In late afternoon on the third day out of New York, Horace and Anne arrive at Flora’s rather primitive establishment in an auto from Kaladar driven by another pair of Whitmanites. Flora has decorated the “inn” with a Welcome Home sign and is flying both the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack. Horace writes to Missus Karsner: “Here safe. Tired. Hopeful. I’m yours in all real senses of the spirit. I hope to come back but not so helpless. Can be of more use to you. I recall the hours with you and Dave and the dear child as a furlough in paradise.”
Horace, the soul of affability, performs all the reminiscing that is expected of him. For many of the Whitmanites, and there is a good crowd of them, promising a small profit for Flora, he is the only person they’ve ever met who was a proven friend of the great man. When he is not earning his supper this way, he is nudging his manuscript to its summation, working either in his room or out on one of the verandas.
Flora is constantly busy as the hostess and manager of the event, but makes time to get to know Anne better. Anne is intelligent and serene and deeply committed to social justice. She is also one of those thin women in whom you can still see the beauty of youth beneath the equal but different beauty of experience. They discuss suffragist issues. In a somewhat patchwork fashion, Canadian women were given the vote partway through the war.
Over the days and weeks, they exchange personal confidences. Flora tells how she went to Detroit when her son, Merrill, was about to be born so that he would be an American citizen, and relates the story of her failed marriage to the boy’s father.
“I assume the people in Canada view divorce much as Americans do,” Anne says.
Flora nods assent, but explains how much more difficult it is obtaining a Canadian divorce, what with the King’s Proctor and the requirement that a private member’s bill be passed as an act of Parliament.
“The failure is always claimed to be the fault of the wife,” Anne says. “Some inadequacy or other, and then she is kept at a distance, viewed with the sort of suspicion that, I suspect, once greeted those vaguely suspected of witchery. But believe me, no sensible woman would blame you in the least. Only moralistic snobs.”
“You and Horace must be a true love match,” says Flora. “To look at the two of you, one would think you stand together on some geological formation like the one this place is built upon.”
Anne smiles, shyly and perhaps a little wanly. “People assume that,” she says, “but there are always compromises to be calculated and weighed. Is an offense that is too big to be overlooked also too big to be forgiven? In the longer run, no. But there are difficult times in every marriage.”
“I find that hard to imagine with the two of you.”
“Oh, the things I could tell you.”
“Please. You know my own failures.”
Anne lets out a miniature sigh, one of fatigue rather than exasperation. “Where can I begin? I have always, as far back as I can remember, been praised for my disposition or temperament or whatever others have wished to call it. I was the best-liked girl in the class.”
Flora immediately forms the familiar image in her mind, though she herself was hardly a person ever singled out for such a distinction.
“I did always smile and try to put others at ease. But what others took to be my great social gift became, at times, more of a curse. I felt that my father, even more so after he became a widower, was using me as a young business accessory. When he invited associates or rivals to our home, as he seemed to do constantly, I was the hostess. I was there to supply the diverting conversation and poise of which he himself was so obviously incapable. Then, once the meal was polished off, I was expected to withdraw to what our mothers would have called the withdrawing room, leaving fat men to bite off the ends of their equally fat cigars as they got down to serious politicking and capitalizing. The hostess sat alone reading a novel or hid in the kitchen with the cook.”
As she says this, she cannot help but show a bit of the same soothing smile that, by her account, helped give rise to so much misunderstanding and mistrust. “I was in the strange position of being the center of attention that no one took seriously. Walt was the first important intellectual who befriended me, followed by Horace. The three of us became inseparable. Walt became more and more affectionate the closer death approached on tiptoes. I understood that, in looking at me, Walt was looking back on youth (I speak in relative terms of course), casting his eyes over the past as it was and as it might have been. But I did not feel that I was used for strange emotional pleasure. It is too simple, the kind of simple thinking I hate, to say that he needed an imaginary daughter as I needed a replacement father. It was more than that, and less than that.
