by Chris Adrian
“I like this place,” Walt said. He had gone to Mrs. Woodhull’s hoping to find Gob when there was no answer at the house on Fifth Avenue, but instead had found Dr. Woodhull. “The boys are still good,” he said, looking about him at the devastated men, some not so very much older than Gob, who leaned against each other and sang “Jeff Davis’s Dream.”
“War wraiths,” said Dr. Woodhull, and poured out his own story of ruin. He’d gone south after Armory Square was closed, and worked in a hospital in Charleston. Dr. Mary Walker went north to continue a career of professional female radicalism. Poor Canning Woodhull deteriorated without her, and without the war. “It made me something better than I am,” he confessed to Walt. “I used to dream of illness, and how it might be conquered. Ah, I talked with Aesclepius in my dreams, and he told me secrets. Now I cannot even talk to his dog, and I dream only of my own death. There I am in my coffin. Do you see me?”
“No,” said Walt. He tried to change the subject. “I am a good friend of your son. An exceptional young man. I think you must be very proud of him.”
“He hates me!” Woodhull moaned. “Oh, Gob hates me with good reason. I only came up here to die. I would have been content just to crawl under her bed and slowly expire, but she was kind to me. She feted me and made her friends my friends, and now I have caused her the most immense trouble.” It was May of 1871, convention time, and Mrs. Woodhull had charmed the National Woman Suffrage Association meeting in New York. But the very next day the papers had published an account of a lawsuit brought by her mother against Colonel Blood. The public eye looked closer at Mrs. Woodhull’s family and discovered that there were other Claflins besides her sister, and they were a grappling, squabbling bunch. The family disharmony was aired in court, and it became public knowledge that Victoria Woodhull had two husbands living in her house. “I am a bother to everyone I meet!” Dr. Woodhull said. Walt patted his hand.
“Not to me, sir,” he said.
“Oh Mr. Whitman,” Woodhull said dismissively. “You are everybody’s friend.”
* * *
There were other strange nights, besides the one at the Patent Office and Ford’s Theatre. Sometimes Gob would put on the hat, and Walt knew something curious would be presented to him as he walked with his friend in the city. They never had another session of naughty vandalism, but they wandered in naughty places, up Front Street and Water Street, where thugs stepped out of the river fog on cold evenings, only to be thrust aside by Gob’s strong arm. Once they leaned over the water and Gob shone a light on the river. Walt saw a baby, dead from a smashed head, floating a foot or two beneath the surface, one hand in its mouth and the other reaching towards him as if to tug at Walt’s fascinating beard. “The river is full of them,” Gob said softly. “Any day of the week you can come down and see them floating.” He took Walt farther up South Street, to a slip where a French steamer was docked, where they waited in the darkness, Walt asking repeatedly what they were waiting for, and Gob only saying, “Patience.” Suddenly, white light came blasting out of the sky, so bright Walt thought they must be in the midst of some impossibly silent explosion. But then there was noise, the spit and hum of an electric arc light burning high on the ship. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Gob asked him, luxuriating in the light as if it were warm sunshine. Walt held up his hand in front of his face, thinking it looked in that light like the hand of a corpse.
Another night they headed for Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Walt paused under the entrance, a massive sandstone edifice that looked like a little cathedral. Moonlit statues stared down at them while Gob picked the lock on the gates: a group representing the raising of the widow’s son, another representing Faith, Hope, Memory, and Love. “It should be your motto,” Walt said of the phrase carved into the stone above them. They passed inside, pausing, before they had walked very far, by the monuments of Charlotte Canda and De Witt Clinton. Little Pickie was with them on this graveyard outing. He leapfrogged over headstones, ran down into the empty moonshade beneath a willow. The three of them wandered over acres of cemetery, Gob offering comments every now and then: “There are one hundred and fifty thousand buried here,” or “Walt, we are gliding into eternity.”
Walt visited the grave of McDonald Clarke. “What a fellow!” he said to Gob. It made him glad, to think of the man, but Gob started to cry. “The heavens ought to open up!” he shouted. “They ought to weep!” Gob pounded his fist on the headstone, and the heavens did open up: a heavy summer rain began to fall, dark and thick and warm.
