Pickie came clambering down off a scaffold and leaped on Dr. Fie. They struggled a little, and Gob came rushing again at them, shouting words that Maci thought she could see leave his mouth as gusts of wind to knock Dr. Fie back against the glass. He shook his head, holding Pickie at arm’s length. When Gob reached him, Dr. Fie pummeled him with the boy, hitting him as if with a big stick. Maci came to them just in time to see him smash Pickie against the glass wall. It cracked with one blow, shattered with the next. Pickie seemed not any worse for the abuse. He clawed at Dr. Fie’s face, and cursed. Dr. Fie threw him across the room.
“Help me,” Dr. Fie shouted at Maci, over a new noise, a disharmony in the singing. Mr. Whitman was still screaming, louder now that his voice wasn’t contained by the house. “It’s killing him!” he shouted.
Maci shook her head. “Dr. Fie,” she said incredulously, “don’t you understand that there is no more death?”
“Oh, Mrs. Woodhull,” he said. “There is for him.” She put her hand on Dr. Fie to stop him when he tried to go in, and he thrust her back as he entered, so that her head knocked into Gob’s head as he was coming up behind her. Gob was saying “No!” again and again, and Maci had the thought that he must have looked just this way, weeping and protesting, at the grave of his brother. There was a surge of breathing and singing. The light flared from the giant lens, and Maci heard a popping in her head, similar to what she’d heard in the caisson, as if there’d been a precipitous shift in the pressure of the air. She felt nauseated, and fell to her knees, thinking she would vomit.
“Will,” Gob said softly — Maci picked his voice out among all the great noise as if it had been spoken in a quiet room. “You’ll ruin it all.” Pickie Beecher ran into the house, only to be ejected. He bounced on the floor like a ball.
Gob went into the crystal house after Dr. Fie, and there they grappled over Mr. Whitman’s body. While Mr. Whitman arched and screamed in his chair, they pounded each other in the head and face. Maci shouted, “Stop! Stop!” but they paid her no heed, or didn’t hear her at all. Dr. Fie brought his two hands together, cranked them back, and struck Gob in the face with such force that blood flew and coated the wall of the house with perfect round drops. Gob staggered, and fell, and Dr. Fie took that opportunity to wrest Mr. Whitman from the chair.
All the noise stopped suddenly, started again and stopped. The floor lurched, and the great lens fell out of its supports. It came crashing down on the gate, splitting it in two. In the quiet before the machine noise started again — a coughing and choking sound in it now — she realized that Mr. Whitman was no longer screaming. He came out of the house, leaning against Dr. Fie, who draped him against Maci and said, “Take him out of here.” When Maci tried to push Mr. Whitman back into the house, Dr. Fie shoved her roughly aside, and hurried away with the poet even as Maci called for him to return.
Her balance was off, or the floor was heaving like liquid, or both — she could barely guide herself through the door of the house, to where Gob was slowly rising to his feet. His nose was crooked and bloody, and blood had stained his teeth and his mouth and his torn lips. “Come away,” Maci said to him. His hands were slick with blood. He pulled them easily out of hers and shook his head.
“To where?” he asked. With great calm and precise deliberation, he set himself down in Mr. Whitman’s chair and set the hat on his head. “You may go out, but there is no other place for me.” Something crashed very nearby, and a moaning sound started up amid all the choking and coughing and intermittent singing. The floor threw her into him, and he pushed her away, an expression of terror and hatred now on his face from which Maci nearly fled. He shouted at her then, without any words she could make out, or perhaps he was shouting because he was feeling the same agony as Mr. Whitman had. She thought his yelling blew her back and forced her away from him, but really it was Dr. Fie, his big hands tangled in her dress and her hair, who dragged her back through the open crystal door, through the crumbling spaces that used to be parlors, over the nubs of walls. As she receded from him, she saw Gob begin to writhe and kick in the chair. She saw little Pickie, trapped under a giant gear, wriggling his limbs like a bug and shouting for his brother. Dr. Fie would not stop to assist him.
Dr. Fie dragged her outside, held her tight by both shoulders and shouted in her face, “Stay here, I will bring him out!” But before he could pass through the door again they were sent flying down the marble steps by an explosion. Maci lay on Fifty-third Street with her leg twisted beneath her, obviously broken, but somehow not very painful. Dr. Fie and Mr. Whitman both lay near her, neither of them moving. There came another explosion, and another, and fire came bursting out of a whole row of windows. A piece of stone came flying down — she watched its whole journey from the house to her head. As she slept she dreamed of a night when her husband had put his finger on the same place the stone hit her and named it for her. “Glabella,” he’d said, and she’d thought how it would be a beautiful name for a daughter.
When she woke, Dr. Fie was sitting on the steps, weeping into his hands. Mr. Whitman had opened his eyes, and was moving his lips, but not making any sound. Maci raised herself on her arms and looked up toward the house, where a figure stood just outside the flaming door, looking indecisive and confused. “Down here!” she called to it, thinking it was Gob. “Come down!” The figure turned at the sound of her voice, and did start down the steps, too slow for a person fleeing a fire.
“Stop your crying, he’s alive!” Maci said to Dr. Fie, but he only wept harder, and as the figure came nearer, she saw that it was not her husband, or even little Pickie. It was a boy older than him, one who wore Gob’s face. Entirely naked, he stepped close and peered at her, trying, she could tell, to recognize her, and then he flinched away, as if he had never seen a lady scream or weep before. “Let me go!” he pleaded. But she held him fast.
~ ~ ~
“THOMAS,” HIS WIFE CALLED OUT FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF their bed, “it’s past your rising time.”
“I know it,” Tomo said. “I’m on my way.” But he lay in bed awhile longer. His knees and his elbows and his shoulders were so stiff these mornings that he liked to loosen them up some in bed before he tried to rise. He was old for his age, and his joints seemed to be the oldest part of his body.
“Don’t be late,” she said, because she thought he had an appointment across the river, a weekly obligation to teach a class at the medical college. She went back to sleep. Tomo felt blindly for his cane, and when he found it, slowly moved his legs off the side of the bed, and rose with all the speed of a growing plant. He’d slept in a hunch, and now his back did not wish to unbend itself. He walked a little around the room, leaning on furniture as he passed it, and paused by the window to look out at the bridge. Half the windows in the house had a view of it — it was the reason he’d purchased the place. He’d put out his clothes by the window so he could dress there, so he could see the bridge and think how he would soon be on it. It was a weekly ritual with him. Every Saturday he’d take a walk over to Manhattan.
Tomo was one of the first to cross over, when the bridge opened at midnight on May 25, 1883. He was twenty-one years old, still a student and still living with Will, who had taken him in even before his mother and Tennie went away to England in ’76. “Aren’t you coming, Will?” he’d asked, but Will wouldn’t go out of the house that night. “Eventually,” Will said, but Tomo was sure that he never even looked out his window at the incredible display of fireworks.