Walt Whitman's Secret (14 page)

Then, in a week or so, came the main event, the birthday banquet itself. By this time I had made another move, a definitive one, in my continuing search for a job that would let me devote hours each day to my manuscript, which I was calling
With Walt Whitman in Camden.
Anne had stubbornly pledged never to accept any of the Montgomerie money (even though she received its fruits, as she still lived at the family home and had long since left her factory job to
be with me— and W). As she and I were becoming a single dimorphic entity, I needed a situation that would provide a bit of financial stability combined with the fewest possible hours and the lightest labor. So it was that I accepted a minor clerical position at the Farmers' and Mechanics' Bank on lower Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. It was repetitious work that provoked tedium, but it didn't tax one's mind or even demand too much attentiveness. I stayed there for the next dozen years.

Late on the morning of the banquet, I stopped by Mickle Street en route to work to offer W my congratulations and give him a celebratory kiss. The anniversary, he said, was being observed “by young women in Camden and elsewhere,” though he gave no names and displayed no telegrams or letters, not even a postal, though various male friends did write and one of them in England had arranged for delivery of a floral tribute and two bottles of champagne, definitely not of the lunar variety. The list of young women for whom he felt significant affection had only two names: Anne's right at the top and then Gussie's. The latter had sent over a birthday cake shortly before I arrived. In one of his characteristic little acts of charity, W had me deliver it to a woman in Arch Street whom he knew was sick.

His disposition was not buoyant that morning of his sixty-ninth birthday, as he leapt to contemplate the next one. “Seventy years,” he said. “Seventy failures? Seventy successes? Which do you say?” But he managed to rouse himself to quite a hearty and energetic state for the local well-wishers who gathered that evening.

Unfortunately, I didn't arrive at the dinner in time for the toasts, having been delayed by the press of book-making business, so Anne was representing us both. When I did turn up, I found grand high spirits all around, to be followed, after Gussie's fine meal, by much singing and piano playing. W talked at length about why he believed
that Bacon had written the plays of Shakespeare (whose name he liked to spell without the final
e
, a style I too affected for a while). This was one of his favorite topics, one he spoke of with the type of animation he must have radiated routinely in his much younger days. I was delighted, having thought he had none left. I imagine it was quite an effort, but he impersonated his younger self gloriously. He lingered until eleven p.m., a later hour than I had ever seen him stay out, and made a touching speech at the end. I have my memorandum of it here. “This has been a calendar day for me,” he told us. “It has justified itself throughout, chiefly by your courtesy, consideration and love. You have been good to me all day. Now I am going. Be good to yourselves. Go to bed; get a rest.”

He told me that he had more copy for the printer and would ask Missus Davis to hand it to me the following day on the ferry dock so I could take it across. Bucke was among the guests, and so was William Kennedy, the Philadelphia writer and future W biographer whom W called “one of my most ardent— I often say ‘granatic'— admirers. Indeed he outbuckes Bucke” (but of course no one could do that). Kennedy and I helped W up onto his buggy. As the elderly mare bestirred herself, W called out a reminder to me. “This side. The ferry. Tomorrow. Twelve o'clock sharp.”

The book, then, was never far from his thoughts. I imagine that was how he was with each of his works, and each successive version of
Leaves
, though
November Boughs
he may have worried over to an unnatural degree. He confessed to me that the Hicks piece wasn't “sufficiently rounded up yet,” adding, “I am a slow piece of machinery. I do not seem able to muster myself for duty on call.” Then he added an uncharacteristic confession. “It needs some finishing touches. I do not seem to be equal to them.” He was thinking of either not including it in the book or publishing it as a separate “volumette,” one of his coinages.

I was going over to Philadelphia consulting with the printer who was putting the pieces of
November Boughs—
virtually all of them except the Hicks— into type and giving me the multiple sets of proof sheets W demanded. This was exacting work, because W had very definite ideas about how the eye would respond to typography, which should therefore be “open” and “democratic.” What's more, he liked to correct proofs quite heavily. Aware of this, he made certain that I took a silver dollar to the lad who pulled the galleys, one of the low liest tasks in a job-printer's shop. So it was that I went to Mickle Street shortly before noon the following day to report on such matters and deliver a large installment of proofs, rolled up under my arm like the bills and posters one sees men pasting onto board-fences and hoardings.

I was greeted by a distraught Missus Davis out front. As she tried to shush her loudly barking dog, she told me that W had come down to breakfast, hobbling a bit more than usual on the stairs perhaps and looking terribly ill. She feared the celebration had been too much for him. She related how he went into the front parlor, put on his spectacles and, sitting near the window with strong light coming over his shoulder, began to read the morning papers the way he liked to do, but was having difficulty. He had experienced a brain attack during the night, and it was followed by two others later. Fortunately, Missus Davis was nearby, and got to him in time to prevent him from crashing to the floor. She in turn called Warren, and together they manhandled him into a reclining position on the davenport. W came round and told Missus Davis she needn't stay with him but to go about her domestic chores, coming in every once in a while to “take a gander” at him. I rushed into the front room and found W supine on the sofa, with Tom and my nephews looking on. As luck would have it, they had come by for a morning chat. Seeing this scene, I immediately feared the worst, but in this I appeared to be quite unlike the patient, who did not seem to be especially downcast.

“I have had since last night,” he told me, “three strokes of a paralytic character. Shocks, premonitions.” His voice was strong and its tone seemed untroubled, but some of the words themselves were slightly slurred. “That's all there is to it. Don't worry about it, boy.” He reached out and took my hand and held it tightly.

