Yet I, whose dreams were surely no less agitated than those around me, seemed ever courted, wooed and sneaked upon. First by some scheming, winking, wicked eye and soon by lips that presumed to follow. When finally I was ready to commit my heart, it had long before been plucked and plundered. Still, what was left—and it seemed enough, if not overmuch—I gave to her, to Ella.
And she had also kissed me first.
My promise to my mother that I would not allow my passions or bachelorhood to persuade me to join the army was balanced by the contentment that I did my part by supplying my brethren of a poor beleaguered South with what comforts smuggled cargoes of quinine could provide. For fourteen months I rode vast quantities of the same past Union blockades with—as he liked to be called—United States Grant’s own signature pass. My tentside orations and fragmented scenes were the alibi of my movements, but my greatest performances were those delivered to the blue-vested picket-line sentries who never guessed beyond my practiced calm to search the over-stuffed harness, the reins of which I steadied with sweating hands. Nor shall I say I did not find, upon the advice of a friend, quick and reliable strength in the ingestion of another such medication, which, though more rare, found great purpose to my deed.
“Really, Johnnie! What is so difficult to understand? I cannot imagine anything more difficult than a mother sending her sons off to be killed at war. Maryland has no part in this conflict. And you have no duty to either side.”
“I have my opinions. And I have my sense of truth and honor.”
“Pooh!” she scoffed.
“And I don’t wish to hear how I am her favorite,” I told her. “She has other sons. And each of them holds a special place in her heart.”
“Don’t let us talk about it then. Because you know it’s true. Though I can’t for the life of me imagine why,” she giggled. “Still, I must say, I have fallen prey to your spell as well.” She stared mock-seriously, as if entranced, and recalled the gypsy woman. “It must be your eyes.”
Asia played the serafina with vacant gaze and mechanical steps across the slope of lawn, habitually tripping over some unsuspecting shrub until I joined her laughter.
“She has other sons,” I continued, fishing in a well-stocked pond.
“That makes no matter. Nature provides our spirits with some kind of precognition, prepares us for the day our parents will leave us. We had one father, but it was no surprise to have him die.”
“He was overdue.”
“For us perhaps. Even still, when mother dies, what will we say except that it was to be expected?”
“Do not talk like that!” I snapped. “I am not sure I could bear it.”
“You see. Still, it must be.” Her intuitions were rarely understood, even when correct. And often, as in her choice of husbands, no less unacceptable.
“I, for one, will grieve,” I sulked.
“And so will we all, sweet Johnnie,” she caressed me with her words. “But we will say she lived well and long.”
Her glance was as far away now as the oriental shores of her christened name.
“Don’t ask me why. Somehow we understand life’s pattern. That is why so many societies exalt the notion of patricide. Yet of the killing of a child or sibling there can be no tolerance. It is the true horror of the present conflict. Nothing in nature is more offensive, more truly onerous, or anathema to our hearts and minds.”
“Perhaps it is the parent who should perish, then,” I suggested. “The sire of this bloody business.”
“But of course, he must,” she replied. She could not have known my thoughts then. Or, if she did, she made that they were mine alone.
***
Perhaps it will be necessary to explain some several other incidents, which, having occurred brought me not only to this woodland but also to this point of recounting my life. What my name is you know already. How I received that name is part of my family history and you may easily ask your uncle if you wish an accounting of the same. Let us start then with a similarly familiar story, yet which, because of the teller, must needs be different.
The war had dragged on those many years and the end was about. Yet for those of us who had not asked for war, nor could not settle for a peace that meant to finish what had no right to begin, there would be no end. Things were then what they always had been despite the appellation of this or that condition. Dissatisfaction would not be satisfied, nor argumentation resolved because some martial tyrant willy-nilled it should be so.
Strophe
We were not satisfied and could not forget the cause of our unrest. If they meant the war was over, what did it matter to a civilian? If they meant that all was repaired, how could they think the deaths of brothers or the tears of widows and the unborn might find appeasement in the ceremonious yielding of a sword, the futile language of some engine-wrought eulogy? Four score and nine years later our nation was torn, our spirits were ravaged, our principles rent, despoiled, profaned. Was this peace?
I may easily state that this was in more than one way a difficult and transitioned time for me. Edwin’s widely circulated fame was also thorning its way into my side. His earnings were reportedly excessive, at least for his talents. It seemed overtime for the family name to recall its former genius. Or what was I? Not merely a descendant and namesake of his excellently rebellious Lord Mayor.
***
That was all before I met your mother. Even in those most unsteady times, there was that separate, if grotesque, peace maintained in Washington. The White House itself had set the pace and busily maintained its languorous lead. Expensive gowns were bought, expansive preparations made, indifferent balls and dinners given. While Pennsylvania farmlands bleated and bled, Missouri and Kansas stretched and suffered, and all of Richmond wept, the federal capital dined and danced.
