“You awful creature!” Mrs. Woodhull shouted at her mother, after the trial was over, after her magnificent speech had been eclipsed in every New York paper by the misleading fact that she had two husbands living in her house. “You false thing!” Mrs. Woodhull put her face in Maci’s shoulder and cried, and Maci brought her arms up to embrace her. Anna Claflin was shrieking curses, but Maci barely heard them. She felt suddenly transported out of the elegant parlor, out of the beautiful house, and up into the sky, because greatness had chosen her arms in which to weep.
Anna and Buck were ejected from the house on Thirty-eighth Street, but they came back in June, recalled by some familial gravity that baffled Maci. By then Maci had other worries. Ever since Anna’s trial, it had become fashionable to insult Mrs. Woodhull, and every day, all over the country, some editor would hop on the slander-cart and write an editorial that called her immoral for sheltering her broken-down former husband in her mansion. The most humiliating attacks came from Catharine Beecher who claimed that Mrs. Woodhull was the pinnacle of five thousand years of accumulating indecency, and from Beecher’s sister Mrs. Stowe, who caricatured Mrs. Woodhull in the pages of The Christian Union. In Mrs. Stowe’s frankly stupid serial novel, Victoria Woodhull was a carousing lady called Audacia Dangereyes, who owned a paper called The Virago, who swore and had multiple husbands, and in whose wake Free Love circulated like a stink.
“This will stop their fat mouths,” Mrs. Woodhull said as she and Maci worked on a letter to the Times, a veiled threat to expose Henry Beecher as an adulterer. Because I am a woman, Maci wrote while Mrs. Woodhull stood with a hand resting on her shoulder, and because I conscientiously hold opinions somewhat different from the self-elected orthodoxy which men find their pride in supporting, self-elected orthodoxy assails me, vilifies me, and endeavors to cover my life with ridicule and dishonor. This has been particularly the case in reference to certain law-proceedings into which I was recently drawn by the weakness of one very near, and provoked by other relatives.
My opinions and principles are subjects of just criticism. I put myself before the public voluntarily. But let him who is without sin cast his stone. I do not intend to be the scapegoat of sacrifice, to be offered up as a victim to society by those who cover up the foulness and the feculence of their thought with hypocritical mouthing of fair professions, and who divert public attention from their own iniquity by pointing their finger at me. I advocate Free Love — in the highest and purest sense, as the only cure for the immorality by which men corrupt sexual relations.
My judges who preach against “Free Love” openly, practice it secretly. For example, I know of one man, a public teacher of eminence, who lives in concubinage with the wife of another public teacher of almost equal eminence. All three concur in denouncing offenses against morality. So be it, but I decline to stand up as the “frightful example.” I shall make it my business to analyze some of these lives and will take my chances in the manner of libel suits.
Maci had delighted in the letter as she wrote it. But later, after it summoned Theodore Tilton from across the river, she regretted it. He came from Brooklyn to silence Mrs. Woodhull with pleas and promises and threats from Mr. Beecher. Tilton was supposed to convert her to silence, or cow her into respecting his and Mr. Beecher’s secret. Instead, he fell in love with her.
Surely, Maci thought, love could not be more Free than this. Mrs. Woodhull suddenly quite forgot Colonel Blood, who in his turn blithely ignored her frequent outings with Mr. Tilton. Maci, however, could not ignore them. She felt compelled to follow the two as they went to the park to ride in pleasure-boats, to Coney Island to play in the surf, or to the top of the Croton Distributing Reservoir to walk around and around the promenade, with their heads close together, sheltered by Mrs. Woodhull’s parasol from the sun but not from common view.
She wasn’t the only person following them. The younger Dr. Woodhull and his ward also trailed after his mother and her intimate friend on their outings. They’d both remove their hats and bow to Maci, whenever she caught sight of them. But he never spoke to her until the day in June that would see Anna and Buck Claflin return to their daughter’s house. That day, Maci had tracked Mrs. Woodhull and Mr. Tilton down to the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street, and thence up to the top of the reservoir, where she paced them as they sauntered underneath a sky so deeply blue it was nearly purple. On such a lovely day, the reservoir was crowded. Mrs. Woodhull looked back every so often and nodded at Maci. She found Maci’s fretting laughable and sweet.
“Miss Trufant,” Dr. Woodhull said, startling her where she was standing at a corner of the reservoir, and nearly causing her to leap clear into the water.
“Dr. Woodhull,” she said, overcome immediately with the familiar, panicked feeling.
“Did you know,” he asked her excitedly, “that this reservoir holds twenty million gallons of water? And did you know that we are a full forty-one miles from Croton Lake? The water flows all that way! Have you seen the bridge and aqueduct over the Harlem River? It is a marvelous piece of engineering. But the great bridge to Brooklyn will be even finer.” His face was flushed, and he was breathing as if he had just subjected himself to great exertion. She stared in his face for a moment, and he looked away, up into the air. His eyes were perfect mirrors of the dark blue sky.
“Is science your religion, Dr. Woodhull?”
“No,” he said, shifting his gaze to his mother, who, standing a few hundred feet off with Mr. Tilton, had begun to walk again. Dr. Woodhull offered Maci his arm. Not taking it, she walked with him. “I do believe, however,” he continued, “that science can change the world. I think it will make a better place for us to live in.”
“My father thought so,” said Maci. “He was wrong.” They walked for a while, stopping again when Mrs. Woodhull stopped. Maci noticed the boy, Pickie, kneeling by the water, where other boys were racing toy sailboats.
“I think science is not your religion, Miss Trufant. But tell me what you do believe in.”
Maci said nothing at first, thinking how her hand was always accusing her. Sister, it wrote, you believe in nothing. That is the most debilitating of sins.
Mrs. Woodhull’s vigorous laugh came drifting to them. Maci’s silence stretched on.
“Yesterday,” said Dr. Woodhull, “my mother was described in a Philadelphia paper as ‘The Dark Angel of Divorce.’”
“I believe,” Maci said forcefully, “that all existence is crossed by sorrow.” A little green sailboat came racing towards them across the water. All the boys were encouraging it, except little Pickie, who was sitting down on the ground now and crying. Maci went and knelt by him.
“What’s the matter, little fellow?” she asked him.
“It’s my brother,” he wailed. “He is unborn!”
“He means he is lonely,” Dr. Woodhull said behind her. “Be quiet, Pickie. Watch the boats. See how they are carefree? You should be like them.”
“There now,” Maci said, holding the boy close while he sobbed. She found herself admiring his long, lustrous brown hair. But then it brought to mind the dream of her mother, and she shuddered. “This boy needs his hair cut,” she said.
Dr. Woodhull shrugged. Pickie stopped crying and returned Maci’s embrace with such strength that she gasped.