PART THREE. THE WONDERFUL INFANT

Towards the close of the visit, for such it really was, I was shown what I now know to have been a panoramic view of the future. The mountains and valleys changed places with the seas, the entire face of the nation underwent a transformation. Cities sank and people fled before appalling disasters in dismay. Then a wondrous calm settled over everything. Confusion, anarchy and destruction were replaced with a scene of beauty and glory which is beyond the power of language to describe. The earth had been changed into the common abode of people of both spheres. The spirits said that all this would be realized during my life and that in making it possible I would bear a prominent part.

VICTORIA C. WOODHULL, From Mr. Tilton’s biography

1

BY MAY OF 1862 IT SEEMED TO MACI TRUFANT THAT MADNESS had become the national pastime, and that her parents had only performed a civic duty by losing their minds. Her mother went insane first, slowly and with considerable subtlety in the first months of her decline; she had a growing fascination with beans. Initially, she praised them for being shapely and nutritious — strange comments, but Maci figured her mother had read an article on beans in one of her weeklies. When she insisted the cook serve them up with increasing frequency, Maci assumed her mother was dabbling again in Dr. Graham’s tasteless diet. But, little by little, beans came to dominate her mother’s life. She celebrated them to the neglect of her husband and children. She sought to make herself pure, eating no food but beans, and so she died.

Maci had flipped desperately through her uncle’s medical books, not trusting him when he said he had no remedy for his sister’s bean-madness. Now, Maci hated beans. For many months, she had flung them from her plate if some grossly insensitive person served them to her. Lately she had eaten them again. They were ashes in her mouth but they were what she and her father could afford. His own madness had driven them into desperate financial straits, and it did not come delicately.

It fell on him like a swooping bird. Maci imagined it, bird-shaped and screeching, falling down on his head to muss his hair into an ageless madman style. Not long after his wife’s funeral, he was in his study writing letters thanking people for their kind sympathies when his hand began suddenly to write of its own accord a letter to him from his dead wife: My darling, I never was not, nor will I ever cease to be. We travel from ever to ever and time is only a span between eternities. You will be called to do a great work. I am watching you with love.

One day he was a bereaved Universalist minister admired for his antislavery stance and his charitable work in prisons (people called him “the Prisoner’s Friend”); the next he was a fledgling Spiritualist prophet. Within months, he was declaring himself the Apostle of Precision, delegate on earth of an Association of Beneficents who spoke to him from a place that was not quite Heaven. Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Murray all spoke through his hand. With growing discomfort, and finally dread, Maci was introduced to the mortal Apostles of Devotion, Harmony, Freedom, Education, Treasures, and Accumulation. Some were men and some were women. They all had a look in their eyes which Maci could only call deranged.

She watched them milling in the parlor of their house on Mount Vernon Street and felt a seething anger. Several times, Maci threw as many out as she could before her father discovered her and called her rude. She pleaded with him to stop all this, but he would take her in his arms and explain that the very Chairman of the General Assembly of Beneficents had called on him to carry out the greatest work yet attempted by man. He would build a living machine, an engine whose product would be not energy but peace. He would call it the Wonderful Infant.

Her brother, Rob, was gone. He’d fled at the beginning of their father’s decline, after many arguments, and a final one when he’d struck their father on the head and knocked him out. “I hoped he’d be sensible when he came to,” he told his sister. “But he started jabbering about electritizers and elementizers as soon as he could speak.” Rob left to live with their mother’s family, and then he went to war. Maci resisted their entreaties to join them.

“Your situation is so peculiar,” said her Aunt Amy, a plain woman fond of elaborate dresses.

“I must stay with my father,” said Maci. She’d been so certain of that, speaking to Aunt Amy’s pale fat face. It had made her serene, somehow, to embrace this obligation. Her father was her first friend, the man who had shaped her mind and her heart. But now she doubted, and her loyalty to him was a source of agitation rather than comfort. He had spent them broke on matériel for his engine and on contributions to the Panfederacy of Apostles. They lost their house in Boston and Maci found herself losing things which were precious to her, not just dresses and jewelry, but dreams. Her father had always talked of launching her off to college when she turned sixteen. But she was called back from Miss Polk’s School for Young Ladies to help tend to her mother, her sixteenth birthday came and went, and when Maci left Boston, it wasn’t for college. They moved to the wilderness of Rhode Island, where electrical and spiritual forces were favorable to the Infant’s construction. Maci hadn’t thought there was any wilderness left in Rhode Island. She had thought it must surely be filled with people who had fled, for one reason or another, from Boston. She imagined them, dissenters all, packed cheek by jowl from Providence to the coast. But this place was empty, just their lonely cottage and the shed on the cliff, the nearest neighbor nearly a mile away, across a saltwater pond at the bottom of a hill behind the house. Various Apostles came and visited them, sometimes bringing parts for the machine.

The porch in front of the house leaned precipitously, and the steps were crooked. When Maci walked from one side to the other, she worried it might pitch her headlong over the cliff and onto the rocks below. Standing carefully on the porch, she listened to the noise of the sea and the noise of her father hammering in the shed, which came together to give her a creeping sense of doom. When she covered her ears with her hands, she could hear the beating of her anxious heart, which she sometimes imagined to be the quick footsteps of voracious madness, hurrying to claim her. Her mother and father had gone insane. Rob had rushed to join a regiment of Zouaves with an alacrity and fearlessness that spoke of a weakness of sanity if not an absolute absence thereof. Maci expected to be the next to lose her mind. At least it would happen here, where no one would notice and she would stand out less in company than in Boston, where her family’s shame would be completed with the departure of her faculties. Would she eat beans exclusively? By July, they’d eaten themselves out of beans, but Maci had a basket of cranberries in the kitchen, and she had noticed a previously unappreciated beauty in the small forms, nestled together in a mound, very pretty in the morning sun that poured through the drafty window. Would these cranberries dominate her fancy? Or would she build something impossible, perhaps a flying machine to sail over the cliff and into Block Island Sound? A gin that separates emotions in a confused mood? A cloud buster?

Maci walked gingerly down the steps, then went around the house and down the hill to the rotting dock that jutted out into the pond. She got in a little boat and took up the oars. “Poppy!” she called out towards the shed. “I’m going out!” There came a pause in the hammering, but no answer. She began to row out towards the neighbor’s house, where she would beg flour. She had plans for her lovely cranberries.


A few days later Maci gnawed on one of her flat, greasy cranberry biscuits as she read a letter from her brother.

Our route from Roanoke Island to Norfolk took us through Croatan Sound and the North River, to the Elizabeth River by way of the Great Dismal Swamp. Tugs pulled us in little boats through the swamp canal — I was put in mind of you traveling hither and thither on the pond behind the Hotel de Trufant — did you write that it is called Potter’s? It was new and strange and silent in there. You ought to see such a forest of cypresses, with their gnarled roots peeking above the water, and whisks and festoons of Spanish moss clinging to the branches. There are curious holes in the roots — they look like round open mouths. I swear I heard one call my name. Sister, ought I to fear for my sanity? It was no ghost that spoke, the root did not declare itself old Uncle Philip with his listening-horn and his green teeth. Cotton-gum and sweet-bay, a curious juniper and holly, huddles of bamboo-cane: you will see that I sketched them for you. I have hidden Uncle Phil somewhere in the drawing — can you find him? Such odd birds in this place! We are all equally strangers here and no one can tell me their names. When we passed a Negro standing mysteriously by the shore I asked him the name of a small, bright thing that darted back and forth over our heads. He said, “That’s a Jesus-bird!” Not, I am certain, the proper name for the thing.

You must go back to Boston and Aunt A.

Rob ended all his letters, Cato-like, with that admonition. There was money in the envelope, two months of his second lieutenant’s salary, and there was a thick sheaf of illustrations. There were the straight columns of the cypresses, and hidden Uncle Phil, betrayed by his horn, which stuck out from a stand of bamboo. There was the Jesus-bird and the mysterious Negro; there was a boatful of Zouaves entering a patch of mist. She thought for a moment that her brother had included a sketch of himself — there was a picture of a boy with his same heavy brows and square chin — until she saw the caption written along his neck. Pvt. G. W. Vanderbilt — he is the Commodore’s son, and insists on his privatehood! He had a wide thick neck, not at all like the piece of licorice her brother balanced his head upon. Looking up from the drawings, Maci saw a blue phaeton coming up the road with its top thrown open to the warm July sun. A woman in a yellow dress was at the reins. When the carriage came near, Maci could see that she was pregnant.

“Girl,” the woman said, occasioning Maci’s instant and intense dislike, “go and fetch your master.”


Maci wrote to her brother that night, huddled at a desk wedged between her bed and the open window. A breeze lifted her hair and threatened to put out her candle.

My dear Zu-Zu,

We have got a new guest here at the Hotel Fou-Fou. Her name is Miss Arabella Suter. She rode up this morning in a pretty phaeton, and she might have been out taking a pleasure-ride if she hadn’t traveled hundreds of miles to find our sweet mad Poppy. She is unmarried but quite pregnant — six months if a day. This is not a scandal because what fills her womb is not a flesh-and-blood baby but the living principle of Poppy’s machine. I think she has got a bladder beneath her shirt, or else she is fleeing dishonor. The former is most likely. An “accidental” poke with a needle will deflate her, and then we will send her back to Philadelphia. I wonder if she is a Quaker. She does not dress like one. She is as colorful as a Jesus-bird. I shall call her the Apostle of Shame, or the Swollen Apostle. Already I detest her, but I think she will save me from becoming the Apostle of Boredom.

I will not go back to Boston but I remain your loving,

Sister.

As she wrote, Maci could hear her father and Miss Suter laughing in the front room of the cottage. He had welcomed the woman literally with open arms when Maci led her into the workshop.

“Here you are at last!” he had said, rushing to embrace her. Maci had never seen him be so familiar with any lady before, except herself and her mother. Strange that such things could still give her a shock, a wrenching feeling all along her spine, even after the many months she’d been witness to her father’s madness. “Maci,” he said, “here is that wonderful lady I spoke of!”

“Yes, Poppy,” Maci said, though he had not spoken of her before. Maci left the shed, keeping her eyes away from the glass and copper lineaments of the Infant, and went back outside to stare over the cliff. On that clear day, she could see all the way to Block Island. She undid her hair and let it blow in the wind, thinking how she must look dramatic and wild, the very picture of an incipient madwoman. She closed her eyes and wondered if it was obvious to a person when her reason departed. With no one sane to tell her she was on the decline, would she know when her madness came down upon her?

After she’d finished the letter to Rob, she got under her quilt and stared at her brother’s sketches. They covered the whole wall opposite the foot of her bed, and now they were creeping across the wall to her left. She got out of bed to put the candle on the floor, to better light them. Back under the quilt, she studied the pictures. They were a history of Rob’s time with Company A of the Ninth New York Volunteers. On the far left was an ink sketch of the regiment drilling in the Central Park — Rob had colored their coats with blue ink; their pantaloons and fezzes were red. Maci had nightmares about those red hats. When she was small, her father had told her stories of a monster who wore such a hat, who colored it with the blood of his victims. In those dreams, her brother was turned from her gentle companion into a man who sopped up the blood of his enemies with his cap, then wrung it into his mouth.

She’d posted the last picture, the sketch of Private Vanderbilt, about three feet from the corner. She rearranged herself in her bed, moving her head down where her feet usually rested. Now she could look out the window at the stars shining above the dark sea, and when she turned her head Private Vanderbilt was just in front of her. For a while she looked into his eyes, wondering that the son of such a man as crude, rich Cornelius Vanderbilt would not buy himself a captaincy, at least. Her sleepy eyes fell to his thick neck; she imagined how her two hands would not fit around it. She closed her eyes but his image hovered behind her lids. Then she opened her eyes again, and kept looking at him until her candle blew out.


When Maci was a little girl, her father had put her under such severe intellectual discipline it made her mother cry. “You’ll ruin the child!” she protested, because John Murray Trufant had declared that he would train his daughter to have a brain bigger than that wielded by Margaret Fuller, a lady who had been his friend before she departed to Italy, never again to set foot in America. “It took a whole ocean to douse her incandescent mind,” her father told Maci, “but yours will burn brighter yet.” Maci, at the age of nine, wrote a sonnet called “The Wreck of the Elizabeth,” in which the Countess Ossoli’s shining head threw light in the eyes of fishes as she died, and seagulls lamented around the body of her soggy dead child after he washed ashore.

Maci hated Greek and was bad at Latin, but reading was her passion, and her father encouraged her in it even when her over-stimulated brain manufactured nightmares to torture her sleep. He buried her in Smollett, Fielding, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Molière, among others. He made her recite to him every night before bed, and gave her stern lectures to make it clear that he expected her to grow up to be more than a creature of habit and affection. Yet that was all he expected of her anymore, since his change and his madness. It made Maci bitter enough to spit.

Miss Suter passed the pricking test. She gave a little shriek — it was very much like the cry of a gull — and leaped up in the air, seeming just for a moment to levitate over the threadbare rug of the front room.

“Forgive me!” said Maci. She was listening intently for a noise of hissing air, but there was none. Could it be a pillow? she wondered.

Miss Suter had clenched her hands over her belly. “Not to worry, my dear,” she said. She’d become quite civil once she realized Maci was not a servant. She had even offered her a few dresses, but Maci declined. The lady’s taste was as defective as her reason.

Maci sat Miss Suter down on the sofa and fetched her some tea. She felt some small regret for the poke, which ballooned into something more formidable while she sat next to her and watched the lady stare into her cup. “I want us to be friends,” Miss Suter had said a few days before. “Of course you do,” Maci had replied in a frosty tone. Now, Maci almost wished she had been more receptive.

“Are you well, Madame?” she asked.

“Of course!” said Miss Suter. “It was a surprise, more than a pain, though the prick was fairly deep. I am not bleeding. Don’t think that I am.”

“And the … principle?” asked Maci. Very slowly, she placed her hand on the lady’s belly. Miss Suter made no move to draw away. There was flesh under Maci’s palm; it gave slightly when she pushed against it.

“She is well. She is proof against such little accidents.”

“Strange,” said Maci. “I think of the Infant sometimes as my little brother. Poppy calls it a boy.”

“Yes,” said Miss Suter. “The form is masculine, but the living principle which shall animate it is feminine. A wonderful union! We live in fascinating times, my dear.”

“Some would call them terrible.”

“Oh, she kicks!” Maci felt nothing under her hand, but she smiled anyhow.

She is fleeing her shame, Maci wrote to Rob. What would Aunt Amy say? A disgraced lady in our pathetic little home. Brother, she shares his bed. I said to Poppy that I thought he was behaving very badly. He called me his sweet moppet and told me that I would lose my doubt when the Infant breathes peace into the world. At night, I go in and look at the thing while they are sleeping. Little Brother has grown considerably over the past months. I think he will outgrow his shed, soon. If he moves into the house, then truly I think I shall go back to Boston and Aunt Amy.

Rob had sent her another letter, and more sketches. Some detailed a month of camp life at Fort Norfolk (a parade ground pocked with stumps that made drill a chore; a loving portrait of his new Springfield rifle), while others depicted his progress up the James in a steamer called the C. S. Terry. There was a portrait of Private Vanderbilt with a view of Fredericksburg behind him; this went next to the other drawing. And there were drawings of which she could not make sense — a whole page filled to within an inch of the top and bottom with charcoal, a stray hand, large as life with hairy knuckles and scars on the fingers. She turned this one over and read on the back, Pvt. G. W. Vanderbilt, his hand. Then she realized that Rob was sending her a puzzle, a life-sized Vanderbilt she might put together on her wall. She assembled the pieces as best she could, building him completely down to his waist, except for a missing hand. She wondered if this was Rob’s neglect or a hideous wound. He is by turns coarse and refined, polite and boorish, Rob wrote. He says his father’s spirit sometimes posseses him. I told him my father is possessed by spirits. I think he is my friend.


There was one good thing about Miss Suter — she had money. The Infant could have alpaca booties and a silver spoon to put in his mouth after he was born, and there was no more begging for flour from the neighbors while she was there. She took Maci shopping in Kingstown, where people were shocked to see a pregnant woman out in her own carriage buying groceries and dry goods, spools of copper wire and plates of glass. Maci was sure that a mob would come stomping up the road one day soon to burn their house and smash the Infant. At least I will look presentable for them, she thought. Miss Suter was making a dress for her, patterned after one of the dresses Maci had long since sold for necessities. Maci had talked about it wistfully, and Miss Suter had got it into her head to recreate it and make a gift of it to her “dear friend.”

While her father worked in the shed, Maci would sit with Miss Suter on the porch, eating the delicious cakes, muffins, and pies that the woman manufactured with a magical lack of effort. Maci had slaved and fretted over her greasy muffins and the tooth-breaking cakes she’d thrown over the cliff in frustration. Sitting thus on the porch, nearly a month after her arrival, Miss Suter ventured a question about Maci’s mother. “She was a generous woman,” Maci said, wishing that Miss Suter would not ask such questions; she was trying to think of Miss Suter as a spirit-sent servant, figuring that turnabout to be fair play. But Miss Suter’s earnest inquiries about her mother made such pretending difficult.

“She liked hymns of all faiths,” Maci found herself saying of her mother — she would miscegenate them shamelessly. She was partial to weeklies and monthlies, and followed events in France and England. Once, when Maci was seven years old, her mother had read aloud to her an article on the toilet of Russia. At Maci’s insistence she and her mother had dressed up like Russian women. They wrapped white cloths around their head, hung themselves with furs, and pinned jewels on one another. They danced around her mother’s room, chanting nonsense and pretending it was Russian. As Maci told this story, Miss Suter laughed so hard she spilled her tea. Maci laughed, too, until she caught herself enjoying Miss Suter’s company, whereupon she stopped and looked out over the water with a stony expression on her face.

We arrived in Washington too late to participate in the latest debacle at Bull Run. Now we are camped on Meridian Hill, awaiting orders. Private Vanderbilt is itching to go deal some trouble to Lee. He has taken the invasion of Maryland as a personal affront. I fear I jeopardized our friendship when I insisted Maryland was not Yankeedom, but we are friends again, now. He has offered me his belly band against the cholera. I declined, though we are rained on incessantly, and a goat has eaten much of my overcoat. Washington is not the least bit refined.

Here is the Private’s hand for you, clenched in anger against me. Here are his hips. If I sent his legs to Aunt Amy would you go there to fetch them? Go to her, won’t you? I think you are withering in that exile.

Maci pinned the ham-fist beneath the empty sleeve. The hips were handsome, she could not help but think so, though she felt hot and embarrassed looking at them. She took them down and put them under the bed, then just as quickly returned them to the wall. She could be a little wanton, here in the privacy of her room on the edge of the world. She sat at her desk and wrote to her brother.

Miss Suter is big as a house (not big as a Boston house, but mind you they build small in these parts) and I cannot think she carries anything but a big baby boy, though she insists it is a female principle swelling in her womb. She requires my help to get up and down the stairs. Some days she is too exhausted by her condition to do anything but lie abed and read novels. Papa spends all his days and most of his nights in the shed. It would be a disaster, he says, if the Infant were not ready when the spirit is born. You may be wondering what sort of doctor will be in at the birth. I wondered that too, until Miss Suter explained to me that good Ben Franklin (the Commissioner of Electritizers, you know) will be there. Of course!

“How I hate to see the summer wane,” said Miss Suter, as Maci escorted her down a narrow dirt road, lined on either side with chokecherry and beach roses. It was September. There were still blossoms on the rosebushes, but they were limp now and wilted. Though it was a warm day, Miss Suter shivered incessantly. She stopped to admire a great congregation of ladybugs swarming over the green leaves. Miss Suter put her hand among them and laughed delightedly when they crawled on her.

“Aren’t they lovely?” she asked.

“Poppy always said a girl ought not to play with creeping things.”

“But they’re delightful. They were the friends of my youth. I would lie in my mother’s garden and they would come to me. Sometimes they quite covered me up. If I listened close, I could hear them speaking, telling me what wonderful things were coming. My spirit guide also cares for them. She’s a young Indian girl — you put me in mind of her, though of course she is woodcrafty and you are not. I think you hold your head as she does. It is very regal.”

Maci had no reply. She often lacked for things to say, on these walks, but Miss Suter did not seem offended by her silence. Indeed, Maci wondered if Miss Suter even noticed her silence. Miss Suter was full of words — they were always leaking from her — and she took every opportunity to instruct Maci in spiritual matters. “This association,” she proclaimed down on the beach, poking delicately at the cast-off shell of a horseshoe crab, “this association, the Great Association of Beneficents, will greatly, wisely, and seasonably instruct and bless the diseased, the suffering, and the wretched of the earth.”

“Tell me,” Maci said, “will they instruct suffrage for women?” Voting was something that Maci wanted very much to do. When she was small she’d imagined that voting was equivalent with wish-getting — she thought a person could go out and vote themselves a fresh peach pie or a new bonnet. It still seemed to her like a great, vast power, an opportunity to execute startling transformations. “How we will change this country,” she’d say to scoffing Rob, “when our hand is on the tiller.” Before he went insane, woman suffrage had been one of her father’s devotions.

