“IT’S A TERRIBLE THING, NOT TO MARRY,” HER AUNT AMY LIKED to say. Maci understood her to mean that it was in fact the worst thing, worse than madness, worse than war, worse than the death of a brother, mother, or even the death of a husband. Aunt Amy’s husband had died when they were just a few months wed, having contracted a particularly virulent smallpox during a trip to Morocco. On the journey back, his skin came off him in great black sheets, until he was all livid, denuded muscle. Aunt Amy told the story without a trace of self-pity, or even with too much sadness. “We were married,” she’d say of him, with a happy sigh. And then she would look at Maci, twenty-four years old in the summer of 1870, and say, “It really is a terrible thing not to marry.”
But Maci thought she could do without marriage. The well-dressed, well-heeled, well-educated young gentlemen to whom her aunt introduced her were unbearable somehow. In conversation with them, her mind inevitably wandered. She’d think of how their wrists were thin and hairless, or else they would inspire in her gruesome flights of fancy. “Don’t you think the Germans a people more clean than the Irish in their personal habits?” one might ask her, and she’d imagine him mortally wounded, with bullets in his spleen and shrapnel in his eye.
Aunt Amy inhabited her widowhood with grace and something that seemed to Maci like satisfaction. They were the best sorts of husbands, the dead ones. They covered you with respectability, but their feet were not on your neck. Maci found it very easy to imagine herself a widow. Private Vanderbilt had died at Chancellorsville. She still had his portrait, folded up into squares and hidden away in a large rosewood box which she kept under her bed. Once a month, she’d unfold all his pieces, spreading them out on the floor of her room. Inevitably, Aunt Amy would come by to knock. She mistrusted a closed door, hated a locked one, and she always seemed to sense when Maci was engaged in private business. She’d call out, “My dear, what are you doing in there?”
“Writing,” Maci would say. That was now her profession, or her vocation—she felt called to it, but it didn’t really pay. She contributed articles to the occasional weekly newspaper, most notably and most often to Godey’s Lady’s Book, whose editor, Mrs. Hale, had formed a distant attachment to Maci from Philadelphia. It was almost acceptable to Aunt Amy, to write articles on perfumes or French dresses for Godey’s. “Everything in moderation,” she’d say, encouraging her niece to put away her pen for weeks between articles, warning that intellectual stimulation had the effect of souring a woman’s disposition. Reading was acceptable, if the book was the Bible or something written by a Beecher, preferably Catharine. Maci preferred Mr. Greeley’s Tribune, or even the New York Times, papers that were not merely trade publications put out to refine the seams or cherry pies of their subscribers. If Aunt Amy happened to find a contraband item, she never mentioned her discovery, but instead quietly confiscated it and threw it away. Maci never protested when her papers or books disappeared from behind a curtain or from under a rug. Emerson, Browning, Tennyson, Lowell, Bryant—every last great man was cast into oblivion by Aunt Amy’s ignorant hand. Maci figured it for a condition of her aunt’s boundless generosity, this gentle but outrageous tyranny. Anyhow, her aunt never looked under her bed, the obvious hiding place, and the one where Maci kept her dearest treasures.
“What are you reading, my dear?” Aunt Amy asked. They were sitting after dinner in a rear parlor, a comfortable room with decidedly inelegant furniture, a place where guests were not welcome. After meals, Aunt Amy liked to sit in silence with her hands folded in her lap, concentrating fiercely on her digestion. She’d done this for an hour a day all her adult life, and credited the practice with her absolute freedom from dyspepsia. Sometimes, Maci would sit in the near-perfect quiet and listen to the gentle murmur of the light, but more often she’d read.
“An article on the history of muslin,” Maci replied, but that was a lie. She had an issue of Godey’s in her hands, but slipped inside it was the June 2 issue of Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly. She was reading an article exposing police involvement in the business of prostitution in New York City. It would seem that the police got free go-rounds with whichever girl they pleased. Clearly, this publication was not a trade paper. It was a women’s paper and a political paper and a financial paper, whose motto was Upward and Onward. Maci liked it very much, and she liked Mrs. Woodhull, not least because the lady had declared herself a candidate for President. This thrilled the would-be voter in Maci. She liked the paper even though the articles sometimes went exploring in ridiculous territory. Mrs. Woodhull’s Weekly had spiritualist sympathies, and Maci, because she felt compelled to read the whole thing, suffered the articles on medical clairvoyance and thought of her father, still living on the cliff with his Heaven-sent paramour. In all the years since she left his house, he had sent her just one short letter, unsigned and written on a smooth piece of wood: Garrison was mobbed, Birney’s press was thrown into the river, and Lovejoy was murdered; yet anti-slavery lived, and those who were oppressed now are free. So shall it ever be with truths which have been communicated to man. They are immortal, my dear, and cannot be destroyed.
Reading the Weekly always inspired her. Maci would excuse herself and go upstairs to her desk, where she’d sit, often chewing pensively at the tip of her pen, so Aunt Amy would scold her the next morning for staining blue the corners of her mouth. These were not articles for Mrs. Hale, the ones she worked on late into the night with a sheet stuffed into the bottom of the door so Aunt Amy would not see light spilling out and know Maci was awake giving herself wrinkles and overheating her brain. They were for the Weekly, for the remarkable Mrs. Woodhull, for whom Maci had written many articles but sent only one, a history of women in newspapering. It praised Maci’s heroes: Elizabeth Timothy, the first lady publisher in the country; Mary Catherine Goddard, who’d been supplanted as editor of her Philadelphia paper by her brother; Cornelia Walter, who so hated Mr. Poe; and, of course, Margaret Fuller. Maci called for more of these ladies to come forth from her own generation. She wanted there to be as many females in newspapering as there were males.
She had sent the article in May of that year, and had an acceptance two weeks later. My magazine is a storehouse for ideas like yours, Mrs. Woodhull wrote. You must come and visit me. Enclosed was a little picture of the beautiful lady, signed on the back Victoria Woodhull, Future Presidentess. Sometimes, at dinner with Aunt Amy, Maci daydreamed of joining Mrs. Woodhull in New York, but the thought of actually doing such a thing seemed as likely as her sprouting wings and flying about over the Back Bay.
Though she wouldn’t run off to New York, Maci could still contribute to Mrs. Woodhull’s paper, and it was while she was preparing another article for Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly that her hand first rebelled against her. It was very unexpected—one minute she was writing some animadversions on Catharine Beecher’s Treatise on Domestic Economy, and the next she was writing something else entirely, and entirely against her will. Her left hand stole the pen from her right and began to scribble.
Her legacy of madness was something Maci thought less on, since she’d been living with sane, stable Aunt Amy. Long before, in the months and years just after she had fled Rhode Island, she was certain insanity would come to her as soon as she grew complacent. So, for a long time, as they sat together in the comfortable parlor she would consider madness while Aunt Amy considered her digestion. Maci would think how it might be voices talking in her head, and how that would be terrifying, to hear a voice that berated you, or commanded you to lick the floor, or eat filth. Worse yet would be a pair of voices, the sort that might offer a constant commentary, one saying, “Do you see what she’s wearing today?” and the other saying, “It does not surprise me.” Or strange beliefs would creep into her mind. One morning she’d wonder how it might have been to be Mary Magdalene or Jean d’Arc, and the next she’d believe that she was Mary Magdalene, or Jean d’Arc, or both combined conveniently in a single body, a lady who gave herself to men, repented of it, then led them successfully in battle.
But years passed, and her inevitable mental decline seemed less and less imminent, until Maci began not to think of it so often, and then not very often at all. Later, she would think that it was precisely when she had finally believed herself safe that she was suddenly not safe, and she would curse carefree, naive Maci, who had stupidly abandoned her vigilance. It came like her father’s, all of a piece. Her left hand jerked once, then leaped from the desk, springing off on its fingers like a jumping bug. It hung a moment in the air, then swooped down to take the pen from her unresisting right hand. It drew one dismissive line through her paragraphs on Catharine Beecher, and then the words came, written carelessly with her own hand, but in a hand that was not her own:
Sister, dear sister,
Know that you are not insane, and forgive me, please, my silence. Time is measured here, not in seconds, hours, or days, but in uncountable units of desire. And it is so difficult to pierce the veil, which is composed of God’s indifference and the unbelief of the bereaved—thick things. Understand that I have been trying forever to come to you, a messenger whose news is all good.
Maci thought it was sensible and just, how she was being punished for destroying the Infant, for a crime worse than fratricide, for the murder of her father’s hope. Her hand—she’d not call it brother, because it was her and not him, it was the part of her that would rather sacrifice reason and sanity than accept how he was gone—reassured her, You’re not insane. But that was like the rain telling you you are not wet. And now this not-Rob had a new admonition with which to close his letters, Go to New York. Go to her. “Don’t you tell me what to do,” she’d whisper in reply.
