Gob's Grief (8 page)

But on the evening of January 20, as Walt sat in his favorite (and only) chair, watching the snow fall outside his window, there came a knock at his door. He listened at it a moment and heard voices. A woman was saying, “Are you certain this is the address?” Walt opened the door and saw a regal-looking lady dressed all in blue, with a white tea rose at her throat, with yet another pair of Hankish eyes set in her head. Gob, obscured by her tall chapeau, stepped around her and clasped Walt to his chest.

“Hello, Walt!” he said. “Hello, my friend! Here I am, just as I promised. And here’s my mother, too. Victoria C. Woodhull, but you may call her Empress Eugenie.”

“Really, Gob,” said the lady. She put out her hand and waited patiently for Walt to take it. She stepped into his room, making it seem somehow as if Walt had drawn her in, though it was not his intention to do that.

“Walt,” said Gob. “Get your coat on and don’t be pokey. We’re late for the female convention.” Walt put his coat on, and his shoes, while Victoria Woodhull said various things, none of which he heard very well because of his agitated state. She complimented him on his room, looking around at the dingy walls, the socks drying on the bedpost, and the curtains nailed up on the wall, where they wouldn’t block his light or his view. The thing that ought to have been under the bed was out in full view, and it was brimming. Her glance fell on it and moved on.

“An honest room, Mr. Whitman,” she said. “Simple and austere. Yet when I close my eyes I can feel how it is a palace of wisdom.”

“Considerably less than that,” said Walt. “A lean-to of good sense, perhaps. Or a thatched hut of affability. I don’t often have visitors.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Woodhull. “Come along, then.” She offered Walt her arm—and yet when he took it he got the feeling somehow that he had offered her his—and they were off. It did not occur to Walt to ask where they were going until they were situated in the fine carriage that was waiting outside.

“Where else but the female convention?” said Gob. It became clear that he thought Walt had received a letter detailing the plans for this evening. When he realized Walt had received none such, both he and his mother were embarrassed and apologetic. Mrs. Woodhull offered to return him to his room, but Walt declined. “I like nothing better than a surprise,” he said, which was not entirely true. But this particular surprise—that Gob should appear unexpectedly at his door and pluck him from out of a still pool of sadness—was altogether fine and good.

The three of them proceeded to the National Woman Suffrage Convention, the first ever to be held in the capital. At Carrol Hall, they sat together among a very heterogeneous congregation. There were men and women, whites and Negros, people with a look of wealth about them and people whose clothes declared their poverty. With a rolled-up program, Mrs. Woodhull pointed out those on the stage.

“There’s Mrs. Mott, in the Quaker bonnet. She looks sweet and grannyish, doesn’t she? Well, she is no ordinary granny, though I hear she is sweet-tempered. There is Mrs. Stanton, next to her. Don’t you think, Mr. Whitman, that she looks like a queen?”

“Certainly,” said Walt. Mrs. Stanton did look queenly, with her hair all in white ringlets, and with her nose, the fineness and nobility of which Walt could appreciate even at a distance. And she possessed an enormous, immensely solid-looking bosom, which seemed to him sturdy enough to be the foundation upon which a queendom might be raised. “And there,” he said, “on the end of the platform, with the Eve-like disarrangement of hair, that is Dr. Mary Walker. I knew her during the war, when she was your husband’s colleague.”

“My former husband,” Mrs. Woodhull corrected. “And speaking of men, is that Senator Julian on the right? I understand he is friendly to the cause. That preacher I do not recognize. He is not a Beecher.”

The preacher was finishing up his opening prayer with an ill-considered reference to Eve: he called her Adam’s spare rib. This started a stir which continued through two more speakers. The crowd only quieted when it came Mrs. Stanton’s turn to address them.

“A great idea of progress is near its consummation,” Mrs. Stanton began, “when statesmen in the councils of the nation propose to frame it into statutes and constitutions; when Reverend Fathers recognize it by a new interpretation of their creeds and canons; when the Bar and Bench at its command set aside the legislation of centuries, and girls of twenty put their heels on the Cokes and Blackstones of the past.”

Walt got quite wrapped up in Mrs. Stanton and her speech. He liked her anger and her eloquence and her bosom. She inspired him to get lost in his own fancy, and he pictured her a giantess, one hundred feet high, who waded into the Potomac and launched ship after ship from her rampart breast, a thousand ships each filled with a thousand angry women. These women were about to fire great broadsides of explosive discontent at the capital when Walt was distracted by a pressure on his shoulder. Gob had lobbed his head there and was sleeping soundly.

