by Norman Lock
“Take my hand,” a shadow adjured me—not a shadow, but a man standing in one.
He stumbled toward me with his hand outstretched. He was an old man, even an ancient one, dressed bizarrely like a character in a Washington Irving tale: a pigtail tied with a ribbon, a tricornered hat, an antique cloak, an old-fashioned frock coat, knee breeches, and buckled shoes. In spite of myself and my recent shock, I laughed at the strangeness of the apparition. He was not insulted. Perhaps he hadn’t noticed my derision. He repeated that I should take his hand. I did and felt a thing as dry and bony as a stick. I flinched and would have taken back my hand, but he held it fast in his own.
“When I was a boy,” he said in a distant, quavering voice, “I saw General Washington ride down Market Street on his white horse, Nelson. I saw Ben Franklin on his way to the Grand Convention. I heard the bells ring for the reading of the Declaration of Independence. All that is in me from those days is now in you. Memory is electric, like what’s stored in the brass ball of Franklin’s electrostatic machine, waiting for its spark to jump from one mind into another’s.”
Holding his hand, I thought I had felt the spark.
He let go of mine and looked at me curiously. “They say I’m mad,” he said.
He stepped back into his shadow and was gone—to Sleepy Hollow, perchance, to dream some more.
I WAS FINISHED WITH POE and resolved not to see him again, even if it should cost me Dr. Mütter’s patronage. Two or three weeks had passed, and I began to feel safe from him and his baleful influence, when, while dusting the skulls on the shelf, I happened to see my own—that is, my twin’s. Striking out wildly, I broke a jar in which a fetus had been swimming; it slipped out and came to rest in a puddle on the floor. I was beside myself! Wouldn’t you have felt the same, Moran, to see yourself rendered down to bone, grinning back at you? I must have shouted in dismay, because Mütter came hurrying into the exhibits room, a dissecting scalpel in his hand.
“What is it, Edward?” he asked, and, in spite of my consternation, I was pleased to hear a genuine concern beneath his gruffness.
Speechless as the skulls themselves, I pointed to my doppelgänger’s. Clenched between its teeth—the slack jaw bandaged shut—was a paper inscribed in India ink with these words:
EDWARD A. FENZIL
BORN DECEMBER 29, 1824
DIED MARCH 5, 1844
Mütter laughed. I suppose to him the joke was irresistible. “It’s a student prank, Edward. In the worst of taste, of course, but our young men are a rowdy, childish lot. I shouldn’t let it distress you.”
“You don’t understand,” I said, tremors passing through me like an electric current.
“What don’t I understand?” asked Mütter.
“It’s my skull bone sitting on the shelf—or it might as well be.”
Then I told him the story of the encounter with my doppelgänger in the Callowhill morgue, my gaze fixed in fascination on a drop of blood resisting gravity at the edge of Mütter’s scalpel. While I spoke, there was in me a voice that asked to know what kind of blood it was. A rat’s? A dog’s? A pigeon’s? Or was it human blood? One looks like another to the naked eye. I suppose it’s only from the quantity of blood—its profusion—that we can guess its source without benefit of a body. My mother had been surprised when a colored boy, son of a stable hand, had cut his finger on broken glass. Friends, we’d been throwing stones at empty bottles. Later, she said that she would never have guessed a black person’s blood could be red like ours.
When I’d finished my panicked recitation, Mütter replied with a reasonableness meant to comfort me. “The light in the morgue is treacherous, Edward, and you may, in fact, have borne only slight resemblance to the dead man.”
His composure enraged me, for I had lost mine completely.
“From what you’ve told me, your friends are not above playing a practical joke, either. With rouge and chalk, an embalmer could produce the desired effect in that starkly lighted place where one might almost expect to see ghosts. Smartly done by an able man, the illusion could have persuaded a far less susceptible person than you of its reality.”
“I looked exactly like him,” I said doggedly. “He looked exactly like me. We looked exactly like each other except for the blemish on his cheek.”
