In the amphitheater, Will told Gob, “I’m very well, thank you.” But he was not very well. Dr. Gouley was lecturing on Harlequin Fetus, a rare but especially awful congenital deformity, and Will feared that he would soon be overwhelmed.
“The eyes appeared to be lumps of coagulated blood, about the bigness of a plum, ghastly to behold. It had no external ears, only holes where the ears should be. The hands and feet appeared to be swollen, were crumped up, and felt hard. The back part of the head was very much open. It made a strange kind of noise, very low, which I will now attempt to imitate.” Dr. Gouley cleared his throat, lowered his head, and emitted a rumbling bass cry like the complaint of a sickly cow.
“Fascinating,” said Gob. “I should have liked to examine it.” Another student shushed him. Will closed his eyes and saw a hideous, bark-skinned Harlequin Fetus toddling out of the blackness in his mind. It held out its crumped-up hands at him and from the shocked O of its mouth came a word: “Papa.”
“You’re about to blow, aren’t you?” said Gob. “Should I take you out of here?”
“No,” Will whispered. He imagined the poor mother who gave birth to such a child, how her bliss would become horror when she saw the thing that had emerged from her. He did not want to hear any more.
“It defeats the purpose of a lecture,” said Gob, “if you plug up your ears.” This time, he was assailed by a whole chorus of shushings.
“It lived about eight and forty hours,” said Dr. Gouley, “and was alive when I saw it.”
Debilitating sympathy, fits, spirits — these were the gifts of the house. Something must have happened as Will sat there, with the sun shining bright but not warm through the picture panels, though in fact it had seemed at first that nothing happened. He had looked around at the confusion of images on the floor and on himself, but he felt no different. Ghosts did not detach themselves from the picture, Jolly’s soul did not come sifting down upon him. He fell asleep and had a perfectly ordinary nap.
He spent the whole first day after he’d finished the house at mundane tasks, cleaning, eating, writing up an advertisement for people to come get their portraits taken by him — he’d started a little business and was doing pretty well at it — and he went to bed feeling disappointed and relieved that nothing had happened. But he woke in the early morning to the sound of artillery, great crashing booms that sounded as if they were being fired from just below his window on Fulton Street. When they were small, Sam had tried to teach him how to wake within sleep, to know he was dreaming while he was dreaming. “Then you are the master of your whole world,” Sam confided. Then you could fly, or squeeze ice cream from a stone, or turn animals to chocolate with your touch. Will could never learn to do this. But when he woke that night surrounded by people staring down at him, he figured he must at last have woken up inside a dream.
He reached to touch Jolly, hoping to turn him to chocolate. Jolly was moving his mouth but Will couldn’t hear him — he thought he must have been deafened by the cannon. Jolly was solid and very cold. He would not turn to chocolate, or stop moving his lips. The others were talking, too. Frenchy and Lewy Greeley and even Sam, who stood away from the bed and looked at Will like a stranger. There were many boys from the Third Onondaga, some of whom he’d barely known, and there were boys Will had never seen before. All of them were chattering at him silently, except for one, a boy who looked like a tatterdemalion Gabriel, because he was dressed in shabby clothes and had only one wing where a more affluent angel would surely have two. The boy did not move his mouth, but only stared and put a bugle — it was bright and pretty, not shabby at all — to his mouth to blow it noiselessly. Will closed his eyes as the artillery sounded again, trying to wake up. But he was already awake, and when he opened his eyes all his guests were still with him.
“I mean to make a pilgrimage,” Will said to Gob, “to the valley of Aesclepius, where I will tie the carotids of a rooster and make a sacrifice of him. Will you go along with me?” Sometimes, Will thought that if he left the country the silent ghosts would not be able to follow. Wasn’t it said that they could not cross water? Yet they followed him easily enough across the river from Brooklyn.
“I have work in this city,” said Gob, passing his finger back and forth through the single candle at their table. “I think I will be retained by it for years.” They were in a filthy saloon in Hester Street, sitting with a bottle of whiskey between them. It was November 5, 1867, Will’s birthday. He was twenty-three years old. Gob, who Will had figured as immensely rich, had taken him to stuff at Delmonico’s, and then Will had brought Gob to this saloon, one of his haunts since the house had changed him into a rank sensualist. Sympathy and spirits and fits — sometimes these seemed easy to abide compared to the last gift of the house, the other, which was a package of lustfulness and wantonness and drinking whiskey, which Will hated almost as much as ever but now had need of, though it never seemed to make him drunk.
Jolly and the angel boy had come along to the saloon, too. Jolly kept pointing at Gob, the same way he had led Will to Bellevue a year before and pointed at it, and led him inside, still pointing, to the office of the secretary, Dr. Macready. Since his appearance, Jolly had been silently guiding him through his life, pointing out the path he must take. Will went where Jolly pointed, because it was the only way to soothe him, and because it felt right to do it. Will had never organized his life by faith or ambition until he built the house — that work had seemed right and true and necessary. He had built it, hoping when it was finished it would practice some magic to make him serene. Now it was building him into a sad, discontented creature, and yet this also seemed right and true and necessary.
“Years and years,” Gob said unhappily.
“You mean doctoring?”
“Partly,” said Gob. He was a brilliant student, not liked at the school except by the faculty, who doted on him. He was haughty, and tended to correct his peers at every chance, wielding his immense knowledge like a blunt stick. In the army, they would have stuck him in a leper mess. Will had had no friends at Bellevue before Gob arrived, though he’d been there already for two terms. He hadn’t wanted any friends — his wartime sociability had departed when peace came — and had not wanted either to be friends with Gob, but the boy had pursued him relentlessly since their encounter in the hall, and soon they were pretty fast.
“What else, then?” Will asked.
“Ah, I think I just might tell you, but not tonight. It’s not birthday talk, and I’m sleepy, anyhow. And you have got to go cut up your capers.” A lady in red boots had come up behind Will and leaned over to pat him on his chest.
“Shall we dance?” she asked him.
“I’m off, then,” said Gob. “Happy birthday, Will.”
“Is it your birthday, Mr. President?” asked the lady.
“Maybe,” Will said to her, and asked Gob if he wouldn’t stay this time for the private can-can dance. Gob shook his head and took up his coat. The tatterdemalion Gabriel cast a final glance at the saloon musicians, three drunks on the stage who made a cacophony on piano, fiddle, and cornet. Then he followed Gob, both of them barely visible in the dark between tables. The angel boy looked back before they left the saloon and waved goodbye. Jolly waved back.