Dante Club

by Matthew Pearl

  It took the sexton a moment to realize that the garment he had used to put out the fire was a minister’s gown. Crawling through a trail of human bones that had risen from the earth, he returned to the tidy stack of clothing and dug through them: undergarments, a familiar cape, and the white cravat, shawl, and well-blacked shoes of the beloved Reverend Elisha Talbot.

  As he closed the door to his office on the second floor of the medical college, Oliver Wendell Holmes nearly collided with a city patrolman in the corridor. It had taken Holmes longer to finish his work for the next day than he planned, having hoped to start earlier so he might have time with Wendell Junior before Junior’s usual group of friends arrived. The patrolman was searching for someone with authority, explaining to Holmes that the chief of police requested the use of the school’s examining room and that Professor Haywood had been sent for to assist in the inquest of an unfortunate gentleman’s body that had been discovered. The coroner, Mr. Barnicoat, could not be located—he did not say that Barnicoat was known to frequent the public houses on weekends, and surely would be in no condition to conduct an inquest. Finding the dean’s rooms empty, Holmes reasoned that since he was the former dean (Yes, yes, five years at the stern of the ship was enough for me, and at fifty-six, who needs so much responsibility?—Holmes carried on both sides of the conversation), he could rightfully indulge the patrolman’s request.

  A police carriage carrying Chief Kurtz and Deputy Chief Savage arrived and a stretcher covered by a blanket was rushed inside, accompanied by Professor Haywood and his student assistant. Haywood taught surgical practice and had developed a keen interest in autopsy. Over Barnicoat’s objections, the police occasionally asked the professor to the deadhouse for an opinion, as when they found an infant walled up in a cellar or a man hanging in a closet.

  Holmes noted with interest that Chief Kurtz posted two state constables at the door. Who would care to intrude at the medical college at this evening hour? Kurtz rolled up the blanket only to the body’s knees. This was enough. Holmes had to stop himself from gasping at the sight of the man’s bare feet, if that word could still be applied.

  The feet—only the feet—had been torched by fire after a smart dousing with what smelled of kerosene. Charred to a crisp, Holmes thought, horrified. The two remaining blobs were protruding awkwardly from the ankles, displaced from the joints. The skin, hardly recognizable as such, was bloated, cracked open by the fire. Pink tissue was pushing out. Professor Haywood bent down for a better view.

  Though he’d cut open hundreds of corpses, Dr. Holmes did not possess the iron stomach of his medical colleagues for such procedures and had to back away from the examination table. As a professor, Holmes had more than once left his classroom when a live rabbit was to be chloroformed, beseeching his demonstrator not to let it squeak.

  Holmes’s head began to spin, and it seemed to him that there was suddenly very little air in the room, with the paltry amount present encased in ether and chloroform. He did not know how long the inquest could last, but he was quite certain he would not remain long without dropping to the floor. Haywood uncovered the rest of the body, introducing the dead man’s pained, scarlet face to the room and brushing away dirt from his eyes and cheeks. Holmes allowed his eyes to travel across the whole of the naked body.

  He barely registered the familiar face as Haywood stooped over the body and Chief Kurtz delivered question after question to Haywood. Nobody had asked Holmes to remain quiet, and as Harvard’s Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology, he could have contributed to the discussion. But Holmes could only concentrate on loosening his silk neck cloth. He blinked convulsively, not knowing whether he should hold his breath to save the oxygen he had already collected or breathe in quick spurts to stockpile the last pockets of air available before the others, whose apparent obliviousness to the dense air made Holmes certain they would all drop to the floor at any moment.

  One of the men present asked Dr. Holmes if he was unwell. He had a gentle, striking face and shining eyes, and he looked to be mulatto. He spoke with a touch of familiarity, and in his daze Holmes remembered: The officer who had come to see Lowell at the Dante Club meeting.

