“You think so?”
“Definitely,” he said. “It is well written.”
“Written by an actor,” she said. “One blinded in this awful war. I’m inviting him and his actress wife to join us here for the opening.”
“It is bound to be a hit,” Eric Mason said.
Her eyes met his. “But the way, what about the letter to London?”
“I’m going directly to the hotel to write it now,” he said. “And as soon as I hear from Myra I’m having both her and the child join me here.”
Chapter 10
The opening night of The Maid and The Miser was one of the highlights of the New York theatrical season. A most distinguished first night audience had been gathered by P. T. Barnum and they were wildly enthusiastic about the new comedy.
Barnum held a party onstage and his new circus partner, Bailey, was also in attendance as were Boss Tweed and many others. Champagne and oysters were plentiful and enjoyed by both cast and guests. It was a night of triumph for the blind Tom Miller and his wife, Nancy.
Barnum removed the inevitable cigar from his mouth to tell the young man, “Your play has life and movement! It is an actor’s vehicle. You have the magic touch! I want you to be at my office tomorrow morning. It is my intention to take an option on all your new plays.”
“I couldn’t wish for a better arrangement,” the young man with the dark glasses said. He looked handsome in his evening dress.
Lovely at his side, the faithful Nancy said, “We worked out every scene as he wrote it.”
“The labor shows,” Fanny assured them. “When are you going back to Washington?”
Tom smiled broadly. “Things are going so well we have decided to live here. After all New York is the scene of the main theatrical activity in this country.”
“That is wonderful!” Fanny said, throwing her arms about Nancy. “It means we can see more of each other!”
“And a better place for Tom here to work on his plays,” was Barnum’s opinion.
The play was an instant success. So many performances were sold out that they removed all the other plays from their repertory except Dot, which they played on matinee and for one night each week. The newspapers remarked on this change in their policy.
Then on April 3rd, 1865, General Grant’s bluecoated soldiers surged into Richmond. The grayclad Confederates fled in a dismal retreat. Six days later, on Palm Sunday, in a frame house on the edge of the Appomattox, General Lee, wearing the finest of swords and a fresh uniform, faced a haphazardly dressed but courteous General Grant. They signed the agreement by which Lee surrendered his army. The war was over!
There was a great cry of triumph from the North! Ringing bells, the crashing of cannon, the wail of factory whistles all mingled in one great symphony of joy! All over the North the buildings were draped with red, white and blue bunting. All places of business closed, the air rang with the tune of “Yankee Doodle” and every city, town and hamlet had a parade. Boys ran through the streets screaming with delight, and men and women filled with free liquor lurched drunkenly about in the city streets!
Yet the occasion was not without its religious observation. Fanny, with Nancy and Tom attended a great service in Trinity Church where all joined in singing, “Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow.” A glance at Tom showed the tears flowing down the cheeks of the young playwright! Tears from the eyes whose sight had been lost in his bid to bring about this moment of victory!
Fanny, like so many others in the North, thought little of how this victory was being celebrated in the South. To the losers it was a tragic day which could only lead to a loss of majesty in the grim years ahead. There were no cheers, no feeling of rejoicing. Only sorrow for the defeated and the dead who had died in vain.
It was stage manager Leroy Barnes who one night spoke of this to Fanny as she rested between acts. The veteran stage manager said, “With all our rejoicing, we forget how the Feds must feel. And their supporters as well, like poor John!”
She had not thought of John Wilkes Booth for many days and suddenly she realized what a desperate time this must be for him. She wished fervently that she could be with him and help sustain him through this terrible ordeal of defeat.
She said, “I wonder where he is?”
“Wasn’t he last in Washington?” the old man asked.
“Yes. He’s probably still there,” she said. “I think it a poor place for him. Especially now that the war is over. I wish he would return to New York.”
The stage manager nodded. “With his ability he could soon be a top star again.”
“I agree,” she worried. “Such a waste!”
She wrote to Major Furlong in Washington and asked if he knew anything about John Wilkes Booth and impatiently waited for some reply.
On the evening of Friday, April the fourteenth, Eric Mason came to the dressing room before the performance of The Maid and The Miser. He had a letter in his hand and she could see that he was overjoyed.
He said, “The best of news!”
“From London?” she asked, at once interested.
“Yes!” He held the letter up happily. “I have heard directly from Myra. She and the little girl are both in good health and coming to join me as soon as she can book a passage to New York.”
“How wonderful for you, Eric!” she exclaimed, rising and going to him and kissing him with complete abandon. Then she laughed and warned him, “Don’t take that as a hint to change anything!”
He looked shamed. “You know better than that. I’ve learned my lesson.”
