Chris Adrian - Gob's Grief

“I’m ready,” Gob said softly, but Walt had fled, out the door and down the stairs. He kept running all the way down Fifth Avenue, and hurried to Brooklyn, hurried even to Washington, taking the first available train after bidding a very hasty goodbye to his mother. Back in his room in Washington, he felt he could catch his breath at last. He wept because he thought his beautiful friendship had been ruined. Gob sent him a package with a simple note. Forgive me , he wrote. I thought for a moment that you were my master. He enclosed a present, a copy of Leaves , the only gift, he said later, that he was absolutely sure Walt would like. Gob inscribed it with a line modified from Emerson: True friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.

Walt wrote back: Dear Gob, you must forgive me for being so cold the last day. I was unspeakably shocked and repelled from you by that proposition of yours — you know what. It seemed indeed to me (for I will talk plain to you, dearest comrade) that the one I loved, and who had always been so manly and so sensible, was gone, and a fool and intentional murderer stood in his place. But I will say no more of this — for I know such thoughts must have come when you were not yourself, but in a moment of derangement — and passed away like a bad dream.

Indeed, they said no more of that incident, and for all that it was terrible Walt came to be glad it had occurred, because it revealed the gigantic nature of their friendship — it seemed to him that only the best and purest sort of friendship could conquer such a horror. So if Gob invoked horror once or a hundred times, so if he was a little mad or a lot, so if he was a boy of seventeen who often acted like an old man of seventy-seven — so what? Walt had taken the measure of his feeling for Gob, and discovered that as wide and deep as his own soul.

The day after the Queen’s Cup race, Walt and Gob went out to Paumanok, because Walt had been promising for months to take Gob to the ocean. “Two hundred and twenty pounds avoirdupois!” Walt said, striking his naked chest and belly, then running off into the surf, into the terrific breathing noise of the sea. He liked to hurl himself around in the water, throwing his body against the breaking waves, or swimming along with them until they bore him up and carried him, flipping and spinning, towards the shore. Gob was more reserved in his play. He entered the surf slowly and purposefully, walking until the water was halfway up his chest, then swimming with powerful, even strokes, ducking under the waves like a dolphin till he was beyond them, then heading straight out into deep water. “Where are you going?” Walt shouted after him, but got no answer. Because Gob was in a poor mood — the outbreak of the new war on the Rhine had had an extraordinarily depressive effect on him — Walt feared, for a moment, that he meant to swim towards the east until he tired and drowned. Hank said, I hate the swift-running eddies that would dash him head-foremost on the rocks!

But very soon after he had disappeared against the horizon, Walt saw him again, heading back, his bobbing head growing from a speck to a blob as he came nearer. He swam as even and serene as when he had gone out. A wave picked him up, sent him tumbling forward to land on his feet. He walked out of the ocean, up the hot sand to the shadows under a dune, where they’d left their clothes. Walt waded ashore, then ran to him.

“What a display!” he said. “I feared you’d be drowned.”

“I like to swim,” Gob said. “It’s the first thing I remember in my whole life, swimming with my brother.”

“Do you feel better, then?” Walt sat down, put his arm around Gob’s shoulder, and gave him a squeeze. He wished he hadn’t asked. As soon as he did, Gob seemed to remember how sad he was.

“I don’t,” he said. Walt tried to cheer him with a dinner of cold roast chicken, and with talk about the beach. He told Gob how he’d come to this same stretch of sand when he was a boy, spearing eels in the winter and gathering seagull eggs in the summer. Somehow this pleasant reminiscence brought to Gob’s mind the latest murder to delight sensation-loving New Yorkers. Mr. Nathan, a distinguished Jew, had been bludgeoned in his beautiful house.

“My mama says she spoke with that dead man,” Gob said. “It was the son who did it, she says.”

Walt said he thought it was terrible that a boy should beat his father to death with a lead pipe, that it reflected a failure to cast aside irritating thoughts. “I am not mastered by my gloomy impulses,” he said. “That is the main part of getting through the battle and toil of life, dear Gob — keeping a cheerful mind.”

“Don’t you think of them, Walt?” Gob asked. “Those Frenchmen dying as they move on Saarbruck? Mr. Nathan crying out for mercy from his furious son? Your brother calling out in the madhouse, dying among strangers?” Walt had lost another brother that winter, Jesse. He’d been mad for years, since taking a hard fall from off a ship’s mast. Walt had had him committed to the King’s County Lunatic Asylum, and had visited him just once. Jesse had sat very quietly while Walt put a gift in his lap — fresh bread and jam from their mother — and while Walt told him news from home. But then without warning Jesse had leapt from his chair and wrestled Walt to the ground. He bit his nose and licked his eyes and called him a despicable hater of cabbages. Now he was dead, and Walt found that, having already put his brother out of his mind after madness claimed him, he did not in death seem so much farther away. How to explain? Jesse’s and Andrew’s deaths seemed small, and yet the thought that Gob might die was incapacitating to him. Indeed, it had incapacitated him. If he thought on it too long he would work himself into a terrible state, getting woozy with sadness and fear. His hands would burn, a lump would swell in his throat, and he’d have a terrible attack of diarrhea. If Gob had been out of his sight for much longer during that long swim, Walt might have fainted away into the water and drowned himself.

“Of course I do,” Walt said. “Of course I am sad. If I let it, it might consume me. His heart tore, and I wonder if it was not the accumulated burden of madness and woe that tore his heart apart as hands might tear a paper bag. Sometimes I think I can hear him, raving and crying and dying. I can think on his life — what it might have been if madness hadn’t claimed him, and I can love that lost life as I can love Andrew’s lost life, and grieve for him. A person could live his whole life like that, in service to grief. You’ve said as much yourself. What does it do? It will not bring them back, to hollow yourself out, to crush your own heart from loneliness and spite. My friend, it will not bring them back.”

Walt liked these words less and less as he spoke them, because they seemed conventional and cowardly and stupid, and at odds with his own experience. Hadn’t Hank come back to him, in a sense?

Surely , said Hank. Surely I did. And Gob said, “It might, too.”

“Mr. Whitman,” said Tennie. “You are fatter and saucier than ever.” Walt was at Victoria Woodhull’s house, invited with Gob to a party on a warm September evening in honor of Stephen Pearl Andrews, an ultimately learned and ultimately radical man, and a very frequent contributor to the paper Mrs. Woodhull had started with Tennie in May of 1870, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly. They were a very special pair of sisters. In the winter they’d opened up their own brokerage house. Walt had visited their offices a few days after they’d opened, when the rooms on Broad Street were still packed with reporters and curiosity-seekers. The lady brokers had received Walt and Gob in their private office. Walt kept a huge walnut desk between himself and Tennie, but offered sincere compliments to both ladies. “You are a prophecy of the future,” he told them.