“Maci,” he said later, shaking her awake. “Did I ever tell you about the time I saw Mr. Lincoln’s funeral procession? He came to New York, you know, on his way back to Illinois. He left this city escorted by sixty thousand citizens and soldiers. They passed under my window, and woke me up with all their noise. I put my head out and watched them go by for hours and hours. The very last mourner was a snuffling dog, a great big gray one. He looked like a ghost.” They were both silent a moment, and then they sat up, each on their own side of the bed, and had a passionate talk, shifting from topic to topic — from Mr. Lincoln to Mrs. Lincoln to madness to insane asylums to Margaret Fuller to shipwrecks and on.
Every night they’d do the same thing. They would dance, sleep, talk. It went on for days, then weeks. Maci wished for absolute darkness because she was certain that would inspire her husband to kiss her — there could be no other reason for his shyness but the light, for hadn’t he been rude and bold down in the caisson? But light from the streetlamps in Madison Square came in their windows, even when the curtains were closed, so Maci could see Gob’s face as he talked, and she knew he could see hers.
She never asked Tennie for advice, but she always credited Tennie with the course of action she took, because it was by pretending to be Tennie that she solved the problem. One night, Maci put her hand over her husband’s mouth and said, “It’s enough.” She kissed him, and grabbed at him everywhere. When he ran from her, she pursued him, grabbing and kissing though he cried out for her to please stop. He ran to a corner and bent down in it, hands over his head, making a crooning noise. She stood over him, staring down. He peeped up at her through his arms. They stood a little while like that, until she put her hand out to him. She had to wait a long time before he took it. She remembered the things that Mrs. Woodhull had shouted from her roof for all of Thirty-eighth Street to hear. Maci shouted these, too, because she thought the noises would encourage her husband, and for a little while she was brutal with him, slapping at his head and his chest, shaking him, and staring fiercely into his lustrous, dilated eyes. “Praise!” she cried, imitating even Mr. Tilton in her desperate excitement. Gob was silent until the end, when he shouted so loud in her mouth she thought her lungs would burst.
She woke up just at dawn with a twitch in her hand. She thought it wanted to congratulate her on the consummation of her marriage, that her left hand might walk over her chest to shake her right. But it wanted a pen, same as always. There weren’t any words, just drawings, not of people or places, but of the thing. For an hour before dawn she watched as her hand drew a profusion of gears and cogs and struts and pipes. She kept on drawing into the morning while Gob slept behind her, waiting and wanting for him to interrupt her, but she didn’t stop until one of the hotel staff came to their door with a telegram announcing that Canning Woodhull was dead.
The Magus, who is beloved of every spirit, cannot see us or hear us. We cannot reach him, and his brother cannot reach him. Heaven loves cruel ironies, but we hate them here. We cannot offer him our wisdom, so we offer it to you.
Maci knew it must be inappropriate, to think of children and their making, while at a funeral. But at the white celebration of death held in honor of Canning Woodhull, she did just that. Dear Aunt Amy, she’d written in another unsent letter, Even as he goes into me, I go into him, and fill him with doubt to topple his delusion. I think he will give up building on his machine in favor of building on a family. Isn’t it how married people manage their mortality, with children?
The children would come, one, two, three, four, another with every year, so she would barely have time to know what it was not to be pregnant. Yet it would be a delight, even the agony, because with every birth a little more of the machine would go away. Five, six, seven — the thing would be reduced to a shell. Eight, nine, ten — it would be scraps. Eleven, twelve — they would sell the house on Fifth Avenue to a man who made his fortune in pessaries.
“A sad day, Mrs. Woodhull,” Dr. Fie said at the funeral. They were wandering together among the monuments, like all the other white mourners who went in groups of two or three over the lush grass.
“My name is still Trufant, Dr. Fie.”
“But you will always be Mrs. Woodhull to me.” He nodded at Gob, where he was still weeping by the grave with Mr. Whitman.
“They have a special friendship, those two,” he said.
“Do you envy them?”
“No,” he said. “But I think I envy Canning Woodhull. Think of it, Mrs. Woodhull, a place where you can dip whiskey out of rivers, and there are ladies whose breath is a gas of peppermint and morphine.”
“One hears that Heaven is white and cold and pleasureless.”
“Well, I don’t think he went to Heaven,” he said. “What a strange occupation it must have been, to be an ex-husband. There goes Miss Claflin.” He put his arms behind his back like a schoolboy and sang:
“She’s sweeter than the flowers in May,
She’s lovelier far than any;
I care not what the world may say,
I pin my faith on Tennie!”
“Dr. Fie,” said Maci, “I think you are deranged with grief for your former colleague.”
“He was a wise man. I never appreciated that until I’d lost the opportunity to learn from him. And you can see that your husband feels the same way.” They walked along in silence for a while. When they came upon a sad-looking tree that drooped like a willow and hid three graves in its shade, they walked under it to inspect the headstones of a Mrs. Sancer and her children. “Recent departures,” said Dr. Fie. “We’ll have you back soon enough.”
Maci thought of the lady’s children. Were they buried with her in the same coffin, snuggling through eternity? She had forgotten, it seemed, that children could die. Now that she remembered again, it was a terrible surprise.
“Do you really think so?” Maci asked him. He plucked down a spray of leaves from the tree and gave them to her.
“Of course I do,” he said. He plucked another leaf from the tree and, taking a piece of charcoal from his pocket, bent to take a rubbing from one of the children’s headstones. Maci leaned against the trunk to watch him. “It puzzles me,” he said as he worked, “how you are a helper, but not a believer.”
“It puzzles me, too, Dr. Fie. And it puzzles me, that such strong minds could subscribe to such an easy, candy-coated belief.”
“But what if it is true, Mrs. Woodhull? What if they are all around us? What if they are all around you now?”
“Books are immortal in the world, Dr. Fie. Not people.” Maci closed her eyes.
“Are you well, Mrs. Woodhull?” he asked her in a little while.
“Just sleepy,” she said. In the silence, she’d been naming children in her mind: John, Jacob, little Victoria, Arthur, Corwin. She loved to name them. “Why don’t you walk on,” she told Dr. Fie. “I’ll join you in a moment.” He looked at her with an inscrutable expression, but then he nodded and walked out. Maci shielded her eyes against the flash of sunlight that came through the hanging leaves as Dr. Fie parted them. Little Tennessee, she thought, Polly, Christopher, Isabella, Constance, William.
I was surprised. Everyone is surprised. But why are we surprised? Haven’t we known, all our lives, that this would come? Such a quiet, subtle poison. Those who complain at how death ruins their days, they are called weak, or morbidly sentimental, but really they are prophets, who rail against the despair that every person practices, but none will acknowledge. Can you imagine, Sister, a world not poisoned? Once or twice in your life, you might truly forget — say, when, thinking yourself incapable of love, you find it, after all, or when your baby hangs dependent on your breast, and you think it must live forever because it feeds on pure, powerful love. But can you even imagine a world in which immortality is fact, not fancy or suspicion, a world in which the worm has departed from the rose? Can you? Can you even?