Walt Whitman's Secret by George Fetherling Page A

Linotype than what in those days, I’m sure you remember, we called a typewriting machine, for
typewriter
was the term for the operator, not the thing on which she performed— another sterling opportunity having opened up for independent females not averse to the menial, the repetitious and the ill-paid. There was a large black handle on the side of the infernal Arithmometer that one pulled, causing the addition or subtraction to take place and get recorded. Three times out of four I couldn’t get it working properly.
    I digress because I believe I clearly hear what I imagine you are asking: “How did the person as he describes himself here ever win her hand?” The answer is that I did not; it was won for me. As I was determined that the first meal we shared should be on her native terrain and not my own, we went to an establishment in Philadelphia that served a great deal of roast beef, cooked Yankee-style, which is to say without discernible flavor. We exhausted whatever chat we possessed about the factory almost before reading the bill of fare, and were talkingabout the other part of our lives. She told me about her family, and I, cautiously, told her about my own. She said that Camden seemed the most surprising yet most familiar of places, being little more than an arm’s length from Philadelphia but separated from it by something more fundamental than a mere river. “When I was growing up here, I never had reason to cross,” she said. Then she told me about a remarkable old poet known as Walt Whitman who had been living in Camden for years, and how “his poetry is just like the city, invigorating in ways you thought were familiar yet had never experienced, or been able to experience, until seeing what he himself saw through his own eyes.” I was flattened and flabbergasted, almost literally unable to speak.
    While my hands fumbled and my brain roiled, she proceeded to tell me of the first time she laid eyes on him. He was lecturing, sitting up on the stage in a plain chair that seemed too small for him, waiting for the convener of the event to finish his introduction. “Walt rolled up his old felt hat and stuck it in one of his coat pockets while extracting from the other a few crumpled pieces of scratch paper— his notes. He wore plain black clothes, not of recent birth, and a big floppy black necktie, possibly velvet, tied like a great bow girdling his throat, as though he were about to make us a gift of himself, which I suppose in a way he was. He adjusted his beard and was about to rise to thank his introducer and begin telling us about President Lincoln. But in the second before he got to his feet, a bright yellow light, as yellow as a lemon rind, lit him from behind, blurring the edges of his contour and making him appear to be from some other world. Some world better than this one.”
    She looked around at the dining room I had selected with such consideration. “I have no idea what caused this effect, which lasted only a second. The part of me that believes in science mocks the part that doesn’t, saying I am a careless and inconstant girl. But I believe some event occurred that permitted me— I don’t knowwhether others saw it— to see him from the inside out, you might say, to catch a glimpse of the essential spirit that resides just inside his physical body, like the lining of a coat.”
    If at that moment I had had a mouth full of roast beef, I might well have choked to death. I recovered my breath and, entreating myself to speak calmly, told her the entire story of my friendship with him, my attachment to him, my entanglement, some would even say my inculpation. She took in every word separately as well as collectively, sometimes looking directly into my eyes. I knew then that we would be lovers eventually. What I did not foresee— for who would have done?—was that W would always seem to be present at the foot of the bed,