Gob's Grief

by Chris Adrian

  “Look, Mr. Whitman,” said the lady, who was pretty and fat, with eyes like her companion’s, blue and Hankish and beautiful. “We are velocipedestrians!” She waved her arms, catching her balance as she stopped her rolling.

  “This is my aunt,” Gob said, “Miss Tennie C. Claflin. When I told her I was to meet you today, she could not stay away.”

  “It is my great pleasure, sir,” she said, taking his hand and shaking it vigorously. “My very intense pleasure.” She was dressed in a dark blue tunic and skirt of blue wool, with a pair of yellow bloomers on her legs that demanded even more attention than the wheels on her feet. All over the park, as far as Walt’s eyes could see, people were pointing at her, but she seemed not to notice.

  “Do you like my land skates?” Gob asked Walt. He’d told Walt the night before that tinkering and inventing were his avocations, that he had been educated as an engineer as well as a physician, and Walt had talked about his engineer brothers, George and Jeff.

  “They are very particular,” Walt said, because he did not quite know what to make of the skates. Tennie insisted on surrendering hers so that Walt could try them out. They held his arms and pulled him to and fro over the grass by the lake, until he got some skill with the things.

  “It’s just like ice-skating!” Walt said, very pleased with how he was flying down the road at what must have been a full ten miles an hour. He imagined a notice in the papers: Walt Whitman was in the Central Park yesterday, riding on the wheels of the future. Gob put his fingers on Walt’s wrist to steady him, then took his hand. They skated full around the lake, returning to find Tennie seated by the water. She rose and ran to them, a confusion of blue and yellow fabric, flashing her legs at the whole wide world, waving in her hand the book she’d found.

  “A dark place,” said Tennie, “but I like it.” Walt had taken them to Pfaff’s, because he thought Tennie would liven the place up considerably. It had become rather staid since the days before the war when Henry Clapp and Ada Clare held court there. “We are in my neighborhood, you know,” she said. “I live with my family in Great Jones Street, Number Seventeen. You are welcome to visit, Mr. Whitman. My sister would be delighted to meet you. Of course, don’t come by thinking to see little Gob, here. Great Jones Street is not great enough for him. He lives in Fifth Avenue, and doesn’t care for visitors.”

  “The house where I live is gloomy,” Gob said. “It was my teacher’s. When he passed on he left it to me.”

  “Did you hear of the horrible murder in France?” asked Tennie. Walt said he had not. “A man named Gaucher went for a stroll in the Tuilleries and noticed a fine handkerchief abandoned on the wet ground. Now, he is a man of limited means, this Gaucher. He has never been a fortunate person, but he blesses his good fortune that he has found this truly exquisite piece of material, which he is already planning to sell before he picks it up. But no sooner does he take it than he discovers that in doing so he has uncovered a horrible staring eye. A hideous, staring green eye. It belonged to the youngest child, the only member of a family of five not buried completely by the fiend who killed them.”

  “I hadn’t heard!” Walt said.

  “No,” said Tennie. “Of course you hadn’t. It’s a year off yet. Sometimes I am confused. But worry you not, Mr. Whitman. Those poor babies will be sheltered in the Summerland.”

  “I think they’d rather shelter on earth,” said Gob. “But what say have we got in it, eh Walt?”

  “Pfaff’s used to be a lively place,” said Walt, feeling bewildered. “Back in its day.”

  “Gob, fetch us some frankfurters,” said Tennie. “I am hungry for a frankfurter and thirsty for a beer.” As soon as Gob left, Tennie leaned over to Walt and whispered to him. “Mr. Whitman,” she said very slowly. “Listen to me. I am beautiful and I love you. I think you have got a child for me, a noble and perfect man child. Our boy … do you not already love him? He must be gotten on a mountaintop, in the open air. Not in lust, not in mere gratification of sexual passion, but in ennobling pure strong deep passionate broad universal love!”

  As she spoke, Walt had shrunk back from her, so far that his chair was leaning away from the table and he might have fallen over if Gob hadn’t come up behind him and steadied the chair with his hip. Tennie had been charming, previously, and now she was just another alarming female.

  “Walt,” said Gob, “I think my aunt has played a joke on you.”

  “A joke!” said Tennie. “Mr. Whitman, I only sought to amuse you!”

  “Of course,” said Walt. “Of course.” He took his frankfurter from Gob, who was scolding his aunt.

  “It’s a cause with me, Mr. Whitman,” Tennie said in her own defense. “The manufacture of liveliness is my cause.”

  Among the men and women the multitude, Hank said, I perceive one picking me out by secret and divine signs. Walt was at his desk in the Attorney General’s office. It was one o’clock on a snowy afternoon in early December of ’68. To the casual observer, he appeared to be very hard at work, bent over a sheet of paper with his broad-brimmed hat on the desk beside his arm. He looked to be copying some official document, writing a bit and then glancing again at the original, but in fact he was copying a letter of his own, making it prettier to look at and more pleasing to the reader’s ear.

  Dear Gob,

  I send you a few lines, though there is nothing new or special with me. I am still working in the same place, and expect to be here all winter (yet there is such a thing as a man’s slipping up in his calculations, you know). My health keeps good, and work easy. I often think of you, my boy, and think whether you are all right and in good health, and riding yet on the Belt Line when the mood takes you.

  I suppose you received the letter I sent you. I got yours November 15 and sent you a letter about the twentieth or twenty-first, I believe. I have not heard from you since.

  Congress began here last Monday. I have been up to see them in session. The halls they meet in are magnificent. The light comes all from the great roof. The new part of the Capitol is very fine indeed. It is a great curiosity to any one that likes fine workmanship both in wood and stone. But I hope that you will come here and see me, as you talked of—Whether we are indeed to have the chance in future to be much together and enjoy each other’s love and friendship—or whether worldly affairs are to separate us—I don’t know. But somehow I feel (if I am not dreaming) that the good square love is in our hearts, for each other, while life lasts.

  As I told you in my previous letter, this city is quite small potatoes after living in New York. The public buildings are large and grand. Most of them are made of white marble, and on a far grander scale than the N.Y. City Hall; but the oceans of life and people, such as in N.Y. and the shipping etc. are lacking here. Still, a young man ought to see Washington once in his life, any how. Then I please myself with thinking it will be a pleasure to you to be with me, Gob, I want you to write me as often as you can.

  Walt folded up the letter in the envelope and took a break to post it. Outside, he leaned for a moment against a streetlamp, because he was momentarily overcome with a feeling like the one he’d had in Central Park—there were magical wheels on his feet and he was flying along hand in hand with his comrade. This feeling kept returning to him, the same way a tossing sea feeling would return to him as he fell asleep after a day playing in the surf. Acknowledging none else, Hank said. Not parent, wife, husband, brother, child, any nearer than I am. Some are baffled, but not that one—that one knows me.

  Walt got no reply to his December letter. Christmas came and went, and though he was among good friends, he felt lonely. He and Hank welcomed in the New Year sitting by his window. Walt made a punch of lemon, scotch whiskey, sugar, and snow from the windowsill. “To the year!” Walt called out to the black sky. Year all mottled with good and evil! shouted Hank. Another week passed, and another and another, with still no word from Gob. Walt gave up hope of hearing from him again, and cursed his own extreme nature. How stupid
, after all, to feel such a ridiculous attachment! “We will leave omniphily to M. Fourier and his moony-eyed compatriots,” Walt said to Hank. “It is not for Walt Whitman.” Hank said, Not in any or all of them O adhesiveness! O pulse of my life! Need I that you exist and show yourself any more than in these songs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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