Fates and Traitors by Jennifer Chiaverini

you.”
    Mary Ann would prefer to have all the children with her, but she knew that was impossible. Junius could hardly settle in Boston with a mysterious woman and five young children without causing a scandal.
    She demurred, but soon Junius’s assurances and her concern for his health overcame her reluctance to be parted from her elder children. And, although she would not admit it aloud, after so many years in the wilderness, she could not resist the allure of Boston’s museums, theatres, shops, and libraries.
    Guided by Ann Hall’s recommendation, Mary Ann hired an excellent nurse to look after the children in her absence, while Junius entrusted the maintenance of The Farm to his father and Joe. In August, Junius and Mary Ann set out for Boston with baby Frederick in her arms and Junius’s trunks full of costumes loaded onto the coach. As soon as they were settled at a boardinghouse, Junius began recruiting talent and arranging a slate of performances.
    While Junius worked, sweet, curious Frederick offered Mary Ann delightful companionship as she explored Boston. He admired the offerings of farmers’ markets and bookstalls with as much wide-eyed awe as he did the museums’ art and antiquities, and he offered shy smiles to passersby who paused to admire the handsome mother and son and to compliment her on her child’s good behavior.
    All the while, Junius resolutely avoided liquor. “If managing a company of vain, temperamental actors does not drive me to drink, nothing shall,” he sometimes joked, and Mary Ann would force a smile. She was glad to be with him, to see him sober and working, but it was increasingly apparent to her that at heart he was an actor, not a manager or a businessman. He thrived on enthralling audiences, not counting receipts and paying bills. Running his own theatre, whether in Boston or Baltimore or anywhere else, was not the panacea for the ailments of separation, loneliness, and intemperance they had fervently hoped it would be.
    Thus when Junius decided to resign from the Tremont Theatre atthe end of October and resume acting, Mary Ann did not object. When he was invited to perform at the Bowery Theatre in New York in early November, Mary Ann encouraged him to accept. “Come with me, you and the boy,” Junius urged, but she was suffering from a painful sore throat and fever, so she decided to remain in Boston with Frederick until she recovered enough to return to The Farm.
    Not long after Junius departed, Mary Ann’s affliction worsened, and within a day, Frederick too fell ill. A week passed in a haze of burning fever and cold sweats, of pain and exhaustion and delirium. She was vaguely aware of her landlady’s presence, of gentle hands holding cold compresses to her brow, of a firm voice commanding her to swallow the powders held to her mouth. She heard herself calling out for Junius, begging for Frederick to be brought to her.
    Eventually her fever subsided and the fog of illness lifted enough for her to realize that Junius was there, sitting in a chair by the side of her bed, trembling, weeping, his hands clenched around his head as if he wished he could wring misery from the brain within.
    It was then that she knew her precious child was dead.
    Grief threatened to finish what the disease had begun. By the time Mary Ann had recovered from the relapse enough to beg that her child’s remains be prepared for transport to The Farm so that he might slumber peacefully in the beautiful wilderness that had been his first home, his tiny coffin had already been beneath Boston soil a week.
    When she was strong enough to travel, Mary Ann returned to The Farm, seeking solace for her unspeakable grief in the hugs and kisses of her four living children. Junius—despairing, grieving, bewildered and shaken to find himself suffering a second time the worst anguish a parent could know—quickly embarked on another tour, hoping to lose himself in