She had sent the article in May of that year, and had an acceptance two weeks later. My magazine is a storehouse for ideas like yours, Mrs. Woodhull wrote. You must come and visit me. Enclosed was a little picture of the beautiful lady, signed on the back Victoria Woodhull, Future Presidentess. Sometimes, at dinner with Aunt Amy, Maci daydreamed of joining Mrs. Woodhull in New York, but the thought of actually doing such a thing seemed as likely as her sprouting wings and flying about over the Back Bay.
Though she wouldn’t run off to New York, Maci could still contribute to Mrs. Woodhull’s paper, and it was while she was preparing another article for Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly that her hand first rebelled against her. It was very unexpected — one minute she was writing some animadversions on Catharine Beecher’s Treatise on Domestic Economy, and the next she was writing something else entirely, and entirely against her will. Her left hand stole the pen from her right and began to scribble.
Her legacy of madness was something Maci thought less on, since she’d been living with sane, stable Aunt Amy. Long before, in the months and years just after she had fled Rhode Island, she was certain insanity would come to her as soon as she grew complacent. So, for a long time, as they sat together in the comfortable parlor she would consider madness while Aunt Amy considered her digestion. Maci would think how it might be voices talking in her head, and how that would be terrifying, to hear a voice that berated you, or commanded you to lick the floor, or eat filth. Worse yet would be a pair of voices, the sort that might offer a constant commentary, one saying, “Do you see what she’s wearing today?” and the other saying, “It does not surprise me.” Or strange beliefs would creep into her mind. One morning she’d wonder how it might have been to be Mary Magdalene or Jean d’Arc, and the next she’d believe that she was Mary Magdalene, or Jean d’Arc, or both combined conveniently in a single body, a lady who gave herself to men, repented of it, then led them successfully in battle.
But years passed, and her inevitable mental decline seemed less and less imminent, until Maci began not to think of it so often, and then not very often at all. Later, she would think that it was precisely when she had finally believed herself safe that she was suddenly not safe, and she would curse carefree, naive Maci, who had stupidly abandoned her vigilance. It came like her father’s, all of a piece. Her left hand jerked once, then leaped from the desk, springing off on its fingers like a jumping bug. It hung a moment in the air, then swooped down to take the pen from her unresisting right hand. It drew one dismissive line through her paragraphs on Catharine Beecher, and then the words came, written carelessly with her own hand, but in a hand that was not her own:
Sister, dear sister,
Know that you are not insane, and forgive me, please, my silence. Time is measured here, not in seconds, hours, or days, but in uncountable units of desire. And it is so difficult to pierce the veil, which is composed of God’s indifference and the unbelief of the bereaved — thick things. Understand that I have been trying forever to come to you, a messenger whose news is all good.
* * *
Maci thought it was sensible and just, how she was being punished for destroying the Infant, for a crime worse than fratricide, for the murder of her father’s hope. Her hand — she’d not call it brother, because it was her and not him, it was the part of her that would rather sacrifice reason and sanity than accept how he was gone — reassured her, You’re not insane. But that was like the rain telling you you are not wet. And now this not-Rob had a new admonition with which to close his letters, Go to New York. Go to her. “Don’t you tell me what to do,” she’d whisper in reply.
It was very easy, Maci thought, how all her most childish desires were written out by this renegade appendage. She wanted, did she not, to get away from Boston? Life was boring there. Aunt Amy was cool and dull, and, living with her, Maci would settle into widowhood without ever marrying. There was a lifetime of comfortable sameness waiting for her in that house. One day Aunt Amy would die, and Maci would put on all her fantastic dresses, one after the other, a new one for every day of the year. It was hateful to think of, so her hand urged her to flee. Go to New York. Go to Mrs. Woodhull. You must go. “I will not,” she said, holding up her left hand to her face and speaking to it, just like a madwoman.
The hand didn’t belong to her anymore. She could move it like her other one, but it seemed to oblige her as a favor, not because it was naturally subject to her will. It wrote letters, spinning out ridiculous fantasies of a war in Heaven, fought by contentious spirits, who wanted to return to the earth, against conservative angels. It told stories about Mrs. Woodhull, and about her sons, two boys from Ohio separated by the war and by death. Her hand made rude gestures behind Aunt Amy’s back. And it drew beautiful pictures: a falling-down shack at the top of a hill; a clearing in an orchard; a hawthorn bush. It drew an enormous house in a city she knew to be Manhattan; a greenhouse; an iron door. It drew a striking woman who Maci knew from her photograph to be Mrs. Woodhull; a careless-looking, smiling fat girl; a worried-looking fellow with a neck fully as thick as Private Vanderbilt’s; an angel in stately robes with a tiara of stars floating around her head, and a little pugnacious angel, with only one wing. And it drew a portrait of two boys with the little angel’s face — her hand groped for blue ink with which to color their eyes. She didn’t hang them on her wall, these pictures. She liked them all very little. They ought to have gone into the garbage, in fact, but instead she put them under the bed, motivated, she supposed, by affection for even the delusion of her brother.
Heaven is cold and white. It is not a place where I would care to reside, though some spirits are drawn there by pleasures so rarefied they are, in fact, empty. I am in the Summerland, a place as warm and green as the garden at Uncle Phil’s summer house. Do you remember it? We chased rabbits there, when you were only two years old. You were still learning the names of things, then. I told you how the creatures were called, but you would not believe me.
“How do you like this one?” asked her aunt. Maci’s hand had been in rebellion for weeks, and she was giving up hope that her affliction would prove to be temporary. It was the third Wednesday of the month, the day the dressmaker always came to deliver new creations. In the evening, Aunt Amy would model them for her niece.
“It’s very pretty,” Maci said.
“Is it too busy?” Aunt Amy was wearing an outfit so complicated Maci could only take it in in pieces: a striped overskirt with fringes, bows, and ruffles; a Chantilly lace jacket; a brooch and matching pendant earrings; a velvet neck ribbon with a dependent cross; a large fringed hair bow; a fan. Elements from her aunt’s outfits would stay with Maci like annoying snatches of song; she knew she’d struggle all week to forget that fringed hair bow.