BY MAY OF 1862 IT SEEMED TO MACI TRUFANT THAT MADNESS had become the national pastime, and that her parents had only performed a civic duty by losing their minds. Her mother went insane first, slowly and with considerable subtlety in the first months of her decline; she had a growing fascination with beans. Initially, she praised them for being shapely and nutritious—strange comments, but Maci figured her mother had read an article on beans in one of her weeklies. When she insisted the cook serve them up with increasing frequency, Maci assumed her mother was dabbling again in Dr. Graham’s tasteless diet. But, little by little, beans came to dominate her mother’s life. She celebrated them to the neglect of her husband and children. She sought to make herself pure, eating no food but beans, and so she died.
Maci had flipped desperately through her uncle’s medical books, not trusting him when he said he had no remedy for his sister’s bean-madness. Now, Maci hated beans. For many months, she had flung them from her plate if some grossly insensitive person served them to her. Lately she had eaten them again. They were ashes in her mouth but they were what she and her father could afford. His own madness had driven them into desperate financial straits, and it did not come delicately.
It fell on him like a swooping bird. Maci imagined it, bird-shaped and screeching, falling down on his head to muss his hair into an ageless madman style. Not long after his wife’s funeral, he was in his study writing letters thanking people for their kind sympathies when his hand began suddenly to write of its own accord a letter to him from his dead wife: My darling, I never was not, nor will I ever cease to be. We travel from ever to ever and time is only a span between eternities. You will be called to do a great work. I am watching you with love.
One day he was a bereaved Universalist minister admired for his antislavery stance and his charitable work in prisons (people called him “the Prisoner’s Friend”); the next he was a fledgling Spiritualist prophet. Within months, he was declaring himself the Apostle of Precision, delegate on earth of an Association of Beneficents who spoke to him from a place that was not quite Heaven. Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Murray all spoke through his hand. With growing discomfort, and finally dread, Maci was introduced to the mortal Apostles of Devotion, Harmony, Freedom, Education, Treasures, and Accumulation. Some were men and some were women. They all had a look in their eyes which Maci could only call deranged.
She watched them milling in the parlor of their house on Mount Vernon Street and felt a seething anger. Several times, Maci threw as many out as she could before her father discovered her and called her rude. She pleaded with him to stop all this, but he would take her in his arms and explain that the very Chairman of the General Assembly of Beneficents had called on him to carry out the greatest work yet attempted by man. He would build a living machine, an engine whose product would be not energy but peace. He would call it the Wonderful Infant.
Her brother, Rob, was gone. He’d fled at the beginning of their father’s decline, after many arguments, and a final one when he’d struck their father on the head and knocked him out. “I hoped he’d be sensible when he came to,” he told his sister. “But he started jabbering about electritizers and elementizers as soon as he could speak.” Rob left to live with their mother’s family, and then he went to war. Maci resisted their entreaties to join them.
“Your situation is so peculiar,” said her Aunt Amy, a plain woman fond of elaborate dresses.
“I must stay with my father,” said Maci. She’d been so certain of that, speaking to Aunt Amy’s pale fat face. It had made her serene, somehow, to embrace this obligation. Her father was her first friend, the man who had shaped her mind and her heart. But now she doubted, and her loyalty to him was a source of agitation rather than comfort. He had spent them broke on matériel for his engine and on contributions to the Panfederacy of Apostles. They lost their house in Boston and Maci found herself losing things which were precious to her, not just dresses and jewelry, but dreams. Her father had always talked of launching her off to college when she turned sixteen. But she was called back from Miss Polk’s School for Young Ladies to help tend to her mother, her sixteenth birthday came and went, and when Maci left Boston, it wasn’t for college. They moved to the wilderness of Rhode Island, where electrical and spiritual forces were favorable to the Infant’s construction. Maci hadn’t thought there was any wilderness left in Rhode Island. She had thought it must surely be filled with people who had fled, for one reason or another, from Boston. She imagined them, dissenters all, packed cheek by jowl from Providence to the coast. But this place was empty, just their lonely cottage and the shed on the cliff, the nearest neighbor nearly a mile away, across a saltwater pond at the bottom of a hill behind the house. Various Apostles came and visited them, sometimes bringing parts for the machine.
The porch in front of the house leaned precipitously, and the steps were crooked. When Maci walked from one side to the other, she worried it might pitch her headlong over the cliff and onto the rocks below. Standing carefully on the porch, she listened to the noise of the sea and the noise of her father hammering in the shed, which came together to give her a creeping sense of doom. When she covered her ears with her hands, she could hear the beating of her anxious heart, which she sometimes imagined to be the quick footsteps of voracious madness, hurrying to claim her. Her mother and father had gone insane. Rob had rushed to join a regiment of Zouaves with an alacrity and fearlessness that spoke of a weakness of sanity if not an absolute absence thereof. Maci expected to be the next to lose her mind. At least it would happen here, where no one would notice and she would stand out less in company than in Boston, where her family’s shame would be completed with the departure of her faculties. Would she eat beans exclusively? By July, they’d eaten themselves out of beans, but Maci had a basket of cranberries in the kitchen, and she had noticed a previously unappreciated beauty in the small forms, nestled together in a mound, very pretty in the morning sun that poured through the drafty window. Would these cranberries dominate her fancy? Or would she build something impossible, perhaps a flying machine to sail over the cliff and into Block Island Sound? A gin that separates emotions in a confused mood? A cloud buster?
