by Morris, Ian;
CROWDER: Eighteen sixty-five.
SING: Eighteen sixty-five, to be sure. I learned of the change in the President’s plans when I went to Grover’s to refamiliarize myself with the scheme of the building. Upon arriving I was informed that Tad Lincoln would be attending the performance that evening with his tutor, and the Backwoods Baboon himself would instead be going to Ford’s, with the Grants. These developments suited me just as well. I went to directly to Ford’s Theater on the excuse of picking up a letter I was expecting regarding my investment in the oil business. The previous month, I had performed there in The Apostate, which was a favorite of mine and a fitting play for my final role.
Then I proceeded to the stables where I rented a horse, a roan mare, a substantial animal, but hardly worth the five dollars I was charged by the liverer who must have recognized me from the stage and therefore thought I was of some means.
From the stables I rode to the National Hotel, and went to the desk where Merrick, a man I knew, was working behind the desk. I asked him for a sheet of writing paper and an envelope, both of which he produced, and—
MAJORS: He stood at the desk composing a letter. He seemed particularly agitated and distracted by the comings and goings around him and after a few minutes he asked me for a private room, at which point I directed him to the clerk’s office behind the front desk. After another minute or so he called out to me,
SING: Hey, Merrick what is the date?
MAJORS: “The fourteenth,” says I.
SING: Of what year?
MAJORS: He asked. “Surely you’re joking,” says I.
SING: I am not.
MAJORS: He said, annoyed with me at his error, he seemed. I informed him that it was 1865 and he resumed writing and left shortly after, though I was toiling at my desk and saw him not as he left.
SING: I was riding down Tenth in the direction of Ford’s when I encountered John Matthews, a thespian with whom I had trod the boards a thousand times, and as recently as my farewell performance at Ford’s in The Apostate.
MAJORS: Did you see Lee’s officers brought in under guard?
SING: “I did,” said I. Struck by the gravity of this moment, I put my hand to my head and cried, “My God! I no longer have a country.” I then said, “Johnny, I wish to ask you a favor; will you do it for me?”
MAJORS: “Of course, John,” said I. He extended a black-gloved hand which held an envelope and said—
SING: I have a letter which I wish you to deliver to the offices of the National Intelligencer tomorrow morning.
MAJORS: I told him, “Certainly I will.”
SING: We parted.
CROWDER: Did you deliver the letter to the National Intelligencer?
MAJORS: No sir.
CROWDER: Do you have it in your possession?
MAJORS: No sir.
SING: From the hotel I rode directly to the Kirkwood House where Vice President Andrew Johnson boarded. A Negro doorman informed us that neither Mr. Johnson nor his secretary Mr. Wm. A. Browning were in, and I left him with my calling card upon which I wrote, “Don’t wish to disturb you; are you in?”
HARRIETTE: Why was that card of Booth’s found in Johnson’s box? Some acquaintance certainly existed. I have always had the harrowing thought that they had an understanding. Did not Booth say there is one thing he would not tell? There is said to be honor among thieves. I have never heard of Johnson regretting my sainted husband’s death. He never wrote me a line of condolence and he behaved in the most brutal way.
SING: That demented hag was only half wrong. As it happens I had had the occasion to meet Johnson, in Nashville, where he was serving as military governor, and I was serving as an adequate Richelieu, and had found him—as all who ever met him found him—a braggart and a drunk. I had given the task of killing him to George Azterodt, a German ferryman and known inebriate. This assignment was perhaps deliberate on my part, since Azterodt was almost certain to fail, and the one of those we had marked for death whom was known to me personally would be spared.
DRUCILLA: [climbs off the stool] Okay Harold, we get the idea. [pages through the script] Hey, you [points at Tom] get up here a second. [He points to himself to make sure she is talking to him, then reluctantly climbs up on the stage. Drucilla hands him a script with a line circled.] Follow along and when it gets to this line, say it—Roy he’s taking your line here.
