Walt Whitman's Secret (26 page)

The evening ends with the men alone, contemplating where they might go to drink. The logical places are the competing establishments that stand on either side of Ford's and are dwarfed by it— the Star and the Greenback. But they go to a restaurant, not a saloon. Wilkes has stocked a private dining room there with liquor, oysters and cigars. Arnold and O'Laughlen arrive soon afterward and are surprised to find others present. They drink until most of the staff have gone home for the night, leaving only a watchman to lock up. Then Wilkes finally lays out all the details of his carefully revised scheme. Wilkes, Arnold and Atzerodt will overpower the president,
handcuff him and lower him to the stage, where Payne will be waiting to help whisk the parcel out the stage door and into the night, with Surratt and Herold meeting up with the others well outside the city.

Everyone has questions about this great unacted drama, and Wilkes answers them with athletic contortions of language and logic. The session goes on until five in the morning. Later in the week, most of the principals will meet, without Wilkes, at Missus Surratt's, where Payne and Surratt have been gathering weapons and other tools of the trade. The landlady, who seems to most people to be a pious widow-woman whose entire life had been her family and her Church, has been keeping her rooms fully rented. Some boarders, such as Louis Weichmann, who is too nosy for the others' taste, live there permanently. Others come and go. One of them, for example, is a mysterious woman who speaks French and is never seen, even indoors, without her face veiled. She has no part in the meeting. The following day, however, she leaves the District for Montreal.

W's conversation had always meandered.
Loafed
he might have said in earlier times, for this was among his favorite words before the war. I consult my notes— I fear they will forever remain mere notes— for July of Ninety-one. It seems I paid my call a bit earlier than usual, at five-fifty. As per custom, W first asked after my own health and doings before kindly filling me in about his own. He was terribly polite and cordial (quite different things). He did not complain as much as I may have suggested elsewhere by my inadvertent reliance on quotations that often sound like so much bellyaching. It was a case, rather, of his always having much to report, and so much of it being bad news that he usually expressed himself with reportorial dispassion, though not on the altogether random day I have chosen to examine now.

Speaking of his breathing in particular but with a more general tone as well, W said, “I have had a couple of bad days. Yesterday especially. Horrible. Wretched. And to-day bad enough too. I do not seem to amount to much anyway.”

I remember that the last statement was made without any attempt to woo pity, though this is not apparent when the same words are set to paper without accompaniment.

Flora, this is why you are my perfect reader: you understand and do not judge. I assume this is true even of the fact that as regards spiritualism W was probably something more of an agnostic and somewhat less than an atheist. My enormous respect for you and the work of your Toronto group contains much praise for your loyalty. I sense that W would have had to commit worse misdeeds than we could possibly imagine, including perhaps the deliberate destruction of as many young lives as he instead saved during the war, for you loyal Canadians even to raise an eyebrow in reproach.

If the two of you had met, I daresay he would perhaps have come, under your guidance, to the same opinion as yourself. Although there are few significant female players in the drama of his life beyond Anne and his sainted mother, and to a lesser extent his sisters Hannah and Mary, this is only to say that he gave first honors to what he considered manliness, to camaraderie, and to the more deeply felt but less well articulated and so much misunderstood quality of adhesiveness. I don't even mean to say that women of the second magnitude of importance in his mostly masculine orbit, such as Missus Davis, necessarily felt they were denied his sympathetic attention. Yet none of them, at least not in his final years, came nearer his heart than did Anne, who in fact seemed almost to colonize it. The statement is the product of my close observation over a long period and not merely an expression of a husband's pride. I made precise notes of what passed between them in my hearing. In one of
these memoranda he spoke of the roses in her cheeks and “the fresh air sent flowing” by her arrival. When she and I called at Mickle Street together, she would sometimes wait downstairs in the parlor when it appeared he might wish a private moment with me or might require my assistance finding a comfortable position. But he would always, regardless, summon her as soon as possible. “Bring her up!” he would say. “Bring her up!” As we made ready to leave, he would kiss her on the mouth.

On the day that I am calling to mind now, W and I chatted about Bucke, a constant subject at these times we had together, and then somehow got onto the topic of an especially unpleasant landlord of W's acquaintance, long dead by the year in question. I was writing so quickly then, much more so than I am able to do nowadays, though I am composing this manuscript for you at the limit of my boilers (another of W's expressions that suddenly comes to mind, a phrase I presume he picked up from the transportation-men). The landlord was a man named Quinn. “He was a mean Irishman,” W said. “I do not intend by that to reflect on Irishmen in general, or to say that Irishmen are mean, but rather to indicate that Irishmen are so rarely mean that when you meet one of the real stripe, he seems to make up for all the rest.”

