Gob's Grief

by Chris Adrian

  “My days are swiftly gliding by, and I a pilgrim stranger,

  Would not detain them as they fly, those hours of toil and danger;

  For O we stand, on Jordan’s strand, our friends are passing over.”

  At the end of June, Walt took a trip to New England, to read a poem at Dartmouth College for its commencement. It was a pleasant journey, but it did nothing to distract him from his unhappiness. Maci Trufant came from this country.

  He did not wish to hate her. He was not jealous, no matter what Hank said. He felt sad, and he felt a fool, and his stomach hurt when he thought of them together, so close and so happy. A person could not have two Camerados—such intimacies of the soul could only be shared with one other—and Gob had chosen the girl to be his. Does the tide hurry, seeking something, and never give up? O I the same, Hank said. But Walt did intend to give up. He was steaming down the Hudson on the Fourth of July, dozing as the boat passed through a series of thunderstorms punctuated by bright skies, when he made his decision. As he slept, he dreamed he was a little spider, throwing out silk from his belly, delicate tendrils that drifted into a void in search of a nonexistent other. When he woke he took out his latest daybook from his pocket and made an entry: To GIVE UP ABSOLUTELY and for good, from this present hour, this FEVERISH, FLUCTUATING, useless undignified pursuit of GW—too long (much too long) persevered in, so humiliating. It must come at last and had better come now—LET THERE FROM THIS HOUR BE NO FALTERING at all henceforth (NOT ONCE, under any circumstances) —avoid seeing him—OR ANY MEETING WHATEVER, FROM THIS HOUR FORTH, FOR LIFE.

  Oh Walt, said Hank. You can’t mean it.

  Walt and Gob wrote letters back and forth, through the rest of the summer and the fall of 1872. Work keeps me here, Walt wrote. And Mother has gone to Camden, so now really I have little reason to return to Brooklyn. And I am very sorry for your mother’s declining fortunes. I think it was a mistake for her to clobber Mr. Beecher—he and his friends will clobber her back hard and long. Mrs. Woodhull ‘s fortunes had indeed taken a precipitous dive after seeming to peak in May, when she gathered a faction of Woman’s Righters to herself and formed the People’s Party, who nominated her as their candidate for President, with Frederick Douglass as her unwitting running mate. After her nomination, people began most vigorously to persecute her for her beliefs. She was turned out of her fancy house, and business dried up at her brokerage. Beecher was her enemy again. Indeed, she perceived him and his sisters Catharine and Harriet to be the chief architects of her misery. She retaliated by publishing an account of Henry Beecher’s affair with one of his parishioners, the wife of Theodore Tilton. Mr. Beecher practiced as Mrs. Woodhull preached—why was he not denigrated as she was? A man named Comstock had her and Tennie and Colonel Blood arrested for sending obscene materials through the mail. They spent election day in jail, and remained there intermittently, from October on.

  I miss you, Walt, Gob wrote. But his life seemed to be proceeding very smoothly and happily without Walt in it. His work went very well—You should see how our little friend has grown, Gob wrote, meaning his engine. He reported that his wife got more beautiful every day, and every time he put pen to paper the weather in New York was balmy or crisp or the beautiful snow was falling like a blessing. (In Washington, meanwhile, it was sweltering or bitter stinging cold or ice fell from the sky and slew horses by the dozen.) Little Pickie was contented and fat, but he missed his Uncle Walt.

  A very happy family, the three of you, Walt wrote. How nice for you, my boy.

  Eventually, Walt stopped answering letters. For a while he sent only tiny notes. So busy! Will write soon! Once, in a little fit of loneliness and spite, he sent just an empty envelope, and then he sent nothing. Gob’s letters he placed unopened in a cigar box, which he hid in his wardrobe. Hank scolded him endlessly, becoming increasingly shrill—You are a kosmos. He is a builder. You must be together. You must help him. How can we come back if you don’t help him? Walt ignored him, or scolded back, and at last drove Hank to silence. Then his winter was truly silent and dark and lonely. Walt trudged back and forth to work, looking like an old man again with his beard and hair grown long, and now walking like an old man, too. He slept more and more, though he wished not to, because Hank and Gob waited in his dreams to plead with him.

