Ship drifted into the room, whistling Billy Joel. He’d been sullen because he was flunking Statistics. That was bad because Ship’s major was Pre-Business, and from what he told me, if you were Pre-Biz, flunking Statistics was the one thing you didn’t want to do. For all his talk, Ship was a bad student. You could attribute his incompetence to two factors: he was lazy and he was dumb. Normally he didn’t let a bad grade get him down so the previous couple of days had been depressing, but now that he was back to his musical self, I missed the gloomy version.
He kept whistling, and I kept ignoring him, until he quit whistling and started to sing, and at last I said, “Shut the fuck up.”
He smiled and dangled a manila envelope in front of my face. “I used the old yearbook ploy.”
More than a minute went by while he waited for me to ask him what the old yearbook ploy was, and when he realized I wasn’t going to, he said, “I went to the theater department and told them I was from the yearbook staff. I said we were going through our files and couldn’t find a current photo of an actress, Drucilla—‘Gordon?’ she says. ‘That’s right,’ I say.”
I made a grab for the envelope, but he jerked it out of reach.
Slowly, he slid the black and white glossy photograph out of the envelope and, holding it tightly, dangled it in front of my face. “That her?”
Doing a lousy job of hiding his satisfaction, he put the picture back in the envelope. “Then I called administration and told them I was Dr. Whatshisname, requisitioning plane tickets for a show in Columbus and I don’t have an ID number on one of my actors. She says, ‘What’s your authorization number?’ and I say, ‘Lady, I don’t have a clue. This is the first time this has happened.’ She says she needs it for the entry, will I call her when I find it. I say, ‘Sure will,’ and she gives me the ID number. After that I call records and say I’m verifying a scholarship on one of my actors.”
“Do they give scholarships for theater?”
“Doubt it,” Ship said, “but she doesn’t know that. She says she’ll send the transcript campus mail. I say, ‘I need it today. I’ll send over my assistant director Dennis Shipman.’ When I get there, she doesn’t get up from her desk. ‘It’s on the counter,’ she says. ‘Thanks,’ I say. I take the transcript, and, in my carelessness, I accidentally get a copy of her application, too.”
He waited for me to congratulate him.
“Let’s see it,” I said.
He tossed the envelope on my bed and read from his notebook. “Gordon, comma, Drucilla. No middle initial. Born 2-17. She’ll be twenty in February—an older woman. Theater major, GPA 3.75—” he whistled, but then said, “Well, it’s Theater. Parents Burt and Alice. Permanent address, Fox Valley Road, Windsor, Ontario.”
“She’s Canadian?”
“That’s what it says.”
“What’s she doing down here?”
“Search me. She lives in Waters.”
“How’d you find that out?”
Ship smiled. He tossed the directory on top of the empty envelope. “She’s in the book, call her up.”
I left the phone book lying where it fell.
Ship folded his arms across his scrawny chest. “Gonna call her?”
“Why not call her now?”
“It doesn’t work that way,” I said. “You wouldn’t just call her up.”
“I wouldn’t?”
“Well, you might.”
“How’re you going to meet her if you don’t call?”
“Who says I want to meet her?”
“You don’t?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You going to stake out her dorm?”
“Oh jeez, you’re bright,” I said and kicked the directory onto the floor.
Ship went to pick it up, thought better of it, and headed for the door. “Bright enough to know you’re yellow,” he said and slammed the door on his way out.
As soon as he was gone, I ripped a page from the pad and opened the directory. Ship had circled the listing and number in red pen. I copied them out, tore the page out of the phone book, put a match to it and used the flame to light a cigarette. A burning ash landed on Ship’s blanket. I whacked it out with the letter I was writing to Aunt Berthe about our happy holiday dinner.
It was after ten when I finished. Ship hadn’t come back and figured to be in the TV lounge watching Leno. I stamped the letters, shut out the lights, and sat cross-legged on my bed, not sure what I should do. I smoked a cigarette, then lit a second with the butt of the first. I listened for Ship’s footsteps in the hall.
I pushed a chair under the doorknob, so Dennis couldn’t barge in, took the slip out of my wallet. I dialed six digits of the number and hung up. Then I dialed again. It rang. It rang a second time. Someone picked up on the other end, there was a silence, and before I could say hello, a girl said, “Dru Gordon doesn’t live here anymore,” and hung up.
