The Poe Shadow

by Matthew Pearl

  “Poe the poet?”

  At first I ignored this. Then I stopped and turned around slowly, wondering if my ears had been fooled by the wind. Truly, though, if this voice had not pronounced on its own power “Poe the poet” it had said something just like that.

  It was the fish dealer, Mr. Wilson, with whom I had just done business at the market. Our law office had recently arranged some mortgages for him. Though a few times he had come to our offices, I preferred finding him here, as I could then also select the finest fish to be prepared for supper at Glen Eliza. And Wilson’s crab-and-oyster gumbo was the best this side of New Orleans.

  The fishmonger motioned me to follow him back to the large market. I had left my memorandum book at his table. He wiped his hands on his streaked apron and handed it to me. It was now wrapped in the distinct odors of his store, as though it had been lost at sea and then pulled out.

  “You don’t want to forget your work. I opened it to see who it belonged to. I see you’ve written the name Edgar Poe.” The fishmonger pointed to the open page.

  I returned the book to my bag. “Thank you, Mr. Wilson.”

  “Ah, Squire Clark, here’s something.” He excitedly unwrapped a package of fish from its paper. Inside was a hideously ugly fish, piled upon its identical brothers. “This was ordered especially from out west for a dinner party. It is called a dog-fish by some. But it’s also called a ‘lake lawyer,’ for its ferocious looks and voracious habits!” He chuckled uproariously. He quickly worried he had insulted me. “Not like you, of course, Squire Clark.”

  “Perhaps that is the problem, my friend.”

  “Yes.” He hesitated and cleared his throat. He was now hacking at fish without looking down at his hands or at the heads shooting off them. “Any event—poor soul, must have been, that Poe. Died over at that creaky ol’ Washington College Hospital some weeks back, I heard. My sister’s husband knows a nurse there, who says, according to another nurse who spoke to a doctor—demonish busybodies, these women—who said Poe wasn’t right in his upper story, that as he lay there he called out a name over and over before he…well, that is,” he shifted to a whisper of great sensitivity, “before he croaked. God have mercy on the weak.”

  “You said he called a name, Mr. Wilson?”

  The fishmonger sloshed around his words to remember. He sat at his stool and began picking out unsold oysters from a barrel, carefully prying each one open and checking them for pearls before discarding them with philosophical regret. The oyster was the consummate Baltimore native, not only because it was enterprising and could be traded but because it possessed the always-present possibility of an even more valuable treasure inside. Suddenly the fish dealer clucked exultantly.

  “‘Reynolds,’ it was! Right, that’s it, ‘Reynolds’! I know because she kept saying it when she told me over supper, and on our plates were the last good soft-shell crabs of the season.”

  I asked him to think hard and be certain.

  “‘Reynolds, Reynolds, Reynolds!’” he said with some offense at my doubt. “That’s how he was calling it out, all through the night. She said she couldn’t pluck it out of her brain after she heard of it. Creaky ol’ hospital—should be burnt down, I say. I knew a Reynolds in my youth who threw stones at infantrymen—he was a demonish character, no mistake, Squire Clark.”

  “But did Poe ever mention a Reynolds before?” I asked myself out loud. “A family member, or…”

  The fish dealer’s enjoyment of the scene lessened, and he stared at me. “This Mr. Poe was a friend of yours?”

  “A friend,” I said, “and a friend of all who read him.”

  I bid my client a hasty good evening with much gratitude for the remarkable service he had provided me. I had been permitted to hear Poe’s very last utterance to this earth (or nearly the last, anyhow), and in it some retort, some revelation, some remedy to the slashing and the cutting of the press might be recovered. That single word meant there was something to be found, some life left of Poe’s for me to discover.

  Reynolds!