SING [annoyed]: At six I took the mare to the stables opposite the stage door of Ford’s Theater. The play was scheduled to begin at 7:30. I would return around nine. I had seen the play more than a few times and never cared to see it again—
DRUCILLA: Let’s go, Harold.
SING [more annoyed]: The performance began at 7:45. I read in the papers the next day that the President arrived around 8:45. At nine I retrieved my horse from the stables and brought it around to the stage door, where I asked Ned Spangler if he would hold the reins while I went inside. He said that he could not, that he would be needed inside to strike the first-act set in but a few minutes. He fetched for me another stableboy, whom I knew not.
MAJORS: This boy is later identified as Peanuts Burrows.
SING: Inside I encountered J. L. DeBonay.
MAJORS: He wanted to cross backstage. I informed him that this was the dairy scene and that there was no room but we could pass below the stage and we did.
SING: I exited though a side door that opened on an alley, and entered the Star Saloon through the back.
TOM: [noticing that all eyes in the room are upon him and reading at a level he believes will make him heard throughout the room, but is in actuality a good deal louder than the other performers] Yeah, he was in here—
SING: Thus fortified, I returned to the theater—
TOM: I wasn’t finished.
SING: [as Booth—as if annoyed by a heckler] What’s that you’re saying?
TOM: I’m supposed to say, “If I had known what he was up to I could have killed him then and there with my bare hands. And even if I hadn’t known, because I never liked him.”—and then you go.
SING: Ur, yes, I had a bourbon to fortify me for what was to come, the most heroic and patriotic blow ever struck on these shores for freedom. I entered through the front door. The usher—a Mr. James E. Buckingham—reached out his hand for a ticket. “You don’t need a ticket, Buck,” says I and bounded up the stairs to the boxes, whistling a jig. If I had not known the layout of the theater so well I might have thought I approached the wrong box, for it was completely unguarded. Slowing the pace of my stride I timed the moment of my arrival at the door to coincide with the certain line when I knew but one actor would be on stage, tired old Lord Dundreary, calling off into the wings: “Don’t know enough to turn you inside out, old gal—you sockdologizing old mantrap.” At that I burst through the door of the box where the President sat in a rocking chair, roaring with laughter, like the rest of the mob. He must have noticed the change in lighting in the room, and I recall was just beginning to turn his head when I drew my pistol and fired but inches from his head. He lolled forward as though I had just sent him into a deep nap. His adjutant was slow to react. He stood and turned to me not thinking to draw his side arm, with my left hand I produced my dagger from my vest and thrust at him striking him in the arm. Mrs. Lincoln screamed.
HARRIETTE: [Screams, a fakey stage scream]
SING: Here I made my famous leap [he crosses to the edge of the platform and puts a foot on the rail]
DRUCILLA: Hold it, Harold.
SING: I have to jump [jumps]. I have to jump to the stage and cry, “Sic semper tyrannis.” Shout, I say, for there were those who say I “hissed” the words or “spat them out,” when the truth was that I used the projection and elocution befitting my skill as a tragedian. Of course, it is true that I had suffered some recurrent hoarseness, owing in large part to my despair and dissipate lifestyle, but when the time came—
DRUCILLA: [louder] Harold I said quit it.
SING: And I said I haven’t f
inished.
DRUCILLA: But you have.
SING: I still have to escape. I was on the run for six days.
DRUCILLA: If you were, it was off stage.
BEA: It’s not working Harold.
SING: Yes, it is.
BEA: No, it’s not.
SING: Harriette?
CROWDER: Why not ask me?
SING: I know what you think.
DRUCILLA: It’s missing something.
BEA: Like talent.
HARRIETTE: Hey, aren’t personal attacks against our rules?
CROWDER: We have rules?
MAJORS: No.
BEA: Anyway, since when is it against the rules to criticize? I said what I thought. It’s dead, it’s Spoon River Anthology or something. [Sits firmly in chair, hands clasped in her lap] It’s like, “I shot the President and now I’m dead.”
DRUCILLA: Maybe, Harold, if you could tell us what you are trying to do.
