“There is no known solution to the puzzle of this gran rifuto, the great refusal. Dante does not give a name,” Longfellow chimed in, brushing away the thick smoke tail from Lowell’s cigar.
“Dante cannot give a name to the sinner,” insisted Lowell passionately. “These shades who ignored life, ‘who never were alive,’ as Virgil says, must be ignored in death, pestered without end by the most insignificant vile creatures. That is their contrapasso, their eternal punishment.”
“A Dutch scholar has suggested this figure is not Pontius Pilate, my dear Lowell, but rather the young man in Matthew 19:22 who is offered eternal life and refuses it,” said Longfellow. “Mr. Greene and I both favor reading the great refusal as having been made by Pope Celestine the Fifth, another man who took a neutral path by turning down the papal throne, giving way to the rise of the corrupt Pope Boniface, who led ultimately to Dante’s exile.”
“That is too much confining Dante’s poem to the borders of Italy!” protested Lowell. “Typical of our dear Greene. This is Pilate. I can almost see him before us scowling as Dante must have.”
Fields and Holmes had remained silent during this exchange. Now Fields said kindly but reproachfully that their work must not become a club session. They had to find a better way to understand these murders, and for that they would have to not merely read the cantos that gave rise to the deaths but cross into them.
At that moment, Lowell was scared for the first time of what might come of all this. “Well, what do you suggest?”
“We must see firsthand,” Fields said, “where Dante’s visions came to life.”
Now, making his way through the Healey estate, Lowell grabbed his publisher’s arm. “‘Come la rena quando turbo spira,’” he whispered.
Fields did not understand. “Say again, Lowell?”
Lowell sped ahead and stopped where the dark dirt lining gave way to a circle of smooth, light sand. He bent down. “Here!” he said triumphantly.
Richard Healey, trailing slightly behind, said, “Why, yes.” When his mind caught up, he looked flabbergasted. “How did you know that, cousin? How did you know this is where my father’s body was found?”
“Oh,” Lowell said disingenuously. “It was a question. You seemed to be slowing your walk, so I asked, ‘Is it here?’ Was he not slowing?” He turned to Fields for help.
“I believe so, Mr. Healey.” Fields, puffing for breath, nodded eagerly.
Richard Healey did not think he had been slowing. “Ah well, the answer then is yes,” he said, making a point not to hide the fact that he was impressed with, and wary of, Lowell’s intuition. “This is precisely where it happened, cousin. At the most demonish ugly portion of our yard, too,” he said bitterly. It was the one patch in the meadow where nothing at all could grow.
Lowell traced his finger in the sand. “It was here,” he said as though caught in a trance. For the first time, Lowell began to feel real and quickening sympathy for Healey. Here he had been sprawled naked and left to be devoured. The worst part was that he had met an end he would never understand, even in the ever after, nor would his wife or his sons.
Richard Healey thought Lowell was on the verge of tears. “He always kept a soft place in his heart for you, cousin,” he said, and knelt beside Lowell.
“What?” Lowell demanded, his sympathy quickly broken.
Healey recoiled at the brusque response. “The chief justice. You were one of his favorite relations. Oh, he read your poetry with great praise and admiration. And whenever the new number of The North American Review would come, he would fill his pipe and read it from beginning to end. He said he felt you had a higher sense for things of truth.”
“He did?” Lowell asked with some bewilderment.
Lowell avoided his publisher’s smiling eyes and muttered a strained compliment about the chief justice’s fine judgment.
When they returned to the house, a hired man appeared with a bundle from the post office. Richard Healey excused himself.
Fields pulled Lowell aside quickly. “How the devil did you know where Healey was killed, Lowell? We had not discussed that in our meetings.”
“Well, any decent Dantean would savor the proximity of the Charles River to the Healeys’ yard. Remember, the Neutrals are found only a few rods from Acheron, the first river of Hell.”
“Yes. But the newspaper reports were not at all specific as to where in the yard he was found.”
“The newspapers were not fit to light a cigar on.” Lowell balked, delaying his answer to enjoy Fields’s anticipation. “It was the sand that led me.”
