Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (613 page)

“Do you know him?” the woman asked.

“He’s a friend of my brother’s.” Anna had no intention of introducing them. She tried to edge away, but the woman still held her.

“My name is Cassie Streichman.”

“Anna Surratt.”

There was a
quick, sideways movement in the woman’s eyes. “Are you related to Mary Surratt?”

“She’s my mother.” Anna began to feel just a bit of concern. So many people interested in her dull, sad mother. Anna tried to shake loose, and found, to her surprise, that she couldn’t. The woman would not let go.

“I’ve heard of the boarding house,” Mrs. Streichman said. It was a courtesy to think of her as a married woman. It was more of a courtesy than she deserved.

Anna looked up at the box again. Booth was already gone. “Let me go,” she told Mrs. Streichman, so loudly that Laura Keene herself heard. So forcefully that Mrs. Streichman finally did so.

Anna left the theater. The streets were crowded and she could not see Booth anywhere. Instead, as she stood on the bricks, looking left and then right, Mrs. Streichman caught up with her. “Are you going home? Might we walk along?”

“No. I have errands,” Anna said. She walked quickly away. She was cross now, because she had hoped to stay and look for Booth, who must still be close by, but Mrs. Streichman had made her too uneasy. She looked back once. Mrs. Streichman stood in the little circle of her friends, talking animatedly. She gestured with her hands like an Italian. Anna saw Booth nowhere.

She went back along the streets to St. Patrick’s Church, in search of her mother. It was noon and the air was warm in spite of the colorless sun. Inside the church, her mother knelt in the pew and prayed noisily. Anna slipped in beside her.

“This is the moment,” her mother whispered. She reached out and took Anna’s hand, gripped it tightly enough to hurt. Her mother’s eyes brightened with tears. “This is the moment they nailed him to the cross,” she said. There was purple cloth over the crucifix. The pallid sunlight flowed into the church through colored glass.

Across town a group of men had gathered in the Kirkwood bar and were entertaining themselves by buying drinks for George Atzerodt. Atzerodt was one of Booth’s co-conspirators. His assignment for the day, given to him by Booth, was to kidnap the Vice President. He was already so drunk he couldn’t stand. “Would you say that the Vice President is a brave man?” he asked and they laughed at him. He didn’t mind being laughed at. It struck him a bit funny himself. “He wouldn’t carry a firearm, would he? I mean, why would he?” Atzerodt said. “Are there ever soldiers with him? That nigger who watches him eat. Is he there all the time?”

“Have another drink,” they told him, laughing. “On us,” and you couldn’t get insulted at that.

Anna and her mother returned to the boarding house. Mary Surratt had rented a carriage and was going into the country. “Mr. Wiechman will drive me,” she told her daughter. A Mr. Nothey owed her money they desperately needed; Mary Surratt was going to collect it.

But just as she was leaving, Booth appeared. He took her mother’s arm, drew her to the parlor. Anna felt her heart stop and then start again, faster. “Mary, I must talk to you,” he said to her mother, whispering, intimate. “Mary.” He didn’t look at Anna at all and didn’t speak again until she left the room. She would have stayed outside the door to hear whatever she could, but Louis Wiechman had had the same idea. They exchanged one cross look, and then each left the hallway. Anna went up the stairs to her bedroom.

She knew the moment Booth went. She liked to feel that this was because they had a connection, something unexplainable, something preordained, but in fact she could hear the door. He went without asking to see her. She moved to the small window to watch him leave. He did not stop to glance up. He mounted a black horse, tipped his hat to her mother.

Her mother boarded a hired carriage, leaning on Mr. Wiechman’s hand. She held a parcel under her arm. Anna had never seen it before. It was flat and round and wrapped in newspaper. Anna thought it was a gift from Booth. It made her envious.

Later at her mother’s trial, Anna would hear that the package had contained a set of field glasses. A man named Lloyd would testify that Mary Surratt had delivered them to him and had also given him instructions from Booth regarding guns. It was the single most damaging evidence against her. At her brother’s trial, Lloyd would recant everything but the field glasses. He was, he now said, too drunk at the time to remember what Mrs. Surratt had told him. He had never remembered. The prosecution had compelled his earlier testimony through threats. This revision would come two years after Mary Surratt had been hanged.

