By summer’s end, Mrs. Woodhull had quite run out of money. The Weekly suspended publication, and the brokerage had no clients anymore. Maci and her husband had their first quarrel when Gob refused to give money to his mother. Everything he had he needed for building, he said, though they were welcome to shelter and feed as long as they wished at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Maci might have carped at him like a Xanthippe, but whenever she considered this injustice, it made her more sleepy than furious. And Mrs. Woodhull, who Maci had thought capable of taking money from anyone, seemed horrified by the prospect of taking money from her son.
Instead, Mrs. Woodhull exhausted herself lecturing — the more scandalous her reputation became, the more people all over the country wanted to hear her for themselves. But even at the annual convention of the National Association of Spiritualists, who had elected her their president the year before, the audience was just as hostile as it was curious. She went to Boston in September to speak to them, and nearly lost her office. She was challenged on account of her reputation as a Free Lover. She’d always insist it was Demosthenes who prompted her to defend herself with an extemporaneous exposé of Mr. Beecher. In the open summer air, she addressed the soft-minded thousands who sought to impeach her, detailing Mr. Beecher’s infidelity with Elizabeth Tilton. They were all won over. The Spiritualists elected her for another term, and would have proclaimed her Queen if their charter had permitted it.
“There’s nothing left for us,” Mrs. Woodhull told Maci when she returned to New York, “but to do the thing.” She meant to expose Mr. Beecher in print, a move that Maci discouraged at first, because she was sure it would bring nothing but a crushing retaliation. “My star,” Mrs. Woodhull scolded, “you are a frightened innocent!” She gathered Maci into her arms, shouting that Mr. Beecher would fall like a giant into the East River, and send up a wave to soak Manhattan from South Street to West Street. Mrs. Woodhull, temporarily as bouncy as Tennie, held Maci tight and jumped up and down with her, as if trying to launch them both into the sky.
Through September and October, Maci worked with Gob and his mother, and sometimes she was so tired that she confused their projects, so she thought that Gob was building a machine to expose and destroy hypocrisy, and that Mrs. Woodhull was writing an article that argued so powerfully against death that nature, shamefaced after reading it, would revoke mortality. It made sense, after all, to conflate these tasks, because they were equally impossible. But by the time she and Mrs. Woodhull had finished with the Beecher article, when all the facts were gathered, sorted, and transcribed, Maci had a feeling that this thing she’d helped make was so powerful that it couldn’t help but wreak some great change out of its destructiveness. It was a bomb that would burst over Brooklyn and rain down burning, phosphoric reform on the pleading, hapless population.
When she and Mrs. Woodhull were done, when all that was left was to wait for the paper to come back from the printers, she went to Gob’s house to rest. Maci had the feeling that she’d been running for weeks, building up speed to lend to her spear when she hurled it, and now that it had left her hand she was too tired to care where it landed. “Good night,” Gob said to her by way of greeting, when she went to his house on the last day of work on the November 2 paper. She sat down in one of his dusty parlor chairs and fell promptly asleep.
Here is New York after the change, her hand wrote beneath a drawing of a city that seemed to be made all of glass. Crystal bridges leaped off towards the horizon; Maci could only guess where they rested their other feet. Different bridges ran between buildings so tall Maci wondered if the ground would even be visible from their roofs. Three concentric suns hung in the sky.
And here is our family after the change, her hand wrote beneath another picture, this one a crowded group portrait. See how happy you look? See how everyone looks happy? Maci wanted to think that the occupants of the portrait looked merely smug, or simpering, but it was true that their faces and eyes seemed blessed with radiant joy. There she was, standing with Gob on one side of her, and Rob on the other. Her mother was there, looking composed and sane, holding up a book so Mrs. Woodhull might read the title off the spine. There was Private Vanderbilt, stooping to kiss Tennie as she held the hand of a man Maci did not recognize, a long-faced fellow in the uniform of a Union soldier. Dr. Fie was standing with his hand on the shoulder of a smaller man, who resembled him in the face. Maci’s father, Miss Suter, Aunt Amy and the man Maci knew must be her husband — these were just the people in front. There were rows and rows of people behind them, and even those whose features were made indistinguishable by distance managed somehow to project great happiness. Everyone was happy except Gob, who knelt with his head bowed, weeping at the feet of a soldier boy that Maci knew was his brother. The boy had a bugle in one hand. The other rested on Gob’s head.
Dear Aunt, Maci wrote. I am a fugitive from justice. There is a man named Anthony Comstock who perceives me as having committed a grave sin against him. He’s taken offence at our Weekly, greater even than Mr. Beecher, who maintains what seems to me an embarrassed silence about his exposure as an amative hypocrite. I know how you love the Beechers, Aunt, and I feel obligated to say that we never really meant him any harm. It wasn’t out of spite for Mr. Beecher that we burst our bomb over Brooklyn. Mrs. Woodhull herself said she has no fault to find with him in any sense as that in which the world will condemn him. The fault and the wrong were not with him, or with Mrs. Tilton, but with the false social institutions under which we still live, while the more advanced men and women of the world have outgrown them in spirit. Practically everybody is living a false life, by professing a conformity which they do not feel and do not live, and which they cannot feel and live any more than the grown boy can reenter the clothes of his early childhood. So you see I had no malicious intent against Mr. Beecher, and certainly none against Mr. Comstock (though I know for a fact he shoots dogs for sport). Yet that man is determined, if he can find me, to put me in jail, where he has put Mrs. Woodhull, her husband, and her sister. But Aunt, you mustn’t worry that I’ll rot in the Tombs waiting for a trial at which justice will no doubt prove elusive, or that I’ll flee to Boston to make unreasonable demands of our relation, and compromise you with my fugitive presence. I am well hidden here.
Maci went about outside disguised as a man, with her hair under a hat, and a beard made of real man-hair that Gob pasted on her face in the morning. On warm days it slipped a little after a few hours of wear, but on cold ones it stuck fast till evening. She registered to vote in her disguise, and voted under Rob’s name on November 5 of 1872. She’d never believe the reports that came later, that Mrs. Woodhull never got a single vote, because Maci cast hers for the lady, and she knew that Gob had, too.
“How are things on the outside?” Tennie asked her, when Maci went to visit her and Mrs. Woodhull at Ludlow Street Jail. There were difficulties with the bail — every time a supporter provided the money to free the sisters, they’d be arrested again. Maci wrote outraged letters every day to five different papers.