“Unfortunately not,” said Miss Suter.

I think I envy her, Maci wrote to her brother. It must be a comfort to believe such things. To believe that Heaven is as comfortable and familiar as your own bed, and that your dog may accompany you there. To believe that the dead have organized themselves for our redemption. To believe that human folly might be dissolved in the exhalations of a good machine. To believe that our own mother might put forth her dead hand to shield you, Brother, from danger. Madness is seductive, pretty, and fat like Miss Suter, but shameful all the same.

Take care, my Zu-Zu.

In Frederick we were welcomed with the most incredible hospitality. Some good Marylanders took me into their house, where I had an honest-to-goodness real bath. I have stunk of lavender for the past three days and the boys all call me Roberta. These same Marylanders gave me lemonade to drink as I soaked in the tub, and there was no mention of the tyrant’s heel. I send you the tub and empty glass as proof of their hospitality, in case you should doubt it. Here, too, are the Private’s legs. Not long enough, I think, but I am getting short on paper.

Go to Aunt Amy.

Maci assembled Private Vanderbilt’s nether portions. The hips were made somehow more civilized by the addition of legs. He still lacked feet, and consequently seemed to float by her bedside. She put the glass of lemonade in his hand, in case he desired refreshment. The tub she put further along the wall to his left. Rob had drawn himself inside it, his arm hanging down to scrape the floor, his cheek resting on the porcelain edge, an allusion to a picture they’d seen in Paris, one thousand years ago before death and madness had smashed their family. Rob had even wrapped a turban around his head, in the drawing, in case she should be stupid and miss the obvious. It was, she decided, a horrible picture, and the first one she would not give a place on her wall. She took it down and set the edge in the candle flame, then held it by the window as it burned. When the fire was close to her fingers she let it go, and it drifted away into the dark.

M. Zu-Zu,

I did not care for your tub picture. If you send me no more like it I would consider that a kindness. Arabella Suter continues to swell. I think she must be drinking up the oceans, to swell so much. We go down to the ocean sometimes and I watch her to make sure she does not drain the Sound dry with her red mouth.

There is the horn from Block Island blowing now — a mournful sound. I think sometimes it is a lament for lost sailors, a noise that says, “Stay away from these rocks,” and “I mourn you.” On windy nights, they say, if you stand on the edge of the cliff you can hear the ghostly voices, calling, “God save a drowning man!”

Do you see how you have yellowed my mood with your tub? But for his feet, Private Vanderbilt is complete on my wall. May he guard me from sadness.

Maci’s father completed the Infant in the second week of September. “A big boy, Poppy,” she said, standing with him in the shed with Miss Suter. The Infant was a great box. The wood that had been in him was gone — that had only been scaffolding, her father said. Now, he was all glass and copper, silver filigree and iron. “Where is his mouth?” she asked. “How will he breathe?” Her father and Miss Suter laughed at her as if she were a five-year old asking why the ocean is blue.

“His true form is on the spiritual plane,” said her father. “You see, my dear, I have been constructing in both places. Why do you suppose it has taken so long?”

They had a feast to honor him, ham and baked corn, quahogs that Maci had dug herself from the mud of Potter’s Pond, and a lemon sponge cake. Miss Suter proclaimed it the last warm evening of the year, so they ate on the rickety porch. Maci fidgeted while the two of them said their odd grace: “We believe in the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, a continuous existence, the communion of spirits and the ministrations of angels, compensation and retribution in the hereafter for good or ill done on earth, and we believe in a path of endless progression!” Listening to them, Maci rather wished she could join them in their belief, just as she had wanted to become a slave, when she was a little girl, because she’d been sure, back then, that if only she were a slave, her father would shower her with all the easy, warm enthusiasm he showered on his dear Negro friends, the fugitive strangers who passed through their house in Boston. It had seemed to her jealous little heart that her father had loved them all better than her, because they got presents of effusive affection, while she got more Vergil.

After dinner, Maci and her father pointed out constellations for Miss Suter’s edification. Boötes and Draco, Hercules and Cepheus, each was very bright in the sky over the black ocean. “That star is Arcturus,” Maci said.

“Where?” asked Miss Suter. “Where?” She waddled over to line up her eye with Maci’s pointing finger. “Ah!” she said. The great swell of her belly was nuzzled against Maci’s shoulder. Miss Suter gave another cry, and Maci thought this time she did feel something, a little kick.

Maci excused herself and took a walk along the cliff. The moon came up, washing out the stars. Low clouds rushed by, little floating islands that looked about the size of a big wagon. She could not help imagining riding one south to Maryland. If there were just room for one other on the cloud, would she take Rob or Private Vanderbilt flying? She was not sure. She wondered if that was the form her madness would take — fascination with a stranger. She had begun to rearrange Vanderbilt’s portrait — switching his hands or arms from side to side, balancing the lemonade on his head, setting his face in the middle of his chest. Rob had kindly sent enough faces to vary his mood — some angry, some sad, but most happy and peaceful-looking. Sometimes she put a peaceful-looking face on her pillow and woke in the morning with smudges on her cheek, and thought that he might have kissed her during the night. Standing by the cliff, she considered a future with him. They would live in Manhattan and manipulate railroad stock.

After a while, she returned to the house and went into the shed to look at the Infant. “Little Brother,” she said. “I ought to love you better.” She could think of nothing else to add, so she just stared at him for a long while. She could see her own face thrown back at her, twisted up along a silver tube, or shattered by the facets of a crystal panel. Then, she saw her father’s reflection. He had entered the shed and was walking towards her, but it looked like his image was rising from the crystalline depths of his machine. He stood next to her and put his arm around her. She closed her eyes, and put her face in his shoulder.

“It’s impossible, what you want to do,” she said.

“Difficult,” her father replied, “but not impossible. And is it any reason not to try a thing, because it is difficult? To the small mind, ending slavery seems as difficult and unlikely as changing the color of the sky. Yet that endeavor proceeds apace.”

“I hate him,” Maci said vehemently, pressing her face harder into her father’s shirt. “I hate all of this so much.”

“Oh Maci,” he said, stroking her hair. “Don’t be envious of him. It will make you ugly, inside and out. And anyhow, don’t you know that you are still my favorite?”

I know I risk your displeasure sending you these soldiers. It is not that I wish you to look at them and be saddened, but rather that I must send them away from me. Fold them into squares and sail them over the cliff — maybe they will find peace in the cold water. On the fifteenth, our regiment was ordered down from the westward slope of South Mountain, where we came upon the scene of the previous day’s heaviest fighting. The enemy’s dead were so numerous that a regiment who passed here before us had to remove them from the road to make way for the troops. They were piled up head high on either side, and made a gauntlet. Private Vanderbilt saw my distress — he is intimate with my moods — and offered to lead me through as I closed my eyes. I declined his kind offer. It seemed a fitting passageway from the land of the living to the land of the dead. I fear it is not the happy place where dwells our mad Poppy’s weakened mind. I thought as I walked of living hands grabbing up the bodies of the dead and stacking them like cordwood upon the road. In ten years, the wall might be made of bones, with only a blowing scrap of gray wool still attached to a wrist or a neck.

Sister, this wall is the work of men’s hands, and the whole war is the work of men’s hands — fingers tear cartridges and pull triggers. I would now that I had not sent you the Private’s hands, but here are his feet. I place them just beneath this letter, and the wall beneath that — all the work of my hand. Do not look at the wall.

Go to Boston. Pray for me.

She did look at the picture of the wall. It was an illustration of Hell. There were boys stacked high, their legs and arms intertwined in gross familiarity. Dead staring faces rested against each other, brow to brow. Motes of light danced in eyes that saw nothing, unless it was the moment of their death frozen before them. Try as she might, she could not imagine her brother’s face as he walked that gauntlet. But she could see Private Vanderbilt. His face was somehow both tender and stern as he put his hand on Rob’s shoulder, and tried to keep his wide back between Rob’s eyes and the wall. Maybe later Private Vanderbilt held him like a brother while he wept, trying to wash out the dead faces from his eyes.

She attached his feet, and at last he stood complete before her. She sat on her bed, watching him and listening to the noise of the surf. “Thank you,” she said to him.

I did look at the wall, she wrote. Such horror! Of course I prefer the Private’s feet to such atrocity, but whatever you must send I will gladly receive. How could it be any other way? Are you not my own Zu-Zu? Am I not your sister? You are in my prayers. I think Poppy and Miss Suter pray for you, too, in their way. Two apostles and an incipient spinster are pleading on your behalf — is this not cause for happiness?

The Infant is complete. Though I am not fond of him, I must admit that he is beautiful. You are not any longer the handsomest Trufant. Nor am I pretty, next to him. He has silver teeth and spun-glass hair and a golden face. He is jewelry, a brooch for a giant. We are waiting now only for Miss Suter to vomit a spirit from her womb. I fear the pall that will settle over this house when their bright hopes are dashed, when only a mundane babe comes into the world. Here is my prediction, I have it from my spirit guide, an Indian girl who inhabits the abandoned shell of a whelk. The baby will come and Miss Suter will flee from it, because it is not a spirit essence, because it reminds her of shame. She will be gone from our lives, and I will have a baby to raise. I shall have to learn to cook properly. We shall sell off the Infant in bits and pieces, and use the money to improve the house, to steady the porch and buy new stoves. Poppy’s folly will recede from him when his machine is a failure. We will wait for you here. This war will end. You will come and visit us with the Private in tow. It is a pleasure to dig for quahogs — I will show you. Do you see, then, how happy futures are born from the gray, despairing present? Brother, you have all my love.

* * *

“It’s a lazy baby that won’t be born,” said Miss Suter. She had an urge to go boating, so Maci had taken her out on the pond. Maci worried that the baby would come there in the middle of the water. She had been feeling anxious around Miss Suter because she seemed capable of giving birth quite at any moment. “I so wish it would come. These late battles might not have been, if only she had come last week.” She bent her neck forward to stare at her belly. “Why do you wait?” she asked it. It was September 25. News of the battle in Maryland had reached even here. Maci had checked casualty lists in a Providence paper and found Rob’s name absent from them.

A raft of yodeling old-squaws suddenly flapped their wings and took off inland. “Running from the storm,” said Miss Suter. The wind had been blowing hard for the past three days. Salt-encrusted fisherman types in the village were predicting “a great big blow.”

Her father had been into the village, to buy a lightning rod for the roof of the shed. He was installing it when Maci and Miss Suter walked up to the house. He waved to them and said to Maci, “You have a letter, my dear!” Miss Suter toddled over to shout encouragement up at him while Maci went inside. She was sure the letter would be from Rob, but it wasn’t. It was from Private Vanderbilt.

There were instances in her life upon which she would later reflect and hate herself. When she was five years old, she had eaten two pounds of chocolate cake, then crawled into a corner and gotten sick like a dog. In the weeks following her mother’s death, Maci had considered how she’d broken under no real strain — her children were healthy and she lived a life of privilege — and she had hated her mother for being weak. Later, she would appreciate how anything could break you, how we are all breakable, and she would hate superior, weakness-hating Maci as certainly as she hated five-year-old gluttonous Maci. In this way, she would hate blithe, carefree, stupid Maci, who thought Private Vanderbilt was writing to make love to her. She sat in front of his portrait and read.

Dear Friend,

I know you will have heard by now of your brother Rob’s death on the 17th of September, before Antietam Creek. I thought I should write and tell you of his last days. He was my friend, though he was an officer and I am only an enlisted volunteer. It was my great honor to know him. He saved my life on the very day he died. Crossing Antietam Creek, I became mired in the mud and would have drowned had Rob not returned for me under heavy fire, taking a wound in his scalp as he fetched me. He bound it with a strip of cloth and would not go back. From the creek, we were ordered forward, and we lost men at every step. Our color guard was mowed down three times in succession, but at last we drove the Rebs over a stone wall, and they fled towards the town. We were ordered back not long after that, for we had used up all our ammunition and there was no relief for us — no one could support us in our far-flung position. This order did not sit well with the men of the Ninth, and some of them pursued the fleeing enemy. Your gentle brother was among those pursuers. I was with them, too. We ran into their strength. Just two of twenty-five men made it back to our lines. Those two were I and your brother, but his wounds were such that he did not last the night. I was with him when he died. He spoke no words — his wound was in his throat — but I do not doubt that his thoughts were with you at the last. He spoke of you so often, I feel I know you well. I hope you will call on me, after we soldiers bury our guns. I live in Manhattan, at Number 10 Washington Place.

It is a sorrow that men should find it necessary to take one another’s lives to establish a principle.

Your friend,


George Washington Vanderbilt.

* * *

Maci kept the news to herself for hours because she could not articulate it. In the end, she walked up to her father and presented the letter to him. He read it with a stern face and said, “My darling. He has passed over into the Summerland. Let us celebrate for him.” Maci slapped him, striking his sweet, bewildered face with the strength of her whole arm, then fled to her room, where she would not open the door for him when he came knocking.

The next day, numb habit took her into the village. She stopped before the post office, sat down on the ground, and stared bleakly at the building, a small white house with a roof of cedar shakes. She wanted to weep, but did not. The postmaster saw her sitting there in the street and came out to ask what was the matter. She only said she was tired, and had to rest a little. He brought her inside, where he had mail for her. There was a letter from Rob, and a package that he could have sent up to the house if she wished. Though she ought not to go back up there, he said. Didn’t she know there was a storm coming? It seemed to Maci that the big blow was as lazy as Miss Suter’s unborn principle. It was waiting politely offshore, as if for an invitation to come in and ravage.

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.

“How do you like this one?” asked her aunt. Maci’s hand had been in rebellion for weeks, and she was giving up hope that her affliction would prove to be temporary. It was the third Wednesday of the month, the day the dressmaker always came to deliver new creations. In the evening, Aunt Amy would model them for her niece.

“It’s very pretty,” Maci said.

“Is it too busy?” Aunt Amy was wearing an outfit so complicated Maci could only take it in in pieces: a striped overskirt with fringes, bows, and ruffles; a Chantilly lace jacket; a brooch and matching pendant earrings; a velvet neck ribbon with a dependent cross; a large fringed hair bow; a fan. Elements from her aunt’s outfits would stay with Maci like annoying snatches of song; she knew she’d struggle all week to forget that fringed hair bow.

“By no means,” said Maci. “I think it is altogether reserved.”

“It’s fortunate that you like it because … I’ve one for you also!” It was always supposed to be a surprise when Aunt Amy had two hideously complex dresses made instead of just one. Maci went to her room to put hers on, too, and then she struggled downstairs, caparisoned for a supper less solemn than usual. Aunt Amy would smile as she talked about the latest wave of fashion to come out of Paris, and Maci would think how it was like a disease, fashion, spreading from woman to woman, making them deranged. When she was younger, fine dresses had given her pleasure, but now all she longed for was a set of Bloomers. So many times, in her imagination, she’d come downstairs for dinner attired in trousers, skirt, and tunic, and, laying eyes upon her, Aunt Amy fled to the kitchen to wash her eyes with lye.

After dinner, Maci went back to her room to write. Earlier in the week, she’d had bad news from Philadelphia. Old Mrs. Hale was retiring, and who knew if the next editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book would be as fond as she was of Maci’s writing? She had a special relationship with Mrs. Hale, who’d dealt her a compliment just a few months after they began working together: “Why, you go on so naturally and make so little fuss about your work that I sometimes forget you are a woman.” She might have become a mentor to Maci if she had not always been proving herself a backward thinker — Mrs. Hale insisted, for example, that the vote would be ruinous to the happiness of women.

Hoping to send a big bunch of fatuous articles for the lady to purchase before she retired, Maci kept busy. Night after night, she sat at her desk composing with her right hand, and she found she was able to ignore how her left hand wielded its own pen, sketching, writing, and admonishing. “I’m not looking,” she’d say aloud as she worked. “Scribble all you like, I shan’t cast a glance on it.” But she always did look, eventually. And she’d ask questions, too, when curiosity finally overwhelmed her. “Who is he?” she’d ask, as her hand drew another picture of the ragged little angel, and her hand would write the answer alongside the bizarre-looking wing, Somebody’s brother.

If I told you I was in Hell, suffering eternal punishment because the war made a killer of me, then I know you would believe me. If I predicted that Aunt Amy would die horribly, killed with burning, acid poison by a scarab hatched of eggs dormant in her best cotton dress, I think you would embrace that news. But when I say that the sun will shine tomorrow, you pout and shake your head. When I say we are all undying, that love and grief can bridge the measureless space between us, you think it must be false because it is good, or because it might comfort you. So let me reassure you: I am in a sort of Hell, like every other spirit who has not forgotten the earth, who remembers that we are all creatures afflicted with unremitting desire.

It was the same way that her father had got her to eat new things when she was a child. “Just try it,” he’d say, “and if it is not, after all, to your taste, then you do not have to eat it.” So Maci’s hand told her, Just go, and if it does not suit you, if you find, after all, that their work is not your work, then you may return here to this dreadful life, and I will leave you alone forever. So she left Aunt Amy’s house with the money she’d saved from her articles (faithful Mrs. Hale did, indeed, buy a fat bunch of them), and rode the train to New York, suffering the advances of strange men. It wasn’t enough to keep you respectable, traveling with your dead brother, who lived in your hand.

Maci got a room at the Female Christian Home on East Fifteenth Street. Her first evening there she sat on her bed and thought about her aunt. Maci had sneaked away from the house like a coward, leaving a note that really explained nothing. Aunt, I have urgent business in Philadelphia. She’d thought she would write again from the train, to explain. But she found she was not inclined to write, not on the train, and not in the room she shared with another Christian female, a shovel-faced, opinionless girl named Lavinia. I am wicked, Maci thought to herself, because she was certain that she never wanted to see her aunt again. It made her happy already, just to be away from Boston. But then she would think how she was away at the bidding of her own lunacy, and how she had only enough money to last her for a month or two, and she’d become angry at herself, and she would think, I am wicked and stupid.

On the morning after her arrival in New York, she walked along Broad Street, looking up every so often to meet the disapproving stares of birds perched on the telegraph wires that ran everywhere overhead. She paused outside Number 44. After a few moments, her left hand reached to open the door. She followed along after it, up the stairs to the office of Woodhull, Claflin and Company. Inside, she was met by a man with immense whiskers who sat examining a telegraphic stock indicator where it chattered away near a north window. Maci could hear a similar one running behind a glass-and-wood partition at the back of the room. “May I help you?” he asked.

“I would like to see Mrs. Woodhull,” she said. “My name is Trufant.”

“Ah,” he said, and he smiled. “She’s been expecting you.” Maci hid her surprise, thinking the man had confused her with someone else, because she hadn’t written ahead to announce her visit. The man, who introduced himself as Colonel James Harvey Blood, escorted her to the back. The office was just as it had been described in the Weekly. It was luxurious, with thick rugs thrown over the floors, bushy ferns under the windows, and elegant statuary scattered here and there. Stern Minerva and luscious Aphrodite inhabited two corners of the office, and a third corner was occupied by a piano, atop which sat a bust of Commodore Vanderbilt. Maci stopped in front of it, reaching out to touch Mr. Vanderbilt on his cold, beakish nose, and thought of his son. Against the bust lay a tiny painting, which depicted three little cherubim floating in a rosy sky, holding up a winding parchment upon which was written, Simply to thy cross I cling.

In the back, Mrs. Woodhull and a red-haired lady Maci’s own age were sitting behind twin walnut desks, with gold pens stuck behind their ears. They were talking to a reporter.

“If I were to notice,” said the red-haired lady, “what is said by what they call society, I could not leave my home except in fantastic walking-dresses and ballroom costume. But I despise what squeamy, crying girls or powdered, counter-jumping dandies say of me. We have the counsel of those who have more experience than we, and we are endorsed by the best backers in the city.”

“Do you mean Mr. Vanderbilt?” asked the reporter, a young man with a face so fat and white that Maci had to resist an urge to gather it in her hands and knead it like dough.

“It is very possible that I do,” the lady answered. From a platter on her desk she picked up a strawberry dipped in chocolate and bit into it with abandon. She looked up at the ceiling while juice ran down her chin. The reporter turned to Maci.

“Are you a customer?”

“This is Miss Trufant,” said Colonel Blood. “She’s come to see you, Mrs. Woodhull.”

Maci had composed a statement. It was brief, and perhaps a little elegant, a plea for employment. Here she was, a woman who wrote for newspapers, and there was Mrs. Woodhull, a woman who published one. Didn’t it follow that Mrs. Woodhull should have work for Maci? Maci’s hand had dictated a different statement, something about being a messenger of the spirits of the air. But Maci forgot both statements when the lady looked up and met her eyes. There was something breathtaking about her. It was not just her beauty. She had the sort of grace, Maci decided in that very instant, that arises from absolute independence of mind. Maci found herself unable to speak, but she didn’t have to say anything at all.

“There you are!” said Mrs. Woodhull, jumping up and taking Maci’s hands in her own. “Tennie, here she is! Here she is at last!” Maci’s right hand was limp as a dead fish, but her left hand squeezed back fervently, and trembled with nervous joy.

