Walt Whitman's Secret (38 page)

Now that I see these words, I realize that they might describe W just as well. His muscles had turned to India rubber long before, as was bound to be the case since he lacked the strength, agility and most of all the wind necessary for exercise. His hearing, particularly on his “bad elevation,” was a hit-or-miss thing, but more so outdoors than in his room, where the walls contained and thus focused the sound. His eyesight, too, became even less than it had been. Formerly he had asked me to read letters and things to him because he enjoyed experiencing the words that way (as poets perhaps often do); now there was no doubt an additional and more practical reason. What was most strange was the way his beard was thinning dramatically, giving his face, indeed his head, an entirely new outline, revealing a countenance that had been hidden from the world for decades. I was reminded of the ghostly outlines of those no longer extant chimneys and staircases you often see on the side of a surviving house when the one that once adjoined it is pulled down in some money-making scheme. Yet despite all this, and I know that I dance with cliché here, his spirit retained its strong pulse most of the time. When I think back on that Autumn and Winter of Ninety, I confront a torrent of images and little episodes that make me, and dear Anne as well, smile at their proof of his contradictions even as they also recall the depth of his justifiable melancholy.

Not only was he dying, but others he loved were dying with him or, all too often, a little in advance of him. First came Charlie Pfaff, owner of the beer hall on lower Broadway where the healthy young poet of yore jousted and sparred with fellow writers and artists, including the actress Ada Clare, to whom an unknowledgeable person might suppose he was romantically appended. Charlie was a last link to a past that likewise had not survived. And where there was not actual death, there was more sickness aplenty. Hannah, his favorite sister, took ill (though she outlived W by nearly a decade), and W wrote often to comfort her.

A much different and unknowable case was that of Harry Stafford, he of the piercing look from underneath dark eyebrows. In his youth he had shared a close but, so it struck me, closely guarded relationship with W, who performed the paternal rôle and Stafford the filial.
Père et fils.
My understanding is that when W, in need of fresh air and the other commodities of Nature, stayed at the farm of Harry's parents, much communal swimming took place. Harry was now a married man with children of his own, and on occasion he called at Mickle Street, once after a severe if also somewhat mysterious sickness had debilitated him. He reported that his condition had caused him to quit his railroad job (as W's vaunted Quakers would have said, he was a transportation-man “by convincement”). W advised him to rent a property where he could take up farming in place of railroading. The labor, while much harder, was also perforce far healthier, he said. Stafford did so, and recovered. I suppose one can't help but absorb some medical wisdom if brought down by as many diseases and ailments as W had been hard done by for so long. Once recovered, though, Stafford wished to continue in agriculture, maintaining the health of his newly restored body, but the lease on the farm expired and he lacked the means to renew it. Left with out resources, he returned with his wife and their two young ones to
his parents' home. Whereupon some break occurred between him and W, I don't know what or how. After Stafford left following his next visit to No. 328, W chastised Missus Davis for letting “every specimen of riff-raff” into the house. Scolded her with the lightest possible touch, of course, given that the recipient of this displeasure was so demonstrably gentle and kind a woman. (When later, at Christmas, he presented her with a simple gold ring, you'd have thought that no one had ever before behaved toward her with such thoughtfulness.)

I watched all such fluctuations from a distance and in a state of puzzlement, and while continuing to perform my duties, was also able to keep pursuing my curiosity, hoping that the time for a discussion franker than any W and I had shared previously would come before Death commenced rapping at
his
door. I feared this was meant to be a closely run thing.

I was charged, but truthfully had charged myself, with the formidable task of keeping all the key figures in the drama of W's decline, and equally in the wonderfully inspiring story of his persistence, in touch with me and, through me, with one another.

So it came about that I heard that, yes, Pete Doyle was indeed living in Baltimore, though whether working for the same railroad as before, or working at all, I did not know. I thought of going there to track him down. How difficult could it be? But I hesitated, of course, knowing that W would feel that I had stepped outside my boundaries.

