Fates and Traitors

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  Rosalie greeted the announcement of Wilkes’s debut with raised eyebrows and a soft murmur of surprise, but their mother was greatly displeased. “Your first appearance on the stage is—premature,” she said, wringing her hands. “It grieves me to say this, darling, but you’ve been manipulated by unscrupulous people seeking notoriety and money by the use of your name.”

  “That’s not true,” Wilkes said, but Asia detected uncertainty in his voice.

  “In the world of the theatre, the name Booth is synonymous with genius,” said Mother. “You’re young and untrained—talented, yes, but unformed, unpolished. You cannot sacrifice your father’s legacy to your own haste.”

  “It’s not Wilkes’s fault that he’s had no opportunity to learn from Father as June and Edwin did,” said Asia. “How else will he prepare if not by performing small parts in good theatres close to home?”

  Mother fixed Asia with a gaze so piercing that Asia almost regretted speaking up in her brother’s defense. “You’re not wrong, but I doubt very much that news of this impetuous debut will please Edwin any more than it pleased me.”

  The next morning, and without a word of complaint, Wilkes cheerfully resumed his theatrical studies, apparently undaunted by the indefinite postponement of his next appearance on the stage. Weeks passed before the post could deliver Edwin’s reaction to Wilkes’s debut to Tudor Hall. He admonished Wilkes for misrepresenting his performance as a triumph when Clarke and other trusted friends had described it as nothing short of a grave embarrassment. The proud Booth name upon the playbills had guaranteed a packed house, and before those hundreds of witnesses Wilkes had performed so badly that the audience had hissed him. “I have worked too hard to allow my raw, untrained brother to tarnish our father’s legacy,” Edwin scolded in his familiar, elegant script. “If and when John Wilkes takes to the stage again, he must do so under an alias so that he does not ruin the name of BOOTH.”

  That was all their mother needed to know. “You may return to the stage when Edwin decides you are ready, and not one hour before,” she declared, and Wilkes had little choice but to obey.

  • • •

  In subsequent letters, Edwin promised that he would return home soon, perhaps as early as the following summer. He had become concerned that another actor would claim the title of the greatest living tragedian—his own rightful inheritance—if he did not return to the eastern United States “while Father’s memory remained dear to the American heart.” In advance of his return, he hired a business manager, the theatrical agent Benjamin Baker, to promote his career back east by securing engagements for him in playhouses all along the Atlantic coast.

  As the year flared with the brightness of autumn and faded into winter, Mother anticipated Edwin’s return with anxious desperation. She had been unable to hire a tenant farmer the previous spring, and Joe Hall and the hired hands had failed to raise enough food to sustain the household through the winter. At her behest Wilkes drove their small herd of cattle to the livestock market and sold them for more than sixty dollars, but although they spent nearly all of it on provisions for the long, cold months ahead, the larder and cellar remained disconcertingly bare compared to years past.

  Asia could not remember a season of such intense cold and heavy snows. Sometimes the drifts were so deep and the winds so frigid that the family could scarcely venture beyond the house and outbuildings. As their provisions failed, they upheld their strict vegetarian father’s decree that no animals would be harmed on The Farm by poaching off their neighbors’ acres instead. Wilkes trapped a wild-eyed possum, and caught a flurry of partridges, and once he shot a neighbor’s turkey. “Every spring Woolsey’s flock feeds off the grain scattered in our best field,” he said by way of an excuse. “And let’s not forget his habit of moving our boundary marker by night. He’s taken over such a large portion of our meadow that I probably took this turkey from land that is rightfully ours.”

  By February everyone at Tudor Hall had fallen ill at least once for the lack of nourishing food. From the last of her savings, Mother scraped together enough money to send Wilkes off to a distant farm to purchase a milch cow, but a treacherous storm struck soon after he departed. When he failed to return that evening as expected, Asia, Mother, and Rosalie waited up all night for him, too anxious to give voice to their deepest fears, which were relieved only after he arrived the next morning leading a stout black cow. He laughed and teased them for their worry, and only later did he admit that he had arrived at the Parker Lea farm nearly frozen, and had been taken into the house speechless and stumbling, half-asleep, then rubbed briskly and slapped awake, and restored by brandy and a warm bed.

