Gob's Grief (34 page)

Maci did not read Rob’s letter, which had been mailed before Private Vanderbilt’s letter, until much later, after two men had pulled up and unloaded Rob’s trunk like a coffin from their wagon. At her direction, they put it in her room. Inside, on the very top, were her letters to him. The last one she’d sent was unopened—maybe the Private’s dear hand had laid it inside the trunk when it arrived too late for Rob to read it. In the trunk there was an extra uniform, two fezzes, three good wool blankets she’d sent him herself before she’d become poor, and his officer’s sword. There were many drawings, including many of her. There she was boating on Potter’s Pond. There she was standing by the cliff, hair blowing like a madwoman’s. There she was walking down a rose-shrouded path with Miss Suter, who was fatter and prettier in the drawing than in real life.

The trunk reeked of him. She put on his uniform and lay on the bed for a little while with her face in her arm, and then she read the letter.

Sister
,

I think I have found my madness. God save me from the noise of breaking bones. Do I worry you? I did not mean to. No pictures for you today—we are in battle. This is just a note to tell you I am alive and well.

Please go to Boston. I think it is the only safe place on the earth.

When Miss Suter heard of Rob’s death she said, “Too late!” and struck her fist against her belly. Then she got very pale, and fell back on a sofa, and claimed that she was in labor. For a day and a night, and then again for a day she lay on a bed downstairs and moaned. And all through the night of the storm, she cried out over the creaking of the little house. “Joy!” she screamed. “Love! O, Peace!” Maci watched from the staircase as her father tended to Miss Suter. Occasionally he consulted with the spirits he saw clustered around the sofa. Which one is Mr. Franklin? Maci wondered. Every so often she left her post on the stairs to go and pet Miss Suter’s perspiring head, or else to venture to the shed, or else to go upstairs and finish her packing. Early in the morning, after the storm had departed and left a brilliant dawn in its wake, the baby finally came. Maci imagined it twice perfectly: Miss Suter gave a last cry, and an ordinary miracle proceeded from her body, a plain old baby boy who squalled his rage at being deposited in the world. Miss Suter and Maci’s father would have stared despondently at each other, wondering what to do with this little baby who was the ruin of their hopes.

Or, Miss Suter gave a last cry—a mixture of exultation and agony—and her big belly flattened. An odor like pine filled the room, but nothing visible proceeded from her, except hysteria. Then Miss Suter and Maci’s father would have made such noises of rejoicing as are made by people who think they have delivered the world from suffering. Her father would have rushed upstairs and pushed open Maci’s door to tell her the good news, to take her arm and proceed triumphantly to the shed, where he would show her the Infant, who would be living now, breathing out peace into the formerly troubled world.

But Maci was not in her room. Her drawings were gone. Her clothes were gone. Only Rob’s empty trunk remained. Maci was by that time already in Kingstown, waiting for a train to take her away to Boston. She had written a letter, addressed to no one, which was still in her hand when the train came, and when she got on and took her seat. She kept it with her, clenched in her fist, as she watched the landscape rush by. How should a person deliver such a letter? You might burn it, or tie it to the leg of a dove. You might throw it in the sea, or bury it under the earth. In the end, after much consideration, she wrestled the window open, put out her arm, and opened her hand.

The storm shocked Miss Suter into labor. While she cried out in the house, I capered in the shed, smashing the Infant to pieces with a wrench. Glass and gold and copper flew all about the room, but seemed to make no sound as they fell because whatever noise they made was drowned out by the howl of the wind. It was delightful, to slay him. Do you know, I imagined I was slaying the whole batch of obscenity that has mauled our family? Is it not obscene that a pregnant woman should attach herself like a barnacle to our father? Is it not obscene that a father won’t grieve for his son? Is it not obscene that our mother was ruined by silly beans, and are beans themselves not the seeds of obscenity? Now what a comfort, to let it all fall to pieces.

