Here’s that segment:
If only old Mrs. Booth could move faster, but, hell’s bells, she was doing well enough, considering the vast distance she’d traversed, in both time and space. He at least had the benefit of knowing Joan’s story, but this was all new news for her, not to mention that her escort was a giant of a stranger, and just look at her wearing that absurd coat, plodding along.
Not that Will had any clear idea of what was going on. And what choice had he but to follow his tracks back where he’d come from? “You managing all right?”
“As good as can be,” she said. “Mighty late in the season for a snowfall. That a cemetery we just passed? I don’t recall seeing it before.”
“I don’t know,” said Studebaker. “I mean, yes, it is a cemetery—they call it the Old Cemetery.” He said nothing about this being New Salem, in the state of Illinois.
“This is a good warm coat—what’d you say your name was again?”
“Studebaker, Will Studebaker.”
“A good coat, Mr. Studebaker,” she said, drawing out the syllables of his name. You warm enough back there?”
She wasn’t listening for an answer, just skittering on down the path like a puppy. He ran a short ways to catch up, but the moment he slowed, she pulled out ahead. He glanced to his right where the sky had a bright edge, like morning. Fifteen, twenty minutes ago, when he got to the schoolhouse, it was day’s end. “Seem like morning to you?” he asked.
“Morning, afternoon, evening! I wouldn’t be surprised to find myself in the sweet flush of youth with Mr. Booth coming by to admire more than my flowers. Mr. Studebaker, you say this is no dream?” She smiled at him and his folly. “Feels to me like A Midsummer Night’s Dream altogether, you and me tangled in these dark woods. Save that it’s mid-winter. The work of Oberon. And Puck too.”
It was her, sure enough, wife and mother to the most famous of all theatrical families. The Booths. The Barrymores were pale shadows beside them. “I know of your husband and your sons,” he said, “the Booths, Junius Brutus and Edwin.”
“I dare say you do.”
Not much to say to that. Like a door closing in your face. Well, what need would he feel to converse with an imaginary figure?
Ahead was a fork in the path. She slowed, let him catch up. “Maybe your vision is sharper than mine,” she said. “Can you make out what’s eastward over there?”
“More trees,” he said, “the bluff.”
“Is there a river?”
“Yes, but—”
“But what?”
“It’s the Sangamon River.”
“No such river hereabouts.”
Below he could see the road to Clary’s Grove with folk walking toward town. Looked like Abe Lincoln, with a woman and a child. It was. Lincoln and Ada.
“I’m taking this way,” said Mrs. Booth, and she turned toward the risen sun, a yellow orb bright against the veil of snow.
Will hesitated, leaned this way, that. He didn’t want to lose the way again. And then he was running after her. “You’ve got my coat,” he called down the path, “and my new gloves, my harmonica,” but her short sturdy figure was diminishing, receding, like a lens collapsing, winking out, was gone. He stood, rooted to the path. She’s found her way back home.
Why? Why was she here? For what end? Is there something I should have said? She said her son thinks of nothing but killing the president. John Wilkes Booth. Could he have said something to save her son’s life? Her son who before long will be cornered in a barn in Maryland, the barn set afire, the son shot to death by a man named—he couldn’t remember the name. He’d seen his picture, an army sergeant, in blue, mad as a hatter—he actually was a hatter—who castrated himself to be spared the temptation of woman. With the last name of a city, Boston. Something Boston. Or first name. No matter. Too late.
He forced himself to move, to turn, to return, to get back to the path from the schoolhouse to the roadway, to town. He traced his long shadow back up the bluff. A voice was crying his name from behind. Again. A shrill voice. “Stop, dammit, stop!”
“Will,” he said, “you look recovered, or are my eyes mistaken?”
“I am myself, Abe. Thank you for drawing me out of the dark wood.”
Lincoln nodded. Then remembered. “You weren’t alone, were you? Was it a woman, and older?”
“No, I wasn’t alone,” said Studebaker. “I found her at the schoolhouse, lost, a traveler like myself. She believed it a dream, and so walked right out of it.”
“I saw her too,” said Ada.
“Me too,” said Sarah. “Did you know her?”
“Sort of,” said Will. “I know of her.” Folk looked at him expectantly.
“Oh,” said Sarah, when the pause went on too long.
“She’s part of a theatrical family,” he said finally. “I don’t know what drew her here. I don’t know much of anything these days. Yet here we are, me and Sarah, and Rusty. It’s as though a lodestone were planted here.”
“Where’s your coat, Will?” Ada asking. “You had it when you ran out.”
“So I did. I gave it to—the woman, before we left the schoolhouse.”
Sarah’s smile was as wide as all outdoors. “So the woman who thought she was dreaming borrowed your coat and walked off with it. And now it’s gone. Like the ruby slippers. That’ll be funny when she wakes up.”
“Especially when they see the size of it. Yeah, and with my harmonica in its pocket. I wish I could be there—well, kind of.
At which point the story reverts to the present version. Of course, once I deleted the prior Mary Ann Holmes Booth scenes, the scene at the schoolhouse had to be revised. Luckily the red wolf I already knew was a resident in Sangamon County and by chance read about in Edward Hoagland’s collection, Hoagland on Nature: Essays, rode to the rescue. Already we had heard his cry in the night, and imagination carried me safely across the bridge to the conclusion of the novel.
