The Judges of the Secret Court

by David Stacton

  “Your father is not himself today,” Mary Ann would tell them, and for that matter tell the world, except that the world knew it already, and that Mary Ann seldom ventured any farther from home than Baltimore.

  They had a great deal to forget, the Booths, but they never forgot their roles, any more than their father did, and for three generations they always played the same parts. Shakespeare was where they belonged; to them those plays were a corridor of mirrors, redecorated by Cibber and Garrick, and for “your father is not himself today”, they automatically supplied the two apposite definitions of “Richard is himself again”, and “I am myself alone”.

  And they could all remember their Grandfather Richard, a pretentious drunk, cowered by expatriation and the excesses of his own son, stalking them down. The longer he was dead, the stronger became their one residuary image of him, tall and crapulous, stalking them through the dark house, in the clothes of a gentleman of thirty years ago, musty and foodstained, but for some reason without shoes, his untrimmed toenails clacking against the rough boards of the flooring, so they always knew when he was coming to accuse them in the dark, but had no way to stop him, even after his death, for in their nightmares they could still hear him approach.

  He had had such burning eyes. They all had burning eyes.

  Even as a child Edwin, and only Edwin, had guessed what they would come to. The knowledge gave him the most haunted eyes of the lot. For, being the sanest, he was the worse concerned with their insanity; the most detached, he could best see what it was that happened on a stage. He had watched his father often enough from the wings to know, even as a child, that the stage is a naked parable. It does not make us, but it shows us, what we are. From Julius Caesar and Richard III, his father had come soon enough to the madness of King Lear. In the repertoire there is a part waiting for everyone, his own part, from which, once he has reached it, he can never escape. He did not want to see those parts discovered. He certainly did not want to see his own.

  Yet on the stage or off, they played their parts. His sister Asia was already Cordelia, and always would be. His mother, though she meant well, and he was fond of her, was already as ominous as Queen Margaret in Richard III, and as unreal to him. And he had been thrust on the stage, whether he would or no, first through the drunkenness of his father, and then, in the Gold Fields of California, because there was no other trade he knew.

  Among them they had had the gall to divide America into three parts. Junius Brutus junior held the Far West, himself the East, and John Wilkes the South. A few months before they had been in the same play, for a benefit. That had filled him with dread. He had already grown into his own role, despite himself, and it was not the inevitable bustle of Julius Caesar. It was Hamlet, the waiter and the watcher, who can say nothing, but dies because he has learned too much.

  He knew nothing about his brothers. These days they were only real to him in a play. Junius did not bother him. Junius took his natural place in Julius Caesar. He was no real actor, he was too stolid, but he made an excellent Roman. When the play was over and the Civil Wars were done, he would fit into the New Rome and make an excellent businessman.

  Nor did his own role bother him, for it had been assigned to him so early that he was used to it. By his father’s whim, he was Hamlet to them all, and so might safely leave the world to Fortinbras. For him the world was unseasonable, and he was accustomed to that. It did not bother him. He was more worried about his daughter Edwina, who was in Philadelphia with his sister Asia.

  He was himself in Boston, playing Sir Giles Overreach, an easy part that bored him, another item in the family repertoire, but the public loved it, and thinking about his brother Wilkes. There was something wrong with Wilkes. He was no actor. He was never the parts he played. His best and only performance was himself. Yet he had been good in Julius Caesar, obsessively good. Edwin had been disturbed at that. He had wanted to say: It is only a play, and the world is not a mirror, but an audience. Unlike a mirror, it never gives you back the echo vanity you search for, for an audience does not reflect the image you see in it. It may seem to, but there are a thousand faces behind the image the audience echoes back to you while you posture, and those are the faces which judge.

  Such were Edwin’s fears awake. His fears asleep were worse, for in his dreams he was never the actor. His dreams were not that simple. He was instead the watcher, like Hamlet, who cannot act, and yet events go on around him and act upon him.