  Asia shivered with horror as Wilkes spun his harrowing tale, his smile and nonchalance belying how close he had come to freezing to death.

  Eventually spring came, supplementing their meager diet with wild greens and the first early harvest of the garden—rhubarb, spinach, and ramps. The family watched for Edwin’s letters and awaited his arrival with increasing desperation, but summer waxed and waned with no sign of him save occasional telegrams announcing that he was on his way.

  “Mother waits for Edwin like Penelope for Odysseus,” grumbled Wilkes, a sting of jealousy in his voice, “as if he were a conquering hero, retuning home to save us from starvation and suffering.”

  Asia refrained from confessing that she awaited Edwin in precisely the same way. The Booths at Tudor Hall needed rescue as badly as any heroine from Greek tragedy ever had.

  It was mid-September when at last Edwin arrived. A crowd of awestruck country lads trailed after his stagecoach as it rattled along the road from Bel Air to The Farm, eager for a glimpse of the world traveler, the local boy who had set out for California four years before and had returned home a famous, and presumably wealthy, man.

  When the coach halted in front of Tudor Hall and Edwin descended, Wilkes ran forward to embrace him, but Asia found herself rooted in place on the piazza, flanked by her mother and her sister. Edwin’s long, black curls hung to his shoulders just as Asia remembered, and his dark eyes gleamed with the same bright intensity, but he strode up the path with a new poise and assurance. His clothes were finely tailored from expensive wools and silks, his rich velvet cloak cut in the Spanish style, and his cravat adorned with a dazzling pin, a diamond set within an enormous gold nugget.

  As Edwin approached the house, arm in arm with Wilkes, the country lads scrambled to take down his heavy trunks and haul them up to the house on their shoulders, marveling at their weight.

  “Edwin, my boy,” Mother cried, holding out her arms to welcome him home.

  Edwin beamed and hurried to embrace her, but as he did, his smile faded, his expression clouded with shock and bewilderment. Asia felt a sudden flush of shame as he took in their gaunt faces, their threadbare clothes. Mother had described their dire circumstances in letter after letter. Had Edwin assumed she exaggerated the depths of their misery?

  “Mother,” Edwin murmured as he took her in her arms. “Dearest Mother. There are no words for how much I’ve missed you.”

  Whatever illusions their reunion had dispelled, Edwin recovered his composure by the time he crossed the threshold of Tudor Hall. The trunks were carried in after him, the eager porters compensated for their labors and sent on their way. After the embraces and greetings and questions were done, scarce refreshments offered and graciously declined, the family learned that Edwin’s trunks were filled with evidence of his triumphs in the West and the South Pacific—rapturous reviews clipped from San Francisco newspapers, playbills announcing engagements in Sydney, a proclamation passed by the California state legislature declaring Edwin Booth a treasure, a priceless gift the citizens of California would graciously share with the rest of the United States.

  Mother glowed with pride as she beheld this vast array of evidence of his tremendous success, but she wept with joy when Edwin revealed one last treasure, secure
ly fastened to his belt and concealed beneath his cloak—a purse heavy with gold.

  • • •

  In the aftermath of Edwin’s homecoming, everything changed.

  For the first time since Father’s death, their bellies were comfortably full, their sleep untroubled by anxious dreams of a bleak and uncertain future. Edwin paid his mother’s debts at the shops in Bel Air and settled Wilkes’s tabs at the Traveler’s Home tavern and Murphy’s Billiard Hall. He purchased new wardrobes for his mother and sisters and treated them to luxuries they had long done without—writing paper and ink, books and sheet music, plenty of coal, new lamps and an ample supply of oil to fill them. Mother smiled again, and when she delighted in Edwin’s amusing stories of his adventures in the West and in the South Pacific, for he was careful to share only cheerful tales, ten years seemed to fall from her age.