The lady called Tennie hauled the reporter up by his elbow, pushing him out past the partition and declaring the interview at an end. Then she threw both her arms around Maci, and kissed her on the neck. Maci wanted to ask her to stand back, to scream for her to keep her wet kisses to herself, but when she opened her mouth, Tennie covered it with her own, at which point Maci was too stunned to make any noise at all.

“There she is, real as can be!” said Tennie, pinching her as if to make sure of her flesh, then kissing her again.

“We’ve been waiting for you,” said Mrs. Woodhull.

Mrs. Woodhull is a great and good woman, a lady celebrated by spirits. There is a grand plaza here dedicated to her and to her wonderful sister. There are colossal statues made — can you picture them in your mind? — of quicksilver desire. They stand back to back, giantesses looking with a supreme clarity of vision over the whole Summerland. Everybody here labors under a burden of enthusiasm for Mrs. Woodhull, but really her living son is more significant than she, and the small garden dedicated to him, while very beautiful, does not do justice to his importance.

Does it surprise you, that the dead build monuments to the living? Sister, the whole Summerland is stubbled with such monuments. We go to them, as you go to yours, to remember and to mourn.

It was an extraordinary welcome. Mrs. Woodhull said she had known Maci would come to New York, and hinted that her spirit guide, Demosthenes himself, had promised to deliver her, but Maci chose to believe that Mrs. Woodhull was expecting her, and welcomed her so warmly, because she believed that Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly must draw enthusiastic young women inexorably to her side.

She insisted that Maci be her guest, and took her to a beautiful house on Thirty-eighth Street, where Maci was given a room adjoining Tennie’s on the second floor. Tennie was almost Maci’s age exactly; their birthdays were just a week apart. “We are almost twins,” Tennie said, convinced that they must become the best of friends. Tennie was like Miss Suter, in a way, except where Maci had always suspected Miss Suter of being a liar, Tennie was brazenly honest. Certainly it was another punishment, for Maci to have delivered herself into the hands of devoted Spiritualists. Yet these ladies did not share the quality of fear that Maci had sensed in Miss Suter. They were not hiding under their beliefs from the cruelty of the world.

Mrs. Woodhull challenged Maci to help her “abolish hypocrisy and transform the social sphere.” Listening to her, Maci found her delusions easy to overlook. Mrs. Woodhull claimed wisdom from the dead, not through their books, as other people got it, but from direct personal interviews. Yet this was not to say that she did not read books. All through dinner they talked of Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Mrs. Woodhull had a clipping book with seventeen pages devoted to articles by Margaret Fuller. All evening she and Maci sat in a third-floor study, underneath a dome of green glass, and talked. Maci confessed her plan to write something very large — a vindication of Wollstonecraft’s Vindication. “All that obvious truth, written over a hundred years ago,” Maci said. “I look around me at the world and it’s as if she never made a peep.” She brought out her animadversions on Catharine Beecher, and told how she planned to dissect and refute every argument she could find in print which advocated anything but that women should have absolute power over their own lives.

“Yes, yes,” Mrs. Woodhull said excitedly, and paraphrased the Countess Ossoli. “I mean to vindicate the birthright of all women, to teach them what to claim, and how to use what they obtain.” Then she yawned. It was close to midnight. “Perhaps we’ve talked enough for an evening. There’s work for us to do in the morning.” Over dinner, she had made Maci an assistant editor on her Weekly, just like that. It was a thrill to have employment, but Maci controlled herself, not crying out or giggling with joy, only nodding serenely and saying, “I will be very happy to accept your generous offer.”

Tennie took Maci to her room. Mrs. Woodhull’s house was so big she was grateful to have a guide, because she was sure she’d have lost herself among all the stairs and the halls full of doors. Maci was tired, but Tennie wouldn’t let her go to sleep just yet. Maci sat on a stool in Tennie’s room, which featured prominently a silken tent set up in one corner. “My Turkish corner,” Tennie called it. “When we are more intimate, I’ll take you in there and tell you confidential things.” Now she wanted to trace Maci’s silhouette, to add it to a collection. Maci sat very still in the darkened room while Tennie traced her shadow on a piece of paper pinned to the wall. On an opposite wall there were a dozen other silhouettes, framed and hung in orderly rows. “There they are,” Tennie said, when she saw where Maci was looking, “the rest of the family.”

“I’m really rather sleepy,” said Maci.

“We’re nearly done,” Tennie said, and cursed the candle when it flickered. When she was finished she had a wavering outline of Maci’s profile drawn on black paper with white chalk. “There,” she said. “I waste no time obtaining these. Now, let’s prepare for bed.” She groped at Maci, undoing buttons and ties even as Maci tried to direct her hands away.

“It’s something I do for myself.”

“Nonsense!” said Tennie. “It’s what a sister’s for.” When they were both in their undergarments, Maci saw that Tennie wore a thing she had never before encountered: a combination of chemise and drawers.

“Do you like my chemiloon?” Tennie asked, turning around to model it. Maci nodded, because she did like it, and she was immediately presented with one from out of Tennie’s wardrobe.

After she had bound Maci’s and her own hair up in rags to maintain their curls, Tennie began to prepare her night-cream, which, she said, she made fresh every night from a recipe of her mother’s. It would keep a lady’s skin soft, and also drive away evil spirits. Maci watched as she mixed equal measures of white wax, almond oil, and cacao in a small blue porcelain bowl. Tennie painted it on Maci’s face with a sable brush, and did the same to her own face.

“We’ll bounce for a while,” she said. “It makes for a good sleep.” She took Maci’s hands and dragged her up on the bed. Then she started bouncing, insisting, when Maci only hopped a little, that she bounce vigorously. Maci’s rag-bound hair flopped in her eyes.

“Now I’m weary!” Tennie said. “Are you weary, too?”

“Entirely.”

“Well, if you have trouble sleeping, if you wake in the night feeling agitated, you may have a ride on my pony.” Tennie pointed to a rocking horse big enough for an adult, with a piece of red silk thrown over its saddle. “He’s for sharing, that fellow. Indeed, everything in this room is for sharing.” She opened the door between their rooms and ushered Maci through. Someone had already turned down her sheets and fluffed up her pillows. “Good night, sister!” Tennie said, turning down the light and retreating to her room. She shut the door only halfway.

Maci lay in her new bed, smelling like a macaroon. It was true that she was weary, but she could not sleep. She stayed awake watching the blowing white shapes of her curtains as they moved in the breeze. Her left hand was twitching, walking up and down the bed like a scrabbling crab, and pinching at the flesh of her belly. “Stop it,” she said, but it would not stop. There was a writing desk already set up for her, as if to provide for her affliction. She turned up the light and sat down.

Didn’t I tell you they’d be waiting?

“Why now?” she asked. “Why did you let me feel safe, first, before you began this torture?” If her hand had rebelled back when rebellion was popular, five years ago or more, then she might have been better prepared to put it down, stronger and more able in her dealings with it. Complacency had made her weak, and reflecting on the very agreeable time she had spent that day with Mrs. Woodhull, she feared it would only be a matter of days before she succumbed to delusion and declared herself the Apostle of the Left Hand.

The veil was thick, the walls were high. Soon the work will be done, and then, Sister, we will be together again. What is in you that you will only believe in despair and think hope only the comfort given by the weak to the weak?

She had no answer for that question. She rose from the desk, though the pen was still in her hand, and lay down again in bed. When the pen wrote on Mrs. Woodhull’s fine sheets she ignored it, but she saw the message in the morning, smeared by her tossing body: not insane, not at all.

Benjamin Franklin is here. Thomas Jefferson is here. Vergil is here — this place is stuffed with virtuous pagans. It is said, of Heaven and the Summerland, that everyone is here, and everyone will be here. But a change is coming. We mean to make the here and there a single place, to make a marriage between Heaven and Earth. Try to imagine that, a world free of the distinctions made by death, where immortals are mortal, and mortals are immortal. Glorious wedding! Mother is here, still desirous of beans. Margaret Fuller is here. She sees you and loves you.

By September, Maci was firmly installed at the Park Row offices of the Weekly. She was almost hidden behind the tall stacks of daily and weekly newspapers, received from all over the country, that were piled on her desk. She’d had the idea of clipping items about women and printing them for the weekly’s readers. She had a nice little collection of them already: Miss Hoag is the pioneer fresh-woman in the Northwestern University; Miss Amy M. Bradley has been appointed Examiner of Schools for New Hanover County, North Carolina; Miss Louisa Stratton of Johnson County, Iowa, challenges any man in the state to a plowing match with her, and proposes a two-horse team.

“Are you in there?” Mrs. Woodhull asked, peering over a paper tower that reached just to her nose.

“I am,” said Maci.

“I want your opinion on this.” Mrs. Woodhull handed over a sheaf of papers, and walked away. Maci leaned back in her chair and read what she had been given, a little treatise on the Fourteenth Amendment, and how it trumped the need for a Sixteenth, for which brave ladies like Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony had been unsuccessfully campaigning. Because women were citizens, they were already guaranteed the right to vote by the Fourteenth Amendment. All they need do was assert that right. The argument was brilliant and simple. “It makes perfect sense,” Maci told Mrs. Woodhull, when she returned to Maci’s desk. “Such an elegant, transparent solution. No wonder it has remained so long invisible.”

“So you’ll admit it?” said Mrs. Woodhull. “You will grant that I see the unseen?” Maci laughed.

“In this instance alone, Mrs. Woodhull.” Maci insisted that Demosthenes would have to sit down with them at dinner before she’d believe in him. Mrs. Woodhull kept a place for him at her table, with a wineglass from which her drunken sister Utica stole nips. Maci kept all her own impossible strangeness a secret. She didn’t tell how her dead brother commanded her hand. It wouldn’t do to tell, because to tell would be to join them in their delusion, to embrace her own madness and to afford it a measure of respect which she preferred to deny it.

Mrs. Woodhull endorsed silliness in public; she’d deliver a learned argument on the politics of the ancient Egyptians, then make herself stupid by saying she had it all direct from the ethereal lips of Demosthenes. Maci wondered how much more the woman could already have accomplished if she could only keep a few choice things to herself. But it was a virtue, too, how she hated hypocrisy, how she would not lie even by omission, but always told the whole truth as she saw it. She was like her paper, sublime and a little ridiculous. She’d assign Maci to investigate a stock swindle, and the next day ask her to write a phony letter from Paris, full of fashion and gossip, under the name Flor de Valdal. Her politics, at least, were serious, and a few powerful men were taking her seriously.

At a party in September of 1870, Maci walked among the omnipresent roses in Mrs. Woodhull’s parlors, talking with Benjamin Butler, a person whom she’d never dreamed of meeting. They were waiting to honor Steven Pearl Andrews, who had asked Maci to call him Professor Pearlo when they met for the first time, and had talked for an hour about his conviction that before the twentieth century dawned, a trans-Saharan railway would relieve the burdens of the camel.

“I think smart girls are ruined by marriage,” Mr. Butler said at the party. “Energies that could be spent improving the world are instead wasted on the pursuit of a husband.”

“But Mrs. Woodhull is married,” said Maci.

“Yes, and rather more extensively than most. But she is a special case.”

“I think I must agree with you,” Maci said. You are in love with her, her hand had accused. “I do admire her,” she said to it, and wasn’t that reasonable, after all? Could a woman start with nothing, in a rickety shack in a place called Homer, and in the course of a decade become a stockbroker, a publisher, a writer, a candidate for President, and not demand a little admiration?

“Sometimes,” said Mr. Butler, “I think a celestial accident occurred at her birth, and that a male soul must have been allotted to her body.” He really was extraordinarily ugly.

“Yes,” Maci said. “Isn’t that easier to believe than that she could have a woman’s soul, and still have a greater purpose than merely to gratify the senses of man?”

“Well,” said Mr. Butler. He reached down to a tray on a table and gathered up a few carrots, cut as small and fine as the fingers of a baby. Eating them by the handful, he looked about the room at length, as if considering his response, while Maci looked over his shoulder at Tennie’s friend Dr. Fie, another man she had offended that night. Her mind turned to Mrs. Woodhull’s accomplished young son, a boy who had made such an early success of medicine that he was able to keep a house even larger than his mother’s. Maci had seen him once or twice, small and furtive, always in the company of Dr. Fie.

“Ah,” said Mr. Butler, at the sound of the doorbell. “Here is Mr. Andrews.” He offered her his arm, to walk her to the crowd that had gathered around the door, but Maci informed him that she was quite capable of seeing herself across the room without assistance.

If woman is capable of being a mother to those who make the laws of nations, if she is capable of training the young mind up to mature age, and shaping its physical, social, and intellectual destiny, then surely she is capable of taking part in politics. Death has leveled us all, Sister. Coke and Blackstone (here too!) say it also: everyone is equal in death, and when the dead live again they will bring perfect equality back with them to wash over the earth.

In January of 1871, Maci wrote a letter to Aunt Amy, the most sensible person she knew.

Aunt, I know what I believe. I know what is foolish and what is wise. I know the symptoms of madness, and I know that I am florid with them. I know that I have, by your judgment, run off quite unexpectedly to join a community of Free Love in a capital of wickedness, and that this must seem queer payment for your generosity. But please understand that every day I rise and work. I often have ideas very late in the evening. In the space of three days I see them in print, and in the space of three more days those same words, that late-night notion of mine, have gone out in twenty thousand copies all over this country, with a few copies to Britain and France and one copy — can you believe it? — to St. Petersburg. And Aunt, Mrs. Woodhull will deliver a memorial to Congress this next week. Can your dresses give you satisfaction, can the memory of your husband keep you content when such a thing is about to happen? Mad or sane, where should I be but with her? I know you worry about me. I know you think it is a scandal, to associate with such a woman. I know you think that madness has sucked me up as it sucked up your sister, that my family is come at last to absolute ruin. But I promise you, Aunt, that my hand can babble as it may, but I will never believe it. I will never succumb to that sweet belief, that the dead are not dead, because it seems obvious to me that to believe this would cast upon them the most atrocious dishonor, that to reduce their loss to nothing is to reduce them to nothing, that to indulge madness to save yourself pain for them is the work of a coward. I go forward, Aunt, as radically and sensibly as I dare.

Maci never sent this letter, or others that she wrote. It pleased her, sometimes, to imagine Aunt Amy in a fret over the disappearance of her niece, but she knew that Aunt Amy was not likely to fret over her. Finding Maci gone, Aunt Amy would have been angry, then relieved, and then fallen back into the comforts of quotidian sameness which Maci’s disappearance had briefly interrupted. Maci collected the letters in a bundle, and put them away in another rosewood box, her fourth, stuffed like the others with pictures and correspondence.

Maci rode down with Mrs. Woodhull to be with her when she delivered her memorial. It was Maci’s first time in Washington. “Mrs. Woodhull,” she said, peering out the window of the carriage when they rode by General Grant’s house on their way to their hotel, “when you are President, you’ll have to live in that big white barn.”

“Not if I move the capital to New York, my star.” That was Mrs. Woodhull’s pet name for Maci, inspired by the pseudonym, Arcturus, under which Maci wrote her articles, and by a certain spiritual radiance which, she claimed, hovered around Maci’s body, especially when ideas were hot in Maci’s head. Sometimes, as they worked together late into the night in the house on Thirty-eighth Street, Mrs. Woodhull would suddenly shield her eyes from Maci and say, “Oh, you are too bright, too bright!”

But it was Mrs. Woodhull who burned up the little room in Congress that day in January. She held the entire audience spellbound with her lucid argument. Maci’s lips moved along during the speech — she and Mrs. Woodhull had been over it so many times that Maci knew it by heart. Maci took great satisfaction in looking around the room at the rapt, attentive faces of all the powerful men and giant women. Only Mrs. Woodhull’s son, the younger Dr. Woodhull, spoiled the perfect attention. He’d brought a child with him into the room, a pale boy named Pickie, whom he claimed to have found in the snow in Madison Square Park a few weeks before.

The boy giggled whenever Dr. Woodhull whispered to him. A reporter standing next to them made hushing noises, but was ignored. Even Mr. Whitman, who Maci understood to be a friend even closer to Dr. Woodhull than was Dr. Fie, failed to quiet them when he tried. It didn’t really matter that they were whispering and giggling — no one was distracted from Mrs. Woodhull — but Maci found it outrageous that the lady’s own son should be so disrespectful towards her in her great hour. It irked Maci, how he did not act like her son, how he was not respectful towards her, how he showed her no affection. Maci’s mother was dead of a madness much less sublime than Mrs. Woodhull’s; her father was huddled uselessly on a cliff in Rhode Island. She wanted to rearrange fate, to effect a parent swap with him, and then she would see if he did not appreciate having Mrs. Woodhull for a mother. She wanted, at least, to take him aside, to scold him. “Don’t you know,” she would ask, “that your mother is extraordinary?”

There was something about him, though, which repelled her. Tennie described him as heavily electritized, and revealed to Maci, as if it were a precious secret, that he and Mr. Whitman were the two poles of a love-magnet. Maci did not know what that meant, and did not want to know, but she wondered, sometimes, if there were not a strange force in him. Whenever she went near him, on the rare occasions when he visited his mother’s house, she felt herself pushed away by something almost like panic. He is the Magus, her hand wrote. He is working to bring us back. What a celebration we would have here, if you would only speak to him. I tell you, there would be a parade! Sister, he needs your assistance.

“Brushing his hair, perhaps,” Maci replied, because it was always in a tangle.

It was after his mother’s memorial that Maci, compelled by her rage, finally spoke to young Dr. Woodhull. She found him outside the Capitol, watching Mr. Whitman play in the snow with the boy, Pickie. She stood behind him where he leaned on a stone railing, and gathered in her breath to shout at him. “How dare you!” is what she wanted to say, surprising him with a bombardment of fury. But she found she wasn’t able to shout at him after all. She let out the breath she had gathered, making a noise that sounded like a sigh.

Dr. Woodhull straightened up and turned around, stared a moment into her face, then turned back to watch his friend and his ward. Saying nothing, he stepped aside to make room for her to stand next to him. He began to gather up snow from off of the railing. Maci stared out at Mr. Whitman and the boy where they were frolicking around the ridiculous statue of General Washington. The boy climbed on the statue, kicking snow off of Washington’s lap and into Mr. Whitman’s face. “You rascal!” Mr. Whitman said. Her rage forgotten, Maci laughed at them.

“When I was a child,” she said, “my nurse discovered a copy of Leaves of Grass in my bed and beat me with it. She said it was a naughty book, and that I was a naughty child to read it.” Dr. Woodhull did a thing with his face — it might have been a smile or it might have been a grimace. He handed her a perfectly shaped snowball, then put his hands over his stomach.

“Are you ill?” Maci asked him.

“No,” he said. “Don’t ever tell Walt you got beaten with his book. It would make him sad.” He looked for a few moments at her shoes, cleared his throat, sniffed in the cold air. “Over there,” he said, pointing across the grounds to a building on the other side of Second Street. “Did you know that’s where they hung Mrs. Surrat?” Before she could reply he ran off to play. Maci considered her snowball, thinking she’d never seen anything so thoroughly round before in her life. It seemed like a sin to destroy it, but still she threw it against the wall of the Capitol, imagining it a perfect ball of fire, not ice, one that would set the place ablaze, and bring down the old order so she and Mrs. Woodhull could build it up again better and more just. The snowball behaved oddly, bouncing whole to the floor of the terrace before it exploded into a cloud of snow.

She watched the three playing for a while longer, until Mr. Whitman paused to stare at her. She thought for a moment that she should wave to him, but it seemed like an overly familiar gesture to make towards a stranger, so she turned and walked away.

I saw you. The veil is thick, but not obscuring to vision. We all see you. We see all of you. We watch you rend your clothes and pull your hair at our absence. You are destroyed because we are not with you, but do you ever consider how we are destroyed because you are not with us? Do you ever consider our grief? Selfish, selfish! O Sister, do you see what small sympathy exists on earth for the dead?

There was a time after Rob’s death when Maci went about in her aunt’s house with her hair in disarray and her dress torn, when she borrowed rituals of grief and devised her own — covering mirrors and putting out food for her brother to eat; standing for hours in the foyer in case a spiritual postman should come scratching ever so lightly at the door with a letter from him; saying a prayer every night for his sake — Lord bless him and keep him eternally in light and please tomorrow let him be alive. She’d lie in bed waiting in vain for sleep to come, and scenes from their life would play out in her head — hiding under Aunt Amy’s bed when she visited their house on Mount Vernon Street, and grabbing at her toes as she sat getting ready for sleep; dressing the dog; teaching the cat to swim in the washtub. Over the course of months she played out their whole lives, going back in time until she wrecked her little boat of reverie upon a first memory. She was two years old, taking a nap under the piano — a place she was fond of until she was seven — when Rob came and woke her. “Get up, you,” he said. He was unfriendly, back then, because he had wished to remain an only child. He hadn’t asked for a sister, and hoped at first that she might just go away without any fuss. She remembered hearing his voice, then opening her eyes and seeing him, and because it was her first memory, it seemed to her sometimes that it was he, not their parents, who had called her into creation, that she entered into life at the sound of his voice. In the weeks and months following his death, she ruminated on such strange notions. Back then she’d thought madness would be a blessing. It would be better to think constantly on beans than to think on him in his last moments, than to think on the wound in his throat, sucking and whistling, throwing out a spray of blood with every breath.

