Gob's Grief (21 page)

“What can I do?” Will had asked, because it seemed to him that he could do nothing. He confessed that he had built the glass house from blind, ignorant compulsion. He wasn’t an engineer or a mechanic. He did not understand steam power or aeolipiles or how steel was different from iron. But Jolly was jumping up and down, pointing to himself and at Sam, as if to suggest that they would help him.

Will waved his hand at all the parts and pieces around the room, at the machine under the gaselier. “I don’t understand any of this. I don’t know how to use such things, or how to make them.”

When Will said this, Gob only smiled wider. “I’ll teach you, my friend,” he said. “And then we’ll build together.”

“Sam,” Will said, “why don’t you come over here and sit with me?” Every so often he’d set two chairs by the big window over Fulton Street, sit down in one, and pat the other invitingly. “It’s nice on a cold day,” he said to his brother, “to sit in the sun and look out on the snow and the people bundled in their coats and think how you’re warm. Come and sit for a while. We’ll just be quiet together.” He patted again, gestured with both his hands, but Sam only stood on the far side of the room and eyed him warily. He shook his head as if to remind Will that he was a spirit, that he couldn’t feel such pleasures as warm sunlight, couldn’t touch the glass to marvel at how cold it was. Or else he shook his head just to say I will not sit with you, to say I do not know you, to say you are not any more my friend now than you were when I lived.

“I used to hate liquor,” said Will, taking a sip from the big flask of brandy he and Gob carried with them in the ambulance. On a cold spring day in 1868, Gob drove them hurriedly through a light snow to Number 344 East Thirty-second Street, where a lady had been shot by her deranged sister. Gob had finished his two terms of lectures. Those and his long apprenticeship with Dr. Oetker were enough to earn him his diploma from Bellevue. He might have become a house physician, but chose instead to enter the newly established ambulance service. Will, though he hadn’t yet earned his diploma, and wouldn’t until he’d completed another term, joined Gob in the ambulance, which had lamps placed on the sides and a reflector attached to the roof. The word “ambulance” was emblazoned on all sides, but this did not stop Gob from yelling at anyone who blocked their way, “Can’t you see this is an ambulance?”

The calls came in by telegraph from the police headquarters. The job was always exciting, especially at night. When they were working, Gob and Will slept in a room over the ambulance stables, a bell above their bed. When it rang it also caused a weight to fall which lit the gas. They would stumble around, blinking in the light, grabbing for their coats, and then rush to the ambulance. The harness, saddle, and collar were suspended from the ceiling, and dropped into place automatically at the sound of the alarm. Not more than two minutes ever passed between the time the bell sounded and the time they rushed out of the stable.

Will handed the flask at Gob, who declined it, saying they would not have enough when they got to their patient. In a box beneath the seat were blankets and splints, tourniquets and bandages. They had a straitjacket and a stomach pump and a copy of Gross’s
Hints on the Emergencies of Field, Camp, and Hospital Practice.
They had a medicine chest with emetics and antidotes and morphine. They never failed to lack something, however, when they arrived at the scene of misfortune.

Will put his hand out to catch the swirling snow as they sped along down Broadway. This was their third call of the day. Earlier, a junk dealer had been crushed by her own cart when it tipped and fell on her at the foot of Roosevelt Street. Before that, a woman getting off the rear platform of a Third Avenue horsecar had been run over by a sleigh. Both those patients had lived.

The gunshot woman died cursing her sister, though they cared for her wound as best they were able, covering it with lint saturated in balsam of Peru, and enlarging the exit wound so it could drain properly. Back at Bellevue, they saw her set up in a bed in Ward 26, and made her comfortable with brandy and morphine. Will wrote down her last words,
Damn you Sally.
He had a collection of those. He wrote them in inch-high letters on fine creamy white paper:
Is it over?; Do you hear the pretty music?; I would rather live; No; What help are you?; Tell my horse I love her.

When they were not at the ambulance house, they were at Gob’s house. So far, Will had made what seemed to him to be merely decorative contributions to the construction. He tied last words to strings and hung them from the body of the machine, or he fixed death masks to it, and Gob made a fuss over Will’s efforts, like a doting, overpraising parent. Will felt ignorant and useless, but his education had begun in earnest. He had thought Gob had a masterful knowledge of medicine, but now he was coming to believe that he had a masterful knowledge of everything.