  Towards dawn, that Friday, he dreamed that he saw before him an immense billiard table, brilliant under its hooded light, in a darkened room. First he had heard the clack of his grandfather’s toenails. Then he had seen the table. Then the cue.

  Like the probing wand of a searchlight, it flashed out of darkness, smacked the moon, and vanished. The moon, hurtling across the poisonous green sky, hit the clustered balls and stopped. The balls separated out and went their various directions. The one, the three, and the eight, which was of course black, went towards the various pockets, but just as they circled the holes, there was a shake, the table tilted upstage, and then, rushing towards him, ahead of all the other balls, and followed pellmell by them, was the eight. It struck the edge of the table and flew up towards his forehead.

  He awoke in a sweat. “Wilkes,” he shouted. “For God’s sake, Wilkes.”

  But the room was still. The plush curtains were heavy at the windows. It had only been a dream. He got up, pulled aside the drapes, and found himself staring down at the prosaic and reassuring cobbles of Franklin Square.

  While he watched, a gentleman in a black topcoat and plug hat came out of the house across the way, descended the stoop, and turned left down the street, as though to do such orderly and mundane things were not a privilege, but a right. Edwin let the curtains fall. It was the decorum of everyday life that he watched from the farthest distance, and with the tenderest of envy.

  He was alone, as always, in a room.

  II

  In Washington City, Mrs. Surratt, a woman he had never met, also felt uneasy. But it was less distressing for her, this period just after the war, for she had her daily chores to do. They left her little time for worry. However, since it was Good Friday, and she was a devout Catholic, she was determined to attend morning Mass.

  She was a woman who had not managed to become what she could have been. She knew that. Daily affairs unsettled her; yet instead of being the mistress of Surrattsville, instead of being the one thing which would have slaked her mild ambition, Mrs. Surratt of that ilk, she was the operator of a boarding house. She had to demand money. She detested that, but she had no choice in the matter, for in order to satisfy one’s creditors, one must be creditor oneself.

  She stopped in front of the mirror in the hall, while she waited for Honora. She was, who could deny it, a lady; but she was a lady much put upon. It was not right that a woman of her age, a little prim perhaps, no longer young, but still not old, should have her gentility interrupted by the realities of a world which contained only failure, a little music, and the clamourings of tradesmen. This afternoon she would have to drive all the way to the Maryland Shore in a rented gig, which was not cheap, to try for the last time to raise money long owed her. She hated to do such things, or to see Surrattsville for what it was, a depressing small bar and wayside tavern, in poor ground. She preferred to remember Surrattsville as a glory lost.

  It was not her fault. Before she had married she had been as pretty as Honora or Annie was now. But she had made the wrong marriage; and how was Annie to be provided for? How could anybody make a good marriage out of a boarding house, whose only portion was a coaching stop hired out, for the miserable rent it brought in, to an unreliable drunkard?

  In the mirror she saw the face of a woman of forty-five, which was not fair, for she was not forty-five. The body may grow older, but alas, we do not. So we have to corset ourselves in. We have to be staid. We have to remember to control what was once charmingly instinctive, and the ageing body does s
omething to our habitual gestures, it twists and confines them, so that we cannot make them with the same grace any more. What had once been the craning of a coquettish girl had turned somehow into the snappish head-turning of a turtle surprised by an enemy it cannot see around the protective bulk of its carapace. Mrs. Surratt’s carapace was the dresses becoming to her age, black, trimmed with grosgrain ribbon, heavy and full; whereas another woman of her age, say the wife of the President, Mary Todd Lincoln, was rich and secure enough to damn the world and still persist in appearing in public in the white rosebud trimmed dresses of a girl of seventeen. It might not be seemly. No doubt it caused comment. But oh how it must satisfy the whims of the soul.

  But then Mrs. Lincoln did not keep a boarding house and did not have to worry about whether or not, for example, the new coloured girl, Susan Mahoney, was a spy as well as the inefficient sloven she so clearly was.

  Honora came out of the bedroom. Mrs. Surratt opened the front door, and the two women went down the stairway to the street. It was a relief to be out of the house. They walked to the church.