It was very easy, Maci thought, how all her most childish desires were written out by this renegade appendage. She wanted, did she not, to get away from Boston? Life was boring there. Aunt Amy was cool and dull, and, living with her, Maci would settle into widowhood without ever marrying. There was a lifetime of comfortable sameness waiting for her in that house. One day Aunt Amy would die, and Maci would put on all her fantastic dresses, one after the other, a new one for every day of the year. It was hateful to think of, so her hand urged her to flee. Go to New York. Go to Mrs. Woodhull. You must go. “I will not,” she said, holding up her left hand to her face and speaking to it, just like a madwoman.
The hand didn’t belong to her anymore. She could move it like her other one, but it seemed to oblige her as a favor, not because it was naturally subject to her will. It wrote letters, spinning out ridiculous fantasies of a war in Heaven, fought by contentious spirits, who wanted to return to the earth, against conservative angels. It told stories about Mrs. Woodhull, and about her sons, two boys from Ohio separated by the war and by death. Her hand made rude gestures behind Aunt Amy’s back. And it drew beautiful pictures: a falling-down shack at the top of a hill; a clearing in an orchard; a hawthorn bush. It drew an enormous house in a city she knew to be Manhattan; a greenhouse; an iron door. It drew a striking woman who Maci knew from her photograph to be Mrs. Woodhull; a careless-looking, smiling fat girl; a worried-looking fellow with a neck fully as thick as Private Vanderbilt’s; an angel in stately robes with a tiara of stars floating around her head, and a little pugnacious angel, with only one wing. And it drew a portrait of two boys with the little angel’s face—her hand groped for blue ink with which to color their eyes. She didn’t hang them on her wall, these pictures. She liked them all very little. They ought to have gone into the garbage, in fact, but instead she put them under the bed, motivated, she supposed, by affection for even the delusion of her brother.
Heaven is cold and white. It is not a place where I would care to reside, though some spirits are drawn there by pleasures so rarefied they are, in fact, empty. I am in the Summerland, a place as warm and green as the garden at Uncle Phil’s summer house. Do you remember it? We chased rabbits there, when you were only two years old. You were still learning the names of things, then. I told you how the creatures were called, but you would not believe me.
“How do you like this one?” asked her aunt. Maci’s hand had been in rebellion for weeks, and she was giving up hope that her affliction would prove to be temporary. It was the third Wednesday of the month, the day the dressmaker always came to deliver new creations. In the evening, Aunt Amy would model them for her niece.
“It’s very pretty,” Maci said.
“Is it too busy?” Aunt Amy was wearing an outfit so complicated Maci could only take it in in pieces: a striped overskirt with fringes, bows, and ruffles; a Chantilly lace jacket; a brooch and matching pendant earrings; a velvet neck ribbon with a dependent cross; a large fringed hair bow; a fan. Elements from her aunt’s outfits would stay with Maci like annoying snatches of song; she knew she’d struggle all week to forget that fringed hair bow.
“By no means,” said Maci. “I think it is altogether reserved.”
“It’s fortunate that you like it because … I’ve one for you also!” It was always supposed to be a surprise when Aunt Amy had two hideously complex dresses made instead of just one. Maci went to her room to put hers on, too, and then she struggled downstairs, caparisoned for a supper less solemn than usual. Aunt Amy would smile as she talked about the latest wave of fashion to come out of Paris, and Maci would think how it was like a disease, fashion, spreading from woman to woman, making them deranged. When she was younger, fine dresses had given her pleasure, but now all she longed for was a set of Bloomers. So many times, in her imagination, she’d come downstairs for dinner attired in trousers, skirt, and tunic, and, laying eyes upon her, Aunt Amy fled to the kitchen to wash her eyes with lye.
After dinner, Maci went back to her room to write. Earlier in the week, she’d had bad news from Philadelphia. Old Mrs. Hale was retiring, and who knew if the next editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book would be as fond as she was of Maci’s writing? She had a special relationship with Mrs. Hale, who’d dealt her a compliment just a few months after they began working together: “Why, you go on so naturally and make so little fuss about your work that I sometimes forget you are a woman.” She might have become a mentor to Maci if she had not always been proving herself a backward thinker—Mrs. Hale insisted, for example, that the vote would be ruinous to the happiness of women.
Hoping to send a big bunch of fatuous articles for the lady to purchase before she retired, Maci kept busy. Night after night, she sat at her desk composing with her right hand, and she found she was able to ignore how her left hand wielded its own pen, sketching, writing, and admonishing. “I’m not looking,” she’d say aloud as she worked. “Scribble all you like, I shan’t cast a glance on it.” But she always did look, eventually. And she’d ask questions, too, when curiosity finally overwhelmed her. “Who is he?” she’d ask, as her hand drew another picture of the ragged little angel, and her hand would write the answer alongside the bizarre-looking wing, Somebody’s brother.
If I told you I was in Hell, suffering eternal punishment because the war made a killer of me, then I know you would believe me. If I predicted that Aunt Amy would die horribly, killed with burning, acid poison by a scarab hatched of eggs dormant in her best cotton dress, I think you would embrace that news. But when I say that the sun will shine tomorrow, you pout and shake your head. When I say we are all undying, that love and grief can bridge the measureless space between us, you think it must be false because it is good, or because it might comfort you. So let me reassure you: I am in a sort of Hell, like every other spirit who has not forgotten the earth, who remembers that we are all creatures afflicted with unremitting desire.
It was the same way that her father had got her to eat new things when she was a child. “Just try it,” he’d say, “and if it is not, after all, to your taste, then you do not have to eat it.” So Maci’s hand told her, Just go, and if it does not suit you, if you find, after all, that their work is not your work, then you may return here to this dreadful life, and I will leave you alone forever. So she left Aunt Amy’s house with the money she’d saved from her articles (faithful Mrs. Hale did, indeed, buy a fat bunch of them), and rode the train to New York, suffering the advances of strange men. It wasn’t enough to keep you respectable, traveling with your dead brother, who lived in your hand.
Maci got a room at the Female Christian Home on East Fifteenth Street. Her first evening there she sat on her bed and thought about her aunt. Maci had sneaked away from the house like a coward, leaving a note that really explained nothing. Aunt, I have urgent business in Philadelphia. She’d thought she would write again from the train, to explain. But she found she was not inclined to write, not on the train, and not in the room she shared with another Christian female, a shovel-faced, opinionless girl named Lavinia. I am wicked, Maci thought to herself, because she was certain that she never wanted to see her aunt again. It made her happy already, just to be away from Boston. But then she would think how she was away at the bidding of her own lunacy, and how she had only enough money to last her for a month or two, and she’d become angry at herself, and she would think, I am wicked and stupid.
On the morning after her arrival in New York, she walked along Broad Street, looking up every so often to meet the disapproving stares of birds perched on the telegraph wires that ran everywhere overhead. She paused outside Number 44. After a few moments, her left hand reached to open the door. She followed along after it, up the stairs to the office of Woodhull, Claflin and Company. Inside, she was met by a man with immense whiskers who sat examining a telegraphic stock indicator where it chattered away near a north window. Maci could hear a similar one running behind a glass-and-wood partition at the back of the room. “May I help you?” he asked.
“I would like to see Mrs. Woodhull,” she said. “My name is Trufant.”
“Ah,” he said, and he smiled. “She’s been expecting you.” Maci hid her surprise, thinking the man had confused her with someone else, because she hadn’t written ahead to announce her visit. The man, who introduced himself as Colonel James Harvey Blood, escorted her to the back. The office was just as it had been described in the Weekly. It was luxurious, with thick rugs thrown over the floors, bushy ferns under the windows, and elegant statuary scattered here and there. Stern Minerva and luscious Aphrodite inhabited two corners of the office, and a third corner was occupied by a piano, atop which sat a bust of Commodore Vanderbilt. Maci stopped in front of it, reaching out to touch Mr. Vanderbilt on his cold, beakish nose, and thought of his son. Against the bust lay a tiny painting, which depicted three little cherubim floating in a rosy sky, holding up a winding parchment upon which was written, Simply to thy cross I cling.
In the back, Mrs. Woodhull and a red-haired lady Maci’s own age were sitting behind twin walnut desks, with gold pens stuck behind their ears. They were talking to a reporter.
“If I were to notice,” said the red-haired lady, “what is said by what they call society, I could not leave my home except in fantastic walking-dresses and ballroom costume. But I despise what squeamy, crying girls or powdered, counter-jumping dandies say of me. We have the counsel of those who have more experience than we, and we are endorsed by the best backers in the city.”
“Do you mean Mr. Vanderbilt?” asked the reporter, a young man with a face so fat and white that Maci had to resist an urge to gather it in her hands and knead it like dough.
“It is very possible that I do,” the lady answered. From a platter on her desk she picked up a strawberry dipped in chocolate and bit into it with abandon. She looked up at the ceiling while juice ran down her chin. The reporter turned to Maci.
