Gob's Grief (9 page)

“Look!” Gob said. “I need that, too!” He reached in, to another shelf, and removed a length of cable. He pushed it in Walt’s face and rubbed it against his cheek, asking, “Do you know what this is? It’s the Atlantic Cable. The thing itself!”

“A crime,” Walt said. As if at his call, a guard came at last, and found them. He called out, “Hey there!” Gob took Walt’s hand and ran, pulling him along, dragging him and lifting him painfully by one arm, so fast and smooth Walt wasn’t quite sure if their feet were touching the ground. They ran toward the guard and knocked into him, sending him sprawling as a train might send an unlucky cow sailing over a pasture. Walt heard him land with an oof and a curse, and then they were flying down the stairs, Walt stumbling at every step and Gob bearing him up.

Did they go after that to Ford’s Theatre? Walt was never sure, and later when he asked Gob, he’d only get a shrug for an answer. It was like remembering something through a great space of water. Walt was thinking they would go into the theater and embrace in the spot where Lincoln had died. Their marvelous passion would go out from them in waves, transforming time, history, and destiny, unmurdering Lincoln, unfighting the war, unkilling all those six hundred thousand, who would be drawn from death into the theater, where they would add their strong arms to the world-changing embrace, until at last a great historic love-pile was gathered in Washington City, a gigantic pearl with Gob and Walt the sand at its center.

But the box was gone. The whole theater had been gutted and refitted as a medical museum. Gob led Walt up a spiral staircase from the first floor, which was cluttered with clerks’ desks, past the second floor, a library, to the top of the building.

The third floor was filled with hideous curiosities, testaments to the ways in which human flesh is heir to misery. At the top of the stairs, Walt was greeted by a row of jars containing heads that looked, because they were near a window, to be suspended in moonlight. Three Maori heads from New Zealand grinned at him as he walked towards them. He bent down to look at their empty eye sockets, their cheeks striped with betel-juice tattoos, their glowing white teeth. Nearby, there were tumors piled like candy in a jar. Walt had a perverse notion that he and Gob would go bobbing for them like apples. He turned away from the tumors and considered all the bones—they hung from the ceiling in complete or partial skeletons. There were skulls lined up on shelves, trephined or saber-whacked or bullet-ridden. Gob began plucking booty from the ceiling and shelves, putting into a sack he’d pulled from his coat the arm bones and leg bones, the finger bones and toe bones and ribs and pelvises. “I need them, Walt,” he said. “I need the bones.” When his sack was full he made as if to leave, but then his head swung around, as if pulled by Mr. Lincoln’s hat, to a place where three human vertebrae were mounted on a stand. Walt lit a match to read the ticket:

No. 4,086—The third, fourth, and fifth cervical vertebrae. A conoidal carbine ball entered the right side, comminuting the base of the right lamina of the fourth vertebrae, fracturing it longitudinally and separating it from the spinous process. From a case where death occurred a few hours after injury. April 26, 1865.

A separate ticket indicated that the bones belonged to Mr. Booth. They looked to Walt to be stained, as if people had spit on them. Gob put them, too, in his sack. He leaned over and whispered in Walt’s ear, his voice sounding almost like Hank’s. “I need the bones,” he said. “I need them for my engine. You see, I’m building an engine to bring them back, my brother and all the rest. A machine to abolish death, to lick it like a cowardly Reb. I need the bones, I need the hat, and I need you, Walt. I need you especially.” Walt tried and failed to imagine the machine that would require such matériel.

That was the last Walt remembered of this very peculiar evening. He did not remember the walk home from Ford’s. He did not remember taking off his coat and shirt, his pants and boots. He woke once before dawn with Gob’s sleeping head on his chest, and then woke again in the morning with his head on Gob’s chest.

Walt sat up in bed. Gob said his brother’s name, “Tomo,” but didn’t wake. Walt looked around the room and saw no bag of bones, but there was a hat placed neatly on the table by the bed. It was an ordinary-looking hat. There wasn’t any tag on it. But it was black, and tall, and made to fit a big head. Walt took it up and put it on his own aching head.
Listen, Walt
, Hank said.
Do you hear it?
Walt listened dutifully, and he heard a noise. At first he thought it was Gob’s breathing, low and steady and deep, but then he understood that it was something different, a deeper, mightier sound, like a giant breathing, a noise of distant waves crashing, a noise like the sea.

3

“
LOOK THERE, WALT
,”
GOB SAID.
“
HOW DO YOU LIKE THAT
boat?” It was July of 1870. Walt and Gob were in New York. They’d gone down to the water to watch the Queen’s Cup race, part of a crowd of one hundred thousand spectators gathered on the shores and hills all around the harbor. Walt followed Gob’s pointing finger to a boat called the
America.

“It’s the handsomest little craft I ever laid eyes upon,” Walt said, but really he was in love with all the boats, and they all seemed very beautiful to him. Walt watched the white sails flapping in the breeze, and the boats tearing along in the green water, trailing flags and streamers and throwing white spray from their bows. He leaned against Gob and tried to think of nothing, to let the lovely darting shapes command his vision and his mind. But thoughts of Gob began to crowd out the boats—first he imagined sailing with Gob in the
America
, how it would delight them both to move so fast. And then Walt imagined them moving over the water without need of a boat. Hand in hand, he and Gob ran over the bay, and leapt howling off the tall tops of the waves. It was always this way; it wasn’t enough merely to be with him, being with him inspired thoughts of him even as they were together.
Your Camerado
, said Hank, and indeed it seemed sometimes that Gob was that, a friend above all friends. Yet sometimes he seemed a stranger, even after a year and more of companionship. Or better to say instead that he was strange, but never a stranger. For he
was
strange, infinitely strange. He had strange knowledge, and strange obsessions. His profession was medicine, but he dedicated his life to his wondrous, tyrannical engine—wondrous because he truly meant it to abolish death, tyrannical because he was enslaved to its creation. “I give it everything,” he said to Walt, on one occasion, “and it gives me nothing.”

He is a builder
, Hank said, but Walt often feared that Gob was a little mad, that his dry, obsessive imagination had been set on fire by the death of his brother. Gob kept the engine at his house, a five-story mansion on Fifth Avenue in the neighborhood of the ever-growing Catholic cathedral. Madame Restell, the infamous abortionist, lived not three houses down. Gob knew her. He called her Auntie.

Walt had disliked the house from the instant he saw it, when he got a grand tour the first time he came to New York to visit Gob. It was a lightless place, and it looked not to have been cleaned in years. Every wall, even in the kitchen, was lined with books. Walt squinted to read their titles as he passed them. There was
Orthographic and Spherical Projections, Determinative Mineralogy, Design of Hydraulic Motors, On the Vanity of Arts and Sciences
, but there was not a line of poetry to be found. Everywhere Gob’s building stuff was scattered—giant gears and metal beams piled in the dining room, magnets heaped on the parlor sofas. “The servants left when my teacher died,” Gob said. Walt asked about that teacher, about how it was that Gob lived apart from his mother, and why he had been living in New York for longer than his mother had—he’d been there, Walt gathered, since the autumn of 1863, but Victoria Woodhull had not arrived until ’68. To all his questions, Gob simply replied, “It doesn’t matter. It’s all past.” Walt came to imagine this teacher as a sort of anti-Camerado, an unfriend who was both wise and cruel, the sort of beast who likes to destroy friendships from the comfort of his grave.

“What’s behind there?” Walt had asked, at the end of the tour, when they’d come to Gob’s bedroom at the top of the house, the place where servants were usually quartered. Walt pointed at a giant iron door a few feet from the bed.

“My workshop,” Gob said softly. He had become quiet and nervous as they ascended into the high parts of the house. On the fifth floor, Walt stuck his head into an abandoned and neglected conservatory. The room was full of dead plants, and carpeted with dead leaves. “There’s nothing in there,” Gob said, pulling him through the only other door off the long hall.

Walt looked around. This was the one clean room Walt had seen in the house, a bedroom furnished in a simple style, except for the bed, which was huge and ornate, hung with white curtains that shivered and undulated in the breeze from a window open despite the cold. A blue skylight let tinted sunshine into the room. There was a wardrobe, and a pine desk covered with mathematical doodles. The floor was wooden, piled with rugs, except in one corner, which was paved with a little circle of stone. While Walt was looking around the room, Gob had gone to this corner, undone his pants, and dropped them. He fell to his knees and bent his head to the ground. Walt looked away too late—he saw the horrible thing like a fleshy eye winking at him obscenely.

“I’m ready,” Gob said softly, but Walt had fled, out the door and down the stairs. He kept running all the way down Fifth Avenue, and hurried to Brooklyn, hurried even to Washington, taking the first available train after bidding a very hasty goodbye to his mother. Back in his room in Washington, he felt he could catch his breath at last. He wept because he thought his beautiful friendship had been ruined. Gob sent him a package with a simple note.
Forgive me
, he wrote.
I thought for a moment that you were my master.
He enclosed a present, a copy
of Leaves
, the only gift, he said later, that he was absolutely sure Walt would like. Gob inscribed it with a line modified from Emerson:
True friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.

Walt wrote back:
Dear Gob, you must forgive me for being so cold the last day. I was unspeakably shocked and repelled from you by that proposition of yours—you know what. It seemed indeed to me (for I will talk plain to you, dearest comrade) that the one I loved, and who
had always been so manly and so sensible, was gone, and a fool and intentional murderer stood in his place. But I will say no more of this—for I know such thoughts must have come when you were not yourself, but in a moment of derangement—and passed away like a bad dream.

Indeed, they said no more of that incident, and for all that it was terrible Walt came to be glad it had occurred, because it revealed the gigantic nature of their friendship—it seemed to him that only the best and purest sort of friendship could conquer such a horror. So if Gob invoked horror once or a hundred times, so if he was a little mad or a lot, so if he was a boy of seventeen who often acted like an old man of seventy-seven—so what? Walt had taken the measure of his feeling for Gob, and discovered that as wide and deep as his own soul.

The day after the Queen’s Cup race, Walt and Gob went out to Paumanok, because Walt had been promising for months to take Gob to the ocean. “Two hundred and twenty pounds avoirdupois!” Walt said, striking his naked chest and belly, then running off into the surf, into the terrific breathing noise of the sea. He liked to hurl himself around in the water, throwing his body against the breaking waves, or swimming along with them until they bore him up and carried him, flipping and spinning, towards the shore. Gob was more reserved in his play. He entered the surf slowly and purposefully, walking until the water was halfway up his chest, then swimming with powerful, even strokes, ducking under the waves like a dolphin till he was beyond them, then heading straight out into deep water. “Where are you going?” Walt shouted after him, but got no answer. Because Gob was in a poor mood—the outbreak of the new war on the Rhine had had an extraordinarily depressive effect on him—Walt feared, for a moment, that he meant to swim towards the east until he tired and drowned. Hank said,
I hate the swift-running eddies that would dash him head-foremost on the rocks!

But very soon after he had disappeared against the horizon, Walt saw him again, heading back, his bobbing head growing from a speck to a blob as he came nearer. He swam as even and serene as when he had gone out. A wave picked him up, sent him tumbling forward to land on his feet. He walked out of the ocean, up the hot sand to the shadows under a dune, where they’d left their clothes. Walt waded ashore, then ran to him.

“What a display!” he said. “I feared you’d be drowned.”

“I like to swim,” Gob said. “It’s the first thing I remember in my whole life, swimming with my brother.”

“Do you feel better, then?” Walt sat down, put his arm around Gob’s shoulder, and gave him a squeeze. He wished he hadn’t asked. As soon as he did, Gob seemed to remember how sad he was.

“I don’t,” he said. Walt tried to cheer him with a dinner of cold roast chicken, and with talk about the beach. He told Gob how he’d come to this same stretch of sand when he was a boy, spearing eels in the winter and gathering seagull eggs in the summer. Somehow this pleasant reminiscence brought to Gob’s mind the latest murder to delight sensation-loving New Yorkers. Mr. Nathan, a distinguished Jew, had been bludgeoned in his beautiful house.

“My mama says she spoke with that dead man,” Gob said. “It was the son who did it, she says.”

Walt said he thought it was terrible that a boy should beat his father to death with a lead pipe, that it reflected a failure to cast aside irritating thoughts. “I am not mastered by my gloomy impulses,” he said. “That is the main part of getting through the battle and toil of life, dear Gob—keeping a cheerful mind.”

“Don’t you think of them, Walt?” Gob asked. “Those Frenchmen dying as they move on Saarbruck? Mr. Nathan crying out for mercy from his furious son? Your brother calling out in the madhouse, dying among strangers?” Walt had lost another brother that winter, Jesse. He’d been mad for years, since taking a hard fall from off a ship’s mast. Walt had had him committed to the King’s County Lunatic Asylum, and had visited him just once. Jesse had sat very quietly while Walt put a gift in his lap—fresh bread and jam from their mother—and while Walt told him news from home. But then without warning Jesse had leapt from his chair and wrestled Walt to the ground. He bit his nose and licked his eyes and called him a despicable hater of cabbages. Now he was dead, and Walt found that, having already put his brother out of his mind after madness claimed him, he did not in death seem so much farther away. How to explain? Jesse’s and Andrew’s deaths seemed small, and yet the thought that Gob might die was incapacitating to him. Indeed, it
had
incapacitated him. If he thought on it too long he would work himself into a terrible state, getting woozy with sadness and fear. His hands would burn, a lump would swell in his throat, and he’d have a terrible attack of diarrhea. If Gob had been out of his sight for much longer during that long swim, Walt might have fainted away into the water and drowned himself.

“Of course I do,” Walt said. “Of course I am sad. If I let it, it might consume me. His heart tore, and I wonder if it was not the accumulated burden of madness and woe that tore his heart apart as hands might tear a paper bag. Sometimes I think I can hear him, raving and crying and dying. I can think on his life—what it might have been if madness hadn’t claimed him, and I can love that lost life as I can love Andrew’s lost life, and grieve for him. A person could live his whole life like that, in service to grief. You’ve said as much yourself. What does it do? It will not bring them back, to hollow yourself out, to crush your own heart from loneliness and spite. My friend, it will not bring them back.”

Walt liked these words less and less as he spoke them, because they seemed conventional and cowardly and stupid, and at odds with his own experience. Hadn’t Hank come back to him, in a sense?

Surely
, said Hank.
Surely I did.
And Gob said, “It might, too.”

“Mr. Whitman,” said Tennie. “You are fatter and saucier than ever.” Walt was at Victoria Woodhull’s house, invited with Gob to a party on a warm September evening in honor of Stephen Pearl Andrews, an ultimately learned and ultimately radical man, and a very frequent contributor to the paper Mrs. Woodhull had started with Tennie in May of 1870,
Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly.
They were a very special pair of sisters. In the winter they’d opened up their own brokerage house. Walt had visited their offices a few days after they’d opened, when the rooms on Broad Street were still packed with reporters and curiosity-seekers. The lady brokers had received Walt and Gob in their private office. Walt kept a huge walnut desk between himself and Tennie, but offered sincere compliments to both ladies. “You are a prophecy of the future,” he told them.

“New York agrees with me,” Walt said to Tennie at the party, looking around for Gob but failing to find him. Mrs. Woodhull’s house was not so large as her son’s, but it was much prettier. The guests were gathered in two large parlors, the walls of which were hung with purple velvet and white silk. White roses were everywhere, in vases and in pots, strung along banisters, and even hanging from the ceiling in flower-chandeliers. “This is a fine house. I think it must be roomier than your house in Great Jones Street.”

“Great Jones Street?” said Tennie. “Did we ever live in that dismal alley?” A man came up to them, a great big tall well-gristled fellow in a black suit. He took Tennie’s hand and kissed it, then looked at Walt coolly.