“My brother died at Chickamauga,” said Gob. “That’s where he died.” He and Walt had adjourned to a saloon after just a few hours of conventioneering. Mrs. Woodhull had stayed on, though she was already belittling the proceedings as a series of teacup hurricanes. “They talk and talk and talk,” she had said, “when they ought to be
doing
.”

“My brother died in Brooklyn,” said Walt, speaking of Andrew. “With his throat rotted out.” After a bottle of whiskey between them, their conversation had taken a maudlin turn.

“Tomo ran off when we were eleven. Walt, I ought to have been with him. We ought to have been together, there at the end.”

Walt wasn’t much of a drinker, but he tried to keep up with Gob, who seemed to take after his papa, the elder Dr. Woodhull, with respect to liquor. The whiskey had made Walt’s emotions labile and monstrous. He stared at Gob’s sad face, turning over in his mind the idea of him dying, arm in arm, with his twin brother, the two of them riddled identically with bullets, whispering goodbye, goodbye to each other as they drifted off the earth. What a scene—it was enormously horrible and enormously beautiful. It caused him to cry. Hank, drunk too, said,
O adhesiveness! O pulse of my life!

“Yes, yes,” said Gob. “My sentiments exactly. I used to cry for it, until it occurred to me that tears do nothing. They comfort the living, but do they appease the dead? Do they want our tears? Is it useful to them that we mourn? Life might spend all its days grieving for lost life. You’d think something could be done with it.”

“All the blood,” said Walt. “All the precious blood. A great work ought to be coming, oughtn’t it?” He was sobbing, uttering a choking call like a hairy animal. It attracted the attention of the other patrons of the saloon, horsecar drivers and conductors all, and many of them Walt’s friends. A few came over to comfort him and glare at Gob. “Walt, is this fellow causing you some upset?” they asked. Walt shook his head, but all the boys kept casting angry looks at Gob, so he and Walt left the place, taking a walk up to the Capitol. As they walked, Walt apologized for the inhospitality of the boys in the saloon. “Everywhere I go I have friends,” he said. “But nobody like
you.”

They sat on the steps of the Capitol passing back and forth another bottle.

“Drunker and drunker and drunker and drunker,” said Walt.

“Do you know what I am thinking, Walt?” Gob asked.

“You are thinking of Mrs. Surrat,” said Walt, “because she was hanged over yonder.” He pointed across the snowy grounds, across the street to where the old prison used to stand. “You are thinking, ‘Poor dear, I bet she was just somebody’s dupe.’ And you are thinking how it would upset your mama and all those other sufferables that a woman can hang but she cannot vote. I saw John Surrat’s trial this summer. He is very young. I sat near him. It was hot in the courtroom, and he kept me cool with his big palm-leaf fan.”

“I was thinking,” said Gob, “that we ought to take shelter from the snow.” Even as he spoke, Walt noticed that the snow was falling again, thicker and faster than earlier. Gob stood up, gathering his enormous black coat about him—it seemed to Walt that there must be room for two of him in it, or one of him and one of Walt. He ran up the Capitol steps, taking them two and three at a time. “Come along, Walt!” he said. “I see a little cottage where we can shelter!”

It was close to two in the morning, so there was no one about on the grounds, and there could be nobody inside the Capitol but a stray guard or two. Yet Gob was knocking as if he expected some bleary-eyed innkeeper to rise from his bed and open the door. “Hello!” he called out. “Open up for two travelers weary with the cold!” Walt laughed, but the door popped open with a great loud click, throwing cheery yellow light onto Gob’s shoes.

It was at just that point that the evening began to seem dreamlike and strange to Walt, but not frightening. Somewhere a little voice—not Hank’s, though—was urging him to flee over the snow and throw himself in George Washington’s arms, to cling to the General till dawn. But the voice was whispering through smothering pillows of booze and contentment. Walt could barely hear it. It was easy to ignore. He followed Gob into the grand building, and walked after him down the gorgeous painted corridors.

“They say this place is haunted,” Gob said. “They say you can see the ghost of a workman who fell from the scaffolding while they were building the new rotunda. They say his neck is at a horrible angle and he moans in a most frightening manner.”

