him by the neck and flung him side to side like a dog with a sock. He shows her his bruises. He asks her to rub his shoulders. Under her fingers, his muscles shift about like rocks.
When they’re alone, she asks John about this. “I only come here to see you,” he says. And in magnificent understatement, “Clarke and I, we are as the antipodes.”
The Clarkes have moved again, out of the country, which Asia decided she hated, and back into Philadelphia, to a house on 13th and Callowhill. Sleeper’s an enormously popular player by now. His favorite role is Timothy Toodle and he’s gone off to do that when this conversation takes place. The children have scattered books and shoes and toys about the parlor. Asia is tidying up while John starts the fire. The wood is too green and the room gets smoky. The night is dark and so dry that the packed snow whistles in the wind.
Asia and John sit by the fire. Asia’s hands are cold. She holds them close to the flames. “If you feel so strongly, why don’t you go and fight for the South?” Asia asks him. “Every Marylander worthy of the name is doing so.” She regrets the words the moment she speaks them. She has no desire to see John go for a soldier.
There’s a long pause before he answers, so she feels she’s shamed him. He stares into the fire, which is burning more cleanly now, though the smell of smoke lingers. His face is thin and shadowed.
“If I had only my arm to give, I would. But my brains are worth twenty men, my money worth a hundred,” he says. “I serve the South best as I am. Thanks to Edwin and his friends in high places, I have General Grant’s pass. It’s a passport to anywhere. Little does Grant know what a good turn he’s done the South.”
His meaning is just coming clear to Asia. John is a spy, a smuggler, a blockade-runner. Any one of these carries the penalty of death. She hadn’t known this. She doesn’t want to know it. She begs him to stop, but he sits, smiling at her, shaking his head. She reaches across the distance between their two chairs to take his hand, surprised by its heat and hard calluses. She runs her thumb along them. “Many nights of rowing,” he says in answer to the question she doesn’t ask. He tells her that his thigh-high boots hide pistol holsters. He’s chosen his shabby coat—he who once was considered quite the dandy—deliberately to keep attention off him. His hat has a brim that covers his face. Against his promise to his mother, he’s joined the Knights of the Golden Circle, a fanatical group dedicated to raising an army, conquering Mexico, and making it part of a slaveholding Confederacy.
Upstairs the baby cries out. Asia feels a mother’s disappointment. She should have slept another hour at least. She hears Becky’s footsteps going in to her. The milk comes prickling into Asia’s breasts and if she doesn’t go up, her dress will soon be soaked with it. She stands. “Please don’t go back to the South,” she says.
He sounds surprised. “Why, where else should I go?” He begins to sing softly—“in 1865, when Lincoln shall be king.”
“That will never happen,” Asia says.
“That will never happen,” he agrees.
The baby’s cry is loud now and heartbroken. Becky’s unable to soothe her and Asia worries she’ll wake the others. She hurries up the stairs.
She’ll share none of this conversation with her husband. If she must choose between the two, the choice is easily made. Booths are Booths above all. She’ll share none of this conversation with her other brothers, a decision that will haunt her the rest of her life.
Lincoln and Shakespeare
Some of Shakespeare’s plays I have never read, while others I have gone over perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader. Among the latter are Lear, Richard Third, Henry Eighth, Hamlet, and especially Macbeth. I think nothing equals Macbeth—It is wonderful.
—Abraham Lincoln to the actor James H. Hackett, 1863
John T. Ford has renovated his theater in Washington, DC, hiring James Gifford, the same architect who built Tudor Hall. In November of 1863, at the express invitation of his good friend Ford, John Wilkes Booth does a two-week engagement there. Abraham Lincoln goes to see him play Raphael Duchalet, Europe’s greatest sculptor, in The Marble Heart. Among the guests in his box that night is Mary Clay, the daughter of the US ambassador to Russia. She begins to feel that Booth is directing some of Duchalet’s threats and oaths directly at the president. She mentions this to Lincoln. “He does look pretty sharp at me, doesn’t he?” Lincoln replies.
Booth credits Lincoln with this one thing—that he loves the theater. In fact, Lincoln often uses it as an escape from the constant entreaties and interruptions of his daily life. His wife complains that he’s not watching the play at all.
On this occasion, he applauds heartily. He sends Booth an invitation to visit the White House, an invitation that is rebuffed. Lincoln hardly notices. He has other things on his mind. Ten days later he’ll be delivering the Gettysburg Address.
* * *
viii
“I’d rather have the applause of a Negro,” John says later that same night. He glories in saying such things right in the heart of Lincoln’s Washington. He’s in a bar, drunk, and everyone around him is drunk. The cigar smoke is thick as fog.
There is at least one Lincoln lover present. “You’ll never be the actor your father was,” a man with a great bushy red beard says.
John sets his glass onto the table. “I’ll be the most famous man in America,” he tells them all.
Meanwhile . . .