Walt Whitman's Secret (47 page)

I had to go over to Philadelphia again to meet with Doctor Longaker and Doctor Cattell, and was surprised to learn that W had given permission in December, when he so very nearly died, for a post-mortem examination to be performed in the name of scientific inquiry. Why had he told me nothing of the matter? George objected strenuously when he too learned of this for the first time, and continued with his protests throughout the day. The formal instructions of the deceased, however, trumped the wishes of the next of kin, and the autopsy convened in the back parlor at about supper time. I was present in my familiar rôle as amanuensis, writing down Doctor Cattell's commentary as he
spoke it. Doctors McAlister and Longaker were part of the team as well. Also present at least some of the time was the undertaker, a man named Simmons, who had brought the body down from the bedroom on a stretcher and transferred it to a mortuary table that had been carried in once all the normal furniture had been removed. Also there in the beginning was a reporter from the
Camden Post
, who rejected common decency to the extent that I had to have him thrown out. My numbness of spirit was evidently lessening, or my awareness of its cause finally affecting me, for I had a difficult time controlling my feelings, not to mention my stomach.

W was stretched out neatly with his arms at his sides, a cloth draped across his loins. I was suddenly reminded of the unclothed photo graph that Eakins had made for the purposes of art study. I kept thinking of Doctor Osler as well, for he had long been one of the most important advocates of autopsies. I once read that he had personally performed well over eight hundred of them just in the years when he taught in Montreal, long before moving to Baltimore and thence London.

The tools and other instruments being used were terrible to see and to hear, and their effects far worse. The doctors sawed around the upper portion of the skull, its entire circumference, and extracted the brain, which was placed in a gupsack brought along for that purpose. Except for being slightly deficient in weight, due to age and illness, it did not, on cursory inspection, seem abnormal. So I was told, and so I duly wrote in the note-book I had been given. When the chest and abdomen were opened and spread apart, the remarkable things to be seen there were obscure to none of the medical men. W's left lung had collapsed like a punctured bellows and the right one, they estimated with apparent precision, had been performing at only sixteen per cent of its intended volume. Abscesses had deformed some of the bones in the chest, and small hard protuberances called tubercles were visible in the stomach, intestines and liver. A stone
almost filled the space inside the gall bladder. Oddly, his heart, which W thought was betraying him as well, had been the soundest part of him. It weighed nine ounces.

I wrote all this down, but the jottings I turned over to the doctors at the end of nearly four hours were fragmentary and telegraphic and full of words such as
oedematous
and
athermatous
whose proper spellings I did not know, much less their meanings. Nonetheless my notes, written as legibly as I possibly could make them when working so quickly, provided a kind of outline for the write-up done by the doctors who later subscribed their names to it. This final report made some remarkable statements about W's physical tenacity that seemed to complement what those of us who knew him best had always seen reflected in his spirit. If I may, let me quote from their findings. “The cause of death was pleurisy of the left side, consumption of the right lung, general miliary tuberculosis and parenchymatous nephritis.” I'm not certain precisely what the last of these is. The document went on to opine that any other man “would have died much earlier with one half of the pathological changes” that W had endured for so long.

The organs that had been removed, all except the brain I mean, were placed together in the chest cavity, and the incision that was the trap door to the body's mysteries was stitched closed. I then readmitted Simmons the undertaker to begin performing his own magical work.

The viewing was held at 328 Mickle Street, and thousands of people snaked their way along the sidewalk in a line-up that extended around the corner. I was later told that one of those slowly shuffling past the coffin was Pete Doyle. He had at first been turned away by a policeman engaged in managing the crowd but had made it inside and solemnly walked through with all the others. I don't know why he should have been singled out that way unless he had arrived too late or was being belligerent or was acting otherwise disturbed.

During the entombment ceremony at Harleigh Cemetery, Burroughs nudged me and directed my eyes to a little hilltop nearby where a solitary figure stood, holding a switch from a tree, swishing it back and forth absent-mindedly.

“Peter Doyle,” he said.

I would not have recognized him from the old photographs, for he had grown much heavier. As we were returning to the city, we saw him again, strolling along the road, still with the switch in his hand. We stopped the carriage so that Burroughs could renew their acquaintance and I could be introduced. At closer range, it struck me that his entire physiognomy had undergone some fundamental alteration that gave him the general appearance of a splendidly moustachioed Irish bartender who had recently come to know a modest degree of prosperity. I later learned that he was working for yet another railroad and was active in the Elks club and the United Confederate Veterans. He was not unpleasant but had little enthusiasm for saying much, and seemed unmoved by his old comrade's end. Perhaps his own numbness of spirit had not begun to wear off. Who can say? Certainly not I.

   
EIGHTEEN
   

F
LORA
M
AC
D
ONALD HAS
long been divorced from Howard Denison of Detroit when Horace encounters her at a Toronto dinner party in 1916. Even at this first meeting, in the home of some fellow Whitman disciples, they address each other by their first names. Such is the common practice among the small but incessantly vocal group of Whitmanites, anti-monarchists, Socialists, single-taxers, theosophists, atheists, spiritualists, communalists and Americanized cranks who, if you were to see them in a shopping crowd on King Street, would be indistinguishable from normal God-fearing Canadians, the ones who march in the Orange parade and read the
Evening Telegram
, atop whose front page every day sits an engraving of the Union Jack, unfurled and benevolent.

