She detailed all the particulars of the conspiracy against her. She told how Anthony Comstock was Beecher’s tool, how his agents had ransacked the offices of the Weekly, how Mr. Comstock had sworn to destroy her utterly if he had to spend all the energies of his life upon the job. But she didn’t look as if anybody could destroy her, that night. She was vibrant and magnetic and fascinating — even the marshals stared at her in wonder, and listened raptly. They seemed to forget that they were obligated to arrest her. Walt forgot some of his sadness, watching her.
At last, Mrs. Woodhull made her concluding exclamation. “Sexual freedom, the last right to be claimed for man in the long struggle for universal emancipation, the least understood and the most feared of all the freedoms, but destined to be the most beneficial of any — will burst upon the world!” There were roars of approval. She tore the rose from her throat and hurled it like a bomb into the crowd, then ran off the stage and up the aisle, through the reaching arms of people who tried to touch her as she passed, all the way to the back door, where two marshals were standing. She stopped, crossed her hands at the wrists, and surrendered.
“That was that,” said Gob.
* * *
Walt and Gob went to Pfaff’s after the speech. Gob seemed uninterested in visiting his mother in jail. “She won’t be there for long,” he said confidently, “and I have a more pressing concern, tonight.”
“What’s that?” Walt asked.
“You, of course,” said Gob. “You’ve come back to me, just as I hoped you would and knew you would.” They sat together for a while in silence, Gob’s hand on Walt’s hand, not touching their beer. Every so often, Gob would reach out to lift Walt’s chin so he could look into his eyes. “Yes,” he’d say, with deep satisfaction. “Yes, there you are.”
They went for a walk, after Pfaff’s, a long walk arm in arm, through the late-night crowds on Broadway, up even into the park, where they sat by the lake, holding hands in the same place where Tennie had found Walt’s planted book years before. Ghostly-looking sheep were out on the meadow.
They still had not said very much to each other. Walt wanted to protest, to say it could not be as it was before, to say, “You are not he.” But it was easier not to speak, and Walt had a fear that if he made a noise, Gob would take his hand away from him and never give it back again.
“My work is done,” Gob said at last, after an hour of sitting. “It’s complete. It only lacks you, Walt.”
“Me,” Walt said softly. Gob did not take away his hand.
“Did you think I was lying when I said I needed you? When I begged you to help me win, did you think it was a jest? They want to come back. Can’t you hear them begging to come back?”
“Not anymore,” Walt said. Though he’d spoken to Gob of Hank, he’d never mentioned the boy’s posthumous chattiness.
Gob stood and pulled Walt up after him. “Come home with me,” Gob said. “I’ll show you something wonderful.”
“Your wife is there,” Walt said, but Gob ignored him. Now, Walt wished Gob would let go his hand. He felt afraid again, as he had been on the stage when he met Gob for the first time. Gob pulled him along, all the way down to the house on Fifth Avenue, where little Pickie opened the door just as they approached it and said, “Welcome Master, welcome Kosmos.”
Inside the house, Walt got a better look at the transformations it had undergone. “My little brother,” Pickie said, waving his arms around at everything. The engine was everywhere. It had grown down from its fifth-floor room, through the ceilings and the walls until, it seemed, it had become the house itself. Here was a big red dude of a fire engine, there was an electromagnet as big as a man. But one part stood out because it was larger than any other, and because it was located in what might as well have been the center of a thing that was otherwise mischievously asymmetric. That part looked like the gate to Greenwood Cemetery, complete with a gatehouse, and the whole thing sheltered under a pair of wings. The gatehouse was lovely, a little church of glass and bone and steel. It was full of gears — visibly turning through the glass — which ranged in size from one story high to as small as the nail of Pickie’s thumb, and they spilled out of the gatehouse to spin all over the room. The gears turned all sorts of contrivances, most of which seemed to be doing no useful work at all. The very biggest gears conspired to turn the wings — Walt squinted at them a few moments before he realized that they were glass wings, made of photographic negative plates.
Dr. Fie and the new Mrs. Woodhull were both there, looking grave and serious. “Are you here?” Dr. Fie asked him, sounding cordial for once. He put his big finger out in front of him and poked Walt in the belly. Walt did not bother to answer the question. Dr. Fie looked to be drunk or confused or in pain. Maci Trufant Woodhull said, “God bless you, Mr. Whitman.”
“There it is,” said Gob, sweeping his hand out to indicate the whole house. “The engine. It’s complete, except for you. There’s a place for you in it, Walt. I need you to go in it, and then it will bring them back, all the six hundred thousand, my brother and Will’s brother and Maci’s brother and your Hank, too. All the dead of the war, all the dead of all the wars, all the dead of the past. We’ll lick death tonight, Walt, if you’ll help us. I’m ready. Will’s ready, and Maci is ready. Pickie is ready and the engine is ready. Are you ready?”
Walt opened his mouth to answer, paused a moment without saying anything, and then he ran away. He fled past Will Fie, pushing him aside when he tried to stand in his way, and knocked down Maci Trufant. He ran, jumping over wires and dodging under steel struts and copper pipes, until he was in the foyer, and then out the door. He ran down the marble steps and then down the street, not slowing till he had passed Madame Restell’s house and the Catholic cathedral. He stopped, looked back for pursuit, and saw there was none. He sat on the steps of the still-unfinished cathedral and put his head in his hands. He tried to quiet his fear but found that he could not. Once, as a child, he’d almost drowned at the beach. A powerful wave had picked him up and thrown him down against the sea bottom, and held him there as if it were trying to murder him. He’d got a lungful of water and was quite sure he was going to die. Even back then, when he never gave a thought to death, when he did not even know yet what it was, it still frightened him. Now he was frightened again in just that same way, blind panic filled him up. When he heard the voice, he thought at first that it was Gob calling after him, but it was Hank, long silent but shouting now: Walt! Walt Walt Walt!
“No,” Walt said.
Walt. Please help. I want to come back. We all want so bad to come back. No one can do it but you. Nobody loves us like you. Please go back you have to go back you have to nobody loves us like you.
“I’m afraid,” Walt said.
Don’t be afraid it’s a good thing you’re going to do. The best ever.
“I can’t,” Walt said. But Hank said you can and you must, and so Walt did. He went slowly back up the street to Gob’s house. The door was still open. Gob, his wife, little Pickie, and Dr. Fie were all waiting patiently, as if they knew he wouldn’t be long in returning. They put him in the gatehouse, bundling him with wires into an iron and glass chair. Young Mrs. Woodhull settled Mr. Lincoln’s hat on his head. Now it was decorated with a corona of silver spikes, each of which plugged into a hole in the crystal wall of the gatehouse.