Walt Whitman's Secret (17 page)

Walt has returned in a state of qualified relief. George, though imprisoned in the tobacco warehouse in Virginia, is alive and, in his own telling at least, perhaps for his relatives' benefit, well. The District is a city of soldiers to be sure, but it is just as much a city of landladies. Walt has a new one, a Southern woman who serves good meals. Prices for everything are criminally high, but the price of lodging especially so. Still, his clerkship at the Indian Affairs office at Interior covers his meals and room and the coal and wood to heat
it, with some left over to satisfy his obligations to the wounded and to send more food and clothing to George, wondering if the parcels actually get through. Of course, with such wartime prices, he has no spare cash but is able to spare hours, which he devotes to two causes. The first is his campaign to convince those in authority to effect a special prisoner exchange for George. The second is the regeneration of the relationship with Pete the Great.

The reunion is warm and rewarding, but can the feeling be sustained? That's the question. Pete seems even more crotchety than before the trip north. He is a low flame simmering politely along a prescribed path until, every so often, he stumbles upon a new piece of fuel to consume, causing sparks to shoot up all of a sudden.

Now that everyone can see and feel the war coming to its conclusion at last, the nation, Walt thinks, will soon seem to have been decontaminated and sanctified, not simply reunited. He believes he is sympathetic to the thicket of contrary emotions that the looming finale provokes in Pete, whose allegiances, while not always acted upon, are certainly obvious enough. To him, the Yankees are the English and the Rebels are the vassal Irishmen. His position becomes still more apparent when he says to Walt that the North started to win the war when it made sure England sent no aid to the Rebels and didn't attempt to rend the blockade though it was in the British interest to do so. Walt, however, questions the special significance of those particular facts. His doing so leads to an argument, a rather one-sided one, with Pete storming about, puffing up what Walt considers his beautiful little chest and throwing his head back like a rooster.

Now comes another such battle, and like so many ugly events it arises from innocent remarks whose potential for inciting combat no one could possibly have foreseen.

They often tell each other stories about their families and recount what has happened in their work that day. Pete speaks of the strange
assortments of people who patronize the horse-cars— women with small children, workingmen coming and going, and always some officer reporting to somebody somewhere, one hand reining in the polished scabbard of the saber belted around a scarlet sash at his waist. Walt, for his part, tells Pete about the Red Indians who are received at the office. “They pass the clerks' room when they come to call,” he says, “and you know, Pete, they have a dignity you would not expect any petitioners to exhibit. Even a nobility.”

Pete is eating a peach as he listens.

“They are not tall men, but they look to be well made under all their finery and feathers,” Walt goes on. “There is much sadness in their faces, relieved only by the wisdom in their eyes. They are strong and unhurried and fully comprehending, you might almost say accepting, of the tragedies all around them.” Walt makes one observation too many. “In these essentials,” he says, “they put me in mind of the president.”

Pete just stares for a moment— stares and squints. Then he lets loose a barrage of invective, Christian and secular. Lincoln the tyrant and torturer, Lincoln the invader and desecrator, nay Lincoln the murderer on a terrible satanic scale. “you'd have
him
in your Bed if you could!”

Statements are contradicted and denied, oaths uttered and returned. Pete's face begins to go red as though a rosy shadow were passing over it quickly. His upper lip straightens and his neck muscles tighten. He sweeps a lamp off the crude chest of drawers. Fortunately, it is not lighted and only the chimney breaks, though lamp oil spills out onto the rug and splashes the unpainted baseboard. Walt stoops to gather the broken glass. When he rights himself, all he sees is an Irish blur of brown clothing and all he hears, after the door is slammed, is the hard flat-footed tread of two boots stomping down the stairs, some muffled questions from the landlady and someone running out the
front door into M Street, where all trace of him is lost amid soldiers, strollers and loafers, wagons, buggies and the occasional barouche.

“Come, I'm taking you to a hotel to meet some friends,” Wilkes says.

“It's not another of them big dinners, is it? I couldn't Stomach another such one.” Pete grins at his clever play on words, possibly his first deliberate one.

“No, no,” Wilkes says. “We won't be dining. This is just a meeting with two of my Baltimore friends. An important meeting. Historic, in fact.”

Pete doesn't know how to respond to that except to wish that he were a little better dressed.

Like Wilkes, Lucy Hale lives at the National Hotel at Sixth and Pennsylvania, and shares a suite with Senator Hale. This proximity makes it a simple matter for Wilkes and her to carry on their
affaire.
He is a patron of numerous other such hostelries as well, using them for meetings and conferences related to his patriotic endeavors. Generally, he does not use the same one twice. To-day's is splendidly nondescript. As though it were a much grander place, Wilkes puts one boot and then the other on the cast-iron scraper outside to clean the mud off the soles before stepping into the lobby, and Pete follows suit. They go upstairs.

“Who's this with you?” asks one of the men in the room.

Wilkes is usually careful to employ only their forenames, but in this case thinks it safer to go another way. “Mike, Sam, I would like you to meet a young friend of mine.” He always relies on this locution though he is only four years older than Pete; O'Laughlen and Arnold are getting close to thirty. “I call him Irish. You may do so as well.”

“A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Irish,” says O'Laughlen. Arnold nods warily. Both men have sad eyes that make them look forlorn even when they are not.