“Are you a customer?”
“This is Miss Trufant,” said Colonel Blood. “She’s come to see you, Mrs. Woodhull.”
Maci had composed a statement. It was brief, and perhaps a little elegant, a plea for employment. Here she was, a woman who wrote for newspapers, and there was Mrs. Woodhull, a woman who published one. Didn’t it follow that Mrs. Woodhull should have work for Maci? Maci’s hand had dictated a different statement, something about being a messenger of the spirits of the air. But Maci forgot both statements when the lady looked up and met her eyes. There was something breathtaking about her. It was not just her beauty. She had the sort of grace, Maci decided in that very instant, that arises from absolute independence of mind. Maci found herself unable to speak, but she didn’t have to say anything at all.
“There you are!” said Mrs. Woodhull, jumping up and taking Maci’s hands in her own. “Tennie, here she is! Here she is at last!” Maci’s right hand was limp as a dead fish, but her left hand squeezed back fervently, and trembled with nervous joy.
The lady called Tennie hauled the reporter up by his elbow, pushing him out past the partition and declaring the interview at an end. Then she threw both her arms around Maci, and kissed her on the neck. Maci wanted to ask her to stand back, to scream for her to keep her wet kisses to herself, but when she opened her mouth, Tennie covered it with her own, at which point Maci was too stunned to make any noise at all.
“There she is, real as can be!” said Tennie, pinching her as if to make sure of her flesh, then kissing her again.
“We’ve been waiting for you,” said Mrs. Woodhull.
Mrs. Woodhull is a great and good woman, a lady celebrated by spirits. There is a grand plaza here dedicated to her and to her wonderful sister. There are colossal statues made—can you picture them in your mind?—of quicksilver desire. They stand back to back, giantesses looking with a supreme clarity of vision over the whole Summerland. Everybody here labors under a burden of enthusiasm for Mrs. Woodhull, but really her living son is more significant than she, and the small garden dedicated to him, while very beautiful, does not do justice to his importance.
Does it surprise you, that the dead build monuments to the living? Sister, the whole Summerland is stubbled with such monuments. We go to them, as you go to yours, to remember and to mourn.
It was an extraordinary welcome. Mrs. Woodhull said she had known Maci would come to New York, and hinted that her spirit guide, Demosthenes himself, had promised to deliver her, but Maci chose to believe that Mrs. Woodhull was expecting her, and welcomed her so warmly, because she believed that Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly must draw enthusiastic young women inexorably to her side.
She insisted that Maci be her guest, and took her to a beautiful house on Thirty-eighth Street, where Maci was given a room adjoining Tennie’s on the second floor. Tennie was almost Maci’s age exactly; their birthdays were just a week apart. “We are almost twins,” Tennie said, convinced that they must become the best of friends. Tennie was like Miss Suter, in a way, except where Maci had always suspected Miss Suter of being a liar, Tennie was brazenly honest. Certainly it was another punishment, for Maci to have delivered herself into the hands of devoted Spiritualists. Yet these ladies did not share the quality of fear that Maci had sensed in Miss Suter. They were not hiding under their beliefs from the cruelty of the world.
Mrs. Woodhull challenged Maci to help her “abolish hypocrisy and transform the social sphere.” Listening to her, Maci found her delusions easy to overlook. Mrs. Woodhull claimed wisdom from the dead, not through their books, as other people got it, but from direct personal interviews. Yet this was not to say that she did not read books. All through dinner they talked of Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Mrs. Woodhull had a clipping book with seventeen pages devoted to articles by Margaret Fuller. All evening she and Maci sat in a third-floor study, underneath a dome of green glass, and talked. Maci confessed her plan to write something very large—a vindication of Wollstonecraft’s Vindication. “All that obvious truth, written over a hundred years ago,” Maci said. “I look around me at the world and it’s as if she never made a peep.” She brought out her animadversions on Catharine Beecher, and told how she planned to dissect and refute every argument she could find in print which advocated anything but that women should have absolute power over their own lives.
“Yes, yes,” Mrs. Woodhull said excitedly, and paraphrased the Countess Ossoli. “I mean to vindicate the birthright of all women, to teach them what to claim, and how to use what they obtain.” Then she yawned. It was close to midnight. “Perhaps we’ve talked enough for an evening. There’s work for us to do in the morning.” Over dinner, she had made Maci an assistant editor on her Weekly, just like that. It was a thrill to have employment, but Maci controlled herself, not crying out or giggling with joy, only nodding serenely and saying, “I will be very happy to accept your generous offer.”
Tennie took Maci to her room. Mrs. Woodhull’s house was so big she was grateful to have a guide, because she was sure she’d have lost herself among all the stairs and the halls full of doors. Maci was tired, but Tennie wouldn’t let her go to sleep just yet. Maci sat on a stool in Tennie’s room, which featured prominently a silken tent set up in one corner. “My Turkish corner,” Tennie called it. “When we are more intimate, I’ll take you in there and tell you confidential things.” Now she wanted to trace Maci’s silhouette, to add it to a collection. Maci sat very still in the darkened room while Tennie traced her shadow on a piece of paper pinned to the wall. On an opposite wall there were a dozen other silhouettes, framed and hung in orderly rows. “There they are,” Tennie said, when she saw where Maci was looking, “the rest of the family.”
“I’m really rather sleepy,” said Maci.
“We’re nearly done,” Tennie said, and cursed the candle when it flickered. When she was finished she had a wavering outline of Maci’s profile drawn on black paper with white chalk. “There,” she said. “I waste no time obtaining these. Now, let’s prepare for bed.” She groped at Maci, undoing buttons and ties even as Maci tried to direct her hands away.
“It’s something I do for myself.”
“Nonsense!” said Tennie. “It’s what a sister’s for.” When they were both in their undergarments, Maci saw that Tennie wore a thing she had never before encountered: a combination of chemise and drawers.
“Do you like my chemiloon?” Tennie asked, turning around to model it. Maci nodded, because she did like it, and she was immediately presented with one from out of Tennie’s wardrobe.
After she had bound Maci’s and her own hair up in rags to maintain their curls, Tennie began to prepare her night-cream, which, she said, she made fresh every night from a recipe of her mother’s. It would keep a lady’s skin soft, and also drive away evil spirits. Maci watched as she mixed equal measures of white wax, almond oil, and cacao in a small blue porcelain bowl. Tennie painted it on Maci’s face with a sable brush, and did the same to her own face.
“We’ll bounce for a while,” she said. “It makes for a good sleep.” She took Maci’s hands and dragged her up on the bed. Then she started bouncing, insisting, when Maci only hopped a little, that she bounce vigorously. Maci’s rag-bound hair flopped in her eyes.
“Now I’m weary!” Tennie said. “Are you weary, too?”
“Entirely.”
“Well, if you have trouble sleeping, if you wake in the night feeling agitated, you may have a ride on my pony.” Tennie pointed to a rocking horse big enough for an adult, with a piece of red silk thrown over its saddle. “He’s for sharing, that fellow. Indeed, everything in this room is for sharing.” She opened the door between their rooms and ushered Maci through. Someone had already turned down her sheets and fluffed up her pillows. “Good night, sister!” Tennie said, turning down the light and retreating to her room. She shut the door only halfway.
Maci lay in her new bed, smelling like a macaroon. It was true that she was weary, but she could not sleep. She stayed awake watching the blowing white shapes of her curtains as they moved in the breeze. Her left hand was twitching, walking up and down the bed like a scrabbling crab, and pinching at the flesh of her belly. “Stop it,” she said, but it would not stop. There was a writing desk already set up for her, as if to provide for her affliction. She turned up the light and sat down.
Didn’t I tell you they’d be waiting?
“Why now?” she asked. “Why did you let me feel safe, first, before you began this torture?” If her hand had rebelled back when rebellion was popular, five years ago or more, then she might have been better prepared to put it down, stronger and more able in her dealings with it. Complacency had made her weak, and reflecting on the very agreeable time she had spent that day with Mrs. Woodhull, she feared it would only be a matter of days before she succumbed to delusion and declared herself the Apostle of the Left Hand.
The veil was thick, the walls were high. Soon the work will be done, and then, Sister, we will be together again. What is in you that you will only believe in despair and think hope only the comfort given by the weak to the weak?
She had no answer for that question. She rose from the desk, though the pen was still in her hand, and lay down again in bed. When the pen wrote on Mrs. Woodhull’s fine sheets she ignored it, but she saw the message in the morning, smeared by her tossing body: not insane, not at all.
Benjamin Franklin is here. Thomas Jefferson is here. Vergil is here—this place is stuffed with virtuous pagans. It is said, of Heaven and the Summerland, that everyone is here, and everyone will be here. But a change is coming. We mean to make the here and there a single place, to make a marriage between Heaven and Earth. Try to imagine that, a world free of the distinctions made by death, where immortals are mortal, and mortals are immortal. Glorious wedding! Mother is here, still desirous of beans. Margaret Fuller is here. She sees you and loves you.
