Walt Whitman's Secret (24 page)

The president is delayed at the Executive Mansion by last-minute paperwork and arrives at his inauguration just as the new vice president, Andrew Johnson, is addressing the assembled dignitaries prior to his own swearing-in. The vice president is Southern-born, a tailor from Tennessee who has been taught to read and write by his wife, and at the moment he is as drunk as a monkey in a monkey-tree. He gives an incoherent speech that embarrasses all who listen. As Lincoln leaves the chamber to step outside and deliver his own oration, the soldiers who have protected him on his journey down Pennsylvania Avenue are superseded by the Capitol police. Along the way, these officers must subdue a “bibulous lunatic,” as they later describe him, who breaks free of the crowd and makes for the president with fairly obvious intentions.

The president's remarks have already been set into type and copies printed for distribution to the press. He has cut up the galley proofs with scissors and pasted them in two columns on a sheet of stiff paper. Even without his ludicrous hat, he still towers above the others on the platform, but is towered over in turn by the enormous fluted columns in the Corinthian order that are lined up behind him like marble bodyguards. His voice is high-pitched and somewhat squeaky, a fact that always surprises people hearing him for the first time and expecting more sonorous and dignified sounds. But this afternoon few in the crowd spread out below like the mightiest of his armies can in fact hear Lincoln at all. Instead, the acoustical conditions carry the sound upward, where a tangled knot of important onlookers strains behind a wrought iron railing. As the president begins to talk, the sky suddenly clears and sunshine strikes the crowd in a wide beam. This causes Walt, unseen somewhere in the colorless multitude down below, to widen his eyes in an almost mystical awe, while Wilkes, who stands above the president and to his left, surprisingly close to the action, rolls his own eyes in disgust. The man everyone has come to hear is only a few yards from the dignitaries' perch where Wilkes and his friend Pete stand with Lucy Hale and her father, thanks to the senator's skill at scaring up two more of the much-coveted tickets. Pete looks uncomfortable.

The speech is so short that thousands of people are still arriving as the president concludes it. Wilkes, however, is positioned to hear every word. The president speaks of the war as a divine punishment meted out to a society that allowed the continued existence of slavery for so long. He belabors the point about God's rôle in the nation's affairs. Then he changes tone and is conciliatory: “With malice toward none; with charity for all …”

Wilkes knows that at the previous inauguration, four years earlier, there were Yankee sharpshooters on the roof of the enormous
alabaster building. He presumes they are there this time as well, and when he turns around and looks straight up, he sees that the top-floor windows are, rather pointedly, wide open.

The crowd is dissolving now. Booth says good-bye to Lucy and her father, who is dragging her away to prepare for another official function. Booth doesn't speak for some time thereafter. When he does, he addresses his overwhelmed and bewildered companion in a sad but exultant whisper. “I could have gotten him,” he says. With that, he takes Pete the Great's left hand and places it lightly on the right-hand pocket of his expensively tailored coat so that the younger man can feel the pistol.

   
NINE
   

M
ANY IN THE
D
ISTRICT
are drinking champagne on the evening of the inauguration. This fact gives Lucy an opportunity to tease Wilkes about why he is not doing the same. She is perhaps the only person who can tease him without risk of repercussions. In any event, he drinks copious amounts of brandy instead. They are in his room at the National, downstairs from the suite she shares with her father. Wilkes is quietly livid as well as morose, muttering into his glass— obscure oaths and what must be lines from old plays. She understands his first emotion. She understands the second as well, for she shares it.

“He has done this to destroy us by dragging you away,” Wilkes says. The accusation has been building for a while. The man whom he likes to call “the human baboon” and other things has nominated her father to be ambassador to Spain. Now, in the light of the reelection, the appointment is certain to go through without opposition or complaint.

“Why must you serve your father and play the hostess?” he demands once again. “There is nothing more absurd than the spectacle that is in my mind of you curtseying to a papist court and wasting your charm on fat old men from whom your father seeks compliance with the Baboon's wishes.”

She is especially patient, as she knows to be when Wilkes is drinking heavily. “You understand, dear one, that the situation could be different only if Mother were alive.”

Wilkes nods in recognition at a well-worn explanation, but this time adds a refinement of his own. “Why could he not ask his mistress to bear the burden, as an honest man might do?”

Knowing not to accept the provocation, she laughs instead: the laugh that she understands without being told can change his mood sometimes. She ices it with her impression of a young Southern lady of high degree and great hypocrisy. “Why, suh, you dishonor me with such a suggestion, for that is no way to speak to a Georgia maiden.”

He looks up from his glass. There are black demi-lunes under his eyes and his lovely thick curly hair is mussed. But his voice smiles even if his mouth does not. “My darling, the stage is poorer for your decision to avoid its unhealthy air and its immoral suasion of the innocent and instead to pursue your fortune as a Yankee senator's daughter.”

