The Dante Club

by Matthew Pearl

  “My dear madam,” Chief Kurtz removed his hat and placed it on a table at the foot of her bed. “We have men on every lead. The inquiry is still in its early morning stages . . .” Kurtz explained the possibilities: There were two men who owed Healey money and a notorious criminal whose sentence had been upheld five years earlier by the chief justice.

  The widow held her head steadily enough to maintain a hot compress balanced on the white peaks of her brows. Since the funeral and the various memorial services for the chief justice, Ednah Healey had refused to leave her chamber and had turned away all callers outside her immediate family. From her neck hung the crystal brooch imprisoning the judge’s tangled lock of hair, an ornament the widow had asked Nell Ranney to string onto a necklace.

  Her two sons, as big around the shoulders and heads as Chief Justice Healey but nowhere near as massive, sat slumped on armchairs flanking the door like two granite bulldogs.

  Roland Healey interrupted Kurtz: “I don’t understand why you have advanced so slowly, Chief Kurtz.”

  “If only we’d offer a reward!” the older son, Richard, added to his brother’s complaint. “We’d be sure to nab someone with enough money put up! Demonish greed, that’s all that drives the public to help.”

  The deputy chief heard this with professional patience. “My good Mr. Healey, if we reveal the true circumstances of your father’s decease, you would be flooded with false reports from those looking only to turn a dollar. You must keep the entire matter dark to the public and let us continue.

  “Trust when I say, my friends,” he added, “that you would not like what should come from wide knowledge of this.”

  The widow spoke up. “The man who died at your show-up. Have you discovered anything of his identity?”

  Kurtz put up his hands. “So many of our good citizens belong to the same family when brought in to show themselves to the police,” he said, and smiled wryly. “Smith or Jones.”

  “And this one,” said Mrs. Healey. “What family was he?”

  “He did not give us any name, madam,” said Kurtz, penitently tucking his smile under the uncombed overhang of his mustache. “But we have no reason to believe he had any information on Judge Healey’s murder. He was merely cracked in the head, and a bit cup-shot, as well.”

  “Potentially deaf and dumb,” added Savage.

  “Why would he be so desperate to get away, Chief Kurtz?” asked Richard Healey.

  This was an excellent question, though Kurtz did not want to show it. “I cannot begin to tell you how many men we find on the street who believe themselves chased by demons and report to us their pursuers’ descriptions, horns included.”

  Mrs. Healey leaned forward and squinted. “Chief Kurtz, your porter?”

  Kurtz motioned Rey in from the hall. “Madam, may I make you acquainted with Patrolman Nicholas Rey. You requested that we bring him with us today, regarding the man who passed away at the show-up.”

  “A Negro police officer?” she asked with visible discomfort.

  “Mulatto, in actuality, madam,” Savage announced proudly. “Patrolman Rey’s the Commonwealth’s very first. The first in all New England, they say.” He held out his hand and made Rey shake it.

  Mrs. Healey managed to twist and crane her neck enough to view the mulatto to her apparent satisfaction. “You are the officer who had charge of the vagrant, the one who died there?”

  Rey nodded.

  “Tell me then, Officer. What do you think made him act in such a way?”

  Chief Kurtz coughed nervously in Rey’s direction.

  “I cannot say positively, madam,” replied Rey honestly. “I cannot say that he understood or considered any danger to his physical being at the time.”

  “Did he speak to you?” asked Roland.

  “He did, Mr. Healey. At least he tried. But I fear nothing in his whisper could be comprehended,” said Rey.

  “Ha! You cannot even discover the identity of an idler who dies on your own floor! I trust you think my husband deserved to meet his end, Chief Kurtz!”

  “I?” Kurtz looked back helplessly at his deputy chief. “Madam!”

  “I am a sick woman, before God, but shan’t be deceived! You think us fools and villains and wish us all go to the devil!”

  “Madam!” Savage echoed the chief.

  “I shan’t give you the pleasure of seeing me dead in this world, Chief Kurtz! You and your ungrateful nigger police! He did everything he knew to do and we haven’t shame for any of it!” The compress crashed to the floor as she raked her neck with her nails. This was a new compulsion, shown by the fresh scabs and red marks covering her skin. She tore her neck, digging into her flesh, scratching at a cluster of invisible insects that were lying in wait in the crevices of her mind.

