Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [62]
As Marc Antony, Booth would speak lines horrifyingly prophetic in his case: “The evil that men do lives after them.”
Julia and her chaperone went backstage afterward and congratulated not only John Wilkes, but his brothers, Junius, who had played Brutus, and Edwin, who had played Cassius. The three American brothers, with John Wilkes the baby, in combination with their British father, Junius Brutus Booth, constituted what remains to this day the greatest family of tragedians in the history of the English-speaking stage.
John Wilkes gallantly kissed the hand of Julia, as though they had just met, and simultaneously slipped her a packet of chloral hydrate crystals, which would be the active ingredient in a Mickey Finn for the chaperone.
Julia had been given to believe by Booth that all she would receive from him when she came to his hotel room would be a single glass of champagne, and a single kiss she would cherish for the rest of her life after the war, back in Rhode Island, a life that would otherwise be humdrum. Madame Bovary!
Little did Julia suspect that Booth would mousetrap her champagne, just as she had mousetrapped her chaperone’s beddy-bye slug of wartime white lightning, with chloral hydrate.
Ting-a-ling!
Booth knocked her up! She had never had a kid before. Something was wrong with her husband’s ding-dong. She was thirty-one! The actor was twenty-four!
Incredible?
Her husband was delighted. She’s pregnant? There was nothing wrong with Assistant Secretary of the Navy Elias Pembroke’s ding-dong after all! Anchors aweigh!
Julia returned to Pembroke, Rhode Island, a town named in honor of an ancestor of her husband‘s, to have the kid. She was scared to death that the upper rims of the kid’s ears would be like those of John Wilkes Booth, pointed like a devil’s, instead of curved. But the kid had normal ears. It was a boy. It was christened Abraham Lincoln Pembroke.
That the only descendant of the most egomaniacal and destructive villain in American history should bear that name did not become supremely ironical until, exactly two years from the night Booth ejaculated in Julia’s birth canal while she was massively sedated, Booth sent a wad of lead into Lincoln’s dog’s breakfast, into Lincoln’s brain.
At Xanadu in 2001, I asked Kilgore Trout for his ballpark opinion of John Wilkes Booth. He said Booth’s performance in Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., on the night of Good Friday, April 14th, 1865, when he shot Lincoln and then jumped from a theater box to the stage, breaking his leg, was “the sort of thing which is bound to happen whenever an actor creates his own material.”
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Julia shared her secret with no one. Did she have regrets? Of course she did, but not about love. When she turned fifty, in 1882, she founded as a memorial for her only love affair, however brief and star-crossed, without saying that’s what it was, an amateur acting group, the Pembroke Mask and Wig Club.
And Abraham Lincoln Pembroke, ignorant of whose son he actually was, in 1889 founded Indian Head Mills, which became the largest textile mill in New England until 1947, when Abraham Lincoln Pembroke III locked out his striking ing employees and moved the company to North Carolina. Abraham Lincoln Pembroke IV subsequently sold it to an international conglomerate, which moved it to Indonesia, and he died of drink.
Not an actor in the bunch. Not a murderer in the bunch. No pixie ears.
Before Abraham Lincoln Pembroke III departed the town of Pembroke for North Carolina, he knocked up an unmarried African-American housemaid, Rosemary Smith. He paid her handsomely for her silence. He was gone when his child Frank Smith was born.
Hold on to your hats!
Frank Smith has pointed ears! Frank Smith has to be one of the greatest actors in the history of amateur theatricals! He is half black, half white, and only five feet, ten inches tall. But in the summer of 2001