Not Quite Dead

by John MacLachlan Gray

  “I am sorry that I can’t fix the language, sir, but you must receive, there is no choice in it.”

  By now Putnam had appeared behind the manager, in his usual coat and a cravat of bottle-green silk. Dickens thought it better to admit them, lest a third figure appear with heaven knows what demand.

  “I am sorry Mr. Dickens, sir,” said Putnam, with the look of a man who had run up against a stone wall. “It was too late to publish a retraction in any form, and now the public has arrived. If you don’t bite the bullet, you will be darned unpopular in Philadelphy.”

  “Not unpopular exactly,” corrected the manager, studying his fingernails. “Our citizens aren’t long of riling up, and the Gazette could flay you like a wild cat.”

  Dickens was about to become wroth, but thought better of it, for he was scheduled to appear before the public for several days and did not wish to be treated like a wild animal. “In heaven’s name, let them come, then.”

  “Oh, they’ll come all right,” agreed the manager, as though it were a foregone conclusion, and opened the door.

  Up the stairs and through the hall they poured like water until the room was clogged with humanity. Peering through the open door Dickens glimpsed a dismal perspective of more to come.

  “You’d better take a seat,” said Putnam, “while there is room for you.

  One after another, dozen after dozen, score after score, up they came, all to shake hands with Dickens. And such varieties of hands: thick, bony, limp, rigid, damp, papery, coarse, and smooth. Such differences of temperature, such diversities of grasp. Still up, up, up they came, ever and anon, while the manager’s voice could be heard above the crowd: “There’s more below! there’s more below!” Followed by the voice of Putnam: “Gentlemen, you that have been introduced to Mr. Dickens, will you now clear? Will you clear and make a little room for more?”

  Indifferent to Putnam’s cries, they did not clear at all, but stood where they were, bolt upright, staring. Just in front of him crouched two gentlemen from the Gazette who had come to write an article. They regarded their subject with heads tilted in opposite directions: if Dickens cleared his throat, it was noted by one; if he rubbed his nose, it was recorded by the other.

  Behind him wandered other guests, whose interest lay in phrenology and physiology, observing him with watchful eyes and itching fingers. When he turned suddenly he saw that one of them had been examining the nape of his neck, and he thought he glimpsed a pair of calipers. At intervals another of them, more daring than the rest, would make a quick grasp at the back of his head, touch it, then vanish in the crowd.

  And still he could hear Putnam’s voice—now so muffled by the crush of humanity that he seemed to be calling from underneath a feather bed: “Gentlemen, you have been introduced to Mr. Dickens, will you clear? Will you clear? …”

  Eventually they began to trickle away; but as soon as the way was clear, in glided a new parade of expensively dressed gentlemen, every one with an expensively dressed lady on each arm. At the end of the procession, in walked a triumphant individual, a Dutchman with a German accent who introduced himself as Councilman Grisse, the author of this travesty. The Dutchman offered Dickens neither a thank-you nor an apology, and addressed him with no more consideration than if he had been purchased, paid for, and set up purely for the delight of his friends.

  Finally they glided away, still in pairs, for dinner—to which Dickens had not been invited. Seemingly, the Boz Balls have a way of evaporating when one is out of favor with the press.

  There now remained only the stragglers: threadbare gentlemen with a ghostly aspect who, having attained admittance, didn’t know how to get out again, and appreciated the warmth. Another one had wedged himself behind the door and stood there like a clock, long after everyone else had gone.

  It was by now late afternoon, and beneath his morning coat Dickens was still in his sweat-soaked nightshirt and dressing gown—had it been a dream? If not, he now knew how a corpse must feel after the visitation.

  Foolishly, he supposed that his day was over.

  “Now you must see the maids,” Putnam said—and, wouldn’t you know, in came the maids.

  HAVING HAD SLAVERY on his mind of late, the procession of maids depressed Dickens even more thoroughly than their predecessors had. In England, though he had spoken and written on the servant problem, in private he had not been overly disturbed by the topic. When not working, he preferred to worry about his health and prospects, and the state of his marriage, and the perpetual pang of anxious unhappiness that had dogged him since his youth.