Maci walked gingerly down the steps, then went around the house and down the hill to the rotting dock that jutted out into the pond. She got in a little boat and took up the oars. “Poppy!” she called out towards the shed. “I’m going out!” There came a pause in the hammering, but no answer. She began to row out towards the neighbor’s house, where she would beg flour. She had plans for her lovely cranberries.
A few days later Maci gnawed on one of her flat, greasy cranberry biscuits as she read a letter from her brother.
Our route from Roanoke Island to Norfolk took us through Croatan Sound and the North River, to the Elizabeth River by way of the Great Dismal Swamp. Tugs pulled us in little boats through the swamp canal—I was put in mind of you traveling hither and thither on the pond behind the Hotel de Trufant—did you write that it is called Potter’s? It was new and strange and silent in there. You ought to see such a forest of cypresses, with their gnarled roots peeking above the water, and whisks and festoons of Spanish moss clinging to the branches. There are curious holes in the roots—they look like round open mouths. I swear I heard one call my name. Sister, ought I to fear for my sanity? It was no ghost that spoke, the root did not declare itself old Uncle Philip with his listening-horn and his green teeth. Cotton-gum and sweet-bay, a curious juniper and holly, huddles of bamboo-cane: you will see that I sketched them for you. I have hidden Uncle Phil somewhere in the drawing—can you find him? Such odd birds in this place! We are all equally strangers here and no one can tell me their names. When we passed a Negro standing mysteriously by the shore I asked him the name of a small, bright thing that darted back and forth over our heads. He said, “That’s a Jesus-bird!” Not, I am certain, the proper name for the thing.
You must go back to Boston and Aunt A.
Rob ended all his letters, Cato-like, with that admonition. There was money in the envelope, two months of his second lieutenant’s salary, and there was a thick sheaf of illustrations. There were the straight columns of the cypresses, and hidden Uncle Phil, betrayed by his horn, which stuck out from a stand of bamboo. There was the Jesus-bird and the mysterious Negro; there was a boatful of Zouaves entering a patch of mist. She thought for a moment that her brother had included a sketch of himself—there was a picture of a boy with his same heavy brows and square chin—until she saw the caption written along his neck. Pvt. G. W. Vanderbilt—he is the Commodore’s son, and insists on his privatehood! He had a wide thick neck, not at all like the piece of licorice her brother balanced his head upon. Looking up from the drawings, Maci saw a blue phaeton coming up the road with its top thrown open to the warm July sun. A woman in a yellow dress was at the reins. When the carriage came near, Maci could see that she was pregnant.
“Girl,” the woman said, occasioning Maci’s instant and intense dislike, “go and fetch your master.”
Maci wrote to her brother that night, huddled at a desk wedged between her bed and the open window. A breeze lifted her hair and threatened to put out her candle.
My dear Zu-Zu,
We have got a new guest here at the Hotel Fou-Fou. Her name is Miss Arabella Suter. She rode up this morning in a pretty phaeton, and she might have been out taking a pleasure-ride if she hadn’t traveled hundreds of miles to find our sweet mad Poppy. She is unmarried but quite pregnant—six months if a day. This is not a scandal because what fills her womb is not a flesh-and-blood baby but the living principle of Poppy’s machine. I think she has got a bladder beneath her shirt, or else she is fleeing dishonor. The former is most likely. An “accidental” poke with a needle will deflate her, and then we will send her back to Philadelphia. I wonder if she is a Quaker. She does not dress like one. She is as colorful as a Jesus-bird. I shall call her the Apostle of Shame, or the Swollen Apostle. Already I detest her, but I think she will save me from becoming the Apostle of Boredom.
I will not go back to Boston but I remain your loving,
Sister.
As she wrote, Maci could hear her father and Miss Suter laughing in the front room of the cottage. He had welcomed the woman literally with open arms when Maci led her into the workshop.
“Here you are at last!” he had said, rushing to embrace her. Maci had never seen him be so familiar with any lady before, except herself and her mother. Strange that such things could still give her a shock, a wrenching feeling all along her spine, even after the many months she’d been witness to her father’s madness. “Maci,” he said, “here is that wonderful lady I spoke of!”
“Yes, Poppy,” Maci said, though he had not spoken of her before. Maci left the shed, keeping her eyes away from the glass and copper lineaments of the Infant, and went back outside to stare over the cliff. On that clear day, she could see all the way to Block Island. She undid her hair and let it blow in the wind, thinking how she must look dramatic and wild, the very picture of an incipient madwoman. She closed her eyes and wondered if it was obvious to a person when her reason departed. With no one sane to tell her she was on the decline, would she know when her madness came down upon her?
