“He’s the world’s happiest man,” Edwin tells her.

“You’re bringing the Booth name,” John says, “which is dowry enough and the only thing he wants from you. You’re just a professional stepping-stone to him.”

John seems tired. Perhaps from the overnight ride, perhaps from his persistent ill health. He’s pale and his eyes are shadowed. But he can’t be allowed to spoil Asia’s wedding day. Edwin won’t have it. “You’ve never liked him. I’ve never understood why.”

“You don’t know him the way I know him.”

“I’ve known him for years.”

“Please,” Mother says. “We won’t send Asia off with a quarrel.”

xiv

Two months later, Mother moves to Philadelphia to live with Sleeper and Asia. Rosalie and Joe follow soon after. Edwin and John arrive when the summer heat has closed the theaters. So they are all there together in August when they learn that June’s wife, Harriet Booth, has died in childbirth along with the baby. Asia’s already suffering through the earliest stage of pregnancy—the days of exhaustion and nausea—so the news carries a special horror.

Mother’s and Rosalie’s sorrow seems to settle on poor bereaved June and little Marion. “They’ll have to come here,” Mother says, and if Sleeper has just a moment in which he wonders how to fit ever-increasing numbers of Booths into his house, who can blame him?

Edwin is the only one who really knew Hattie and the loss lays him low. He remembers her courage on the trip over the Isthmus, her kindness to him after Father’s death. He’d found her an ideal wife, mild-tempered and yielding, and now that June is so unenviable, he’s able to admit having envied him. The way his family is talking, as if she’ll be missed only as a wife and mother, is adding to his grief. He leaves the house to walk with his own memories, grieve in his own silence. He sits on a park bench in the shade of a maple tree. Above his head, a breeze moves with focused precision through the branches, fluttering one green leaf and then another. Squirrels dash about the grass, halfway up the trunks and down again, engaged in a game whose only goal is quickness. He opens his flask, thinking of his wild California days, his days among the dunes and saloons. He wonders if Hattie was disappointed in him. She never said so, but how could she not have been? What would Mary think if she knew half the things he’s done?