Maci lay in her new bed, smelling like a macaroon. It was true that she was weary, but she could not sleep. She stayed awake watching the blowing white shapes of her curtains as they moved in the breeze. Her left hand was twitching, walking up and down the bed like a scrabbling crab, and pinching at the flesh of her belly. “Stop it,” she said, but it would not stop. There was a writing desk already set up for her, as if to provide for her affliction. She turned up the light and sat down.
Didn’t I tell you they’d be waiting?
“Why now?” she asked. “Why did you let me feel safe, first, before you began this torture?” If her hand had rebelled back when rebellion was popular, five years ago or more, then she might have been better prepared to put it down, stronger and more able in her dealings with it. Complacency had made her weak, and reflecting on the very agreeable time she had spent that day with Mrs. Woodhull, she feared it would only be a matter of days before she succumbed to delusion and declared herself the Apostle of the Left Hand.
The veil was thick, the walls were high. Soon the work will be done, and then, Sister, we will be together again. What is in you that you will only believe in despair and think hope only the comfort given by the weak to the weak?
She had no answer for that question. She rose from the desk, though the pen was still in her hand, and lay down again in bed. When the pen wrote on Mrs. Woodhull’s fine sheets she ignored it, but she saw the message in the morning, smeared by her tossing body: not insane, not at all.
Benjamin Franklin is here. Thomas Jefferson is here. Vergil is here — this place is stuffed with virtuous pagans. It is said, of Heaven and the Summerland, that everyone is here, and everyone will be here. But a change is coming. We mean to make the here and there a single place, to make a marriage between Heaven and Earth. Try to imagine that, a world free of the distinctions made by death, where immortals are mortal, and mortals are immortal. Glorious wedding! Mother is here, still desirous of beans. Margaret Fuller is here. She sees you and loves you.
By September, Maci was firmly installed at the Park Row offices of the Weekly. She was almost hidden behind the tall stacks of daily and weekly newspapers, received from all over the country, that were piled on her desk. She’d had the idea of clipping items about women and printing them for the weekly’s readers. She had a nice little collection of them already: Miss Hoag is the pioneer fresh-woman in the Northwestern University; Miss Amy M. Bradley has been appointed Examiner of Schools for New Hanover County, North Carolina; Miss Louisa Stratton of Johnson County, Iowa, challenges any man in the state to a plowing match with her, and proposes a two-horse team.
“Are you in there?” Mrs. Woodhull asked, peering over a paper tower that reached just to her nose.
“I am,” said Maci.
“I want your opinion on this.” Mrs. Woodhull handed over a sheaf of papers, and walked away. Maci leaned back in her chair and read what she had been given, a little treatise on the Fourteenth Amendment, and how it trumped the need for a Sixteenth, for which brave ladies like Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony had been unsuccessfully campaigning. Because women were citizens, they were already guaranteed the right to vote by the Fourteenth Amendment. All they need do was assert that right. The argument was brilliant and simple. “It makes perfect sense,” Maci told Mrs. Woodhull, when she returned to Maci’s desk. “Such an elegant, transparent solution. No wonder it has remained so long invisible.”
“So you’ll admit it?” said Mrs. Woodhull. “You will grant that I see the unseen?” Maci laughed.
“In this instance alone, Mrs. Woodhull.” Maci insisted that Demosthenes would have to sit down with them at dinner before she’d believe in him. Mrs. Woodhull kept a place for him at her table, with a wineglass from which her drunken sister Utica stole nips. Maci kept all her own impossible strangeness a secret. She didn’t tell how her dead brother commanded her hand. It wouldn’t do to tell, because to tell would be to join them in their delusion, to embrace her own madness and to afford it a measure of respect which she preferred to deny it.
Mrs. Woodhull endorsed silliness in public; she’d deliver a learned argument on the politics of the ancient Egyptians, then make herself stupid by saying she had it all direct from the ethereal lips of Demosthenes. Maci wondered how much more the woman could already have accomplished if she could only keep a few choice things to herself. But it was a virtue, too, how she hated hypocrisy, how she would not lie even by omission, but always told the whole truth as she saw it. She was like her paper, sublime and a little ridiculous. She’d assign Maci to investigate a stock swindle, and the next day ask her to write a phony letter from Paris, full of fashion and gossip, under the name Flor de Valdal. Her politics, at least, were serious, and a few powerful men were taking her seriously.
At a party in September of 1870, Maci walked among the omnipresent roses in Mrs. Woodhull’s parlors, talking with Benjamin Butler, a person whom she’d never dreamed of meeting. They were waiting to honor Steven Pearl Andrews, who had asked Maci to call him Professor Pearlo when they met for the first time, and had talked for an hour about his conviction that before the twentieth century dawned, a trans-Saharan railway would relieve the burdens of the camel.
“I think smart girls are ruined by marriage,” Mr. Butler said at the party. “Energies that could be spent improving the world are instead wasted on the pursuit of a husband.”
“But Mrs. Woodhull is married,” said Maci.
“Yes, and rather more extensively than most. But she is a special case.”
“I think I must agree with you,” Maci said. You are in love with her, her hand had accused. “I do admire her,” she said to it, and wasn’t that reasonable, after all? Could a woman start with nothing, in a rickety shack in a place called Homer, and in the course of a decade become a stockbroker, a publisher, a writer, a candidate for President, and not demand a little admiration?
“Sometimes,” said Mr. Butler, “I think a celestial accident occurred at her birth, and that a male soul must have been allotted to her body.” He really was extraordinarily ugly.
“Yes,” Maci said. “Isn’t that easier to believe than that she could have a woman’s soul, and still have a greater purpose than merely to gratify the senses of man?”
“Well,” said Mr. Butler. He reached down to a tray on a table and gathered up a few carrots, cut as small and fine as the fingers of a baby. Eating them by the handful, he looked about the room at length, as if considering his response, while Maci looked over his shoulder at Tennie’s friend Dr. Fie, another man she had offended that night. Her mind turned to Mrs. Woodhull’s accomplished young son, a boy who had made such an early success of medicine that he was able to keep a house even larger than his mother’s. Maci had seen him once or twice, small and furtive, always in the company of Dr. Fie.
“Ah,” said Mr. Butler, at the sound of the doorbell. “Here is Mr. Andrews.” He offered her his arm, to walk her to the crowd that had gathered around the door, but Maci informed him that she was quite capable of seeing herself across the room without assistance.
If woman is capable of being a mother to those who make the laws of nations, if she is capable of training the young mind up to mature age, and shaping its physical, social, and intellectual destiny, then surely she is capable of taking part in politics. Death has leveled us all, Sister. Coke and Blackstone (here too!) say it also: everyone is equal in death, and when the dead live again they will bring perfect equality back with them to wash over the earth.