Yet we remember him today not for his clumsy military thinking or vindictive politics but for, of all things, a heart open and exposed to hurt. The man I met in that private car felt the death of strangers more acutely than any I’ve ever known. He lived in horror, not as its countryman but as a spy behind enemy lines.
I was there when he wrote his right and terrible Gettysburg Address, but no one believes me that I was no help at all—just present to watch him catch it, a cry and a paean and a curse all at once.
Seven and eighty years ago, our great progenitors conjured a nation with words, a tribe united not by coincidence of geography or inherited belief but upon ideals freely chosen. We are the nation that chose together to be a nation.
On November 18th, the President’s chartered train left Washington for Gettysburg to dedicate the new cemetery there. I was among a dozen journalists aboard, watching the others play poker and drink brandy while I wrote a column for my newspaper. I don’t remember much about that column except that it was almost certainly wrong.
What I do remember is that at 5:20 p.m., Poe’s personal secretary John Newell entered the lounge, glanced over the heads of everyone there and caught me in his gaze. I froze and hunched slightly, wondering if the President’s men had only just then realized who I was.
I began to gather my papers as he approached, wondering insanely if they’d slow the train down enough for me to step off or if I’d have to leap. Newell sidled past the other men who’d gone silent at his approach, and he leaned close to me.
“The President requests to meet with you, sir,” he said.
“With me?” I said, stupidly.
“Yes,” he said.
“With George Youngston of the Cincinnati Advertiser?”
“Yes, sir,” he said, guiding me to my feet with a gentle touch to the elbow. I gathered my bag with the papers sprayed from the top and followed him.
“Oh, Youngsy,” said Fred Villiers from the Globe. “I hear they left one grave open just for you.”
The other reporters laughed and I glanced back at them one more time before Newell guided me to the door. Newell knocked twice and, at the assent of a voice on the other side, swung it open for me.
What I saw first was what seemed to be a faceless man seated at a simple pine desk, and it took a moment for me to realize that the President of the fractured United States was holding his bald head in his hands above the scattered pages before him.
“You are the man on this train who hates me most, but you’re the only one with a shred of fancy,” said Poe.
In the decades since, we have brought men and women and children among us who had not the luxury of that choice, and we are now in the third year of a war deciding whether they are human. Ten thousand voices pro and con are now smothered by the blood-soaked soil beneath our feet, their words unintelligible from their shattered and fleshless jaws, their eyes blinded by eternal darkness, their hearts too still and silent. What they now know cannot help us, not even were we wise enough to listen.
I noticed a sharp pain in my knuckles from clutching my bag, and I willed myself to ease my grip.
“Sir,” I said. “Mr. President. Your Excellency.” My mind was flipping through every possible form of address, hoping one would be correct.
Poe looked up and squinted beneath his enormous pale brow. “Those are a far sight better than your usual names for me. ‘Ol’ Half-Heart.’ ‘The Turtle of War,’ which I presume to be a reference to my features. ‘Death’s Usher.’”
“Sir, I—”
Newell stepped forward. “Can I get you anything, Mr. President?”
“No, thank you,” Poe said. He coughed then in a burst so loud and concentrated that it made me step back.
“May I remind you that you haven’t eaten since we left?”
I’d never seen Poe in person, but he indeed looked haggard and pale, his lips in their deep red the only color on his face. His deep-set eyes peered out from above dark and greasy smears. He seemed a skull atop a skeleton, and I was righter than I knew.
“I’m fine, Newell. You may go.”
Newell did so, and I stood alone as far from the President’s desk as I could.
“Mr. President,” I said, “about those columns—”
“Are you about to tell me that I am not a ‘a fourth-rate understudy who has not learned his lines’ nor ‘a Southern parasite gnawing at the blighted tree of liberty’?”
I didn’t let myself wince, though I was surprised that Poe not only read but remembered my work. “I confess I say things sometimes more...largely...than I should.”
“Largely,” Poe said.
“I mean no disrespect, of course. One has to speak loudly sometimes to get the attention of others in a crowded room,” I said.
“The room of people who despise me is crowded indeed, all of the South and half of the North.”
“I don’t...I don’t despise you, sir,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter to me if you do,” the President replied. “I want your help to write a speech that speaks...largely, as you might say.”
“How largely?”
“Largely enough to end a war,” the President said.
It is for us to decide why they died, and it is possible—even likely—that we may choose that they died for nothing. They certainly fought for nothing, trying to convince fools by the force of arms of what we already know and deny only for the sake of petulance: it is not the skin that makes a man better but his heart, and all of those are crimson.
To the eye of sufficient distance—distant Aidenn perhaps or a ship at sail between the stars—we are an amorphous mass of writhing gray worms feasting on a corpse, this mighty struggle as indistinguishable to that intelligence as the quarrels of ants are to us.
Our wars are not grand and heroic—they are small, and they are fought first between the heart that steers us true and the mind that we fill with the worst ideas of our loudest neighbors.
