So, Rita Dunn said. You want to know a thing or two about Mr. Whitman.
I do.
May I ask what exactly youre looking for?
Relating to a case Im investigating.
Does it have to do with the explosion?
Im sorry, I cant discuss the details.
I understand. A case involving Walt Whitman. Is he in trouble?
I know its unusual.
Rita Dunn steepled her fingers, touched them to her mahogany-red lips. Cat felt, abruptly, the force of her attention. It was palpable, a clicking-on, a jewel-like zap that rose in her perfectly outlined eyes. Right, Cat thought. You dress like this to fool the men, dont you? Youre a stealth fighter.
I like the unusual, Rita said. I like it very much. Can you give me a hint about where to begin?
Lets say this. Could you give me some idea about Whitmans message to his readers?
His message was complicated.
Got that. Just tell me whatever comes to mind.
Hm. Do you know anything about him at all?
A little. I read him in college. Ive been reading him again.
A little. I read him in college. Ive been reading him again.
Well. Okay. Whitman as you probably know was the first great American visionary poet. He didnt just celebrate himself. He celebrated everybody and everything.
Right.
He spent his life, and it was a long life, extending and revising Leaves of Grass. He published it himself. The first edition appeared in 1855. There were nine editions in all. The last, which he called his deathbed edition, appeared in 1891. You could say that he was writing the poem that was the United States.
Which he loved.
Which he did love.
Would you call him patriotic, then?
Its not quite the right term for Whitman, I dont think. Homer loved Greece, but does the word patriotic feel right for him? I think not. A great poet is never anything quite so provincial.
She picked up a pearl-handled letter opener, ran a fingertip along the blade. Aristocrats with tentative claims to thrones might have been just this impeccably overdressed, Cat thought. They might have possessed this underlayer of fierce, cordial vigilance.
Cat said, But might someone, reading him today, interpret him as patriotic? Could Leaves of Grass be read as some sort of extended national anthem?
Well, you wouldnt believe some of the interpretations Ive heard. But really, Whitman was an ecstatic. He was a dervish of sorts. Patriotism, dont you think, implies a certain fixed notion of right versus wrong. Whitman simply loved what was"
Indiscriminately.
Yes and no. He believed in destiny. He imagined that the redwood tree was glad for the ax because it was the trees destiny to be cut down.
So he had no particular sense of good and evil.
He understood life to be transitory. He was not particularly concerned about mortality.
Right, Cat said. Is that helpful?
Mm-hm. Does the phrase In the family mean anything to you?
Do you mean, do I recognize it from Whitman?
Its not from Whitman.
I thought not. Though I cant claim to know every single line.
Does it suggest anything to you?
Not really. Could you put it in some sort of context?
Say, as a declaration. If somebody said to you, Im in the family. In light of Whitman.
Well. Whitman empathized with everyone. In Whitman there are no insignificant lives. There are mill owners and mill workers, there are great ladies and prostitutes, and he refuses to favor any of them. He finds them all worthy and fascinating. He finds them all miraculous.
The way, say, a parent refuses to favor one child over the others?
I suppose you could say that, yes.
What about the idea of working for a company?
I beg your pardon?
If somebody said, We all work for the company. In light of Whitman.
Hmm. I could go out on a limb a little, I suppose.
Please do.
Well. When Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, the industrial revolution was well under way. People who had lived on farms for generations were all moving to the cities in hopes of getting rich.
And
A handful did in fact get rich. Almost everybody else worked twelve-hour shifts in factories, six days a week. It was the end of the agrarian world and the beginning of the mechanized one. Do you know that universal time didnt exist until around the late 1800s? It was two oclock in one village, three oclock in another. It wasnt until the transcontinental railroads that we all had to agree on when it was two and when it was three, so people could make their trains. It took a full generation just to convince people that they had to show up at work every single day at the same hour.
Everybody worked for the company, in a manner of speaking.
You could say that. But, really, its impossible to pin a poet like Whitman down this way. Was he writing about industrialization? Yes, he was. Was he writing about family? Certainly. And he was also writing about logging and sex and the westward expansion. You can go at him from just about any angle and find something that seems to support some thesis or other.
I see.
Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power, cheerful, for freest action formd under the laws divine, The Modern Man I sing. Im afraid that if you insist on too much focus here or there, you miss the larger point.
Cat said, To die is different from what any one supposes, and luckier.
You know your Whitman, then.
Just a line or two. I shouldnt take up any more of your time.
