IN SEPTEMBER OF 1867, WILL SAT IN THE AMPHITHEATER OF the Bellevue Medical College with his head clutched between his hands, staring fixedly at Dr. Gouley, a lecturer in morbid anatomy. Dr. Gouley was a sweet-looking man whose gentle voice belied the gruesome content of his lecture. “The skin of the child,” he said, “was dry and hard and seemed to be cracked in many places, somewhat resembling the scales of a fish. The mouth was large and round and wide open. It had no external nose but two holes where the nose should have been.”
“Are you all right, Will?” asked his neighbor, a small young man named Gob Woodhull. As there were no proper seats left in the crowded amphitheater, they sat next to each other on the steps. “Are you going to have a fit? The way your eyes bulge, it worries me.”
They had met a month before, after Will had collapsed in the hospital hallway. When he came back to his senses, Will was in a bed in Ward 10, surrounded by noisy consumptives. Little Gob, for all that he looked like a fifteen-year-old in store-bought whiskers, had picked him up in the hallway like a child and carried him to bed. “It’s a divine affliction, what you have,” he said.
“It’s not,” said Will. He could barely see, and he felt cold, though it was hot in the ward. No, it wasn’t divine, what he had. They were from the glass house, these attacks of sympathy that culminated in shaking, foaming fits. Medical school was the last place he should be, in his condition, because the sad natural histories of disease became personal to him. His mind would come loose from its moorings and drift on tides of turbulent fancy, so he found himself becoming the sufferer, or someone who loved the sufferer, and he would contemplate their troubled, failing lives until the fit came along, inevitably, and put an end to it. He’d collapsed in the hall on account of a young German mother, recently delivered and now afflicted with a debilitating fistula that made her smell so horrible her family had turned her out of the house. He hadn’t cared so much for other people’s trouble in the past. Even his own mother’s agony had occurred at a distance remote from his heart, but the house had changed that.
In the amphitheater, Will told Gob, “I’m very well, thank you.” But he was not very well. Dr. Gouley was lecturing on Harlequin Fetus, a rare but especially awful congenital deformity, and Will feared that he would soon be overwhelmed.
“The eyes appeared to be lumps of coagulated blood, about the bigness of a plum, ghastly to behold. It had no external ears, only holes where the ears should be. The hands and feet appeared to be swollen, were crumped up, and felt hard. The back part of the head was very much open. It made a strange kind of noise, very low, which I will now attempt to imitate.” Dr. Gouley cleared his throat, lowered his head, and emitted a rumbling bass cry like the complaint of a sickly cow.
“Fascinating,” said Gob. “I should have liked to examine it.” Another student shushed him. Will closed his eyes and saw a hideous, bark-skinned Harlequin Fetus toddling out of the blackness in his mind. It held out its crumped-up hands at him and from the shocked O of its mouth came a word: “Papa.”
“You’re about to blow, aren’t you?” said Gob. “Should I take you out of here?”
“No,” Will whispered. He imagined the poor mother who gave birth to such a child, how her bliss would become horror when she saw the thing that had emerged from her. He did not want to hear any more.
“It defeats the purpose of a lecture,” said Gob, “if you plug up your ears.” This time, he was assailed by a whole chorus of shushings.
“It lived about eight and forty hours,” said Dr. Gouley, “and was alive when I saw it.”
Debilitating sympathy, fits, spirits—these were the gifts of the house. Something must have happened as Will sat there, with the sun shining bright but not warm through the picture panels, though in fact it had seemed at first that nothing happened. He had looked around at the confusion of images on the floor and on himself, but he felt no different. Ghosts did not detach themselves from the picture, Jolly’s soul did not come sifting down upon him. He fell asleep and had a perfectly ordinary nap.
He spent the whole first day after he’d finished the house at mundane tasks, cleaning, eating, writing up an advertisement for people to come get their portraits taken by him—he’d started a little business and was doing pretty well at it—and he went to bed feeling disappointed and relieved that nothing had happened. But he woke in the early morning to the sound of artillery, great crashing booms that sounded as if they were being fired from just below his window on Fulton Street. When they were small, Sam had tried to teach him how to wake within sleep, to know he was dreaming while he was dreaming. “Then you are the master of your whole world,” Sam confided. Then you could fly, or squeeze ice cream from a stone, or turn animals to chocolate with your touch. Will could never learn to do this. But when he woke that night surrounded by people staring down at him, he figured he must at last have woken up inside a dream.
He reached to touch Jolly, hoping to turn him to chocolate. Jolly was moving his mouth but Will couldn’t hear him—he thought he must have been deafened by the cannon. Jolly was solid and very cold. He would not turn to chocolate, or stop moving his lips. The others were talking, too. Frenchy and Lewy Greeley and even Sam, who stood away from the bed and looked at Will like a stranger. There were many boys from the Third Onondaga, some of whom he’d barely known, and there were boys Will had never seen before. All of them were chattering at him silently, except for one, a boy who looked like a tatterdemalion Gabriel, because he was dressed in shabby clothes and had only one wing where a more affluent angel would surely have two. The boy did not move his mouth, but only stared and put a bugle—it was bright and pretty, not shabby at all—to his mouth to blow it noiselessly. Will closed his eyes as the artillery sounded again, trying to wake up. But he was already awake, and when he opened his eyes all his guests were still with him.
“I mean to make a pilgrimage,” Will said to Gob, “to the valley of Aesclepius, where I will tie the carotids of a rooster and make a sacrifice of him. Will you go along with me?” Sometimes, Will thought that if he left the country the silent ghosts would not be able to follow. Wasn’t it said that they could not cross water? Yet they followed him easily enough across the river from Brooklyn.
“I have work in this city,” said Gob, passing his finger back and forth through the single candle at their table. “I think I will be retained by it for years.” They were in a filthy saloon in Hester Street, sitting with a bottle of whiskey between them. It was November 5, 1867, Will’s birthday. He was twenty-three years old. Gob, who Will had figured as immensely rich, had taken him to stuff at Delmonico’s, and then Will had brought Gob to this saloon, one of his haunts since the house had changed him into a rank sensualist. Sympathy and spirits and fits—sometimes these seemed easy to abide compared to the last gift of the house, the other, which was a package of lustfulness and wantonness and drinking whiskey, which Will hated almost as much as ever but now had need of, though it never seemed to make him drunk.
Jolly and the angel boy had come along to the saloon, too. Jolly kept pointing at Gob, the same way he had led Will to Bellevue a year before and pointed at it, and led him inside, still pointing, to the office of the secretary, Dr. Macready. Since his appearance, Jolly had been silently guiding him through his life, pointing out the path he must take. Will went where Jolly pointed, because it was the only way to soothe him, and because it felt right to do it. Will had never organized his life by faith or ambition until he built the house—that work had seemed right and true and necessary. He had built it, hoping when it was finished it would practice some magic to make him serene. Now it was building him into a sad, discontented creature, and yet this also seemed right and true and necessary.
“Years and years,” Gob said unhappily.
“You mean doctoring?”
