Fates and Traitors (10 page)

She was unaware Junius had followed her until he sat beside her on the sofa. “My son Richard has come to America too, and has been here more than a year,” he said.

“Why did he come?”

“Perhaps because he hadn't seen his father in ten years, not since my last visit to England.”

“Of course. Forgive me—a foolish question.” How old would Richard be now—twenty-seven? Twenty-eight? A man grown, surely curious about his long-absent, famous father, and determined to forge the neglected bond that should have been his birthright.

“He may have come because—” Junius hesitated. “The truth is, I haven't sent Adelaide any money in quite some time. I suspect she sent Richard here to confirm that I'm still working, still earning.”

“Oh, Junius—” Mary Ann left it there. It would accomplish nothing to scold him for neglecting Adelaide's payments. The damage was done.

When Richard arrived in America, Junius told her, he had been stunned by a new acquaintance's accusation that he could not possibly be the legitimate son of the great tragedian Junius Brutus Booth, for everyone knew that the celebrated tragedian had a beautiful wife and a thriving brood of children in Maryland. Aghast, Richard had settled in Baltimore, where he had quickly discovered his father's secret and had written to his mother urging her to come to America and prove his legitimacy. Adelaide had been in the city five months, watching the house on Exeter Street, gathering evidence, doing nothing to distract Junius from earning money until she could confront him.

“With the manager looking on and the entire cast and crew listening at the keyhole, I could not deny her charges,” Junius said. “Nevertheless, I ordered her to return to London. She refused, and she declared that she would not leave America until it was proven in court that she is my true wife and Richard my legitimate son, entitled to all the rights thereof. I could not suffer her another moment, and as I stormed off, she shrilled after me that I should expect to hear from her attorney.”

“We'll have to tell the children.” Mary Ann rose, wringing her hands, dreading what must come next. “They must hear it from us, not on the streets.”

June was away on tour, but Rosalie was in her bedchamber and the four youngest were playing outside. Mary Ann knew she would never forget the children's stunned, pained, bewildered expressions when she and Junius gathered them together and told them, as gently as they could, that their parents were not married, that another woman was their father's wife, and that she had come to demand what she felt he owed her.

Asia's eyes narrowed as she absorbed the news, and Mary Ann could see her shrewd mind at work. “You married that other lady and had a son,” she queried her father, “and then five years later you eloped with Mother?”

“It was closer to six years,” said Junius, as if each word were an effort, “but yes, daughter, that is so.”

Asia frowned. “So
her
six years mean everything, and Mother's twenty-six years with you mean nothing?”

“According to the law, yes.”

Asia tossed her head to show exactly what she thought of the law.

Soon thereafter, Adelaide's lawyer presented her terms. In exchange for the enormous sum of two thousand dollars and assurances of the continued payment of her annual stipend, she would forego a lawsuit.

Junius had no choice but to submit. A lawsuit would ruin the family, which was already strained by the shocking revelations. With the decision made and the need to earn money greater than ever, Junius packed his costume trunks and resumed his tour, apologizing profusely for leaving Mary Ann and the children alone in the center of the storm. “We'll pay her off, and that will be the end of it,” he said, kissing Mary Ann on his way out the door. “Once she's satisfied, she and Richard will return to Brussels.”

“I'm sure they will,” Mary Ann said, because she knew he needed to hear it, but a new chill pervading the neighborhood told her that the damage had already been done, and it was irreparable. The previous day, Asia had returned from dance lessons fuming about snide remarks from other students who had overheard their mothers gossiping. Joseph had fled home in tears after his longtime friends said they were not allowed to play with him anymore. Every day Edwin shrank from the bullies who jeered and called him a bastard, but John Wilkes made them pay with his fists, often coming home with a bloodied nose, fresh bruises, and torn clothing.

Hiding her distress, Mary Ann told the children to ignore the taunts and say nothing if anyone asked about their parentage. “Least said, soonest mended,” she reminded them, fighting to keep her voice steady, her features smooth. They nodded, Edwin in resignation, Asia mutinously as if to say she would not be cowed into holding her tongue, and John Wilkes with a stubborn frown and fists balled at his sides. Eventually, Mary Ann hoped, Adelaide would take her ransom and go away, and perhaps eventually the unpleasantness would be forgotten.