Poppy must not grieve for his mechanical son. He is in that Summerland, frolicking with all the other mechanical children. Is this my madness? Now I break his crystal eyes. Now I pluck his copper hair. Now I smash his glass limbs, and I undo him. I imagined that I was undoing it all: your death; Miss Suter’s arrival; Poppy’s madness; Mama’s madness. I undid it all until, sitting amid the shards and pieces, I was in a place where none of it had happened, where we all still lived in Boston, where Miss Suter’s belly was unoccupied by spirit or flesh, where there was no war. I think that was my madness, that murderous rage. Rob, I have killed our little brother. But you see, don’t you, how he was a success? How he made a sort of peace in me.

2

“
IT’S A TERRIBLE THING, NOT TO MARRY
,”
HER AUNT AMY LIKED
to say. Maci understood her to mean that it was in fact the worst thing, worse than madness, worse than war, worse than the death of a brother, mother, or even the death of a husband. Aunt Amy’s husband had died when they were just a few months wed, having contracted a particularly virulent smallpox during a trip to Morocco. On the journey back, his skin came off him in great black sheets, until he was all livid, denuded muscle. Aunt Amy told the story without a trace of self-pity, or even with too much sadness. “We were
married
,” she’d say of him, with a happy sigh. And then she would look at Maci, twenty-four years old in the summer of 1870, and say, “It really is a terrible thing not to marry.”

But Maci thought she could do without marriage. The well-dressed, well-heeled, well-educated young gentlemen to whom her aunt introduced her were unbearable somehow. In conversation with them, her mind inevitably wandered. She’d think of how their wrists were thin and hairless, or else they would inspire in her gruesome flights of fancy. “Don’t you think the Germans a people more clean than the Irish in their personal habits?” one might ask her, and she’d imagine him mortally wounded, with bullets in his spleen and shrapnel in his eye.

Aunt Amy inhabited her widowhood with grace and something that seemed to Maci like satisfaction. They were the best sorts of husbands, the dead ones. They covered you with respectability, but their feet were not on your neck. Maci found it very easy to imagine herself a widow. Private Vanderbilt had died at Chancellorsville. She still had his portrait, folded up into squares and hidden away in a large rosewood box which she kept under her bed. Once a month, she’d unfold all his pieces, spreading them out on the floor of her room. Inevitably, Aunt Amy would come by to knock. She mistrusted a closed door, hated a locked one, and she always seemed to sense when Maci was engaged in private business. She’d call out, “My dear, what are you doing in there?”

“Writing,” Maci would say. That was now her profession, or her vocation—she felt called to it, but it didn’t really pay. She contributed articles to the occasional weekly newspaper, most notably and most often to
Godey’s Lady’s Book
, whose editor, Mrs. Hale, had formed a distant attachment to Maci from Philadelphia. It was almost acceptable to Aunt Amy, to write articles on perfumes or French dresses for
Godey’s.
“Everything in moderation,” she’d say, encouraging her niece to put away her pen for weeks between articles, warning that intellectual stimulation had the effect of souring a woman’s disposition. Reading was acceptable, if the book was the Bible or something written by a Beecher, preferably Catharine. Maci preferred Mr. Greeley’s
Tribune
, or even the
New York Times
, papers that were not merely trade publications put out to refine the seams or cherry pies of their subscribers. If Aunt Amy happened to find a contraband item, she never mentioned her discovery, but instead quietly confiscated it and threw it away. Maci never protested when her papers or books disappeared from behind a curtain or from under a rug. Emerson, Browning, Tennyson, Lowell, Bryant—every last great man was cast into oblivion by Aunt Amy’s ignorant hand. Maci figured it for a condition of her aunt’s boundless generosity, this gentle but outrageous tyranny. Anyhow, her aunt never looked under her bed, the obvious hiding place, and the one where Maci kept her dearest treasures.

