Gob's Grief (40 page)

“You are hard, Miss Stone,” he said, walking off, and not bringing her any more returns.

“If I let you out,” Maci asked her hand, “will you behave?” If it gave any sort of answer, Maci missed it, distracted by abrupt cheers that broke out all over the house. News had come from Rochester that Susan B. Anthony had successfully cast a ballot.

Until January of 1872, Mrs. Woodhull always had just as many New Year’s visitors as were due a lady who was famous, beautiful, daring, and consistently more interesting than anyone else, male or female, in a city full of daily distractions and ever-hatching novelty. The previous year, Maci had barely been able to walk through the house because it was so crowded. But now no one came to eat from tables set in magnificent style, to drink the brandy and whiskey and lemonade and punch. Mrs. Woodhull seemed to have driven away all her friends with the lecture she’d given two months before at Steinway Hall, or all except Mr. Andrews (who could never be shocked or out-radicaled by anyone, even Mrs. Woodhull). Maci, sitting down next to Mrs. Woodhull and listening to clocks ticking all over the quiet house, thought back to that wet, disagreeable night in November.

“Yes, I am a Free Lover!” Mrs. Woodhull had exclaimed. She hadn’t been supposed to say that. It was an unfortunate departure from the text Maci had written, a reasonable discourse on social contracts which meant to demonstrate that freedom in the social sphere was no less desirable, and no more immoral, than freedom in the political and religious spheres. Mrs. Woodhull departed from the text after her sister, drunken, despicable Utica, heckled her from a box where she leaned against her escort, a man in green spectacles who hissed like a furious kitty all during the lecture. Hissing and boos came like that from the smaller part of the audience. Mrs. Woodhull ignored them. But when Utica stood up and demanded to know how Mrs. Woodhull would like it if she was a bastard, then asked if she was a damned Free Lover, she stirred her sister’s passion. Mrs. Woodhull got such an awful and majestic look on her face that the first five rows fell absolutely silent. Just with her gaze, Mrs. Woodhull seemed to fling Utica back into the recesses of her box. Then she spoke some words which delighted the reporters, but distressed Maci.

“I have,” Mrs. Woodhull said, loud and clear, “an inalienable, constitutional, and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame has any right to interfere. And I have the further right to demand a free and unrestricted access of that right, and it is your duty not only to accord it, but, as a community, to see that I am protected in it. I trust that I am fully understood, for I mean just that, and nothing less!”

For the party, a New Year’s hair artiste had given Maci an enormous hairdo to match Tennie’s and Mrs. Woodhull’s. It made her head feel very large, and gave her the shadow of a monster. Maci stared at her hands where they lay folded in her lap. She’d freed her left hand two weeks before. It seemed a little shriveled up now from disuse, though it was vigorous as ever, if more polite, when it wielded a pen.

“Was that the door?” Mrs. Woodhull would ask, every so often.

“No,” Tennie would say. Colonel Blood and the senior Dr. Woodhull were playing chess. Once in a while, Canning Woodhull would bemoan a loss, but otherwise it remained silent. Maci almost wished she hadn’t arranged for all the noisemaking Claflins to be sent away for the day. She went often to the window, where she could see little crowds of people passing from house to house, some of them already drunk on whiskey and punch, stumbling on the ice. Many passed by, but none stopped.

Maci had quite given up hope of there being any callers at all when the bell finally rang. Mrs. Woodhull leaped up and shouted for a servant to open the door. But it was only Gob Woodhull, with little Pickie in tow. Dr. Fie was not with him. Maci was certain he must be back at the house on Fifth Avenue, building on the machine. Was it noble to share your friend’s delusion, or merely foolish? Maci didn’t know. Dr. Fie was sullen and grim, very much the opposite of Tennie, yet Maci was sure those two would have married if Tennie had not considered marriage a terrible sin.

Mrs. Woodhull’s son was not surprised at the empty house. “You have frightened people away from you,” he said. “The timid and the hypocritical, who do not understand how your notions are refined, indict you with your own words. You ought not to have strayed from your text.” It was a sign, Maci thought, that he was concerned for his mother, that he scolded her for being too bold. It was Maci’s aim to make him an ally in his mother’s cause, and to lessen the distance that seemed to stretch between the two of them. She’d imagined a scene between them, in which, fully reconciled and truly loving, they embraced, and in which Mrs. Woodhull would say, “Come into the world. There is so much work for us to do, here.”

