We arrived in Washington too late to participate in the latest debacle at Bull Run. Now we are camped on Meridian Hill, awaiting orders. Private Vanderbilt is itching to go deal some trouble to Lee. He has taken the invasion of Maryland as a personal affront. I fear I jeopardized our friendship when I insisted Maryland was not Yankeedom, but we are friends again, now. He has offered me his belly band against the cholera. I declined, though we are rained on incessantly, and a goat has eaten much of my overcoat. Washington is not the least bit refined.
Here is the Private’s hand for you, clenched in anger against me. Here are his hips. If I sent his legs to Aunt Amy would you go there to fetch them? Go to her, won’t you? I think you are withering in that exile.
Maci pinned the ham-fist beneath the empty sleeve. The hips were handsome, she could not help but think so, though she felt hot and embarrassed looking at them. She took them down and put them under the bed, then just as quickly returned them to the wall. She could be a little wanton, here in the privacy of her room on the edge of the world. She sat at her desk and wrote to her brother.
Miss Suter is big as a house (not big as a Boston house, but mind you they build small in these parts) and I cannot think she carries anything but a big baby boy, though she insists it is a female principle swelling in her womb. She requires my help to get up and down the stairs. Some days she is too exhausted by her condition to do anything but lie abed and read novels. Papa spends all his days and most of his nights in the shed. It would be a disaster, he says, if the Infant were not ready when the spirit is born. You may be wondering what sort of doctor will be in at the birth. I wondered that too, until Miss Suter explained to me that good Ben Franklin (the Commissioner of Electritizers, you know) will be there. Of course!
“How I hate to see the summer wane,” said Miss Suter, as Maci escorted her down a narrow dirt road, lined on either side with chokecherry and beach roses. It was September. There were still blossoms on the rosebushes, but they were limp now and wilted. Though it was a warm day, Miss Suter shivered incessantly. She stopped to admire a great congregation of ladybugs swarming over the green leaves. Miss Suter put her hand among them and laughed delightedly when they crawled on her.
“Aren’t they lovely?” she asked.
“Poppy always said a girl ought not to play with creeping things.”
“But they’re delightful. They were the friends of my youth. I would lie in my mother’s garden and they would come to me. Sometimes they quite covered me up. If I listened close, I could hear them speaking, telling me what wonderful things were coming. My spirit guide also cares for them. She’s a young Indian girl — you put me in mind of her, though of course she is woodcrafty and you are not. I think you hold your head as she does. It is very regal.”
Maci had no reply. She often lacked for things to say, on these walks, but Miss Suter did not seem offended by her silence. Indeed, Maci wondered if Miss Suter even noticed her silence. Miss Suter was full of words — they were always leaking from her — and she took every opportunity to instruct Maci in spiritual matters. “This association,” she proclaimed down on the beach, poking delicately at the cast-off shell of a horseshoe crab, “this association, the Great Association of Beneficents, will greatly, wisely, and seasonably instruct and bless the diseased, the suffering, and the wretched of the earth.”
“Tell me,” Maci said, “will they instruct suffrage for women?” Voting was something that Maci wanted very much to do. When she was small she’d imagined that voting was equivalent with wish-getting — she thought a person could go out and vote themselves a fresh peach pie or a new bonnet. It still seemed to her like a great, vast power, an opportunity to execute startling transformations. “How we will change this country,” she’d say to scoffing Rob, “when our hand is on the tiller.” Before he went insane, woman suffrage had been one of her father’s devotions.
“Unfortunately not,” said Miss Suter.
I think I envy her, Maci wrote to her brother. It must be a comfort to believe such things. To believe that Heaven is as comfortable and familiar as your own bed, and that your dog may accompany you there. To believe that the dead have organized themselves for our redemption. To believe that human folly might be dissolved in the exhalations of a good machine. To believe that our own mother might put forth her dead hand to shield you, Brother, from danger. Madness is seductive, pretty, and fat like Miss Suter, but shameful all the same.
Take care, my Zu-Zu.
In Frederick we were welcomed with the most incredible hospitality. Some good Marylanders took me into their house, where I had an honest-to-goodness real bath. I have stunk of lavender for the past three days and the boys all call me Roberta. These same Marylanders gave me lemonade to drink as I soaked in the tub, and there was no mention of the tyrant’s heel. I send you the tub and empty glass as proof of their hospitality, in case you should doubt it. Here, too, are the Private’s legs. Not long enough, I think, but I am getting short on paper.
Go to Aunt Amy.
Maci assembled Private Vanderbilt’s nether portions. The hips were made somehow more civilized by the addition of legs. He still lacked feet, and consequently seemed to float by her bedside. She put the glass of lemonade in his hand, in case he desired refreshment. The tub she put further along the wall to his left. Rob had drawn himself inside it, his arm hanging down to scrape the floor, his cheek resting on the porcelain edge, an allusion to a picture they’d seen in Paris, one thousand years ago before death and madness had smashed their family. Rob had even wrapped a turban around his head, in the drawing, in case she should be stupid and miss the obvious. It was, she decided, a horrible picture, and the first one she would not give a place on her wall. She took it down and set the edge in the candle flame, then held it by the window as it burned. When the fire was close to her fingers she let it go, and it drifted away into the dark.
M. Zu-Zu,
I did not care for your tub picture. If you send me no more like it I would consider that a kindness. Arabella Suter continues to swell. I think she must be drinking up the oceans, to swell so much. We go down to the ocean sometimes and I watch her to make sure she does not drain the Sound dry with her red mouth.
There is the horn from Block Island blowing now — a mournful sound. I think sometimes it is a lament for lost sailors, a noise that says, “Stay away from these rocks,” and “I mourn you.” On windy nights, they say, if you stand on the edge of the cliff you can hear the ghostly voices, calling, “God save a drowning man!”
Do you see how you have yellowed my mood with your tub? But for his feet, Private Vanderbilt is complete on my wall. May he guard me from sadness.
Maci’s father completed the Infant in the second week of September. “A big boy, Poppy,” she said, standing with him in the shed with Miss Suter. The Infant was a great box. The wood that had been in him was gone — that had only been scaffolding, her father said. Now, he was all glass and copper, silver filigree and iron. “Where is his mouth?” she asked. “How will he breathe?” Her father and Miss Suter laughed at her as if she were a five-year old asking why the ocean is blue.
“His true form is on the spiritual plane,” said her father. “You see, my dear, I have been constructing in both places. Why do you suppose it has taken so long?”
They had a feast to honor him, ham and baked corn, quahogs that Maci had dug herself from the mud of Potter’s Pond, and a lemon sponge cake. Miss Suter proclaimed it the last warm evening of the year, so they ate on the rickety porch. Maci fidgeted while the two of them said their odd grace: “We believe in the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, a continuous existence, the communion of spirits and the ministrations of angels, compensation and retribution in the hereafter for good or ill done on earth, and we believe in a path of endless progression!” Listening to them, Maci rather wished she could join them in their belief, just as she had wanted to become a slave, when she was a little girl, because she’d been sure, back then, that if only she were a slave, her father would shower her with all the easy, warm enthusiasm he showered on his dear Negro friends, the fugitive strangers who passed through their house in Boston. It had seemed to her jealous little heart that her father had loved them all better than her, because they got presents of effusive affection, while she got more Vergil.