“What are you reading, my dear?” Aunt Amy asked. They were sitting after dinner in a rear parlor, a comfortable room with decidedly inelegant furniture, a place where guests were not welcome. After meals, Aunt Amy liked to sit in silence with her hands folded in her lap, concentrating fiercely on her digestion. She’d done this for an hour a day all her adult life, and credited the practice with her absolute freedom from dyspepsia. Sometimes, Maci would sit in the near-perfect quiet and listen to the gentle murmur of the light, but more often she’d read.

“An article on the history of muslin,” Maci replied, but that was a lie. She had an issue of
Godey’s
in her hands, but slipped inside it was the June 2 issue of
Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly.
She was reading an article exposing police involvement in the business of prostitution in New York City. It would seem that the police got free go-rounds with whichever girl they pleased. Clearly, this publication was not a trade paper. It was a women’s paper and a political paper and a financial paper, whose motto was
Upward and Onward.
Maci liked it very much, and she liked Mrs. Woodhull, not least because the lady had declared herself a candidate for President. This thrilled the would-be voter in Maci. She liked the paper even though the articles sometimes went exploring in ridiculous territory. Mrs. Woodhull’s
Weekly
had spiritualist sympathies, and Maci, because she felt compelled to read the whole thing, suffered the articles on medical clairvoyance and thought of her father, still living on the cliff with his Heaven-sent paramour. In all the years since she left his house, he had sent her just one short letter, unsigned and written on a smooth piece of wood:
Garrison was mobbed, Birney’s press was thrown into the river, and Lovejoy was murdered; yet anti-slavery lived, and those who were oppressed now are free. So shall it ever be with truths which have been communicated to man. They are immortal, my dear, and cannot be destroyed.

Reading the
Weekly
always inspired her. Maci would excuse herself and go upstairs to her desk, where she’d sit, often chewing pensively at the tip of her pen, so Aunt Amy would scold her the next morning for staining blue the corners of her mouth. These were not articles for Mrs. Hale, the ones she worked on late into the night with a sheet stuffed into the bottom of the door so Aunt Amy would not see light spilling out and know Maci was awake giving herself wrinkles and overheating her brain. They were for the
Weekly
, for the remarkable Mrs. Woodhull, for whom Maci had written many articles but sent only one, a history of women in newspapering. It praised Maci’s heroes: Elizabeth Timothy, the first lady publisher in the country; Mary Catherine Goddard, who’d been supplanted as editor of her Philadelphia paper by her brother; Cornelia Walter, who so hated Mr. Poe; and, of course, Margaret Fuller. Maci called for more of these ladies to come forth from her own generation. She wanted there to be as many females in newspapering as there were males.

She had sent the article in May of that year, and had an acceptance two weeks later.
My magazine is a storehouse for ideas like yours
, Mrs. Woodhull wrote.
You must come and visit me.
Enclosed was a little picture of the beautiful lady, signed on the back
Victoria Woodhull, Future Presidentess.
Sometimes, at dinner with Aunt Amy, Maci daydreamed of joining Mrs. Woodhull in New York, but the thought of actually doing such a thing seemed as likely as her sprouting wings and flying about over the Back Bay.

Though she wouldn’t run off to New York, Maci could still contribute to Mrs. Woodhull’s paper, and it was while she was preparing another article for
Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly
that her hand first rebelled against her. It was very unexpected—one minute she was writing some animadversions on Catharine Beecher’s
Treatise on Domestic Economy
, and the next she was writing something else entirely, and entirely against her will. Her left hand stole the pen from her right and began to scribble.

Her legacy of madness was something Maci thought less on, since she’d been living with sane, stable Aunt Amy. Long before, in the months and years just after she had fled Rhode Island, she was certain insanity would come to her as soon as she grew complacent. So, for a long time, as they sat together in the comfortable parlor she would consider madness while Aunt Amy considered her digestion. Maci would think how it might be voices talking in her head, and how that would be terrifying, to hear a voice that berated you, or commanded you to lick the floor, or eat filth. Worse yet would be a pair of voices, the sort that might offer a constant commentary, one saying, “Do you see what she’s wearing today?” and the other saying, “It does not surprise me.” Or strange beliefs would creep into her mind. One morning she’d wonder how it might have been to be Mary Magdalene or Jean d’Arc, and the next she’d believe that she
was
Mary Magdalene, or Jean d’Arc, or both combined conveniently in a single body, a lady who gave herself to men, repented of it, then led them successfully in battle.