I dont think Ive been very helpful.
She rose graciously, a compassionate duchess whod reached the limits of her ability to intercede in the coarser mysteries of the world, its infestations and calamitous weather. There were afflictions that were probably best addressed by local methods by chants and ritual burnings, the drawing of pentagrams.
May I ask you one more question? Cat said. Its not related to Whitman.
By all means.
Is this where that fire was, the one that killed all those women? Was it this building?
No, actually, that building is around the corner. Its part of the biochemistry department now.
Cat rose and went to the window. It was all calmness below. It was students hurrying to class and, at the end of the block, the leaf-shimmer of Washington Square Park.
She called Pete on her cell when she got to the street.
Ashberry.
I just talked to the Whitman person.
She tell you anything?
It seems you could interpret him as some sort of voice for the status quo. As in, if you worked at some awful job in a factory, twelve hours a day, six days a week, here was Whitman to tell you that your life was great, your life was poetry, you were a king in your own world.
You think the kid thinks that?
I think somebody thinks that. I think somebody is speaking through the kid.
You on your way back in?
I am.
See you.
Pete was waiting in her cubicle when she arrived. He didnt ask about Whitman. He said, Dick Hartes wife just gave us a little something.
What?
He woke up in the middle of the night, the night before he was killed. Said he heard a noise.
A noise?
One of those middle-of-the-night things.
He was scared?
She didnt say scared. She said he said he heard a noise. She said he said he was going to go see what it was.
"She was scared.
Yeah. But she takes a little something to help her sleep. She doesnt rouse easily, it seems.
And?
And he got up, left the bedroom. Was gone maybe ten minutes. Came back, said it was nothing, the two of them went back to sleep.
Thats it?
Thats it, Pete said.
You think it means anything?
Probably not. What do you think?
Hard to say. Probably not.
At least shes talking now.
At least shes talking now.
The daughter?
Still in the ozone. Seriously unhinged.
Whats up with the son?
Mondo cooperative. Scary cooperative. Boy detective seems to like his sudden fame.
As people do.
Hes a piece of work, as it turns out. Serious drug history, lately turned to Jesus. That school in Vermonts a jail, basically, for rich kids.
Interesting.
Semi-interesting. You dont think the sons involved, do you?
No. I dont.
Were not going to get anything from the family, I dont think. I mean, I dont think theres anything to get.
Probably right, she said.
And yet, an image crept into her mind. She pictured Dick Harte roused from sleep, walking through a big, dark house in his pajamas (hed have worn pajamas, wouldnt he; a balding fifty-three-year-old with no record of drug use or illicit sex, a man who paid his bills on time, whose pretty wife number two sent herself to Pluto every night with the help of a few key Pharmaceuticals), tracking down a suspicious nocturnal sound. What would it have been like, being Dick Harte? Was he satisfied; was he prospering in his heart? Had he had a premonition that night, out there in the stately abundance of Great Neck? Cat imagined him going down the staircase, walking barefoot over parquet and Oriental rugs, finding nothing amiss, but wondering. She pictured him going to a window make it a living-room window, Thermopane, with heavy brocade window treatments (the wife was a decorator, right?); say it looked out onto an expanse of black lawn, with hedges and rosebushes and the dark glitter of a pool. She saw Dick standing at the window, looking out. She saw him understanding he would sense more than see it that a child stood on his lawn, a boy, skinny and erect and alert, crazy and worshipful: a sentinel, watching Dick Hartes slumbering house the way a guerrilla fighter might take a last look at a village, its lamps extinguished and its people dreaming, before he set it on fire. The child would have vanished immediately, nothing more than a child-shaped shadow that resolved itself into a patch of darkness where a rosebush bore no blooms. Dick would have shrugged it off, gone back to bed, assured his zonked-out wife that there was nothing to fear.
Pete said, Just wanted to let you know. See you later.
Ill be right here. At my loom.
Huh?
Nothing. See you later.
She sat at her desk, resumed her waiting. Was it possible that the kid had gone out to Dick Hartes house, to see his deathmate at home? Unlikely. She was projecting. Say it: you want Luke to be out there in the dark, watching you. You want that, and you fear it. She couldnt help imagining herself looking down at Fifth Street from her own window, late at night, and seeing him on the pavement, three years old, staring up at her window. There hed be, dark-eyed, curious, prone to fits of inexplicable laughter, a little bit pigeon-toed, devoted to trucks and to anything red.