When I received my invitation to the 1863–64 New Year’s Eve gala at the home of a certain Senator Nash, I was somewhat surprised, yet thought little of going. My brother Edwin, finished with his New York season, was in Washington for a dinner given in his honor by Secretary of State Seward. This the result of the Union tyrant having seen Edwin’s performance of Shylock in a current adaptation of the same name. Seward, forever trying to put himself in everyone’s favor, particularly the northern president’s, had heard of this new affection for my brother’s work. A man who rarely missed an opportunity to go to the theater, the tyrant had never stayed awake through an entire performance—until seeing Edwin. So my brother had received the invitation to the Nash home and urged me to attend with him.
“There will be many individuals by whose introduction you might benefit,” he added.
Not only because it was unusual for Edwin to ever take an interest in my affairs, much less in our doing anything together, I conceded. There were those rare occasions when our lives seemed less complicated than the times and our contrary dispositions generally insisted. Yet there was then a greater need in my system than that of a brother. Nor could I pass up an opportunity of cementing our relationship beyond the mere fact that we were family—especially as my sympathies for the South were already well-known, and Edwin was busily and forever trying to disassociate himself from any ideology that might be construed as harmful to his career.
But things with Edwin had been greatly changed since the loss the previous February of his wife of less than three years, the actress Mary Devlin. Not even 23 years old, she had left him his one great remaining joy, Edwina. Strange, dark and haunted, she was yet a loving and devoted daughter and bore constant witness to her mother’s lasting impression upon my brother. When some years later he married Mary McVicker, he could bring himself only to call her Vickie, rather than summon once more the memory of his first marriage.
The previous summer I had paid a visit to New York as the dutiful uncle at the moment when a friend of Edwin’s, a writer named Adam Badeau, had been wounded in the city’s anti-war riots. I helped carry the man into my brother’s house where Edwin and I nursed him back
to health. Badeau was a sometime journalist and state department clerk who, at the outset of the war, cast down his pen to take up the Unionist sword and was presently on staff for a certain General Q. A. Gillmore. Prior to that he had been an aide-de-camp to General Sherman, a position recommended him by his enlistment and state experience—and rumors were prevalent of his upcoming appointment as military secretary to General Grant. From camp to general’s camp, Badeau’s assignments increased in honor and prestige without a hint of effort. How ironic that he should become the innocent casualty of a freak accident from a dispute over the irregularities and discriminations of mandatory inscription.
Edwin was surprised that day, I recall, to see his young and fiery brother forego his passions long enough to recognize a man in need regardless of the color of his uniform. Still, something underneath the situation seemed to recommend to both of us that we were brothers, we were Booths. Edwina’s sweetly clinging, year-and-a-half-old affections for her uncle were in no little part responsible for this new-found filial amity.
Edwin had wired home to assure little Edwina’s well-being in her grandmother’s care and explained to me the source of our invitations to the New Year’s party to be his friend Badeau. When he told me of the expected attendance of Generals Sherman, Gillmore, and Grant, he paused to check my reaction, as if I might be as vehement in my company as my opinions. But that was his persuasion dictating a perception of how I might also be.
The New Year’s ball seemed an opportunity for us to complete the mending of our long-standing rift and Edwin’s estrangement toward me. His recent widowing made him seem almost desperately in need of friends and family, and I felt our bond more strongly than ever, in spite of growing political and ideological differences. In addition, I had always meant to thank Grant for the courtesy he had done me by extending a pass to me solely on the recommendation of my name. I could not help but laugh to myself that I had taken such advantage of the general’s generosity. The man who was routing our Southern armies was inadvertently seeing that those same routed armies were receiving the medical attentions they needed to continue their fight.
Scene V
Ringing,
Swinging,
Dashing as they go
Over the crest of the beautiful snow:
Snow so pure when it falls from the sky,
To be trampled in mud by the crowd rushing by;
To be trampled and tracked by the thousands of feet
Till it blends with the horrible filth in the street.
John Harrison Surratt Jr., according to the record, was living in Baltimore in 1890, where he had accepted a position as auditor for the Old Bay Line of the Baltimore Steam Packet Company. Of all of us his story is the most fascinating. Yea, more than mine own.
Harrison, as he was called by the others to avoid confusion with references to his mother, I suppose, or Jack, as I knew him, had left Capital City the day of the deed, ostensibly to follow the departing Grant but truly to flee his own cowardice for the plan he himself had helped to conceive. I can forgive him for his fear, but for his treachery, never.
Indeed, Surratt had boarded that same train upon which left the Union general, but rather than perform his part, continued on to Canada, from where—prudently, most prudently, then—he boarded a packet to the continent of Europe, where he accepted an appointment in the papal zouaves at the Vatican City. There was the truth of his promises to my own Ella, and the jealousy, which I justly bear as a result.
Somewhat over a year later he was appropriately betrayed by one of his fellows, and brought back to the United States for trial only after a daring attempt to escape that saw him leaping—if not as gracefully, somewhat more successfully than I—over a hundred-foot cliff, only to be washed ashore and apprehended on the coast of Egypt.