Then they are silent for a moment. They have stopped playacting now.

“Wilkes, I don't know how I can persist without you. Not knowing exactly how long before I will see you again is another impossible burden to be lain atop the first.”

“Four years, I should think,” he answers. He sounds matter-of-fact. “That is, presuming that the Beast and his litter can be defeated after that length of time. Some are optimistic, others not; but no one knows for a certainty. Everything is so much conjecture now. Of course, an act of God could alter the course. Or indeed, an act of Man.” He mentions “four years” not to dampen her hopes but to bolster them. He has confided his plans to the men necessary to help him carry them out, men who in any event he does not care about, but he has never intimated more than the subtlest indication of his thinking to Lucy. Because he loves her? because she is a woman?
because she might tip her hand to her father if she knew the secret? He is in no state to dabble in the mathematics of the emotions.

She looks into those black eyes, like the cinder-eyes on the snow effigies that playful children make each winter back in New Hampshire. She always has been the careful coquette, the rounded intelligence that smooths the edges of his own more angular presence. But now she draws her words from a deeper source.

“Wilkes,” she says, “I would love you no less were I a man and you a woman. It would change nothing.”

He seems slightly taken aback, but for only a second. Recovering his stage presence, he asks, “And if we were of one gender between us?”

She says nothing.

From his left-hand breast pocket he withdraws his billfold, lays it on the table and begins to remove its contents one at a time, as though to itemize them. There are several calling cards given him in New York and Montreal. These he must remember to burn. There is a generous but not ostentatious sheaf of banknotes, including two or three of the Confederate States with portraits of Jefferson Davis or Judah P. Benjamin. They suffer from the most casual comparison with the Yankee currency by the poverty of their engraving and printing. The South long ago ran short even of paper. He has seen notes printed on the verso of old wallpaper of a rather parlor-y design. There is also a note from one of the Montreal banks, and a variety of postage stamps.

A flap comes down to reveal a special pocket from which he extracts six photographs. He puts them on the table linen face down, then flips them over one at a time as though he were playing vingt-et-un.

The first three are the cartes-de-visite of young ladies she has never lain eyes on before. None of them is what you could call plain, though several are prim or aspire to give that impression. The photographs are well thumbed.

The dealer then flips over the fourth photo and then the fifth. More of the same, but all different. These last ones are not simply photographs of young women with straight mouths but of young women showing the viewer how they are having their likenesses made in some photographic gallery (the District is full of such establishments now).

The final image he leaves cupped in his hand for another moment before revealing it with a flourish. It is, as expected, the image of herself that she has given him to carry on his travels. Now, she knows, it will have to support him during her own long absence.

“In my profession, I'm sure you know, it is easy for people to confound the character they see on the stage with the man behind the mask. They find it easy to be attracted to the one and mistake him for the other.”

“I myself, in the first instance …” She trails off rather than interrupt.

“Sometimes young ladies one meets in social company will present one with such things.” He taps his right ring finger on the image of the lovely Lucy. “This is the only one that I carry next to my heart.”

His speech has lost its slur. The drink has not affected him to the usual extent. He has stopped drinking at the moment of maximum clarity. But he knows that this will not prevent the headache.

Anne and I were married on the twenty-eighth of May Ninety-one, a Thursday. Our friends took our motivations as being obvious to all, but the actual decision to make the abstraction real— that came upon us suddenly, like the most benevolent Summer storm you could possibly imagine.

Our first thought was that the ceremony should be conducted, as Father so enthusiastically wished it to be, at the Traubel family home (as none of us thought that the Montgomerie one would be so welcoming). This plan changed, however, when it became clear that W would be unable to attend. His numerous ailments— the word is hardly satisfactory— which previously attacked him in an orderly sequence, a few each day or each week, had now joined forces and were massed on the border. Every part of him seemed to be afflicted. He said, as he did quite often by this point, that he feared most for the condition of his heart, which he always called his “pump,” though the list on which it appeared was a long one indeed.

About six weeks before the wedding, he took one of his by then infrequent voyages in the wheeling-chair. Less than a year had gone by since a carriage ride down to Haddonfield from which he had returned overtaxed but also, so it seemed to me, exhilarated. This says nothing of the bad fall when his left leg gave way under him, a reminder of the paralysis he had now been struggling against, somewhat discontinuously but only somewhat, for the better part of two decades. And all his problems of digestion and disposal were worse than ever. What's more, his respiration was seriously impaired. I remember seeing him napping one time and noticing that the thin blanket that covered him scarcely rose and fell at all, so insubstantial was his breathing. He took measures to preserve his eyesight, which declined on a sporadic basis, as did his hearing; but he could not accommodate himself to a pair of new spectacles— or the pair after that. He complained of headaches and of heightened sensitivity to sound, especially the voices of visitors with whom he was not on terms of intimacy.