“Oh, you are like a croaking bird, with that refrain!” said Mrs. Woodhull to her son. But Maci, too, had been telling her all month how she had made a mistake at Steinway Hall. And Maci had been telling her, also, that she should not have marched at the head of the December parade protesting the execution of M. Rossel, one of the Paris Communards. Mrs. Woodhull had walked behind a black-draped coffin, while Maci and Tennie had followed carrying a banner that read,
Complete Social and Political Equality for Both Sexes.

It was the most self-evident of facts, that there was no profit in associating with Communists. Maci knew that, and yet she had marched anyhow with Mrs. Woodhull, because she couldn’t refuse her anything. Maci had been constantly afraid that they would spark a riot, that by evening bodies would be piled on all the corners of Manhattan, and the city would be in flames. But the march had wreaked a different sort of havoc—the two sisters’ participation alienated Commodore Vanderbilt. Free Love excited him, Spiritualism comforted him, but Communism was anathema to him. Tennie announced one morning a few days after the march that he wouldn’t see her anymore. “I knew it would happen,” she told Maci. “But oh, it still hurts!”

At her guestless party, Mrs. Woodhull shook her head at her son, then went to sit down between her two husbands, who had given up their chess game and retired to a sofa. “It’s a hot January for us, isn’t it?” she said. “Well, I am inclined to make it hot for somebody else.” It had become a reflex with her, to threaten Henry Beecher whenever her fortunes dipped. She’d come to blame him for most of her troubles, though, as far as Maci could tell, he hadn’t actually done anything to hurt her. It was Mrs. Stowe and Catharine Beecher who wanted to destroy her. Mr. Beecher had, in fact, made an attempt to rein his sisters in, but, frenzied with hypocrisy and vituper, they would not be silenced.

“We have the fixings already for a celebration,” Gob Woodhull said brightly, closing the curtains and hiding the stream of visitors passing the house by. “And today happens to be Pickie’s birthday. What shall we do?”

“It’s not my birthday,” said Pickie.

“Certainly it is. I found you on this day one year ago. My boy, you are one year old today!”

“It is not my birthday, and it is not my brother’s birthday,” the boy insisted. Nonetheless, he had a happy party, eating his fill of white cake and red punch. The house became as joyful and carefree as it had previously been sad and nervous. Mrs. Woodhull seemed to forget that Mrs. Grundy had brought a fist down upon her that day. Standing on a chair, she proclaimed how 1872, the year of her predestined election to the Presidency of the United States, would be the greatest year of her life, and the greatest year of all their lives. “This is
my
year!” Mrs. Woodhull said.

She took Maci aside to confide in her. “My star,” she said. “I know it looks dark now, but don’t give up hope. We’ll bounce back, and bounce higher than anybody expects. I’ve never told you this. I’ve been waiting, and now I am inspired, in this dark hour, to give you the news I’ve been husbanding. I mean to give you a cabinet post, if I arrive in Washington in my destined capacity.”

Maci was flustered. She didn’t think at all how it was almost impossible that Mrs. Woodhull would be elected, or even get very many votes. All she felt was honored, but this soon passed as Mrs. Woodhull distributed promises like party favors. Everybody was a future secretary. Colonel Blood would be Secretary of War, her son the Secretary of Building, and Tennie C. Claflin would be Secretary of the newly established Department of Good Times, from which she would dole out budgets of fun to every despondent citizen.

Maci’s hand drew a picture of Gob Woodhull, a life-sized masterpiece of foreshortening—if she squinted at it she almost believed that his hand, detailed down to the split nails, was reaching out of the paper. She’d lie back and consider the picture, wondering if he and Private Vanderbilt would quarrel if she put them side by side on the wall. Little Dr. Woodhull was stronger than he looked—she’d seen him lift boilerplate as if it were china plate. Her hand attributed that strength to what it called a demispiritual nature, but it was Maci’s belief that the strength of his obsession found its way into his muscles and bones. How many times had her mother lifted up her bedstead in search of a stray bean?

