Gob's Grief (29 page)

“But I have been waiting for you. Spirits beg for masters. They want to be dominated, and those spirits who are my slaves have spoken of you, promised that a boy would come one day to learn all I could teach. Are you him? Are you the boy who would become a master of spirits, a magus, an engineer? Such a small mind. Such a yearning towards sloth. I think you must be made from your brother’s leftover material—there must have been something extra, but not enough for a whole proper boy. God made you, a half thing, a well-intentioned but poorly executed gesture. Perhaps it was your brother I was meant to teach. But you are sweet in your way. We will have to make do.”

Gob was not a prisoner in that house. He could have left, but he never tried to catch a train west to Ohio, back to his mama and his obstreperous relatives. He was there to learn, and he was learning, and the more he learned, the more he realized that he was laboring under a world’s weight of ignorance. And anyhow, whenever he remembered his mama, it was mostly to hear her laughing at Tomo’s death, and then he would feel fresh rage towards her.

Gob’s life was mostly work, but it was not all work. Sometimes the Urfeist took him out to restaurants or oyster bars. They went for rides in Central Park, racing against the sleek equipage of the Urfeist’s friend Mr. Vanderbilt. They saw plays. The Urfeist was a great devotee of Edwin Booth and Charlotte Cushman, and did not miss a production that featured one of those actors. The Urfeist was also partial to opera. He had one of those highly coveted boxes at the Academy of Music. During intermissions tastefully dressed people came to visit the Urfeist in his box, and he introduced Gob as his ward, the child of a cousin who’d died of cholera the year before, his last living relative. “What happened to his hand?” they would whisper to the Urfeist.

“A congenital deformity,” he’d reply.

“I am dismayed by current developments,” said Madame Restell. She sat next to the Urfeist at one of his to-dos. He threw dinner parties whenever news of a great battle reached New York. Ostensibly, he was celebrating the increasingly frequent Union victories that came in the spring of 1865, but Gob suspected his master was just celebrating the carnage. “Dundrearies, sluggers, muttonchops, burnsides, beavers. I think there is too much variety in facial hair—there ought to be a regulation. Some have ventured so far beyond the pale I shiver to think of them. I offer as an example the type of man represented by Mr. Greeley, and those hideous
things
that proceed from out of his collar. It makes me shudder!”

“I don’t think Mr. Greeley can be regarded as representing any type but his own, Annie,” said the Urfeist. This brought laughs from all around the table. The scandalous, rich friends of the Urfeist were lingering over port and cigars. They flouted convention by staying at the table, and the ladies partook with the men. Gob usually eavesdropped from the kitchen, where one of the servants always gave him a cigar of his own. But tonight Gob was in the dining room, standing just off to the side of the Urfeist, who had called him out to entertain his guests. Gob had been reading aloud from a report of the battle at Spotsylvania. One of the guests had interrupted him to say that General Grant ought to grow a beard, because it would hide his features, which were obviously those of a dipsomaniac. “He flaunts it, with his bare face,” said the guest. This prompted Madame Restell to make her comment on the chaos of facial hair threatening to undo society.

“That Grant!” said another guest. “An efficacious general, but he must be cruel. He’s who makes me shudder.”

“That Grant!” said the Urfeist, standing up and proposing a toast to him. “There is a man who is not afraid of death.” His guests all drank to that, but the Urfeist did not. “And what sort of man,” he asked them, “is that?”

“A hero,” came the reply, and “A leader,” and “A ruiner,” this last from a man who made his great living selling shoddy wool to the Union army.

“No!” said the Urfeist, with such vehemence that some of his guests flinched. He clutched his glass so hard he broke it, and Madame Restell gave a squeal. “What sort of man?” the Urfeist cried. “What sort!”

“A fool,” said Gob, wondering if the Urfeist would beat him in front of his guests, but his teacher laughed, and looked surprised at how he’d broken his glass and cut his hand.

His guests laughed, too, rather nervously, and the Urfeist said, “Forgive me, friends. The war excites me, you see. It excites me.”

