Dante Club

by Matthew Pearl

  “‘Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create se non etterne, e io etterno duro, lasciate ogne,’” Lowell recited to Fields. “From the inscription over the gates of Hell, this is just a fragment of it! ‘Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.’”

  Lowell snapped his eyes closed as he translated:

  “‘Before me nothing was created,

  If not eternal, and eternal I shall endure.

  All hope abandon, ye who enter.’”

  The leaper, also, had seen this sign appear before him at the Central Police Station. He had seen the Neutrals: Ignavi. They swatted helplessly in the air and then swatted their own bodies. Wasps and flies circled their white, naked forms. Gross maggots crawled out from rotted gaps in their teeth, gathering in heaps below, sipping up their blood mixed with salt of their tears. The souls followed a blank banner ahead of them as a symbol of their pointless paths. The leaper felt his own skin alive with flies, flapping up and down with globs of gnawed flesh, and he had to escape . . . at least to try.

  Longfellow found his proof for the corrected translation of Canto Three and laid it on the table for comparison.

  “Heavens above,” Holmes wheezed, clinging to Longfellow’s sleeve. “Why, that mulatto officer was at the inquest of the Reverend Talbot. And he came to us with this after Judge Healey’s death! He must know something already!”

  Longfellow shook his head. “Remember, Lowell is the College’s Smith Professor. The patrolman wished to identify an unknown language, which we were all too blind at the time to decipher. Some students directed him to Elmwood on the night of our Dante Club session, and Mabel directed him here. There is no reason to believe he knows anything at all of the Dantesque nature of these crimes or that he knows about our translation project.”

  “How could we not have seen it right away?” Holmes asked. “Greene thought it might be Italian, and we ignored him.”

  “Thank heavens,” Fields exclaimed, “or the police would have been on us right then and there!”

  Holmes continued in a refreshed panic: “But who would have recited the portal’s inscription to the patrolman? This cannot be an entire coincidence of timing. It must have something to do with these murders!”

  “I suspect that’s right.” Longfellow nodded calmly.

  “Who could have said this?” Holmes pressed, turning the piece of paper over again and again in his hand. “That inscription,” Holmes continued. “The gates to Hell—it comes in Canto Three, the same canto where Dante and Virgil walk among the Neutrals! The model for Chief Justice Healey’s murder!”

  Footfalls multiplied up the Craigie House walkway and Longfellow opened the door for the yardman’s son, who rushed in, his obtrusive teeth chattering. Looking out onto the front step, Longfellow found himself facing Nicholas Rey.

  “He made me take him along, Mr. Longfellow sir,” Karl whinnied, seeing Longfellow’s surprise, then looking up at Rey with a sour grimace.

  Rey said, “I was at the Cambridge station house on another matter when this boy arrived to report your trouble. A local officer is looking outside.”

  Rey could almost hear the heavy silence that set in from the study at the sound of his voice.

  “Would you come in, Officer Rey?” Longfellow did not know what else to say. He explained the source of his scare.

  Nicholas Rey was back among the George Washington troop in the front hall. With his hand in his trousers pocket, he stroked the gobs of paper that had been scattered about the underground vault, still moist from the damp burial clay. Some of the scraps of paper had one or two letters on them; others were smudged beyond recognition.

  Rey stepped into the study and surveyed the three gentlemen: walrus-tusked Lowell with his overcoat wrapped around his dressing gown and plaid trousers; the other two in slackened collars and tangled neck cloths. A double-barreled shotgun leaned against the wall; a loaf of bread waited on the table.

  Rey rested his eyes on the agitated man with the boyish features, the only one not shielded by a beard. “Dr. Holmes assisted us with an examination this afternoon at the medical college,” Rey explained to Longfellow. “In fact, that is the same business which now brings me to Cambridge. Thank you again, Doctor, for your help in that matter.”

  The doctor jumped to his feet and gave a wobbly bow from the waist. “Not at all, sir. And if you ever are in need of further assistance, please send for me without hesitation,” he blurted out humbly, then handed Rey his card, forgetting for a moment that he had been of no help whatsoever. Holmes was too nervous to speak wisely. “Perhaps what sounds like a useless Latin prognosis could help in some small way to catch this killer running about our city.”

