Free Walt Whitman's Secret by George Fetherling Page B

Gettysburg and Vicksburg, and of the great defeat at Chancellorsville that equaled either in savagery, but also the time of Lincoln’s declaration granting freedom to the slaves.
    Anne’s own emancipation was self-proclaimed and, like that of the Negroes, not fully implemented for reasons outside her control. As I need hardly tell you (of all people), few young women back then labored for wages or salary other than those who taught, nursed or worked behind counters in shops, particularly establishments selling goods of a feminine character. To say the least, there were even fewer women working in manufacturing, much less helping oversee a noisy,smelly plant where men sweated freely and were fluent in profanity. I soon gathered that she had no urgent need of the income. Her father, Peter Montgomerie, a well-known
homme d’affaires
in Philadelphia, enjoyed more than sufficient prosperity. The family did not live on the Main Line with the filthily well-to-do in their unseemly mansions. They merely inhabited the upper register of the wide and complacent middle swath of society, occupying a large, pleasant house in an equally pleasant neighborhood lined on either side with trees of good parentage that seemed smugly satisfied with their station in the plant world. The Montgomerie place was of the Queen Anne style still popular at that time. It had a high turreted room to one side, facing the street, which was balanced for the eyes’ benefit by a large dormer on the other front corner, indicating the room where the maid and the skivvy slept. Anne, whom the whole household doted on and admired, never
wanted
for anything but
wished
to undertake some activity that only cigar-smoking men had done. And she did so, and did it supremely well.
    She was my boss, but I was, in the romantic rather than the Confederate sense of the word, her slave; was so from the moment I first spoke with her. You know her now for the still-slender straight-backed woman of fifty-five whose intelligence penetrates to the heart of whatever subject she addresses. Would that you had seen her as I was privileged to do. Then no more or less than now, her silhouette was tall and elegant, and she was somewhat athletic in her habits. Her face was the ground where fiery determination met exceptional kindness. It was presented as a perfect isosceles triangle decorated with a delicately rounded chin. Her unusually large eyes are blue, as you know, and neither too light nor too dark. They seemed to symbolize her warmth and understanding. She appeared to be the effortless leader in any serious conversation, though she never gave the impression of taking charge. She did not whisper (that was not her way) but had, as you cannot help but know though you might notphrase it quite this way, one of those fleecy feminine voices that leads men, old as well as young, to a mild form of insanity that would have been worthy of study by our departed Doctor Bucke. When I would see her in her partitioned-off office on the factory floor, her almost-flaxen hair would be gathered in the back, giving prominence to her wide forehead of course but also, in some way, I don’t know how exactly, adding emphasis to her aquiline nose and her lips. In other surroundings, her hair was evenly distributed, framing her face so softly and artfully that one (I, in any case) constantly had to resist the temptation to stroke her cheek for the sheer tactile pleasure of doing so.
    Flora, I hope you will not take offense at the way I’ve expressed the facts about Anne’s appearance alone, exclusive of all other significant considerations. But I feel I should at least describe, if I cannot scientifically account for, the effect she had on me. And not on me alone but, as far as I know but wouldn’t be surprised to see confirmed by independent assessors, on every other male adult who fancied himself, deservedly or not, to be smart, intellectually and culturally developed, and gifted