By September, Maci was firmly installed at the Park Row offices of the Weekly. She was almost hidden behind the tall stacks of daily and weekly newspapers, received from all over the country, that were piled on her desk. She’d had the idea of clipping items about women and printing them for the weekly’s readers. She had a nice little collection of them already: Miss Hoag is the pioneer fresh-woman in the Northwestern University; Miss Amy M. Bradley has been appointed Examiner of Schools for New Hanover County, North Carolina; Miss Louisa Stratton of Johnson County, Iowa, challenges any man in the state to a plowing match with her, and proposes a two-horse team.
“Are you in there?” Mrs. Woodhull asked, peering over a paper tower that reached just to her nose.
“I am,” said Maci.
“I want your opinion on this.” Mrs. Woodhull handed over a sheaf of papers, and walked away. Maci leaned back in her chair and read what she had been given, a little treatise on the Fourteenth Amendment, and how it trumped the need for a Sixteenth, for which brave ladies like Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony had been unsuccessfully campaigning. Because women were citizens, they were already guaranteed the right to vote by the Fourteenth Amendment. All they need do was assert that right. The argument was brilliant and simple. “It makes perfect sense,” Maci told Mrs. Woodhull, when she returned to Maci’s desk. “Such an elegant, transparent solution. No wonder it has remained so long invisible.”
“So you’ll admit it?” said Mrs. Woodhull. “You will grant that I see the unseen?” Maci laughed.
“In this instance alone, Mrs. Woodhull.” Maci insisted that Demosthenes would have to sit down with them at dinner before she’d believe in him. Mrs. Woodhull kept a place for him at her table, with a wineglass from which her drunken sister Utica stole nips. Maci kept all her own impossible strangeness a secret. She didn’t tell how her dead brother commanded her hand. It wouldn’t do to tell, because to tell would be to join them in their delusion, to embrace her own madness and to afford it a measure of respect which she preferred to deny it.
Mrs. Woodhull endorsed silliness in public; she’d deliver a learned argument on the politics of the ancient Egyptians, then make herself stupid by saying she had it all direct from the ethereal lips of Demosthenes. Maci wondered how much more the woman could already have accomplished if she could only keep a few choice things to herself. But it was a virtue, too, how she hated hypocrisy, how she would not lie even by omission, but always told the whole truth as she saw it. She was like her paper, sublime and a little ridiculous. She’d assign Maci to investigate a stock swindle, and the next day ask her to write a phony letter from Paris, full of fashion and gossip, under the name Flor de Valdal. Her politics, at least, were serious, and a few powerful men were taking her seriously.
At a party in September of 1870, Maci walked among the omnipresent roses in Mrs. Woodhull’s parlors, talking with Benjamin Butler, a person whom she’d never dreamed of meeting. They were waiting to honor Steven Pearl Andrews, who had asked Maci to call him Professor Pearlo when they met for the first time, and had talked for an hour about his conviction that before the twentieth century dawned, a trans-Saharan railway would relieve the burdens of the camel.
“I think smart girls are ruined by marriage,” Mr. Butler said at the party. “Energies that could be spent improving the world are instead wasted on the pursuit of a husband.”
“But Mrs. Woodhull is married,” said Maci.
“Yes, and rather more extensively than most. But she is a special case.”
“I think I must agree with you,” Maci said. You are in love with her, her hand had accused. “I do admire her,” she said to it, and wasn’t that reasonable, after all? Could a woman start with nothing, in a rickety shack in a place called Homer, and in the course of a decade become a stockbroker, a publisher, a writer, a candidate for President, and not demand a little admiration?
“Sometimes,” said Mr. Butler, “I think a celestial accident occurred at her birth, and that a male soul must have been allotted to her body.” He really was extraordinarily ugly.
“Yes,” Maci said. “Isn’t that easier to believe than that she could have a woman’s soul, and still have a greater purpose than merely to gratify the senses of man?”
“Well,” said Mr. Butler. He reached down to a tray on a table and gathered up a few carrots, cut as small and fine as the fingers of a baby. Eating them by the handful, he looked about the room at length, as if considering his response, while Maci looked over his shoulder at Tennie’s friend Dr. Fie, another man she had offended that night. Her mind turned to Mrs. Woodhull’s accomplished young son, a boy who had made such an early success of medicine that he was able to keep a house even larger than his mother’s. Maci had seen him once or twice, small and furtive, always in the company of Dr. Fie.
“Ah,” said Mr. Butler, at the sound of the doorbell. “Here is Mr. Andrews.” He offered her his arm, to walk her to the crowd that had gathered around the door, but Maci informed him that she was quite capable of seeing herself across the room without assistance.
If woman is capable of being a mother to those who make the laws of nations, if she is capable of training the young mind up to mature age, and shaping its physical, social, and intellectual destiny, then surely she is capable of taking part in politics. Death has leveled us all, Sister. Coke and Blackstone (here too!) say it also: everyone is equal in death, and when the dead live again they will bring perfect equality back with them to wash over the earth.
In January of 1871, Maci wrote a letter to Aunt Amy, the most sensible person she knew.
Aunt, I know what I believe. I know what is foolish and what is wise. I know the symptoms of madness, and I know that I am florid with them. I know that I have, by your judgment, run off quite unexpectedly to join a community of Free Love in a capital of wickedness, and that this must seem queer payment for your generosity. But please understand that every day I rise and work. I often have ideas very late in the evening. In the space of three days I see them in print, and in the space of three more days those same words, that late-night notion of mine, have gone out in twenty thousand copies all over this country, with a few copies to Britain and France and one copy—can you believe it?—to St. Petersburg. And Aunt, Mrs. Woodhull will deliver a memorial to Congress this next week. Can your dresses give you satisfaction, can the memory of your husband keep you content when such a thing is about to happen? Mad or sane, where should I be but with her? I know you worry about me. I know you think it is a scandal, to associate with such a woman. I know you think that madness has sucked me up as it sucked up your sister, that my family is come at last to absolute ruin. But I promise you, Aunt, that my hand can babble as it may, but I will never believe it. I will never succumb to that sweet belief, that the dead are not dead, because it seems obvious to me that to believe this would cast upon them the most atrocious dishonor, that to reduce their loss to nothing is to reduce them to nothing, that to indulge madness to save yourself pain for them is the work of a coward. I go forward, Aunt, as radically and sensibly as I dare.
Maci never sent this letter, or others that she wrote. It pleased her, sometimes, to imagine Aunt Amy in a fret over the disappearance of her niece, but she knew that Aunt Amy was not likely to fret over her. Finding Maci gone, Aunt Amy would have been angry, then relieved, and then fallen back into the comforts of quotidian sameness which Maci’s disappearance had briefly interrupted. Maci collected the letters in a bundle, and put them away in another rosewood box, her fourth, stuffed like the others with pictures and correspondence.
Maci rode down with Mrs. Woodhull to be with her when she delivered her memorial. It was Maci’s first time in Washington. “Mrs. Woodhull,” she said, peering out the window of the carriage when they rode by General Grant’s house on their way to their hotel, “when you are President, you’ll have to live in that big white barn.”
“Not if I move the capital to New York, my star.” That was Mrs. Woodhull’s pet name for Maci, inspired by the pseudonym, Arcturus, under which Maci wrote her articles, and by a certain spiritual radiance which, she claimed, hovered around Maci’s body, especially when ideas were hot in Maci’s head. Sometimes, as they worked together late into the night in the house on Thirty-eighth Street, Mrs. Woodhull would suddenly shield her eyes from Maci and say, “Oh, you are too bright, too bright!”
But it was Mrs. Woodhull who burned up the little room in Congress that day in January. She held the entire audience spellbound with her lucid argument. Maci’s lips moved along during the speech—she and Mrs. Woodhull had been over it so many times that Maci knew it by heart. Maci took great satisfaction in looking around the room at the rapt, attentive faces of all the powerful men and giant women. Only Mrs. Woodhull’s son, the younger Dr. Woodhull, spoiled the perfect attention. He’d brought a child with him into the room, a pale boy named Pickie, whom he claimed to have found in the snow in Madison Square Park a few weeks before.
The boy giggled whenever Dr. Woodhull whispered to him. A reporter standing next to them made hushing noises, but was ignored. Even Mr. Whitman, who Maci understood to be a friend even closer to Dr. Woodhull than was Dr. Fie, failed to quiet them when he tried. It didn’t really matter that they were whispering and giggling—no one was distracted from Mrs. Woodhull—but Maci found it outrageous that the lady’s own son should be so disrespectful towards her in her great hour. It irked Maci, how he did not act like her son, how he was not respectful towards her, how he showed her no affection. Maci’s mother was dead of a madness much less sublime than Mrs. Woodhull’s; her father was huddled uselessly on a cliff in Rhode Island. She wanted to rearrange fate, to effect a parent swap with him, and then she would see if he did not appreciate having Mrs. Woodhull for a mother. She wanted, at least, to take him aside, to scold him. “Don’t you know,” she would ask, “that your mother is extraordinary?”