Surratt’s trial, though it did not serve my vengeful heart, was a triumph of our cause, as the jury was hung—four for conviction, eight for acquittal—and dismissed. His subsequent lectures (Yes! I said lectures) on our association and the plot itself drew crowds and sums as large as any actor’s debut. Throughout all he conveniently omitted any reference to his knowledge of the plan to kill the union leader. This, perhaps, no less than I would have done by then.
His implications of the weasel Weichmann for the latter’s denouncing of our plot to save his own skin, while just could only have been half-hearted as he surely sensed his own betrayal of his one true friend. My only solace was that despite any efforts I might have imagined he should have made to reconcile with Ella after his return and acquittal, he was a reported bachelor who had never married. I prayed and thanked God it was true.
It was neither difficult nor particularly fruitful when at last I found Surratt on the fringe of Baltimore, in Ellicott City. Oh, he recognized me immediately, and reacted as strongly as had my brother, but had nothing of much interest to say either to me or in his own defense. In short, and for all his past adventures and exploits, he had not really changed. Except I discovered he had in fact wasted little time in marrying and had seven children, the youngest being five years old at this time.
“Still delivering your lectures, Jack?”
“Lectures? No, no more lectures,” he said, stopping short and checking the street in both directions before turning around with blunt reply. “And you, Wilkes? Are you still in the habit of delivering yours?”
“Jack, poor Jack!”
“Wilkes, ever Wilkes,” he replied.
“You recognize me so easily? Without my name, without my fame—my face too so changed?”
“Who else would call me Jack? And your eyes, Wilkes, your eyes. You cannot change the eyes.”
We walked for a moment together—he continuing to look in every direction for the unwanted eyes, and he admitted seeking out Ella as soon as he could—to bestow a favored fez, no doubt—intending to invite her to one of his lectures—but had no luck whatsoever in finding her. Could not remember the precise excuse offered by her father upon inquiry, but recalled never having received a colder reception, “No, not even by Judge Fisher, himself.”
Apparently, Surratt could view me only as one more likely audience member to hear the recounting of his exploits. I had no such desire and resigned to take my leave, swearing him to a secrecy I was not sure could be trusted—even after he acknowledged he had become a family man, had a wife and children—until he briefly accounted the circumstances of his narrow escape from hanging those many years ago to a lack of evidence for the extent of our association. The story could not be changed, even twenty-five years hence. He was right, I had nothing to fear from him.
***
“A little education will lead to atheism,” Edwin misquoted. “A lot of education leads to true faith.”
“Brother, you know I have never had even a little education,” I replied, smiling. “Still, I have ever tried my best to be the most devout atheist. But the deity keeps getting in the way.”
He tried to return my smile, yet could not.
Henry drove us up the tree-lined drive and waited in the front carriage court with the other livery servants and lackeys. The stately brick home, with its exterior gaslamps, curved and tiered portico and symmetrically columned design, was much the impressive image of a distant capital or foreign embassy. The air about seemed almost perfumed as pure white smoke billowed out of the three visible chimneys, and a light snow began to fall, furthering the candelabra-lit entry’s glowing allure as we laid the evening’s first bootprints in the newly fallen snow on the red brick porch stairs.
Inside, costumed menservants with powdered wigs looked out of place but took our capes and hats and canes and led the way to the reception room. There we exchanged salutary greetings with a group of masked and anonymous hosts and certain sober men by the names of Crowe, Jones, Kennedy, Lester, McCord, Reed and others, then left to our own. Dutch-capped maids bustled about, attentively serving sparkling Catawba and Cornish pasties.
“Why were we not told this was a masque?”
I asked Edwin almost nervously.
“Oh?” he said with half a smile. “I thought you knew. But what need have we for costumes, brother? Effortlessly, we shall change our parts every half-hour, according to our whims.”
We stepped into the grand salon where Edwin was greeted by this and that admirer or consoling friend, all quick to also wonder why we had not arrived in costume. His answer being that, as theatricals, we found more disguise in our natural state. Soon Edwin was off with these others, leaving me alone to contemplate a poised and easy posture.
I recognized Lee’s old friend Mr. Pike standing in one corner, his powerful stature towering over the others. He was becoming my personal landmark—if he was in attendance, I somehow knew I certainly belonged. When last I had seen his granite-featured face, it had been chiseled with lines of laughter. Here, as those of the men he addressed, it was uncommonly grim and recalled Chappel’s painting of Washington’s farewell to his officers. They were all talking loudly, yet from where I stood their voices mingled with those about the room into a strange, almost coded language, somewhere, perhaps, between the Portuguese of explorer priests and another less-familiar tongue.
In another section of the room I saw Lutz, on whose arm was that other long-time friend of my brother, the ringlet-tressed actress Laura Keene. As we, she wore no costume. A knotted strand of Indian beads about her neck and short black leather gloves commended her eccentricity. She and Lutz were gathered with yet another group of seriously demeanored men, including two of those who had greeted Edwin and me at the door, but no one seemed to be talking. Lutz stood with one arm propped upon the mantle, according to his habit. Whether he stood or sat, he always had one arm raised to lean elbow-first against a wall, or over the back of his chair, always in readiness, wherever, rather than easily rest both arms at his side.
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