Gob's Grief (32 page)

When Maci was a little girl, her father had put her under such severe intellectual discipline it made her mother cry. “You’ll ruin the child!” she protested, because John Murray Trufant had declared that he would train his daughter to have a brain bigger than that wielded by Margaret Fuller, a lady who had been his friend before she departed to Italy, never again to set foot in America. “It took a whole ocean to douse her incandescent mind,” her father told Maci, “but yours will burn brighter yet.” Maci, at the age of nine, wrote a sonnet called “The Wreck of the Elizabeth,” in which the Countess Ossoli’s shining head threw light in the eyes of fishes as she died, and seagulls lamented around the body of her soggy dead child after he washed ashore.

Maci hated Greek and was bad at Latin, but reading was her passion, and her father encouraged her in it even when her over-stimulated brain manufactured nightmares to torture her sleep. He buried her in Smollett, Fielding, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Molière, among others. He made her recite to him every night before bed, and gave her stern lectures to make it clear that he expected her to grow up to be more than a creature of habit and affection. Yet that was all he expected of her anymore, since his change and his madness. It made Maci bitter enough to spit.

Miss Suter passed the pricking test. She gave a little shriek—it was very much like the cry of a gull—and leaped up in the air, seeming just for a moment to levitate over the threadbare rug of the front room.

“Forgive me!” said Maci. She was listening intently for a noise of hissing air, but there was none. Could it be a pillow? she wondered.

Miss Suter had clenched her hands over her belly. “Not to worry, my dear,” she said. She’d become quite civil once she realized Maci was not a servant. She had even offered her a few dresses, but Maci declined. The lady’s taste was as defective as her reason.

Maci sat Miss Suter down on the sofa and fetched her some tea. She felt some small regret for the poke, which ballooned into something more formidable while she sat next to her and watched the lady stare into her cup. “I want us to be friends,” Miss Suter had said a few days before. “Of course you do,” Maci had replied in a frosty tone. Now, Maci almost wished she had been more receptive.

“Are you well, Madame?” she asked.

“Of course!” said Miss Suter. “It was a surprise, more than a pain, though the prick was fairly deep. I am not bleeding. Don’t think that I am.”

“And the … principle?” asked Maci. Very slowly, she placed her hand on the lady’s belly. Miss Suter made no move to draw away. There was flesh under Maci’s palm; it gave slightly when she pushed against it.

“She is well. She is proof against such little accidents.”

“Strange,” said Maci. “I think of the Infant sometimes as my little brother. Poppy calls it a boy.”

“Yes,” said Miss Suter. “The form is masculine, but the living principle which shall animate it is feminine. A wonderful union! We live in fascinating times, my dear.”

“Some would call them terrible.”

“Oh, she kicks!” Maci felt nothing under her hand, but she smiled anyhow.

She is fleeing her shame
, Maci wrote to Rob.
What would Aunt Amy say? A disgraced lady in our pathetic little home. Brother, she shares his bed. I said to Poppy that I thought he was behaving very badly. He called me his sweet moppet and told me that I would lose my doubt when the Infant breathes peace into the world. At night, I go in and look at the thing while they are sleeping. Little Brother has
grown considerably over the past months. I think he will outgrow his shed, soon. If he moves into the house, then truly I think I shall go back to Boston and Aunt Amy.

Rob had sent her another letter, and more sketches. Some detailed a month of camp life at Fort Norfolk (a parade ground pocked with stumps that made drill a chore; a loving portrait of his new Springfield rifle), while others depicted his progress up the James in a steamer called the
C. S. Terry.
There was a portrait of Private Vanderbilt with a view of Fredericksburg behind him; this went next to the other drawing. And there were drawings of which she could not make sense—a whole page filled to within an inch of the top and bottom with charcoal, a stray hand, large as life with hairy knuckles and scars on the fingers. She turned this one over and read on the back,
Pvt. G. W. Vanderbilt, his hand.
Then she realized that Rob was sending her a puzzle, a life-sized Vanderbilt she might put together on her wall. She assembled the pieces as best she could, building him completely down to his waist, except for a missing hand. She wondered if this was Rob’s neglect or a hideous wound.
He is by turns coarse and refined, polite and boorish
, Rob wrote.
He says his father’s spirit sometimes posseses him. I told him my father is possessed by spirits. I think he is my friend.