Most of us are losing.
At the President’s gesture, I took a seat in a narrow wooden chair. Then he reached into the pocket of his waistcoat and withdrew a folded square of newsprint. It opened gently in his fingers like a butterfly.
“You assert here in your column from the sixteenth of February this year that—in your grandiloquent words—‘a just Universe would never have elevated Poe to the presidency of these United States.’”
For a moment I marveled that a man of such stature would carry my words on his person, enjoyed even a moment of pride, but then my face surged with heat.
“Mr. President, I find it vindictive in the extreme that you would summon a man from the press to admonish him for exercising his right to free expression.”
“Mr. Youngston,” he said. “You are not here to be admonished. You are here because I agree with you.”
“Sir?”
“I have felt for some time like a man stretched taut across his years like the skin of a drum, sensitive to subtle vibrations, ready to tear at the slightest excess of pressure,” Poe said. “What I want to know, Mr. Youngston, is how you perceived it.”
I have written perhaps a million words in the decades since my meeting with President Poe, and it still took me more than half of them to learn that there is a kind of drunkenness one gets from the beauty of words on a page, an addiction to their sounds, and that there is nothing so sobering as having to repeat them to the face of a living human being. That lesson began on my way to Gettysburg.
“It was hyperbole, sir, nothing more. It sounded true but wasn’t.”
“What is truth but the beautiful sound of it? You listened closely and I want to know what you heard.”
“As I reflect on it now, I’m not sure any man is suited to the office of President in a war.”
He waved that off. “But I am singularly unsuited. Why?”
What was it I had perceived, truly? Nothing. I’d seen between what others saw and reported, that was all. A man who thought overlong. A man more w
ounded by words than by death. A man morbidly paralyzed by his office.
“It is my impression, Mr. President, that you seem a man of deeper feeling than action.”
Poe smiled at that in a way unsettling to the extreme, and he clapped his hands together with a dull, weak clopping noise. “There it is, Mr. Youngston. There it is! I am a watcher of men, not their leader—sail more than engine?”
“That is an eloquent way to state it.”
“I find myself in this place not from my own propulsion but by a long series of accidents and coincidences, Mr. Youngston. You know of the circumstances of my birth?”
“Yes, sir. Born to celebrated actors in Boston who died tragically early and raised by friends of the family, theater owners from whom you take your middle name.”
“Quite true, though it was my mother who was justly celebrated and my father justly uncelebrated. She died of consumption, as did my beloved Virginia. We are a family cursed to die of civil wars in the blood.”
I had already guessed the signs of his malady, but that confirmed them.
“Hardly a Presidential origin, wouldn’t you agree? Had they lived, I might have been a third-rate actor on a stage instead of a fourth-rate one in the White House. Would my signature role be Hamlet or Macbeth?”
I hoped the question was rhetorical but as the silence limped on, I realized it wasn’t. “Neither, I’d hope?” I tried.
“Both, more likely,” Poe said. “As I am now, the feckless cowardly prince and the conniving madman.”
“I wouldn’t say—”
“I consider every day that my life comes down to the choice of a single hour above my mother’s corpse in a Richmond theater dressing room. Had the Ushers been harder to find, had they said no...I could be a Virginian, dead or wearing gray. Had they been attorneys instead of theater owners, I might have been a rebellious actor instead of a rebellious lawyer.”
The difference in the President had been slight enough; his early fame had come from dramatic closing soliloquies, including one that would have saved Oliver Dew from the gallows if he’d been white. What made Poe popular (beside his youthful orations) were the many stories of his passionate, nearly deranged fights for lost causes. I’d had written once that the Union was too important to be another of them, but with the man now sitting in front of me, I started to wonder.
“I suspect all thinking beings consider their lives that could have been, but I...” He formed a frame with his fingers in the air. “I can see mine as through a soot-streaked window. I feel most acutely a second Poe who walks a half step ahead or behind me always, just out of my reach. I wonder often if he is the better Poe, the one not losing scores of his countrymen.”
“Is it not as likely, sir, that you are the better Poe? Your career, your accomplishments...”
The President seemed as surprised as I was to hear me say that. He tapped his finger to his temple.
“I see his dreams, Youngston. He goes farther at night than I do, and more importantly, farther also by day.”
I am a man born in the North and raised in the South. I have kissed white-gloved hands in ballrooms and waded barefoot in creeks with the children of slaves. I’ve had the fortune of two homes and the misfortune that their people now hate each other, with some of their dead rotting over there and others rotting over here, sharing the same oblivion.
By now, their blood has seeped and trickled its way to the hideous heart at the center of the Earth, the one that feeds on our death and suffering because those are the most common nutrients we produce. It thrums stronger in all our violent stupidity, and when reason dares to whisper, it sings hatred to us in our dreams.
The flavor of our deaths, the flags that waved above them, make us no less a delicacy — only a varied one.
