Will stood among the musicians and the serenaders, looking up at Tennie, and the thought came into his head that she was very beautiful, and that what he felt towards her was the highest, best, and most genuine love. She saw Will among the crowd and nodded at him. She was gone for a few moments from the window, and when she returned she threw him a note, casting it down very precisely so it landed just at his feet. She liked to pass notes, and seemed to take the same joy and pride in writing them as a five-year-old brand new to letters. Sometimes she’d hand Will one as they lay in bed, something she’d written hours before and saved to give him after they had wrestled and gasped. Sometimes they stated the obvious, You are a big fellow or We are together, you and I. Sometimes they boasted of her prescience. Once, after he tripped over his own feet in the dark and knocked a teapot from a table by her bed, she handed him a note sealed and dated the day before, telling him he would do just that. “I can’t see very far ahead,” she told him whenever he asked her if he and Gob would succeed in their work, if her sister would in fact become the President of the United States, “but I always see true.”
He unfolded the note, looking up at her and kissing it before he read it: Even a blind man could see how I am busy. Go away and come back later.
The very hottest day of the summer of 1871 came in August. Will went to the house on Fifth Avenue thinking to take refuge in the cool dark library. Letting himself in, he fell over something in the foyer. On the floor, he examined the thing that had tripped him — a bright new copper pipe, stamped with the name of the manufacturer, Advent Pipeworks. The pipes ran all over the first floor in neat rows. Will stepped over them, wondering at how they’d sprung up so quickly. At his last visit, three days previous, there had been no sign of them. He found Gob laying pipe in the dining room.
“What is their purpose?” he asked Gob. Could the machine grow so big it would fill up the house from first floor to fifth? It made Will flushed and hot again, thinking about that.
“To make ice,” Gob said. He explained how he would boil aqua ammonia in a still, and drive the pure gas through a condenser to liquefy it, then pass it through the pipes, where it would expand and evaporate, stealing heat from the water around the pipes and freezing it.
“But your house,” Will said. “You’ll get it all wet.”
“Help me,” Gob said. “It’s necessary for the machine.”
“Very well,” Will said, and put his hands to laying pipe, thinking as he worked of Pickie Beecher saying, “My brother, he likes the cold.”
“Do you think she’ll like it?” Gob asked, after they’d flooded the place to a depth of five inches and turned the whole first floor to a mess of ice.
“Who?”
“You know,” Gob said. “Her.” Will understood him to mean Miss Trufant.
“Does it matter of she likes it or doesn’t?”
“It matters very much.” Gob gave Will a puzzled look. “Very, very much,” he said.
Gob had been saying lately that Miss Trufant was necessary to the machine. This was something Will did not understand. She was, after all, a girl, and not even one inclined to science. Gob insisted that she mattered to the building, but Will figured this to be a symptom of his ever-waxing infatuation with her.
“All this is for her?” Will asked. He had been thinking, as they worked, of rarefied chemical processes that could only take place at very low temperatures, of the precipitation of a gaseous soul, the opposite of sublimation, where an airy, unexisting thing would be made solid and real. “You said it was necessary for the machine.”
“Immediately it is for her, but ultimately it is for the machine. Can’t you see how very important she is, Will?” Gob got down on his knees and started to polish the ice with a wire brush. Will thought, as he turned away, What does he feel for her that it’s not sufficient to make her a miracle, but he must polish it, too?
“You fellow,” Will said quietly. “You must have her.” He walked away slowly and carefully out of the dining room, out through the foyer. When he opened the door the night air was so hot and wet he choked on it.
Gob startled him when he pounded on his back — Will didn’t hear him come gliding up on the ice. He knocked a few more times on the space between Will’s shoulders, then patted it, then pulled Will back to embrace him. “Oh, my friend,” Gob said, kicking the door shut with his foot. “I think she makes you green. But don’t you know that no one can help me like you? Others are necessary to the building, but none is necessary like you. You are the most vital, the bravest and the smartest of my collaborators. It’s you, not her or anyone else, who’s most important.”
“Now we are all together,” Gob announced. He’d brought Maci Trufant into the workshop one night in December of 1871. Will, who was at work on the machine, had scrambled around nervously, trying to cover things up — batteries, bones, a pile of uncut gem-stones gathered by Pickie Beecher. He felt as if he’d been walked in on in the bath, but the fact was that she’d been visiting the house since the end of the summer, and had even begun to contribute to the construction. Will had noticed her little touches — blue paint on a copper pipe, pieces of glass twisted into patterns like bows — and he cared very little for them.
Pickie Beecher rushed out from under a table to clutch Miss Trufant around her legs and say, “Welcome!”
She patted him on the back and said, “Little child.” He took her hand and led her to the middle of the room, where a number of the holes in the floor had been consolidated into one great hole, which led now through three floors of the house, so standing there she could look down all the way to the library.
“Dr. Fie,” she said, nodding at him. “I’ve been meaning to tell you how your work is most ridiculous.” Then she laughed at him. She was dressed all in black, with a red sash that cut across her chest and her belly, and a red carnation in her hat. She’d been marching that day in a parade organized by Mrs. Woodhull to honor the martyrs of the Paris Commune.
“Perhaps your eye is jaundiced,” Will said. “Perhaps you do not see clearly.”
She stared and stared. “You two,” she said. “My father was a weekend tinkerer, compared to you.”
Gob came forward and joined their hands, left to right, and then he took their free hands up in his own. Pickie ducked under their arms, so he stood in the middle of their circle, and Gob said it: “Now we are all together.”
Will broke apart from them. Gob took Miss Trufant’s arm and escorted her around the room. They’d lean down together, bending in unison as if connected by a bar from hip to hip, to examine some fascinating piece of machinery. Will went downstairs to the library, where he sat in a chair away from the hole in the ceiling, with a text on steam engines open in his lap to a chapter on the Giffard injector. Pickie had followed him downstairs, and was rooting in a box of stereographs near Will’s chair.
“He didn’t ask, did he? May she come in? Don’t you think he ought to have asked?”
“She is very beautiful,” said Pickie. “She is the mother of my brother.”
“She just walked right in.”
Pickie came over and climbed into Will’s lap, sitting on the book Will wasn’t reading. He had a stereopticon clutched in his little hands. “See?” he said, putting it to Will’s eyes. “It’s my brother.”
Will didn’t like to look at stereographs — they gave him a headache. But Pickie held the viewer hard against his face, so he had no choice. The image slowly gained depth and detail. It was a boy who had been ruined by a shell. He was in two pieces, and bits of grass grew up straight and strong between the halves of his body. Will could see little clumps of dirt stuck to the trailing intestines. “Yes, yes,” he said. “I’ve seen it, Pickie.”