The Dante Club

by Matthew Pearl

  “After all our efforts, we haven’t answered that question for Elisha Talbot, my dear Lowell,” said Longfellow. “His thousand-dollar simony—for what? Two contrapassos, with two invisible sins. Dante has the benefit of asking the sinners themselves what has brought them to Hell.”

  “Were you not close with Jennison?” Fields asked Lowell. “And yet you can think of nothing?”

  “He was a friend; I did not look for his misdeeds! He was an ear for me to complain about losses in stocks, about lecturing, about Dr. Manning and the blasted Corporation. He was a steam engine in trousers, and I admit sometimes he cocked his hat a bit too much—he had a hand in every flashy business enterprise over the years that I suppose had an underbelly of brine. Railroads, factories, steelworks—such business matters are hardly comprehensible to me, you know, Fields.” Lowell dropped his head.

  Holmes sighed heavily. “Patrolman Rey is as sharp as a blade, and likely has suspected our knowledge all along. He recognized the manner of Jennison’s death from what he had overheard at our Dante Club session. The logic of the contrapasso, the Schismatics, he connected to Jennison, and when I explained more, he immediately understood Dante in the deaths of Chief Justice Healey and Reverend Talbot, too.”

  “As did Grifone Lonza when he killed himself at the station house,” said Lowell. “The poor soul saw Dante in everything. This time he happened to be right. I have often thought, in like manner, of Dante’s own transformation. The mind of the poet, left homeless on earth by his enemies, making its home more and more in that awful otherworld. Is it not natural that exiled from all he loved in this life, he would brood exclusively on the next? We praise him lavishly for his skills, but Dante Alighieri had no choice but to write the poem he did, and to write in his heart’s blood. It is no wonder he died so soon after he finished.”

  “What shall Officer Rey do with his knowledge of our involvement?” Longfellow asked.

  Holmes shrugged. “We withheld information. We obstructed an investigation into the two most horrendous murders Boston has ever seen, which now have become three! Rey may very well be turning us and Dante in as we speak! What loyalty does he have to a book of poetry? How much should we have?”

  Holmes pushed himself to his feet and, pulling at the waist of his baggy pantaloons, paced nervously. Fields raised his head from his hands when he realized Holmes was gathering his hat and coat.

  “I wanted to share what I have learned,” Holmes said in a soft, dead voice. “I cannot continue.”

  “You’ll rest now,” Fields began.

  Holmes shook his head. “No, my dear Fields, not just tonight.”

  “What?” Lowell cried.

  “Holmes,” Longfellow said. “I know this seems unanswerable, but it behooves us to fight.”

  “You can’t just walk away from this anyhow!” Lowell shouted. With his voice filling their space, he felt powerful again. “We’ve gone too far, Holmes!”

  “We had gone too far from the beginning, too far from where we belong—yes, Jamey. I’m sorry,” Holmes said calmly. “I know not what Patrolman Rey shall decide, but I shall cooperate in any fashion he wishes and I expect the same from you. I only pray we are not taken in for obstruction—or worse—accessory. Isn’t that what we have been? Each one of us had a role in allowing the deaths to continue.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have given us away to Rey!” Lowell jumped to his feet.

  “What would you have done in my place, Professor?” Holmes demanded.

  “Walking away is not an option here, Wendell! The milk is spilt. You swore to protect Dante, as did we all, right under Longfellow’s roof, though the heavens cave in!” But Holmes fitted his hat and buttoned his overcoat. “‘Qui a bu boira,’” Lowell said. “‘He who has once been a drinker will drink again.’”

  “You didn’t see it!” Every emotion pent up inside Holmes erupted as he turned on Lowell. “Why has it been I who has seen two horribly shredded bodies instead of you brave scholars! It was I who went down into Talbot’s fiery hold with the scent of death in my nostrils! It is I who have had to go through it all while you can analyze from the comfort of your fireside, filtering it all through alphabets!”

  “The comfort? I was assailed by rare man-eating insects within an inch of my life, you oughtn’t forget!” Lowell shouted.

  Holmes laughed mockingly. “I’d take ten thousand blowflies for what I’ve seen!”

