Gob's Grief (24 page)

Will considered a fresco on Mrs. Woodhull’s parlor ceiling: it depicted Aphrodite surrounded by her mortal and immortal loves. They were clothed, but the goddess had exposed herself fully, and any guest who cared to stretch back his neck could gaze on her nakedness. Tennie was going on about Mr. Whitman. She got overexcited on his behalf whenever he was nearby. Gob had brought him to a party given in September of 1870 by Mrs. Woodhull in honor of Steven Pearl Andrews and his massive brain. Mr. Whitman was walking around the room with his hostess, having just left, thank goodness, Will’s company and Tennie’s, and still she went on about him.

“I had a vision,” she said, “in which he grew out of the ground like some wholesome weed. He was a green man, with daisies and bluebirds in his hair. Little animals came out of the forest to play about his feet.”

Will rubbed his chest where Tennie had given him a little shock. It hadn’t hurt, but it was always a surprise, when she did it. He wanted her to do it again.

“Let’s go upstairs,” he said. “I’m tired of this party.”

“Already? Mr. Andrews hasn’t even arrived.”

“Let’s go away,” he said. “Let’s go away tonight on a journey. Have you been to Canada? It’s a foreign country, you know.”

“I’d heard,” she said, and gave him a look that he knew too well. It said,
I’m bored with you.

“Do you see how he walks?” she asked, staring after Whitman. “Like a bear, heavy and shambling and careless.”

“He is a magnificent creature,” Will said hollowly. “He is a kosmos.” He thought of Gob. They’d argued, earlier, because Will had made disparaging remarks about Whitman. Will had said this whole kosmos business seemed to him a senseless honor and an unearned distinction. “Who named him Kosmos, anyhow?” Will had asked. “Was it his cat? Is he also the Marquis of Carrabas?” Now, Gob was nowhere to be seen.

“I know you hate Mr. Whitman,” Tennie said, and went away in search of punch. He watched her go, leaning to speak a word or two into the ears of various men as she passed them. Mr. Challis, the licentious broker, was not at that party, yet Will found his thoughts drawn towards the man and colored with jealousy. When he was with her, when he came half awake in the night and she was wrapped all around him, when her hair lay heavy on his face and the very air he breathed was flavored by her, then he got a feeling that she surrounded him utterly, and this was a notion that comforted him and agitated him. He would think of her as a beautiful house, one entirely unlike Gob’s house, a place without secret basements where bones hung in chains from the ceiling and swayed and clanked in sourceless breezes. In his mind, he would go from room to room, each one stuffed with bright trinkets, and find way up top a machine whose purpose was the manufacture of delight. It was good to wander there, to look at her machine and listen to its noise, which was the noise of her snoring, chortling breath. Yet inevitably he encountered other men as he wandered in the rooms, always there were others who tended her machine, men who were strangers to him, who, when he opened a door and surprised them where they lounged in the supremely comfortable furniture, peered at him and asked, “Who are you?”

“Are you sleeping, Dr. Fie?” asked a lady who had come up and stood silently next to him. Will thought it was Mrs. Woodhull, but when he opened his eyes he saw that it was Miss Trufant, a girl who was her secretary and aide-de-camp in her war of reform. She was dressed up like her mistress in a skirt and a masculine coat.

“No, I’m quite awake,” he said.

“Mr. Andrews will stimulate you, if you are sleepy. I think he must be the most intelligent man in the world.”

“I think that person is Dr. Woodhull,” said Will, because he’d promised Gob he’d say flattering things about him in her presence. Gob had a giggly, schoolgirlish affection for this small, dark person. “What do you think of her?” Gob would ask over and over. “Do you think she is pretty?”

“I think you are besotted with that fellow,” she said. “Tell me, Dr. Fie, does Dr. Woodhull keep the stars in his pocket? Can he bring down the moon to give you as a good-evening present?” She smiled.

“Don’t you admire him, too?”

“Oh, I am indifferent to him. But I think two persons as devoted as you two should marry at the earliest convenience.” She folded her hands in front of her. Will looked down at them, noticing how they had a particular quality of loveliness—he thought how it must be difficult to make two things so perfect and small. She put them behind her back. “I said that in jest, Dr. Fie. But now I think I have offended you.”

“Not at all,” he said, but she was blushing, and she turned the conversation to the subject of the Fourteenth Amendment and its bearing on woman suffrage, something about which Will knew nothing at all. Very soon, she excused herself, saying she had to seek out Mr. Butler. “Yes,” he’d tell Gob later, as he always did, “she’s very pretty.”

