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.
The bills mounted. The creditors pressed. “I don’t know what will become of us,” his mother wrote to Edwin. “I don’t see how we’ll survive.” His mother, like his father, did not believe in subtlety.
In January, 1866, the Winter Garden Theater in New York announced Edwin’s return to the stage. “Will it be Julius Caesar?” an outraged newspaper asked, “Will he perhaps, as would be fitting, play the assassin?”
He would be playing Hamlet.
Long before the performance, every ticket had sold. There would be such a crush as the Winter Garden had never seen before.
On the night of the performance, some without tickets forced their way in as far as the lobby. The play began. From his dressing room, Edwin Booth knew when the ghost had made his entrance. Marcellus: Peace, break thee off, look, where it comes again. And then Bernardo: In the same figure, like the king that’s dead. Edwin couldn’t actually hear the words. He recognized the lines from their stress and inflections. He knew the moment of them. He knew exactly how much time remained until he took his place for the second scene.
Edwin leaned into the mirror to stare past his own painted face into the space behind him. On the wall to the right of the small dressing-table mirror was a coat rack, so overwhelmed with hats and capes that it loomed over the room, casting the shadow of a very large man. Swords of all sorts lay on the table tops, boots on the floor, doublets and waistbands on the chairs.
A knock at the door. His father’s old friend, George Spear, had come to beg Edwin to reconsider. What is out there, he said, what is waiting for you is not an audience so much as a mob. Yet Edwin couldn’t hear them at all. It seemed they sat in a complete, uncanny silence.
“I am carrying a bullet for you.” “Your life is forfeit.”
No one in his family had dared to come. His daughter, Edwina, was at his mother’s house. He imagined her descending the stairs in her nightgown to give her grandmother a kiss. He imagined her ascending again. He imagined her safe in her bed. He was called to take his place onstage for the second scene, but could not make his legs move.
“We hate the very name Booth.” “Your next performance will be a tragedy.”
Now he could hear the audience, stamping their feet, impatient at the delay. He waited for his father’s ghost to arrive, ask why he kept an audience waiting in their seats. But there was only the stage manager, knocking a second time, calling with some agitation. “Mr. Booth? Mr. Booth?” What did it mean that his father had not come?
I’m ready, Edwin said, and having said so, he could rise. He left the dressing room and took his place on the stage. The actors around him were stiff with tension.
One of the hallmarks of Edwin’s Hamlet was that he made no entrance. As the curtain opened on the second scene, it often took the audience time to locate him among the busy Danish court. He sat unobtrusively off to one side, under the standard of the great Raven of Denmark, his head bowed. “Among a gaudy court,” a critic had written of an earlier performance, “ ‘he alone with them, alone,’ easily prince, and nullifying their effect by the intensity and color of his gloom.” On this particular night he seemed a frail figure, slight and dark and unremarkable save for the intensity and color of his gloom. The audience found him in his chair. There sat their American Hamlet.
Someone began to clap and then someone else. The audience came to their feet. The next day’s review in The Spirit of the Times reported nine cheers, then six, then three, then nine more. The play could not continue, and as they clapped, many of them, men and women both, began to weep.
Edwin stood and came forward into the footlights. He bowed very low, and then he couldn’t straighten, but continued to sink. Someone caught him from behind, just before he fell. “There, boy,” his father said, unseen, a whisper in Edwin’s ear as he was lifted to his feet.
When he stood again upright, the audience saw that Edwin, too, was weeping. It made them cheer him again. And again.
His fellow actors gathered tightly in, clapping their hands. His father’s arms were wrapped around him. Edwin smelled his father’s pipe and beyond it, the forest, the fireplace of his childhood home. ”There, boy. There, boy,” his father said. “Your foot is on your native heath.”
The thing raised its head and fixed her with eyes like pearls and mercury, quicksilver fire, and then she couldn’t have moved for all
the angels in Heaven . . .
Apokatastasis
Caitlín R. Kiernan
“Well, it was there,” Terry says, pointing, pointing again in case he wasn’t paying attention before, and Aaron sighs and makes a show of looking at the alarm clock. He tells her what time it is, 3:38 a.m., like she might care, like that makes any difference at all. She’s sitting at the foot of their bed, watching the dark hallway beyond the open door; third night in a row and she knows better than to hope that maybe this time he’ll believe her, maybe this time it’ll come back and he’ll have to see it, too.
“Well, was it a dog or not?”
“I don’t know,” she says again, sounding more annoyed than the first time he asked. ”It was like a dog.”
“I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean.”
“It was an animal,” Terry says, not taking her eyes off the hall, the night driven back a few grudging feet by the glow from her reading lamp. “It was an animal like a dog.”
“It was a dream,” he says. “Now go back to sleep,” and lies down again, turning his back to her and the lamp and the bedroom door. Terry looks away from the hall long enough to glance at him over her shoulder.
