They hold their Mitchell cousins in particular contempt. During the summers, back on the farm, they exclude the Mitchells from every game they play, filling the numbers when needed with any Hall child who might be about. If no one else thinks being a Booth is an important distinction, then they’ll insist on it themselves.

Edwin

i

Now it’s 1846, another March coming round. On this particular day, the weather has been shifting rapidly from snow to rain and back again. A layer of white covers North Exeter Street and then is washed away. Four crows sit on the thin, barely budding branches of the mulberry. Their shoulders are hunched. Occasionally one or another opens and closes its beak. Edwin imagines the small, unhappy sound he’s too far away to hear. He’s at the window, watching the street in the faint hope that something interesting will happen outside. Certainly, nothing interesting is happening inside.

Edwin is twelve now, Asia ten, and Johnny will soon be eight. Like every adolescent everywhere, Edwin’s turning moody and aggrieved, but he’s so quiet compared to Asia and Johnny that this has gone largely unnoticed.

Tomorrow Father comes home, all boredom banished for a familial mélange of nerves and excitement. The house wakes up when Father is in it, the threads that connect the family tightening like violin strings until they buzz. Everyone, perhaps even Father, gets busy pretending that they follow his rules in his absence, as if there is a routine of cooking and cleaning and chores and school, and he merely drops into it.

He’ll spend the next two weeks here at home, completing a run at the Baltimore Museum, where he’ll be, on different evenings, Othello, Hamlet, Richard III, Kotzebue’s Stranger, and Edward Mortimer in The Iron Chest. Mortimer first. Edwin’s read the play and it’s easy to imagine how well his father will inhabit that angry, haunted, guilty man. Edwin imagines himself in the part of the young orphan Wilford and has already memorized a handful of dramatic speeches.

This house is no house for me. Fly I will, I am resolved:—but whither? His threats strike terror into me; and were I to reach the pole, I doubt whether I should elude his grasp.

What’s harder to imagine is playing Wilford opposite his father’s Mortimer. He’s watched for years as his father prepares for a part. Early on the day The Iron Chest opens, Father will start his transformation. Over breakfast, his posture will change, his gestures, his intonations. How deep does the transformation go? For the course of a day and an evening, is Father truly in love with a woman who is not Mother? Does he even have children?