Johnny is discriminating. He loves dogs. He hates cats. He loves horses. He hates squirrels. He sings sometimes to the frogs on the farm, but they all do that—“A Frog He Would A-Wooing Go,” which Mother taught them, or, from Ann, “Down by the Riverside.” An image from the time Johnny’s horse Blackie bit him rises in Edwin’s mind, Johnny’s face so full of his hurt feelings. When Johnny loves, he expects to be loved in return. Edwin has no such expectations.

“Let them loose,” Edwin says, “or you’ll see Father’s belt.”

“Only if you tell,” Johnny says, but he cuts the string with his pocketknife. The cats bolt, leaping the fence (the black one), climbing a tree (the gray).

Father appears briefly at dinnertime, but only partly as Father, and partly as someone midway between Edward Mortimer and the Stranger. He seems unsurprised by Mother’s absence, speaks very little, only saying wistfully that the big cherry tree on the farm will soon be budding and how sad it will be to miss that. If they were Japanese, they would go to the farm as a pilgrimage. So many things would be different if they were Japanese, Father says despondently.

Edwin waits to hear what these different things would be, but Father is apparently done with the Japanese. There are still traces of his stage make-up, particularly in the creases around his eyes. His eyes appear widened by it, as if he’s painted a kind of shock onto them. “We should all go to the farm,” Father says. “We were safe when we were on the farm.”

Then he heads to the theater again, leaving the children to manage their bedtimes for themselves. Staying up late in the sad quiet house has lost its allure and they don’t do it again.

—

Mother, Rosalie, and Joe return two days later. That evening, when Mother has shut herself in her bedroom, and Father is facing the opening curtain, Rosalie gathers the older children into the girls’ room to finally tell them as much as she knows. The important point is this one: Adelaide Booth, Father’s wife, has arrived from England and is hell-bent on destroying them all.

v

The children had always assumed that Mother was Father’s wife.

vi

Rosalie says that someone must have told Mrs. Booth that Mother was at the farm, because straight to the farm she’d come, in a hired carriage with a Negro driving, and then on foot, right through the gate and up to the cabin door, where she’d stood in the yard in her big black bonnet, spewing such dreadful names at Mother that nothing on this earth would compel Rosalie to repeat them. She was glad, she said, that none of them were there to hear it.