  I spent countless hours searching through Poe’s letters to me and through all of his tales and verse to detect any sign of Reynolds. Tickets to exhibitions and concerts went unused; if Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale,” were singing in town, I would have been among my books all the same. I could almost hear my father direct me to put all this away and return to my law books. He would say (so I imagined), “Young men like yourself should observe that Industry and Enterprise can slowly do anything Genius does with impatience—and many things Genius cannot. Genius needs Industry as much as Industry needs Genius.” I felt suddenly, each time I opened another Poe document, as though I was in an argument with Father, that he was trying to tear the very books out of my hands. It was not a wholly unwelcome feeling to encounter: in fact, I think it actually pushed me forward. Besides, in my capacity as a man of business I had promised Poe, a prospective client, that I would defend him. Perhaps Father would have commended me.

  Hattie Blum, meanwhile, called at Glen Eliza with her aunt frequently. Whatever disapproval on their part had developed from my recent transgression had passed, or at least been suspended. Hattie was as thoughtful and generous in our conversations as ever. Her aunt, perhaps, was more watchful than usual, and seemed to have developed the dark eyes of a secret agent. Of course, my intense preoccupations, along with my general tendency to grow quiet when others talked, meant the women in my drawing room addressed each other more than me.

  “I do not know how you bear it,” said Hattie, looking up at the high domed ceiling. “I could not suffer a house as enormous as Glen Eliza alone, Quentin. It takes bravery to have too much space for yourself. Don’t you think, Auntie?”

  Auntie Blum snorted out a laugh. “Dear Hattie becomes terribly lonesome when I leave her for an hour with only the help for company. They can be dreadful.”

  One of my domestics came from the hall and refreshed the ladies’ tea.

  “Not so, Auntie! But with my sisters gone,” Hattie began, then paused, with a slight and uncharacteristic blush.

  “Because they’ve all married,” her aunt said quietly.

  “Of course,” I agreed after a long pause from both Blum ladies suggested a comment on my part.

  “With my three sisters out of the house, well, it can seem awfully desolate at times, like I must fend for myself but I do not even know against what. Haven’t you ever had a feeling like that?”

  “On the other hand,” I said, “dear Miss Hattie, there is a certain peace to it, separated from the bustle of the streets and the concerns of other people.”

  “Oh, Auntie!” She turned jovially to the other woman. “Perhaps I crave the bustle too much. Do you think our family blood runs too warm for Baltimore after all, Auntie?”

  A word about the woman being addressed, the one sitting in front of the hearth on an armchair as if it were a throne, the stately dame with a shawl wrapped around her as though it were a monarch’s robe, Auntie Blum—yes, a word more about her since her influence will not diminish as our story’s complications set in. She was one of that stalwart species of lady who seemed lost in her choicest bonnets and social habits but in fact possessed an ability to jostle her listener to his core, in the same trifling tone with which she critiqued the table of a rival hostess. For instance, during the same visit to my parlor she found occasion to comment offhandedly, “Quentin, isn’t it fortunate, Peter Stuart finding you for his partner?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Such a mind for business he possesses! He is a man of flat-footed sense, depend upon it. You are the younger brother of the pair, allegorically I mean, and soon shall be able to boast you are like him in all respects.”

  I returned her smile.

  “Why, it is like our Hattie and her sisters. One day she shall be as successful in society as them—I mean if she becomes a wife in time, of course,” Auntie Blum said, taking a long taste of the scalding hot tea.

  I saw th
at Hattie looked away from both of us. Her aunt was the one person in the world who could remove Hattie’s wonderful self-assurance. This angered me.

  I placed my hand on Hattie’s chair, near her hand. “When that time comes, her sisters will learn how to be true wives and mothers from this woman, I assure you, Mrs. Blum. More tea?”

  I did not want to mention anything related to Edgar Poe in their hearing on the chance that Auntie Blum would find some excuse to inform Peter, or write a concerned epistle on the state of my life to my great-aunt, with whom she had been very hand and glove over the years. I found myself relieved, indeed, when each interview with that woman closed without my having said a word about my investigations. However, the restriction would make me anxious to resume my recent searches as soon as the Blums had departed.

  On this occasion, when I boarded an omnibus I was addressed by the conductor as though I had just spit tobacco juice on the floor. “You!”

  I had forgotten to hand over my ticket. An inauspicious start. After correcting this, the bus conductor painstakingly studied the portrait I held up for him before deciding the face was unfamiliar.

