Her ears ringing, Mary Ann forced herself to stand, to cross the room, to conceal herself beside the window and cautiously draw back the curtain. A woman paced back and forth on the sidewalk in front of the house, tall and stout, her gray-and-black hair worn in a loose bun beneath an overlarge hat, her cheeks florid, her face twisted in an ugly scowl. “This is where the tragedian lies with his trollop!” she shouted, glaring this way and that to draw the eye of every passerby, of every startled neighbor peering out a window. “This is where the Holmes bastards wrongly claim the name of Booth!”
Dizzy, Mary Ann let the curtain fall and stumbled into the other room, where she was violently sick in the washbasin.
Adelaide—for the woman could be no one else—abandoned her cruel pageant when her voice grew hoarse and faint, but two days later she reappeared, parading back and forth in front of the house, shouting cruel taunts, accosting neighbors with questions about whether they knew what sordid business went on within the deceptively modest house. A few days later she returned, and then two days of blissful silence, followed by three days of torment.
One day John Wilkes came home, his face a blotched mess of tears, blood, and mucus. “The boys at school call you a whore,” he sobbed angrily as she tended his wounds. “They say I’m not a Booth, but I am, I know I am.”
“You are,” she soothed, fighting back tears. “Of course you are, my darling boy.”
Mary Ann’s letters carried the outrageous news to Junius, who fumed to Adelaide’s lawyer through the post that their financial agreement was contingent on her silence. Adelaide countered that she had agreed to forgo a lawsuit, not to refrain from pleading her case in the court of public opinion. If Mary Ann did not care to have her sins aired before her neighbors, she should not have stolen another woman’s husband.
As Adelaide’s tirades along North Exeter Street persisted, Mary Ann and the children counted the days until Junius finished his tour and the family could withdraw to the countryside for the summer.
Once there, Mary Ann felt herself restored by The Farm’s isolation, which had never seemed more wonderful. The headaches and insomnia that had plagued her since Adelaide first confronted Junius disappeared; the children laughed and shouted at play again; the haunted, haggard look faded from Junius’s visage. Even the earth and sky seemed to bless their homecoming, with warm sunshine and gentle rains falling upon rich soil that yielded abundant crops. When Mary Ann took her first cartload of vegetables to the Baltimore market, her harvest sold quickly and at favorable prices, and so by late morning she had made a tidy profit. The next two weeks brought similar results, but on the third, she was enjoying a noontime of especially brisk sales when a familiar angry voice shrilled, “Here is the whore Mary Ann Booth, selling vegetables instead of her body for a change!”
Scarcely able to breathe, blood pounding in her ears, Mary Ann began packing up her stall.
“Where are her bastard children?” Adelaide demanded, so painfully loud that she must have been only a few stalls away, though Mary Ann refused to look. “Where is the whoremaster who sired them, the great Junius Brutus Booth, who abandoned his lawful wife and legitimate son to run off with this Covent Garden strumpet?”
Mary Ann’s cheeks burned in the heat of what felt like hundreds of curious, demanding stares. With as much dignity as she could muster, she drove the cart away from the market at a measured pace, and eventually Adelaide’s voice faded behind her.
She wanted nothing more than to hurry home to her children, her dear sons and daughters who never spoke an unkind or resentful word against her, despite the tribulations inflicted upon them by the choices she had made more than a quarter century before. She wanted to hurry home, but she knew she could not, not with a load of fresh vegetables in her cart and money yet to earn. Instead she took a deep breath to steady her nerves, drove to a market on the east side of the city, and set up her stall in the first vacant spot she could find. The best locations had been claimed hours before, but she did fairly well nonetheless, selling enough of her produce by late afternoon to call it a good day’s work.
The next week, she had scarcely set up her market stall when Adelaide again found her. Hiding her distress as best she could, Mary Ann packed up her cart and retreated to the east-side market. The following week she asked Joe Hall to accompany her, and they avoided the more lucrative west-side market altogether and set up the stall in a choice spot on the east-side venue. That day was blessedly free of hostile demonstrations, but Adelaide tracked her down a fortnight later. Mary Ann kept her expression carefully stoic as she packed up and decamped to the west market.
