Walt Whitman's Secret (13 page)

They invited forty-five people. As long as he could establish the time-table, Tom loved having guests in for a meal; I believe it reinforced his sense of being a paterfamilias, in a particularly Republican sense of the word. But poor Gussie. Tom had discharged the cook. Was he experiencing money troubles? I didn't know; we were never able to speak of such things as men do, because he regarded me as a mere Bohemian. With no one on hand to assist her, Gussie had taken on the cook's rôle herself. And not only did she do most of the work in preparing the meal, she had the duties of hostess to perform as well, though Anne helped out as needed in the second capacity, and did so very well indeed and without apparent strain or special effort. There's nothing like growing up the way she had done to teach a person how to put some oil on the waters when the conversation goes awry or, with the remaining oil, lubricate parts of the event where squeaks have developed. The birthday party should properly have been held in a house the size of the Montgomerie residence, or at a banqueting hall or restaurant (my own preference had I been asked). Tom and Gussie
had a fine home to be sure, with more than enough room for them and the children, but the size of the celebration put the place to the test.

Sometimes in these recollections, Flora, two or more parts of the past will run together in my mind, for as I have filled these pages with my scribbles, first in New York and then Connecticut, intending to finish on your side of the border, I am always aware of just how very long ago these events took place. There is no danger, however, that my recollections of W's two sixty-ninth-birthday meals will elide, for to say the least they were of different characters.

On the day of the pre-anniversary get-together, Anne and I waited with the others for W's buggy to draw up outside the house on Federal Street shortly after one. W came in, helped by his driver. Some of the guests were seated in the parlor, laughing and talking, loosened by the drinks Tom was making them. W looked pale, even deathly, and had the usual problems of locomotion. He eased himself down into a comfortable chair, announcing, without preamble, “I feel miserable, as the darkies say.” His choice of words disturbed me, and Anne as well, I could see; but I stayed silent and made a point of only smiling weakly. Tom began to concoct a drink for him, but W said no, no toddy to-day. “It would finish me.” Then he went on to tell a joke about “darkies.” Again Anne and I refrained from laughter. I often had to reassure myself that these terms he used for Negroes were those commonly uttered by most everyone in his own younger days.

Tom then asked if W would like to sample the stock of local “champagne” he had laid in (another economizing measure?). W declined politely but finally let himself be poured “a little less than two fingers” of the vile but undeniably democratic stuff. He took only a sip or so. Tom asked him what he thought of it.

“I pronounce it authentically lunar,” he replied. “Moonshine has its importance and place too.”

The other guests chuckled.

Normally, W didn't drink at all, and had scarcely done so since the big stroke in Seventy-three. Yet there were days when he was feeling at his best, as circumstances had redefined that state, when for a brief period he could drive bodily worries to the hindmost part of his brain. Then he might hoist a glass and recapture for a moment the presumption of immortality that is the right and privilege of the young and healthy. That was as much as the former beer-quaffing Bohemian from Brooklyn— one, it might be noted, who wrote a Temperance novel in his twenties— could engage in without endangering himself any further.

His talk that day was animated but jumpy. One minute he was speaking about Elias Hicks. This pleased me, because it signified that he was trying out on us the ideas and no doubt the very phrases he would soon, I hoped, get down on paper. The next minute, with no concession to transitional niceties, he was going on about Doctor Bucke.

Now, as you know as well as I if not better, Bucke was a big man and an unstoppable one, strong in the way that cripples often become as they try to make up for the cards that have been dealt them. W was telling everyone the story of how Bucke had lost one leg and the toes of the other foot when, as a young man, he strode down from Canada to prospect in our western states but became trapped in the mountains when the big snows came and almost perished— an unusual beginning for someone who became such a figure in what W often referred to as the “medicine-men” fraternity. He graphically described the frostbite that his valued friend endured after being, in W's own words, “‘froze out and starved out,' as the n——s say.” I was shocked, and instinctively looked across at Anne, who seemed just as taken aback as I was, though I was the only person who could see through her fine tranquility and perfect etiquette. Reflecting on the matter later, she and I concluded that we had been horrified all the more because the offensive statement did not reflect poor
antebellum slaves in the Deep South, where temperatures low enough to freeze anything were unknown. Rather, it illustrated the abiding habit of Caucasians even in the present time of derogating and humiliating the entire Negro race, whose cause, as you know, I have worked hard on over the years.

Just when W's talk was taking its unfortunate turn, Tom and Gussie's front door swung open dramatically and the resulting aperture was instantly filled by— speak of the Devil— Doctor Richard Maurice Bucke himself, as though a prompter in the wings had given him his cue. “I see I have got here just in time,” he said heartily. “Wouldn't have missed it for the world. First took the train to Toronto and continued on from there, changing at Montreal. Wonderful journey, marvelous, scenic, but tiring.” He neither looked nor sounded fatigued in the least. Then, turning to W with not just rapt attention but the kind of concentrated energy that could cut through steel: “My dear fellow.
Jolly fine
to see you about in these preliminaries to your birthday, as though I could believe that you could actually have been born like the rest of us, in naked obscurity, rather than sent down from Parnassus fully formed!”

Caught up in Bucke's long-legged enthusiasm, Tom tried to persuade the guest of honor to have another digit of the
soi-disant
champagne. “Where are my manners?” he said, but W demurred.

No sooner had the hubbub of Bucke's arrival subsided than W, in another gaucherie, allowed himself to indulge in an argument about mere business, one such as might suggest that such matters are important. The specific subject was the tariff issue about which everyone was excited in those days. The conversation at the table assumed this direction when another guest, the retired United States consul at Liverpool and a political ally of Tom's, began going on about the high tariff protecting American industry. W remained an advocate of free trade, though in other respects his politics doubtless changed
with age. Now his views were sometimes puzzling, at least to me, as they were not always so clear-cut and unambiguous as his opinions on, for example, the tariff question.

