“What is equality?” Mrs. Woodhull asked, at the May convention of the People’s Party. “And what is justice? Shall we be slaves to escape revolution? Away with such weak stupidity! A revolution shall sweep over the whole country, to purge it of political trickery, despotic assumption, and all industrial injustice!”
“Wake up, my love,” Gob said to Maci, moving her head where it rested on his shoulder. “You’re missing the speech.”
“I wrote it,” Maci said. “I know it.” She opened her eyes and saw Mrs. Woodhull on the stage in Apollo Hall, in her red cheeks, white rose, and her blue dress. “Now you must admit she is a great woman,” Maci said sleepily.
“Who will dare,” Mrs. Woodhull asked, “to unlock the luminous portals of the future with the rusty keys of the past?”
Who indeed — it seemed everybody in the hall was willing to have a try. The whole place was on its feet and screaming for her, “Woodhull! Woodhull, Woodhull!”
Colonel Blood stepped up from the crowd, dressed in a fine black suit. He nominated Mrs. Woodhull to the Presidency of the United States of America, then cried out for all in favor of the nomination to second it, and the hall shook with ayes. Women wept and kissed each other. Men wept and kissed women. A fat man next to Maci jumped up and down on his chair until it broke under him, and then he lay laughing on the floor. “Woodhull!” he shouted.
Gob leaned close to Maci and said, “Look at her. She doesn’t even remember that someone has died. Woodhull! They think they’re shouting for my mother, but really they’re shouting for you. She is the Mrs. Woodhull who will be President, but you’re the Mrs. Woodhull who will bridge Heaven and Earth.”
“My name is Trufant, sir,” Maci said. She wondered if he might not be putting something else in her besides the stuff that makes a baby. Maybe it was an acid to erode her disbelief, something that went into her soul and her mind to make her weak and gullible. It was a terrible thought, and she always banished it when it came, but it was true that she felt weaker as the days passed, that she became ill sometimes with nerves. It was something different from madness, softer, sleepier, and harder to resist, this smothering, nervous fatigue.
“You are the most important person in the world,” he told her, while the crowd continued to scream for his mother. “Others will help me, but no one else can help me as you can, I need nobody as I need you. Who else is there but you in the world? I look around every day and the whole vast city is empty but for you. I look up above the roofs and see your face flashing in the sky.”
“Flatterer,” she said.
Two weeks later, Mrs. Woodhull had another triumph when her nomination was ratified at a second meeting of the People’s Party, which had renamed itself the Equal Rights Party. Frederick Douglass was selected to be her running mate. In the grasp of their considerable enthusiasm the members of the Equal Rights Party neglected to inform Mr. Douglass that he’d won their nomination, and when he did discover it, he didn’t much care. Maci thought his male pride must have been bruised by having a lady put over him on the ballot.
The month, which had started with a funeral, got gloomy again as it closed out. Maci found it startling, how there were people who took seriously Mrs. Woodhull’s bid for the Presidency, how all the work on the Victoria Leagues had borne fruit. Maci thought they were inflating a glorious trial balloon, making a brazen, powerful statement, and it was her conviction that even a score of votes would be a triumph in November. But the largely imaginary Victoria Leagues had turned entirely real. This was a miracle equal in Maci’s mind to the one Gob hoped to accomplish. For roughly a week, she truly believed that Mrs. Woodhull would make a very serious bid for the Presidency, and for a few moments of that week she believed that Mrs. Woodhull actually would be President. Then Mrs. Grundy sat on Maci’s cake.
Maci didn’t know who precisely all Mrs. Woodhull’s enemies were. There were the obvious ones: the Beecher sisters and their devotee, Governor Hawley of Connecticut; Mr. Greeley, who had always vilified Mrs. Woodhull in the Tribune, and perhaps thought her candidacy somehow devalued his own; the entire editorial staff of Harper’s Weekly. These were the people who spoke publicly against Mrs. Woodhull, and though they were all giants, they were slayable because Maci could fight against them in the pages of her own Weekly, addressing every charge they printed or spoke and specifically refuting it.
But there were other enemies, large, nebulous, and inchoate. There were unknown persons who were possessed of such power that they could have the rent raised on Mrs. Woodhull’s home and place of business by ten thousand dollars a year, all payable in advance. In May alone, advertisements in the Weekly fell off by seventy-five percent, and clients abandoned the brokerage in droves. Mrs. Woodhull was forced out of her beautiful house, and no one in the city would rent to her. Maci came home one day to find the Claflins crowded into her rooms at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. “It’s just for a while,” Mrs. Woodhull said, but Maci, looking at Anna Claflin lying in her bed with her shoes on, suspected it would be for a long while, indeed. Yet it was a pleasure to give Mrs. Woodhull shelter when she needed it, even if the Claflins trailed after her like a persistent infestation. Maci was rarely at the hotel anyhow.
For all that she had sworn not to live in Gob’s house, she practically did live there. Her hand ached from making the drawings her husband used as fast as she made them, and she could tell now how his machine was beginning to take its shape from her madness. From your brother, her hand corrected her. From an association of spirits millions and centuries strong. From the accumulated longing of all history’s dead.
In July, Maci sat at a table in Gob’s house, drawing with one hand, writing with the other, while Dr. Fie and her husband wielded sledges to knock down walls, making room for the fattening new Infant. Little Pickie approached her, wearing an apron of pockets, each one holding a different tool, wrenches and hammers and things that looked very much like surgical instruments. “Mama, would you like to make an adjustment?”
“No, thank you,” she said.
“Damn you, then!” he cried, his standard response to her refusals to play at building. He said it more with an air of exuberance than condemnation, and always with a smile. Maci continued with her writing, an open letter to the Times, Herald, and Tribune, in defense of her employer: Mrs. Woodhull is a great and good woman, assaulted by men who hate and fear her because they recognize her as the lady who will steal their fire and make of it a gift for her own sex. No one would ever think of calling her a Romanist because she says that everybody has the right to be Catholic, but transfer the question from religion to sexuality, and because she advocates the same theory for this that she does for religion, she is denounced as an advocate of promiscuousness.
Maci jumped in her seat as a piece of wall fell with a crash. She looked at her left hand as it drew, undisturbed by the noise or the floating plaster dust that settled over the page. It finished a picture, a gentleman’s hat pierced with a corona of glass spikes, then pushed it aside to start another on a fresh sheet. Sometimes she imagined herself drawing and drawing, as her hand stiffened with age, until she was an old lady buried under twoscore of years’ worth of mechanical illustrations. And still, she was sure, her crimped hand would move the pencil.