Gob's Grief (39 page)

“Was it an animal? Did an animal bite you?”

“A congenital deformity,” he said. “You’ll notice that I share it with my grandmother. But won’t you come down and celebrate, Miss Trufant?”

“I prefer not to,” she said. “In fact, I am sleepy. Good night, Dr. Woodhull.” She gathered up her papers, shook his hand—the whole one—and went upstairs to her room. By the time she came to her room she’d become so weary that she lay on her bed without undressing and fell immediately into a dream, in which she and Dr. Woodhull were back at the reservoir, sitting with their bare feet dangling in the water. He had an abundance of hair on his toes.

“Do you believe in love, Miss Trufant?” he asked her. “Do you believe it is more than a gratifying delusion?”

“Free Love?” she asked.

“Any kind,” he said.

“Well,” she said, getting up from where they were sitting and walking away rapidly on her wet feet, suddenly remembering that she had to find Mrs. Woodhull. “In fact I do not,” she said softly. Dr. Woodhull had hurried after her and was walking with his face very close to her own. “I do not believe in it at all.” Mrs. Woodhull dropped down out of the sky to land in front of them without a sound. Maci reached out and touched her face, and woke to her voice.

Mrs. Woodhull and Mr. Tilton were on the roof. They had a bower there, to which they retreated nightly. Mrs. Woodhull was berating Mr. Tilton for going on about how his wife and Mr. Beecher had wounded him. They began a spirited argument, but just as they seemed ready to start screaming like Claflins, their voices cut off, and presently Maci heard Mrs. Woodhull crying out in a high voice, and Tilton shouting, “Praise, praise!”

Maci had gotten into the habit of listening, rather than closing her window, just as she listened sometimes at Tennie’s door when she was entertaining her large friend Dr. Fie, or some other friend, large or small. Tennie seemed to take them in all sizes. Maci pretended that she was exploring a mystery with her shameful listening. She’d write down the words she heard, the cries that sounded plaintive, frustrated, angry, relieved, and then arrange them together in sentences of strident lust. And, sometimes, when she had been lying in her damp sheets for an hour listening to the lovers on the roof, she’d consider finally taking a ride on the pony, which Tennie had solicitously moved into her room, insisting that Maci had greater need of it than she did. Maci had sat on it once, the little bump put just in the place it was meant to go, and taken a few exploratory rocks. She’d dismounted immediately, covering the thing up again with its slip of silk, and then with two wool blankets on top of that, to hide it completely. She never got on it again, but on the hottest nights, when she could hear the lovers so very loud on the roof, she thought of riding the pony to a strange, new place, with her book open in her hand, reading aloud as she went.

Is it because Adam sinned to keep company with Eve? Is it because intelligence can only become perfect through suffering, as the earth can only reach a perfect state through storms as well as sunshine, and the soul can only reach a perfect state through storms of sorrow and despair? No, I think it is for no reason, or, at the least, for no good reason. I do not believe that we are hallowed by sadness. I do not believe it is sufficient answer, to say we are justly punished by death, or to say that we die because we die.

Maci kept busy, all through the summer of 1871, organizing Victoria Leagues. They were Maci’s own idea, associations, formed all over the country, whose purpose would be to promote Mrs. Woodhull’s bid for the Presidency. Maci recruited members from out of Mrs. Woodhull’s parlor parties, from subscribers to the paper, and from brokerage clients. And, sitting at a table in the third-floor study, she wrote an anonymous open letter to Mrs. Woodhull, care of the
Weekly.

Madam, a number of your fellow citizens, both men and women, have formed themselves into a working committee, borrowing its title from your name, and calling itself The Victoria League. Our object is to form a new national political organization, composed of the progressive elements in the existing Democratic and Republican parties, together with the Women of the Republic, who have hitherto been disenfranchised, but to whom the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the Constitution, properly interpreted, guarantee, equally with men, the right of suffrage. This new Political organization will be called The Equal Rights Party, and its platform will consist solely and only of a declaration of the equal civil and political rights of all American citizens, without distinction of sex. We shall urge all women who possess the political qualifications of other citizens, in the respective States in which they reside, to assume and exercise the right of suffrage without hesitation or delay. And we ask you, Madam, to become the standard bearer of this idea before the people, and for this purpose nominate you as our candidate for President of the United States, to be voted for in 1872, by the combined suffrage of both sexes.