Mr. Whitman got ill standing in the rain watching the funeral procession of Admiral Farragut. Will, when Gob brought him in to consult, diagnosed pneumonia, because Whitman’s lungs were wet as sponges. The patient insisted it was an old sickness contracted during his time in the Washington hospitals, and that the rain had weakened him and made him susceptible. He asked to be bled, because that always improved him when this illness was on him. Gob gave him an elixir and put him in one of the huge beds at Number 1 East Fifty-third Street, in a room that hadn’t been opened in years. Whitman got sicker under their care, feverish and delirious, calling out in lament for David Farragut, and then for a variety of persons. He mumbled names: John, Stephen, Elijah, Hank, Hank, Hank. “Dr. Woodhull,” he moaned. “How is my fever-boy?” Even Will tried to comfort him, putting his big hand on Whitman’s hot sweating head and saying, “Hush, sir.”

Gob bled him over Will’s objections. It was a surprise to Will, because Gob had always protested that bleeding a patient was only ever as helpful as biting him. “It’s what he wants,” Gob said, another surprise, because it was a fundamental rule of doctoring that the patient’s wishes were generally irrelevant to his care. Gob wielded a scarificator like a practiced leech, and bled his patient into a white porcelain bowl. Will half expected the man to bleed light or perfumed air, but it was ordinary red blood that seeped out of his veins. When he was done, Gob let Will do the bandaging while he transferred the blood to a green glass flask, and added a powder which he claimed would keep it from clotting up. “Yes,” he said, swirling the blood in the flask, “this will certainly be useful.”

As winter came, Gob kept saying they were nearly done building, but Will never believed him. It didn’t seem grand enough, the thing they’d made over these two years. It wasn’t much bigger than Will himself, and though it was complex and strange-looking beyond description, still it did not seem strange or complex enough. So he kept protesting, “It’s not enough.”

“Enough of what?” Gob would say.

“Of … what it is.”

Gob would laugh, and go back to his tinkering. It looked like a fashionable angel now, because the masses of cable looked like wings, and because the body of the thing flared out in the back like a bustle. Its arms held aloft a great empty silver bowl, just under the canopy of negative plates. Gob had adjusted his gaselier to burn acetylene. The gas, which they made themselves from water and calcium carbide, gave off an acrid, garlicky odor. When lit, the gaselier threw off painfully bright light that fell through the plates, and the images were caught up and focused into the bowl by means of lenses hung on wire so thin they seemed to float like bubbles below the picture negatives. “What goes in the bowl?” Will asked repeatedly, but Gob said he didn’t yet know. He said he’d dreamed the bowl, but not its contents.

Gob found the answer in December. Though there were hundreds of batteries already scattered around the room, Will made more, and he had been making them all night when Gob burst into the workroom at dawn, his face still puffy and creased from sleeping, to declare that he had at long last learned what went into the bowl.

That night they went to dinner at Madame Restell’s. “She’s been asking me to dinner for years,” Gob said, just before they walked the two blocks down Fifth Avenue to his neighbor’s house, “but I have always declined. She was my master’s good friend, and like an aunt to me, you know, yet I have neglected her. I don’t regret it—I have aunts enough as it is, and they cause me sufficient distress, thank you. Anyhow, I sent her a message this morning, and the reply came immediately. So perhaps I am forgiven.”

Madame Restell was delighted to see Gob. “How you’ve grown!” she said. At dinner she ignored Will to ask Gob about his life. He told her about his work at Bellevue, but failed to mention his mother, or, of course, the machine. He said he and his friend Dr. Fie were writing a textbook of anatomy, that their specimens had been destroyed in an unfortunate fire, that they had a publishing deadline and only blank pages where they should have drawings of fetal anatomy. A delicate favor, he admitted, but could she possibly accommodate him?

“Such a young man,” she said, “and already at work on a book! Oh, you will be distinguished just like your uncle. How he would be proud!” Of course she would help, she said. She partook heavily of the sweet wine she kept at her table, and grew tearful when she talked of Gob’s old teacher. “Sometimes I pass by the house, and I find myself climbing the steps, and only when I am standing at the door, about to ring, do I remember that he is gone. Oh, he was taken in his prime!”

“But Auntie,” said Gob. “You should ring the bell. You certainly should.” When she embraced him, he looked at Will over her shoulder and rolled his eyes.

