“I apologize for the subterfuge, Willie,” Poe said. “The fact is, I’m in a scrape and desperately need your help.” And his enormous eyes declared this to be the truth.
“Of course as your physician I shall see to your health and comfort in any way I can,” I replied.
He responded with surprising vehemence. “Bugger my health and comfort, Willie! Because of me, a woman was murdered!”
“Murdered?”
“Three days ago in this very city. It was reported in the Clipper, did you not see it?”
In truth, I try to avoid newspapers. Reading about the misery of others tends to distract me from my own.
“Very well, Eddie, let us say it was in the Clipper. Why have you made this dead woman your business?”
“Because it was done for my benefit.”
I think it was here that he snagged my interest—clinical of course—for it is not often that delusions occur in such detail. It occurred to me that his case might provide the basis for an article on artistic hallucination, entitled something like, Coup d’ État: The Rebellion of the Trained Imagination.
“Do tell me more,” I said, weighing a diagnosis of brain fever, for it is a characteristic of this malady that the patient will alternate moments of perfect lucidity with episodes of sheer madness.
“I mean, suh, that a clock has been set into motion. First he destroys my work, then my reputation, and my life and work become irrelevant. Don’t you see? He wishes to turn me into the living dead.”
“Might this business involve a gentleman named Riley?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Riley. You were shouting that name as you came in.”
“I did?”
“Yes. You were quite specific.”
“I know nobody named Riley. You must have been mistaken.”
In cases of paranoid delusion, the proper protocol is well established according to the principles of Moral Treatment: after an expression of sympathetic understanding, ease the patient back to sanity by refuting his error, persistently and calmly, with facts from the real world.
“This is distressing news indeed, Eddie. No wonder you were in a state of agitation. But if you believe there has been a murder, don’t you think the first place to turn would be to the constabulary?”
“That I did. And spent the night in jail for my trouble.”
“On what charge?”
“Drunkenness—what else? These days, anyone who voices an unpalatable opinion is accused of drunkenness.”
I refrained from supporting or refuting this self-serving observation.
Continued my old acquaintance: “He is murdering my books, don’t you see? And my reputation.”
“So you have said, Eddie. But how does one murder a book?”
“First he brands me a madman. Then he establishes my work as the product of a diseased mind. Is it not obvious?”
“But what sort of person would attempt such a thing? Who is this fellow?”
“I am not prepared to say, at present. But be assured that he will stop at nothing, not even the murder of an innocent woman— especially so, for he has a notoriously low opinion of women.”
“Drunk or sober, Eddie, did you tell the police what you are telling me?
“I did. They replied that no innocent woman has ever been murdered in Baltimore. Then they threw me into jail, a filthy place filled with Negroes.”
“On a charge of drunkenness?”
“That is what I said.”
“I see.” Already a credible diagnosis suggested itself—extreme drunkenness, followed by a swelling of the brain, followed by fever, and the pitiable symptoms before me.
By now I suspected that even his time in jail might have been a delusion, and made a mental note to inquire. Would a Baltimore constable incarcerate a white man in a cell full of Negroes? Highly unlikely, it seemed to me.
“How did you come to arrive here in your present condition, dressed as you are?”
“They beat me and took my clothes.”
“The constabulary?”
“The Negroes.”
“I see.” Amazing, I thought, how a man can be barking mad, yet devilishly cunning at the same time. I continued to take mental notes, for the case might enhance my theses concerning the mechanics of dementia—which might, in turn, justify a resubmission to the Scientific American. The study would include an exegesis of the character and imagination of Edgar Allan Poe—let that provide sufficient procedural clarity for them!
Seen in retrospect, I am embarrassed to acknowledge the secret pleasure it gave me to see Poe in distress. Of course I put my lack of sympathy down to professional detachment; yet for a physician on an emergency case I was having an unusually good time.
“Do you think I’m mad, Willie?” He stared at me with the look of a tragic owl.
“You are delusional, Eddie. Mad is not a word we use at this institution.”
“But the upshot is, you believe nothing I say, suh.”
“As a man of science I remain skeptical. For lack of evidence, don’t you see?”
Poe nodded, almost briskly, with that peculiar half-smile of his. Immediately I began to suspect that I had fallen into a trap.
“I salute your integrity, suh,” he said. “Therefore I demand that you view the evidence. This can easily be done—for the victim of whom I speak is in the morgue of this very hospital.”
At that moment I experienced once again the feeling he had produced in me as a boy, of being drawn irresistibly into a realm of Eddie Poe’s imagination.
“Is this the murdered woman you mentioned earlier?”
“Indeed it is.”
“In the morgue here at Washington College Hospital?”
“Correct.” I see.
I did not see. Only in hindsight does it become clear that I had been manipulated, that he had predetermined the entire sequence of events from beginning to end. After pompously asserting myself as a man of science, I had no choice but to observe his evidence— otherwise I was not really a scientist.
Rather than applying Moral Treatment to lead the patient to the light of reality, I had become his second, following him into the dark.