Across the table from her, Mrs. Woodhull wrote back a long, elegant, and somewhat demure letter of acceptance.

Maci had by this time understood completely that nothing would come of Mr. Tilton’s association with her employer except the fatuous biography he had written, a fawning, spineless thing that damned Mrs. Woodhull with abundant praise. It was widely mocked because it detailed all Mrs. Woodhull’s spiritual transactions, telling how Demosthenes was her mentor, how Josephine was her spirit sister, how all Mrs. Woodhull’s utterances were dictated under otherworldly influence.

Not concerned anymore about Mr. Tilton, Maci exercised her organ of worry on Mrs. Woodhull’s Communist enthusiasm. Mrs. Woodhull had thrown herself into the leadership of Section Twelve of the International Workingmen’s Association, not caring if she was lumped together with the Paris revolutionaries, who were widely regarded as repulsive monsters. Maci reminded Mrs. Woodhull repeatedly that no one but a Communist likes a Communist. It was to no avail.

In August, just when she was afloat on a tide of hot, Communist distress, Maci received an invitation from Dr. Woodhull.
We must discuss my mother’s situation
, he wrote to her.
We are not alike, she and I, but I have always known that she will achieve great things, if she is not brought down by her wilder sympathies. Come and meet with me at my house, No. One E. 53rd St.

Mrs. Woodhull’s house was very noisy, so Maci was glad to leave it for a while. Because Tennie was campaigning for a spot in the New York State assembly, the house was full of prospective German constituents, who in the weeks previous had serenaded Tennie outside her window. Now they played their brass instruments inside the house, and there was nowhere a person could escape the splattering music, which was silly as Tennie was silly, and as her light-hearted, completely unserious campaign was silly. Maci went out into the dreadful heat without even telling anybody goodbye.

The younger Dr. Woodhull lived way up towards the park, where enormous houses were popping up with ever greater frequency. Maci’s hair was hanging wet and stinging in her eyes when she rang the bell, but when the door opened she shivered in the rush of cool air that poured out onto the marble steps. Dr. Woodhull stood in front of her with a pair of ice skates in his hands.

“You’ve come!” he said. “I wasn’t sure you would.”

“It was serious business in your letter.”

“The letter!” he said. “Come in and we’ll speak of it. Mind your way.” Maci slipped when she stepped into his unnaturally cool house, but he caught her arm and held her up. “That meeting has been canceled, after all,” he said. “It has been postponed in favor of a skating party.”

Maci might have reminded him it was August, except she could already see how the floor was covered with ice.

“I thought it might please you,” he said, “because it is so hot, and because you are from Boston. Don’t they all love to ice-skate in Boston? Come and skate with me, Miss Trufant. The ball is up. It’s a private pond. Nobody will disturb us.”

“You have deceived me,” Maci whispered. It occurred to her that she should be angry at him for drawing her into his house with false pretenses, but she was wonderstruck at the ice, and it was all she could think about. “How did you do it?” she asked.

He tried to explain about the copper pipes under the ice, and how liquid ammonia, as it expanded to a gas, could steal heat from water. “It’s really very simple. It’s how they make ice in the factories.”

The drapes were drawn all over the house. She could see very little besides large, dark shapes that leaned in the corners. Maci thought they might be furniture. She and Dr. Woodhull glided from room to room, through open doors into a dim parlor where a hundred mirrors reflected her shadowy, floating image, into a dining room where the table was pushed on its side against the wall, and where Maci caught her skate on a frozen apple. They didn’t talk, except when Dr. Woodhull pointed out an obstacle. She collided with him repeatedly. Even when they stopped to rest, standing in a wide, blank room whose purpose, before it became a skating pond, Maci could not figure, she drifted towards him and collided with him softly. “Excuse me!” she said, backing away.

“It’s the floor,” he said. “It slants.”

On her third pass through the mirror-parlor she skated closer to a large shape to investigate it. It was partly sunk in the ice. When she got right up by it she could see that it was a giant gear, like what might turn a house-sized clock.

