For Susan,
Who though she has stolen the heart of one I dearly love must be forgiven nonetheless. For in truth a father’s love cannot be diminished, but is by his son’s loves multiplied.
Edgar Allan Poe
The inscription was more for me, I think, than for her. I bowed my head and hid my eyes. I could not speak.
He placed the book in my hands, then turned away and went to the mirror. When I ventured to look up again he was removing the pin from his cravat, then fussing with it needlessly. “And now we know,” he said with a smile, “where you have been spending all your time.”
I nodded. A few moments passed. Deliberately, if awkwardly, I changed the subject. “Did you hear that a man has been arrested for the murder of the seven girls?”
His brow wrinkled.
“Do you remember about the girls?”
“Vaguely,” he said. “As in a half-remembered dream.”
“A man was arrested this morning. Apparently he’s confessed to it.”
“I would like to read that story,” Poe said. “Have you the newspaper?”
“It’s probably not in the papers yet. Tomorrow at the latest. But I spoke to the man myself.”
A pause before he replied. “Why in the world … ?”
“I’m working for the newspaper now, remember?”
“When did this come about?”
“I told you a few nights ago. Don’t you recall?”
“You are writing for a newspaper?”
“The Daily Chronicle. I told you this.”
“I think not.”
“But I did, I know—,” and then I stopped myself. I would not argue with him, not tonight. “Well, perhaps I didn’t. Perhaps I only think I did because I’ve wanted so badly to tell you. Because I want you to be proud of me, but I’m also a bit afraid that you won’t be.”
He spoke in a voice absent of all censure. “Why would I not be proud of your accomplishments? Can you tell me that?”
“The name,” I said. “The name I write under, James Dobson. It was my understanding that you objected to the name.”
“James was your father’s name, was it not?”
“So I was told.”
“And Dobson? As close to Dubbins as you might get, without actually getting there, of course.”
“Precisely my intention.”
“I fail, then, to understand your concern,” he said. “It is a common practice for a writer to employ a pseudonym. How many have I employed myself? And you. In truth you had little choice but to assume another name. Had I not already appropriated yours for Monsieur Dupin? I left you little option but to re-create yourself. So why should you be concerned? I am proud of everything you do. Sissie would be proud as well. And Muddy! We must save a copy of everything you write and send it to her.”
“How I would love that,” I said.
“How she will love it!”
He turned back to the mirror then and fussed with the cravat awhile longer. Finally he tossed it aside. “Damn this thing! I have never known silk to so chaff like a noose!”
He looked my way. “A glass of claret before supper, what do you say to that? We will sit on the front veranda and sip our claret and you can tell me all about this writing you do.”
“There’s not much to tell of it. You’ve read my work, the elephant piece at least. I don’t think my writing much appeals to the poet in you.”
“You have a plainspoken style,” he told me. “It is forthright and true.”
“I can’t claim your gift for words, that’s for sure.”
“Plainspokenness will serve you well. Better, I hasten to add, than my gift for words has ever served me.”
“Until now,” I said.
“Now is an illusion, my friend. But what a bountiful illusion. So come; downstairs we go. To indulge ourselves awhile longer. Before the illusion of this feast vanishes altogether.”
We spent a wonderful hour together that afternoon, two men unrelated by blood yet as close as father and son. And it was no illusion, that feeling we shared. We basked in the waning light of a golden afternoon and sipped our sweet claret and spoke nothing more of mad Englishmen or murdered girls but only of our riotous times together in Manhattan, the risks we had taken, the people we loved. And in that lemony light of spring I imagined our soft sweet hour as a new beginning, and never suspected, young fool that I was, how such contentment could serve as portent of an end.
21
BY EVENING the news that the murderer of seven young women was locked safely away had reached every corner of the city, and as if with a mountain breeze the climate of Pittsburgh was refreshed and lightened. The pall of fear, if not the gray smoke that seemed to embody it, was lifted. Noticeably more women strolled the street, some singly, others arm in arm. Had I been asked for a word to describe this recharged atmosphere, I would have said that it fell just short of exuberance.
Owing only in part to this revivified ambiance, Poe’s reading was a great success. He was, as always, severely nervous at the start and recited too quickly, hurrying the words. But the audience was receptive, as such audiences will be. If in every such audience there are a few ungenerous souls who come hoping for fodder to validate their cynicism—come hoping to spot the poet’s frailties and fumblings so as to claim “You see? He is no Junius Booth, is he now? His words are flat, his sentiments shallow. His is a minor art after all.”—if there are those few who will not be happy unless they can walk away grumbling, and there are always those few, the rest had come out of respect for the work and were rewarded for their patience when Poe’s voice gradually strengthened, when the confidence that infused the poems themselves, the confidence of solitude, infused the man as well, that benign symbiosis of art, and the voice of the poems presided over the voice of the poet.
He recited “A Dream” and “Dream-Land” and “Eulalie,” and with those rhythms gently rocking, like a man at midnight walking through the graveyard of his thoughts … .
