Gob's Grief (7 page)

“Are you well, sir?” Walt asked him, because the thumb, out of the young man’s mouth now, was bleeding profusely. Walt thought back to an instance in Armory Square when his own thumb had been cut by a scalpel covered with gangrenous filth. His thumb had swelled up like a plum, then, and taken months to heal.

“It’s a scratch,” said the boy. Now Walt thought he was definitely a boy, not even twenty years old, though deep lines of care were writ on his brow. Walt leaned over, very slowly, to inspect the wound.

“It’s deep. It should be bandaged.”

“It’s not so deep,” he said. “See? Now it’s drying up.” He gave it a few shakes, and the trickling blood slowed and stopped.

“But it was deep,” said Walt, who thought he’d seen a flash of white bone between the lips of the cut.

“No,” said the fellow. “I think it wasn’t. And I am a doctor. A connoisseur, if you will, of wounds.” He put out his bloody hand for Walt to shake. “Dr. George Washington Woodhull,” he said, “but you may please call me Gob.”

Walt stared and stared at him, but did not take his hand. Though Armory Square was so fresh in his mind that he sometimes thought he could still smell blood and ether in his beard and his skin, it took him a moment to place the name Woodhull.

“Well, you are Walt Whitman. You don’t need to tell me. I knew it the very moment I entered this car. Who else, I ask you, looks like Walt Whitman? And see here, the whole city has been notified of your visit.” He moved over, sat down next to Walt, and took a copy of the
Times
from his coat. “‘With the advent of autumn,’” he read, “‘Walt Whitman once again makes his appearance on the sidewalks of Broadway. His large, massive personality; his grave and prophetic, yet free and manly appearance; his insouciance of manner and movement; his easy and negligent but clean and wholesome dress—all go to make up a figure and an individuality that attracted the attention and interest of every passer-by.’” Walt stared, remembering Dr. Woodhull of Armory Square, barely listening to the personal notice in the paper, though he was very pleased with it. He’d written the outline himself and submitted it to a friend at the
Times.

“Mr. Whitman,” said the boy. “I am so glad to meet you.” He put his hand out again, and this time Walt took it. It was a small hand, but strong, and the boy squeezed so hard Walt thought he might whimper. He pumped Walt’s arm and with every shake Walt got a feeling, a happy feeling, as if this young fellow were pumping him up with joy.
See?
Hank said.
Do you see him, Walt? Do you see him?

The next day Walt went planting in the park. While he waited for his new friend, he searched out places where he thought people might settle down for a picnic. Kneeling in a good spot on the meadow, near the lake, he tore up some grass and made a little bed of it on which to rest his book. He’d inscribed it earlier in a neat but carefree hand: For
you.

It was his conviction that he was most successful with the reader in the open air, and so he planted, certain that a person who encountered his poems among the natural splendors of this park would be charmed and changed by them. He sat down on a bench some hundreds of feet away from where he’d left his book, and watched. Opening a paper and pretending to read it, he thought not about his prospective reader, but of Dr. Woodhull—of Gob.

Gob had invited Walt to walk with him, and walk they did, all over the city for hours and hours, so today even Walt, a perennially enthusiastic and untiring perambulator, had sore feet. Walt confessed that he already knew a Dr. Woodhull, and Gob confessed that Canning Woodhull was indeed his father, though he had not seen him since he was five years old. They talked about poems because Gob insisted that he was a great admirer of Walt’s
Leaves
, and they talked about politics because as night fell there began a grand Democratic meeting and torchlight procession. Democrats poured out into the street by the thousands, and the whole city was lit up with torches. On Second Avenue, Walt and Gob climbed up on a stalled omnibus to watch the procession go by. There were models of ships some sixty feet long, fully manned, and liberty cars overflowing with women in robes of red, white, and blue. Every member of the parade carried a torch. Gob laughed at a lady who wore a hat made of Roman candles, which shot tiny fireballs into the crowd along the sidewalks. The two of them had parted after the last straggler in the procession, a child wearing a placard proclaiming for Seymour, had passed by. They arranged to meet the next day in the park, and then Walt went home, thinking of his new friend, wondering that he had ever been afraid of him. Hank was silent, except to make an occasional exclamation.
O joy
, he said.
O happiness.

