xi
Almost the first thing that happens is Edwin nearly losing his father. The month is August, the year 1848, and Father has a weeklong engagement in Albany, playing Othello one night, Iago another, Edward Mortimer, and then Sir Giles Overreach. On the 18th, he is scheduled to finish the run with Richard III, performed as a benefit. That’s when the real money should arrive.
Edwin is finding his way into this new life. He looks younger than his fourteen years, thin and pale, with hooded eyes. The women in the cast make a pet of him, treating him as more of a child than he feels, which he likes and dislikes in equal measure. These women are bold and loud and touch him often, stroking his hair, taking his hand and running a finger over his wrist. He might be less uncomfortable if his father weren’t there, one moment paying no attention and the next, seeing everything. Father either disapproves or is amused. Knowing Father, it’s probably both. Edwin can’t tell which he dislikes more.
Edwin aims for an unimpeachable professionalism. He stands in the wings, reading along in case his father needs a prompt or a sip of water. He manages the trunks and costumes, the entrances and exits. Nothing distracts him. For years, he hasn’t been allowed to see his father act. Now it seems he does nothing but. He begins to notice when his father tries out a new gesture or an intonation. He sees the parts that never change. He begins to feel that he can tell, as the audience clearly cannot, when his father is bored, which is often.
The afternoon of the 17th, Edwin goes out looking for newspapers. His father likes to take his tea with the day’s death notices. He’s made it about four blocks from the Eagle Hotel, when he begins to smell smoke. He doesn’t think anything of this at first, but the smell grows stronger and soon he sees the smoke as well, coiling above the harbor, spreading, thickening. More and more people appear on the sidewalks. At first, they merely watch, asking each other quietly what is happening. Fire, of course. Obviously. But how big? How close?
Edwin couldn’t say who starts the panic. One minute, everyone seems calm and the next, they are all shouting at each other, running back towards their houses or else up the street. Soon, like a flock of birds or a school of fish, they’ve settled on their singular direction, out of the city, away from the fire. A bearded man in a tall top hat seizes Edwin’s arm as he runs past. “Come with me,” he cries, and it costs Edwin a wrenched wrist to break free.
Edwin is running back towards the hotel, moving with difficulty against the flow as the pavement fills with people. An oncoming family—mother and father, each with a child in their arms and another on their backs—forces him into the middle of the street where the horses have caught the contagion of alarm. A few feet away, a young Negro fights the reins against a large white horse. While he grapples for control, an older white boy takes advantage of his inattention to lift three children into the back of his cart, climb aboard himself. The horse nearly steps on Edwin, who pushes his way back into the crowd.
More people, and now Edwin is losing ground. A bonnetless girl falls and several people step over or on her until a flushed, fat woman takes pity, leans down and hauls her to her feet. This woman grabs for Edwin, too, forcing him to turn around, but he breaks loose again, only to be seized from the other side. “Let me go!” he shouts and his voice cracks and squeaks in the way it sometimes does now, which angers him so much he has to clench his jaw or his teeth will chatter.
“Ned, boy!”
He looks and the person holding his arm is his father. The relief of this makes him suddenly dizzy. He might have fallen himself, but his father’s grip keeps him upright. His father is wearing Richard’s hump and Othello’s cloak. He carries a hotel pillowcase over his back like St. Nicholas, knobby with two crowns, as well as with some other bits of costumes that are easily carried—eye patches, Othello’s earring, Iago’s hose. Also letters from Mother and Rosalie, and a few of last week’s reviews. Later, when he unpacks it, Edwin will see that his father took the time to cull the best of these. His father throws Hamlet’s cape onto Edwin’s shoulders.
The light has become so strange now, thin and blurred, and ash is falling like snow from the sky. For a few moments, Edwin has the odd feeling that he and his father are alone in a small, unhurried place, under a bell jar, while outside the glass, all is roil, cacophony, and dimly heard chaos. “Where are we going?” Edwin asks and he doesn’t even have to raise his voice. He takes a shallow breath and the taste of smoke goes all the way down his throat and into his lungs.