“What is this?” she asked. “Why do you have this?” Dr. Woodhull was not in the room to answer her question, though he’d been skating at her side just moments before. She went looking for him, thinking she might have dreamed this already—searching for him in a dark, cold house, floating like a ghost—but knowing that she hadn’t because this was stranger and suddenly more terrible than any dream she’d had. She wandered through his house, tottering awkwardly, once upstairs, with the skates still strapped to her shoes, going from room to room, discovering old furniture, tall stacks of moldering books, and everywhere gears and rods and pieces of shaped glass, machine-spoor the sight of which made her stomach twist up in a knot. With the sense that she was wandering at her own peril she went up and up, compelled to open every door until she reached the top floor. She stood in the abandoned conservatory, and made the mistake of leaning against a withered potted tree, which tipped and fell, and broke in half when it struck the floor. She hurried clumsily from that room, and went through the only other door on the hall. Then she was in Dr. Woodhull’s bedroom, where she found him sitting quietly on his bed.

“Why are you crying, Miss Trufant?” he asked her, after he’d thrown open the other iron door and brought her in to see the sprawling thing he kept behind it.

“It is too, too much, Dr. Woodhull,” she said. “Too, too much.” Because it really was too much, for such a thing to happen once, and too, too much for it to happen twice, for her brother to introduce her again to an unsuitable boy, and for somebody else’s life to be wasted in the construction of an impossible and useless machine. It was clear to her then that she should sit on the bed and calmly remove her skates, then run frantically out of the room, down the stairs, and out of the house. She ought to run right back to Boston, because she would proclaim herself an irredeemable fool if she stayed and ignored the lessons of her ridiculous life.
Dear Aunt Amy
, she wrote in her mind as she stood there,
Here I come!
But she didn’t go anywhere except deeper into the room, following her left hand as it yearned towards the machine, closing in a fist around a hot section of pipe. Something beat through it like blood.

“Do you like it?” he asked her.

“I despise it,” she said, but her hand would not come free, and she feared, in that moment, that it never would.

3

YOUNG DR. WOODHULL INVITED MACI TO AN INDUSTRIAL EXPO
sition in September of 1871. She went, though it was obvious to her that there was nothing she should like less than a festival of machines. Tennie rushed to accompany them when she learned Mr. Whitman was to be seen and heard. As they stood together in the little crowd at the Cooper Institute, listening to Mr. Whitman read a poem, Maci thought she understood why the poet and Dr. Woodhull were friends. Mr. Whitman was another engine-lover. He’d even imagined a muse for their new mechanical age, a dame of dames who would supersede Clio and her sisters. How she must clank when she moves, Maci thought, and stink of oil and coal smoke.

Mr. Whitman, with his big gray beard, reminded Maci of her father, though her father had the voice of a man used to giving sermons, and Mr. Whitman squeaked his poem like a mouse. On the stage, the poet waved his thick arms in broad, warm gestures of invitation, and spoke:

“I say I see, my friends, if you do not, the illustrious émigré.
Making directly for this rendezvous, vigorously clearing a path for herself, striding through the confusion,
By thud of machinery and shrill steam-whistle undismay’d,
Bluff’d not a bit by drain-pipe, gasometers, artificial fertilizers,
Smiling and pleas’d with palpable intent to stay,
She’s here, install’d amid the kitchen ware!”

It went on and on, as laborers abandoned the work of putting up the exhibits and came over to listen. Maci liked it much less than the poems she’d read as a girl. It’s Gob Woodhull, Maci thought, whose acquaintance makes people less than they were. He’s poisoned Mr. Whitman’s muse, altered her so smoke pours out of her ears and she leaves wet oily spots wherever she sits. Gob, Gob, Gob, she’d say to herself sometimes, thinking how it sounded like the noise made by irritable intestines. She would have preferred not to think of him or his machine, but despite those wishes she spent many hours in consideration of both.

“I cannot,” she had replied, when, standing in front of his machine, he had asked her to help him complete it. She had laughed in his face when he told her his ambitions for the thing, when he claimed it would abolish death. She thought he would cry, and this pleased her during those furious, confused moments after she was introduced to his secret. But the laugh was directed at her own life, and not at him. She hadn’t meant to be cruel. With her left hand still fastened to the pipe, she considered that she might be able to help him, after all, though not in the way he suspected. Here at last was not only punishment, but penance suitable for Infanticide: she might save Dr. Woodhull from his delusion, and show him how the complicated assemblage that he revered was only a pile of stuff.

Maci went among the industrial exhibits arm in arm with Tennie, while Dr. Woodhull and Mr. Whitman walked ahead of them. “See how he goes like a bear?” Tennie asked her. “But he is as gentle as a deer.”

