The Judges of the Secret Court

by David Stacton

  And now there was the painful mummery of the funeral to live through. The body was exhumed and taken to an undertaking parlour in Baltimore. It had been wrapped in an old army blanket. The body was well preserved, but began to fall away as soon as air hit it. Mary Ann had her look. She had seen death often enough before, and then of course, what she saw and what she wanted to remember having seen were two different things. Still, when a Miss Chapman, an actress who was there, asked for a lock of the glossy black hair, Mary Ann gave her a radiantly grateful smile. Edwin was so stern.

  The body was buried in Greenmount Cemetery on 26th June. The day was gloomy. There were a few friends, and the casket, an expensive one, was borne by some actors, perhaps more as a favour to Edwin than anything else. A clergyman said what he could. And then it was over with, at least Edwin hoped so. He wanted it all dead, buried, or destroyed. If he could do that himself, he would.

  But it was 1873 before he could bring himself to burn Wilkes’s theatrical trunk. One by one he stuffed the costumes into a fire in the basement furnace, a Hamlet hauberk, Mark Antony’s toga, a robe of Indian shawls, used in Othello, all initialled JWB, but there was no costume for that last role. That costume had been buried with him.

  The last clothing to come out of the trunk was a purple velvet tunic. Edwin sat down on the edge of the trunk and wept. He could not help it. His father had worn it in Boston, the first night Edwin had appeared with him on a public stage.

  The boy with him asked if he shouldn’t keep it.

  “No,” said Edwin. “Put it in with the others.” The light was getting stronger. It must be almost dawn. Edwin told the boy to chop up the trunk, and then watched it burn.

  “That’s all,” he said, “we’ll go now,” in that still, throbbing, quiet voice of his. In the face of any personal emotion, Edwin always froze like a hunted hare.

  But of course it was not all. It went on and on.

  He made a grand tour of the South. He was a curiosity down there: he was John Wilkes’s brother. In Mobile he received a request for free tickets from a man named Boston Corbett, Sergeant Boston Corbett.

  “I am sure,” Corbett wrote, “that you will not refuse, when I tell you that I am the United States soldier who shot and killed your brother.”

  Edwin sent the tickets. What else could he do? He was not an actor down there, but a raree-show. He moved on. Asia wanted him to come to London. Her husband, she said, would not even speak to her. “It is marvellous how he hates me, the mother of his babies, but I am a Booth, that is sufficient. I call myself the secret ladder that he mounted by.” She did not want to live. “I shall bless God when my hour comes to relieve me from the thralldom.”

  He had always been fond of Asia, but England was not possible just yet. He went to Chicago instead. He played Richard II there. That was one of Wilkes’s old roles, but Edwin played it differently, for he understood it better. He sat in a chair, in his cell at Pomfret, to recite the last great speech of the play:

  “I have been studying how I may compare

  This prison where I live unto the world;

  And for because the world is populous,

  And here is not a creature but myself,

  I cannot do it.”

  The stage was dark, except for one calcium flare on Edwin. Always he played this scene in the same habitual posture. But it was true. He could not do it. There was not a creature but himself. He shifted his position.

  A young man stood up in the audience and shot at him.

  He was a demented dry goods clerk named Mark Gray. The shot meant nothing. But the newspapers hauled the whole sorry story of the Booths and John Wilkes up again. In London, Clarke was furious, wrote Asia. Edwin was safe. “He dwells upon that. Not touched, not hurt, as if it was a great pity to have escaped. The Booths got all the notoriety without suffering!! Look at me! I was dragged to jail by the neck. Literally dragged to prison, and Edwin goes scot free —gets all the fame, sympathy. Who thinks of what I endured?”

  “Without suffering,” read Edwin. They had all played together as children, Sleepy Clarke, Asia, himself, before he had been put out at fourteen to work his life away. And now it came to this.

  Irony is as good a substitute for laughter as any other. He had the bullet dug out of the scenery and mounted on a gold cartridge cap for his watch chain, with an inscription: From Mark Gray to Edwin Booth. And he made up his quarrel with his old friend Barrett, though it was Barrett’s quarrel, not his. Barrett was someone from the past. It was agreeable to know a few old friends from the past. Then he went to England, taking Edwina with him.

  There he had Christmas dinner with the Clarkes. Edwin did not take everything Asia reported about Clarke’s private vendetta seriously. He enjoyed himself. Yet it could not be denied that Clarke occupied rooms in that house deliberately separate from those of his wife and children, to which he pointedly and publicly retired, once the social civilities were over with. It seemed impossible to believe that he had ever excelled in low comedy. He was a theatre manager now. That was good for his pride, no doubt, but Edwin rather missed Toodles.