After she’d finished the letter to Rob, she got under her quilt and stared at her brother’s sketches. They covered the whole wall opposite the foot of her bed, and now they were creeping across the wall to her left. She got out of bed to put the candle on the floor, to better light them. Back under the quilt, she studied the pictures. They were a history of Rob’s time with Company A of the Ninth New York Volunteers. On the far left was an ink sketch of the regiment drilling in the Central Park—Rob had colored their coats with blue ink; their pantaloons and fezzes were red. Maci had nightmares about those red hats. When she was small, her father had told her stories of a monster who wore such a hat, who colored it with the blood of his victims. In those dreams, her brother was turned from her gentle companion into a man who sopped up the blood of his enemies with his cap, then wrung it into his mouth.
She’d posted the last picture, the sketch of Private Vanderbilt, about three feet from the corner. She rearranged herself in her bed, moving her head down where her feet usually rested. Now she could look out the window at the stars shining above the dark sea, and when she turned her head Private Vanderbilt was just in front of her. For a while she looked into his eyes, wondering that the son of such a man as crude, rich Cornelius Vanderbilt would not buy himself a captaincy, at least. Her sleepy eyes fell to his thick neck; she imagined how her two hands would not fit around it. She closed her eyes but his image hovered behind her lids. Then she opened her eyes again, and kept looking at him until her candle blew out.
When Maci was a little girl, her father had put her under such severe intellectual discipline it made her mother cry. “You’ll ruin the child!” she protested, because John Murray Trufant had declared that he would train his daughter to have a brain bigger than that wielded by Margaret Fuller, a lady who had been his friend before she departed to Italy, never again to set foot in America. “It took a whole ocean to douse her incandescent mind,” her father told Maci, “but yours will burn brighter yet.” Maci, at the age of nine, wrote a sonnet called “The Wreck of the Elizabeth,” in which the Countess Ossoli’s shining head threw light in the eyes of fishes as she died, and seagulls lamented around the body of her soggy dead child after he washed ashore.
Maci hated Greek and was bad at Latin, but reading was her passion, and her father encouraged her in it even when her over-stimulated brain manufactured nightmares to torture her sleep. He buried her in Smollett, Fielding, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Molière, among others. He made her recite to him every night before bed, and gave her stern lectures to make it clear that he expected her to grow up to be more than a creature of habit and affection. Yet that was all he expected of her anymore, since his change and his madness. It made Maci bitter enough to spit.
Miss Suter passed the pricking test. She gave a little shriek—it was very much like the cry of a gull—and leaped up in the air, seeming just for a moment to levitate over the threadbare rug of the front room.
“Forgive me!” said Maci. She was listening intently for a noise of hissing air, but there was none. Could it be a pillow? she wondered.
Miss Suter had clenched her hands over her belly. “Not to worry, my dear,” she said. She’d become quite civil once she realized Maci was not a servant. She had even offered her a few dresses, but Maci declined. The lady’s taste was as defective as her reason.
Maci sat Miss Suter down on the sofa and fetched her some tea. She felt some small regret for the poke, which ballooned into something more formidable while she sat next to her and watched the lady stare into her cup. “I want us to be friends,” Miss Suter had said a few days before. “Of course you do,” Maci had replied in a frosty tone. Now, Maci almost wished she had been more receptive.
“Are you well, Madame?” she asked.
“Of course!” said Miss Suter. “It was a surprise, more than a pain, though the prick was fairly deep. I am not bleeding. Don’t think that I am.”
“And the … principle?” asked Maci. Very slowly, she placed her hand on the lady’s belly. Miss Suter made no move to draw away. There was flesh under Maci’s palm; it gave slightly when she pushed against it.
“She is well. She is proof against such little accidents.”
“Strange,” said Maci. “I think of the Infant sometimes as my little brother. Poppy calls it a boy.”
“Yes,” said Miss Suter. “The form is masculine, but the living principle which shall animate it is feminine. A wonderful union! We live in fascinating times, my dear.”
“Some would call them terrible.”
“Oh, she kicks!” Maci felt nothing under her hand, but she smiled anyhow.
She is fleeing her shame, Maci wrote to Rob. What would Aunt Amy say? A disgraced lady in our pathetic little home. Brother, she shares his bed. I said to Poppy that I thought he was behaving very badly. He called me his sweet moppet and told me that I would lose my doubt when the Infant breathes peace into the world. At night, I go in and look at the thing while they are sleeping. Little Brother has grown considerably over the past months. I think he will outgrow his shed, soon. If he moves into the house, then truly I think I shall go back to Boston and Aunt Amy.