“The sand?”
“Yes, yes. ‘Come la rena quando turbo spira.’ Remember your Dante,” he rebuked Fields. “Imagine entering the circle of Neutrals. What do we see as we look upon the mass of sinners?”
Fields was a material reader and tended to recall quotes by page numbers, the weight of paper, the layout of the type, the smell of the calf leather. He could feel the gilded corners of his edition of Dante graze his fingers. “‘Accents of anger,’”—Fields sounded out the poetry carefully as he translated in his mind—“‘words of agony, and voices high and hoarse . . .’” He could not remember. What he would give to remember what was next, to understand whatever it was Lowell now knew that made the situation less uncontrollable. He had brought along a pocket edition of Dante in Italian and began thumbing through.
Lowell pulled this away. “Further along, Fields! ‘Facevano un tumulto, il qual s’aggira sempre in quell’ aura sanza tempo tinta, come la rena quando turbo spira’: ‘Made up a tumult that goes whirling on/Forever in that dark and timeless air,/Even as the sand doth, when the whirlwind breathes.’”
“So . . .” Fields digested this.
Lowell exhaled impatiently. “The meadows behind the house are largely billowing grass, or of dirt and rock. But a very different, fine grain of loose sand was blowing in our faces, so I followed it. The punishment of the Neutrals occurs in Dante’s Hell accompanied by a tumult like sand when a whirlwind blows. That metaphor of loose sand is not idle language, Fields! It is the emblem of the shifting and unstable minds of these sinners, who chose to do nothing when they had the power to act and so in Hell lose that power!”
“Hang it, Jamey!” Fields said a little too loudly. The chambermaid was running a feather duster along an adjacent wall. Fields didn’t notice this. “Hang it all! Sand like a whirlwind! The three types of insects, the flag, the nearby river, that’s quite enough. But the sand? If our fiend can stage even such a minute metaphor of Dante’s into his acts . . .”
Lowell nodded somberly. “He truly is a Dantean,” he said with a tinge of admiration.
“Sirs?” Nell Ranney appeared next to the poets, and they both jumped back.
Lowell demanded ferociously to know whether she had been listening.
She shook her sturdy head in protest. “No, good sir, I vow it. But I wonder if . . .” She looked over one shoulder nervously, then the other. “You gentlemen are different than the others who come to pay their respects. The way you’ve looked over the house . . . and the yard where . . . Won’t you come back another time? I must . . .”
Richard Healey returned and, in mid-sentence, the chambermaid crossed over to the other side of the massive entrance hall, master of the household art of disappearance.
He sighed heavily, deflating half the bulk of his large barrel chest. “Since the posting of our reward, each morning I am taken in by the foolish revival of hope, leaping headfirst into the letters, truly thinking somewhere the truth waits to be shared.” He moved to the fireplace and tossed in the latest pile. “I can’t say whether people are cruel or merely crazy.”
“Pray, my dear cousin,” said Lowell. “Do not the police have any information that can assist you?”
“The venerated Boston police. Might I tell you, cousin Lowell. They brought in every demonish criminal they could find to the station house, and do you know what came of it?”
Richard was act
ually waiting for an answer. Lowell replied, hoarse with suspense, that he did not.
“Well, I’ll tell you then. One of them jumped out a window to his death. Can you imagine? The mulatto officer who supposedly tried to save him said something of him whispering words that could not be understood.”
Lowell sprang forward and grabbed Healey as though to shake more from him. Fields yanked Lowell’s coat. “A mulatto officer, you say?” Lowell demanded.
“The venerated Boston police,” Richard repeated with restrained bitterness. “We would hire a private detective,” Healey said, frowning, “but they are nearly as demonish corrupt as the city’s.”
Moans came from a room above, and Roland Healey ran halfway down the stairs. He told Richard that their mother was having another fit.
Richard broke away. Nell Ranney started toward Lowell and Fields, but Richard Healey noticed this on his way up. He leaned over the wide banister and commanded her. “Nell, finish the work in the basement, won’t you.” He waited until she had descended before continuing upstairs.