On and on it went, all summer long and into the fall. Angrily Junius offered to go to the market in her place, but he was needed on The Farm, and his presence at the markets would allow Adelaide to create an even more scandalous scene, which was surely exactly what she craved. Mary Ann did not doubt that Adelaide took malicious delight in the visible wounds she inflicted upon her rival—the new gray hairs, the shadows beneath her eyes, the hollows in her cheeks that appeared after sleep and appetite fled.
But humiliating Mary Ann was not all that Adelaide wanted. Soon word came through the lawyers that she intended to sue Junius for divorce on the indisputable charges of abandonment and adultery. Maryland law required a two-year residency in the state before she could file suit, and Mary Ann knew that Adelaide would take great pleasure in making all of their lives miserable in the interim.
Junius could avoid his vengeful wife by embarking on a tour, but he could not go alone. Someone must accompany him to keep him sober, to persuade him to take the stage when melancholy threatened to keep him away, and to collect his pay before he could squander it.
Twenty-five-year-old June was married now, with a life of his own, one he could not abandon to chaperone his father. John Wilkes eagerly volunteered, entranced by the thought of traveling the country and having adventures with his magnificent father rather than staying home and struggling doggedly with his books and lessons. Cheerful, outgoing, strong, and filled with a zest for life, John Wilkes would have been the ideal companion for his father, but he was only nine years old. At nearly fourteen, Edwin—somber, studious, frail, withdrawn—was chosen instead. He was too dutiful to protest, but his large, expressive eyes fixed on Mary Ann in a silent plea to keep him home and at his studies.
It seemed wrong to take their most intellectual, erudite son out of school and keep their most reluctant scholar in it, and if John Wilkes were only a few years older, perhaps they could have given each boy the role he preferred. But there was nothing to be done, so Edwin resignedly packed a satchel, silently hugged Mary Ann goodbye, and followed along in the shadow of his eccentric, impulsive father to serve as his dresser, aide, and guardian.
John Wilkes and Asia were consumed with jealousy, and nothing Mary Ann said—nothing she was willing to reveal about traveling with the mad genius Junius Brutus Booth—would dispel their notion that Edwin was embarking on a golden holiday. They could not possibly understand the miseries of travel—carriages rattling over rough roads; frigid railroad cars; squalid, vermin-infested hotel rooms; questionable meals; exposure to all manner of disease, filth, and vice. Nor could they fathom how arduous, fraught, and exhausting Edwin’s duties were. They knew only that he helped their father don his costumes and rehearse his lines, day and night his constant companion, entertained and enthralled by the sights and sounds of new cities and scenery and the long-forbidden world of the theatre. They could not imagine their slender, withdrawn elder brother blocking the doorway so their father could not leave their hotel room in search of a drink, or trailing after him as he strode through an unfamiliar city all night working off the frenetic energy of a performance, or cajoling him out of a black funk of melancholy and onto the stage. John Wilkes and Asia were too young to understand what they themselves had not experienced, but Mary Ann knew, and worry and regret for her sensitive son often kept
her awake late into the night.
As the months passed, the younger children’s envy grew. Asia knew that as a girl she could not possibly serve as her father’s chaperone, and so she had never expected the honor, but John Wilkes felt greatly wronged to have been left behind to endure the dullness of school and the shame of illegitimacy. Too often he returned home furious and bloodied after defending his mother’s honor with his fists. Any boy who dared call Mary Ann a whore and him a bastard never made that mistake in John Wilkes’s hearing a second time.
“Am I a Booth, Mother?” he would ask her as she tended his wounds, and she would assure him he was—but with Adelaide and the rest of the Baltimore adamantly insisting that he was not, his uncertainty persisted.
Eventually, although Mary Ann grieved to be parted from her favorite child, she and Junius decided that eleven-year-old John Wilkes must be removed from the neighborhood that had become for him a battlefield. They enrolled him in Milton Academy, a Quaker boarding school in Cockeysville, Maryland, twelve miles from The Farm and yet a world away. It was a very fine place, a three-story stone building with an excellent library and charming views of the countryside. The headmaster, Mr. John Lamb, was a Quaker, so although John Wilkes would receive a rigorous course of study, Mary Ann trusted that he would be treated with kindness, gentleness, and simplicity in all things. They could scarcely afford the tuition—seventy dollars per term, plus an additional ten dollars for Greek and Latin classes—but Mary Ann took comfort in knowing that her darling boy would be safe.