His father ties a scarf over his nose and mouth, hands Edwin one to do the same. “Upwards. Mansion Hill,” his father says, muffled as a bandit. Moments later. “Mark my words, it will turn out to be a woman caused it.”
Mansion Hill proves to be a long climb away. Eventually, the crowd substantially reduced, they arrive at the old Kane estate, an elegant house of yellow brick, surrounded by stands of maple and pines, its once spacious grounds now cut through with roads and alleyways. From the gated entry, his father lowers his scarf and expounds authoritatively to the other evacuees about the methods the firefighters will use. All the ingenuity of man—the leather buckets, the horse‐drawn pumps—will prove futile against the dreadful power of the great fire. “When God claps His Hands...” his father says. He quotes William Blake.
Little fly,
Thy summer’s play My thoughtless hand Has brushed away. Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?
The contemplation of human frailty seems to please Edwin’s father enormously. He turns then to another equally pleasurable narrative—the egalitarian camaraderie of the volunteer firefighters. Apparently his father had once missed a curtain call to join in a communal effort to quell a fire. Edwin has never heard this story before. Under his scarf, he smells his own breath and the smell is stale and unpleasant.
Far away, down by the water, an explosion sends shafts of fire into the air like red spears, which then fall back into the boiling cauldron of smoke and flame. This all happens behind his father, the fiery backdrop to his speeches. He doesn’t turn to see.
His father says that in January, the New Theater in Vicksburg burned. He was supposed to be playing Iago. “I begin to think God doesn’t care for Shakespeare,” Edwin’s father says. He passes a hand over his flattened nose.
He has his usual rapt audience. The others have only just figured out that the oddly dressed man before them is the famous, the infamous Junius Booth. They may be losing their homes and all their worldly goods, but what a story they will have to tell.
Father returns to extolling the firefighters. “Most satisfying thing I’ve ever done,” he says, “fighting in a battle so worthy. Against so implacable a foe. If I didn’t have my son here to watch out for, I’d be down there right now, surrounded by comrades in arms. A man has so few chances to prove his mettle. Don’t ever let one pass you by, Ned.” Ripples of flame behind him, the low black sky above. The devil never had a better setting.
A skinny old woman stands next to Edwin. She has a drooping eye, a twisted foot, and a walking stick. Edwin thinks that she has already proved her mettle, just by making the climb here. She taps his shoulder with her stick, then thrusts it upwards. “Maybe God is not such a philistine, after all,” she says. The thick, dark clouds above them are not, as he’d thought, entirely smoke and ash. It begins to rain, lightly at first, then with gusto. Everyone moves to the shelter of the trees. They are wet; they are smiling; they are thanking God for His mercy. The wind has shifted and over the slow minutes, the red horizon vanishes, either drowned or hidden by clouds. Lightning appears as arrows in the sky.
The branches are a porous roof. Edwin shakes the water from his hair like a dog, Hamlet’s cape plastered wetly onto his shoulders. “‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends Rough‐hew them how we will,’” he tells the woman.
His father regards him amiably. “You’re soaked through, Ned. We really should get you in front of a fire.”
_
By the time the rain comes, the fire has lasted five hours. Much of Albany has been destroyed. There are ten fatalities, many more injured by flame or smoke inhalation. Six hundred buildings are burned, businesses and ships, the whole Hudson River waterfront reduced to cinders. But the firefighters have more than repaid Father for his admiration. The Eagle Hotel is gone, but Father’s trunks have been saved. Rumors that a careless chambermaid started the whole conflagration are never proved.
Johnny is deeply envious when he hears. Secretly, he doesn’t think he would have spent hours under a tree when there was a fire to be fought. Secretly, he is unsurprised that Edwin would choose to do so.
Edwin is left with a question that will continue to puzzle him for years. Was his father looking for him in the crowd that day, or was it simply chance that he and Edwin found each other? Mother was quite clear that Edwin’s job was to take care of his father. Was taking care of Edwin also his father’s job? Or had the weather vane stopped pointing that direction?