“Dear God Jesus, help me to see to see to see to see …” babbled the man next door. Alarmingly, his words were beginning to make sense.
CHAPTER TWO
* * *
Philadelphia
For Finn Devlin, Philadelphia was the logical destination. Unlike New York, the second-largest city in America had grown from within, and not by constant immigration. Maneuvering through the myriad gangs of New York would have entailed a whole new set of skills, whereas Philadelphia was familiar turf. When it came to deepset prejudice, class resentment, blood feuds, and sectarian rivalries, Devlin might have landed in a second Dublin.
The difference between Dublin and Philadelphia lay not so much in kind as in rate of development. It had required centuries for Dublin to reach its current inbred state, whereas in a fraction of that time Philadelphia had become a welter of Quaker Protestantism, nativist intolerance, colonial pretension, and upper-class disdain.
As waves of famished, filthy Irish began to pour into Philadelphia, it took no time at all for the unwelcome arrivals to be dubbed white niggers, with all the fellow-feeling the term implied.
For their part, the Irish were in no mood to conduct diplomacy. Taking their hosts’ racial epithet at face value, and having resisted slavery for decades, they responded insult for insult, blow for blow, though outnumbered, outmoneyed, and outgunned.
In a short time this conflict had found its locus in the ancient enmity between Catholics and Protestants. To native Philadelphians, the presence of the Irish signified the first offensive in a papist campaign to dominate America, through a subversion of its ideals. The Gaelic presence was only the vanguard of a vast tide of Catholics, who by their sheer numbers would destroy all that had been sought and accomplished in this outpost of religious freedom in the New World.
Populists of the press urged loyal Americans to defend the country against the “bloody hand of the pope.” In the minds of American Protestants, the Irish became an infestation with a common purpose—to establish America as an outpost of Roman Catholicism, like Mexico and Peru.
Rumors abounded. The Irish were said to be arming themselves, undergoing military training in remote locations. Irish students were said to be conducting inquisitions in Catholic colleges, as a rehearsal for the show trials to come, with mock tortures for anatomy lessons.
Protestant Philadelphia responded accordingly. During the Bible Riots of 1844, cathedrals, rectories, and seminaries in Irish neighborhoods were burnt with the tacit approval of the city, along with surrounding dwellings and shops—systematically, block by block, as though it were a campaign of civic hygiene.
(The Irish tried to sue the city for allowing St. Augustine Cathedral to be burnt. The city ruled that they had no right to sue, as they were a foreign group ruled by the pope.)
To be certain, Philadelphia was a disappointment for the immigrant Irishman who sought a new and better life. For Finn Devlin, however, the resulting discord made Philadelphia a city of grand opportunity. Fertile ground for the next revolution. A station on the way to the Promised Land.
CHAPTER THREE
* * *
Baltimore, 1849
Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual
independence; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual.
—Ambrose Bierce
Aturning point in our association occurred when I took Eddie home to see my pigeons and introduced him to my mother. (Father was seldom in the house during the day or the evening; in truth, I doubt that Poe ever met him.)
To hear Eddie describe her afterward, you would have thought Mother was Helen of Troy, and not my mother.
True, she was always known as a beauty. Yet it was impossible for me to understand the significance of the description. Can one’s own mother ever be anything but beautiful?
(Alas, I possess no physical memory of her. When I close my eyes I cannot see her face. Yet I remember father perfectly, though I exchanged not more than twenty sentences with him in my life. It is a harsh fact of life that memories fade when desired, and persist when least welcome.)
Not long after their first encounter, Eddie began to bring verses to Mother and to read them aloud. It was beyond my comprehension that the leader of the Butcher Cats would do such a thing. Of course, Mother responded with delight, being high-strung herself. It was not long before she began bringing poems of her own to their meetings, and they would read back and forth to one another for hours.
Looking back, I see myself as an unattractive child. I would not warm to myself, were we to meet today. A good-looking boy perhaps, but far too inward, too skeptical, too tight-lipped when it came to overt expressions of emotion. Nor, unlike my friend Eddie, was I disposed to alter my manner in order to secure affection. I made no effort to seduce others by saying what they wanted to hear.
From my perspective, the association between Eddie and my mother seemed to have been invented, made up out of whole cloth. They were like a pair of balloons, blowing each other up to the point of bursting.
Though aware of their rapport, I did not understand its significance at first, nor in what way it might constitute a threat. So I took the position of the interested spectator, eager to share in their enthusiasm. However, as I listened, disturbing feelings occurred within my breast that I did not wish to entertain. Therefore, I took the position that it was all frivolous nonsense and beneath my notice—the poems, the shared laughter, the long silences, the inadvertent touches and ritual kisses, none of which had ever occurred between Mother and myself, not in the same way, not ever.
As the months went by, I came to truly hate Eddie at times. I wished him ill—and as the Negro proverb has it, to wish a man ill is to do him ill. Is that what caused Mother’s subsequent decline, and then Eddie’s? Had I placed them both under some sort of hex?