Rob had sent her another letter, and more sketches. Some detailed a month of camp life at Fort Norfolk (a parade ground pocked with stumps that made drill a chore; a loving portrait of his new Springfield rifle), while others depicted his progress up the James in a steamer called the C. S. Terry. There was a portrait of Private Vanderbilt with a view of Fredericksburg behind him; this went next to the other drawing. And there were drawings of which she could not make sense—a whole page filled to within an inch of the top and bottom with charcoal, a stray hand, large as life with hairy knuckles and scars on the fingers. She turned this one over and read on the back, Pvt. G. W. Vanderbilt, his hand. Then she realized that Rob was sending her a puzzle, a life-sized Vanderbilt she might put together on her wall. She assembled the pieces as best she could, building him completely down to his waist, except for a missing hand. She wondered if this was Rob’s neglect or a hideous wound. He is by turns coarse and refined, polite and boorish, Rob wrote. He says his father’s spirit sometimes posseses him. I told him my father is possessed by spirits. I think he is my friend.
There was one good thing about Miss Suter—she had money. The Infant could have alpaca booties and a silver spoon to put in his mouth after he was born, and there was no more begging for flour from the neighbors while she was there. She took Maci shopping in Kingstown, where people were shocked to see a pregnant woman out in her own carriage buying groceries and dry goods, spools of copper wire and plates of glass. Maci was sure that a mob would come stomping up the road one day soon to burn their house and smash the Infant. At least I will look presentable for them, she thought. Miss Suter was making a dress for her, patterned after one of the dresses Maci had long since sold for necessities. Maci had talked about it wistfully, and Miss Suter had got it into her head to recreate it and make a gift of it to her “dear friend.”
While her father worked in the shed, Maci would sit with Miss Suter on the porch, eating the delicious cakes, muffins, and pies that the woman manufactured with a magical lack of effort. Maci had slaved and fretted over her greasy muffins and the tooth-breaking cakes she’d thrown over the cliff in frustration. Sitting thus on the porch, nearly a month after her arrival, Miss Suter ventured a question about Maci’s mother. “She was a generous woman,” Maci said, wishing that Miss Suter would not ask such questions; she was trying to think of Miss Suter as a spirit-sent servant, figuring that turnabout to be fair play. But Miss Suter’s earnest inquiries about her mother made such pretending difficult.
“She liked hymns of all faiths,” Maci found herself saying of her mother—she would miscegenate them shamelessly. She was partial to weeklies and monthlies, and followed events in France and England. Once, when Maci was seven years old, her mother had read aloud to her an article on the toilet of Russia. At Maci’s insistence she and her mother had dressed up like Russian women. They wrapped white cloths around their head, hung themselves with furs, and pinned jewels on one another. They danced around her mother’s room, chanting nonsense and pretending it was Russian. As Maci told this story, Miss Suter laughed so hard she spilled her tea. Maci laughed, too, until she caught herself enjoying Miss Suter’s company, whereupon she stopped and looked out over the water with a stony expression on her face.
We arrived in Washington too late to participate in the latest debacle at Bull Run. Now we are camped on Meridian Hill, awaiting orders. Private Vanderbilt is itching to go deal some trouble to Lee. He has taken the invasion of Maryland as a personal affront. I fear I jeopardized our friendship when I insisted Maryland was not Yankeedom, but we are friends again, now. He has offered me his belly band against the cholera. I declined, though we are rained on incessantly, and a goat has eaten much of my overcoat. Washington is not the least bit refined.
Here is the Private’s hand for you, clenched in anger against me. Here are his hips. If I sent his legs to Aunt Amy would you go there to fetch them? Go to her, won’t you? I think you are withering in that exile.
Maci pinned the ham-fist beneath the empty sleeve. The hips were handsome, she could not help but think so, though she felt hot and embarrassed looking at them. She took them down and put them under the bed, then just as quickly returned them to the wall. She could be a little wanton, here in the privacy of her room on the edge of the world. She sat at her desk and wrote to her brother.
Miss Suter is big as a house (not big as a Boston house, but mind you they build small in these parts) and I cannot think she carries anything but a big baby boy, though she insists it is a female principle swelling in her womb. She requires my help to get up and down the stairs. Some days she is too exhausted by her condition to do anything but lie abed and read novels. Papa spends all his days and most of his nights in the shed. It would be a disaster, he says, if the Infant were not ready when the spirit is born. You may be wondering what sort of doctor will be in at the birth. I wondered that too, until Miss Suter explained to me that good Ben Franklin (the Commissioner of Electritizers, you know) will be there. Of course!
“How I hate to see the summer wane,” said Miss Suter, as Maci escorted her down a narrow dirt road, lined on either side with chokecherry and beach roses. It was September. There were still blossoms on the rosebushes, but they were limp now and wilted. Though it was a warm day, Miss Suter shivered incessantly. She stopped to admire a great congregation of ladybugs swarming over the green leaves. Miss Suter put her hand among them and laughed delightedly when they crawled on her.
“Aren’t they lovely?” she asked.
