What I Didn't See and Other Stories Read online

  From the newspaper the next morning, they learned that the fires near the theater had been set by Southern rebels. Had they been in California, Junius said, the arsonists would have been strung up without a trial. He was for that. Edwin was for the Union. He told them that a few days earlier, he'd voted for the first time. He'd voted for Lincoln's reelection. John dissolved in rage. Edwin would see Lincoln become a king, John shouted, and have no one to blame but himself. Their mother intervened. No more talk of politics.

  * * * *

  The next night the Winter Garden Theater saw the debut of Hamlet with Edwin in the title role. The play ran for two weeks, three, eight, ten, until Edwin felt the exhaustion of playing the same part, night after night. He begged for a change, but the play was still selling out. This run, which would last one hundred nights, was the making of Edwin's name. Ever after, he would be America's Hamlet. It was more than a calling, almost a cult. Edwin referred to this as “my terrible success."

  It was a shame Shakespeare couldn't see him, the critics wrote, he was so exactly what Hamlet ought to be, so exactly what Shakespeare had envisioned. One morning his little daughter, Edwina, was offered an omelet. “That's my daddy,” she said.

  There came a night when, deadened from the long run, Edwin began to miss his cues. He had the curtain brought down, retired to his dressing room to gather himself. “O God! O God!” he said to himself. “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable/ Seem to me all the uses of this world."

  When the ghost appeared, Edwin was not surprised. He'd been born with a caul, which meant protection, but also the ability to see spirits. Almost a year earlier, his beloved young wife had died of tuberculosis. She'd been in Boston, he in New York. He was Hamlet then, too, a week's worth of performances and often drunk when onstage. “Fatigued,” one of the critics said, but others were not so kind.

  The night she died, he'd felt her kiss him. “I am half frozen,” she'd said. He'd stopped drinking and begun to spend his money on s?ances instead.

  Initially he'd gotten good value; his wife sent many messages of love and encouragement. Her words were general, though, impersonal, and lately he'd been having doubts. He'd begun to host s?ances himself, with no professional medium in attendance. A friend described one such evening. He was seized, this friend said, by a powerful electricity and his hands began to shake faster and harder than mortal man could move. He was given pen and paper, which he soon covered in ink. But when he came back to his senses, he'd written no words, only scrawl. It had all been Edwin, he decided then, doing what Edwin did best. Night after night on the stage, Edwin made people believe.

  The ghost visiting Edwin now was about the height of a tall woman or else a short man. It wore a helmet, but unlike the ghost in Hamlet, its visor was lowered so its face could not be seen. Its armor was torn and insubstantial, half chain mail, half cobweb. It stood wrapped in a blue-green light, shaking its arms. There was an icy wind. A sound like the dragging of chains. Edwin knew who it was. His father's acting had always been the full-throated sort.

  "Why are you here?” Edwin asked.

  "Why are you here?” his father's ghost asked back. His tone reverberated with ghostly disappointment. It was a tone Edwin knew well. “You have an audience in their seats. The papers will put it down to drink.” More arm shaking, more dragging of chains.

  Edwin pulled himself together and returned to the stage.

  * * * *

  Two:

  The serpent that did sting thy father's life Now wears his crown.

  * * * *

  Drink and the theater ran heavy in Edwin's blood. His father, Junius Brutus Booth, was famous for both. Born in England, Junius had come to America in 1821 on a ship named The Two Brothers. He brought with him his mistress and child. He left a wife and child behind.

  Junius Brutus Booth leased a property in northern Baltimore, a remote acreage of farmland and forest. When he wasn't touring, he and his family lived in isolation in a small cabin. He refused to own slaves, forbid his family to eat meat or fish, or to kill any animal. When he inadvertently injured a copperhead with the plow, he brought it home, kept it on the hearth in a box padded with a blanket until it recovered.

  Edwin's earliest memory was of returning to the farm after dark on the back of a horse. As they passed through the forest toward home, his night terror grew. There were branches that grabbed for him, the screaming of owls. The horses came to a halt. His father dismounted, swung Edwin down and across the fence. “Your foot is on your native heath, boy,” his father said, and Edwin never forgot the overwhelming sense of belonging, of safety, of home that washed through him.

