by Chris Adrian
“I’ll show you around the house, Maci,” Tennie said suddenly, sliding off Mr. Vanderbilt’s lap. She kissed his cheek and said, “You don’t mind, do you, old goat?” She didn’t wait for his answer, but took Maci’s hand and led her out into the dark hall.
“We must be quiet,” she said. “If we wake Frank we might be sorry for it.” Frank was the new Mrs. Vanderbilt, the daughter of the lady whom Mr. Vanderbilt’s surviving children had put forth, after their mother’s death, as an acceptable bride. She was the lady he’d settled for when Tennie refused him. Maci followed Tennie as she tiptoed down the hall to a staircase, which she ascended in slow, cautious steps, pausing every now and then as if to listen for sounds of alarm.
“Where are we going?” Maci asked.
“Upstairs,” Tennie whispered. On the second floor, Tennie led her to a bedroom. She opened the creaking door very slowly, and after she had turned up the gas, touched Maci on the hand and said, “I thought you would like to see it.”
“Where are you going?” Maci asked, as Tennie left. Maci would have followed, but as soon as the light came up she recognized that this room belonged to her brother’s friend. She had confessed her stupid conceit late one night in Tennie’s Turkish corner, had unfolded Rob’s portrait of Private Vanderbilt while Tennie praised the art and the man. “He’s a big handsome beast,” she’d said, and they’d worked each other into sentimental tears for the lover Maci never had. Maci had been deeply ashamed the next day, and because Tennie had not ever spoken of it except to ask her if her friend Dr. Fie was not the same beastly size as Private Vanderbilt, Maci figured she’d forgotten.
Maci explored the room quietly, after briefly acknowledging to herself that she ought just to leave without disturbing a thing. It was as he must have left it years before, except his uniform was folded on the bed. There were a few pictures on the wall, big oil paintings of steamers, portraits of his father’s property. She opened a wardrobe to look at his clothes, oversized sack coats and shirts into whose sleeves she imagined she could easily fit her whole leg. When Maci lay down on his bed, her head found something hard under the pillow: a Bible. She put her face on the uniform, thinking to discover his secret, personal odor in it. But it had been too long since he’d worn it, and now his uniform smelled utterly blank. With her face in his shirt she considered how it was very bad, what she’d done, so grossly assuming that they might have been friends, and imagining him her husband in various domestic scenes. She was embarrassed for herself, to be sneaking in a stranger’s house, sniffing at a stranger’s clothes. And she was embarrassed because, lying here at last in Private Vanderbilt’s abandoned bed, as close as she would ever get to him in this life, she felt very little. In fact, she felt nothing at all, not love, not grief, not desire, just a great empty space where a ghost did not live, where there was nobody and nothing, after all.
Do you remember the day our mother died? Do you remember how it was beautiful, bright, and warm after two cold days of rain? It put me in mind of Easter, because I had never seen it rain on Easter, or fail to rain on Good Friday. There was something that I wanted to say to you, then, but like you I was dumb in my mourning. I wanted to tell you that I was so sad I felt as if I might be happy, or in love, simply because such powerful feelings can appear the same to the naive. I was mighty with grief, and I thought I should be empowered by it. I thought my hands should shine with a yellow light, and that should I reach out to touch our mother on the head, I would call her back from the place she’d gone. I felt so very powerful. Later I thought, Fool, you’ve never been more powerless in your life. And it seemed so stupid, to think I could have called Mother back to life merely with the strength of my sadness. But Sister, the ridiculous fallacy is to think that grief cannot bring us back. You must believe me when I say that it certainly can. If only you grieved more and better, we would be back with you now. If only you did not forget us, we could return to you.
Maci tended to arrange all the Claflins but Tennie by their bad habits, and in her mind she often referred to them by their chiefest sins instead of their names. So big, hairy Malden Claflin was Gluttony. Sinister, one-eyed Buck, who’d come pawing at Maci one night in her bedroom, and was dealt a black eye by her left hand, was Avarice, because his greed was even more prominent a feature in him than his lechery. Miss Utica, drunk and jealous of her sisters every hour of the day and night, was Envy. Worst of all of them was Anna Claflin, Mrs. Woodhull’s demonic mother, a lady who embodied a sin Maci had no name for. It involved a quality of being murderous in intent if not in action, of being a contemptible liar and a relentless hater, and of trying to own every person around you, even strangers.