That night I dreamed I was back on the island. It was just as it had been at Thanksgiving, only the table was outdoors and no one seemed to notice or care except me. The trees were bare. There was snow and a gale blowing from the north. Everyone was there, sitting at a long table. My father, Grey, Callie, the Reeds, Todd and Trudy, Dolores and Ray, his blazer now white instead of orange. We were dressed for a summer picnic on the beach. Everyone was talking at once. Or I should say that everyone’s lips were moving at once. I couldn’t hear a word over the wind, though I understood that what they were saying was horrible, full of hatred and regret. My place was at the head of the table, Callie sat at the other end. For a long time I stared at her, willing her to look at me. She leaned toward Ray to whisper something in his ear and as she did our eyes met for the first time. I said her name. She smiled and held her finger to her lips.
Waking in a state of dread, I lay in the dark with no idea of where I was until I heard air whistling through Ship’s nostrils as he slept. I had an irresistible feeling that I should go home, that something hideous would happen if I didn’t. I couldn’t sleep the rest of the night and thrashed around until seven in the morning when I called the shop and let the phone ring for about twenty times without an answer.
I decided not to go home. Instead I would take Dooley’s advice and fall in love with school instead of a girl.
“Take Edwards’s class,” he said, as I was filling out my registration form for the spring semester.
“He good?” I asked.
“He is a she, Pamela Edwards. No, she is not good. In point of fact she’s dead awful.”
“Then why would you want me to take her?”
“Don’t ask the obvious question. It doesn’t befit the scholar.” He licked an envelope shut and held it up between two fingers.
“Even so I am going ask you to do something for me that you may thank me for and that I will equally likely come to regret.”
“Do I have to do it?”
He looked at the envelope as he tapped it on his desk. “Yes, I imagine the powers of destiny are too strong for you to resist. Do you know the theater next to the church?”
“At the foot of the hill? Yes, sir.”
“Take this envelope down there and give it to Harold Sing.”
“Harold Sing, did you say?”
He smiled across his desk. “Yes, I believe you know him.”
The front door was locked. I walked around to the side and tried the door there, which opened onto a dark corridor with a dim light coming from what turned out to be a small auditorium. As my eyes got used to the dark, I made out the familiar shapes of Crowder and Sing, another man with the sharp-featured good looks of a movie actor, Majors, he would tell me his name was, Mike Majors; and two girls, one tall and coat-hanger thin and the other not so tall. The not-so-tall girl was a familiar face around campus, dressed always in black mourning clothes, right down to the hat and veil, with her face caked with white makeup and black lipstick. She looked like a corpse. The tall coat-hanger I would get to know as Bea. The corpse’s name was Harriette.
Downstage, Drucilla Gordon crouched on her knees, leafing through a pile of papers that lay on the floor in front of her. She was the only one who saw me coming down the aisle.
“Professor Dooley told me to bring this over,” I said, croaking a bit.
“Dewey did?” Her black eyes reflected the gold light high above her head, in a way that gave her a look of willfulness, even willful willfulness.
“Dooley.”
“Dewey to us. What’d he send over?”
Before I could answer, Sing called from upstage, “Is that our letter from Dewey?”
Drucilla Gordon looked at me. “Is it our letter?” she asked.
“I guess,” I said
“He says he thinks so,” she said.
“Then ask him to give it to you.”
“I think he was going to—” and then to me—“you were, weren’t you?”
“It’s why I brought it over.”
“Splendid,” she said.
“You’re making fun of me.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said, tilting her head and talking to me like I was five.
It was a little humiliating. I handed over the letter and turned to leave.
“Wait.” She called after me, “Want to see?”
“What?”
“We were just about to do a run-through.”
I got the feeling that she was sorry about giving me a hard time, and I said, “Sure.”
“Sit there,” she said. She climbed the stairs to the stage. “Go ahead, Roy.”
CROWDER: [standing against a semicircular rail that stands on top of a smaller stage or dais in the middle of the larger stage] Good Friday began with a third denial. General and Mrs. Grant had arrived in the capital on Thursday on their way to Philadelphia. They were hoping to meet with the Secretary of War and leave town before the Lincolns knew they were in Washington. President Lincoln was planning to go to Grover’s Theater on Friday to attend a new production, Aladdin, or the Wonderful Lamp, with his son, Tad. But upon hearing that his general was in town, he canceled his reservation at Grover’s and sent a messenger to the Grants inviting them to Ford’s Theater to see Our American Cousin, probably thinking that an English drawing room farce was more suitable to the Grants’ taste than a kiddie play about flying carpets and genies.