  He was not his father's favorite child nor his mother's, either. The favorite was Henry, until he died, and then it was John Wilkes. Four of the Booth children passed before adulthood. They were all older than Edwin or would have been had they lived. These deaths drove their father into an intermittent raving madness. In later years, Junius Booth was much admired for his King Lear.

  Surviving from the older set were Rosalie and Junius Jr. Edwin was the eldest of the younger set, followed by Asia, John Wilkes, and Joseph. The youngest three in particular were very close.

  All but Edwin were well educated. At the age of thirteen, Edwin had been taken permanently out of school to go on the road with his father. His job was to see that Junius showed up for performances and to keep him out of taverns. It was a job no one could do with complete success. The most difficult time was after the curtain.

  This seems to have been the rule: that Junius would not drink if Edwin was watching. Some nights Edwin managed to lock his father in his room. On one of these occasions, Junius bribed the innkeeper and drank mint juleps with a straw through the keyhole.

  More often Junius would insist on going out, Edwin trailing silently, close enough to watch his father, but far enough behind to escape invective. He was a child with enormous beauty and dark, anxious eyes.

  His father's goal on these evenings was to give him the slip. Then Edwin would be forced to search through a midnight landscape of deserted streets for the one tavern his father was in. He received little affection and no gratitude for this. When found, Junius would curse at Edwin, shout, threaten to see him shanghaied into the navy if he didn't go away.

  One afternoon his father woke up from a nap and refused to go to the theater. He was scheduled to play Richard III. “You do it,” he told Edwin. “I'm sick of it."

  Lacking an alternative, the manager sent Edwin onstage in his father's hump, his father's outsized costume. No warning had been given the audience, whose applause fell away into a puzzled silence. Edwin began tentatively. He tried to imitate his father's inflections, his gestures. The actors nearest him provided every possible support while those offstage crowded the wings, watching in friendly, nervous sympathy. The audience, too, found themselves filled with pity for the young boy, so obviously out of his depth, drowning in his own sleeves. He had them on the edge of their seats, wondering if he'd get through his next line, his next scene. The play ended with Edwin's first ovation. He had won it merely by surviving.

  * * * *

  Junius Jr., Edwin's oldest brother, relocated to San Francisco, where he ran a theater company. In 1852, he talked his father into coming west on tour. No one imagined Junius Sr. could make the trip alone. Junius Jr. traveled east to pick his father up. Edwin, now eighteen years old, was to be, at long last, left at home.

  The party had tickets on a steamer leaving from New York and traveling around the cape. As soon as he arrived in the city, Junius the elder and an actor friend, George Spear, shook Junius the younger loose and went off on a toot. The boat sailed without them. Clearly Junius Jr. was not up to the task. While they waited for the next boat, Edwin was fetched from Baltimore.

  After the long voyage, the Booths landed finally in San Francisco. They did several engagements at Junius Jr.'s theater. Both sons took minor supporting roles, and they all made money, but lost it again in Sacramento, where
the playhouses were empty. Junius the elder went home, tired and discouraged, after only two months. Edwin remained in California with Junius the younger.

  Edwin turned nineteen, and celebrated his freedom from responsibility by, in his own words, drinking and whoring, often in the very taverns his father had frequented, until his older brother had had enough. Edwin then joined a company touring the mining camps. He played in Nevada City, Yuba City, Grass Valley. In Downieville, the company was caught in a tremendous blizzard. They made their slow way back over snowy roads to Nevada City.

  It was night. Edwin was wandering drunk and alone along the main street in the bright moonlit snow when he saw his father coming toward him. He wore no costume, but was dressed as himself in a stained coat and shabby hat. Edwin stopped to wait for him. “Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,” his father said. A bobbing lantern shone through his body. “I'm sick to the heart of it. You do it now.” The light grew brighter as his father dimmed until he finally vanished completely. The man holding the lantern was George Spear. “I've come to fetch you, boy,” said George.