In the park, Walt kept watch over his book, but though a few people passed by it, no one stooped to pick it up. His spirits were beginning to droop when he heard Gob’s voice behind him saying, “Hello, Walt!” Gob was proceeding rapidly down the carriage path, accompanied by a laughing redheaded female in liberated dress. Only their upper portions were visible above a hedge that ran along the road, and these seemed quite impossibly to be floating. Walt figured they must be on bicycles, but when they came around the hedge he saw that they had contraptions on their feet, big rubber wheels the size of a person’s head, two for each foot, attached to iron braces that fit under their shoes.

“Look, Mr. Whitman,” said the lady, who was pretty and fat, with eyes like her companion’s, blue and Hankish and beautiful. “We are velocipedestrians!” She waved her arms, catching her balance as she stopped her rolling.

“This is my aunt,” Gob said, “Miss Tennie C. Claflin. When I told her I was to meet you today, she could not stay away.”

“It is my great pleasure, sir,” she said, taking his hand and shaking it vigorously. “My very intense pleasure.” She was dressed in a dark blue tunic and skirt of blue wool, with a pair of yellow bloomers on her legs that demanded even more attention than the wheels on her feet. All over the park, as far as Walt’s eyes could see, people were pointing at her, but she seemed not to notice.

“Do you like my land skates?” Gob asked Walt. He’d told Walt the night before that tinkering and inventing were his avocations, that he had been educated as an engineer as well as a physician, and Walt had talked about his engineer brothers, George and Jeff.

“They are very particular,” Walt said, because he did not quite know what to make of the skates. Tennie insisted on surrendering hers so that Walt could try them out. They held his arms and pulled him to and fro over the grass by the lake, until he got some skill with the things.

“It’s just like ice-skating!” Walt said, very pleased with how he was flying down the road at what must have been a full ten miles an hour. He imagined a notice in the papers:
Walt Whitman was in the Central Park yesterday, riding on the wheels of the future.
Gob put his fingers on Walt’s wrist to steady him, then took his hand. They skated full around the lake, returning to find Tennie seated by the water. She rose and ran to them, a confusion of blue and yellow fabric, flashing her legs at the whole wide world, waving in her hand the book she’d found.

“A dark place,” said Tennie, “but I like it.” Walt had taken them to Pfaff’s, because he thought Tennie would liven the place up considerably. It had become rather staid since the days before the war when Henry Clapp and Ada Clare held court there. “We are in my neighborhood, you know,” she said. “I live with my family in Great Jones Street, Number Seventeen. You are welcome to visit, Mr. Whitman. My sister would be delighted to meet you. Of course, don’t come by thinking to see little Gob, here. Great Jones Street is not great enough for him. He lives in Fifth Avenue, and doesn’t care for visitors.”

“The house where I live is gloomy,” Gob said. “It was my teacher’s. When he passed on he left it to me.”

“Did you hear of the horrible murder in France?” asked Tennie. Walt said he had not. “A man named Gaucher went for a stroll in the Tuilleries and noticed a fine handkerchief abandoned on the wet ground. Now, he is a man of limited means, this Gaucher. He has never been a fortunate person, but he blesses his good fortune that he has found this truly exquisite piece of material, which he is already planning to sell before he picks it up. But no sooner does he take it than he discovers that in doing so he has uncovered a horrible staring eye. A hideous, staring green eye. It belonged to the youngest child, the only member of a family of five not buried completely by the fiend who killed them.”

“I hadn’t heard!” Walt said.

“No,” said Tennie. “Of course you hadn’t. It’s a year off yet. Sometimes I am confused. But worry you not, Mr. Whitman. Those poor babies will be sheltered in the Summerland.”

“I think they’d rather shelter on earth,” said Gob. “But what say have we got in it, eh Walt?”

“Pfaff’s used to be a lively place,” said Walt, feeling bewildered. “Back in its day.”