“Poppy always said a girl ought not to play with creeping things.”
“But they’re delightful. They were the friends of my youth. I would lie in my mother’s garden and they would come to me. Sometimes they quite covered me up. If I listened close, I could hear them speaking, telling me what wonderful things were coming. My spirit guide also cares for them. She’s a young Indian girl—you put me in mind of her, though of course she is woodcrafty and you are not. I think you hold your head as she does. It is very regal.”
Maci had no reply. She often lacked for things to say, on these walks, but Miss Suter did not seem offended by her silence. Indeed, Maci wondered if Miss Suter even noticed her silence. Miss Suter was full of words—they were always leaking from her—and she took every opportunity to instruct Maci in spiritual matters. “This association,” she proclaimed down on the beach, poking delicately at the cast-off shell of a horseshoe crab, “this association, the Great Association of Beneficents, will greatly, wisely, and seasonably instruct and bless the diseased, the suffering, and the wretched of the earth.”
“Tell me,” Maci said, “will they instruct suffrage for women?” Voting was something that Maci wanted very much to do. When she was small she’d imagined that voting was equivalent with wish-getting—she thought a person could go out and vote themselves a fresh peach pie or a new bonnet. It still seemed to her like a great, vast power, an opportunity to execute startling transformations. “How we will change this country,” she’d say to scoffing Rob, “when our hand is on the tiller.” Before he went insane, woman suffrage had been one of her father’s devotions.
“Unfortunately not,” said Miss Suter.
I think I envy her, Maci wrote to her brother. It must be a comfort to believe such things. To believe that Heaven is as comfortable and familiar as your own bed, and that your dog may accompany you there. To believe that the dead have organized themselves for our redemption. To believe that human folly might be dissolved in the exhalations of a good machine. To believe that our own mother might put forth her dead hand to shield you, Brother, from danger. Madness is seductive, pretty, and fat like Miss Suter, but shameful all the same.
Take care, my Zu-Zu.
In Frederick we were welcomed with the most incredible hospitality. Some good Marylanders took me into their house, where I had an honest-to-goodness real bath. I have stunk of lavender for the past three days and the boys all call me Roberta. These same Marylanders gave me lemonade to drink as I soaked in the tub, and there was no mention of the tyrant’s heel. I send you the tub and empty glass as proof of their hospitality, in case you should doubt it. Here, too, are the Private’s legs. Not long enough, I think, but I am getting short on paper.
Go to Aunt Amy.
Maci assembled Private Vanderbilt’s nether portions. The hips were made somehow more civilized by the addition of legs. He still lacked feet, and consequently seemed to float by her bedside. She put the glass of lemonade in his hand, in case he desired refreshment. The tub she put further along the wall to his left. Rob had drawn himself inside it, his arm hanging down to scrape the floor, his cheek resting on the porcelain edge, an allusion to a picture they’d seen in Paris, one thousand years ago before death and madness had smashed their family. Rob had even wrapped a turban around his head, in the drawing, in case she should be stupid and miss the obvious. It was, she decided, a horrible picture, and the first one she would not give a place on her wall. She took it down and set the edge in the candle flame, then held it by the window as it burned. When the fire was close to her fingers she let it go, and it drifted away into the dark.
M. Zu-Zu,
I did not care for your tub picture. If you send me no more like it I would consider that a kindness. Arabella Suter continues to swell. I think she must be drinking up the oceans, to swell so much. We go down to the ocean sometimes and I watch her to make sure she does not drain the Sound dry with her red mouth.
There is the horn from Block Island blowing now—a mournful sound. I think sometimes it is a lament for lost sailors, a noise that says, “Stay away from these rocks,” and “I mourn you.” On windy nights, they say, if you stand on the edge of the cliff you can hear the ghostly voices, calling, “God save a drowning man!”
Do you see how you have yellowed my mood with your tub? But for his feet, Private Vanderbilt is complete on my wall. May he guard me from sadness.
Maci’s father completed the Infant in the second week of September. “A big boy, Poppy,” she said, standing with him in the shed with Miss Suter. The Infant was a great box. The wood that had been in him was gone—that had only been scaffolding, her father said. Now, he was all glass and copper, silver filigree and iron. “Where is his mouth?” she asked. “How will he breathe?” Her father and Miss Suter laughed at her as if she were a five-year old asking why the ocean is blue.
“His true form is on the spiritual plane,” said her father. “You see, my dear, I have been constructing in both places. Why do you suppose it has taken so long?”
They had a feast to honor him, ham and baked corn, quahogs that Maci had dug herself from the mud of Potter’s Pond, and a lemon sponge cake. Miss Suter proclaimed it the last warm evening of the year, so they ate on the rickety porch. Maci fidgeted while the two of them said their odd grace: “We believe in the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, a continuous existence, the communion of spirits and the ministrations of angels, compensation and retribution in the hereafter for good or ill done on earth, and we believe in a path of endless progression!” Listening to them, Maci rather wished she could join them in their belief, just as she had wanted to become a slave, when she was a little girl, because she’d been sure, back then, that if only she were a slave, her father would shower her with all the easy, warm enthusiasm he showered on his dear Negro friends, the fugitive strangers who passed through their house in Boston. It had seemed to her jealous little heart that her father had loved them all better than her, because they got presents of effusive affection, while she got more Vergil.
