Mrs. Woodhull’s son was not surprised at the empty house. “You have frightened people away from you,” he said. “The timid and the hypocritical, who do not understand how your notions are refined, indict you with your own words. You ought not to have strayed from your text.” It was a sign, Maci thought, that he was concerned for his mother, that he scolded her for being too bold. It was Maci’s aim to make him an ally in his mother’s cause, and to lessen the distance that seemed to stretch between the two of them. She’d imagined a scene between them, in which, fully reconciled and truly loving, they embraced, and in which Mrs. Woodhull would say, “Come into the world. There is so much work for us to do, here.”
“Oh, you are like a croaking bird, with that refrain!” said Mrs. Woodhull to her son. But Maci, too, had been telling her all month how she had made a mistake at Steinway Hall. And Maci had been telling her, also, that she should not have marched at the head of the December parade protesting the execution of M. Rossel, one of the Paris Communards. Mrs. Woodhull had walked behind a black-draped coffin, while Maci and Tennie had followed carrying a banner that read, Complete Social and Political Equality for Both Sexes.
It was the most self-evident of facts, that there was no profit in associating with Communists. Maci knew that, and yet she had marched anyhow with Mrs. Woodhull, because she couldn’t refuse her anything. Maci had been constantly afraid that they would spark a riot, that by evening bodies would be piled on all the corners of Manhattan, and the city would be in flames. But the march had wreaked a different sort of havoc — the two sisters’ participation alienated Commodore Vanderbilt. Free Love excited him, Spiritualism comforted him, but Communism was anathema to him. Tennie announced one morning a few days after the march that he wouldn’t see her anymore. “I knew it would happen,” she told Maci. “But oh, it still hurts!”
At her guestless party, Mrs. Woodhull shook her head at her son, then went to sit down between her two husbands, who had given up their chess game and retired to a sofa. “It’s a hot January for us, isn’t it?” she said. “Well, I am inclined to make it hot for somebody else.” It had become a reflex with her, to threaten Henry Beecher whenever her fortunes dipped. She’d come to blame him for most of her troubles, though, as far as Maci could tell, he hadn’t actually done anything to hurt her. It was Mrs. Stowe and Catharine Beecher who wanted to destroy her. Mr. Beecher had, in fact, made an attempt to rein his sisters in, but, frenzied with hypocrisy and vituper, they would not be silenced.
“We have the fixings already for a celebration,” Gob Woodhull said brightly, closing the curtains and hiding the stream of visitors passing the house by. “And today happens to be Pickie’s birthday. What shall we do?”
“It’s not my birthday,” said Pickie.
“Certainly it is. I found you on this day one year ago. My boy, you are one year old today!”
“It is not my birthday, and it is not my brother’s birthday,” the boy insisted. Nonetheless, he had a happy party, eating his fill of white cake and red punch. The house became as joyful and carefree as it had previously been sad and nervous. Mrs. Woodhull seemed to forget that Mrs. Grundy had brought a fist down upon her that day. Standing on a chair, she proclaimed how 1872, the year of her predestined election to the Presidency of the United States, would be the greatest year of her life, and the greatest year of all their lives. “This is my year!” Mrs. Woodhull said.
She took Maci aside to confide in her. “My star,” she said. “I know it looks dark now, but don’t give up hope. We’ll bounce back, and bounce higher than anybody expects. I’ve never told you this. I’ve been waiting, and now I am inspired, in this dark hour, to give you the news I’ve been husbanding. I mean to give you a cabinet post, if I arrive in Washington in my destined capacity.”
Maci was flustered. She didn’t think at all how it was almost impossible that Mrs. Woodhull would be elected, or even get very many votes. All she felt was honored, but this soon passed as Mrs. Woodhull distributed promises like party favors. Everybody was a future secretary. Colonel Blood would be Secretary of War, her son the Secretary of Building, and Tennie C. Claflin would be Secretary of the newly established Department of Good Times, from which she would dole out budgets of fun to every despondent citizen.
Maci’s hand drew a picture of Gob Woodhull, a life-sized masterpiece of foreshortening — if she squinted at it she almost believed that his hand, detailed down to the split nails, was reaching out of the paper. She’d lie back and consider the picture, wondering if he and Private Vanderbilt would quarrel if she put them side by side on the wall. Little Dr. Woodhull was stronger than he looked — she’d seen him lift boilerplate as if it were china plate. Her hand attributed that strength to what it called a demispiritual nature, but it was Maci’s belief that the strength of his obsession found its way into his muscles and bones. How many times had her mother lifted up her bedstead in search of a stray bean?
Maci found she could complain to the picture as she could complain to nobody else. Mrs. Woodhull, Tennie, her hand — these all talked back. They all tried to convince her that sanity was unreasonable, but Gob Woodhull’s picture never did that. He smiled, he held out his hand, and that was all. “Isn’t it a burden?” she said to him. “Isn’t it unfair, how I am afflicted with lunacy from the outside and the inside?”
Here are his hands, her own hand wrote on them as it drew, to touch you. Here are his eyes to see you. Here is his mouth to speak you. Tattooed with this primer, he was not clean. Here is his heart, to love you. Maci groaned and looked away when her hand wrote this last thing, fearing it would draw his heart popping out of his chest, as in those gruesome Catholic icons. But her hand only drew a black shadow in his breast.
“Tell me,” he’d ask her, whenever she visited at his house. He’d say it both playfully and plaintively. “I know you can tell me.” He remained convinced that she could help him build up his folly. Maci suggested that a bit of raw iron might be decorated with blue or yellow paint, or suggested arbitrary revisions: “Shouldn’t these three inches of wire be gold, and not silver?” He seemed not to realize that she was mocking him. They were playing like children, piling up stuff into a heap of nonsense. It gave her a wicked sort of pleasure, to think how it was all a waste, and to think how it would gratify her when the giant apparatus failed at everything but being a giant apparatus. But sometimes it made Maci sad, for his sake, to think how he would fail. And, most rarely, she’d think it would be wonderful if this thing could cough out the dead, after all, if even one dead soul could be born again out of its chimney-stack. She even tried to believe this, closing her eyes and straining to see the triumphant spirit of her brother being born back into flesh. But, try as she might, all she could see was darkness.
“Oh, sir,” she said to his picture. “You refine my sense of the ridiculous and the tragic.”
Maci went with Gob Woodhull down to the foot of Roosevelt Street, where the New York tower of the great bridge was going up. Across the river, the Brooklyn tower was already one hundred feet high.