  “Holmes,” Longfellow entreated. “Remember: Virgil tells the pilgrim that fear is the main impediment to his journey.”

  “I do not give a copper for that! Not any longer, Longfellow! I yield my place! We are not the first to try to liberate Dante’s poetry and perhaps ours shall always be the losing end! Did you never once think that Voltaire was right—Dante was but a madman and his work a monster. Dante lost his life in Florence, so he avenged himself by creating a literature with which he dared make himself into God. And now we have unleashed it on the city we say we love, and we shall live to pay!”

  “That’s enough for now, Wendell! Enough!” Lowell yelled, standing in front of Longfellow as though he could shield him from the words.

  “Dante’s own son thought him delusional to believe that he had traveled through Hell, and spent a lifetime trying to disown his father’s words!” Holmes went on. “Why should we sacrifice our safety to save him? The Commedia was no love letter. Dante did not care about Beatrice, about Florence! He was venting the spleen of his exile, imagining his enemies writhe and beg for salvation! Do you ever hear him mention his wife, just once? This is how he got even for his disappointments! I only wish to protect us from losing everything we hold dear! That’s all I’ve wanted from the beginning!”

  “You don’t want to find out that anyone is guilty,” Lowell said, “just as you didn’t ever want to think Bachi was culpable, just as you imagined Professor Webster blameless even as he dangled from the end of a rope!”

  “Not so!” Holmes cried.

  “Oh, this is a fine thing you’re doing for us, Holmes. A fine thing!” Lowell shouted. “You’ve stayed as steady as your most rambling lyrics! Perhaps we should’ve drafted Wendell Junior into our club all along instead of you. At least we’d have a chance of victory!” He was ready to say more, but Longfellow restrained him by the arm with a tender hand, unbreakable as an iron gauntlet.

  “We could not have come this far along without you, my dear friend. Pray do get some rest and give our affection to Mrs. Holmes,” Longfellow said softly.

  Holmes made his way out of the Authors’ Room. When Longfellow released his hold, Lowell stalked the doctor to the door. Holmes hurried into the hall, looking over his shoulder as his friend trailed behind with a cold stare. Reaching the corner, Holmes smashed into a cart of papers being pushed by Teal, the night shop boy assigned to Fields’s offices, whose mouth always worked in a grinding or chewing motion. Holmes went flying to the floor, the cart tipping over and spilling papers across the hall and on the toppled doctor. Teal kicked away some papers and with a look of great sympathy tried to help Oliver Wendell Holmes to his feet. Lowell rushed to Holmes’s side too, but stopped himself, renewed in anger because he was ashamed at his moment of softness.

  “There, you’re happy, Holmes. Longfellow needed us! You’ve betrayed him finally! You’ve betrayed the Dante Club!”

  Teal, staring with fright as Lowell repeated his charge, lifted Holmes to his feet. “Many apologies,” he whispered into Holmes’s ear. Though it was entirely the doctor’s fault, Holmes could barely reciprocate an apology. He was not experiencing his heaving, wheezing asthma any longer. It was the tight, cramping kind. Whereas the other felt like he needed more and more air to fill himself, this made all air poison.

  Lowell burst back into the Authors’ Room, slamming the door behind him. He found himself facing an unreadable expression on Longfellow’s face. At the first sign of a thunderstorm, Longfellow would close all shutters in his house, explaining that he did not like such discordance. Now he
wore the same look of retreat. Apparently Longfellow had said something to Fields, because the publisher was standing expectantly, leaning forward for more.

  “Well,” Lowell pleaded, “tell me how he could do that to us, Longfellow. How could Holmes do that now?”

  Fields shook his head. “Lowell, Longfellow thinks he has realized something,” he said, translating the poet’s expression. “You remember how we took on the canto of the Schismatics just last night?”

  “Yes. What of it, Longfellow?” Lowell asked.

  Longfellow had begun to collect his coat, and was staring out the window. “Fields, would Mr. Houghton still be at Riverside?”

  “Houghton’s always at Riverside, at least when he’s not at church. What can he do for us, Longfellow?”