After dinner, she took them downstairs into her basement office. They did not loiter in the finely appointed rooms where she received clients or performed procedures, but quickly passed into an unfinished back room, and went past rack after rack of dusty wine bottles to a group of barrels set aside in a little corral. A single gas jet was burning low on the damp wall.

“Here we are,” she said. “How many do you require?”

“Just one,” said Gob. She had pushed back the sleeves of her dress and taken a pair of tongs from where they hung on the wall. She lifted the top off a barrel marked
Pork
—that was to fool the postal authorities when she shipped out specimens to medical schools all over the country, charging, as she did, outrageous prices.

“Just one? I have them to spare. Let me give you two or three. Or let me give you four. It is no imposition, my dear.”

“Only one, thank you. Just whichever is freshest.”

“Ah, that would be young Mr. Tilton. Or rather, little Mr. Beecher.” She replaced the barrel’s lid and went to another, and as she fished out the abortus from the brine she gave its history. It was not her habit to betray confidences, but she was drunk now, and overcome with nostalgia for her old friend and his ward, so she talked freely of how she had helped Mrs. Tilton and Mr. Beecher eject from the world the consequence of their love. Will caught a glimpse of glistening pink flesh as she put the boy into a plain gray hatbox. She looked in for a moment before she put the top on. “A beautiful specimen,” she said. “Almost whole. And I know you will draw him beautifully. He will live on in that way, at least. Come upstairs. I’ll wrap him for you.”

Walking home with the hatbox wrapped up neatly in white paper like a purchase from Stewart’s, Gob told Will how in his dream his mother had summoned him to her house on Thirty-eighth Street. She received him in the conservatory, where she sat under a little tree that still had its autumn colors, though it was winter in the dream as it was winter in the world. She sat for a while, not speaking, and Gob sat next to her silently while the little tree dropped its brilliant leaves between them.

“This is a dream,” she said, suddenly and matter-of-factly. Then she reached under the bench and brought up what Gob thought at first was a jar of his grandmother’s marmalade—it was red and yellow, the very same shades as the settling leaves of the tree, and it was in just the kind of jar Anna used for her preserves. But when he looked closer at it he saw that it was a little fetus, and he knew it had been canned fresh out of his mother’s womb. “Here,” she said, “is your brother. This is your brother, come back to us at last.” He’d reached to take the jar from her, because he was overwhelmed with the feeling that he must take it and cherish it always, but in his haste he dropped it. It cracked on the bench, and the unfinished child fell out in a burst of orange-and-red liquid. It rolled among the fallen leaves, where it kicked and squalled.

From out of that dream, Gob woke understanding what they had been missing all these months. The machine required flesh and it required blood. Blood would catalyze the return, and Gob knew that it was the purpose of the machine to harness the energies of loss and grief and bring them to bear on the silver bowl, to call back a spirit—his brother’s—and see it installed in flesh. And he knew that once this was accomplished, the walls between the dead and the living would become weak and soft, because the law that declared there was no return from death would be broken, and this law was the foundation of the walls that kept the dead out of the world. The machine would reach through the weakened wall and pluck them, one by one, back into life.

“It’s so simple,” he said. “Don’t you think?”

Will said nothing. He only held the box and kept walking, trying to ignore the reek of blood and pickles that rose from it.

Gob pored every day over heavy books out of the library—books that looked hundreds of years old and were not in any language that Will could recognize, let alone read. Gob would exclaim every now and then as he read, while Will played with the engine, testing the light or making adjustments to the picture negatives, rearranging them by theme—belly wound, amputation, advanced decay. He put the fetus, as Gob directed him, in a glass jar full of brine, and sometimes he would sit and watch it, expecting it to move an arm, or swing its head to look at him.

They began one evening in late December, a few weeks after their visit to Madame Restell. Gob put on Mr. Lincoln’s hat and surrounded the engine with symbols and words drawn with colored sand on the stone floor between the batteries. Some he copied from the old masters he’d studied, some were his own creations. At midnight, he emptied the child from the jar to the bowl. Then he walked around the machine, stepping over the wires and glass string that led in from the outlying elements—boxes and batteries and pieces of mirror. He walked around once for every year of his brother’s life on earth, then walked back the other way once for every year that he had been dead. He poured out the blood from the green bottle into the bowl, and immediately it began to spin and sing. When Gob signaled to him, Will threw a switch to activate an arc lamp—they’d given up on acetylene, too, as not sufficiently bright, so now, beneath the ornate gas chandelier, they’d installed an electric light. It sparked up and glared above the negatives, throwing images into the bowl and down onto Gob.