Walt Whitman's Secret (8 page)

“Tell me about the men in your life before me.”

Walt is surprised, for he would never make the same demand of Pete, who for all his general cockiness is most guarded about his own affections. His actions always speak more loudly than his words, for he lives in the sway of the present moment, not the stillness of the past.

“They have been several. More than a couple but fewer than a multitude.”

The two men are in Walt's room in a boarding-house on Pennsyl vania Avenue close to Third Street where he has relocated, believing that a change of environment might do him good, not to mention regular meals of better food.

“All right, who was the first one? Start with him.” Pete says this in a tease.

“The first important one was a driver.” Walt is actually skipping a few decades here, not letting on that he is transposing Pete's immediate predecessor to a point far back in time.

“You fancy all the drivers, don't you?” Pete is smiling. He has a fine smile, though his teeth are in poor repair.

“Pete, I swear it, you are the individual and not the symbol, yet I can't deny the suggestion. Transportation-men are the most modern. They're always heading westward, for that is the way the roads, the rails and even many of the greatest rivers ultimately run. They see life as it is to-day and see it up close and at first hand, not through a gauze curtain. They see it in bright sunlight. On the other hand, they— maybe I should be saying you, all of you— remind me of the ancients, the Greeks, how they take things at their ease and are robust.”

Pete sees that stevedores, deckhands, carters, brakemen and teamsters do have something in common, but the talk about Greeks eludes him, its meaning undisturbed.

“What was his name?” Pete has the fingers of his left hand on Walt's upper thigh and is mimicking a piano player's motions on the keyboard.

“It's now long in the past.”

In fact, though, Fred Vaughan up in New York has written letters to Walt until just a little while ago, usually moaning that he so seldom receives a reply. Still, his letters have been full of good humor. In Sixty, when a Boston publishing concern took on Walt and his plans for a bigger edition of
Leaves
, relieving him of the chore of selling his own book, he tells Fred of his plan to go up there for a couple of months to see the work through the press. In response comes a letter back offering suggestions. “If you want to form the acquaintance of any Boston Stage men, get one of the stages running to Charlestown Bridge, or Chelsea Ferry, & inquire for Charley Hollis or Ed Morgan, mention my name, and introduce yourself as my friend.” The Boston publisher went bankrupt the following year and the plates of the greatly expanded
Leaves
were acquired by a notorious book-pirate. Recently Fred has been writing again, not knowing that Pete has appeared on the horizon and indeed now consumes the foreground,
like a big tall figure taking up all the space in a narrow doorway. Walt neglects to respond even more adamantly than in the past.

Fred is from Canada. Eventually, after many long years in America, he will return home. He will marry there, only to grow restless and footloose in his native jurisdiction and die in a place called Vancouver, a town too new to have history but only opinions.

Pete becomes still more mischievous. “Was his robertson as good a thing as my own?” he asks, looking down at himself. Pete's dick is not long but nonetheless enormously thick even in repose, nearly the circumference of a silver half-dollar.

“I'll not answer that,” Walt replies. “But I have had the sad duty to give bed baths and such to many a young man in the hospitals. I may very likely have seen more phalluses than the majority of doctors, and while some are sweet and others sassy, none is more outstanding than your own.”

Pete purses his lips in satisfaction, receiving the compliment for what it is: generous but not exaggerated.

Having already told Walt to keep away from the wards until his own health is more certain, the doctors suggest he go north where there are no noxious swamps and where, by seeing that the other Whitmans are all right, he might relieve at least one major source of the anxiety that has caused him to become so run-down. The nurse who has now in effect become a patient has hesitated, undecided as to what he should do. The fighting is intense, the reports in the papers still horrifying. If George should be wounded again, would he not be sent to the capital once more? Walt should be there for him. And yet the family is coming apart. Jeff is all right, always has been. But Andrew is in the grave now, Eddie the slow one still lives with
Mother, and Jesse is not right in the head either, just as before, except that now he is prey to violent outbursts against Mother and Jeff's daughter (who is called Hattie because her full name, supplied by Uncle Walt, is Mannahatta). Jeff wants Jesse committed but Mother does not, just as she also holds out against confining Eddie (who thus runs free until her death). Jeff writes Walt asking for his support in the Jesse matter. In the circumstances, the boys' sister Hannah, living in Vermont with her husband, a painter, refuses even to come near Brooklyn. For her part, Mary, the other sibling, seems strangely sane though she resides at Greenport, not far away from the scene of the chaos.

