by Chris Adrian
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.
“It’s something I do for myself.”
“Nonsense!” said Tennie. “It’s what a sister’s for.” When they were both in their undergarments, Maci saw that Tennie wore a thing she had never before encountered: a combination of chemise and drawers.
“Do you like my chemiloon?” Tennie asked, turning around to model it. Maci nodded, because she did like it, and she was immediately presented with one from out of Tennie’s wardrobe.
After she had bound Maci’s and her own hair up in rags to maintain their curls, Tennie began to prepare her night-cream, which, she said, she made fresh every night from a recipe of her mother’s. It would keep a lady’s skin soft, and also drive away evil spirits. Maci watched as she mixed equal measures of white wax, almond oil, and cacao in a small blue porcelain bowl. Tennie painted it on Maci’s face with a sable brush, and did the same to her own face.
“We’ll bounce for a while,” she said. “It makes for a good sleep.” She took Maci’s hands and dragged her up on the bed. Then she started bouncing, insisting, when Maci only hopped a little, that she bounce vigorously. Maci’s rag-bound hair flopped in her eyes.
“Now I’m weary!” Tennie said. “Are you weary, too?”
“Entirely.”
“Well, if you have trouble sleeping, if you wake in the night feeling agitated, you may have a ride on my pony.” Tennie pointed to a rocking horse big enough for an adult, with a piece of red silk thrown over its saddle. “He’s for sharing, that fellow. Indeed, everything in this room is for sharing.” She opened the door between their rooms and ushered Maci through. Someone had already turned down her sheets and fluffed up her pillows. “Good night, sister!” Tennie said, turning down the light and retreating to her room. She shut the door only halfway.
Maci lay in her new bed, smelling like a macaroon. It was true that she was weary, but she could not sleep. She stayed awake watching the blowing white shapes of her curtains as they moved in the breeze. Her left hand was twitching, walking up and down the bed like a scrabbling crab, and pinching at the flesh of her belly. “Stop it,” she said, but it would not stop. There was a writing desk already set up for her, as if to provide for her affliction. She turned up the light and sat down.
Didn’t I tell you they’d be waiting?
“Why now?” she asked. “Why did you let me feel safe, first, before you began this torture?” If her hand had rebelled back when rebellion was popular, five years ago or more, then she might have been better prepared to put it down, stronger and more able in her dealings with it. Complacency had made her weak, and reflecting on the very agreeable time she had spent that day with Mrs. Woodhull, she feared it would only be a matter of days before she succumbed to delusion and declared herself the Apostle of the Left Hand.
The veil was thick, the walls were high. Soon the work will be done, and then, Sister, we will be together again. What is in you that you will only believe in despair and think hope only the comfort given by the weak to the weak?
She had no answer for that question. She rose from the desk, though the pen was still in her hand, and lay down again in bed. When the pen wrote on Mrs. Woodhull’s fine sheets she ignored it, but she saw the message in the morning, smeared by her tossing body: not insane, not at all.
Benjamin Franklin is here. Thomas Jefferson is here. Vergil is here—this place is stuffed with virtuous pagans. It is said, of Heaven and the Summerland, that everyone is here, and everyone will be here. But a change is coming. We mean to make the here and there a single place, to make a marriage between Heaven and Earth. Try to imagine that, a world free of the distinctions made by death, where immortals are mortal, and mortals are immortal. Glorious wedding! Mother is here, still desirous of beans. Margaret Fuller is here. She sees you and loves you.
By September, Maci was firmly installed at the Park Row offices of the Weekly. She was almost hidden behind the tall stacks of daily and weekly newspapers, received from all over the country, that were piled on her desk. She’d had the idea of clipping items about women and printing them for the weekly’s readers. She had a nice little collection of them already: Miss Hoag is the pioneer fresh-woman in the Northwestern University; Miss Amy M. Bradley has been appointed Examiner of Schools for New Hanover County, North Carolina; Miss Louisa Stratton of Johnson County, Iowa, challenges any man in the state to a plowing match with her, and proposes a two-horse team.
“Are you in there?” Mrs. Woodhull asked, peering over a paper tower that reached just to her nose.
“I am,” said Maci.
“I want your opinion on this.” Mrs. Woodhull handed over a sheaf of papers, and walked away. Maci leaned back in her chair and read what she had been given, a little treatise on the Fourteenth Amendment, and how it trumped the need for a Sixteenth, for which brave ladies like Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony had been unsuccessfully campaigning. Because women were citizens, they were already guaranteed the right to vote by the Fourteenth Amendment. All they need do was assert that right. The argument was brilliant and simple. “It makes perfect sense,” Maci told Mrs. Woodhull, when she returned to Maci’s desk. “Such an elegant, transparent solution. No wonder it has remained so long invisible.”
“So you’ll admit it?” said Mrs. Woodhull. “You will grant that I see the unseen?” Maci laughed.
“In this instance alone, Mrs. Woodhull.” Maci insisted that Demosthenes would have to sit down with them at dinner before she’d believe in him. Mrs. Woodhull kept a place for him at her table, with a wineglass from which her drunken sister Utica stole nips. Maci kept all her own impossible strangeness a secret. She didn’t tell how her dead brother commanded her hand. It wouldn’t do to tell, because to tell would be to join them in their delusion, to embrace her own madness and to afford it a measure of respect which she preferred to deny it.
Mrs. Woodhull endorsed silliness in public; she’d deliver a learned argument on the politics of the ancient Egyptians, then make herself stupid by saying she had it all direct from the ethereal lips of Demosthenes. Maci wondered how much more the woman could already have accomplished if she could only keep a few choice things to herself. But it was a virtue, too, how she hated hypocrisy, how she would not lie even by omission, but always told the whole truth as she saw it. She was like her paper, sublime and a little ridiculous. She’d assign Maci to investigate a stock swindle, and the next day ask her to write a phony letter from Paris, full of fashion and gossip, under the name Flor de Valdal. Her politics, at least, were serious, and a few powerful men were taking her seriously.
At a party in September of 1870, Maci walked among the omnipresent roses in Mrs. Woodhull’s parlors, talking with Benjamin Butler, a person whom she’d never dreamed of meeting. They were waiting to honor Steven Pearl Andrews, who had asked Maci to call him Professor Pearlo when they met for the first time, and had talked for an hour about his conviction that before the twentieth century dawned, a trans-Saharan railway would relieve the burdens of the camel.
“I think smart girls are ruined by marriage,” Mr. Butler said at the party. “Energies that could be spent improving the world are instead wasted on the pursuit of a husband.”
“But Mrs. Woodhull is married,” said Maci.
“Yes, and rather more extensively than most. But she is a special case.”
“I think I must agree with you,” Maci said. You are in love with her, her hand had accused. “I do admire her,” she said to it, and wasn’t that reasonable, after all? Could a woman start with nothing, in a rickety shack in a place called Homer, and in the course of a decade become a stockbroker, a publisher, a writer, a candidate for President, and not demand a little admiration?
“Sometimes,” said Mr. Butler, “I think a celestial accident occurred at her birth, and that a male soul must have been allotted to her body.” He really was extraordinarily ugly.
“Yes,” Maci said. “Isn’t that easier to believe than that she could have a woman’s soul, and still have a greater purpose than merely to gratify the senses of man?”