There was something about him, though, which repelled her. Tennie described him as heavily electritized, and revealed to Maci, as if it were a precious secret, that he and Mr. Whitman were the two poles of a love-magnet. Maci did not know what that meant, and did not want to know, but she wondered, sometimes, if there were not a strange force in him. Whenever she went near him, on the rare occasions when he visited his mother’s house, she felt herself pushed away by something almost like panic. He is the Magus, her hand wrote. He is working to bring us back. What a celebration we would have here, if you would only speak to him. I tell you, there would be a parade! Sister, he needs your assistance.
“Brushing his hair, perhaps,” Maci replied, because it was always in a tangle.
It was after his mother’s memorial that Maci, compelled by her rage, finally spoke to young Dr. Woodhull. She found him outside the Capitol, watching Mr. Whitman play in the snow with the boy, Pickie. She stood behind him where he leaned on a stone railing, and gathered in her breath to shout at him. “How dare you!” is what she wanted to say, surprising him with a bombardment of fury. But she found she wasn’t able to shout at him after all. She let out the breath she had gathered, making a noise that sounded like a sigh.
Dr. Woodhull straightened up and turned around, stared a moment into her face, then turned back to watch his friend and his ward. Saying nothing, he stepped aside to make room for her to stand next to him. He began to gather up snow from off of the railing. Maci stared out at Mr. Whitman and the boy where they were frolicking around the ridiculous statue of General Washington. The boy climbed on the statue, kicking snow off of Washington’s lap and into Mr. Whitman’s face. “You rascal!” Mr. Whitman said. Her rage forgotten, Maci laughed at them.
“When I was a child,” she said, “my nurse discovered a copy of Leaves of Grass in my bed and beat me with it. She said it was a naughty book, and that I was a naughty child to read it.” Dr. Woodhull did a thing with his face—it might have been a smile or it might have been a grimace. He handed her a perfectly shaped snowball, then put his hands over his stomach.
“Are you ill?” Maci asked him.
“No,” he said. “Don’t ever tell Walt you got beaten with his book. It would make him sad.” He looked for a few moments at her shoes, cleared his throat, sniffed in the cold air. “Over there,” he said, pointing across the grounds to a building on the other side of Second Street. “Did you know that’s where they hung Mrs. Surrat?” Before she could reply he ran off to play. Maci considered her snowball, thinking she’d never seen anything so thoroughly round before in her life. It seemed like a sin to destroy it, but still she threw it against the wall of the Capitol, imagining it a perfect ball of fire, not ice, one that would set the place ablaze, and bring down the old order so she and Mrs. Woodhull could build it up again better and more just. The snowball behaved oddly, bouncing whole to the floor of the terrace before it exploded into a cloud of snow.
She watched the three playing for a while longer, until Mr. Whitman paused to stare at her. She thought for a moment that she should wave to him, but it seemed like an overly familiar gesture to make towards a stranger, so she turned and walked away.
I saw you. The veil is thick, but not obscuring to vision. We all see you. We see all of you. We watch you rend your clothes and pull your hair at our absence. You are destroyed because we are not with you, but do you ever consider how we are destroyed because you are not with us? Do you ever consider our grief? Selfish, selfish! O Sister, do you see what small sympathy exists on earth for the dead?
There was a time after Rob’s death when Maci went about in her aunt’s house with her hair in disarray and her dress torn, when she borrowed rituals of grief and devised her own—covering mirrors and putting out food for her brother to eat; standing for hours in the foyer in case a spiritual postman should come scratching ever so lightly at the door with a letter from him; saying a prayer every night for his sake—Lord bless him and keep him eternally in light and please tomorrow let him be alive. She’d lie in bed waiting in vain for sleep to come, and scenes from their life would play out in her head—hiding under Aunt Amy’s bed when she visited their house on Mount Vernon Street, and grabbing at her toes as she sat getting ready for sleep; dressing the dog; teaching the cat to swim in the washtub. Over the course of months she played out their whole lives, going back in time until she wrecked her little boat of reverie upon a first memory. She was two years old, taking a nap under the piano—a place she was fond of until she was seven—when Rob came and woke her. “Get up, you,” he said. He was unfriendly, back then, because he had wished to remain an only child. He hadn’t asked for a sister, and hoped at first that she might just go away without any fuss. She remembered hearing his voice, then opening her eyes and seeing him, and because it was her first memory, it seemed to her sometimes that it was he, not their parents, who had called her into creation, that she entered into life at the sound of his voice. In the weeks and months following his death, she ruminated on such strange notions. Back then she’d thought madness would be a blessing. It would be better to think constantly on beans than to think on him in his last moments, than to think on the wound in his throat, sucking and whistling, throwing out a spray of blood with every breath.
But she had not grown fascinated with beans, not with roses or budgies or with the patterns made by the grain in a wood floor, though she had given all these things the most thorough consideration, and opened herself up to them, inviting them to rule her. Instead, she had straightened her hair over a period of months, sewn up the tear in her dress, and traded her acute misery for something more sensible and less exhausting, a cruel and hard sort of wisdom that said people die, and a person can do nothing against that. It’s the greatest open secret, that death will take everyone, that every person is as transient as a shadow. Embracing this knowledge, she came to realize, was how sane people managed their grief, and she thought it had served her pretty well for as long as she remained sane. It’s me it’s me it’s me, her impostor hand would write all through the winter, and all through the winter she’d reply, “How dare you say that?”
And all winter long she had terrible dreams. They featured young Dr. Woodhull, a person who was expressly not invited to invade her sleeping mind. She’d lie awake, fearing sleep as she did when she was a girl, back when nightmares were always springing out of the crevices of her agitated brain. “Not tonight,” she’d whisper, praying for dreamless sleep, or at least for the sort of dreams she used to enjoy, in which she healed the split between the New York and Boston factions of the woman suffrage movement, or in which Private Vanderbilt’s big hands closed, over and over, about her waist.
Despite her prayers, she’d find herself in the moonlit orchard, up to her ankles in rotting windfall apples and pears. She’d look up and see a child’s dress blowing in the branches of a pear tree. Dr. Woodhull would step out from a pool of darkness. “It’s a shame,” he’d say as he put his hand on her, “how it must pass away. Even something as beautiful as this.” He’d hold her breast in his two hands, lifting it up as if for her inspection, and as she watched it turned the color of ash. His touch was reverent, but everywhere it left purple blotches of rot in the shape of his hand.
“Not much room to roll around in here, is there?” he asked her in another dream. They were together in a coffin meant, like all coffins, for just a single occupant. “Why don’t they make them bigger? It’s not as if people always die one at a time.”
And in another dream, the worst, Maci stood with him looking down into her mother’s casket. Louisa Trufant was a wasted thing, shriveled away to bones, tendons, and skin by her diet of beans. But her hair was thick and shining as it had never been in life. Even as Maci watched, it grew, filling the casket until her mother seemed to be bathing in it, and indeed it made a sound like rushing water as it poured from her head. “Look,” Dr. Woodhull told her. “Look at her. Keep looking. If you keep at it she will give up a secret to you.”
Maci would wake, quieting sobs with one hand while her other pulled her across the room to the desk. We are creatures, like you, it wrote, made all of sadness and desire, only a thousand times more so. We share want like water, here. Sister, do you know how you are missed by strangers? We want to come back. Please, we want to come back.
In April of 1871, Maci went along with Tennie to Number 10 Washington Place, the home of Mr. Vanderbilt. Maci had been working on something for the Weekly, an article in support of the late Mr. Lincoln’s wife. Mrs. Lincoln, she wrote, is thrown over on the assigned ground that the widow of the murdered President is not in danger of actual starvation. We have no affection for pensions in public allowance. Every honest worker is as much a servant of the state and a public benefactor as any duly appointed official. In the case of accident or sudden death the laborer’s widow or child gets no State assistance. But if there be any such principle as public gratitude and any such way of testifying it as pension or pecuniary gratuity, Abraham Lincoln’s widow is the woman to receive it—her husband killed on account of public duty with a record, beyond the doubt of selfish motive—if that be not a claim on the nation’s bounty, what is?
It was typical of Mrs. Woodhull’s new direction. She had been courting the labor movement for months, and had instructed Maci to write pieces favorable to it. Maci complied as best she could, but always she found herself writing articles that endorsed the perspectives of the working class while simultaneously rejecting them. Maci thought it ill-advised for the Weekly to embrace Communists. She tried to tell this to Mrs. Woodhull, but the lady was dogged in her conviction that Communists, like Free Lovers and Spiritualists, were all decent and righteous and good.