“Let me grant you, then, that you did see your double.” He was all patience and reason. “What of it? While the chances are slight, the encounter is not impossible. I don’t doubt that there exists, for some of us anyway, a likeness that may even, in rare instances, be perfect. The world is large, and there are a great many people in it. Doppelgängers may be among them. I further grant you that to meet one’s own in a morgue, at night, in such fantastical company would be terrifying. But the encounter does not signify that your life is at risk either from harm or damnation. There may be doppelgängers, but Poe’s use of the idea in ‘William Wilson’ is absurd. He based his tale on an impossibly evolved affinity where to kill one’s double is to kill oneself. It’s laughable!”
I did not laugh, but I thought it best to pretend to Dr. Mütter that his logic had convinced me of my childishness. Satisfied as much with himself as with me, he returned to the dissecting room, while I went to the pit to observe Dr. Chapman operate on an ulcerated artery after a second hemorrhaging brought on by a night of “excess,” meaning whiskey and women. The patient, an ironmonger, had been shot six days earlier and, having had the wound dressed by a barber-surgeon, never realized that his earthly vessel would shortly be unstoppered and his life’s blood let to spill onto the floor. I did not see him go. I was preoccupied by the mortal danger in which I found myself—and would soon lose myself. When the corpse had been removed, I went into the pit and mopped. Watching the red strings of the mop turn the water in the pail to blood, I thought of old Aaron’s parlor trick.
By the afternoon, I had almost forgotten my doppelgänger when, having taken the specimen book from the shelf in order to catalogue a prodigious gallstone, I happened to turn to the osteological pages and saw my name and entry written there:
Name, age: Edward Arthur Fenzil, 19
Gender: Male
Place of Origin: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Cause of Death: Delirium tremens and moral degeneracy
Description: Port-wine stain on cheek. Warder of Mütter’s monsters
Holloway! No one else would have carried the joke, if joke it was meant to be, to this extreme. Enraged, I went in search of him. At that moment, I wouldn’t have cared if Dr. Mütter had come into the room with George Washington’s brain on a tray to be pickled and catalogued. Goddamn Holloway! I could have filleted him with the nearest scalpel. I found him sitting in a quiet corner of the medical library, smoking a cheroot.
“Goddamn you!” I shouted in his face, whose mouth, after the cigar had been removed, relaxed into a grin.
“What is it now, Fenzil? Has one of your skeletal exhibits run off?”
I hit him. I saw the blood come out on his upper lip, soaking a portion of his dandified mustache. I saw him remove a white handkerchief from his pocket and daub at it. The blood—so crimson!—made a rose-shaped stain on the linen. A small gray rose of ash had fallen from the end of his cigar. My anger spent, I was suddenly calm.
“You oughtn’t to have done that, you know,” he said.
For a moment, I thought he meant to slap my cheek and challenge me to a duel: scalpels at twenty paces, lancets at dawn. But he was too taken aback and much too craven for charades.
“Where did you get it, Holloway?”
He knew what I meant. “A friend sent it over last night while I was on duty.”
“What friend?”
“Buffone, the hairy attendant.”
I was surprised that he would know such a person.
“I make it a point to cultivate friends in low places,” he said smugly. “I don’t expect to have a brilliant career doctoring, Fenzil. I’m just a muddler. If I didn’t have a few good friends in high plac
es—or, rather, if my father didn’t—I wouldn’t be enrolled here at all. Father has his heart set on my following in his footsteps. To be frank, mine isn’t in it. I’m sure to botch things once in a while, and I wouldn’t want my ineptitude becoming common knowledge. You know what they say: Dead men tell no tales, but the coroner, the mortician, and the morgue chap will unless you’re on good terms with them. You might say I’m an honorary Eschatologist.” He laughed, delighted with himself. “They appreciate the occasional gift of a bottle—doesn’t matter what so long as it scalds the inner man. Now if you’ll forgive me, Fenzil, I need an astringent and a sticking plaster.”
“Then you know Edgar Poe?” I asked as he removed his bulk from the depths of the chair with a creak of leather.
“Everybody in the ‘underworld’ knows Thánatos.”
“Did he put Buffone up to it?”
Holloway shrugged and said, “You have to find that out for yourself.”
He left me alone in the room, with only the ghost of his tobacco smoke to mark his having been there.
Holloway died this year. His heart. He grew to be enormously fat! He was also in the gallery when Eakins made his preliminary sketches for Dr. Gross’s Clinic. I was pleased to no end when I saw that Holloway had been left out of the final painting.