After dinner, Maci and her father pointed out constellations for Miss Suter’s edification. Boötes and Draco, Hercules and Cepheus, each was very bright in the sky over the black ocean. “That star is Arcturus,” Maci said.
“Where?” asked Miss Suter. “Where?” She waddled over to line up her eye with Maci’s pointing finger. “Ah!” she said. The great swell of her belly was nuzzled against Maci’s shoulder. Miss Suter gave another cry, and Maci thought this time she did feel something, a little kick.
Maci excused herself and took a walk along the cliff. The moon came up, washing out the stars. Low clouds rushed by, little floating islands that looked about the size of a big wagon. She could not help imagining riding one south to Maryland. If there were just room for one other on the cloud, would she take Rob or Private Vanderbilt flying? She was not sure. She wondered if that was the form her madness would take—fascination with a stranger. She had begun to rearrange Vanderbilt’s portrait—switching his hands or arms from side to side, balancing the lemonade on his head, setting his face in the middle of his chest. Rob had kindly sent enough faces to vary his mood—some angry, some sad, but most happy and peaceful-looking. Sometimes she put a peaceful-looking face on her pillow and woke in the morning with smudges on her cheek, and thought that he might have kissed her during the night. Standing by the cliff, she considered a future with him. They would live in Manhattan and manipulate railroad stock.
After a while, she returned to the house and went into the shed to look at the Infant. “Little Brother,” she said. “I ought to love you better.” She could think of nothing else to add, so she just stared at him for a long while. She could see her own face thrown back at her, twisted up along a silver tube, or shattered by the facets of a crystal panel. Then, she saw her father’s reflection. He had entered the shed and was walking towards her, but it looked like his image was rising from the crystalline depths of his machine. He stood next to her and put his arm around her. She closed her eyes, and put her face in his shoulder.
“It’s impossible, what you want to do,” she said.
“Difficult,” her father replied, “but not impossible. And is it any reason not to try a thing, because it is difficult? To the small mind, ending slavery seems as difficult and unlikely as changing the color of the sky. Yet that endeavor proceeds apace.”
“I hate him,” Maci said vehemently, pressing her face harder into her father’s shirt. “I hate all of this so much.”
“Oh Maci,” he said, stroking her hair. “Don’t be envious of him. It will make you ugly, inside and out. And anyhow, don’t you know that you are still my favorite?”
I know I risk your displeasure sending you these soldiers. It is not that I wish you to look at them and be saddened, but rather that I must send them away from me. Fold them into squares and sail them over the cliff—maybe they will find peace in the cold water. On the fifteenth, our regiment was ordered down from the westward slope of South Mountain, where we came upon the scene of the previous day’s heaviest fighting. The enemy’s dead were so numerous that a regiment who passed here before us had to remove them from the road to make way for the troops. They were piled up head high on either side, and made a gauntlet. Private Vanderbilt saw my distress—he is intimate with my moods—and offered to lead me through as I closed my eyes. I declined his kind offer. It seemed a fitting passageway from the land of the living to the land of the dead. I fear it is not the happy place where dwells our mad Poppy’s weakened mind. I thought as I walked of living hands grabbing up the bodies of the dead and stacking them like cordwood upon the road. In ten years, the wall might be made of bones, with only a blowing scrap of gray wool still attached to a wrist or a neck.
Sister, this wall is the work of men’s hands, and the whole war is the work of men’s hands—fingers tear cartridges and pull triggers. I would now that I had not sent you the Private’s hands, but here are his feet. I place them just beneath this letter, and the wall beneath that—all the work of my hand. Do not look at the wall.
Go to Boston. Pray for me.
She did look at the picture of the wall. It was an illustration of Hell. There were boys stacked high, their legs and arms intertwined in gross familiarity. Dead staring faces rested against each other, brow to brow. Motes of light danced in eyes that saw nothing, unless it was the moment of their death frozen before them. Try as she might, she could not imagine her brother’s face as he walked that gauntlet. But she could see Private Vanderbilt. His face was somehow both tender and stern as he put his hand on Rob’s shoulder, and tried to keep his wide back between Rob’s eyes and the wall. Maybe later Private Vanderbilt held him like a brother while he wept, trying to wash out the dead faces from his eyes.
She attached his feet, and at last he stood complete before her. She sat on her bed, watching him and listening to the noise of the surf. “Thank you,” she said to him.
