Gob's Grief (18 page)

Will had no answer. In the silence, Jolly took his hand and put it over his chest. Jolly’s heart was fluttering. “Is it beating?” Jolly asked him. “Am I alive?”

“Yes,” said Will, and took away his hand.

“Sometimes I wonder.”

The images look like portraits of ghosts. They are pale where living people are dark, dark where the living are pale. When the sun passes through the glass negatives, it is like a visitation from beyond, the way they shimmer and glow. At night, when he goes into the unfinished house with a lantern, the backing darkness makes ambrotypes of the images, and the dead take on the tones and shades of the living. It makes sense to him that it should be so, that the dead should be more solid, should look more real at night, and that the day should make ghosts of them.

Frenchy had new hope, which stemmed from a new plan and a new technique. He had determined that he’d failed to capture the boy’s departing soul because his medium was insensitive. He needed a better collodion—hadn’t Fox-Talbot’s calotype process been similarly insensitive, hadn’t it also been defective? He was gone for two weeks in June, consulting with a learned gentleman in New York. When he returned, he had a new collodion formula. It was the same as the old one, except he added three drops of a liquid from a mysterious-looking blue bottle. The liquid looked and smelled like whiskey, and Will was tempted to smash the bottle.

Will and Jolly got separated in the last day’s fighting at Gettysburg, of which the Third had more than its fair share. Will got called away by Frenchy, whose mule had died in the quartermaster-seeking overshots of the Rebel artillery. Will himself pulled the wagon while Frenchy screeched at him to hurry. Ambulances and sutler’s tents were meeting their ends all around him. Will and Frenchy fled down the Baltimore Pike until they came to a place of comparative safety, where they waited amid a crowd of other fugitives. Frenchy’s powerful letters of recommendation helped him to appropriate a new mule. By the time Will got back to the Third’s position on Culp’s Hill, it was almost night. He spent the evening looking fruitlessly for Jolly.

On the Fourth of July, Will ventured out into the rain with Frenchy. For the first time, they saw many boys from the Third dead on the field. There was a boy, one of the first Will had met, who as they waited in the train to leave Syracuse had asked Will to do him a favor. “Hey, Goliath,” he’d said. “Give me a boost.” Will had hoisted him through the window, thinking for a moment he’d had a last-minute change of heart and was going to desert prematurely. There were women clustered around the train, come to bid goodbye to the boys of Onondaga County, and all the boy had wanted was kisses. Will held the fellow by his boots as he puckered his lips up obscenely and meshed them wetly with the wanton lips of three, five, and then ten different women. In the end, Will had dropped him on his head, and so lost his first friend in the regiment. He was a little fellow, whose lips were wide and thick. On reflection, Will understood how he might feel pressed to kiss excessively with them. Now they were gone, torn away by a bullet or a fragment of shell. Each time Will stepped in wet, soft places on the field, he worried that he’d trodden upon those sensuous lips.

Frenchy had just scolded Will for moving a pile of dead into convincing “as they fell” positions—he was supposed to be looking for the dying, not playing with the dead—when Will uncovered a living Reb. The Reb opened his gray eyes and began to squall when Will grabbed his arm. “Don’t bury me!” he said. “I ain’t dead, you son of a bitch!” It was a marvel, though, that he was alive. His belly had been opened, and his guts were spilling promiscuously from the wound. “Go away,” he said to Will, once it became clear to him that Will was not going to bury him. “Ain’t it enough that you killed me? Why don’t you leave me in peace? My granny is coming up to get me. She’ll be here soon. She doesn’t care for greasy Yanks, and one who shines and stinks like you would offend her.”

“I’ll take you to the doctors,” Will said.

“No,” said the Reb. Frenchy came waddling up excitedly.

“You beautiful boy!” he said to the Reb.