Anna stood at the window a long time, pretending that Booth might return with just such a present for her.

John Wilkes Booth passed George Atzerodt on the street at five P.M. Booth was on horseback. He told Atzerodt he had changed his mind about the kidnapping. He now wanted the Vice President killed. At 10:15 or thereabouts. “I’ve learned that Johnson is a very brave man,” Atzerodt told him.

“And you are not,” Booth agreed. “But you’re in too deep to back out now.” He rode away. Booth was carrying in his pocket a letter to the editor of The National Intelligencer. In it, he recounted the reasons for Lincoln’s death. He had signed his own name, but also that of George Atzerodt.

The men who worked with Atzerodt once said he was a man you could insult and he would take no offense. It was the kindest thing they could think of to say. Three men from the Kirkwood bar appeared and took Atzerodt by the arms. “Let’s find another bar,” they suggested. “We have hours and hours yet before the night is over. Eat, drink. Be merry.”

At six P.M. John Wilkes Booth gave the letter to John Matthews, an actor, asking him to deliver it the next day. “I’ll be out of town or I would deliver it myself,” he explained. A group of Confederate officers marched down Pennsylvania Avenue where John Wilkes Booth could see them. They were unaccompanied; they were turning themselves in. It was the submissiveness of it that struck Booth hardest. “A man can meet his fate or make it,” he told Matthews. “A man can rise to the occasion or fall beneath it.”

At sunset, a man called Peanut John lit the big glass globe at the entrance to Ford’s Theatre. Inside, the presidential box had been decorated with borrowed flags and bunting. The door into the box had been forced some weeks ago in an unrelated incident and could no longer be locked. It was early evening when Mary Surratt returned home. Her financial affairs were still unsettled; Mr. Nothey had not even shown up at their meeting. She kissed her daughter. “If Mr. Nothey will not pay us what he owes,” she said, “I can’t think what we will do next. I can’t see a way ahead for us. Your brother must come home.” She went into the kitchen to oversee the preparations for dinner.

Anna went in to help. Since the afternoon, since the moment Booth had not spoken to her, she had been overcome with unhappiness. It had not lessened a bit in the last hours; she now doubted it ever would. She cut the roast into slices. It bled beneath her knife and she thought of Henrietta Irving’s white skin and the red heart beating underneath. She could understand Henrietta Irving perfectly. All I crave is affection, she said to herself, and the honest truth of the sentiment softened her into tears. Perhaps she could survive the rest of her life, if she played it this way, scene by scene. She held the knife up, watching the blood slide down the blade, and this was dramatic and fit her Shakespearean mood.

She felt a chill and when she turned around one of the new boarders was leaning against the doorjamb, watching her mother. “We’re not ready yet,” she told him crossly. He’d given her a start. He vanished back into the parlor.

Once again, the new guests hardly ate. Louis Wiechman finished his food with many elegant compliments. His testimony in court would damage Mary Surratt almost as much as Lloyd’s. He would say that she seemed uneasy that night, unsettled, although none of the other boarders saw this. After dinner, Mary Surratt went through the house, turning off the kerosene lights one by one.

Anna took a glass of wine and went to sleep immediately. She dreamed deeply, but her heartbreak woke her again only an hour or so later. It stabbed at her lightly from
the inside when she breathed. She could see John Wilkes Booth as clearly as if he were in the room with her. “I am the most famous man in America,” he said. He held out his hand, beckoned to her. Downstairs she heard the front door open and close. She rose and looked out the window, just as she had done that afternoon. Many people, far too many people were on the street. They were all walking in the same direction. One of them was George Atzerodt. Hours before he had abandoned his knife, but he too would die, along with Mary Surratt. He had gone too far to back out. He walked with his hands over the shoulders of two dark-haired men. One of them looked up. He was of a race Anna had never seen before. The new boarders joined the crowd. Anna could see them when they passed out from under the porch overhang.

Something big was happening. Something big enough to overwhelm her own hurt feelings. Anna dressed slowly and then quickly and more quickly. I live, she thought, in the most wondrous of times. Here was the proof. She was still unhappy, but she was also excited. She moved quietly past her mother’s door.