  “We must leave for there at once,” said Longfellow.

  “You’ve realized something that will help us, my dear Longfellow?” Lowell filled with hope.

  He thought Longfellow was considering the question, but the poet made no answer on the ride over the river into Cambridge.

  At the giant brick building housing the Riverside Press, Longfellow requested that H. O. Houghton provide the full printing records for the translation of Dante’s Inferno. Despite its untested subject matter, the translation, breaking years of virtual silence by the most beloved poet in their country’s history, was anxiously awaited by the literary world. With the bells and trumpets Fields had in store for it, its first printing of five thousand would sell out within a month. Anticipating this, Oscar Houghton had been preparing plates from Longfellow’s proofs as the poet brought them in, maintaining a detailed, unimpeachably accurate log of dates.

  The three scholars commandeered the printer’s private counting room.

  “I’m at a loss,” Lowell said, not one to remain focused on the finer points of his own publishing projects, much less someone else’s.

  Fields showed him the schedule. “Longfellow submits his proofs with revisions the week after our translation sessions. So whatever date we find here recording Houghton’s receipt of the proofs, the Wednesday of the week before that would be the meeting of our Dante circle.”

  The translation of Canto Three, the Neutrals, had taken place three or four days after the murder of Justice Healey. Reverend Talbot’s murder had occurred three days before the Wednesday set aside for the translation of Cantos Seventeen, Eighteen, and Nineteen—the latter containing the punishment of the Simoniacs.

  “But then we found out about the murder!” Lowell said.

  “Yes, and I set our schedule ahead to the Ulysses canto at the last minute so that we might reinvigorate ourselves, and worked on the intermediate cantos myself. Now, the latest, the massacre of Phineas Jennison, has by all accounts occurred on this Tuesday—one day before yesterday’s translation of the very same verses which give rise to that gross deed.”

  Lowell turned white and then steamy red.

  “I see, Longfellow!” Fields cried.

  “Each one—each crime—happens directly before our Dante Club translates the canto on which the murder has been based,” Longfellow said.

  “How could we have not seen that before?” cried Fields.

  “Somebody has been playing with us!” Lowell boomed. Then quickly he lowered his voice to a whisper. “Someone has been watching us all along, Longfellow! It has to be someone who knows our Dante Club! Whoever it is has timed each murder with our translation!”

  “Wait a minute. This could only be a dreadful coincidence.” Fields looked at the chart again. “Look here. We have translated nearly two dozen Inferno cantos, yet there have been but three murders.”

  “Three deadly coincidences,” said Longfellow.

  “There’s no coincidence,” Lowell insisted. “Our Lucifer has been racing us to see what will come first—Dante translated into ink or into blood! We have been losing the race by two or three lengths each time!”

  Fields protested. “But who could possibly know our schedule in advance? With enough time to plan such elaborate crimes? We write up no timetable. Sometimes we miss a week. Sometimes Longfellow skips a canto or two that he does not feel we are prepared for and goes out of order.”

  “My own Fanny would not know which cantos we sit down with, much less would she care to know,” Lowell admitted.

  “Who would possibly possess such particulars, Longfellow?” asked Fields.

  “If this were all true,” Lowell interrupted, “it means we are somehow implicated firsthand with the murders having begun at all!”

  They were silent. Fields looked at Longfellow protectively. “Humbug!” he said. “Humbug, Lowell!” That was all he could think to argue.

  “I do not profess to understand this strange pattern,” Longfellow said as he rose from Houghton’s desk. “But we cannot escape its implication. Whatever course of action Patrolman Rey decides, we can no longer consider our involvement merely as our prerogative. Thirty years have passed since the day I first sat at my desk in happier times to translate the Commedia. I have laid my hands upon it with such great reverence that it has sometimes amounted to unwillingness. But the time has come to make haste, to complete this work, or risk more loss.”