“Horace was so euphorically happy when, after long months of my being evasive on the subject, I gave in and suggested that we marry— the sooner the better. Well, Walt Whitman was not the only musketeer in our trio to sometimes keep secrets. I trust you, Flora. Trust you to the point that I can tell you what I’ve never told Horace, not that it matters much now. We had conceived a child, if indeed he or she could be called a child at that first stage of existence, and it— in the circumstances, I think I am more comfortable using the neutral pronoun— died in the womb in a matter of weeks, its father in ignorance of its existence. Why did I not tell him? Many reasons, I suppose, including concern for how he would have reacted, for he is such an emotional man, you know. Also, concern for what Father might have done if and when he learned of it. To him, the only thing worse than sharing my life with Horace Traubel was to have a child with him out of wedlock. Marriage came to seem an option that would give some comfort to the people involved.
“But the wedding, I must tell you, was ludicrous, though I can see the rich humor in it now. Horace and Walt arranged all the details. Need I say more than this? Well, I suppose I shall. The bedroom on Mickle Street was our chapel. In honor of the occasion Walt had evidently permitted Missus Davis, the housekeeper, to change the linen and make the bed, which he had vacated, probably not without difficulty, for his reading chair only a few feet distant. She had blackened the stove, beaten the rug and washed the windows. She was powerless, however, to do much about Walt’s ‘files’ beyond throwing out the comparatively recent newspapers. She dared not disturb the order in which the senior papers were piled atop one another, along with all the old letters, documents and manuscripts. She stuffed as many stacks as possible either in the closet or under the bed. Even with this unprecedented tidying, there was scarcely enough space for the guests and us to stand shoulder to shoulder. I did not have a bouquet, but if I had, I could only have handed it to the person next to me as there wouldn’t have been enough clearance for me to toss it in the air. The service, which made no reference to any divinity and may not even have mentioned marriage as such, was conducted by a perfectly kind but bumbling man. He was not simply a Unitarian but, I believe, a lapsing, or perhaps I should say collapsing, Unitarian, finding the strictures of that sect’s virtually nonexistent doctrines too harsh and confining for him to bear. He was dressed like a man applying for a position as a cigar-roller. As he spoke, Horace and Walt became rather weepy. And then our wedding trip was with Bucke, who not only traveled with us but, once at our destination, followed us everywhere with such overpowering closeness that Horace and I scarcely had a waking second alone together. Such was life with Horace and Walt.
“Despite the concern of my doctor, the second pregnancy, which began not long after I was declared fit, was without incident, and our lovely Gertrude was born a little more than a year after the previous experience and a little less than a year after Walt’s death. Horace certainly greeted his daughter’s arrival with all the joyous-ness it deserved, but otherwise he wasn’t himself after Walt died. Understandably enough, witnessing that slow death at close range every day affected his equilibrium. He was forced to grab life by the coattails lest he undergo a somewhat similar future but without having first lived to the fullest. He was often away in either New York or B
oston, especially Boston. When he was not, he still worked through the night. I felt he was meeting someone else or at least trying to avoid me.”
Flora listens closely.
“Sometimes we quarreled. Or rather he attempted to quarrel and I refused to take part. He began giving voice to his resentment that I had never accepted an allowance from Father. ‘Now we have another mouth to feed,’ he would say. I grew weary of explaining yet again how any such arrangement would have been a collar and chain stricter than the household budgeting we must practice without it. This argument, which ran like an underground stream, out of sight but gurgling sometimes, ended when Father was ruined, absolutely and completely, down to selling the house and all its contents, in the great Panic of Ninety-three. It seems he had every cent of his money, what he had made or inherited plus whatever he could borrow, invested in railroad and bank stocks. When the railroads began failing, there were runs on the banks, many of which closed. Some men caught in the situation killed themselves. Father did not, though I cannot but conclude that the humiliation of his newfound poverty hastened his own end.
“I was expecting once again while the Panic unfolded, and Horace’s anxiety grew. Little Wallace Traubel, named after our friend the Whitmanite from Bolton in England, was underweight at birth, and was always a sickly child. We were both devastated, as you might imagine, for I cannot describe the extent of such sorrow, when dear little Wally was carried away by scarlet fever shortly before what would have been his fifth birthday.
