Walt Whitman's Secret (15 page)

He redirected some of his unease into worrying about writing a new will. He applied himself to the chore with a discipline he could not muster for what seemed to me, putting his physical problems to one side for a moment, the incomprehensibly difficult task of finishing the Hicks. He showed me the resulting document. Family members were to be the primary beneficiaries, with a bequest of two hundred and fifty dollars to Missus Davis and his silver watch and chain to Pete the Great, about whom he spoke from time to time— of how, for example, the two of them used to walk together all over Washington in a spirit of ease and were sometimes hailed with
greetings by the late martyred president, James A. Garfield, then still a mere member of Congress. As he passed, Garfield would shout out a couple of lines from one of W's poems.

One day he surprised me by saying, “Pete was in yesterday and brought some flowers.” Pete, he said, had been his salvation after the first attack back in Seventy-three, serving many of the functions now performed by Missus Davis and me (and by then a medical student taken on as a nurse, ensconced in the tiny bedroom next to W's). W could not walk any longer without the use of the cane he had had for years and had been using only sparingly.

“It was Pete who gave me the cane with the crook in it,” he said. “I always use Pete's cane. I like to think of it having come from Pete, as being so useful to me in my lame aftermath.” Then he asked, “You have never met Pete?”

He knew full well that I had not.

“We should arrange it some way sometime,” he said. The promise was quite as insecure as it sounded.

   
SIX
   

T
HE CELEBRATED THESPIAN
known to his friends as Wilkes, one of Baltimore's favorite sons but one who is frequently away, appearing in plays in all the major cities and a great many minor ones as well, must continue to move around from city to city as though he were still acting. At the Holliday Street Theatre in Baltimore he meets his old school chum Sam Arnold, the one who joined the Southern army early but was invalided out. Arnold found work as a clerk in the Confederate government, though he gave it up after a short while. Wilkes invites him to his hotel room and regales him with stories of his exploits offstage and on. As they talk and drink, there is a rap on the door. It is Mike O'Laughlen, another old friend, who served in the same regiment as Sam.

A generous host, Wilkes orders up more wine from the bellman. When all three of them are fluent but none drunk, Wilkes turns the conversation to the rumored plots to capture Lincoln and trade his freedom for that of Southern prisoners.

“Much is chattered about some such course of action,” Arnold says. “My suspicion is that those who talk, only talk, and that those who would act never say a word. But I don't know.”

O'Laughlen pipes up. “Whether rumors in the newspapers cause the talk or the other way around, I cannot say.”

They drink a great deal more wine. There is more tobacco too, and more brandy. Independently of each other, the two Baltimore men come to the simultaneous conclusion that Wilkes is not engaging in mere badinage. He is a serious operator, whether sanctioned or not (he is coy on this point— as someone who is sanctioned would be). He is obviously well financed (by his own speculations in shares, he insists, though his listeners know he may be saying this to account for money that actually comes from Richmond, perhaps via Montreal). He inspires confidence, for now. They agree to help him realize his hostage scheme in whatever small ways they can, not knowing exactly what these could be, only that they will be called on for some competent service in the District where, accordingly, they will have to resettle. The two young men, neither of them prospering in the world, resolve to keep down expenses through shared living accommodations.

“Where is your sentimental friend?”

The man from the President's Park is of medium height, not a six-footer like Walt, and his complexion is dark. He is brooding whereas Walt is open by nature, albeit with the particular kind of bonhomie that is sometimes a nursery for secrets.

“He's still up at New York,” Pete the Great replies, not disguising his bitterness, “but he Has written up a Letter to me sayin he's returning soon enough.”

“I must go there myself shortly,” Wilkes says. “I am engaged in a great enterprise that requires my presence there and other places.”

In a vague way, he has spoken to Pete of his plans earlier, more than once in fact. The first occasion began with war talk of the sort everyone engages in. Wilkes then drew attention to the matter of the prisoners.

“You, dear heart, have been in one of their foul dungeons. I do not preach to you, for you were converted already by your own experience.”

“I can lay claim to havin been a Prisoner of both armies,” Pete answers. “I have no preference for the one over tother. I tell you though that the yankee prison here in their capital is a barbarous Place. It is God's truth.”

“I have no doubt of that at all,” Wilkes replies.

