Gob's Grief (22 page)

Before Will could speak, Gob’s mother raised her voice above all the others. She had been talking excitedly at Gob, pausing every now and then to embrace him. He suffered her hugs with an expression of perfect neutrality.

“All these years of wandering and wondering. The beautiful Greek has at last revealed his name to me. It is Demosthenes. Do you know what that means?”

“That’s Vicky’s spirit guide,” Miss Claflin whispered. “He is her mentor and her constant companion.”

“I don’t,” said Gob.

“It means that all my waiting is over!” Mrs. Woodhull said. “Now, now it can begin! Close your eyes, darling.” Mrs. Woodhull sat in her son’s lap and put her hands over his eyes. “There, don’t you see them? Don’t you see the great things that are coming?” Will closed his eyes, because everyone else was doing it, and saw the angel in his mind, and thought how her hair was red like Miss Claflin’s, and how, even as she had asked him again why he participated in abomination, he cherished lascivious thoughts of her.

“It’s another sign,” said Mrs. Woodhull, “that you’ve returned to your family. Isn’t it so good to be together again, all of us? Now we’ll all be together forever. Come, everybody! Come and embrace our sweet lost sheep!” Miss Claflin hurried down to the other end of the table and threw her arms around Gob. “I could squeeze you till you pop!” she declared. Blood put his hero’s arms around him, and Anna slipped her withered stick-limbs around his belly. Utica knelt down and clutched his leg, overcome suddenly with emotion and drunkenness. She wept against his pants. Big Malden put his long arms around them all and squeezed. Buck sauntered down and made as if to walk by the affectionate heap. He stopped and considered it for a moment. Then Will thought he would join the embrace, but instead Buck turned and backed his ass into the great lump of bodies.

Gob had disappeared entirely, and Will did not know if he should join them or quietly slip away. They chattered and squeezed and writhed and cried, and began to quarrel among themselves, saying, “You are squeezing too hard,” or “Let me have a grab at him, hog!” Buck was cruel to Utica, calling her a whore and saying that the only thing worth a damn in her had been her virginity, and wasn’t it a shame how she had ruined that herself with a carrot when she was eleven? Then Mrs. Woodhull’s clear strong voice rose up, saying would you blame a vegetable for your own hungry sin?

“Come along, Will,” said Gob, who was suddenly next to him. How he had escaped from his family, Will could not tell. They slipped away from the pile as it degenerated into individual quarrels. The grandmother called Colonel Blood a corrupter and a schweinehund, and attacked him with a potato.

“I’m sorry,” Gob said, when they were outside in the twilight on Great Jones Street. “They’re a rough bunch.”

There was a spirit, a young fellow dressed up in the fetching uniform of a Zouave, who made a habit of staring at Will, then scribbling on a pad of paper the same size as the plate which Frenchy always carried with him. Will thought the soldier must be taking notes on his behavior, in order to tattle to whatever otherworldly ministry exists to register such transgressions. Will only discovered that the spirit was not taking notes, but drawing a picture, when he was finally shown the finished piece. “Who are you, anyhow?” Will demanded, because he did not like the portrait, in which he was naked, and possessed of an embarrassment of stiff, dripping organs of procreation. They stuck out from him like quills on a porcupine. In twenty arms he held a variety of bottles, each one containing, he was sure, some foul liquor. “Did I commission this insult?” Will asked and looked away from the picture. He would have liked never to look at it again, but the spirit would put it in his way, so he’d have no choice but to see it where it hung on a stage, or in the hospital wards, or on a Broadway streetlamp where thousands of people passed it in a day, but did not know it was there.

“It’s very warm in here,” said Miss Claflin. “Is it always so warm?” She had arrived unexpectedly, and now was in Will’s studio sitting for a carte de visite. He’d answered the door in his shirtsleeves because he’d thought she was Gob, come over for another load of negative plates. “I’m here for my portrait,” she’d said, as if he had invited her. He’d hurried to dress himself properly while she poked about the studio, choosing a setting for her portrait, just a plain chair in which she sat sideways.

“You mustn’t talk, Miss Claflin.”