  This portrait of Poe, published after his death, was not of the highest quality. But I believed it captured the essentials. His dark mustache, straighter and neater than his curling hair. The eyes, clear and almond shaped—eyes with restlessness almost magnetic. Forehead, broad and prominent above the temples, so that from certain angles he must look to have no hair—a man who could be all forehead.

  As the doors closed and I was bumped into a seat by the line of oncoming passengers, a short and wide fellow tugged at my arm with the end of his umbrella.

  “Pardon me!” I cried.

  “Say, the man in that illustration, I think I’d seen him a while ago. Sometime in September, like you said to the conductor.”

  “Truly, sir?” I asked.

  He explained that he rode the same bus almost every day and remembered someone who looked just like the man in the portrait. It happened as they were leaving the omnibus.

  “I recollect it because he asked for help—wanted to know where a Dr. Brooks lived, if I remember. I’m an umbrella mender, not a city directory.”

  I readily agreed with the point, although I did not know if the latter comment was meant for me or Poe. N. C. Brooks’s name was familiar enough to me—and certainly would have been to Edgar Poe. Dr. Brooks was an editor who had published some of Poe’s finest tales and poems, which had helped introduce Poe’s work to the Baltimore public. Finally, some real proof that Poe had not entirely disappeared into the air of Baltimore after all!

  The horses’ rumbling was starting to slow, and I jumped out of my seat as the vehicle began rolling to its next stop.

  I hastened to my law chambers to consult with the city directory for Dr. Brooks’s address. It was six in the evening, and I had assumed Peter had retired already after finishing his appointments at the courthouse. But I was wrong.

  “My dear friend,” he bellowed over my shoulder. “You look startled! Nearly jumped out of your skin!”

  “Peter.” I paused, realizing when I spoke that I was out of breath. “It is only—well, I suppose I was presently on my way out again.”

  “I have a surprise,” he said, grinning and lifting his walking stick like a scepter. He blocked my way to the door, his hand groping for my shoulder.

  “There is to be a grand blow-out this evening at my home, with many friends of yours and mine, Quentin. It was very lately planned, for it is the birthday of one who is most—”

  “But you see I’m just now…” I interrupted impatiently, but stopped myself from explaining when I saw a dark glint in my partner’s eyes.

  “What, Quentin?” Peter looked around slowly, with mock interest. “There is no more to do here this evening. You have somewhere you must rush to? Where?”

  “No,” I said, feeling faintly flushed, “it is nothing.”

  “Good, then let us be right off!”

  Peter’s table was overrun with familiar faces, in celebration of Hattie Blum’s twenty-third birthday. Shouldn’t I have remembered? I felt a terrible tinge of remorse at my insensitivity. I had seen her for every one of her birthdays. Had I strayed so far from my ordinary path to forsake even the most pleasurable affairs of society and intimate friends? Well, one visit to Brooks, and I believed my preoccupation could be happily concluded.

  There were as highly respectable ladies and gentlemen there that night as could be obtained in Baltimore. Yet wouldn’t I have preferred to be in Madame Tussaud’s chamber of murderers just then, anywhere just then but caught in slow and smooth conversation, when I had such a momentous task tempting me!

  “How could you?” This was spoken by a large, pink-faced woman who appeared across from me when we sat down to the elaborate supper.

  “What?”

  “Oh dear,” she said with a playful and humble moan, “looking at me—plain old me!—when there is such a specimen of beauty next to you.” She made a gesture at Hattie.

  Of course, I hadn’t been looking at the pink-faced woman, or not intentionally. I realized I had fallen into one of my staring fits again. “I am surrounded by pure beauty, aren’t I?”

  Hattie did not blush. I liked that she did not blush at compliments. She whispered to me with a confidential air, “You are fixated on the clock, and have overlooked our most fascinating guest, the duck braised with wild celery, Quentin. Will not that demon Mr. Stuart allow you one evening free without work?”

  I smiled. “It is not Peter’s fault this time,” I said. “I’m just picking, I suppose. I have little appetite these days.”