As I warned earlier, there are unflattering aspects to this account of myself. They begin to appear, it seems, at age ten.
A more Christian boy would have felt sympathy for Eddie’s situation, for here was an unfortunate if ever there was one. A son of stage actors (a drunkard and a consumptive), orphaned at an early age, taken in out of duty by a moneyed uncle in Richmond (codfish aristocracy, a big bug in the export trade, and a notorious tightwad), it is certain that Eddie Poe had had no easy time of it.
It was very sad that he had no mother. Even so, I did not understand why it meant he should have mine.
And when she died—oh! Who could compare with the quality and extent of his grief? The mourning black, the stricken aspect he affected, always with an eye to the nearest mirror. (He was, we must always remember, a son of professional actors.)
It has been said that Eddie haunted our family plot in Shockoe Cemetery for years after—indeed, I would not put it past him to have hired some wretch to attend on his behalf.
Who could compete with such an enterprising mourner? Can you imagine how it feels, to have one’s bereavement upstaged by another?
Following her death, I began to view the ties of sympathy between the two of them in a new way—as the morbid camaraderie of people who have the same disease. This view was later confirmed by none other than the Reverend Thomas Paxton, who termed it “the fruits of oversensitivity and willfulness”—an apt description, and a quality they bred in one another.
After only a minimum of training in the medical field, however, I came to understand that Mother’s death was a result of the treatment and not the disease.
When Father sent her to the Hospital For Insane and Disordered Minds, her fate was sealed. Lobotomists and phrenologists probed her skull. She was doused with freezing water and whirled while tied to a wheel. In between these ordeals she was subjected to repeated enemas, in fact I believe she died of dehydration.
This later realization transformed my visceral hurt into something like professional vexation, and a desire to improve the science. Eddie, on the other hand, transformed not a bit. Well into adulthood he continued to visit (or appear at) her grave, visibly overcome with emotion.
Do you see? Even after her death, I held the shells of the relationship, while Eddie ate the omelet. And to pile on the agony, I would carry the stigma of her illness for life—mental illness runs in families, you know. It is in the blood.
True, all of this happened when we were children, and Eddie the child was not to be blamed. In any case, as his physician I would treat Eddie the patient with all the skill at my command.
Still, a small voice within suggested that he deserved it, every bit.
I CANNOT SATISFACTORILY explain how I came to perform the actions I am about to describe. Looking back, it seems as if they were the work of someone else—someone as near to me as my own skin, yet a stranger nonetheless. Having devoted years of study to the mind, I can only speculate as to the motives of the character I call Myself.
In my defense, I did not accede to his demand right away. It was only with the greatest reluctance that I accompanied Eddie Poe down to the morgue.
In truth, I scarcely knew how to get there myself, nor did I want to. For a professional who valued his reputation, the morgue was a hazardous place to visit, in more ways than one.
As I may have mentioned, Washington College Hospital sat immediately next to the medical school by that name, and as a matter of practical necessity the morgue served both institutions. Hence, the mortician on duty acted as death’s intermediary, receiving goods from the hospital and delivering them to the school—an essential service, for no medical school will survive long without a supply of cadavers for dissection and analysis.
However, unlike the tumultuous Baltimore of decades earlier, by 1849, fewer cadavers remained nameless, and fewer next of kin were willing to submit the remains of a loved one to the scalpels of supercilious young men.
In res
ponse to the chronic shortage, the department developed certain procedural flaws. For example, a mortician might fail to fully and correctly document the description, origin, even the existence of a particular cadaver—especially if it appeared down-at-the-heel. Thus, at any given time, the morgue housed cadavers who might just as well have walked in on their own for all anyone knew about them.
This lack of due diligence, while it troubled the mortician not a bit and aided the college a good deal, placed the attending physician in a delicate position, for nothing will kill a practice as quickly as a connection to a burial scandal.
Ignorance is bliss, when ‘tis folly to be wise.
Yet there I was, leading Eddie to the rear stairway to the morgue, feeling our way along the damp wall as we spiraled down into the gloom.
At the time it seemed the only possible thing to do. I had demanded evidence, Eddie had offered to supply it, therefore I could hardly refuse to look at it.
I put the best professional face to the matter—that a visit to another part of the hospital could do the patient no harm; that it was only proper protocol to assist him in separating reality from delusion, by putting his assertion to the test. This is what I intended to write in my report, at any rate.
It was not Eddie’s persuasive powers that clinched my cooperation. My reflexive need for objective proof had led me by the nose.
A morgue is never a cheerful place. The unit at Washington College Hospital was a long, cavernous, windowless basement (the coolest part of the building), smelling of lye soap, chicken gone bad, and rising damp. The walls of blistered plaster had been whitewashed long ago, but had since taken on a green-gray, fuzzy quality. From each wall the cobblestone floor raked down to a drain, so that bodily fluids might be washed away with a single pass of a rubber hose. Directly above the drain stood an elongated wooden table with a surface of polished granite, equipped with two sets of wide buckled straps.
Not Quite Dead Page 3
