Walt Whitman's Secret (33 page)

The dying man now looked me squarely in the face, his eyes level with my eyes, his nose seemingly in contact with my own, his mouth telling my mouth words it implored my entire body to remember.

“Horace,” said the transfigured lips, “you must return as my delegate to Walt. Take my body and take my soul with you. Set them down on his doorstep, under his feet, across his pillow, anywhere, so that he may know I have survived whole and entire in the Old Faith. To this message I consecrate your journey back to Camden.”

This will sound odd, but for a second I wondered whether Pete Doyle, a direct son of the old country over the ocean, had ever managed to free himself from his own theater of candles and incense or had turned back to it, if he had ever truly left, to seek expiation for what nearly everyone save convicts, soldiers and sailors without recourse to females, and certain poetry-writing Englishmen who have such access but refuse it, evidently considers a heinous sin and a soul-destroying terror. You are a forthright woman, sensitive but devoid of most forms of nonsense and not given to squeamishness or timidity, so I trust that I can be frank with you, even bald in my way, when I mention such things. If I have made an error in judgment in doing so, I will implore you to harass me by the use of spirit mediums once I am gone, perhaps even before completing my
cri de coeur
, if that indeed is what I am writing for you now! You see, I jest.

Bucke and I stayed for two and one-half hours in all before leaving to catch the three-thirty train. That was on March second. William Douglas O'Connor deserted life on May ninth, aged fifty-seven, thirteen years younger than W when he learned of the news and only four years younger than I am as I write this. W was sadder than I had ever seen him. How did O'Connor's departure compare with other dark cataclysms? With Lincoln's murder? With his mother's death? With what I was coming to sense may have been a violent separation from Pete the Great? I didn't know the answers to such questions, and I lacked the means of improving my judging ability.

Another of my duties was to be what I believe is now called a press agent. Formerly W had performed this task for himself, and no one could have done it better. Such was my impression from what had become my rather bulky file of newspaper cuttings. Once, when we were working on
Complete Poems and Prose
, he told me that the previous evening, after I had left him, when Missus Davis had gone to bed and the house was dark, he was moved by an urge to go downstairs. I did something I virtually never did: I upbraided him. Didn't he realize how dangerous and foolish that was? Why did he ignore advice from me, Missus Davis and his impressive complement of doctors? Why did he ignore even what his own body was imploring him not to do?

He looked contrite and said he had made the descent unaided because he suddenly needed a book from the parlor and didn't wish to disturb Missus Davis. “I'll never again attempt to make the trip alone,” he said. “Never. I promise.” He said that he spent so much effort slowly navigating the staircase in the blackness that he had exhausted himself, and that he continued to be exhausted even now, a fact that was obvious. For some reason I suddenly had a vision of W the young schoolboy, the one who, or so his adult incarnation claimed, had been part of the crowd welcoming the aged Marquis de Lafayette to Long Island in Twenty-five. This was at the commencement of the old Revolutionary gentleman's triumphant tour of all twenty-six states, where he might easily have died from being fêted and fed so often and so grandly. One end of life and then the other, with too short a string between them.

In any event, as W's health worsened still more, it fell to me to make certain that his name continued to be laid before readers' eyes without permitting them to believe that the famous man was dying. Here, for example, is a piece I prompted the
Ledger
to publish by imposing on my acquaintanceship with one of the newspapermen across the river, who came to the house but was denied a meeting by
W, thereby unwittingly providing me the opportunity to steer the reporting in a certain benign direction without much loss of prominence in the paper as printed:

I cannot lie to you by claiming that I wasn't lying then. W was terribly ill with a malfunctioning of his lungs and chest, some sort of severe failure in his left leg, and what he confided to me in a meek voice was discomfort and even pain deep within the reproductive regions. My supposition was that the last item on the list would have affected him the most, as it would do with anyone but especially so him, as the author of all those hymns to the body that brought him so much in the way of scandal and rejection. These ailments were in addition to his growing shortcomings of memory and vision. These were simply attendants of old age, though Doctor Osler would in form me that they were nonetheless opportunistic ailments that had taken root only because other divisions of the body had broken down.

Short of the immediate aftermath of the brain seizure that had stolen his mobility, W was now in the worst condition I had seen him suffer through. I find it difficult, however, to remember this fact now, looking back, for the story of his icy slide toward death was doled out a day at a time. The ligatures that joined each day to the next
were usually so tenuous that it was difficult to observe the general trend at first hand while retaining a sense of which way the story's big arrows were pointing. That is the way history is. Like the Chinese water torture, it is released one drop at a time, in a steady
pling pling pling
, designed to limit our comprehension of the deluge overall. That type of understanding is the job of later historians and of the next generation as a whole.