I did look at the wall, she wrote. Such horror! Of course I prefer the Private’s feet to such atrocity, but whatever you must send I will gladly receive. How could it be any other way? Are you not my own Zu-Zu? Am I not your sister? You are in my prayers. I think Poppy and Miss Suter pray for you, too, in their way. Two apostles and an incipient spinster are pleading on your behalf—is this not cause for happiness?
The Infant is complete. Though I am not fond of him, I must admit that he is beautiful. You are not any longer the handsomest Trufant. Nor am I pretty, next to him. He has silver teeth and spun-glass hair and a golden face. He is jewelry, a brooch for a giant. We are waiting now only for Miss Suter to vomit a spirit from her womb. I fear the pall that will settle over this house when their bright hopes are dashed, when only a mundane babe comes into the world. Here is my prediction, I have it from my spirit guide, an Indian girl who inhabits the abandoned shell of a whelk. The baby will come and Miss Suter will flee from it, because it is not a spirit essence, because it reminds her of shame. She will be gone from our lives, and I will have a baby to raise. I shall have to learn to cook properly. We shall sell off the Infant in bits and pieces, and use the money to improve the house, to steady the porch and buy new stoves. Poppy’s folly will recede from him when his machine is a failure. We will wait for you here. This war will end. You will come and visit us with the Private in tow. It is a pleasure to dig for quahogs—I will show you. Do you see, then, how happy futures are born from the gray, despairing present? Brother, you have all my love.
“It’s a lazy baby that won’t be born,” said Miss Suter. She had an urge to go boating, so Maci had taken her out on the pond. Maci worried that the baby would come there in the middle of the water. She had been feeling anxious around Miss Suter because she seemed capable of giving birth quite at any moment. “I so wish it would come. These late battles might not have been, if only she had come last week.” She bent her neck forward to stare at her belly. “Why do you wait?” she asked it. It was September 25. News of the battle in Maryland had reached even here. Maci had checked casualty lists in a Providence paper and found Rob’s name absent from them.
A raft of yodeling old-squaws suddenly flapped their wings and took off inland. “Running from the storm,” said Miss Suter. The wind had been blowing hard for the past three days. Salt-encrusted fisherman types in the village were predicting “a great big blow.”
Her father had been into the village, to buy a lightning rod for the roof of the shed. He was installing it when Maci and Miss Suter walked up to the house. He waved to them and said to Maci, “You have a letter, my dear!” Miss Suter toddled over to shout encouragement up at him while Maci went inside. She was sure the letter would be from Rob, but it wasn’t. It was from Private Vanderbilt.
There were instances in her life upon which she would later reflect and hate herself. When she was five years old, she had eaten two pounds of chocolate cake, then crawled into a corner and gotten sick like a dog. In the weeks following her mother’s death, Maci had considered how she’d broken under no real strain—her children were healthy and she lived a life of privilege—and she had hated her mother for being weak. Later, she would appreciate how anything could break you, how we are all breakable, and she would hate superior, weakness-hating Maci as certainly as she hated five-year-old gluttonous Maci. In this way, she would hate blithe, carefree, stupid Maci, who thought Private Vanderbilt was writing to make love to her. She sat in front of his portrait and read.
I know you will have heard by now of your brother Rob’s death on the 17th of September, before Antietam Creek. I thought I should write and tell you of his last days. He was my friend, though he was an officer and I am only an enlisted volunteer. It was my great honor to know him. He saved my life on the very day he died. Crossing Antietam Creek, I became mired in the mud and would have drowned had Rob not returned for me under heavy fire, taking a wound in his scalp as he fetched me. He bound it with a strip of cloth and would not go back. From the creek, we were ordered forward, and we lost men at every step. Our color guard was mowed down three times in succession, but at last we drove the Rebs over a stone wall, and they fled towards the town. We were ordered back not long after that, for we had used up all our ammunition and there was no relief for us—no one could support us in our far-flung position. This order did not sit well with the men of the Ninth, and some of them pursued the fleeing enemy. Your gentle brother was among those pursuers. I was with them, too. We ran into their strength. Just two of twenty-five men made it back to our lines. Those two were I and your brother, but his wounds were such that he did not last the night. I was with him when he died. He spoke no words—his wound was in his throat—but I do not doubt that his thoughts were with you at the last. He spoke of you so often, I feel I know you well. I hope you will call on me, after we soldiers bury our guns. I live in Manhattan, at Number 10 Washington Place.
It is a sorrow that men should find it necessary to take one another’s lives to establish a principle.
Your friend,
George Washington Vanderbilt.
Maci kept the news to herself for hours because she could not articulate it. In the end, she walked up to her father and presented the letter to him. He read it with a stern face and said, “My darling. He has passed over into the Summerland. Let us celebrate for him.” Maci slapped him, striking his sweet, bewildered face with the strength of her whole arm, then fled to her room, where she would not open the door for him when he came knocking.