So it was a happy night for them. Word passed around the company and everyone shared in Eric’s joy. He invited Fanny along with Tom and Nancy, who often attended the performances, to join him at Delmonico’s for a special midnight celebration feast!
Delmonico’s was, as usual, filled with a crowd of people celebrating one occasion or another. They were in the right spirit to join in the general roistering mood. The country was still drunk from the recent peace. Everyone stretched out for a share of the happiness.
Tom raised a glass and proposed a toast to the joyful reunion of Eric and his wife and child. Eric responded with a toast to the play and then all in turn toasted Fanny.
Fanny realized soon that she was more than a little drunk. Her head was spinning from the champagne. Some of the people at the other tables recognized the theatrical party and came over to congratulate them. It was a truly, wonderful occasion if one could only survive it.
Fanny teased Nancy saying, “You and Tom are at the theatre nearly every night. I vow you can’t get acting out of your blood.”
“It’s true,” the blind Tom agreed. “We work on the plays in the daytime. Then at night we’re both impatient to be in a theatre. When we aren’t at the Lyceum we’re somewhere else.”
“Why don’t you act again?” Eric Mason asked Nancy. “I hear from Fanny you’re very good.”
The petite blonde girl looked embarrassed and linking a hand with one of her blind husband’s, she said, “I do miss the stage but I want to be with Tom.”
Tom laughed. “That needn’t hold you back. I should enjoy sitting in a box listening to you, or waiting backstage or in your dressing room. I’d feel more part of it.”
“Yes,” Nancy said. “I had hoped Tom and I might have a family by now but all we seem to be able to produce are plays.”
“But they’re so successful!” Fanny laughed and everyone else joined in.
Suddenly a man in evening dress jumped up on a table and shouted for silence. Every eye in the place turned on him and. he stood there slightly drunken and shocked looking. A hush fell over the great dining room.
Tom murmured, “What is it?”
As if to answer him the man began to speak in a broken voice, saying, “The Times has just received a wireless message from Washington! A terrible thing has happened! President Abraham Lincoln has been shot!”
His words brought cries of dismay and protest from all in th
e restaurant. Fanny felt a sudden stab of fear along with the sadness the news brought her. She watched tensely as the man waved for silence again.
The man went on, “Lincoln was attending a play in Ford’s Theatre when a man broke into the box with the president’s party and shot him! The assassin then leapt to the stage and flourishing a dagger shouted, “Sic semper tyrannis!” He then fled and somehow made his escape. His exact identity is not known but rumor has it the man was the actor, John Wilkes Booth!”
“Johnny!” Fanny murmured in despair and her eyes brimmed with tears. “Oh, Johnny, what have you done!”
The room was filled with commotion again. Someone called out, “Does the President still live?”
The man on the table shouted again, “The President has been moved across the street where doctors are in attendance. His condition is grave.”
Eric Mason took her by the arm. “Come, let us get out of here! There can be no more celebration this night!”
The actor paid the waiter hastily and escorted her to the door. Nancy and Tom Miller followed. At the entrance as they waited for a carriage a stout, gray-haired woman glanced at Fanny and then her look turned to one of near hatred!
“Aren’t you the actress, Fanny Cornish?” the woman demanded harshly.
“Yes,” Fanny said.
“You and John Wilkes Booth played together,” the woman said in an angry voice. “Isn’t that so?”
“It is true,” Fanny said.
“Theatre people!” the woman said with disgust and turned her back on them.
Eric had secured a carriage and quickly led them to it. He said, “This is not going to be a good time for the theatre!”
Tom complained, as he took his seat in the carriage, “Why blame us?”
Nancy said, “For the moment they see all of us in John Wilkes Booth. People can be so unreasonable! And who knows, it may not have been him at all. Someone else may have shot the President. Don’t you agree, Fanny?”
Fanny was lost in despair. But she managed, “I hope it wasn’t John! Oh, how much I hope it wasn’t!”
When they reached the hotel many people usually asleep at the late hour were up and milling about the lobby. The entire city was in a state of near panic. Eric saw her safely to her room and offered to stay a little while with her. She thanked him but refused.
Alone, she sobbed long and loudly. Then exhausted fell into a deep, dreamless sleep. In the morning she was wakened by the sound of bells tolling. It seemed that every church in the city must be sounding out the news! The only news which such universal grief justified. The President was dead!
She was having coffee and dry toast when Nancy arrived with a copy of the morning paper. The blonde girl told her, “It is almost impossible to get copies of the paper. I managed to get my hands on this one for you.”
Fanny rejected the paper and said, “Later! I can’t face it yet! It was John, wasn’t it?”
