I miss you, Walt, Gob wrote. But his life seemed to be proceeding very smoothly and happily without Walt in it. His work went very well—You should see how our little friend has grown, Gob wrote, meaning his engine. He reported that his wife got more beautiful every day, and every time he put pen to paper the weather in New York was balmy or crisp or the beautiful snow was falling like a blessing. (In Washington, meanwhile, it was sweltering or bitter stinging cold or ice fell from the sky and slew horses by the dozen.) Little Pickie was contented and fat, but he missed his Uncle Walt.
A very happy family, the three of you, Walt wrote. How nice for you, my boy.
Eventually, Walt stopped answering letters. For a while he sent only tiny notes. So busy! Will write soon! Once, in a little fit of loneliness and spite, he sent just an empty envelope, and then he sent nothing. Gob’s letters he placed unopened in a cigar box, which he hid in his wardrobe. Hank scolded him endlessly, becoming increasingly shrill—You are a kosmos. He is a builder. You must be together. You must help him. How can we come back if you don’t help him? Walt ignored him, or scolded back, and at last drove Hank to silence. Then his winter was truly silent and dark and lonely. Walt trudged back and forth to work, looking like an old man again with his beard and hair grown long, and now walking like an old man, too. He slept more and more, though he wished not to, because Hank and Gob waited in his dreams to plead with him.
“You are not he,” Walt would say to them both. He dreamed of the reviewing stand in winter, without Mr. Lincoln and without the parade. Only the sign remained, but now it spelled How are you, Walt? Hank and Gob were with him on the stand. “You are not the Camerado, and you are not the Camerado,” Walt said. Because they were not. One had abandoned him for death, the other for marriage, and neither, he understood finally, had reciprocated his affection and his friendship — their love was never as pure and strong as his love. In the dream, Hank and Gob would crowd around him, enfolding him in their arms. “We do love you,” they’d say. “Brother, father, son, we love you — you are our love and our hope. Come back to us. Come back to New York.” Then Gob would put his earnest beautiful face in Walt’s and say, “Help me win, Walt, please help me win.” They would squeeze him and squeeze him until he woke, shouting, “I won’t, I won’t! Leave me be!”
* * *
Walt went back to New York in the second week of January of 1873 because he wanted to sleep without Gob and Hank pestering him all night long, and also because he thought that seeing Gob again would help rid him of the weighty feeling — the deep grief that he could feel in his belly, as if he’d eaten stones. This feeling was on him like the old feeling he’d had before he went down to Washington looking for his brother. Walt felt tired and hopeless, as if all his days had been lived for nothing, and all his work was nothing more than whispering into his own hands — no one had heard, and no one cared. On the train he slept a dreamless, squeezeless sleep, the first in months. When he woke he felt no less weary.
When Gob opened his door and found Walt standing there, he said, “You’re just in time.” Beyond the foyer, Walt could see that the house was transformed. Walls had been knocked down, ceilings removed through all five floors, so what was formerly many rooms on many floors was now a huge barnlike edifice spanned by immense arches like the ribs of some leviathan. Gob put on his coat and pushed Walt out the door. “We’d better hurry.”
“Where are we going?” Walt asked.
“To hear a speech,” Gob said. “Didn’t you get my letter? You were expressly invited, and now here you are.”
“I got it,” Walt said. “I’ve been dreaming….” He tried to tell Gob that he’d been haunted by him in dream after dream, but for the first time since he was an infant Walt found himself at a total loss for words.
“Ah,” said Gob. “We can talk later.” Dr. Fie was waiting in the stable with a carriage all ready. He tipped his hat to Walt. “Mr. Whitman,” he said. When Walt and Gob were settled in their seats, he took off, driving the horses like a fiend. “Will’s a brave driver,” Gob said. “He used to drive an ambulance. We’ll make it in time.”
“Is your mother speaking from jail?” Walt asked.
“Jail?” said Gob. “No, she’s escaped! She’s escaped to New Jersey.”
“My mama, too,” Walt said. Gob had his arm around him and was squeezing, but it was not oppressive, as in the dreams. Walt wanted more of it.
Federal marshals were guarding all the entrances to the Cooper Institute, waiting, Gob said, to snatch up his mama if she dared show her face. Walt asked if she would really come.
“Of course she will,” said Gob. Walt looked around the rooms for Mrs. Woodhull, but found Gob’s wife instead. She was standing amid the crowd, all by herself, looking very tired. She returned his stare for a few moments, then shifted her attention to the stage, where a lady had come forward and begun to talk.
“The enemies of free speech,” she said, “have ringed this place round with marshals and police. Though our friends are free from Ludlow Street Jail, the custodians of the law guard the doors of the institute, and neither Mrs. Woodhull nor Miss Claflin can, no matter how much they may desire it, appear upon this platform tonight.” This announcement was greeted with howls and hisses.
The lady was trying to shout over the noise of the crowd that she had been deputized to read the speech, and that she would do so if they would only quiet down. As she shouted, an old Quakeress, dressed in a long gray cloak, a coal-scuttle bonnet, and heavy veils, joined the lady on the stage. The old woman walked half bent over, and held her hands before her as if blind. People laughed at her, thinking she was just a confused old biddy who had somehow managed to wander up on the stage, until suddenly she pushed the cloak back so it fell off her shoulders, and tore off her bonnet and veils. Victoria Woodhull stood revealed before the audience.
“Well,” said Gob. “There she is.” Her hair was all in disarray and her dress rumpled, but she looked proud and mighty. Her commanding presence precipitated a hush over the whole hall. The lady who had begun the speech smiled exultantly and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Victoria C. Woodhull!”
Cheers and applause filled the hall, but Mrs. Woodhull held up her hands for silence and got it immediately. “My friends and fellow citizens!” she began. “I come into your presence from the American Bastille, to which I was consigned by the cowardly servility of the age. I am still held under heavy bonds to return to that cell, upon a scandalous charge trumped up by the ignorant or the corrupt officers of the law, conspiring with others to deprive me, under the falsest and shallowest pretenses, of my inherited privileges as an American citizen. In my person, the freedom of the press is assailed, and stricken down, and such has been the adverse concurrence of circumstances that the press itself has tacitly consented, almost with unanimity, to this sacrilegious invasion of one of the most sacred of civil rights!”