The next day, the air is mild as it often is before a good snowstorm, and ten thousand vehicles careen through the streets of the affluent. Inside one omnibus is Walt Whitman, en route to the Runkels. Both he and Henry Saunders slept late this morning, and for the first time in several days, Walt actually is feeling like himself. He wishes he could say the same thing for Henry. Though he has improved, Henry still has a fever and body aches. He has recovered some of his appetite, and so before he left the room this morning, Walt made a breakfast of eggs, toast, and ham. Henry ate as he hasn’t in several days, and he was eager to change into fresh clothing. Walt helped him with that too. Last of all, he made sure the fire would continue to burn for a few hours, and then he left for the Aurora, where he produced the day’s edition in record time. If Henry felt better tonight, they planned to eat supper at the Pewter Mug, where Walt has promised to fill him in on what he learns today.
Broadway Ike swings the omnibus around the corner, the dividing line between rich and poor, and sputters to a stop, waits for Whitman to hop out before swerving back into traffic and disappearing around the bend. Walt stretches his legs and buttons up his coat. His beard itches under the wool scarf, and his chapped lips sting.
The streets and buildings breathe people. Heads stick out of windows, men and women move in and out of open front doors, and children bounce through it all. The noises travel in and out of each other with no beginning and no end—dogs chase pigs in gutters clogged with sewage, chickens squawk and flap their wings as if they can fly. And the pungent odors created by the marshlands nearby hover oppressively, as if the entire neighborhood has spoiled.
In the long row of tenements before him, each building appears more dilapidated than the last. Most are two stories high; some are three; a few single-story buildings remain. Many of the windows have been broken or removed. Those that remain intact have gaping holes between the frames and the walls around them so that residents have to battle the cold air that rushes in on every floor and in every room.
The wooden staircase to his left is barely functional. Each of the remaining steps, nothing more than slabs of wood, bow in the middle, and the space between them is dangerously large.
He bends down to see three barefoot children sleeping huddled together. A girl with sunken eyes and cheeks, the oldest, leans into the corner, and uses her hat as a pillow against the brick wall. A smaller boy next to her wraps his arms around her torso and presses himself into her while another even younger boy lies in their laps. Their tiny bodies expand and contract together in one mass.
He wonders where their parents are, if they have any at all. When Walt was growing up, the Whitmans never had much money, and his father squandered most of what did come in, but it was never this severe. Every New Yorker knows about the thousands of orphans around the city, but to see them like this is different, worse. Whitman often spends his nights at one of the beer halls one street over, oblivious to their suffering.
They are only children—what chance do they have? He kneels. “Excuse me,” he calls out to the sleeping children.
They don’t stir. So he finds a few coins in his pocket and tosses them down. They land on the ground in front of the children, nearly roll into a grate he hadn’t noticed. Now he understands. They sleep there for the heat that comes from tunnels below, their bare feet strewn across the metal bars.
Walt backs out of the alleyway and from where he stands, he has a view of the Old Brewery, once the famous Coulthard’s Brewery built in 1792 and now a ramshackle dwelling for several hundred people. The five-story building was painted yellow long ago, but that paint has peeled away, taking down many of the clapboards with it. When he looks closer, the faces of at least fifty people loom in the broken windows. Like the others in the alleyway, they only stare at him, their eyes lit up like funeral candles.
That is where he has to go.
As if the living spaces are part of some elaborate, multifloored theater, humans fill the space in every imaginable way, in rooms without doors—one woman in a frayed orange shawl stirs a pot of what looks like potatoes on a stove while in the room next door a couple copulates, he with his pants pulled down and she with her dress pushed up. A barefoot baby in a blue nightgown sits on the ground next to them and plays with an iron key, thick and rusted. They pay Walt no attention as he makes his way up the stairway to where the Runkels live.
On the second floor, at least in this wing, conditions improve. Fewer people lie in the halls. Some of the rooms have walls and doors, but no numbers. So he counts from left to right, from one to eight, and on that door he knocks.
The door opens. “You found us.” Harriet wipes her hands on her apron and shakes his hand. “Where’s Mr. Saunders?”
“He came down with a fever,” Walt says. “He sends his regrets.”
“Sorry to hear it,” she says. “Come in, and I’ll get Ned.”
The front door opens to the kitchen, a tiny room no larger than five feet by five feet with a wood-burning stove that nearly fills the space. Opposite the stove, potato peels are piled on the floor, which slants toward the back wall, and a dog lounges against the wall, his tongue flapping out of his mouth.
A small girl tugs on Whitman’s jacket.
“Who did that?” He laughs to let her know he’s not serious.
Her long brown hair is parted on the left side and hangs down over her eyes. Her cheeks are rounded in baby fat. The dress she wears is at least two sizes too big, her tiny frame almost invisible inside it.
“Call me Abby.”
Harriet Runkel returns with her husband, Ned, who walks with his right hand under her arm. Half of Mr. Runkel’s body is crippled—his left hand curls up in a ball and when he walks, he drags his left leg.
“In here.” They lead Whitman through the doorway to the other room, which is only three times as big as the kitchen. Two beds line the walls, a clothesline droops down the middle as a barrier between the beds, and a shabby brown dresser has been installed under the window even though it doesn’t fit the space. On one wall hangs a small cabinet displaying the family’s china even though there is no table to set it on. Next to the cabinet is a tattered wardrobe, the doors of which won’t shut, exposing the two coats and three dresses hanging inside.
Ned and Harriet sit on one bed while Walt and Abby sit on the other.
Abby takes his hand and rubs it as she speaks. “I prayed to God, and he told me he’d send someone to help us. That must be you.” Her fingers feel brittle in his hand.
