Walt Whitman's Secret (16 page)

Walt arrives back in the District, knowing that he can plead, cajole and bargain for his brother's exchange more effectively from the
capital than from Brooklyn, going as high as young John Hay in the Executive Mansion if need be. Only days after his return, he is able to have a wooden box of proper foodstuffs sent across the lines to Danville. He doesn't know that George is falling ill and will soon be too sick to finish off the contents.

The room is enormous, its walls papered in red felt with velvet trim. The bill of fare begins with mock turtle soup and proceeds to “to-day's New York oysters in variety” and entrées both boiled (salmon, turkey with oyster sauce, leg of mutton with caper sauce) and roasted (pork, duck, mongrel geese). The array of puddings, custards and pastries is staggering (sago, mince pies, lemon and squash pies, and so on), the relishes likewise. The register of them extends all the way to syllabub. The lengthy wine list is a bit confounding, as most of the wine Pete has drunk has been at Communion, for he is a spirits man. “Truth to tell, i'd be happier looking at a pitcher of this grand Set-up than sittin here,” he says.

Wilkes smiles— almost laughs— at his young friend's artless candor. “You needn't feel out of place,” he says. “The public rooms of a fine hotel such as this are in the essentials a type of theater. The lighting is identical, as you see. The same sconces and plaster work and carpets, the same soft white clouds painted on the ceiling for when you glance upward—look.”

“Same uncomfortable seats as well,” Pete says.

This time Wilkes does laugh, appreciatively. “And we are at once the players and the audience, strutting across the boards while all others watch us and we watch them watching us. Everyone's eyes are fixed on the costumes while waiting for the action. You do
enjoy
the theater?”

“Walt's the big one for the plays and things. He likes all kinds. Comedies, tragedies and such. He is a Glutton for it. He is that way with music too, and can sing whole operas.”

“In any event, I hope you will enjoy what I have planned for us this evening.” The first course begins to arrive, the waiters moving as though they themselves and not just their tunics have been stiffened with heavy starch. “With this fine dinner under our belts, and both of us in a relaxed state, I will make you a gift of my promised surprise. It will have to last for a time, as I am going to New York as I mentioned, to be gone a number of days. I'm unsure just how many.”

They leave the hotel and begin walking through the snow, Wilkes taking long strides, Pete with shorter legs taking occasional catch-up steps. They go to a row house in a street of row houses in a neighborhood of such streets. Number Seventy-five is three from the corner, a three-story brick house with large twin dormers set in a fish-scale roof and a modest bit of stained glass in the fanlight over the thick black front door. Wilkes, wearing a heavy cloak against the wet snow, raps on the door with his stick rather than use the knocker. Pete, after blowing on his hands, has stuck them deep in his trouser pockets. Recognizing a distinguished gentleman, the Negro who opens the door graciously nods Wilkes to the double parlor on the right-hand side, where another man, white, pulls apart the oaken sliders.

“Welcome,” says the second man.

Nodding toward his companion, Wilkes says, “This is a young friend of mine, Peter, whom I would like you to meet.”

“How you do, sir?” the man says to Pete, who answers with a quick modest smile, showing two blackened teeth in the bottom row. “You will find a warm haven here on such a night,” the man continues, speaking to Wilkes as another Negro, a youth, takes the visitors' wraps and hats.

“Whom do we have this evening, then?” Wilkes asks.

Two young men sit at opposite ends of one of the deep blue sofas. The taller one, the one with the very pale skin, gets to his feet on some subtle signal from the person in command.

“I am Thomas,” he says. His brown hair has been cropped abnormally short.

The other one then rises in his turn. “Francis, sir. A pleasure to see you again, sir.” He is skinny and refined-looking, with hazel eyes and long fingers like a musician's.

“Peter, I believe Francis and you will find you have something in common.”

“You Irish?” Pete asks.

“No, sir,” replies Francis, who was a private in the Rebel forces only recently. “Unfortunately,” he adds, smiling.

Pete is not accustomed to being addressed with an honorific.

“You should compare experiences,” Wilkes says.

A bit uneasily, the two strangers, whose combined age is rather less than fifty, move to another of the sofas, near the grate, where the fire replaces the wall globes as the source of illumination.

Later, Wilkes ascends the wide staircase with Thomas several steps to his rear. He pauses on the first carpeted landing and leans over the well-oiled banister to speak to the proprietor. “If a man you've never seen before should call for me here, asking for Doctor B, please tell him to meet me on the fourteenth,” he says softly. “He will know where.”