  After Fields started in his carriage for Boston, Lowell and Longfellow walked through the falling snow to their homes. Word of Phineas Jennison’s murder had burned through their society. The elmy quiet of the Cambridge street was deafening. Wreaths of ascending snow-white chimney smoke vanished like ghosts. The windows not covered by shutters were blocked from the inside with clothing, shirts and blouses hanging loosely, for it was too cold to dry them outside. The latch strings were lowered on all the doors. Houses that had newly installed iron locks and metal chains, on the advice of local patrolmen, were kept tightly shut; some residents had even concocted a type of alarm for their doors, using a system of currents sold by door-to-door Jeremy Didlers from the West. No children were playing in the plush snowbanks. With these three murders, there was no hiding the certainty that there was one hand at work. Newspaper stories soon included the information that each victim had had his suit of clothing folded neatly at the scene of death and suddenly the whole city felt naked. The terror that started with the demise of Artemus Healey had now descended over Beacon Hill, along Charles Street, across Back Bay, and over the bridge to Cambridge. All at once, there seemed irrational but palpable reasons to believe in a scourge, in apocalypse.

  Longfellow paused a block from Craigie House. “Could we be responsible?” His voice sounded frighteningly weak to his own ears.

  “Don’t let that maggot get into your brain. I wasn’t thinking when I said that, Longfellow.”

  “You must be honest with me, Lowell. Do you think—”

  Longfellow’s words were splintered. A little girl’s shout rose up from the air and shook the very foundations of Brattle Street.

  Longfellow’s knees buckled as his mind traced the sound back to his own house. He knew he would have to make a mad dash down Brattle Street through the virgin blanket of snow. But for a moment his thoughts trapped him in place, snared him with the trembling of possibility as one who wakes from a terrible nightmare searches for signs of bloody calamities in the peaceful room around him. Memories flooded the air ahead. Why could I not save you, my love?

  “Should I go for my rifle?” Lowell cried frantically.

  Longfellow sprinted ahead.

  The two men reached the front step of Craigie House at about the same time, a remarkable feat for Longfellow, who, unlike his neighbor, was not practiced in physical exertion. They rushed side by side into the front hall. In the parlor, they found Charley Longfellow kneeling down trying to calm the excited little Annie Allegra, who was shouting and squealing joyfully at the gifts her brother had brought for them. Trap was growling in delight and wagging his pudgy tail in circles, showing all his teeth in an expression comparable to a human smile. Alice Mary came into the hall to greet them.

  “Oh, Papa,” she cried. “Charley has just
come home for Thanksgiving! And he has brought us French jackets, striped red-and-black!” Alice posed in her jacket for Longfellow and Lowell.

  “What a dasher!” Charley applauded. He embraced his father. “Why, Papa, you’re whiter than a sheet, aren’t you? Are you feeling unwell? I meant only to give you a small surprise! Perhaps you’ve gotten too old for us.” He laughed.

  The color had returned to Longfellow’s fair skin by the time he pulled Lowell aside. “My Charley has come home,” he said confidentially, as if Lowell could not see for himself.

  Later that evening, after the children were asleep upstairs and Lowell had departed, Longfellow felt profoundly calm. He leaned at his standing desk and passed his hand over the smooth wood on which most of his translation was written. When he had first read Dante’s poem, he had to confess to himself, he did not have faith in the great poet. He feared how it might end, beginning so gloriously. But throughout, Dante bore himself so valiantly that Longfellow could but wonder more and more, not only at his great but at his continuous power. The style rose with the theme, and swelled like tidewaters, and at length its flood lifted the reader, freighted with doubts and fears. Most often it had seemed that Longfellow was serving the Florentine, but sometimes Dante taunted, his meaning eluding all words, all language. Longfellow felt at these times as a sculptor who, unable to represent in cold marble the living beauty of the human eye, had recourse to such devices as sinking the eye deeper and making the brow above more prominent than it is in the living model.

  But Dante resisted mechanical intrusions, and withheld himself, demanding patience. Whenever translator and poet came to this impasse, Longfellow would pause and think: Here Dante laid down his pen—all that follows was still a blank. How shall it be filled up? What new figures shall be brought in? What new names written? Then the poet resumed his pen—and, with an expression of joy or indignation upon his face, wrote further in his book—and Longfellow now followed without timidity.