“Partly,” said Gob. He was a brilliant student, not liked at the school except by the faculty, who doted on him. He was haughty, and tended to correct his peers at every chance, wielding his immense knowledge like a blunt stick. In the army, they would have stuck him in a leper mess. Will had had no friends at Bellevue before Gob arrived, though he’d been there already for two terms. He hadn’t wanted any friends—his wartime sociability had departed when peace came—and had not wanted either to be friends with Gob, but the boy had pursued him relentlessly since their encounter in the hall, and soon they were pretty fast.
“What else, then?” Will asked.
“Ah, I think I just might tell you, but not tonight. It’s not birthday talk, and I’m sleepy, anyhow. And you have got to go cut up your capers.” A lady in red boots had come up behind Will and leaned over to pat him on his chest.
“Shall we dance?” she asked him.
“I’m off, then,” said Gob. “Happy birthday, Will.”
“Is it your birthday, Mr. President?” asked the lady.
“Maybe,” Will said to her, and asked Gob if he wouldn’t stay this time for the private can-can dance. Gob shook his head and took up his coat. The tatterdemalion Gabriel cast a final glance at the saloon musicians, three drunks on the stage who made a cacophony on piano, fiddle, and cornet. Then he followed Gob, both of them barely visible in the dark between tables. The angel boy looked back before they left the saloon and waved goodbye. Jolly waved back.
“Come along, Mr. President,” said the lady. Will had forgotten her name, though she’d danced for him before. He followed her towards the stairway, a whiskey bottle in one hand, her hand in the other. Jolly followed after them.
“You know I am not the president of anything.”
“Not even the League of Large Gentlemen?”
“No,” said Will. She took him up the stairs and onto a creaking wooden gallery, along which the private theaters were set. Will’s dancer held a curtain open for him, and he passed in, Jolly right behind him. The room was directly over the trio, so the music was very loud.
The dancer pushed Will towards the far wall, where a photograph hung, two ladies dressed only in hats, their four breasts pressed together. Will sat down in a dirty yellow chair while the dancer closed the curtain, and Jolly flattened himself against the wall. The woman started to dance, kicking up her legs in that confined space. A few times she almost kicked Will in the head with her boots, but after a few near misses he became adroit at dodging her, even as he watched her take her skirt in her hand and toss it around. There were tiny bells sewn into the hem that made a small music which was sweet compared to the din below. She was not wearing any underclothes. She turned around, leaned forward, threw her skirt up over her head, then shook her dimpled ass in Will’s face.
“Why don’t you give it a slap?” she asked, but he did not do that. She had a few bruises back there already, one of them very much in the shape of Italy’s kicking boot. She turned around again, holding her skirt up so it obscured her face but left her crotch in plain sight. It wasn’t young anymore, what she had. It looked old and broken down, but still he thought it was fascinating. She inched towards him in tiny steps. It seemed to Will that it took forever for her to cover the scant distance from the curtain to the chair, and when at last she arrived to press herself into his face he thought that he would die, or at the very least fall away in a fit. The smell of her turned his stomach yet delighted all his base instincts. Jolly watched her too, though he tried to give the appearance of not watching her.
She stepped back from Will, reaching down with one hand to stroke his face, his neck, his shoulder. Still holding her skirt up, she undid her blouse and freed one of her breasts. Pendulous and covered with scars, it was utterly unbeautiful. It reminded Will of the breast of Mrs. Hanbury, a patient in Ward 23 at Bellevue. She was an ancient Negro woman, somnolent to the point that she would have seemed dead if she had not been hot to the touch. Once, Will was obliged to move her breast so he could listen to her weak heart. The breast seemed four feet long to him. It was unwieldy, a sock filled with sand, and it sought to thwart him; its wrinkled nipple was a mocking eye. The dancer’s breast was unpleasant like that, but still it demanded his attention. She pushed it towards his mouth, but he only stared at the thing. She took the bottle from his hand, did something unspeakable with it, then put it to Will’s lips. He drank greedily, not minding how the liquor ran down his chin. “Oh Jolly,” Will said. “What am I doing?”
“Jolly indeed,” said the lady, her hand on his pants now. “You’re doing well enough.”
Occasionally Jolly and Sam and Lewy Greeley and Frenchy and a dozen others would gather around a luxurious divan—the rudest ladies always preferred to drape themselves on it for their portrait—upon which the angel boy would sit with his legs crossed under him, his one wing waving lazily in the breeze from an open window. Will would demand of them, “What are you looking at? What?” Scolding them never did any good. He’d swum with Sam in a clear spring when they were boys. He’d looked down and seen fish through the clear water, floating and moving their mouths just like these spirits, open and closed and open, but never a sound came out. “Stop looking at me!” he’d say, but they wouldn’t, and the only way he could escape them was by covering up his own eyes.
Being friendly with Gob was good for Will’s education. Though technically his junior, Gob was farther along than Will; he’d been apprenticed to a respected German physician, Dr. Oetker, for three years before he came to Bellevue. His performance on the entrance exam had so impressed Macready that the secretary had made Gob a junior assistant in the second surgical division.
Under Gob’s aegis, Will was allowed to assist on a surgery with the great Dr. Wood himself. It was a daring procedure, an exhilarating bowel repair. The fattest man Will had ever seen lay on the table. He’d been set on by would-be murderers after a feast, and their stabbing knives had poked three holes in his vast belly. Will and Gob hooked out loops of bowel and held them steady while Dr. Wood, a neat man who sported a boutonniere of violets on his black coat, sewed up the wounds. Will thought of the boy he’d carried over the field at Gettysburg, and how his guts had been similarly exposed.
“So you see, Mr. Woodhull,” Dr. Wood was saying, “how you must put your stitches through the fibrous tunic of the intestine.” He was finished with his suturing, and now he inspected his work from various angles. He took a decanter from another assistant and began to pour oil liberally over the wound. He smiled and said, “A little olive oil will facilitate the return of the bowel to the peritoneal cavity.”
Surgery made Will partial to ether. Assisting Dr. Wood, he was often assigned the role of anesthetist. He’d apply Squibb’s ether to the patient with a cone made of newspaper, a towel, and a wad of cotton. He filched small quantities and brought them home to Fulton Street for use in making collodion, and for sniffing. He liked to sit with all the lights out but the curtains open, and take little whiffs of ether until he passed into a dreamless black sleep.
It was better than hooking arteries or bowel, this ether-duty. Will never got sleepy administering the ether, but he sometimes developed a carefree attitude during the course of an operation. It made him bold.
“Doctor,” he said to a senior assistant during a multiple amputation, “please stay away from the patient’s head. You will cause her to combust.” The assistant had a lit cigar wedged between his teeth.
“She says her mother was frightened by an elephant when she was pregnant,” said Dr. Wood. The blond-headed girl on the table had been born with an extra finger and seven extra toes. Dr. Wood was pruning the girl to a better life. Whenever anyone noticed her finger she had suffered fits of hysterical blindness and St. Vitus’s dance. “What do you think of that, Mr. Woodhull?”
“I think elephants are formidable creatures, sir,” said Gob. “I think it is sensible to fear them.” Dr. Wood laughed too long and too loud. Gob’s hands, dexterous despite the congenital absence of one finger, were educated while Will looked on, wondering if his friend couldn’t take the girl’s extra finger as a replacement for his own. It didn’t seem beyond him. Under Dr. Wood’s tutelage, Gob tied off arteries and sewed up wounds, and once even opened up a skull with a Hey’s saw. Will would have liked to do some cutting of his own, but Dr. Wood seemed unlikely ever to let him. He often looked scornfully at Will’s big mashers and said, “Those are not the hands of a surgeon.”
