Sometimes his father gives him the slip and Edwin is forced to search, bar by bar, through the night. Sometimes the streets are deserted. Sometimes groups of men stagger by. Sometimes women in doorways call to him, tell him how pretty he is and to go home to his mother before it’s too late. He begins to dream of running in a panic through dark streets in strange cities. In his dreams, he is not the pursuer. He is the pursued.

xiii

One August night in Boston, he visits seven taverns before finding his father. Gas lamps light the streets. His shadow stretches and shrinks across the pavement as he passes beneath them. The air is thick, mild, and windless, the stars brilliant. His father has just performed at the Boston Museum in the part of Shylock.

The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.

Edwin turns down a small alley and arrives at the famed Green Dragon. The round sign marking the tavern sways over the door. A man is just emerging and, mysteriously, appears to recognize him. He holds the door for Edwin and points towards the stairs. “In the basement,” he says. “Rare form tonight,” when in fact, Father’s state of pixilation is all too common.

Edwin descends the steps. There Father sits in a winged chair, his cravat loose, his blue jacket off, his vest unbuttoned from the bottom to make room for his stomach. A felt hat cups one knee. Edwin has never seen this hat before. He prepares to be shouted at. Instead, his father raises the hat, waving Edwin in, sliding over so that Edwin can take the arm of his chair. “Ned, Ned, my boy,” Father says, as if surprised and delighted by this happy meeting. “You’ll want to hear this.” His face is flushed, his eyes water.

What Edwin will want to hear is a story he’s already heard about a hundred times, the story of Father’s early feud with the famous actor Edmund Kean. Edwin doesn’t mind. As with all Father’s performances, Edwin watches for new interpretations of old lines. Father has an audience of three men, all seemingly well versed in the theater and hardly drunk at all. Edwin takes them for journalists, which might explain Father’s warm reception. Just part of the show.

The basement is large, but brightly lit through a careful arrangement of hurricane lamps and mirrors aligned with other mirrors. Edwin can see his father’s famous profile, like the head on a coin, with his flat nose and unkempt hair, reflected and repeating, smaller and more distant with each iteration, an endless line of Fathers. The pocked surfaces refract the light and wreath his head in rays and halos, as if he were a saint.