  Rey paused and nodded appreciatively.

  The yardman’s son took Longfellow’s arm and pulled him aside. “I’m sorry, Mr. Longfellow,” the boy said. “I didn’t believe he was no policeman. He ain’t got no uniform or anythin’, just a regular day coat. But the other officer there told me the aldermen makes him wear regular clothes so nobody gets mad at him for being a nigger cop and licks him!”

  Longfellow dismissed Karl with a promise of sweets on another day.

  In the study, Holmes, shifting from one foot to the other as though standing on hot coals, blocked the center table from Rey’s sight. There, a newspaper headlined the Healey murder; there, Longfellow’s English translation of Canto Three, the model for that murder, was next to it; in between was the scrap of paper with Nicholas Rey’s jotting: Deenan see amno atesennone turnay eeotur nodur lasheeato nay.

  Behind Rey, Longfellow stepped into the threshold of the study. Rey could feel his quick spurts of breathing. He noticed Lowell and Fields staring oddly at the table behind Holmes.

  Swiftly, in a motion almost undetectable, Dr. Holmes stretched his arm, snatching the officer’s notepaper from the table. “Oh, and Officer,” announced the doctor. “Might we return your note to you?”

  Rey felt a sudden rush of hope. He said quietly, “Have you . . .”

  “Yes, yes,” Holmes said. “Part of it, anyhow. We’ve run the sounds through every language on the books, my dear officer, and I fear broken English seems our most likely conclusion. Part of it reads”—Holmes took a breath and stared hard, reciting—“‘See no one tour, nay, O turn no doorlatch out today.’ Rather Shakespearean, if a bit of balderdash, don’t you think?”

  Rey glanced at Longfellow, who seemed as surprised as him. “Well, I thank you for remembering, Dr. Holmes,” said Rey. “I shall bid you gentlemen goodnight now.”

  They flocked to the entryway as Rey vanished down the footpath.

  “Turn no doorlatch?” Lowell asked.

  “It shall keep him from suspecting anything, Lowell!” cried Holmes. “You could have looked more convinced. It is a good rule for the actor who manages Punch and Judy not to let the audience see his legs!”

  “It was pretty good thinking, Wendell.” Fields patted Holmes’s shoulder warmly.

  Longfellow started to speak but could not. He went into his study and closed the door, leaving his friends awkwardly stationed in the front hall.

  “Longfellow? My dear Longfellow?” Fields knocked gently.

  Lowell took his publisher’s arm and shook his head. Holmes realized he was holding something. He threw it down. Rey’s notepaper. “Look here. Officer Rey forgot this.”

  They were no longer seeing Rey’s notebook paper. It was the cold, carved stone of colorless iron at the summit of the open gates to Hell, where Dante had stopped reluctantly, Virgil pushing him forward.

  Lowell snatched the paper angrily and thrust Dante’s garbled words into the flame of the hall lamp.

  VII

  Oliver Wendell Holmes was late arriving at the next Dante Club meeting, which he knew would be his last. He wouldn’t accept a ride in Fields’s carriage, though the sky over the city was hooded black. The poet-doctor barely heaved a sigh when the spine of his umbrella cracked in the downpour as he slipped on layers of leaves, the last deposit of autumn,
in front of Longfellow’s house. There was too much wrong in the world for him to spar with physical annoyances. In Longfellow’s pristine welcoming eyes there was no comfort, no serenity to impart, no answer to the question tightening the doctor’s stomach: How do we go on with this now?

  He would tell them at supper that he was giving up his role in the Dante translation. Lowell might even be too disorientated by recent events to blame him for desertion. Holmes feared being known as a dilettante. But there was no way he could pretend to read Dante as usual with the aroma of the Reverend Talbot’s scorched flesh in the air. He was choking on an indistinct sense that somehow they had been responsible, that they had gone too far, that their readings of Dante each week had released Inferno’s punishments into the air of Boston by virtue of their own blithe faith in poetry.

  One man had stomped in a half-hour earlier like an army of thousands.

  James Russell Lowell. He was drenched, though he had only walked from around the corner; he ridiculed umbrellas as senseless contraptions. The soft fire of cannel coal with hickory logs radiated from the wide chimney, the heat making the moisture on Lowell’s beard gleam as though from an inner light.