  “You can speak to me, Quentin,” Hattie said, and seemed at that moment of a gentler cut than any woman I had ever met. “What do you think about now with such trouble on your face?”

  “I am thinking, dear Miss Hattie…” I hesitated, then said, “Of some lines of poetry.” Which was true, for I had just reread them that morning.

  “Recite them, won’t you, Quentin?”

  In my excessive distraction I had taken two glasses of wine without eating properly to balance the effects of the spirits. So with a little persuasion, I found myself agreeing to recite. My voice hardly sounded familiar to me; it was round and bold and even resonant. To convey the style of presentation, the reader should stand wherever he happens to find himself and venture to pronounce in solemn and moody tones some of the following. The reader must also imagine meanwhile a cheery table exhibiting that species of abrupt, grating silences that accompany imposed interruptions.

  And all with pearl and ruby glowing Was the fair palace door, Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing, And sparkling evermore, A troop of Echoes, whose sweet duty Was but to sing, In voices of surpassing beauty, The wit and wisdom of their king. But evil things, in robes of sorrow, Assailed the monarch’s high estate. (Ah, let us mourn!—for never morrow Shall dawn upon him desolate!) And round about his home, the glory That blushed and bloomed Is but a dim-remembered story Of the old time entombed. When a period was put to this poem, I felt triumphant. There reached my ears thinly scattered applause, drowned out by a few coughs. Peter frowned at me, and simultaneously threw a pitying glance at Hattie. Only a few guests who had not been listening, but were pleased for any distraction, seemed appreciative. Hattie still applauded after all the others had stopped.

  “It is the finest recitation ever spoken on a girl’s birthday,” she said.

  Soon, one of Hattie’s sisters agreed to sing a song at the piano. Meanwhile, I’d taken more wine. Peter’s frown, which had quivered into place during the recitation of the poem, remained fixed when, after the ladies excused themselves to another room and the men began smoking, he brought me to a private corner where the massive hearth sequestered us.

  “Do you know, Quentin, that Hattie came quite close to not wanting to celebrate her birthday tonight, and relented at the last moment upon my insistence on a supper?”

  “Not because of me,
Peter?”

  “How could someone who thinks so much of the world depends on him not see what does depend on him? You did not even remember it was her birthday. It is time to stop, Quentin. Remember the words of Solomon: ‘By slothfulness the building decayeth, by idleness of the hands the house droppeth through.’”

  “I don’t know what you’re driving at,” I said irritably.

  He looked straight at me. “You know well enough! This queer behavior. First, your strange preoccupation with a stranger’s funeral. And riding the omnibuses back and forth without destination like a gadabout—”

  “But who told you that, Peter?”

  And there was more, he said. I had been seen running through the streets a week earlier, my dress out at the elbows, chasing someone like I was a police officer making an arrest. I had continued to spend inordinate amounts of time in the athenaeum.

  “Then there is the idea of imagining strangers are threatening you on the streets for the poems you read. Do you think your reading is so important that people would harm you for it? And you wandering around the old Presbyterian burial ground like a pretty resurrection man looking for bodies to steal, or like a man who walks under a spell!”

  “Hold on,” I said, regaining my composure. “How do you know that, Peter? That I was at that old burial ground the other day? I am certain I hadn’t mentioned it.” I thought of the carriage hurrying away from the burial yard. “Why, Peter! Was it you? You followed me!”

  He nodded and then shrugged. “Yes, I followed you. And found you at that cemetery. I confess openly I have been most anxious. I wanted to be certain you were not involved in some trouble or that you hadn’t joined some cracked Millerites, waiting in white robes somewhere for the Savior to descend from heaven two Tuesdays from now! Your father’s money will not last forever. To be rich and useless is to be poor. If you are occupied in strange habits, I fear you will find ways to squander it—or that some woman, some lesser member of the kinder sex than Miss Blum, by the bye, finding you in such a lonely state, will squander it for you—even a man with the strength of Ulysses must fasten himself to his mast when facing the artful woman!”