But she had not grown fascinated with beans, not with roses or budgies or with the patterns made by the grain in a wood floor, though she had given all these things the most thorough consideration, and opened herself up to them, inviting them to rule her. Instead, she had straightened her hair over a period of months, sewn up the tear in her dress, and traded her acute misery for something more sensible and less exhausting, a cruel and hard sort of wisdom that said people die, and a person can do nothing against that. It’s the greatest open secret, that death will take everyone, that every person is as transient as a shadow. Embracing this knowledge, she came to realize, was how sane people managed their grief, and she thought it had served her pretty well for as long as she remained sane. It’s me it’s me it’s me, her impostor hand would write all through the winter, and all through the winter she’d reply, “How dare you say that?”

And all winter long she had terrible dreams. They featured young Dr. Woodhull, a person who was expressly not invited to invade her sleeping mind. She’d lie awake, fearing sleep as she did when she was a girl, back when nightmares were always springing out of the crevices of her agitated brain. “Not tonight,” she’d whisper, praying for dreamless sleep, or at least for the sort of dreams she used to enjoy, in which she healed the split between the New York and Boston factions of the woman suffrage movement, or in which Private Vanderbilt’s big hands closed, over and over, about her waist.

Despite her prayers, she’d find herself in the moonlit orchard, up to her ankles in rotting windfall apples and pears. She’d look up and see a child’s dress blowing in the branches of a pear tree. Dr. Woodhull would step out from a pool of darkness. “It’s a shame,” he’d say as he put his hand on her, “how it must pass away. Even something as beautiful as this.” He’d hold her breast in his two hands, lifting it up as if for her inspection, and as she watched it turned the color of ash. His touch was reverent, but everywhere it left purple blotches of rot in the shape of his hand.

“Not much room to roll around in here, is there?” he asked her in another dream. They were together in a coffin meant, like all coffins, for just a single occupant. “Why don’t they make them bigger? It’s not as if people always die one at a time.”

And in another dream, the worst, Maci stood with him looking down into her mother’s casket. Louisa Trufant was a wasted thing, shriveled away to bones, tendons, and skin by her diet of beans. But her hair was thick and shining as it had never been in life. Even as Maci watched, it grew, filling the casket until her mother seemed to be bathing in it, and indeed it made a sound like rushing water as it poured from her head. “Look,” Dr. Woodhull told her. “Look at her. Keep looking. If you keep at it she will give up a secret to you.”

Maci would wake, quieting sobs with one hand while her other pulled her across the room to the desk. We are creatures, like you, it wrote, made all of sadness and desire, only a thousand times more so. We share want like water, here. Sister, do you know how you are missed by strangers? We want to come back. Please, we want to come back.


In April of 1871, Maci went along with Tennie to Number 10 Washington Place, the home of Mr. Vanderbilt. Maci had been working on something for the Weekly, an article in support of the late Mr. Lincoln’s wife. Mrs. Lincoln, she wrote, is thrown over on the assigned ground that the widow of the murdered President is not in danger of actual starvation. We have no affection for pensions in public allowance. Every honest worker is as much a servant of the state and a public benefactor as any duly appointed official. In the case of accident or sudden death the laborer’s widow or child gets no State assistance. But if there be any such principle as public gratitude and any such way of testifying it as pension or pecuniary gratuity, Abraham Lincoln’s widow is the woman to receive it — her husband killed on account of public duty with a record, beyond the doubt of selfish motive — if that be not a claim on the nation’s bounty, what is?

It was typical of Mrs. Woodhull’s new direction. She had been courting the labor movement for months, and had instructed Maci to write pieces favorable to it. Maci complied as best she could, but always she found herself writing articles that endorsed the perspectives of the working class while simultaneously rejecting them. Maci thought it ill-advised for the Weekly to embrace Communists. She tried to tell this to Mrs. Woodhull, but the lady was dogged in her conviction that Communists, like Free Lovers and Spiritualists, were all decent and righteous and good.

The article was giving Maci a headache when Tennie came by and offered to take her away to visit the Commodore, a benefactor and intimate friend. Tennie had offered before to take Maci to his house, but Maci had always declined, because she was certain there would be a great awkwardness involved in visiting the father of the man she’d practically married in her imagination. But that day in April, Maci went because small, peculiar George Washington Woodhull was still sneaking into her dreams, bringing her strange gifts now: a lump of cold iron, a double handful of ashes, a bouquet of broken glass flowers. She wanted to drive him away, and she thought a visit to the Vanderbilt house might help to do it.

Her left hand denied coincidence, maintaining that it was a sign that Tennie was cozy with the Private’s father. It was clear to Maci that the relationship was not exactly a coincidence, but it wasn’t a magical arrangement, either. Mrs. Woodhull had told how she had sought out Commodore Vanderbilt when she’d first arrived in the city. She’d given him advice, that she claimed to have from the spirits, on the future behavior of certain stocks. He’d repaid her in kind, and she’d built her fortune on those first stock tips. “We’re kindred souls,” Mrs. Woodhull claimed of the Commodore, but it was her sister to whom he’d proposed marriage, and who had rejected him. “Marriage is the grave of love,” Tennie said simply, when Maci asked why she hadn’t accepted his offer. At Number 10 Washington Place a winking servant let them in a back door and led them through the house.

In a study full of empty bookshelves, Maci and Tennie had a visit with Mr. Vanderbilt. He greeted Maci in a very cordial manner, but soon grew cold when it became clear to him that she would not sit on his lap. Tennie did sit there, and they smoked from the same cigar, and drank whiskey. Their intimacy was routine and not shocking to Maci, who laughed now when she thought how she had been shocked by her father’s behavior towards Miss Suter. Maci pretended to sip from a glass of wine while she stared at Mr. Vanderbilt, looking for his son in him but not finding him there. She’d heard it said that a bride could look to her husband’s father to see the man with whom she’d spend her old age, and as she sat listening to Tennie and Mr. Vanderbilt talking of the virtues of cigars, she tried to imagine being old with someone who looked like this, a man with giant white whiskers, a hard face, and hawkish eyes. She failed at it. He was too coarse and grabby. All she could think was how her frail old bones and papery skin would never withstand his pinching and poking.

“I’ll show you around the house, Maci,” Tennie said suddenly, sliding off Mr. Vanderbilt’s lap. She kissed his cheek and said, “You don’t mind, do you, old goat?” She didn’t wait for his answer, but took Maci’s hand and led her out into the dark hall.

“We must be quiet,” she said. “If we wake Frank we might be sorry for it.” Frank was the new Mrs. Vanderbilt, the daughter of the lady whom Mr. Vanderbilt’s surviving children had put forth, after their mother’s death, as an acceptable bride. She was the lady he’d settled for when Tennie refused him. Maci followed Tennie as she tiptoed down the hall to a staircase, which she ascended in slow, cautious steps, pausing every now and then as if to listen for sounds of alarm.

“Where are we going?” Maci asked.

“Upstairs,” Tennie whispered. On the second floor, Tennie led her to a bedroom. She opened the creaking door very slowly, and after she had turned up the gas, touched Maci on the hand and said, “I thought you would like to see it.”

“Where are you going?” Maci asked, as Tennie left. Maci would have followed, but as soon as the light came up she recognized that this room belonged to her brother’s friend. She had confessed her stupid conceit late one night in Tennie’s Turkish corner, had unfolded Rob’s portrait of Private Vanderbilt while Tennie praised the art and the man. “He’s a big handsome beast,” she’d said, and they’d worked each other into sentimental tears for the lover Maci never had. Maci had been deeply ashamed the next day, and because Tennie had not ever spoken of it except to ask her if her friend Dr. Fie was not the same beastly size as Private Vanderbilt, Maci figured she’d forgotten.

Maci explored the room quietly, after briefly acknowledging to herself that she ought just to leave without disturbing a thing. It was as he must have left it years before, except his uniform was folded on the bed. There were a few pictures on the wall, big oil paintings of steamers, portraits of his father’s property. She opened a wardrobe to look at his clothes, oversized sack coats and shirts into whose sleeves she imagined she could easily fit her whole leg. When Maci lay down on his bed, her head found something hard under the pillow: a Bible. She put her face on the uniform, thinking to discover his secret, personal odor in it. But it had been too long since he’d worn it, and now his uniform smelled utterly blank. With her face in his shirt she considered how it was very bad, what she’d done, so grossly assuming that they might have been friends, and imagining him her husband in various domestic scenes. She was embarrassed for herself, to be sneaking in a stranger’s house, sniffing at a stranger’s clothes. And she was embarrassed because, lying here at last in Private Vanderbilt’s abandoned bed, as close as she would ever get to him in this life, she felt very little. In fact, she felt nothing at all, not love, not grief, not desire, just a great empty space where a ghost did not live, where there was nobody and nothing, after all.

Do you remember the day our mother died? Do you remember how it was beautiful, bright, and warm after two cold days of rain? It put me in mind of Easter, because I had never seen it rain on Easter, or fail to rain on Good Friday. There was something that I wanted to say to you, then, but like you I was dumb in my mourning. I wanted to tell you that I was so sad I felt as if I might be happy, or in love, simply because such powerful feelings can appear the same to the naive. I was mighty with grief, and I thought I should be empowered by it. I thought my hands should shine with a yellow light, and that should I reach out to touch our mother on the head, I would call her back from the place she’d gone. I felt so very powerful. Later I thought, Fool, you’ve never been more powerless in your life. And it seemed so stupid, to think I could have called Mother back to life merely with the strength of my sadness. But Sister, the ridiculous fallacy is to think that grief cannot bring us back. You must believe me when I say that it certainly can. If only you grieved more and better, we would be back with you now. If only you did not forget us, we could return to you.

Maci tended to arrange all the Claflins but Tennie by their bad habits, and in her mind she often referred to them by their chiefest sins instead of their names. So big, hairy Malden Claflin was Gluttony. Sinister, one-eyed Buck, who’d come pawing at Maci one night in her bedroom, and was dealt a black eye by her left hand, was Avarice, because his greed was even more prominent a feature in him than his lechery. Miss Utica, drunk and jealous of her sisters every hour of the day and night, was Envy. Worst of all of them was Anna Claflin, Mrs. Woodhull’s demonic mother, a lady who embodied a sin Maci had no name for. It involved a quality of being murderous in intent if not in action, of being a contemptible liar and a relentless hater, and of trying to own every person around you, even strangers.

“How do you rise, with such weighty hangers-on?” Maci had asked Mrs. Woodhull, because she did not understand how she could have accomplished all she had with such a persecutory chorus always trailing after her.

“My family is my strength,” Mrs. Woodhull replied confidently, but they almost destroyed her in May, when Anna Claflin swore out a warrant against Colonel Blood, whom she hated because he had appropriated a portion of her daughter’s love that Anna thought was due all to her. May was anniversary month, when a person could not open a paper without seeing accounts of the annual meetings of a half-dozen societies. Societies bent on reforming or deforming the nation; associations for the advancement of the street urchin; bands of veterans; amateur devotees of the botanical sciences; the River Pirates’ Orphans’ Benevolent Circle — everyone met in May. Mrs. Woodhull had a bright moment at the convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association at Apollo Hall, but even as she was speaking her mother was slouching down to Essex Market police court. There Anna swore out her warrant accusing Colonel Blood of beating her and threatening to kill her with an iron dog similar to the one used to murder the distinguished Mr. Nathan nearly a year before. She hinted that it was very possible, to her mind, that Colonel Blood, not Mr. Nathan’s son, was the still-at-large fiend who had gleefully bludgeoned that esteemed man to death.

“You awful creature!” Mrs. Woodhull shouted at her mother, after the trial was over, after her magnificent speech had been eclipsed in every New York paper by the misleading fact that she had two husbands living in her house. “You false thing!” Mrs. Woodhull put her face in Maci’s shoulder and cried, and Maci brought her arms up to embrace her. Anna Claflin was shrieking curses, but Maci barely heard them. She felt suddenly transported out of the elegant parlor, out of the beautiful house, and up into the sky, because greatness had chosen her arms in which to weep.

Anna and Buck were ejected from the house on Thirty-eighth Street, but they came back in June, recalled by some familial gravity that baffled Maci. By then Maci had other worries. Ever since Anna’s trial, it had become fashionable to insult Mrs. Woodhull, and every day, all over the country, some editor would hop on the slander-cart and write an editorial that called her immoral for sheltering her broken-down former husband in her mansion. The most humiliating attacks came from Catharine Beecher who claimed that Mrs. Woodhull was the pinnacle of five thousand years of accumulating indecency, and from Beecher’s sister Mrs. Stowe, who caricatured Mrs. Woodhull in the pages of The Christian Union. In Mrs. Stowe’s frankly stupid serial novel, Victoria Woodhull was a carousing lady called Audacia Dangereyes, who owned a paper called The Virago, who swore and had multiple husbands, and in whose wake Free Love circulated like a stink.

“This will stop their fat mouths,” Mrs. Woodhull said as she and Maci worked on a letter to the Times, a veiled threat to expose Henry Beecher as an adulterer. Because I am a woman, Maci wrote while Mrs. Woodhull stood with a hand resting on her shoulder, and because I conscientiously hold opinions somewhat different from the self-elected orthodoxy which men find their pride in supporting, self-elected orthodoxy assails me, vilifies me, and endeavors to cover my life with ridicule and dishonor. This has been particularly the case in reference to certain law-proceedings into which I was recently drawn by the weakness of one very near, and provoked by other relatives.

My opinions and principles are subjects of just criticism. I put myself before the public voluntarily. But let him who is without sin cast his stone. I do not intend to be the scapegoat of sacrifice, to be offered up as a victim to society by those who cover up the foulness and the feculence of their thought with hypocritical mouthing of fair professions, and who divert public attention from their own iniquity by pointing their finger at me. I advocate Free Love — in the highest and purest sense, as the only cure for the immorality by which men corrupt sexual relations.

My judges who preach against “Free Love” openly, practice it secretly. For example, I know of one man, a public teacher of eminence, who lives in concubinage with the wife of another public teacher of almost equal eminence. All three concur in denouncing offenses against morality. So be it, but I decline to stand up as the “frightful example.” I shall make it my business to analyze some of these lives and will take my chances in the manner of libel suits.

Maci had delighted in the letter as she wrote it. But later, after it summoned Theodore Tilton from across the river, she regretted it. He came from Brooklyn to silence Mrs. Woodhull with pleas and promises and threats from Mr. Beecher. Tilton was supposed to convert her to silence, or cow her into respecting his and Mr. Beecher’s secret. Instead, he fell in love with her.

Surely, Maci thought, love could not be more Free than this. Mrs. Woodhull suddenly quite forgot Colonel Blood, who in his turn blithely ignored her frequent outings with Mr. Tilton. Maci, however, could not ignore them. She felt compelled to follow the two as they went to the park to ride in pleasure-boats, to Coney Island to play in the surf, or to the top of the Croton Distributing Reservoir to walk around and around the promenade, with their heads close together, sheltered by Mrs. Woodhull’s parasol from the sun but not from common view.

She wasn’t the only person following them. The younger Dr. Woodhull and his ward also trailed after his mother and her intimate friend on their outings. They’d both remove their hats and bow to Maci, whenever she caught sight of them. But he never spoke to her until the day in June that would see Anna and Buck Claflin return to their daughter’s house. That day, Maci had tracked Mrs. Woodhull and Mr. Tilton down to the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street, and thence up to the top of the reservoir, where she paced them as they sauntered underneath a sky so deeply blue it was nearly purple. On such a lovely day, the reservoir was crowded. Mrs. Woodhull looked back every so often and nodded at Maci. She found Maci’s fretting laughable and sweet.

“Miss Trufant,” Dr. Woodhull said, startling her where she was standing at a corner of the reservoir, and nearly causing her to leap clear into the water.

“Dr. Woodhull,” she said, overcome immediately with the familiar, panicked feeling.

“Did you know,” he asked her excitedly, “that this reservoir holds twenty million gallons of water? And did you know that we are a full forty-one miles from Croton Lake? The water flows all that way! Have you seen the bridge and aqueduct over the Harlem River? It is a marvelous piece of engineering. But the great bridge to Brooklyn will be even finer.” His face was flushed, and he was breathing as if he had just subjected himself to great exertion. She stared in his face for a moment, and he looked away, up into the air. His eyes were perfect mirrors of the dark blue sky.

“Is science your religion, Dr. Woodhull?”

“No,” he said, shifting his gaze to his mother, who, standing a few hundred feet off with Mr. Tilton, had begun to walk again. Dr. Woodhull offered Maci his arm. Not taking it, she walked with him. “I do believe, however,” he continued, “that science can change the world. I think it will make a better place for us to live in.”

“My father thought so,” said Maci. “He was wrong.” They walked for a while, stopping again when Mrs. Woodhull stopped. Maci noticed the boy, Pickie, kneeling by the water, where other boys were racing toy sailboats.

“I think science is not your religion, Miss Trufant. But tell me what you do believe in.”

Maci said nothing at first, thinking how her hand was always accusing her. Sister, it wrote, you believe in nothing. That is the most debilitating of sins.

Mrs. Woodhull’s vigorous laugh came drifting to them. Maci’s silence stretched on.

“Yesterday,” said Dr. Woodhull, “my mother was described in a Philadelphia paper as ‘The Dark Angel of Divorce.’”

“I believe,” Maci said forcefully, “that all existence is crossed by sorrow.” A little green sailboat came racing towards them across the water. All the boys were encouraging it, except little Pickie, who was sitting down on the ground now and crying. Maci went and knelt by him.

“What’s the matter, little fellow?” she asked him.

“It’s my brother,” he wailed. “He is unborn!”

“He means he is lonely,” Dr. Woodhull said behind her. “Be quiet, Pickie. Watch the boats. See how they are carefree? You should be like them.”

“There now,” Maci said, holding the boy close while he sobbed. She found herself admiring his long, lustrous brown hair. But then it brought to mind the dream of her mother, and she shuddered. “This boy needs his hair cut,” she said.

Dr. Woodhull shrugged. Pickie stopped crying and returned Maci’s embrace with such strength that she gasped.

“Mama!” Pickie said, then laughed.

“Forgive him,” Dr. Woodhull said. “He hugs dogs, and calls them ‘Mama.’ Trees, too.”

“Not my mama,” Pickie said, “but my brother’s mama.” He broke away from her embrace and went back to watch the boats.

“He has a volatile temperament,” Dr. Woodhull said apologetically. Maci looked all around for Mrs. Woodhull, but failed to find her.

“She’s escaped me,” Maci said.

“She’s gone home,” Dr. Woodhull said. “To prepare for the party.”

“Which party is that?” Maci asked him, but he’d already walked off to retrieve Pickie. The two of them made a formal bow to her and walked into the crowds.

Maci would have liked not to celebrate the return of the nasty prodigals, but Mrs. Woodhull insisted that she participate in the groundless festivities. We ought to be mourning, Maci said to herself, and sat at the far end of Mrs. Woodhull’s table, away from the revelry, working on an article that profiled and condemned Madame Restell. She is seen every day, she wrote, a pale lady riding fast in her gorgeous carriage. Why does she drive so fast? Is she flying from herself?

“Sweet, sweet forgiveness!” Anna Claflin shouted at the other end of the room. Engrossed in her work, Maci didn’t notice how the old lady was sneaking up on her. She’d smeared her lips with honey, and meant to give Maci a sugar-kiss. Maci looked up too late to duck away. But young Dr. Woodhull’s hand came between them before Anna’s lips could connect with Maci’s. Anna kissed his hand lovingly, then went back to the other end of the table. She took a knife and began to stab at Colonel Blood’s shadow where the light threw it on a wall.

“Thank you,” Maci said, watching Dr. Woodhull wipe honey from his palm. Marking his deficit, she stared too long.

“My eighty-percent hand,” he said.

“I am rude,” she said. “Please forgive me.”

“There’s nothing to forgive.”

“Was it an animal? Did an animal bite you?”

“A congenital deformity,” he said. “You’ll notice that I share it with my grandmother. But won’t you come down and celebrate, Miss Trufant?”

“I prefer not to,” she said. “In fact, I am sleepy. Good night, Dr. Woodhull.” She gathered up her papers, shook his hand — the whole one — and went upstairs to her room. By the time she came to her room she’d become so weary that she lay on her bed without undressing and fell immediately into a dream, in which she and Dr. Woodhull were back at the reservoir, sitting with their bare feet dangling in the water. He had an abundance of hair on his toes.

“Do you believe in love, Miss Trufant?” he asked her. “Do you believe it is more than a gratifying delusion?”

“Free Love?” she asked.

“Any kind,” he said.

“Well,” she said, getting up from where they were sitting and walking away rapidly on her wet feet, suddenly remembering that she had to find Mrs. Woodhull. “In fact I do not,” she said softly. Dr. Woodhull had hurried after her and was walking with his face very close to her own. “I do not believe in it at all.” Mrs. Woodhull dropped down out of the sky to land in front of them without a sound. Maci reached out and touched her face, and woke to her voice.

Mrs. Woodhull and Mr. Tilton were on the roof. They had a bower there, to which they retreated nightly. Mrs. Woodhull was berating Mr. Tilton for going on about how his wife and Mr. Beecher had wounded him. They began a spirited argument, but just as they seemed ready to start screaming like Claflins, their voices cut off, and presently Maci heard Mrs. Woodhull crying out in a high voice, and Tilton shouting, “Praise, praise!”

Maci had gotten into the habit of listening, rather than closing her window, just as she listened sometimes at Tennie’s door when she was entertaining her large friend Dr. Fie, or some other friend, large or small. Tennie seemed to take them in all sizes. Maci pretended that she was exploring a mystery with her shameful listening. She’d write down the words she heard, the cries that sounded plaintive, frustrated, angry, relieved, and then arrange them together in sentences of strident lust. And, sometimes, when she had been lying in her damp sheets for an hour listening to the lovers on the roof, she’d consider finally taking a ride on the pony, which Tennie had solicitously moved into her room, insisting that Maci had greater need of it than she did. Maci had sat on it once, the little bump put just in the place it was meant to go, and taken a few exploratory rocks. She’d dismounted immediately, covering the thing up again with its slip of silk, and then with two wool blankets on top of that, to hide it completely. She never got on it again, but on the hottest nights, when she could hear the lovers so very loud on the roof, she thought of riding the pony to a strange, new place, with her book open in her hand, reading aloud as she went.

Is it because Adam sinned to keep company with Eve? Is it because intelligence can only become perfect through suffering, as the earth can only reach a perfect state through storms as well as sunshine, and the soul can only reach a perfect state through storms of sorrow and despair? No, I think it is for no reason, or, at the least, for no good reason. I do not believe that we are hallowed by sadness. I do not believe it is sufficient answer, to say we are justly punished by death, or to say that we die because we die.

Maci kept busy, all through the summer of 1871, organizing Victoria Leagues. They were Maci’s own idea, associations, formed all over the country, whose purpose would be to promote Mrs. Woodhull’s bid for the Presidency. Maci recruited members from out of Mrs. Woodhull’s parlor parties, from subscribers to the paper, and from brokerage clients. And, sitting at a table in the third-floor study, she wrote an anonymous open letter to Mrs. Woodhull, care of the Weekly.

Madam, a number of your fellow citizens, both men and women, have formed themselves into a working committee, borrowing its title from your name, and calling itself The Victoria League. Our object is to form a new national political organization, composed of the progressive elements in the existing Democratic and Republican parties, together with the Women of the Republic, who have hitherto been disenfranchised, but to whom the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the Constitution, properly interpreted, guarantee, equally with men, the right of suffrage. This new Political organization will be called The Equal Rights Party, and its platform will consist solely and only of a declaration of the equal civil and political rights of all American citizens, without distinction of sex. We shall urge all women who possess the political qualifications of other citizens, in the respective States in which they reside, to assume and exercise the right of suffrage without hesitation or delay. And we ask you, Madam, to become the standard bearer of this idea before the people, and for this purpose nominate you as our candidate for President of the United States, to be voted for in 1872, by the combined suffrage of both sexes.

Across the table from her, Mrs. Woodhull wrote back a long, elegant, and somewhat demure letter of acceptance.

Maci had by this time understood completely that nothing would come of Mr. Tilton’s association with her employer except the fatuous biography he had written, a fawning, spineless thing that damned Mrs. Woodhull with abundant praise. It was widely mocked because it detailed all Mrs. Woodhull’s spiritual transactions, telling how Demosthenes was her mentor, how Josephine was her spirit sister, how all Mrs. Woodhull’s utterances were dictated under otherworldly influence.

Not concerned anymore about Mr. Tilton, Maci exercised her organ of worry on Mrs. Woodhull’s Communist enthusiasm. Mrs. Woodhull had thrown herself into the leadership of Section Twelve of the International Workingmen’s Association, not caring if she was lumped together with the Paris revolutionaries, who were widely regarded as repulsive monsters. Maci reminded Mrs. Woodhull repeatedly that no one but a Communist likes a Communist. It was to no avail.

In August, just when she was afloat on a tide of hot, Communist distress, Maci received an invitation from Dr. Woodhull. We must discuss my mother’s situation, he wrote to her. We are not alike, she and I, but I have always known that she will achieve great things, if she is not brought down by her wilder sympathies. Come and meet with me at my house, No. One E. 53rd St.

Mrs. Woodhull’s house was very noisy, so Maci was glad to leave it for a while. Because Tennie was campaigning for a spot in the New York State assembly, the house was full of prospective German constituents, who in the weeks previous had serenaded Tennie outside her window. Now they played their brass instruments inside the house, and there was nowhere a person could escape the splattering music, which was silly as Tennie was silly, and as her light-hearted, completely unserious campaign was silly. Maci went out into the dreadful heat without even telling anybody goodbye.

The younger Dr. Woodhull lived way up towards the park, where enormous houses were popping up with ever greater frequency. Maci’s hair was hanging wet and stinging in her eyes when she rang the bell, but when the door opened she shivered in the rush of cool air that poured out onto the marble steps. Dr. Woodhull stood in front of her with a pair of ice skates in his hands.

“You’ve come!” he said. “I wasn’t sure you would.”

“It was serious business in your letter.”

“The letter!” he said. “Come in and we’ll speak of it. Mind your way.” Maci slipped when she stepped into his unnaturally cool house, but he caught her arm and held her up. “That meeting has been canceled, after all,” he said. “It has been postponed in favor of a skating party.”

Maci might have reminded him it was August, except she could already see how the floor was covered with ice.

“I thought it might please you,” he said, “because it is so hot, and because you are from Boston. Don’t they all love to ice-skate in Boston? Come and skate with me, Miss Trufant. The ball is up. It’s a private pond. Nobody will disturb us.”

“You have deceived me,” Maci whispered. It occurred to her that she should be angry at him for drawing her into his house with false pretenses, but she was wonderstruck at the ice, and it was all she could think about. “How did you do it?” she asked.

He tried to explain about the copper pipes under the ice, and how liquid ammonia, as it expanded to a gas, could steal heat from water. “It’s really very simple. It’s how they make ice in the factories.”

The drapes were drawn all over the house. She could see very little besides large, dark shapes that leaned in the corners. Maci thought they might be furniture. She and Dr. Woodhull glided from room to room, through open doors into a dim parlor where a hundred mirrors reflected her shadowy, floating image, into a dining room where the table was pushed on its side against the wall, and where Maci caught her skate on a frozen apple. They didn’t talk, except when Dr. Woodhull pointed out an obstacle. She collided with him repeatedly. Even when they stopped to rest, standing in a wide, blank room whose purpose, before it became a skating pond, Maci could not figure, she drifted towards him and collided with him softly. “Excuse me!” she said, backing away.

“It’s the floor,” he said. “It slants.”

On her third pass through the mirror-parlor she skated closer to a large shape to investigate it. It was partly sunk in the ice. When she got right up by it she could see that it was a giant gear, like what might turn a house-sized clock.

“What is this?” she asked. “Why do you have this?” Dr. Woodhull was not in the room to answer her question, though he’d been skating at her side just moments before. She went looking for him, thinking she might have dreamed this already — searching for him in a dark, cold house, floating like a ghost — but knowing that she hadn’t because this was stranger and suddenly more terrible than any dream she’d had. She wandered through his house, tottering awkwardly, once upstairs, with the skates still strapped to her shoes, going from room to room, discovering old furniture, tall stacks of moldering books, and everywhere gears and rods and pieces of shaped glass, machine-spoor the sight of which made her stomach twist up in a knot. With the sense that she was wandering at her own peril she went up and up, compelled to open every door until she reached the top floor. She stood in the abandoned conservatory, and made the mistake of leaning against a withered potted tree, which tipped and fell, and broke in half when it struck the floor. She hurried clumsily from that room, and went through the only other door on the hall. Then she was in Dr. Woodhull’s bedroom, where she found him sitting quietly on his bed.

“Why are you crying, Miss Trufant?” he asked her, after he’d thrown open the other iron door and brought her in to see the sprawling thing he kept behind it.

“It is too, too much, Dr. Woodhull,” she said. “Too, too much.” Because it really was too much, for such a thing to happen once, and too, too much for it to happen twice, for her brother to introduce her again to an unsuitable boy, and for somebody else’s life to be wasted in the construction of an impossible and useless machine. It was clear to her then that she should sit on the bed and calmly remove her skates, then run frantically out of the room, down the stairs, and out of the house. She ought to run right back to Boston, because she would proclaim herself an irredeemable fool if she stayed and ignored the lessons of her ridiculous life. Dear Aunt Amy, she wrote in her mind as she stood there, Here I come! But she didn’t go anywhere except deeper into the room, following her left hand as it yearned towards the machine, closing in a fist around a hot section of pipe. Something beat through it like blood.

“Do you like it?” he asked her.

“I despise it,” she said, but her hand would not come free, and she feared, in that moment, that it never would.

3

YOUNG DR. WOODHULL INVITED MACI TO AN INDUSTRIAL EXPOsition in September of 1871. She went, though it was obvious to her that there was nothing she should like less than a festival of machines. Tennie rushed to accompany them when she learned Mr. Whitman was to be seen and heard. As they stood together in the little crowd at the Cooper Institute, listening to Mr. Whitman read a poem, Maci thought she understood why the poet and Dr. Woodhull were friends. Mr. Whitman was another engine-lover. He’d even imagined a muse for their new mechanical age, a dame of dames who would supersede Clio and her sisters. How she must clank when she moves, Maci thought, and stink of oil and coal smoke.

Mr. Whitman, with his big gray beard, reminded Maci of her father, though her father had the voice of a man used to giving sermons, and Mr. Whitman squeaked his poem like a mouse. On the stage, the poet waved his thick arms in broad, warm gestures of invitation, and spoke:

“I say I see, my friends, if you do not, the illustrious émigré.


Making directly for this rendezvous, vigorously clearing a path for herself, striding through the confusion,


By thud of machinery and shrill steam-whistle undismay’d,


Bluff’d not a bit by drain-pipe, gasometers, artificial fertilizers,


Smiling and pleas’d with palpable intent to stay,


She’s here, install’d amid the kitchen ware!”

It went on and on, as laborers abandoned the work of putting up the exhibits and came over to listen. Maci liked it much less than the poems she’d read as a girl. It’s Gob Woodhull, Maci thought, whose acquaintance makes people less than they were. He’s poisoned Mr. Whitman’s muse, altered her so smoke pours out of her ears and she leaves wet oily spots wherever she sits. Gob, Gob, Gob, she’d say to herself sometimes, thinking how it sounded like the noise made by irritable intestines. She would have preferred not to think of him or his machine, but despite those wishes she spent many hours in consideration of both.

“I cannot,” she had replied, when, standing in front of his machine, he had asked her to help him complete it. She had laughed in his face when he told her his ambitions for the thing, when he claimed it would abolish death. She thought he would cry, and this pleased her during those furious, confused moments after she was introduced to his secret. But the laugh was directed at her own life, and not at him. She hadn’t meant to be cruel. With her left hand still fastened to the pipe, she considered that she might be able to help him, after all, though not in the way he suspected. Here at last was not only punishment, but penance suitable for Infanticide: she might save Dr. Woodhull from his delusion, and show him how the complicated assemblage that he revered was only a pile of stuff.

Maci went among the industrial exhibits arm in arm with Tennie, while Dr. Woodhull and Mr. Whitman walked ahead of them. “See how he goes like a bear?” Tennie asked her. “But he is as gentle as a deer.”

“Gentler, I think,” Maci said, because Mr. Whitman seemed to her eminently gentle and sad, not at all the stomping, shouting fellow suggested by the poems for which she’d suffered a beating so many years before. “As gentle as a plant,” Maci said, as they passed into a stand of rubber furniture.

“It’s not bouncy,” Tennie said, sitting down in a hard, ornate chair. “Still, I like it very much. It’s just the sort of thing I’d like to have in my corner.” She refused to walk any farther. Maci left her there, amid a crowd of workmen who’d been drawn to her as if by a scent. Walking on, Maci overtook Mr. Whitman, who’d paused, and seemed to be admiring Dr. Woodhull as Dr. Woodhull admired a candy vat.

“I think science is his religion,” Maci said.

Mr. Whitman turned to her and looked earnestly into her eyes. It was rare for Maci to be unable to meet a gaze, but she found herself compelled to look elsewhere. She considered how Mr. Whitman’s shirt, open at the neck, allowed white hair to curl out at her.

“What is your religion, Miss Trufant?”

“The religion,” Maci said, “of earthly reform.”

“I think you made that up just now. One day this spot will be holy. ‘Here Miss Trufant founded the religion of earthly reform!’” He laughed, and Maci found herself laughing with him.

“Very well, Mr. Whitman. Let me clarify. I do not hope for Heaven, except as we can approximate it on earth. I am not religious.”

“Your life must gape like a hole,” he said. Maci thought this a harsh accusation to make to a practical stranger. Yet he laughed again.

Dr. Woodhull had turned his attention to a mechanical thresher, and was touching it affectionately. Maci said, “I say science is his religion because I think he is overfond of machines. Don’t you think it is possible to be overfond of machines?”

Mr. Whitman said nothing for a moment. Thinking he might be a little deaf, Maci was about to repeat her question when he spoke. “Has he shown you his … thing?” he asked.

“You mean his engine? He has. I think I must have been the last person in the world still ignorant of its existence.” Now it can be told! her hand had written, when she went home that night in August, and had proceeded to bore her with the particulars of its construction. Maci discovered, in the next few days, that every Claflin knew about the engine, though none of them would talk much about it. Tennie would only say that she thought it was wonderful and sad. Mrs. Woodhull said it was her son’s work to build, as it was her own work to reform. Even Dr. Fie knew about the thing. Indeed, he was assisting in its assembly.

“Then you are not fond of it, Miss Trufant?”

“It is a functionless machine. It is, as you say, a thing, and not to be liked or disliked.” Maci was tired, suddenly, of engine-talk, and decided to alter the course of their conversation. “But I did like your poem,” she said, though she hadn’t really.

“Then you should take it.” He held out his copy to her, folded up to a square the size of his palm.

“Oh, I couldn’t,” she said. “I certainly couldn’t. I’ll get a copy from out of the papers tomorrow.”

“No, please,” he said, his voice rising. He angled his head to meet her eyes again, his stare rude and intense. “I want you to take this, too.” He reached for her with the paper, pressing it against her hand, then letting it go.

It fell to the ground. Dr. Woodhull, returned from his close examination of the thresher, picked it up and presented it to her silently. “Walt,” he said, “come and see the sewing machines!” He ran off, scampering like his boy, Pickie. Mr. Whitman followed him, and Maci looked down at the dirty old piece of paper he’d made a gift to her. It was full of writing, front and back, used and used again until every inch was covered with ink. She unfolded it and brought it up close to her face to read the poet’s script. On the front was the poem, on the back, a list: John Watson (bed 29), get some apples; Llewellyn Woodin (bed 14), sore throat, wants some candy; bed 14 wants an orange.


Dear Aunt Amy, Maci wrote in another unsent letter. I am doing well here in New York, proceeding sensibly from day to day and living a good honest life. I know, Aunt, that you worry about me, and that to your casually observing distant eye it may seem that my urge towards free thinking has plumped into actual vice, and that I am engaged in foolish, scandalous, even dangerous behavior. Let me reassure you that this is, in fact, not the case.

He is a magus, her left hand wrote, creeping over with an extra pen to crowd her right hand off the paper. And though he is small, his hips are handsome. She pushed the hand away.

Yes, I associate with him. Yes, I am alone with him in his house. Yes, we are awake till very late in the evening. We discuss science and mortality and politics. He has got a keen interest in his mother, for all that he pretends indifference. He hates her, I think, because she is not like him, because she does not spend her whole life stretched on the grave of his dead brother. She works in the world to change the world, while he cloisters himself in a decaying mansion and wastes his obvious talents making his grief for his brother manifest in iron and glass and copper. I tell him as much, and he says, “I like how you are honest with me, Miss Trufant.”

I cannot make you believe in his work, but he can make you believe in his work. You believe in his mama as she changes what can’t be changed, why can’t you do him the same favor?

How comforting it would be, Maci wrote to Aunt Amy, to believe that the whole war happened for reasons more cosmic than political, to believe that all the war’s deaths could be undone, that Rob and all the others died only so they could come back to us. But Aunt, comfort is a clue to falseness, and the ease of a thing can make it not so.

Sister, you don’t believe in anything good.


“I will create a distraction,” Mrs. Woodhull told Maci, “while you do the deed.” They had a plan to cast a vote in the November elections of 1871. A whole contingent of women, accompanied by a few male reporters, marched down from Thirty-eighth Street to the polling place for the twenty-third district of the twenty-first ward, a furniture store on Sixth Avenue. While Mrs. Woodhull, with Tennie by her side, made what came to be known as her “Rats and Spiders” speech, Maci made a lunge for the ballot box. Her shooting hand felt to her like a bullet, and she suspected it would kill any man who got between her and the vote that day. But the attendant — a Tammany thugee, Maci was sure — slapped her hand down, scattering her tickets whole feet from the box.

Maci thought, later, that if she’d only had both hands functioning at the time of her attack on the ballot box, she might have performed some dexterous switcheroo to confuse and defeat her adversary. But for weeks her left hand had been immobilized in a split and wrapped in thick white bandages. The senior Dr. Woodhull had indulged her when she claimed to have sprained it. “What injury there is, is not severe,” he said, turning her hand over in his skeleton claw. But he did as she asked. “Please,” she said, “would you bind it up a little more? The bandages are a comfort.” Three times he tried to stop when her hand was still not sufficiently wrapped, but she urged him on. She liked to put the hand on the desk, next to the paper and the pen. It would flop and twitch. “Is there something you wanted to tell me?” she’d ask it.

“Next year, my star,” Mrs. Woodhull told Maci, after her failure, “I know we will succeed.” Mrs. Woodhull led the voting party back to her house, where she fed and liquored everyone while they waited for news of the returns. Maci sat by herself on a bench secluded by ferns. A reporter found her there.

“What have you got to do with all this?” he demanded. Maci decided to lie to him.

“My mother,” she said, “is a leader in the woman suffrage movement. I may not tell you her name — suffice to say that she is a member of the Boston Coven. Do you understand my meaning? What I am saying is that she may be Lucy Stone, or she may not! Anyhow, Mother is a great and secret admirer of Mrs. Woodhull. She has called her an apotheosis and the Jean d’Arc of Woman Suffrage. Yet publicly she excoriates Mrs. Woodhull for her social theories, even as she embraces them in her private behavior. Is this fair, sir? I think it is not, yet family loyalties keep me from speaking out. I know only too well how blood is thicker than water.”

“Are you an admirer of Mrs. Woodhull, then?”

“Is the sun a round ball of fire?” She asked him for a glass of water, hoping to sneak away while he fetched it, but he returned in an instant with champagne for her and whiskey for himself. He interpreted Maci’s exasperated sigh as an invitation to sit next to her. It was Tennie’s fault that the male reporters of New York expected a kiss from any lady who resided at Number 15 East Thirty-eighth Street, because Tennie was always drawing them aside for kisses.

“Clark is one hundred to Bradley’s sixty-five,” the man said.

Maci thought, Next he will ask me to show him my ankles. Two times before, reporters had asked her that, thinking she was Tennie. Once, on a whim, Maci had obliged, but she could not master Tennie’s maneuver, a standing skip and hop that flashed the ankles so briefly men were left wondering if they had been revealed at all. Maci had merely lifted her hem. The reporters had gone away from her disappointed, and, she thought, a little embarrassed for her.

“I’ll dash your hopes,” Maci said.

“Pardon?”

“A dash of hope. Perhaps Tammany is doomed, after all.”

“How did you injure your hand?”

“It’s a casualty of our war. I bruised it assaulting the walls that imprison my sex.”

“Let me kiss it, then. To speed the recovery.”

“Please do not,” Maci said, but he was already bending toward her big white mitt, which twitched and knocked him in the nose. He straightened up with his hand over his face.

“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.

They started their tour, Maci walking carefully along planks that ran across the sucking mud, but giving up in seconds on ever rehabilitating her dress. Mr. Farrington explained how there were five other chambers like this one. “We are seventy feet below the river surface,” he said. “And even now, as the men clear away more rock and mud, we are descending ever deeper.” When they came to a wall he pointed at the boilerplate that covered the whole interior and told how it had been installed as a precaution against fire, which had nearly destroyed the caisson on the other side of the river.

“Fascinating!” Maci said, but she wanted to leave, and she wished the tour would end. She had gathered all the information she needed in the first moments, and she felt confident that she could convey to the readers of the Weekly a sense of the hot, close horror of the place. Mr. Farrington was called away. He left them standing under a blinding calcium light.

“Do you like it down here?” Dr. Woodhull asked her.