This fuss over the arrival of the Grants takes on the qualities of a farce, itself, if you imagine the hickish Lincolns scrambling around the White House to prepare for the arrival of le grand Général, Mrs. Lincoln dusting, the President dictating commendations and dispatching couriers. Just as plans appear to be set, a rider arrives with a letter conveying the Grants’ regrets.
BEA: Stood up at the last minute, the President asks several of his cabinet members; all refuse. After declaring the theater outing off, the President inexplicably changed his mind and instead asked his military attaché Major Rathbone [Majors steps forward and clicks his heels] if he would like to attend with Clara Harris, his stepsister and fiancée.
DRUCILLA: Imagine, Henry, the theater with the President of the United States.
SING: We, myself and a small band of patriots, met at Gautier’s restaurant on March 13. Over a dinner of oysters and cognac and fine cigars, I detailed my plan of abduction, one that outshone those previous in its boldness, desperation, and ingenuity.
Whereas in the past we had sought to stop the President’s carriage in open country, like highwaymen, I thought instead to burst in upon his box, the next time he attended the theater. The plan, though well-struck, did not proceed well from its inception. Lee’s surrender on Palm Sunday intervened, and the President’s fickle nature when it came to public appearance also complicated our execution, when on the morning of the 14th of April 1864—
CROWDER: Eighteen sixty-five.
SING: Eighteen sixty-five, to be sure. I learned of the change in the President’s plans when I went to Grover’s to refamiliarize myself with the scheme of the building. Upon arriving I was informed that Tad Lincoln would be attending the performance that evening with his tutor, and the Backwoods Baboon himself would instead be going to Ford’s, with the Grants. These developments suited me just as well. I went to directly to Ford’s Theater on the excuse of picking up a letter I was expecting regarding my investment in the oil business. The previous month, I had performed there in The Apostate, which was a favorite of mine and a fitting play for my final role.
Then I proceeded to the stables where I rented a horse, a roan mare, a substantial animal, but hardly worth the five dollars I was charged by the liverer who must have recognized me from the stage and therefore thought I was of some means.
From the stables I rode to the National Hotel, and went to the desk where Merrick, a man I knew, was working behind the desk. I asked him for a sheet of writing paper and an envelope, both of which he produced, and—
MAJORS: He stood at the desk composing a letter. He seemed particularly agitated and distracted by the comings and goings around him and after a few minutes he asked me for a private room, at which point I directed him to the clerk’s office behind the front desk. After another minute or so he called out to me,
SING: Hey, Merrick what is the date?
MAJORS: “The fourteenth,” says I.
SING: Of what year?
MAJORS: He asked. “Surely you’re joking,” says I.
SING: I am not.
MAJORS: He said, annoyed with me at his error, he seemed. I informed him that it was 1865 and he resumed writing and left shortly after, though I was toiling at my desk and saw him not as he left.
SING: I was riding down Tenth in the direction of Ford’s when I encountered John Matthews, a thespian with whom I had trod the boards a thousand times, and as recently as my farewell performance at Ford’s in The Apostate.
MAJORS: Did you see Lee’s officers brought in under guard?
SING: “I did,” said I. Struck by the gravity of this moment, I put my hand to my head and cried, “My God! I no longer have a country.” I then said, “Johnny, I wish to ask you a favor; will you do it for me?”
MAJORS: “Of course, John,” said I. He extended a black-gloved hand which held an envelope and said—
SING: I have a letter which I wish you to deliver to the offices of the National Intelligencer tomorrow morning.
MAJORS: I told him, “Certainly I will.”
SING: We parted.
CROWDER: Did you deliver the letter to the National Intelligencer?
MAJORS: No sir.
CROWDER: Do you have it in your possession?
MAJORS: No sir.
SING: From the hotel I rode directly to the Kirkwood House where Vice President Andrew Johnson boarded. A Negro doorman informed us that neither Mr. Johnson nor his secretary Mr. Wm. A. Browning were in, and I left him with my calling card upon which I wrote, “Don’t wish to disturb you; are you in?”
HARRIETTE: Why was that card of Booth’s found in Johnson’s box? Some acquaintance certainly existed. I have always had the harrowing thought that they had an understanding. Did not Booth say there is one thing he would not tell? There is said to be honor among thieves. I have never heard of Johnson regretting my sainted husband’s death. He never wrote me a line of condolence and he behaved in the most brutal way.