“I know the difference,” she says, trying not to sound angry or irrational, trying to sound calm and not at all afraid, her heart still beating just a little too fast and her mouth gone dry as dust, but he doesn’t have to know that. “I wasn’t asleep.”
“Then where the hell is it now? And how’s it getting in and out of the apartment?” He’s talking to her without opening his eyes, without turning over to look at her. “Jesus, Terry. Go back to sleep, please.”
So she watches the hallway alone, the straight, white walls, plaster washed the delicate color of eggshells, and an oil painting in a walnut frame that her grandmother did when she was only seventeen. A field with wildflowers and a line of trees in the distance, but the shadows hide everything and the canvas is only an indistinct outline in the gloom.
“I know the difference,” she says again, even though Aaron’s probably already asleep and she’s talking to no one but herself.
Maybe if she hadn’t been so frightened when it woke her, the eager, snuffling sounds it made nosing about in the hall, maybe if she’d awakened Aaron immediately he would have seen it too and somehow it would have been something that was easier for two people to understand. The answer not half so strange, not so difficult, if two people have to think about it together. But instead she lay perfectly still, waiting for it to see her, waiting for it not to be there anymore, until, finally, the thing raised its head and fixed her with those eyes like pearls and mercury, quicksilver fire, and then she couldn’t have moved for all the angels in Heaven. It might have smiled, she thinks, but it was only an animal and dogs don’t smile.
“Go to sleep, Terry,” Aaron says. “We’ll talk about it in the morning.”
“I don’t want to sleep anymore,” she tells him and he doesn’t reply. A few minutes more and Aaron’s snoring softly, gentle-rough sound that she’s always found so comforting, and now it’s nothing but a reminder that he doesn’t believe her, that whatever waits for her between this moment and the next and dawn is there for her and her alone. Terry thinks about her legs dangling carelessly over the edge of the bed, her bare feet and the blackness between the floor and the box springs, blackness that might hide more than old photo albums and lost socks. She pulls her legs up, feet tucked safely beneath her thighs, protective lotus, and she watches the hallway and waits for morning.
Meeting Cyn for lunch at the little coffee shop and deli down the street from the shoe store where she works, expensive hipster shoes for hipster yuppies and suburban punker kids, Doc Martens and Birkenstocks, London Underground and Fluevogs, and they sit at one of the outside tables despite the August heat because there’s no smoking inside. A faded green-and-white canvas umbrella for shade and hardly any breeze at all; Cyn orders the curried chicken salad plate and Terry only orders iced coffee, black, and sips it while Cyn picks indifferently at slices of tomato and avocado.
“Have you thought about trying to take a picture of it’?” Cyn asks, brushing her lavender bangs from her eyes. “If it worked and you had a photograph, well, he’d have to believe you then, wouldn’t he?” She stabs a slice of tomato with her fork and then shakes it loose again.
Terry shrugs and takes another sip of coffee, doesn’t want to admit that she’s afraid what might happen if she did try to take a picture of the animal. Maybe it wouldn’t much like having its picture taken. Or maybe it isn’t anything that can be photographed and where would she be then? No proof one way or another, and “There’s something wrong with our camera,” she lies. “It’s been acting up and I haven’t had time to have it fixed.”
“I could loan you mine,” Cyn offers unhelpfully, pushing, cornering her, and Terry knows better than to think this means that Cyn believes she’s really seeing anything at all.
“I don’t even believe in ghosts,” Terry says and shakes her head, hoping Cyn will shut up about the camera. “If it wasn’t happening to me, if it was happening to you instead, and you were trying to convince me, I wouldn’t believe you.”
“Gee, thanks, kiddo.”
“I just don’t believe in ghosts, that’s all. I don’t even think I believe in souls, so how can I believe in ghosts’? And if l did, I don’t think I’d believe that animals have them.”
“Souls or ghosts?”
“What?”
Cyn frowns at her and chews a forkful of avocado and chicken, washes it down with ginger ale before she answers. “Which wouldn’t you believe that animals have, souls or ghosts?”
“Well, either. If I don’t believe animals have souls, I can’t very well believe they have ghosts.”
“I thought you were Catholic?”
“My mother was Catholic. I’m not anything.”
“Hell, I always thought being Catholic was practically genetic. I didn’t know you had a choice.”
Cyn stares at her plate for a moment, then pushes it away and takes a pack of cigarettes from her purse. She lights one and the smoke hangs in the stagnant air above the table.
“I fucking hate dogs,” she says. “When I was five, I was bitten by a dog. I still have a scar on my ass from where the damned thing took a plug out of me. I thought sure it was gonna eat me, just like the wolf in ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ ”
“It might not be a dog. I only said it looked like a dog.”
Cyn takes another drag off her cigarette, glances up at the simmering, Wedgwood sky while smoke leaks slow from her nostrils. “Scared the holy shit out of me. I had to have eight fucking stitches,” she says. ”Jesus, if I woke up and there was a big, black dog in my bedroom, I’d probably have a heart attack.”
“It wasn’t in the bedroom. It was in the hall.”