“Gob, fetch us some frankfurters,” said Tennie. “I am hungry for a frankfurter and thirsty for a beer.” As soon as Gob left, Tennie leaned over to Walt and whispered to him. “Mr. Whitman,” she said very slowly. “Listen to me. I am beautiful and I love you. I think you have got a child for me, a noble and perfect man child. Our boy … do you not already love him? He must be gotten on a mountaintop, in the open air. Not in lust, not in mere gratification of sexual passion, but in ennobling pure strong deep passionate broad universal love!”

As she spoke, Walt had shrunk back from her, so far that his chair was leaning away from the table and he might have fallen over if Gob hadn’t come up behind him and steadied the chair with his hip. Tennie had been charming, previously, and now she was just another alarming female.

“Walt,” said Gob, “I think my aunt has played a joke on you.”

“A joke!” said Tennie. “Mr. Whitman, I only sought to amuse you!”

“Of course,” said Walt. “Of course.” He took his frankfurter from Gob, who was scolding his aunt.

“It’s a cause with me, Mr. Whitman,” Tennie said in her own defense. “The manufacture of liveliness is my cause.”

Among the men and women the multitude
, Hank said,
I perceive one picking me out by secret and divine signs.
Walt was at his desk in the Attorney General’s office. It was one o’clock on a snowy afternoon in early December of ’68. To the casual observer, he appeared to be very hard at work, bent over a sheet of paper with his broad-brimmed hat on the desk beside his arm. He looked to be copying some official document, writing a bit and then glancing again at the original, but in fact he was copying a letter of his own, making it prettier to look at and more pleasing to the reader’s ear.

Dear Gob
,

I send you a few lines, though there is nothing new or special with me. I am still working in the same place, and expect to be here all winter (yet there is such a thing as a man’s slipping up in his calculations, you know). My health keeps good, and work easy. I often think of you, my boy, and think whether you
are all right and in good health, and riding yet on the Belt Line when the mood takes you.

I suppose you received the letter I sent you. I got yours November
15
and sent you a letter about the twentieth or twenty-first, I believe. I have not heard from you since.

Congress began here last Monday. I have been up to see them in session. The halls they meet in are magnificent. The light comes all from the great roof. The new part of the Capitol is very fine indeed. It is a great curiosity to any one that likes fine workmanship both in wood and stone. But I hope that you will come here and see me, as you talked of—Whether we are indeed to have the chance in future to be much together and enjoy each other’s love and friendship—or whether worldly affairs are to separate us—I don’t know. But somehow I feel (if I am not dreaming) that the good square love is in our hearts, for each other, while life lasts.

As I told you in my previous letter, this city is quite small potatoes after living in New York. The public buildings are large and grand. Most of them are made of white marble, and on a far grander scale than the N.Y. City Hall; but the oceans of life and people, such as in N.Y. and the shipping etc. are lacking here. Still, a young man ought to see Washington once in his life, any how. Then I please myself with thinking it will be a pleasure to you to be with me, Gob, I want you to write me as often as you can.

Walt folded up the letter in the envelope and took a break to post it. Outside, he leaned for a moment against a streetlamp, because he was momentarily overcome with a feeling like the one he’d had in Central Park—there were magical wheels on his feet and he was flying along hand in hand with his comrade. This feeling kept returning to him, the same way a tossing sea feeling would return to him as he fell asleep after a day playing in the surf.
Acknowledging none else
, Hank said.
Not parent, wife, husband, brother, child, any
nearer than I am. Some are baffled, but not that one—that one knows me.

Walt got no reply to his December letter. Christmas came and went, and though he was among good friends, he felt lonely. He and Hank welcomed in the New Year sitting by his window. Walt made a punch of lemon, scotch whiskey, sugar, and snow from the windowsill. “To the year!” Walt called out to the black sky.
Year all mottled with good and evil!
shouted Hank. Another week passed, and another and another, with still no word from Gob. Walt gave up hope of hearing from him again, and cursed his own extreme nature. How stupid, after all, to feel such a ridiculous attachment! “We will leave omniphily to M. Fourier and his moony-eyed compatriots,” Walt said to Hank. “It is not for Walt Whitman.” Hank said,
Not in any or all of them O adhesiveness! O pulse of my life! Need I that you exist and show yourself any more than in these songs.