“Revenge, revenge,” Timotheus cries,
“See the furies arise,
See the snakes that they rear,
How they hiss in their hair,
And the sparkles that flash from their eyes!”
Sorry, Moran, I’ve not much of a singing voice. But Handel knew the delicious meal that malice sometimes makes.
That night, I returned to the morgue to confront Buffone. The negro grave digger was with him. They were sharing a bottle of Old Tom gin without bothering to wipe its mouth on their sleeves. I always thought that drunkards were the true democrats.
Buffone set the bottle down on an empty slab and shouted, “Mictlantecuhtli!”
“My name is Fenzil,” I said. My scowl went unnoticed where faces of pain, fear, regret, and protest were commonplace.
“Mr. Fenzil, please forgive me,” he said, bowing genteelly in an alcoholic befuddlement. “You are correct inasmuch as the Thanatopsis Club has not been called into session. Having put aside, for the moment, our divine natures, we are met here tonight as ordinary friends.”
“I’m not your friend.”
“No? Acquaintances, then. We are acquaintances—there’s no disputing the fact. Am I right, Young Werther?” he asked the negro. “He was named thus by his ol’ massa for his sorrows. His massa was a southern gentleman who taught the classics of literature to little southern massas and gents in English, German, French, and, if I’m not mistaken, Greek. My friend has sorrowed a great deal. You’ve sorrowed a great deal, haven’t you, Young Werther? Sorrowed and suffered.”
The grave digger indicated that he had sorrowed and suffered.
“He’s no longer young, of course. His sorrows have aged him, turned his woolly pate white. White like the hair of a southern gentleman at a dignified time of life.” Buffone took another drink from the gin bottle and then thought to offer me some. I declined. “What do you want here?” he asked, his tone sharpened by my look of distaste.
“Why did you send Holloway my double’s skull?”
“Did it disturb you?” he asked silkily.
“It did. Why did you send it?” I hoped I sounded righteously indignant, but I probably sounded fretful, like a sulking child. “Did Edgar Poe put you up to it?”
“He did. He thought you would enjoy having—what did he say? He thought you’d enjoy having your very own Yorrick to talk to. Isn’t that right, Young Werther?”
The grave digger nodded. Having never once heard him speak, I wondered if he were a mute.
“Are you familiar with the Bard’s greatest work, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark? There’s a grave digger in it. Two, in fact. Isn’t that right, Young Werther? More than once, I’ve read the play from beginning to end for my friend here. Helps to pass the long nights in the tomb. He keeps me company—don’t you keep me company, Young Werther?”
Once again, the negro nodded his head.
“We pass the long nights together, drinking, reading, reciting from the classics. People shy from us. They say we stink of death. Maybe we do, though I can’t say I smell anything out of the ordinary. Young Werther and I think that the graveyard scene in Hamlet is the best of all. ‘There is no ancient gentleman but gardeners, ditchers, and grave-makers: they hold up Adam’s profession.’ Old Will called his two grave diggers ‘clowns,’ which was a rude remark. Young Werther is no clown; he has the dignity of his sorrows to elevate him above most of them he plants. He got his tongue cut out for having the gall to ask his ol’ massa not to sell his wife.”
The speechless grave digger drank deeply from the bottle, as if in honor of himself.
“And to pay him back in kind, and a little more, Young Werther stove his ol’ massa’s head in with a shovel. And don’t you know that, after a terrifying journey to freedom through malarial swamps and towns dark with ancient anger, the Good Lord put a shovel in his hands and bid him dig graves? Mysterious are the ways of the Lord—mysterious and cunning!”
Young Werther drank deeply to the perplexities of life and death.
NEXT MORNING, ITS BEING SATURDAY, I went to Edgar’s house to have it out with him. A middle-aged colored woman answered my knock on the front door. She eyed me suspiciously. I suppose I gave a fairly good impression of a man with a grievance. I told her I wanted to see Mr. Poe.
“He ain’t home,” she said curtly, beginning to close the door on me.
“Who is it, Aunt Sarah?” It was Virginia’s voice arriving faint and small from inside the house.
“It’s Edward Fenzil, Mrs. Poe,” I called. “Edgar’s friend.”