“Leave me be,” he said. But they wouldn’t. Will cleared away the bodies from around the boy and Frenchy gave him sips of whiskey from a flask. As Frenchy set up his camera, the boy put down his head and seemed to sleep, so while Frenchy wasn’t looking Will picked him up and carried him back to a hospital tent. The boy woke and began to scream horribly, and Frenchy screamed horribly, too, honking and honking as Will hurried away with the prize. Will held the Reb tight, lest something vital spill out further and drag along the ground. By the time he had reached the hospital, the boy was silent and dead. Will put him down on a door set on two saw-horses, which had lately served as a surgery table. Had Will felt anything leave as he walked? Had a spirit passed through him? It would have felt like a chill, he was sure. But he had felt nothing. He sat there for a long while, not wanting, anymore, to assist Frenchy in an enterprise that now seemed stupid and vile and immensely rude.

No matter, though. Frenchy was dead, when Will went back to him, shot through the chest as he was taking a picture. Jolly had been his subject, dead now, too—though Will was certain that he had been mostly alive for his portrait. Jolly had no obvious wound on him. Will thought he must have died of sadness and uncertainty, but when he looked closer he could see that Jolly had been shot in the thigh. He’d crossed his legs demurely, as if to hide the wound. His brow, when Will laid his hand on it, was still warm, but even as he knelt there it grew cold. For a little while he knelt with his hand on Jolly’s head, thinking of his friend dying all night long. Will’s eyes were closed. He was waiting for someone to shoot him. He wanted to say something but seemed to have forgotten, for the moment, every word he ever knew. His mother intruded into his mind, then. She dragged her green sofa onto the battlefield and reclined upon it. She gathered Jolly into her lap and cried out, “Where is it written that a woman has got to bear such a load of heartache?”

Frenchy’s camera had fallen over, but the plate inside was safe and whole. With the plate closed up in a box, Will walked to where the new mule had taken the wagon, a few hundred yards away. Under the yellow light, he poured the developer over the plate and waited for the image.

There is Jolly’s long face, his lips turned down in a frown. His eyes are open. His head is resting on his arm. He is pointing at nothing. He has wrapped his mouth around a piece of grass. Something is rising from him. It looks like a bit of dark mist in the shape of a wing.

In the Wilderness, and at Spotsylvania, at Cold Harbor and Petersburg, the Third saw the elephant abundantly, and it trampled them. Frenchy would have had many opportunities to take his world-changing picture. Brave or foolish behavior got Will back into the Tiger Mess—he saved some lives and became better liked. He wanted friends, all of a sudden, as immediately and as intensely as he had not wanted them before. He would still smash your whiskey, but that became something they could overlook in the dwindling fraternity of Company D. The boys all got in the habit of writing their names and the addresses of their families on slips of paper, which they pinned to their shirts before they went into battle. Will had a slip pinned to his shirt, but it was not his parents’ address—he didn’t want even his dead body to go back home. Instead he’d written,
Sam, here I come.

Will had many near misses. It seemed that bullets wanted to touch him. He got grazed on his arms and legs, along his scalp. He lost an earlobe. But he never got a serious wound, though he felt at last that he was ready for one. Jolly’s picture, which he kept in his knapsack by day and under his head at night, cheered him. Such a spirit-shape might rise from him, when his bullet finally found him. Such a spirit-shape as rose from Jolly might have risen from Sam, might abide in some place free from the heavy cares of the war and the world.

Generous Frenchy had made up a sort of will, which he would have changed, no doubt, had he lived after his assistant betrayed him at Gettysburg. He’d left instructions with Captain Brower. In the event of his death, Will was to have his cart and all it contained, as well as a big brass key, with an address at which one could find its lock. Will sold the cart. The new mule went back to its former owner, from whom Frenchy had bullied it. Will kept only the key and Jolly’s negative.

After the war, Will went to Brooklyn, where his key opened up a musty photography studio on the fourth floor of a building in Fulton Street. The rent, he discovered, was paid through the next two years. He walked among the props—marble columns, rich draperies, painted backgrounds depicting mountains or the sea. He stood for a while under a massive skylight, looking up at the gray sky. In a dark corner, beneath a gigantic rubber blanket, he found neat tall stacks of negatives, hundreds and hundreds of them, all taken during the war, some of which he’d developed himself. Frenchy had been sending them back to this place.

Will built the glass house on the roof. There was a derelict greenhouse up there, whose clear panels he tore out and replaced with the boys by the church, the boy with no hips, the catalogues. All the hundreds of negatives became four walls and a roof. Finally, there was Jolly’s picture—it went over the door in what Will thought must be the position of honor. Will put it in place, the last panel, and the house was finished.

