Gob's Grief (20 page)

“What’s that one?” Gob asked, moving his arm, too, to point at a plate negative taken at Bull Run. It was not one of Frenchy’s. Will had been collecting them from other photographers.

“Now it’s ruined,” Will said, taking his head out of the camera and scowling.

“Is that one from Chickamauga?” Gob asked, walking over to examine the plate.

“No,” said Will. “I have none from that battle. That’s three plates you’ve wasted. Why can’t you hold still?”

“Where are the pictures from Chickamauga?” Gob asked. He went rooting among the mounds of pictures and plates on tables around the room. Will finally made him understand that there were no pictures from Chickamauga, but Gob was fascinated by any picture. He held the negative plates up to the light and closed his eyes and said, “Oh!” With their sleeves rolled up and their collars loosened, they looked at every picture Will owned. Gob delighted especially in the stereoscopic images. He sat cross-legged on the floor, looking at Mr. Gardner’s gruesome photographs, reaching out his hand repeatedly to try and touch the carnage that floated before him.

When there were no more pictures to look at, Will taught Gob how to take and develop a photograph. He mastered the process immediately. There were people who did not have to be shown a thing twice to learn it, but with Gob you almost didn’t have to show him even once. When Will asked how he knew to make the negative for an ambrotype thin and light, Gob only said, “Well, it makes sense, doesn’t it?” He insisted on taking Will’s picture, and Will obliged him, though he didn’t like it. He stood in a formal pose, next to a broken plaster column and an urn. He was surrounded by spirits, Jolly and Lewy Greeley and even Sam, who stood away from him, but still within the picture. Gob developed the picture himself, mounted it as an ambrotype, and then presented it to Will.

“Ah, you’re a professional,” Will said. It was a good picture. He looked like a big hulking fool, with his sleepy, stupid gaze and his slack idiot’s mouth: Gob had captured him. There were no spirits in the picture, but they clustered around Will to look at it, as if expecting to find themselves in the glass.

Just as the day ended, they went up to the roof. Will had never shown the glass house to anyone, because he had no friends with which to share any secrets, least of all a peculiar monument to death, a greenhouse fit for the cultivation of fat white tombflowers. But he thought it would interest Gob, because pictures fascinated him, and because death fascinated him. And Jolly pointed urgently at Gob, at the stairs, at Gob again, and made sweeping motions with his hands, as if to shoo the both of them up to the roof.

“You’re a builder, too,” Gob said when he saw it. It was a warm Sunday in February. The last night’s snow had been melting all day off the glass house, so it looked clean and fresh and wet. Gob reached out with his hand, running his finger from plate to plate. A crowd of spirits gathered, between eyeblinks, to watch him. “May I go in?” Gob asked.

“Certainly,” Will said. Then he thought how it might change Gob as it had changed him, and he said, “Wait, it could hurt you.”

“I’m sure it won’t,” Gob said, and he went into the house. Will put it down to a trick of the setting sun, how yellow light flashed inside. Spirits were all around them. They joined hands to circle the house, and then they danced around it, first one way, and then the other. Will had never seen them all so happy. Even ever-angry Frenchy was happy, even Sam was smiling and dancing. Only the angel boy didn’t dance. He perched on the top of the house, blowing his bugle at the sun.

Did it follow, Will wondered, that if you could see them you ought to be able to hear them, too? What logic governed such interaction? He could hear the cannon still sounding, still deafening, still waking him every so often from sleep. Often it was just Frenchy standing watch over his bed. Sometimes he had a plate with him, one upon which pictures flashed like the images from a magic lantern. Will saw the faces of strangers, night landscapes, scenes of the war, a shack on a hill with a decaying orchard behind it, a dark thick wood at twilight. Frenchy would point at the images and talk, wearing the same expression as when he’d been Will’s living instructor, an angry, impatient look that very often got screwed up into a raging scowl as he yelled and yelled.

“I can’t hear you,” Will would say, when Frenchy worked himself into a fury. “But it suits you, sir, this quietness. I think it has made you likable, dear Frenchy.” This made him angrier, but Will, grumpy anyhow at being woken, felt compelled to tease him. “Dear, meek Frenchy. Quiet as a mouse!”

Will stood on Fifth Avenue, looking up at Number 1 East Fifty-third Street, wondering if his friend could really live in this enormous house. Gob had invited him for supper, reciprocating, Will supposed, the invitation to Brooklyn. “We’ll eat,” Gob said, “and then I’ll show you something.”

It was only a day since Gob had stumbled weeping out of the glass house. Will had caught him by the shoulders and said, “I knew it! It’s hurt you to go in there.” But Gob said he was crying tears of joy, and then he hurried off, saying only that he had work to do.

Gob opened the door, looking exhausted but very happy. “My friend!” he said. “There you are!” He clapped Will on the back and drew him inside. It was the finest house that Will had ever seen, though very dirty. There were three reception rooms and two drawing rooms, with what must have been five hundred mirrors hanging on all their high walls. In the dining room there was a table four times as long as Will was himself. There was a meal already set up: soup, corn, green peas, cabbage, beets, puddings and pies, a salad of dandelion greens, pork with stewed apples, steak with peaches, salt fish with onions, coffee and wine and cold root beer. Gob played with his food, arranging it in patterns on his plate, but not eating much. “I’m never hungry when I’ve been working,” he explained. Will waited for Gob to speak of the glass house, to tell him what had happened inside, but he said nothing of it. Will had been ready, when Gob came out, to make a confession to him:
I see spirits
or
I fear I’m insane
, and he had hoped, he knew now, that Gob would say,
Oh yes, those pesky spirits. They’re everywhere!
It would be so pleasant, so unburdening, to share the affliction. But Gob gave no sign of seeing the spirits. As Will had approached Manhattan on the ferry, they’d run like children, leaning dangerously over the rails, pointing excitedly at the churning water. When Gob opened the door, they’d swarmed into his house like yokels bustling to get into Barnum’s. Now, they sported everywhere in the room. Sam stood by the table, looking sadly at a pudding, not a foot from Gob’s elbow.

Will sighed. Since Gob was not forthcoming, he would be rude. Gob was talking about how long ago, with Dr. Wood looking on, he’d removed a tumor from the jaw of Emily McNee, the Sozodont dentifrice heiress. He was praising her teeth when Will interrupted.

“What did you see, there in my little house?”

“Ah,” Gob said, smiling and passing a hand over his eyes. “What did I see?”

“Yes,” said Will. “That’s what I asked.”

“What
did you
see?”

“I saw nothing,” Will said, “but now I see … spirits. There. I’ve said it. Sir, I think it cost me my sanity to go into that place.”

“Spirits!” Gob said, and Will thought at first that he was angry. He put his face in his hands, and his voice was plaintive. “I wish I saw them! I wish I did. But that comfort is denied me.”

“Comfort? You don’t think,” Will said, “that such visions are manufactured by a sick mind?”

Gob raised his head and gave Will a scornful look. “You insult my mother,” he said. Will did not know whether or not to apologize, because now Gob was laughing, louder and louder, and pounding his fist on the table so forcefully that plates danced and glasses tipped.

“Come along,” Gob said, when he had calmed some. “Let’s have the rest of the tour.” He took Will’s arm and walked with him. In the parlors, there were marble-topped tables, armchairs and sofas of black lacquered wood inlaid with mother-of-pearl. There were rugs two and three deep on the floor, stained in the corners but otherwise bright and beautiful. And there were books everywhere, stacked on tables or furniture, or against the walls. Will picked one up at random. It was dusty and smelled of mold, but the binding was rich leather, and the title stood out in gold on the spine:
The Dove of Archytas.

“Of course,” said Gob. “You’d like to see the library, wouldn’t you?”

That room took up most of the second and third floors. They climbed a spiral staircase to the iron mezzanine and looked down at the floor, where a score of grandfather clocks, all run down and silent, were set randomly around the room, among golden armillary spheres and dusty overstuffed chairs.

“My master liked clocks,” Gob said.

“You mean your late uncle?” Will asked. “Dr. Oetker?” At Bellevue, Dr. Oetker had had a reputation for brilliance. Will had heard that he had made a fortune catering to the ills of fashionable and unfashionable society.

“He was not my uncle. But he admired a good clock. He’d ask me sometimes, ‘Who is the god of the future?’”

“Professor Morse?” said Will. Gob laughed.

“That answer would have gotten you a slap.”

“What was the answer, then?”

Gob was silent for a moment, and then he said, “I don’t like clocks. It used to be my job to care for them, but since he died I’ve been, as you can see, on holiday. Onward and upward.”

He took Will out of the library, and they went down halls that were increasingly, in the upper levels of the house, littered with little pieces of machinery. Gears and struts and cranks and cylinders, they lay in the halls, or they were piled in the guest bedrooms and parlors. In one room, empty of furniture except for a magnificent bed whose mahogany posts were carved with laurel and acanthus leaves, Gob was reunited with a friend. “My aeolipile!” he said, speaking of a tall bronze globe, decorated with a figure of the wind—a gleeful face with pursed lips and puffed cheeks. It was obviously broken, cracked at the bottom and looking as if it were missing parts. “I made this when I was a child,” he said to Will, putting his arms around it and hugging it to him. “I haven’t seen it for years.”

Gob’s bedroom was on the fifth floor. “Lots of stairs,” Will said, “to climb every night.”

Gob shrugged. There were two doors off the hall at the top of the house. One was made of wood, the other iron. The iron door was open, rusted on its hinges so when Will stumbled against it it moaned horribly. He peered inside and saw the gray shapes of dead trees, lit up by weak moonlight falling through a dirty glass roof. “Not in there,” Gob said, pulling Will away and opening the wooden door. This was the neatest place in the house. There was a blue skylight in the ceiling, and a second iron door in the wall on the far side of the room.

“Don’t stand there,” Gob said. Will had stepped into a circle of stone, set incongruously in the wood floor.

“Sorry,” Will said, because a look of extreme displeasure had passed over his friend’s face. He walked out of the circle, and Gob smiled again.

“Now I will show you my house,” he said.

“I think you just did,” Will said, misunderstanding. Gob opened the second iron door in the far side of the room and they entered a place crowded with spirits and machinery. It looked like the pack-hole of some industrious squirrel, one that robbed factories instead of trees. There were gears of all sizes, great tangles of cable, stacks of lumber and steel plates, and underneath an ornate gaselier an assemblage that Will knew must be a machine of some sort, though he had never seen anything like it. Some spirits were caressing it, others milled happily about the room, gazing at pieces of matériel like fascinated gallery-goers.

“What is it?” Will asked, pointing to the machine.

“A combination,” Gob said, “of resistant bodies so arranged that by their means the mechanical forces of nature can be compelled to do work accompanied by certain determinate motions. It’s an engine.
My
house, you see,
like your
house.”

Will looked at it, his hands in fists at his sides. It seemed familiar and wonderful, and horrible, too, in the same way his glass house was horrible. “Are you compelled to build it?” Will asked. Gob grabbed him roughly by the shoulders, and Will thought he would eject him from the room, but instead he embraced him, crushing him with his little arms, crying happy tears again and saying, “Oh Will, oh my good friend, you understand me. You are a builder, too.”

There was another spirit, initially as furtive as the others were bold, and the only female. She flitted outside Will’s window, or she hid in the shadow of an alley at night, and he’d only catch a glimpse of her as he passed by. She was different because she was shy, and because she looked to be a complete angel. He’d groaned when he saw her. Somehow it was bearable to see a half angel. It did not bode the same ill for one’s mind or one’s equanimity. But she was entire. There was no missing her strange wings, her great height and fine green robes that looked to be hewn out of malachite, or the spots of green light that floated around her head like a crown of emeralds. She had strange wings and strange eyes. They were the darkest eyes Will had ever seen, flat and black as if someone had gouged them out and filled up the sockets with ink. Her wings were white and not made of feathers but tiny things like fingers or the beard of a cuttlefish.

One night he woke, not at the sound of the cannon, but because a cat was screaming on his roof. He lay with his eyes closed, thinking the animal might have become trapped in the glass house. When he opened his eyes the spirit was there, kneeling by his bed and leaning over him, so close he thought she might kiss him. She opened her mouth, and then she fled. Not a moment later, the little angel boy arrived, looking furious, stomping silently around the room. He turned to Will and shook his finger at him.

It was the last question Will would have asked, what the machine would do. He might not ever have known, if Gob hadn’t volunteered the answer. He had never known what the glass house would do—he’d just built it. He assumed that Gob, too, was building in ignorance of ultimate function. But Gob told him, standing in his workshop, the purpose he meant for his machine to accomplish, and it did not seem so terribly insane. Or it seemed properly insane, to build a machine to abolish death. Only the most reasonable of lunatics could devote his life to something so sensible and worthwhile, to put aside all other work and devote himself to this ultimate concern. “Will you help me, Will?” Gob had asked. “I mean to lick death, but I can’t do it alone. Will you help me win?” Jolly and Sam were standing on either side of Will, and their lips seemed to be moving in the same manner as Gob’s, asking the same question.