Many nights, Gob and Will would sit up with fresh amputees, watching over their wounds for signs of secondary hemorrhage. The patients would be arranged in their beds in a circle around the two students, with their stumps facing inward. Gob and Will would sit back to back, observing the stumps.
“I think blood is beautiful,” Gob said during one such vigil.
“You wouldn’t,” said Will, “if you’d ever been covered in it for days. It loses its charm.”
“I like it because it is perfect, because it does its work perfectly. A perfect fuel for a perfect machine.” Jolly was walking up and down the ward, not waving or speaking, just turning his head this way and that, regarding everything with sadness and longing. Will looked away from him, his attention drawn to a stump that twitched briefly, and when he looked back Jolly was gone. The spirits came and went like that.
“I hate the smell,” Will said. “And anyhow if I were less tired and more articulate I would argue that we are not perfect, body or soul.” The stump that had twitched began to bleed again, so Will leaned forward to tighten a band of elastic around it, but this was not sufficient. He had to plunge his fingers through the stitches and feel blindly under the flap, seeking to catch the leaking artery between his fingers. The patient was screaming and the sheets were soaking through.
Gob put his little hand in, too, and in a moment he’d caught the vessel and pinched it. “Ah,” he said, over the patient’s screaming. “Feel that!” Will put his finger along Gob’s and felt the blood beating. The strength and the rhythm of it did seem like a miracle, just then. “Perfect,” said Gob. “Oh, I wish I could build like this.”
Sometimes he’d feel the pressure of eyes on him as he walked, and looking back he would see them. Jolly was always out in front, taking measured, even steps. Will would keep walking, thinking they might go away if only he ignored them, but he never could. He’d look back again and again, and each time there’d be another, until there was a long train of them following him down Broadway or the Bowery or Fulton Street. They stepped fluidly among the living, never touching them even on the busiest streets, while Will, always looking over his shoulder, knocked packages from the arms of ladies, and got tangled in their parasols. “Stop following me!” he shouted, but he knew this would do nothing to deter them, and it did not.
In the lying-in ward, the women waiting to deliver kept busy making shrouds. Will wondered, as he walked among them, how many would lie buried in their work. Bellevue had a reputation as a nest of puerperal fever. Gob had switched to the second medical division after the end of the first term. Dr. Wood offered to make him a senior assistant, but Gob said he felt drawn to the medical wards, to the cholera and consumption and pneumonia. Will shadowed him there, and saw how his patients did better than others. Gob eschewed calomel and tartar emetic in all cases. He dosed the weak of heart with foxglove. He gave calcined magnesia for excessive flatulence, carbonate of soda for dyspepsia, a mixture of turpentine and gin for worms. Patients with intractable dry coughs who got no relief from syrup of squills were healed by a weird elixir. “Moss squeezings, bat’s blood, and death angel,” Gob said, and Will thought he must be joking.
They liked to go around the wards at night. The nurses were untrained and incompetent, sentenced to Bellevue to serve out ten-day terms for public drunkenness. They would find them snoring in a corner, the remains of Friday’s fish dinner smeared on their frocks, while patients called out for assistance or mercy or death. Gob and Will might turn a patient on his side so he could urinate, a veteran with a bullet in his bladder that acted as a ball valve, or sit at the bedsides of cholera patients, measuring out grains of morphine into a cup of hot water. The cholera patients had shriveled fingers. Their lips were blue, and their clammy faces were shrunken.
By January of ‘68, Will had become an assistant in the first medical division. He spent most of his time in the basement, among the alcoholics and the insane. “They are all very unreasonable down there,” he complained, when he came upstairs at night to visit Gob. “You are living the life here on the second floor, let me tell you.” He would sit on a bed and throw wadded-up gauze at a passed-out nurse, saying, “Wake up, Sairey Gamp!” or else assist Gob in taking pulses and listening to hearts and lungs. When the patients were all asleep they would sit in a window, staring at the East River and talking quietly. They both belonged to a not very exclusive club of surviving brothers.
“Sam was the companion of my youth,” Will said one night. “But then we grew distant.”
“I failed him,” said Gob, raising his hand as if to touch the full moon framed in the window. A cold wind was whipping up blue foam on the river.
“How does that happen? He was the only other person in the world, and then he was no one.”
“If I had been with him he would yet be alive,” Gob said quietly.
“He was a stranger to me, when he died,” Will said. “Do you think that’s a crime?” He looked around the room for Sam, thinking that talk of him might summon him. He wasn’t there, but Jolly was pacing up and down the ward, looking at his feet as they walked.
“Help me!” said a cholera patient, sitting up suddenly in his bed. Will was too late with the bucket.
In the morning, they would go for a walk on the hospital grounds, which used to be filled with orchards of peach and apple and plum trees, but now were covered with small and large buildings of gneiss rock and brick. They would wander for a while in the cold, both of them exhausted but neither in a mood for sleep. Gob, Will discovered, had a morbid imagination. It seemed to Will that Gob was becoming a doctor for the wrong reason, not because he loved life, but because he was obsessed with death. Not that it was the right reason, either, to become a doctor at the direction of a spirit.
After their walk they might seek out Dr. Gouley, to assist him with an autopsy, Gob weighing livers or kidneys or brains while Will measured the thickness of a heart. Dr. Gouley, a lonely man, was happy for their company. “You work well together,” he said to them on more than one occasion. Sometimes he invited them to put on loupes and do a detailed dissection. Gob liked to pull on the tendons of a flayed hand and make it beckon invitingly to the other corpses. When the organs were all removed, and there was nothing left in the late person but watery blood pooling in the gutters alongside the spine, Dr. Gouley would stare lovingly into the body and put his hands into the pink fluid, lifting it and holding it in his palms until it ran through his fingers. “My boys,” he would say. “Do you see how we are vessels?”
The spirits followed Will to a place called the Pearl, a saloon run by a woman of the same name. It was a hideous dive. A white-painted glass ball as big as a head hung over the door. Inside, it looked at first glance like any other saloon—dim and smoky, with sawdust on the floor. But there was a door in the back, and if you went through it you found yourself, not outside in the alley, but at the top of a staircase, and if you took those stairs down you entered a bagnio, a maze, in whose secret recesses prostitutes reclined expectantly.
Will went downstairs without looking back to see how many followed. At the bottom of the stairs, he opened the door to the maze. Down there it was musty, and it stank of fish. What might once have been stored there he never knew, but it seemed like a place that must once have held bones. Along the twisting, turning way there were recesses, hidden by thin curtains, where couches sat. Some of the curtains were drawn, and if there were lights inside they threw copulating silhouettes onto the hanging fabric. Grunting cries rang off the low ceiling.
There was something he liked about these seedy, curtained places. He had enough money from portrait-taking that he could visit a nice house, someplace on West Twenty-fifth Street, where the girls were pretty and all the fornication was done amid the trappings of purity. He might visit every one of the Seven Sisters’ houses, or dress up in his finest clothes for a visit to Josie Woods’s. He’d heard about those places—white sheets and soft beds, girls with clean hair and shining faces who dressed up in old-fashioned hoop skirts and spoke with great refinement—but he had never visited one. The glass house had made him honest in his debauchery; when he wallowed he wallowed like a pig.