“Call me Tennie,” she said. “I insist upon it, and I won’t tell you again.” She was wearing a heavy-looking yellow dress, with a dark red wrap of silk thrown over her shoulders, hiding her arms and her hands, and her hair was coiffed up formidably on her head like a great pair of ram’s horns. Her oval face was aglow with perspiration.

“Hold still your head, Miss Tennie, or else your face will be all a blur.” Will thought of Frenchy’s blond hospital boy, with his blurred, cursing mouth. Tennie held still, and stared unblinking at Will, so he felt not at all hidden behind the lens and under the hood. But she was oblivious to the spirits around her. So much for her claim that she too, saw them, Will thought. Sam and Lewy Greely and Jolly walked around her, all of them peering and gawking as if they’d never seen a pretty lady before. Frenchy stood close by the camera, scolding. Will exposed the negative, counting out fifteen seconds, then put the cap back on. “I’ll return,” he said, and left to develop the plate. He found he was breathless, waiting just the few moments as he poured the developer down the plate. Then her image was there, ghostly and reversed. He went up to the roof to make the print in the sun, then came back to the darkroom to tone and fix it. A half hour passed before she was represented to his satisfaction, as pretty and bold in the picture as she was in real life.

“I think you’ll be pleased,” he said as he came out of the darkroom. “I think,” he continued, but then he quite forgot what he was going to say. Tennie C. Claflin had taken off her clothes and sat dressed only in her hairdo, in the very same pose as before, with her head still stuck quite securely in the stand. Her clothes seemed to have melted off her like spun sugar in a hot rain. All the spirits had fled, except Jolly, who had retreated against a wall, where he turned his face towards the ceiling but his eyes towards the lady.

“It’s warm, Dr. Fie,” Ms. Claflin said. “It’s so terribly warm.”

“Do you remember your first time?” she asked him.

“No,” Will said, turning in the bed so she could not see his face. “Not really.” But he remembered it clearly. It was not three days after he’d finished the glass house. He’d been walking on Broadway, followed by spirits. It was early in the night, but the prostitutes were already swarming. It had always been his habit, when they gestured at him, or when they called out something rude about his size, to ignore them. But this time, when one waved him after her down Grand Street, he followed. “Are you lost?” she asked when he approached. She stood just beyond the reach of a streetlamp, so a little light fell on her dress and her neck and her hair, but none on her face.

“Probably,” Will said. His stomach was all knotted up, the way it had always been during a hot fight, and just like then he felt quite certain that he had no say in his actions. His feet were walking after this bad woman like his eye and his hand had conspired to shoot his enemy, and when he had her against a damp wall in an alley, it was as terrible and inevitable as having the life of a Reb. He raised her dress up over her head, and the delicate but filthy material caught on her snaggly teeth as she smiled at him.

“I was seven years old,” Tennie said excitedly.

“An early start,” Will said, glad she could not see the dismay on his face.

“Vicky started even earlier. I was in Pennsylvania. Mama and Papa had sent me off to live with relatives, because we were so poor. Aunt Sally’s fruit spoke to me from the cupboard. ‘We are for you!’ they said. ‘Come in and have us!’ There were some wormy apples on the table, so I asked, ‘Aunt, where have you hid all the good fruit?’ She called me her darling and said the apples were the best she had, but I walked to the cupboard and I showed her. It was my sister Thankful, still a little girl as she was when she died, who spoke in the voice of a peach and called to me from the cupboard. After that, I heard her and saw her always. Wasn’t it that way with you? Some spirit you loved sought you out, and then you saw others?”

“No,” said Will. “I saw them all at once.”

“Well,” she said. “Why should it be the same for everybody? Oh, there she is now! There’s my Thankful!”

“I don’t see her,” Will said.

“You wouldn’t. She is only for me and Vicky to see.”

“Does she speak?”

“Faintly. She is saying, ‘I heard you talking of me.’”