  It is important, as she often told her daughter Annie, to walk with one’s head up. She walked with her own head up. But the posture was no longer natural to her. Do what we will, time will make it droop. Then we can only keep it up by a firm act of the will.

  Mrs. Surratt may have been an impractical woman, but she had a firm will.

  At church she tried to concentrate, but she could not. That often happened these days. Easter was a solemn moment, but it happened every year, and she was worried about the menu for dinner. She could remember how she had looked in her confirmation dress. The incense was soothing, but the weather was bad and the church was cold. She was a convert, but no Catholic worships God. He worships Jesus, Mary, and the Saints. Concentrate on God and you see nothing. Concentrate on Jesus, Mary, or your favourite saint, and you see an intercessor and a friend, someone to take that hand you have not dared to extend since you were a small child, romping through the pasture behind the house, or waiting upstairs, in the dark, with one candle, for your mother to come upstairs to tuck you in.

  Mrs. Surratt’s lips tightened. Once you are older than ten, there is no one to tuck you in, not even your husband. Your husband wants something else, or else he snores, or else he dies.

  Jesus, in plaster, on the cross in front of her, under His draping, had the same look the dead on the battlefields had, in Mr. Brady’s photographs, crumpled, inarticulate, boneless, and yet somehow still uttering the last word they had had to say while living.

  As for the Seven Last Words of Christ, they meant nothing to her, though in Mr. Haydn’s version they were very fine. She had heard it once, in Baltimore.

  Again her lips tightened. She could never quite see God, but she knew that He was there somewhere, just out of earshot, if only He would turn and she could catch His attention. He had a long white beard and kind wrinkles around the eyes and His wrath was terrible. Her marriage had been so unfortunate, that He was the only man she ever missed, except for her son John, who was never there even when he was there.

  Why was it always she who had to help him?

  She was worried about him. She knew he was up to something, though she did not know what. She had not heard from him for several weeks. He was so thoughtless. He never seemed to realize how much she was worried.

  As for her boarders, she had no idea how she would get Annie married. Mr. Holahan was decent enough, but married already. Those strange people John had brought to the house, the troll-like German Atzerodt and Mr. Wood, a giant bumpkin who said he was a Protestant minister, were gone and good riddance. Mr. Booth had been a little better. When he came, the parlour became courtly and gay. Despite herself, she liked him. But she did not trust him. He was an actor. One knew about actors, and Annie was an impressionable girl. Mr. Booth would not do.

  Otherwise, the only men who came to the house were weedy clerks, in search of lodgings, like that wretched expriest Weichmann, who boarded with her and whose whey face and permanent snivel got on her nerves. She did not trust him either. Not only did he work for the War Department, but he was an eavesdropper, a coward, and a sneak. He had damp hands. All the same, he would have the afternoon off from work, because of the holiday, and in the absence of anyone else, she would have to ask him to drive her into Maryland about that debt.

  To tell the truth, it would be agreeable to get out of the city and to see trees, open fields, and spring flowers again. Also, she had a little errand to run for Mr. Booth. That, at least, was a pleasure. She might not trust him in so far as Annie was concerned, but unlike her son, who was not, he was a southern gentleman. He had had no part in this dreadful war. He had sometimes given them theatre tickets. It would be a pleasure to do him a favour in return.

  III

  Booth made up his mind at noon, when he went down to the theatre to get his mail. Of course, he had made up his mind before, only to fail, but like that sort of swimmer who hesitates too often on the brink of what he wants to do, he had become impatient with himself, and this time would enter history with one enormous, ill-timed dive.

  It was history he wanted to enter. He was not named John Wilkes for nothing. His namesake was famous for adherence to a cause. So would he be. He wanted his image carried down the ages, bigger than that of his brothers, like the ancestral portraits of a Roman funeral procession, bigger than the real image of the corpse.

