“But I have been waiting for you. Spirits beg for masters. They want to be dominated, and those spirits who are my slaves have spoken of you, promised that a boy would come one day to learn all I could teach. Are you him? Are you the boy who would become a master of spirits, a magus, an engineer? Such a small mind. Such a yearning towards sloth. I think you must be made from your brother’s leftover material — there must have been something extra, but not enough for a whole proper boy. God made you, a half thing, a well-intentioned but poorly executed gesture. Perhaps it was your brother I was meant to teach. But you are sweet in your way. We will have to make do.”
Gob was not a prisoner in that house. He could have left, but he never tried to catch a train west to Ohio, back to his mama and his obstreperous relatives. He was there to learn, and he was learning, and the more he learned, the more he realized that he was laboring under a world’s weight of ignorance. And anyhow, whenever he remembered his mama, it was mostly to hear her laughing at Tomo’s death, and then he would feel fresh rage towards her.
Gob’s life was mostly work, but it was not all work. Sometimes the Urfeist took him out to restaurants or oyster bars. They went for rides in Central Park, racing against the sleek equipage of the Urfeist’s friend Mr. Vanderbilt. They saw plays. The Urfeist was a great devotee of Edwin Booth and Charlotte Cushman, and did not miss a production that featured one of those actors. The Urfeist was also partial to opera. He had one of those highly coveted boxes at the Academy of Music. During intermissions tastefully dressed people came to visit the Urfeist in his box, and he introduced Gob as his ward, the child of a cousin who’d died of cholera the year before, his last living relative. “What happened to his hand?” they would whisper to the Urfeist.
“A congenital deformity,” he’d reply.
“I am dismayed by current developments,” said Madame Restell. She sat next to the Urfeist at one of his to-dos. He threw dinner parties whenever news of a great battle reached New York. Ostensibly, he was celebrating the increasingly frequent Union victories that came in the spring of 1865, but Gob suspected his master was just celebrating the carnage. “Dundrearies, sluggers, muttonchops, burnsides, beavers. I think there is too much variety in facial hair — there ought to be a regulation. Some have ventured so far beyond the pale I shiver to think of them. I offer as an example the type of man represented by Mr. Greeley, and those hideous things that proceed from out of his collar. It makes me shudder!”
“I don’t think Mr. Greeley can be regarded as representing any type but his own, Annie,” said the Urfeist. This brought laughs from all around the table. The scandalous, rich friends of the Urfeist were lingering over port and cigars. They flouted convention by staying at the table, and the ladies partook with the men. Gob usually eavesdropped from the kitchen, where one of the servants always gave him a cigar of his own. But tonight Gob was in the dining room, standing just off to the side of the Urfeist, who had called him out to entertain his guests. Gob had been reading aloud from a report of the battle at Spotsylvania. One of the guests had interrupted him to say that General Grant ought to grow a beard, because it would hide his features, which were obviously those of a dipsomaniac. “He flaunts it, with his bare face,” said the guest. This prompted Madame Restell to make her comment on the chaos of facial hair threatening to undo society.
“That Grant!” said another guest. “An efficacious general, but he must be cruel. He’s who makes me shudder.”
“That Grant!” said the Urfeist, standing up and proposing a toast to him. “There is a man who is not afraid of death.” His guests all drank to that, but the Urfeist did not. “And what sort of man,” he asked them, “is that?”
“A hero,” came the reply, and “A leader,” and “A ruiner,” this last from a man who made his great living selling shoddy wool to the Union army.
“No!” said the Urfeist, with such vehemence that some of his guests flinched. He clutched his glass so hard he broke it, and Madame Restell gave a squeal. “What sort of man?” the Urfeist cried. “What sort!”
“A fool,” said Gob, wondering if the Urfeist would beat him in front of his guests, but his teacher laughed, and looked surprised at how he’d broken his glass and cut his hand.
His guests laughed, too, rather nervously, and the Urfeist said, “Forgive me, friends. The war excites me, you see. It excites me.”
“Chicago is the mud hole of the prairie. Do not visit there. Cleveland is better. There, elegant villas are surrounded by orchards and gardens. Cincinnati is a porkopolis: a fine place to live, if you are a pig. New York is really the only place to reside, except in summer, when one really must retire to the countryside. Make dumplings from 2 cups of flour, 1 teaspoon of salt, 1 tablespoon of lard, a cup of milk, 4 teaspoons of baking powder, and a pinch of child’s blood. These are light, fluffy dumplings — to eat them is to eat air. But stray from the recipe and you’ll eat lead. The holy names of God are: Dah, Gian, Soter, Jehovah, Emmanuel, Tetragrammaton, Adonay, Sabtay, Seraphin. A woman has a little piece of chicken between her legs by which you may rule her.”
On the Saturday before Easter, Gob walked down Broadway, on his way to Barnum’s museum, so completely absorbed in his thoughts that he did not notice the hush on the streets, or how some of the hanging flags had been draped with black, or how the rosettes of red, white, and blue had been replaced with black. It was late in the afternoon. He’d stayed up late, reading Della Porta’s Celestial Physiognomy. It was almost dawn before he went to bed, where he had uneasy dreams, not of the machine, but of his Aunt Tennie. She was weeping and he could not console her.
He was thinking, as he walked down Broadway, about Mr. Watt’s double-acting engine, about how it was such an improvement over previous models, since it introduced the steam from both sides of the piston. This led Gob to consider how every-thing he himself had built so far seemed to act only from one side. That, he was sure, was inappropriate and a waste, because he knew, suddenly, that his machine must run on such a double-acting principle. But he didn’t know what such a principle would be, unless it was that Tomo was dead, and yet he must not be.
Barnum’s was closed. Black crepe was strung around the door, and all the posters were edged in black. A large plaster urn was set on a granite pedestal by the door, and bore an inscription: Dulce est pro patria mori.
“Poor Mr. Booth,” said Madame Restell, many days later, meaning Edwin. “I saw him in Macbeth. I think his anguish will inform that role, if he ever plays it again.”
“I think I would hide forever, if my brother did such a thing,” said another guest. “I could never forgive such atrocity.” The Urfeist had a funereal feast, on the eve of the arrival of the late President’s body in New York. Gob, trotted out again to amuse the Urfeist’s friends, wanted to say that a brother ought to forgive a brother any misdeed, any at all. He wondered if Tomo might still be angry at him.
Gob felt sick. He’d eaten too much, and the guests were making him dizzy with their demands upon his memory. The Urfeist had made him memorize the minutes of Dr. Abbott, the physician attending at Mr. Lincoln’s death.
“Eleven thirty-two p.m.,” said Madame Restell, continuing the game.
“Pulse forty-eight,” said Gob. “Respirations twenty-seven.”