“Chicago is the mud hole of the prairie. Do not visit there. Cleveland is better. There, elegant villas are surrounded by orchards and gardens. Cincinnati is a porkopolis: a fine place to live, if you are a pig. New York is really the only place to reside, except in summer, when one really must retire to the countryside. Make dumplings from 2 cups of flour, 1 teaspoon of salt, 1 tablespoon of lard, a cup of milk, 4 teaspoons of baking powder, and a pinch of child’s blood. These are light, fluffy dumplings—to eat them is to eat air. But stray from the recipe and you’ll eat lead. The holy names of God are: Dah, Gian, Soter, Jehovah, Emmanuel, Tetragrammaton, Adonay, Sabtay, Seraphin. A woman has a little piece of chicken between her legs by which you may rule her.”

On the Saturday before Easter, Gob walked down Broadway, on his way to Barnum’s museum, so completely absorbed in his thoughts that he did not notice the hush on the streets, or how some of the hanging flags had been draped with black, or how the rosettes of red, white, and blue had been replaced with black. It was late in the afternoon. He’d stayed up late, reading Della Porta’s
Celestial Physiognomy.
It was almost dawn before he went to bed, where he had uneasy dreams, not of the machine, but of his Aunt Tennie. She was weeping and he could not console her.

He was thinking, as he walked down Broadway, about Mr. Watt’s double-acting engine, about how it was such an improvement over previous models, since it introduced the steam from both sides of the piston. This led Gob to consider how every-thing he himself had built so far seemed to act only from one side. That, he was sure, was inappropriate and a waste, because he knew, suddenly, that his machine must run on such a double-acting principle. But he didn’t know what such a principle would be, unless it was that Tomo was dead, and yet he must not be.

Barnum’s was closed. Black crepe was strung around the door, and all the posters were edged in black. A large plaster urn was set on a granite pedestal by the door, and bore an inscription:
Dulce est pro patria mori.

“Poor Mr. Booth,” said Madame Restell, many days later, meaning Edwin. “I saw him in
Macbeth.
I think his anguish will inform that role, if he ever plays it again.”

“I think I would hide forever, if my brother did such a thing,” said another guest. “I could never forgive such atrocity.” The Urfeist had a funereal feast, on the eve of the arrival of the late President’s body in New York. Gob, trotted out again to amuse the Urfeist’s friends, wanted to say that a brother ought to forgive a brother any misdeed, any at all. He wondered if Tomo might still be angry at him.

Gob felt sick. He’d eaten too much, and the guests were making him dizzy with their demands upon his memory. The Urfeist had made him memorize the minutes of Dr. Abbott, the physician attending at Mr. Lincoln’s death.

“Eleven thirty-two p.m.,” said Madame Restell, continuing the game.

“Pulse forty-eight,” said Gob. “Respirations twenty-seven.”

“One forty-five a.m.,” said another guest.

“Pulse eighty-six. Patient is very quiet. Respirations are irregular. Mrs. Lincoln is present.”

“Six o’clock!” said an excitable lady. “Is he dead yet?”

“Pulse falling,” said Gob. “Respirations twenty-eight.”

“Seven o’clock,” said the same lady.

“Symptoms of immediate dissolution,” said Gob.

“Will he never die?” the lady asked.

“Patience, my dear,” said the Urfeist. “Seven twenty-two.”

Gob said, “Death.”

“Hate death. It is the only sensible thing to do. What pale thin shields the living hold up against him! Nevermore with anguish laden! Sweet rest! Let us cross over the river and rest beneath the shade of the trees! Let us recline in the dank grave. Let us become wispy hurting creatures. Let us desire flesh, sunlight, a cheek laid against our own, let us even desire the sting of a bee. Spirits will do anything for a taste of flesh—this is the wisdom of the necromancer, who does not love death, but hates it, hates how it lurks under every thing, every root and leaf, every creature’s skin. Every dumb child’s happy face is a mask by which death hides his own smiling face from the world. Do you know how death mocks us? A world is not fair that says, ‘Partake of these days while I ruin them,’ for what joy can you have when every last thing exists only so it may one day be taken away from you? Do we not want eternally? Do we not love eternally? Do we not hate eternally? Why then is death a miser? Why does he steal our allotment of forevers? Why does he lick me every day with his wet hungry gaze and say, ‘Though you still live and breathe, do you see how you are already dead?’ Do you see how you could spend a whole life grieving for your own self? Don’t you hate him, my ugly one? If only you weren’t so ugly and stupid, if only you could make a determinate motion to wound smug death. If only you were not destined for laziness and failure, for dreams instead of works.”

