by Norman Lock
We had stopped at Kelly’s, or O’Shaughnessy’s, or O’Malley’s—there was no shortage of Irish taprooms in the river wards in those days—to make a poor man’s lunch of boiled eggs and beer. I’m embarrassed, still, to recall the superiority I felt toward the patrons there—carters, draymen, and street diggers in rough and dirty clothes—dressed, as I was, à la mode, in a clean linen shirt, standup collar, cravat, and fawn-colored coat. I could be a smug and pompous ass, aping, as I did, Dr. Mütter’s stylish dress and demeanor. As you see, Moran, I no longer bother about fashion.
“How’s that, Mr. Poe?” I asked, salting my egg.
“Do please call me Edgar.”
“What door did you have in mind?”
“Since Sir Thomas Brown, we’ve known that ‘eyes and noses have tongues, and the countenance proclaims the heart and inclinations.’ But we could not have supposed, until now, that the proclamation might be revoked; that the wrinkles in that antique writ could be ‘ironed out’ with a knife and hook, forceps and waxed thread.”
I took a bite of hard-boiled egg and chewed.
“Most of us have believed that men’s and women’s acts are predestined; their fortunes told by bumps on the head and features of the face, bestowed at birth. Phrenology, physiognomy—they’re a kind of Presbyterianism of natural philosophy, where predestination makes senseless the idea of freedom of the will. It’s a somber thought for those who hope, by education and self-government, to alter the courses of their lives, to improve their stations by hard work and virtue, to exchange the cards dealt them at birth for a better hand. You can dress as elegantly as you please, Edward,” he said, undoing my ruby-colored cravat with a flourish, “but you cannot undo the knot fate has tied for you.”
I was annoyed by his illustration and knotted up my cravat.
He seemed pleased with himself and, finishing his beer, called for another.
“That was the general idea before ‘Mütter’s miracle.’”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said petulantly, tracing an arabesque in the salt that had accumulated on the table.
“The poor woman whose face was changed beyond recognition—her character also must have been altered by the fire. Her features having been transmogrified, her personality could not help but become grotesque. At the very least, she would be shy of people—possibly a recluse—embittered, angry, envious, and jealous of her former self, whom she might have come to detest as someone else, a woman prepossessing and sociable, fortunate and happy.”
I nodded to show him I was listening, despite a distraction in the street, where a man was vomiting onto the cobblestones, to the amusement of two others dressed in leather smocks.
“But Mütter’s operation might have restored not only her face but also her personality to what they had been before her accident.” His words filled him with excitement.
“I suppose . . .” I said, growing tired of the subject.
“Don’t you see, Edward? We aren’t necessarily a bounden slave to misfortune. We need not, like the Hindus and the British, resign ourselves to a caste. I’m speaking metaphorically, of course: I view Mütter’s procedure as a fable for the possibility of altering fate itself. My interest is not in medicine, but in philosophy and literature. What’s one woman’s face to the overthrow of universal slavery?”
I shuddered for a cause I could not have identified. “The change,” I said, “needn’t be for the good.”
“No.” He revolved the glass in his hand and watched the beer roll round the rim. “But there’s a story here. . . . Suppose, Edward, that a terrible accident befalls a man—upright, God-fearing, and honorable. His horse bolts, and he’s thrown into the street, or else a thief, intent on snatching his wallet, cuts him with a knife. For whatever reason, the man’s cheek is scarred . . . disfigured; his once-handsome face ruined. This most excellent of men who had enjoyed the favor of women, the respect of his employer, the esteem of his colleagues, becomes, by the sympathetic reaction of his personality, solitary, irascible, a hateful, villainous person . . . a drunkard or an opium eater. Systematically, he kills his own finer traits and instincts, until, having destroyed himself, having become, as it were, another person, he murders his friend . . . his wife . . . his child.”
A man at the table next to ours had leaned toward Edgar while he built his fiction by the addition of one bloody detail on another. For a moment, I thought that the entire barroom had fallen silent under the spell of Poe’s rehearsal, but it was only the natural lull in conversation that sometimes follows a lively din. A noise in the street, like a pistol shot, loosened the temporarily stoppered tongues of the handful of patrons remaining in the room. One o’clock had come and gone. The man at the table next to ours laughed oddly, as at a joke whose point you don’t quite understand, and returned to his sausage and mash.