Well, it was contagious, as all fine writing must be. It was hypnotic. The large room, every seat occupied, sat hushed. And when Poe read The Tell-Tale Heart, his timbre rising with the narrator’s fear, his own eyes dilating, the terror upon him, there was not a rustle of petticoat in the house, not a scratch of restless foot across the floor. Until that point in the story, of course, when Poe put a hand to his own throat, pulled at the choking cravat and shouted, “ … tear up the planks!—here, here!—it is the beating of his hideous heart!” And then came gasping, swooning, a quivering of the air. Women reached for their escorts’ hands. Men gripped their armrests.
If Poe committed any misstep that evening it was with the material that would soon be known as “Eureka,” the treatise in which he proposed a unification of science and art, joined at the nexus that is God. Wisely, though, he read only briefly from his notes for that massive compilation and limited himself, in keeping with the theme of the night, to the passage in which he intuited the fate of the universe, that moment when the principal force of gravity will suck together all heavenly bodies into one “climactic magnificence” of destruction.
The audience was puzzled by this, I could read it in their faces. Was he spinning another story? Another tale of madness?
And then he puzzled them further by adding a strangely optimistic endnote: “Are we not, indeed, more than justified in entertaining a belief—let us say, rather, in indulging a hope—that the processes we have here ventured to contemplate will be renewed forever and forever and forever; a novel Universe swelling into existence, and then subsiding into nothingness, with every throb of the Heart Divine?”
I wonder if he even meant to recite “The Raven” that night. He had looked out upon the audience at the close of his “Eureka” material and saw so many sitting there with heads cocked, as if trying to fathom what he had meant by that last strange bit. There was no applause, no shouts of “Bravo!” Maybe they were stunned by his peculiar assertions, though more likely only confus
ed. (He would try out the material again the following February, this time in New York City, where even his supporters would label the material “a mountainous piece of absurdity”)
In any case he was astute and sober enough to realize, judging from the Pittsburghers’ reaction, that this was not what they wanted that night, this intellectual exercise in hope, in the mind’s long reach for meaning. They wanted to be spooked, to be pricked by fear. (I think he despised this shallowness but felt mired in it, for it was, as a rule, his only source of acclaim.)
In the audience’s silence he stepped away from the podium, moved, as if feeling his way through darkness, to the very edge of the stage. Stood there for a moment gazing down at his feet, looking for all the world like a man about to topple forward (I shifted in my seat, ready to spring to his aid), when he then lifted his gaze to just above the heads of the audience, looked beyond them and beyond the theater’s walls, raised a hand to his forehead, remembering something, some dread encounter, and he spoke: “‘Once, upon a midnight dreary … .’”
With those words the audience returned to him, all in a rush. Faces relaxed, smiles were renewed, heads nodded. Here was a throb they could understand and even feel, this throb of loss and misery, this haunted thing of life.
Susan’s lips mouthed the final word in unison with him. As did my own and everybody else’s. A hundred mouths spoke, “‘Nevermore.’”
Then silence. A chill ran through us all.
Poe stood with head bowed, a slender man, used up, depleted.
Brunrichter was first on his feet, but by no more than half a second. The hall exploded with applause, a thunder of ovation that did not wane until our hands were sore. He had chilled us to the bone, made every one of us, when we stepped away from that chill and shook it off, so grateful to discover that it had all been just a trick of words, a collusion of imaginations. Poe’s own climactic magnificence.
SUSAN WAS bewitched by him. Is there any other way to say it? And all the members of the Quintillian Society, they clung to him as if he were their personal own, as if they were somehow responsible for his genius.
When he came down off the stage he was immediately swarmed by admirers, yet still managed to signal to me. I brought Susan forward, leading her by the arm as if she were drugged. She could scarcely bring herself to look at him when introduced.
We stood with our noses nearly touching, the three of us, pressed on all sides by Poe’s devotees. “You must come to the house with Augie,” he told her. “There is to be a reception at the house. Only a handful are invited. Come to the house in an hour or so. I can better greet you there.”
He was turned away from us then, Brunrichter’s insistent hand upon his arm.
I led Susan to the side of the room, where the path to the door was unobstructed. Outside, with the door shut behind us, the smoky night air seemed charged with energy.
“Did you hear?” I asked. “You’ve been invited to the reception at the doctor’s mansion.”
Still she trembled. She pulled the shawl about her shoulders. “I couldn’t go, I can’t. I’m just—”
“He has a gift for you.”
“Mr. Poe?”
I nodded.
“He doesn’t even know me.”
“He has a gift for you all the same.”
“Because of you,” she said.
“Because of you.”
She put a hand to my cheek. Now it was my turn to be bewitched. “I will have to ask Father,” she said.
“I won’t allow him to say no.”
Would there be no end to my mistakes?
22
HER FATHER was not at home, the small house dark.
“Good for him,” she said.
“Good that he’s not here?”
“He’s gone out with friends. I suggested he do so, though he said he would probably not. But he works so hard and takes too little relaxation.”
“Is he nearby? We could go looking for him.”
“He will be at the Dog and Rooster down the street. But no matter; I will leave him a note.”