“Gentler, I think,” Maci said, because Mr. Whitman seemed to her eminently gentle and sad, not at all the stomping, shouting fellow suggested by the poems for which she’d suffered a beating so many years before. “As gentle as a plant,” Maci said, as they passed into a stand of rubber furniture.

“It’s not bouncy,” Tennie said, sitting down in a hard, ornate chair. “Still, I like it very much. It’s just the sort of thing I’d like to have in my corner.” She refused to walk any farther. Maci left her there, amid a crowd of workmen who’d been drawn to her as if by a scent. Walking on, Maci overtook Mr. Whitman, who’d paused, and seemed to be admiring Dr. Woodhull as Dr. Woodhull admired a candy vat.

“I think science is his religion,” Maci said.

Mr. Whitman turned to her and looked earnestly into her eyes. It was rare for Maci to be unable to meet a gaze, but she found herself compelled to look elsewhere. She considered how Mr. Whitman’s shirt, open at the neck, allowed white hair to curl out at her.

“What is
your
religion, Miss Trufant?”

“The religion,” Maci said, “of earthly reform.”

“I think you made that up just now. One day this spot will be holy. ‘Here Miss Trufant founded the religion of earthly reform!’” He laughed, and Maci found herself laughing with him.

“Very well, Mr. Whitman. Let me clarify. I do not hope for Heaven, except as we can approximate it on earth. I am not religious.”

“Your life must gape like a hole,” he said. Maci thought this a harsh accusation to make to a practical stranger. Yet he laughed again.

Dr. Woodhull had turned his attention to a mechanical thresher, and was touching it affectionately. Maci said, “I say science is his religion because I think he is overfond of machines. Don’t you think it is possible to be overfond of machines?”

Mr. Whitman said nothing for a moment. Thinking he might be a little deaf, Maci was about to repeat her question when he spoke. “Has he shown you his … thing?” he asked.

“You mean his engine? He has. I think I must have been the last person in the world still ignorant of its existence.”
Now it can be told!
her hand had written, when she went home that night in August, and had proceeded to bore her with the particulars of its construction. Maci discovered, in the next few days, that every Claflin knew about the engine, though none of them would talk much about it. Tennie would only say that she thought it was wonderful and sad. Mrs. Woodhull said it was her son’s work to build, as it was her own work to reform. Even Dr. Fie knew about the thing. Indeed, he was assisting in its assembly.

“Then you are not fond of it, Miss Trufant?”

“It is a functionless machine. It is, as you say, a thing, and not to be liked or disliked.” Maci was tired, suddenly, of engine-talk, and decided to alter the course of their conversation. “But I did like your poem,” she said, though she hadn’t really.

“Then you should take it.” He held out his copy to her, folded up to a square the size of his palm.

“Oh, I couldn’t,” she said. “I certainly couldn’t. I’ll get a copy from out of the papers tomorrow.”

“No, please,” he said, his voice rising. He angled his head to meet her eyes again, his stare rude and intense. “I want you to take this, too.” He reached for her with the paper, pressing it against her hand, then letting it go.

It fell to the ground. Dr. Woodhull, returned from his close examination of the thresher, picked it up and presented it to her silently. “Walt,” he said, “come and see the sewing machines!” He ran off, scampering like his boy, Pickie. Mr. Whitman followed him, and Maci looked down at the dirty old piece of paper he’d made a gift to her. It was full of writing, front and back, used and used again until every inch was covered with ink. She unfolded it and brought it up close to her face to read the poet’s script. On the front was the poem, on the back, a list:
John Watson (bed
29
), get some apples; Llewellyn Woodin (bed
14
), sore throat, wants some candy; bed
14
wants an orange.

Dear Aunt Amy
, Maci wrote in another unsent letter.
I am doing well here in New York, proceeding sensibly from day to day and living a good honest life. I know, Aunt, that you worry about me, and that to your casually observing distant eye it may seem that my urge towards free thinking has plumped into actual vice, and that I am engaged in
foolish, scandalous, even dangerous behavior. Let me reassure you that this is, in fact, not the case.

He is a magus
, her left hand wrote, creeping over with an extra pen to crowd her right hand off the paper.
And though he is small, his hips are handsome.
She pushed the hand away.

Yes, I associate with him. Yes, I am alone with him in his house. Yes, we are awake till very late in the evening. We discuss science and mortality and politics. He has got a keen interest in his mother, for all that he pretends indifference. He hates her, I think, because she is not like him, because she does not spend her whole life stretched on the grave of his dead brother. She works in the world to change the world, while he cloisters himself in a decaying mansion and wastes his obvious talents making his grief for his brother manifest in iron and glass and copper. I tell him as much, and he says, “I like how you are honest with me, Miss Trufant.”

