A squad of policemen have managed to hold their ground against the fleeing crowd. One of them calls out, “There’s no danger. The fire is already out. It’s only a drunken man! It’s only a drunken man.” His words are a pebble tossed into water. The panic subsides, first in the small circle around him and then in expanding rings. The words finally reach Asia. “Only a drunk. Only a drunk.”
It takes half an hour to completely restore order. Asia is far too hot now, sweating under her dress collar. The man in the top hat has helped her down. The people who made it to the aisle now step on her feet as they return. The play resumes.
Julius Caesar is not a play often performed. It’s widely thought to read better than it plays and it has an insufficiency of female roles. So when, during his most famous speech, Mark Antony adds a line, few notice. Sic semper tyrannis, Antony says. The motto of Virginia. It makes sense in the context. Asia doesn’t even wonder if that’s the way Shakespeare wrote it.
The applause at the end is thunderous. Asia claps until her palms sting. The Booths come back and come back again. They step forward individually. The applause for John is louder than that for Edwin or June. The Booths step forward together. They raise their hands towards their mother in her box and she, too, is applauded. The next day’s reviews will liken her to Cornelia, the Roman mother whose sons were her jewels. How proud she must be, the papers will say, with such jewels as these. No one will note how badly things went for Cornelia’s sons. Or that she also had daughters.
Two events mar the evening’s end, though Asia only hears of them the next day. William Stuart, the stage manager, is responsible for both. Stuart is the personification of bonhomie. Also of duplicity. First, he neglects to invite John or June to the after party. By the time Edwin realizes, June has already left, escorting Asia and Mother home. He begs John to come. An oversight, Edwin says. Please come.
But John leaves. William Stuart has never liked him and the feeling is mutual. He pretends to believe that Edwin is not behind this insult.
On the following evening, Edwin is due to begin a run as Hamlet. Stuart has posted the playbills all over the lobby. booth, they say. Edwin finds Stuart to object. “There are three Booths.”
“After your Hamlet, there will only be one,” Stuart tells him. In any event it’s too late. John and June have already seen them.
* * *
—
In 1867, the uninsured Winter Garden will be destroyed by fire, along with all the carefully commissioned sets and costumes. Edwin’s wardrobe alone is valued at sixty thousand dollars and all of it ash. “It gets me out of my contract with Stuart,” Edwin will say. “I won’t complain.”
* * *
—
From the newsboys that night, they learn that the fire in the Lafarge Hotel next to the theater was set by a Confederate agent. From the newspaper next morning, they learn it was only one of nineteen fires set that night in a plot to overwhelm the fire department and burn New York City to the ground. As a plot it was better in theory than execution. All nineteen fires were easily extinguished.
Next morning, while Edwin sleeps in after his late night, Asia, June, and John take the children out front to play in the snow. June and John pelt each other with snowballs. The children demand a snowman.
As they comply, June and John talk about last night’s performance. No one says so, but Asia feels an undercurrent of resentment that when all three are onstage together, Edwin is understood to be the star, even when John gets most of the applause, even when June is the novelty on the New York stage where Edwin is a fixture.
They get to the panic around the fire. June says, “If this were California, the arsonists would have been strung up without a trial.”
“They’re just trying to show Northern cities one fraction of what’s been done to cities in the South,” John says. “Little enough return for what’s happening right now in the Shenandoah Valley.”
The family is increasingly worried about John. He’s become monomaniacal. He rejects any news of Northern victories. “I haven’t heard that,” he’ll tell June when faced with evidence as if, since he hasn’t heard it, it can’t possibly be true.
“It’s a family quarrel,” June says. “North, South—we’re all still family. We quarrel, we make it up. Don’t drive yourself mad over it.”
Here’s the thing about John. You can talk to him. But you can’t make him listen.
Still since it’s June and not Edwin saying these things, there’s no reason to spoil the day over it. Asia goes inside to find a hat for the snowman. When she comes back, Molly is chasing John with a handful of snow, the other children shouting, laughing, and dancing like monkeys.
xii
The next night the Winter Garden Theatre sees the debut of Hamlet with Edwin in the title role. The play runs for two weeks, three, eight, until Edwin feels the exhaustion of playing the same part, night after night. He begs for a change, but Stuart says no, the play is still selling out. This run, which will last one hundred nights, is the final making of Edwin’s name. Ever after, he will be America’s Hamlet. Edwin refers to this as “my terrible success.”
It was a shame Shakespeare couldn’t see him, the critics write, he was so exactly what Hamlet ought to be. In outer aspect composed and gentle, inwardly filled with a fierce passion, Booth’s Hamlet inspired a sort of worship. It was more than a calling, almost a cult. One morning little Edwina is offered an omelet. “That’s my daddy,” she says.
The role of Claudius is played by Samuel Knapp Chester, the same man John credited with saving his life in Montgomery. Night after night, Chester stands onstage with Edwin, saying nothing beyond his lines. “?‘God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another,’?” Hamlet tells Ophelia, and no one knows better than Chester how true this is.
Unbeknownst to anyone else, John has made repeated attempts to enlist Chester in a plot he is forming against the president. It’s to be a kidnapping. Lincoln will be bundled into Richmond, Virginia, and held there until he can be traded for Confederate prisoners.
John has applied every pressure at his disposal on the frightened, but unyielding, Chester. Chester need only show up with the carriage. He never even has to see Lincoln. John is asking so little.
“I have a family,” Chester says, but so does John; this excuse holds no water. John insists. He cajoles. He threatens.
In the face of Chester’s intransigence, he’s sorry to have ever divulged his plans. He holds a gun under Chester’s chin. “If you mention this to anyone,” John says, “I will send Confederate agents after you. They will hunt you down. Wherever you hide, they will find you. And your family.” Chester feels the barrel of the gun pressing into his neck. He finds it persuasive. He regrets having saved John’s life, but cannot say even that to anyone.
* * *