“Mama!” Pickie said, then laughed.
“Forgive him,” Dr. Woodhull said. “He hugs dogs, and calls them ‘Mama.’ Trees, too.”
“Not my mama,” Pickie said, “but my brother’s mama.” He broke away from her embrace and went back to watch the boats.
“He has a volatile temperament,” Dr. Woodhull said apologetically. Maci looked all around for Mrs. Woodhull, but failed to find her.
“She’s escaped me,” Maci said.
“She’s gone home,” Dr. Woodhull said. “To prepare for the party.”
“Which party is that?” Maci asked him, but he’d already walked off to retrieve Pickie. The two of them made a formal bow to her and walked into the crowds.
Maci would have liked not to celebrate the return of the nasty prodigals, but Mrs. Woodhull insisted that she participate in the groundless festivities. We ought to be mourning, Maci said to herself, and sat at the far end of Mrs. Woodhull’s table, away from the revelry, working on an article that profiled and condemned Madame Restell. She is seen every day, she wrote, a pale lady riding fast in her gorgeous carriage. Why does she drive so fast? Is she flying from herself?
“Sweet, sweet forgiveness!” Anna Claflin shouted at the other end of the room. Engrossed in her work, Maci didn’t notice how the old lady was sneaking up on her. She’d smeared her lips with honey, and meant to give Maci a sugar-kiss. Maci looked up too late to duck away. But young Dr. Woodhull’s hand came between them before Anna’s lips could connect with Maci’s. Anna kissed his hand lovingly, then went back to the other end of the table. She took a knife and began to stab at Colonel Blood’s shadow where the light threw it on a wall.
“Thank you,” Maci said, watching Dr. Woodhull wipe honey from his palm. Marking his deficit, she stared too long.
“My eighty-percent hand,” he said.
“I am rude,” she said. “Please forgive me.”
“There’s nothing to forgive.”
“Was it an animal? Did an animal bite you?”
“A congenital deformity,” he said. “You’ll notice that I share it with my grandmother. But won’t you come down and celebrate, Miss Trufant?”
“I prefer not to,” she said. “In fact, I am sleepy. Good night, Dr. Woodhull.” She gathered up her papers, shook his hand — the whole one — and went upstairs to her room. By the time she came to her room she’d become so weary that she lay on her bed without undressing and fell immediately into a dream, in which she and Dr. Woodhull were back at the reservoir, sitting with their bare feet dangling in the water. He had an abundance of hair on his toes.
“Do you believe in love, Miss Trufant?” he asked her. “Do you believe it is more than a gratifying delusion?”
“Free Love?” she asked.
“Any kind,” he said.
“Well,” she said, getting up from where they were sitting and walking away rapidly on her wet feet, suddenly remembering that she had to find Mrs. Woodhull. “In fact I do not,” she said softly. Dr. Woodhull had hurried after her and was walking with his face very close to her own. “I do not believe in it at all.” Mrs. Woodhull dropped down out of the sky to land in front of them without a sound. Maci reached out and touched her face, and woke to her voice.
Mrs. Woodhull and Mr. Tilton were on the roof. They had a bower there, to which they retreated nightly. Mrs. Woodhull was berating Mr. Tilton for going on about how his wife and Mr. Beecher had wounded him. They began a spirited argument, but just as they seemed ready to start screaming like Claflins, their voices cut off, and presently Maci heard Mrs. Woodhull crying out in a high voice, and Tilton shouting, “Praise, praise!”
Maci had gotten into the habit of listening, rather than closing her window, just as she listened sometimes at Tennie’s door when she was entertaining her large friend Dr. Fie, or some other friend, large or small. Tennie seemed to take them in all sizes. Maci pretended that she was exploring a mystery with her shameful listening. She’d write down the words she heard, the cries that sounded plaintive, frustrated, angry, relieved, and then arrange them together in sentences of strident lust. And, sometimes, when she had been lying in her damp sheets for an hour listening to the lovers on the roof, she’d consider finally taking a ride on the pony, which Tennie had solicitously moved into her room, insisting that Maci had greater need of it than she did. Maci had sat on it once, the little bump put just in the place it was meant to go, and taken a few exploratory rocks. She’d dismounted immediately, covering the thing up again with its slip of silk, and then with two wool blankets on top of that, to hide it completely. She never got on it again, but on the hottest nights, when she could hear the lovers so very loud on the roof, she thought of riding the pony to a strange, new place, with her book open in her hand, reading aloud as she went.
Is it because Adam sinned to keep company with Eve? Is it because intelligence can only become perfect through suffering, as the earth can only reach a perfect state through storms as well as sunshine, and the soul can only reach a perfect state through storms of sorrow and despair? No, I think it is for no reason, or, at the least, for no good reason. I do not believe that we are hallowed by sadness. I do not believe it is sufficient answer, to say we are justly punished by death, or to say that we die because we die.
Maci kept busy, all through the summer of 1871, organizing Victoria Leagues. They were Maci’s own idea, associations, formed all over the country, whose purpose would be to promote Mrs. Woodhull’s bid for the Presidency. Maci recruited members from out of Mrs. Woodhull’s parlor parties, from subscribers to the paper, and from brokerage clients. And, sitting at a table in the third-floor study, she wrote an anonymous open letter to Mrs. Woodhull, care of the Weekly.
Madam, a number of your fellow citizens, both men and women, have formed themselves into a working committee, borrowing its title from your name, and calling itself The Victoria League. Our object is to form a new national political organization, composed of the progressive elements in the existing Democratic and Republican parties, together with the Women of the Republic, who have hitherto been disenfranchised, but to whom the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the Constitution, properly interpreted, guarantee, equally with men, the right of suffrage. This new Political organization will be called The Equal Rights Party, and its platform will consist solely and only of a declaration of the equal civil and political rights of all American citizens, without distinction of sex. We shall urge all women who possess the political qualifications of other citizens, in the respective States in which they reside, to assume and exercise the right of suffrage without hesitation or delay. And we ask you, Madam, to become the standard bearer of this idea before the people, and for this purpose nominate you as our candidate for President of the United States, to be voted for in 1872, by the combined suffrage of both sexes.
Across the table from her, Mrs. Woodhull wrote back a long, elegant, and somewhat demure letter of acceptance.
Maci had by this time understood completely that nothing would come of Mr. Tilton’s association with her employer except the fatuous biography he had written, a fawning, spineless thing that damned Mrs. Woodhull with abundant praise. It was widely mocked because it detailed all Mrs. Woodhull’s spiritual transactions, telling how Demosthenes was her mentor, how Josephine was her spirit sister, how all Mrs. Woodhull’s utterances were dictated under otherworldly influence.
Not concerned anymore about Mr. Tilton, Maci exercised her organ of worry on Mrs. Woodhull’s Communist enthusiasm. Mrs. Woodhull had thrown herself into the leadership of Section Twelve of the International Workingmen’s Association, not caring if she was lumped together with the Paris revolutionaries, who were widely regarded as repulsive monsters. Maci reminded Mrs. Woodhull repeatedly that no one but a Communist likes a Communist. It was to no avail.