Ah, you’ve a bad hand; the lines all cris-cras. It’s full enough of sorrow. Full of trouble. Trouble in plenty, everywhere I look. You’ll break hearts, they’ll be nothing to you. You’ll die young and leave plenty to mourn you, many to love you, too, but you’ll be rich, generous, and free with your money. You’re born under an unlucky star. You’ve got in your hand a thundering crowd of enemies—not one friend—you’ll make a bad end, and have plenty to love you afterwards. You’ll have a fast life—short, but a grand one. Now, young sir, I’ve never seen a worse hand, and I wish I hadn’t seen it, but every word I’ve told is true by the signs.

He reads this later to Rosalie and Asia. “I asked if she really expected me to pay her for this, but she took the money all right.”

His sisters rush to reassure him. “What tittle,” Asia says. “Sheep bleatings,” says Rosalie. They honestly don’t believe in this prophecy, but they feel sorry for him all the same. I wouldn’t want to get that fortune, they each secretly think, as if Johnny’s fate is entirely his own and nothing to do with them.

“She said I’d better become a missionary. She said she was glad not to be a young girl or she’d follow my pretty face anywhere,” Johnny says.

He carries the paper with her words on his person for a long time. At least it will be grand, he tells himself.

—

In April, the divorce is granted, with Father conceding that all of Adelaide’s accusations are true.

Also April. Father is performing in New York City. Waking from a nap, he refuses to go to the theater and be Richard III yet again. “You do it,” he tells Edwin. “I’m sick of it.”

Lacking an alternative, the manager sends Edwin onstage in his father’s hump, his father’s outsized costume. No warning has been given the audience, whose applause falls away into a puzzled silence. Edwin begins tentatively. He tries to imitate his father’s inflections, his gestures. To his horror, his boots squeak loudly on the wood planks. The audience laughs.

He performs his first scene rooted in place, just when his father would be striding the stage. He can think of nothing but that squeaking. Or maybe quacking. His boots sound like a duck. A stagehand meets him when he exits, standing in his stocking feet, holding his own boots out to Edwin. They don’t fit the period, they don’t fit his feet, but at least they are silent.