In August, just when she was afloat on a tide of hot, Communist distress, Maci received an invitation from Dr. Woodhull. We must discuss my mother’s situation, he wrote to her. We are not alike, she and I, but I have always known that she will achieve great things, if she is not brought down by her wilder sympathies. Come and meet with me at my house, No. One E. 53rd St.
Mrs. Woodhull’s house was very noisy, so Maci was glad to leave it for a while. Because Tennie was campaigning for a spot in the New York State assembly, the house was full of prospective German constituents, who in the weeks previous had serenaded Tennie outside her window. Now they played their brass instruments inside the house, and there was nowhere a person could escape the splattering music, which was silly as Tennie was silly, and as her light-hearted, completely unserious campaign was silly. Maci went out into the dreadful heat without even telling anybody goodbye.
The younger Dr. Woodhull lived way up towards the park, where enormous houses were popping up with ever greater frequency. Maci’s hair was hanging wet and stinging in her eyes when she rang the bell, but when the door opened she shivered in the rush of cool air that poured out onto the marble steps. Dr. Woodhull stood in front of her with a pair of ice skates in his hands.
“You’ve come!” he said. “I wasn’t sure you would.”
“It was serious business in your letter.”
“The letter!” he said. “Come in and we’ll speak of it. Mind your way.” Maci slipped when she stepped into his unnaturally cool house, but he caught her arm and held her up. “That meeting has been canceled, after all,” he said. “It has been postponed in favor of a skating party.”
Maci might have reminded him it was August, except she could already see how the floor was covered with ice.
“I thought it might please you,” he said, “because it is so hot, and because you are from Boston. Don’t they all love to ice-skate in Boston? Come and skate with me, Miss Trufant. The ball is up. It’s a private pond. Nobody will disturb us.”
“You have deceived me,” Maci whispered. It occurred to her that she should be angry at him for drawing her into his house with false pretenses, but she was wonderstruck at the ice, and it was all she could think about. “How did you do it?” she asked.
He tried to explain about the copper pipes under the ice, and how liquid ammonia, as it expanded to a gas, could steal heat from water. “It’s really very simple. It’s how they make ice in the factories.”
The drapes were drawn all over the house. She could see very little besides large, dark shapes that leaned in the corners. Maci thought they might be furniture. She and Dr. Woodhull glided from room to room, through open doors into a dim parlor where a hundred mirrors reflected her shadowy, floating image, into a dining room where the table was pushed on its side against the wall, and where Maci caught her skate on a frozen apple. They didn’t talk, except when Dr. Woodhull pointed out an obstacle. She collided with him repeatedly. Even when they stopped to rest, standing in a wide, blank room whose purpose, before it became a skating pond, Maci could not figure, she drifted towards him and collided with him softly. “Excuse me!” she said, backing away.
“It’s the floor,” he said. “It slants.”
On her third pass through the mirror-parlor she skated closer to a large shape to investigate it. It was partly sunk in the ice. When she got right up by it she could see that it was a giant gear, like what might turn a house-sized clock.
“What is this?” she asked. “Why do you have this?” Dr. Woodhull was not in the room to answer her question, though he’d been skating at her side just moments before. She went looking for him, thinking she might have dreamed this already — searching for him in a dark, cold house, floating like a ghost — but knowing that she hadn’t because this was stranger and suddenly more terrible than any dream she’d had. She wandered through his house, tottering awkwardly, once upstairs, with the skates still strapped to her shoes, going from room to room, discovering old furniture, tall stacks of moldering books, and everywhere gears and rods and pieces of shaped glass, machine-spoor the sight of which made her stomach twist up in a knot. With the sense that she was wandering at her own peril she went up and up, compelled to open every door until she reached the top floor. She stood in the abandoned conservatory, and made the mistake of leaning against a withered potted tree, which tipped and fell, and broke in half when it struck the floor. She hurried clumsily from that room, and went through the only other door on the hall. Then she was in Dr. Woodhull’s bedroom, where she found him sitting quietly on his bed.
“Why are you crying, Miss Trufant?” he asked her, after he’d thrown open the other iron door and brought her in to see the sprawling thing he kept behind it.
“It is too, too much, Dr. Woodhull,” she said. “Too, too much.” Because it really was too much, for such a thing to happen once, and too, too much for it to happen twice, for her brother to introduce her again to an unsuitable boy, and for somebody else’s life to be wasted in the construction of an impossible and useless machine. It was clear to her then that she should sit on the bed and calmly remove her skates, then run frantically out of the room, down the stairs, and out of the house. She ought to run right back to Boston, because she would proclaim herself an irredeemable fool if she stayed and ignored the lessons of her ridiculous life. Dear Aunt Amy, she wrote in her mind as she stood there, Here I come! But she didn’t go anywhere except deeper into the room, following her left hand as it yearned towards the machine, closing in a fist around a hot section of pipe. Something beat through it like blood.
“Do you like it?” he asked her.
“I despise it,” she said, but her hand would not come free, and she feared, in that moment, that it never would.
3
YOUNG DR. WOODHULL INVITED MACI TO AN INDUSTRIAL EXPOsition in September of 1871. She went, though it was obvious to her that there was nothing she should like less than a festival of machines. Tennie rushed to accompany them when she learned Mr. Whitman was to be seen and heard. As they stood together in the little crowd at the Cooper Institute, listening to Mr. Whitman read a poem, Maci thought she understood why the poet and Dr. Woodhull were friends. Mr. Whitman was another engine-lover. He’d even imagined a muse for their new mechanical age, a dame of dames who would supersede Clio and her sisters. How she must clank when she moves, Maci thought, and stink of oil and coal smoke.
Mr. Whitman, with his big gray beard, reminded Maci of her father, though her father had the voice of a man used to giving sermons, and Mr. Whitman squeaked his poem like a mouse. On the stage, the poet waved his thick arms in broad, warm gestures of invitation, and spoke:
“I say I see, my friends, if you do not, the illustrious émigré.
Making directly for this rendezvous, vigorously clearing a path for herself, striding through the confusion,
By thud of machinery and shrill steam-whistle undismay’d,
Bluff’d not a bit by drain-pipe, gasometers, artificial fertilizers,
Smiling and pleas’d with palpable intent to stay,
She’s here, install’d amid the kitchen ware!”