“Pete keeps saying he wants a Doberman and I told him no fucking way, mister, not if he wants me around.”
Terry sips her bitter, icy coffee, watches Cyn and her purple hair, and she wishes that she hadn’t stopped smoking, wishes she’d taken her lunch break alone today. “I’m not afraid of dogs,” she says when Cyn finally stops talking. “But I’m not sure this is a dog.”
Cyn looks at her watch and sighs, stubs her cigarette out in her plate. “Damn. I gotta get back to work, kiddo. Listen, if you change your mind about the camera, give me a ring.”
“Thanks.”
“Hey, anytime at all. That’s what I’m here for,” and she leaves a ten-dollar bill on the table, leaves Terry alone in the heat and the summer sun as bright as the eyes of God.
Home an hour before Aaron, almost always home before Aaron, and she stands in the hall, the bathroom at her back, bedroom to her left, dining room to her right. Listening and hearing only the traffic sounds from the street, the windy whup-whup-whup of the ceiling fan from the living room, all the small and inconsequential daytime noises that the building makes. Faint smell of garbage from the kitchen because she forgot to take it down before work, coffee grounds and last night’s spaghetti, soap and potpourri from the bathroom—everything in its place, nothing that shouldn’t be there.
“Here, doggy,” she whispers. “Here, boy.”
No reply but a car alarm going off somewhere, and Terry feels more foolish than she can remember ever having felt before. What if someone heard her, what if Mr. Dugan next door heard her? He might think she and Aaron had gotten a dog, and all pets are strictly forbidden by their lease. No dogs, no cats, no birds, not even fish because someone on the second floor once had a huge salt-water aquarium that broke and soaked straight through the floor.
Terry chews at a nubby thumbnail and stares at her grandmother’s oil painting, the field, the careful dabs of orange and blue and red, a thousand shades of green beneath a wide and perfect sky. No signature, but there’s a date—1931—in the lower righthand corner, and for a moment she’s only thinking about how long it’s been since she’s taken flowers to the old woman’s grave instead of thinking about the black animal watching her while she slept. A whole house full of antiques when her grandmother died, but her sisters claiming most of them, and Terry not really wanting anything but the painting, anyway. A long ago day in June, maybe, a June afternoon seventy years ago and Terry leans closer, examining the trees at the far edge of the field; never really daylight beneath those trees, between those crooked trunks, the sagging limbs, and then Terry notices the tiny figure standing where the trees begin. Her whole life and all the time spent staring at this painting and that’s something she somehow hasn’t seen before.
“Who are you?” Terry asks the canvas. touching it gently with her ring finger, wedding-ring finger, and she squints because she isn’t wearing her reading glasses; trying to make out the features, the cherub-round face, golden hair, dress the color of butter, and she realizes that the canvas feels cold, damp, and pulls her hand quickly away. She curses under her breath and takes a step back from the wall, and now she can clearly see the damp spot, no larger than a dime, but completely surrounding, enclosing, the girl in the yellow dress standing at the edge of the forest. She lifts t
he painting off its hook and there’s a slightly larger stain hiding on the wall behind it. Something that glistens like a slug trail, and Terry sets the canvas down on the floor.
“Goddamn it,” she mutters and thinks it’s probably the plumbing, the ancient pipes that should have been replaced decades ago, and just the other day Aaron was complaining about the way they clank and wheeze, the way water sometimes comes out of the tap brown after a particularly heavy rain. Terry imagines the leak behind the wall, corroding iron or copper, the patient trickle to seep through the plaster and ruin her grandmother’s painting. She touches the wall and it feels slick, sticky, colder than the spot on the canvas. When she sniffs her fingertip the smell isn’t anything that she’d expected, not the moldy, dank scent of wet rot, but something meaty, more like a piece of steak that’s gone over, or a dead animal at the side of a road.
A dead dog, she thinks, wiping her fingers on her pants leg, and there’s a sound behind her, then, the sharp, staccato click of long nails against the hardwood floor. Don’t look, don’t see it, just wait for it to go away again, but she’s already turning, worse not to know, worse to have to lay awake wondering and wishing she’d had the nerve . . .
And there’s only the empty hallway, a shaft of late afternoon sunlight spilling through the bathroom window, dust motes drifting from shadow into light and back into shadow again. Terry stands very still for a minute, five minutes, and then she goes to the sink to wash the rotting-meat smell off her hand.
“You’ve just never noticed it, that’s all,” he said, not looking at her, reading his novel in bed and only half listening while she talked about the girl in the painting, the blond girl in the yellow dress who hadn’t ever been there before, the sticky spot behind the stained canvas. She’d shown him both as soon as he’d come home and Aaron had only shrugged his shoulders, shaken his head and “Maybe it’s a mouse,” he suggested. “Maybe a mouse died back there somewhere,” and then he’d asked if she thought they should order Thai or Chinese take-out for dinner.
Ghosts: Recent Hauntings Page 34
