By Thomas Shess, Author of Cantina Psalms and Tough Love.
John Wilkes Booth was not stopped by a soldier’s bullet.
He was not stopped by Providence in thunder, nor by a warning whispered into Mrs. Lincoln's ear, nor by some sudden tightening of security in the corridor behind the President's box.
He was delayed by vanity. That was all.
A young woman asked for his autograph.
She was one of the understudies at Ford's Theatre, not yet famous, perhaps never to be famous, though she possessed the mien confidence of a young woman who had already been noticed often enough to know that notice was a form of currency. Her name was Roberta Woodward and on the night the President came to see the play Our American Cousin, she stood backstage in a blue dress with a ribbon at her throat and a folded playbill in her hand.
She saw Booth before he saw her.
Everyone saw Booth. That was his curse and his nourishment. The handsome actor moved through the backstage corridors as if they were partly his property, partly his stage. He knew the walls, the turns, the stairways, the smells of gaslight and dust and greasepaint. He knew where men would step aside for him. He knew which doors stuck and which ones opened with the slightest pressure. He knew, most importantly, that fame made an assassin almost invisible.
No one challenged his celebrated face.
Roberta Woodward did not challenge him either.
She admired him. "Mr. Booth?"
He stopped.
The interruption was so small that history nearly overlooked it.
Booth turned, and in turning lost the first few seconds.
"Yes?"
"I beg your pardon," she said. "I know you are in haste." He nodded that he was. Every nerve in him knew the hour. Every calculation had been made. The laugh would come. The line producing a huge laugh would cover the shot. The corridor would be empty enough. The leap from the stage would be possible. The horse by the rear stage door would be open.
But the woman was beautiful. In fact, grandly beautiful. She was immediate, young, bright-eyed, and close enough to the stage lamps that a gold edge touched her cheek and hair. She held out the playbill. "I wondered if you might sign this for me."
Booth was taken aback by her blondeness then by the playbill for the current play in her hand. Then at her smile. Then, fatally, at himself reflected in her admiration. "Of course, I'll sign, but I'm not a star in this play."
"Does it matter? I know your work?" she asked. "I saw you in The Apostate."
Booth relaxed, smiled. "Are you an understudy?"
"Yes. A volunteer. I'm hoping for a chance."
That cost him more time. "We all paid our dues," he said. "It is the only thing saving actors from acute vanity."
She laughed softly, not too loudly, not cheaply. A woman who wanted an autograph from John Wilkes Booth knew enough to make him feel witty. "Then I shall remember that from now on," she said. "But I confess I'll remember you the most."
He took the playbill and started to sign it.
"Do you know," she said, "I had hoped to meet you properly one day."
"Properly?" Booth asked. "There is no such thing backstage."
"I have never asked for an autograph before."
He glanced up. There it was. The smallest flame. The familiar invitation. The little human tribute every actor lives for and pretends not to expect. Booth let the silence linger. "Miss," he said, "you have the advantage of me."
"I doubt that."
"You know my name. I do not yet know yours."
"Roberta Woodward."
"Miss Woodward?" It was a question not a repetition. He said her name one more time, as if testing how it might sound from a stage.
"Roberta if you prefer."
"I rarely prefer propriety," Booth said. "But I admire it in women who can make it appear temporary."
She smiled again, but missing the boldness of what was said.
Because she smiled, he began signing the playbill. "Are you here alone?"
"I'm in the company of Dr. Charles and Sarah Taft. Sarah is my aunt. They're in the audience."
A lesser man might have scrawled his name and gone. Booth, however, was not a lesser man in the theater. He was worse. He was a performer who believed every pause existed for his use. He searched for a better surface, found a small table crowded with pins, rouge, a cracked hand mirror, and a cup gone cold, and wrote with a flourish: To Miss Roberta Woodward, whose kindness may yet improve the American stage.
"You are generous," she said.
"I am accurate." She stood near him now. Near enough to smell tobacco, cologne, leather, but not the faint metal edge of anxiety he had buried beneath charm.
"Then I shall keep it, proudly" she said.
"You must not show it to unworthy men."
"Are there any other kind?"
He laughed despite himself. That cost him the last of his margin. The stage echoed with laughter. The crowd of 1,700 howled at a witty retort coming from the stage. He heard it.