He went in through the first open curtain he found. There was a girl sitting on a green couch piled with blankets. She was reading a book by the light of a lantern hung on the wall. A pair of cracked spectacles were balanced on the end of her nose.
“Close the curtain, darling,” she said, without looking up. “I never like to put on a show.” Already, a cloud of witnesses was crowding inside, jostling him with their cool flesh. Jolly’s and Sam’s were the only familiar faces, though there were a dozen or more with him. He couldn’t meet Sam’s eyes, but he couldn’t leave the place, either, couldn’t go home and read, couldn’t even content himself with rubbing up against some pretty, unsuspecting lady on a Second Avenue stage, as a more restrained fiend might do.
He had whiskey with him, and she asked to sip it from his mouth, so he took some and he kissed her. She would not take off her glasses and they bumped against his face. She lifted her dress, really just an old and stained shift of silk, put her book down gently on the couch, and lay back, putting one arm behind her head. Pushing her glasses up high on her nose, she told Will to take down his pants. He opened up his jacket and his shirt so he could press his skin against hers. She was clammy and cold, and her breasts were pimply, but he kissed them as if he loved them.
After a while, the girl gave a little titter. Will thought it was because his work was unsatisfying and ridiculous, but in fact she was laughing at some bit of humor in her book, which she had picked up again, and was reading over his shoulder. He propped himself up on his elbows and looked down at her.
“What, darling?” she asked. “What? It’s Mr. Dickens. I can hardly put it down. Not for anything. So go on. Just go right on with it.” The spirits, crowded close, were nodding avidly, and their mouths were moving as if to say, Yes, do.
“Hold still,” Will said, because Gob would not stop fidgeting. “You’ll ruin the photograph.”
“Sorry,” said Gob, but he kept moving his eyes and his head to look at the pictures around the studio. Will had brought him to Brooklyn for a complimentary portrait, motivated by friendship and by Jolly. Will was thrilled to be able to teach Gob the photographic process, because he’d learned as much about medicine from Gob as he had from their professors. And as they walked on South Street one day, Jolly had pointed repeatedly at Gob and then at Brooklyn, making it very obvious that he wanted Will to take him there.
“I’ll bind your head to the stand,” Will said.
“What’s that one?” Gob asked, moving his arm, too, to point at a plate negative taken at Bull Run. It was not one of Frenchy’s. Will had been collecting them from other photographers.
“Now it’s ruined,” Will said, taking his head out of the camera and scowling.
“Is that one from Chickamauga?” Gob asked, walking over to examine the plate.
“No,” said Will. “I have none from that battle. That’s three plates you’ve wasted. Why can’t you hold still?”
“Where are the pictures from Chickamauga?” Gob asked. He went rooting among the mounds of pictures and plates on tables around the room. Will finally made him understand that there were no pictures from Chickamauga, but Gob was fascinated by any picture. He held the negative plates up to the light and closed his eyes and said, “Oh!” With their sleeves rolled up and their collars loosened, they looked at every picture Will owned. Gob delighted especially in the stereoscopic images. He sat cross-legged on the floor, looking at Mr. Gardner’s gruesome photographs, reaching out his hand repeatedly to try and touch the carnage that floated before him.
When there were no more pictures to look at, Will taught Gob how to take and develop a photograph. He mastered the process immediately. There were people who did not have to be shown a thing twice to learn it, but with Gob you almost didn’t have to show him even once. When Will asked how he knew to make the negative for an ambrotype thin and light, Gob only said, “Well, it makes sense, doesn’t it?” He insisted on taking Will’s picture, and Will obliged him, though he didn’t like it. He stood in a formal pose, next to a broken plaster column and an urn. He was surrounded by spirits, Jolly and Lewy Greeley and even Sam, who stood away from him, but still within the picture. Gob developed the picture himself, mounted it as an ambrotype, and then presented it to Will.
“Ah, you’re a professional,” Will said. It was a good picture. He looked like a big hulking fool, with his sleepy, stupid gaze and his slack idiot’s mouth: Gob had captured him. There were no spirits in the picture, but they clustered around Will to look at it, as if expecting to find themselves in the glass.
Just as the day ended, they went up to the roof. Will had never shown the glass house to anyone, because he had no friends with which to share any secrets, least of all a peculiar monument to death, a greenhouse fit for the cultivation of fat white tombflowers. But he thought it would interest Gob, because pictures fascinated him, and because death fascinated him. And Jolly pointed urgently at Gob, at the stairs, at Gob again, and made sweeping motions with his hands, as if to shoo the both of them up to the roof.
“You’re a builder, too,” Gob said when he saw it. It was a warm Sunday in February. The last night’s snow had been melting all day off the glass house, so it looked clean and fresh and wet. Gob reached out with his hand, running his finger from plate to plate. A crowd of spirits gathered, between eyeblinks, to watch him. “May I go in?” Gob asked.
“Certainly,” Will said. Then he thought how it might change Gob as it had changed him, and he said, “Wait, it could hurt you.”
“I’m sure it won’t,” Gob said, and he went into the house. Will put it down to a trick of the setting sun, how yellow light flashed inside. Spirits were all around them. They joined hands to circle the house, and then they danced around it, first one way, and then the other. Will had never seen them all so happy. Even ever-angry Frenchy was happy, even Sam was smiling and dancing. Only the angel boy didn’t dance. He perched on the top of the house, blowing his bugle at the sun.
Did it follow, Will wondered, that if you could see them you ought to be able to hear them, too? What logic governed such interaction? He could hear the cannon still sounding, still deafening, still waking him every so often from sleep. Often it was just Frenchy standing watch over his bed. Sometimes he had a plate with him, one upon which pictures flashed like the images from a magic lantern. Will saw the faces of strangers, night landscapes, scenes of the war, a shack on a hill with a decaying orchard behind it, a dark thick wood at twilight. Frenchy would point at the images and talk, wearing the same expression as when he’d been Will’s living instructor, an angry, impatient look that very often got screwed up into a raging scowl as he yelled and yelled.
“I can’t hear you,” Will would say, when Frenchy worked himself into a fury. “But it suits you, sir, this quietness. I think it has made you likable, dear Frenchy.” This made him angrier, but Will, grumpy anyhow at being woken, felt compelled to tease him. “Dear, meek Frenchy. Quiet as a mouse!”
Will stood on Fifth Avenue, looking up at Number 1 East Fifty-third Street, wondering if his friend could really live in this enormous house. Gob had invited him for supper, reciprocating, Will supposed, the invitation to Brooklyn. “We’ll eat,” Gob said, “and then I’ll show you something.”
It was only a day since Gob had stumbled weeping out of the glass house. Will had caught him by the shoulders and said, “I knew it! It’s hurt you to go in there.” But Gob said he was crying tears of joy, and then he hurried off, saying only that he had work to do.
Gob opened the door, looking exhausted but very happy. “My friend!” he said. “There you are!” He clapped Will on the back and drew him inside. It was the finest house that Will had ever seen, though very dirty. There were three reception rooms and two drawing rooms, with what must have been five hundred mirrors hanging on all their high walls. In the dining room there was a table four times as long as Will was himself. There was a meal already set up: soup, corn, green peas, cabbage, beets, puddings and pies, a salad of dandelion greens, pork with stewed apples, steak with peaches, salt fish with onions, coffee and wine and cold root beer. Gob played with his food, arranging it in patterns on his plate, but not eating much. “I’m never hungry when I’ve been working,” he explained. Will waited for Gob to speak of the glass house, to tell him what had happened inside, but he said nothing of it. Will had been ready, when Gob came out, to make a confession to him: I see spirits or I fear I’m insane, and he had hoped, he knew now, that Gob would say, Oh yes, those pesky spirits. They’re everywhere! It would be so pleasant, so unburdening, to share the affliction. But Gob gave no sign of seeing the spirits. As Will had approached Manhattan on the ferry, they’d run like children, leaning dangerously over the rails, pointing excitedly at the churning water. When Gob opened the door, they’d swarmed into his house like yokels bustling to get into Barnum’s. Now, they sported everywhere in the room. Sam stood by the table, looking sadly at a pudding, not a foot from Gob’s elbow.
Will sighed. Since Gob was not forthcoming, he would be rude. Gob was talking about how long ago, with Dr. Wood looking on, he’d removed a tumor from the jaw of Emily McNee, the Sozodont dentifrice heiress. He was praising her teeth when Will interrupted.
“What did you see, there in my little house?”
“Ah,” Gob said, smiling and passing a hand over his eyes. “What did I see?”
“Yes,” said Will. “That’s what I asked.”
“What did you see?”
“I saw nothing,” Will said, “but now I see … spirits. There. I’ve said it. Sir, I think it cost me my sanity to go into that place.”
“Spirits!” Gob said, and Will thought at first that he was angry. He put his face in his hands, and his voice was plaintive. “I wish I saw them! I wish I did. But that comfort is denied me.”
“Comfort? You don’t think,” Will said, “that such visions are manufactured by a sick mind?”
Gob raised his head and gave Will a scornful look. “You insult my mother,” he said. Will did not know whether or not to apologize, because now Gob was laughing, louder and louder, and pounding his fist on the table so forcefully that plates danced and glasses tipped.
“Come along,” Gob said, when he had calmed some. “Let’s have the rest of the tour.” He took Will’s arm and walked with him. In the parlors, there were marble-topped tables, armchairs and sofas of black lacquered wood inlaid with mother-of-pearl. There were rugs two and three deep on the floor, stained in the corners but otherwise bright and beautiful. And there were books everywhere, stacked on tables or furniture, or against the walls. Will picked one up at random. It was dusty and smelled of mold, but the binding was rich leather, and the title stood out in gold on the spine: The Dove of Archytas.
“Of course,” said Gob. “You’d like to see the library, wouldn’t you?”
That room took up most of the second and third floors. They climbed a spiral staircase to the iron mezzanine and looked down at the floor, where a score of grandfather clocks, all run down and silent, were set randomly around the room, among golden armillary spheres and dusty overstuffed chairs.
“My master liked clocks,” Gob said.
“You mean your late uncle?” Will asked. “Dr. Oetker?” At Bellevue, Dr. Oetker had had a reputation for brilliance. Will had heard that he had made a fortune catering to the ills of fashionable and unfashionable society.
“He was not my uncle. But he admired a good clock. He’d ask me sometimes, ‘Who is the god of the future?’”
“Professor Morse?” said Will. Gob laughed.
“That answer would have gotten you a slap.”
“What was the answer, then?”
Gob was silent for a moment, and then he said, “I don’t like clocks. It used to be my job to care for them, but since he died I’ve been, as you can see, on holiday. Onward and upward.”
He took Will out of the library, and they went down halls that were increasingly, in the upper levels of the house, littered with little pieces of machinery. Gears and struts and cranks and cylinders, they lay in the halls, or they were piled in the guest bedrooms and parlors. In one room, empty of furniture except for a magnificent bed whose mahogany posts were carved with laurel and acanthus leaves, Gob was reunited with a friend. “My aeolipile!” he said, speaking of a tall bronze globe, decorated with a figure of the wind—a gleeful face with pursed lips and puffed cheeks. It was obviously broken, cracked at the bottom and looking as if it were missing parts. “I made this when I was a child,” he said to Will, putting his arms around it and hugging it to him. “I haven’t seen it for years.”
Gob’s bedroom was on the fifth floor. “Lots of stairs,” Will said, “to climb every night.”
Gob shrugged. There were two doors off the hall at the top of the house. One was made of wood, the other iron. The iron door was open, rusted on its hinges so when Will stumbled against it it moaned horribly. He peered inside and saw the gray shapes of dead trees, lit up by weak moonlight falling through a dirty glass roof. “Not in there,” Gob said, pulling Will away and opening the wooden door. This was the neatest place in the house. There was a blue skylight in the ceiling, and a second iron door in the wall on the far side of the room.
“Don’t stand there,” Gob said. Will had stepped into a circle of stone, set incongruously in the wood floor.
“Sorry,” Will said, because a look of extreme displeasure had passed over his friend’s face. He walked out of the circle, and Gob smiled again.
“Now I will show you my house,” he said.
“I think you just did,” Will said, misunderstanding. Gob opened the second iron door in the far side of the room and they entered a place crowded with spirits and machinery. It looked like the pack-hole of some industrious squirrel, one that robbed factories instead of trees. There were gears of all sizes, great tangles of cable, stacks of lumber and steel plates, and underneath an ornate gaselier an assemblage that Will knew must be a machine of some sort, though he had never seen anything like it. Some spirits were caressing it, others milled happily about the room, gazing at pieces of matériel like fascinated gallery-goers.
“What is it?” Will asked, pointing to the machine.
“A combination,” Gob said, “of resistant bodies so arranged that by their means the mechanical forces of nature can be compelled to do work accompanied by certain determinate motions. It’s an engine. My house, you see, like your house.”
Will looked at it, his hands in fists at his sides. It seemed familiar and wonderful, and horrible, too, in the same way his glass house was horrible. “Are you compelled to build it?” Will asked. Gob grabbed him roughly by the shoulders, and Will thought he would eject him from the room, but instead he embraced him, crushing him with his little arms, crying happy tears again and saying, “Oh Will, oh my good friend, you understand me. You are a builder, too.”
There was another spirit, initially as furtive as the others were bold, and the only female. She flitted outside Will’s window, or she hid in the shadow of an alley at night, and he’d only catch a glimpse of her as he passed by. She was different because she was shy, and because she looked to be a complete angel. He’d groaned when he saw her. Somehow it was bearable to see a half angel. It did not bode the same ill for one’s mind or one’s equanimity. But she was entire. There was no missing her strange wings, her great height and fine green robes that looked to be hewn out of malachite, or the spots of green light that floated around her head like a crown of emeralds. She had strange wings and strange eyes. They were the darkest eyes Will had ever seen, flat and black as if someone had gouged them out and filled up the sockets with ink. Her wings were white and not made of feathers but tiny things like fingers or the beard of a cuttlefish.
One night he woke, not at the sound of the cannon, but because a cat was screaming on his roof. He lay with his eyes closed, thinking the animal might have become trapped in the glass house. When he opened his eyes the spirit was there, kneeling by his bed and leaning over him, so close he thought she might kiss him. She opened her mouth, and then she fled. Not a moment later, the little angel boy arrived, looking furious, stomping silently around the room. He turned to Will and shook his finger at him.
It was the last question Will would have asked, what the machine would do. He might not ever have known, if Gob hadn’t volunteered the answer. He had never known what the glass house would do—he’d just built it. He assumed that Gob, too, was building in ignorance of ultimate function. But Gob told him, standing in his workshop, the purpose he meant for his machine to accomplish, and it did not seem so terribly insane. Or it seemed properly insane, to build a machine to abolish death. Only the most reasonable of lunatics could devote his life to something so sensible and worthwhile, to put aside all other work and devote himself to this ultimate concern. “Will you help me, Will?” Gob had asked. “I mean to lick death, but I can’t do it alone. Will you help me win?” Jolly and Sam were standing on either side of Will, and their lips seemed to be moving in the same manner as Gob’s, asking the same question.
“What can I do?” Will had asked, because it seemed to him that he could do nothing. He confessed that he had built the glass house from blind, ignorant compulsion. He wasn’t an engineer or a mechanic. He did not understand steam power or aeolipiles or how steel was different from iron. But Jolly was jumping up and down, pointing to himself and at Sam, as if to suggest that they would help him.
Will waved his hand at all the parts and pieces around the room, at the machine under the gaselier. “I don’t understand any of this. I don’t know how to use such things, or how to make them.”
When Will said this, Gob only smiled wider. “I’ll teach you, my friend,” he said. “And then we’ll build together.”
“Sam,” Will said, “why don’t you come over here and sit with me?” Every so often he’d set two chairs by the big window over Fulton Street, sit down in one, and pat the other invitingly. “It’s nice on a cold day,” he said to his brother, “to sit in the sun and look out on the snow and the people bundled in their coats and think how you’re warm. Come and sit for a while. We’ll just be quiet together.” He patted again, gestured with both his hands, but Sam only stood on the far side of the room and eyed him warily. He shook his head as if to remind Will that he was a spirit, that he couldn’t feel such pleasures as warm sunlight, couldn’t touch the glass to marvel at how cold it was. Or else he shook his head just to say I will not sit with you, to say I do not know you, to say you are not any more my friend now than you were when I lived.
“I used to hate liquor,” said Will, taking a sip from the big flask of brandy he and Gob carried with them in the ambulance. On a cold spring day in 1868, Gob drove them hurriedly through a light snow to Number 344 East Thirty-second Street, where a lady had been shot by her deranged sister. Gob had finished his two terms of lectures. Those and his long apprenticeship with Dr. Oetker were enough to earn him his diploma from Bellevue. He might have become a house physician, but chose instead to enter the newly established ambulance service. Will, though he hadn’t yet earned his diploma, and wouldn’t until he’d completed another term, joined Gob in the ambulance, which had lamps placed on the sides and a reflector attached to the roof. The word “ambulance” was emblazoned on all sides, but this did not stop Gob from yelling at anyone who blocked their way, “Can’t you see this is an ambulance?”
The calls came in by telegraph from the police headquarters. The job was always exciting, especially at night. When they were working, Gob and Will slept in a room over the ambulance stables, a bell above their bed. When it rang it also caused a weight to fall which lit the gas. They would stumble around, blinking in the light, grabbing for their coats, and then rush to the ambulance. The harness, saddle, and collar were suspended from the ceiling, and dropped into place automatically at the sound of the alarm. Not more than two minutes ever passed between the time the bell sounded and the time they rushed out of the stable.
Will handed the flask at Gob, who declined it, saying they would not have enough when they got to their patient. In a box beneath the seat were blankets and splints, tourniquets and bandages. They had a straitjacket and a stomach pump and a copy of Gross’s Hints on the Emergencies of Field, Camp, and Hospital Practice. They had a medicine chest with emetics and antidotes and morphine. They never failed to lack something, however, when they arrived at the scene of misfortune.
Will put his hand out to catch the swirling snow as they sped along down Broadway. This was their third call of the day. Earlier, a junk dealer had been crushed by her own cart when it tipped and fell on her at the foot of Roosevelt Street. Before that, a woman getting off the rear platform of a Third Avenue horsecar had been run over by a sleigh. Both those patients had lived.
The gunshot woman died cursing her sister, though they cared for her wound as best they were able, covering it with lint saturated in balsam of Peru, and enlarging the exit wound so it could drain properly. Back at Bellevue, they saw her set up in a bed in Ward 26, and made her comfortable with brandy and morphine. Will wrote down her last words, Damn you Sally. He had a collection of those. He wrote them in inch-high letters on fine creamy white paper: Is it over?; Do you hear the pretty music?; I would rather live; No; What help are you?; Tell my horse I love her.
When they were not at the ambulance house, they were at Gob’s house. So far, Will had made what seemed to him to be merely decorative contributions to the construction. He tied last words to strings and hung them from the body of the machine, or he fixed death masks to it, and Gob made a fuss over Will’s efforts, like a doting, overpraising parent. Will felt ignorant and useless, but his education had begun in earnest. He had thought Gob had a masterful knowledge of medicine, but now he was coming to believe that he had a masterful knowledge of everything.
One day in April, he had Will follow him through the house with a wheelbarrow. Gob took books from where they lay and threw them in. “Oh yes,” he’d say, picking up a volume, “you had better be familiar with this, if we are going to make any progress.” Each title was more dismaying to Will than the last: Optics, Acoustics, Thermotics, Stability of Structures, Intellectual and Ethical Philosophy, Higher Geodesy, Analytical Geometry of Three Dimensions, Calculus of Variations. Then there was all the Aristotle: eight books on physics, four on meteors, thirteen on metaphysics, two on generation and destruction. “What am I forgetting?” Gob asked as they stood in the library, the wheelbarrow already overflowing. He looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, “Of course, the Renaissance Magi!” He scurried around the room, plucking books from the shelves. Will looked at the authors’ names, men of whom he had never heard, books that looked to be a hundred years old or more. Paracelsus and Nettesheim and Della Porta, Albertus Magnus and Mirandola and Dr. Dee, Gob tossed them about without a care for their ancient bindings and brittle pages.
“You will learn!” Gob kept saying, but days spent reading about Determinative Mineralogy or the Seven Names of God made Will suspect that Gob’s faith was misplaced. He would put his face between his knees and have a spell of worry. “It’s too hard, Jolly,” he’d say, because Jolly was always leaning over his shoulder when he read. Jolly would shake his head and smile and wag his finger, as if to scold him for his despair. Will took to reading in the glass house. Inside, it was pleasant and warm in the spring, but he went in even after summer came, and sweat ran off his nose to drum on the pages of Della Porta’s Celestial Physiognomy, because it seemed to him that his brain was more agile in there, and it restored some of his faith in himself, since it was proof that he could, after all, build something.
