Walt Whitman's Secret

by George Fetherling

  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, wh
ich 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.

  “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 tho
ugh 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!”