“I’m not afraid of spirits,” Walt said.

“There’s also a demon cat. A great big one, black as soot, with red coals for eyes. It always appears before somebody important dies. And they say these statues come alive on New Year’s Eve and dance with one another to celebrate another year of survival for this delicate, sickly Union.”

They had come to Statuary Hall. Walt paused by a statue of Mr. Adams and tried to imagine him stepping down from his pedestal to click his marble heels around the room. “Come along,” Gob shouted as he ran away. “To the House Floor. We shall legislate!”

When Walt came into the House Chamber, Gob was already down at the bottom. Walt called to him: “John Quincy Adams died right there. In the middle of a passionate speech he suffered an apoplectic fit and fell down dead. In times of trouble, he reappears and finishes his speech. If you listen to the whole thing you will find that at the very end, he reveals the solution to whatever national crisis is pending. A very convenient arrangement, I think. It’s said that Mr. Lincoln came here during the war, in hope of a consultation, but Mr. Adams did not show.”

“Spirits are notoriously fickle,” Gob said.

“I make a habit of coming to watch the proceedings here. But I think I will give it up. I am sick of the shrewd, gabby little manikins, all dressed in black, all supremely lacking in ability.” Walt paused a moment and looked around the room, feeling bold and drunk and powerful. “From right here they might do it,” Walt said. “They might do a great work with the blood, might have done, but I begin to think it will turn out to have been all for nothing.”

“Shall we make it better, Walt? Shall we legislate?” Gob bounded up to the Speaker’s desk and, picking up a gavel, banged it on the wood. “I hereby declare,” he shouted, “that brothers are nevermore to be separated! Let it be so written into the laws, natural and unnatural, the laws of this Union and the laws of every state!” He let go with the gavel again. “Mr. Whitman,” he shouted, “what say you, sir?”

Walt raised his hands in a grand gesture. “Let it be so!” he shouted. “And furthermore make it forbidden that true friends and comrades should ever be separated!”

“Not by distance!” said Gob. “And not by death! Let it be so!” He banged again with the gavel, pounding away with it, relentless and furious, until it broke in half in his hand.

Walt kept wondering, Where were the guards? They were not drawn out by the racket he and Gob made in the Capitol. Now, in the Model Room of the Patent Office, there was no sign of them as Gob’s boots made sharp, loud noises. Gob stomped up and down the aisles, peering into the glass cases by the light of a match. Walt walked behind him, looking at Ben Franklin’s printing press, at the models of fire extinguishers and ice cutters, guns and rattraps. Gob was deeply excited. He said he was looking for something, and he wanted Walt to be there when he found it. There was a whole series of cases containing treaties between the United States and various foreign powers. Gob lingered over Bonaparte’s sprawling, nervous-looking signature on the treaty of 1803. Nearby were various Oriental articles. Walt pointed at an Eastern saber, at a Persian carpet presented to President Van Buren by the Iman of Muscat. “Is that it? Is this what you seek?” Gob shook his head and moved on.

“Not that,” Gob said. “Not this either, but maybe … this.” He shone a new match on another model, very plain and roughly made, representing a steamboat. A ticket on it read,
Model of sinking and raising boats by bellows below. A. Lincoln, May 30, 1849.
Hank spoke up, his voice very loud this time in the immense quiet of the Model Room.
He was a builder, too.

“Is that it?” Walt said. “Is that what you require?”

“No,” Gob said. “But it is related to the thing I require. Ah, there it is.” With very little ado—he only cranked his arm back a little—he put his elbow through the case next to the one containing Mr. Lincoln’s boat. He reached in and removed a hat, which he immediately set on his head.

“It’s a crime!” Walt said. “It’s a crime what you did!” But he didn’t say it very loud, and in fact he found the vandalism somehow exciting. He had the old thrill back—the buzzing in his soul like Olivia’s frantic wings, and he did not know if it was the crime, or proximity to Gob, or the drunkenness that caused it. He lit another match and held it near the tag that dangled from the brim of the hat.
Hat worn by Abraham Lincoln
, it read,
on the night of his assassination.

“There,” said Gob. “Now my thinking is much improved.” He put his hands on his face and was silent awhile. Walt closed his eyes too, and saw sick and wounded boys laid out on cots between the glass cases, saw blood gleaming by gaslight on the polished marble floor. When Walt opened his eyes again, Gob had turned back to the broken case.