The article was giving Maci a headache when Tennie came by and offered to take her away to visit the Commodore, a benefactor and intimate friend. Tennie had offered before to take Maci to his house, but Maci had always declined, because she was certain there would be a great awkwardness involved in visiting the father of the man she’d practically married in her imagination. But that day in April, Maci went because small, peculiar George Washington Woodhull was still sneaking into her dreams, bringing her strange gifts now: a lump of cold iron, a double handful of ashes, a bouquet of broken glass flowers. She wanted to drive him away, and she thought a visit to the Vanderbilt house might help to do it.
Her left hand denied coincidence, maintaining that it was a sign that Tennie was cozy with the Private’s father. It was clear to Maci that the relationship was not exactly a coincidence, but it wasn’t a magical arrangement, either. Mrs. Woodhull had told how she had sought out Commodore Vanderbilt when she’d first arrived in the city. She’d given him advice, that she claimed to have from the spirits, on the future behavior of certain stocks. He’d repaid her in kind, and she’d built her fortune on those first stock tips. “We’re kindred souls,” Mrs. Woodhull claimed of the Commodore, but it was her sister to whom he’d proposed marriage, and who had rejected him. “Marriage is the grave of love,” Tennie said simply, when Maci asked why she hadn’t accepted his offer. At Number 10 Washington Place a winking servant let them in a back door and led them through the house.
In a study full of empty bookshelves, Maci and Tennie had a visit with Mr. Vanderbilt. He greeted Maci in a very cordial manner, but soon grew cold when it became clear to him that she would not sit on his lap. Tennie did sit there, and they smoked from the same cigar, and drank whiskey. Their intimacy was routine and not shocking to Maci, who laughed now when she thought how she had been shocked by her father’s behavior towards Miss Suter. Maci pretended to sip from a glass of wine while she stared at Mr. Vanderbilt, looking for his son in him but not finding him there. She’d heard it said that a bride could look to her husband’s father to see the man with whom she’d spend her old age, and as she sat listening to Tennie and Mr. Vanderbilt talking of the virtues of cigars, she tried to imagine being old with someone who looked like this, a man with giant white whiskers, a hard face, and hawkish eyes. She failed at it. He was too coarse and grabby. All she could think was how her frail old bones and papery skin would never withstand his pinching and poking.
“I’ll show you around the house, Maci,” Tennie said suddenly, sliding off Mr. Vanderbilt’s lap. She kissed his cheek and said, “You don’t mind, do you, old goat?” She didn’t wait for his answer, but took Maci’s hand and led her out into the dark hall.
“We must be quiet,” she said. “If we wake Frank we might be sorry for it.” Frank was the new Mrs. Vanderbilt, the daughter of the lady whom Mr. Vanderbilt’s surviving children had put forth, after their mother’s death, as an acceptable bride. She was the lady he’d settled for when Tennie refused him. Maci followed Tennie as she tiptoed down the hall to a staircase, which she ascended in slow, cautious steps, pausing every now and then as if to listen for sounds of alarm.
“Where are we going?” Maci asked.
“Upstairs,” Tennie whispered. On the second floor, Tennie led her to a bedroom. She opened the creaking door very slowly, and after she had turned up the gas, touched Maci on the hand and said, “I thought you would like to see it.”
“Where are you going?” Maci asked, as Tennie left. Maci would have followed, but as soon as the light came up she recognized that this room belonged to her brother’s friend. She had confessed her stupid conceit late one night in Tennie’s Turkish corner, had unfolded Rob’s portrait of Private Vanderbilt while Tennie praised the art and the man. “He’s a big handsome beast,” she’d said, and they’d worked each other into sentimental tears for the lover Maci never had. Maci had been deeply ashamed the next day, and because Tennie had not ever spoken of it except to ask her if her friend Dr. Fie was not the same beastly size as Private Vanderbilt, Maci figured she’d forgotten.
Maci explored the room quietly, after briefly acknowledging to herself that she ought just to leave without disturbing a thing. It was as he must have left it years before, except his uniform was folded on the bed. There were a few pictures on the wall, big oil paintings of steamers, portraits of his father’s property. She opened a wardrobe to look at his clothes, oversized sack coats and shirts into whose sleeves she imagined she could easily fit her whole leg. When Maci lay down on his bed, her head found something hard under the pillow: a Bible. She put her face on the uniform, thinking to discover his secret, personal odor in it. But it had been too long since he’d worn it, and now his uniform smelled utterly blank. With her face in his shirt she considered how it was very bad, what she’d done, so grossly assuming that they might have been friends, and imagining him her husband in various domestic scenes. She was embarrassed for herself, to be sneaking in a stranger’s house, sniffing at a stranger’s clothes. And she was embarrassed because, lying here at last in Private Vanderbilt’s abandoned bed, as close as she would ever get to him in this life, she felt very little. In fact, she felt nothing at all, not love, not grief, not desire, just a great empty space where a ghost did not live, where there was nobody and nothing, after all.
Do you remember the day our mother died? Do you remember how it was beautiful, bright, and warm after two cold days of rain? It put me in mind of Easter, because I had never seen it rain on Easter, or fail to rain on Good Friday. There was something that I wanted to say to you, then, but like you I was dumb in my mourning. I wanted to tell you that I was so sad I felt as if I might be happy, or in love, simply because such powerful feelings can appear the same to the naive. I was mighty with grief, and I thought I should be empowered by it. I thought my hands should shine with a yellow light, and that should I reach out to touch our mother on the head, I would call her back from the place she’d gone. I felt so very powerful. Later I thought, Fool, you’ve never been more powerless in your life. And it seemed so stupid, to think I could have called Mother back to life merely with the strength of my sadness. But Sister, the ridiculous fallacy is to think that grief cannot bring us back. You must believe me when I say that it certainly can. If only you grieved more and better, we would be back with you now. If only you did not forget us, we could return to you.
Maci tended to arrange all the Claflins but Tennie by their bad habits, and in her mind she often referred to them by their chiefest sins instead of their names. So big, hairy Malden Claflin was Gluttony. Sinister, one-eyed Buck, who’d come pawing at Maci one night in her bedroom, and was dealt a black eye by her left hand, was Avarice, because his greed was even more prominent a feature in him than his lechery. Miss Utica, drunk and jealous of her sisters every hour of the day and night, was Envy. Worst of all of them was Anna Claflin, Mrs. Woodhull’s demonic mother, a lady who embodied a sin Maci had no name for. It involved a quality of being murderous in intent if not in action, of being a contemptible liar and a relentless hater, and of trying to own every person around you, even strangers.
“How do you rise, with such weighty hangers-on?” Maci had asked Mrs. Woodhull, because she did not understand how she could have accomplished all she had with such a persecutory chorus always trailing after her.
“My family is my strength,” Mrs. Woodhull replied confidently, but they almost destroyed her in May, when Anna Claflin swore out a warrant against Colonel Blood, whom she hated because he had appropriated a portion of her daughter’s love that Anna thought was due all to her. May was anniversary month, when a person could not open a paper without seeing accounts of the annual meetings of a half-dozen societies. Societies bent on reforming or deforming the nation; associations for the advancement of the street urchin; bands of veterans; amateur devotees of the botanical sciences; the River Pirates’ Orphans’ Benevolent Circle—everyone met in May. Mrs. Woodhull had a bright moment at the convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association at Apollo Hall, but even as she was speaking her mother was slouching down to Essex Market police court. There Anna swore out her warrant accusing Colonel Blood of beating her and threatening to kill her with an iron dog similar to the one used to murder the distinguished Mr. Nathan nearly a year before. She hinted that it was very possible, to her mind, that Colonel Blood, not Mr. Nathan’s son, was the still-at-large fiend who had gleefully bludgeoned that esteemed man to death.
“You awful creature!” Mrs. Woodhull shouted at her mother, after the trial was over, after her magnificent speech had been eclipsed in every New York paper by the misleading fact that she had two husbands living in her house. “You false thing!” Mrs. Woodhull put her face in Maci’s shoulder and cried, and Maci brought her arms up to embrace her. Anna Claflin was shrieking curses, but Maci barely heard them. She felt suddenly transported out of the elegant parlor, out of the beautiful house, and up into the sky, because greatness had chosen her arms in which to weep.
Anna and Buck were ejected from the house on Thirty-eighth Street, but they came back in June, recalled by some familial gravity that baffled Maci. By then Maci had other worries. Ever since Anna’s trial, it had become fashionable to insult Mrs. Woodhull, and every day, all over the country, some editor would hop on the slander-cart and write an editorial that called her immoral for sheltering her broken-down former husband in her mansion. The most humiliating attacks came from Catharine Beecher who claimed that Mrs. Woodhull was the pinnacle of five thousand years of accumulating indecency, and from Beecher’s sister Mrs. Stowe, who caricatured Mrs. Woodhull in the pages of The Christian Union. In Mrs. Stowe’s frankly stupid serial novel, Victoria Woodhull was a carousing lady called Audacia Dangereyes, who owned a paper called The Virago, who swore and had multiple husbands, and in whose wake Free Love circulated like a stink.