There was one good thing about Miss Suter—she had money. The Infant could have alpaca booties and a silver spoon to put in his mouth after he was born, and there was no more begging for flour from the neighbors while she was there. She took Maci shopping in Kingstown, where people were shocked to see a pregnant woman out in her own carriage buying groceries and dry goods, spools of copper wire and plates of glass. Maci was sure that a mob would come stomping up the road one day soon to burn their house and smash the Infant. At least I will look presentable for them, she thought. Miss Suter was making a dress for her, patterned after one of the dresses Maci had long since sold for necessities. Maci had talked about it wistfully, and Miss Suter had got it into her head to recreate it and make a gift of it to her “dear friend.”

While her father worked in the shed, Maci would sit with Miss Suter on the porch, eating the delicious cakes, muffins, and pies that the woman manufactured with a magical lack of effort. Maci had slaved and fretted over her greasy muffins and the tooth-breaking cakes she’d thrown over the cliff in frustration. Sitting thus on the porch, nearly a month after her arrival, Miss Suter ventured a question about Maci’s mother. “She was a generous woman,” Maci said, wishing that Miss Suter would not ask such questions; she was trying to think of Miss Suter as a spirit-sent servant, figuring that turnabout to be fair play. But Miss Suter’s earnest inquiries about her mother made such pretending difficult.

“She liked hymns of all faiths,” Maci found herself saying of her mother—she would miscegenate them shamelessly. She was partial to weeklies and monthlies, and followed events in France and England. Once, when Maci was seven years old, her mother had read aloud to her an article on the toilet of Russia. At Maci’s insistence she and her mother had dressed up like Russian women. They wrapped white cloths around their head, hung themselves with furs, and pinned jewels on one another. They danced around her mother’s room, chanting nonsense and pretending it was Russian. As Maci told this story, Miss Suter laughed so hard she spilled her tea. Maci laughed, too, until she caught herself enjoying Miss Suter’s company, whereupon she stopped and looked out over the water with a stony expression on her face.

We arrived in Washington too late to participate in the latest debacle at Bull Run. Now we are camped on Meridian Hill, awaiting orders. Private Vanderbilt is itching to go deal some trouble to Lee. He has taken the invasion of Maryland as a personal affront. I fear I jeopardized our friendship when I insisted Maryland was not Yankeedom, but we are friends again, now. He has offered me his belly band against the cholera. I declined, though we are rained on incessantly, and a goat has eaten much of my overcoat. Washington is not the least bit refined.

Here is the Private’s hand for you, clenched in anger against me. Here are his hips. If I sent his legs to Aunt Amy would you go there to fetch them? Go to her, won’t you? I think you are withering in that exile.

Maci pinned the ham-fist beneath the empty sleeve. The hips were handsome, she could not help but think so, though she felt hot and embarrassed looking at them. She took them down and put them under the bed, then just as quickly returned them to the wall. She could be a little wanton, here in the privacy of her room on the edge of the world. She sat at her desk and wrote to her brother.

Miss Suter is big as a house (not big as a Boston house, but mind you they build small in these parts) and I cannot think she carries anything but a big baby boy, though she insists it is a female principle swelling in her womb. She requires my help to get up and down the stairs. Some days she is too exhausted by her condition to do anything but lie abed and read novels. Papa spends all his days and most of his nights in the shed. It would be a disaster, he says, if the Infant were not ready when the spirit is born. You may be wondering what sort of doctor will be in at the birth. I wondered that too, until Miss Suter explained to me that good Ben Franklin (the Commissioner of Electritizers, you know) will be there. Of course!