  “You are not he,” Walt would say to them both. He dreamed of the reviewing stand in winter, without Mr. Lincoln and without the parade. Only the sign remained, but now it spelled How are you, Walt? Hank and Gob were with him on the stand. “You are not the Camerado, and you are not the Camerado,” Walt said. Because they were not. One had abandoned him for death, the other for marriage, and neither, he understood finally, had reciprocated his affection and his friendship—their love was never as pure and strong as his love. In the dream, Hank and Gob would crowd around him, enfolding him in their arms. “We do love you,” they’d say. “Brother, father, son, we love you—you are our love and our hope. Come back to us. Come back to New York.” Then Gob would put his earnest beautiful face in Walt’s and say, “Help me win, Walt, please help me win.” They would squeeze him and squeeze him until he woke, shouting, “I won’t, I won’t! Leave me be!”

  * * *

  Walt went back to New York in the second week of January of 1873 because he wanted to sleep without Gob and Hank pestering him all night long, and also because he thought that seeing Gob again would help rid him of the weighty feeling—the deep grief that he could feel in his belly, as if he’d eaten stones. This feeling was on him like the old feeling he’d had before he went down to Washington looking for his brother. Walt felt tired and hopeless, as if all his days had been lived for nothing, and all his work was nothing more than whispering into his own hands—no one had heard, and no one cared. On the train he slept a dreamless, squeezeless sleep, the first in months. When he woke he felt no less weary.

  When Gob opened his door and found Walt standing there, he said, “You’re just in time.” Beyond the foyer, Walt could see that the house was transformed. Walls had been knocked down, ceilings removed through all five floors, so what was formerly many rooms on many floors was now a huge barnlike edifice spanned by immense arches like the ribs of some leviathan. Gob put on his coat and pushed Walt out the door. “We’d better hurry.”

  “Where are we going?” Walt asked.

  “To hear a speech,” Gob said. “Didn’t you get my letter? You were expressly invited, and now here you are.”

  “I got it,” Walt said. “I’ve been dreaming….” He tried to tell Gob that he’d been haunted by him in dream after dream, but for the first time since he was an infant Walt found himself at a total loss for words.

  “Ah,” said Gob. “We can talk later.” Dr. Fie was waiting in the stable with a carriage all ready. He tipped his hat to Walt. “Mr. Whitman,” he said. When Walt and Gob were settled in their seats, he took off, driving the horses like a fiend. “Will’s a brave driver,” Gob said. “He used to drive an ambulance. We’ll make it in time.”

  “Is your mother speaking from jail?” Walt asked.

  “Jail?” said Gob. “No, she’s escaped! She’s escaped to New Jersey.”

  “My mama, too,” Walt said. Gob had his arm around him and was squeezing, but it was not oppressive, as in the dreams. Walt wanted more of it.

  Federal marshals were guarding all the entrances to the Cooper Institute, waiting, Gob said, to snatch up his mama if she dared show her face. Walt asked if she would really come.

  “Of course she will,” said Gob. Walt looked around the rooms for Mrs. Woodhull, but found Gob’s wife instead. She was standing amid the crowd, all by herself, looking very tired. She returned his stare for a few moments, then shifted her attention to the stage, where a lady had come forward and begun to talk.

  “The enemies of free speech,” she said, “have ringed this place round with marshals and police. Though our friends are free from Ludlow Street Jail, the custodians of the law guard the doors of the institute, and neithe
r Mrs. Woodhull nor Miss Claflin can, no matter how much they may desire it, appear upon this platform tonight.” This announcement was greeted with howls and hisses.

  The lady was trying to shout over the noise of the crowd that she had been deputized to read the speech, and that she would do so if they would only quiet down. As she shouted, an old Quakeress, dressed in a long gray cloak, a coal-scuttle bonnet, and heavy veils, joined the lady on the stage. The old woman walked half bent over, and held her hands before her as if blind. People laughed at her, thinking she was just a confused old biddy who had somehow managed to wander up on the stage, until suddenly she pushed the cloak back so it fell off her shoulders, and tore off her bonnet and veils. Victoria Woodhull stood revealed before the audience.