The path leading away from this unanticipatedly diplomatic utterance took us somehow to architecture, particularly that found in Washington. He said he could well remember the Capitol before the completion of its famous dome late in the war. He described being in its shadow as he watched Lincoln's second inauguration there from a throng gathered down below the speaker's perch. He told how stark and erect and without purpose the monument to George Washington was before it was topped off with its stone cap. He mentioned the public buildings and natural vantage points from which one enjoyed the best views of the city.

Somehow making a marriage of Irishmen like Quinn and strolls through the wartime city, I mentioned Pete Doyle so that I could note how he might react involuntarily to the name, for a poker player's countenance was one of the assets that W was losing to fatal old age. But he responded with the customary platitudes: Dear sweet Pete, a good boy, we shared such good times, I regret how we have fallen out of touch, & cet.

“As you know, he has not been here for a very long while,” he concluded without special inflection of any sort.

Subject closed, at least for the moment. The drawbridge to the past was squeaking its way shut now.

In fact, it was October before I had another such good opportunity to ask my question again with the same combination of casualness and compulsion. I told him that the Bolton group of Whitmanites in England, who seem determined to flush out many of the major witnesses to his life, had located Pete in Baltimore. W clearly had known all along that Pete was there but had perhaps misspoken earlier, for his memory was beginning to tease and trick him a bit, which of course made me keep my question on the docket. Pete seemed to have been employed for some time as a railroad brakeman, dangerous work indeed for a man of about forty-six or so, walking the tops of moving cars and leaping from one to the next.

In any case, W gave the familiar response, as though I were some local reporter with whom he could have his way by wearing the hat of the legendary Good Gray Poet when he spoke, rather than that of W the man. “The noble Pete!” he said. The exclamation point is not only another evidence of my poor writing style but an emphasis I heard in W's voice, unusual because he spoke most often in a raspy whisper now. That was all he said. His voice was (conveniently?) giving out on him, precluding any more bromides for the moment.

I must have been looking at him with my head tilted to one side and a countenance full of disappointment. (Anne has always said that I somewhat resemble a hound, with a hound's inability to disguise what it is thinking.)

W looked me squarely in the eye, commandingly. Leaning forward as best he could, the better to have his words travel the few feet that separated us, he said, “Be patient, Horace, dear Horace, my boy. Be patient …”

The message was cut short by an eruption of wheezing.

   
TEN
   

W
ILKES IS A BUSY MAN
. In the afternoon he drops in at Missus Surratt's boarding-house. This being Good Friday, she is making preparations for Easter, the most solemn of holidays. Federal employees receive the afternoon off, so Lou Weichmann is there as well. Bumping into Wilkes revives, as though such incitement were necessary, his curiosity. The emotion is a combination of suspicion that the actor is up to no good and knowledge that he, Weichmann, is being deliberately excluded because the others dislike him, he doesn't know why. For his part, Herold is in town securing a roan, for he is still prepared to ride with Wilkes on an escape through Maryland to Virginia, as though Virginia too were not enemy territory now.

At the same moment, employees of the theater, including the stagehand Ned Spangler and the dogsbody known as Peanuts, are carrying out orders from Harry Ford, the co-owner with his brother, to remove the partition between the two upper boxes to form a single enclosure. When they finish, they are to decorate it with flags borrowed from the Treasury Department. Out back, Wilkes is riding quickly up and down Baptist Alley, practicing. Spangler and another man come out to converse with him when their task is completed. Wilkes treats them to a round at the Greenback,
and then announces he is going over to Grover's Theatre to deliver a letter.

A short distance away, the first batch of high-level Confederate prisoners taken since the surrender, eight generals among them, is being marched through the city for the people to jeer at.

In fact, Wilkes is going less to deliver a letter than to compose one. He asks for pen and paper and writes as follows:

“For a long time I have devoted my energies, my time and money to the accomplishment of a certain end. I have been disappointed. The moment has now arrived when I must change my plans. Many will blame me for what I am about to do, but posterity, I am sure, will justify me. Men who love their country better than gold or life.” He lists them below: himself, Payne, Herold and Atzerodt. Admittedly, he scribbles in haste, and omits the pair of cowards Arnold and O'Laughlen, who are still probably sitting somewhere shivering with a fever of fear. Neither does he mention the Irish catamite with a stable hand's manners and the mighty robertson, nor any of twelve or twenty others of whom the planet's second and third rings are composed. So many names he cannot remember them now in the midst of the greatest mind-storm of his life. So many potential names that they might detract from the plan's heroic proportions were he to recite the roster, making himself seem in the eyes of history a simple organizer, a theatrical manager, a businessman.