Walt Whitman's Secret

by George Fetherling

  He began to cough and asked for some water, which he drank quickly. Some of it spilled down his front. It looked to me that his under-lip had gone numb, for it appeared scarcely to move at all when he spoke.

  “I was back in the District two days later. I couldn’t locate Pete anywhere; he had gone to ground. You have read about the events that followed the murder. There was found to be a large conspiracy. Many were jailed, from the surgeon who set Booth’s leg to those who had made disparaging remarks about Lincoln and people who just happened to resemble Booth. It was a bad time for good-looking black-haired young men with a certain bearing to them. Of the actual assailants, three were hanged: Payne, who stabbed Seward, Herold, who fled with Booth into the swamps, and the feeble-minded Prussian, Atzerodt. Missus Surratt, who participated in no violence, was hanged with them. Her son, however, escaped to Canada and from Canada to Europe, and when brought back for trial was let go because of a hung jury. He is still among the living.

  “In short, the country was in an uproar of retribution. Even a fellow named Spangler, I believe it was, one of the stage-hands at Ford’s, was sent to prison, because he may or may not, absentmindedly or with deliberation, have left open the rear door through which Booth fled. Everyone believed that there were a great many other small fry, and no doubt some bigger fishes as well, who dispersed widely in the hours after the event and were never identified, have not been identified even yet.”

  He took another gulp of water and closed his eyes, resting for less than half a moment. His voice was still more hesitant and muted when he resumed.

  “Pete burned the one piece of paper that would have connected him to the assassin with criminal certainty, a brief note Booth had sent him. Then he fled the capital, sensibly enough. He was still in a state of justifiable fear in the Autumn of Sixty-eight when he wrote me that he was considering taking his own life on account of a bad case of barber’s rash. Of course I knew the genuine agony that hid behind that flimsiest of ciphers. He was wounded and needed me. In my letters I sent him every affection. We even undertook a brief trip together. He accompanied me to Mannahatta and to Brooklyn, where I introduced him to Mother, though we were careful to stay in New Jersey. It was here in Jersey that he gave me the details of April the fourteenth Sixty-five and what he was doing at Ford’s.

  “Booth had obviously planned the murder to take place at a moment when the stage was least populated with actors. He also depended on the fact, or the hope, that the response of those in the audience would be slowed down by the jolt to their nerves. He believed that he could make his histrionic leap, utter his line like the player that he was and escape across the stage— but only if there were no overly heroic soldiers in the house who were armed and were quick enough of wits and hands to prevent him from effecting his exit. Booth asked Pete to rise the instant the commotion began, survey the rows carefully and shoot down anyone who might him self get to his feet and begin to point a weapon. He sat on the left-hand side of the house, the actor’s stage-right, up quite a ways so that there would be few who could in turn shoot him in the back. But not so far away as to preclude him from discerning the Lincolns clearly. He had to get his quarry, if there were to be any, before they could clamber awkwardly onto the stage from below and step over the foot-lights, becoming, for that one brief but crucial moment, other than fully upright and then silhouettes with blurry outlines.

  “I was astonished. If this had been known, poor Pete would have been hanged for certain. I asked what plans Booth had made for Pete’s own escape from the theater. Apparently there were none. Fortunately, no armed soldiers jumped up before Booth disappeared, and Pete didn’t even touch the pistol hidden beneath his long coat. He just took his sweet time, as shocked as everyone else, and walked out of Ford’s seeming to be exactly the thing he was not, another follower of the theater, slightly fazed and confused.”

  W paused once more, overcome by emotion this time and perhaps by the necessity of having to re-enter the one part of the past he feared reliving. He got control of himself and tried, unsuccessfully, to clear his throat.

  “Later, in my own silent analysis of what he had told me, I could conclude only that Pete’s lack of ease, or do I mean his disease?, must somehow have entered a new period. The two hemispheres of his problem— the extreme melancholia that weighted his step and dulled his thinking, and the blind anger that became actual violence; two states that until then had alternated with irregular frequency— were now, briefly, operating in unison. Bucke is the expert who would have the better explanation, but of course I have never told him of Pete’s part in the tragedy, have never told another soul until this instant. And you must never do so either, on your word to God or whatever you hold most sacred, for Pete too is still among us on Earth, weighted down with guilt. Whether at this late date he might still be hanged or at least imprisoned, I cannot say, but he would be destroyed all the same.”

  W’s eyes opened and closed rapidly a number of times, as though he were trying to clear some obstruction from his idealized vision of those war-weary days. Or perhaps he was fighting to keep from weeping.

  “After that, I resolved to break off our relations, though another part of me wished not to. The process was neither quick nor neat. Both of us had grave doubts about our abilities to go on as previously. There was much recrimination, to be followed by attempts at renewed affection, themselves succeeded by still more recrimination. Knowing myself the pressures brought by family difficulties, I tried to help and console Pete in Seventy-one when his brother, the policeman who had barely escaped dismissal from the force, was shot to death while performing his duties.

  “Pete needed a fresh start. He quit the horse-cars and became a railroad brakeman. As I had tried to comfort him when first restoring contact and then during the unfortunate business with his brother, so he helped to nurse me when I had the first stroke in Seventy-three, which as you know brought me here to the city from which I am about to take my leave.”

