Walt Whitman's Secret (45 page)

Such was his frankness that he kept mentioning what a poor memory he had. On days when he and I had been in W's presence at the same time, he would ask afterward, “What was that word he used in answer to my question about …?” or “Can you remind me of his opinion about” such and such. One evening I found him busily engaged in working up his day's notes. Again, he chided himself for not having the type of recollective powers required to set down speech in an accurate fashion. While we talked, he asked if I would like him to read some of his entries, and they were quite good. Don't think me arrogant if I say they were much as I would have done them, except that he lacked a natural affinity for the American idiom.

Not long afterward, I was taken aback when, over a cup of tea, he said, “I read some of my notes to Missus Traubel and she thinks them quite like Walt, I believe. But she tells me also that you are doing this same sort of work, and have been for a long time.”

Motivated by her helpfulness and her openness of heart, Anne had let the cat out of the bag. I resolved to think of the matter that way, rather than in terms of worms that could not be put back in the can. I told him about my manuscripts in some detail and later even read him some patches. I suppose I thought at the back of my mind that the length, breadth and depth of what I was doing would deter him from trying to beat me into print. Two years ago,
With Walt Whitman in Camden
having come to a halt with changes in the public's reading habits and the rise in government repression of dissent during (and since) the war in Europe, the Johnson and Wallace collaboration finally appeared. It was entitled
Visits to Walt Whitman in 1890–1891
by Two Lancashire Friends.
I was happy to see the book for its worthwhile qualities, but honesty compels me to say that I was just as pleased, if not more so, to observe that it found no wider audience than it did and came to light long after my own.

Sadly, this shows that there was Capitalist competition as well as Socialist co-operation amongst the Whitman circles, a fact that eventually snapped shut the correspondence between Wallace and me, which extended into the present century. Looking back, I am alarmed to see how competitive I myself was about Emerson's 1855 letter to W. I told myself that I was eager only to rescue it from accidental loss or destruction; I couldn't admit that I was just as eager to prevent it becoming a part of Bucke's collection. “No, I haven't forgotten,” W would say. “It shall be yours when I see it next.” He often claimed to have misplaced it. My hunch was that he knew exactly where it could be excavated with a few seconds' drilling. I could not restrain my pleasure when I visited one day and found Wallace at the bedside getting W to autograph a stack of photographs. W greeted me with, “Here it is!” The original envelope was all nicked and soiled from so much shuffling around the floor, but inside was folded the communiqué beginning with its famous greeting, with its wise prediction of a long career and its prescient understanding of W's long foreground. Not only that, but it was in fine condition. Someday had arrived after all.

   
SEVENTEEN
   

A
S
W'
S END CAME EVER NEARER
, finally at a canter rather than a creep, he himself became more sentimental in his love. I am remembering one day at the end of November Ninety-one when Anne and I visited and they kissed each other heartily yet tenderly with the full measure of whatever connected the dying inversionist with the vibrant woman forty-four years his junior. I do not believe that this was merely a proof that she saw him as the father she would have preferred over the one she had been assigned. Beyond that, however, I don't know what, if anything, it is that I do know as a certainty. As she and I were about to depart, he kissed her again, saying, “Come often, darling. Come often.” As we descended the stairs, he was straining his feeble voice to call out similar sentiments after her.

As I entered the house on December seventeenth to make my regular suppertime visit, Warrie warned me that W had experienced a terrible day. I went in and found him unable to raise his head from the pillow. But his humor was fit enough, for he dismissed what was clearly a general malfunctioning of the lungs as “premature rigor.” I was greatly worried, and sent for Doctor Longaker. The next day's
Camden Post
carried the headline

Without giving their names, the reporter who came calling described being met at the door by the “hearty and hospitable” Missus Davis, followed by Warrie, “Mister Whitman's faithful and courteous attendant,” bearing a note from W. The note read: “I may get over it and I may not. It doesn't make much difference which.”

Doctor Longaker came on the scene, Doctor Bucke hurried down from Canada and John Burroughs arrived as well, as did W's niece Jessie, the first of the family members to reach the house, followed by W's brother George, to be followed by his wife, a more difficult person. Longaker vouchsafed to me that W's odds of survival were very poor indeed. The congestion was internally crippling. None of the great amounts he coughed up from the depths seemed to reduce the total; his chest was like a magic well in a children's storybook. He was often thirsty and sometimes a bit disoriented with fever. With Missus Davis and Warrie, there were more than enough of us to stand watches, like sailors at sea. The Bolton Boys sent me a list of code words to be used to wire them any news without incurring big charges. A message reading only
Ontario
would mean “No alarm at present,” while
Prelude
would be “Much worse.”
Starry
was the cipher to be used for “Likely to be fatal.”
Triumph
would signal that W had died.