SING: That demented hag was only half wrong. As it happens I had had the occasion to meet Johnson, in Nashville, where he was serving as military governor, and I was serving as an adequate Richelieu, and had found him—as all who ever met him found him—a braggart and a drunk. I had given the task of killing him to George Azterodt, a German ferryman and known inebriate. This assignment was perhaps deliberate on my part, since Azterodt was almost certain to fail, and the one of those we had marked for death whom was known to me personally would be spared.
DRUCILLA: [climbs off the stool] Okay Harold, we get the idea. [pages through the script] Hey, you [points at Tom] get up here a second. [He points to himself to make sure she is talking to him, then reluctantly climbs up on the stage. Drucilla hands him a script with a line circled.] Follow along and when it gets to this line, say it—Roy he’s taking your line here.
SING [annoyed]: At six I took the mare to the stables opposite the stage door of Ford’s Theater. The play was scheduled to begin at 7:30. I would return around nine. I had seen the play more than a few times and never cared to see it again—
DRUCILLA: Let’s go, Harold.
SING [more annoyed]: The performance began at 7:45. I read in the papers the next day that the President arrived around 8:45. At nine I retrieved my horse from the stables and brought it around to the stage door, where I asked Ned Spangler if he would hold the reins while I went inside. He said that he could not, that he would be needed inside to strike the first-act set in but a few minutes. He fetched for me another stableboy, whom I knew not.
MAJORS: This boy is later identified as Peanuts Burrows.
SING: Inside I encountered J. L. DeBonay.
MAJORS: He wanted to cross backstage. I informed him that this was the dairy scene and that there was no room but we could pass below the stage and we did.
SING: I exited though a side door that opened on an alley, and entered the Star Saloon through the back.
TOM: [noticing that all eyes in the room are upon him and reading at a level he believes will make him heard throughout the room, but is in actuality a good deal louder than the other performers] Yeah, he was in here—
SING: Thus fortified, I returned to the theater—
TOM: I wasn’t finished.
SING: [as Booth—as if annoyed by a heckler] What’s that you’re saying?
TOM: I’m supposed to say, “If I had known what he was up to I could have killed him then and there with my bare hands. And even if I hadn’t known, because I never liked him.”—and then you go.
SING: Ur, yes, I had a bourbon to fortify me for what was to come, the most heroic and patriotic blow ever struck on these shores for freedom. I entered through the front door. The usher—a Mr. James E. Buckingham—reached out his hand for a ticket. “You don’t need a ticket, Buck,” says I and bounded up the stairs to the boxes, whistling a jig. If I had not known the layout of the theater so well I might have thought I approached the wrong box, for it was completely unguarded. Slowing the pace of my stride I timed the moment of my arrival at the door to coincide with the certain line when I knew but one actor would be on stage, tired old Lord Dundreary, calling off into the wings: “Don’t know enough to turn you inside out, old gal—you sockdologizing old mantrap.” At that I burst through the door of the box where the President sat in a rocking chair, roaring with laughter, like the rest of the mob. He must have noticed the change in lighting in the room, and I recall was just beginning to turn his head when I drew my pistol and fired but inches from his head. He lolled forward as though I had just sent him into a deep nap. His adjutant was slow to react. He stood and turned to me not thinking to draw his side arm, with my left hand I produced my dagger from my vest and thrust at him striking him in the arm. Mrs. Lincoln screamed.
HARRIETTE: [Screams, a fakey stage scream]
SING: Here I made my famous leap [he crosses to the edge of the platform and puts a foot on the rail]
DRUCILLA: Hold it, Harold.
SING: I have to jump [jumps]. I have to jump to the stage and cry, “Sic semper tyrannis.” Shout, I say, for there were those who say I “hissed” the words or “spat them out,” when the truth was that I used the projection and elocution befitting my skill as a tragedian. Of course, it is true that I had suffered some recurrent hoarseness, owing in large part to my despair and dissipate lifestyle, but when the time came—
DRUCILLA: [louder] Harold I said quit it.
SING: And I said I haven’t finished.
DRUCILLA: But you have.
SING: I still have to escape. I was on the run for six days.
DRUCILLA: If you were, it was off stage.
BEA: It’s not working Harold.
SING: Yes, it is.
BEA: No, it’s not.
SING: Harriette?
CROWDER: Why not ask me?
SING: I know what you think.
DRUCILLA: It’s missing something.
