Dante Club

by Matthew Pearl

  A small scratching sound, like fingers on a chalkboard, caught the attention of Trap’s triangle ears while he was wound in a ball by Longfellow’s feet. It sounded like ice scraping against a window in the wind.

  Longfellow was still translating at two o’clock in the morning. With furnace and fire in full blast, he could not make the mercury climb its little ladder higher than the sixtieth round, when it would go down, discouraged. He placed a candle at one window and looked out through another at the lovely trees, all feathered and plumed with snow. The air was motionless, and in their illumination they looked like one great aerial Christmas tree. As he was closing up shutters, he noticed some unusual marks in one window. He pulled the shutters open again. The sound of scraping ice had been something else: a knife slicing into the glass. And he had been just a few feet from their rival. At first the words cut into the window were unintelligible: . Longfellow could decipher it almost immediately, but still he put on his hat, shawl, and coat and went outside, where the threat could be read clearly as he traced the sharp edges of the words with his fingers.

  : “MY TRANSLATION.”

  XII

  Chief Kurtz announced on the Central slate that he was leaving by train in a few hours on a lyceum tour of all New England, to address city committees and lyceum groups on new methods of policing. Kurtz explained to Rey. “To salvage our city’s reputation, quoth the aldermen. Liars.”

  “Then why?”

  “To get me far away, far away from the detectives. By resolution I’m the only officer of the department with authority over the detective bureau. Those rogues shall have free rein. This investigation falls completely to them now. There will be no one here with the power to stop them.”

  “But, Chief Kurtz, they are looking in the wrong place. They only want an arrest for show.”

  Kurtz stared up at him. “And you, Patrolman, you must stay here as ordered. You know that. Until this is completely cleared up. That could be in many moons.”

  Rey blinked. “But I have much to tell, Chief . . .”

  “You know I must instruct you to share with Detective Henshaw and his men anything you know or think you know.”

  “Chief Kurtz . . .”

  “Anything, Rey! Should I take you to Henshaw myself?”

  Rey hesitated, then shook his head.

  Kurtz extended his hand to Rey’s arm. “Sometimes the only satisfaction is to know there’s nothing more you can do, Rey.”

  When Rey walked home that evening, a cloaked figure stepped next to him. She brought her hood down, breathing fast, the vapor of her breath crashing through her dark veil. Mabel Lowell cast off her veil and glared at Patrolman Rey.

  “Patrolman. You remember me from when you came looking for Professor Lowell? I have something I think you should look at,” she said, pulling out a thick package from under her cloak.

  “How did you find me, Miss Lowell?”

  “Mabel. Do you think it is so difficult to find the one mulatto police officer in Boston?” She closed her statement with a curled smirk.

  Rey paused and looked at the package. He removed some sheets of paper. “I don’t think I’ll take this. Does it belong to your father?”

  “Yes,” she said. These were the proofs of Longfellow’s Dante translation, which were overrun with Lowell’s marginal notes. “I think that Father has discovered some aspects of Dante’s poetry in those strange murders. I do not know the details that you must, and could never speak to him about this without him growing terribly warm, so please don’t say you’ve seen me. It took much work, Officer, sneaking around Father’s study hoping he would not notice.”

  “Please, Miss Lowell.” Rey sighed.

  “Mabel.” Faced with the honest glow in Rey’s eyes, she could not bring herself to show her desperation. “Please, Officer. Father tells Mrs. Lowell little, and me even less. But I know this: His Dante books are scattered at all times. When I hear him with his friends these days, it is all they speak about—and with such a tone of duress and anguish inappropriate to men in a translating society. Then I found a sketch of a man’s feet burning, with some newspaper clippings about Reverend Talbot: His feet, some say, were charred when he was found. Haven’t I heard Father review that canto of the nefarious clerics with Mead and Sheldon only a few months ago?”

  Rey led her into the courtyard of a nearby building, where they found a vacant bench. “Mabel, you must tell nobody else that you know this,” the patrolman told her. “It shall only confuse the situation and cast a dangerous shadow on your father and his friends—and, I fear, on yourself. There are interests involved that would take advantage of this information.”

