“You will learn!” Gob kept saying, but days spent reading about Determinative Mineralogy or the Seven Names of God made Will suspect that Gob’s faith was misplaced. He would put his face between his knees and have a spell of worry. “It’s too hard, Jolly,” he’d say, because Jolly was always leaning over his shoulder when he read. Jolly would shake his head and smile and wag his finger, as if to scold him for his despair. Will took to reading in the glass house. Inside, it was pleasant and warm in the spring, but he went in even after summer came, and sweat ran off his nose to drum on the pages of Della Porta’s Celestial Physiognomy, because it seemed to him that his brain was more agile in there, and it restored some of his faith in himself, since it was proof that he could, after all, build something.
It was in the glass house that Will got what he considered to be his first good idea. He was struggling with a simple book of algebra, wearing nothing but his pants because it was so hot. Sometimes when he got frustrated he would abuse Gob’s precious books. Usually he would imagine a face for them, a mocking face embossed on the leather cover, with a snide mouth that he would punch and punch until his fist ached. He did that for a while, staining the leather with his sweaty hand, and finally threw it against a wall of the house, where it knocked out a plate that fell on the rooftop but miraculously did not break. He took up the book gently (he was always kind and loving to them after he abused them) and went outside. He picked up the plate and considered it, and holding the book in one hand and the plate in the other, he had his idea. Jolly stepped up from behind him, shivering with excitement. He seemed to know what Will was thinking. Will closed his eyes and imagined a great shield of negative plates that could be placed over the engine, with a bright light positioned above them, so that they rained down images on it, filling it with lost lives.
Will thought it was a bug hurrying across his cheek. They came out of his walls in the summer, fat black moist-looking things that he doused with acid to kill them. Sometimes they crawled on him while he was sleeping, but when he woke he saw that the tickling pressure on his face was not from little feet but from a wing. She moved them just like fingers, the not-feathers. The angel looked earnestly into his face, closed her eyes, and trembled as if with a sob. Her wings made a noise like broken glass shaken in a bag. She opened her mouth again, and to Will’s great surprise, words came out of it.
“Creature,” she said, “why do you participate in abomination?”
In August, Will got another invitation to dinner, this one from Gob’s mother, Mrs. Woodhull, who was recently arrived in New York. She’d set up her house in Great Jones Street, not with her son. “I wouldn’t let her live with me,” Gob said, when Will asked why she didn’t stay in Fifth Avenue. “Not in ten thousand years.”
“Is she a difficult person?” Will asked, thinking of his own difficult mama.
“Yes. And she is always surrounded by difficult people. But you can judge her for yourself tonight. Oh, yes. I like that. My friend, you are a genius of building!” They were installing the images over the engine. Gob had jumped up and down and hugged himself when Will showed up at his friend’s house with a rented cart full of plates.
“I like it too,” Will said. They were hot and filthy from their work. Now the machine would shelter under a giant flower of picture negatives. It was late in the day, but the sky was still bright outside, and the plates they’d installed were gently lit.
“We need a brighter light,” Gob said. “Maybe the brightest light ever.”
They kept working until it was almost time for dinner. Will might have kept going and going with it — he was filled with the same feeling as when he’d built the glass house, a mixture of trepidation and certainty, because he knew he must build but feared what he was building — but he noticed the time and excused himself to go home and change his clothes. He was an hour late when he arrived at Number 17 Great Jones Street. A man fully as big as Will, but fatter and hairier, opened the door.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“I’ve been invited to dinner,” Will said, thinking the man must be a servant because he smelled like a stable.
“Not by me,” the man said. He made to shut the door in Will’s face, but before he could do that, a lovely red-haired woman came up behind him, scolding and pinching him. He yelped just like a dog and stood aside.
“I know you are Dr. Fie,” said the lady. “Please come in, and do not mind my rude brother.”
“Not a doctor yet, ma’am. Are you Mrs. Woodhull?” Will asked, though this lady looked too young to be Gob’s mother.
“Her sister.” She said her name was Tennie C. Claflin, spelling it for him. She took for herself the flowers he’d brought for the hostess, a summer bouquet of daisies and violets. She put one of each in her hair and kissed Will on the cheek. This made him blush and veer towards a fit, though what she excited was not his sympathy.
“Push her off now or she’ll slobber on you all night long,” the brother said, then shuffled away down the hall.
“Come along,” Miss Claflin said. “Everyone is waiting to meet Gob’s good friend. Our Gob! Lost to us for so long, but now we are together again. He tells me you see spirits.”
Will opened his mouth but did not speak. He felt more faint, and hotter. He stumbled over a man’s boot left carelessly in the hall. Miss Claflin kept him from falling.
“Was it a secret? Forgive him for telling it. There are no secrets in this family. And don’t worry that we’ll think less of you. I see them too, you know, as does my sister. You are like us, sir. Hello! Here we are, everybody! Here is Dr. Fie!”
They’d come to the dining room, where a crowd of people was gathered around a worn oak table. Gob was sitting with another beautiful lady who Will guessed must be his mama. She had dark hair, and wore a fine purple dress, and Gob was her very image. There was another aunt, less friendly than Miss Tennie C. Claflin, this one called Utica. Her eyes — they all had the same eyes, a shade of blue so dark it almost seemed purple — were hooded, Will could tell, from too much laudanum. There was a shriveled-up old woman who looked as if she might be some clever making of Gob’s, an effigy of nutshells and bark, but with those same voracious blue eyes. She was his grandmother, and like Gob she lacked the smallest finger of her left hand. There were three men — an old one-eyed fellow who looked like the Devil, the big hairy one who’d answered the door, and finally another man with elaborate whiskers and brown eyes. They were introduced as Buck Claflin, Uncle Malden, and Colonel Blood, Gob’s stepfather.
Colonel Blood shook Will’s hand, but the other men ignored him. Miss Claflin sat him down between herself and drunken Utica. Then the family proceeded to feast. Grandma Anna brought out bowls full of peas and potatoes, and plates heaped with lamb chops. There was a diversity of manners among them. Miss Claflin and Mrs. Woodhull and Gob and Colonel Blood ate primly and talked in low voices, but the others ate with hand and knife, and shouted. Buck and Malden fought over a chop.