One afternoon, she was in the parlor sewing a summer pinafore for
Asia when she was startled by a harsh shout in front of the house. Suddenly apprehensive, she rested her hands in her lap and listened, expecting to hear one of the children cry out for her to come tend some injury.

“This is the house of Junius Brutus Booth, whoremaster, his slut Mary Ann Holmes, and their bastard children!”

For a moment it seemed to Mary Ann that her heart stopped.

“This is where the whore lives,” the voice shrilled again. “Mary Ann Booth, prostitute and mother of bastards!”

Her ears ringing, Mary Ann forced herself to stand, to cross the room, to conceal herself beside the window and cautiously draw back the curtain. A woman paced back and forth on the sidewalk in front of the house, tall and stout, her gray-and-black hair worn in a loose bun beneath an overlarge hat, her cheeks florid, her face twisted in an ugly scowl. “This is where the tragedian lies with his trollop!” she shouted, glaring this way and that to draw the eye of every passerby, of every startled neighbor peering out a window. “This is where the Holmes bastards wrongly claim the name of Booth!”

Dizzy, Mary Ann let the curtain fall and stumbled into the other room, where she was violently sick in the washbasin.

Adelaide—for the woman could be no one else—abandoned her cruel pageant when her voice grew hoarse and faint, but two days later she reappeared, parading back and forth in front of the house, shouting cruel taunts, accosting neighbors with questions about whether they knew what sordid business went on within the deceptively modest house. A few days later she returned, and then two days of blissful silence, followed by three days of torment.

One day John Wilkes came home, his face a blotched mess of tears, blood, and mucus. “The boys at school call you a whore,” he sobbed angrily as she tended his wounds. “They say I'm not a Booth, but I am, I know I am.”

“You are,” she soothed, fighting back tears. “Of course you are, my darling boy.”

Mary Ann's letters carried the outrageous news to Junius, who fumed to Adelaide's lawyer through the post that their financial agreement was contingent on her silence. Adelaide countered that she had agreed to forgo a lawsuit, not to refrain from pleading her case in the
court of public opinion. If Mary Ann did not care to have her sins aired before her neighbors, she should not have stolen another woman's husband.

As Adelaide's tirades along North Exeter Street persisted, Mary Ann and the children counted the days until Junius finished his tour and the family could withdraw to the countryside for the summer.

Once there, Mary Ann felt herself restored by The Farm's isolation, which had never seemed more wonderful. The headaches and insomnia that had plagued her since Adelaide first confronted Junius disappeared; the children laughed and shouted at play again; the haunted, haggard look faded from Junius's visage. Even the earth and sky seemed to bless their homecoming, with warm sunshine and gentle rains falling upon rich soil that yielded abundant crops. When Mary Ann took her first cartload of vegetables to the Baltimore market, her harvest sold quickly and at favorable prices, and so by late morning she had made a tidy profit. The next two weeks brought similar results, but on the third, she was enjoying a noontime of especially brisk sales when a familiar angry voice shrilled, “Here is the whore Mary Ann Booth, selling vegetables instead of her body for a change!”

Scarcely able to breathe, blood pounding in her ears, Mary Ann began packing up her stall.

“Where are her bastard children?” Adelaide demanded, so painfully loud that she must have been only a few stalls away, though Mary Ann refused to look. “Where is the whoremaster who sired them, the great Junius Brutus Booth, who abandoned his lawful wife and legitimate son to run off with this Covent Garden strumpet?”

Mary Ann's cheeks burned in the heat of what felt like hundreds of curious, demanding stares. With as much dignity as she could muster, she drove the cart away from the market at a measured pace, and eventually Adelaide's voice faded behind her.

She wanted nothing more than to hurry home to her children, her dear sons and daughters who never spoke an unkind or resentful word against her, despite the tribulations inflicted upon them by the choices she had made more than a quarter century before. She wanted to hurry home, but she knew she could not, not with a load of fresh vegetables in her cart and money yet to earn. Instead she took a deep breath to steady her nerves, drove to a market on the east side of the city, and set up her
stall in the first vacant spot she could find. The best locations had been claimed hours before, but she did fairly well nonetheless, selling enough of her produce by late afternoon to call it a good day's work.