  A letter following behind them had finally caught up. On the last leg of his voyage back, Junius Brutus Booth had drunk a glass of water from the Mississippi River that made him so ill he died within days. He'd never reached home, and his final hours had been filled with torment. In spite of the raving and drunkenness, the Booth children had adored their father. Edwin believed Junius had secretly come to watch on that night he'd stood in as Richard III, although there was no evidence to support this. Edwin believed he'd caused his father's death by choosing not to see him safely home.

  He'd promised his father to someday play Hamlet. On April 25, 1853, he talked Junius Jr. into giving him the role for the first time. Junius found him inadequate and wouldn't let him repeat it. But a young critic, Ferdinand Cartwright Ewer, thought otherwise. Ewer left the San Francisco theater in great excitement and went to the newspaper offices to write a long review. Edwin Booth, he wrote, had made Hamlet “the easy, undulating, flexible thing” Shakespeare intended.

  Tastes were changing. Edwin's Hamlet, as it developed over the years, was subtle where his father had been theatrical and natural where his father had declaimed. Junius Jr. may not have liked it, but Ferdinand Cartwright Ewer wrote, in that very first review of Edwin's very first Hamlet, that, in concept if not in polish, Edwin had already surpassed his father.

  * * * *

  Three:

  O horrible, O horrible, most horrible!

  * * * *

  In February of 1865, Junius Jr. traveled to Washington, D.C. to see John Wilkes. Junius had always admired his younger brother, but now found him hysterical and unhinged on the subject of the Richmond campaign.

  Their mother wrote to John that she was miserable and lonely visiting Edwin in his Boston house. “I always gave you praise,” she wrote, “for being the fondest of all my boys, but since you leave me to grief I must doubt it. I am no Roman mother. I love my dear ones before country or anything else.” She went back to her home in New York, where she lived with Rosalie, her oldest daughter.

  In March, John Wilkes attended Lincoln's second inauguration, standing on the platform, close to the president. After that, he came to Boston briefly, charmed his little niece Edwina with stories of his childhood. These stories were remarkable in part for how little a role her father, Edwin, had in them. Edwin and John had lived completely different lives.

  Then John quarreled again with Edwin about the war, and again he left the house in anger. Back in Washington he joined thousands of others on the White House lawn when Lincoln spoke from the balcony about extending voting rights to the Negroes. John retired to a bar to drink his way through his fury. A quart of brandy in, another drinker told him he'd never be the actor his father was.

  "I'll be the most famous man in America,” John Wilkes answered.

  * * * *

  On the night of April 14, 1865, Edwin Booth was in Boston, playing the villain in a melodrama called The Iron Chest to a sold-out house. The Civil War had just ended; the city was celebrating. Edwin Booth was thirty-one years old and engaged to be married again.

  Some of his audience, on the way home from the theater, heard that the president had been shot, and some of those dismissed this as idle rumor. Edwin knew nothing until the newspaper arrived the next morning. When he saw his brother's name in print, Edwin wrote later to a friend, he felt he'd been struck on the head with a hammer. Soon a message arrived from the manager of the Boston Theater. Although he prayed, the note said, that what everyone was saying about Wilkes would yet prove untrue, he thought it best and right to cancel all further performances.

  Edwin's daughter, Edwina, was visiting her aunt Asia in Philadelphia. Asia read the news in the paper and collapsed. While her husband was trying to calm her, a U.S. marshal arrived, forbid them to leave the house, and put a guard at every door.

  Junius Jr. was on tour in Cincinnati. When he entered his hotel lobby for breakfast, the clerk immediately sent him back upstairs. Moments later, a mob of some five hundred people arrived. They had stripped the lampposts of Junius’ playbills and come to hang him. His life was saved by the hotel clerk, who convinced the mob that Junius had gone in the night, and the staff, who hid him in an attic room until the danger passed.

  Mrs. Booth and Rosalie were at home in New York. A letter from John arrived that afternoon, written the day before. “I only drop you these few lines to let you know I am well.” It was signed, “I am your affectionate son.” His mother wrote to Edwin that her dearest hope now was that John would shoot himself. “Please don't let him live to be hanged,” she wrote.

