Walt Whitman's Secret (50 page)

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 writer 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.

This destruction in no way impairs her own pursuit of an answer to what has become for her the central question. Was Horace Traubel the actual spirit-child of his spirit-father Walt Whitman in more than a symbolic way? Or might their two souls have crossed or mingled? Might Walt's
living
spirit, after years of wandering, have found another home, inside Horace's shell?

She has pursued her research with Canadian mediums but without satisfaction. She has, however, heard of a medium in Buffalo, New York, who is spoken of so highly by seekers and admirers that she invites him to Toronto in the hope he might be able to put her question to the author of the immortal
Leaves
directly. So it is that two Americans come to her door, a small bald-headed fellow fretting inside his celluloid collar and carrying a flat parcel wrapped in oiled paper, and another one, who is younger, taller and faithful to the gospel of the firm handshake. She shows them into the surprisingly large front room, saying, “Welcome, gentlemen, to 22 Carlton Street.
Although both of you
are
gentlemen, I am sure you won't be intimidated to know that I have entertained Missus Pankhurst herself in this very room.”

The short one nods in meek fashion and says little thereafter. The tall one smiles and says, “Ah, the famous Missus Pankhurst. Of course.”

They look around the square room, whose main furnishing is an oaken table. The walls are papered in a French pattern above the wainscots and there are pillows everywhere, encased in fabrics bearing what appear to be various Oriental designs. The alert one of the pair notices a rod running across the ceiling midway down the room.

Flora sees him shoot glances at the unusual drapes of rough linen and the tassels used as wall decoration.

“Do you like my Bohemian style?”

“Very much so,” he replies.

She regards her guests again. “Do either of you have any notion why so few of the people with your gift are female?” As she says this, she looks directly at the short man, who says, “No.” The answer collides with the other one's response.

“I don't believe that is the case at all,” he says. “You see …”

But she is off on a different topic, the persecution, as she calls it, of spiritualism by the church-going officials of Toronto. In a few minutes she winds down, and silence threatens to reassert itself until the taller man rushes to fill the gaps in conversation that his companion has left unclaimed. He compliments his hostess on the cleanliness of Toronto's streets. She replies by denouncing the city again, as an oligarchy of Capitalists and clergy, dividing her opprobrium equally between the two categories.

“I cannot abide their ignorance— no, that is the wrong word, their contempt— for Democratic Ideals,” she says. She rants against the misguided fools at moderate length, allowing thin splinters of her own story to poke through the invective. She lets drop that she is
no longer married and earns her living doing dressmaking at home. The vocal American thinks: That explains the curtain, which can be drawn to divide the space in two, creating one chamber with only the chairs and the big table, the smaller one with abundant cushions, a clothes tree and a painted screen.