He explained that, after leaving the feast, he had had himself driven with Bucke to Norristown, the site of the New Jersey asylum and of the medical business that had brought his friend across the border this time. That done, W asked to be driven out to the seashore for some clean night air. Then he returned home, where he collapsed to the floor while bathing himself with a sponge. He believed he lay there for some hours. I asked why he didn't shout for Missus Davis, who was in her room at the end of the short corridor. He replied that he had had many small attacks in the past and had always recovered without assistance. This time, the stroke was followed by another in the morning, then yet another. I asked if his ability to speak clearly had been impinged upon back in Seventy-three.

“I never suffered that entanglement in my former experiences,” he said with a bit of difficulty. The formality of his utterance struck me as unusual coming from this man who relished slang and often cultivated poor grammar to set himself at a distance from what he called “the literary class.” He had dissuaded Tom and Missus Davis from summoning the medicine-men, saying, “I shall not only have to fight the disease but fight them, whereas if I am left alone I have but the one foe to contend with.”

Now he sent the others away and, when he and I were alone, asked me eagerly for the batch of proofs. I was skeptical of this being the right time to go over them, but W said, “This attack is a warning to us to hurry the book along as we can.” He unfolded his eyeglasses so as to begin correcting proof, reminding me to bring four sets of the other “matter,” as printers call it, when I returned that evening.
He was shooing me out. So after only a half hour I left with Tom, who had a telephone at his home on which he said he would attempt to contact Bucke. On finally being located, the Doctor rushed to the bedside in the company of William Osler, the fellow Canadian who ran the medical department at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (how you Canadians stick together).

They were there when I turned up about eight with untitled proofs of what was now to be called the “Sands at Seventy” section. In exchange, W gave me copy to take across the river the next day. Although Bucke kept up a façade of relative unconcern with the patient present, W was not fooled, telling the medicine-men: “There are earthquakes which shake walls, chandeliers, and, yes, there are earth quakes which destroy cities.” When I was alone with him, W said: “I know myself. I know my peril. I am on shaky foundations. It cannot be concealed. So let us push the book along— get it done— before anything absolutely disqualifying occurs to me.”

He gave me a couple of old letters that had recently floated to the surface in the bedroom upstairs. “Curios” he called them, as though he viewed them as unimportant, which obviously they were not. Some days later he showed me another letter, dated 1870, from a physician at the asylum in Brooklyn, informing him that his brother Jesse had died from the rupture of an aneurysm and was being buried the next day. I expected him to comment, but he didn't.

Finally I said, “Do I understand that I am to take this?”

Yes, he said; I should see that it is preserved.

His speech was not yet returned to its original clarity, but he was happy to chat anyway. I made a passing reference to Anne.

“I have my suspicions about you and Anne Montgomerie,” he said in sly fashion, pretending to be more innocent of the details than he actually was.

I had to go over to Philadelphia on W business, where I ran into
Bucke, who started by saying that, although he couldn't determine exactly why, it seemed to him “as if the old man is dying”—as though W were simply another patient. I suppose medicine-men must learn to steel themselves against emotional responses. Later in the day Bucke turned up at Mickle Street with Doctor Osler once again. When I returned from the bank, I found W full out on his sofa in the darkened parlor, with Bucke taking his pulse at the wrist. Tom was there as well. W had obviously taken another step in his descent since I had seen him earlier.

When I entered, he called out, “Who's that?” I said my name. His response was, “Ah, I thought it might be some other particular friend of mine.”

Tom, Bucke and Osler agreed that W needed a resident nurse. W overheard the discussion and weighed in with his own idea. Missus Davis had been so kind, he said, “but if I am going to be more than ever helpless, it will not do for me to impose on her for more service.” He thought “a large man” should be engaged as the nurse, “no slim or slight fellow.” Before dashing across the river to recruit one of this or some other description, Bucke took me aside with instructions to engage in long-drawn-out conversation to keep W awake, saying that the patient was mentally confused as well as in physical straits. But in fact his mind had cleared a bit since my morning visit. I pulled a chair up to where he lay. “Someday there will be a final spell,” he said, “and then …” He trailed off. “But then, we are not going to discuss that final spell until we have got out
November Boughs
, are we, Horace?”

Later he showed me a note he had sent to the printer without telling me. It advised the shop to put “two good men” on the job, hard-working ones. I didn't know what to think. Was he afraid that I wasn't forceful enough to see the book done right? Or put another way, did he feel that his signature would add forensic force to my instructions to the back-shop? No, I concluded that, having turned
sixty-nine, he was at the age where he sometimes distrusted the abilities of the young— ones younger than I myself was, for at least I had been born before the war.

Sitting there, engaging him in the long elliptical conversations that Bucke had prescribed, I already was thinking how I might raise money from W's admirers to pay for the nurse that Bucke would return with. As I did so, I looked down at W's sweet upturned face. He had become my own wounded soldier boy.

Over the next several weeks, I continued to bring him proof after proof, thinking that was what he desired, but he found his memory had gone haywire. He complained of “jelly-like sensations in my skull.” He settled back into the cave of the bedroom above, where Missus Davis carried all the books and papers that had been in the parlor. He refused to see visitors, even, for example, Eakins. But despite his condition, he still kept on with his small acts of kindness toward others, as when, for instance, he gave me a quarter-dollar to pass along to a particular newsboy who worked the ferry dock on the other side.