“Then, I guess, the murderer, sentenced to death, repents,” I said, taking up the broken thread of Poe’s anecdote. “His last wish, granted because of his former goodness, is that his disfigurement be repaired by the famous Dr. Mütter, of Jefferson Medical College, so that he might enter heaven in the shape and character of the person he used to be.”
“In his Maker’s image—yes, yes, Edward. The tale should end so. I thought, when I started to sketch its outline, that it would be so. But my humor is saturnine, my imagination bleak. I part the heavy drapes around the coffin and try to stare down death. And fail—fail to find consolation in this world or the next. I’m temperamentally opposed to redemption—in fiction, that is. The other sort belongs to theology.”
The barkeep interposed a damp rag, with which, having taken up our empty plates, he wiped the tabletop. “Another drink, gents?”
“By all means!” replied Edgar grandly.
“None for me,” I said, seized by an instant’s revulsion caused by the table’s unpleasant dampness. “I must be getting back to the ‘museum of horrors,’ or Mütter will have my liver in one of his jars.”
Tossing the damp rag over his shoulder, the barkeep withdrew with our plates and empty glasses. Shortly, he returned with a fresh glass of beer for Edgar. It hissed like a sibyl wishing to reveal a great secret. But it was only the fermentation of hops and yeast I heard.
“You see how easily I’m carried away by my own fancy. It’s the curse and blessing of an imaginative mind. To speak frankly, Edward, the world my mind conceives of is more important than that which God made and is everywhere disappointing and absurd. I’m more interested in the truth of fiction than in actuality.”
“What’s the truth of your tale about the disfigured man?” I asked, laying money on the table to pay for my egg and beer.
“That he murdered, did not repent, was not restored to his former face or self, and was hanged.”
“I must be going,” I said, pushing back my chair.
“Edward, have you ever seen a hanging?”
“No.”
“On the scaffold is where you’ll find the truth—not in Mütter’s fairy tale. I wish it were otherwise.”
THE WORLD MIGHT HAVE ENDED—not in fire, but in snow—so desolate the prison yard appeared below a leaden sky. Snow had fallen during the night; it lay upon the cornices and the window ledges, on the high stone walls and on the gallows’ beam. God had damned the curious woman and her man and sentenced us, their heirs to sin and death, to a like inquisitiveness. No sooner had I heard the iron door shut behind me, however, than I wished I hadn’t come. What had I to do with the hanging of a stranger? The pickled souvenirs of our kind’s brief struggle with death would have been a more welcome sight than the hemp cravat that the condemned man would be wearing to his grave.
By now, I’d read too much of Poe to see the world without an intervening gloom: a gray drizzle of dust or, during this raw January day, an atmosphere composed of icy crystals, biting wind, and dread. I was unmoved when dusting Vogel’s skull and, once, to amuse a silly girl, I had kissed his tongue-less, gumless, altogether fleshless fa
ce. But at the sight of this man—his name was Rudolph Holtz, or Heinz—dragging his misery, like a game leg, up a flight of wooden steps, I trembled. Poe looked on with only a trace of excitement in his gray eyes to leaven an otherwise-impassive expression. He gathered the collar of his shabby coat around his neck, not in an unconscious sympathy for the man who would soon be gathered into eternity, but against the bitter cold.
I was grateful that, for once, Poe had nothing to say; I could not have answered him for the chattering of my teeth. I was scared, Moran. I was familiar with what a man leaves behind after he’s departed this life for the next, but the solemn moment of departure—that’s a secret better kept untold. My advice to you, Moran, is to avoid a hanging at all costs.
Now Holtz, or Heinz, entered the unearthly suspension of time that Poe had claimed to experience when he’d pawed over Vogel’s skull and imagined in minute detail his own now-concluded transaction with the gallows. Heinz, or Holtz, seemed to mount the rough staircase toward the waiting noose as if he had all the time in the world. I would not have been surprised if winter had been replaced by spring, the gray sky by blue, so very slowly did he mount the wooden treads. With equal slowness, the rope was fitted around his neck, the chaplain muttered “Courage,” and the warden nodded toward the executioner, who pulled an iron lever, solemnly, as though to release the bottom of the world itself for humankind to tumble out into extinction. The condemned man descended gravely; I heard a noise like a bowstring when the arrow is let go; he nodded as in farewell to a world that had been unkind, intolerant, or merely indifferent to him. The tautening rope seemed to sting the very air, and then I heard a noise like an arrow’s hitting home. I felt the noose tighten. The dead man twisted on his axis. Silence flooded the prison yard, cold and barren as the moon. It seemed to me that even the wind was holding its breath.