“It’s charming,” she said. Then she cried out because she got a pain in her ears as if someone had poked them each with an awl, and the pain distracted her from the great blast of air that almost knocked her into the mud. The lights were all extinguished. The workmen were groaning and cursing. She heard Mr. Farrington shouting for them to mind their language for the sake of the lady journalist.

“It’s just a blowout,” said Dr. Woodhull, explaining how the edge of the caisson, because it hadn’t sunk far enough into the ground, was prone to lift a little as the tide shifted, sending a burst of air out into the river. “The lights will be out momentarily,” he said. “But all’s well.”

“No,” she said. “No, I think that all’s less than well.” They were knee deep in water so cold it hurt her bones, and she was sure the water was rising. “I think we are going to die.”

“Nonsense,” he said. “You will never die, Miss Trufant.” Her eyes were opened as wide as they’d ever been in her whole life. They were opened so wide they were burning and tearing, so she thought she should have seen him coming closer to her. But she didn’t know he was there until he’d already pressed his lips against hers. What was he doing? Was she one of those Portuguese ladies who when left alone with a man are mortally offended if he does not at least try to be grossly familiar with their person? The thought flashed in her mind that she should scream and push him away. Bright as lightning, it flashed in her eyes, but it passed in an instant, and then the darkness, which somehow was sweet now, returned. Maci grabbed at his lips with her own. Grab grab grab, she thought. Gob Gob Gob. She knocked a tooth against his.

We are motivated strictly by love or by fear, and it is better to go the way that love pushes you, than the other way. I think I climbed off the earth on that thought, the way the pious dying climb off on a prayer. You, with your rich vocabulary of motivation, will find this a silly, simple idea. But isn’t it rightly said of the dead, that they are wise? I’ll give you this advice, and plead with you to accept it: let him enter you and obsess you, as I have entered and obsessed you.

“Spiritualists are all so serious,” Maci said to Gob, as they took another turn on top of the Distributing Reservoir. “There are trance-speakers, trance-healers, trance-levitators. But why are there no trance-comedians?”

“There’s no humor in death,” Gob said.

“Isn’t there? I giggled at my mother’s funeral. To any observer it seemed a sob, but I know what it was. Hideous, perverse giggling, because my mother died of bean-love. I thought of them spilling from her mouth even as she lay in her coffin, and I felt I’d have to laugh, or else die myself right there.”

“A terrible story, Miss Maci.”

“Yes. But don’t you believe, Dr. Gob, that a person ought to be able to laugh at death? I think that’s how we bring him down.”

“Did your mother come out of her grave, when you laughed at her?”

“Of course she didn’t. You deliberately misunderstand me.”

“I understand you very well,” he said, slipping his arm into hers. An urge to pull away flailed and died in her, then she leaned against him.

“What a ridiculous assertion,” she said, though just that morning she’d stood in her room with all the curtains flung open, and the lights turned up to a blaze, looking in the mirror and examining herself in the flood of light. She turned her head and brought her eye almost close enough to touch the glass, peering into her own pupil because she was sure that if only her vision could penetrate through the tiny black hole, she’d see him there, sitting comfortably inside her head. “Get out,” she’d whispered. They’d shared one deep breath — in and out — down in the caisson, and Maci was sure he’d put something in her, a part of himself that inspired in her a relentless desire to be near him. She liked to think that another woman had come out of the air-lock that day, one who hurried out before she could get kissed, one who went on without need of this strange person, who went on with a life not afflicted anymore with ghosts and rebel hands and machines. Every day that passed after the kiss, Maci made sure to set aside a little time to be happy for that girl.

“There is a secret world, Miss Maci,” Gob Woodhull said, taking her to lean over the edge of the water. “Hidden in plain view of this one, it is invisible to people who truly believe that hurling giggles at death will ameliorate mortality. It is full of grieving people and grieving spirits. See? Here are two citizens of that world.” He nodded his head at their reflections.

Maci disengaged herself from his arm and stepped back from the water. “Morbid fancy,” she said.

“Look here, I have something for you.” He took off his hat and reached into it, bringing up an ordinary flower, a humble daisy, mashed and sweaty from being under his hat. He held it out for her. She took it with her right hand.

“Thank you,” she said, and put it to her nose. It smelled of his hair.

Do you remember playing Troy? I was Helen bound up with our mother’s scarves, high on their bed, which we’d pushed into the middle of their room. You had to be Achilles, splendid in your fury, dragging the cat around the bed by a string, and calling it dead Hector. Such a cruel game; only children could play it. Around and around you went, deaf to the protests of the cat. I had to shout for you to hear me. I wanted to be released. “Let me go,” I pleaded. “I’m uncomfortable.” “Wretched creature,” you shouted, never slowing, “there is no comfort in this world!” You were five years old. I was ten.

Now, any spirit will grant that the comforts of mortality are small and fleeting, but that is no reason to spurn them. Sister, I urge you to take a portion of happiness for yourself.

Maci confided to the senior Dr. Woodhull that she believed herself to be the victim of some infective illness. “There was an invading process,” she told him, describing her symptoms, “and now there is a dissolving process.” Dissolving was not actually the appropriate term. Whatever had been put in her with the kiss had exploded, and shattered her into a confused, fractious being. Wasn’t that the function of time, to keep you from being more than a single person at once? But Maci was at present a crowd of contrary opinion and in-decisiveness.

“I have just the thing for you,” said Canning Woodhull. He left the kitchen to go to his room, and came back in a moment bearing a lovely yellow bottle marked with painted flowers and eyes. “Believe me,” he said, “this will help you.” It only made her drunk.

If Maci had learned anything, living in Mrs. Woodhull’s house, she had certainly learned that marriage was not an exalted state, or even a necessary one. A husband could be merely a courteous appendage, like Colonel Blood, or, like Canning Woodhull, a broken thing deserving of heaped charity. So why did Maci wake one morning convinced that marriage was the only remedy for love, and why did she wake one morning believing herself in love with Gob Woodhull? She did not believe these things — it was the others who did. The rebellious other Maci Trufants who jostled inside of her, who staged a coup and overthrew her reason.

“Now you will be my mama, too,” little Pickie told her. She tried to imagine mothering this strange child, who curdled all her maternal instincts. He was listening at the door when Maci went to Mrs. Woodhull, to ask for the hand of her son in marriage. Maci wanted so badly to agree with her employer, when she argued against the idea of Gob and Maci’s binding themselves in conventional union. “Did you know that the Colonel and I are divorced?” she asked Maci. “Just after we were married, we obtained the divorce. As a protest, my star, against Sunday-school mentality. And didn’t you just review a novel called Married in Haste?”

I’ll be with you, her hand promised, I’ll give you away. Maci went down the aisle alone, a bride without need of her father. She had not invited him or her aunt to the wedding, though she felt compelled to write a brief message to Aunt Amy, which she actually mailed to the lady: Aunt, it is indeed a terrible thing not to marry. Maci had wished, anyhow, for a wedding so private that there’d be no one there but her and Gob and some unifying principle. They would join their hands and cleave to each other. They did join hands at the behest of Mr. Beecher’s subordinate, but when they did it brought her no mystical feelings of union. As she held his hands she wondered how she could possibly be marrying someone who dismissed the Vindication as “chatty.”

It was the least private function she’d ever attended, crowded with guests, all Mrs. Woodhull’s, people who came out to show their support of her. Her friends had flocked back to her since January — it turned out that no one could stay away from her for long, no matter how the scarecrows of so-called morality shook their pumpkin heads. But they had not really come for the wedding. They hoped for a speech that would preach brilliant, exciting reform at the same time it wished her son a happy future with his bride. There wasn’t a speech, but Mrs. Woodhull threw a brilliant party, paid for with her son’s money. Mrs. Woodhull was getting poor.

“You must adore the first night,” said Canning Woodhull, one of many people who accosted Maci with advice. “It will be the very best of your life. Everything that follows will be misery, my dear.”

Colonel Blood said, “Do not try to pin his heart to the wall of your bedchamber. It will only bleed, you know.”

Tennie scolded her. “You broke your promise, didn’t you?” They’d had an anti-marriage ceremony, almost two years before. Maci had stood with Tennie in the Turkish corner, dressed in white, and shared a golden cup of wine. “Marriage is the grave of love,” they had intoned together. “I will never enter the grave of love.”

Maci wanted to say, “You’re right!” And she wanted to take Tennie’s hand and flee with her to Paris or Berlin, places Maci remembered from her childhood tour, where they could lead unmarried lives of complicated pleasure. But some other Maci was in charge of her limbs, in that moment, and she could not flee. Still another Maci was trying to push her heart out of her chest, towards Gob where he stood talking with Dr. Fie underneath a mural depicting the loves of Venus: Adonis, Ares, and Anchises. From across the room her new husband looked very small. She wanted to gather him up in her hand.

Maci refused to live in his house, with his engine. They took rooms down at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where their windows looked out on the trees of Madison Square Park. They had a parlor, with a marble fireplace big enough for little Pickie to stand up in, and red curtains that Maci could close when she did not wish to see the telegraph wires, when she thought they were making a noise like many conversations. Little Pickie remained at the house, under the care of Dr. Fie, but he was a frequent visitor at the hotel. Maci and Gob each had a study, hers filled with a big desk upon which she could lay out proofs, and his stuffed with moldering books. They were on the fourth floor, reached by means of a mechanical elevator, a thing Gob loved. He’d pay the attendant to take him riding in it for hours.

“Would you like to dance?” Gob asked her on their wedding night, when they’d both made themselves ready for bed. Maci had a satchel full of creams and perfumes and washes that Tennie had given her, each with five minutes of advice on its function. She’d not used them, and thought that must be why she felt awkward and homely as she sat on the bed. So she was glad to dance. They danced without music, and they talked, until Gob said he was very tired. He lay down in their bed and fell immediately asleep. Maci lay down beside him, watching him breathe and snore. He groaned, and ran in his sleep like a dog. She considered putting her arm around him, but in the end she did not. She was surprised at how quickly she fell asleep, when she tried.

“Maci,” he said later, shaking her awake. “Did I ever tell you about the time I saw Mr. Lincoln’s funeral procession? He came to New York, you know, on his way back to Illinois. He left this city escorted by sixty thousand citizens and soldiers. They passed under my window, and woke me up with all their noise. I put my head out and watched them go by for hours and hours. The very last mourner was a snuffling dog, a great big gray one. He looked like a ghost.” They were both silent a moment, and then they sat up, each on their own side of the bed, and had a passionate talk, shifting from topic to topic — from Mr. Lincoln to Mrs. Lincoln to madness to insane asylums to Margaret Fuller to shipwrecks and on.

Every night they’d do the same thing. They would dance, sleep, talk. It went on for days, then weeks. Maci wished for absolute darkness because she was certain that would inspire her husband to kiss her — there could be no other reason for his shyness but the light, for hadn’t he been rude and bold down in the caisson? But light from the streetlamps in Madison Square came in their windows, even when the curtains were closed, so Maci could see Gob’s face as he talked, and she knew he could see hers.

She never asked Tennie for advice, but she always credited Tennie with the course of action she took, because it was by pretending to be Tennie that she solved the problem. One night, Maci put her hand over her husband’s mouth and said, “It’s enough.” She kissed him, and grabbed at him everywhere. When he ran from her, she pursued him, grabbing and kissing though he cried out for her to please stop. He ran to a corner and bent down in it, hands over his head, making a crooning noise. She stood over him, staring down. He peeped up at her through his arms. They stood a little while like that, until she put her hand out to him. She had to wait a long time before he took it. She remembered the things that Mrs. Woodhull had shouted from her roof for all of Thirty-eighth Street to hear. Maci shouted these, too, because she thought the noises would encourage her husband, and for a little while she was brutal with him, slapping at his head and his chest, shaking him, and staring fiercely into his lustrous, dilated eyes. “Praise!” she cried, imitating even Mr. Tilton in her desperate excitement. Gob was silent until the end, when he shouted so loud in her mouth she thought her lungs would burst.

She woke up just at dawn with a twitch in her hand. She thought it wanted to congratulate her on the consummation of her marriage, that her left hand might walk over her chest to shake her right. But it wanted a pen, same as always. There weren’t any words, just drawings, not of people or places, but of the thing. For an hour before dawn she watched as her hand drew a profusion of gears and cogs and struts and pipes. She kept on drawing into the morning while Gob slept behind her, waiting and wanting for him to interrupt her, but she didn’t stop until one of the hotel staff came to their door with a telegram announcing that Canning Woodhull was dead.

The Magus, who is beloved of every spirit, cannot see us or hear us. We cannot reach him, and his brother cannot reach him. Heaven loves cruel ironies, but we hate them here. We cannot offer him our wisdom, so we offer it to you.

Maci knew it must be inappropriate, to think of children and their making, while at a funeral. But at the white celebration of death held in honor of Canning Woodhull, she did just that. Dear Aunt Amy, she’d written in another unsent letter, Even as he goes into me, I go into him, and fill him with doubt to topple his delusion. I think he will give up building on his machine in favor of building on a family. Isn’t it how married people manage their mortality, with children?

The children would come, one, two, three, four, another with every year, so she would barely have time to know what it was not to be pregnant. Yet it would be a delight, even the agony, because with every birth a little more of the machine would go away. Five, six, seven — the thing would be reduced to a shell. Eight, nine, ten — it would be scraps. Eleven, twelve — they would sell the house on Fifth Avenue to a man who made his fortune in pessaries.

“A sad day, Mrs. Woodhull,” Dr. Fie said at the funeral. They were wandering together among the monuments, like all the other white mourners who went in groups of two or three over the lush grass.

“My name is still Trufant, Dr. Fie.”

“But you will always be Mrs. Woodhull to me.” He nodded at Gob, where he was still weeping by the grave with Mr. Whitman.

“They have a special friendship, those two,” he said.

“Do you envy them?”

“No,” he said. “But I think I envy Canning Woodhull. Think of it, Mrs. Woodhull, a place where you can dip whiskey out of rivers, and there are ladies whose breath is a gas of peppermint and morphine.”

“One hears that Heaven is white and cold and pleasureless.”

“Well, I don’t think he went to Heaven,” he said. “What a strange occupation it must have been, to be an ex-husband. There goes Miss Claflin.” He put his arms behind his back like a schoolboy and sang:

“She’s sweeter than the flowers in May,


She’s lovelier far than any;


I care not what the world may say,


I pin my faith on Tennie!”

“Dr. Fie,” said Maci, “I think you are deranged with grief for your former colleague.”

“He was a wise man. I never appreciated that until I’d lost the opportunity to learn from him. And you can see that your husband feels the same way.” They walked along in silence for a while. When they came upon a sad-looking tree that drooped like a willow and hid three graves in its shade, they walked under it to inspect the headstones of a Mrs. Sancer and her children. “Recent departures,” said Dr. Fie. “We’ll have you back soon enough.”

Maci thought of the lady’s children. Were they buried with her in the same coffin, snuggling through eternity? She had forgotten, it seemed, that children could die. Now that she remembered again, it was a terrible surprise.

“Do you really think so?” Maci asked him. He plucked down a spray of leaves from the tree and gave them to her.

“Of course I do,” he said. He plucked another leaf from the tree and, taking a piece of charcoal from his pocket, bent to take a rubbing from one of the children’s headstones. Maci leaned against the trunk to watch him. “It puzzles me,” he said as he worked, “how you are a helper, but not a believer.”

“It puzzles me, too, Dr. Fie. And it puzzles me, that such strong minds could subscribe to such an easy, candy-coated belief.”

“But what if it is true, Mrs. Woodhull? What if they are all around us? What if they are all around you now?”

“Books are immortal in the world, Dr. Fie. Not people.” Maci closed her eyes.

“Are you well, Mrs. Woodhull?” he asked her in a little while.

“Just sleepy,” she said. In the silence, she’d been naming children in her mind: John, Jacob, little Victoria, Arthur, Corwin. She loved to name them. “Why don’t you walk on,” she told Dr. Fie. “I’ll join you in a moment.” He looked at her with an inscrutable expression, but then he nodded and walked out. Maci shielded her eyes against the flash of sunlight that came through the hanging leaves as Dr. Fie parted them. Little Tennessee, she thought, Polly, Christopher, Isabella, Constance, William.

I was surprised. Everyone is surprised. But why are we surprised? Haven’t we known, all our lives, that this would come? Such a quiet, subtle poison. Those who complain at how death ruins their days, they are called weak, or morbidly sentimental, but really they are prophets, who rail against the despair that every person practices, but none will acknowledge. Can you imagine, Sister, a world not poisoned? Once or twice in your life, you might truly forget — say, when, thinking yourself incapable of love, you find it, after all, or when your baby hangs dependent on your breast, and you think it must live forever because it feeds on pure, powerful love. But can you even imagine a world in which immortality is fact, not fancy or suspicion, a world in which the worm has departed from the rose? Can you? Can you even?

“What is equality?” Mrs. Woodhull asked, at the May convention of the People’s Party. “And what is justice? Shall we be slaves to escape revolution? Away with such weak stupidity! A revolution shall sweep over the whole country, to purge it of political trickery, despotic assumption, and all industrial injustice!”

“Wake up, my love,” Gob said to Maci, moving her head where it rested on his shoulder. “You’re missing the speech.”

“I wrote it,” Maci said. “I know it.” She opened her eyes and saw Mrs. Woodhull on the stage in Apollo Hall, in her red cheeks, white rose, and her blue dress. “Now you must admit she is a great woman,” Maci said sleepily.

“Who will dare,” Mrs. Woodhull asked, “to unlock the luminous portals of the future with the rusty keys of the past?”

Who indeed — it seemed everybody in the hall was willing to have a try. The whole place was on its feet and screaming for her, “Woodhull! Woodhull, Woodhull!”

Colonel Blood stepped up from the crowd, dressed in a fine black suit. He nominated Mrs. Woodhull to the Presidency of the United States of America, then cried out for all in favor of the nomination to second it, and the hall shook with ayes. Women wept and kissed each other. Men wept and kissed women. A fat man next to Maci jumped up and down on his chair until it broke under him, and then he lay laughing on the floor. “Woodhull!” he shouted.

Gob leaned close to Maci and said, “Look at her. She doesn’t even remember that someone has died. Woodhull! They think they’re shouting for my mother, but really they’re shouting for you. She is the Mrs. Woodhull who will be President, but you’re the Mrs. Woodhull who will bridge Heaven and Earth.”

“My name is Trufant, sir,” Maci said. She wondered if he might not be putting something else in her besides the stuff that makes a baby. Maybe it was an acid to erode her disbelief, something that went into her soul and her mind to make her weak and gullible. It was a terrible thought, and she always banished it when it came, but it was true that she felt weaker as the days passed, that she became ill sometimes with nerves. It was something different from madness, softer, sleepier, and harder to resist, this smothering, nervous fatigue.

“You are the most important person in the world,” he told her, while the crowd continued to scream for his mother. “Others will help me, but no one else can help me as you can, I need nobody as I need you. Who else is there but you in the world? I look around every day and the whole vast city is empty but for you. I look up above the roofs and see your face flashing in the sky.”

“Flatterer,” she said.

Two weeks later, Mrs. Woodhull had another triumph when her nomination was ratified at a second meeting of the People’s Party, which had renamed itself the Equal Rights Party. Frederick Douglass was selected to be her running mate. In the grasp of their considerable enthusiasm the members of the Equal Rights Party neglected to inform Mr. Douglass that he’d won their nomination, and when he did discover it, he didn’t much care. Maci thought his male pride must have been bruised by having a lady put over him on the ballot.

The month, which had started with a funeral, got gloomy again as it closed out. Maci found it startling, how there were people who took seriously Mrs. Woodhull’s bid for the Presidency, how all the work on the Victoria Leagues had borne fruit. Maci thought they were inflating a glorious trial balloon, making a brazen, powerful statement, and it was her conviction that even a score of votes would be a triumph in November. But the largely imaginary Victoria Leagues had turned entirely real. This was a miracle equal in Maci’s mind to the one Gob hoped to accomplish. For roughly a week, she truly believed that Mrs. Woodhull would make a very serious bid for the Presidency, and for a few moments of that week she believed that Mrs. Woodhull actually would be President. Then Mrs. Grundy sat on Maci’s cake.

Maci didn’t know who precisely all Mrs. Woodhull’s enemies were. There were the obvious ones: the Beecher sisters and their devotee, Governor Hawley of Connecticut; Mr. Greeley, who had always vilified Mrs. Woodhull in the Tribune, and perhaps thought her candidacy somehow devalued his own; the entire editorial staff of Harper’s Weekly. These were the people who spoke publicly against Mrs. Woodhull, and though they were all giants, they were slayable because Maci could fight against them in the pages of her own Weekly, addressing every charge they printed or spoke and specifically refuting it.