  Though only twenty-three, experience had bestowed maturity upon him, and he immediately assumed his rightful place as head of the household. Entrusting The Farm to the care of the ever reliable Joe and Ann, Edwin closed Tudor Hall and moved his mother and younger siblings to Baltimore, renting a comfortable townhouse at 7 North High Street in their old neighborhood. But even as his family rejoiced in his return and in the restoration of all their old comforts and necessities, a frisson of resentment ran through every smile. They could not forget Edwin’s prolonged neglect, nor, though they never spoke of it, could they entirely forgive him for abandoning Father on the pier in San Francisco.

  Mother showered Edwin in affection and expressed sincere and abundant gratitude for his many gifts, but her condemnation of his singular, fatally disloyal act was made manifest when Edwin asked for his father’s magnificent collection of costumes and theatrical props as his inheritance. He gaped, astonished, when she refused. “Why not?” he asked, a trifle sharply. “I think it’s fair to say I earned them.”

  “Perhaps that’s true, but you’ve asked me too late.” Mother smiled regretfully, but Asia detected a glimmer of steel in her gaze. “I’ve already given them to John Wilkes.”

  “But I would make far better use of them,” Edwin protested.

  “Perhaps, perhaps not. Only time will tell.” She waved a hand in a gesture of graceful dismissal. “As I say, you’re too late. Such a decision, once made, cannot be undone, even if time and hindsight grant us the wisdom to regret it.”

  Edwin inclined his head respectfully, but if his mother’s rebuke wounded him, he gave little sign of it. And yet, somehow, an undefinable quality in his demeanor told Asia that he accepted his family’s judgment and knew he must make amends.

  Soon thereafter, Edwin embarked on tour, filling theatres and earning rave reviews and rapturous comparisons to the great Junius Brutus Booth everywhere he went. He deliberately followed the Southern routes their father had trod, dazzling audiences at Grover’s Theatre in Washington City before moving on to Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, Montgomery, and New Orleans. Asia thought it was an inspired plan to reclaim the territory where their father had enjoyed such success, and where Edwin could renew ties with theatre owners and managers he had met as his father’s young valet and apprentice player.

  Only after whetting the public’s anticipation with his rising fame and ever more rapturous reports in the press that the celebrated Booth genius was alive and well in the heir apparent did Edwin set his sights on New York, a thespian’s true testing ground, where riches and acclaim were bestowed upon the best and the brightest. “Hope for the Living Drama!” declared the playbills for his opening at the Bond Theatre on Broadway. From what Asia read in the papers, theatre critics and audiences alike agreed that Edwin deserved all the applause he could bear.

  Nearly a year after Edwin’s return, he at last decided that Wilkes might begin his apprenticeship. Wilkes promptly joined William Wheatley’s company at the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia as a supernumerary, calling himself J. B. Wilkes to avoid tarnishing the celebrated family name with his neophyte efforts. As a humble supe, nineteen-year-old Wilkes remained in the background, attired as a soldier, servant, peasant, or nobleman as the play required, his costumed presence helping to set the scene, though he had no lines to speak. He earned a mere eight dollars a week, insufficient to pay for his room at a boardinghouse near the theatre, much less the new clothes, tavern meals, brandy, and occasional train fares to Baltimore he also required. Mother paid his expenses out of the funds Edwin provided for the household, although Asia doubted her elder brother knew.

  Asia realized that Wilkes had John Sleeper Clarke as well as Edwin to thank for the opportunity, unprofitable though it was. Clarke’s fame as a talented comedian was growing all along the East Coast, and he had decided to further advance his career by taking on a management role at the Arch Street Theatre. It was Clarke who had convinced Wheatley to hire Wilkes—and although Asia adamantly denied it, her mother and Rosalie teased that he had acted not out of friendship to Edwin or Wilkes, but to prove his devotion to Asia. Over the course of the year Clarke had called at the Booth residence whenever he was in Baltimore, even if Edwin was away on tour, but he could not possibly persist in the delusion that he was courting Asia, for she had not given him a single word of encouragement. She was grateful that he had found a place in his company of players for Wilkes, but gratitude was not affection. Surely Clarke was not too besotted to understand that.

  For months Wilkes toiled away in bit parts in the background while Edwin filled theatres in great cities portraying the characters their father had made his own—Shylock, Pescara, Iago, Richard III—as well as Hamlet and Romeo, roles Edwin’s ethereal, compelling grace enabled him to inhabit better than the legendary tragedian ever had, if the enraptured theatre critics did not exaggerate.

