by Paul Collins
Yet to the students in this lecture hall, Holmes was neither poet nor physician nor Harvard dean; he was “Professor Bones”—a sharp-eyed anatomy instructor, a man whose amiability made his precise incisions into his students’ inexperience painless.
“My subject this afternoon,” he’d drolly begin a lecture on female genitalia, “is one with which I trust you young gentlemen are not familiar.”
Sometimes, while wandering the raked seating of the hall, hefting and weighing a disarticulated piece from one of the room’s many display skeletons, he’d gaze in one direction while thrusting a bone at the surprised student to his side.
“Smith!” All at once he’d pounce, jamming a femur into fumbling hands. “Here, take the bone! What is the reason that the thigh-socket is much deeper than the arm-socket?”
Because . . . Nervous laughter from the student’s classmates. Because . . .
“Because upon the leg rests the entire weight of the body, and it does not need much range of movement; but the arm requires to be moved in every direction, as, for example, in knocking a man thus”—Holmes mimed knocking down the hapless Smith, to laughter—“or in the oratorical gesture.”
And with a flourish, his lecture would be done. Chastened students signed up to borrow one of the many skeleton boxes maintained for checkout: ten bodies, broken up into six wooden boxes apiece, that could be taken back to the dorms for further study. When it was not jovially keeping its fixed smile over a candlelit textbook, a prized cranium segment might serve as a fine companion over a late-night cigar and brandy.
Amid the swirl of students picking up boxes and gathering up their notes, Littlefield spotted the young man he was looking for. Just twenty-one years old, John Hathaway worked in the apothecary shop over at the hospital, but he was keenly ambitious for a higher station in life. Because many of the Med School faculty also served as visiting physicians and board members at the hospital, Hathaway knew them well; he’d leave the apothecary counter with alacrity to observe any surgery at the hospital, and he had been auditing all of Webster and Holmes’s lectures that fall in anticipation of formally enrolling as a Harvard Medical student.
Webster’s lecture needs a pint of blood, Littlefield asked. Can you get it?
“I think we shall bleed someone tomorrow morning,” Hathaway said thoughtfully, taking the jar in the entryway. “I will save the blood.”
It was a reasonable enough request. This wasn’t the first time Webster had asked for blood, after all, and Littlefield’s reputation as the building’s middleman meant it was hardly the first time he’d relayed such a request. Who else would know where all the skeletons were in the building, or where to find a man with extra blood on his hands?
4
THE GREAT WORLD GOES CLANGING ON
WHILE LITTLEFIELD FUSSED OVER THE OTHER LECTURERS and labs, Webster generally retreated back to his Cambridge home by two in the afternoon. That day the sun had broken out bright and warm, a final reminder of Indian summer just one week before Thanksgiving. For one of Webster’s neighbors, the day was a welcome one indeed. Emerging from long weeks of finishing The Seaside and the Fireside, Henry Longfellow stepped out of his Brattle Street house, looking the resplendent part of the local poet, with his slightly disheveled hair and subtly luxuriant clothes; but he also bore the exhaustion of a middle-aged language professor. Though he lived in one of the finest homes in town—Craigie House, where Washington had once headquartered—Longfellow hadn’t had the time to enjoy it much lately, as he’d raced to finish his manuscript. Over the past few days, some of his greatest pleasure had come simply from closing his eyes and letting his wife, Frances, read to him.
Now, at last, the manuscript was finally in the mail. Longfellow was ready to go with Frances to “the place we have selected for ourselves”—their future grave sites.
The wind and rain of a few days earlier, which had dotted Cambridge’s potholed lanes with “porridge basins,” or outfit-ruining mud puddles, had dried enough to allow for a pleasant walk out over to Mount Auburn. Cambridge’s bucolic city of the dead had become a place that drew picnickers and was a model for what the area’s decrepit churchyards might one day aspire to. Its creation had been an abiding interest of the elder Professor Bigelow of the Medical College; indeed, since handing over the professorship to his son that fall, Bigelow Sr. had turned his focus to Mount Auburn altogether, capping a lifetime of keeping patients alive with a retirement of helping them get pleasingly buried. Bigelow’s Harvard colleagues already had a very permanent presence at the cemetery; there was, inevitably, a “Harvard Hill” of late professors and students, including former president Kirkland.