“How do you rise, with such weighty hangers-on?” Maci had asked Mrs. Woodhull, because she did not understand how she could have accomplished all she had with such a persecutory chorus always trailing after her.
“My family is my strength,” Mrs. Woodhull replied confidently, but they almost destroyed her in May, when Anna Claflin swore out a warrant against Colonel Blood, whom she hated because he had appropriated a portion of her daughter’s love that Anna thought was due all to her. May was anniversary month, when a person could not open a paper without seeing accounts of the annual meetings of a half-dozen societies. Societies bent on reforming or deforming the nation; associations for the advancement of the street urchin; bands of veterans; amateur devotees of the botanical sciences; the River Pirates’ Orphans’ Benevolent Circle—everyone met in May. Mrs. Woodhull had a bright moment at the convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association at Apollo Hall, but even as she was speaking her mother was slouching down to Essex Market police court. There Anna swore out her warrant accusing Colonel Blood of beating her and threatening to kill her with an iron dog similar to the one used to murder the distinguished Mr. Nathan nearly a year before. She hinted that it was very possible, to her mind, that Colonel Blood, not Mr. Nathan’s son, was the still-at-large fiend who had gleefully bludgeoned that esteemed man to death.
“You awful creature!” Mrs. Woodhull shouted at her mother, after the trial was over, after her magnificent speech had been eclipsed in every New York paper by the misleading fact that she had two husbands living in her house. “You false thing!” Mrs. Woodhull put her face in Maci’s shoulder and cried, and Maci brought her arms up to embrace her. Anna Claflin was shrieking curses, but Maci barely heard them. She felt suddenly transported out of the elegant parlor, out of the beautiful house, and up into the sky, because greatness had chosen her arms in which to weep.
Anna and Buck were ejected from the house on Thirty-eighth Street, but they came back in June, recalled by some familial gravity that baffled Maci. By then Maci had other worries. Ever since Anna’s trial, it had become fashionable to insult Mrs. Woodhull, and every day, all over the country, some editor would hop on the slander-cart and write an editorial that called her immoral for sheltering her broken-down former husband in her mansion. The most humiliating attacks came from Catharine Beecher who claimed that Mrs. Woodhull was the pinnacle of five thousand years of accumulating indecency, and from Beecher’s sister Mrs. Stowe, who caricatured Mrs. Woodhull in the pages of The Christian Union. In Mrs. Stowe’s frankly stupid serial novel, Victoria Woodhull was a carousing lady called Audacia Dangereyes, who owned a paper called The Virago, who swore and had multiple husbands, and in whose wake Free Love circulated like a stink.
“This will stop their fat mouths,” Mrs. Woodhull said as she and Maci worked on a letter to the Times, a veiled threat to expose Henry Beecher as an adulterer. Because I am a woman, Maci wrote while Mrs. Woodhull stood with a hand resting on her shoulder, and because I conscientiously hold opinions somewhat different from the self-elected orthodoxy which men find their pride in supporting, self-elected orthodoxy assails me, vilifies me, and endeavors to cover my life with ridicule and dishonor. This has been particularly the case in reference to certain law-proceedings into which I was recently drawn by the weakness of one very near, and provoke
d by other relatives.
My opinions and principles are subjects of just criticism. I put myself before the public voluntarily. But let him who is without sin cast his stone. I do not intend to be the scapegoat of sacrifice, to be offered up as a victim to society by those who cover up the foulness and the feculence of their thought with hypocritical mouthing of fair professions, and who divert public attention from their own iniquity by pointing their finger at me. I advocate Free Love—in the highest and purest sense, as the only cure for the immorality by which men corrupt sexual relations.
My judges who preach against “Free Love” openly, practice it secretly. For example, I know of one man, a public teacher of eminence, who lives in concubinage with the wife of another public teacher of almost equal eminence. All three concur in denouncing offenses against morality. So be it, but I decline to stand up as the “frightful example.” I shall make it my business to analyze some of these lives and will take my chances in the manner of libel suits.