“My response was a great aching of the spirit that went on and on. Horace’s reaction was rather different: he went and had a child by another woman. When I learned of this, he suggested in effect that such was his right. Those were not his words but that was his meaning. He was distraught and not himself at all. We came to terms with the situation in time.”
Flora is flabbergasted and thinks she will never be able to look upon Horace again in quite the same way, not that much time remains for anything other than posthumous judgments.
“Have you ever come across the name Gustave Wiksell?” Anne asks. “He is from Boston. Another quasi-holy person.”
“I would remember a name such as Gustave Wiksell,” Flora answers.
“He was Horace’s other lover. I felt myself quite inadequate of course, but in the end this revelation was much more easily digested than the other had been, and all was fine. The three of us all learned to share ourselves, which is no bad thing.”
Flora is shocked anew. “I don’t know what to say, because I suppose I don’t know what to think.”
“Like the other, it goes back to Walt in some basic way that is so much easier to see from the outside looking in than it is for Horace to see on the inside looking out. You know of Walt’s bastard children, all phantoms of course, and his relationship with Peter Doyle and doubtless others, which he sought to hide by lies and evasions while also burning to express his joy in them.”
Flora doesn’t know how to react to the things she is being told. She fumbles, betraying her astonishment. “I didn’t know that Walt and Doyle were actually practicing homo-sexualism, if I am correct in taking that to be your meaning and if this is the correct term for it.”
Anne again shows Flora her patient-suffering smile. “Walt was a very important person indeed in my life, in all our lives, in various ways,” Anne says. “I believe that I loved him in a way that was of course shy of the physical but nonetheless powerful, and that he loved me as much or more than he did any other woman after his mother. But still and all, sometimes one has to admit that dear old Walt was a bad influence on the world that had mistreated him.”
For the first while, Horace seems at least somewhat less frail and certainly in good spirits but continues to put off the day when he and Flora will cross the lake by boat and consecrate the monument to Walt’s memory. He will be ready tomorrow, he says each day. Flora has many reasons to urge him on, including the fact that the room he and Anne occupy, the only one free for them to use, is unheated. He might still be there when the weather starts to turn cooler, as it commonly does in early September but can do so even in late August.
August the twenty-fifth is the day when the weather is still warm enough, the lake still enough and Horace feeling well enough for them to act. He walks down the path to the large rowboat as others carry his empty wheelchair behind. Flora is in the stern with Horace, Anne in the prow. There are four or five others, including the volunteer oarsmen. Another party follows them in a smaller rowboat, followed in turn by still others in a canoe. The little flotilla moves through the Narrows into North Lake, the larger of the conjoined bodies of water, and crawls along the base of the Rock. When they come alongside the spot where the inscription is to be carved, the first boat is maneuvered up close against the cliff and held steady. Standing up precariously, Horace and Flora place their palms against the Rock and, by prearrangement, say “Old Walt” as they dedicate the site to, as they say, the Democratic Ideals of Walt Whitman. Then Horace begins to sob, as does Anne. Seeing them crying together this way, Flora, who has been avoiding Horace since hearing Anne’s revelations, is reassured that all is well between the two of them. Horace, who believes his years with Walt have helped him locate and sharpen a latent talent for personal diplomacy, tells Flora that evening that the ceremony opened a door into his spiritual consciousness and flooded him with invisible light. He always knows just the right thing to say to believers.
When the party returns to the inn, Horace is taken to the proposed site of the Whitman Library that will never be built and turns the first spadeful of earth. He gathers up the loosened dirt and gives each person a handful. Writes “Walt” on the bare spot and then, strangely, empties his pockets of coins and covers them with soil. This exhausts all the deeply moving symbolic gestures that his imagination, tired from writing, is able to come up with on short notice. Having thus acquitted himself honorably, he goes to lunch in the dining hall.