  “Professor Holmes? Do you concur with the assessment of Professor Haywood?” Chief Kurtz then asked, perhaps in a polite attempt to include him in the proceeding, as Holmes had gone nowhere near enough to the body to make any but the most presumptuous medical assessment. Holmes tried to think whether he had noted Haywood’s dialogue with Chief Kurtz and seemed to recall Haywood remarking that the deceased had been alive while his feet were set aflame, that he must have been in a position helpless to stop the torture, and that from the look of the face and the absence of other injuries, it was not unlikely that he had died from shock to the heart.

  “Why, of course,” Holmes remarked. “Yes, of course, Officer.” Holmes stepped backward to the door as though in escape from a deadly peril. “Perhaps you gentlemen could carry on without me for a spell?”

  Chief Kurtz continued his catechism with Professor Haywood, and with that Holmes reached the door, the hall, and soon the outside courtyard, taking in as much air as possible in every quick, desperate breath.

  As the violet hour was overtaking Boston, the doctor, wandering through the rows of pushcarts, walking aimlessly past the seedcakes, the jugs of ginger beer, the white-smocked oyster- and lobstermen holding out their monstrosities, could not suffer the thought of his behavior at the side of Reverend Talbot’s corpse. Out of embarrassment, he had not yet unburdened himself of the knowledge that Talbot had been killed, had not yet rushed to share the sensational tidings with Fields or Lowell. How could he, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, doctor and professor of medical science, renowned lecturer and medical reformer, shiver so at the sight of a corpse as if it were a ghost in some sentimental set-novel? Wendell Junior would be particularly bemused by his father’s chickenhearted stumbling. The younger Holmes made no secret of his feeling that he would have made a better doctor than the elder, as well as a better professor, husband, and father.

  Though not yet twenty-five, Junior had been in the battlefield and had seen bodies shredded, whole gaps in his ranks mowed down by cannon fire, limbs dropping off like leaves and amputations, performed with ax-saws, by amateur surgeons while screamers were held down on doors used for operating tables by volunteer nurses splattered in blood. When his cousin asked why Wendell Junior could easily grow a mustache while his own attempt could not move past the earliest stages, Junior had replied curtly, “Mine was nourished in blood.”

  Now Dr. Holmes mustered all he had ever known about the process of baking the best quality of bread. He summoned all the tips known to him for finding the finest-quality vendors in a Boston marketplace by clothing or demeanor or nativity. He grabbed and squeezed the wares of the vendors harshly, absently, but with the commanding touch of a doctor’s hand. His forehead soaked his handkerchief as he dabbed it. At the next provision stall, some horrid older women poked their fingers into the salt-meat. The distractions of the task at hand could not last.

  As he reached the stall of an Irish matron, the doctor realized that his tremors at the medical college had been deeper than they had first seemed. It was not caused merely by his distaste for the distorted body and its silent tale of dread. And it was not only because Elisha Talbot, as much a fixture in Cambridge as the Washington Elm, had been done in, and so brutally. No—something in the murder had been familiar, so familiar.

  Holmes purchased a warm brown loaf of bread and started home. He considered whether he could have dreamt about Talbot’s death in some strange brush with prescience. But Holmes did not believe in such bugbears. He must have once read a description of this gruesome act, the details of which then flooded back to him without warning when he saw Talbot’s body. But what text would contain such a horror? Not a medical journal. Not the Boston Transcript, certainly, for the murder had just happened. Holmes stopped in the middle of the street and envisioned the preacher kicking his f
laming feet in the air, while the flames moved . . .

  “‘Dai calcagni a le punte,’” Holmes whispered aloud: From their heels to their toes—that’s where the corrupt clerics, the Simoniacs, burn forever in their craggy ditches. His heart sank. “Dante! It’s Dante!”

  Amelia Holmes centered the cold game pie on the fully set dining room table. She passed some directions to the help, smoothed her dress, and leaned out on the front step to look for her husband. She was certain she had seen Wendell turning onto Charles Street from the upstairs window not five minutes ago, presumably with the bread she had asked him to bring for her supper hosting several friends, including Annie Fields. (And how could a hostess live up to the salon of Annie Fields without everything perfect?) But Charles Street was empty save for the dissolving shadows of its trees. Perhaps it was another short man in a long tailcoat she had seen through the window.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow tested the notepaper left by Patrolman Rey. He prodded the jumble of letters, copied out the text several times on a separate sheet, anagrammatizing the words at different junctions to form new scrambles, buttressing himself from thoughts of the past. His daughters were visiting his sister’s family in Portland and his two sons were traveling abroad separately, so there would be days of solitude, which he relished more in idea than in practice.

