But Maci was not in her room. Her drawings were gone. Her clothes were gone. Only Rob’s empty trunk remained. Maci was by that time already in Kingstown, waiting for a train to take her away to Boston. She had written a letter, addressed to no one, which was still in her hand when the train came, and when she got on and took her seat. She kept it with her, clenched in her fist, as she watched the landscape rush by. How should a person deliver such a letter? You might burn it, or tie it to the leg of a dove. You might throw it in the sea, or bury it under the earth. In the end, after much consideration, she wrestled the window open, put out her arm, and opened her hand.
The storm shocked Miss Suter into labor. While she cried out in the house, I capered in the shed, smashing the Infant to pieces with a wrench. Glass and gold and copper flew all about the room, but seemed to make no sound as they fell because whatever noise they made was drowned out by the howl of the wind. It was delightful, to slay him. Do you know, I imagined I was slaying the whole batch of obscenity that has mauled our family? Is it not obscene that a pregnant woman should attach herself like a barnacle to our father? Is it not obscene that a father won’t grieve for his son? Is it not obscene that our mother was ruined by silly beans, and are beans themselves not the seeds of obscenity? Now what a comfort, to let it all fall to pieces.
Poppy must not grieve for his mechanical son. He is in that Summerland, frolicking with all the other mechanical children. Is this my madness? Now I break his crystal eyes. Now I pluck his copper hair. Now I smash his glass limbs, and I undo him. I imagined that I was undoing it alclass="underline" your death; Miss Suter’s arrival; Poppy’s madness; Mama’s madness. I undid it all until, sitting amid the shards and pieces, I was in a place where none of it had happened, where we all still lived in Boston, where Miss Suter’s belly was unoccupied by spirit or flesh, where there was no war. I think that was my madness, that murderous rage. Rob, I have killed our little brother. But you see, don’t you, how he was a success? How he made a sort of peace in me.
2
“IT’S A TERRIBLE THING, NOT TO MARRY,” HER AUNT AMY LIKED to say. Maci understood her to mean that it was in fact the worst thing, worse than madness, worse than war, worse than the death of a brother, mother, or even the death of a husband. Aunt Amy’s husband had died when they were just a few months wed, having contracted a particularly virulent smallpox during a trip to Morocco. On the journey back, his skin came off him in great black sheets, until he was all livid, denuded muscle. Aunt Amy told the story without a trace of self-pity, or even with too much sadness. “We were married,” she’d say of him, with a happy sigh. And then she would look at Maci, twenty-four years old in the summer of 1870, and say, “It really is a terrible thing not to marry.”
But Maci thought she could do without marriage. The well-dressed, well-heeled, well-educated young gentlemen to whom her aunt introduced her were unbearable somehow. In conversation with them, her mind inevitably wandered. She’d think of how their wrists were thin and hairless, or else they would inspire in her gruesome flights of fancy. “Don’t you think the Germans a people more clean than the Irish in their personal habits?” one might ask her, and she’d imagine him mortally wounded, with bullets in his spleen and shrapnel in his eye.
Aunt Amy inhabited her widowhood with grace and something that seemed to Maci like satisfaction. They were the best sorts of husbands, the dead ones. They covered you with respectability, but their feet were not on your neck. Maci found it very easy to imagine herself a widow. Private Vanderbilt had died at Chancellorsville. She still had his portrait, folded up into squares and hidden away in a large rosewood box which she kept under her bed. Once a month, she’d unfold all his pieces, spreading them out on the floor of her room. Inevitably, Aunt Amy would come by to knock. She mistrusted a closed door, hated a locked one, and she always seemed to sense when Maci was engaged in private business. She’d call out, “My dear, what are you doing in there?”
“Writing,” Maci would say. That was now her profession, or her vocation — she felt called to it, but it didn’t really pay. She contributed articles to the occasional weekly newspaper, most notably and most often to Godey’s Lady’s Book, whose editor, Mrs. Hale, had formed a distant attachment to Maci from Philadelphia. It was almost acceptable to Aunt Amy, to write articles on perfumes or French dresses for Godey’s. “Everything in moderation,” she’d say, encouraging her niece to put away her pen for weeks between articles, warning that intellectual stimulation had the effect of souring a woman’s disposition. Reading was acceptable, if the book was the Bible or something written by a Beecher, preferably Catharine. Maci preferred Mr. Greeley’s Tribune, or even the New York Times, papers that were not merely trade publications put out to refine the seams or cherry pies of their subscribers. If Aunt Amy happened to find a contraband item, she never mentioned her discovery, but instead quietly confiscated it and threw it away. Maci never protested when her papers or books disappeared from behind a curtain or from under a rug. Emerson, Browning, Tennyson, Lowell, Bryant — every last great man was cast into oblivion by Aunt Amy’s ignorant hand. Maci figured it for a condition of her aunt’s boundless generosity, this gentle but outrageous tyranny. Anyhow, her aunt never looked under her bed, the obvious hiding place, and the one where Maci kept her dearest treasures.
“What are you reading, my dear?” Aunt Amy asked. They were sitting after dinner in a rear parlor, a comfortable room with decidedly inelegant furniture, a place where guests were not welcome. After meals, Aunt Amy liked to sit in silence with her hands folded in her lap, concentrating fiercely on her digestion. She’d done this for an hour a day all her adult life, and credited the practice with her absolute freedom from dyspepsia. Sometimes, Maci would sit in the near-perfect quiet and listen to the gentle murmur of the light, but more often she’d read.
“An article on the history of muslin,” Maci replied, but that was a lie. She had an issue of Godey’s in her hands, but slipped inside it was the June 2 issue of Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly. She was reading an article exposing police involvement in the business of prostitution in New York City. It would seem that the police got free go-rounds with whichever girl they pleased. Clearly, this publication was not a trade paper. It was a women’s paper and a political paper and a financial paper, whose motto was Upward and Onward. Maci liked it very much, and she liked Mrs. Woodhull, not least because the lady had declared herself a candidate for President. This thrilled the would-be voter in Maci. She liked the paper even though the articles sometimes went exploring in ridiculous territory. Mrs. Woodhull’s Weekly had spiritualist sympathies, and Maci, because she felt compelled to read the whole thing, suffered the articles on medical clairvoyance and thought of her father, still living on the cliff with his Heaven-sent paramour. In all the years since she left his house, he had sent her just one short letter, unsigned and written on a smooth piece of wood: Garrison was mobbed, Birney’s press was thrown into the river, and Lovejoy was murdered; yet anti-slavery lived, and those who were oppressed now are free. So shall it ever be with truths which have been communicated to man. They are immortal, my dear, and cannot be destroyed.
Reading the Weekly always inspired her. Maci would excuse herself and go upstairs to her desk, where she’d sit, often chewing pensively at the tip of her pen, so Aunt Amy would scold her the next morning for staining blue the corners of her mouth. These were not articles for Mrs. Hale, the ones she worked on late into the night with a sheet stuffed into the bottom of the door so Aunt Amy would not see light spilling out and know Maci was awake giving herself wrinkles and overheating her brain. They were for the Weekly, for the remarkable Mrs. Woodhull, for whom Maci had written many articles but sent only one, a history of women in newspapering. It praised Maci’s heroes: Elizabeth Timothy, the first lady publisher in the country; Mary Catherine Goddard, who’d been supplanted as editor of her Philadelphia paper by her brother; Cornelia Walter, who so hated Mr. Poe; and, of course, Margaret Fuller. Maci called for more of these ladies to come forth from her own generation. She wanted there to be as many females in newspapering as there were males.