I saw you. The veil is thick, but not obscuring to vision. We all see you. We see all of you. We watch you rend your clothes and pull your hair at our absence. You are destroyed because we are not with you, but do you ever consider how we are destroyed because you are not with us? Do you ever consider our grief? Selfish, selfish! O Sister, do you see what small sympathy exists on earth for the dead?
There was a time after Rob’s death when Maci went about in her aunt’s house with her hair in disarray and her dress torn, when she borrowed rituals of grief and devised her own — covering mirrors and putting out food for her brother to eat; standing for hours in the foyer in case a spiritual postman should come scratching ever so lightly at the door with a letter from him; saying a prayer every night for his sake — Lord bless him and keep him eternally in light and please tomorrow let him be alive. She’d lie in bed waiting in vain for sleep to come, and scenes from their life would play out in her head — hiding under Aunt Amy’s bed when she visited their house on Mount Vernon Street, and grabbing at her toes as she sat getting ready for sleep; dressing the dog; teaching the cat to swim in the washtub. Over the course of months she played out their whole lives, going back in time until she wrecked her little boat of reverie upon a first memory. She was two years old, taking a nap under the piano — a place she was fond of until she was seven — when Rob came and woke her. “Get up, you,” he said. He was unfriendly, back then, because he had wished to remain an only child. He hadn’t asked for a sister, and hoped at first that she might just go away without any fuss. She remembered hearing his voice, then opening her eyes and seeing him, and because it was her first memory, it seemed to her sometimes that it was he, not their parents, who had called her into creation, that she entered into life at the sound of his voice. In the weeks and months following his death, she ruminated on such strange notions. Back then she’d thought madness would be a blessing. It would be better to think constantly on beans than to think on him in his last moments, than to think on the wound in his throat, sucking and whistling, throwing out a spray of blood with every breath.
But she had not grown fascinated with beans, not with roses or budgies or with the patterns made by the grain in a wood floor, though she had given all these things the most thorough consideration, and opened herself up to them, inviting them to rule her. Instead, she had straightened her hair over a period of months, sewn up the tear in her dress, and traded her acute misery for something more sensible and less exhausting, a cruel and hard sort of wisdom that said people die, and a person can do nothing against that. It’s the greatest open secret, that death will take everyone, that every person is as transient as a shadow. Embracing this knowledge, she came to realize, was how sane people managed their grief, and she thought it had served her pretty well for as long as she remained sane. It’s me it’s me it’s me, her impostor hand would write all through the winter, and all through the winter she’d reply, “How dare you say that?”
And all winter long she had terrible dreams. They featured young Dr. Woodhull, a person who was expressly not invited to invade her sleeping mind. She’d lie awake, fearing sleep as she did when she was a girl, back when nightmares were always springing out of the crevices of her agitated brain. “Not tonight,” she’d whisper, praying for dreamless sleep, or at least for the sort of dreams she used to enjoy, in which she healed the split between the New York and Boston factions of the woman suffrage movement, or in which Private Vanderbilt’s big hands closed, over and over, about her waist.
Despite her prayers, she’d find herself in the moonlit orchard, up to her ankles in rotting windfall apples and pears. She’d look up and see a child’s dress blowing in the branches of a pear tree. Dr. Woodhull would step out from a pool of darkness. “It’s a shame,” he’d say as he put his hand on her, “how it must pass away. Even something as beautiful as this.” He’d hold her breast in his two hands, lifting it up as if for her inspection, and as she watched it turned the color of ash. His touch was reverent, but everywhere it left purple blotches of rot in the shape of his hand.
“Not much room to roll around in here, is there?” he asked her in another dream. They were together in a coffin meant, like all coffins, for just a single occupant. “Why don’t they make them bigger? It’s not as if people always die one at a time.”
And in another dream, the worst, Maci stood with him looking down into her mother’s casket. Louisa Trufant was a wasted thing, shriveled away to bones, tendons, and skin by her diet of beans. But her hair was thick and shining as it had never been in life. Even as Maci watched, it grew, filling the casket until her mother seemed to be bathing in it, and indeed it made a sound like rushing water as it poured from her head. “Look,” Dr. Woodhull told her. “Look at her. Keep looking. If you keep at it she will give up a secret to you.”
Maci would wake, quieting sobs with one hand while her other pulled her across the room to the desk. We are creatures, like you, it wrote, made all of sadness and desire, only a thousand times more so. We share want like water, here. Sister, do you know how you are missed by strangers? We want to come back. Please, we want to come back.
In April of 1871, Maci went along with Tennie to Number 10 Washington Place, the home of Mr. Vanderbilt. Maci had been working on something for the Weekly, an article in support of the late Mr. Lincoln’s wife. Mrs. Lincoln, she wrote, is thrown over on the assigned ground that the widow of the murdered President is not in danger of actual starvation. We have no affection for pensions in public allowance. Every honest worker is as much a servant of the state and a public benefactor as any duly appointed official. In the case of accident or sudden death the laborer’s widow or child gets no State assistance. But if there be any such principle as public gratitude and any such way of testifying it as pension or pecuniary gratuity, Abraham Lincoln’s widow is the woman to receive it — her husband killed on account of public duty with a record, beyond the doubt of selfish motive — if that be not a claim on the nation’s bounty, what is?
It was typical of Mrs. Woodhull’s new direction. She had been courting the labor movement for months, and had instructed Maci to write pieces favorable to it. Maci complied as best she could, but always she found herself writing articles that endorsed the perspectives of the working class while simultaneously rejecting them. Maci thought it ill-advised for the Weekly to embrace Communists. She tried to tell this to Mrs. Woodhull, but the lady was dogged in her conviction that Communists, like Free Lovers and Spiritualists, were all decent and righteous and good.
The article was giving Maci a headache when Tennie came by and offered to take her away to visit the Commodore, a benefactor and intimate friend. Tennie had offered before to take Maci to his house, but Maci had always declined, because she was certain there would be a great awkwardness involved in visiting the father of the man she’d practically married in her imagination. But that day in April, Maci went because small, peculiar George Washington Woodhull was still sneaking into her dreams, bringing her strange gifts now: a lump of cold iron, a double handful of ashes, a bouquet of broken glass flowers. She wanted to drive him away, and she thought a visit to the Vanderbilt house might help to do it.
Her left hand denied coincidence, maintaining that it was a sign that Tennie was cozy with the Private’s father. It was clear to Maci that the relationship was not exactly a coincidence, but it wasn’t a magical arrangement, either. Mrs. Woodhull had told how she had sought out Commodore Vanderbilt when she’d first arrived in the city. She’d given him advice, that she claimed to have from the spirits, on the future behavior of certain stocks. He’d repaid her in kind, and she’d built her fortune on those first stock tips. “We’re kindred souls,” Mrs. Woodhull claimed of the Commodore, but it was her sister to whom he’d proposed marriage, and who had rejected him. “Marriage is the grave of love,” Tennie said simply, when Maci asked why she hadn’t accepted his offer. At Number 10 Washington Place a winking servant let them in a back door and led them through the house.