“Very well,” said Will.
“I am not! My friend Colonel Blood says a person ought not to pluck the wings from his butterfly, but it seems to me that he is a man who doesn’t know if his grapes are sweet or sour. Colonel Blood is in the blood, you see. We are in it, but sometimes I float above. It ought to be contained in bodies. Do you know Sydenham? I used to worship him. But who cares about the mysteries of the circulation when the blood will come out, anyhow? We will put it on the ground until it drowns us. Vicky! Now there’s a woman possessed of a natural and indefatigable buoyancy. Tell me, do you think she will love me again?”
“Let go my hand,” Will said.
“If you let me go, you’ll drown. My floating is all that’s holding you up.” Will pulled his hand away roughly.
“Good evening,” Will said, after he’d grabbed up some fruit.
“I tried,” said Canning Woodhull. “I tried to save you.”
Gob and Pickie Beecher consulted at a speed Will could not follow, and in a language he often failed to comprehend. Pickie Beecher talked rapidly of how his brother had fifty toes or a caterpillar in his throat, and every revelation sent Gob into an ecstasy of drawing and calculation. The machine was taking shape again, not as a person anymore, but as an edifice, growing into the walls and through the floor. Will had gone into the workshop one morning to find holes bored into the floor — they were all over the room, at least a hundred of them, rough around their edges as if something had gnawed them in the stone and the wood. Gob and Pickie Beecher were busy threading cables through the holes. They dangled in the bedrooms beneath the workshop, connected to nothing. “Little brother is growing,” said Pickie Beecher.
Will studied dynamos, because Pickie Beecher had obtained three and deposited them in a parlor. All the furniture had been pushed to the wall to make room for them. They were arranged in a circle, so they seemed to be in silent conversation with each other, each of them chaperoned by the engine that powered it. Will was fond of their principle, of how the current produced in the revolving armature was sent back through the field coils of the electromagnet, increasing its power, which in turn increased the current. It was a building-up process of mutual and reciprocal excitation, and it reminded him of Tennie, because kissing her brought this principle to his mind. While Gob and Pickie Beecher consulted upstairs, Will made an accidental discovery: when he connected one dynamo to another already in operation, the second began to revolve in a direction opposite from the first.
“You are a genius!” Gob proclaimed, when Will showed him.
Pickie Beecher scampered around the two linked dynamos and said, “My brother, he has two hearts!” He stretched his little hand towards the brushes of one dynamo. Will rushed to stop him but was too late. He was sure the little fellow would be cooked alive, but the fat spark and the shock only made him giggle. “It’s my brother,” he said, when Will scolded him. “He wouldn’t hurt me. Not ever.”
Sometimes Pickie Beecher acted like an ordinary child. Sometimes he eschewed blood on his ice cream, and sometimes he clamored for a bedtime story or a stick of plain candy. He liked animals. He liked to go to the menagerie in Central Park and visit a hippopotamus with whom he had formed an attachment. Will took him down there one day in the middle of August.
Pickie knew just where his hippo’s cage was. He ran to it and grabbed the bars. “Murphy!” he said. “Hello, sir.” Will came up behind him and looked into the cage. Murphy looked fat and sleepy, and not entirely well, but better than most of his peers. Pickie rolled a piece of chocolate towards him. He snapped it up without even looking to see what it was.
They strolled among the other cages. Pickie paused before a skinny tiger.
“He would eat me up, if he could break his cage,” he said.
“I think he would try,” said Will. “He has that reputation. But I would protect you.” Yet it seemed unlikely that the boy would need his protection.
They visited a balding lion, and cage after cage of hissing, spitting monkeys. Pickie said he wanted one for a pet. Will said they were dirty, mean animals, and that he’d be happier with his hippo.
“I would make them serve me,” said Pickie. “They would be useful.”
Will sat down while Pickie ran from cage to cage, gibbering at the monkeys, roaring at the monstrous cats, and reaching his small hands through a cage to pinch the noses of deer.
All his running made Pickie hungry, so Will took him east to the Dairy, where they shared a bowl of ice cream. Pickie took no interest in the nearby playground, or in the children playing there. All he wanted was a ride in a goat cart. Will gave him ten cents and he ran off to clamber into a little buggy, pulled by two goats and captained by a black-haired gypsy boy. Not long after it began, the ride ended in an argument: the gypsy boy accused Pickie of biting his goat.
Will took Pickie up to the lake, because he had the idea that they could both take off their shoes and dip their feet in the water, but Pickie would have none of that. So they sat watching the lazy motion of the pleasure boats, and the boy said many times how he would like to have a swan to love and to pet and to eat. Will ignored him, because his attention was captured by a young couple in one of the boats, whom he mistook for Gob and Miss Trufant, but when they drifted closer he saw that it was not they. Will had seen them here before, though, chaperoning Mrs. Woodhull as she floated conspicuously with her paramour, Mr. Tilton. Gob had begun to follow Miss Trufant that summer, going wherever she went, and when Will had asked him why he did it, he’d only say, “I must.” Now Gob was done with his secret pursuit, and he and Miss Trufant walked openly all over the city, keeping an eye on Mrs. Woodhull and, Will supposed, talking about the Fourteenth Amendment.
“Aren’t you coming in?” Pickie asked, after Will had brought him to the door of Gob’s house. “Don’t you want to play with my brother?”
“I’ll come later,” Will said. He walked down to the Woodhull residence on East Thirty-eighth Street, looking at the ground as he went, because there were never any spirits there. After he passed the unfinished cathedral, he sensed that there was someone walking too close alongside him. He kept his head down even after she spoke.
“Creature,” the angel said. “You must destroy that abominable child.”
Will said nothing.
“You’ll fail,” she said. “You must fail.”
“I think you must have been the angel who brought the bad news to Mary,” Will said, finally looking up, but the angel was gone. She had visited more and more as work progressed on the machine, and every time she had told him that he and Gob would fail in their endeavor. She had a special hatred for Pickie Beecher, and never missed an opportunity to urge his destruction. Will was learning to ignore her.
He heard the music a few blocks before he got to the house — tooting, oomping, German brass. There were Germans gathered in a little crowd below Tennie’s window, out of which she leaned attractively, smiling and throwing down flowers from a wreath beside her on the sill. She was emulating her sister, running for election in the state congress from the largely German eighth district. Will had seen Tennie make a speech to a crowd of hundreds at Irving Hall. She’d promised them everything Mrs. Woodhull promised in her speeches — freedom and progress and equality — but Tennie had added that she would campaign for their right to drink lager beer on Sundays.