Here then are the deleted scenes with Mary Ann Holmes Booth, which in an alternate universe might find residency, perhaps even admirers.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Monday, January 12, 2009
The first out of a few...
I just got a rather large package in the mail this weekend. I will start putting them all up now.
Preface
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Not long after I had written the opening scene of what would become Lincoln’s Daughter I began casting about for what to include in the wide frame of a story still under construction. Two new books had come into my possession—I say that as if they had a life of their own, but, no, I bought these two books deliberately. One, The Complete Works of John Wilkes Booth, a collection of letters, a speech or two, the draft of a book. Such a strange title, as though he were more writer than actor. The second, A Sister’s Memoir, a book which had been bowdlerized in the 1930s and came years later had been published by a southern state university press, by Asia Booth Clarke, the sister of John Wilkes Booth. It’s an affectionate book by the loving sister, living in England. It has a awkward history: kept secret from her husband, the leading comic actor of his day on the London stage, a man who did not want to hear the name of his infamous brother-in-law mentioned in his home; a book secretly left in the possession of Asia Clarke’s daughter, and passed down to a friend of the family.
I found myself reading about the Booth family, a family at least as great in theatrical history as the Barrymores. Reading is a dangerous activity for a writer. What you read can rub off on what you’re writing. Which is what happened. I would weave in the story of the assassin, or would-be assassin of Abraham Lincoln into my story. I wrote several scenes which might pique the interest of the reader, who would ask, I wonder what this is doing here—how will it fit into the story of Sarah, Joan, Will and the others?
I also was reading a massive biography of Walt Whitman, and that worked its way in too. Perhaps he might become his own character as the story progressed. Like a blind man, I was feeling my way along. But, as will happen when the Muses are on your side of the playing field, I forgot about my Mary Ann Holmes Booth chapters and rattled on to the end—I think I hear a Model-T Tin Lizzie lodged in my metaphor.
Suddenly, I was near the end of my story. I looked over the chapters I had written and spotted the several chapters, not from the 1960s or the 1830s but the 1860s. I could cut them, the Alexander-the-Great solution to the Gordien Knot. I was reluctant to perform such surgery. Instead I wrote the scene right at the end, where Will goes into the old schoolhouse. I confess I love that scene: Will wondering what John Wilkes Booth’s mother is doing here in 1834, and knowing she was there and not a phantasm. Mary Ann Holmes Booth thinking she must be dreaming; and so, sturdy woman that she is, she walks out of the scene and back to her bedroom in New York City. I can still see her determined strides carrying her eastward. In the scene that follows, from Will’s point of view, the question comes up about the woman they saw with Will.
Preface
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Not long after I had written the opening scene of what would become Lincoln’s Daughter I began casting about for what to include in the wide frame of a story still under construction. Two new books had come into my possession—I say that as if they had a life of their own, but, no, I bought these two books deliberately. One, The Complete Works of John Wilkes Booth, a collection of letters, a speech or two, the draft of a book. Such a strange title, as though he were more writer than actor. The second, A Sister’s Memoir, a book which had been bowdlerized in the 1930s and came years later had been published by a southern state university press, by Asia Booth Clarke, the sister of John Wilkes Booth. It’s an affectionate book by the loving sister, living in England. It has a awkward history: kept secret from her husband, the leading comic actor of his day on the London stage, a man who did not want to hear the name of his infamous brother-in-law mentioned in his home; a book secretly left in the possession of Asia Clarke’s daughter, and passed down to a friend of the family.
I found myself reading about the Booth family, a family at least as great in theatrical history as the Barrymores. Reading is a dangerous activity for a writer. What you read can rub off on what you’re writing. Which is what happened. I would weave in the story of the assassin, or would-be assassin of Abraham Lincoln into my story. I wrote several scenes which might pique the interest of the reader, who would ask, I wonder what this is doing here—how will it fit into the story of Sarah, Joan, Will and the others?
I also was reading a massive biography of Walt Whitman, and that worked its way in too. Perhaps he might become his own character as the story progressed. Like a blind man, I was feeling my way along. But, as will happen when the Muses are on your side of the playing field, I forgot about my Mary Ann Holmes Booth chapters and rattled on to the end—I think I hear a Model-T Tin Lizzie lodged in my metaphor.
Suddenly, I was near the end of my story. I looked over the chapters I had written and spotted the several chapters, not from the 1960s or the 1830s but the 1860s. I could cut them, the Alexander-the-Great solution to the Gordien Knot. I was reluctant to perform such surgery. Instead I wrote the scene right at the end, where Will goes into the old schoolhouse. I confess I love that scene: Will wondering what John Wilkes Booth’s mother is doing here in 1834, and knowing she was there and not a phantasm. Mary Ann Holmes Booth thinking she must be dreaming; and so, sturdy woman that she is, she walks out of the scene and back to her bedroom in New York City. I can still see her determined strides carrying her eastward. In the scene that follows, from Will’s point of view, the question comes up about the woman they saw with Will.
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