There Flora speculates idly as to whether she can convince the Dominion government to contribute some financing help to make Bon Echo a permanent Whitman memorial. Why she even considers such a notion is a mystery but for the fact that Flora is an enthusiast and a mover. Horace speaks right up with his own view.
“You cannot trust governments,” he says emphatically, suggesting perhaps the extent to which illness has weakened his Socialist outlook as well as his body. “No governments and no railroads!”
That night he takes a turn for the worse. Anne, who is herself on the verge of collapse with unstated sickness, probably a complaint of the nerves, looks after him tenderly, uttering endearments. There the situation remains for several days, as various other guests leave for the city. Their departure frees up a warmer room for the Traubels. One night Horace claims that Walt has appeared out of the lake and spoken to him. He has a similar experience, but one that takes place in the daytime and is entirely auditory, on September third, when it seems he might give up.
“I hear Walt’s voice,” he says to Flora, who is paying a bedside courtesy call. “He is talking to me.”
“What does he say?”
“Walt says, ‘Come on, come on.’”
After that, he is quiet for a while but breaks the silence by saying, “Flora, I see them all about me. W and Bob Ingersoll and Bucke and the rest.”
Restless after so long in one position, he says, “Turn me.” None of the Whitmanites knows or recalls that these were Walt’s last words, spoken to the faithful Warrie.
Then he adds, “Why is it so difficult to die?”
Doctors have been sent for, but it takes two days for the first one to get there. He pronounces that a cerebral hemorrhage has left the patient completely paralyzed. Anne is sitting at his side when Horace dies at five in the morning on September eighth. He is sixty-one.
Flora suggests that Horace might be happy to rest eternally at Bon Echo, but Anne smoothly counters that she will return with him to either New York or Camden. Merrill Denison, a young wri
ter of twenty-six, dresses the body as Flora rushes to the nearest likely town, a scribble on the map called Flinton, to buy a coffin in which the body can be transported. It is an ugly thing that is delivered that evening, when there is an impromptu funeral service before Horace’s boxed corpse is taken across the lake by boat, then transferred to Flora’s rattletrap Ford for a wild dash to Kaladar station so that Anne and her husband of twenty-eight years can catch the Montreal train. The motor trip covers more than twenty miles in a rainstorm so intense that the road, at the best of times little more than a deeply rutted trail, is being obliterated, or so it seems. The two women arrive with only moments to spare.
Anne, Flora and the mortal remains arrive in New York, where the body is embalmed and placed in a fancy coffin. There is considerable discussion as to where the New York funeral should be held. Anne of course has the deciding vote and chooses a community church known for its liberal views and general avoidance of theology. Mourners and curiosity seekers are beginning to select their seats early, for the body has not even arrived from the undertaker’s as yet. Suddenly a woman enters to say that the building is on fire, as indeed seems to be the case. The hearse and the fire reels appear simultaneously and could have collided. Anne, whose long marriage to Horace has instilled in her a certain flexibility, scurries to find a new venue: a school auditorium. Flora keeps her shock to herself on learning that the service will be conducted by Gustave Wiksell.
The next day the body is taken to Camden by motorized hearse as Anne and Flora take the train, and Horace is buried in Harleigh Cemetery, not far from the Whitman tomb.
Nearly two years have gone by, during which Flora has agonized over what to do with the manuscript found with Horace’s effects at Bon Echo. Anne has read it and pronounces that it contains little new except the exposure of Pete Doyle, which is of no interest to anyone, he having died in O-seven. In any case, it was a gift, albeit an odd gift, from her late husband to Flora, and so properly belongs to its intended recipient, not to the widow. Flora considers perhaps deleting some of the material that casts Walt in an unfair light, the result no doubt of restricted vessels in Horace’s brain that were fore-warnings of his eventual stroke. But what would be left? What would propel the great Whitman Fellowship, and perhaps the Whitman Library at Bon Echo, and what would impede them? On a more ethical level, she wonders whether imposing censorship could ever be the proper reaction, given how poor Walt, so misunderstood until the Whitmanites came along, suffered at the censor’s hand during his earthly life. In the end, she takes all the pages and burns them in the furnace at Carlton Street.
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