  By this time, I believe I myself must have been in tears.

  “He quit the brakeman’s job too, and got work as a baggage master in Philadelphia. We wrote each other still and even visited. It was always awkward. I wished my heart to be free of him, yet could not cease to worry about him, which inevitably meant continuing our communication. He gave me this box, telling me he wished never to set eyes on it again, though why he didn’t destroy it I don’t know. I suppose that, like me, he was now trapped in his past while trying to persist through each new day.”

  He stopped once again, for his lungs’ sake, I believe.

  “And that is the sad story, abridged to meet the requirements of my waning strength. For now I have made myself very tired. You see how my hands shake. I must rest.”

  With his eyes he pointed to the box, imploring me to take it with me when I went, which I did but only after opening it, to see what I was letting myself in for. Inside, wrapped tightly in a big square pillow slip, was a very old pistol of some kind.

  He had talked far too much and at far too great a cost. His voice was barely functioning at all. I believe what he said was, “Colt, thirty-six caliber. Not large.”

  I resealed the lid and left with the box under my arm, like a large loaf of bread. Going back across to Philadelphia, I threw it over the side of the ferry when I thought no one was looking.

  Still stunned and about to become more so, I entered the front parlor at mid-morning to find Tom sitting there with the painter Eakins and two of Eakins’s assistants, all of them looking purposeful and somehow serene. Sitting opposite were W’s brother George and his fearsome wife. Missus Whitman looked cross. W had died the previous evening, March twenty-sixth, Ninety-two. Even now I can barely write even a sentence about what I had seen take place the previous evening, not with any assurance that my face will not soon be streaked by tears. I was at the bedside with Tom, Doctor McAlister, Missus Davis and Warrie. Once the end came, all of us dispersed to our individual sorrows. And to our tasks, as
with Tom and me frantically sending the news by telegraph far and wide to those who most cared for him. Missus Davis washed the face and Warrie the body. Then the room was darkened. Later I returned alone and gazed down on the still form, which looked sweet and innocent of trouble. I bent down and kissed his forehead. He was stony cold of course, but I caught the scent of his hair. Later still I went in a second time just to take another look. I kept my composure but barely. Now I took Eakins and his apprentices up the worn stairs and opened the shutters on the three windows. It was raining hard yet there was good light, which they needed in making the death mask. Tom helped them. I can’t imagine what use a lawyer could actually be, but he too was quite attached to the person who had resided in the body, and so he wished to participate as best he could.

  I had to go over to Philadelphia again to meet with Doctor Longaker and Doctor Cattell, and was surprised to learn that W had given permission in December, when he so very nearly died, for a post-mortem examination to be performed in the name of scientific inquiry. Why had he told me nothing of the matter? George objected strenuously when he too learned of this for the first time, and continued with his protests throughout the day. The formal instructions of the deceased, however, trumped the wishes of the next of kin, and the autopsy convened in the back parlor at about supper time. I was present in my familiar rôle as amanuensis, writing down Doctor Cattell’s commentary as he spoke it. Doctors McAlister and Longaker were part of the team as well. Also present at least some of the time was the undertaker, a man named Simmons, who had brought the body down from the bedroom on a stretcher and transferred it to a mortuary table that had been carried in once all the normal furniture had been removed. Also there in the beginning was a reporter from the Camden Post, who rejected common decency to the extent that I had to have him thrown out. My numbness of spirit was evidently lessening, or my awareness of its cause finally affecting me, for I had a difficult time controlling my feelings, not to mention my stomach.

  W was stretched out neatly with his arms at his sides, a cloth draped across his loins. I was suddenly reminded of the unclothed photo graph that Eakins had made for the purposes of art study. I kept thinking of Doctor Osler as well, for he had long been one of the most important advocates of autopsies. I once read that he had personally performed well over eight hundred of them just in the years when he taught in Montreal, long before moving to Baltimore and thence London.

  The tools and other instruments being used were terrible to see and to hear, and their effects far worse. The doctors sawed around the upper portion of the skull, its entire circumference, and extracted the brain, which was placed in a gupsack brought along for that purpose. Except for being slightly deficient in weight, due to age and illness, it did not, on cursory inspection, seem abnormal. So I was told, and so I duly wrote in the note-book I had been given. When the chest and abdomen were opened and spread apart, the remarkable things to be seen there were obscure to none of the medical men. W’s left lung had collapsed like a punctured bellows and the right one, they estimated with apparent precision, had been performing at only sixteen per cent of its intended volume. Abscesses had deformed some of the bones in the chest, and small hard protuberances called tubercles were visible in the stomach, intestines and liver. A stone almost filled the space inside the gall bladder. Oddly, his heart, which W thought was betraying him as well, had been the soundest part of him. It weighed nine ounces.

