She’s freezing. Even with a cape, her black dress is too thin for the weather. She reaches out for Johnny’s hand with her gloved fingers. She’s lost the feeling in her thumbs. She thinks that she’ll never be warm again. Father was the fire that warmed them all.

The cemetery paths have been shoveled, but snow covers the ground and lies in hillocks on the graves. Tombstones rise from the white drifts. A marble angel spreads its wings over the frozen world. Midway through the service, snow begins to fall again, thick, wet stars that land and melt on hair and hats, gloves and Bibles. At a distance, a local band plays a dirge composed for the occasion. The music is soft and faraway.

The coffin is set on a bier in front of the mausoleum. The reverend begins. “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” Asia huddles between Johnny and Joe. Rosalie holds on to her mother. All are sobbing. Asia’s handkerchief is a sodden ball.

The black mourners must watch from outside the cemetery walls, the white crowd the paths inside. Some say later that they saw Adelaide Booth, standing at a distance, silent as a statue and heavily veiled. Others insist she was never there.

—

Edmund Kean had his Samuel Coleridge, but Junius Booth his Walt Whitman. Thirty-six years after Booth’s death, Whitman will still be mourning. He will write:

The words fire, energy, abandon, found in him unprecedented meanings . . . For though those brilliant years had many fine and even magnificent actors, undoubtedly at Booth’s death . . . went the last and by far the noblest Roman of them all.

ii

Life without Father begins with Mother going mad. Rosalie moves into Mother’s room and for several weeks Asia sleeps alone. Rosalie has been through Mother’s grief before. Asia hasn’t and is horrified to see it. It’s so unrelenting in its need for compresses, teas and soups, kisses and quiet. She can’t take physical care of Mother since Rosalie has that role tightly wrapped up. She can’t take emotional care of Mother; only Johnny can do that and he and Joe are already off at school.

Her own feelings of loss seem to hardly count in the face of Mother’s extravagant grief and (even though she’s just lost her father!) no one is paying her any attention at all. Hours go by without anyone saying a word to her. She eats her solitary meals, the sound of Mother’s weeping coming through the wall.

The boys come home for one final, cheerless Christmas in Baltimore and then, in the thickest part of winter, they remain to help with the move to the farm. They can’t all fit in the cariole, and Johnny and Joe must ride alongside. The women’s skirts fill the carriage, dishes and lamps squashed between the hoops and petticoats, the valises and blankets.