“What’s behind there?” Walt had asked, at the end of the tour, when they’d come to Gob’s bedroom at the top of the house, the place where servants were usually quartered. Walt pointed at a giant iron door a few feet from the bed.
“My workshop,” Gob said softly. He had become quiet and nervous as they ascended into the high parts of the house. On the fifth floor, Walt stuck his head into an abandoned and neglected conservatory. The room was full of dead plants, and carpeted with dead leaves. “There’s nothing in there,” Gob said, pulling him through the only other door off the long hall.
Walt looked around. This was the one clean room Walt had seen in the house, a bedroom furnished in a simple style, except for the bed, which was huge and ornate, hung with white curtains that shivered and undulated in the breeze from a window open despite the cold. A blue skylight let tinted sunshine into the room. There was a wardrobe, and a pine desk covered with mathematical doodles. The floor was wooden, piled with rugs, except in one corner, which was paved with a little circle of stone. While Walt was looking around the room, Gob had gone to this corner, undone his pants, and dropped them. He fell to his knees and bent his head to the ground. Walt looked away too late — he saw the horrible thing like a fleshy eye winking at him obscenely.
“I’m ready,” Gob said softly, but Walt had fled, out the door and down the stairs. He kept running all the way down Fifth Avenue, and hurried to Brooklyn, hurried even to Washington, taking the first available train after bidding a very hasty goodbye to his mother. Back in his room in Washington, he felt he could catch his breath at last. He wept because he thought his beautiful friendship had been ruined. Gob sent him a package with a simple note. Forgive me, he wrote. I thought for a moment that you were my master. He enclosed a present, a copy of Leaves, the only gift, he said later, that he was absolutely sure Walt would like. Gob inscribed it with a line modified from Emerson: True friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.
Walt wrote back: Dear Gob, you must forgive me for being so cold the last day. I was unspeakably shocked and repelled from you by that proposition of yours — you know what. It seemed indeed to me (for I will talk plain to you, dearest comrade) that the one I loved, and who had always been so manly and so sensible, was gone, and a fool and intentional murderer stood in his place. But I will say no more of this — for I know such thoughts must have come when you were not yourself, but in a moment of derangement — and passed away like a bad dream.
Indeed, they said no more of that incident, and for all that it was terrible Walt came to be glad it had occurred, because it revealed the gigantic nature of their friendship — it seemed to him that only the best and purest sort of friendship could conquer such a horror. So if Gob invoked horror once or a hundred times, so if he was a little mad or a lot, so if he was a boy of seventeen who often acted like an old man of seventy-seven — so what? Walt had taken the measure of his feeling for Gob, and discovered that as wide and deep as his own soul.
The day after the Queen’s Cup race, Walt and Gob went out to Paumanok, because Walt had been promising for months to take Gob to the ocean. “Two hundred and twenty pounds avoirdupois!” Walt said, striking his naked chest and belly, then running off into the surf, into the terrific breathing noise of the sea. He liked to hurl himself around in the water, throwing his body against the breaking waves, or swimming along with them until they bore him up and carried him, flipping and spinning, towards the shore. Gob was more reserved in his play. He entered the surf slowly and purposefully, walking until the water was halfway up his chest, then swimming with powerful, even strokes, ducking under the waves like a dolphin till he was beyond them, then heading straight out into deep water. “Where are you going?” Walt shouted after him, but got no answer. Because Gob was in a poor mood — the outbreak of the new war on the Rhine had had an extraordinarily depressive effect on him — Walt feared, for a moment, that he meant to swim towards the east until he tired and drowned. Hank said, I hate the swift-running eddies that would dash him head-foremost on the rocks!
But very soon after he had disappeared against the horizon, Walt saw him again, heading back, his bobbing head growing from a speck to a blob as he came nearer. He swam as even and serene as when he had gone out. A wave picked him up, sent him tumbling forward to land on his feet. He walked out of the ocean, up the hot sand to the shadows under a dune, where they’d left their clothes. Walt waded ashore, then ran to him.
“What a display!” he said. “I feared you’d be drowned.”
“I like to swim,” Gob said. “It’s the first thing I remember in my whole life, swimming with my brother.”
“Do you feel better, then?” Walt sat down, put his arm around Gob’s shoulder, and gave him a squeeze. He wished he hadn’t asked. As soon as he did, Gob seemed to remember how sad he was.
“I don’t,” he said. Walt tried to cheer him with a dinner of cold roast chicken, and with talk about the beach. He told Gob how he’d come to this same stretch of sand when he was a boy, spearing eels in the winter and gathering seagull eggs in the summer. Somehow this pleasant reminiscence brought to Gob’s mind the latest murder to delight sensation-loving New Yorkers. Mr. Nathan, a distinguished Jew, had been bludgeoned in his beautiful house.
“My mama says she spoke with that dead man,” Gob said. “It was the son who did it, she says.”
Walt said he thought it was terrible that a boy should beat his father to death with a lead pipe, that it reflected a failure to cast aside irritating thoughts. “I am not mastered by my gloomy impulses,” he said. “That is the main part of getting through the battle and toil of life, dear Gob — keeping a cheerful mind.”
“Don’t you think of them, Walt?” Gob asked. “Those Frenchmen dying as they move on Saarbruck? Mr. Nathan crying out for mercy from his furious son? Your brother calling out in the madhouse, dying among strangers?” Walt had lost another brother that winter, Jesse. He’d been mad for years, since taking a hard fall from off a ship’s mast. Walt had had him committed to the King’s County Lunatic Asylum, and had visited him just once. Jesse had sat very quietly while Walt put a gift in his lap — fresh bread and jam from their mother — and while Walt told him news from home. But then without warning Jesse had leapt from his chair and wrestled Walt to the ground. He bit his nose and licked his eyes and called him a despicable hater of cabbages. Now he was dead, and Walt found that, having already put his brother out of his mind after madness claimed him, he did not in death seem so much farther away. How to explain? Jesse’s and Andrew’s deaths seemed small, and yet the thought that Gob might die was incapacitating to him. Indeed, it had incapacitated him. If he thought on it too long he would work himself into a terrible state, getting woozy with sadness and fear. His hands would burn, a lump would swell in his throat, and he’d have a terrible attack of diarrhea. If Gob had been out of his sight for much longer during that long swim, Walt might have fainted away into the water and drowned himself.