  Her sons jumped from their chairs but could only back away toward the door, where Kurtz and Savage had also helplessly receded, as though the widow might burst into flames at any second.

  Rey waited another moment, then calmly took a step toward the side of her bed.

  “Madam Healey.” Her scratching had loosened the strings of her nightdress. Rey reached over and dimmed the flame of the lamp until she could be seen only in silhouette. “Madam, I wish you to know that your husband helped me once.”

  She was stilled.

  Kurtz and Savage traded surprised glances in the doorway. Rey spoke too quietly for them to hear every word from the other end of the room and they were too frightened of renewing the widow’s mania to move forward. But they could sense, even in the dark, how tranquil she had become, how still and silent but for her troubled breathing.

  “Tell me please,” she said.

  “I was brought to Boston as a child by a Virginia woman traveling here on a holiday. Some abolitionists took me away from her to bring me before the chief justice. The chief justice ruled that a slave became emancipated by law once crossing into a free state. He assigned me to the care of a colored blacksmith, Rey, and his family.”

  “Before that wretched Fugitive Slave Act did us all in.” Mrs. Healey’s lids snapped shut and she sighed, her mouth curling strangely. “I know what friends of your race think, because of that Sims boy. The chief justice did not like me to attend court, but I went—there was so much talk then. Sims was like you, a handsome Negro, but dark as the blackness in some people’s heads. The chief justice would have never sent him back if he didn’t have to. He had no choice, you understand that. But he gave you a family. A family that made you happy?”

  He nodded.

  “Why must mistakes only be made up for afterwards? Can’t they sometimes be mended by what came before? It is so tiring. So tiring.”

  Some sense returned to her, and she knew now what had to be done once the officers were gone. But she needed one more thing from Rey. “Pray, did he speak to you when you were a boy? Judge Healey always liked talking with children more than anyone.” She remembered Healey with their own children.

  “He asked me if I did wish to stay here, Mrs. Healey, before he wrote his orders. He said that we would always be safe in Boston but that it had to be my choice to be a Boston man, a man who stood for himself and for his city at the same time, or I would always be an outsider. He told me that when a Boston man reaches the pearly gates, an angel comes out to warn him: ‘You won’t like it here, for it is not Boston.’”

  He heard the whisper as he listened to Widow Healey fall asleep; he heard it in the bareness of his shivering rooming house. He awoke each morning with the words on his tongue. He could taste them, could smell the potent odor that coated them, could brush against the crusted whiskers that recited them, but when he tried to speak the whisper himself, sometimes while driving, sometimes before a looking glass, it was nonsense. He sat with his pen at all hours, using up inkwells, writing it out, and the nonsense looked worse than it sounded. He could see the whisperer, reeking of rot, shocked eyes glaring at him before the body carried itself through the glass. The nameless man had been dropped from the
sky from a faraway place, Rey couldn’t help thinking, into Rey’s arms, from where he had dropped him again. He trained himself to put it out of his mind. But how clearly he could see the plummet onto the courtyard, where the man became all blood and leaves, over and over again, as smooth and constant as pictures passed through the slide of a magic lantern. He had to stop the fall, Chief Kurtz’s command be damned. He had to find some meaning for the words left hanging on the dead air.

  “I wouldn’t let him go with anybody else,” said Amelia Holmes, her small face pleated, pulling her husband’s coat collar to cover his neck cloth. “Mr. Fields, he ought not to go out tonight. I am worried what will come of it. Hear how he wheezes with the asthma. Now, Wendell, when will you get home?”

  J. T. Fields’s well-appointed carriage had driven up to 21 Charles Street. Though it was only two blocks down from his house, Fields never made Holmes walk. The doctor was breathing with difficulty on the front step, accusing the cooling weather, as he often did the heat.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Dr. Holmes said, slightly annoyed. “I put myself into Mr. Fields’s hands.”

  She said somberly, “Well, Mr. Fields, how early will you get him back?”