Tennie began to have a one-sided conversation, talking of a place called Homer and agreeing that the orchard there had the sweetest apples ever. As she spoke, she seemed to forget Will, though she had him clasped firmly in her arms. Her conversation became a sleepy mumble, until finally she fell quiet. Will felt her twitch a few times. He lay awake as spirits came to visit, a procession of them like shepherds and animals passing by the sacred crib, gazing down on him and his lady acquaintance and smiling. He thought the angel would come again to scold him. She never did arrive, but long after all the other spirits had gone, the boy with the trumpet remained, hunched up in a corner of the ceiling.

“Avaunt,” Will said, to no effect.

The boy shook his head and blinked slowly, and Will fell asleep with him still up there, staring down.

3

“
ONE THOUSAND OF THE BEST MEN IN THE CITY
,”
SAID GOB
, “and two thousand of the worst women.” He and Will were about to go into the Bal d’Opéra at the Academy of Music, an annual affair notorious for its licentiousness. It was January of 1870, a warm night in what had so far been a very mild winter. Will feared that Gob’s machine was changing the weather, making it inappropriate to the season. Weather-making would suit the thing—that was something as dramatic and as large as the machine itself. It seemed, certainly, that it ought to do
something.
And yet it was plain to Will that the machine did nothing.

“Prepare to enjoy yourself,” Gob told him as they walked across Fourteenth Street and joined the crowd at the entrance to the Academy of Music. There were people in costume waiting to get in, and a crowd who had gathered to gawk at them. Will and Gob were accosted by an old man, a filthy preacher. “Going to see the delightful whores!” the man shrieked. Will could not tell if he and Gob were being condemned or congratulated.

Gob shook his wand in the man’s face and said, “Indeed.” He and Will were dressed alike in jester’s costumes, with bells on their caps, wands, and shoes, and with half-masks that sported obscene long noses.

Inside the Academy there was every sort of costume, some of which strayed considerably from the French theme. Will and Gob were not the only jesters, though only they had obscene noses. Will could not count all the Sun Kings and Marie Antoinettes, one of whom carried her head under her arm. A high-collared cloak gave her the illusion of headlessness. When she approached, he could see her eyes peeking out from where a neck ought to have been.

“Go and tell that woman that her morals have come loose,” Will said, pointing randomly at a woman sitting in a man’s lap near a mammoth champagne fountain on the stage. She was dressed as a seminude ballerina, in a tutu that left the whole of her legs exposed. Jolly, the only ghost present, was staring at her.

“You can tell her yourself,” said Gob, and they walked down to the fountain. It was made in the shape of Notre Dame. Will marveled at it, at how the champagne ran down off the high towers to trickle into a very abbreviated Seine.

“To loose morals,” toasted Gob, as he and Will took their first glass of champagne.

“To Parisian carousing,” said Will. “Wasn’t it Mr. Jefferson who said a little debauchery every now and then is a good thing?”

“Actually, I think that was my aunt,” Gob said. He turned his head to point his long nose at a box over the stage, where a woman dressed as a shepherdess was standing with two more naked-legged ballet girls and two men in plain evening dress. “There is my mother,” he said, smiling. Usually he scowled at her, but tonight, Will knew, he was in a very happy mood. He thought the building was going very well, and did not seem to mind that the machine did no apparent work.

Up in the box, Mrs. Woodhull waved her crook at them. Gob bowed. Will raised his glass to her. “Shall we go up?” Gob asked. Will said he would follow in a moment. He looked around for Tennie, worrying, briefly and irrationally, that she might grow angry at him for ogling all the loose women. But she was not a jealous person. The idea that they might be true to one another was ridiculous to her. Will would have liked for them to be married in spirit or practice, if not in name, but she would have none of it, and anyhow whenever he tried to be faithful to her he failed. Gob’s view of the situation was simple. “She is too much, my friend,” he’d say. “You should give her up.”

Will approached the ballerina, who had been abandoned by her lover of the minute and was staring forlornly at Notre Dame.

“Mademoiselle,” he said. “Aren’t you an actress? Didn’t I see you in
Mazeppa?”

“No,” she said, hurrying away from him. “I think you did not.” Will dipped his glass again and sat on the edge of the pool. He looked down at the bubbles clinging to the side of his glass, and it seemed to him that the way they let go and rushed up to burst at the surface must be like the motion of souls flying off of the earth. Jolly sat next to him, his head jerking this way and that.