“I’m afraid so,” Nancy said.
“Have they caught him?”
“No. He managed to get away by some miracle.”
Tears brimmed in her eyes again. “They will catch him. It is only a matter of time.”
“Likely,” Nancy agreed. “He broke his leg when he jumped onto the stage. It is amazing that he managed to limp away in that great pain and escape everyone. People were so stunned they could not act for a time.”
“It will be the end of him,” she said. “Twenty-seven and his life is over.”
“He must have been completely mad,” Nancy said, sitting across from her.
“He believed in what he did,” she said sadly. “He truly thought Lincoln was a tyrant.”
A messenger came from P. T. Barnum telling her that all theatrical performances had been cancelled and would be for a time. Probably until after the funeral.
Nancy said bitterly, “It will be a sad time for actors. For all their applause and laughter they think of us as not much more than vagabonds.”
Each night Fanny prayed, that murderer though he was, John might somehow escape the country and live to repent in a foreign clime. The days went by and still he was free. But there were rumors that the military were close on his heels.
New York was silent and draped in the black folds of mourning. Just as the North had gone on an orgy of joy when the War was declared over, so now it went the opposite way. Bells pealed everlastingly and the drums were muffled. On April 21st a solemn funeral cavalcade set out from Washington. In the procession escorting the hearse along Pennsylvania Avenue a torn flag was carried, the flag which had caught John Wilkes Booth’s spur and might yet through the injury inflicted on him, be the means of the fleeing criminal being captured.
A numbed Fanny in a black veil stood with Eric Mason as the body of the murdered President was drawn through New York streets by sixteen white horses. Every building in the city was decked with black crepe and there was a long funeral procession with wreaths, floral decorations, all to the solemn beat of drums.
Fanny kept mostly to her hotel room. The yellow press now began printing lurid stories about John being an opium eater. There was also one feature about the love affair between her and the actor. They suggested she was also a Confederate loyalist and might have encouraged him to the murder. Eric Mason warned her not to go out alone.
Then came the fateful day of April 26th when Fanny had felt she had reached the end of her endurance. It was on this morning that the man she’d planned to marry was caught in a blazing barn in Virginia. Trapped, he shot himself, and was rescued from the flames paralyzed from the wound, and in a dreadfully burned condition.
As he neared death people at the scene tried to ease his agony. He once managed to gasp, “I did it for my country!” Then he asked that his paralyzed hands be held up and moaned, “Useless! Useless!” Then he died.
It was ended! She had wept much and could weep no more. Mostly she waited until dusk and then she and Nancy and Tom or she and Eric Mason would go out for a stroll. She wore a veil so as not to be recognized. It seemed the public felt that Lincoln’s blood was on the heads of all theatre people. And those who had known John Wilkes Booth were looked on as especially guilty.
P. T. Barnum called a meeting of the company on the stage of the shuttered theatre a fortnight later. He told them, “A few theatres are open. But criticism is still great and business is poor. However, time will cure all. I have every conviction that within a few months things will be on their way to normal. And in a year all will be as it was before.”
Old Leroy Barnes worried, “How do we live in the meantime, sir?”
Barnum sighed. “I can give some of you employment with my circus venture. And I will open again by the middle of the month even though business be slow.”
When the general meeting was at an end Barnum called Fanny aside, along with Eric Mason, Nancy and Tom Miller. He said, “It is my intention to open with a new Miller play. The public need some laughter in their lives at this time whether they realize it or not.”
Tom worried, “Is that too daring a plan?”
“I have always succeeded best when I have dared most,” Barnum told him.
Eric Mason agreed, “I think Mr. Barnum is right. A new play will bring the public who enjoyed The Maid and the Miser back from curiosity. It shouldn’t take long to build an audience for the new piece.”
“Exactly my view,” Barnum said. Then with a deep sigh he turned to her, “Do you feel equal in this time of sorrow of playing comedy, Fanny?”
She glanced at the big face, so sober now. “No,” she said. “I have decided against going on.”
There was dismay from all but Barnum. Eric Mason asked, “We need you Fanny! After all you are the star!”
“I would hurt the venture,” she said tautly.
Barnum nodded. “She is right. People associate her with John. Even his brother Edwin dare not yet go on stage. He is somewhere here in New York in hiding. It will be some time before I’d advise Fanny to take to the boards ag
ain.”
“What are we to do?” Eric Mason lamented.
“Fanny so cleverly interpreted Tom’s comedy.”
Fanny said. “I know someone else who can do as well.”
“Who?” The famous theatrical impressario asked.
“Nancy,” she said, indicating the petite blonde. “She is a good actress and thoroughly understands the plays.”
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