Nonetheless, in the early years of their acquaintance Horace always calls her Missus Denison when speaking of her to others. She learns of this but never corrects him. Such usage does not contradict her suffragist beliefs or even the democratic principles implicit in the use of forenames (advanced people do not endorse the term
Christian name
). No one can quite explain why she is so forgiving, except to say that Horace, whom she has long hoped to meet, is one of the last important links to the living human being who wrote the immortal
Leaves
, in the pages of which a new generation has found validation for its every
cockamamie belief. Even if he were not the last, Horace would still be one of the most important. Knowing the man who was Walt's closest confidant for the final three and a half years is suffused with special meaning. How could one possibly explain this to other Canadians except by saying that it is analogous to meeting Paul of Tarsus?

Horace compliments the hostess on the “damn nice spread” with its damn nice vegetables and such, and Flora immediately sizes him up. With his casual tweed clothing and his wild white hair and droopy white moustache, he is obviously, she believes, a gentleman of learning and European refinement who nonetheless has so embraced the memory of his late spirit-father that he revels in the use of slang, with all its inherent democratizing.

“I have heard Mark Twain speak and know what real cursing is,” she later tells her local Whitman group, one of the most active of the many such organizations. “It is usually a way for the speaker to show his disdain for the listener. Horace's was just the opposite.”

Following the dinner, he offers to walk her home to Carlton Street so that he can hear more about Bon Echo, the resort property she has acquired in the eastern part of Ontario. She had been a private dressmaker, it seems, but later became head of the ladies' custom-tailoring salon at the Robert Simpson Company departmental store at Yonge and Queen streets. She still finds it necessary, however, to do a certain amount of dressmaking at her residence. She needs the extra money because Bon Echo costs her slightly more in taxes and the manager's wages than it returns in fees from campers. Hence her plan to turn the place into a permanent memorial to Walt, as outlined at dinner. As it isn't making money anyway, it should be made to serve a higher purpose. Who knows but that in time it might prove self-supporting or even turn a small profit, as the number of Whitman pilgrims will only grow as his spiritual doctrines seep even more deeply into the texture of society, as she believes is beginning to be the case.

They stroll through the wartime streets. At one point a constable walking the beat approaches from the opposite direction, and Horace tenses a bit. But when he gets closer, the policeman says, “It's a nice night” as he passes them by, not taking them for radicals but only as an elderly gent and his somewhat younger companion.

At Carlton Street, they sit and talk in the front room for hours. She describes the property generally and Mazinaw Rock in particular. This is a granite outcropping cast up by the glaciers. It is more than a mile long and, at its zenith, three hundred feet high, accessible by small boat on Mazinaw Lake, which laps demurely at its base.

“It was a sacred place to the Indians,” she says. “You can see their paintings of beasts and birds, hundreds of them, faintly on the steep granite face.”

Horace nods approvingly. He remembers how, when Walt was a government clerk in Washington, he actually saw genuine Indian chiefs, in their full ceremonial get-up; they had come in from the West on treaty business. Walt always regarded himself as a commiserative white man. This connection would make Horace even more sympathetic, as though greater sympathy were wanted, with Flora's wish to, as she explains at length, dedicate the Rock to Walt on the occasion of the centenary of his birth, in 1919, and eventually to build a Whitman Library there where scholars and ordinary enlightened people could come to study and reflect.

“Flora, go right ahead,” he says at the close of the evening, while warning her of the obstacles in her path. “You will be up against snaps,” he says, taking silent delight in keeping alive one of Walt's terms for his many critics. “Your best friends will desert you or be indifferent to your work.”

He sounds as though he is speaking from long and bitter experience gained while spreading the Whitman gospel.

“But go right ahead, and I will help you,” he continues. “Why, the whole thing is magnificent. Canada's Gibraltar a monument to Walt! Don't let anything switch you.”

She gives him gifts to take back to his wife and their daughter, Gertrude.

Later she receives a warm note of thanks from Anne that makes her feel as though they are already friends and confidantes, as indeed turns out, magically, to be the case when they meet the following year at the annual Whitman Dinner held in New York on May thirty-first, the great man's birthday.

Over the years, Horace has spent many short periods in Canada without being able to explain exactly why but only to note that the country, slowly and eventually, gripped his imagination as it had Walt's, though Walt supposed it to be a natural paradise unspoiled by industry and Horace likes it for its cities. He has even holed up in Montreal to do some of his writing.

It is August 1918, four years exactly into the Great War that in Europe is being fought against the Germans but in America is being fought against dissent, and less than a year since the Bolshevik revolution of which Horace excitedly approves. He is in Hamilton, Ontario, a place that he thinks has some characteristics in common with Camden, visiting a Whitmanite couple there who are old friends of his. Flora arrives after a very brief train ride from Toronto to share in his company but is shocked, horribly shocked, when she lays eyes on him again. Horace is ill— sallow-looking, with a slight yellow cast; cheeks sunken; somewhat hesitant and stooped in his movement. She tries to keep from betraying her concern, because Horace himself is speaking as though nothing is amiss.