One day in April, he had Will follow him through the house with a wheelbarrow. Gob took books from where they lay and threw them in. “Oh yes,” he’d say, picking up a volume, “you had better be familiar with this, if we are going to make any progress.” Each title was more dismaying to Will than the last:
Optics, Acoustics, Thermotics, Stability of Structures, Intellectual and Ethical Philosophy, Higher Geodesy, Analytical Geometry of Three Dimensions, Calculus of Variations.
Then there was all the Aristotle: eight books on physics, four on meteors, thirteen on metaphysics, two on generation and destruction. “What am I forgetting?” Gob asked as they stood in the library, the wheelbarrow already overflowing. He looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, “Of course, the Renaissance Magi!” He scurried around the room, plucking books from the shelves. Will looked at the authors’ names, men of whom he had never heard, books that looked to be a hundred years old or more. Paracelsus and Nettesheim and Della Porta, Albertus Magnus and Mirandola and Dr. Dee, Gob tossed them about without a care for their ancient bindings and brittle pages.

“You will learn!” Gob kept saying, but days spent reading about Determinative Mineralogy or the Seven Names of God made Will suspect that Gob’s faith was misplaced. He would put his face between his knees and have a spell of worry. “It’s too hard, Jolly,” he’d say, because Jolly was always leaning over his shoulder when he read. Jolly would shake his head and smile and wag his finger, as if to scold him for his despair. Will took to reading in the glass house. Inside, it was pleasant and warm in the spring, but he went in even after summer came, and sweat ran off his nose to drum on the pages of Della Porta’s
Celestial Physiognomy
, because it seemed to him that his brain was more agile in there, and it restored some of his faith in himself, since it was proof that he could, after all, build something.

It was in the glass house that Will got what he considered to be his first good idea. He was struggling with a simple book of algebra, wearing nothing but his pants because it was so hot. Sometimes when he got frustrated he would abuse Gob’s precious books. Usually he would imagine a face for them, a mocking face embossed on the leather cover, with a snide mouth that he would punch and punch until his fist ached. He did that for a while, staining the leather with his sweaty hand, and finally threw it against a wall of the house, where it knocked out a plate that fell on the rooftop but miraculously did not break. He took up the book gently (he was always kind and loving to them after he abused them) and went outside. He picked up the plate and considered it, and holding the book in one hand and the plate in the other, he had his idea. Jolly stepped up from behind him, shivering with excitement. He seemed to know what Will was thinking. Will closed his eyes and imagined a great shield of negative plates that could be placed over the engine, with a bright light positioned above them, so that they rained down images on it, filling it with lost lives.

Will thought it was a bug hurrying across his cheek. They came out of his walls in the summer, fat black moist-looking things that he doused with acid to kill them. Sometimes they crawled on him while he was sleeping, but when he woke he saw that the tickling pressure on his face was not from little feet but from a wing. She moved them just like fingers, the not-feathers. The angel looked earnestly into his face, closed her eyes, and trembled as if with a sob. Her wings made a noise like broken glass shaken in a bag. She opened her mouth again, and to Will’s great surprise, words came out of it.

“Creature,” she said, “why do you participate in abomination?”

In August, Will got another invitation to dinner, this one from Gob’s mother, Mrs. Woodhull, who was recently arrived in New York. She’d set up her house in Great Jones Street, not with her son. “I wouldn’t let her live with me,” Gob said, when Will asked why she didn’t stay in Fifth Avenue. “Not in ten thousand years.”

“Is she a difficult person?” Will asked, thinking of his own difficult mama.

“Yes. And she is always surrounded by difficult people. But you can judge her for yourself tonight. Oh, yes. I like that. My friend, you are a genius of building!” They were installing the images over the engine. Gob had jumped up and down and hugged himself when Will showed up at his friend’s house with a rented cart full of plates.

“I like it too,” Will said. They were hot and filthy from their work. Now the machine would shelter under a giant flower of picture negatives. It was late in the day, but the sky was still bright outside, and the plates they’d installed were gently lit.

