“Did I ever tell you about my trip to Hawaii?” he asks. “We performed there on our way home from Australia. We were only men then. I’d been drunk and stupid and the women had all quit us and gone back to California. We tried to talk the captain’s wife into taking a role, but she just stood on the stage and laughed hysterically the whole time, though it might have been sobbing; it was hard to tell. So we made Lars Roy our leading lady instead. He was a little man with a beard he refused to shave so he wore a scarf across his face like a lady in a harem. Which he had! He married three of the island women and we left him behind. I think about him sometimes. Wondering how paradise worked out for him.

“My God, but Lars Roy was the ugliest Juliet you ever did see.”

Adam says nothing. Perhaps he’s asleep. Edwin lowers his voice. “I mistook what they eat for breakfast for paste and used it to put up the playbills. Worked just fine,” he says. No answer.

Edwin can’t calm down. He feels rattled and jangled and aroused. Adam smells of cigars and also sweat, and also the mildew of the cloaks. An owl calls. A dog barks. Edwin remembers the great black dogs of his childhood. They were his first horses. Rosalie would set him on their backs and hold him by the arm so he didn’t slip off. He remembers the bullfrog, realizing there’d been no sound of it this evening. Perhaps its reign of terror has ended. He wishes he were in the cabin instead of this house, in his real bedroom where the sound of the streams was his original lullaby. They can’t be heard from John’s room. How can he sleep without that?

He thinks about Father’s playbills and about time passing and how the things you can keep really only serve to remind you of all that you’ve lost. He feels the permanence of trees and stars, his own life galloping by. He thinks about Mary Devlin, her brown eyes, her soft hair. Adam accepts Edwin’s drinking. He understands that the price of Edwin’s friendship is forgiving and forgetting the things he says and does while on a toot. Mary is not so resigned. Promise me you’ll be a good boy, she says. Promise me. Promise me.

Edwin should be the one wrapped in Macbeth’s cloak. Edwin is the one who’s murdered sleep.

—

From Adam’s essay:

I warrant you, some of his fair admirers would not have slept, so long as he talked, and doubtless they envy me my snooze on his arm. But ’twas dark, and I couldn’t see his eyes; besides I had seen them all day.

—

Mary Devlin: