Gob's Grief (35 page)

“How do you like this one?” asked her aunt. Maci’s hand had been in rebellion for weeks, and she was giving up hope that her affliction would prove to be temporary. It was the third Wednesday of the month, the day the dressmaker always came to deliver new creations. In the evening, Aunt Amy would model them for her niece.

“It’s very pretty,” Maci said.

“Is it too busy?” Aunt Amy was wearing an outfit so complicated Maci could only take it in in pieces: a striped overskirt with fringes, bows, and ruffles; a Chantilly lace jacket; a brooch and matching pendant earrings; a velvet neck ribbon with a dependent cross; a large fringed hair bow; a fan. Elements from her aunt’s outfits would stay with Maci like annoying snatches of song; she knew she’d struggle all week to forget that fringed hair bow.

“By no means,” said Maci. “I think it is altogether reserved.”

“It’s fortunate that you like it because … I’ve one for you also!” It was always supposed to be a surprise when Aunt Amy had two hideously complex dresses made instead of just one. Maci went to her room to put hers on, too, and then she struggled downstairs, caparisoned for a supper less solemn than usual. Aunt Amy would smile as she talked about the latest wave of fashion to come out of Paris, and Maci would think how it was like a disease, fashion, spreading from woman to woman, making them deranged. When she was younger, fine dresses had given her pleasure, but now all she longed for was a set of Bloomers. So many times, in her imagination, she’d come downstairs for dinner attired in trousers, skirt, and tunic, and, laying eyes upon her, Aunt Amy fled to the kitchen to wash her eyes with lye.

After dinner, Maci went back to her room to write. Earlier in the week, she’d had bad news from Philadelphia. Old Mrs. Hale was retiring, and who knew if the next editor of
Godey’s Lady’s Book
would be as fond as she was of Maci’s writing? She had a special relationship with Mrs. Hale, who’d dealt her a compliment just a few months after they began working together: “Why, you go on so naturally and make so little fuss about your work that I sometimes forget you are a woman.” She might have become a mentor to Maci if she had not always been proving herself a backward thinker—Mrs. Hale insisted, for example, that the vote would be ruinous to the happiness of women.

Hoping to send a big bunch of fatuous articles for the lady to purchase before she retired, Maci kept busy. Night after night, she sat at her desk composing with her right hand, and she found she was able to ignore how her left hand wielded its own pen, sketching, writing, and admonishing. “I’m not looking,” she’d say aloud as she worked. “Scribble all you like, I shan’t cast a glance on it.” But she always did look, eventually. And she’d ask questions, too, when curiosity finally overwhelmed her. “Who is he?” she’d ask, as her hand drew another picture of the ragged little angel, and her hand would write the answer alongside the bizarre-looking wing,
Somebody’s brother.

If I told you I was in Hell, suffering eternal punishment because the war made a killer of me, then I know you would believe me. If I predicted that Aunt Amy would die horribly, killed with burning, acid poison by a scarab hatched of eggs dormant in her best cotton dress, I think you would embrace that news. But when I say that the sun will shine tomorrow, you pout and shake your head. When I say we are all undying, that love and grief can bridge the measureless space between us, you think it must be false because it is good, or because it might comfort you. So let me reassure you: I am in a sort of Hell, like every other spirit who has not forgotten the earth, who remembers that we are all creatures afflicted with unremitting desire.

It was the same way that her father had got her to eat new things when she was a child. “Just try it,” he’d say, “and if it is not, after all, to your taste, then you do not have to eat it.” So Maci’s hand told her,
Just go, and if it does not suit you, if you find, after all, that their work is not your work, then you may return here to this dreadful life, and I will leave you alone forever.
So she left Aunt Amy’s house with the money she’d saved from her articles (faithful Mrs. Hale did, indeed, buy a fat bunch of them), and rode the train to New York, suffering the advances of strange men. It wasn’t enough to keep you respectable, traveling with your dead brother, who lived in your hand.

Maci got a room at the Female Christian Home on East Fifteenth Street. Her first evening there she sat on her bed and thought about her aunt. Maci had sneaked away from the house like a coward, leaving a note that really explained nothing.
Aunt, I have urgent business
in Philadelphia.
She’d thought she would write again from the train, to explain. But she found she was not inclined to write, not on the train, and not in the room she shared with another Christian female, a shovel-faced, opinionless girl named Lavinia. I am wicked, Maci thought to herself, because she was certain that she never wanted to see her aunt again. It made her happy already, just to be away from Boston. But then she would think how she was away at the bidding of her own lunacy, and how she had only enough money to last her for a month or two, and she’d become angry at herself, and she would think, I am wicked and stupid.

On the morning after her arrival in New York, she walked along Broad Street, looking up every so often to meet the disapproving stares of birds perched on the telegraph wires that ran everywhere overhead. She paused outside Number 44. After a few moments, her left hand reached to open the door. She followed along after it, up the stairs to the office of Woodhull, Claflin and Company. Inside, she was met by a man with immense whiskers who sat examining a telegraphic stock indicator where it chattered away near a north window. Maci could hear a similar one running behind a glass-and-wood partition at the back of the room. “May I help you?” he asked.

“I would like to see Mrs. Woodhull,” she said. “My name is Trufant.”

“Ah,” he said, and he smiled. “She’s been expecting you.” Maci hid her surprise, thinking the man had confused her with someone else, because she hadn’t written ahead to announce her visit. The man, who introduced himself as Colonel James Harvey Blood, escorted her to the back. The office was just as it had been described in the
Weekly.
It was luxurious, with thick rugs thrown over the floors, bushy ferns under the windows, and elegant statuary scattered here and there. Stern Minerva and luscious Aphrodite inhabited two corners of the office, and a third corner was occupied by a piano, atop which sat a bust of Commodore Vanderbilt. Maci stopped in front of it, reaching out to touch Mr. Vanderbilt on his cold, beakish nose, and thought of his son. Against the bust lay a tiny painting, which depicted three little cherubim floating in a rosy sky, holding up a winding parchment upon which was written,
Simply to thy cross I cling.

In the back, Mrs. Woodhull and a red-haired lady Maci’s own age were sitting behind twin walnut desks, with gold pens stuck behind their ears. They were talking to a reporter.

“If I were to notice,” said the red-haired lady, “what is said by what they call society, I could not leave my home except in fantastic walking-dresses and ballroom costume. But I despise what squeamy, crying girls or powdered, counter-jumping dandies say of me. We have the counsel of those who have more experience than we, and we are endorsed by the best backers in the city.”

“Do you mean Mr. Vanderbilt?” asked the reporter, a young man with a face so fat and white that Maci had to resist an urge to gather it in her hands and knead it like dough.

“It is very possible that I do,” the lady answered. From a platter on her desk she picked up a strawberry dipped in chocolate and bit into it with abandon. She looked up at the ceiling while juice ran down her chin. The reporter turned to Maci.

“Are you a customer?”

“This is Miss Trufant,” said Colonel Blood. “She’s come to see you, Mrs. Woodhull.”

Maci had composed a statement. It was brief, and perhaps a little elegant, a plea for employment. Here she was, a woman who wrote for newspapers, and there was Mrs. Woodhull, a woman who published one. Didn’t it follow that Mrs. Woodhull should have work for Maci? Maci’s hand had dictated a different statement, something about being a messenger of the spirits of the air. But Maci forgot both statements when the lady looked up and met her eyes. There was something breathtaking about her. It was not just her beauty. She had the sort of grace, Maci decided in that very instant, that arises from absolute independence of mind. Maci found herself unable to speak, but she didn’t have to say anything at all.

“There you are!” said Mrs. Woodhull, jumping up and taking Maci’s hands in her own. “Tennie, here she is! Here she is at last!” Maci’s right hand was limp as a dead fish, but her left hand squeezed back fervently, and trembled with nervous joy.

The lady called Tennie hauled the reporter up by his elbow, pushing him out past the partition and declaring the interview at an end. Then she threw both her arms around Maci, and kissed her on the neck. Maci wanted to ask her to stand back, to scream for her to keep her wet kisses to herself, but when she opened her mouth, Tennie covered it with her own, at which point Maci was too stunned to make any noise at all.

“There she is, real as can be!” said Tennie, pinching her as if to make sure of her flesh, then kissing her again.

“We’ve been waiting for you,” said Mrs. Woodhull.

Mrs. Woodhull is a great and good woman, a lady celebrated by spirits. There is a grand plaza here dedicated to her and to her wonderful sister. There are colossal statues made—can you picture them in your mind?—of quicksilver desire. They stand back to back, giantesses looking with a supreme clarity of vision over the whole Summerland. Everybody here labors under a burden of enthusiasm for Mrs. Woodhull, but really her living son is more significant than she, and the small garden dedicated to him, while very beautiful, does not do justice to his importance.

Does it surprise you, that the dead build monuments to the living? Sister, the whole Summerland is stubbled with such monuments. We go to them, as you go to yours, to remember and to mourn.

It was an extraordinary welcome. Mrs. Woodhull said she had known Maci would come to New York, and hinted that her spirit guide, Demosthenes himself, had promised to deliver her, but Maci chose to believe that Mrs. Woodhull was expecting her, and welcomed her so warmly, because she believed that
Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly
must draw enthusiastic young women inexorably to her side.

She insisted that Maci be her guest, and took her to a beautiful house on Thirty-eighth Street, where Maci was given a room adjoining Tennie’s on the second floor. Tennie was almost Maci’s age exactly; their birthdays were just a week apart. “We are almost twins,” Tennie said, convinced that they must become the best of friends. Tennie was like Miss Suter, in a way, except where Maci had always suspected Miss Suter of being a liar, Tennie was brazenly honest. Certainly it was another punishment, for Maci to have delivered herself into the hands of devoted Spiritualists. Yet these ladies did not share the quality of fear that Maci had sensed in Miss Suter. They were not hiding under their beliefs from the cruelty of the world.

Mrs. Woodhull challenged Maci to help her “abolish hypocrisy and transform the social sphere.” Listening to her, Maci found her delusions easy to overlook. Mrs. Woodhull claimed wisdom from the dead, not through their books, as other people got it, but from direct personal interviews. Yet this was not to say that she did not read books. All through dinner they talked of
Woman in the Nineteenth Century.
Mrs. Woodhull had a clipping book with seventeen pages devoted to articles by Margaret Fuller. All evening she and Maci sat in a third-floor study, underneath a dome of green glass, and talked. Maci confessed her plan to write something very large—a vindication of Wollstonecraft’s
Vindication.
“All that obvious truth, written over a hundred years ago,” Maci said. “I look around me at the world and it’s as if she never made a peep.” She brought out her animadversions on Catharine Beecher, and told how she planned to dissect and refute every argument she could find in print which advocated anything but that women should have absolute power over their own lives.

“Yes, yes,” Mrs. Woodhull said excitedly, and paraphrased the Countess Ossoli. “I mean to vindicate the birthright of all women, to teach them what to claim, and how to use what they obtain.” Then she yawned. It was close to midnight. “Perhaps we’ve talked enough for an evening. There’s work for us to do in the morning.” Over dinner, she had made Maci an assistant editor on her
Weekly
, just like that. It was a thrill to have employment, but Maci controlled herself, not crying out or giggling with joy, only nodding serenely and saying, “I will be very happy to accept your generous offer.”

Tennie took Maci to her room. Mrs. Woodhull’s house was so big she was grateful to have a guide, because she was sure she’d have lost herself among all the stairs and the halls full of doors. Maci was tired, but Tennie wouldn’t let her go to sleep just yet. Maci sat on a stool in Tennie’s room, which featured prominently a silken tent set up in one corner. “My Turkish corner,” Tennie called it. “When we are more intimate, I’ll take you in there and tell you confidential things.” Now she wanted to trace Maci’s silhouette, to add it to a collection. Maci sat very still in the darkened room while Tennie traced her shadow on a piece of paper pinned to the wall. On an opposite wall there were a dozen other silhouettes, framed and hung in orderly rows. “There they are,” Tennie said, when she saw where Maci was looking, “the rest of the family.”

“I’m really rather sleepy,” said Maci.

“We’re nearly done,” Tennie said, and cursed the candle when it flickered. When she was finished she had a wavering outline of Maci’s profile drawn on black paper with white chalk. “There,” she said. “I waste no time obtaining these. Now, let’s prepare for bed.” She groped at Maci, undoing buttons and ties even as Maci tried to direct her hands away.