But years passed, and her inevitable mental decline seemed less and less imminent, until Maci began not to think of it so often, and then not very often at all. Later, she would think that it was precisely when she had finally believed herself safe that she was suddenly not safe, and she would curse carefree, naive Maci, who had stupidly abandoned her vigilance. It came like her father’s, all of a piece. Her left hand jerked once, then leaped from the desk, springing off on its fingers like a jumping bug. It hung a moment in the air, then swooped down to take the pen from her unresisting right hand. It drew one dismissive line through her paragraphs on Catharine Beecher, and then the words came, written carelessly with her own hand, but in a hand that was not her own:

Sister, dear sister
,

Know that you are not insane, and forgive me, please, my silence. Time is measured here, not in seconds, hours, or days, but in uncountable units of desire. And it is so difficult to pierce the veil, which is composed of God’s indifference and the unbelief of the bereaved—thick things. Understand that I have been trying forever to come to you, a messenger whose news is all good.

*     *     *

Maci thought it was sensible and just, how she was being punished for destroying the Infant, for a crime worse than fratricide, for the murder of her father’s hope. Her hand—she’d not call it brother, because it was her and not him, it was the part of her that would rather sacrifice reason and sanity than accept how he was gone—reassured her,
You’re not insane.
But that was like the rain telling you you are not wet. And now this not-Rob had a new admonition with which to close his letters,
Go to New York. Go to her.
“Don’t you tell me what to do,” she’d whisper in reply.

It was very easy, Maci thought, how all her most childish desires were written out by this renegade appendage. She wanted, did she not, to get away from Boston? Life was boring there. Aunt Amy was cool and dull, and, living with her, Maci would settle into widowhood without ever marrying. There was a lifetime of comfortable sameness waiting for her in that house. One day Aunt Amy would die, and Maci would put on all her fantastic dresses, one after the other, a new one for every day of the year. It was hateful to think of, so her hand urged her to flee.
Go to New York. Go to Mrs. Woodhull. You must go.
“I will not,” she said, holding up her left hand to her face and speaking to it, just like a madwoman.

The hand didn’t belong to her anymore. She could move it like her other one, but it seemed to oblige her as a favor, not because it was naturally subject to her will. It wrote letters, spinning out ridiculous fantasies of a war in Heaven, fought by contentious spirits, who wanted to return to the earth, against conservative angels. It told stories about Mrs. Woodhull, and about her sons, two boys from Ohio separated by the war and by death. Her hand made rude gestures behind Aunt Amy’s back. And it drew beautiful pictures: a falling-down shack at the top of a hill; a clearing in an orchard; a hawthorn bush. It drew an enormous house in a city she knew to be Manhattan; a greenhouse; an iron door. It drew a striking woman who Maci knew from her photograph to be Mrs. Woodhull; a careless-looking, smiling fat girl; a worried-looking fellow with a neck fully as thick as Private Vanderbilt’s; an angel in stately robes with a tiara of stars floating around her head, and a little pugnacious angel, with only one wing. And it drew a portrait of two boys with the little angel’s face—her hand groped for blue ink with which to color their eyes. She didn’t hang them on her wall, these pictures. She liked them all very little. They ought to have gone into the garbage, in fact, but instead she put them under the bed, motivated, she supposed, by affection for even the delusion of her brother.

Heaven is cold and white. It is not a place where I would care to reside, though some spirits are drawn there by pleasures so rarefied they are, in fact, empty. I am in the Summerland, a place as warm and green as the garden at Uncle Phil’s summer house. Do you remember it? We chased rabbits there, when you were only two years old. You were still learning the names of things, then. I told you how the creatures were called, but you would not believe me.