Longfellow had picked a spot for his own family plot away from his colleagues’ resting places, Lot 580 on Indian Ridge Path. A decade earlier, after purchasing the lot, he had watched his own monument prepared “without one feeling of dread.” And now, lingering over the dirt and grass that would one day become a more permanent home than Craigie House seemed to cheer Longfellow again.
“The foliage all gone,” he rhapsodized over their plot, “and the sunshine falling warm and bright on all the graves”—ah, what was there not to love about such a place on an afternoon like this? An almost Puritan stoicism toward the blessing of bodily release could still be found in Longfellow’s own newly written verses in The Seaside and the Fireside:
Take them, O Grave! and let them lie
Folded upon thy narrow shelves,
As garments by the soul laid by,
And precious only to ourselves!
Mortality had been on his mind much more of late. His first wife, Mary, was buried at Mount Auburn, and a one-year-old daughter by Fanny had died in 1848. His own father had passed away in August. It had been up to Henry to clean out the old lawyer’s offices in Maine; he’d sat numbly staring at the years of unpaid bills his elderly father had been too kindly to dun his neighbors for, and was dazed to find how “again the great world goes clanging on, as if there were no dead and no mourners.”
If here at Mount Auburn Longfellow and his wife could muse over their own future, the fine view atop the hill also hinted at Cambridge’s; in the distance, Irish rail workers laid new steel tracks, so that the living could indeed go clanging on. Ground had been broken three weeks earlier for the Harvard Branch railway, the town’s first; the terminus sat just north of Harvard Yard and a ten-minute walk from Longfellow’s house. The construction moved so quickly, with the opening set for the end of the year, that the railway’s board still hadn’t even voted on what color to paint the station house. How its arrival would affect the town was, naturally, the subject of endless discussion. Henry and his wife had spent a pleasant meal with his colleague Louis Agassiz musing upon what it all meant; the Swiss biologist had inevitably turned the question into one of nature.
“He says,” Longfellow recalled, “whenever a railway is opened in this country, there European weeds spring up.” Ribwort so commonly followed development that the Algonquin Indians had dubbed it “the white man’s foot.”
And now the march of those feet, real and figurative, was becoming louder and faster: Cambridge’s horse-drawn omnibuses only just outpaced walking the four miles into town, which made the city feel curiously distant. But the new trains, slated to begin running on Christmas Eve, would be a fraction of the cost and time. From here, atop Mount Auburn on a sunny afternoon, Cambridge could still seem like a town in a pleasant slumber, but for how much longer?
WALKING DOWN from the hilltop cemetery to Craigie House, Longfellow was briefly free from the cares of his next book; there was even the pleasant prospect of a $1,000 check in the mail from his publisher. But Longfellow knew that as hard as he worked, he was nonetheless deeply fortunate. For he’d married well; even his lovely home was a wedding gift from his father-in-law. Had they relied solely on Harvard’s pay to language instructors, Longfellow’s writing would have been less an artistic necessity than a financial one. Harvard was no place for poverty, e
ither in students or faculty: most of the instructors were Harvard men themselves, and already wealthy by birth or by marriage. A typical Harvard professor’s net worth was an impressive $75,000, and they had not come by that money through teaching. Some salaries scarcely broke $1,000 per year, and for years a number of language instructors had earned a stingy $500 annually.
For all the poetic fame Longfellow brought to the post, Modern Languages was long an ailing department, and a palpable drain on the poet’s energy. He’d arrived in 1836 to find that he’d inherited a team that was a “four-in-hand of outlandish animals, all pulling the wrong way, except one”—the Italian instructor, who eventually proved problematic as well. The department was already roiled by the past firing of a German instructor for abolitionism, an offense to the school’s soberly conservative Federalism. Under Longfellow’s exacting standards, the next German instructor was also fired, as was the French instructor. These decisions came to haunt him; to save money, Harvard simply piled many of their former classes into Longfellow’s duties, raising his salary only slightly.