It was in the glass house that Will got what he considered to be his first good idea. He was struggling with a simple book of algebra, wearing nothing but his pants because it was so hot. Sometimes when he got frustrated he would abuse Gob’s precious books. Usually he would imagine a face for them, a mocking face embossed on the leather cover, with a snide mouth that he would punch and punch until his fist ached. He did that for a while, staining the leather with his sweaty hand, and finally threw it against a wall of the house, where it knocked out a plate that fell on the rooftop but miraculously did not break. He took up the book gently (he was always kind and loving to them after he abused them) and went outside. He picked up the plate and considered it, and holding the book in one hand and the plate in the other, he had his idea. Jolly stepped up from behind him, shivering with excitement. He seemed to know what Will was thinking. Will closed his eyes and imagined a great shield of negative plates that could be placed over the engine, with a bright light positioned above them, so that they rained down images on it, filling it with lost lives.
Will thought it was a bug hurrying across his cheek. They came out of his walls in the summer, fat black moist-looking things that he doused with acid to kill them. Sometimes they crawled on him while he was sleeping, but when he woke he saw that the tickling pressure on his face was not from little feet but from a wing. She moved them just like fingers, the not-feathers. The angel looked earnestly into his face, closed her eyes, and trembled as if with a sob. Her wings made a noise like broken glass shaken in a bag. She opened her mouth again, and to Will’s great surprise, words came out of it.
“Creature,” she said, “why do you participate in abomination?”
In August, Will got another invitation to dinner, this one from Gob’s mother, Mrs. Woodhull, who was recently arrived in New York. She’d set up her house in Great Jones Street, not with her son. “I wouldn’t let her live with me,” Gob said, when Will asked why she didn’t stay in Fifth Avenue. “Not in ten thousand years.”
“Is she a difficult person?” Will asked, thinking of his own difficult mama.
“Yes. And she is always surrounded by difficult people. But you can judge her for yourself tonight. Oh, yes. I like that. My friend, you are a genius of building!” They were installing the images over the engine. Gob had jumped up and down and hugged himself when Will showed up at his friend’s house with a rented cart full of plates.
“I like it too,” Will said. They were hot and filthy from their work. Now the machine would shelter under a giant flower of picture negatives. It was late in the day, but the sky was still bright outside, and the plates they’d installed were gently lit.
“We need a brighter light,” Gob said. “Maybe the brightest light ever.”
They kept working until it was almost time for dinner. Will might have kept going and going with it—he was filled with the same feeling as when he’d built the glass house, a mixture of trepidation and certainty, because he knew he must build but feared what he was building—but he noticed the time and excused himself to go home and change his clothes. He was an hour late when he arrived at Number 17 Great Jones Street. A man fully as big as Will, but fatter and hairier, opened the door.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“I’ve been invited to dinner,” Will said, thinking the man must be a servant because he smelled like a stable.
“Not by me,” the man said. He made to shut the door in Will’s face, but before he could do that, a lovely red-haired woman came up behind him, scolding and pinching him. He yelped just like a dog and stood aside.
“I know you are Dr. Fie,” said the lady. “Please come in, and do not mind my rude brother.”
“Not a doctor yet, ma’am. Are you Mrs. Woodhull?” Will asked, though this lady looked too young to be Gob’s mother.
“Her sister.” She said her name was Tennie C. Claflin, spelling it for him. She took for herself the flowers he’d brought for the hostess, a summer bouquet of daisies and violets. She put one of each in her hair and kissed Will on the cheek. This made him blush and veer towards a fit, though what she excited was not his sympathy.
“Push her off now or she’ll slobber on you all night long,” the brother said, then shuffled away down the hall.
“Come along,” Miss Claflin said. “Everyone is waiting to meet Gob’s good friend. Our Gob! Lost to us for so long, but now we are together again. He tells me you see spirits.”
Will opened his mouth but did not speak. He felt more faint, and hotter. He stumbled over a man’s boot left carelessly in the hall. Miss Claflin kept him from falling.
“Was it a secret? Forgive him for telling it. There are no secrets in this family. And don’t worry that we’ll think less of you. I see them too, you know, as does my sister. You are like us, sir. Hello! Here we are, everybody! Here is Dr. Fie!”
They’d come to the dining room, where a crowd of people was gathered around a worn oak table. Gob was sitting with another beautiful lady who Will guessed must be his mama. She had dark hair, and wore a fine purple dress, and Gob was her very image. There was another aunt, less friendly than Miss Tennie C. Claflin, this one called Utica. Her eyes—they all had the same eyes, a shade of blue so dark it almost seemed purple—were hooded, Will could tell, from too much laudanum. There was a shriveled-up old woman who looked as if she might be some clever making of Gob’s, an effigy of nutshells and bark, but with those same voracious blue eyes. She was his grandmother, and like Gob she lacked the smallest finger of her left hand. There were three men—an old one-eyed fellow who looked like the Devil, the big hairy one who’d answered the door, and finally another man with elaborate whiskers and brown eyes. They were introduced as Buck Claflin, Uncle Malden, and Colonel Blood, Gob’s stepfather.
Colonel Blood shook Will’s hand, but the other men ignored him. Miss Claflin sat him down between herself and drunken Utica. Then the family proceeded to feast. Grandma Anna brought out bowls full of peas and potatoes, and plates heaped with lamb chops. There was a diversity of manners among them. Miss Claflin and Mrs. Woodhull and Gob and Colonel Blood ate primly and talked in low voices, but the others ate with hand and knife, and shouted. Buck and Malden fought over a chop.
“We have been all through the western states,” Miss Claflin said to him, turning the conversation to herself and her family after asking many prying questions about Will. “We gathered gold and golden opinions wherever we went. And we gathered up the Colonel, too. He comes from St. Louis, where he consulted with Vicky for the sake of his wife, who suffers terribly with a condition I am not at liberty to discuss. Vicky is a clairvoyant healer, you see. And in that regard I am not myself without power. But when she saw the Colonel, Vicky fell into a trance, and the spirits of the air spoke through her, betrothing them on the spot. Then he came along with us.”
“A rash man,” said Will.
“He’s a hero. He has got six bullets in his body. And do you think it rash when one magnet comes together with another, as nature has decreed that they must? Is a river rash because it flows from a high place to a low one? Is it rash of the sea to yearn towards the moon? He only did what he must. Now, do you really think he is rash?”
Before Will could speak, Gob’s mother raised her voice above all the others. She had been talking excitedly at Gob, pausing every now and then to embrace him. He suffered her hugs with an expression of perfect neutrality.
“All these years of wandering and wondering. The beautiful Greek has at last revealed his name to me. It is Demosthenes. Do you know what that means?”
“That’s Vicky’s spirit guide,” Miss Claflin whispered. “He is her mentor and her constant companion.”
“I don’t,” said Gob.
“It means that all my waiting is over!” Mrs. Woodhull said. “Now, now it can begin! Close your eyes, darling.” Mrs. Woodhull sat in her son’s lap and put her hands over his eyes. “There, don’t you see them? Don’t you see the great things that are coming?” Will closed his eyes, because everyone else was doing it, and saw the angel in his mind, and thought how her hair was red like Miss Claflin’s, and how, even as she had asked him again why he participated in abomination, he cherished lascivious thoughts of her.
“It’s another sign,” said Mrs. Woodhull, “that you’ve returned to your family. Isn’t it so good to be together again, all of us? Now we’ll all be together forever. Come, everybody! Come and embrace our sweet lost sheep!” Miss Claflin hurried down to the other end of the table and threw her arms around Gob. “I could squeeze you till you pop!” she declared. Blood put his hero’s arms around him, and Anna slipped her withered stick-limbs around his belly. Utica knelt down and clutched his leg, overcome suddenly with emotion and drunkenness. She wept against his pants. Big Malden put his long arms around them all and squeezed. Buck sauntered down and made as if to walk by the affectionate heap. He stopped and considered it for a moment. Then Will thought he would join the embrace, but instead Buck turned and backed his ass into the great lump of bodies.
