xii
For the next five years, on and off, Edwin travels with his father. He will, in time, reduce this grim and lonely interlude to a handful of stories, told and retold, more amusing and less painful with each recounting.
There is the time he’d forbade his father to leave their room and Father locked himself in the closet, staying there so long and so silent, Edwin feared he’d suffocated. After an hour of banging on the door and begging for reassurance, Edwin had just decided he must fetch the innkeeper and an axe, when Father suddenly emerged without a word or a look, and climbed into bed. Soon he was snoring away.
The time in Louisville, when he chased his father at full run for the whole of one night—really, Father’s stamina was astonishing—up moonlit streets, down unlit alleyways, hysteria rising in his throat so that he couldn’t tell if he was laughing or sobbing at all the ways his father failed to lose him.
The time he locked his father in their hotel room to keep him sober while Edwin prepared for his appearance at the theater, only to find on his return that his father had bribed the innkeeper to serve him mint juleps, which he’d drunk through the keyhole with a straw.
More time passes and Edwin will stop telling these stories. His father’s oddities were most painful to Father himself. “It’s not for the son to lay bare what the sire would have wished concealed,” Edwin will say. “I have no interest in merely satisfying the curious or making the unskilled laugh.”
_
Edwin’s schooling ceases—he will feel disadvantaged by this for the rest of his life. But he sees much of the country as they move from hotel to hotel, theater to theater. His father performs in Chicago, Boston, Cincinnati, New York City. Louisville, New Orleans, Mobile, Savannah. Edwin picks up regional accents, mingles with people in fair straits and foul, enslaved and free, immigrant and native. He hones his gift for invisibility. Mostly, he watches Father.
He learns that there is to be no escape. One March, an illness keeps Edwin home. Already he’s become an interloper in his own family, awkward with them and they awkward in return. Johnny is mostly absent at this time, and so is Joe, both at school at the Bel Air Academy. Joe boards there. Johnny rides back and forth daily, leaving early and arriving home again late. It’s hoped that this tutelage will keep him from getting into the kind of scrape no one gets out of. Johnny never intends to worry his mother, but he can’t seem to help himself.