  “Well,” said Gob. “There she is.” Her hair was all in disarray and her dress rumpled, but she looked proud and mighty. Her commanding presence precipitated a hush over the whole hall. The lady who had begun the speech smiled exultantly and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Victoria C. Woodhull!”

  Cheers and applause filled the hall, but Mrs. Woodhull held up her hands for silence and got it immediately. “My friends and fellow citizens!” she began. “I come into your presence from the American Bastille, to which I was consigned by the cowardly servility of the age. I am still held under heavy bonds to return to that cell, upon a scandalous charge trumped up by the ignorant or the corrupt officers of the law, conspiring with others to deprive me, under the falsest and shallowest pretenses, of my inherited privileges as an American citizen. In my person, the freedom of the press is assailed, and stricken down, and such has been the adverse concurrence of circumstances that the press itself has tacitly consented, almost with unanimity, to this sacrilegious invasion of one of the most sacred of civil rights!”

  She detailed all the particulars of the conspiracy against her. She told how Anthony Comstock was Beecher’s tool, how his agents had ransacked the offices of the Weekly, how Mr. Comstock had sworn to destroy her utterly if he had to spend all the energies of his life upon the job. But she didn’t look as if anybody could destroy her, that night. She was vibrant and magnetic and fascinating—even the marshals stared at her in wonder, and listened raptly. They seemed to forget that they were obligated to arrest her. Walt forgot some of his sadness, watching her.

  At last, Mrs. Woodhull made her concluding exclamation. “Sexual freedom, the last right to be claimed for man in the long struggle for universal emancipation, the least understood and the most feared of all the freedoms, but destined to be the most beneficial of any—will burst upon the world!” There were roars of approval. She tore the rose from her throat and hurled it like a bomb into the crowd, then ran off the stage and up the aisle, through the reaching arms of people who tried to touch her as she passed, all the way to the back door, where two marshals were standing. She stopped, crossed her hands at the wrists, and surrendered.

  “That was that,” said Gob.

  * * *

  Walt and Gob went to Pfaff’s after the speech. Gob seemed uninterested in visiting his mother in jail. “She won’t be there for long,” he said confidently, “and I have a more pressing concern, tonight.”

  “What’s that?” Walt asked.

  “You, of course,” said Gob. “You’ve come back to me, just as I hoped you would and knew you would.” They sat together for a while in silence, Gob’s hand on Walt’s hand, not touching their beer. Every so often, Gob would reach out to lift Walt’s chin so he could look into his eyes. “Yes,” he’d say, with deep satisfaction. “Yes, there you are.”

  They went for a walk, after Pfaff’s, a long walk arm in arm, through the late-night crowds on Broadway, up even into the park, where they sat by the lake, holding hands in the same place where Tennie had found Walt’s planted book years before. Ghostly-looking sheep were out on the meadow.

  They still had not said very much to each other. Walt wanted to protest, to say it could not be as it was before, to say, “You are not he.” But it was easier not to speak, and Walt had a fear that if he made a noise, Gob would take his hand away from him and never give it back again.

  “My work is done,” Gob said at last, after an hour of sitting. “It’s complete. It only lacks you, Walt.”

  “Me,” Walt said softly. Gob did not take away his hand.

  “Did you think I was lying when I said I needed you? When I begged you to help me win, did you think it was a jest? They want to come back. Can’t you hear them begging to come back?”

  “Not anymore,” Walt said. Though he’d spoken to Gob of Hank, he’d never mentioned the boy’s posthumous chattiness.

  Gob stood and pulled Walt up after him. “Come home with me,” Gob said. “I’ll show you something wonderful.”

  “Your wife is there,” Walt said, but Gob ignored him. Now, Walt wished Gob would let go his hand. He felt afraid again, as he had been on the stage when he met Gob for the first time. Gob pulled him along, all the way down to the house on Fifth Avenue, where little Pickie opened the door just as they approached it and said, “Welcome Master, welcome Kosmos.”