“‘And when He had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour,’” said Poe, who loved the Book of Revelation, of Saint John of Patmos, more than any other sacred text.
Two men in rubber aprons took down the body, as Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea had done the murdered Christ from his gibbet. They laid him—tenderly, I thought—on a barrow and wheeled him inside the prison to wash his corpse. It would end in potter’s field or, perhaps, in Mütter’s own museum after the bones had been rid of their flesh and blood. I wondered what Vogel and he would find to talk about during the long hours of darkness when the door to the exhibits was shut. Edgar would know. He’d make a story out of it, damn him: a comic piece of minstrelsy, with Vogel playing the part of Bones, Holtz, or Heinz, that of Tambo, with Poe as Mr. Interlocutor—pedantic middleman to their befuddled and black-faced end men.
INTERLOCUTOR: Brother Bones.
BONES: Yessuh, Mr. Interlocutor?
INTERLOCUTOR: You seem down in the mouth this morning. Didn’t you sleep well?
BONES: No, suh. The new man was gnashin’ his teeth all night.
INTERLOCUTOR: Did you have a nightmare, Brother Tambo?
TAMBO: Yessuh. I dreamt I was once a man and had come to grief and dust.
INTERLOCUTOR: AS do we all—correct, Brother Bones?
BONES: Ain’t that the truth!
TAMBO (anguished): I can’t feel my face!
INTERLOCUTOR: There’s nothing anymore to feel.
TAMBO: I wisht I had a mirror to see myself in!
INTERLOCUTOR: There’s nothing more to see, Tambo. Isn’t that right, Bones?
BONES (to Tambo): Not in Mr. Mütter’s charnel house, there ain’t.
TAMBO (wistfully): I can almost remember the world. . . . (Bones laughs.) What’s to be done, suhs?
BONES: Nothin’ to be done. We is all past doin’.
TAMBO (whispering): I sees a bloody knife and the hangman’s rope.
BONES: Don’t distress yourself, Brother Tambo. They’s just figments of the Interlocutor’s mind. He’s a writer man. He makes things up in his head.
TAMBO: Am I only a thought in his mind, then?
BONES: We boff is. (Shakes his head sadly.) No happy endings here. (Tambo weeps.) He’s cryin’ again, Mr. Interlocutor, even though he ain’t got no eyes or tears.
INTERLOCUTOR (brightly): Cheer up, Brother Tambo! Mr. Bones.
BONES: Yessuh?
INTERLOCUTOR: Let’s sing Tambo one of our humorous songs.
BONES: Tha’s a good idea, Mr. Interlocutor!
BONES and MR. INTERLOCUTOR (singing together):
Love, sweet love, is the poet’s theme—
Love, sweet love, is the poet’s dream;
But all of this of which they sing
Is only a nightmare, a dreadful dream.
(Tambo weeps all the more.)
BONES: He didn’t like that song much, Mr. Interlocutor, suh.
INTERLOCUTOR: Then I’ll sing him another one.
(Singing, while Bones accompanies him with the bone “clackers.”)
Now the tambo and the bones are forever laid away,
The fiddle and the banjo are unstrung;
But I often heave a sigh for the happy days gone by,
And the times I used to have when I was young.
(Tambo weeps some more.)
The wind had emptied its cheeks with a sigh that blew flakes of snow against my own. It had begun to snow again. Turning from the iron door opening onto the street to take a last look at the place where we had stood—a threshold between life and its dismal opposite—I saw how the sunken footsteps in the yard and on the gallows’ stairs had nearly filled with snow. In a moment, it would be as if none of us had ever walked there and trembled in fear and impatience. The door shut behind us. Life was suddenly everywhere in the street, boisterous and gay. Edgar took my arm. I shook it off and hurried down the pavement.
