Walt Whitman's Secret (34 page)

I wished I could induce him to apply the same honesty to the subject of Pete Doyle and whatever others like Doyle there may have been and must have been, though clearly Pete was a special case. There is only one such attachment in a single lifetime, or so sentimentalists tell us. Mine was and is Anne Montgomerie, just as his, I have not the smallest doubt, was Peter Doyle, late of the Confederate army and who knows what other rightly maligned and constantly misunderstood associations.

It may be, I thought, that there will never come a time when I can put to W the questions that now occupied such a prominent place in my mind. In any event, I knew that this was not that moment. This, rather, was a time for comings and goings. It was a time of frequent visitors who, by being briefly present, worked in favor of his spirit even as they further eroded his strength, and of contemporaries, some of them long-time compatriots, whom he saw drop away, snapped up by death in a manner that could not help but make his last days all the sadder.

   
THIRTEEN
   

B
UCKE, THE MERCURIAL
bombastic Bucke, so mysterious because he was mystical, so overpowering because he was enthusiastic to a degree ordinarily found only in Hell's-fire preachers and underhanded stockjobbers, was promising (or threatening) to come down from Canada for another visit. Every few days a postal would arrive, announcing his imminent arrival, followed quickly by others that cited inevitable delays. “He has been coming every day since last September,” W said with a lightness of tone that could not obliterate the bed of anxiety over which it was lain.

That Bucke's life was busy there was absolutely no doubt whatsoever. Doing good for the weak-minded remanded to his care was enormously difficult and demanding, particularly if one was forever evading censure, as I imagined he was, for introducing new techniques and ideas. And possibly, but I'm not certain, for being associated with the notorious libertine W, whose very name, as the libertine himself enjoyed remarking, would sometimes be invoked to frighten small children into behaving themselves.

Bucke of course was at all times minutely aware of conditions at Mickle Street, for he sent letters as well as cards. He kept W engaged in the longer exchanges of the sort the old man had gotten in the habit of maintaining. As he did so, however, he also wrung news
from the other members of W's— what is the proper term? Not
circle
, for though I have used that description often enough, it sounds far too literary and genteel for the intended purpose. Not
coterie
or
band.
Truth to tell,
gang
is nearer the mark, though the newspapers' love of sensational crime has given the term an unhealthy cast. Or perhaps the German
Ring.
In any case, Bucke finally arrived in a frenzy of compassion in February of Eighty-nine, and when I was alone with him, he was extremely candid as to W's chances. We both knew that the situation was bleak and its termination near, but Bucke's dark vision had greater power than my own, as he could back up his assertions with medical reasoning and all the terminology that attends it, including generous outbursts of Latin and even, when extra emphasis was warranted, of Greek. He was one of W's comparatively few friends who were highly educated according to accepted principles, though it was obvious that he filled his days with living as well as with mere learning. In that way, he stood proud of the other gang-members.

Previously I had usually confined my visits to the hours after supper, by which time the food had lifted W's energies a bit and he was feeling most rested. Yet following Bucke's departure, I added morning calls as well. It was remarkable how his condition, rather than simply his disposition or alertness, varied from one end of a day to the other. I do not know whether or to what extent he feared death. He seemed no sadder to be going than he was weary of lingering, but that was sorrow enough for anyone to feel or even, as I did, to experience by direct witness. Perhaps he found some true comfort in the knowledge that his pain was about to end. I hope so. Not to compare myself to him in his condition, but I myself was finding it hard to adjust to his pending absence and the sheer awful permanence of it. My life until that time had been devoid of tragedy, but I knew full well what to expect. I did not know how I might react, then and
later; how I might bear up under the grief that events made me practice for, every day, twice a day.

Bucke's energy, while perhaps not contagious, did linger in the air for a while following his visit. W had grown to depend on some form of communication from him. He needed the certainty of this communication as well as that of my visits, and other things, to serve the function of little rituals to which he could hitch himself on his last earthly journey, now so surely in its final miles. Even with the benevolent fumes of Bucke's personality still in our nostrils, he became agitated with worry when days and days went by without any word from Ontario. Looking back, I wonder now, as I did then, why Bucke, who was so well informed, had allowed his friend's supply of reassurance to be interrupted in this way. I tried to palliate the prevailing atmosphere by repeating that Bucke had taken to cultivating an appearance as much like his hero's as possible. He had groomed his beard to closely approximate the famously tangled garden of gray that obscured W's breastbone, had disciplined his hair, if that is a correct verb, to place as much emphasis on his bare pate as possible. He was also dressing in clothing of the color (black) and cut (slightly homespun looking) that had always distinguished W's own. He was even aspiring to the young W's deliberately lackadaisical manner, quite singular for someone other than, as W said, admiringly for once, “a Negro tramping along a railroad right-of-way in such a suit of clothes, carrying himself in a free, easygoing, unpremeditated and joyous manner even when no cause for joy was apparent but quite the opposite.”