But there were other enemies, large, nebulous, and inchoate. There were unknown persons who were possessed of such power that they could have the rent raised on Mrs. Woodhull’s home and place of business by ten thousand dollars a year, all payable in advance. In May alone, advertisements in the Weekly fell off by seventy-five percent, and clients abandoned the brokerage in droves. Mrs. Woodhull was forced out of her beautiful house, and no one in the city would rent to her. Maci came home one day to find the Claflins crowded into her rooms at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. “It’s just for a while,” Mrs. Woodhull said, but Maci, looking at Anna Claflin lying in her bed with her shoes on, suspected it would be for a long while, indeed. Yet it was a pleasure to give Mrs. Woodhull shelter when she needed it, even if the Claflins trailed after her like a persistent infestation. Maci was rarely at the hotel anyhow.

For all that she had sworn not to live in Gob’s house, she practically did live there. Her hand ached from making the drawings her husband used as fast as she made them, and she could tell now how his machine was beginning to take its shape from her madness. From your brother, her hand corrected her. From an association of spirits millions and centuries strong. From the accumulated longing of all history’s dead.

In July, Maci sat at a table in Gob’s house, drawing with one hand, writing with the other, while Dr. Fie and her husband wielded sledges to knock down walls, making room for the fattening new Infant. Little Pickie approached her, wearing an apron of pockets, each one holding a different tool, wrenches and hammers and things that looked very much like surgical instruments. “Mama, would you like to make an adjustment?”

“No, thank you,” she said.

“Damn you, then!” he cried, his standard response to her refusals to play at building. He said it more with an air of exuberance than condemnation, and always with a smile. Maci continued with her writing, an open letter to the Times, Herald, and Tribune, in defense of her employer: Mrs. Woodhull is a great and good woman, assaulted by men who hate and fear her because they recognize her as the lady who will steal their fire and make of it a gift for her own sex. No one would ever think of calling her a Romanist because she says that everybody has the right to be Catholic, but transfer the question from religion to sexuality, and because she advocates the same theory for this that she does for religion, she is denounced as an advocate of promiscuousness.

Maci jumped in her seat as a piece of wall fell with a crash. She looked at her left hand as it drew, undisturbed by the noise or the floating plaster dust that settled over the page. It finished a picture, a gentleman’s hat pierced with a corona of glass spikes, then pushed it aside to start another on a fresh sheet. Sometimes she imagined herself drawing and drawing, as her hand stiffened with age, until she was an old lady buried under twoscore of years’ worth of mechanical illustrations. And still, she was sure, her crimped hand would move the pencil.

By summer’s end, Mrs. Woodhull had quite run out of money. The Weekly suspended publication, and the brokerage had no clients anymore. Maci and her husband had their first quarrel when Gob refused to give money to his mother. Everything he had he needed for building, he said, though they were welcome to shelter and feed as long as they wished at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Maci might have carped at him like a Xanthippe, but whenever she considered this injustice, it made her more sleepy than furious. And Mrs. Woodhull, who Maci had thought capable of taking money from anyone, seemed horrified by the prospect of taking money from her son.

Instead, Mrs. Woodhull exhausted herself lecturing — the more scandalous her reputation became, the more people all over the country wanted to hear her for themselves. But even at the annual convention of the National Association of Spiritualists, who had elected her their president the year before, the audience was just as hostile as it was curious. She went to Boston in September to speak to them, and nearly lost her office. She was challenged on account of her reputation as a Free Lover. She’d always insist it was Demosthenes who prompted her to defend herself with an extemporaneous exposé of Mr. Beecher. In the open summer air, she addressed the soft-minded thousands who sought to impeach her, detailing Mr. Beecher’s infidelity with Elizabeth Tilton. They were all won over. The Spiritualists elected her for another term, and would have proclaimed her Queen if their charter had permitted it.

“There’s nothing left for us,” Mrs. Woodhull told Maci when she returned to New York, “but to do the thing.” She meant to expose Mr. Beecher in print, a move that Maci discouraged at first, because she was sure it would bring nothing but a crushing retaliation. “My star,” Mrs. Woodhull scolded, “you are a frightened innocent!” She gathered Maci into her arms, shouting that Mr. Beecher would fall like a giant into the East River, and send up a wave to soak Manhattan from South Street to West Street. Mrs. Woodhull, temporarily as bouncy as Tennie, held Maci tight and jumped up and down with her, as if trying to launch them both into the sky.

Through September and October, Maci worked with Gob and his mother, and sometimes she was so tired that she confused their projects, so she thought that Gob was building a machine to expose and destroy hypocrisy, and that Mrs. Woodhull was writing an article that argued so powerfully against death that nature, shamefaced after reading it, would revoke mortality. It made sense, after all, to conflate these tasks, because they were equally impossible. But by the time she and Mrs. Woodhull had finished with the Beecher article, when all the facts were gathered, sorted, and transcribed, Maci had a feeling that this thing she’d helped make was so powerful that it couldn’t help but wreak some great change out of its destructiveness. It was a bomb that would burst over Brooklyn and rain down burning, phosphoric reform on the pleading, hapless population.

When she and Mrs. Woodhull were done, when all that was left was to wait for the paper to come back from the printers, she went to Gob’s house to rest. Maci had the feeling that she’d been running for weeks, building up speed to lend to her spear when she hurled it, and now that it had left her hand she was too tired to care where it landed. “Good night,” Gob said to her by way of greeting, when she went to his house on the last day of work on the November 2 paper. She sat down in one of his dusty parlor chairs and fell promptly asleep.


Here is New York after the change, her hand wrote beneath a drawing of a city that seemed to be made all of glass. Crystal bridges leaped off towards the horizon; Maci could only guess where they rested their other feet. Different bridges ran between buildings so tall Maci wondered if the ground would even be visible from their roofs. Three concentric suns hung in the sky.

And here is our family after the change, her hand wrote beneath another picture, this one a crowded group portrait. See how happy you look? See how everyone looks happy? Maci wanted to think that the occupants of the portrait looked merely smug, or simpering, but it was true that their faces and eyes seemed blessed with radiant joy. There she was, standing with Gob on one side of her, and Rob on the other. Her mother was there, looking composed and sane, holding up a book so Mrs. Woodhull might read the title off the spine. There was Private Vanderbilt, stooping to kiss Tennie as she held the hand of a man Maci did not recognize, a long-faced fellow in the uniform of a Union soldier. Dr. Fie was standing with his hand on the shoulder of a smaller man, who resembled him in the face. Maci’s father, Miss Suter, Aunt Amy and the man Maci knew must be her husband — these were just the people in front. There were rows and rows of people behind them, and even those whose features were made indistinguishable by distance managed somehow to project great happiness. Everyone was happy except Gob, who knelt with his head bowed, weeping at the feet of a soldier boy that Maci knew was his brother. The boy had a bugle in one hand. The other rested on Gob’s head.


Dear Aunt, Maci wrote. I am a fugitive from justice. There is a man named Anthony Comstock who perceives me as having committed a grave sin against him. He’s taken offence at our Weekly, greater even than Mr. Beecher, who maintains what seems to me an embarrassed silence about his exposure as an amative hypocrite. I know how you love the Beechers, Aunt, and I feel obligated to say that we never really meant him any harm. It wasn’t out of spite for Mr. Beecher that we burst our bomb over Brooklyn. Mrs. Woodhull herself said she has no fault to find with him in any sense as that in which the world will condemn him. The fault and the wrong were not with him, or with Mrs. Tilton, but with the false social institutions under which we still live, while the more advanced men and women of the world have outgrown them in spirit. Practically everybody is living a false life, by professing a conformity which they do not feel and do not live, and which they cannot feel and live any more than the grown boy can reenter the clothes of his early childhood. So you see I had no malicious intent against Mr. Beecher, and certainly none against Mr. Comstock (though I know for a fact he shoots dogs for sport). Yet that man is determined, if he can find me, to put me in jail, where he has put Mrs. Woodhull, her husband, and her sister. But Aunt, you mustn’t worry that I’ll rot in the Tombs waiting for a trial at which justice will no doubt prove elusive, or that I’ll flee to Boston to make unreasonable demands of our relation, and compromise you with my fugitive presence. I am well hidden here.

Maci went about outside disguised as a man, with her hair under a hat, and a beard made of real man-hair that Gob pasted on her face in the morning. On warm days it slipped a little after a few hours of wear, but on cold ones it stuck fast till evening. She registered to vote in her disguise, and voted under Rob’s name on November 5 of 1872. She’d never believe the reports that came later, that Mrs. Woodhull never got a single vote, because Maci cast hers for the lady, and she knew that Gob had, too.

“How are things on the outside?” Tennie asked her, when Maci went to visit her and Mrs. Woodhull at Ludlow Street Jail. There were difficulties with the bail — every time a supporter provided the money to free the sisters, they’d be arrested again. Maci wrote outraged letters every day to five different papers.

“Dull,” Maci said, though really she was caught up in an excitement of writing and building. Her days were structured — agitate in the morning, go out in the city in her disguise during the day, build at night. She wandered in a mixed state of belief and disbelief. Sometimes when she was walking alone she’d look at her passing reflection in a shop window and not believe it could possibly be her under those clothes; other times it seemed the natural fruition of the past two years’ events, to be walking the city as a man. Likewise, she’d wander in Gob’s house, not believing it could be her hand that helped shape the machine that was growing every day until it was no longer possible to distinguish it from the house itself. “What are you doing?” she’d ask her reflection, a lady in men’s clothes with glue on her face, her hat off, her hair down, a pencil in her left hand and a pen in her right. Sometimes she would just stare and stare, wondering if she shouldn’t break the mirror that showed her such a thing. “I don’t believe it,” she’d whisper, but it was getting harder to say that. “Why not?” she’d ask, experimentally, of her reflection, and a voice in her mind — her own voice, the voice of murine sanity — would say, Simply because it is never so, and never has been so, and never will be.

“It’s a poor likeness,” Gob said. One day, after visiting the jail, Maci and Gob came to a museum on the Bowery where all sorts of sensational persons and things were on display: a three-hundred-pound lady, tattooed over every inch of her massive body — she was called the Mystic Bulk; a man who could swallow half his arm and spit it out again; and a woman who juggled with her feet the body of her amputee husband, a distinguished veteran who had lost all his limbs at Sayler’s Creek. Mrs. Woodhull’s likeness was featured in a display of wax figures called “Dante’s Inferno.” Here you could see personalities writhing in eternal torment. Mrs. Woodhull’s figure had recently been added. It really was a poor likeness, obviously executed from Mr. Nast’s cartoon, the one that portrayed Mrs. Woodhull as Mrs. Satan, who beckoned to downtrodden wives with the promise of salvation through Free Love. Her hair was done up in horns, and she sported a cloak that flared out behind her like bat wings. In such an outfit, Maci thought she’d more properly be depicted as an infernal administrator, but she was suffering just like any other of the damned, writhing with her hands lifted up in a gesture of supplication, and a look of weakness and horror on her face such as Maci had never seen on her, and knew she never would.

Mr. Beecher was writhing beside Mrs. Woodhull, and Mr. and Mrs. Tilton were there too, all of them licked by flames fashioned from orange and red cotton. It was a depiction of Hell less convincing than the scene in the caisson, and Maci said so. She took out a pad of paper and pencil from her coat and began to sketch the thing inexpertly with her right hand — Mrs. Woodhull had heard about the display, and wanted to know what it looked like. Her left hand plucked away the pencil and took over the work. “Thank you,” Maci said politely. Her eyes and her attention were free to wander. She watched her husband standing at a recreation of Mr. Lincoln’s funeral catafalque, which had been on view in City Hall seven years before. Gob stood peering down at the wax face. “Another poor likeness,” he called back to her. She walked after him, still sketching, and she paused before a set of twisted mirrors that tortured her reflection. She was short and fat in one, immensely tall in the other.

“More poor likenesses,” Gob said when he was next to her again. He lifted his head to talk into her ear, telling her how every person was a poor likeness of herself, how death holds the best part of us in a prison of fear, and how his machine would reverse this, so all the undying people who walked the earth would be perfectly themselves. Maci tried to laugh.

“Don’t give your machine too much work, sir,” she said. “You’ll make it nervous with exhaustion.”

Such wings! They spread over the whole Summerland, and the gates are as high as the clouds. We could sigh forever over the beauty of this engine. It is almost alive, here. When the Kosmos steps into it, when he takes his places as its heart, then it will breathe and speak. Come to me, it will say, the walls are falling. You have torn them down with your brilliant grief, with your love, your desire. Come to me, the way is open.

Goodbye, Sister. You’ll hear from me no more, until we meet again in the changed world. Farewell, I am coming to you!

Maci tried to cheer as Mrs. Woodhull threw off her coal-scuttle bonnet to reveal herself to the people who’d gathered in the Cooper Institute in the hope of hearing a forbidden lecture called “The Naked Truth!” But all Maci could manage was a weak little yelp. She was very tired — not sleepy, but so weary she ached. Months of building had done this to her. As the weeks passed it seemed that every drawing took something from her, as if she were using her own vital stuff for ink, and that in putting it on paper her hand made her a little more fatigued. She knew she ought to be excited, that she ought to be cheering for Mrs. Woodhull, free at last from Ludlow Street Jail and actively resisting attempts to return her there, and that she ought to be cheering in her heart for the machine, because it was all finished, the ink in Maci was dry. The last strut had been installed, the last glass negative put in place, the last glass pipe filled with a curious liquid fetched by odd little Pickie. She might at least muster the energy to curse the thing for a folly, but when she tried, sometimes, in a fit of sanity, to shake her fist at it, the result was the same as when she tried to put her hands together for Mrs. Woodhull. All she seemed able to do was raise a hand to her eyes, to cover them up and press on them until they ached.

“You’re tired, my love,” Gob had said to her. “You ought to rest.” He had wanted her to stay home and await the arrival of Mr. Whitman, who, he insisted, would come to the house on Fifth Avenue now that the machine was ready to receive him. That seemed unlikely to Maci, because she was sure that Mr. Whitman had absented himself most purposefully from her husband’s life. “He will come,” Gob had said.

“Hooray,” Maci said softly, at the Cooper Institute. She looked across the crowd to where her husband was standing with Mr. Whitman, cheering and applauding. Mr. Whitman looked tired, too. After the speech had reached its dramatic conclusion, and Mrs. Woodhull had surrendered again to the marshals, Maci went back to the house on Fifth Avenue with Dr. Fie. Little Pickie was in a fury of polishing and preparation. Maci sat down on a cold pipe the thickness of her whole body, and the cool brought to mind the private skating party Gob had arranged for her fourteen months previous. She closed her eyes and remembered gliding through the dark, cool house. It was all she could think of for a little while, but even as she enjoyed this pleasant memory, another thought kept crowding into her mind.

It was a thought that had been coming and going in her head over the past few months, the thought that she needed to destroy this thing, that she ought to have been undoing it every night, a Penelope faithful to her reason. “I ought to smash it,” she said, “before it can disappoint him.” Her left hand crossed to her right, and took it by the wrist, holding it down against her leg. “I wasn’t going to,” she said.

She wouldn’t do it because she thought it was necessary for her husband to put his friend in the thing, and then see how nothing came of it. And she thought it was necessary because she hoped sometimes that something might come of it after all, the sky might crack open, and all the departed might rain down like feathers. She had been trying so hard to believe, for his sake, and it was to this that she really attributed her weariness, not the days of being a fugitive, or the nights of work on this strange, monstrous Infant that made her father’s Infant seem like a puppy. Maybe unbelief was her madness, since she didn’t believe when her hand spoke to her with love, when it spoke like Rob, when it drew like Rob, when it knew what Rob knew, and told true stories that were other people’s lives — when it did all these things and she still could not call it brother. When she saw little Pickie rolling a giant lens down a hall in Gob’s house; when she saw the machine grow so huge and complex that it looked to be sufficient engine to drive Manhattan out to sea, so the island could anchor halfway to Europe and become a new Atlantis: still she didn’t believe, and wasn’t it madness to ignore the evidence of your senses, even when they said you must believe the unbelievable?

“Here they come!” Pickie said, bouncing elastically on his feet. He rushed over to where Maci was sitting and pulled her up by her hands. He pulled her around in a little dance. Just for a few seconds, Maci shuffled around in a circle, then he let her go and went to the door. She would have fallen if Dr. Fie hadn’t caught her. “Steady,” he said, looking at her but not smiling.

“Is it right, what we’re doing?” she asked him, but even as she asked, she knew it wasn’t the proper question for the situation, and it was only something she asked to distract herself from the more pressing question of whether or not they would succeed, and the still more pressing question of why she could make no room in her heart for the possibility that they might.

“God bless you,” she said to Mr. Whitman, when he came in, and she called these words after him when he fled, hoping that God would bless him, after all, and keep him from such situations as the one he’d just escaped. She had a rush of energy at the thought that now they must begin a work of disassembly, for she knew that if Mr. Whitman wouldn’t play, there’d be no game, tonight or ever.

“He’ll return,” Gob said. Maci thought he meant he’d be back in days or weeks, but he was back in moments. Maci smiled at him again. Gob and her hand had told her how it would be uncomfortable for him, how his body would articulate the formless grief that saturated the world of the living. But it would do him no lasting harm. He was a kosmos, Gob said, who had the qualities of everyone and everything. The grief would pass through him, but not hurt him. “Are you sure?” she’d asked, when her hand drew the spiked hat that was painful just to look at.

“Absolutely,” he said.

“There it is,” Gob had said, speaking to Mr. Whitman before he fled. “The engine. It’s complete, except for you. There’s a place for you in it, Walt. I need you to go in it, and then it will bring them back, all the six hundred thousand, my brother and Will’s brother and Maci’s brother and your Hank, too. All the dead of the war, all the dead of all the wars, all the dead of the past. We’ll lick death tonight, Walt, if you’ll help us. I’m ready. Will’s ready, and Maci is ready. Pickie is ready and the engine is ready. Are you ready?”

Am I ready? Maci asked herself. She tried again to believe, an effort of will that was like trying to get her bones to step out of her body, but when she looked at the thing all she saw was failure, and it seemed to her that it was a great curse and a punishment, not to believe, that after all it was the people who could believe in nothing but death who got nothing but death for their lot. And she worried for the first time that her doubt would poison the working of the thing, as she feared that her doubt in her father’s Infant had poisoned it and killed it even before she beat it to death with a wrench.

“I should go,” she said aloud, but Dr. Fie was already directing her to her work, to the switches that needed to be thrown, the valves that needed to be turned. There were a hundred different tasks split among the four of them, and every one had to be done in an order that was as precise as music. “Bless you,” she said again to Mr. Whitman as she settled the spiked hat on his head.

As the gears started to turn, she thought her doubt would fall away. When she saw how it looked to be doing something, how the steam engines steamed and the lights lighted, she thought that mechanical competence would indicate supernatural competence, and her doubt would shrivel. But the thing was roaring away gloriously and still she thought it was folly, just an enormous monument to Gob’s grief that was beautiful and complex, but no more likely to raise the dead than an ordinary lever. Maci found herself planning a future for herself and her husband. Her neurasthenia would remit, and she would be strong for both of them because he would collapse in a wreck of disappointment. He’d be so weak and sad he’d not be able to speak for months, but she’d take him away to Europe, and fortify his ailing spirit with a tour of great museums. Slowly he’d come back to life, and they would return to America in time for Maci to help Mrs. Woodhull organize her next bid for the Presidency in 1876.

Even when the impossible light came on, so bright it seemed to shine through them all, she didn’t believe. But then she thought, Maybe somewhere tonight in this city a dog will die of loneliness and neglect, and then in the next moment it will rise again. And then she thought, Maybe it will be a child who gets up out of his deathbed to kiss the face of his mother. She heard a keening, which she mistook for the noise of a grieving mama, but it was Mr. Whitman, crying out from within his crystal house. As he screamed more forcefully, her belief grew, until it was three babies, ten men, a hundred women who would rise from death that night. As he writhed and screamed, making the most horrible noise she’d ever heard in her whole life, Maci believed and believed and believed. It was like a muscle in her, swelling as she flexed it over and over. Her weariness evaporated — she thought she saw it pass away, a little wisp of gray smoke that bled out of her eyes with the tears. There was the other thought still in her, dwarfed by the joy of faith, that she had come all this way to wreck this machine, too, that it was her sacred responsibility to smash it. Hadn’t crude fate let her practice one such destruction? But she paid very little attention to this thought.

Instead, she considered how it was wonderful that a machine could manufacture faith and put it in you, how it could abolish doubt, and that this was perhaps more miraculous than the abolition of death. She held on to a pipe that was hot on one side, cold on the other, while the whole house shook and her husband cried out exultantly. With her right hand she raised her left to her cheek and cried out, “Rob!” and there was a picture in her mind as perfect as a photograph, a scene in which he was alive again, marching through the gate in the machine with Private Vanderbilt at his side. “They’re coming!” she shouted, because she believed it.

Gob was standing outside the gatehouse, chanting words Maci could not understand. His hair was standing up ridiculously on end. Maci put her hand to her head and discovered that hers was doing the same. She heard breathing, and singing, a beautiful sound of plaintive voices, and over that Mr. Whitman’s terrific screaming. There was another sound, too, a rude knocking, as if someone was at the door trying to disturb them in this exquisite moment. She had a notion it must be Mr. Comstock, come to arrest her, but actually it was Dr. Fie, who, having tried to open the door to Mr. Whitman’s crystal house and found it locked, was banging his fist on its walls. Every time he struck the noise changed — now it was like a knock on wood, now it was like a brass gong, and now it was the delicate chime of two glasses struck together in a toast to success. Gob walked slowly towards him, and when he was close he shouted a question at him. In answer, Dr. Fie pushed him away, and when Gob came at him again Dr. Fie struck him in the face.