Maci had delighted in the letter as she wrote it. But later, after it summoned Theodore Tilton from across the river, she regretted it. He came from Brooklyn to silence Mrs. Woodhull with pleas and promises and threats from Mr. Beecher. Tilton was supposed to convert her to silence, or cow her into respecting his and Mr. Beecher’s secret. Instead, he fell in love with her.
Surely, Maci thought, love could not be more Free than this. Mrs. Woodhull suddenly quite forgot Colonel Blood, who in his turn blithely ignored her frequent outings with Mr. Tilton. Maci, however, could not ignore them. She felt compelled to follow the two as they went to the park to ride in pleasure-boats, to Coney Island to play in the surf, or to the top of the Croton Distributing Reservoir to walk around and around the promenade, with their heads close together, sheltered by Mrs. Woodhull’s parasol from the sun but not from common view.
She wasn’t the only person following them. The younger Dr. Woodhull and his ward also trailed after his mother and her intimate friend on their outings. They’d both remove their hats and bow to Maci, whenever she caught sight of them. But he never spoke to her until the day in June that would see Anna and Buck Claflin return to their daughter’s house. That day, Maci had tracked Mrs. Woodhull and Mr. Tilton down to the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street, and thence up to the top of the reservoir, where she paced them as they sauntered underneath a sky so deeply blue it was nearly purple. On such a lovely day, the reservoir was crowded. Mrs. Woodhull looked back every so often and nodded at Maci. She found Maci’s fretting laughable and sweet.
“Miss Trufant,” Dr. Woodhull said, startling her where she was standing at a corner of the reservoir, and nearly causing her to leap clear into the water.
“Dr. Woodhull,” she said, overcome immediately with the familiar, panicked feeling.
“Did you know,” he asked her excitedly, “that this reservoir holds twenty million gallons of water? And did you know that we are a full forty-one miles from Croton Lake? The water flows all that way! Have you seen the bridge and aqueduct over the Harlem River? It is a marvelous piece of engineering. But the great bridge to Brooklyn will be even finer.” His face was flushed, and he was breathing as if he had just subjected himself to great exertion. She stared in his face for a moment, and he looked away, up into the air. His eyes were perfect mirrors of the dark blue sky.
“Is science your religion, Dr. Woodhull?”
“No,” he said, shifting his gaze to his mother, who, standing a few hundred feet off with Mr. Tilton, had begun to walk again. Dr. Woodhull offered Maci his arm. Not taking it, she walked with him. “I do believe, however,” he continued, “that science can change the world. I think it will make a better place for us to live in.”
“My father thought so,” said Maci. “He was wrong.” They walked for a while, stopping again when Mrs. Woodhull stopped. Maci noticed the boy, Pickie, kneeling by the water, where other boys were racing toy sailboats.
“I think science is not your religion, Miss Trufant. But tell me what you do believe in.”
Maci said nothing at first, thinking how her hand was always accusing her. Sister, it wrote, you believe in nothing. That is the most debilitating of sins.
Mrs. Woodhull’s vigorous laugh came drifting to them. Maci’s silence stretched on.
“Yesterday,” said Dr. Woodhull, “my mother was described in a Philadelphia paper as ‘The Dark Angel of Divorce.’”
“I believe,” Maci said forcefully, “that all existence is crossed by sorrow.” A little green sailboat came racing towards them across the water. All the boys were encouraging it, except little Pickie, who was sitting down on the ground now and crying. Maci went and knelt by him.
“What’s the matter, little fellow?” she asked him.
“It’s my brother,” he wailed. “He is unborn!”
“He means he is lonely,” Dr. Woodhull said behind her. “Be quiet, Pickie. Watch the boats. See how they are carefree? You should be like them.”
“There now,” Maci said, holding the boy close while he sobbed. She found herself admiring his long, lustrous brown hair. But then it brought to mind the dream of her mother, and she shuddered. “This boy needs his hair cut,” she said.
Dr. Woodhull shrugged. Pickie stopped crying and returned Maci’s embrace with such strength that she gasped.
“Mama!” Pickie said, then laughed.
“Forgive him,” Dr. Woodhull said. “He hugs dogs, and calls them ‘Mama.’ Trees, too.”
“Not my mama,” Pickie said, “but my brother’s mama.” He broke away from her embrace and went back to watch the boats.