But the most troubling loss was of the one instructor he respected: Pietro Bachi, a Sicilian exile with, as Longfellow mused, “a cloud of mystery in his life.” Bachi was widely believed to be a political exile, with his past station in society evident by his cultivation. He was in no rush to dispel the mystery about his person—to admit that his real name was Bartolo, for instance, or that he had actually fled an unfortunate romantic affair. Bachi’s brilliance as an instructor, though, was quite real. Even their contrarian alumnus Thoreau had studied with him in every one of his years at Harvard, drinking deeply from readings in Tasso and Dante.
A penniless Catholic in a faculty of well-heeled Unitarians, Bachi eschewed the usual whitewashed Cambridge cottage and had moved into the grimy brick depths of Boston. Except for the medical faculty, where all but Webster took up urban residence near the city campus of their medical school, Harvard professors typically lived in the pleasant enclave of Cambridge. But Bachi lived in mortifyingly cheap city digs—on a stretch, one friend put it, “given up to pawnbrokers, gin-shops, and coach and omnibus offices.” There he spent his evenings writing Italian and Spanish textbooks, steadily fueling himself from decanters helpfully labeled RUM, GIN, and WHISKEY. “I never drink more than is good for me—at least not while I am in good company,” he explained to visitors. “The mischief is, what is a man to do by himself in the long dull hours of a New England winter evening!”
When books and the scant Harvard pay weren’t enough to sustain him, Bachi took to borrowing and, a friend later recalled, became “like a horse that has once fallen on its knees—never safe from new and more disastrous troubles.” Bachi had once been the president of the Boston chapter of the Italian Charitable Society, helping poor émigrés; now he was about to become a client himself. After the beleaguered Sicilian declared bankruptcy, he at least had fair reason to hope that Edward Everett, then the president of the college, might assist him.
“Mr. Everett cold! Mr. Everett haughty or indifferent!” he’d scolded a worried countryman. “Is it because he does not hug you in his arms like a Neapolitan? You must take men as they are. Reserve is the main feature of the English character; and an American, if a polished man, if a gentleman, is as stiff in his behavior as an Englishman and a half. . . . There is not one man in the world with readier sympathies or more generous impulses than Edward Everett.”
And indeed, Everett did come to the rescue—of the university. Bachi was fired. Harvard, the president insisted, was “not to be trifled with.”
Bachi had worked at Harvard for twenty years without a raise or promotion, even after authoring popular textbooks. The school was too circumspect to give a public reason for Bachi’s departure; even years later, the university’s preacher would say only that the dismissal was “not without reason.” But that reason had less to do with honor, perhaps, than the embarrassing revelation that Bachi’s salary was inadequate for a poor exile to support his family.
“Poor Bachi!” Longfellow wrote in his journal. He’d pleaded for Bachi’s job to be saved, and even for the man to get a raise—to no avail. Since then, no further scandal had touched upon Longfellow or his colleagues. But Bachi’s dismissal stood as a stark warning to the remaining instructors to remember who they were: respectable Harvard gentlemen of sufficient means. To be revealed as anything less was to end one’s career.
NIGHTTIME BROUGHT the inevitable social obligations: dinners with faculty, followed by music with the Cambridge Musical Association; Longfellow’s most recent foray with the association, in fact, was at a piano and violin soiree in the parlor of Dr. Webster’s house. The poet was skilled enough on the piano and flute that he sometimes found himself idly wishing that he’d taken up music as a profession instead, and his colleagues were no less passionate on the subject. Peirce had authored a treatise on the science of sound and music, while the young Dr. Bigelow played French horn and attacked the drums so enthusiastically that he sounded like a clattering army regiment.
Tonight, the distant plink of piano notes could be heard once again, this time from the music hall on the corner of Brattle Street, where the local dancing master led his seven-thirty class in the polka, the minuet, and the gallopade. But Longfellow and his wife were not staying in town, and headed onward into Boston, on a road that darkened as it wound eastward. It was here, on the stretch between campus and the bridge, that the smallness of Cambridge closed in; the town still had no streetlamps, and carriages and omnibuses plunged through a darkness only faintly relieved by the soft glow of candlelight from the faculty and student homes. The effect, as one approached the bridge and the city hove into view, was to render Boston all the more blazingly bright; it was a vision of brick and gaslight, its glow growing upon them as they crossed over the Charles River.