  That morning, the same day on which the Reverend Talbot was killed, the poet had sat up in his bed just before dawn without the faintest consciousness of having slept at all. It was his usual routine. Longfellow’s sleeplessness was not caused by frightful dreams or traumatized by tossing or turning. In fact, he would describe the haze he entered during the night as rather peaceful, something analogous to sleeping. He was grateful that even after the long insomniac watches of the night he could still feel rested at daybreak from having laid himself down for so many hours. But sometimes, in the pale nimbus of the night lamp, Longfellow thought he could see her gentle face staring at him from the corner of the bedchamber, here in the room where she died. At these times, he would jump with a start. The sinking of the heart that followed his half-formed joy was a terror worse than any nightmare Longfellow could remember or invent, for whatever phantom image he might see during the night, he would still rise in the morning alone. As Longfellow slipped into his calamanco dressing gown, the flowing silver tresses of his beard felt heavier than when he had put himself to bed.

  When Longfellow made his way down the back stairway, he was wearing a dress coat, with a rose in his buttonhole. He did not like to be at all untidy, even at home. At the bottom landing was a print of Giotto’s portrait of the young Dante, with one eye replaced by a blank hole. Giotto’s fresco had been painted in the Bargello at Florence but over the centuries had been whitewashed and forgotten. Now only a lithograph of the damaged fresco remained. Dante had sat for Giotto before the pains of exile, his war with fate, had overtaken him; he was still the silent suitor of Beatrice, a young man of medium stature, with a dark, melancholy, thoughtful face. His eyes are large, his nose aquiline, his underlip projecting, with an almost feminine softness in the lines of the face.

  The young Dante seldom spoke unless questioned, so said the legends. A particularly pleasing contemplation would preclude attention to anything outside his own thoughts. Dante once found a rare volume in an apothecary’s shop in Siena and spent the whole day reading on a bench outside without ever noticing the street festival going on directly in front of him, unconscious of the musicians and the dancing women.

  When he had settled in the study with a bowl of oatmeal and milk, a meal he would be content to repeat for dinner most days, Longfellow could not help thinking of Patrolman Rey’s note. He imagined a million different possibilities and a dozen languages for the scribbled writing before abandoning the hieroglyphic—as Lowell had branded it—to its place in the back of the drawer. From the same drawer he brought out proof sheets of Cantos Sixteen and Seventeen of Inferno, annotated neatly with the suggestions from the latest Dante séance. His desk had remained empty of original poems for some time now. Fields had issued a new “Household Edition” of Longfellow’s most famous poems and convinced him to complete Tales of a Wayside Inn, hoping to spur new poems. But it seemed to Longfellow that he would never write anything original again, nor did he care to try. Translating Dante had once been an interlude to his own poetry, his Minnehahas, his Priscillas, his Evangelines. The practice had begun twenty-five years ago. Now, over the last four years, Dante had become his morning prayer and his day’s work.

  As Longfellow poured his second and final cup of coffee, he thought of the report Francis Child had been rumored to have made to friends in England: “Longfellow and his coterie are so infected with the Tuscan malady that they dare classify Milton as a second-rate genius in comparison to Dante.” Milton was the gold standard of religious poets for English and American scholars. But Milton wrote of Hell and Heaven from above and below, respectively, not from the inside: safer vantages. Fields, diplomatic as long as nobody was hurt, had laughed when Arthur Hugh Clough had relayed Child’s comment in the Authors’ Room at the Corner, but it had irked Longfellow quite a bit to hear of the exchange.