I cannot make you believe in his work, but he can make you believe in his work. You believe in his mama as she changes what can’t be changed, why can’t you do him the same favor?

How comforting it would be
, Maci wrote to Aunt Amy,
to believe that the whole war happened for reasons more cosmic than political, to believe that all the war’s deaths could be undone, that Rob and all the others died only so they could come back to us. But Aunt, comfort is a clue to falseness, and the ease of a thing can make it not so.

Sister, you don’t believe in anything good.

“I will create a distraction,” Mrs. Woodhull told Maci, “while you do the deed.” They had a plan to cast a vote in the November elections of 1871. A whole contingent of women, accompanied by a few male reporters, marched down from Thirty-eighth Street to the polling place for the twenty-third district of the twenty-first ward, a furniture store on Sixth Avenue. While Mrs. Woodhull, with Tennie by her side, made what came to be known as her “Rats and Spiders” speech, Maci made a lunge for the ballot box. Her shooting hand felt to her like a bullet, and she suspected it would kill any man who got between her and the vote that day. But the attendant—a Tammany thugee, Maci was sure—slapped her hand down, scattering her tickets whole feet from the box.

Maci thought, later, that if she’d only had both hands functioning at the time of her attack on the ballot box, she might have performed some dexterous switcheroo to confuse and defeat her adversary. But for weeks her left hand had been immobilized in a split and wrapped in thick white bandages. The senior Dr. Woodhull had indulged her when she claimed to have sprained it. “What injury there is, is not severe,” he said, turning her hand over in his skeleton claw. But he did as she asked. “Please,” she said, “would you bind it up a little more? The bandages are a comfort.” Three times he tried to stop when her hand was still not sufficiently wrapped, but she urged him on. She liked to put the hand on the desk, next to the paper and the pen. It would flop and twitch. “Is there something you wanted to tell me?” she’d ask it.

“Next year, my star,” Mrs. Woodhull told Maci, after her failure, “I know we will succeed.” Mrs. Woodhull led the voting party back to her house, where she fed and liquored everyone while they waited for news of the returns. Maci sat by herself on a bench secluded by ferns. A reporter found her there.

“What have you got to do with all this?” he demanded. Maci decided to lie to him.

“My mother,” she said, “is a leader in the woman suffrage movement. I may not tell you her name—suffice to say that she is a member of the Boston Coven. Do you understand my meaning? What I am saying is that she may be Lucy Stone, or she may not! Anyhow, Mother is a great and secret admirer of Mrs. Woodhull. She has called her an apotheosis and the Jean d’Arc of Woman Suffrage. Yet publicly she excoriates Mrs. Woodhull for her social theories, even as she embraces them in her private behavior. Is this fair, sir? I think it is not, yet family loyalties keep me from speaking out. I know only too well how blood is thicker than water.”

“Are you an admirer of Mrs. Woodhull, then?”

“Is the sun a round ball of fire?” She asked him for a glass of water, hoping to sneak away while he fetched it, but he returned in an instant with champagne for her and whiskey for himself. He interpreted Maci’s exasperated sigh as an invitation to sit next to her. It was Tennie’s fault that the male reporters of New York expected a kiss from any lady who resided at Number 15 East Thirty-eighth Street, because Tennie was always drawing them aside for kisses.

“Clark is one hundred to Bradley’s sixty-five,” the man said.

Maci thought, Next he will ask me to show him my ankles. Two times before, reporters had asked her that, thinking she was Tennie. Once, on a whim, Maci had obliged, but she could not master Tennie’s maneuver, a standing skip and hop that flashed the ankles so briefly men were left wondering if they had been revealed at all. Maci had merely lifted her hem. The reporters had gone away from her disappointed, and, she thought, a little embarrassed for her.

“I’ll dash your hopes,” Maci said.

“Pardon?”

“A dash of hope. Perhaps Tammany is doomed, after all.”

“How did you injure your hand?”

“It’s a casualty of our war. I bruised it assaulting the walls that imprison my sex.”

“Let me kiss it, then. To speed the recovery.”

“Please do not,” Maci said, but he was already bending toward her big white mitt, which twitched and knocked him in the nose. He straightened up with his hand over his face.