Walt Whitman's Secret (49 page)

The Brevoort Hotel at Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street is where the leading Whitmanites gather for a dinner each May thirty-first. This time, two hundred people will be celebrating W's centennial, and Horace is determined to be there, however much further damage he might do himself in the process. He knows almost everyone at the tables; from the gossip network that is even more efficient than telegraphy, they know that he is dying. As if to reinforce the point, he eschews the head table and sits at the back, by the door, in case he should have another meeting with the snarling mastiffs.

The event is taking place immediately prior to passage of the
new Espionage Act and the Palmer Raids, in which American citizens such as Emma Goldman are forcibly deported (in her case to Russia, where over the next decade she will lose many of her radical admirers, temporarily at least, by exposing the horrors still taking place there routinely, long after the Revolution). Even that young man named Hoover in the Treasury Department is a few months away from compiling lists of thousands of Reds and radicals. The atmosphere in the country is such that matters similar to these, rather than the literary and spiritual small talk of past years, dominate most of the speeches. Only one guest, someone with whom Horace has corresponded for years but meets now for the first time, speaks with eloquence of W's views on writing and society: Helen Keller. At the apex of the evening there is a lengthy tribute to Horace, who replies to the compliments as best he can, though by now his voice is low and muffled, as though W's voice, as it was at the very end, were being superimposed over his own.

Flora's dedication of the Rock at Bon Echo does not follow hard on the celebrations in May, for she has planned the event for August, one of only two months on the calendar when tourists foreign and domestic can take good weather for granted in that part of Ontario. For Horace, though, this will be the climax of everything. Rough as it is, his manuscript is three-fourths finished, and he has got through the night at the Brevoort without incident. His spirit and mind are peppy even if his corporeal self is not. Some friends headed for the same destination go with him and Anne to Grand Central. Lest any dull-witted people miss the gods' irony, he is wheeled to the platform in what's now simply called a wheelchair. He has a slight heart attack en route to Montreal.

The reason Bon Echo is as unspoiled as Flora's literature promises is that it is terribly remote and difficult to get to. At Windsor Station in Montreal, you leave the Canadian Pacific from New York and take
a westbound train about two hundred and fifty miles to a place called Napanee, which sits a few miles north of Lake Ontario. From there you wait for a train to take you straight north to Kaladar, a distance roughly equal to that between Kaladar and your destination. The country is made of granite, limestone and thin soil, the lakes look cold and deadly. God help the people who farm here, but many do.

In late afternoon on the third day out of New York, Horace and Anne arrive at Flora's rather primitive establishment in an auto from Kaladar driven by another pair of Whitmanites. Flora has decorated the “inn” with a Welcome Home sign and is flying both the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack. Horace writes to Missus Karsner: “Here safe. Tired. Hopeful. I'm yours in all real senses of the spirit. I hope to come back but not so helpless. Can be of more use to you. I recall the hours with you and Dave and the dear child as a furlough in paradise.”

Horace, the soul of affability, performs all the reminiscing that is expected of him. For many of the Whitmanites, and there is a good crowd of them, promising a small profit for Flora, he is the only person they've ever met who was a proven friend of the great man. When he is not earning his supper this way, he is nudging his manuscript to its summation, working either in his room or out on one of the verandas.

Flora is constantly busy as the hostess and manager of the event, but makes time to get to know Anne better. Anne is intelligent and serene and deeply committed to social justice. She is also one of those thin women in whom you can still see the beauty of youth beneath the equal but different beauty of experience. They discuss suffragist issues. In a somewhat patchwork fashion, Canadian women were given the vote partway through the war.

Over the days and weeks, they exchange personal confidences. Flora tells how she went to Detroit when her son, Merrill, was about to be born so that he would be an American citizen, and relates the story of her failed marriage to the boy's father.

“I assume the people in Canada view divorce much as Americans do,” Anne says.

Flora nods assent, but explains how much more difficult it is obtaining a Canadian divorce, what with the King's Proctor and the requirement that a private member's bill be passed as an act of Parliament.

“The failure is always claimed to be the fault of the wife,” Anne says. “Some inadequacy or other, and then she is kept at a distance, viewed with the sort of suspicion that, I suspect, once greeted those vaguely suspected of witchery. But believe me, no sensible woman would blame you in the least. Only moralistic snobs.”

“You and Horace must be a true love match,” says Flora. “To look at the two of you, one would think you stand together on some geological formation like the one this place is built upon.”

Anne smiles, shyly and perhaps a little wanly. “People assume that,” she says, “but there are always compromises to be calculated and weighed. Is an offense that is too big to be overlooked also too big to be forgiven? In the longer run, no. But there are difficult times in every marriage.”

“I find that hard to imagine with the two of you.”

“Oh, the things I could tell you.”

“Please. You know my own failures.”

Anne lets out a miniature sigh, one of fatigue rather than exasperation. “Where can I begin? I have always, as far back as I can remember, been praised for my disposition or temperament or whatever others have wished to call it. I was the best-liked girl in the class.”

Flora immediately forms the familiar image in her mind, though she herself was hardly a person ever singled out for such a distinction.

“I did always smile and try to put others at ease. But what others took to be my great social gift became, at times, more of a curse. I felt that my father, even more so after he became a widower, was
using me as a young business accessory. When he invited associates or rivals to our home, as he seemed to do constantly, I was the hostess. I was there to supply the diverting conversation and poise of which he himself was so obviously incapable. Then, once the meal was polished off, I was expected to withdraw to what our mothers would have called the withdrawing room, leaving fat men to bite off the ends of their equally fat cigars as they got down to serious politicking and capitalizing. The hostess sat alone reading a novel or hid in the kitchen with the cook.”