She lit a coal oil lamp, and in its sooty glow sat at the table with paper and pen.
A minute or so later she said, “I think this will do,” and held the paper out for me to read.
“Dear Father,” she had written, her script small but not cramped, elegant without a single baroque loop of flourish, “The reading was wonderful. And now I have been invited to attend the reception for Mr. Poe! It seems that Mr. Dubbins is not the exaggerator we had both assumed! I expect to be home before the Cinderella hour, but if I am not, do not be concerned. The newly redeemed Mr. Dubbins is my escort. Your loving daughter, Susan.”
I handed the letter back to her, and thanked darkness for concealing my intractable grin. “So I have been redeemed in your eyes?”
She laid the letter on the table and weighted it in place with an earthenware salt mill. “I hope you do not intend to give me reason to think otherwise,” she said.
“I believe you know by now what I intend.”
She smiled to herself but said nothing more. She stood, leaned close to the lamp’s chimney and blew out the flame. In the sudden darkness a hollow feeling swooped over me abruptly; a kind of grief, I know no other way to describe it. The lightness of her scent and how it always weakened me; the small, neat snugness of her home, with nothing visible for those moments save the glow of embers in the fireplace; the chill of the unlit street upon my back—which of these forces so emptied me, so turned me inside out with sudden despair and longing, I cannot say. But as she came toward me at the door I reached out for her suddenly, I seized her hand and brought it to my lips, I held her hand to my mouth and wanted to weep for the emptiness I felt, that deep, black, inexplicable ache of wanting her.
She did not pull her hand away. She put a hand to the back of my head, touched me lightly there.
I came out of the emptiness only gradually, as if rising from murky water. She did not hurry my ascent. And when finally I lifted my eyes to hers I was fully filled again; by her smile remade.
“We had better get started,” she said. “We have a long walk ahead.”
“You will do no walking tonight. Where might I hire a carriage?”
“In daylight hours there are many places. But now …”
“It’s not yet half-past nine.”
“There’s a livery two blocks from here,” she said.
“Would you like to wait until I return with the carriage?”
“It isn’t necessary, Augie, really. I’m a strong girl. I can walk to the reception. A carriage ride will be so expensive.”
“Consider it a gift from a friend of mine.”
“Not Mr. Poe again!”
I took her by the arm. “A man named Dobson. A journalist. Have you heard of him?”
She stepped into the street with me. “They say he will be famous one day.”
“Is that what they say?” and I pulled shut the door.
“As famous as Mr. Poe.”
“Surely not.”
“It’s what they say.”
We talked like that most of the way, her hand on my arm. I felt such a dandy, such a prince. There was nothing I could not do.
“Perhaps he will be famous,” I said. “If he can find a few more men willing to give up their heads in the service of literature.”
“Or even one who, having given up his head, might then engage in an act even more spectacular.”
“I once saw a headless chicken fly thirty feet up into a tree,” I told her.
“You did not.”
“But I did. And was told that it happens quite frequently. The chicken’s body, you see, doesn’t know that the head was chopped off. But, sensing danger, it tries to escape. And a reptile’s heart, for example—I’ve seen this too. You can cut out a turtle’s heart and hold it in your hand and it will continue to beat.”
“Is that true of all animals?” she asked, and shivered, a quick tremor passing fr
om her hand and into my arm. “Is it true of us as well?”
“Only in Poe’s stories,” I said.
“And in the story of the Headless Horseman.”
“I once met Washington Irving, you know.”
“Oh, Augie.”
“I did! And James Cooper too. In fact, now that I recall it, I very nearly punched him in the nose for insulting Poe.”
“You are a terrible prevaricator,” she said.
“I am a very good prevaricator. Except that in this case I am telling the truth.”
“Augie, no—did you really? You met them both?”
“Why would I lie? I am newly redeemed—you said so yourself.”
“I did, yes. But what can a girl from Pittsburgh know?”
THE WALK to the livery stables took us not quite five minutes. For another twenty we waited for the proprietor to pull on his trousers and boots and join us at his carriage house, an old barn whose heat-charred exterior walls showed how narrowly it had missed the Great Fire of two years earlier. He was a suspicious man, slow to speak (and perhaps to think), whose every response was introduced by a repetition of what I had said a moment earlier.
“I would like to engage a carriage for the evening,” I told him.
“Engage a carriage,” he said, and worked his jaw around as if trying to locate the next mouthful of words. “The way the two of you is dressed, you’ll be wanting a Victoria.”
“That will be fine,” I answered.
“That will be fine, yes.” After chewing on the phrase for a few seconds, then, “I could let you have a phaeton.”
“What about the Victoria?”
“What about the Victoria?” A pause. “Don’t have one. Nor a coachman neither.”
“In that case the phaeton will have to do.”
“The phaeton will do.” Up and down went the jaw, side to side. “Little late to be hiring out.”
“We’d only need it for a couple of hours.”
“A couple of hours, yes.” To watch the man think was an agonizing process, akin to watching a bucket of water being drawn from a dry well a hundred feet deep. “Which puts me in my bed when you return with it.”
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