Upon her return from escorting John Wilkes to Cockeysville, Mary Ann managed a tremulous smile as she described for Rosalie, Asia, and Joseph the forested grounds of his new school, the students’ plain dress, and the Quakers’ quaint custom of addressing one another as “thee” and “thou.” Rosalie nodded thoughtfully, Joseph looked faint with relief that his parents had not forced him to enroll with his brother, and Asia bravely declared that she hoped John Wilkes would enjoy himself and learn a lot, but her bleak expression betrayed her misery. Mary Ann’s heart went out to her clever, moody daughter. Rosalie was reliable if silent company, and Asia had a few good friends at school, but with John Wilkes gone, life at 62 North Exeter Street and The Farm was certain to be lonelier than she had ever known it.
On the first day of the autumn term, Mary Ann’s heart sank as Asia dressed and packed her satchel, her movements slow and deliberate, as if her limbs were weighed down by woe. In years past, John Wilkes had walked Asia to school every morning, unfailingly cheerful, ready with a joke or a funny tale or an adventure to plan. Even if he ran ahead to greet a friend along the way, he always returned to his sister’s side before they reached the schoolyard gate. Now Asia would walk alone, forced to endure the whispers and stares and taunts of the other children, suffering for her parents’ sins. At least Adelaide would not be among the tormentors, for she had ceased her spiteful vigils outside their home, perhaps tiring of them, perhaps saving up her malice for the inevitable lawsuit.
“Would you like me to walk with you?” Mary Ann offered.
“No,” Asia said, too quickly. Mary Ann nodded, understanding that her presence would only make matters worse.
Her expression a study in fierce determination, Asia kissed her mother, bade Rosalie goodbye, and set out for school. As soon as she closed the door behind her, Mary Ann hastened to the front window only to discover that Asia had halted on the porch at the sight of a young man in a thick tweed coat and cap sitting on the bottom step. He turned at the sound of the door closing, and at once Mary Ann recognized the round face, wide brow, and downturned mouth of Edwin’s friend John Sleeper.
“Sleepy?” Asia greeted him, bewildered.
He scrambled to his feet. “Hello, Asia.”
“Hello.” She studied him. “Edwin isn’t here.”
“I know that.”
“John Wilkes isn’t here either.”
“I know. That’s why I thought maybe I should walk you to school instead.”
Bristling, Asia glared at him—but suddenly her expression shifted from indignation to pity. Perhaps she detected, as Mary Ann had, something in the set of the young man’s jaw that hinted at barely concealed loneliness. With Edwin off on another merry theatrical jaunt with Father, Sleepy too had lost his best friend and closest confidant.
“Thank you,” Asia said. “That would be nice.”
So Sleepy walked her to school that morning, and he met her outside on the sidewalk almost every day after that. “I can’t bring myself to turn him away,” Asia admitted to Mary Ann a month later. “I know he’s doing it out of friendship for Edwin, but I’m not even sure that I like him.”
Mary Ann was fairly certain Sleepy liked Asia, but she kept her observations to herself.
By wintertime, Asia’s relentless, determined escort had asked her not to call him Sleepy anymore but to use his given name. “I objected,” Asia told Mary Ann afterward. “John’s name is too dear to me to squander it on just anyone.”
“You call your brother Wilkes.”
“Not always. But it doesn’t matter, because we agreed that I would call him by his middle name, Clarke.” Asia shrugged dismissively. “It’s his name, after all, and I hardly care. And yet I don’t understand why he insists that I call him Clarke, while everyone else still calls him Sleepy.”
“Who knows?” said Mary Ann, though she was quite sure that she did. Asia was only fourteen, but Sleepy, a year older than Edwin, was seventeen, no longer a child. Sleepy often played the clown, but he would have to be a fool indeed not to see that Asia was not only his best friend’s sister but also a blossoming young beauty.