  Junius Jr. was arrested, charged with conspiracy, taken to Washington and imprisoned there. A letter had been found from him to John that referenced the “oil business,” the phrase so oblique it was obviously code. Asia's husband, John Sleeper Clarke, was also imprisoned. There was an irony in this: Clarke was a comic actor of great ambition. John Wilkes had warned Asia before she married him that Clarke didn't love her. All he'd wanted was the magic of the Booth name, John had said.

  In Clarke's case there wasn't even a vague, incriminating phrase, only the partiality of his wife to her little brother. Asia would surely have been imprisoned herself, if she hadn't been pregnant. Instead she was put under house arrest.

  It's not clear how Edwin escaped the conspiracy charges. He'd once saved Lincoln's son from a train accident. He was known as a Union man. He had powerful friends who exerted themselves. He'd been born with a caul. Somehow he stayed out of jail. Still, he couldn't leave his house; the streets were too dangerous. His daughter returned from her aunt's under police escort. His fianc?e broke off their engagement by letter.

  More letters arrived, hundreds of them, to all members of the Booth family. They came for months; they came for years. “I am carrying a bullet for you.” “Your life is forfeit.” “We hate the very name Booth.” “Your next performance will be a tragedy."

  John Wilkes was exposed as a debaucher as well as a murderer. Junius Sr.'s bigamy was suddenly remembered; the whole Booth clan was bastard-born. Plus there was Jewish blood. What a Shylock Junius Brutus Booth had once played! Asia's husband was furious to be in jail while Edwin was out. They were a nest of vipers, he told the press, a family of Iagos. His honor demanded he divorce his pregnant wife as soon as he regained his freedom.

  Before dawn on April 26, John Wilkes Booth was discovered in a barn in the Maryland swamps. A torch was thrown inside. The straw caught immediately, illuminating the scene as clearly as if he were onstage. “I saw him standing upright,” one Colonel Conger said later, “leaning on a crutch. He looked so like his brother Edwin I believed for a moment the whole pursuit to have been a mistake."

  * * * *

  Four:

  If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now...

  In the months that followed, Edwin could only leave the house at night. He walked for miles through th
e dark Boston streets, his hat pulled over his face. During the day, he hid in his house, writing letters of his own. He'd worked so hard to make the name of Booth respectable, he wrote. He repeated often the story of how he had once saved the life of Robert Lincoln on a train. At a friend's suggestion, to distract himself, he wrote an autobiography of his early childhood for his daughter to read, but then destroyed it before she could. He made several unsuccessful efforts, on his mother's behalf, to recover his brother's body. “I had such beautiful plans for the future,” he said. “All is ruin and ever will be."

  He was forced to Washington during the trial of the co-conspirators. The defense had planned to call him to attest to John Wilkes’ insanity, and also to the charismatic power he held over the minds of others. The lawyers interviewed Edwin for several hours and then decided not to put him on the stand. While he was in the capital, he visited his brother and brother-in-law, still in jail. His brother-in-law repeated his plan to divorce Asia. He wondered aloud at Edwin's freedom.

  "Those who have passed through such an ordeal,” Asia wrote, “if there are any such ... never relearn to trust in human nature, they never resume their old place in the world, and they forget only in death."

  Edwin thought he might go mad. He had a chronic piercing headache, frequent nightmares. His friends worried that he'd return to drink, and Tom Aldritch, one of the closest, moved into the house to keep him company. Edwin swore that he would never act again. It would be grotesque for any Booth to perform anywhere. The rest must be silence.

  * * * *

  Nine months passed. Lewis Paine, George Atzerodt, David Herold, and Mary Surratt were hanged as co-conspirators in the prison yard before a large, enthusiastic crowd. Junius Booth and John Sleeper Clarke were released. Though he never forgave her, Asia's husband did not ask for a divorce. Instead they retreated to England, where they lived for the rest of their lives. Edwin's continued requests for his brother's body continued to go unanswered. Within a very few months, the entire Booth family, none of whom were working, was deeply in debt.