I did not always find W in his bedroom, lying either in or across the bed (the sign of a day of weakness) or reading in his chair by the windows (compared to the other, an indicator of a more positive state). Sometimes he would greet me from the front parlor once Missus Davis had taken him firmly by the arm and shoulder and eased him down to the main floor, a task that on other occasions I would be called on to perform. Sometimes I would catch him emerging from the second-floor bath-room, carrying a towel or belting his trousers. His lengthy visits there were audible to all, as he enjoyed singing arias, loudly, while sitting in the zinc tub. Seeing him navigate Missus Davis's well-worn runner in the hallway gave me a still more accurate sense of the hesitation and difficulty with which he propelled himself along. At the end of the shortest such journey, he would be glad of a rest in the chair or a return to his bed.

Knowing the difficulty I was having raising money to pay for nursing, Bucke had somehow persuaded a young man named Nathan Baker, who worked at the Canadian asylum, to come down to Camden. When he left in order to pursue medical studies (Doctor Osler gave the address to his graduating class), Bucke sent Eddie Wilkins, a fine young man, selfless and intelligent, with a companionable personality as well as a strong physique. Most likely it was Osler who brought in
Doctor Daniel Longaker of Philadelphia to examine W on a regular basis, recording the many diseases and their symptoms, relieving the suffering that attended them and throwing impediments in their path where he could. Doctor Longaker was a worthy of the Society for Ethical Culture. I am not certain whether the Ethical Culture doctrines found favor in your own country. If they did, Doctor Bucke would surely have been at the forefront, I imagine. In the United States such groups formed in all the great cities. Their common basis was the belief that ethical behavior lay at the heart of all the organized religions and that the pursuit of such an approach in all departments of life was the proper substitute for what goes on in churches, synagogues, tabernacles, gospel halls, Quaker meeting-houses, and any number of temples and mosks. I need not say that W, though he was not a joiner and said he never had been, found such non-theistic views agreeable. He was true right to the end to whatever combination of non-beliefs he held dear, though he may have been wavering. Once I came upon him sitting in his chair reading a big old leather-clad Bible. He looked slightly embarrassed, telling me that he read it frequently as the source of so much of our literature rather than as insight into God or the Lord (or even as a source of comfort for its familiar and reassuring words, which is what I imagine he was seeking).

One evening when I arrived at the house, his first question was, “Where have you been to-day?” I believe he took a vicarious pleasure, the only sort he could practice by then, in my hum-drum traipsing from a chair at the library to my stool at the bank, from post office to grocery to newspaper stand.

I told him that I had gone for a pleasant walk across the river with a friend of mine.

He pressed for the details.

Then he responded by telling me what I already knew. “I walked great walks myself in the Washington days. Often with Pete Doyle.

“Pete was never a scholar,” he continued, reconfirming the blatantly obvious. “We had no scholarly affinities. But he was worldly, an everyday workingman.”

In those photographs of him that I had seen, Pete looked no different from the other thuggish Hibernians found everywhere in the country. I have never visited the island nation whence they originate, but I knew the statistics showing that they had been the main practitioners of immigration and new growth to America until overtaken somehow by the clearly less fertile German migrants, such as the Traubels. Even the German Catholics bred far fewer children than the Irish with whom they shared dogma. I suppose this is because the Germans are industrious and gifted in business, so it is constantly said, and thus stand in contrast to the Irish, whose great contribution to civilization has been the whiskey they distill but whose main exports to America's shores are young men so full of the stuff that work suffers when it cannot be avoided altogether.

Continuing on, W pronounced Doyle a companion who was (and still is?) “full to the brim with the real substance of God.” This statement almost left me prostrate. He then contrasted the abundant perambulations he and Pete shared with the relatively infrequent ones he engaged in with his friend O'Connor during the same period. Of course in the latter case there was clearly an intellectual bond being forged, based upon their shared interest in books and writing. Its continuation on the additional grounds of shared ideas in other areas was a later development. So W explained, adopting the tone of crystalline candor that he took to whenever the spirit moved him to truly open up instead of merely reminiscing or recounting events. These moments became the real joy of all the Camden conversations I came to cherish.

“At that time,” he said, “for the first two or three years of the war, William O'Connor was warm, earnest, eager, passionate— warriorlike for the anti-slavery ideas. He was immersed, suckered in. This
in some ways served to keep us apart, superficially apart. I can easily see now that I was a good deal more repelled by that sentiment, by that devotion in William, than was justified, for I am not temperamentally suited to having any truck or trade with fashionable movements. With these latter-day confirmations of William's balance, of his choice, of his masterly decisions— the fruit of later eventuation, the later succession of events— there has come to me some self-regret, some suspicion that I was extreme or at least too lethargic in my withdrawals from William's magnificent enthusiasm.” He paused, looking spent. “Years have added luster to the O'Connor of that day.”