“We have been all through the western states,” Miss Claflin said to him, turning the conversation to herself and her family after asking many prying questions about Will. “We gathered gold and golden opinions wherever we went. And we gathered up the Colonel, too. He comes from St. Louis, where he consulted with Vicky for the sake of his wife, who suffers terribly with a condition I am not at liberty to discuss. Vicky is a clairvoyant healer, you see. And in that regard I am not myself without power. But when she saw the Colonel, Vicky fell into a trance, and the spirits of the air spoke through her, betrothing them on the spot. Then he came along with us.”
“A rash man,” said Will.
“He’s a hero. He has got six bullets in his body. And do you think it rash when one magnet comes together with another, as nature has decreed that they must? Is a river rash because it flows from a high place to a low one? Is it rash of the sea to yearn towards the moon? He only did what he must. Now, do you really think he is rash?”
Before Will could speak, Gob’s mother raised her voice above all the others. She had been talking excitedly at Gob, pausing every now and then to embrace him. He suffered her hugs with an expression of perfect neutrality.
“All these years of wandering and wondering. The beautiful Greek has at last revealed his name to me. It is Demosthenes. Do you know what that means?”
“That’s Vicky’s spirit guide,” Miss Claflin whispered. “He is her mentor and her constant companion.”
“I don’t,” said Gob.
“It means that all my waiting is over!” Mrs. Woodhull said. “Now, now it can begin! Close your eyes, darling.” Mrs. Woodhull sat in her son’s lap and put her hands over his eyes. “There, don’t you see them? Don’t you see the great things that are coming?” Will closed his eyes, because everyone else was doing it, and saw the angel in his mind, and thought how her hair was red like Miss Claflin’s, and how, even as she had asked him again why he participated in abomination, he cherished lascivious thoughts of her.
“It’s another sign,” said Mrs. Woodhull, “that you’ve returned to your family. Isn’t it so good to be together again, all of us? Now we’ll all be together forever. Come, everybody! Come and embrace our sweet lost sheep!” Miss Claflin hurried down to the other end of the table and threw her arms around Gob. “I could squeeze you till you pop!” she declared. Blood put his hero’s arms around him, and Anna slipped her withered stick-limbs around his belly. Utica knelt down and clutched his leg, overcome suddenly with emotion and drunkenness. She wept against his pants. Big Malden put his long arms around them all and squeezed. Buck sauntered down and made as if to walk by the affectionate heap. He stopped and considered it for a moment. Then Will thought he would join the embrace, but instead Buck turned and backed his ass into the great lump of bodies.
Gob had disappeared entirely, and Will did not know if he should join them or quietly slip away. They chattered and squeezed and writhed and cried, and began to quarrel among themselves, saying, “You are squeezing too hard,” or “Let me have a grab at him, hog!” Buck was cruel to Utica, calling her a whore and saying that the only thing worth a damn in her had been her virginity, and wasn’t it a shame how she had ruined that herself with a carrot when she was eleven? Then Mrs. Woodhull’s clear strong voice rose up, saying would you blame a vegetable for your own hungry sin?
“Come along, Will,” said Gob, who was suddenly next to him. How he had escaped from his family, Will could not tell. They slipped away from the pile as it degenerated into individual quarrels. The grandmother called Colonel Blood a corrupter and a schweinehund, and attacked him with a potato.
“I’m sorry,” Gob said, when they were outside in the twilight on Great Jones Street. “They’re a rough bunch.”
There was a spirit, a young fellow dressed up in the fetching uniform of a Zouave, who made a habit of staring at Will, then scribbling on a pad of paper the same size as the plate which Frenchy always carried with him. Will thought the soldier must be taking notes on his behavior, in order to tattle to whatever otherworldly ministry exists to register such transgressions. Will only discovered that the spirit was not taking notes, but drawing a picture, when he was finally shown the finished piece. “Who are you, anyhow?” Will demanded, because he did not like the portrait, in which he was naked, and possessed of an embarrassment of stiff, dripping organs of procreation. They stuck out from him like quills on a porcupine. In twenty arms he held a variety of bottles, each one containing, he was sure, some foul liquor. “Did I commission this insult?” Will asked and looked away from the picture. He would have liked never to look at it again, but the spirit would put it in his way, so he’d have no choice but to see it where it hung on a stage, or in the hospital wards, or on a Broadway streetlamp where thousands of people passed it in a day, but did not know it was there.
“It’s very warm in here,” said Miss Claflin. “Is it always so warm?” She had arrived unexpectedly, and now was in Will’s studio sitting for a carte de visite. He’d answered the door in his shirtsleeves because he’d thought she was Gob, come over for another load of negative plates. “I’m here for my portrait,” she’d said, as if he had invited her. He’d hurried to dress himself properly while she poked about the studio, choosing a setting for her portrait, just a plain chair in which she sat sideways.
“You mustn’t talk, Miss Claflin.”
“Call me Tennie,” she said. “I insist upon it, and I won’t tell you again.” She was wearing a heavy-looking yellow dress, with a dark red wrap of silk thrown over her shoulders, hiding her arms and her hands, and her hair was coiffed up formidably on her head like a great pair of ram’s horns. Her oval face was aglow with perspiration.
“Hold still your head, Miss Tennie, or else your face will be all a blur.” Will thought of Frenchy’s blond hospital boy, with his blurred, cursing mouth. Tennie held still, and stared unblinking at Will, so he felt not at all hidden behind the lens and under the hood. But she was oblivious to the spirits around her. So much for her claim that she too, saw them, Will thought. Sam and Lewy Greely and Jolly walked around her, all of them peering and gawking as if they’d never seen a pretty lady before. Frenchy stood close by the camera, scolding. Will exposed the negative, counting out fifteen seconds, then put the cap back on. “I’ll return,” he said, and left to develop the plate. He found he was breathless, waiting just the few moments as he poured the developer down the plate. Then her image was there, ghostly and reversed. He went up to the roof to make the print in the sun, then came back to the darkroom to tone and fix it. A half hour passed before she was represented to his satisfaction, as pretty and bold in the picture as she was in real life.
“I think you’ll be pleased,” he said as he came out of the darkroom. “I think,” he continued, but then he quite forgot what he was going to say. Tennie C. Claflin had taken off her clothes and sat dressed only in her hairdo, in the very same pose as before, with her head still stuck quite securely in the stand. Her clothes seemed to have melted off her like spun sugar in a hot rain. All the spirits had fled, except Jolly, who had retreated against a wall, where he turned his face towards the ceiling but his eyes towards the lady.
“It’s warm, Dr. Fie,” Ms. Claflin said. “It’s so terribly warm.”
“Do you remember your first time?” she asked him.
“No,” Will said, turning in the bed so she could not see his face. “Not really.” But he remembered it clearly. It was not three days after he’d finished the glass house. He’d been walking on Broadway, followed by spirits. It was early in the night, but the prostitutes were already swarming. It had always been his habit, when they gestured at him, or when they called out something rude about his size, to ignore them. But this time, when one waved him after her down Grand Street, he followed. “Are you lost?” she asked when he approached. She stood just beyond the reach of a streetlamp, so a little light fell on her dress and her neck and her hair, but none on her face.