  About fame he had no doubts. He was an actor. More than that, he was the actor; he was always careful to be treated as such; he always was treated as such; but an actor is expected to act, and he was afraid to do that. Bad training had ruined his voice. He could not now, as his brother had recently done, play Hamlet for a hundred nights. He could, at most, appear once a month, in terror lest his voice grow hoarse and he would have to stop. It was not fair that Edwin, who was a haunted wisp of a man, or Junius, who looked like a side of beef, should have an accidental stamina that he, with a body that had never failed him, smooth muscles, and the best face in the family, at least so women always told him, had not.

  That was his secret. When he was sure of his voice, he acted in a play. When it failed him, he played the actor. He was dapper, assured, elegant, and handsome. At the same time he raged that he should be so put down. Fame was the only thing he wanted. Now fame demanded another kind of act. Well, he was ready to comply with that demand. Besides, he was tired of acting. He belonged on a bigger stage than any boxed in a theatre. There are no great men in the theatre, only great actors. It is the same with every profession. One will never be famous merely by doing what one can do. One must do more than that.

  Life and Washington had maddened him these last few months, even though the clear part of his brain was as mercilessly immediate as a stereopticon. That was natural enough. He had no feeling for words. He thought in images. It was not the acting, but the stage business that interested him, like that leap from the rock he made in Macbeth, when the witches began to jeer. Now that had taken skill. What did words matter? It was the stage business of life that had always meant more to him than its mere meaning.

  The actress Cushman, that terrifying amazon, who was dying of cancer, when she took a benefit slapped her diseased breast, in order to produce the right sort of dramatic scream. That passed for great acting. At the world’s benefit he would do the same.

  Yet how was he to make himself a hero now, with no cause left to fight for? The war was over. Jefferson Davis had fled with his cabinet on the last train out of Richmond. The city stood empty for a little while. Then Lincoln had walked in its streets, surrounded by swarms of superstitious niggers, half of them down on their knees, until the President raised them up, telling them to pray to God, not to him. Jesus had said the same thing in his day, and if this man could ape the manners of the Son, then where was God? In Richmond Wilkes had commenced his career. Now the President had snuffed out his audience. The smoke had scarcely settled, yet the Union flag was back over Fort Sumter alre
ady. Or so they said.

  And though the niggers may have followed that tall, shambling, plug-hatted nemesis, no one else had but his own troops. Still, in Washington, that walk through a sullen city passed for a victory. On Tuesday night there had been a high hissing in the air, and small orange flames, like fox, like St. Elmo’s fire, with blue-green cores, had leapt to life on the Capitol, until that ostentatious building loomed over Wilkes like a columbarium to receive his personal ambitions, and the whole city became a stage set against the night sky, against the cosmic opera house, like that crypt scene in which Romeo dies. He had done the play often, and always as Romeo.

  It was Romeo’s play. Once he had left them in the morning, he never gave a thought to Juliet. Juliet was a part, filled in by a supporting player, with no significance of its own, a player such as Ella Turner, who called herself Starr, the redhead whom he had left that morning, his mistress, part of his life’s permanent stock company, who always knew her lines when he came back to play out his engagement for the night.

  As for what she did the rest of the time, he didn’t care. Perhaps she worked in her sister’s brothel. It didn’t matter. For five years he had had star billing. It was he the world came to see. And so he meant to keep it. He had no use for Lincoln.

  On Palm Sunday, Lee had surrendered. That left only Johnston in the field. The cannon had celebrated all day. They were still booming. They had been booming on and off for two weeks.

  And now it was Good Friday.

  So far the day had not pleased him. His boots squeaked and that was annoying. It is impossible to get the squeak out of a pair of boots once it has gotten in, and these were new and expensive ones. He was conscious of himself all over in that way, down to the last handkerchief or disconcertingly renascent pimple. That was because he was an actor. He had no repose. He did not even exist, unless he kept moving, and the nature of his own existence was something he had never been able to face, even in sleep. So he had a discontinuous mind, like that of a woman, in which nothing had either cause or consequence, since the whole world was one unique event, himself, and everything a play.