"That was from a line by Mr. Harry Hawk," she grinned. "Do you know him?"
"Forgive me," he's a hack." His hand stopped in the air, still holding the pen. He knew the rhythm of that play the way a cavalryman knows the rhythm of hoofbeats. He knew the line he wanted. He knew the roar that was meant to cover him has been wasted. He had arranged the crime around the sound of laughter and applause, and now applause had become something that brought him back to his night's task. He handed back the playbill. "Keep that," he said.
"I shall."
"I've noticed you're arriving late, Mr. Booth. It's already Act III."
"Ah," he said, reaching for one last scrap of the performance, "no one arrives late in the theater. He merely chooses a better entrance."
"Then you chose well, Mr. Booth."
"I most certainly did. I met you." He bowed. Not deeply. Just enough. An actor's bow, practiced into reflex. "Alas, good night, sweet princess."
Roberta Woodward played along by dropping a little curtsey, half-mocking, half-sincere. For one absurd second they were not deadly plotter and understudy, not history and interruption, but man and woman in the warm disorder behind a stage enjoying the unexpected banter.
Then he left her. His smile vanished before he reached the first turn. The corridor ahead narrowed. The boards beneath his boots gave their small, familiar complaints. He passed a coil of rope, a ladder, a painted flat, a heap of costumes left in shadow. His right hand brushed the pocket where the pistol lay. His left moved once against the knife at his side. Breath entered him and would not settle. He had rehearsed this walk. Now each step had weight. He moved from the feverish life of backstage toward the colder passages that led upward.
The sounds changed as he went. Behind him were whispers, hems of dresses, prop men, gaslight, the warm vanity of actors waiting for cues. Ahead of him were stairs, walls, closed doors, and the muffled body of an audience laughing without knowing what depended on its laughter.
The first stair creaked beneath him.
He stopped. No one called out. No one followed. From above came the dim vibration of voices through wood and plaster. The play continued. The nation continued. The President continued breathing.
He climbed.
One step. Then another. At the third step he heard a woman laugh from inside the theater, a clean laugh, free of politics, and it came to him with the force of insult.
All evening he had imagined the audience as scenery for his act. Now it seemed separate from him, alive without his permission.
The fourth step turned sharply. He placed his hand against the wall. The plaster was cool. For an instant he saw Roberta Woodward's face again, the playbill in her hand, his own name drying across it. The image angered him because she had no place in the planned design of how the evening would transpire.
Beauty had no place in a plot once the plot had begun. Admiration had no place in murder. Yet he had accepted both.
The fifth step. The stairwell seemed longer than he remembered.
The sixth. The pistol grew more obvious.
The seventh. He could hear the play more clearly now. Lines came through the doorways in broken pieces, then a pause, then the audience responding. He tried to place the dialogue within the scene. He tried to repair the clock in his mind. He had missed one big laugh. Perhaps not the laugh. Perhaps there was still time. Theater forgave timing if the actor had nerve enough.
The eighth step. His boot brushed grit left by other patrons. He nearly slipped, caught himself, and froze again. A man moving toward glory should not stumble on dust.
The ninth. At the landing, he saw the corridor. It stretched ahead in a low wash of light, quieter than it should have been. Curtains moved faintly in air disturbed by doors opening and closing elsewhere in the building. The passage to the President's box lay beyond, familiar, available, waiting as it had waited in his imagination.
But it was not empty.
Booth took one more step, then another, slow enough now that he could hear the blood in his ears.
At the far end, before the closed curtain that led to the Lincolns, two men stood side by side. They were not theater men. They were not actors, ushers, idlers, or hangers-on. Their coats were dark. Their shoulders were squared. Their faces were plain and alert in the poor light. Each held himself with that particular stillness that belongs to men who do not need to announce weapons because weapons have already announced them.
Pinkerton agents.
Armed. One stood with his hands folded loosely in front of him. The other kept his right arm close to his body, as if trained never to let a stranger know the exact distance between hand and holster.
The curtain behind them was closed. Beyond it, only a few feet away, Abraham and Mary Lincoln sat with their guests, removed from death by cloth, wood, two wary men, and the minutes Booth had wasted on a young woman's smile. He stopped so abruptly that his heel struck the board behind him. The taller agent looked at him first. Then the second. Neither spoke at once. That was worse. Neither made the easy mistake of recognizing the famous actor and softening into admiration. They simply looked hard. They took him in from hat to boots, face to hands, coat to posture. Their eyes did what trained eyes do. They asked questions without sound.
