Walt Whitman's Secret

by George Fetherling

  The mind-storms that sometimes overtake him, often seeming to come from nowhere, always trouble him after the fact but are invigorating at the time. They speed the mechanisms of the brain. He sees with perfect clearness and celerity the actions that are necessary and their consequences. Sometimes, when the condition has swept up and obliterated the predictable thinking of the workaday world, he finds all of his senses grow instantly sharper and his faculties enlarge. Once, at Asia’s, he looked across the parlor and suddenly saw the spines of all the books in intaglio relief, as though they had been carved out of stone like inscriptions on classical monuments, but colored brightly. He has come to cherish these moments of transcendence. (Is there another word? He doubts that there can be.) They provide him with enormous advantages in making decisions, though other powers are oftentimes demanded to clean up the unintended minor consequences. This is his advantage over others. Anyone can acquire simple information, even secret information. The ability to analyze it both before and afterward is given to few. Its absence is notably apparent in, for example, the dullards assigned to Canada.

  He keeps appearing in rural Maryland. Still using the pretense of wishing to invest his oil profits in farmland, he continues to scout all possible routes by which Lincoln might be transported to Richmond through the enemy’s lines. A local doctor who might have property for sale is kind enough to introduce him to another such person, Samuel Mudd MD, whose place the actor later visits. The bottom has fallen out of farm property in Maryland because of the devastating ban on slavery in the new constitution. The doctor and the visitor discuss this. Wilkes raises some questions about easy places to get across the river into Virginia unseen. He is a professional actor, after all. He knows how to use his voice to project innocence or whatever other state or emotion he wishes, regardless of the lines in the script. He is, however, unsure of his audience this time. He doesn’t know whether his own voice is too subtle for Doctor Mudd’s ears. He is in the market for a horse as well. Mudd recommends a neighbor with an animal for sale. Wilkes makes the purchase.

  You can’t deny it: Wilkes does have a thespian’s knowledge of how to plumb the meaning of daily life, with all its comedies, dramas and curtain-raisers. He lingers in the area, making the acquaintance of a Lincoln-hating local who is expert at getting people into Virginia without being seen, using his intricate knowledge of the smallest marshes and waterways. Within hours, Wilkes takes the man aside and confides his intentions. Like Chester, the fellow is alarmed. “Why,” Wilkes writes in his notes, “have the beautiful mind-storms begun to betray me so? I do not understand. Do I misjudge others or do they wish to betray me from their ignorance of the importance of what must be done?” Shortly, however, he brings the man around. Even so, that night he burns the notes to himself. He must do so every night, he tells himself. However circumspect I am, he says silently, I cannot allow myself to be caught with notes more than a few hours old, if indeed with any whatsoever.

  He collects equine accomplices as well as human ones. Back in the District, he asks Sam Arnold to acquire a horse and gig while he himself asks people at John Ford’s theater, where he often gets his mail, to recommend a boarding stable. The theater’s carpenter suggests one in Baptist Alley, which runs right behind the building.

  Wilkes’s acquaintance John Surratt is a slender young man with the serious, ethereal and most of all bloodless look of the divinity student he recently was and would like to be again were he not intent on becoming a spy instead. When his father died in Sixty-two, he had to abandon his studies and go to work tending the tavern and hotel (it is also the post office) that the family owns in Surrattsville and for most purposes is Surrattsville, ten miles below the District, on Maryland soil. All the residents nearby knew Surratt senior. Now all of them know the junior one.

  Surratt looks even younger than his twenty years, but Wilkes knows full well that there is more to him than meets the eye. He knows that the Surrattsville tavern is a safe house for Confederate couriers passing north or south, and for who knows what other skulduggery. The information is so common that the authorities in Washington have sacked Surratt as the village’s part-time post master upon hearing of his politically unsavory longings. Wilkes and Surratt have not been in touch of late, but then Fortune and necessity reunite them. Two days before Christmas, Surratt meets Wilkes in Washington, where they then run into Doctor Mudd, who has come into the city for last-minute shopping. With Surratt is another young man, a former classmate who now boards at 541 H Street, the house that Surratt’s mother inherited and has turned into a rooming house. As Missus Surratt knows so well, Washington is a city with too few beds. It is also one with strange bedfellows. The boarder with Surratt is Louis Weichmann, who is wearing blue trousers with a stripe on the legs. They are part of his uniform as a member of an infantry unit made up of War Department employees. Weichmann used to work there for the general in charge of feeding Confederate prisoners. Wilkes does what he does so well and invites everybody to join him for a drink. Surratt, Mudd and Weichmann end up in Booth’s room at the National.

  The next day, Wilkes dashes to New York again in the grip of another mind-storm. Confronting Sam Chester once more, he tells him bluntly of the plot against Lincoln, tells him that he must take part or be blackmailed, or even risk being shot with a small but heavy-caliber pistol that Wilkes says he has taken to carrying for just such occasions. Chester naturally thinks Wilkes has gone mad.