Wilkes possesses the gift for making others feel the emotions he wishes them to experience. Such is the way of actors. He is such a well-proportioned man, not muscled as with a farmhand but strong all the same, and most of all vital: lithe and athletic, as though he could bound into the saddle from a standing position beside the mount, without reference to the stirrups or the pommel and without losing his breath. His jaw is firm. His hair is so thick that curls tumble over the precipice of his forehead. He is a clean-shaven man but for his moustache, which adds to his flamboyantly distinguished bearing. The voice is magnificent, and Pete the Great is vulnerable to voices.

In their conversations, the two of them have touched on Pete's romantic situation. “The ting about it is that it ended before it really picked up a full head of steam,” Pete says.

Wilkes appears sympathetic. “Why did your friend go back up north? What precisely is he doing there?” The actor certainly knows how to make the inquiry sound casual. “Do you know?”

“The people that he does the job of work for at the Hospital got concerned about his nerves,” Pete says. “They told him to get away for a time. So he goes to New York to see his kin. Course, he takes in the hospitals up there, too, so as to seem to be carryin on with business. He does write-ups about em for the Newspapers. Sent me one.”

“I read his views on the prisoner exchange,” Wilkes says. “I must say, I approved, if from different motives.”

Early in the war, each government repatriated prisoners in return
for the release of its own from the enemy camp. As the Confederacy has grown weaker, the practice has been steadily curtailed.

“The cold-hearted tyrant and freak!” Wilkes is referring to President Lincoln. His sympathetic manner has slipped away, like a piece of painted scenery slid off the stage.

“That was what walt and me was arguing about just before he upped and departed,” Pete says. “He's always goin on and on about St. Abe, like he's comparing me to him to my disadvantage. About how Lincoln is tall and stately, so manly, and how he's come up from his beginnings in some shanty on the prairie, meaning that I have done no such ting. Course, he's twice my own age at least. To hear Walt tell it, if the Proddies had a calendar of saints, Abe would be on it all right, one of the most important ones.”

Wilkes is careful not to smile, careful not to point out that the first requirement for canonization is to not be among the living.

Just as, early in the Struggle, men in the District predicted the imminent fall of Richmond and a quick termination of hostilities, so now they speak of an end to the war at the very first breath of Spring, if not sooner. The Struggle cannot stagger on much longer with so few men in the ranks and many of those not much better fed than if they had been prisoners on Johnson's Island or any of the other notorious pesthole prison encampments.

Pete fulminates against St. Abe a bit longer, his jaw locked and his gaze ignited. When he finally winds down like a dollar watch, Wilkes offers him a diverting evening.

“There is an establishment in this benighted town of which it is unworthy,” he says. “It is one of the District's most closely held secrets, known to only a few, who guard the fact of its existence as though with their very lives. Clean yourself up and we shall go there, and you will be amazed.”

It is nearly Christmas.

On the twenty-sixth of December, a drayman arrives at the family home in Brooklyn to deliver a battered trunk with g. whitman 51st n.y. painted on it. As the others watch, Walt pries off the hasp with an iron bar and lifts the lid. Inside is George's uniform, a Colt revolving pistol, a mirror, a comb, a tin mug and various other such articles, and George's war diary. There is nothing to indicate why it has been sent or even by whom, if not by George himself. The family members gathered in the small parlor don't ask out loud whether the owner might be dead, but this is what they are thinking.

In the ensuing days, Walt seeks out officials, former colleagues and acquaintances, and old contacts from happier times when he was a newspaperman, hoping to learn at least where the regiment is camped, that he might go there. But there is no information of this sort to be had through such channels. He remains diligent. More than three weeks later, a Union officer returned to New York, one of the trickle of captives still being exchanged, arrives in Brooklyn with fresh news and a letter he has promised to see safely delivered to the mistress of the house. He informs them that George is being held in Virginia. The letter tells of his capture more than three months earlier at Poplar Grove Church, a nearly invisible pimple on the map of Virginia. George puts on a brave front: “I am in tip-top health and spirits, and am tough as a mule and shall get along first rate.”

The next day's mail brings a letter from George giving the family what he thought would be the first news of his predicament. It should have arrived before the trunk but has not. It tells of being one of three and a half hundred officers held under guard in a tobacco warehouse at Danville.