  One night, as he was leaving the stage door of the theatre where he was playing, and had just settled in his carriage, gazing at the pea soup fog outside, a face loomed up at the window, young, black haired, with black eyes, and mouthing at him.

  Edwin leaned forward to roll down the window. “Wilkes,” he called. “For God’s sake, Wilkes.” By the time he had got the window down, the face had disappeared. He leaned back in the cushions and let the fog pour over him. He closed his eyes. The horse jogged on into the mist. But it took him a while to get over that apparition. It was enough to have to live with ghosts, without having to see them as well.

  The apparition was a Lieutenant William C. Allen, who had always been thought a ringer for Wilkes. Allen and some friends had gone to see Edwin perform, and had enjoyed the performance so much that they had decided to play a little trick on him afterwards, out of pure animal high spirits. Edwin was not such an animal. He covered his face with his hands.

  There had to be an end to it somewhere.

  But when Garfield was assassinated, the whole matter came out once more. For solace he went to Shakespeare. He had to go somewhere.

  Nor I, nor any man that but man is,

  With nothing shall be pleas’d, till he be eas’d

  With being nothing.

  What other ease was there? Mary Ann had died at last. He went to Germany, with Edwina, their last trip together, before her marriage.

  The tour was a triumph. At home, this horrible business would never be buried, but in Germany it was different. They remembered not his family, there, for once, but him. He acted in English, the other members of the cast in German. That made it difficult for him to pick up his cues. The Germans like loud and declamatory noises. His own manner, as the years had gone by, had become more and more quiet, until now he acted most intensely when he was most intensely still. The audience was also still. How could they make anything of it, if they could not understand what he was saying?

  They could not understand the words, but they understood what he was saying well enough. What he was saying had nothing to do with words. He spoke through them, for the talents of a virtuoso exist neither in himself nor in his medium. They exist in what the world has done to him, that he should be able so selflessly to show what this which has been done means. The play was Hamlet. Who cares for the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, if they have no meaning? But for him they had a meaning. It was a concerto his audience was listening to, for voice. Sometimes that solo instrument rose above the accompaniment, and sometimes it sank below it, but always the solo instrument performed the invisible in the visible rite, and so transubstantiated the word.

  “You can understand him perfectly, even though you may not know a single word of what he utters,” said the Tägliche Berliner Rundschau.

  It was true enough. Germans understand such things. When he had done, they wept. “T
his Hamlet was not played, but lived,” said the Berliner Fremdenblatt. And so it was. The Germans love what makes an American or an Englishman uneasy, which is to say, a scapegoat. They pulled his carriage in triumph through the streets. They are a devout people. They can never have enough of such a mass.

  But Shakespeare would have us individual and human, too.

  At a reception in Hamburg the women in the audience formed a double line on the stage. He had to kiss hands. He did not care for that. He swayed mechanically towards the last extended, bent over, and pursed his lips.

  “I am an American,” she said.

  And hearing that fresh voice, he said, “Oh, I beg your pardon, and thank you so very much.”

  He meant it. Though his Hamlet might be lived, it was not the role in life he would have chosen to play. He had had enough of tragedy.

  And then he lost Edwina, not by death, as he had always feared, but marriage. He did not know what he would do without her, but he was glad to see her happy. To see her happy was the only purpose his life any longer had. “You must think of me as not at all lonesome,” he wrote her.

  But he was lonesome. The house at 29 Chestnut Street, in Boston, seemed endlessly empty. It was an old house, with purple panes in the windows to prove it. Sometimes he was allowed to visit Edwina. He knew she loved him. But she had a husband, a life, and children of her own. He could not visit them all the time.

  At the house at Newport he had built for Edwina years ago and given her on her marriage, he had had a little Norman tower built on the shore. When he was out sailing his yacht, late in the afternoon, Edwina would mount the tower and put out a lantern to guide him home. That was over with now. He sold the yacht.

  His only family now was what his family had always been, the stage. But life had worn him out. He could not go on acting much longer. So he founded the Players Club, in Gramercy Park, and retired there, to the third floor of it.

  “I used to enjoy acting comedy,” he told a man who had come to interview him. “Especially farce. Oh, I went through it all. I went through it all.”

  Indeed he had. It had been time to retire.