The President coughed again. “I am not as well as I appear,” he said, a shocking statement given how poorly he did.
“I regret very much to hear that, sir,” I said. “Are your physicians hopeful?”
“Do you think they should be?”
I thought briefly of a platitude, some assurance that with faith and tenacity, there could be hope. Yet there was nothing more absurd to say to the man before me with skin so wan that it was nearly translucent.
“Perhaps not,” I said finally.
“It is not a cause for melancholy, I assure you. The war is drawn to me as surely as iron filings to a magnet. I must take it with me when I go, and you must help me.”
“I will do all that I am able, sir.” From my satchel I removed a sheet of paper, a pen, and my inkwell.
The President smiled. “Is it that easy for you to free the words from your brain? Me, I need a hatchet and even then reach but one half the dreams afloat in my imagination.”
“Perhaps it is an issue of practice,” I said.
Our nation is a mansion of many-colored rooms built upon that blood-soaked sand, and the cracks to our foundation have widened now past deniability. We have danced in those rooms oblivious to the loping specter of our national pestilence outside, and now it walks among us. It is an apparition masked with poisonous blood, and as our national host, it falls to me to expose and confront it.
We must accept the ravages of our illness, and I must be first. We can but hope our blood is not exhausted before we win.
By that moment in our conversation, the sweat on the President’s brow was flowing down his forehead and toward his exhausted eyes. He closed them and blotted himself with a red-flecked handkerchief, and when he lowered his hand, he did not open them.
I waited as long as I could, though only a matter of seconds, before saying, “Mr. President?” rather stridently.
“I’m still here, Youngston, though ‘here’ is not what it once was.”
Knowing time was running short not only for our journey but for his, I leaned forward. “Tell me what you see, Mr. President.”
He swallowed, eyes still closed. Then, slowly, he said, “I see a great mansion sliding into a tarn.”
I wrote down his dreams.
That sullen phantasm before us has come to collect the debt of ideals we borrowed with usurious interest. We shall pay now or we shall pay forever more, the maddened nation that fell shrieking into the abyss of history, a warning to all others of what comes when heart and action disagree.
The truth I now acutely perceive is this: we are a nation of liars. We say and write many things—all men are created equal, for example—that we hope become true simply from our inspired utterance. We practice an American voodoo, a desperate faith that by changing the signs, we change the universe.
Every one of these men died because we are liars, and our only possible virtue is that we labor harder to make our lies become true.
When we arrived in Gettysburg, Newell and Secretary Seward were so aghast at the President’s haggard and feverish appearance that they pleaded for him to return to Washington and wait to dedicate the next cemetery instead of this one.
It was that suggestion of another time and another cemetery that invigorated Poe enough to take quarters in town and even nod solemnly at the bullet holes we were shown in the walls on the way. I prepared to take my leave, but he bade me to stay and so I did in the parlor of the house with his secretary in a long vigil.
The next morning, he was strong enough after a late breakfast to walk most of the way to the dedication ceremony without our assistance. He paused once to hover his hand near to the ground, and we rushed forward to prevent a fall that didn’t come. He rose slowly from his haunches, and we guided him the rest of the way to the platform and up the steps and to a waiting chair. There he sat sweat-dreaming while the Honorable Edward Everett prattled on for two agonizing hours with his own oration.
Though we earned this horror, there is yet a feeble gleam of hope. All diseases must end, either in death or in health. We cannot predict or contain the raging of most afflictions, but we can contain this one. We can decide that these men moldering around us are enough. We can honor their sacri
fice by making them nearly the last. We can lie to ourselves that the debt of blood is paid, and then we can work for the rest of our nation’s life to make it true.
We can choose that there will be only one more casualty of our national disease.
When the Baltimore Glee Club finished their “Consecration Chant,” Poe did not immediately rise. He took two deep inhalations and clutched the arms of his chair, and only when Secretary Seward held it in place could he stand. He then thumped his way across the wooden planks with laborious steps.
It was my great privilege to watch the President of the United States deliver the Gettysburg Address at his personal invitation, and when I am asked to tell what happened that day, I little recall the tone of his voice or the motions of his arms. What I remember instead are the faces of his audience, the people who started by fanning themselves with hats and ended as frozen in place as the dead, their jaws agape, their eyes wide.
Scholars debate how much of that address was written by the President and how much was written by me, and none of them believe that it was neither of us—that the speech came from somewhere or someone else and used him as its mouth and lungs. I know nothing of that other man, the one the President summoned on that dais, except that he lived in such darkness that our lives were the light.
I was the man who caught the President when he died, and I was the one who heard his final whispered word among the screams of the crowd. I have never revealed that word and I never will, though like our nation, it too is a compound of two ideas, the first a negative and the last a hope. It was the perfect word to end a war, and it did though only I heard it.
He wanted the speech to be what we remember instead, and so it shall be.
Acres of Perhaps Page 14