Maci found she could complain to the picture as she could complain to nobody else. Mrs. Woodhull, Tennie, her hand—these all talked back. They all tried to convince her that sanity was unreasonable, but Gob Woodhull’s picture never did that. He smiled, he held out his hand, and that was all. “Isn’t it a burden?” she said to him. “Isn’t it unfair, how I am afflicted with lunacy from the outside and the inside?”

Here are his hands
, her own hand wrote on them as it drew,
to touch you. Here are his eyes to see you. Here is his mouth to speak you.
Tattooed with this primer, he was not clean.
Here is his heart, to love you.
Maci groaned and looked away when her hand wrote this last thing, fearing it would draw his heart popping out of his chest, as in those gruesome Catholic icons. But her hand only drew a black shadow in his breast.

“Tell me,” he’d ask her, whenever she visited at his house. He’d say it both playfully and plaintively. “I know you can tell me.” He remained convinced that she could help him build up his folly. Maci suggested that a bit of raw iron might be decorated with blue or yellow paint, or suggested arbitrary revisions: “Shouldn’t these three inches of wire be gold, and not silver?” He seemed not to realize that she was mocking him. They were playing like children, piling up stuff into a heap of nonsense. It gave her a wicked sort of pleasure, to think how it was all a waste, and to think how it would gratify her when the giant apparatus failed at everything but being a giant apparatus. But sometimes it made Maci sad, for his sake, to think how he would fail. And, most rarely, she’d think it would be wonderful if this thing could cough out the dead, after all, if even one dead soul could be born again out of its chimney-stack. She even tried to believe this, closing her eyes and straining to see the triumphant spirit of her brother being born back into flesh. But, try as she might, all she could see was darkness.

“Oh, sir,” she said to his picture. “You refine my sense of the ridiculous and the tragic.”

Maci went with Gob Woodhull down to the foot of Roosevelt Street, where the New York tower of the great bridge was going up. Across the river, the Brooklyn tower was already one hundred feet high.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” he asked her. They were there on an errand. Mrs. Woodhull had asked Maci to write an article for the March 8 issue of the
Weekly
on the progress of the bridge, with an eye to uncover any corruption in its financing that might yet be lingering despite Mr. Tweed’s downfall. Dr. Woodhull had offered to escort her, as the bridge was understandably fascinating to him. He had friends there, and could get her into the bowels of the construction. They walked onto the top of the rising tower, among the workmen with their wheelbarrows, hods, picks, and shovels. Dr. Woodhull put his arms out towards a huge steam crane lifting stone off a barge at the side of the dock, and Maci got the impression that if only his arms had been long enough, he might embrace it lovingly.

“Are you ready to go down?” he asked her, after they had been introduced to their escort, a man named Farrington who was so efficient he shook Maci’s and Dr. Woodhull’s hands simultaneously. He had them put on ankle-high rubber boots.

“Of course,” she said. Dr. Woodhull had offered to go down alone and give her a report, if the thought of doing it herself was too frightening. She went first down the ladder. They were crowded together in a little room lit from above by glass in the iron ceiling.

“This is the air-lock,” said Mr. Farrington. “You’ll be uncomfortable, soon,” he added bluntly, “but do as I do and you’ll come out all right.” Outside a worker was tightening down the roof, and when he was done Mr. Farrington put his hands over his ears. Maci copied his motion too late to block out the piercing shriek that filled the room. “Just the air coming in!” Mr. Farrington shouted.

“A curious sensation!” Maci said, because her head felt as if it were sinking underwater. The sensation was curious, then painful—the pressure felt as if it would crush up her head to the size of her fist. Dr. Woodhull showed her how to relieve the pressure by pinching her nose and trying to sneeze. The sound stopped, all of a sudden, and a hatch in the floor dropped open. The feeling of disagreeable heaviness in Maci’s head had not passed altogether, and as she went down another ladder into the caisson she felt dizzy and a little breathless. Her pulse was racing in her ears, and when she spoke her voice sounded unnatural. Dr. Woodhull’s voice was high as a child’s when he spoke. “Are you well?” he asked.

“I’m well,” she said. “Are
you
well? I fear you may be too delicate for this place!” She turned away from him to look around at the room into which they’d descended. Her first impression was of flame and shadows and a great noise that managed somehow to sound very loud and very distant; hammers and drills striking rock. Half-naked men were walking everywhere in the steaming light between shadows, and breaking rocks. It looked very much the way Maci expected Hell to look.