“So Patrolman Rey was investigating Healey’s murder when he heard the whisper,” Fields said when he and Lowell were alone.
“And now we know who it was that whispered—whoever died that day at the station house.” Lowell thought for a moment. “We must see what has frightened that chambermaid so.”
“Mind, Lowell. You’ll have her in hot water if the Healey boy sees you.” Fields’s concern held Lowell in place. “He said she’s been imagining things, in any case.”
Just then, there was a loud bang from the nearby kitchen. Lowell made sure they were still alone and then headed for the kitchen door. He knocked lightly. No answer. He pushed in the door and could hear a residual noise to the side of the stove: the vibration of the dumbwaiter. It had just bounced up from the basement. He opened the wood-paneled door to the dumbwaiter car. It was empty but for a piece of paper.
He hurried past Fields.
“What is it? What’s the matter?” Fields asked.
“We cannot call that a dumb waiter. I need to find the study. You stay and watch, make certain the Healey boy doesn’t return yet,” Lowell said.
“But, Lowell!” Fields said. “What shall I do if he comes?”
Lowell did not answer. He handed the publisher the note.
The poet rushed through the halls, peering into open doors until he saw one blocked by a settee. Pushing it out of the way, he stepped lightly inside. The room had been cleaned, but just barely, as though in the middle of the process it had become too painful a prospect for Nell Ranney, or one of the younger servants, to stay. And not just because this was where Healey had died but because of the memories of Judge Healey that lived on, sustained in the fragrance of old book leather.
From above, Lowell could hear Ednah Healey’s moaning climb to a terrible crescendo, and he tried to ignore that they were in a deadhouse all around.
Left standing in the hall, Fields read the note written by Nell Ranney: They tell me I must keep this to myself, but I cannot, and know not who to tell. When I took Judge Healey into his study, he groaned in my arms before dying. Won’t someone help?
“Oh good Lord!” Fields involuntarily crumbled the note. “He was still alive!”
In the study, Lowell knelt down and put his head close to the floor. “You were still alive,” he whispered. “The great refuser. That’s why you were done in.” He broke it to Artemus Healey gently. “What did Lucifer say to you? You were trying to tell your maid something when she found you. Or were you trying to ask something?” He saw specks of blood still on the floor. He saw something else along the edges of the rug: squashed wormlike maggots, strange insect parts Lowell did not recognize, the wings and trunks of a few of the fire-eyed insects Nell Ranney had torn to pieces over the body of Judge Healey. He rummaged through Healey’s overflowing desk until he found a pocket lens and passed it over the insects. They, too, were traced with his blood.
Suddenly, from underneath piles of paper behind the desk, four or five fire-eyed flies shot out and bolted in a line toward Lowell.
He gasped foolishly and stumbled over a heavy chair, banged his leg hard against a cast-iron umbrella stand and fell over.
Lowell, with a thirst for revenge, brought down a ponderous law book methodically against each of the flies. “Do not think you can scare off a Lowell.” Then he felt a slight tingle above his ankle. A fly had slipped inside, and when Lowell lifted his pants leg, the fly, disoriented, twisted out and tried to get away. Lowell smashed it into the rug with his boot heel with childish pleasure. That was when he noticed a red abrasion just above his ankle where he had hit the umbrella stand.
“Damn you,” he said to the dead infantry of flies. He stopped cold, noticing how the heads of the flies seemed to have the expressions of dead men.
Fields murmured from outside to hurry. Lowell, breathing in irregular spurts, ignored the warnings until footsteps and voices could be heard from above.
Lowell took out his handkerchief, embroidered with JRL by Fanny Lowell, and scooped up the insects he had just killed, as well as the other insect parts he could find. Stuffing the cargo into his coat, he ran out of the study. Fields helped him wheel the settee back into place as the voices of his beleaguered cousins grew closer.
The publisher was parched for knowledge. “Well? Well, Lowell? Did you find anything?”
Lowell patted the handkerchief in his pocket. “Witnesses, my dear Fields.”
