Walt Whitman's Secret (48 page)

“Flora,” he says, “I'll be at Bon Echo and do anything you want me to do next year except make a speech.”

She hopes that she can get him to give any number of addresses or lectures, if he is well enough to be present at all and, if so, well enough to speak.

Anne tries to alter Horace's unhealthy existence but cannot. Typically he sleeps only four hours out of twenty-four and spends eighteen writing and editing at his small dark office in Philadelphia. The place is in and of itself unhealthy, a rat's warren of obsolete pieces of paper, including a great many of the very same ones that littered 328 Mickle Street decades earlier. Usually he does not eat with Anne and Gertrude at the house on Elm Street in Camden but snatches a bite at a cheap and brightly illuminated little place before heading back down to the ferry a couple of blocks away. Philadelphia and the other large cities have many more all-night diners than places like Camden possess. In any event, he doesn't eat on a fixed schedule. Indeed he is reminded of the necessity to eat only when the rumbling of his stomach threatens his concentration. As the Traubels have next to no money, Gertrude wears second-hand clothing, Anne shops at the day-old counter of Camden's biggest bakers— and Horace will seek out one of the places (it hardly matters which) patronized by taxi-men, soiled doves, coppers, and workers setting out for another day on the seven-to-three shift or just coming off the eleven-to-seven. He will carefully read the menu cards, correcting typographical errors when he finds them, and order the largest amount of the cheapest offering that the coins in his pocket will provide. He has had many a fine meal whose various courses have all been bean or barley soup, a little watery but excellent for the purpose when consumed in volume.

When he was fifty, he prided himself on having much the same blooming vitality as W crowed about so loudly in his earliest poems.
But gradually the situation began to change. In O-nine, while crossing back to Camden on the ferry, he was knocked off his feet by a nervous horse. The frightened animal trampled him, breaking a number of his ribs. While hardly so severe a misfortune as W's initial brain-attack of Seventy-three, the incident has the same power to foretell the direction the future will take. Horace was a suspiciously long time recovering, with Anne nursing him at home as he chafed to return to his office. From that point forward, he has never had full confidence that his body isn't planning something else. So there is at least a bit of relief to be found amid all the dread and fear when, in the year the European war breaks out, he is found to have a leaky valve in his heart.

As he recuperates, Anne tries to keep him from seeing the newspapers, thinking that the news is terribly bad for him, as the war has defeated all hope of a peaceful Socialist world. But his friends visit constantly and they recount and recite the day's events. Soon, how ever, some of these same visitors are being hounded by the authorities.

Almost out of the blue, one evening he says to Anne, “If Father were still alive, he'd probably be rounded up as a German-born radical, though he never harmed a soul in his life.”

In one way, it is perhaps all to the good that Horace will not be around to share in the strange triumph of his friend Eugene Debs. Debs is the unionist agitator sent to prison in Ninety-four on a charge of inciting the great Pullman strike that paralyzed all railroad traffic west of Chicago. He served his sentence in Moundsville, one of the most hellish prisons in the country, but was at least permitted to do some reading and writing there, and made himself a crude desk for his cell.

Debs has been the Socialist candidate for president of the United States in 1900, 1904, 1908 and 1912. Horace and his circle are proud when, in 1918, Debs makes a speech urging American men to avoid the
draft. They are horrified when, in retaliation, he is tried under the Espionage Act and sent to the Atlanta penitentiary. In 1920, while incarcerated there, he runs for the presidency again, as a write-in candidate. In the country of fifty-four million people, he receives an astounding 913,664 votes, a feat made possible partly by the fact that this is the first national election in which women enjoy the franchise. Horace does not live to see this.

America has waited out the first part of the war until Britain, Canada, Australia, France and others weaken the Germans at staggering costs to themselves. But then in 1917 the U.S. enters the conflict for the final phase. The exact cause and effects are of course impossible to state scientifically, but Anne believes that this development is what has made her husband's heart condition not only recur, not only worsen, but become permanent.

Washington enlists itself in the war in April and Horace has a heart attack in June that very nearly kills him. A coincidence? Horace is alone at the time, for Anne and Gertrude have gone to New York to finalize arrangements for Gertrude's wedding, scheduled to take place there two days later. One day after the heart episode, Horace is feeling strong enough to put in another all-night appearance at the office. When his stomach reproaches him for neglect, he eats a big plate of beans at a lunch-room he knows, where he has a lively but disturbing discussion about the war with the waiter, a German who has lost two brothers in the fighting. Then he catches the ferry, only to discover when he gets to Camden that he has just missed the last streetcar. The night is clear and warm, so he decides to walk. Late that evening, he has a second attack similar to the first. Breathing becomes quite difficult and he suddenly finds himself so weak that his arms remain at his sides.

His friend David Karsner, who is the biographer of Debs, has been staying at Elm Street the past little while, and the following day the
two men leave for the ceremony in New York, Karsner convinced that his comrade has had another heart attack but Horace refusing to entertain the idea, much less admit how damaging it was. Looking back, Karsner and Anne will find it incredible that Horace survived the trip. He does his clearest thinking when away from home. So when visiting New York he is able to sort out his honest thoughts. There he comes to terms with the terror he has been trying to avoid and realizes that when the Traubels return home, he must go to Philadelphia and close his office. Shut the place down. Turn out the lights. Lock the door.