“Irish too is a veteran of our forces,” Wilkes says.

Arnold, a
rara avis
as he was actually born in the District, has been living in Maryland, where partisans of both sides exist cheek by jowl and one never knows the truth of one's neighbor's allegiance. As for O'Laughlen, he is a bigger fellow than Arnold and handsome in a different way, broad of shoulder and with a high forehead. He wears full moustaches with a small goatee that looks as though an artist has painted it on with a camel-hair brush. He is a Confederate deserter but doesn't brag about it. Prior to relocating in the District, he used as his place of residence the Baltimore feed barn and livery stable that employed him.

“Gentlemen, I have asked Irish to participate in our interview to-day because he is, in his heart, one of us and has faith in the righteousness of our mission.” Sometimes Wilkes's speech becomes a trifle too well enunciated, as though he were trying to make the words reach the family circle at the rear of the hall, but even when speaking softly he speaks clearly. “Simply, I wish him to join us, as I intend to inform all of you of a momentous development that will cause us to alter our plans thus far, which by your leave I will now recapitulate not only for his benefit but our own mutual refreshment.”

Pete realizes that his eyebrows have shot up in surprise, but he has the presence of mind to stay completely silent for once. He looks first at Wilkes and then at the others as Wilkes presents his summary, talking of the North's refusal to continue large-scale prisoner exchanges, the Confederate operations in Canada, his own purchase in New York of arms brought into the District secretly. Sam and Mike try to hide their impatience at the long recitation, especially as it is, despite the speaker's preamble, clearly only for the new boy's benefit.
In recounting the plan for the president's capture, Wilkes describes how he has kept a log of the days and precise times that the president passes along Seventh Street en route to the Soldiers' Home and back. He explains how he himself has carefully traveled every foot of two escape routes, the alternate being in reserve should it become necessary to abandon the first one at the last minute.

There he pauses half a beat to heighten the drama. “Gentlemen,” he says, “now I must tell you of a startling development, as I have been informed of it by Mister Watson.” Jack Watson is one of the names used by his old friend John Surratt, the courier who transports documents between the office of the Confederate secretary of state in Richmond and that of the Confederate commissioner in Montreal. “He has told me reliably that for some reason the president will no longer be traveling to the Soldiers' Home or anywhere else in the countryside, and I have confirmed this independently and then, just to be sure, confirmed it a second time.”

Sam and Mike give each other quick glances to assure themselves that their reactions are the same.

“As a result, I have had to conceive a new plan,” Wilkes says. “Given that the president is such an ardent lover of the stage”—he sneers a bit as he says this—“we shall abduct him from the theater!”

More looks are exchanged as Pete for his part tries to puzzle out what is taking place.

“That's ridiculous.” Mike is first to put his reaction into words. “Seizing him on a public highway or in open country is one thing. Doing it with hundreds of people watching and then having to escape through crowded streets— scarcely possible.”

Wilkes answers their objections individually. As the president patronizes the theaters often, his presence in and of itself, though it always draws the usual gawking curiosity seekers, will not seem to any one a singular event. He will occupy a grand box wherever he is,
be it Ford's or Grover's or even one of the lesser places, but human guard dogs do not accompany him there. In the usual run of things, the president will have no entourage beyond a messenger, ready to run news to or from the War Department or the Executive Mansion or any other official place.

“In contrast to Seventh Street, he will not be surrounded by troopers,” he goes on. “Of course, there are almost certain to be many bluecoats in the audience. Who can say that a few of them might not be quick-witted and one or two of them armed with their pistols?”

Pete is struck by shock and excitement but says nothing, for now he is unsure whether he
can
speak. As Wilkes continues with his outline, he appears to be smiling slightly. He explains how he of course has free run of all parts of the theaters and can slip unnoticed, or at least unremarked on, into the entrance of any box and immobilize the president with a blow or simply a handkerchief (his are silk) soaked in chloroform. “I would hold the other persons in the box to stay still and be silent, using my pistol for this purpose, out of sight of the rest of the audience. You will enter and together we will truss the tyrant and lower him to the stage by rope and whisk him away through the stage door.”

The conference is thrown into chaos as the room becomes a shambles of emotions and resentments. Arnold and O'Laughlen have lost confidence in Wilkes. For certain this time, he must be mad. For his part, Irish isn't altogether sure what's happening except that he is now part of a world different from the one he inhabited seconds before he crossed the threshold of this hotel.

O'Laughlen sputters a single word: “Impossible!”

Arnold is less dismissive. “How would we get him across the lines?” he asks.

“We would not. Yankee soldiers would infest the countryside like a plague of blue locusts. All the while our prize would be safe in
a cellar not far from the spot where we sit this instant. I am preparing the space now.”

To differing degrees, Sam and Mike are at once both dumbfounded and extremely skeptical. The two reactions engage in a gladiatorial combat to see which is to prevail. As for Pete, he thinks he might actually be sick with excitement, remembering the guards at the Old Capitol Prison where they had him incarcerated, and of course thinking of Walt as well.

Wilkes seems pleased with himself. He looks his listeners in the eye and rests his left hand on his hip. “You will allow, gentlemen,” he says, “that I do my best work in the theater.”

   
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