IX
The week after Elisha Talbot’s funeral, every minister in New England had preached an impassioned eulogy to his fallen peer. The following Sunday, the sermons focused on the commandment not to murder. When neither Talbot’s nor Healey’s murder seemed any closer to being resolved, Boston’s clergymen preached on every sin committed since before the war—culminating with the force of the Last Judgment in tirades against the police department’s futile work, with a mesmerizing spirit that would have made Talbot, the old tyrant of the Cambridge pulpit, tear up with pride.
Newspapermen asked how the murders of two leading citizens could happen without consequence. Where had the money gone that the aldermanic council had voted to improve police efficiency? To flashy silver numbers on the officers’ uniforms, said one newspaper sardonically. Why had the city approved Kurtz’s petition for policemen to be permitted to carry firearms if they could not find criminals on which to use them?
Nicholas Rey read with interest these and other critiques from his desk at the Central Station. In fact, the police department was making some real improvements. Fire-alarm bells were arranged so as to call the entire police force, or some part, to any section of the city. The chief had also ordered sentinels and scouts to deliver constant reports back to the Central Station, with all policemen ready for duty at the smallest sign of a potential problem.
Kurtz privately asked Patrolman Rey for his assessment of the murders. Rey considered the situation. He had the rare gift in a man of allowing himself to be silent before speaking, so that he said just what he meant. “When a soldier was caught trying to desert in the army, the whole division was ordered into a field, where there was an open grave and a coffin beside it. The deserter would be marched before us with a chaplain at his side and ordered to sit on the coffin, where he was blindfolded and his hands and feet bound. A firing squad of his own men would line up and wait for the command. Ready, aim . . . With fire, he would fall dead into the coffin and be buried on the spot, with no marker left in the ground. We would shoulder arms back to camp.”
“Healey and Talbot were done in as examples of some kind?” Kurtz seemed skeptical.
“The deserter could as easily have been shot in the brigadier general’s tent or in the woods, or been sent to a court-martial. The public performance was to show us that the deserter would be abandoned, just as he abandoned our ranks. Slave masters used similar tactics to make an example of slaves who tried to escape. The fact that Healey and Talbot were murdered might be secondar
y. First and foremost, we are dealing with punishments of these men. We are meant to fall in line and observe.”
Kurtz was fascinated but not won over. “Just so. Punishments by whom, Patrolman? And for what errors? If someone did want us to learn from these acts, wouldn’t it make sense they would do it in a way we could understand? The naked body left under a flag. The feet on fire. No sense in it at all!”
They must make sense to someone though, Rey thought. He and Kurtz might not be the ones being spoken to.
“What do you know of Oliver Wendell Holmes?” Rey asked Kurtz during another conversation as he was escorting the police chief down the steps of the State House to the waiting carriage.
“Holmes.” Kurtz shrugged, indifferent. “Poet and doctor. Social gadfly. He was a friend of old Professor Webster’s before Webster was hung. One of the last to accept Webster’s guilt. Wasn’t much help at the inquest of Talbot, though.”
“No, he wasn’t,” Rey said, thinking about Holmes’s nervousness at the sight of Talbot’s feet. “I believe he was not well, that he suffers from asthma.”
“Yes—asthma of the mind,” Kurtz said.
After Talbot’s body was discovered, Rey had shown Chief Kurtz the two dozen bits of paper he had picked up from the ground near Talbot’s vertical grave. They were tiny squares, each one no bigger than a carpet tack and each containing at least one typeset printed letter, with some showing barely discernible print on the reverse side. Some were smudged beyond recognition by the constant moisture in the vault. Kurtz wondered at Rey’s interest in the litter. This formed a general dent in his confidence in his mulatto patrolman.
But Rey laid them out carefully on a table. These scraps glowed with importance, and he was certain they signified something, as certain as he had been of the leaper’s whisper. He could identify the contents of twelve of the bits: e, di, ca, t, I, vic, B, as, im, n, y, and another e. One of the smudged bits contained the letter g, although, in truth, it could just as easily have been q.
The Dante Club Page 17