I did remark to W, however, that on seeing Bucke, people sometimes asked me whether he was related to the Good Gray Poet. “A long-lost sibling perhaps, come back to claim an inheritance,” I said.

“Might he not more reasonably be mistaken for one of my children out of wedlock?” W responded in kind. “He is some two decades my junior”—eighteen years actually—“and could well be the fruit
of one of my missteps in love. Let's see, I would have been teaching country school on Long Island about then. But he has traveled in this country a great deal, as you know, just as I have lingered with such easy pleasure in his own.”

Even as I watched my own head start to become frosted with white like the panes in a shop-window at Christmas, I was always to remain, save for Anne, the youngster of this tight little gang of rogue spirits, for while I myself was born some twenty-one years later than Bucke, I was, at the same time, W's junior by thirty-nine. This fact caused me to carry on the playful charade.

“Might not I be another of the unintended ones of whom you have been known to brag with such unselfish shame?”

I took W's chuckle as a sign that at this last or at least penultimate extremity, our relationship had reached a fresh plateau of candor. Just as I articulated this thought, silently to myself, he began to cough uncontrollably, a horrible tearing cough from some place near the center of his skeletal framework and deep within his girdle of vitals. Had it persisted with such violence, I realized, I wouldn't have known what to do, but I was able to stem the deathly noise with a slap on his now sadly convex back and a few sips of water. A man is in a sorrowful state when his own laughter causes him pain.

When he recovered his bearings, he returned to being morose, and spoke feelingly of the way so many of his old friends had lost their final struggle with the dark angel. This euphemism had been used commonly among his beloved boys in the hospitals so long ago, boys who by the time he said this were men in their forties, their bodies, however well they survived the rebellion, far from the young specimens of W's constant recollection.

He spoke of how death had reshaped his world. He saw the numerous fatal casualties just within his own family as the opening of a drama on which his own non-existence would bring down the
curtain. And then there was the fact that some of his wartime contemporaries specifically, his fellow non-combatant veterans you might almost say, had also begun disappearing, although most were younger than he was. I don't believe he knew anyone his own age who had participated in the conflict in ways so profound as his own. Wounded and maimed men certainly, but not ones who emerged from the conflict with a change of spirit in ways that Grand Army of the Republic parades could never fully express. All too soon he and these men would be history together, imperfect as history always is.

When this thought welled over me then, it remained unexpressed. Yet I knew without saying so that this was another signal that W was enlarging his trust in me. Especially so coming on the heels of all the harmless banter about his children who existed only as a device for deceiving and deflecting the naïfs, the suspicious ones and those who were far too curious. Language always had been the food of his non-bodily existence, but precious little talk was expended for the rest of the day.

He was certainly living far longer than anyone, medical people and members of the laity alike, had expected. Some elderly persons are too ornery to die when others suppose they should. You must have known instances of this, just as I have. Then there are artists who often must hang on against all the bookmakers' predictions until they have finished some great work that not only concludes their lifetime of labor but symbolizes and indeed actually completes, with a satisfaction impossible for us to guess, one entire human consciousness (oh dear, I'm sounding like the late Doctor Bucke).

There was to be one more edition of
Leaves
, the ninth one not counting piracies, though it was really no more than a needless fattening
of a life's-work that had reached its state of fullness long ago and increasingly was accepted by the world that once reviled it, though W for sanity's sake still clutched at its rebellious bent and flavor. Although the book seemed to have created him as much as he had created it, I believe it was far from the only thing keeping him alive. Another one, as I steadily came to realize over time, was Anne: a statement that will probably surprise you but I hope will delight you as well.

How shall I put this? There is a stage, the highest and most profound one, I believe, at which a black man and a white man lose their respective histories of degradations and prerogatives. Without diminishing their pride in what they are— on the contrary, in fact— they become, quite simply, two men who have moved beyond what so obviously separates them and have located the knowledge that they— and we, all of us— are in the same boat, trying to survive while straining to figure out what is so good about the “good life,” that elusive abstraction of the philosophers.