“We need a brighter light,” Gob said. “Maybe the brightest light ever.”

They kept working until it was almost time for dinner. Will might have kept going and going with it—he was filled with the same feeling as when he’d built the glass house, a mixture of trepidation and certainty, because he knew he must build but feared what he was building—but he noticed the time and excused himself to go home and change his clothes. He was an hour late when he arrived at Number 17 Great Jones Street. A man fully as big as Will, but fatter and hairier, opened the door.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“I’ve been invited to dinner,” Will said, thinking the man must be a servant because he smelled like a stable.

“Not by me,” the man said. He made to shut the door in Will’s face, but before he could do that, a lovely red-haired woman came up behind him, scolding and pinching him. He yelped just like a dog and stood aside.

“I know you are Dr. Fie,” said the lady. “Please come in, and do not mind my rude brother.”

“Not a doctor yet, ma’am. Are you Mrs. Woodhull?” Will asked, though this lady looked too young to be Gob’s mother.

“Her sister.” She said her name was Tennie C. Claflin, spelling it for him. She took for herself the flowers he’d brought for the hostess, a summer bouquet of daisies and violets. She put one of each in her hair and kissed Will on the cheek. This made him blush and veer towards a fit, though what she excited was not his sympathy.

“Push her off now or she’ll slobber on you all night long,” the brother said, then shuffled away down the hall.

“Come along,” Miss Claflin said. “Everyone is waiting to meet Gob’s good friend. Our Gob! Lost to us for so long, but now we are together again. He tells me you see spirits.”

Will opened his mouth but did not speak. He felt more faint, and hotter. He stumbled over a man’s boot left carelessly in the hall. Miss Claflin kept him from falling.

“Was it a secret? Forgive him for telling it. There are no secrets in this family. And don’t worry that we’ll think less of you. I see them too, you know, as does my sister. You are like us, sir. Hello! Here we are, everybody! Here is Dr. Fie!”

They’d come to the dining room, where a crowd of people was gathered around a worn oak table. Gob was sitting with another beautiful lady who Will guessed must be his mama. She had dark hair, and wore a fine purple dress, and Gob was her very image. There was another aunt, less friendly than Miss Tennie C. Claflin, this one called Utica. Her eyes—they all had the same eyes, a shade of blue so dark it almost seemed purple—were hooded, Will could tell, from too much laudanum. There was a shriveled-up old woman who looked as if she might be some clever making of Gob’s, an effigy of nutshells and bark, but with those same voracious blue eyes. She was his grandmother, and like Gob she lacked the smallest finger of her left hand. There were three men—an old one-eyed fellow who looked like the Devil, the big hairy one who’d answered the door, and finally another man with elaborate whiskers and brown eyes. They were introduced as Buck Claflin, Uncle Malden, and Colonel Blood, Gob’s stepfather.

Colonel Blood shook Will’s hand, but the other men ignored him. Miss Claflin sat him down between herself and drunken Utica. Then the family proceeded to feast. Grandma Anna brought out bowls full of peas and potatoes, and plates heaped with lamb chops. There was a diversity of manners among them. Miss Claflin and Mrs. Woodhull and Gob and Colonel Blood ate primly and talked in low voices, but the others ate with hand and knife, and shouted. Buck and Malden fought over a chop.

“We have been all through the western states,” Miss Claflin said to him, turning the conversation to herself and her family after asking many prying questions about Will. “We gathered gold and golden opinions wherever we went. And we gathered up the Colonel, too. He comes from St. Louis, where he consulted with Vicky for the sake of his wife, who suffers terribly with a condition I am not at liberty to discuss. Vicky is a clairvoyant healer, you see. And in that regard I am not myself without power. But when she saw the Colonel, Vicky fell into a trance, and the spirits of the air spoke through her, betrothing them on the spot. Then he came along with us.”

“A rash man,” said Will.

“He’s a hero. He has got six bullets in his body. And do you think it rash when one magnet comes together with another, as nature has decreed that they must? Is a river rash because it flows from a high place to a low one? Is it rash of the sea to yearn towards the moon? He only did what he must. Now, do you really think he is rash?”