I could be a plausible and fraudulent young man.
“Come in, Mr. Fenzil. Let the gentleman in, Sarah.”
Sarah grunted and let me pass.
Virginia was lying on the sofa, a tartan blanket covering her. The fire had been made up in the grate, but the room was damp on that March morning. Gloomy and chill, the house might have been decorated by Poe himself in a style suitable to his tales. Virginia made an effort to rise in order to greet me but sank once more into lassitude. I wondered if I ought to go to her and kiss her hand. In those days, I knew nothing of propriety. Not that I’m a hand kisser now, but I know enough to attend a sickbed in a rich man’s house.
“Don’t get up,” I said, in lieu of anything decorous.
She smiled at me—gratefully, I thought.
“Edgar’s not at home,” she said. “He’s visiting Mr. Lowell.” James Russell Lowell was, at the time, editing an abolitionist newspaper in Philadelphia. “My mother is at the stores. Aunt Sarah used to do our washing, and she’s kind enough to sit with me when I’d be alone otherwise.”
Virginia lay on the sofa, weak and forlorn, and I forgot my anger. Despite her illness, she was pretty, and not much older than I. Seeing her pallor and listlessness, I felt foolish. I’d seen my dead twin; I’d handled his skull. What of it? My complaint was trivial. She closed her eyes; the lids were nearly transparent. She was so young, Moran! I wondered what their life together was like, hers and Edgar’s. I could not picture intimacy. She was frail and otherworldly, while Poe was ensorcelled by his own phantasms.
“Edgar is busy with his writing,” she said apologetically, to account for his absence. “He often visits Mr. Lowell, who understands it.”
“What do you think of it?” I asked, to have something to say.
“I think what the world thinks: That it is fine, although I confess, Mr. Fenzil, that I don’t read it. It’s too sensational; my nerves won’t stand for it.”
She was like a child. But I couldn’t imagine Poe as her father any more than I could as her husband. Brother and sister, then. She was his Sis, after all, his Sissie. There was in him some
thing that defied categorization. He was an original. Maybe that’s what it means to possess genius. He and Virginia must have passed their days and nights together, chastely, in the rarefied atmosphere of a sentimental novel. If he looked at her—he must have sometimes looked at her—it was not with desire, but with curiosity. I could picture him reading poetry to her—not his own—and her, at the piano, singing and playing “The Blue Juniata,” “The May Queen,” or “Sleeping, I Dreamed of Love.” She had done so up until two years before, when she’d broken a blood vessel in her throat. That was the beginning of her long illness. The piano was gone—sold, no doubt, to pay a debt. They would never, in their short lives, be free of financial crises and panics.
“Will you have tea, Mr. Fenzil?” she asked. “Sarah will bring it if you like.”
“No, thank you. I have to go. An appointment.”
“So soon?”
She looked relieved. I suppose she wanted to shut her eyes again.
“Don’t get up, Mrs. Poe. I’ll let myself out.”
“I’ll tell Edgar you paid us a visit. He’ll be disappointed to have missed you.”
I nodded, smiled, and moved toward the door. My gaze fell on a stack of writing paper on Poe’s desk. A new story—one dedicated to me! I looked at Virginia; her eyes were closed; and, hesitating hardly at all, I purloined the manuscript. On the desk, a tintype of my dead other, reunited with me, glared from under glass, inside a frame of yellowed ivory. The smudge of his—or its—disfigurement was just visible on the cheek.
At home that evening, I sat by the fire while my mother sewed and gabbled as inconsequentially as the pigeons in Mütter’s coop. She insisted on recounting the minutia of her day: what the butcher had said to her and how she’d answered him; how she’d nearly turned an ankle on the front step, whose bricks needed pointing; the state of poor Mrs. Murphy’s lumbago and Mr. Crowther’s gout; the saucy color of Anne-Marie’s wool stockings poking out from the skirt of her dress for all the world to see. And then there were the questions: When did I think my brother, Franklin, would come home and in what condition would he drag himself upstairs to bed? Had I been to see Ida lately, and did I care any for her? Did it snow last year this time, or was she thinking of the year before? What was I reading? If I weren’t careful, I’d end up looking through spectacles. She took hers off and rubbed the indentations on either side of her nose.