  I wrote all this down, but the jottings I turned over to the doctors at the end of nearly four hours were fragmentary and telegraphic and full of words such as oedematous and athermatous whose proper spellings I did not know, much less their meanings. Nonetheless my notes, written as legibly as I possibly could make them when working so quickly, provided a kind of outline for the write-up done by the doctors who later subscribed their names to it. This final report made some remarkable statements about W’s physical tenacity that seemed to complement what those of us who knew him best had always seen reflected in his spirit. If I may, let me quote from their findings. “The cause of death was pleurisy of the left side, consumption of the right lung, general miliary tuberculosis and parenchymatous nephritis.” I’m not certain precisely what the last of these is. The document went on to opine that any other man “would have died much earlier with one half of the pathological changes” that W had endured for so long.

  The organs that had been removed, all except the brain I mean, were placed together in the chest cavity, and the incision that was the trap door to the body’s mysteries was stitched closed. I then readmitted Simmons the undertaker to begin performing his own magical work.

  The viewing was held at 328 Mickle Street, and thousands of people snaked their way along the sidewalk in a line-up that extended around the corner. I was later told that one of those slowly shuffling past the coffin was Pete Doyle. He had at first been turned away by a policeman engaged in managing the crowd but had made it inside and solemnly walked through with all the others. I don’t know why he should have been singled out that way unless he had arrived too late or was being belligerent or was acting otherwise disturbed.

  During the entombment ceremony at Harleigh Cemetery, Burroughs nudged me and directed my eyes to a little hilltop nearby where a solitary figure stood, holding a switch from a tree, swishing it back and forth absent-mindedly.

  “Peter Doyle,” he said.

  I would not have recognized him from the old photographs, for he had grown much heavier. As we were returning to the city, we saw him again, strolling along the road, still with the switch in his hand. We stopped the carriage so that Burroughs could renew their acquaintance and I could be introduced. At closer range, it struck me that his entire physiognomy had undergone some fundamental alteration that gave him the general appearance of a splendidly moustachioed Irish bartender who had recently come to know a modest degree of prosperity. I later learned that he was working for yet another railroad and was active in the Elks club and the United Confederate Veterans. He was not unpleasant but had little enthusiasm for saying much, and seemed unmoved by his old comrade’s end. Perhaps his own numbness of spirit had not begun to wear off. Who can say? Certainly not I.

  EIGHTEEN

  FLORA MACDONALD HAS long been divorced from Howard Denison of Detroit when Horace encounters her at a Toronto dinner party in 1916. Even at this first meeting, in the home of some fellow Whitman disciples, they address each other by their first names. Such is the common practice among the small but incessantly vocal group of Whitmanites, anti-monarchists, Socialists, single-taxers, theosophists, atheists, spiritualists, communalists and Americanized cranks who, if you were to see them in a shopping crowd on King Street, would be indistinguishable from normal God-fearing Canadians, the ones who march in the Orange parade and read the Evening Telegram, atop whose front page every day sits an engraving of the Union Jack, unfurled and benevolent.

  Nonetheless, in the early years of their acquaintance Horace always calls her Missus Denison when speaking of her to others. She learns of this but never corrects him. Such usage does not contradict her suffragist beliefs or even the democratic principles implicit in the use of forenames (advanced people do not endorse the term Christian name). No one can quite explain why she is so forgiving, except to say that Horace, whom she has long hoped to meet, is one of the last important links to the living human being who wrote the immortal Leaves, in the pages of which a new generation has found validation for its every cockamamie belief. Even if he were not the last, Horace would still be one of the most important. Knowing the man who was Walt’s closest confidant for the final three and a half years is suffused with special meaning. How could one possibly explain this to other Canadians except by saying that it is analogous to meeting Paul of Tarsus?

  Horace compliments the hostess on the “damn nice spread” with its damn nice vegetables and such, and Flora immediately sizes him up. With his casual tweed clothing and his wild white hair and droopy white moustache, he is obviously, she believes,
a gentleman of learning and European refinement who nonetheless has so embraced the memory of his late spirit-father that he revels in the use of slang, with all its inherent democratizing.

  “I have heard Mark Twain speak and know what real cursing is,” she later tells her local Whitman group, one of the most active of the many such organizations. “It is usually a way for the speaker to show his disdain for the listener. Horace’s was just the opposite.”

  Following the dinner, he offers to walk her home to Carlton Street so that he can hear more about Bon Echo, the resort property she has acquired in the eastern part of Ontario. She had been a private dressmaker, it seems, but later became head of the ladies’ custom-tailoring salon at the Robert Simpson Company departmental store at Yonge and Queen streets. She still finds it necessary, however, to do a certain amount of dressmaking at her residence. She needs the extra money because Bon Echo costs her slightly more in taxes and the manager’s wages than it returns in fees from campers. Hence her plan to turn the place into a permanent memorial to Walt, as outlined at dinner. As it isn’t making money anyway, it should be made to serve a higher purpose. Who knows but that in time it might prove self-supporting or even turn a small profit, as the number of Whitman pilgrims will only grow as his spiritual doctrines seep even more deeply into the texture of society, as she believes is beginning to be the case.

  They stroll through the wartime streets. At one point a constable walking the beat approaches from the opposite direction, and Horace tenses a bit. But when he gets closer, the policeman says, “It’s a nice night” as he passes them by, not taking them for radicals but only as an elderly gent and his somewhat younger companion.