  Inside the house, Walt got a better look at the transformations it had undergone. “My little brother,” Pickie said, waving his arms around at everything. The engine was everywhere. It had grown down from its fifth-floor room, through the ceilings and the walls until, it seemed, it had become the house itself. Here was a big red dude of a fire engine, there was an electromagnet as big as a man. But one part stood out because it was larger than any other, and because it was located in what might as well have been the center of a thing that was otherwise mischievously asymmetric. That part looked like the gate to Greenwood Cemetery, complete with a gatehouse, and the whole thing sheltered under a pair of wings. The gatehouse was lovely, a little church of glass and bone and steel. It was full of gears—visibly turning through the glass—which ranged in size from one story high to as small as the nail of Pickie’s thumb, and they spilled out of the gatehouse to spin all over the room. The gears turned all sorts of contrivances, most of which seemed to be doing no useful work at all. The very biggest gears conspired to turn the wings—Walt squinted at them a few moments before he realized that they were glass wings, made of photographic negative plates.

  Dr. Fie and the new Mrs. Woodhull were both there, looking grave and serious. “Are you here?” Dr. Fie asked him, sounding cordial for once. He put his big finger out in front of him and poked Walt in the belly. Walt did not bother to answer the question. Dr. Fie looked to be drunk or confused or in pain. Maci Trufant Woodhull said, “God bless you, Mr. Whitman.”

  “There it is,” said Gob, sweeping his hand out to indicate the whole house. “The engine. It’s complete, except for you. There’s a place for you in it, Walt. I need you to go in it, and then it will bring them back, all the six hundred thousand, my brother and Will’s brother and Maci’s brother and your Hank, too. All the dead of the war, all the dead of all the wars, all the dead of the past. We’ll lick death tonight, Walt, if you’ll help us. I’m ready. Will’s ready, and Maci is ready. Pickie is ready and the engine is ready. Are you ready?”

  Walt opened his mouth to answer, paused a moment without saying anything, and then he ran away. He fled past Will Fie, pushing him aside when he tried to stand in his way, and knocked down Maci Trufant. He ran, jumping over wires and dodging under steel struts and copper pipes, until he was in the foyer, and then out the door. He ran down the marble steps and then down the street, not slowing till he had passed Madame Restell’s house and the Catholic cathedral. He stopped, looked back for pursuit, and saw there was none. He sat on the steps of the still-unfinished cathedral and put his head in his hands. He tried to quiet his fear but found that he could not. Once, as a child, he’d almost drowned at the beach. A powerful wave had picked him up and thrown him down against the sea bottom, and held him there as if it were trying to murder him. He’d got a lungful of water and was quite sure he was going to die. Even back then, when he never gave a
thought to death, when he did not even know yet what it was, it still frightened him. Now he was frightened again in just that same way, blind panic filled him up. When he heard the voice, he thought at first that it was Gob calling after him, but it was Hank, long silent but shouting now: Walt! Walt Walt Walt!

  “No,” Walt said.

  Walt. Please help. I want to come back. We all want so bad to come back. No one can do it but you. Nobody loves us like you. Please go back you have to go back you have to nobody loves us like you.

  “I’m afraid,” Walt said.

  Don’t be afraid it’s a good thing you’re going to do. The best ever.

  “I can’t,” Walt said. But Hank said you can and you must, and so Walt did. He went slowly back up the street to Gob’s house. The door was still open. Gob, his wife, little Pickie, and Dr. Fie were all waiting patiently, as if they knew he wouldn’t be long in returning. They put him in the gatehouse, bundling him with wires into an iron and glass chair. Young Mrs. Woodhull settled Mr. Lincoln’s hat on his head. Now it was decorated with a corona of silver spikes, each of which plugged into a hole in the crystal wall of the gatehouse.

  “Bless you, Mr. Whitman,” said Maci Woodhull, again as she put the hat on him, and she kissed him on the forehead as a mother might do. Walt thought then of his mother, thought he saw her bustle by outside with a stack of pancakes on a plate, thought he caught the wholesome odor that fell off her.

  “We’re ready,” said Dr. Fie, and closed the crystal door of the gatehouse.

  Gob put his face up against it and called through. “Don’t be afraid, Walt,” he said. “It’s all for the best.”

  Hank said it too. It’s for me. It’s for us. Thank you, Walt.