“Not everyone has the good sense to appreciate a fool.” Will looked up and saw Tennie struggling under a gargantuan wig, fully four feet high, studded with boats and dolphins and, high above all, an angry golden sun face. “Do you like my coiffure?” she asked him.

“It’s large,” said Will. She smiled, cracking her pancake makeup. She wore a black silk mask over her eyes. She lifted it up briefly to wink at him and whisper, “It’s me, Tennie C.”

“I thought you were Mrs. Astor.”

“This wig will snap my neck, soon, and then my good time at the ball will be ruined. Well, I did not come here anyway to enjoy myself.”

“Didn’t you?”

“No,” she said. “I came tonight to observe. Vicky is going to write an article for Mr. Bennett and I am going to help. We will expose all these panting dignitaries who think a mask is shelter for hypocrisy.”

“Are there famous people here?”

“Oh yes.” She put her hands up a moment to adjust her wig. “But come with me, I need to steady my coif.” She walked over to a wall and leaned her head back against it. “There,” she said, taking the glass that Will offered. “Thank you. See over there? That Cardinal Richelieu is Mr. Bowen, of Brooklyn. And there, the musketeer who licks his lips so often, that is Mr. Fisk.”

“Is Mr. Whitman here?” Will asked.

Whitman was Gob’s friend. Gob had a plan for him. He’d use him as a battery in his machine, a horrifying notion, at first, to Will, though Gob was unperturbed by it. When Will suggested that it might be wrong to use Mr. Whitman so, Gob looked confused for the first time since Will had known him. “I don’t understand,” he’d said.

“Mr. Whitman certainly is not here,” she said. It was clear to Will that she admired the poet. “He would not come to a place like this. Are you an admirer or a detractor?”

“A detractor, I think. He is a fool who goes about in a costume and pollutes our literature with ceaseless exclamations.” It gave Will pleasure to insult the man, because he disliked the very notion of him. How could someone so thoroughly silly be so vital to the machine? Will had come to know that he was not himself a genius—not someone like Gob who could intuit all the possibilities of matter—but merely a hard worker, and he resented people like Mr. Whitman who claimed to approximate the divine function of creation when all they really did was take notes on the fevered wanderings of their undisciplined minds.

“I suppose there is no solidarity among fools,” Tennie said tartly. She nodded at a headless Marie Antoinette, who walked by just then and waved at them. “That was my friend Mrs. Wabash. And there is Madame Restell. The ball is made officially wicked by her presence.” Will looked at the pudgy little queen she indicated, wondering if it really was Madame Restell, the abortionist of Fifth Avenue. She raised an eyebrow at him as she passed.

“Anyhow,” Tennie said, “I must return to my work. You are charming but not famous, and I am already familiar with your vices. There’s Mr. Challis, the broker—I’ll follow him.” She stepped away from the wall, swaying under her wig. “Those antique French ladies, what necks they must have had!” She handed him her glass and went in pursuit of Mr. Challis, who was watering himself at the fountain. Will watched her strike up a conversation with him. She touched his arm and leaned on him. She spoke something directly into his ear that made him burst out laughing, so loud Will could hear it even at a distance.

On the floor, people were dancing, throwing themselves around with wild abandon. Jolly was among them, his eyes closed and his head thrown back rapturously, dancing unpartnered, unseen and untouched by the living. Sam had joined him. He beckoned to Will, smiling—he had become more friendly as work on the machine progressed. Now they were close, or at least he stood close sometimes, often just inches away. Will figured it a reward for his untiring work on the machine. He watched them for a little while. Their beckoning was more seductive than the flashing legs of the ballerinas. “They command you, don’t they?” Gob had asked once. Will hadn’t answered right away, but he had thought, Shouldn’t they? He was still a physician and a photographer, but though he still labored at these professions, they were no longer his work.

Days later, he’d answered Gob’s question. They sat close together at his long table, both of them eating directly from the same roast chicken. Gob said, “What will we eat, after we are successful? If cutting off the chicken’s head only makes it uncomfortable, then what are you left with for dinner? Cabbages?” Will put down his fork and knife and drew patterns on the table with his greasy finger.

“I think they command us all,” he said after a while.

Wheel, lever, pulley, wedge, screw—all through winter, Will mastered simple machines. Gob would present him with one and then demand that he describe its properties mathematically, and after a few months of Gob’s persistent tutelage, Will was able to build a machine of his own. Nothing like Gob’s engine, it was just a humble plumping mill.

One evening Will arrived in the workshop to find a gift of lumber stacked on the stone floor. From the pile he chose a pole, a slim birch trunk with the bark still on it. To one end of the pole he attached an ironwood mallet, to the other an oak water box. He then drilled a hole in the middle of the pole, and slipped a heavy dowel through. Will’s machine was a peculiar-looking thing—it might have been the weapon of some giant hairy god who lived in the woods, worshiped by animals and trees.

Back in Onondaga County, Will would have set his plumping mill up where it could catch the spray off the waterwheel that turned his father’s gristmill. As this was New York City, he set it up on Gob’s roof between two blocks of wood, and poured the water himself from a pitcher so big even he had to lift it with both hands.

Will filled the box. The weight of the water lifted the hammer higher and higher, until the angle was such that the water ran out of the open-backed box. Now the hammer fell with a dull thud against the snow-covered roof. It was hardly a glorious sound, but Will felt a glorious sort of joy when it worked. He filled it repeatedly, watching it rise and fall for hours, till the eastern sky began to lighten and he could better appreciate the handiwork of his little mill. He’d neglected to put a pestle under it. It pounded no grain into flour. Instead it had broken a hole in the snow. Will considered the black hole and imagined Sam or Jolly climbing out of it, and no sooner had he done so but there they were, smiling at him and silently praising his little contrivance. It seemed barbaric compared to the complex and mysterious thing in the room below him, yet they bowed to it all the same. Will kept filling the box, so the plumping mill, with its up-and-down motion, seemed to return their courtesy.

Sam came and stood next him, and leaned his head closer and closer to Will’s until they were touching, and when they touched Will became lost in the pleasant memory of standing with Sam when they were little boys, gazing down into the well behind their house. The sun shone full down to the water that particular noon, and they could see the snakes there at the bottom, twisting and curling over each other. “Ain’t it grand, Will?” his brother had asked, and they’d stood watching until the shadows returned to cover the water once again.

In March of 1870, Will and Gob watched as the first caisson for the great bridge was launched into the East River from a Brooklyn shipyard. Gob was fascinated by the bridge. The late Mr. Roebling had been one of his heroes—he had a little picture of his bridge over the Ohio, which he sighed over sometimes as if it were the portrait of a pretty girl—and he had exchanged letters with the junior Roebling, who’d taken over the work of building the bridge after his father died. Gob would go on about the principal of the caissons and how it related to their own work. The caisson was a giant house that sank down as men dug out its floor, falling slowly through silt and mud and bedrock until it rested beneath the earth, an empty coffin upon which the great bridge would stand its foot. Gob spoke of a caisson of the spirit, built of discipline and grief and despair, in which he and Will would sink down until they rested in the lightless depths of their own souls. Inspiration and success would proceed from that deep place, Gob said. To Will, this made a vague sort of sense, and he nodded, the way he always did whenever Gob made such pronouncements. Will could understand, certainly, that their work was not the work of contented or happy men.

The caisson was fascinating, regardless of whatever philosophy Gob attached to it. It was so very large. Will knew its dimensions because Gob had repeated them endlessly—one hundred and sixty-eight feet long by one hundred and twenty feet wide, twenty feet high and three thousand tons heavy. Yet it seemed much larger, and the sloping walls gave it an Egyptian feel, as if it might be the base of a pyramid or a pedestal for a sphinx. The roof was covered with air pumps and tackle and various other pieces of machinery which Will could not recognize. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Gob asked. There was something childish in the way he hopped restlessly from foot to foot, waiting among the crowd of thousands for the launch, which went off without a hitch. The thing fell gracefully down to the water.