Of all the mansions in the city, the brightest lights shone from the Deacon House, an immense new brick château on the corner of Washington and Worcester. It was there that the Longfellows pulled into the great courtyard, where carriages circulated around a stone perron column as if arriving at some French duchy newly declared in Boston. The poet and his wife were ushered in by liveried servants, through an immense atrium, up a grand oak staircase, and into a sumptuous billiards room, where they signed their names in a guest book. They then glided through throngs of guests in one grand room after another—a library, a drawing room, a dining room, and finally into the stately whirl and grace of the ballroom. Somewhere amid all this was Mr. Edward Preble Deacon himself, the owner of this great architectural folly; on costume nights, he was sure to be dressed in the finest outfit of all, pointedly favoring the attire of a thirteenth-century feudal lord.
Like Longfellow, he had married well. His wife’s grandfather had risen from driving a country butcher’s cart to become a wealthy merchant, and had built the newly married couple the finest rococo mansion money could buy. Designed by a French architect in the style of the old nobility—“a chateau as Monte-Christo might have lavished his riches upon,” one newspaper mused—it had thrown its doors open just the year before to a procession of amazed patricians, who marveled at its mirrored halls, marble floors covered with animal rugs, a fountain of cologne, and rooms upholstered in pink satin. The centerpiece of the house was a boudoir, the Marie Antoinette Room, that held claim to being an exact reproduction of the original—complete with paintings of Cupid, a marble statue of Venus, and ceiling frescoes depicting, as one visitor put it, “young cherubs tumbling about in mid-air irrespective of all laws of gravity.” Deacon had bought the furnishings the year before, without apparent irony, during the frantic auctions by fleeing and ransacked nobility in the Revolution of 1848—yet another paroxysm of French workers trying to throw off the very nobility Antoinette had stood for.
The mansion was wealth in the style of the Old World, but not of old Boston: making vast expenditures visible was not the local way, though acquiring the means to certainly was. Some of those who w
alked soberly among these halls quietly possessed fortunes that would make Deacon himself swoon. Their money was inherited, invested, and grimly held on to; their contracts were exact and binding. And yet even a thoughtful and well-provided poet like Longfellow, beholding the Gobelin tapestries on the landing and the Rubens painting in Deacon’s private library, could hardly keep from admiring what an outlandish aesthete’s money could indeed buy. “It haunts me like a vision,” he once confessed in his journal.
The respectable men and women of Boston danced, drank Deacon’s champagne, and cheerily spilled out to the courtyard; pleasantly abuzz, the Longfellows journeyed back across the river and into that looming headland where, for just a little longer, neither railway nor gaslight could penetrate the darkness. Across Cambridge, the final omnibuses for the night rattled in from the city; books were closed and candles snuffed out; the dancing studio’s doors were locked; and even over in Hollis Hall, the midnight prank of rolling cannonballs down the stairs eventually had to cease, giving way to the exhausted early morning slumbers of a new Friday. And save for perhaps one man, none in the town would have the faintest premonition of what was to happen next.
Part II
THE VICTIM
5
A BAD BUSINESS
DR. GEORGE PARKMAN STEPPED DOWN THE LONG, VERTIGINOUS spiral staircase, each footfall paid out precisely; the trapezoidal steps of his home, thriftily twisting inward, demanded an economical gait. The doctor emerged on the ground floor each morning, always at the same time, to be placed in receipt of his breakfast from his manservant, Patrick, whose attention would be divided between Parkman’s meal and seeing callers arriving in the vestibule. Their forms were silhouetted in the hallway under a spiderweb transom, their voices low and respectful. The first visitor this morning, a gentleman stopping by before the clock had chimed nine, had managed to catch sight of Parkman himself as the doctor passed between his office and the breakfast room.