Walt Whitman's Secret (44 page)

The sense everyone had, that the long drama, at times melodrama, of W's life was finally and surely approaching its conclusion, was confirmed by a surge of invitations to symposia and other events, none of which he could accept, and the arrival of ever more visitors. More ominous were the honors. Another portrait of W, the one by John
Alexander, was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum in New York. From that same city came William O'Donovan, an Eakins colleague or acquaintance, who wished to sculpt a bust of the dying man. This proposal meant repeated appearances. Later, O'Donovan engaged a student of Eakins to take a series of photographs of W in his rocker. They still make for sad viewing to-day.

W complained that the callers were giving him headaches and aggravating his deafness. But when he forced himself to rally enough for a spin in the wheeling-chair with the ever-loyal Warrie as navigator, Warrie reported that the passenger found life in the street confusing and that the unfiltered daylight weakened his vision even more. I understood the significance of the fact that, as testimonials and trophies continued to pour in, W, for perhaps the first time in his life, tried to ignore them.

Never had so many of his poems been published in so many different prestigious journals in so short a time. Some editors ran special sections on him. These read well enough, but I thought they were suggestive of the ribbons made by the local mill at which Anne eventually had to take a position (writing the firm's advertising copy and causing sales to increase, I need hardly say). The company specialized in those long, broad and tastefully fancy ribbons that are attached to funeral wreaths and bear such sentiments as “From a Friend” or, what's more in the style of my home state, “So Long Our Pal Walt From The Brotherhood Of Hod Carriers And General Laborers Local No. 17 Newark New Jersey.”

To return to my original point in the way that sick old men must always discipline themselves to do, it was at this exact moment, smack in the middle of all this crepuscular terror, that I experienced
the single happiest day of my life. I have mentioned it some pages back, but I am feeling a bit stronger this morning, so permit me to elaborate upon it. In a change of heart not far short of a brazen miracle, Anne announced that she no longer had any doubts about our becoming married. Indeed, she felt we should have the ceremony quickly, “as our engagement, at least in the less formal sense of the term, has now gone on so long.”

My delight blocked out all other concerns and kept me from trying to understand this volte-face. She had been looking pale and tired of late, a fact I put down to the Mickle Street situation, which was jangling the nerves of all of us who were witnessing it up close day after day. I nonetheless understood that the agent of her decision was her father across the river. They were still fundamentally at odds on almost every matter. Perhaps while continuing to fear him she had also wearied of doing so, and in that way stepped up her defiance to the point of saying to herself, “I shall marry Horace, just as my heart urges me to do, and Father be d——ed.” She told me that she didn't wish him to give her away or even be invited to the ceremony. Strangely, though, she did desire that a minister officiate. To me, this illustrated how her increasing defiance went hand in hand with her ongoing ambivalence about the Montgomeries, Philadelphia, allegiances based upon the class system, and everything that went with them; sometimes, surely, such an extraordinary woman could hardly escape being complex beyond the comprehension of us less remarkable men. She and I agreed that I would ask my father if we might have the event take place in the Traubel home (where the suggestion was of course received with cries of joy and, to my well-hidden amusement, what I interpreted as a sigh of relief).

When I told W the news and how it had come up so quickly, like the most benevolent Summer storm you could possibly imagine, he was happier than his condition had allowed him to be for— actually,
for as long as I had known him. What a pity, he said, that he himself could attend only in spirit, not in body, given the general agreement by everyone with day-by-day knowledge of the situation that his numerous ailments (the word is hardly satisfactory), which previously afflicted him in an orderly sequence, a few each day or each week, had now combined all at once. Before I could react intelligently, he insisted we hold the ceremony in his room, where, he said, all would be welcome. He offered to draw up a wedding document to which all those present, perhaps twenty of us all told, could affix our signatures. He would try to revive the unaffected and democratic beauty of the copyist's script by which he had earned his bread in Washington, he said. Anticipation of the event as well as the event itself perked him up to the extent that he was able to pay a weekend visit to his tomb, ordering changes to the stone lettering above the massive door. I went along. So did Bucke, who had just arrived.

Father suggested, and I, Anne and then W all agreed, that the only possible choice of a minister was the Reverend John H. Clifford of the Unitarian church in Germantown. He often built his sermons around lines from
Leaves
and was as close as possible to not being a clergyman at all while still meeting all the legal and institutional requirements. With that resolved, the pace accelerated even more. Anne seemed just as delighted with the progress as I was, though she hoped, she said privately, that Missus Davis might find some method of at least moving the paper residue of a long and busy life to one side of W's room or the other. “Otherwise there will be no place for people to sit,” she said. “Or to stand, for that matter.”