“You remind me of my sister Mary,” Whitman says. “The way you speak, so much like a grown-up.”
And then Abby cries. “The minister said if we don’t find Maggie, she won’t get resurrected.”
“Abby.” Mr. Runkel sits up straight when he speaks.
“Well, that’s what he said.”
Walt places his hand on her shoulder. “I don’t think God would allow that, now, do you?”
Harriet touches Abby’s other shoulder. “Why don’t you finish peeling those potatoes for dinner?”
Abby wipes her eyes on her sleeve. “You said that when the priest speaks, it’s like the Lord himself.”
“Abigail Helen Runkel.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Before Abby leaves the room, she curtsies.
“She doesn’t understand death,” Ned says. “She pretends that Maggie will come home, that finding her body will somehow resurrect her. Poor thing. Difficult being an only child now.”
“Maggie took Abby everywhere,” Mrs. Runkel says. “They shared a bed, and they shared clothes. Abby didn’t mind that they didn’t always fit her.”
Ned continues. “Now she wants to be a doctor too.”
“Maggie was unique,” Harriet says. “She understood people. She had a gift with them. Could get along with anyone in any situation. If she were here now, she would already know everything about you.”
Ned turns to Harriet. “Get the sketches, love, will you?”
She steps over to a small stack of books and notebooks in the corner past the wardrobe, picks one, and hands it to Walt. Inside, Maggie has drawn page after page of human anatomy, and like the drawings in the college, they are precise. The leg size matches the arm size and the head matches the torso.
“Impressive,” Walt says. “How did she learn?”
Harriet reaches down and produces a book entitled The Anatomy of Human Bodies by William Cowper. “Neighbor gave it to Maggie for her eighth birthday. She’s been doing these sketches ever since.”
Walt turns the pages, and as he progresses through the notebook, the sketches become more and more about what is inside the body than what is on the outside.
“I need to ask the obvious question,” Whitman says. “Why not leave her? It seems like the perfect place for her body, given her interests.” He’s thinking about Lena’s donation to the women’s college, Quigley’s museum of specimens, the dissected baby.
Harriet asks, “Would you leave your sister?”
The image of Mary or Hannah on a dissection table turns his stomach.
“Of course not,” Harriet answers for him.
Walt says, “I only meant that Maggie seems to have understood the importance of her own material body. Dissection allows us to learn more about the human body than ever before.” He pauses. “I know doctors who believe they are close to a cure for cholera. Can you imagine how the world would change if that comes to pass?”
Ned says, “Do you believe in the resurrection, Mr. Whitman?”
He’s not sure, but he says he does.
“What do you suppose happens to the soul that tries to return to the dissected body?”
The same thing that happens to a nondissected body, Whitman thinks, but remains silent.
“Nothing,” Ned says. “Nothing happens.”
“This is about more than Maggie’s body,” Mrs. Runkel says. “This is about her salvation.”
Harriet helps Ned stand. “Come, Mr. Whitman. We want to introduce you around.” They go out the front door and knock on the door to room number seven. An older woman answers the door and smiles. She has no teeth. “Oh, good,” the older woman says. “You’re here.”
“Good afternoon,” Ned says. “Mrs. Swinburne, this is Mr. Walt Whitman, the man who is writing the article about Maggie.”
“Oh,” Mrs. Swinburne says. “How do you do?”
Walt takes her hand.
“Mrs. Swinburne, did they ever find your husband’s body?” Mr. Runkel asks.
She shakes her head. “Sadly, no. And I can’t bear to think about poor Mikey, wherever it is that he ended up. Those horrible medical folks think they can play God. Well, I hope one day they realize what they’ve done—” At this, she stops and wipes her eyes on her sleeve.
Ned touches her shoulder. “We’re all in this together. That’s why Mr. Whitman is here. To help us all.”
Mrs. Swinburne nods, but keeps her head down.
“And what about your son’s body, Mrs. Traubel?” Harriet asks.
Mrs. Traubel pokes her head into the room, “Nobody looked, dear. You know that.”
Whitman touches her shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
“They think we don’t understand,” Mrs. Traubel says, her blue eyes fierce. “They think we don’t know anything.”
“Of course you do,” says Walt.
Ned turns to him. “At least half the people in this building have had a family member snatched from their graves, and none of them are ever found.”
A man hidden in the shadows leans up onto his knees and grabs Whitman’s arm, startling him. “Find our Maggie, won’t you?” His wrinkled face radiates a calm confidence when he speaks. “I’d wring every one of their necks if I could.”
“Was it your wife, sir, who went missing?” Walt says to the man gripping his arm.
“My son.” The man dips his head. “My poor Jacob, God rest his soul.”
Whitman follows Ned and Harriet back into the Runkels’ rooms.
“That was Mr. Lankton,” Harriet says. “His son was hanged for robbery and murder, then dissected as part of his sentence.”
“That’s terrible.”
Ned glances about him. “It’s all terrible here.”
Walt says, “The article will be published in the next few days. But I have to be honest—the chances that they will find your daughter’s body in one piece—”
Ned stops him. “We know, Mr. Whitman. But we want to try.”
“One more thing,” Walt says. “Can I borrow Maggie’s drawings?”
Harriet hands him the notebook. “Remember what Mrs. Traubel said: We’re not stupid, Mr. Whitman. Remember that when you write your article.”
As he prepares to leave, Abby calls to him from the other side of the room. “Wait.” She runs to him, holding out a single piece of paper. “I don’t draw so good, so I wrote you a poem.” She smiles. “You can read it when you get home.”
“I can’t wait.” Whitman folds up the piece of paper and slips it into his pocket. “We’ll help them find your sister,” he says. “I promise.”