Walt Whitman's Secret (7 page)

A fortnight later, “the affidant, Peter Doyle, further states on oath that he joined the Fayette Artillery (Capt. Cabbell's company), on the 25th day of April, 1861, and that he does not intend to acquire
a permanent residence in the Confederate States of America and that he intends to return to his native country (Ireland), as soon as an opportunity will afford his doing so. Sworn and Subscribed to me this 31st day of Octr. 1862.”

Four others from his unit, including Poitras, a Canadian, and Baccigal, from Sardinia, receive discharges as aliens. Pete's attempt too works like a charm, the way lies frequently do. Thirty-five others desert. Pete is out of the army by the time those who remain fight at Fredericksburg, where George Whitman gets his wound from a fragment of a Southern artillery shell. Pete, with a bad fever, is in a hospital in Richmond when, having failed to leave Virginia as promised, he is arrested as a deserter. Four months after that, he has quit the South for Washington when he is again arrested, by Union troops this time, for “entering & attempting to enter our lines, from the insurgent states, without a permit from the Federal authorities,” him a penniless and benighted subject of Her Majesty, whom he despises, a refugee fleeing the war. The British legation asks William Seward, whom most Americans hate worse than Pete hates the Queen, to investigate. The judge advocate rules that Pete is one of a number in the Old Capitol Prison who are “poor Irishmen who fled from Richmond to avoid starvation [and] will not take oath of allegiance, but will give sworn parole,” which they do.

Pete gets work as a blacksmith's helper at the Washington Navy Yard. His brother Francis, whom he lives with now on M Street in the Island section, home of immigrants and freed Negroes, was a smith at the yard earlier in the war but is now in the Union forces. After the war, he becomes a Washington cop, dedicated to keeping an eye on miscreants like Pete. The yard is where the ironclad
Monitor
is fitted and launched. Their father, who helps armor the
Merrimack
at the Tredegar works in Richmond, soon disappears, presumed drowned en route to New York, presumed dead drunk in a gutter somewhere,
presumed anything you like, but indisputably absent. Eventually, most all the surviving Doyles end up in Washington, city of brothels and pawnshops, whiskey stews and gambling hells, pickpockets and profiteers, cradle of democracy.

To hear Walt tell it, any year qualifies as his worst one ever, but 1863 is different in that his problems, and they are genuine, are psychological as well as physical. He ardently hopes he will not have to continue past the Spring in the Army Paymaster's Office, but even intercession by powerful acquaintances does not shoehorn him into another position. He is shocked finally to realize just what a thick crust of prejudice has formed around his name and his
Leaves.
He finds that what takes place in the hospitals is heartbreaking. Having a crush on a nineteen-year-old Rebel in the wards does not prevent him from being choked with emotion when a Union sergeant he has nursed returns to the fighting. Walt writes to the sergeant often. “My love you have in life or death forever.” But he seldom receives a response. Such is the disadvantage of young men. They are callous. If this were the future and there were telephones, they would promise to phone you the next day but never follow through.

When the hot weather comes, living in Washington is like being suffocated with a wet pillow. At the same time, the president, for reasons having to do with the pressure, the weather and the first lady, cannot stand to be in the Executive Mansion longer than necessary, and every evening when he can do so rides to the Soldiers' Home just outside the city, accompanied by only a few troopers. Their sabers are drawn and the scabbards jingle at their sides in answer to the clicking of hooves. Walt comes upon the scene by chance on Fourteenth Street as he is leaving the office for his rooming house. He gets quite
a good look at the president in his tall hat, mounted on a gray mare that must be sixteen or seventeen hands high. No horse, however, will ever seem in the right proportion to him. He looks overwhelmingly sad: the face with its rugosity, the eyes with their mournfulness, everything. Without quite admitting to himself that he is doing so, Walt contrives to be at the same spot every day at the same time, even if he has to rush through paperwork or slow his pace once he's picked up his hat to go. The president is robust, virile, manly, strong— almost supernaturally strong, with the long knurled muscles of a wrestler or a wolf. Yet vulnerable, compassionate, bereft, beset by trouble that words can never convey as well as his face does.

The president grows accustomed to seeing the white-bearded gent standing on the pavement. The president has received a literal drawerful of mortal threats, some dating back to well before the inauguration. He does not fear the persons who write such letters, and there is certainly no need to fear the man on Fourteenth Street, for he is merely a particular example of a large species, like a bird one gets to know in the woods or a fish one has come to expect seeing in the pond. Sometimes, as he trots past, the president touches the brim of his absurdly high hat in silent greeting and the man in the plain rough suit and the whiskers like white stalactites returns the courtesy, lifting the sloucher off his old pink head until the president and his little blue toy soldiers have passed by.

It is the summer of Gettysburg and the hospitals reek in the heat. There's only so much good that gifts of tobacco, fruit juices and playing cards can do. A few of Walt's network of donors begin to waver in their generosity as new rumors reach them of the poet's immoral propensities.