Doctor Longaker's prognosis soon became the standard of opinion, for no one, including the patient, was even guardedly optimistic. Bucke, for example, said just after midnight on Christmas Day that he doubted W would make it to sunrise. Of course, when W did in fact meet the morning, he did so in even worse condition and with a slowed heart rate.

I will not impose the burden of much further graphic detail so as to keep myself from having to relive those weeks and months
and to spare you the necessity of reading much more of my prose. I will say only that Doctor Longaker told me in early January that it was a mystery how W continued to cling to life in the face of all medical knowledge. My own theory concerned the part Anne's presence played in steering him away from defeat, but I kept it to myself lest it be discounted as unscientific. Three days later W and I had our single most important conversation.

I came into the room to find him sitting up in bed, his head clear, his spirits not at their worst and his voice rough and scratchy, sometimes perfectly understandable but other times on the level of a mumble. On the counterpane lay a pine box about a foot long and perhaps four inches high and five wide. It was well constructed, joined without resort to nails, and looked rather old.

He asked after my health and Anne's, and I after his, though we both already knew the answers.

“I feel somewhat more nearly hale to-day,” he said. “As for hardy as well, perhaps that is gilding the lily.” We talked about
Leaves
for a moment and followed with trivialities such as the news.

Then he got more serious. Not solemn or lugubrious, but sober.

“Horace, my boy, you of course know of my most recent will. There is one more bequest I must make. It is a bequest to you, as it may complete your work with me, in the same sense of the phrase that I am completing my own labor on this Earth. I have not bothered Tom this time to make a new document for me, because I want this gift to be a private matter between us. No one else is to know of it. No one else
can
know of it. What I'm giving you doesn't even belong to me in the strictest legal sense of ownership, but I have been storing it for a great many years, hiding it in fact. I brought it with me to Camden when I first came here. Yesterday I got Warrie to retrieve it from its hiding place.”

Well, this certainly sounded intriguing; he surely did know how to tell a story. I sat attentively and said nothing.

“Where shall I begin? Where
can
I begin?”

In general terms, I knew now what must be coming. W was tidying up all his unfinished business and I was part of it. “Pete Doyle?” I asked.

There was a pause.

“Yes, Pete.”

He told the story everyone now knows of the Washington City horse-car on that snowy night during the war, and how he would continue to take the same car other evenings, hoping always to engage Pete in more conversation. That led them to drink together at the Union Hotel in Georgetown, a place that had returned to its original use, having been transformed into yet another hospital for the wounded at some stage. When not in the tap-room, they would cross the Navy Yard Bridge to tramp along the Maryland shore of the Potomac and even take the ferry— W and his love of ferries!—to Alexandra, on Virginian soil. Flora, forgive me, I don't know how much of this geography you're familiar with.

“Whether we were getting half-loaded, as I confess we did on occasion, or marching along country roads, we would talk. Our talk was endless, back and forth it went, freely exchanged. Someone overhearing us might have said our conversation was incessant, which it was— when we weren't singing instead. Sometimes I would recite passages from Shakespeare or sing snippets of arias. Pete with his natural honesty of statement said he liked hearing the music of the first but enjoyed the ‘tunes' of the other, while understanding nothing of either. Ours wasn't a great intellectual sympathy, but a great unaffected one of a much rarer and more important kind.”

His voice was starting to lose the clarity of only a few minutes earlier, becoming a low rumble, the result of lingering fatigue. I didn't want to wear him down or tire him out. He wasn't telling me what had happened between the two of them, but I was uncertain
whether I should interject any questions less I scotch the feeling of the moment. I decided to take the risk.

“Was yours what might be called an
intimate
association?” I asked.

“An intimate
friendship
to be sure.” A pause in such a way that the momentary silence became another species of question. “I understand the direction you are taking. While I don't wish to be coy— and before not very long I will have no further need to be— I can say that such intense fellowship as Pete and I had, during the war especially, often ripens quickly into an ever greater bond. Those are the best friendships, in fact.”

“I have read some of the letters that passed between you that Bucke got from Pete.”

“Well, then you know. In the main, they are not letters on lofty subjects. They are bits of news and what you might call domestic gossip.”

“The Lincoln murder. We know of the happenstance that put Pete in the theater that night. What more did he tell you of it than you were able to make use of for the Lincoln lecture?”

His voice sank further and he coughed and floundered for a few moments. Was it his voice I was overtaxing with these questions, or something else?

Again he sounded growly, but not from meanness. I sensed that he had begun to feel the relief of impending weightlessness, as the secret was about to be lifted from his shoulders.

“Horace, you would have made a fine inquisitive lawyer, just like Tom. I can see how you would break the resolve of an elderly witness, trying to force a confession of guilt but not wishing to appear to be doing so, posing instead as just an honest counselor attempting to get to the bottom of things.” He said this, however, in a wry tone, unmistakable even with his voice in its present condition. “Or a reporter of the very first rank, which I suppose you are.”

I said nothing (a lawyer's trick or a reporter's?), so he was forced to resume.