Fates and Traitors (3 page)

Though school frustrated John Wilkes, he was cheerful, exuberant, and confident everywhere else. Mary Ann's heart softened just to look upon him, so beautiful he was with his dark, silky hair and smooth, fair skin, his ready smile and perfect features. Even for a boy his profile was strong and noble, resembling his father's but refined, perfected, with his mother's beauty. His ardent, impulsive nature was so like his father's that Mary Ann could not help adoring him all the more for it. Like Junius, in a moment of passion or enthusiasm John Wilkes would grant any request or give away anything he possessed to please a friend or comfort a sibling. To Mary Ann's knowledge, he had never once abandoned a friend or slighted an acquaintance, and when confronted with danger, he quickly and coolly assessed the situation, his poise and confidence commanding the other children's respect.

Naturally, the most harrowing of John's escapades occurred well out of his mother's sight, and Mary Ann learned about them only after all was said and done, dismay warring with pride and relief as she absorbed a reluctant confession. One summer evening, John Wilkes and Asia returned home from their play much later than expected, and when their worried mother questioned them, they admitted they had been delayed at the magistrate's office. John Wilkes and his friends had been playing “telegraph” by sending fireworks sailing along a wire strung across the street, and had successfully sent crackling showers of sparks overhead from tree to lamppost several times when an unwitting gentleman had passed beneath the line just as John Wilkes had taken his turn to light the fuse. The careening firework had caught the gentleman's hat, and as he shouted angrily at the boys and bellowed for the police, the other boys had scattered, but John Wilkes, hastily coiling up the wire, had felt a police officer's hand clamp down on his shoulder. “Don't frighten
Mother,” he had calmly called to his siblings as he had been led away. Asia, observing the scene from their front porch, had quickly darted after them, pausing only long enough to beg a kindly neighbor to accompany her. At the magistrate's office, John Wilkes had refused to give up the names of his comrades, and Asia had ably mounted a defense, explaining the game and insisting that no harm had been intended. Satisfied, the magistrate had admonished John Wilkes not to obstruct the streets again, and, after imposing a fine, which the generous neighbor had promptly paid, he had smiled at the children and ordered them straight home.

“You could have set that poor gentleman on fire,” Mary Ann scolded, “or taken off a horse's head with that wire.” Abashed, John Wilkes apologized and promised not to play the game again, but his sweet contrition and Asia's loyalty melted Mary Ann's indignation, and she struggled to keep her expression appropriately stern as she sent them to wash up for supper.

John Wilkes was athletic, popular, and daring, a true and loyal friend and an intimidating adversary, proud of his strength and his fighting prowess. He was often obliged to employ them in defense of his elder brother Edwin, whose withdrawn, bookish nature and affectations—growing his hair long, donning a short Italian cape like a Shakespearean hero—provoked attacks from belligerent classmates.

Junius delighted in reports of John's scrapes and rewarded him with adventurous tales of his old friend Sam Houston, lately renowned as a hero of the Mexican War. He was far less pleased when he learned that Edwin's favorite pastime was to gather his friends together and put on theatricals in a backyard tent. “Don't encourage him,” Junius growled by letter to Mary Ann after she had sent him what she had thought was an amusing account of the debut performance of an original drama full of swordplay and double-crosses and bold speeches. “Edwin is to be a cabinetmaker.”

It pained Mary Ann to admonish Edwin for his harmless playacting, but Junius was adamant that no more of his offspring should follow him onto the stage. When Edwin absorbed the edict in silence, regarding her sorrowfully with his large, dark, hauntingly expressive eyes, Mary Ann hastened to tell him that he could read Shakespeare as much as he liked, as long as he did not perform.

Not surprisingly, tempering Junius's decree failed to cheer Edwin—but it did provoke a small, triumphant grin from John Wilkes, which he tried unsuccessfully to conceal. Mary Ann wished John did not enjoy his elder brother's disappointment, but she understood the impetus. Edwin always relegated John Wilkes to the least significant roles in his productions, performing bit parts with hardly any lines or clanging a triangle between acts. And yet she could not bring herself to scold John Wilkes for his resentment. She knew she shouldn't have a favorite child, but she could not help herself—John Wilkes was hers. She did her best to make sure his siblings never suspected.