“They say she is a female Wendell Phillips,” said the Urfeist, speaking of Mrs. Burleigh of Brooklyn. He’d brought Gob to see her lecture on the condition of children in society. All part of his continuing edification, the Urfeist assured Gob, who felt tricked. He’d been under the impression that he was being taken to see handsome, inspiring Anna Dickinson, not some lesser-light nobody from across the river.

Mrs. Burleigh was lecturing at Association Hall, under the aegis of the Sorosis Club, which sounded to Gob like an association for the diseased. Organ music played as the audience got settled, and Gob watched Mrs. Burleigh, red-faced, vital-looking, and pregnant, sitting quietly at the foot of the stage. Her tapping foot disturbed her skirts in rhythm to the music, until a thin, birdlike woman arose from the audience to introduce her as “the very best friend of our nation’s children.” This brought a rush of applause from the audience, and a cry of “Huzzah for Ms. Phillips!” from the back.

“My name is Burleigh, thank you sir!” said Mrs. Burleigh. She bowed her head a few moments, as if in prayer, and then spoke: “The general principle acted on in the world is that children have no rights which we are bound to respect!”

She elaborated on this bold statement while Gob shifted in his seat, too restless to care if the Urfeist punished him later for squirming. “What has she got to do with the machine?” he asked.

“Hush,” said the Urfeist, and gave him a sharp poke in the side. “You will see.”

“Quiet and care are essential to a child’s welfare,” said Mrs. Burleigh. “Cigar-smoking fathers and gin-drinking nurses are to be avoided. Heavily corseted mothers set a bad example. The groping uncle is anathema in any family not set on the ruination of its children.”

The Urfeist frowned and reached into his pocket. He removed a silver box about the size of his palm. When he opened it, Gob saw that it was full of a fine yellow powder, and thought it must be sulfur. He moved his face over to take smell it, but the Urfeist pushed his head away roughly. “It wouldn’t do,” the Urfeist said, “to have a sniff.” He set some on his palm and raised it to his lips, then blew it towards Mrs. Burleigh.

“What is it?” Gob asked.

“Watch,” said his teacher. Their neighbor in the hall, a lady in a pink hat and a wine-red velvet dress, hissed at them. The Urfeist brought a handkerchief to his face and breathed through it, and indicated that Gob should do the same. All around, people began to sniff and wipe their eyes as Mrs. Burleigh detailed the plight of American children, depicting them as hapless, abused innocents. People began to weep openly. The lady in the wine-red dress lost her scowl, took a deep breath, and uttered a series of quick little sobs.

“Yes, weep!” said Mrs. Burleigh. “Weep, as the chimney boy cries out ‘Weep, weep’ for his living and his plight! We are every one of us their tormentors!” She was weeping, too, throwing tears from her face with rough swipes of her hands.

“What did you do?” asked Gob.

“It’s your hideous face,” the Urfeist said, smiling. “Which brings strangers to tears.” The situation was deteriorating. Mrs. Burleigh’s chest was heaving, even as she warned against the dangers of too much kissing of children. She decried it as an invasion of bodily privacy.

“They are not your kissing-dolls, Israel. Oh no, they are not!”

Gob was careless with his handkerchief. He breathed the tainted air, and felt overcome by sadness. He began to cry, not in tribute to the woes of childhood, but because it seemed to him in that moment that every last thing in the world was unbearably sad.

“What did you do?” he asked again on the way home. “What is that yellow powder?”

“A simple concoction,” said the Urfeist. “I will demonstrate its making.”

“It makes people sad?”

“No. It makes nothing. It releases sadness. Every last creature is sad. Do you know why?”

“They miss their dead.”

“No!” he said. He looked around him for the paddle, and when he could not find it, gave Gob’s head a slap with his naked hand. “No, it is not that they miss their dead. Not that they mourn their beloveds. They mourn themselves. They are sad because they know that they are going to die.”

In May of 1865, Gob got an idea from a dream of dead soldiers. A great company of them lay in an open grave and chattered their teeth. How cold they are! Gob said to himself, and he wondered how to warm them. He could not figure that out, but it did occur to him that the noise of their teeth was very much like the noise of a telegraph. He knew the code, and listening very carefully he made out a message—
Bring us back.
Gob woke from the dream, rushed into his workroom, and started work on a spiritual telegraph.

Like most first efforts, it was a failure. But he worked on it for months. The Urfeist chose to escape the city that summer. “It will be a good year for cholera,” he said. He packed up his kilt and his hat and his shirt and admonished Gob to read a book a day while he was gone. He had made selections and stacked them in the library.