Walt's family problems refuse settlement, especially at long distance. In the Autumn he gets his hair cut and his beard pruned back— he looks like a different person now, years closer to his true age— and
goes to the Executive Mansion to ask the president's secretary, a well-known dispenser of alms, for railroad passes so that he can return to New York to assist his brother Andrew, who is dying of throat cancer, his brother Jesse, whose mental condition, never strong, continues to deteriorate apace, and a third brother, Eddie, who labors under physical as well as mental handicaps and must live with their elderly mother, a strong woman but feeling much put-upon by the tragedies of life, the personal, individual ones that have nothing to do with politics or the news. While in the outer office talking with young Mister Hay, the secretary, Walt catches a glimpse of the president behind a partially open door, talking to a much shorter man, his head lowered, holding a sheaf of papers at his side, before stepping out of sight across the room, slowly but with the enormous stride of those obviously powerful thighs. That night Walt records in his journal that the president's face is “inexpressibly sweet.” He goes on to say, “I love the president personally.”

New York is a familial hell. His one consolation is the opera, in which he immerses himself.
Il Travatore, Lucrezia Borgia, La Sonnambula.

Pete's own family troubles are many and complex. Some have to do with the Almighty, others with the Devil. In response to the simpler ones, arising from nothing more complicated than poverty, Pete takes on a second job. At night, after his shift at the yard ends, he reports to work at the Washington and Georgetown Railroad. The horse-cars run along Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol. One evening in that Winter of 1864, when winds are slamming rain sideways against the coach, a passenger climbs aboard and pays his nickel. His hat and clothes are soaked, and he has an army blanket draped over his coat for added warmth. He takes a seat in the middle on the right-hand
side and drips water on the velvet. He sports white whiskers. He keeps eyeing Pete as though he knows him from somewhere, or wants to. Pete thinks: Looks familiar. From the army? No, he seems “like an old sea-captain.” The man is sitting so near the oil lamp that its red globe gives his face a rosy tinge. “He was the only passenger, it was a lonely night, so i tought i'd go in and talk with im. Somethin in me made me want to do it and something in him drew
him
that way. He used to say there was somethin in me that had the same effect on im. Anyway, I went into the car. We were familiar at once— I put my hand on his knee. We understood. He did not get out at the end of the trip. In fact, went all the way back with Me.”

They arrange to talk more another time. Pete doesn't read much, and when, later, he opens Walt's book, the copy Walt has given him, he's unable to make out what the Hell the author is trying to do and therefore doesn't know whether he's succeeded. He's a bit better with the prose pieces in the newspapers, but of the
Leaves
he can't make heads or tails. But when Walt talks! How the words pour out of his mouth like thick erotic syrup. He could almost be Irish. Pete wants to know everything about Walt and Walt wants to know everything about Pete.

Hard to say who is the more vulnerable, the prison-scarred Rebel deserter living in the enemy capital or the poet of freedom who's the slave of his own infatuations. Early indications are that for Walt this is a much deeper attraction, far beyond adhesiveness. Love makes him feel manly, healthy too: illusions, of course, he knows, for he is in fact unwell, as he has picked up many bad humors at the hospitals. The illusions, however, are necessary ones seeing that his emotions are so thinly stretched already. He has watched, through a door ajar at Armory Square, as a dear young soldier-friend has a limb amputated, and has tended him quietly through the long recovery. He is even more confident that the war will end soon as the glorious General
Grant pursues the president's angelic mission, the noblest one ever devised in These States, that of holding said States together. But while this may be, the maiming and suffering and death must continue, and he must continue to live surrounded by it all.

He crosses over into the pacified part of Virginia, visiting the hospitals there, which are places to store the wounded temporarily until the goods can be freighted to Washington, mother of the Republic, the most heavily fortified spot on Earth, people say. For weeks he even camps with troops in the field, the not yet wounded and the not yet dead. Later he goes to hear a famous spiritualist, wondering, at the back of his mind, whether there might in fact be some way to receive messages from all the young men whose cots have suddenly become free after a quick scuffle with the angels in the middle of the night or simply from defeat of a spirit weakened by pain and a broken heart. He would like to believe, but he cannot.

He realizes with greater and greater certainty just how the hospital visits are affecting his own health more and more. He complains to himself and others of poor circulation, tingling sensations in his fingers, toes and reproductive extremities, and mysterious headches that seem to come from the center of the brain, not the front or the temples. In time, the doctors can see what is becoming of him. They order him to stay out of the hospitals until he has recovered. Some days war and family are not separate things. Rebels in his bloodstream are in a secessionist frame of mind.

Every day the evening papers are full of war news, some of it accurate. An item says that George Whitman's regiment, the Fifty-first New York, will pass through the city with the rest of General Burnside's army. Walt stands among the parade watchers for three hours as the current of blue uniforms ripples past, on and on to the point where people might suspect that the head of the column had circled the city block in a flanking maneuver, forming a continuous
loop. But no, the regimental flags are always different. Then he sees one such flag, for the good old Fifty-first, and there he is, George, flushed with sunburn though it is not yet May and looking perfectly hale. Fortunately, he is marching at the head of his rank and Walt rushes out to surprise him. He walks along at his brother's side, keeping pace but staying out of step, and brings him up to date on news from home, none of it particularly refreshing. Walt tires, but the marching does not. He clutches George's right hand in farewell and soon the two sets of fingers slip away from each other and the army pushes on, disappearing up the street as though into a tunnel.