When Walt tells Pete he must go to Brooklyn, not sure for how long, the news is not well received.

“God d— n you,” Pete says. “What would you have me do? i've got family too and a work that goes a long way toward keeping em fed and shod. i can't go running off. But then i suppose you understand as much, don't you? Will you forsake my affections for them you get from other people?”

There's no talking sense with him. Walt slowly repeats his reasoning about the doctors, Mother, brothers and sisters, the soldiers in the hospitals. The discussion, if it be called that, continues late and keeps returning to its place of origin, like some elliptical river unknown to the science of geography. Walt can barely concentrate, given developments. It is as though the pair of them are part of some company of touring actors in which assigned parts are performed by different members of the troupe in different cities on certain days of the week. Despite the roughness of his manner and speech, Pete is not usually the demonstrative one but most often the jaunty one who goes along. But now he's moved from being a playful and only sometimes slightly troublesome dog to being a snarling, unpredictable one, gums drawn back to reveal sharp teeth. “I've given you
everythin i got to give,” he says, “and you treat me like i'm an irish serf boy who don't have to be spoken to about important matters.” And a little later: “You just want to climb up on the tops of omnibuses! I know you. Who knows better than Me? That's what i say, old fool.”

All this while Pete tramps the room, scraping chair legs against the floor, and at one point, but only one, banging his left fist on the wallpaper. He is like a little boiler letting off steam so it won't build up pressure to the point where it ruptures. “Eternal damnation!”

Walt thinks to say that, although the Doyles live so close by, he doesn't really know them any more than Pete knows his own relations up in Brooklyn. But he stops himself. That could lead to accusations that each is so ashamed of his love for the other that he thinks it best if family members are never introduced into the life the two of them have together. Besides, Walt is always so weary now and sometimes too deficient in spirit to climb out of his gloom. Pete's anger will pass, he knows, but his own mood appears to show no sign of elevation. Sometimes he feels a bit angry even with himself. But then he is low-down all over. So much so that he entertains unfriendly thoughts that he does not even bother trying to express yet is somehow pleased to have at hand. They at least prove that he's still capable of normal animation.

At length Pete stalks off home. The two don't meet again before Walt boards the train for New York in a few days' time. Walt writes a note of reconciliation, reiterating his deep affection for the greatest and closest of all his comarados down through the years. But he doesn't post it, concluding that the better course is to let time work its wonders. He hopes that a temper that comes up without warning will withdraw with equal quickness.

In Walt's absence, Pete's anger finds expression in behavior rather than words. He goes for angry strolls in President's Park close by the
Executive Mansion, where indeed the president does take some air from time to time in the afternoons before darkness gives the place a different character, a different complexion. Men and near boys— soldiers, deserters without papers, farmhands feeling lonely in the unfamiliar city, all the various types drawn to the capital by the opportunity the war affords them— take their nocturnal exercise there and oftentimes fall into conversation. Pete wanders slowly up and down the footpaths, his boots in need of blacking, his hat level with his brow. There on a bench is a nobby-looking gent in a full cloak of some fine dark material. He looks up to see if he recognizes Pete or, more to the point, whether Pete recognizes him. At close quarters, one can see that his eyes are every bit as dark as his moustache. He has an aristocratic face and a sensitive mouth. One can tell at a glance that he is lithe and athletic under all those clothes. The inevitability is startling.

   
FOUR
   

A
S YOU SEE
, I have many imperfections as an author. Believe me, I too am piercingly aware of them, though only now have I gained the knowledge that eluded me for so long without my being conscious of its absence. I refer to how it has been only in the past few years that I have come to accept that my gift was never for making even minor literature but only for reading and appreciating the literature of others. Would that I had comprehended this before publishing those collections of my verse and prose. All of them were failed attempts to work in the manner of W— under the spell of W, one might as well say it— while lacking his invention and authority. The wise student is the one who absorbs the lessons his teacher has to give with no wish to become his instructor's
Doppelgäenger.
I have learned this too late in life.