Gob's Grief (31 page)

The answer, they decided, was to put a feeling thing in it. “We shall have to bind you up,” the Urfeist informed Gob, sounding almost sad. With wire thin as thread he wrapped Gob under the thing, and ran a thicker wire from Gob’s heart to the mouth of the sheep. “Of course there has to be a little pain,” the Urfeist said, pushing the sharp wire through the skin of Gob’s chest. He sank it no more than a half inch, but Gob was sure he felt it pierce his heart. “You are not a kosmos,” the Urfeist told him, “yet perhaps you will do. Perhaps you are sufficient for a short message.” He opened the current in the batteries, mixed up the mystic fluid with a glass wand, blew a harmonica in the four corners of the room. The telegraph did what it always did, danced and hummed and chittered. “You must sink down,” the Urfeist said, pinching the wire delicately between his thumb and finger and twisting it round so it spiraled deeper into his student. “Think of your brother,” the Urfeist said, but Gob didn’t need to be told. It was easy for him to sink down to a place where there was nothing but absence of Tomo, and need of Tomo, and love of Tomo.

“Yes,” the Urfeist said. “Yes! Sink down! There
is
a message!” Gob did not hear the noise of the stock indicator, but he felt it as a ticking in his bones. He felt his vitality go out of him like a single breath. If he hadn’t been bound up with wire he would have fallen. He hung his head and moaned because he hurt all over. The Urfeist was moaning too, but in pleasure. The spiritual telegraph had relayed a message. “What does it say?” Gob asked weakly, after the Urfeist tore off the message and looked at it.

“Nothing,” the Urfeist said, but Gob could see even from far away how there was ink on the paper. The Urfeist stuck the message away in his vest and said, “Your machine, it was a failure. You yourself are a failure. Why do I waste the time it takes to teach you? I might as well kick you as try to give you knowledge.” He did kick Gob, and then he walked away, taking out the slip to read it again.

“What does it say!” Gob shouted, but the Urfeist left him alone without answering. It was a day and a night before Gob wriggled out from the wires, before he went looking, bleeding and furious, for his master. The Urfeist wasn’t in the library or the dining room, or even among the tall plants of the green room. Gob walked faster and faster as he searched, and every time he found another room empty of the Urfeist, he quickened his pace. The Urfeist was not in any of the parlors. He was not in the library. Gob was running when at last he found his master, curled in a ball in a bedroom. “Where is it?” he said, and “Liar!” He wasn’t afraid to yell and demand, or even to strike his fists against the Urfeist’s back. “Give it to me!” he said, but he found that he was able to take the note for himself because his master was cold, still, and dead. A look of angry denial deformed the Urfeist’s ugly face. He had torn off his shirt, and Gob could see the livid handprint, the size and shape of his own hand, over his master’s heart. The message was very simple:
You are dead.

Gob dropped the paper as soon as he’d read it, because he thought it must kill him, too, this powerful message from his brother that he was sure must have been meant for him. You are dead, it said, because he ought to be dead with his brother, and he ought to be dead for betraying his brother. “It did too work,” he said to the gray face of the Urfeist. Sure that he, too, would die any moment, Gob lay down next to his teacher, lifting one of the cold hands to lay it across his own neck.

T
HE
W
ONDERFUL
I
NFANT

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.