  Fields considered this with the utmost gravity. A wife’s comfort was as important to him as an author’s, and Amelia Holmes had been apprehensive lately.

  “I wish Wendell would not publish anything more, Mr. Fields,” Amelia had said at a breakfast at the Fieldses’ earlier in the month, in their pretty room looking out through leaves and flowers at the well-tempered river. “He’ll only call down newspaper criticism, and where is the use?”

  Fields had opened his mouth to set her mind at rest, but Holmes was too quick—when he was agitated or panicked, no one could talk as fast, especially about himself. “How do you mean, ’Melia? I have written something new which the critics won’t complain of. This is the ‘American Story’ Mr. Fields has long been pressing me to make. You’ll see, dear, it’ll be better than anything I have ever done.”

  “Oh, that’s what you always say, Wendell.” She shook her head sadly. “But I wish you’d let it alone.”

  Fields knew Amelia had endured Holmes’s disappointment when his sequel serial to The Autocrat—The Professor at the Breakfast-Table—was dismissed as repetitive, despite Fields’s promises of success. Still, Holmes planned a third in the series, which he would call The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. There had also been his devastation over the critical attacks and only modest success wrought by Elsie Veneer, his first novel, which he had written breathlessly and published shortly before the war.

  The new set of Bohemian critics in New York liked to attack the Boston establishment, and Holmes represented his proud city more than anybody—he, after all, had dubbed Boston the Hub of the Universe and had named his own class the Boston Brahmins, after those in more exotic lands. Now the ruffians who called themselves Young America and dwelt in subterranean Manhattan taverns along Broadway had declared Fields’s long dominant Fireside Poets irrelevant to the next age. What had the Longfellow coterie’s quaint rhymes and village settings done to prevent the catastrophe of a civil war? they demanded to know. Holmes, for his part, years before the war, had spoken out for compromise and had even signed, along with Artemus Healey, a resolution to support the Fugitive Slave Act, which would send escaped slaves back to their masters, as a hopeful measure to avoid conflict.

  “But don’t you see, Amelia,” Holmes had continued at the breakfast table. “I shall make money by it, and that won’t come amiss.” Suddenly he looked up at Fields. “If anything should happen to me before I get the story done, you wouldn’t come down upon the widow for the money, would you now?” They’d all laughed.

  Now, standing next to his carriage, Fields glanced at the checkered sky as if it could tell him the answer Amelia waited on. “About twelve,” he said. “How does twelve sound, my dear Mrs. Holmes?” He looked at her with his kind brown eyes, though he knew it would be closer to two in the morning.

  The poet took his publisher’s arm. “That’s pretty well for a Dante night. ’Melia, Mr. Fields will take care of me. Why, it’s one of the greatest compliments one man ever paid another, my going out to Longfellow’s tonight with all I’ve been doing lately, between my lectures and my novel and the fine dinners. Why, I ought not to go out at all tonight.”

  Fields decided not to hear this last comment, lighthearted though it was.

  It was popular Cambridge legend by 1865 that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow would divine precisely when to appear outside his sun-yellow Colonial mansion to greet arrivals, whether long anticipated guests or entirely unforeseen callers. Of course, legends often disappoint, and commonly one of the poet’s servants would answer the massive door to Craigie House, so named for its previous owners; in recent years there had been times when Henry Longfellow had simply been of the mind to receive no one at all.

  But this afternoon, faithful enough to village lore, Longfellow was on his doorstep when Fields’s horses towed their cargo up the Craigie House carriageway. Holmes, leaning on the carriage window, made out the erect figure from up the street before the white-dusted hedges parted and bowed. His pleasant view of Longfellow standing serenely under the lamplight in the downy snow, weighted by his flowing leonine beard and impeccably fitted frock coat, matched the representation of the poet embossed in the public mind. This image had crystallized in the wake of the unfathomable loss of Fanny Longfellow, when the world seemed intent on memorializing the poet (as if he, rather than his wife, had been the one who died) as some divine apparition sent to answer for the human race, when his admirers sought to sculpt his persona into a permanent allegory of genius and suffering.

  The three Longfellow girls rushed in from playing in the unexpected snow, pausing just long enough at the entrance hall to kick off their overshoes before scrambling over the sharply angled stairs.

