Gob's Grief

by Chris Adrian

  “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 i
nstruments. “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.