SING [talking very quickly, as if to prevent interruption]: The point—if there has to be a point—is to situate the assassin at the center of the history, rather than as an agent of the victim’s history, rather than as the Outsider, as Sandburg calls Booth, the Strange Man, the American Judas. The Biblical dimension of the proto-traitor is appealing for its grandiosity, if nothing else. Yet Judas was a disciple and the one whom Jesus favored of the twelve. On the other hand, Chapter 14, verse 11 of the gospel of Mark, “And he sought how he might conveniently betray him,” that carries an echo of prophecy for the conspiracy.
The more eerie echoes are of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Consider that Booth’s grandfather Richard Booth named his first boy Junius Brutus Booth after the killer of Caesar. Booth’s father, like his father, was an anti-royalist. Booth’s second to last performance was in Julius Caesar, in New York City, with his brothers, Junius Jr., and Edwin. Though in that performance, John took the role of Marc Antony against Edwin’s Brutus. Neither comparison is perfect, Judas or Brutus, yet it’s the echoes of those two killers who were seemingly driven by fate, that gives the man and his act of violence something even beyond historical importance.
CROWDER: If you accept the view that Lincoln was predestined to die, then who actually killed him is unimportant.
SING: I contend exactly the opposite: that Lincoln was not predestined to die, Booth was predestined to kill. That’s the significant distinction.
CROWDER: By what standard?
SING: [reaches in his pocket and pulls out a small gun, a derringer, which he places on the rail. All regard it silently for several seconds.]
BEA: Is it loaded?
SING: Of course not. Don’t be stupid.
HARRIETTE [amazed]: Where did you get it?
DRUCILLA: Mike got it.
MAJORS [nods self-consciously]: It wasn’t that hard.
HARRIETTE: Is it the real one?
MAJORS: The real one’s at the Smithsonian or someplace. This isn’t a replica, but it was manufactured by the same company, several years later, there are differences, which sets us back in the sense of absolute realism, if that remains a goal but—
CROWDER: Where would you find the bullets?
SING: It’s a .44 caliber. Not uncommon.
DRUCILLA: What we’re looking for is like a cap, right?
MAJOR: A blank. That shouldn’t be a problem.
BEA: Still, be careful.
DRUCILLA: Yeah, put it away, Harold, it’s creepy.
They’d forgotten I was there so, before any of them had a chance to ask me why I was still hanging around, I stepped behind the curtain, up the aisle, and was actually out the door when Drucilla Gordon called after me, “Hey, wait.”
“You’re coming back, right?”
“Nah, I got some business.”
“Not today. I meant you’ll come to rehearsal again.”
“Really? I wasn’t good, was I?”
“What? God, no,” she said. “That’s not what I meant. But Dewey likes you and you seem to drive Harold nuts. It’ll be fun. Trust me.” Outdoors, her eyes were the purest black.
“When’s the next one?”
“Next week actually. It’s not a rehearsal really. It’s a party, a party for us. Harold’s just finished this play and he thinks he can get us a grant. Here, come here.” She took my hand in hers, which was small, her fingers short and thin like a doll’s, and wrote an address on my palm. “The door’s around the side and don’t knock, we’ll never hear you.”
I walked staring at the address on my palm, on air, but feeling like I’d been given something I wasn’t ready for. I didn’t know what to make of all the waving of arms and the yelling. The historical stuff was mundane. I didn’t understand the argument and I seemed to be the only one who didn’t. This was what I was thinking about, lying on my back and staring at the ceiling when someone knocked at the door of my room. “Get lost,” I shouted, thinking it was Ship.
“I already am,” a voice said.
I pulled the chair away and opened the door a crack. Over the course of the term more than half of the bulbs in the hallway had been broken, stolen, or burned out, and all I could see of the guy at my door was that he wore a heavy Army jacket and his head was shaved.
I said, “What’s up.”
He put his cigarette to his mouth backhanded, and I realized it was Grey. “Laertes,” he said, “has come to Wittenburg.”