  Running now with all engines burning, Wilkes returns to the District by way of Philly. There he pays two calls, the first on his sister, the other on a theatrical manager he has known for years. He gives Asia another packet to put in the safe: evidence incriminating Chester in the plot. Such tactics are an essential element of his plan, for evidence of someone’s association with Wilkes’s efforts, however flimsy the claim, will, under the rules in use at the time, preclude that person from testifying for the prosecution. From the theatrical manager he begs a favor: persuade John Ford to hire Sam Chester for his stock company in the capital. He suggests to Surratt, a good patriot, that he follow his own example and sign over all his property to others so that it cannot be confiscated by the federal government should matters go awry.

  March 1865. Family troubles and publishing details back in New York will soon truncate Walt’s brief return to the District, but while he is here, he must not forsake the spectacle. The crowd is certainly the largest he and the others have ever seen. Certainly it is the thickest, the most dense. How many thousands? The newspapers’ estimate is fifty, all jostling one another, waiting for the president to leave the Senate chamber of the Capitol, where he has renewed his vows, and come outside onto the giant east portico to speak to them. There are a few hundred Negroes in the throng below, and many thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of white men in blue uniforms. It is shortly after noon on a cold day, Saturday the fourth, and it is raining. An uncountable number of hats, of every type and variety, seem to bob atop the mob like blossoms tossed upon the ocean. The dome of the great white building has finally been completed and seems all the more impressive against the endless and dispirited gray sky.

  The president is delayed at the Executive Mansion by last-minute paperwork and arrives at his inauguration just as the new vice president, Andrew Johnson, is addressing the assembled dignitaries prior to his own swearing-in. The vice president is Southern-born, a tailor from Tennessee who has been taught to read and write by his wife, and at the moment he is as drunk as a monkey in a monkey-tree. He gives an incoherent speech that embarrasses all who listen. As Lincoln leaves the chamber to step outside and deliver his own oration, the soldiers who have protected him on his journey down Pennsylvania Avenue are superseded by the Capitol police. Along the way, these officers must subdue a “bibulous lunatic,” as they later describe him, who breaks free of the crowd and makes for the president with fairly obvious intentions.

  The president’s remarks have already been set into type and copies printed for distribution to the
press. He has cut up the galley proofs with scissors and pasted them in two columns on a sheet of stiff paper. Even without his ludicrous hat, he still towers above the others on the platform, but is towered over in turn by the enormous fluted columns in the Corinthian order that are lined up behind him like marble bodyguards. His voice is high-pitched and somewhat squeaky, a fact that always surprises people hearing him for the first time and expecting more sonorous and dignified sounds. But this afternoon few in the crowd spread out below like the mightiest of his armies can in fact hear Lincoln at all. Instead, the acoustical conditions carry the sound upward, where a tangled knot of important onlookers strains behind a wrought iron railing. As the president begins to talk, the sky suddenly clears and sunshine strikes the crowd in a wide beam. This causes Walt, unseen somewhere in the colorless multitude down below, to widen his eyes in an almost mystical awe, while Wilkes, who stands above the president and to his left, surprisingly close to the action, rolls his own eyes in disgust. The man everyone has come to hear is only a few yards from the dignitaries’ perch where Wilkes and his friend Pete stand with Lucy Hale and her father, thanks to the senator’s skill at scaring up two more of the much-coveted tickets. Pete looks uncomfortable.

  The speech is so short that thousands of people are still arriving as the president concludes it. Wilkes, however, is positioned to hear every word. The president speaks of the war as a divine punishment meted out to a society that allowed the continued existence of slavery for so long. He belabors the point about God’s rôle in the nation’s affairs. Then he changes tone and is conciliatory: “With malice toward none; with charity for all …”

  Wilkes knows that at the previous inauguration, four years earlier, there were Yankee sharpshooters on the roof of the enormous alabaster building. He presumes they are there this time as well, and when he turns around and looks straight up, he sees that the top-floor windows are, rather pointedly, wide open.

  The crowd is dissolving now. Booth says good-bye to Lucy and her father, who is dragging her away to prepare for another official function. Booth doesn’t speak for some time thereafter. When he does, he addresses his overwhelmed and bewildered companion in a sad but exultant whisper. “I could have gotten him,” he says. With that, he takes Pete the Great’s left hand and places it lightly on the right-hand pocket of his expensively tailored coat so that the younger man can feel the pistol.

  NINE

  MANY IN THE DISTRICT are drinking champagne on the evening of the inauguration. This fact gives Lucy an opportunity to tease Wilkes about why he is not doing the same. She is perhaps the only person who can tease him without risk of repercussions. In any event, he drinks copious amounts of brandy instead. They are in his room at the National, downstairs from the suite she shares with her father. Wilkes is quietly livid as well as morose, muttering into his glass— obscure oaths and what must be lines from old plays. She understands his first emotion. She understands the second as well, for she shares it.

  “He has done this to destroy us by dragging you away,” Wilkes says. The accusation has been building for a while. The man whom he likes to call “the human baboon” and other things has nominated her father to be ambassador to Spain. Now, in the light of the reelection, the appointment is certain to go through without opposition or complaint.