She was nearly correct. The only one who sat was W. In my mind's eye, I see him there yet, assisted from bed to rocker, decked out in his best suit of democratic clothes, both serene and highly animated (as much of either as a sick person can be), seeming to consolidate within himself the rôles of best man, maid of honor and both proud
parents. All the while he smiled so broadly that I thought I saw the tip of his beard curled upward like the toe of an elf ‘s shoe. Beneath our happiness, though, we knew that he was exhausting one of his last reserves of energy.

Bucke's visit was partly to confer with Doctor Longaker and others about the state of W's health. They pooled their observations to essay a prognosis with which, sadly, no one familiar with the patient's precipitous decline could disagree. Bucke had to get back to his asylum soon, and Anne and I accepted his invitation to accompany him so as to have a wedding trip, albeit a quick one: our wedding night would in fact come a few days after the wedding itself. I was as nervous as all those bridegrooms in flash fiction are said to be.

The night before Bucke, Anne and I boarded the train together, he to his berth and we to our compartment, I was visiting Mickle Street, where I became somewhat terrified by a horrible suspicion. Something hinted at by a new look in W's eyes suggested that perhaps he thought it his duty, as a spirit-paterfamilias, to whisper to me about the things new husbands are supposed to know relative to how they should conduct themselves in— how shall I put this?—“the boudoir.” That would have been at once rather more than merely risible and also the signal for buffoonish laughter, given that, as Anne and I had long since been doing business as a fully fledged couple, I possessed more understanding of such relations than he could possibly have dreamed of having. That is, unless, by some magic, his unwed mothers in New Orleans should turn out to be more than mere characters in his own unwritten fictional account of his various doings on Earth. I swear I do not believe that my hunch and foreboding misread his intention, one that, if carried out, would reinforce
the claim to the manliness that he pursued through the corridors of his imagination. What saved me the embarrassment but otherwise scared me greatly was the fact that he accidentally set fire to some of the papers on the floor, unaware that he had done so until I managed to stamp out the flame with my boot. Naturally, this increased my remaining apprehension— my concern about leaving him. But Anne and I had responsibilities to ourselves.

For the whole trip, she and I were scarcely ever out of each other's sight. So, once we were settled in at the Bucke residence in London, I had no opportunity to continue my earlier conversation with him on the subject of inversionism. I got only one brief additional look at Pete Doyle's letters, and it did little to further my understanding of either their author or recipient.

We were delighted to find on our return so many notes and letters of congratulation from near and far, including one from Doctor Johnson in Bolton and another from his co-leader there, James William Wallace, known as J.W. It was evidently the latter's turn to sail over to America to pursue more of the field research that Doctor Johnson had undertaken during his own stay. Wallace was about five years older than me. Pardon once again, I should say
is;
it is my bad but understandable habit to assume that everyone from the past has predeceased me. He looked as English as he sounded, and I suspected that his speech would have seemed almost as curious to a sophisticated Londoner as it did to people in Camden. His elliptical face was very narrow, yet he seemed to have the beginnings of a second chin. He was clean-shaven except for sideburns (or
burnsides
as W still called them, a reference to the wartime general with whom the vogue originated); they extended the whole way to his lower
jaw. He wore small wire spectacles for his large eyes to peer through, and was seldom seen without a derby, pronounced
darby
, worn squarely on the head, not aggressively askew like Pete Doyle's in that old photograph.

I think of the comparison because I had virtually no opportunity to speak with Bucke about Pete the Great during our honeymoon, honeymoons being what they are. I looked forward to showing my bride Niagara Falls, but the weather was so foul on the first attempt that we could hear its roar but see very little. We had better conditions the following day, having stayed on in any case so that our baggage, which the railroad had misplaced, could reunite with us. At the Buckes', all was well. Anne got on splendidly with Missus Bucke and her children, but confessed after a few days that she had overtaxed herself and was once more feeling run-down. And of course both of us were distracted by our worries about W, though I received communications from Warrie and others almost daily and these suggested no further decline.

Wallace had seemed a likable fellow in his earlier correspondence with me and, like Johnson, proved to be so in person as well. Anne and I got back to Camden two weeks after the wedding and learned that he would be arriving in late August or very early September (perhaps having learned of the notorious mugginess and misery of Summers in New Jersey). He arrived bearing gifts for the strangers he would soon turn into friends. These were presented in the name of the entire Bolton group. They included a beautiful red coverlet for Anne. Being one of those people who could talk himself into the good graces of anyone he wished to see, and get them to impart the information he sought without making himself sound like an interrogator, he proved just as dogged a researcher as his friend Johnson, though he spent most of his time with W. Assuming his means to be as modest as our own, Anne and I were putting him up at the
brand-new matrimonial apartment we had rented, where I was astonished to learn that he was intending to keep a literal transcription of every word that came from W's lips. He spoke of his plan quite freely, unaware of what I'd been doing since March of Eighty-eight. I said nothing.