  “You knew about this already, didn’t you? Well, you must be planning to do something to stop this madness.”

  “I don’t know, to be honest.”

  “You can’t stand by and watch, not while Father . . . please.” She placed the package of proof sheets in his hands again. Her eyes filled up, in spite of herself. “Take these. Read through them before he misses this. Your visit to Craigie House that day must have had something to do with all this, and I know you can help.”

  Rey examined the package. He had not read a book since before the war. He had once consumed literature with alarming avidity, especially after the deaths of his adoptive parents and sisters: He had read histories and biographies and even romances. But now the very idea of a book struck him as offensively contained and arrogant. He preferred newspapers and broadsides, which had no chance to dominate this thoughts.

  “Father is a hard man sometimes—I’m aware how he can seem,” Mabel continued. “But he has been through much strain in his life, inside and out. He lives in fear of losing his ability to write, but I never thought of him as a poet at all, only as my father.”

  “You don’t have to worry about Mr. Lowell.”

  “Then you are going to help him?” she asked, placing a hand on his arm. “Is there anything I can do to assist? Anything to make certain Father is safe, Patrolman?”

  Rey remained silent. Passersby glared at the two of them, and he looked away.

  Mabel smiled sadly and withdrew to the far side of the bench. “I understand. You are just like Father then. I must not be trusted with real matters, I suppose. On some fancy, I thought you’d feel differently.”

  For a moment Rey felt too much empathy to answer. “Miss Lowell, this is a matter not to get involved in, if one can choose.”

  “But I can’t choose,” she said, and returned her veil to its place as she headed toward the horsecar station.

  Professor George Ticknor, an old man in decline, instructed his wife to send up his caller. His instructions were accompanied by an odd smile on his large and peculiar face. Ticknor’s once-black hair was grizzled down the back of his neck and along his muttonchops, and pitifully thin below his skullcap. Hawthorne had once called Ticknor’s nose the reverse of aquiline, not quite pug or snub.

  The professor had never had much imagination and was thankful for the fact—it protected him from the vagaries that had beset fellow Bostonians, fellow writers especially, in times of reform thinking things would change. Still, Ticknor could not help imagining now that the servant lifting him, helping him out of his chair, was a perfect grown image of George Junior, who had died at the age of five. Ticknor was still sad at George Junior’s death thirty years later, very sad, because he could no longer see his bright smile or hear his glad voice even in his mind; because he turned his head at some familiar sound and the boy was not there; because he listened for his son’s light step, which did not come.

  Longfellow entered the library, bashfully bearing a gift. It was a clasped sack with gold fringe. “Please, stay seated, Professor Ticknor,” he urged.

  Ticknor offered cigars, which from their cracked wrappers, seemed to have been offered and rejected through many years by infrequent guests. “My dear Mr. Longfellow, what have you here?”

  Longfellow placed the sack on Ticknor’s desk. “Something
I thought you, more than anyone, would like to see.”

  Ticknor looked at him in anticipation. His black eyes were impassable.

  “I received it this morning from Italy. Read the letter that came with it.” Longfellow handed it to Ticknor. It was from George Marsh, of the Dante Centennial Committee in Florence. Marsh was writing to assure Longfellow that there should be no concern over the acceptance of his translation of Inferno by the Florentine Committee.

  Ticknor began to read: “‘The Duke of Caietani and the Committee shall gratefully receive the first American reproduction of the great poem as a contribution most fitting the solemnity of the Centenary, and at the same time as a worthy homage from the New World to one of the chief glories of the country of its discoverer Columbus.’

  “Why would you not feel assured?” Ticknor asked bemusedly.

  Longfellow smiled. “I suppose that in his kind way, Mr. Marsh is asking me to hurry. But is it not said Columbus was far from punctual?”

  “‘Please accept from our Committee,’” Ticknor continued reading, “‘in appreciation of your upcoming contribution, one of the seven sacks containing Dante Alighieri’s ashes, taken lately from his tomb in Ravenna.’”

