It went on and on, as laborers abandoned the work of putting up the exhibits and came over to listen. Maci liked it much less than the poems she’d read as a girl. It’s Gob Woodhull, Maci thought, whose acquaintance makes people less than they were. He’s poisoned Mr. Whitman’s muse, altered her so smoke pours out of her ears and she leaves wet oily spots wherever she sits. Gob, Gob, Gob, she’d say to herself sometimes, thinking how it sounded like the noise made by irritable intestines. She would have preferred not to think of him or his machine, but despite those wishes she spent many hours in consideration of both.
“I cannot,” she had replied, when, standing in front of his machine, he had asked her to help him complete it. She had laughed in his face when he told her his ambitions for the thing, when he claimed it would abolish death. She thought he would cry, and this pleased her during those furious, confused moments after she was introduced to his secret. But the laugh was directed at her own life, and not at him. She hadn’t meant to be cruel. With her left hand still fastened to the pipe, she considered that she might be able to help him, after all, though not in the way he suspected. Here at last was not only punishment, but penance suitable for Infanticide: she might save Dr. Woodhull from his delusion, and show him how the complicated assemblage that he revered was only a pile of stuff.
Maci went among the industrial exhibits arm in arm with Tennie, while Dr. Woodhull and Mr. Whitman walked ahead of them. “See how he goes like a bear?” Tennie asked her. “But he is as gentle as a deer.”
“Gentler, I think,” Maci said, because Mr. Whitman seemed to her eminently gentle and sad, not at all the stomping, shouting fellow suggested by the poems for which she’d suffered a beating so many years before. “As gentle as a plant,” Maci said, as they passed into a stand of rubber furniture.
“It’s not bouncy,” Tennie said, sitting down in a hard, ornate chair. “Still, I like it very much. It’s just the sort of thing I’d like to have in my corner.” She refused to walk any farther. Maci left her there, amid a crowd of workmen who’d been drawn to her as if by a scent. Walking on, Maci overtook Mr. Whitman, who’d paused, and seemed to be admiring Dr. Woodhull as Dr. Woodhull admired a candy vat.
“I think science is his religion,” Maci said.
Mr. Whitman turned to her and looked earnestly into her eyes. It was rare for Maci to be unable to meet a gaze, but she found herself compelled to look elsewhere. She considered how Mr. Whitman’s shirt, open at the neck, allowed white hair to curl out at her.
“What is your religion, Miss Trufant?”
“The religion,” Maci said, “of earthly reform.”
“I think you made that up just now. One day this spot will be holy. ‘Here Miss Trufant founded the religion of earthly reform!’” He laughed, and Maci found herself laughing with him.
“Very well, Mr. Whitman. Let me clarify. I do not hope for Heaven, except as we can approximate it on earth. I am not religious.”
“Your life must gape like a hole,” he said. Maci thought this a harsh accusation to make to a practical stranger. Yet he laughed again.
Dr. Woodhull had turned his attention to a mechanical thresher, and was touching it affectionately. Maci said, “I say science is his religion because I think he is overfond of machines. Don’t you think it is possible to be overfond of machines?”
Mr. Whitman said nothing for a moment. Thinking he might be a little deaf, Maci was about to repeat her question when he spoke. “Has he shown you his … thing?” he asked.
“You mean his engine? He has. I think I must have been the last person in the world still ignorant of its existence.” Now it can be told! her hand had written, when she went home that night in August, and had proceeded to bore her with the particulars of its construction. Maci discovered, in the next few days, that every Claflin knew about the engine, though none of them would talk much about it. Tennie would only say that she thought it was wonderful and sad. Mrs. Woodhull said it was her son’s work to build, as it was her own work to reform. Even Dr. Fie knew about the thing. Indeed, he was assisting in its assembly.
“Then you are not fond of it, Miss Trufant?”
“It is a functionless machine. It is, as you say, a thing, and not to be liked or disliked.” Maci was tired, suddenly, of engine-talk, and decided to alter the course of their conversation. “But I did like your poem,” she said, though she hadn’t really.
“Then you should take it.” He held out his copy to her, folded up to a square the size of his palm.
“Oh, I couldn’t,” she said. “I certainly couldn’t. I’ll get a copy from out of the papers tomorrow.”
“No, please,” he said, his voice rising. He angled his head to meet her eyes again, his stare rude and intense. “I want you to take this, too.” He reached for her with the paper, pressing it against her hand, then letting it go.
It fell to the ground. Dr. Woodhull, returned from his close examination of the thresher, picked it up and presented it to her silently. “Walt,” he said, “come and see the sewing machines!” He ran off, scampering like his boy, Pickie. Mr. Whitman followed him, and Maci looked down at the dirty old piece of paper he’d made a gift to her. It was full of writing, front and back, used and used again until every inch was covered with ink. She unfolded it and brought it up close to her face to read the poet’s script. On the front was the poem, on the back, a list: John Watson (bed 29), get some apples; Llewellyn Woodin (bed 14), sore throat, wants some candy; bed 14 wants an orange.
Dear Aunt Amy, Maci wrote in another unsent letter. I am doing well here in New York, proceeding sensibly from day to day and living a good honest life. I know, Aunt, that you worry about me, and that to your casually observing distant eye it may seem that my urge towards free thinking has plumped into actual vice, and that I am engaged in foolish, scandalous, even dangerous behavior. Let me reassure you that this is, in fact, not the case.
He is a magus, her left hand wrote, creeping over with an extra pen to crowd her right hand off the paper. And though he is small, his hips are handsome. She pushed the hand away.
Yes, I associate with him. Yes, I am alone with him in his house. Yes, we are awake till very late in the evening. We discuss science and mortality and politics. He has got a keen interest in his mother, for all that he pretends indifference. He hates her, I think, because she is not like him, because she does not spend her whole life stretched on the grave of his dead brother. She works in the world to change the world, while he cloisters himself in a decaying mansion and wastes his obvious talents making his grief for his brother manifest in iron and glass and copper. I tell him as much, and he says, “I like how you are honest with me, Miss Trufant.”
I cannot make you believe in his work, but he can make you believe in his work. You believe in his mama as she changes what can’t be changed, why can’t you do him the same favor?
How comforting it would be, Maci wrote to Aunt Amy, to believe that the whole war happened for reasons more cosmic than political, to believe that all the war’s deaths could be undone, that Rob and all the others died only so they could come back to us. But Aunt, comfort is a clue to falseness, and the ease of a thing can make it not so.
Sister, you don’t believe in anything good.
“I will create a distraction,” Mrs. Woodhull told Maci, “while you do the deed.” They had a plan to cast a vote in the November elections of 1871. A whole contingent of women, accompanied by a few male reporters, marched down from Thirty-eighth Street to the polling place for the twenty-third district of the twenty-first ward, a furniture store on Sixth Avenue. While Mrs. Woodhull, with Tennie by her side, made what came to be known as her “Rats and Spiders” speech, Maci made a lunge for the ballot box. Her shooting hand felt to her like a bullet, and she suspected it would kill any man who got between her and the vote that day. But the attendant — a Tammany thugee, Maci was sure — slapped her hand down, scattering her tickets whole feet from the box.