W, you see, often accepted gifts of clothing, even of drawers. A female admirer in England had sent him a waistcoat, the delivery of which had been delayed by Customs. He was certain that duty would make it the most expensive waistcoat on record. “The whole tariff business is an insult to our good sense, besides being a palpable impertinence and invasion,” he said, nearly fuming. “The spirit of the tariff is malevolent. It flies in the face of all American ideas. I hate it root and branch.”

At this time, W's
bête noire
, and that of all other free traders, was James G. Blaine, President Harrison's secretary of state, who made high tariffs a key point in his own run at the presidency. “I am for free trade, absolutely free trade, for the federation of the world!” W said. In his mouth the name Blaine became a jagged oath. “I am all for getting all the walls down. All of them.”

His antagonist, the former consul, condescended to ask whether W wished to strike down even the barriers between planets as well as those between nations.

“If I could, yes. That's what the astronomers are working on all their days and nights, especially the nights, to do.”

They bantered on like this, smiling through their animosity. Once again I glanced over at Anne. She was beginning to look worried by the exchange, though my sister, as is expected of a hostess, showed no trace of disequilibrium. No doubt she had already learned the trick of being wife to a young lawyer with ambitions for public office.

I assumed that Anne would save the day by casually saying something that everyone would adjudge to be charming. Before she could do so, however, one of my nephews clambered down from his tall seat, saying, “There's too much old folk here for me.”

W laughed and replied, “For me too. Let's all get young again. We are all of us a good deal older than we need to be, than we think we are.” Thus was the tension broken.

Seeking common ground, the way a diplomatist must do, even one appointed as reward for his contributions to the Republican Party, the consul proposed a toast to the memory of Abraham Lincoln. From where he was sitting, W could see the portrait of Lincoln that hung on the opposite wall. He raised his barely touched glass of alleged champagne in a gesture of homage and said simply, “Here's to you, here's to you.” The moment was a moving one in ways I cannot convey. Here was the author of “O Captain! My Captain!” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd” confronting the source of his inspiration on those occasions, someone with whom he never spoke but with whom he might be said to have had an intricate emotional relationship that was strongly resistant to understanding by others not acquainted with the construction of his mind.

Perhaps Lincoln was especially in his thoughts on that particular Sunday. When I had called on him only a few days earlier, he told me he had “been making a few notes to-day on the subject of my removal from the Interior Department” after someone discovered the “Calamus” poems and showed them to the Secretary, James Harlan. W said: “I was told by a man then very close to Lincoln”— John Hay, the president's secretary? I was too surprised to ask—“that this obtuseness in Harlan had gone a great way toward nullifying his ambitions for the vice presidency.”

Can it really be that the gods brought about Harlan's downfall in retribution for his rebuke to W? Was W perhaps permitting his desire for justice to influence his recollection? I don't know. That he was read by people in Lincoln's circle, including Hay, seems clear enough.

Over the last few courses of supper, W resumed entertaining and educating us with talk of Hicks. He placed special emphasis on how
Hicks applied Quaker principles to the routines of daily existence. One example concerned how, despite his small income, Hicks was able to put money aside against lean times and misfortune. Of course I thought of W, the freehold owner of Mickle Street despite having a poet's income.

Then he said: “I want to take a vote on an alternative of titles for the poem section of
November Boughs.
Should it be ‘Sands at Seventy'”—for W was looking ahead to his seventieth year—“or ‘Sands on the Shores at Seventy,' or something in effect the same?”

He urged us to vote on the choices. When polled, we were all of one accord: “Sands at Seventy.”

“I was a good deal unsure about the title until your unanimous vote removed my uncertainty.”

“That's a big concession for you to make,” Tom teased him.

“Never mind, it's the truth.”

When inevitably there were further observations about the war years, I grew apprehensive, but needn't have. W simply wished to expound on some of the Union generals, including Sherman, his almost exact contemporary; they were separated by only a few months in both their births and their deaths. “It is necessary to see him in order to realize the Norse make-up of the man,” W said. Sherman's Norseness came as a surprise to me, as I suspect it would have to Sherman himself. “The hauteur, noble yet democratic, a hauteur I have always hoped that I too possess.” He went on: “Try to picture Sherman— seamy, sinewy in style, a bit of stern open air made up in the image of a man. I can see him now, at the head of the line on Pennsylvania Avenue the day the army filed before Lincoln, the silent Sherman riding beyond his aides.” W had high regard for the military virtues and sometimes used military terms in his speech, as when he suggested that young writers would do well to “stay beyond my pickets.” I did not feel the admonition was directed at me, for I
was hardly young and had yet to become a writer even to the extent I did later.

Not long afterward, during one of my daily visits, W held up to my eyes a document he had discovered in the great job lot of stuff on the bedroom floor, the way he enjoyed doing. “Here's a letter from John Hay written to me years ago— twelve years ago. I laid it aside for you. It illustrates the friendly basis upon which our acquaintance rests. When Hay was with Lincoln, I used to see a great deal of him. He has been loyal, has always watched my work, has inevitably appeared at the right time with his applause.” There was a screen of formality erected behind the note's friendly tone. The message expressed thanks for a cutting of one of W's new poems.

As close as W and I became— spirit-father and spirit-child, than which no other bond is closer— I could never bring myself to ask for explanations or to give voice to the possibility that his memory might possess variant versions of past events, though privately then, and less privately now, that is what I supposed. People of my age and medical circumstances know that memory resembles the art of mosaic-making more than the science of archeology.

“I like to cross-examine,” W said to me once, “but I don't like to
be
cross-examined.”