It still lacked an hour till dawn. He went inside without a light and sat in the middle of the house. It was likely and certain and necessary that something would happen when the sun came to shine down on him. But what? Would the white ghosts assault him? Would he hear Jolly’s voice whispering a question? Would the mist that might be Jolly’s spirit depart from the plate and settle over Will like manna? Maybe ghosts would crowd the house, and maybe Sam would be among them. Maybe Will would fall asleep under their images and dream their vanished lives.

Maybe nothing would happen. Dawn was in the sky, now. The sun was just starting to peep over a neighboring building. Will closed his eyes and he waited.

2

IN SEPTEMBER OF 1867, WILL SAT IN THE AMPHITHEATER OF
the Bellevue Medical College with his head clutched between his hands, staring fixedly at Dr. Gouley, a lecturer in morbid anatomy. Dr. Gouley was a sweet-looking man whose gentle voice belied the gruesome content of his lecture. “The skin of the child,” he said, “was dry and hard and seemed to be cracked in many places, somewhat resembling the scales of a fish. The mouth was large and round and wide open. It had no external nose but two holes where the nose should have been.”

“Are you all right, Will?” asked his neighbor, a small young man named Gob Woodhull. As there were no proper seats left in the crowded amphitheater, they sat next to each other on the steps. “Are you going to have a fit? The way your eyes bulge, it worries me.”

They had met a month before, after Will had collapsed in the hospital hallway. When he came back to his senses, Will was in a bed in Ward 10, surrounded by noisy consumptives. Little Gob, for all that he looked like a fifteen-year-old in store-bought whiskers, had picked him up in the hallway like a child and carried him to bed. “It’s a divine affliction, what you have,” he said.

“It’s not,” said Will. He could barely see, and he felt cold, though it was hot in the ward. No, it wasn’t divine, what he had. They were from the glass house, these attacks of sympathy that culminated in shaking, foaming fits. Medical school was the last place he should be, in his condition, because the sad natural histories of disease became personal to him. His mind would come loose from its moorings and drift on tides of turbulent fancy, so he found himself becoming the sufferer, or someone who loved the sufferer, and he would contemplate their troubled, failing lives until the fit came along, inevitably, and put an end to it. He’d collapsed in the hall on account of a young German mother, recently delivered and now afflicted with a debilitating fistula that made her smell so horrible her family had turned her out of the house. He hadn’t cared so much for other people’s trouble in the past. Even his own mother’s agony had occurred at a distance remote from his heart, but the house had changed that.

In the amphitheater, Will told Gob, “I’m very well, thank you.” But he was not very well. Dr. Gouley was lecturing on Harlequin Fetus, a rare but especially awful congenital deformity, and Will feared that he would soon be overwhelmed.

“The eyes appeared to be lumps of coagulated blood, about the bigness of a plum, ghastly to behold. It had no external ears, only holes where the ears should be. The hands and feet appeared to be swollen, were crumped up, and felt hard. The back part of the head was very much open. It made a strange kind of noise, very low, which I will now attempt to imitate.” Dr. Gouley cleared his throat, lowered his head, and emitted a rumbling bass cry like the complaint of a sickly cow.

“Fascinating,” said Gob. “I should have liked to examine it.” Another student shushed him. Will closed his eyes and saw a hideous, bark-skinned Harlequin Fetus toddling out of the blackness in his mind. It held out its crumped-up hands at him and from the shocked O of its mouth came a word: “Papa.”

“You’re about to blow, aren’t you?” said Gob. “Should I take you out of here?”

“No,” Will whispered. He imagined the poor mother who gave birth to such a child, how her bliss would become horror when she saw the thing that had emerged from her. He did not want to hear any more.

“It defeats the purpose of a lecture,” said Gob, “if you plug up your ears.” This time, he was assailed by a whole chorus of shushings.

“It lived about eight and forty hours,” said Dr. Gouley, “and was alive when I saw it.”

Debilitating sympathy, fits, spirits—these were the gifts of the house. Something must have happened as Will sat there, with the sun shining bright but not warm through the picture panels, though in fact it had seemed at first that nothing happened. He had looked around at the confusion of images on the floor and on himself, but he felt no different. Ghosts did not detach themselves from the picture, Jolly’s soul did not come sifting down upon him. He fell asleep and had a perfectly ordinary nap.