Wilkes has stood more or less where Walt has stood— they easily might have seen each other— waiting for the president to canter out to the Soldiers' Home with his little Praetorian guard of troopers. Wilkes has been told that on occasion the president is accompanied
by no one at all, though this is only gossip; he has not himself seen the solitary and unescorted figure on a mount: a ridiculous spectacle even to contemplate.

The plan inspired by the ritual and the rumor is not lacking in boldness or daring, but is brilliant in what might be called its flamboyant simplicity, as the actor's admirers might have expected. He will arrest the procession (if there is one), abduct the president at gunpoint, spirit him away and free him only when the demands are met. The demands are to be the release of all Southern prisoners— the emptying of the prisons and the prison encampments.

Walt and Wilkes may also pass each other in the streets of New York: Walt hurrying along uncharacteristically, not seeing much beyond the spots on the pavement where his feet will land next, so concerned is he about the fate of his brother; and Wilkes doing an important chore, appearing both righteous and shifty, like a player not certain whether he has been cast as hero or villain. The errand is the purchase of ammunition and firearms. Specifically, of Spencer carbines, short enough to fit in his trunk. As George's trunk makes its way to Brooklyn, Wilkes's trunk travels to Baltimore. There, Mike O'Laughlen carries it by buggy to the District, helped by Sam Arnold.

The idea of abducting the president may have derived from a suggestion by one of the local Confederate operatives, a plainspoken and unsmiling man who might be mistaken for the owner of a feedlot with a couple of thousands in the bank and some more in the mattress ticking. He has been assigned either to assist Wilkes or to keep an eagle eye on him. In practice, the two tasks are interchangeable, for assisting Wilkes is in fact the best way of maintaining a watch over him.

The two men don't care for each other, the foppish actor dressed in immaculate style, well connected, suave, handsome, at close range always smelling of lilac vegetal as though he has just emerged from the barber's, and the other fellow, hale and well met but deceiving no one, a shady but not entirely sharp-witted jasper who believes in the Struggle to be sure but might not continue to do so if sorely pressed, for he lacks passion.

The two of them go shopping for a boat and a boatman, and in this way come upon the ignoramus Atzerodt. His forename is George, but he calls himself Andrew. Wilkes calls him Port Tobacco, for that is the miserable village on the river where they find him. There he scratches out a livelihood of sorts as a wheelwright. Less exaltedly, he also does general repairs to carriages and other types of rig. He is short and grotesque-looking, as though a monkey's head has been stuck atop a man's body. He has a permanent stoop, so that his figure in profile suggests a barrel stave. He wears his hair untrimmed and oily to the touch, and his eyebrows come within half an inch of meeting in the center of his overhanging forehead. His clothes never fit properly, and he always looks as though he is dirty not from working with axle grease and the like but merely from absence of mind.

Much or most of the time there is no trace of Prussia in his speech, such as it is. His voice is low and guttural, his talk simple and constantly interrupted by a lunger's cough, the sort that starts out like a hellhound's growl and increases in spasmodic ferocity until you think it might begin rattling the globes on the lamps and the panes in the windows. Wilkes is told that Atzerodt has run the Union blockade. That is difficult to believe. But he does have a boat and can get other ones if needed, on short notice and with discretion. More important, he knows every marshy appendage to the river and every copse of waterlogged trees where a person might secrete
himself until he could cross to the opposite bank undetected and step ashore on the glorious soil of Virginia.

Wilkes's manner of speech is too complex, his sentences too long and cadenced, for Atzerodt to comprehend fully. This is where Wilkes's companion is useful. He knows how to converse with such people. And so conversing, he reassures himself and Wilkes that Atzerodt too is a patriot, albeit one who prefers to be paid for his services, for the war is sputtering to its inevitable and ignoble conclusion and in such a situation a young man does well to look to the future, uncertain though it is.

Wilkes returns to the District, where he has a tryst with Lucy, a young woman of abundant charm and intellect. She is a skilled lover and the daughter of a senator who is a devout abolitionist. As for her own views, they are outrageously advanced, encompassing the nature of relations between male and female. She has no objection to her beau's ill-concealed adventures with other women “so long as it is I with whom you take breakfast.” She gibes him with allusions to her own several admirers. One of them is a young officer assigned to General Grant's headquarters staff, a position that his powerful father has secured for him. His name is Robert Todd Lincoln.