What I Didn't See Read Online Free Page B

blame but himself. Their mother intervened. No more talk of politics.
    * * * *
    The next night the Winter Garden Theater saw the debut of Hamlet with Edwin in the title role. The play ran for two weeks, three, eight, ten, until Edwin felt the exhaustion of playing the same part, night after night. He begged for a change, but the play was still selling out. This run, which would last one hundred nights, was the making of Edwin's name. Ever after, he would be America's Hamlet. It was more than a calling, almost a cult. Edwin referred to this as “my terrible success."
    It was a shame Shakespeare couldn't see him, the critics wrote, he was so exactly what Hamlet ought to be, so exactly what Shakespeare had envisioned. One morning his little daughter, Edwina, was offered an omelet. “That's my daddy,” she said.
    There came a night when, deadened from the long run, Edwin began to miss his cues. He had the curtain brought down, retired to his dressing room to gather himself. “O God! O God!” he said to himself. “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable/ Seem to me all the uses of this world."
    When the ghost appeared, Edwin was not surprised. He'd been born with a caul, which meant protection, but also the ability to see spirits. Almost a year earlier, his beloved young wife had died of tuberculosis. She'd been in Boston, he in New York. He was Hamlet then, too, a week's worth of performances and often drunk when onstage. “Fatigued,” one of the critics said, but others were not so kind.
    The night she died, he'd felt her kiss him. “I am half frozen,” she'd said. He'd stopped drinking and begun to spend his money on s?ances instead.
    Initially he'd gotten good value; his wife sent many messages of love and encouragement. Her words were general, though, impersonal, and lately he'd been having doubts. He'd begun to host s?ances himself, with no professional medium in attendance. A friend described one such evening. He was seized, this friend said, by a powerful electricity and his hands began to shake faster and harder than mortal man could move. He was given pen and paper, which he soon covered in ink. But when he came back to his senses, he'd written no words, only scrawl. It had all been Edwin, he decided then, doing what Edwin did best. Night after night on the stage, Edwin made people believe.
    The ghost visiting Edwin now was about the height of a tall woman or else a short man. It wore a helmet, but unlike the ghost in Hamlet, its visor was lowered so its face could not be seen. Its armor was torn and insubstantial, half chain mail, half cobweb. It stood wrapped in a blue-green light, shaking its arms. There was an icy wind. A sound like the dragging of chains. Edwin knew who it was. His father's acting had always been the full-throated sort.
    "Why are you here?” Edwin asked.
    "Why are you here?” his father's ghost asked back. His tone reverberated with ghostly disappointment. It was a tone Edwin knew well. “You have an audience in their seats. The papers will put it down to drink.” More arm shaking, more dragging of chains.
    Edwin pulled himself together and returned to the stage.
    * * * *
    Two:
    The serpent that did sting thy father's life Now wears his crown.
    * * * *
    Drink and the theater ran heavy in Edwin's blood. His father, Junius Brutus Booth, was famous for both. Born in England, Junius had come to America in 1821 on a ship named The Two Brothers . He brought with him his mistress and child. He left a wife and child behind.
    Junius Brutus Booth leased a property in northern Baltimore, a remote acreage of farmland and forest. When he wasn't touring, he and his family lived in isolation in a small cabin. He refused to own slaves, forbid his family to eat meat or fish, or to kill any animal. When he inadvertently injured a copperhead with the plow, he brought it home, kept it on the hearth in a box padded with a blanket until it recovered.
    Edwin's