• • •
Milton Academy’s curriculum was so rigorous that John Wilkes could visit his family only rarely, and privately Mary Ann lamented that she saw little more of him than of Edwin, whose somber, haunted gaze revealed that his travels with his father had aged him beyond his years. Whenever Junius brought him home for brief visits, Edwin’s exhaustion and relief and unmistakable yearning to stay pained Mary Ann deeply, but what choice did the family have? Junius must tour and he must perform or they would all starve, and there was no certainty that he would do either without a guardian—much to Mary Ann’s consternation. He was a man grown, and a man ought to be able to control his vices and conduct his own affairs. Sometimes she thought she might burst from the strain of repressing her anger and disappointment and fear, but she dared not rail at him. She would not become a shrew, complaining and criticizing, tearing him down when he needed so desperately for her to build him up, to hold him together. Their home must remain his safe haven, free of judgment and recriminations, or he might grow despondent and decide not to return to it.
Then Edwin wrote from Boston to inform her of his stage debut, when he had been obliged to fill in at the last moment as Tressel to his father’s Richard III. A fortnight later he portrayed Cassio in Othello at the Providence Museum, and two days later he played the virtuous secretary Wilford opposite his father’s villainous Sir Edward Mortimer in The Iron Chest. It seemed impossible that her sensitive, reserved, intelligent son could have taken the stage against his father’s wishes, forcing Mary Ann to wonder and worry that perhaps Junius, flinging away his earlier decree that his children would not be actors, had instead bullied Edwin into the company for the sake of his wages.
John Wilkes lacked the empathy to worry as his mother did, and saw only treachery in his elder brother’s accomplishments. “None of us were to be actors like Father,” he protested when he returned home in February for a brief holiday between terms. “First June, now Edwin. Why not me? Why do I have to go to school?”
“Education is a privilege,” Mary Ann reminded him. “Edwin longs to attend Milton Academy as you do.”
“I’d gladly change places with him.” John Wilkes’s handsome features, usually as sunny as spring, had darkened into a scowl. “Acting is the famil
y trade.”
“It isn’t, but even if it were, it’s not the trade your father wants for you.”
What John Wilkes could not comprehend was that Edwin’s additional obligations as a player had only doubled his toil. In April, tearful and exhausted, he begged his parents to allow him a fortnight at home, and Mary Ann resolved that he should have all the rest he needed. She wished June could take his younger brother’s place, but not quite a year before, he had abandoned his wife and child for the allure of the gold fields of California and the company of a pretty young actress. Privately Mary Ann and Junius lamented, but they realized it would be the height of hypocrisy if they condemned June for what they themselves had done, so they did not rebuke him in their letters, but only urged him to be careful, to write to them often, and to remember his financial responsibilities to his young daughter.
With June unavailable, Junius was obliged to set out for Richmond without the steadying presence of a sober companion. He departed cheerfully enough, with fond embraces for Mary Ann and the children and promises to visit as soon and as often as he could. “I swear to you, darling,” he vowed as he departed, holding her by the shoulders and kissing her firmly, “I shall indulge in nothing stronger than coffee and tea while I’m away.”
Mary Ann was glad to hear it, but soon thereafter she received word via a telegram from the outraged manager of the Marshall Theatre that Junius had never arrived. Frantic, Mary Ann sent off a flurry of telegrams to theatre acquaintances, but no one knew where Junius had gone. He had simply disappeared.
“I’m sorry, Edwin, darling,” Mary Ann said, her voice shaking as she packed his suitcase. “Someone must be sent, and there is no one else.”
“I understand,” he said dully, but he could barely meet her gaze when she saw him off at the train station.
Several anxious days passed before Edwin sent word that he had found his father wandering drunk and disoriented in the countryside north of Richmond. Junius’s pocketbook was empty, forcing Edwin to borrow fifty dollars from local theatre friends to pay for their fare to Baltimore. When at last the weary travelers reached home, Mary Ann’s heart broke to see the resignation and misery in Edwin’s eyes. He knew he could never again expect to be granted leave from his duties as his father’s keeper.
Fates and Traitors Page 9