“This will stop their fat mouths,” Mrs. Woodhull said as she and Maci worked on a letter to the Times, a veiled threat to expose Henry Beecher as an adulterer. Because I am a woman, Maci wrote while Mrs. Woodhull stood with a hand resting on her shoulder, and because I conscientiously hold opinions somewhat different from the self-elected orthodoxy which men find their pride in supporting, self-elected orthodoxy assails me, vilifies me, and endeavors to cover my life with ridicule and dishonor. This has been particularly the case in reference to certain law-proceedings into which I was recently drawn by the weakness of one very near, and provoked by other relatives.
My opinions and principles are subjects of just criticism. I put myself before the public voluntarily. But let him who is without sin cast his stone. I do not intend to be the scapegoat of sacrifice, to be offered up as a victim to society by those who cover up the foulness and the feculence of their thought with hypocritical mouthing of fair professions, and who divert public attention from their own iniquity by pointing their finger at me. I advocate Free Love—in the highest and purest sense, as the only cure for the immorality by which men corrupt sexual relations.
My judges who preach against “Free Love” openly, practice it secretly. For example, I know of one man, a public teacher of eminence, who lives in concubinage with the wife of another public teacher of almost equal eminence. All three concur in denouncing offenses against morality. So be it, but I decline to stand up as the “frightful example.” I shall make it my business to analyze some of these lives and will take my chances in the manner of libel suits.
Maci had delighted in the letter as she wrote it. But later, after it summoned Theodore Tilton from across the river, she regretted it. He came from Brooklyn to silence Mrs. Woodhull with pleas and promises and threats from Mr. Beecher. Tilton was supposed to convert her to silence, or cow her into respecting his and Mr. Beecher’s secret. Instead, he fell in love with her.
Surely, Maci thought, love could not be more Free than this. Mrs. Woodhull suddenly quite forgot Colonel Blood, who in his turn blithely ignored her frequent outings with Mr. Tilton. Maci, however, could not ignore them. She felt compelled to follow the two as they went to the park to ride in pleasure-boats, to Coney Island to play in the surf, or to the top of the Croton Distributing Reservoir to walk around and around the promenade, with their heads close together, sheltered by Mrs. Woodhull’s parasol from the sun but not from common view.
She wasn’t the only person following them. The younger Dr. Woodhull and his ward also trailed after his mother and her intimate friend on their outings. They’d both remove their hats and bow to Maci, whenever she caught sight of them. But he never spoke to her until the day in June that would see Anna and Buck Claflin return to their daughter’s house. That day, Maci had tracked Mrs. Woodhull and Mr. Tilton down to the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street, and thence up to the top of the reservoir, where she paced them as they sauntered underneath a sky so deeply blue it was nearly purple. On such a lovely day, the reservoir was crowded. Mrs. Woodhull looked back every so often and nodded at Maci. She found Maci’s fretting laughable and sweet.
“Miss Trufant,” Dr. Woodhull said, startling her where she was standing at a corner of the reservoir, and nearly causing her to leap clear into the water.
“Dr. Woodhull,” she said, overcome immediately with the familiar, panicked feeling.
“Did you know,” he asked her excitedly, “that this reservoir holds twenty million gallons of water? And did you know that we are a full forty-one miles from Croton Lake? The water flows all that way! Have you seen the bridge and aqueduct over the Harlem River? It is a marvelous piece of engineering. But the great bridge to Brooklyn will be even finer.” His face was flushed, and he was breathing as if he had just subjected himself to great exertion. She stared in his face for a moment, and he looked away, up into the air. His eyes were perfect mirrors of the dark blue sky.
“Is science your religion, Dr. Woodhull?”
“No,” he said, shifting his gaze to his mother, who, standing a few hundred feet off with Mr. Tilton, had begun to walk again. Dr. Woodhull offered Maci his arm. Not taking it, she walked with him. “I do believe, however,” he continued, “that science can change the world. I think it will make a better place for us to live in.”
“My father thought so,” said Maci. “He was wrong.” They walked for a while, stopping again when Mrs. Woodhull stopped. Maci noticed the boy, Pickie, kneeling by the water, where other boys were racing toy sailboats.
“I think science is not your religion, Miss Trufant. But tell me what you do believe in.”
Maci said nothing at first, thinking how her hand was always accusing her. Sister, it wrote, you believe in nothing. That is the most debilitating of sins.
Mrs. Woodhull’s vigorous laugh came drifting to them. Maci’s silence stretched on.
“Yesterday,” said Dr. Woodhull, “my mother was described in a Philadelphia paper as ‘The Dark Angel of Divorce.’”
“I believe,” Maci said forcefully, “that all existence is crossed by sorrow.” A little green sailboat came racing towards them across the water. All the boys were encouraging it, except little Pickie, who was sitting down on the ground now and crying. Maci went and knelt by him.
“What’s the matter, little fellow?” she asked him.
“It’s my brother,” he wailed. “He is unborn!”
“He means he is lonely,” Dr. Woodhull said behind her. “Be quiet, Pickie. Watch the boats. See how they are carefree? You should be like them.”
“There now,” Maci said, holding the boy close while he sobbed. She found herself admiring his long, lustrous brown hair. But then it brought to mind the dream of her mother, and she shuddered. “This boy needs his hair cut,” she said.
Dr. Woodhull shrugged. Pickie stopped crying and returned Maci’s embrace with such strength that she gasped.
“Mama!” Pickie said, then laughed.
“Forgive him,” Dr. Woodhull said. “He hugs dogs, and calls them ‘Mama.’ Trees, too.”
“Not my mama,” Pickie said, “but my brother’s mama.” He broke away from her embrace and went back to watch the boats.
“He has a volatile temperament,” Dr. Woodhull said apologetically. Maci looked all around for Mrs. Woodhull, but failed to find her.
“She’s escaped me,” Maci said.
“She’s gone home,” Dr. Woodhull said. “To prepare for the party.”
“Which party is that?” Maci asked him, but he’d already walked off to retrieve Pickie. The two of them made a formal bow to her and walked into the crowds.
Maci would have liked not to celebrate the return of the nasty prodigals, but Mrs. Woodhull insisted that she participate in the groundless festivities. We ought to be mourning, Maci said to herself, and sat at the far end of Mrs. Woodhull’s table, away from the revelry, working on an article that profiled and condemned Madame Restell. She is seen every day, she wrote, a pale lady riding fast in her gorgeous carriage. Why does she drive so fast? Is she flying from herself?
“Sweet, sweet forgiveness!” Anna Claflin shouted at the other end of the room. Engrossed in her work, Maci didn’t notice how the old lady was sneaking up on her. She’d smeared her lips with honey, and meant to give Maci a sugar-kiss. Maci looked up too late to duck away. But young Dr. Woodhull’s hand came between them before Anna’s lips could connect with Maci’s. Anna kissed his hand lovingly, then went back to the other end of the table. She took a knife and began to stab at Colonel Blood’s shadow where the light threw it on a wall.
“Thank you,” Maci said, watching Dr. Woodhull wipe honey from his palm. Marking his deficit, she stared too long.
“My eighty-percent hand,” he said.
“I am rude,” she said. “Please forgive me.”
“There’s nothing to forgive.”
“Was it an animal? Did an animal bite you?”
“A congenital deformity,” he said. “You’ll notice that I share it with my grandmother. But won’t you come down and celebrate, Miss Trufant?”
“I prefer not to,” she said. “In fact, I am sleepy. Good night, Dr. Woodhull.” She gathered up her papers, shook his hand—the whole one—and went upstairs to her room. By the time she came to her room she’d become so weary that she lay on her bed without undressing and fell immediately into a dream, in which she and Dr. Woodhull were back at the reservoir, sitting with their bare feet dangling in the water. He had an abundance of hair on his toes.
“Do you believe in love, Miss Trufant?” he asked her. “Do you believe it is more than a gratifying delusion?”
“Free Love?” she asked.
“Any kind,” he said.
“Well,” she said, getting up from where they were sitting and walking away rapidly on her wet feet, suddenly remembering that she had to find Mrs. Woodhull. “In fact I do not,” she said softly. Dr. Woodhull had hurried after her and was walking with his face very close to her own. “I do not believe in it at all.” Mrs. Woodhull dropped down out of the sky to land in front of them without a sound. Maci reached out and touched her face, and woke to her voice.