Thus it comes about that he takes his seat at the desk for a final time, and spends a couple of hours letting various Mickle Street relics find their place in his hands. He allows his mind to play over the course of his relationship with W, applying clear reasoning, he hopes, to the question of to what extent, and how and why, his own life was changed forever by their association.

The overwhelming majority of his Mickle Street notes aren't written up yet but still sit, and most probably will forever do so, in these cabinets and cartons, wherever they may end up. If he is going to truly follow W's example, he too must be a seeker after truth. With whatever writing energy might remain to him— perhaps more will come once he has rested for a significant period— he will begin a memoir of everything he still remembers but deliberately has never committed to paper. He doesn't know how long such a document will be, only that, given the actuarial circumstances that prevail, it must be written quickly; but then he always has been a fast writer, as, in his experience, authors who work through the night usually are. Whether such a thing could be published, at least during what remains of his own lifetime, or perhaps ever, who knows? That will depend on whether tolerance ever returns to America or continues to be chipped away. Perhaps for that reason one of the Canadians or
the English should become its guardian. In any case, it should go to someone who loves what W stood for but never made his acquaintance, a natural teacher but a discreet person all the same, someone who is a confident personality without being a censorious or condemnatory individual, someone who might be willing to accept the truth and then understand it— and proceed from there in one fashion or another, basing decisions on whatever conditions may be current at the time. He settles on Flora MacDonald. So resolving, he packs up whatever material he knows he will need to freshen his memory, making a note to have it delivered across the river. Then he takes one last panoramic look at the old place, pulls the chain that operates the green-shaded lamp overhead, and makes his way back to the ferry with the most prudent and conservative slowness.

Month after month, he takes it easy physically while building up the muscles of the mind. Most of the words come easily enough once he gets into the swim, but the actual act of composition is tiring, particularly as his eyesight is now poor and he must write less quickly than in the past and in a large hand. He works an hour a day, possibly an hour and a half. He has made very substantial progress by the time the leaves have fallen from the trees and the winter of 1918–19 approaches.

When he needs another big shot of new surroundings to get him through the wrenching details of W's own last illnesses and diseases, he and Anne accept an invitation to visit radical friends in Connecticut. There another attack strikes him, one the doctors are convinced comes closer to stopping his heart altogether than the previous ones combined. He has walked with a slight limp to his left leg ever since that horse fell on him, and the latest heart episode had made the stiffness
more pronounced. He must now drag the leg behind him as he pulls himself forward with a cane, this man who used to race up several flights of stairs to reach the office, for the building has no elevator. His mind goes back to Doctor Bucke's crippled limb, and this helps him remember still more. Despite the fact he is getting far less exercise, he loses weight rather than gains it. Perhaps this is the effect of his diet. The doctors back in Camden all tell him that he must ask the heart to carry around as light a load as possible without becoming so thin as to compromise his system in some new way.

Two important tasks remain. He and Anne move to New York for a few weeks to bask in the presence of their infant grandson and lift some of the burden from the boy's parents, Gertrude Traubel Aalholm and her husband, Malcolm Aalholm, both musicians. They move into a rooming-house on West Twentieth, around the corner from the Aalholms. A week into their stay there, Horace suffers— no one knows what to call it. Not a heart attack in the sense of pain or even discomfort, nothing to do with the left side as distinct from the right, but just a sudden and deep weakness that leaves him facing a new level of disability. His mind, however, remains vigorous. His manuscript moves forward.

He and Anne accept the kind invitation to share the Karsner living quarters, the basement and ground floor of an apartment building on Beekman Place, right on the East River. Horace is delighted to be able to write at the very desk that Debs made in prison. It occupies pride of place in the front room, where Horace can look out directly onto the life of the river and the Brooklyn waterfront in the distance. The similarities between past and present are becoming eerie. Worse than eerie— frightening. Especially at night when he lies in bed next to Anne, when fear of dying in his sleep keeps him awake, and alive, until some force delivers another morning right on schedule. Writing through lameness and weakness, always fearful of new outrages
against his body yet accepting of them as well, remembering the old days, seeing Brooklyn when his eyes open and likewise when they shut, thinking about the war, he wonders whether some angel, or devil, has taken hold of him, forcing him to end his own days as W ended his. The room actually looks a bit like Mickle Street, except that it's clean and neat as a pin. In whose past is he being held prisoner, his own or the other person's?

He even finds himself beginning to sound much more like W than he had years ago when he used to consciously attempt such mimicry, producing an approximation of the strange juxtaposing of suspicion and admiration that W himself so often provoked in people of both classes. For example, the verb
to freeload.
The Traubels are acutely aware of freeloading on the Karsners, and embarrassed by it. One day, after the freeloading enters its fourth week, Horace is playing with Walta Whitman Karsner, who is three going on four, when without warning the feral dogs attack once again and bite into his heart with their sharp white teeth. But he survives one more time. Barely, but he survives.