Each strange evening would end with a trip to Gob’s house, to the fifth floor. They’d walk into Gob’s room, passing by the stone circle (not even casting a glance at it), and pause before the iron door. Gob would throw it open, revealing his enormous workshop and his engine, a great nonsensical conglomeration of mechanical parts that sat under an enormous telescopic gaselier whose fittings were cast in the shape of birds that shot flame out of their beaks. Glass tubes and iron gears, steel ribs, yards and yards of twisting, wrist-thick bundles of copper wire, here and there a bone, after all, from the theater—it was bigger every time Walt saw it. It’s for you, Hank would say. You are a kosmos. Gob would say, “Won’t you help me, Walt? Won’t you help me win?” as he started a steam engine or activated a battery. “It’s not ready yet,” Gob would say, “but it will be, and then it will require your help to be complete. Will you give it to me, Walt?”
“Yes,” was always his answer. Walt would reach his hand out and touch a copper pipe, cold despite the June heat in the house. Pickie would dance around in a circle, saying, “Little brother!”
Sometimes they’d drink on these nights, but even when they didn’t, Walt would have a drunk feeling by this time. “You are the most important, Walt,” Gob would say to him as they lay in bed together. “There are others who will help me, but no one is as important as you are.” He’d sleep as dawn came, and wake with Gob’s head heavy as a chunk of wood on his shoulder. He’d look over and see the iron door, closed again and locked, and he’d have something in his belly, a question turned into a feeling—did it all happen? Every time Walt woke up he made a decision; he didn’t care to know the answer, he didn’t care about the answer. Gob was real, their beautiful, mountain-high, sea-deep affinity was real, squeezing him was real, his snort and his sleepy smile were real and natural and perfect.
Walt was invited to read a poem at the fortieth annual exhibition of the American Institute, a festival of industry. On September 7 he went with Gob, Tennie, and Miss Trufant to the Cooper Institute.
“I think you’ll be a most welcome change from Mr. Greeley,” Miss Trufant said to him before he mounted the dais to begin. It was usually Horace Greeley who gave the address every year. “He blathers.”
“Thank you, my dear,” Walt said.
The displays were still being assembled when Walt, dressed in a gray suit and white vest—gifts from Gob—climbed a stand to open the exhibition with his poem. On the fringes of the crowd, men in their shirtsleeves worked with hammers and saws and wrenches to put in order the displays of goods and machinery. They put down their tools as Walt read, so by the time he was half done the racket of assembly had quieted. He was thinking as he read of Gob, who stood holding Walt’s Panama hat at the foot of the stage. Tennie and Miss Trufant stood next to him. The iron door swung open in Walt’s mind, in the same way that the doors of Armory Square sometimes swung open to release memories of sickness and dying and death. The door opened and Walt saw gears and batteries, smelled acid and coal and fresh white steam. He heard Hank’s voice reading with him as he spoke: Earth’s modern wonder, history’s seven outstripping, high rising tier on tier with glass and iron facades.
When the poem was done, after Walt had retired to enthusiastic applause, Gob took him around to look at the displays. Gob was keen on all of them, a sewing machine or a buttonhole maker put the same light in his eyes as a screw propeller or shiny electric engine, and he seemed to know all the intimate details of every
machine’s operation. They examined a harvester that could clear a field of oats in twenty-two minutes, a furniture suite made entirely of india rubber—here they lost Tennie, who sat down in an intricately carved chair and held court for the workmen.
“I think science is his religion,” Maci Trufant said. Walt talked with her some, as Gob stared, open-mouthed, at a copper vat the size of a cottage.
Mrs. Woodhull held a reception for Walt at her home. All that night, Gob was in an ebullient, bouncy mood, the result, Walt figured, of his spending the day at a celebration of machines. Tennie, inspired by Walt’s poem, was playing “find the muse.” “Not here!” she’d say, peeking under a chair cushion. She looked behind curtains and said, “Not here either! No, she is installed among the kitchenware!” Walt couldn’t tell if she was mocking him or not.
This night, it was Walt who retreated to the bench behind the fern, peeking out occasionally to watch Gob circulating among the elegant radicals, laughing with Tennie, putting his hand on Maci Trufant’s arm. Eventually Mrs. Woodhull came and sat down next to Walt, and invited him to a Spiritualist convention up in Troy, for which she would depart late in the evening. Walt politely declined.