Mrs. Woodhull and Mr. Tilton were on the roof. They had a bower there, to which they retreated nightly. Mrs. Woodhull was berating Mr. Tilton for going on about how his wife and Mr. Beecher had wounded him. They began a spirited argument, but just as they seemed ready to start screaming like Claflins, their voices cut off, and presently Maci heard Mrs. Woodhull crying out in a high voice, and Tilton shouting, “Praise, praise!”
Maci had gotten into the habit of listening, rather than closing her window, just as she listened sometimes at Tennie’s door when she was entertaining her large friend Dr. Fie, or some other friend, large or small. Tennie seemed to take them in all sizes. Maci pretended that she was exploring a mystery with her shameful listening. She’d write down the words she heard, the cries that sounded plaintive, frustrated, angry, relieved, and then arrange them together in sentences of strident lust. And, sometimes, when she had been lying in her damp sheets for an hour listening to the lovers on the roof, she’d consider finally taking a ride on the pony, which Tennie had solicitously moved into her room, insisting that Maci had greater need of it than she did. Maci had sat on it once, the little bump put just in the place it was meant to go, and taken a few exploratory rocks. She’d dismounted immediately, covering the thing up again with its slip of silk, and then with two wool blankets on top of that, to hide it completely. She never got on it again, but on the hottest nights, when she could hear the lovers so very loud on the roof, she thought of riding the pony to a strange, new place, with her book open in her hand, reading aloud as she went.
Is it because Adam sinned to keep company with Eve? Is it because intelligence can only become perfect through suffering, as the earth can only reach a perfect state through storms as well as sunshine, and the soul can only reach a perfect state through storms of sorrow and despair? No, I think it is for no reason, or, at the least, for no good reason. I do not believe that we are hallowed by sadness. I do not believe it is sufficient answer, to say we are justly punished by death, or to say that we die because we die.
Maci kept busy, all through the summer of 1871, organizing Victoria Leagues. They were Maci’s own idea, associations, formed all over the country, whose purpose would be to promote Mrs. Woodhull’s bid for the Presidency. Maci recruited members from out of Mrs. Woodhull’s parlor parties, from subscribers to the paper, and from brokerage clients. And, sitting at a table in the third-floor study, she wrote an anonymous open letter to Mrs. Woodhull, care of the Weekly.
Madam, a number of your fellow citizens, both men and women, have formed themselves into a working committee, borrowing its title from your name, and calling itself The Victoria League. Our object is to form a new national political organization, composed of the progressive elements in the existing Democratic and Republican parties, together with the Women of the Republic, who have hitherto been disenfranchised, but to whom the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the Constitution, properly interpreted, guarantee, equally with men, the right of suffrage. This new Political organization will be called The Equal Rights Party, and its platform will consist solely and only of a declaration of the equal civil and political rights of all American citizens, without distinction of sex. We shall urge all women who possess the political qualifications of other citizens, in the respective States in which they reside, to assume and exercise the right of suffrage without hesitation or delay. And we ask you, Madam, to become the standard bearer of this idea before the people, and for this purpose nominate you as our candidate for President of the United States, to be voted for in 1872, by the combined suffrage of both sexes.
Across the table from her, Mrs. Woodhull wrote back a long, elegant, and somewhat demure letter of acceptance.
Maci had by this time understood completely that nothing would come of Mr. Tilton’s association with her employer except the fatuous biography he had written, a fawning, spineless thing that damned Mrs. Woodhull with abundant praise. It was widely mocked because it detailed all Mrs. Woodhull’s spiritual transactions, telling how Demosthenes was her mentor, how Josephine was her spirit sister, how all Mrs. Woodhull’s utterances were dictated under otherworldly influence.
Not concerned anymore about Mr. Tilton, Maci exercised her organ of worry on Mrs. Woodhull’s Communist enthusiasm. Mrs. Woodhull had thrown herself into the leadership of Section Twelve of the International Workingmen’s Association, not caring if she was lumped together with the Paris revolutionaries, who were widely regarded as repulsive monsters. Maci reminded Mrs. Woodhull repeatedly that no one but a Communist likes a Communist. It was to no avail.
In August, just when she was afloat on a tide of hot, Communist distress, Maci received an invitation from Dr. Woodhull. We must discuss my mother’s situation, he wrote to her. We are not alike, she and I, but I have always known that she will achieve great things, if she is not brought down by her wilder sympathies. Come and meet with me at my house, No. One E. 53rd St.
Mrs. Woodhull’s house was very noisy, so Maci was glad to leave it for a while. Because Tennie was campaigning for a spot in the New York State assembly, the house was full of prospective German constituents, who in the weeks previous had serenaded Tennie outside her window. Now they played their brass instruments inside the house, and there was nowhere a person could escape the splattering music, which was silly as Tennie was silly, and as her light-hearted, completely unserious campaign was silly. Maci went out into the dreadful heat without even telling anybody goodbye.
The younger Dr. Woodhull lived way up towards the park, where enormous houses were popping up with ever greater frequency. Maci’s hair was hanging wet and stinging in her eyes when she rang the bell, but when the door opened she shivered in the rush of cool air that poured out onto the marble steps. Dr. Woodhull stood in front of her with a pair of ice skates in his hands.
“You’ve come!” he said. “I wasn’t sure you would.”
“It was serious business in your letter.”
“The letter!” he said. “Come in and we’ll speak of it. Mind your way.” Maci slipped when she stepped into his unnaturally cool house, but he caught her arm and held her up. “That meeting has been canceled, after all,” he said. “It has been postponed in favor of a skating party.”
Maci might have reminded him it was August, except she could already see how the floor was covered with ice.
“I thought it might please you,” he said, “because it is so hot, and because you are from Boston. Don’t they all love to ice-skate in Boston? Come and skate with me, Miss Trufant. The ball is up. It’s a private pond. Nobody will disturb us.”
“You have deceived me,” Maci whispered. It occurred to her that she should be angry at him for drawing her into his house with false pretenses, but she was wonderstruck at the ice, and it was all she could think about. “How did you do it?” she asked.
He tried to explain about the copper pipes under the ice, and how liquid ammonia, as it expanded to a gas, could steal heat from water. “It’s really very simple. It’s how they make ice in the factories.”
The drapes were drawn all over the house. She could see very little besides large, dark shapes that leaned in the corners. Maci thought they might be furniture. She and Dr. Woodhull glided from room to room, through open doors into a dim parlor where a hundred mirrors reflected her shadowy, floating image, into a dining room where the table was pushed on its side against the wall, and where Maci caught her skate on a frozen apple. They didn’t talk, except when Dr. Woodhull pointed out an obstacle. She collided with him repeatedly. Even when they stopped to rest, standing in a wide, blank room whose purpose, before it became a skating pond, Maci could not figure, she drifted towards him and collided with him softly. “Excuse me!” she said, backing away.
“It’s the floor,” he said. “It slants.”
On her third pass through the mirror-parlor she skated closer to a large shape to investigate it. It was partly sunk in the ice. When she got right up by it she could see that it was a giant gear, like what might turn a house-sized clock.
“What is this?” she asked. “Why do you have this?” Dr. Woodhull was not in the room to answer her question, though he’d been skating at her side just moments before. She went looking for him, thinking she might have dreamed this already—searching for him in a dark, cold house, floating like a ghost—but knowing that she hadn’t because this was stranger and suddenly more terrible than any dream she’d had. She wandered through his house, tottering awkwardly, once upstairs, with the skates still strapped to her shoes, going from room to room, discovering old furniture, tall stacks of moldering books, and everywhere gears and rods and pieces of shaped glass, machine-spoor the sight of which made her stomach twist up in a knot. With the sense that she was wandering at her own peril she went up and up, compelled to open every door until she reached the top floor. She stood in the abandoned conservatory, and made the mistake of leaning against a withered potted tree, which tipped and fell, and broke in half when it struck the floor. She hurried clumsily from that room, and went through the only other door on the hall. Then she was in Dr. Woodhull’s bedroom, where she found him sitting quietly on his bed.
“Why are you crying, Miss Trufant?” he asked her, after he’d thrown open the other iron door and brought her in to see the sprawling thing he kept behind it.
“It is too, too much, Dr. Woodhull,” she said. “Too, too much.” Because it really was too much, for such a thing to happen once, and too, too much for it to happen twice, for her brother to introduce her again to an unsuitable boy, and for somebody else’s life to be wasted in the construction of an impossible and useless machine. It was clear to her then that she should sit on the bed and calmly remove her skates, then run frantically out of the room, down the stairs, and out of the house. She ought to run right back to Boston, because she would proclaim herself an irredeemable fool if she stayed and ignored the lessons of her ridiculous life. Dear Aunt Amy, she wrote in her mind as she stood there, Here I come! But she didn’t go anywhere except deeper into the room, following her left hand as it yearned towards the machine, closing in a fist around a hot section of pipe. Something beat through it like blood.
“Do you like it?” he asked her.
“I despise it,” she said, but her hand would not come free, and she feared, in that moment, that it never would.