For one moment, Booth's entire body refused the fact before him. He had been late. The world had changed in the minutes he had given to Roberta Woodward's eyes and his own name on paper. Someone had thought better of the President's safety. Someone had sent men. Someone had closed the gap through which murder meant to pass.
John Wilkes Booth had been discovered. Instinctly, he spun on his heels to head back toward the steps. The pistol in his pocket became suddenly not destiny but evidence.
The taller agent said to Booth's back, "Can we help you, sir?"
Booth's mouth opened. He could have acted. He had spent his life acting. He had played noblemen, villains, patriots, lovers, sons, doomed men. He had made audiences believe anguish he did not feel and courage he did not possess. But there, in that corridor, with two armed men looking at him and the President alive on the other side of the closed curtain, the actor found no line. "Sorry," Booth said over his shoulder: "I'm in the wrong..."
He never finished the thought. He moved away before the agents could ask the question that would have ended him. His boots carried him back down the stairs, past the landing, past the walls that seemed now to lean inward with contempt, past the stair that had creaked beneath him and the corridor where his entrance had died.
He passed the coil of rope and the painted flats. He passed the table where the ink still glistened faintly on Roberta Woodward's playbill. He did not see her again. Perhaps she had gone to her dressing room. Perhaps she was watching from some shadow, pleased with her treasure and ignorant that she had just delayed a bullet.
Perhaps she had already tucked the playbill away, hearing applause through the walls and thinking only that John Wilkes Booth had smiled at her as if she mattered.
Booth left Ford's Theatre by the unplanned front doors. He dare not turn the corner and step into the alley for his waiting horse. He hurried away into the Washington he knew well. The city shouted, laughed, sang, and wept under the gas lamps. The city did not know it had been spared. Horses stamped at their traces. Men in uniform staggered arm in arm with civilians who had spent four years hating war and that evening loving victory. Somewhere a band debauched a patriotic air with great enthusiasm.
Booth avoiding the street, breathing hard, moved into a tavern.
Behind him, Abraham Lincoln laughed at a line in a play. The sound never reached Booth.
Roberta Woodward heard it. Another big laugh made her laugh as well. It turned out to be a good evening. She met a famous actor and she held her own in a bold conversation with a real man.
Inside the theater, the play went on to its harmless end. The President rose afterward to an ovation he did not seek but could not refuse. Mary took his arm. Box guests Major Rathbone and Clara Harris followed. Two Pinkerton men walked near enough to be noticed by those who noticed such things.
Behind the backstage curtain, Roberta Woodward rolled the signed playbill and tucked it into the little pocket inside her cloak. Years later, when she discovered this night's playbill in a garment trunk in the attic of her son's home, she didn't give it a second thought and dismissed it along with other moldy trash. She barely remembered being 18 years old backstage at Ford's Theatre, on the night President Lincoln attended Our American Cousin.
No authorities would question her whether John Wilkes Booth had seemed in a hurry that night. No one asked whether he had accomplices. And so the great calamity did not occur. The President went home tired but living.
The nation woke wounded but not orphaned. Reconstruction remained hard, bitter, compromised, and human, but it began with Lincoln still breathing.
History seldom knows whom to thank.
As for Booth, he drank at the rooming house he had retreated to. He counted his comrades returning, one by one. confused as to what went wrong? What happened, they asked in different ways.
"I missed my cue," he slurred. The assassin had arrived too late. And the smallest possible hinge upon which a country could have turned occurred unbeknownst to the world.
Fate changed, however.
Sharply, at 11 p.m. four months later in mid-August. Father Abraham was struck down when an assassin fired from behind a tree as the President rode alone on horseback along Rock Creek Road, returning from a late dinner at Willard’s Hotel. He never reached the Soldiers’ Home, his summer retreat north of the City.
The murderer has never been apprehended much less identified.
That night in New York City, John Wilkes Booth was on stage at Mary Provost's Theatre starring in Shakespeare's Richard III.
Fate regrouped.
Denied one entrance in April, found another in August.
***
OTHER FICTION BY THOMAS SHESS
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