“Of course I do,” Walt said. “Of course I am sad. If I let it, it might consume me. His heart tore, and I wonder if it was not the accumulated burden of madness and woe that tore his heart apart as hands might tear a paper bag. Sometimes I think I can hear him, raving and crying and dying. I can think on his life — what it might have been if madness hadn’t claimed him, and I can love that lost life as I can love Andrew’s lost life, and grieve for him. A person could live his whole life like that, in service to grief. You’ve said as much yourself. What does it do? It will not bring them back, to hollow yourself out, to crush your own heart from loneliness and spite. My friend, it will not bring them back.”
Walt liked these words less and less as he spoke them, because they seemed conventional and cowardly and stupid, and at odds with his own experience. Hadn’t Hank come back to him, in a sense?
Surely, said Hank. Surely I did. And Gob said, “It might, too.”
“Mr. Whitman,” said Tennie. “You are fatter and saucier than ever.” Walt was at Victoria Woodhull’s house, invited with Gob to a party on a warm September evening in honor of Stephen Pearl Andrews, an ultimately learned and ultimately radical man, and a very frequent contributor to the paper Mrs. Woodhull had started with Tennie in May of 1870, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly. They were a very special pair of sisters. In the winter they’d opened up their own brokerage house. Walt had visited their offices a few days after they’d opened, when the rooms on Broad Street were still packed with reporters and curiosity-seekers. The lady brokers had received Walt and Gob in their private office. Walt kept a huge walnut desk between himself and Tennie, but offered sincere compliments to both ladies. “You are a prophecy of the future,” he told them.
“New York agrees with me,” Walt said to Tennie at the party, looking around for Gob but failing to find him. Mrs. Woodhull’s house was not so large as her son’s, but it was much prettier. The guests were gathered in two large parlors, the walls of which were hung with purple velvet and white silk. White roses were everywhere, in vases and in pots, strung along banisters, and even hanging from the ceiling in flower-chandeliers. “This is a fine house. I think it must be roomier than your house in Great Jones Street.”
“Great Jones Street?” said Tennie. “Did we ever live in that dismal alley?” A man came up to them, a great big tall well-gristled fellow in a black suit. He took Tennie’s hand and kissed it, then looked at Walt coolly.
“Dr. Fie,” Tennie asked, “have you met Mr. Whitman? He’s Gob’s dear friend, you know. And mine too. Mr. Whitman, Dr. Fie is also a friend of our Gob.” Walt put his hand out for the doctor to shake. Dr. Fie considered it a moment before he took it.
“I’m a physician,” Dr. Fie said, shaking Walt’s hand hard and slow. “What’s your profession, Mr. Whitman?”
“I write poems,” Walt said.
“Mr. Whitman took care of our sick boys during the war,” said Tennie. “Didn’t you, Mr. Whitman?”
“Did you?” asked Dr. Fie. His smile was not friendly. “No doubt you healed them with verse.”
“I gave them the medicine of daily affection and personal magnetism,” Walt said.
“Very efficacious, I’m sure,” said Dr. Fie.
“Dr. Fie,” said Tennie, “do you doubt that magnetism is strong medicine?” She put out her finger and poked Dr. Fie in his broad chest and he leapt up, as if shocked. Tennie threw her head back and laughed very loud. This attracted her sister, who stepped gracefully across the room, nodding and smiling at her guests, until she came to where Walt was standing.
Mrs. Woodhull nodded at her sister and Dr. Fie, then asked Walt to walk with her. Walt was afraid she might ask him again to endorse her bid for the Presidency of the United States in 1872: She had declared herself a candidate back in April, in a letter to the Herald.
“Isn’t Tennie a delight?” she asked, but before Walt could answer she started talking about the late war between the French and the Germans. She said Louis Napoleon fully deserved his defeat.
“Yes,” said Walt. “Even with all his smartness, I consider him by far the meanest scoundrel that ever sat upon a throne.”
“It’s cheered Gob,” said Mrs. Woodhull. “To have all the killing done with.” She leaned over and whispered in his ear. “Yet he seems a little gloomy, this evening. Would you investigate the cause?” They rounded a giant fern, whose drooping branches were hung with roses. Gob was sitting alone on a deacon’s bench. “Well, Mr. Whitman. I hope I will be in Washington this winter. You may expect me to call on you.” Mrs. Woodhull gave him a little push towards Gob, who did indeed look gloomy, though earlier in the day he’d been very happy. He and Walt had had one of their customary walks along the river, and the sight of all the German steamers covered with bright flags had made Gob caper.
“Hello!” Walt said as he sat down. “I thought I’d lost you.”
“I’m just having a rest.”
“You’ve been mighty cruel to that flower.” Gob had taken a rose from the fern and plucked out all its petals. They were scattered on his lap.
“Yes,” said Gob. He took the petals up and began to manipulate them, rolling them into tiny cigar shapes and tying them together end to end. “How do you like the party?”
“It is more subdued than I expected. I thought there would be more emancipated dress. More Free Love. More people hanging upside down from the ceiling shouting out revolutionary slogans. I thought Dr. Graham would be here, peddling his sawdust muffins. Did you know your Aunt Tennie is the author of a pamphlet? She gave me a copy.” Walt took it out of his pocket—The Non-Participatory Female, and Other Natural Abominations.
Gob laughed. He took the pamphlet and put it in the fern pot. Then he went back to weaving the petals. Walt watched silently. For five minutes, Gob’s nine fingers made a quiet frenzy of obsessive, repetitive motion. When he was finished, he took Walt’s hand and tied the bracelet around it. “There, my friend,” he said. “A present for you.” Walt held his hand up, pulled at the bracelet. It was as strong as any good yarn. Hank spoke: Camerado, I give you my hand! I give you love more precious than money, I give you myself before preaching or law; Will you give me yourself? Will you come travel with me? Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?
“Thank you,” Walt said.
“It’s just a trinket,” said Gob. “Don’t get all sobby-eyed. Look here, I need your opinion.” He leaned across Walt and spread the branches of the fern, revealing a scene from the party: a young lady in conversation with a hideous man. Walt knew the man. It was ugly Benjamin Butler, the congressman who had wanted so badly to evict Mr. Johnson from his fancy house. Walt didn’t know the young lady. She looked to be about twenty-five years old, and was very small and dark.
“Do you see her?” Gob asked. “Do you think that girl is pretty?”