“He has a volatile temperament,” Dr. Woodhull said apologetically. Maci looked all around for Mrs. Woodhull, but failed to find her.
“She’s escaped me,” Maci said.
“She’s gone home,” Dr. Woodhull said. “To prepare for the party.”
“Which party is that?” Maci asked him, but he’d already walked off to retrieve Pickie. The two of them made a formal bow to her and walked into the crowds.
Maci would have liked not to celebrate the return of the nasty prodigals, but Mrs. Woodhull insisted that she participate in the groundless festivities. We ought to be mourning, Maci said to herself, and sat at the far end of Mrs. Woodhull’s table, away from the revelry, working on an article that profiled and condemned Madame Restell. She is seen every day, she wrote, a pale lady riding fast in her gorgeous carriage. Why does she drive so fast? Is she flying from herself?
“Sweet, sweet forgiveness!” Anna Claflin shouted at the other end of the room. Engrossed in her work, Maci didn’t notice how the old lady was sneaking up on her. She’d smeared her lips with honey, and meant to give Maci a sugar-kiss. Maci looked up too late to duck away. But young Dr. Woodhull’s hand came between them before Anna’s lips could connect with Maci’s. Anna kissed his hand lovingly, then went back to the other end of the table. She took a knife and began to stab at Colonel Blood’s shadow where the light threw it on a wall.
“Thank you,” Maci said, watching Dr. Woodhull wipe honey from his palm. Marking his deficit, she stared too long.
“My eighty-percent hand,” he said.
“I am rude,” she said. “Please forgive me.”
“There’s nothing to forgive.”
“Was it an animal? Did an animal bite you?”
“A congenital deformity,” he said. “You’ll notice that I share it with my grandmother. But won’t you come down and celebrate, Miss Trufant?”
“I prefer not to,” she said. “In fact, I am sleepy. Good night, Dr. Woodhull.” She gathered up her papers, shook his hand—the whole one—and went upstairs to her room. By the time she came to her room she’d become so weary that she lay on her bed without undressing and fell immediately into a dream, in which she and Dr. Woodhull were back at the reservoir, sitting with their bare feet dangling in the water. He had an abundance of hair on his toes.
“Do you believe in love, Miss Trufant?” he asked her. “Do you believe
it is more than a gratifying delusion?”
“Free Love?” she asked.
“Any kind,” he said.
“Well,” she said, getting up from where they were sitting and walking away rapidly on her wet feet, suddenly remembering that she had to find Mrs. Woodhull. “In fact I do not,” she said softly. Dr. Woodhull had hurried after her and was walking with his face very close to her own. “I do not believe in it at all.” Mrs. Woodhull dropped down out of the sky to land in front of them without a sound. Maci reached out and touched her face, and woke to her voice.
Mrs. Woodhull and Mr. Tilton were on the roof. They had a bower there, to which they retreated nightly. Mrs. Woodhull was berating Mr. Tilton for going on about how his wife and Mr. Beecher had wounded him. They began a spirited argument, but just as they seemed ready to start screaming like Claflins, their voices cut off, and presently Maci heard Mrs. Woodhull crying out in a high voice, and Tilton shouting, “Praise, praise!”
Maci had gotten into the habit of listening, rather than closing her window, just as she listened sometimes at Tennie’s door when she was entertaining her large friend Dr. Fie, or some other friend, large or small. Tennie seemed to take them in all sizes. Maci pretended that she was exploring a mystery with her shameful listening. She’d write down the words she heard, the cries that sounded plaintive, frustrated, angry, relieved, and then arrange them together in sentences of strident lust. And, sometimes, when she had been lying in her damp sheets for an hour listening to the lovers on the roof, she’d consider finally taking a ride on the pony, which Tennie had solicitously moved into her room, insisting that Maci had greater need of it than she did. Maci had sat on it once, the little bump put just in the place it was meant to go, and taken a few exploratory rocks. She’d dismounted immediately, covering the thing up again with its slip of silk, and then with two wool blankets on top of that, to hide it completely. She never got on it again, but on the hottest nights, when she could hear the lovers so very loud on the roof, she thought of riding the pony to a strange, new place, with her book open in her hand, reading aloud as she went.