The next day, numb habit took her into the village. She stopped before the post office, sat down on the ground, and stared bleakly at the building, a small white house with a roof of cedar shakes. She wanted to weep, but did not. The postmaster saw her sitting there in the street and came out to ask what was the matter. She only said she was tired, and had to rest a little. He brought her inside, where he had mail for her. There was a letter from Rob, and a package that he could have sent up to the house if she wished. Though she ought not to go back up there, he said. Didn’t she know there was a storm coming? It seemed to Maci that the big blow was as lazy as Miss Suter’s unborn principle. It was waiting politely offshore, as if for an invitation to come in and ravage.
Maci did not read Rob’s letter, which had been mailed before Private Vanderbilt’s letter, until much later, after two men had pulled up and unloaded Rob’s trunk like a coffin from their wagon. At her direction, they put it in her room. Inside, on the very top, were her letters to him. The last one she’d sent was unopened—maybe the Private’s dear hand had laid it inside the trunk when it arrived too late for Rob to read it. In the trunk there was an extra uniform, two fezzes, three good wool blankets she’d sent him herself before she’d become poor, and his officer’s sword. There were many drawings, including many of her. There she was boating on Potter’s Pond. There she was standing by the cliff, hair blowing like a madwoman’s. There she was walking down a rose-shrouded path with Miss Suter, who was fatter and prettier in the drawing than in real life.
The trunk reeked of him. She put on his uniform and lay on the bed for a little while with her face in her arm, and then she read the letter.
Sister,
I think I have found my madness. God save me from the noise of breaking bones. Do I worry you? I did not mean to. No pictures for you today—we are in battle. This is just a note to tell you I am alive and well.
Please go to Boston. I think it is the only safe place on the earth.
When Miss Suter heard of Rob’s death she said, “Too late!” and struck her fist against her belly. Then she got very pale, and fell back on a sofa, and claimed that she was in labor. For a day and a night, and then again for a day she lay on a bed downstairs and moaned. And all through the night of the storm, she cried out over the creaking of the little house. “Joy!” she screamed. “Love! O, Peace!” Maci watched from the staircase as her father tended to Miss Suter. Occasionally he consulted with the spirits he saw clustered around the sofa. Which one is Mr. Franklin? Maci wondered. Every so often she left her post on the stairs to go and pet Miss Suter’s perspiring head, or else to venture to the shed, or else to go upstairs and finish her packing. Early in the morning, after the storm had departed and left a brilliant dawn in its wake, the baby finally came. Maci imagined it twice perfectly: Miss Suter gave a last cry, and an ordinary miracle proceeded from her body, a plain old baby boy who squalled his rage at being deposited in the world. Miss Suter and Maci’s father would have stared despondently at each other, wondering what to do with this little baby who was the ruin of their hopes.
Or, Miss Suter gave a last cry—a mixture of exultation and agony—and her big belly flattened. An odor like pine filled the room, but nothing visible proceeded from her, except hysteria. Then Miss Suter and Maci’s father would have made such noises of rejoicing as are made by people who think they have delivered the world from suffering. Her father would have rushed upstairs and pushed open Maci’s door to tell her the good news, to take her arm and proceed triumphantly to the shed, where he would show her the Infant, who would be living now, breathing out peace into the formerly troubled world.
But Maci was not in her room. Her drawings were gone. Her clothes were gone. Only Rob’s empty trunk remained. Maci was by that time already in Kingstown, waiting for a train to take her away to Boston. She had written a letter, addressed to no one, which was still in her hand when the train came, and when she got on and took her seat. She kept it with her, clenched in her fist, as she watched the landscape rush by. How should a person deliver such a letter? You might burn it, or tie it to the leg of a dove. You might throw it in the sea, or bury it under the earth. In the end, after much consideration, she wrestled the window open, put out her arm, and opened her hand.
The storm shocked Miss Suter into labor. While she cried out in the house, I capered in the shed, smashing the Infant to pieces with a wrench. Glass and gold and copper flew all about the room, but seemed to make no sound as they fell because whatever noise they made was drowned out by the howl of the wind. It was delightful, to slay him. Do you know, I imagined I was slaying the whole batch of obscenity that has mauled our family? Is it not obscene that a pregnant woman should attach herself like a barnacle to our father? Is it not obscene that a father won’t grieve for his son? Is it not obscene that our mother was ruined by silly beans, and are beans themselves not the seeds of obscenity? Now what a comfort, to let it all fall to pieces.
Poppy must not grieve for his mechanical son. He is in that Summerland, frolicking with all the other mechanical children. Is this my madness? Now I break his crystal eyes. Now I pluck his copper hair. Now I smash his glass limbs, and I undo him. I imagined that I was undoing it all: your death; Miss Suter’s arrival; Poppy’s madness; Mama’s madness. I undid it all until, sitting amid the shards and pieces, I was in a place where none of it had happened, where we all still lived in Boston, where Miss Suter’s belly was unoccupied by spirit or flesh, where there was no war. I think that was my madness, that murderous rage. Rob, I have killed our little brother. But you see, don’t you, how he was a success? How he made a sort of peace in me.