Pickie came clambering down off a scaffold and leaped on Dr. Fie. They struggled a little, and Gob came rushing again at them, shouting words that Maci thought she could see leave his mouth as gusts of wind to knock Dr. Fie back against the glass. He shook his head, holding Pickie at arm’s length. When Gob reached him, Dr. Fie pummeled him with the boy, hitting him as if with a big stick. Maci came to them just in time to see him smash Pickie against the glass wall. It cracked with one blow, shattered with the next. Pickie seemed not any worse for the abuse. He clawed at Dr. Fie’s face, and cursed. Dr. Fie threw him across the room.

“Help me,” Dr. Fie shouted at Maci, over a new noise, a disharmony in the singing. Mr. Whitman was still screaming, louder now that his voice wasn’t contained by the house. “It’s killing him!” he shouted.

Maci shook her head. “Dr. Fie,” she said incredulously, “don’t you understand that there is no more death?”

“Oh, Mrs. Woodhull,” he said. “There is for him.” She put her hand on Dr. Fie to stop him when he tried to go in, and he thrust her back as he entered, so that her head knocked into Gob’s head as he was coming up behind her. Gob was saying “No!” again and again, and Maci had the thought that he must have looked just this way, weeping and protesting, at the grave of his brother. There was a surge of breathing and singing. The light flared from the giant lens, and Maci heard a popping in her head, similar to what she’d heard in the caisson, as if there’d been a precipitous shift in the pressure of the air. She felt nauseated, and fell to her knees, thinking she would vomit.

“Will,” Gob said softly — Maci picked his voice out among all the great noise as if it had been spoken in a quiet room. “You’ll ruin it all.” Pickie Beecher ran into the house, only to be ejected. He bounced on the floor like a ball.

Gob went into the crystal house after Dr. Fie, and there they grappled over Mr. Whitman’s body. While Mr. Whitman arched and screamed in his chair, they pounded each other in the head and face. Maci shouted, “Stop! Stop!” but they paid her no heed, or didn’t hear her at all. Dr. Fie brought his two hands together, cranked them back, and struck Gob in the face with such force that blood flew and coated the wall of the house with perfect round drops. Gob staggered, and fell, and Dr. Fie took that opportunity to wrest Mr. Whitman from the chair.

All the noise stopped suddenly, started again and stopped. The floor lurched, and the great lens fell out of its supports. It came crashing down on the gate, splitting it in two. In the quiet before the machine noise started again — a coughing and choking sound in it now — she realized that Mr. Whitman was no longer screaming. He came out of the house, leaning against Dr. Fie, who draped him against Maci and said, “Take him out of here.” When Maci tried to push Mr. Whitman back into the house, Dr. Fie shoved her roughly aside, and hurried away with the poet even as Maci called for him to return.

Her balance was off, or the floor was heaving like liquid, or both — she could barely guide herself through the door of the house, to where Gob was slowly rising to his feet. His nose was crooked and bloody, and blood had stained his teeth and his mouth and his torn lips. “Come away,” Maci said to him. His hands were slick with blood. He pulled them easily out of hers and shook his head.

“To where?” he asked. With great calm and precise deliberation, he set himself down in Mr. Whitman’s chair and set the hat on his head. “You may go out, but there is no other place for me.” Something crashed very nearby, and a moaning sound started up amid all the choking and coughing and intermittent singing. The floor threw her into him, and he pushed her away, an expression of terror and hatred now on his face from which Maci nearly fled. He shouted at her then, without any words she could make out, or perhaps he was shouting because he was feeling the same agony as Mr. Whitman had. She thought his yelling blew her back and forced her away from him, but really it was Dr. Fie, his big hands tangled in her dress and her hair, who dragged her back through the open crystal door, through the crumbling spaces that used to be parlors, over the nubs of walls. As she receded from him, she saw Gob begin to writhe and kick in the chair. She saw little Pickie, trapped under a giant gear, wriggling his limbs like a bug and shouting for his brother. Dr. Fie would not stop to assist him.

Dr. Fie dragged her outside, held her tight by both shoulders and shouted in her face, “Stay here, I will bring him out!” But before he could pass through the door again they were sent flying down the marble steps by an explosion. Maci lay on Fifty-third Street with her leg twisted beneath her, obviously broken, but somehow not very painful. Dr. Fie and Mr. Whitman both lay near her, neither of them moving. There came another explosion, and another, and fire came bursting out of a whole row of windows. A piece of stone came flying down — she watched its whole journey from the house to her head. As she slept she dreamed of a night when her husband had put his finger on the same place the stone hit her and named it for her. “Glabella,” he’d said, and she’d thought how it would be a beautiful name for a daughter.

When she woke, Dr. Fie was sitting on the steps, weeping into his hands. Mr. Whitman had opened his eyes, and was moving his lips, but not making any sound. Maci raised herself on her arms and looked up toward the house, where a figure stood just outside the flaming door, looking indecisive and confused. “Down here!” she called to it, thinking it was Gob. “Come down!” The figure turned at the sound of her voice, and did start down the steps, too slow for a person fleeing a fire.

“Stop your crying, he’s alive!” Maci said to Dr. Fie, but he only wept harder, and as the figure came nearer, she saw that it was not her husband, or even little Pickie. It was a boy older than him, one who wore Gob’s face. Entirely naked, he stepped close and peered at her, trying, she could tell, to recognize her, and then he flinched away, as if he had never seen a lady scream or weep before. “Let me go!” he pleaded. But she held him fast.

~ ~ ~

“THOMAS,” HIS WIFE CALLED OUT FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF their bed, “it’s past your rising time.”

“I know it,” Tomo said. “I’m on my way.” But he lay in bed awhile longer. His knees and his elbows and his shoulders were so stiff these mornings that he liked to loosen them up some in bed before he tried to rise. He was old for his age, and his joints seemed to be the oldest part of his body.

“Don’t be late,” she said, because she thought he had an appointment across the river, a weekly obligation to teach a class at the medical college. She went back to sleep. Tomo felt blindly for his cane, and when he found it, slowly moved his legs off the side of the bed, and rose with all the speed of a growing plant. He’d slept in a hunch, and now his back did not wish to unbend itself. He walked a little around the room, leaning on furniture as he passed it, and paused by the window to look out at the bridge. Half the windows in the house had a view of it — it was the reason he’d purchased the place. He’d put out his clothes by the window so he could dress there, so he could see the bridge and think how he would soon be on it. It was a weekly ritual with him. Every Saturday he’d take a walk over to Manhattan.


Tomo was one of the first to cross over, when the bridge opened at midnight on May 25, 1883. He was twenty-one years old, still a student and still living with Will, who had taken him in even before his mother and Tennie went away to England in ’76. “Aren’t you coming, Will?” he’d asked, but Will wouldn’t go out of the house that night. “Eventually,” Will said, but Tomo was sure that he never even looked out his window at the incredible display of fireworks.

“I sent my mama a telegram,” he said the next day. “Datelined ‘Brooklyn Bridge.’”

“She’ll be glad of it,” Will said. “You ought to have sent one to Walt.”

“I’ll send one to him, too,” Tomo said, though he did not intend to do that. When he was still a boy, Will would take him to Camden to visit the old poet, a man who pinched Tomo every time he saw him, and demanded kisses like a bearded, bad-breathed aunt. Will went down to see him every year in January, on the anniversary of the stroke that had made an invalid of Mr. Whitman, half-paralyzing him.

They had their breakfast — steak for Tomo, apples and toast for Will — and Tomo talked excitedly of how the bridge was magnificent, of how he had jumped up and down in the middle, expecting it to bounce under him.

“Of course it did not,” Tomo said, and then continued to eat in silence. Moody Will was crying again, and it was best to let him alone when he got this way. When Tomo had returned earlier that morning, Will was sitting in a battered chair and looking down at the crowds walking home underneath the paper lanterns on Fulton Street. “No one remembers,” he said as soon as Tomo came into the room. “Not even you. I think that is the worst thing about it. Walt’ll kick off soon, and then it will be just Maci and I. He never forgot you, did he? He remained inside, when he might have come back out into the world. Why don’t you remember? Shouldn’t you be ashamed, to have forgotten him? And shouldn’t you be ashamed, to have forgotten what he did?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Will,” Tomo said. “Are you talking about Sam? Are you talking about Gob?”

“You should remember,” Will said sadly.

“But I do,” Tomo said. “What sort of person wouldn’t remember his own brother?” He pulled a chair closer to Will’s and put his hand on Will’s knee, thinking of their respective brothers, both dead in the war. He cried a little, too, thinking of Gob’s abbreviated life, but he could not keep up with Will, a champion mourner, and Will’s snuffling sobs turned to voices in Tomo’s head as he drifted to sleep in his chair, thinking again of the illuminations over the bridge.

He had stood under the millions of flashing stars, listening to every ship in the harbor blow its horn, and thought how Will must be standing with his face to a wall, so as not to see even the glimmer in neighboring windows. Next to Tomo, a little boy in a black suit and a porkpie hat was clapping his hands and laughing at the display, at the fountains of gold and silver stars roaring off the towers, and the hundreds of Japanese shells bursting in rapid succession into blue, red, white, and emerald sparks that fell, still incandescent, into the river. “Isn’t it sad?” the boy asked Tomo. “Isn’t it so terribly sad?”


Tomo was always very slow going up the stairs to the promenade. Sometimes he’d stop and lean casually against the rail, unfold the paper that he carried under his arm, and pretend to read. In a little while he’d be able to go on again, up to the top of the stairs, where he always found himself thinking of the people who’d died on the bridge during the big stampede. Every May he’d bring a little wreath over and lay it down to get trampled, too.

It was his custom to stop in the middle of the bridge and look down the river. It was pretty rare, these days, to see anybody jump, or even to read about it in the papers. But Tomo had been there when Odlum made his leap in 1885, and he still remembered very well how he jumped, with one arm raised up over his head, and how his fall was so easy to follow because of the startling red shirt he wore. Tomo had missed Steve Brodie’s supposed midnight jump, which had probably not ever really happened, anyhow, but he had been there in ’87, when a man named Hollow had leaped off wearing a pair of giant canvas wings. Tomo watched as the man glided down to land gently on the surface of the river, just in front of a friendly-looking tug. It plowed over him, crushing his wings, but he lived through that abuse.

“He’s dead!” the little boy had said, next to Tomo. He’d hauled himself up on the railing, and was looking down the river, his face all twisted up in dismay.

“No, child,” Tomo told him. “See there, he’s swimming away in the wake. It’s only his wings that have been injured.”

“He’s dead!” the boy wailed. “He has died, and nothing can bring him back!” Tomo reached out to console him, but the boy dropped off the rail and ran away.


“What do you remember of your youth?” Maci would ask him. It was a question she reserved for her rare solemn moods. A friend also to Tomo’s wife (she’d introduced them to each other), she was often a visitor at their house. She’d been visiting Tomo all his life, with such frequency, when he was younger, that she had been nearly a constant presence. Now her visits were more rare. Five or six times a year she’d take time off from her career of political agitation and come to Brooklyn.

“Not very much,” Tomo told her again at her last visit, the same answer he always gave her. “When we were small, Gob and I used to play in a clearing in the orchard behind the house in Homer. He liked to play games called Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville — we had scarecrows dressed up as Confederate soldiers at whom we would shoot with toy muskets made from apple boughs.”

“Yes,” Maci said, and was silent a moment. “My friend,” she said, “I don’t think memory is to be trusted. I used to think that madness was the chief enemy of joy, and then I thought it must be hypocrisy, and then it seemed very clear that it was mortality. But in my late days I think it is memory that keeps us all ever from being happy.”

“My dear lady,” Tomo said. “Learn from me. I am very happy.” It was the truth. Her visits made him happy. From the next room his wife threw off happiness like heat from her person. And yet, thinking of the orchard in Homer, he suddenly remembered how he had hurt his brother, how he had been a coward and refused to go along when Gob ran off to the war. Tomo closed his eyes and inhabited that moment, with Alanis Bell’s warbling ringing in his ears. Over and over he sent his brother off to die without him.


“Why are you crying?” Tomo asked the boy. He was three-fourths of the way across the bridge, and about one-fourth of the way to his destination, when he saw the boy, leaning against the railing and sobbing. Every other passerby seemed completely unmoved by the boy’s display. He was about seven years old, with long, shining brown hair that fell past his shoulders and down his back. He wore a neat, old-fashioned black suit. In that moment, he was not at all familiar to Tomo.

“He’s gone!” the boy said. “Gone forever!”

“Who?” Tomo asked. “Did somebody jump?”

“Who?” the boy asked him back, looking up at him with black eyes that had more anger than sadness in them. “Who do you think? They’re all gone. All of them, never to return, and before them all my brother is gone, gone for always.”

“There now,” Tomo said, reaching out to touch the boy on his head. “My brother, he died, too.” He leaned down slowly, sure he heard himself creaking, to better comfort the little fellow. “It is a difficult thing, the death of a brother,” he said. The boy smiled, then, and darted forward like a snake. He kissed instead of biting, a dry little peck, but it burned horribly where he planted it on Tomo’s cheek.

“It’s a difficult thing,” the boy said, and Tomo felt dizzy. He had a falling sensation, and he was certain he had managed somehow to tumble off the bridge. He raised his arm up over his head in the attitude of Odlum, and prepared to meet the water.

“Goodbye, my love,” he said, speaking to his wife. He heard a noise like the ocean, or the breathing of a giant, and he was overcome with desire — he opened his eyes and wanted the whole far shore of Manhattan and all the tall buildings on it; he wanted the bodies of every person passing him where he stood with his arm up over his head, still feeling as if he were falling through endless spaces of air, he wanted to put his hands under their dresses and shirts, to grab at their flesh with his dry old hands.

“Excuse me,” said a lady walking by, because her dog had nipped at Tomo’s shoe as they passed. He took down his arm and looked around. There was the boy, standing a few feet off. Tomo could not remember what they had been discussing. He tossed the little man a coin, because he knew every child likes a nickel to buy a bag of candy with, and every child liked how Tomo could make a coin spin in the air. The boy caught the coin in his mouth and seemed to swallow it.

“I only wanted to see you, Uncle,” the boy said, and then he ran off towards Brooklyn, ducking between pedestrians. Tomo turned and walked on, thinking, just for a moment, that the boy was very familiar, after all, because he suddenly knew how the boy had been haunting him all his life — Tomo had seen him all over Manhattan and Brooklyn, far away in London and Paris, in Cuba, Hong Kong, Portugal, and Morocco. There was no place where he was not. Tomo kept walking, thinking that very soon he would remember why the boy was so sad, and why he never got any older, but as Tomo got closer to Manhattan he began to forget about him. Walking up to the terminal he stepped over the shadow of a streetlamp and paused to read a sign far ahead — though his joints were ruined, though his heart was weak and his bladder was nervous, his eyes were quite sharp. “If the baby is cutting its teeth,” it advised, “use Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup.”

“What baby?” Tomo asked aloud, and then he walked on.


“Would you like to go faster?” his mama asked him. They were driving in a speedy Talbot-Darracq, her latest automobile. She kept a chauffeur, but always put him in the passenger seat, insisting on driving herself at high speeds all over her estate at Bredon’s Norton in England.

“No,” Tomo said, knowing she would go faster anyway. His wife didn’t like automobiles. She had remained at the house to eat strawberries and doze in the sun while Tomo and his mother went out for a drive. She thought there was something obscene about automobiles. Tomo thought they were intriguing, though he would not ever drive one.

“It’s a shame they don’t make them any faster,” his mama said. She drove every day for an hour because she insisted that in doing so she was putting a little more distance between herself and death. Since her third husband, the banker Mr. Martin, had died, she’d become obsessed with her own mortality. “Not too close,” she’d say, if a person tried to kiss her, because she feared the pollution of touch.

“You quick widow!” Tomo called out to her, but she was half deaf, and could not hear him above the engine.


Often, by the time he’d reached the other side of the bridge, Tomo would have had enough of walking, so he’d take a cab to the church, struggling with his paper to pick out the address to give to the driver. It was a different church every time, and he was sure that by now he must have visited every one on the island. On that day in 1927 he went to a Catholic church on East Twenty-fifth Street, to a funeral, one that was especially dolorous and grim — that was how he liked them.

It was a sin, he knew, to lie to his wife, and probably also a sin to masquerade as a mourner. And yet wasn’t he sad for this person, this man who had died of a bleeding stomach, who was survived by a wife, seven children, and a full score of grandchildren? Tomo might go to the hospital tomorrow or the next day and fail to save a person like this man, a balding Irishman whose skin was too big for him to fit into anymore. He might go to that funeral, too, because he was drawn to them, because he had always been drawn to them.

Tomo sat in the back, and watched quietly, not crying until the end, when he approached the casket and looked in to see the face of the man. He put a hand over his mouth and wept, sure that all around people were wondering who he was, this well-dressed, hobbling old man who grieved so dramatically. A pair of girls led him back to his seat. They were sisters, he could tell. “Are you twins?” he asked them loudly, and they both told him to hush. One of them stayed with him, standing while he sat, her hand placed gently on the back of his neck.

“Listen,” he said to her. “Do you know how you are undying? Do you know how Heaven waits for the faithful? It’s the good news, that a person is such a piece of work that there can be no end to her.”

“Hush,” she said.

“Do you doubt it?” he asked. “Do you?” He held her wrist, finding her pulse and reading her perfect health in it. “You do doubt it, don’t you? You callow, doubting girl! You are afraid to die!”

“Stopper it up, Gramps,” she said, placing a soft hand over his mouth, but Tomo pushed it away. He stood up and left the church, not caring how his slow, heavy tread rang out in the air and marred the lovely, sad music.


“Was it a good day?” his wife asked him. It was the question she asked every night as they got into bed together.

“Good enough,” Tomo said. He’d spent the afternoon in Central Park, eaten ice cream on Madison Avenue, and bought an armful of daisies for his wife, enjoying, for a while, how they drew the stares of everyone who passed him.

“My feet are aching,” his wife said, after they had been lying side by side for a while in the quiet dark. They had been dancing, that evening. They were neither of them very good at it, so they did it in the privacy of their home, in the empty bedroom that had once sheltered their second daughter.

“I’ll heal them,” Tomo said, sitting up and peeling back the covers so he could get at his wife’s big feet. They were very pale, and as he massaged them they seemed brighter than any other thing in the room.

“Shall I reach under the bed?” she asked him, after he had been rubbing on her for a while, and after his hands had started to wander up her body.

“I think you had better,” he said. Even as he worked her with his hands, she reached down under the bed and brought up a little porcelain bowl. It was too dark for Tomo to see it clearly, but he knew how it was painted in blue with birds, tall herons and egrets. It made a grating, ringing noise as his wife removed the top. Age required her to augment her natural charms with petrolatum.

With his creaking joints and his crooked back, his cloudy brain and his obstipated bowels, it always seemed to Tomo that physical love should be beyond him, but it was not yet, and sometimes, as on this night, it took a supreme effort of will to keep from spending himself like a naive boy. He did surgeries in his mind as he kissed his wife and whispered her own name into her face. It made him think of hernias, what they were doing, of organs invading cavities that were not their usual homes, and so to keep himself in order he went through the Bassini repair, sewing, in his mind, the conjoined tendon and the iliopubic tract into a forbidding wall that said to the protruding viscus, Stay where you belong.

When his time came, he imagined the futile sutures bursting, the tendons ripping and breaking to release a tumbling mass of bright confetti that ignited in his brain, becoming the millions of stars that had fallen around the bridge on that distant past night. He called out his wife’s name, “Phoebe!” It was a distinct and equal pleasure, to shout it as loud as he could, in a house emptied by time, where no one could hear the name but him and its owner. His wife, a singer, answered him with a perfect C in an octave that told him he was doing well for her this evening.

He got a terrible pain in his left eye, and if his arms had not been locked around his wife, he would have clapped a hand to his face. It was painful, like being stabbed, and painful because it brought with it searing, lucid remembrance. Just for an instant, Tomo knew it was not Gob who had died at Chickamauga. His wife, he was sure, must take his screaming as a manifestation of unbearable pleasure.

But the knowledge, like the pleasure, passed in an instant, and he collapsed, still crying out softly, against his wife. There was a confused mess of flame where his mind ought to have been, and he did not know why he was crying. “There now,” his wife said, putting her hand on the back of his neck, and stroking him there. “It wasn’t all that bad, was it, my love?”

“No,” Tomo said. And then he said it over and over, “No, no, no.”

“Go to sleep, now,” his wife said in reply to his continued protest. Tomo became quiet, but the word still echoed in his head. He rolled onto his side and held her even closer, thinking how she was undying, and how he himself was undying, how Heaven waits for the faithful, how a man is such a piece of work that there can be no end to him, and how he wanted to believe that.

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