  “I’m not jealous of our dear brother nor discouraged for myself,” Wilkes wrote home to Asia in the first week of January 1858, with his usual good cheer. “In fact, I have high hopes that this will be the year ‘J. B. Wilkes’ makes audiences sit up and take notice. And the moment I make my reputation as an actor, I will take back the name our father made great.”

  Soon thereafter, Wilkes wrote again with delightful news: He had been cast in speaking roles in both of the Arch Street Theatre’s newest upcoming productions. They were small parts, to be sure, far beneath actors of Edwin’s stature, but if Wilkes could distinguish himself with a flash of brilliance onstage—winning over the audience, earning a spontaneous burst of applause—it could speed his ascension through the ranks.

  In late February, the Booth ladies traveled to Philadelphia for the opening night of Lucretia Borgia, for not even the reclusive Rosalie would dream of missing Wilkes’s official debut. They knew Wilkes would be too busy preparing for the show to meet them at the train station in Philadelphia, but Asia was astonished to find Clarke waiting on the platform in his place, his cheeks red from cold.

  “Shouldn’t you be at the theatre, preparing for curtain rise?” Asia asked after he had greeted them with a stiff formality that struck her as rather ridiculous considering his long acquaintance with their family.

  “I’m not in the cast,” he said, offering Asia his arm. “Our Lucretia Borgia is adapted from Victor Hugo’s play, a melodrama set in Renaissance Venice. There’s no good part in it for a comedian.”

  “Surely you’re wanted backstage, then.” Glancing at his crooked elbow from beneath arched eyebrows, Asia stepped gracefully aside so that it would appear that Clarke had offered to escort her mother instead, as was proper. His smile faltered slightly as he stepped closer to Mother, but he otherwise did not acknowledge his gaffe. Taking his arm, Mother fixed Asia with a look of reprimand over her shoulder as Clarke led her away.

  “I don’t understand how Clarke can be so amusing on the stage and so stilted off it,” Asia murmured to Rosalie as he helped their mother into a hired carriage.

  “You make him nervous,” Rosalie whispered back. “Only before you is he afraid to look a fo
ol.”

  “Well, that’s foolishness itself. I’ve known him since—” But she could say no more, because Clarke had turned to her, hand outstretched, to assist her into the carriage beside her mother.

  “How is Wilkes?” Mother asked as they rode to the theatre. “I do wish we could see him before curtain rise.”

  “He’s doing well, Mrs. Booth.” Clarke looked quite well himself, attired in a fine black wool suit and topcoat, expertly tailored, and a black felt hat, evidently new. Edwin, who never squandered an opportunity to sing his friend’s praises, had told Asia that Clarke’s onstage pratfalls and comic escapades had made him a wealthy man, and his ventures in management proved that he was prudent too. Asia had merely nodded, unwilling to offend her brother but reluctant to appear to admire his friend. She was well aware that Edwin and her mother conspired as matchmakers, but to her Clarke would always remain mischievous, round-faced Sleepy from the neighborhood, a good enough fellow but hardly her heart’s desire.

  They arrived at the Arch Street Theatre at half past six, just as the doors were opening. Clarke escorted them past the ladies and gentlemen lined up at the box office, shivering in their cloaks and furs and chattering with anticipation while they waited to purchase their tickets: fifty cents for a seat on the main floor, fifteen for the balcony. After seeing the Booth ladies to their places on the main floor, Clarke bowed and hurried off backstage with promises to carry their good wishes to Wilkes.

  The gas footlights shone, the audience took their seats, and the quiet murmur of voices fell to an expectant hush as the orchestra struck up the melancholy strains of an old Italian melody. The curtain rose upon a festive twilight scene, a celebration of Carnival in Venice. False moonlight shone on the marble façade of a palace, its arched columns rising above the street, and upon the Grand Canal beyond it, where gondolas passed, silent and graceful. Downstage, men and women strolled by in rich clothes and painted masks, their lecherous mouths, crooked noses, and staring, empty eye sockets ominous and unsettling.