“How I hate to see the summer wane,” said Miss Suter, as Maci escorted her down a narrow dirt road, lined on either side with chokecherry and beach roses. It was September. There were still blossoms on the rosebushes, but they were limp now and wilted. Though it was a warm day, Miss Suter shivered incessantly. She stopped to admire a great congregation of ladybugs swarming over the green leaves. Miss Suter put her hand among them and laughed delightedly when they crawled on her.

“Aren’t they lovely?” she asked.

“Poppy always said a girl ought not to play with creeping things.”

“But they’re delightful. They were the friends of my youth. I would lie in my mother’s garden and they would come to me. Sometimes they quite covered me up. If I listened close, I could hear them speaking, telling me what wonderful things were coming. My spirit guide also cares for them. She’s a young Indian girl—you put me in mind of her, though of course she is woodcrafty and you are not. I think you hold your head as she does. It is very regal.”

Maci had no reply. She often lacked for things to say, on these walks, but Miss Suter did not seem offended by her silence. Indeed, Maci wondered if Miss Suter even noticed her silence. Miss Suter was full of words—they were always leaking from her—and she took every opportunity to instruct Maci in spiritual matters. “This association,” she proclaimed down on the beach, poking delicately at the cast-off shell of a horseshoe crab, “this association, the Great Association of Beneficents, will greatly, wisely, and seasonably instruct and bless the diseased, the suffering, and the wretched of the earth.”

“Tell me,” Maci said, “will they instruct suffrage for women?” Voting was something that Maci wanted very much to do. When she was small she’d imagined that voting was equivalent with wish-getting—she thought a person could go out and vote themselves a fresh peach pie or a new bonnet. It still seemed to her like a great, vast power, an opportunity to execute startling transformations. “How we will change this country,” she’d say to scoffing Rob, “when our hand is on the tiller.” Before he went insane, woman suffrage had been one of her father’s devotions.

“Unfortunately not,” said Miss Suter.

I think I envy her
, Maci wrote to her brother.
It must be a comfort to believe such things. To believe that Heaven is as comfortable
and familiar as your own bed, and that your dog may accompany you there. To believe that the dead have organized themselves for our redemption. To believe that human folly might be dissolved in the exhalations of a good machine. To believe that our own mother might put forth her dead hand to shield you, Brother, from danger. Madness is seductive, pretty, and fat like Miss Suter, but shameful all the same.

Take care, my Zu-Zu.

In Frederick we were welcomed with the most incredible hospitality. Some good Marylanders took me into their house, where I had an honest-to-goodness real bath. I have stunk of lavender for the past three days and the boys all call me Roberta. These same Marylanders gave me lemonade to drink as I soaked in the tub, and there was no mention of the tyrant’s heel. I send you the tub and empty glass as proof of their hospitality, in case you should doubt it. Here, too, are the Private’s legs. Not long enough, I think, but I am getting short on paper.

Go to Aunt Amy.

Maci assembled Private Vanderbilt’s nether portions. The hips were made somehow more civilized by the addition of legs. He still lacked feet, and consequently seemed to float by her bedside. She put the glass of lemonade in his hand, in case he desired refreshment. The tub she put further along the wall to his left. Rob had drawn himself inside it, his arm hanging down to scrape the floor, his cheek resting on the porcelain edge, an allusion to a picture they’d seen in Paris, one thousand years ago before death and madness had smashed their family. Rob had even wrapped a turban around his head, in the drawing, in case she should be stupid and miss the obvious. It was, she decided, a horrible picture, and the first one she would not give a place on her wall. She took it down and set the edge in the candle flame, then held it by the window as it burned. When the fire was close to her fingers she let it go, and it drifted away into the dark.

M. Zu-Zu
,

I did not care for your tub picture. If you send me no more like it I would consider that a kindness. Arabella Suter continues to swell. I think she must be drinking up the oceans, to swell so much. We go down to the ocean sometimes and I watch her to make sure she does not drain the Sound dry with her red mouth.

There is the horn from Block Island blowing now—a mournful sound. I think sometimes it is a lament for lost sailors, a noise that says, “Stay away from these rocks,” and “I mourn you.” On windy nights, they say, if you stand on the edge of the cliff you can hear the ghostly voices, calling, “God save a drowning man!”