  Lowell had pulled Fields aside at the Corner that week and explained that he could not live in this manner. Their silence to the police was necessary—very well. Their good names had to be protected—very well. Dante had to be protected—also very well. But none of this fine rationale erased a plain fact: Lives were at stake.

  Fields had said he would try to arrive at a sensible idea. Longfellow had said he did not know what Lowell imagined they could do. Holmes had successfully avoided his friend. Lowell tried his best to arrange for the four men to meet at one time, but until today they had resisted assembling as resolutely as opposing magnets.

  Now that they sat in a circle, the same circle they had been sitting around for two and a half years, there was only one reason Lowell did not shake them by the shoulders one after the other. And that reason was crouched delicately in his favorite green easy chair and weighed down by Dante folios: They had all promised not to tell George Washington Greene what they had discovered.

  There he was, brittle fingers unfolded out in front, warming himself at the hearth. The others knew that Greene, in fragile health, could not cope with the violent tidings they possessed. So the old historian and retired preacher, complaining lightheartedly about not having enough time to prepare his thoughts because of Longfellow’s last-minute switch of canto assignments, proved the only cheery member this Wednesday evening.

  Earlier in the week, Longfellow had sent word to his scholars that they would review Canto Twenty-six, where Dante meets the flaming soul of Ulysses, the Greek hero of the Trojan War. This was a favorite among the group, so there was a hope it would reinvigorate them.

  “Thank you, everyone, for coming,” Longfellow said.

  Holmes remembered the funeral that, in retrospect, had heralded the start of the Dante translation. When news spread of Fanny’s death, some Boston Brahmins had felt an involuntary touch of pleasure—something they would never acknowledge or admit even to themselves—upon waking one morning to find that misfortune had visited someone so impossibly blessed in life. Longfellow had seemed to arrive at talent and luxury without the slightest strain. If Dr. Holmes had experienced anything less respectable than complete and utter anguish for the loss of Fanny to that terrible fire, it was perhaps a feeling that might be called wonder, or selfish excitement, that he would dare to aid Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in a time when he needed healing.

  The Dante Club had restored life to a friend. And now—now two murders had been committed through the guise of Dante. And, presumably, there could be a third, or a fourth, while they sat by the fire, proof sheets in hand.

  “How can we ignore . . .” James Russell Lowell blurted out before swallowing his thought with a bitter glance at the oblivious Greene, who was jotting a note in the margin of his proof sheet.

  Longfellow read and discussed the Ulysses canto, not stopping to acknowledge the miscarried comment. His ever-present smile was strained and faded, as though borrowed from a previous meeting.

  Ulysses found himself in Hell among the Evil Counselors as a bodiless flame, waving his tip back and forth like a wagging tongue. Some in Hell were resistant to telling Dante their stories; others were unbecomingly eager. Ulysses was above both vanities.

  Ulysses tells Dante how after the Trojan War, as an aged soldier, he did not sail back to Ithaca to his wife and family. He convinced the few remaining members of his crew to continue forward past the line that no mortal should cross, to flout destiny and pursue knowledge. A whirlwind rose up and the sea swallowed them.

  Greene was the only one to say much on the topic. He was thinking of the Tennyson poem that was based on this Ulysses episode. He smiled sadly and commented, “I think we should consider the inspiration Dante provides for Lord Tennyson’s interpretation of the scene.

  “‘How dull it is to pause, to make an end,’” Greene said, daintily reciting the Tennyson poem from memory. “‘To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use! As though to breathe were life! Life piled on life were all too little, and of one to me’”—he paused with a visible mist in his eyes—“‘little remains.’ Let Tennyson be our guide, dear friends, for in his sorrow he lived a bit of Ulysses, of the desire to triumph in the final voyage of life.”

  After eager responses by Longfellow and Fields, old Greene’s commentary gave way to high-pitched snores. Having made his contribution, he was spent. Lowell was clutching his proof sheets tightly, his lips clamped together like those of a recalcitrant schoolboy. His frustration at the genteel charade was growing, his temper open to all comers.

  When he could find nobody to speak, Longfellow said pleadingly, “Lowell, have you any comments on this tercet?”