BEA: Like talent.
HARRIETTE: Hey, aren’t personal attacks against our rules?
CROWDER: We have rules?
MAJORS: No.
BEA: Anyway, since when is it against the rules to criticize? I said what I thought. It’s dead, it’s Spoon River Anthology or something. [Sits firmly in chair, hands clasped in her lap] It’s like, “I shot the President and now I’m dead.”
DRUCILLA: Maybe, Harold, if you could tell us what you are trying to do.
SING [talking very quickly, as if to prevent interruption]: The point—if there has to be a point—is to situate the assassin at the center of the history, rather than as an agent of the victim’s history, rather than as the Outsider, as Sandburg calls Booth, the Strange Man, the American Judas. The Biblical dimension of the proto-traitor is appealing for its grandiosity, if nothing else. Yet Judas was a disciple and the one whom Jesus favored of the twelve. On the other hand, Chapter 14, verse 11 of the gospel of Mark, “And he sought how he might conveniently betray him,” that carries an echo of prophecy for the conspiracy.
The more eerie echoes are of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Consider that Booth’s grandfather Richard Booth named his first boy Junius Brutus Booth after the killer of Caesar. Booth’s father, like his father, was an anti-royalist. Booth’s second to last performance was in Julius Caesar, in New York City, with his brothers, Junius Jr., and Edwin. Though in that performance, John took the role of Marc Antony against Edwin’s Brutus. Neither comparison is perfect, Judas or Brutus, yet it’s the echoes of those two killers who were seemingly driven by fate, that gives the man and his act of violence something even beyond historical importance.
CROWDER: If you accept the view that Lincoln was predestined to die, then who actually killed him is unimportant.
SING: I contend exactly the opposite: that Lincoln was not predestined to die, Booth was predestined to kill. That’s the significant distinction.
CROWDER: By what standard?
SING: [reaches in his pocket and pulls out a small gun, a derringer, which he places on the rail. All regard it silently for several seconds.]
BEA: Is it loaded?
SING: Of course not. Don’t be stupid.
HARRIETTE [amazed]: Where did you get it?
DRUCILLA: Mike got it.
MAJORS [nods self-consciously]: It wasn’t that hard.
HARRIETTE: Is it the real one?
MAJORS: The real one’s at the Smithsonian or someplace. This isn’t a replica, but it was manufactured by the same company, several years later, there are differences, which sets us back in the sense of absolute realism, if that remains a goal but—
CROWDER: Where would you find the bullets?
SING: It’s a .44 caliber. Not uncommon.
DRUCILLA: What we’re looking for is like a cap, right?
MAJOR: A blank. That shouldn’t be a problem.
BEA: Still, be careful.
DRUCILLA: Yeah, put it away, Harold, it’s creepy.
They’d forgotten I was there so, before any of them had a chance to ask me why I was still hanging around, I stepped behind the curtain, up the aisle, and was actually out the door when Drucilla Gordon called after me, “Hey, wait.”
“You’re coming back, right?”
“Nah, I got some business.”
“Not today. I meant you’ll come to rehearsal again.”
“Really? I wasn’t good, was I?”
“What? God, no,” she said. “That’s not what I meant. But Dewey likes you and you seem to drive Harold nuts. It’ll be fun. Trust me.” Outdoors, her eyes were the purest black.
“When’s the next one?”
“Next week actually. It’s not a rehearsal really. It’s a party, a party for us. Harold’s just finished this play and he thinks he can get us a grant. Here, come here.” She took my hand in hers, which was small, her fingers short and thin like a doll’s, and wrote an address on my palm. “The door’s around the side and don’t knock, we’ll never hear you.”
I walked staring at the address on my palm, on air, but feeling like I’d been given something I wasn’t ready for. I didn’t know what to make of all the waving of arms and the yelling. The historical stuff was mundane. I didn’t understand the argument and I seemed to be the only one who didn’t. This was what I was thinking about, lying on my back and staring at the ceiling when someone knocked at the door of my room. “Get lost,” I shouted, thinking it was Ship.
“I already am,” a voice said.
I pulled the chair away and opened the door a crack. Over the course of the term more than half of the bulbs in the hallway had been broken, stolen, or burned out, and all I could see of the guy at my door was that he wore a heavy Army jacket and his head was shaved.
I said, “What’s up.”
He put his cigarette to his mouth backhanded, and I realized it was Grey. “Laertes,” he said, “has come to Wittenburg.”