Similar conversations follow, ambushing Asia in places and times where she’d thought herself safe. So many of the neighbors now wish to share their recollections of Father, the closest, Asia thinks, that they will ever come to greatness, yet they rarely acknowledge his iconic roles, his towering genius. Most never even saw him act.

No, they all want to repeat the old salacious stories Asia had hoped were now forgotten. The things they say are fantastical, completely untrue, and yet there they stand, all of them swearing to have witnessed it personally. Asia hears again the story in which Father tries to raise his pony from the dead, but also of his attempts to do the same for his daughter. In this second story, Father digs up Mary Ann’s grave, opens her coffin, slices into her arm, and drinks her blood.

Asia finds Rosalie in the kitchen, sitting with Ann Hall and her daughter Nancy. Old Mrs. Preston has just sold Nancy to Joe and Ann for a dollar and Ann has scarcely let Nancy out of her sight since. Slowly, laboriously, Ann is gathering in her children.

Nancy’s seated at the table, her little head wrapped in a green scarf, eating a large piece of bread with sugar on it. The two women are seeding tomatoes, both of them up to their elbows in gore, great pots of water steaming on the stove. Asia doesn’t want to talk about blood-sucking in front of little Nancy, so she pulls Rosalie into the parlor, repeats the story about Mary Ann, and appeals to Rosalie, as an eyewitness herself, to refute it. “There was no drinking of blood,” Rosalie says, and then returns with her heavy step to the kitchen. This is the saddest excuse for a rebuttal Asia can even imagine. Its smallness makes her angry. If his own children don’t vigorously counter these tales, who will?

The job falls to John. “I can’t understand why it pleases sensible people to concoct ridiculous stories about great actors,” he says on one occasion. And on another, “Don’t bring damnation on yourself by swearing to the truth of your anecdotes.” On a third, he laments the effort forced on him, to laugh politely in the right places while pretending to believe a great whacking pack of lies.

A relatively benign story in which Father is fishing, falls in, and has to leg it dripping wet for the theater, makes John explode. “If you’d actually known my father,” he says, “you’d know he never fished. He considered fishing a kind of murder.” Asia feels that John has successfully shown up the raconteur as a liar. But he’s also, unwittingly, added to the general sense that their father was some kind of lunatic.

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