One day while Junius was home on a brief respite from touring, he came down from the attic wearing a black hat, fringed prayer shawl, and a quizzical expression. “Darling,” he asked, “is my Shylock robe in your sewing basket?”

“No, I don't have it. Does it need mending?”

“No, but I need it and it wasn't in any of my costume trunks.” Junius looked around the room as if hoping to find it misplaced on a bookshelf or armchair. “A few other pieces were missing too. I hope I didn't leave them in Richmond.”

“Father?”

Junius and Mary Ann turned to find John Wilkes in the doorway, hands clasped behind his back, eyes wide with innocence. “Yes, son?” Junius replied, his frown softening. John Wilkes was his favorite child too.

“Do you mean the black robe with the shiny spangles in the front?”

“Yes, that's the one. Do you know where it is?”

“I don't want to get anyone in trouble—”

“Speak, boy,” Junius thundered.

“Edwin said he needed it for
Richard the Third
.” John gestured vaguely over his shoulder. “The Tripple Alley Players are putting it on right now.”

“The Tripple Alley Players?” echoed Mary Ann.

“Edwin's theatre troupe. Him, Stuart, George, Sleepy, and some of the other boys perform in the basement of Barnum's City Hotel on Calvert Street.” John looked from his mother to his father and back. “Didn't you know?”

Junius seized John by the upper arm. “Lead on.”

John gulped and nodded as his father propelled him from the house.

Before long, Junius returned in a fury, yanking a tearful Edwin along by the scruff of his shirt, which Mary Ann quickly recognized as his father's Shylock robe, cut down to resemble King Richard's armor. John trailed along after them, his hands thrust in his pockets, his expression alternately merry and contrite.

Junius had interrupted the play at its climax, he told Mary Ann after he had thrashed Edwin soundly and sent him off to bed without supper. The hotel janitor, hired as the troupe's doorman for a cut of the profits, had challenged Junius for the admission fee, but Junius had shoved past him and had stormed into the makeshift theatre just as Edwin was desperately offering his kingdom for a horse. When his outraged father burst into the room, Edwin bolted for the window, but Junius grabbed his legs when he was only halfway through, rendering the boy ideally situated for a spanking. Edwin's wails attracted a passing policeman, who seized Edwin by the arms, believing he had captured a young burglar. Thus the brief career of the Tripple Alley Players was brought to an abrupt and ignominious end.

The following morning, Edwin remained so humiliated and angry that he waited until his father left and his siblings went out to play before he trudged downstairs and slumped dejectedly at the breakfast table. “John shouldn't have tattled,” he groused, digging into the plate of ham and eggs Mary Ann set before him.

“You shouldn't have disobeyed your father,” she replied, “nor should you have cut up those lovely costumes I worked so hard to make for him.”

Edwin's remorse made her wish she could take the words back. “I'm sorry, Mother,” he said, stricken, his eyes welling up with tears. “King Richard needed armor, but I didn't think—I didn't mean—”

She hastened to tell him she forgave him, before his sobs beckoned his curious younger siblings in from the garden and exposed her most sensitive child to more embarrassment. She almost wished John had not tattled, and she certainly wished she could tell Edwin that the Tripple Alley Players could continue, that she would make him his own King Richard costume, and that he need not become a cabinetmaker. But she could not contradict Junius, not with his behavior on tour
swinging erratically from acclaimed performances in one city to frightening mad freaks in another.

Junius had an artist's temperament—and she adored him for it—but it required her to be steadfast and strong, to believe in him so fiercely that he would never question his ability to provide for her and their children. The profits she brought home from peddling produce at the Baltimore markets did not trouble him because he had a hand in everything grown at The Farm, and so the earnings were his as much as hers. But if the family came to depend upon Mary Ann's sales too much, he would begin to doubt himself, and all would be lost. In dark moments Mary Ann sometimes felt herself adrift on a sea of willful self-deception, but she would not have traded her tumultuous life with her beloved Junius for anything, certainly not the dullness and dubious comfort of marriage to a lesser man.

