Walt Whitman's Secret by George Fetherling

in one of the creative arts. As you will see, I do not exclude from this category one celebrated old Uranian adhesivist whose friendships with women before this time had covered the spectrum from limpid fiction (those Creole ladies of old New Orleans) to well-hidden trepidation and even fear (Missus Gilchrist) to a puzzling prurience that was in great measure adulterated by an even more intense regard for male members of the same household (Susan Stafford, young Harry’s mother).
    I am trying to write of her as seen through a young fellow’s eyes in the former century that is rapidly being forgotten, and perhaps in the process writing better than I could do were I not so inspired by the topic, back then just as I am to this day. But I will leave you to decide whether Anne has made my prose jump as high as my now-ailing heart. You, the former Missus Flora MacDonald
Denison
, have experience inthese matters. As you remain a sophisticated woman conversant with the world, you appreciate science and cannot be in doubt as to the biological forces hard at work in the situation I describe. We are, all of us, indentured to biology, especially at the ages she and I were. I trust I won’t repel you when I say baldly that when I saw her rise to her feet in her modest glass-fronted office across the way, as viewed from the even smaller closet-like cubicle I shared with two others, I was overcome with silent speculation as to whether her ankles and calves could truly luxuriate beneath that skirt and what exactly her shirtwaist hid.
    Throughout my three half-days of work each week, I made a point of engaging her in conversation. I forged urgent questions about some invoice or misplaced payment so that I could run with it to her side of the shop floor, stepping around the mysterious clanking machines. She was always patient and even-tempered, though I have no doubt whatever that she saw right through my pathetic ruse. Anyone would have done. I like to think she smiled inwardly at my clumsiness, which was at once so helpless and so hopeful. Here I was, far shorter than she, dark to her fair, an American-born foreigner without a family of long-established Yankees to ratify my existence. My hair had yet to droop this way or even to begin graying en route to going white. It was obvious that I had not quite grown into the moustache I wore, which of course was in those days dark as well and had yet to turn downward at the corners of my mouth, making me look sorrowful and unkempt even when in fact I am at my happiest and most dandily groomed. In short, I was annoyed that here I was, not a Jew according to Jewish law, enjoying none of the uplifting cultural, ritualistic and, yes, religious benefits of Jews as I have come to appreciate them in old age and following Father’s death, but a Jew nonetheless in her eyes, as I was sure must be the case.
    She betrayed nothing of the matter, but I thought I could almost hear her mockery. I need not say that this first appraisal, of someonewho after all is even more of a democrat than I, proved absolutely mistaken. I discovered all this only after I had marshaled my skill with the language, a smaller one than her own, as I learned to my chagrin, and secured her agreement to have dinner with me. She had first countered my invitation by suggesting a luncheon instead to discuss the firm’s finances, saying that she couldn’t possibly step out with me socially as I was an employee. So I immediately gave in my notice and repeated my proposal.
    If she found my priorities a bit startling, she found my perseverance flattering in a way, though I feared it would potentially give her ammunition for even greater disdain in the future should I turn out to be the same awkward dullard at table that I appeared to be when seated at the cluttered desk covered in the ledgers and a monstrous German device called the Arithmometer. This mechanical innovation had ranks of keys, more like a lilliputian