“Well,” she said. “I think your poem would be well received there. I am sorry I missed it earlier. You see, my duty to the workers kept me busy all day.” She’d taken on new responsibilities recently, besides those of publisher and broker and presidential candidate. Now she was the head of Section Twelve of the International Workingmen’s Association. Walt said she must be fearless, to associate with Communists. “Yes,” she said. “Demosthenes tells me, ‘Be radical, be radical, but not too damned radical.’ Still, I go where I must in Heaven and on the earth. If I worried what people said of me, then I would stay home all day in bed, prostrate with nervousness. But I think you know as well as I do what it is to be maligned by distempered, ignorant maleficos.” She thrust out her wrists, showing him how she’d sewn the 120th psalm into the sleeves of her dress.
“‘I am for peace,’” Walt said, “‘but when I speak, they are for war.’”
“It’s not easy, is it, Mr. Whitman, trying to improve the world?”
Maci Trufant and Gob were married in April of 1872, in Plymouth Church. How they came to be married in the church of glorious, greasy-headed Henry Beecher, Walt didn’t know. He had been under the impression that Beecher and Mrs. Woodhull were enemies for all that Theodore Tilton, Beecher’s chippish adjulant, had been a near constant presence at Mrs. Woodhull’s house the previous summer. Walt’s misery was compounded by the seating arrangements—he was put next to Tennie and the other Claflins. “Mr. Whitman,” Tennie said to him as they were waiting for the ceremony to begin, “you’ve cut your hair and beard all away!”
“Yes,” said Walt. “All my acquaintances are in anger and despair and go about wringing their hands. ‘Who are you?’ they ask me.”
“I like it,” Tennie said. “It’s taken ten years off you. Why do you deliberately cultivate the aspect of old age?” She looked like she wanted to say more, but she was hushed by music.
Walt put his hand to his greatly shortened beard. He’d cut it all away in anguish when he’d gotten the telegram from Gob announcing his engagement. The news had come as a total surprise. Walt had just returned to Washington from New York, where he’d taken a fat leave of two months spent almost entirely with Gob, during which time there had been no mention of the pending marriage. When Walt got the news, he had sat up all night in his favorite chair, with a glass of whiskey punch in one hand and a letter, recently received from Tennyson, in the other. “He says I have a large and lovable nature,” Walt had said to Hank, who all that bad night would only say one thing over and over, You are a kosmos.
The wedding was a simple and beautiful ceremony, marred only by Tennie’s constant whispering that her nephew and Miss Trufant were making a terrible mistake. Any other church besides Plymouth would have been bursting with the guests—Gob had joked to Walt that his wedding was a campaign event. Mrs. Woodhull’s star was taking crazy dips and turns. It seemed to Walt that she could not appreciate how different species of radicalism were immiscible, how a Woman’s Righter could hate her for being a Communist, how a Communist could hate her for being a Spiritualist, how a Spiritualist could think her a fool for putting too much faith in Graham Crackers.
There was no one Mrs. Woodhull could not alienate, but it seemed there were always people who loved her. The wedding and its association with respectable Mr. Beecher brought out all her old supporters. She sat looking prim and regal as her son was married to her protégé. A moon-faced reverend, not much less dramatic than Mr. Beecher, invoked for the couple the perpetual tropical luxuriance of blessed love. But when I hear, Hank said, of the brotherhood of lovers, how it was with them, how together through life, through dangers, odium, unchanging, long and long, through youth and through middle and old age, how unfaltering, how affectionate and faithful they were. Then I am pensive—I hastily walk away filled with the bitterest envy.
The guests filled up a whole ferry getting back to Manhattan for the celebration at Mrs. Woodhull’s house. Walt tried to hide away in the bow, but little Pickie followed him there.