“YOU LOOK TERRIBLE, EDWARD,” said Dr. Mütter while I was hanging up my coat and hat on the clothes tree in a corner of the dissecting room.
I noticed that the aspidistra on the windowsill was dead. This is a dreadful place to spend one’s days, I said to myself. I should have let my brother find me a job on the wharf. I’d rather dream of dank holds and bilges than atrocities. I could as well have been a grave digger or an undertaker’s boy as the keeper of a chamber of horrors.
“I went to a hanging,” I said, unable to hold his gaze, which always put me in mind of a straight pin through an insect’s thorax.
“With Edgar Poe?”
I nodded.
“I’m told he has acquaintances throughout the Philadelphia netherworld,” said Mütter. “He’s a regular visitor to the city morgue and God knows what other unsavory haunts. I suppose he must do so for the sake of his art. Had he been Dana, Cooper, or Melville, his disposition would be no less grim, but, relieved of his penchant for the sordid, his literary efforts would be more wholesome. Still, you have to admire him. I do, for we have something in common.”
I didn’t bother to ask him what. Honestly, Moran, I was sick to death of Edgar Poe and his “literary efforts.”
“Did you learn anything useful?” asked Mütter.
“Learn anything?” I repeated stupidly.
“At this morning’s hanging. I understood you to have an interest in anatomy. I can think of no better introduction to the subject—short of dissecting a corpse—than a hanging.”
Mütter liked to make unconventional remarks. Usually, I would laugh to show him my loyalty—a different thing altogether from servility, at least in my own mind as it was constituted then. That afternoon, however, I made my face a mask suitable to the numbness of my heart. The spectacle had shaken me, Moran! I had yet to be hardened—coarsened—by war’s butchery and the bloody “pit” of the operating theater. I wanted a drink and might have thrown a beaker’s worth of medicinal alcohol down my gullet to anesthetize my frayed nerves. There were times when I felt myself to be the boy I was and wanted others to see me thus. Feeling my eyes begin to moisten in self-pity, I grew angry. We act by contrariety, Moran. We advance
and retreat.
Mütter pretended not to notice my distress. “It’s fascinating to see the human body at the limits of its structural integrity. In his own way, the hangman is an anatomical empiricist. If he makes the rope too long, the condemned man’s head will be torn from his shoulders at the end of the drop; too short, and his neck won’t break. Death won’t be instantaneous—that is, merciful—but an agony of slow asphyxiation.”
I left him to his drollery and walked into the exhibits room. I had a mind to take Vogel from the shelf and search his eye sockets for news of his brother Heinz, or Holtz. But I shook off the fancy. At that moment, I wanted nothing to do with Poe or Mütter or anyone else whose mind was not commonplace and whose wit would make a woman blanch. The doctor followed after me.
“You must learn to ignore it,” he said. I gave him my blankest look. “The disgust, the dismay a good soul feels in the presence of obscene horrors, which are everywhere. You’ve only to open your eyes, Edward, and see—around every corner, underneath every stone, just beyond the vanishing point—what cannot be endured. But we must endure it, Edward—you must if you intend to become a physician. I know that’s your ambition, and it is a noble one. I can help you. But you won’t last—I would not have lasted for as long as I have—without a counterbalancing emotion: humor, irreverence, blasphemy, even. Do you see what I mean?”
I did, but I kept silent.
His disappointment was evident. Squirming, I felt the specimen pin of his penetrating gaze.
“You’ll learn stoicism, Edward, or you will surely fail. If you had Edgar Poe’s gift, you might write your horrors down and make a few dollars. I don’t foresee a long or happy life for our friend. By the way, I invited Edgar to view the restorative surgery on Nathaniel Dickey’s face. He’s written that he’ll come. I knew he would. The organ where his curiosity is seated is degenerate. As a surgeon, I would advise him to have it out, if only I knew where to cut. He’d refuse, of course. Men like him must cling to their perversities; they are what define them. Can you imagine Poe as a clergyman? No, not even a Unitarian. Demons have eaten into his vitals; his heart is cankered. His reason, I suspect, is perpetually in the balance. I wouldn’t recommend his life or his example. You’re better off here, where hearts no longer beat or minds think.”