J.W. Wallace was, with his friend Doctor John Johnson, leader of the Whitmanite study circle in Bolton over in England, the group that prefigured the various Whitman cells and fellowships, including of course your own Canadian one and excluding, naturally, the
fraudulent effort planned by Sadakichi Hartmann, whom W continued to regret having ever met with. Like Doctor Johnson, Wallace seemed to me a perfectly congenial fellow from the provinces, a person of laboring-class stock. In Ninety-one he was over in America to extend his researches into W's past doings. I found him easy to talk with, and one day I let slip what I knew of Pete's whereabouts in vague terms. As I had not thought to pledge him to secrecy, Wallace later passed along the information to W, who was eager to interrogate me about the matter.

He contrived to be off-hand about it. Turning from friendly remarks about Wallace and his group, he said: “And before it passes out of my mind, Horace, let me ask you something. Wallace says you report Pete Doyle is in Baltimore. This is entirely new to me. I did not know of the change. The noble Peter! I hear but little from him. Yet that is not to wonder, for I never did hear much.”

“Did he not at one period write you often?”

“Oh no, his letters were never frequent. He is a mechanic, an instance of the many mechanics I have known who don't write or won't write and are apt to get mad as the devil if you ask them to. But I always humored Pete in that respect. It was enough for me to
know
him, and I suppose for him to know
me.
I did most of the writing. He is a train-hand, and like all transportation-men, he is necessarily a wanderer.”

I took this in.

“Wallace wants to see him,” he continued. “He is a collector, collecting not simply scarce copies of my books but the acquaintance of most everyone I have known. You must put your heads together and see if a meeting with Pete can't be arranged.”

His voice was unruffled and convivial, but I did not take these words literally, for I comprehended the threat that was hidden in them at no great depth, embedded like sharp bits of iron baked into a cake.

On his death-bed, W executed a codicil to his will. In it, he revoked the bequest of his gold watch to Pete and the silver one to me. Now the gold went to me and the silver one to Harry Stafford, with Pete the Great receiving nothing. I take from this several suppositions. First, that perhaps W and Pete had some final contact of which I never learned, some correspondence exchanged and quickly destroyed in the new stove, perhaps even some unsuccessful reunion, carefully held when I was not around and of which I was never told. Another conclusion, which I am now in the unfortunate position of being able to confirm from my own present experience, is this: that the body outlives, what shall we say?, physical amativeness, but desire in turn outlives the body.

The double-decker
Leaves
on which I labored at W's direction was in large part a stereotyping of the previous one. In that sense it was not a true edition at all, not as genuine bookmen would see it— that is, no fresh setting of type. It was, however, to have appended to it a sequence of new poems, written over the past two years and continuing into the present. He decided to call this section “Good Bye My Fancy.” I was staggered when I first read the title piece with which we are all now so familiar, the poem in which he bids farewell to his creative life, the soul of his existence that he was watching go dark— except that the lines themselves had been pushed up from the deepest and most fertile part of his imagination in a way that perhaps (I hoped) gave lie to their literal intent. This time he did not tarry in having the new writing ready for me to mark up for the plant. There was none of the agony of finishing his essay on Hicks. This time the agony was in what the writing was actually saying.

He had a headache much of the time now and was going through a rough patch of deafness. The pains in the lower belly and, most obviously, his constant difficulty breathing, were further unwavering indications of the curtain about to descend. Before the end of the year he had a bad fall when his game leg gave way as he was making a transit of the hallway. Fortunately, he wasn't on the stairs. But then he could never have been on the stairs without assistance from Warrie, who was quite protective of him and quite considerate as well, sometimes bringing him flowers for the room.

I marveled at what I saw, just as I marvel at the memory of it now. Despite what he said at times, W wasn't simply waiting to die. He would, to the best of his capabilities, carry on being Walt Whitman and let Death surprise him as to the exact timing, shutting him up in mid-sentence and stilling him in mid-motion. In the interim, he would write as best he could and show himself to still be part of the world.

   
FIFTEEN
   

O
CTOBER OF
N
INETY
was the worst month to date, and not only for W but also for those who cared for him. The statement is not meant to contradict Dickens's famous assertion that the worst of times are often the best of times as well. After all, we are alive, and what else matters, especially if, like me in those days or W's atheistic friends, one carries no brief for the afterlife, at least not for our own. Flora, I apologize if this offends, but I am beyond mere etiquette, lurching toward some type of truth, I hope.