  A white marble statuette of Dante Alighieri stood over one of the study’s mirrors. The hollow eyes faced them heartlessly. Lowell mumbled, “Did not Dante himself once write that no poetry can be translated? Yet we come together weekly and gleefully murder his words.”

  “Lowell, peace!” gasped Fields, who then apologized with his eyes to Longfellow. “We are doing all we must,” the publisher whispered hoarsely in a volume loud enough to chide Lowell but not so loud as to wake Greene.

  Lowell leaned forward eagerly. “We need to do something . . . we need to decide . . .”

  Holmes widened his quick eyes at Lowell and pointed at Greene, or, more precisely, at Greene’s shaggy ear canal. The old man could wake at any moment. Holmes then reeled in his finger and dragged it across his outstretched neck to signal their silence on the subject.

  “What would you have us do anyway?” Holmes asked. He meant this to sound ridiculous enough to quash the muted asides. But the rhetorical question arched above the room with the enormity of a cathedral ceiling. “There’s nothing to do, unfortunately,” Holmes murmured now, pulling at his necktie, trying to retrieve his question. Unsuccessfully.

  Holmes had unleashed something. This was the challenge waiting to be posed, the challenge that could be avoided only until that moment it was spoken aloud, when all four men were breathing the same air.

  Lowell’s face flushed red with a burning need. He stared at George Washington Greene’s rhythmic respiration and his mind was filled simultaneously with all the sounds of their meeting: Longfellow desperately thanking them for coming, Greene croaking Tennyson, Holmes’s wheezing sighs, the majestic words of Ulysses, first spoken from the deck of his doomed ship and then repeated in Hell. All of this rumbled together in his brain and forged something new.

  Dr. Holmes watched Lowell clasp his forehead with his strong fingers. Holmes did not know what made Lowell say it at first. He was surprised. Perhaps he expected Lowell to yell and scream to rouse them; perhaps he even hoped for this as one hopes for anything familiar. But Lowell had the exquisite sensibilities of a great poet in times of crisis. He began in a speculative whisper, every tight featu
re in his red face gradually relaxing. “‘My mariners, souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me . . .’” This was a verse from Tennyson’s poem, Ulysses stirring his crew to defy mortality.

  Lowell leaned in and, smiling, continued with an earnestness that came as much from his iron-trimmed voice as from the words.

  “‘. . . you and I are old;

  Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.

  Death closes all; but something ere the end,

  Some work of noble note, may yet be done, . . .’”

  Holmes was stunned, though not at the power of the words, for he had long ago committed Tennyson’s poem to memory. He was overwhelmed at their immediate meaning for him. He felt a tremor inside. This was no recitation: Lowell was talking to them. Longfellow and Fields were also staring with heightened rapture and fear, because they too clearly understood. Lowell had, with a smile as he spoke, just dared them to find the truth behind two murders.

  The sheets of cold, howling rain pounded the windows, seeming to land first only on one and then shift their attack clockwise. There was a flash of light, the ancient beckoning of thunder, and a rattling of windowpanes. Before Holmes knew it, Lowell’s voice was drowned out for a moment and he was no longer reciting.

  Then Longfellow spoke, seamless in picking up the Tennyson poem in the same imploring whisper:

  “‘. . . the deep

  Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends.

  ’T is not too late to seek a newer world. . . .’”

  Then Longfellow spun his head to his publisher with a searching gaze: Your turn now, Fields.

  Fields ducked his head at the invitation, his beard nestling in his parted frock coat and rubbing against the guard chain of his waistcoat. Holmes was panicked that Lowell and Longfellow had rushed into the impossible cause, but here was hope. Fields was the guardian angel of his poets and would not lead them headfirst into peril. Fields had stayed clear of trauma in his personal life, never trying to have children and thus sparing himself the sorrow of babes who did not live past their first or second birthday or mothers turned into corpses on their birthing beds. Free of domestic constraints, he devoted his protective energies to his authors. Once, Fields had spent an entire afternoon arguing with Longfellow about a poem that narrated the shipwreck of Hesperus. The argument made Longfellow miss his planned excursion on Cornelius Vanderbilt’s luxury ship, which hours later burned and sank. Likewise, Holmes prayed to himself, this would be a time when Fields would pester and nudge until the danger passed.