He spent the whole first day after he’d finished the house at mundane tasks, cleaning, eating, writing up an advertisement for people to come get their portraits taken by him—he’d started a little business and was doing pretty well at it—and he went to bed feeling disappointed and relieved that nothing had happened. But he woke in the early morning to the sound of artillery, great crashing booms that sounded as if they were being fired from just below his window on Fulton Street. When they were small, Sam had tried to teach him how to wake within sleep, to know he was dreaming while he was dreaming. “Then you are the master of your whole world,” Sam confided. Then you could fly, or squeeze ice cream from a stone, or turn animals to chocolate with your touch. Will could never learn to do this. But when he woke that night surrounded by people staring down at him, he figured he must at last have woken up inside a dream.

He reached to touch Jolly, hoping to turn him to chocolate. Jolly was moving his mouth but Will couldn’t hear him—he thought he must have been deafened by the cannon. Jolly was solid and very cold. He would not turn to chocolate, or stop moving his lips. The others were talking, too. Frenchy and Lewy Greeley and even Sam, who stood away from the bed and looked at Will like a stranger. There were many boys from the Third Onondaga, some of whom he’d barely known, and there were boys Will had never seen before. All of them were chattering at him silently, except for one, a boy who looked like a tatterdemalion Gabriel, because he was dressed in shabby clothes and had only one wing where a more affluent angel would surely have two. The boy did not move his mouth, but only stared and put a bugle—it was bright and pretty, not shabby at all—to his mouth to blow it noiselessly. Will closed his eyes as the artillery sounded again, trying to wake up. But he was already awake, and when he opened his eyes all his guests were still with him.

“I mean to make a pilgrimage,” Will said to Gob, “to the valley of Aesclepius, where I will tie the carotids of a rooster and make a sacrifice of him. Will you go along with me?” Sometimes, Will thought that if he left the country the silent ghosts would not be able to follow. Wasn’t it said that they could not cross water? Yet they followed him easily enough across the river from Brooklyn.

“I have work in this city,” said Gob, passing his finger back and forth through the single candle at their table. “I think I will be retained by it for years.” They were in a filthy saloon in Hester Street, sitting with a bottle of whiskey between them. It was November 5, 1867, Will’s birthday. He was twenty-three years old. Gob, who Will had figured as immensely rich, had taken him to stuff at Delmonico’s, and then Will had brought Gob to this saloon, one of his haunts since the house had changed him into a rank sensualist. Sympathy and spirits and fits—sometimes these seemed easy to abide compared to the last gift of the house, the other, which was a package of lustfulness and wantonness and drinking whiskey, which Will hated almost as much as ever but now had need of, though it never seemed to make him drunk.

Jolly and the angel boy had come along to the saloon, too. Jolly kept pointing at Gob, the same way he had led Will to Bellevue a year before and pointed at it, and led him inside, still pointing, to the office of the secretary, Dr. Macready. Since his appearance, Jolly had been silently guiding him through his life, pointing out the path he must take. Will went where Jolly pointed, because it was the only way to soothe him, and because it felt right to do it. Will had never organized his life by faith or ambition until he built the house—that work had seemed right and true and necessary. He had built it, hoping when it was finished it would practice some magic to make him serene. Now it was building him into a sad, discontented creature, and yet this also seemed right and true and necessary.

“Years and years,” Gob said unhappily.

“You mean doctoring?”

“Partly,” said Gob. He was a brilliant student, not liked at the school except by the faculty, who doted on him. He was haughty, and tended to correct his peers at every chance, wielding his immense knowledge like a blunt stick. In the army, they would have stuck him in a leper mess. Will had had no friends at Bellevue before Gob arrived, though he’d been there already for two terms. He hadn’t wanted any friends—his wartime sociability had departed when peace came—and had not wanted either to be friends with Gob, but the boy had pursued him relentlessly since their encounter in the hall, and soon they were pretty fast.

“What else, then?” Will asked.