  One day at the club, Richard Harding Davis, a new member, tactless and brash, but you could not blame him for that, said he had an interesting relic he would like to present to the club, a playbill used at Ford’s Theatre, in Washington, on the night Lincoln was…

  Well, these things could not be avoided. Booth went up to his rooms on the third floor. When he went, he saw Barrett’s death mask staring at him, from the centre table. The man had only died a few days before, and the messenger had left it there by mistake, instead of in the library downstairs. Edwin did not like the look of it. He had it removed. But with Barrett gone, and Edwina married, he was lonelier than ever, even in his own club. That’s why he left Barrett’s aeolian harp in place.

  Sometimes he went for a short stroll around the square. He always dined downstairs in the restaurant. He talked with the members. Edwina came to see him. But mostly he sat in his room. The club was stuffed with memorabilia, from the Sargent portrait over the mantelpiece of the main room, to old costumes in cases along the walls. If he cared to look up, he could see himself in all roles and at all ages. But he did not often care to do so. There were pictures of his brothers, and of his father, too. But none of Wilkes.

  The picture of Wilkes was upstairs, in his own rooms.

  Epilogue

  He sat there now, a frail old man with a long face, a sensitive mouth, balding straggly hair, strong hands, and those firm eyes. The harp was silent, but from downstairs he could hear the click of balls, from time to time, in the billiard room. The sound raised a faint memory, but he did not know of what. Some dream, perhaps.

  He would die soon, he supposed, but that did not much bother him. What did bother him was the manuscript of that play by Miss Althea Lathrop Lee, The Judges of the Secret Court. He would have to tell her something, but what?

  He had gone through life with this sense of guilt, but now he saw that it was not guilt after all. For what did life mean? What had the assassination meant? Both were meaningless, to Wilkes, at any rate; for it is the bystander who has to live with the crime, not the criminal. When criminals are caught, they die. It is the rest of us who have to go on living with what they have done, with what life has done, with what the world does, with what has been done to us.

  No, there was no guilt in this world, yet somehow life makes us culpable. That is the meaning of the Judges of the Secret Court. No matter what we do, they are always there. And though one is seldom apprehended, one does not get off so easily, in this world which runs after Fortinbras, and so belongs to him. Why be Hamlet, when the whole world runs after Fortinbras? He had outlived his time.

  On the wall beside his bed hung a portrait of Johnny. It always had. “I am myself alone.” “Why I can smile, and murder whiles I smile, and cry ‘Content!’ to that which grieves my heart, and frame my face to all occasions.” “Conscience avaunt! Richard’s himself again.” But that was Cibber, not Shakespeare. And Johnny would never be himself again. Nor would any of them be.

  Yet we defy augury. He preferred his own lines. Even as a child, he had felt their definition, though he had not then known why. Shakespeare turned a better jest than ever Dante and Byron knew.

  If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.

  And so it was. Yet what special providence was there in Wilkes, who had snared them all? What providence in Asia, Sleeper Clarke, Mrs. Surratt, Mary Ann, Dr. Mudd, himself; in Mary Todd, that other Mary, his first wife, who had died so soon, or in Lincoln? What providence was there in Johnson, Stanton, Spangler, Arnold, Payne, or John Surratt? All of them, and so many deaths. He could see none. They had merely been caught before their time. Hence the Judges of the Secret Court. He began to perceive that he owed Miss Althea Lathrop Lec a good deal. Her play might be twaddle, but she had given him his explication.

  And yet, before him, somehow, he seemed to see Mr. Lincoln’s slow, sad, warm, and understanding smile. Death, too, had made him a judge, and yet he smiled.

  So Edwin smiled, too. Everybody knows Tom Fool.

  It was Julia Ward Howe who once asked Charles Sumner if he had heard of young Booth yet.

  “Why no, Madam,” said Sumner. “I long since ceased to take any interest in individuals.”

  “You have made great progress, sir,” Julia told him. “God has not yet gone so far—at least according to the last accounts.”

  Tucson

  November 1959-April 1960

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1961 by David Derek Stacton

  Introduction copyright © 2011 by John Crowley

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Burt Barr, The Gun (detail from video still), 2007; © Burt Barr, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stacton, David, 1925–1968.

  The judges of the secret court: a novel about John Wilkes Booth / by David Stacton ; introduction by John Crowley.

  p.cm.— (New York Review Books classics)

  1. Booth, John Wilkes, 1838–1865—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3537.T1178J83 2011

  813'.54—dc22

  2011009961

  eISBN 978-1-59017-471-5

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

 

 

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