“There is a secret world, Miss Maci,” Gob Woodhull said, taking her to lean over the edge of the water. “Hidden in plain view of this one, it is invisible to people who truly believe that hurling giggles at death will ameliorate mortality. It is full of grieving people and grieving spirits. See? Here are two citizens of that world.” He nodded his head at their reflections.
Maci disengaged herself from his arm and stepped back from the water. “Morbid fancy,” she said.
“Look here, I have something for you.” He took off his hat and reached into it, bringing up an ordinary flower, a humble daisy, mashed and sweaty from being under his hat. He held it out for her. She took it with her right hand.
“Thank you,” she said, and put it to her nose. It smelled of his hair.
Do you remember playing Troy? I was Helen bound up with our mother’s scarves, high on their bed, which we’d pushed into the middle of their room. You had to be Achilles, splendid in your fury, dragging the cat around the bed by a string, and calling it dead Hector. Such a cruel game; only children could play it. Around and around you went, deaf to the protests of the cat. I had to shout for you to hear me. I wanted to be released. “Let me go,” I pleaded. “I’m uncomfortable.” “Wretched creature,” you shouted, never slowing, “there is no comfort in this world!” You were five years old. I was ten.
Now, any spirit will grant that the comforts of mortality are small and fleeting, but that is no reason to spurn them. Sister, I urge you to take a portion of happiness for yourself.
Maci confided to the senior Dr. Woodhull that she believed herself to be the victim of some infective illness. “There was an invading process,” she told him, describing her symptoms, “and now there is a dissolving process.” Dissolving was not actually the appropriate term. Whatever had been put in her with the kiss had exploded, and shattered her into a confused, fractious being. Wasn’t that the function of time, to keep you from being more than a single person at once? But Maci was at present a crowd of contrary opinion and in-decisiveness.
“I have just the thing for you,” said Canning Woodhull. He left the kitchen to go to his room, and came back in a moment bearing a lovely yellow bottle marked with painted flowers and eyes. “Believe me,” he said, “this will help you.” It only made her drunk.
If Maci had learned anything, living in Mrs. Woodhull’s house, she had certainly learned that marriage was not an exalted state, or even a necessary one. A husband could be merely a courteous appendage, like Colonel Blood, or, like Canning Woodhull, a broken thing deserving of heaped charity. So why did Maci wake one morning convinced that marriage was the only remedy for love, and why did she wake one morning believing herself in love with Gob Woodhull? She did not believe these things — it was the others who did. The rebellious other Maci Trufants who jostled inside of her, who staged a coup and overthrew her reason.
“Now you will be my mama, too,” little Pickie told her. She tried to imagine mothering this strange child, who curdled all her maternal instincts. He was listening at the door when Maci went to Mrs. Woodhull, to ask for the hand of her son in marriage. Maci wanted so badly to agree with her employer, when she argued against the idea of Gob and Maci’s binding themselves in conventional union. “Did you know that the Colonel and I are divorced?” she asked Maci. “Just after we were married, we obtained the divorce. As a protest, my star, against Sunday-school mentality. And didn’t you just review a novel called Married in Haste?”
I’ll be with you, her hand promised, I’ll give you away. Maci went down the aisle alone, a bride without need of her father. She had not invited him or her aunt to the wedding, though she felt compelled to write a brief message to Aunt Amy, which she actually mailed to the lady: Aunt, it is indeed a terrible thing not to marry. Maci had wished, anyhow, for a wedding so private that there’d be no one there but her and Gob and some unifying principle. They would join their hands and cleave to each other. They did join hands at the behest of Mr. Beecher’s subordinate, but when they did it brought her no mystical feelings of union. As she held his hands she wondered how she could possibly be marrying someone who dismissed the Vindication as “chatty.”
It was the least private function she’d ever attended, crowded with guests, all Mrs. Woodhull’s, people who came out to show their support of her. Her friends had flocked back to her since January — it turned out that no one could stay away from her for long, no matter how the scarecrows of so-called morality shook their pumpkin heads. But they had not really come for the wedding. They hoped for a speech that would preach brilliant, exciting reform at the same time it wished her son a happy future with his bride. There wasn’t a speech, but Mrs. Woodhull threw a brilliant party, paid for with her son’s money. Mrs. Woodhull was getting poor.
“You must adore the first night,” said Canning Woodhull, one of many people who accosted Maci with advice. “It will be the very best of your life. Everything that follows will be misery, my dear.”
Colonel Blood said, “Do not try to pin his heart to the wall of your bedchamber. It will only bleed, you know.”
Tennie scolded her. “You broke your promise, didn’t you?” They’d had an anti-marriage ceremony, almost two years before. Maci had stood with Tennie in the Turkish corner, dressed in white, and shared a golden cup of wine. “Marriage is the grave of love,” they had intoned together. “I will never enter the grave of love.”
Maci wanted to say, “You’re right!” And she wanted to take Tennie’s hand and flee with her to Paris or Berlin, places Maci remembered from her childhood tour, where they could lead unmarried lives of complicated pleasure. But some other Maci was in charge of her limbs, in that moment, and she could not flee. Still another Maci was trying to push her heart out of her chest, towards Gob where he stood talking with Dr. Fie underneath a mural depicting the loves of Venus: Adonis, Ares, and Anchises. From across the room her new husband looked very small. She wanted to gather him up in her hand.
Maci refused to live in his house, with his engine. They took rooms down at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where their windows looked out on the trees of Madison Square Park. They had a parlor, with a marble fireplace big enough for little Pickie to stand up in, and red curtains that Maci could close when she did not wish to see the telegraph wires, when she thought they were making a noise like many conversations. Little Pickie remained at the house, under the care of Dr. Fie, but he was a frequent visitor at the hotel. Maci and Gob each had a study, hers filled with a big desk upon which she could lay out proofs, and his stuffed with moldering books. They were on the fourth floor, reached by means of a mechanical elevator, a thing Gob loved. He’d pay the attendant to take him riding in it for hours.
“Would you like to dance?” Gob asked her on their wedding night, when they’d both made themselves ready for bed. Maci had a satchel full of creams and perfumes and washes that Tennie had given her, each with five minutes of advice on its function. She’d not used them, and thought that must be why she felt awkward and homely as she sat on the bed. So she was glad to dance. They danced without music, and they talked, until Gob said he was very tired. He lay down in their bed and fell immediately asleep. Maci lay down beside him, watching him breathe and snore. He groaned, and ran in his sleep like a dog. She considered putting her arm around him, but in the end she did not. She was surprised at how quickly she fell asleep, when she tried.