16
THIS CARP OF TRUTH
He looked like shit and I’d never been happier to see anyone in my life. I went to hug him but he pushed past, dropping his jacket on the floor. Underneath he wore a blue filling station coverall, which was dirty and ripped at both knees, and his work boots were spattered with paint and varnish stains. His eyes were half shut and he’d shaved his head.
“Jesus,” I said.
Grey jumped on Ship’s bed and put his feet up. “This one yours?”
“No.”
“Does it belong to Dennis?”
“Yeah,” I said.
He sat up and looked for a place to flick his ash, which fell as he did. He ground the ashes into the bedspread, then found an empty Coke can on Ship’s desk to use as an ashtray.
“How’d you get down here?”
“Hitched to Minneapolis and took a bus from there.”
“Where’s Callie?”
“Home.”
“How come she didn’t come with?”
“I didn’t feel she should travel in her condition.”
“Which condition?”
“Pregnant,” he said. He said it in an offhand way, as though it was news I’d heard but forgotten.
“What?”
“She’s pregnant,” he said. “She’s going to have a baby.”
“When?”
“I don’t know, six months.”
“Do your mom and dad know?”
“Yes.”
“What did they say?”
“Jack said I should tell you.”
“Does Dolores know?”
“Yes.”
“What did she say?”
“Get out.”
“You’re shitting me.”
He shook his head.
“Where’s she staying?”
“Our house.”
“She mad you left?”
He took a long, two-part drag on the butt. “She didn’t know I was coming.”
I tried to picture Callie pregnant and couldn’t, any more than I could picture Drucilla Gordon pregnant. “I’ll go back with you,” I said.
“I’m not asking.”
“What’d you come for, then?” I asked, and he was about to answer when Ship popped through the door and looked sadly at Grey.
It was only after we convinced Dennis that Grey would be gone the next day—which we all knew was a lie—that he returned to his standard pallor. Grey slept in my bed that night. I couldn’t remember how long it had been since we bunked together. We didn’t say two words before he was asleep. The next morning Grey went to Dooley’s cl
ass with me. It was hard to get used to him without the hair. It’d always been the first thing anyone noticed. I gave him a notebook to carry. If the campus impressed him, he didn’t show it. Chewing on a wad of gum, he mostly looked straight ahead, except to turn his head occasionally to watch someone go by, never to look at the various landmarks I pointed out. I’d say something like, “There’s the observatory,” and he’d nod as though he already knew and say, “Yeah, great.”
It was Dooley’s last lecture of the semester, on Polk and the Mexican War. While he paced the western expanses of the map, tracing his pointer along the Rio Grande, Grey hummed to himself and doodled Fender guitars in his notebook. Dooley, who believed that history was made not in war but in treaty, skipped over the battles and talked instead of the Wilmot Proviso. We hadn’t made it to the Civil War, which was kind of a bummer because I can only imagine what he would have to say about the dark enterprises behind that disaster. Nonetheless the students stood and cheered when he finished. He bowed and left the stage and the applause got louder, while Grey looked up from his drawing. “Do they do this every day?”
At lunch at the Plaza, a quarter-beer joint, Grey bought two bottles of Point and we played some pool. He knocked down two solids on the break and lined up a combination across the full length of the table,
“What are you going to do?” I asked him, hoping to mess up his shot.
He pocketed the ball and said, “About what?”
Grey was good at pool. I wasn’t particularly. Grey was good at almost everything that I wasn’t. I believed that there had to be something that I could beat him at, but I hadn’t found it. “Get married, I guess.” He put away the eight ball and held out his hand for more quarters.
I said, “You think you have to?”
“Break,” he said.
The cue ball smacked the formation and sent the twelve ball flying off the table. He missed an easy side shot by striking too hard, and I ran three solids that were bunched in a corner before missing on a bank.
“So what’s the problem?”
He didn’t have a shot and circled the table twice before tapping the cue ball against the rail so I wouldn’t either. “I need money?”