  From my study I see in the lamplight,

  Descending the broad hall-stair,

  Grave Alice and laughing Allegra,

  And Edith with golden hair.

  Holmes had just passed that broad stair and now stood with Longfellow in that study, where the lamplight illumined the poet’s writing desk. All the while, the three girls tumbled from sight. Still he walks through a living poem. Holmes smiled to himself and took the paw of Longfellow’s yappy little dog, who showed all his teeth and shook his piglike body.

  Then Holmes greeted the feeble, goat-bearded scholar who sat bent in a chair by the fire, looking lost in an oversize folio. “How is the liveliest George Washington in Longfellow’s collection, my dear Greene?”

  “Better, better, thank you, Dr. Holmes. I’m afraid, though, I was not well enough to attend Judge Healey’s funeral.” George Washington Greene was generally referred to as “old” by the rest of them, but he was actually sixty—just four years older than Holmes and two years ahead of Longfellow. Chronic illnesses had aged the retired Unitarian minister and historian decades beyond his years. But he railroaded in each week from East Greenwich, Rhode Island, with as much enthusiasm for the Wednesday nights at Craigie House as for the guest sermons he offered whenever called upon—or for the Revolutionary War histories that his name had fated him to compile. “Longfellow, were you present?”

  “I’m afraid not, my dear Mr. Greene,” said Longfellow. Longfellow had not been to Mount Auburn Cemetery since before Fanny Longfellow’s funeral, a ceremony during which he was confined to his bed. “But I trust it was well attended?”

  “Oh, quite so, Longfellow.” Holmes locked his fingers over his chest thoughtfully. “A beautiful and fitting tribute.”

  “Too well attended, perhaps,” Lowell said, coming in from the library with a handful of books and ignoring the fact that Holmes had already answered the question.

  “Old Healey knew the best of himself,” Holmes pointed out gently. “He knew his place was the courthouse, not the barbaric arena of politics.”

  “Wendell! You can’t mean th
at,” said Lowell authoritatively.

  “Lowell.” Fields gazed pointedly at him.

  “To think we became the hunters of slaves.” Lowell backed away from Holmes only for a second. Lowell was a sixth or seventh cousin to the Healeys, as the Lowells were sixth or seventh cousins—at least—to all the best Brahmin families, and this only increased his resistance. “Would you ever have ruled as cowardly as Healey, Wendell? If I proposed that it had been your choice, would you have sent that Sims boy back to his plantation in chains? Tell me that. Just tell me that, Holmes.”

  “We must respect the family’s loss,” said Holmes quietly, directing his comment mainly at the half-deaf Mr. Greene, who nodded politely.

  Longfellow excused himself when a bell sounded from upstairs. There could be professors or reverends, senators or kings among his guests, but at the signal, Longfellow would make his way to listen to the bedtime prayers of Alice, Edith, and Annie Allegra.

  By the time he returned, Fields had deftly redirected the conversation toward lighter fare, so the poet walked into a round of laughter produced by an anecdote jointly retold by Holmes and Lowell. The host checked his Aaron Willard mahogany clock, an old timepiece he was partial to, not because of its looks or accuracy but because it seemed to tick more leisurely than others.

  “Schooltime,” he said softly.

  The room fell hush. Longfellow closed the green shutters over the windows. Holmes turned down the flames of the moderator lamps while the others helped arrange a row of candles. This series of overlapping halos communed with the flickering glow of the fire. The five scholars and Trap—Longfellow’s plump Scotch terrier—assumed their preordained posts along the circumference of the small room.

  Longfellow gathered up a sheaf of papers from his drawer and passed out a few pages of Dante’s Italian to each guest, along with a set of printed proof sheets with his corresponding line-by-line translation. In the delicately woven chiaroscuro of hearth, lamp, and wick, the ink seemed to lift off Longfellow’s proofs, as if a page of Dante suddenly came alive under one’s eyes. Dante had arranged his verse in a terza rima, every three lines a poetic set, the first and third rhyming and the middle projecting a rhyme with the first line of the next set, so that the verses leaned ahead in forward motion.