The flow of people took her down several blocks. She was taking her last walk again, only backward, like a ribbon uncoiling. She went past St. Patrick’s Church, down Eleventh Street. The crowd ended at Ford’s Theatre and thickened there. Anna was jostled. To her left, she recognized the woman from the carriage, the laughing woman, though she wasn’t laughing now. Someone stepped on Anna’s hoop skirt and she heard it snap. Someone struck her in the back of the head with an elbow. “Be quiet!” someone admonished someone else. “We’ll miss it.” Someone took hold of her arm. It was so crowded, she couldn’t even turn to see, but she heard the voice of Cassie Streichman.

“I had tickets and everything,” Mrs. Streichman said angrily. “Do you believe that? I can’t even get to the door. It’s almost ten o’clock and I had tickets.”

“Can my group please stay together?” a woman toward the front asked. “Let’s not lose anyone,” and then she spoke again in a language Anna did not know.

“It didn’t seem a good show,” Anna said to Mrs. Streichman. “A comedy and not very funny.”

Mrs. Streichman twisted into the space next to her. “That was just a rehearsal. The reviews are incredible. And you wouldn’t believe the waiting list. Years. Centuries! I’ll never have tickets again.” She took a deep, calming breath. “At least
you’re
here, dear. That’s something I couldn’t have expected. That makes it very real. And,” she pressed Anna’s arm, “if it helps in any way, you must tell yourself later there’s nothing you could have done to make it come out differently. Everything that will happen has already happened. It won’t be changed.”

“Will I get what I want?” Anna asked her. She could not keep the brightness of hope from her voice. Clearly, she was part of something enormous. Something memorable. How many people could say that?

“I don’t know what you want,” Mrs. Streichman answered. She had an uneasy look. “I didn’t get what
I
wanted,” she added. “Even though I had tickets. Good God! People getting what they want! That’s not the history of the world, is it?”

“Will everyone please be quiet!” someone behind Anna said. “Those of us in the back can’t hear a thing.”

Mrs. Streichman began to cry, which surprised Anna very much. “I’m such a sap,” Mrs. Streichman said apologetically. “Things really get to me.” She put her arm around Anna.

“All I want,” Anna began, but a man to her right hushed her angrily.

“Shut up!” he said. “As if we came all this way to listen to you.”

—
for John Kessel

* * * *

Copyright © 1997 by Dell Magazines.

(1955– )

The first time I came across Jim Gardner’s writing was when Avon Books asked me to copyedit his first novel,
Expendable
(1997). The book was a raw but brilliant and darkly funny satire on appearance issues that originated in an improv routine from the point of a doomed “red shirt” on
Star Trek
. We’ve become pretty good friends over the years, although our being in different countries has limited face-to-face interactions to conferences and the occasional visit and guest lecture to my classes. When I listen to Jim read, my first reaction is often, “I wish
I’d
thought of that.” There’s something very quirky and appealing about both his writing and his characters.

An Ontario native, Jim earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in applied math from the University of Waterloo. He honed his writing first as a tech writer (His book
Learning UNIX
has been used as a textbook in some Canadian universities) and then at Clarion West in 1989. Several story sales followed quickly: “Reaper” (1991) to
F&SF
, “The Children of Creche” (1990) to the
Writers of the Future
anthology, and “Muffin Explains Teleology to the World at Large” (1990) to
On Spec
. The latter won the Aurora Award for Canadian SF. (He won another Aurora for the story below.)

Beginning with
Expendable
and its sequels, most of Jim’s novels have been set in the League of People’s universe, a brutally peaceful bureaucratic morass of a future that lends itself nicely to dark humor (with perhaps more emphasis on humor than on dark). Because of the quirks of publishing, he’s no longer writing League of People’s material, though he is still writing work that is dark and funny and quirky; most recenty “The Ray-Gun: A Love Story” (2008) won a Sturgeon Award.

Jim is part of a strong and diverse Toronto SF community, which ranges from the hard SF of Rob Sawyer to the Caribbean-tinged stories of Nalo Hopkinson. In addition to his improv theatrical experience, Jim also holds a black belt in Kung Fu.