“Well, Pickie,” Walt said, “now you have a mama.” Pickie shrugged and showed him two uncut emeralds, which he pulled from his pocket as Walt talked. “They are for my brother but you may have one, since you are for my brother also.” When Walt didn’t take either jewel, he put them away and said, “My brother is absent. Your brother is absent. They are absent from this boat, absent from there and there.” Pickie pointed with either hand at Brooklyn and Manhattan, and then up over his head. “They are absent from the sky. The whole world is made up of the absence of brothers.” He took Walt’s hand, and stood with him in the bow, under swarms of gulls flying in circles above the boat, looking back at the milling radicals swarming like the gulls around Gob and his bride. Walt had been the very first to congratulate them—he had made sure of that, that his congratulations were first and heartiest. He’d kissed Gob and said, “My dear boy, I am so very happy for you.” Now Walt looked away from Gob and the new Mrs. Woodhull and stared out across the water at the place where the tower for the great bridge rose high on the Brooklyn shore. Had he gone there one strange night with Gob? Had Gob borne him up to the top of the Brooklyn tower and showed him the impossible vista? It all seemed unreal—every year of perfect loving comradeship seemed unreal and impossible, a ridiculous dream inspired by loneliness. I too knotted the old knot of contrariety, blabb’d, blushed, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d.
“Oh, be quiet, Hank,” Walt said, for the first time ever. Hank was quiet, but another voice spoke next to him.
“Mr. Whitman,” said big Dr. Fie. “You look pensive.”
Little Pickie took his hand out of Walt’s, pointed at the Brooklyn tower, and said, “It comes before and makes the way. It is like me.”
“Yes,” said Dr. Fie. “Run along, Pickie.” The boy ran a few steps and stopped, and started to grab at gulls when they swooped close to the deck. Dr. Fie nodded at the tower. “Can you imagine the bridge?”
Walt said, “I think it will be glorious.” Dr. Fie smiled, and then he leaned close to Walt’s face.
“I’m sure you do. I’m sure you can see it in all its glory. You are so precious and able, Mr. Whitman. You with your swaggering walk and your great soul and your distinctive absence of necktie. But I know you, sir. I know you well, and you are not very much at all. You think you are special, and yet really you are not. Really, sir, you are nobody at all. Really you are the least important person in all the world.” Dr. Fie went away, then, not elaborating on his attack, or explaining it. Instead he took Pickie into his big arms and walked back to the crowd. Walt hung on the rail and looked down at the rushing water. Usually he was sensitive to cruel words, but it meant nothing to him, today, to be attacked by a stranger.
Canning Woodhull died two weeks after his son’s wedding. Walt went up
to see him buried at Greenwood Cemetery, though he had planned not to return to New York for a long time. He’d encouraged his mother to move to Camden with George, so he could visit her but not have to look at all the places in Brooklyn and Manhattan—every last place, everywhere, it seemed—where he and Gob had wandered.
It was a pretty, white funeral, filled with joyous songs—a Spiritualist funeral. Mrs. Woodhull and Tennie and Maci Trufant and all the Claflin ladies wore matching white dresses of white silk, with lace at their throats, and white skirts that became stained green at the hems by cemetery grass. Gob and Dr. Fie wore white suits, with white silk ties and diamond stickpins. Pickie Beecher was dressed to match them precisely, except he had a ruby pin in his small tie, that glinted there like a spot of fresh wet blood.
The joyous white mourners were gathered next to a coffin draped like an Easter altar with white linen and lilies. It was lowered down into the ground while everybody sang a very happy song. Mrs. Woodhull herself officiated—Mr. Beecher was nowhere to be seen. She spoke elegantly and harshly for the dead man, saying her husband was a genius, selfish and inconsolable in his need for drink, and that death had translated him into a happy spirit who worked with all the other spirits to hurry the day when Earth and Heaven would be married into a single perfect place. Walt stood with his arm around Gob, who’d sidled up to him as his mother spoke, and listened. Walt was dressed in a respectable black suit, and felt he must look like a penguin in a wilderness of ice.
Gob stayed on after his mother and her family had left. Even after the new Mrs. Woodhull went wandering off among the tombstones with Dr. Fie, he stayed, looking down into the grave. Because Gob had asked him to, Walt stayed with him. Gob began to cry. Not, Walt was sure, because he loved his father, but simply because he loved all the dead. Walt gave him a long squeeze and sang a song for him, one as joyous as those sung by the white mourners. He leaned over, singing loud and sweet into the grave:
