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scene.
    Edwin leaned into the mirror to stare past his own painted face into the space behind him. On the wall to the right of the small dressing-table mirror was a coat rack, so overwhelmed with hats and capes that it loomed over the room, casting the shadow of a very large man. Swords of all sorts lay on the table tops, boots on the floor, doublets and waistbands on the chairs.
    A knock at the door. His father's old friend, George Spear, had come to beg Edwin to reconsider. What is out there, he said, what is waiting for you is not an audience so much as a mob. Yet Edwin couldn't hear them at all. It seemed they sat in a complete, uncanny silence.
    "I am carrying a bullet for you.” “Your life is forfeit."
    No one in his family had dared to come. His daughter, Edwina, was at his mother's house. He imagined her descending the stairs in her nightgown to give her grandmother a kiss. He imagined her ascending again. He imagined her safe in her bed. He was called to take his place onstage for the second scene, but could not make his legs move.
    "We hate the very name Booth.” “Your next performance will be a tragedy."
    Now he could hear the audience, stamping their feet, impatient at the delay. He waited for his father's ghost to arrive, ask why he kept an audience waiting in their seats. But there was only the stage manager, knocking a second time, calling with some agitation. “Mr. Booth? Mr. Booth?” What did it mean that his father had not come?
    "I'm ready,” Edwin said, and having said so, he could rise. He left the dressing room and took his place on the stage. The actors around him were stiff with tension.
    One of the hallmarks of Edwin's Hamlet was that he made no entrance. As the curtain opened on the second scene, it often took the audience time to locate him among the busy Danish court. He sat unobtrusively off to one side, under the standard of the great Raven of Denmark, his head bowed. “Among a gaudy court,” a critic had written of an earlier performance, “—'he alone with them, alone,’ easily prince, and nullifying their effect by the intensity and color of his gloom.” On this particular night he seemed a frail figure, slight and dark and unremarkable save for the intensity and color of his gloom. The audience found him in his chair. There sat their American Hamlet.
    Someone began to clap and then someone else. The audience came to their feet. The next day's review in The Spirit of the Times reported nine cheers, then six, then three, then nine more. The play could not continue, and as they clapped, many of them, men and women both, began to weep.
    Edwin stood and came forward into the footlights. He bowed very low, and then he couldn't straighten, but continued to sink. Someone caught him from behind, just before he fell. “There, boy,” his father said, unseen, a whisper in Edwin's ear as he was lifted to his feet.
    When he stood again upright, the audience saw that Edwin, too, was weeping. It made them cheer him again. And again.
    His fellow actors gathered tightly in, clapping their hands. His father's arms were wrapped around him. Edwin smelled his father's pipe and beyond it, the forest, the fireplace of his childhood home. “There, boy. There, boy,” his father said. “Your foot is on your native heath."
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The Last Worders
    Charlotta was asleep in the dining car when the train arrived in San Margais. It was tempting to just leave her behind, and I tried to tell myself this wasn't a mean thought, but came to me because I, myself, might want to be left like that, just for the adventure of it. I might want to wake up hours later and miles away, bewildered and alone. I am always on the lookout for those parts of my life that could be the first scene in a movie. Of course, you could start a movie anywhere, but you wouldn't; that's my point. And so this impulse had nothing to do with the way Charlotta had