  This sent a faint crimson delight into Ticknor’s cheeks, and his eyes drifted toward the sack. His cheeks were no longer that hot red shade that, in collusion with dark hair, had led people to think him Spanish in his youth. Ticknor unfastened the clasp, opened the sack, and stared at what could have been coal dust. But Ticknor let some run through his fingers, like the tired pilgrim coming at last to holy water.

  “For how many years did it seem I searched the wide earth for fellow scholars of Dante, with little success,” Ticknor said. He swallowed hard, thinking, For how many years? “I tried to teach so many members of my family how Dante made me a better man, with little understanding. Did you notice, Longfellow, that last year there was not a club or society in Boston that did not hold a celebration to honor the three-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s birthday? Yet how many outside Italy think this year, the six-hundredth anniversary of Dante’s birth, worthy of note? Shakespeare brings us to know ourselves. Dante, with his dissection of all others, bids us know one another. Tell me of the fortunes of your translation.”

  Longfellow took a deep breath. Then he narrated a story of murder; about Judge Healey punished as a Neutral, Elisha Talbot as a Simoniac, Phineas Jennison as a Schismatic. He explained how the Dante Club had traced Lucifer’s path through the city and had come to understand that he paced himself by the progress of their translation.

  “You can help us,” Longfellow said. “Today begins a new phase for our fight.”

  “Help.” Ticknor seemed to taste the word as he might a new wine and then dribble it back in disgust. “Help to do what, Longfellow?”

  Longfellow leaned back, surprised.

  “Foolish to try to stop something like this,” Ticknor said without sympathy. “Did you know, Longfellow, that I have begun to give away my books?” He pointed with his ebony cane at the bookshelves all around the room. “I’ve given nearly three thousand volumes already to the new public library, piece by piece.”

  “A wonderful gesture, Professor,” Longfellow said sincerely.

  “Piece by piece until I fear I shall have nothing left of myself.” He pushed down into his plush rug with his shiny black scepter. A wry part-smile, part-scowl stirred his tired mouth. “My very first memory of my life is the death of Washington. My father when he came home that day could not speak, so overcome was he with the news; I was terrified that he could be so stricken and I begged Mother to send for a doctor. For some weeks everyone, even the smallest children, wore black crepe on their sleeve. Did you ever pause to consider why it is that if you kill one person you are a murderer but if you kill a thousand you are a hero, as was Washington? I once thought to ensure the future of our literary arenas by study and instruction, by deference to tradition. Dante pleaded that his poetry carry on beyond him in a new home, and for forty years I toiled for him. The fate of literature prophesied by Mr. Emerson has come to life by the events you describe—literature that breathes life and death, that can punish, and can absolve.”

  “I know you cannot sanction what has happened, Professor Ticknor,” Longfellow said thoughtfully. “Dante disfigured as a tool for murder and personal vengeance.”

  Ticknor’s hands shook. “Here at last is a text of old, Longfellow, converted into a present power, a power of judgment before our eyes! No, if what you’ve discovered is true, when the world learns of what has happened in Boston—even if that is ten centuries from now—Dante shall not be disfigured, shall not be tainted or ruined. He will be revered as the first true creation of the American genius, the first poet to unleash the majestic power of all literature upon the unbelievers!”

  “Dante wrote to remove us from times when death was incomprehensible. He wrote to give us hope for life, Professor, when we have none left, to know that our lives, our prayers, make a difference to God.”

  Ticknor sighed helplessly and pushed the gold-fringed sack forward. “Remember your gift, Mr. Longfellow.”

  Longfellow smiled. “You were the first to believe it all possible.” Longfellow placed the sack of ashes in Ticknor’s old hands, which grasped it greedily.

  “I am too old to help anyone, Longfellow,” Ticknor apologized. “But shall I give you this advice? You are not after a Lucifer—that is not the culprit you describe. Lucifer is pure dumbness when Dante finally meets him in frozen Cocytus, sobbing and mute. You see, that is how Dante triumphs over Milton—we long for Lucifer to be astounding and clever so we may defeat him, but Dante makes it more difficult. No. You are after Dante—it is Dante who decides who should be punished and where they go, what torments they suffer. It is the poet who takes those measures, yet by making himself the journeyer, he tries to make us forget: We think he too is another innocent witness to God’s work.”