“Ah, I think I just might tell you, but not tonight. It’s not birthday talk, and I’m sleepy, anyhow. And you have got to go cut up your capers.” A lady in red boots had come up behind Will and leaned over to pat him on his chest.

“Shall we dance?” she asked him.

“I’m off, then,” said Gob. “Happy birthday, Will.”

“Is it your birthday, Mr. President?” asked the lady.

“Maybe,” Will said to her, and asked Gob if he wouldn’t stay this time for the private can-can dance. Gob shook his head and took up his coat. The tatterdemalion Gabriel cast a final glance at the saloon musicians, three drunks on the stage who made a cacophony on piano, fiddle, and cornet. Then he followed Gob, both of them barely visible in the dark between tables. The angel boy looked back before they left the saloon and waved goodbye. Jolly waved back.

“Come along, Mr. President,” said the lady. Will had forgotten her name, though she’d danced for him before. He followed her towards the stairway, a whiskey bottle in one hand, her hand in the other. Jolly followed after them.

“You know I am not the president of anything.”

“Not even the League of Large Gentlemen?”

“No,” said Will. She took him up the stairs and onto a creaking wooden gallery, along which the private theaters were set. Will’s dancer held a curtain open for him, and he passed in, Jolly right behind him. The room was directly over the trio, so the music was very loud.

The dancer pushed Will towards the far wall, where a photograph hung, two ladies dressed only in hats, their four breasts pressed together. Will sat down in a dirty yellow chair while the dancer closed the curtain, and Jolly flattened himself against the wall. The woman started to dance, kicking up her legs in that confined space. A few times she almost kicked Will in the head with her boots, but after a few near misses he became adroit at dodging her, even as he watched her take her skirt in her hand and toss it around. There were tiny bells sewn into the hem that made a small music which was sweet compared to the din below. She was not wearing any underclothes. She turned around, leaned forward, threw her skirt up over her head, then shook her dimpled ass in Will’s face.

“Why don’t you give it a slap?” she asked, but he did not do that. She had a few bruises back there already, one of them very much in the shape of Italy’s kicking boot. She turned around again, holding her skirt up so it obscured her face but left her crotch in plain sight. It wasn’t young anymore, what she had. It looked old and broken down, but still he thought it was fascinating. She inched towards him in tiny steps. It seemed to Will that it took forever for her to cover the scant distance from the curtain to the chair, and when at last she arrived to press herself into his face he thought that he would die, or at the very least fall away in a fit. The smell of her turned his stomach yet delighted all his base instincts. Jolly watched her too, though he tried to give the appearance of not watching her.

She stepped back from Will, reaching down with one hand to stroke his face, his neck, his shoulder. Still holding her skirt up, she undid her blouse and freed one of her breasts. Pendulous and covered with scars, it was utterly unbeautiful. It reminded Will of the breast of Mrs. Hanbury, a patient in Ward 23 at Bellevue. She was an ancient Negro woman, somnolent to the point that she would have seemed dead if she had not been hot to the touch. Once, Will was obliged to move her breast so he could listen to her weak heart. The breast seemed four feet long to him. It was unwieldy, a sock filled with sand, and it sought to thwart him; its wrinkled nipple was a mocking eye. The dancer’s breast was unpleasant like that, but still it demanded his attention. She pushed it towards his mouth, but he only stared at the thing. She took the bottle from his hand, did something unspeakable with it, then put it to Will’s lips. He drank greedily, not minding how the liquor ran down his chin. “Oh Jolly,” Will said. “What am I doing?”

“Jolly indeed,” said the lady, her hand on his pants now. “You’re doing well enough.”

Occasionally Jolly and Sam and Lewy Greeley and Frenchy and a dozen others would gather around a luxurious divan—the rudest ladies always preferred to drape themselves on it for their portrait—upon which the angel boy would sit with his legs crossed under him, his one wing waving lazily in the breeze from an open window. Will would demand of them, “What are you looking at? What?” Scolding them never did any good. He’d swum with Sam in a clear spring when they were boys. He’d looked down and seen fish through the clear water, floating and moving their mouths just like these spirits, open and closed and open, but never a sound came out. “Stop looking at me!” he’d say, but they wouldn’t, and the only way he could escape them was by covering up his own eyes.