  Longfellow soaked his quill pen. Of his three finely decorative inkwells, this one he prized most, having once belonged to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and then to Lord Tennyson, who had sent it to Longfellow as a gift to wish him well on the Dante translation. The reclusive Tennyson was one of too small a contingent in that country that truly understood Dante and held him in high esteem, and had known more of the Comedy than a few episodes of the Inferno. Spain had shown an early appreciation for Dante until strangled by official dogma and bludgeoned by the reign of the Inquisition. Voltaire had initiated the French animosity toward Dante’s “barbarity” that continued still. Even in Italy, where Dante was most widely known, the poet had been drafted into the service of various factions fighting for control. Longfellow often thought of the two things Dante must have yearned for the most as he wrote the Divine Comedy while sitting in exile from his beloved Florence: The first was to win a return to his homeland, which he would never succeed in doing; the second was to see his Beatrice again, which the poet never could.

  Dante wandered about homeless as he composed, almost having to borrow the ink in which he wrote. When he approached a strange city’s gates, surely he could not but be reminded that he would never again enter the gates of Florence. When he beheld the towers of the feudal castles cresting the distant hills, he felt how arrogant are the strong, how much abused the weak. Every brook and river reminded him of the Arno; every voice he heard told him by its strange accent that he was an exile. Dante’s poem was no less than his search for home.

  Longfellow was methodical about mastering his time and set aside the early hours for his writing and the late morning for his personal business, refusing to admit any visitors until after twelve o’clock—except, of course, his children.

  The poet sifted through his piles of unanswered letters, pulling close to him his box of autographs written on small squares of paper. Since the publication of Evangeline years earlier had broadened his popularity, Longfellow regularly received mail from strangers, most of whom requested a signature. A young woman from Virginia included her own carte de visite portrait, on the back of which was written: “What fault can be found with this?” with her address below it. Longfellow raised an eyebrow and sent her a standard autograph without comment. “The fault of too great youth,” he considered replying. After sealing some two dozen envelopes, Longfellow wrote a gracious rebuff of another lady. He did not like to be discourteous, but this particular solicitant requested fifty autographs, explaining that she wanted to offer them as place settings for her guests at a dinner party. He was delighted, on the other hand, by a woman relating the story of her daughter running into the parlor after finding a daddy longlegs on her pillow. When asked the matter, the girl announced: “Mr. Longfellow is in my room!”

  Longfellow was pleased to find in his pile of n
ew mail a note from Mary Frere, a young lady from Auburn, New York, with whom Longfellow had recently become acquainted when summering at Nahant, where they walked many evenings, after the girls fell asleep, along the rocky shore, talking of new poetry or music. Longfellow wrote her a long letter, relating to her how the three girls ask often after her doings; the girls also beg him to find out where Miss Frere will be spending the next summer.

  He was lured away from his letters by the ever-present temptation of the window in front of his writing desk. The poet always expected a revival of creative power with the onset of autumn. His fireless grate was heaped with autumnal leaves that imitated a flame. He noticed that the warm, bright day had waned more quickly than it seemed from inside the brown walls of his study. The window overlooked the open meadows, several acres of which Longfellow had recently purchased, stretching all the way to the gleaming waters of the Charles River. He found it amusing to think of the popular superstition that he made the purchase with a view to a rise in property value, while in fact all he wanted to secure was the view.

  On the trees were no longer only leaves but brown fruits, on the bushes no longer blossoms but clusters of red berries. And the wind had a rough manliness in its voice—the tone not of a lover but of a husband.

  Longfellow’s day settled into just the right pace. Supper over, he dismissed the help and resolved to catch up on his newspaper reading. But after lighting the lamp in his study, he spent only a few minutes with the paper. The late edition of the Transcript carried Ednah Healey’s startling announcement. The article contained details of the murder of Artemus Healey, which had until then been suppressed by the widow “on the counsel of the office of the Chief of Police and other official persons.” Longfellow could read no further, though certain details from the article, he would realize in the next eventful hours, had burrowed into his mind uninvited; it was not the pain of the chief justice that ended Longfellow’s tolerance for the story for now so much as that of the widow.