And yet worry constantly stalked her hope and happiness. Junius missed performances due to indisposition so frequently that some theatre managers refused to hire him, relenting only after indignant citizens circulated petitions demanding that he be invited to perform. One evening in St. Louis, after his character had died onstage, Junius had suddenly leapt to his feet and bowed deeply to the audience three times and lay down again, only to be resurrected a second time by the audience's thunderous applause—and he likely would have continued to postpone his character's demise had the stage manager not ordered the drop lowered. In New Orleans, wary managers drove him around in a carriage all day to keep him sober, refusing to stop or let him out until minutes before curtain so he could not break away from them and flee to a bar. Sometimes even when sober his villainous characters possessed him so ferociously that his fellow players shrank from him on the stage, the men refusing to engage in any swordplay with him lest he forget the choreography and run them through, the women fearing his Othello would truly strangle them before the scene ended. And yet interspersed between canceled engagements and others interrupted by drunken or erratic behavior were performances of such astonishing brilliance, such incomparable sublimity, that Junius continued to fill theatres, to inspire audiences to spontaneous ovations of thunderous applause. No one knew what the mad tragedian might do next, and that anticipation and uncertainty electrified the theatre the moment he stepped onstage.

Mary Ann was thankful and relieved that Junius could still find work despite his habit of baffling audiences, annoying critics, and infuriating theatre owners. She could not imagine what he might do if he could not sublimate his creative fervor into myriad other lives. One man's life was too small to contain all that Junius possessed, all that possessed him.

The entire family was delighted when Junius booked a two-week engagement at the Baltimore Museum in March 1847, for their home was boisterously merry whenever he was in it. The children eagerly memorized poems to recite and songs to perform for their father, each determined to earn the greatest share of his attention. Mary Ann showed off new stage costumes she had made, prepared his favorite meals, and blissfully fell into his embrace every night.

Mary Ann and the children took great pride in the posters displayed throughout the city announcing Junius's performances, especially the enormous banner hanging atop the theatre that proclaimed
MR. BOOTH
in letters three feet high. Once Mary Ann caught Edwin, Asia, and John conspiring in whispers to sneak inside and watch from the balcony, but abiding by Junius's decrees that his children must never see him perform lest they be tempted to follow him onto the stage, she quickly put a stop to that.

One afternoon while Junius was supposed to be at rehearsal, Mary Ann glanced out the window and was surprised to see him storming home, shoulders squared and head bowed as if he strode into a gale. She rose and went to meet him at the door, her first thought that the children had disobeyed her, that he had spied them watching him rehearse, that they had fled and he was in hot pursuit.

“Junius?” she greeted him, but the look on his face, flushed with anger and dread, silenced her.

“She's here,” he said, short of breath, his usually rich, compelling voice strangled in his throat. “Adelaide. She's come to Baltimore.”

Adelaide Delannoy Booth, Junius's wife.

For nearly thirty years, an ocean had separated Junius from his wife and eldest son, an ocean and an even broader chasm of lies and deception and steady financial support meant to keep Adelaide reassured and safely remote. For nearly thirty years, Adelaide had endured her husband's long sojourn abroad, raising their son alone in London and
in Brussels, where her mother lived, where she and Junius had met as he toured Europe with a group of traveling players. In all that time, regular, generous payments and utter ignorance of the new family he had created with Mary Ann had kept Adelaide content with their arrangement, but now, now—

Mary Ann's hand flew to her heart, her fingertips brushing the brooch with Byron's portrait that Junius had given her so many years ago, when he had renounced his wife and firstborn son and had begged her to run away with him, when she had agreed to be his forever. “Are you certain Adelaide is in Baltimore?” she asked. Then she remembered the hired carriage she had observed parked across the street from their home, and the strange sensation that hostile, hateful eyes were upon her, and she knew.

“Absolutely certain,” said Junius. “She interrupted rehearsal to confront me in front of the entire cast, the crew, staff, everyone. The manager persuaded her to retire to his office, but even with the door closed, they must have heard every word of her denunciation.”