  “Why must you serve your father and play the hostess?” he demands once again. “There is nothing more absurd than the spectacle that is in my mind of you curtseying to a papist court and wasting your charm on fat old men from whom your father seeks compliance with the Baboon’s wishes.”

  She is especially patient, as she knows to be when Wilkes is drinking heavily. “You understand, dear one, that the situation could be different only if Mother were alive.”

  Wilkes nods in recognition at a well-worn explanation, but this time adds a refinement of his own. “Why could he not ask his mistress to bear the burden, as an honest man might do?”

  Knowing not to accept the provocation, she laughs instead: the laugh that she understands without being told can change his mood sometimes. She ices it with her impression of a young Southern lady of high degree and great hypocrisy. “Why, suh, you dishonor me with such a suggestion, for that is no way to speak to a Georgia maiden.”

  He looks up from his glass. There are black demi-lunes under his eyes and his lovely thick curly hair is mussed. But his voice smiles even if his mouth does not. “My darling, the stage is poorer for your decision to avoid its unhealthy air and its immoral suasion of the innocent and instead to pursue your fortune as a Yankee senator’s daughter.”

  Then they are silent for a moment. They have stopped playacting now.

  “Wilkes, I don’t know how I can persist without you. Not knowing exactly how long before I will see you again is another impossible burden to be lain atop the first.”

  “Four years, I should think,” he answers. He sounds matter-of-fact. “That is, presuming that the Beast and his litter can be defeated after that length of time. Some are optimistic, others not; but no one knows for a certainty. Everything is so much conjecture now. Of course, an act of God could alter the course. Or indeed, an act of Man.” He mentions “four years” not to dampen her hopes but to bolster them. He has confided his plans to the men necessary to help him carry them out, men who in any event he does not care about, but he has never intimated more than the subtlest indication of his thinking to Lucy. Because he loves her? because she is a woman? because she might tip her hand to her father if she knew the secret? He is in no state to dabble in the mathematics of the emotions.

  She looks into those black eyes, like the cinder-eyes on the snow effigies that playful children make each winter back in New Hampshire. She always has been the careful coquette, the rounded intelligence that smooths the edges of his own more angular presence. But now she draws her words from a deeper source.

  “Wilkes,” she says, “I would love you no less were I a man and you a woman. It would change nothing.”

  He seems slightly taken aback, but for only a second. Recovering his stage presence, he asks, “And if we were of one gender between us?”

  She says nothing.

  From his left-hand breast pocket he withdraws his billfold, lays it on the table and begins to remove its contents one at a time, as though to itemize them. There are several calling cards given him in New York and Montreal. These he must remember to burn. There is a generous but not ostentatious sheaf of banknotes, including two or three of the Confederate States with portraits of Jefferson Davis or Judah P. Benjamin. They suffer from the most casual comparison with the Yankee currency by the poverty of their engraving and printing. The South long ago ran short even of paper. He has seen notes printed on the verso of old wallpaper of a rather parlor-y design. There is also a note from one of the Montreal banks, and a variety of postage stamps.

  A flap comes down to reveal a special pocket from which he extracts six photographs. He puts them on the table linen face down, then flips them over one at a time as though he were playing vingt-et-un.

  The first three are the cartes-de-visite of young ladies she has never lain eyes on before. None of them is what you could call plain, though several are prim or aspire to give that impression. The photographs are well thumbed.

  The dealer then flips over the fourth photo and then the fifth. More of the same, but all different. These last ones are not simply photographs of young women with straight mouths but of young women showing the viewer how they are having their likenesses made in some photographic gallery (the District is full of such establishments now).

  The final image he leaves cupped in his hand for another moment before revealing it with a flourish. It is, as expected, the image of herself that she has given him to carry on his travels. Now, she knows, it will have to support him during her own long absence.

  “In my profession, I’m sure you know, it is easy for people to confound the character they see on the stage with the man behind the mask. They find it easy to be attr
acted to the one and mistake him for the other.”

  “I myself, in the first instance …” She trails off rather than interrupt.

  “Sometimes young ladies one meets in social company will present one with such things.” He taps his right ring finger on the image of the lovely Lucy. “This is the only one that I carry next to my heart.”

  His speech has lost its slur. The drink has not affected him to the usual extent. He has stopped drinking at the moment of maximum clarity. But he knows that this will not prevent the headache.

  Anne and I were married on the twenty-eighth of May Ninety-one, a Thursday. Our friends took our motivations as being obvious to all, but the actual decision to make the abstraction real— that came upon us suddenly, like the most benevolent Summer storm you could possibly imagine.

  Our first thought was that the ceremony should be conducted, as Father so enthusiastically wished it to be, at the Traubel family home (as none of us thought that the Montgomerie one would be so welcoming). This plan changed, however, when it became clear that W would be unable to attend. His numerous ailments— the word is hardly satisfactory— which previously attacked him in an orderly sequence, a few each day or each week, had now joined forces and were massed on the border. Every part of him seemed to be afflicted. He said, as he did quite often by this point, that he feared most for the condition of his heart, which he always called his “pump,” though the list on which it appeared was a long one indeed.