“So I said to Shylock, ‘Would you take ten ducats and a fine pig?’ and Shylock said, ‘I guess that’s as good an offer as I’m going to get,’ and Portia said, ‘How about we all dance the Virginnie Reel then?’ and we dropped the curtain. The audience had heard the whistle; they all understood. We left them laughing and legged it to the docks just in time to board.”

“Who was playing Portia?” Asia asks.

ix

Edwin’s obsessed with a guilt-induced plan to put up a grand new marker for Father’s grave, an expense he can only manage with an exhausting season. Uncle Ben has booked him everywhere. The year is 1858.

Edwin’s chosen the sculptor Joseph Carew of Boston, the same man who, with his brother, designed the beautiful monument for the Reverend Charles T. Torrey, an obelisk with Torrey’s likeness in bas-relief on one side and a grieving woman at the base. If you didn’t know to look for them, you might miss the shackles on the woman’s feet. Torrey had been jailed in Baltimore for helping fugitive slaves and died a martyr in the prison there.

Arguably, Edwin has hired the lesser of the Carew brothers.

It’s his only economy. Father’s tombstone will also be a marble obelisk, only bigger, almost twenty feet high, with the name BOOTH also unusually large and, on the far side, an epitaph from Julius Caesar:

His life was gentle, and the elements

So mix’d in him that Nature might stand up

And say to all the world—This was a man.

Edwin lays out all these plans as he makes them. Rosalie sees how much he wants Mother to be happy. “You’re such a good son,” Mother assures him, reaching over to pat his hand. Privately, to Rosalie, she worries about the expense.

Rosalie has her own plans. In a quiet moment, she asks Edwin, could the bodies of Frederick, Mary Ann, and Elizabeth be moved from the farm to the Baltimore cemetery? “Father loved them so,” she says to Edwin. “I know he’d want them gathered about him.”

Edwin is instantly agreeable, even enthusiastic. Yet nothing is done to make this happen. He continues to talk about Father’s stone which he plans to unveil on Father’s birthday, and never mentions the lost children. It seems to Rosalie that he forgot his promise the moment he made it. Perhaps it was a mistake not to have had Mother there as witness. Rosalie refuses to nag, but a little worm of anger eats at her. Let Edwin meet a ghost or two and see how soon he forgets them.