Gob had disappeared entirely, and Will did not know if he should join them or quietly slip away. They chattered and squeezed and writhed and cried, and began to quarrel among themselves, saying, “You are squeezing too hard,” or “Let me have a grab at him, hog!” Buck was cruel to Utica, calling her a whore and saying that the only thing worth a damn in her had been her virginity, and wasn’t it a shame how she had ruined that herself with a carrot when she was eleven? Then Mrs. Woodhull’s clear strong voice rose up, saying would you blame a vegetable for your own hungry sin?
“Come along, Will,” said Gob, who was suddenly next to him. How he had escaped from his family, Will could not tell. They slipped away from the pile as it degenerated into individual quarrels. The grandmother called Colonel Blood a corrupter and a schweinehund, and attacked him with a potato.
“I’m sorry,” Gob said, when they were outside in the twilight on Great Jones Street. “They’re a rough bunch.”
There was a spirit, a young fellow dressed up in the fetching uniform of a Zouave, who made a habit of staring at Will, then scribbling on a pad of paper the same size as the plate which Frenchy always carried with him. Will thought the soldier must be taking notes on his behavior, in order to tattle to whatever otherworldly ministry exists to register such transgressions. Will only discovered that the spirit was not taking notes, but drawing a picture, when he was finally shown the finished piece. “Who are you, anyhow?” Will demanded, because he did not like the portrait, in which he was naked, and possessed of an embarrassment of stiff, dripping organs of procreation. They stuck out from him like quills on a porcupine. In twenty arms he held a variety of bottles, each one containing, he was sure, some foul liquor. “Did I commission this insult?” Will asked and looked away from the picture. He would have liked never to look at it again, but the spirit would put it in his way, so he’d have no choice but to see it where it hung on a stage, or in the hospital wards, or on a Broadway streetlamp where thousands of people passed it in a day, but did not know it was there.
“It’s very warm in here,” said Miss Claflin. “Is it always so warm?” She had arrived unexpectedly, and now was in Will’s studio sitting for a carte de visite. He’d answered the door in his shirtsleeves because he’d thought she was Gob, come over for another load of negative plates. “I’m here for my portrait,” she’d said, as if he had invited her. He’d hurried to dress himself properly while she poked about the studio, choosing a setting for her portrait, just a plain chair in which she sat sideways.
“You mustn’t talk, Miss Claflin.”
“Call me Tennie,” she said. “I insist upon it, and I won’t tell you again.” She was wearing a heavy-looking yellow dress, with a dark red wrap of silk thrown over her shoulders, hiding her arms and her hands, and her hair was coiffed up formidably on her head like a great pair of ram’s horns. Her oval face was aglow with perspiration.
“Hold still your head, Miss Tennie, or else your face will be all a blur.” Will thought of Frenchy’s blond hospital boy, with his blurred, cursing mouth. Tennie held still, and stared unblinking at Will, so he felt not at all hidden behind the lens and under the hood. But she was oblivious to the spirits around her. So much for her claim that she too, saw them, Will thought. Sam and Lewy Greely and Jolly walked around her, all of them peering and gawking as if they’d never seen a pretty lady before. Frenchy stood close by the camera, scolding. Will exposed the negative, counting out fifteen seconds, then put the cap back on. “I’ll return,” he said, and left to develop the plate. He found he was breathless, waiting just the few moments as he poured the developer down the plate. Then her image was there, ghostly and reversed. He went up to the roof to make the print in the sun, then came back to the darkroom to tone and fix it. A half hour passed before she was represented to his satisfaction, as pretty and bold in the picture as she was in real life.
“I think you’ll be pleased,” he said as he came out of the darkroom. “I think,” he continued, but then he quite forgot what he was going to say. Tennie C. Claflin had taken off her clothes and sat dressed only in her hairdo, in the very same pose as before, with her head still stuck quite securely in the stand. Her clothes seemed to have melted off her like spun sugar in a hot rain. All the spirits had fled, except Jolly, who had retreated against a wall, where he turned his face towards the ceiling but his eyes towards the lady.
“It’s warm, Dr. Fie,” Ms. Claflin said. “It’s so terribly warm.”
“Do you remember your first time?” she asked him.
“No,” Will said, turning in the bed so she could not see his face. “Not really.” But he remembered it clearly. It was not three days after he’d finished the glass house. He’d been walking on Broadway, followed by spirits. It was early in the night, but the prostitutes were already swarming. It had always been his habit, when they gestured at him, or when they called out something rude about his size, to ignore them. But this time, when one waved him after her down Grand Street, he followed. “Are you lost?” she asked when he approached. She stood just beyond the reach of a streetlamp, so a little light fell on her dress and her neck and her hair, but none on her face.
“Probably,” Will said. His stomach was all knotted up, the way it had always been during a hot fight, and just like then he felt quite certain that he had no say in his actions. His feet were walking after this bad woman like his eye and his hand had conspired to shoot his enemy, and when he had her against a damp wall in an alley, it was as terrible and inevitable as having the life of a Reb. He raised her dress up over her head, and the delicate but filthy material caught on her snaggly teeth as she smiled at him.
“I was seven years old,” Tennie said excitedly.
“An early start,” Will said, glad she could not see the dismay on his face.
“Vicky started even earlier. I was in Pennsylvania. Mama and Papa had sent me off to live with relatives, because we were so poor. Aunt Sally’s fruit spoke to me from the cupboard. ‘We are for you!’ they said. ‘Come in and have us!’ There were some wormy apples on the table, so I asked, ‘Aunt, where have you hid all the good fruit?’ She called me her darling and said the apples were the best she had, but I walked to the cupboard and I showed her. It was my sister Thankful, still a little girl as she was when she died, who spoke in the voice of a peach and called to me from the cupboard. After that, I heard her and saw her always. Wasn’t it that way with you? Some spirit you loved sought you out, and then you saw others?”
“No,” said Will. “I saw them all at once.”
“Well,” she said. “Why should it be the same for everybody? Oh, there she is now! There’s my Thankful!”
“I don’t see her,” Will said.
“You wouldn’t. She is only for me and Vicky to see.”
“Does she speak?”
“Faintly. She is saying, ‘I heard you talking of me.’”
Tennie began to have a one-sided conversation, talking of a place called Homer and agreeing that the orchard there had the sweetest apples ever. As she spoke, she seemed to forget Will, though she had him clasped firmly in her arms. Her conversation became a sleepy mumble, until finally she fell quiet. Will felt her twitch a few times. He lay awake as spirits came to visit, a procession of them like shepherds and animals passing by the sacred crib, gazing down on him and his lady acquaintance and smiling. He thought the angel would come again to scold him. She never did arrive, but long after all the other spirits had gone, the boy with the trumpet remained, hunched up in a corner of the ceiling.
“Avaunt,” Will said, to no effect.
The boy shook his head and blinked slowly, and Will fell asleep with him still up there, staring down.