The next week, she had scarcely set up her market stall when Adelaide again found her. Hiding her distress as best she could, Mary Ann packed up her cart and retreated to the east-side market. The following week she asked Joe Hall to accompany her, and they avoided the more lucrative west-side market altogether and set up the stall in a choice spot on the east-side venue. That day was blessedly free of hostile demonstrations, but Adelaide tracked her down a fortnight later. Mary Ann kept her expression carefully stoic as she packed up and decamped to the west market.

On and on it went, all summer long and into the fall. Angrily Junius offered to go to the market in her place, but he was needed on The Farm, and his presence at the markets would allow Adelaide to create an even more scandalous scene, which was surely exactly what she craved. Mary Ann did not doubt that Adelaide took malicious delight in the visible wounds she inflicted upon her rival—the new gray hairs, the shadows beneath her eyes, the hollows in her cheeks that appeared after sleep and appetite fled.

But humiliating Mary Ann was not all that Adelaide wanted. Soon word came through the lawyers that she intended to sue Junius for divorce on the indisputable charges of abandonment and adultery. Maryland law required a two-year residency in the state before she could file suit, and Mary Ann knew that Adelaide would take great pleasure in making all of their lives miserable in the interim.

Junius could avoid his vengeful wife by embarking on a tour, but he could not go alone. Someone must accompany him to keep him sober, to persuade him to take the stage when melancholy threatened to keep him away, and to collect his pay before he could squander it.

Twenty-five-year-old June was married now, with a life of his own, one he could not abandon to chaperone his father. John Wilkes eagerly volunteered, entranced by the thought of traveling the country and having adventures with his magnificent father rather than staying home and struggling doggedly with his books and lessons. Cheerful, outgoing, strong, and filled with a zest for life, John Wilkes would have been the ideal companion for his father, but he was only nine years old.
At nearly fourteen, Edwin—somber, studious, frail, withdrawn—was chosen instead. He was too dutiful to protest, but his large, expressive eyes fixed on Mary Ann in a silent plea to keep him home and at his studies.

It seemed wrong to take their most intellectual, erudite son out of school and keep their most reluctant scholar in it, and if John Wilkes were only a few years older, perhaps they could have given each boy the role he preferred. But there was nothing to be done, so Edwin resignedly packed a satchel, silently hugged Mary Ann goodbye, and followed along in the shadow of his eccentric, impulsive father to serve as his dresser, aide, and guardian.

John Wilkes and Asia were consumed with jealousy, and nothing Mary Ann said—nothing she was willing to reveal about traveling with the mad genius Junius Brutus Booth—would dispel their notion that Edwin was embarking on a golden holiday. They could not possibly understand the miseries of travel—carriages rattling over rough roads; frigid railroad cars; squalid, vermin-infested hotel rooms; questionable meals; exposure to all manner of disease, filth, and vice. Nor could they fathom how arduous, fraught, and exhausting Edwin's duties were. They knew only that he helped their father don his costumes and rehearse his lines, day and night his constant companion, entertained and enthralled by the sights and sounds of new cities and scenery and the long-forbidden world of the theatre. They could not imagine their slender, withdrawn elder brother blocking the doorway so their father could not leave their hotel room in search of a drink, or trailing after him as he strode through an unfamiliar city all night working off the frenetic energy of a performance, or cajoling him out of a black funk of melancholy and onto the stage. John Wilkes and Asia were too young to understand what they themselves had not experienced, but Mary Ann knew, and worry and regret for her sensitive son often kept her awake late into the night.

As the months passed, the younger children's envy grew. Asia knew that as a girl she could not possibly serve as her father's chaperone, and so she had never expected the honor, but John Wilkes felt greatly wronged to have been left behind to endure the dullness of school and the shame of illegitimacy. Too often he returned home furious and bloodied after defending his mother's honor with his fists. Any boy who
dared call Mary Ann a whore and him a bastard never made that mistake in John Wilkes's hearing a second time.