As she says this, she cannot help but show a bit of the same soothing smile that, by her account, helped give rise to so much misunderstanding and mistrust. “I was in the strange position of being the center of attention that no one took seriously. Walt was the first important intellectual who befriended me, followed by Horace. The three of us became inseparable. Walt became more and more affectionate the closer death approached on tiptoes. I understood that, in looking at me, Walt was looking back on youth (I speak in relative terms of course), casting his eyes over the past as it was and as it might have been. But I did not feel that I was used for strange emotional pleasure. It is too simple, the kind of simple thinking I hate, to say that he needed an imaginary daughter as I needed a replacement father. It was more than that, and less than that.

“Horace was so euphorically happy when, after long months of my being evasive on the subject, I gave in and suggested that we marry— the sooner the better. Well, Walt Whitman was not the only musketeer in our trio to sometimes keep secrets. I trust you, Flora. Trust you to the point that I can tell you what I've never told Horace, not that it matters much now. We had conceived a child, if indeed he or she could be called a child at that first stage of existence, and it— in the circumstances, I think I am more comfortable using the neutral pronoun— died in the womb in a matter of weeks, its father
in ignorance of its existence. Why did I not tell him? Many reasons, I suppose, including concern for how he would have reacted, for he is such an emotional man, you know. Also, concern for what Father might have done if and when he learned of it. To him, the only thing worse than sharing my life with Horace Traubel was to have a child with him out of wedlock. Marriage came to seem an option that would give some comfort to the people involved.

“But the wedding, I must tell you, was ludicrous, though I can see the rich humor in it now. Horace and Walt arranged all the details. Need I say more than this? Well, I suppose I shall. The bedroom on Mickle Street was our chapel. In honor of the occasion Walt had evidently permitted Missus Davis, the housekeeper, to change the linen and make the bed, which he had vacated, probably not without difficulty, for his reading chair only a few feet distant. She had blackened the stove, beaten the rug and washed the windows. She was powerless, however, to do much about Walt's ‘files' beyond throwing out the comparatively recent newspapers. She dared not disturb the order in which the senior papers were piled atop one another, along with all the old letters, documents and manuscripts. She stuffed as many stacks as possible either in the closet or under the bed. Even with this unprecedented tidying, there was scarcely enough space for the guests and us to stand shoulder to shoulder. I did not have a bouquet, but if I had, I could only have handed it to the person next to me as there wouldn't have been enough clearance for me to toss it in the air. The service, which made no reference to any divinity and may not even have mentioned marriage as such, was conducted by a perfectly kind but bumbling man. He was not simply a Unitarian but, I believe, a
lapsing
, or perhaps I should say
col
lapsing, Unitarian, finding the strictures of that sect's virtually nonexistent doctrines too harsh and confining for him to bear. He was dressed like a man applying for a position as a cigar-roller. As he spoke, Horace and Walt
became rather weepy. And then our wedding trip was with Bucke, who not only traveled with us but, once at our destination, followed us everywhere with such overpowering closeness that Horace and I scarcely had a waking second alone together. Such was life with Horace and Walt.

“Despite the concern of my doctor, the second pregnancy, which began not long after I was declared fit, was without incident, and our lovely Gertrude was born a little more than a year after the previous experience and a little less than a year after Walt's death. Horace certainly greeted his daughter's arrival with all the joyous-ness it deserved, but otherwise he wasn't himself after Walt died. Understandably enough, witnessing that slow death at close range every day affected his equilibrium. He was forced to grab life by the coattails lest he undergo a somewhat similar future but without having first lived to the fullest. He was often away in either New York or Boston, especially Boston. When he was not, he still worked through the night. I felt he was meeting someone else or at least trying to avoid me.”

Flora listens closely.

“Sometimes we quarreled. Or rather he attempted to quarrel and I refused to take part. He began giving voice to his resentment that I had never accepted an allowance from Father. ‘Now we have another mouth to feed,' he would say. I grew weary of explaining yet again how any such arrangement would have been a collar and chain stricter than the household budgeting we must practice without it. This argument, which ran like an underground stream, out of sight but gurgling sometimes, ended when Father was ruined, absolutely and completely, down to selling the house and all its contents, in the great Panic of Ninety-three. It seems he had every cent of his money, what he had made or inherited plus whatever he could borrow, invested in railroad and bank stocks. When the railroads began
failing, there were runs on the banks, many of which closed. Some men caught in the situation killed themselves. Father did not, though I cannot but conclude that the humiliation of his newfound poverty hastened his own end.

“I was expecting once again while the Panic unfolded, and Horace's anxiety grew. Little Wallace Traubel, named after our friend the Whitmanite from Bolton in England, was underweight at birth, and was always a sickly child. We were both devastated, as you might imagine, for I cannot describe the extent of such sorrow, when dear little Wally was carried away by scarlet fever shortly before what would have been his fifth birthday.

“My response was a great aching of the spirit that went on and on. Horace's reaction was rather different: he went and had a child by another woman. When I learned of this, he suggested in effect that such was his right. Those were not his words but that was his meaning. He was distraught and not himself at all. We came to terms with the situation in time.”