  Meanwhile in Cambridge, James Russell Lowell saw ghosts.

  When he was in his easy chair with winter light streaming through, he had a distinct vision of the face of Maria, his first love, and was drawn to her by the resemblance. “By and by,” he kept repeating. “By and by.” She was sitting with Walter on her knee, and she said reassuringly to Lowell, “See what a fine, strong boy he is grown into.”

  Fanny Lowell told him that he seemed to be entranced, and she insisted that Lowell take to bed. She would fetch a doctor, or Dr. Holmes if he liked. But Lowell ignored her, because he felt so happy; he left Elmwood by the back way. He thought of how his poor mother, in the asylum, used to promise him that she was most content during her fits. Dante had said that the greatest sorrow was remembering past happiness, but Dante was wrong on that formulation—dead wrong, thought Lowell. There are no happinesses like our sad, regretful ones. Joy and sorrow were sisters, and very like each other too, as Holmes had said, or else both would not bring tears as they equally did. Lowell’s poor baby son, Walter, Maria’s last dead child, his rightful heir, seemed palpable to him as he walked the streets trying to think of anything, anything but sweet Maria, anything. But Walter’s ghostly presence was not so much an image now as a babbling feeling that shadowed him, that was in him, as a pregnant woman feels life pressing within her stomach. He also thought he saw Pietro Bachi passing him on the street, saluting, taunting as if to say, “I shall always be here to remind you of failure.” You’ve never fought for anything, Lowell.

  “You’re not here!” Lowell muttered, and a thought rang in his head: If he had not initially been so certain of Bachi’s guilt, if he possessed a measure of Holmes’s nervous skepticism, they might have found the murderer and Phineas Jennison might be alive. And then, before he could ask for a glass of water from one of the street’s storekeepers, he saw ahead of him a shining white coat and tall white silk hat gliding joyfully away on the strength of a gold-trimmed walking stick.

  Phineas Jennison.

  Lowell rubbed his eyes, consciou
s enough of his state of mind to distrust his eyes, but he could see Jennison bumping shoulders with some passersby while others avoided him with strange looks. He was corporeal. Flesh and blood.

  He was alive . . .

  Jennison! Lowell tried to cry out but was too parched. The sight told him to run and at the same time tied his legs. “Oh, Jennison!” At the same time as he found his strong voice, his eyes began to pump tears. “Phinny, Phinny, I’m here, I’m here! Jemmy Lowell, you see? I haven’t lost you yet!”

  Lowell rushed through pedestrians and spun Jennison around by the shoulder. But the hybrid that faced him was cruel. It was Phineas Jennison’s tailor-made hat and coat, his brilliant walking stick, but stuck inside them was an old man in tattered vests, face smeared with dirt, unshaven and misshapen. He was shaking in Lowell’s grasp.

  “Jennison,” Lowell said.

  “Don’t turn me in, sir. I needed to stay warm . . .” The man explained: He was the vagrant who had discovered Jennison’s body after swimming to the abandoned fort from a nearby island occupied by an almshouse. He had found some beautiful clothes folded neatly in a pile on the floor of the storage room where Jennison’s body hung and had helped himself to a few items.

  Lowell remembered and felt sharply the solitary maggot now removed from him, alone on its steep, savage path, eating into his insides. He felt a hole had been left, releasing everything that was caught up in his gut.

  Harvard Yard was gagged with snow. Fruitlessly, Lowell searched the campus for Edward Sheldon. Lowell had sent him a letter on Thursday evening, after seeing Sheldon with the phantom, demanding the student’s immediate presence at Elmwood. But Sheldon had not responded. Several students who knew Sheldon said they had not seen him in a few days. Some students passing Lowell reminded him of his lecture, for which he was late. When he entered his lecture room in University Hall, a spacious room formerly housing the College chapel, he gave his usual greeting. “Gentlemen and fellow students . . .” This was followed by the usual practiced laugh of students. Fellow sinners—that’s how the Congregationalist ministers from his childhood used to begin. His father, to a child the voice of God. Holmes’s father, too. Fellow sinners. Nothing could shake Lowell’s father’s sincere piety, his trust in a God who shared his strength.