  It is a paradox of foreign travel that it provides occasion for examining oneself, in the emptiness between places and events, while one is doing nothing but simply going from one place to the other. A time for self-refreshment—that is, assuming that one is not surrounded by people remarking on one’s every twitch …

  In the applicants came, four of them—two Negresses, one Irish, and a Frenchwoman. The Irishwoman was chewing tobacco, whereas the Frenchwoman smoked a cigarette. When he had recovered from the shock of seeing a woman do such a thing in his parlor, it occurred to Dickens that the Frenchwoman was smoking quite a good-looking cigarette.

  He returned to the task of evaluation. All four women came well recommended and equally presentable. Having been selected by the hotel manager, there was not the slightest possibility that he would receive less than excellent service, no matter whom he chose.

  But it could not possibly be the Irishwoman, for that would do him no good, brooding about the Corn Laws and the famine and its aftermath, all over again. He had done the subject to death in print, had exhausted every ounce of moral rhetoric he possessed. Now he could muster up nothing but a banal, monotonous hatred for Lord Russell, beacon of laissez-faire, who saw a half-million starve rather than risk “a distortion of trade.”

  Now he observed the two Negresses, fine-looking girls with ebony skin and a heartbreaking shyness of manner, and it dawned on him that he could not look at them without the most hideous thoughts coming to mind. What would it be like to buy such a woman? Were he to do so, would he ever again approach Catherine, in one of her moods? Why would any man put up with a free woman, when he could own one? And in that moment of demeaning speculation, Dickens understood how the mere existence of slavery made an ogre of a man …

  “Excusez, monsieur. You are staring at me for a long time.”

  “Pardonez-moi, madame, mais il y a une bonne cigarette, là”

  “Merci,” she replied. “Voulez-vous une cigarette, monsieur? I sell one to you for two cents.”

  “That would be most excellent,” he replied, and she extracted a cigarette from the folds of her dress, and the transaction was made.

  Dickens lit his cigarette, savored the rich, mild smoke in his mouth, and blew it out in the shape of an O. An excellent cigarette indeed! Tightly rolled, it was made of fresh, pure Virginia leaf. After going without for days, it surely made one of the most satisfying cigarettes he had ever tasted.

  “Où avez-vous obtenu ce cigarette, madame?”

  The Frenchwoman laughed at the question. He liked how she threw her head back when she laughed. “Mais, monsieur, I make them myself.”

  “Remarkable! You don’t say! I am impressed!”

  “It is for me a business, what they say, on the side. I learn it from mon père.”

  Miss Genoux, who went under the name Sister Genoux, was a mature but comely woman in her mid-thirties and a member of some sect or other. This latter circumstance did not alarm Dickens as it might have done at home. From what he had seen and read, half the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania belonged to some Communist experiment, whose members sought either a return to Eden or the Second Coming and a quick end to it all.

  Astonishing, how this Utopian stream threaded its way through the country, from their Constitution to their institutions and so on, flowing downward like lava, even to their farming methods. Despite her Georgian architecture and her English books,
America began as a rash Continental experiment, in many ways more so than the English, and the undercurrent remained.

  Through Sister Genoux, perhaps Dickens might gain an insight into France, a country that was currently unavailable to him as a public person. And he had often thought of writing a book about the revolutions taking place in Europe, seemingly in every country but England. These thoughts proved useful in supporting his decision to hire Miss Genoux as his housekeeper; yet the truth was that he desired her cigarettes.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  * * *

  Philadelphia

  It is not easy for a man to travel incognito after the age of thirty-five. The problem has nothing to do with the risk of discovery from the outside, but with the physical challenge of identifying oneself as someone else, of saying and writing a name other than one’s own on a consistent basis. The instinct to do otherwise is almost animal: when asked his name, only by a supreme effort can a man avoid pronouncing the one he was given, however skillfully he might prevaricate in other ways. Though everyone speaks unfamiliar names on a daily basis, applying one to oneself requires an extraordinary amount of practice, not to sound like a complete fraud.

  As the 4 A.M. steamer Richmond rattled and lurched its way up Chesapeake Bay to Baltimore, at Elmira Royster’s urging I rehearsed my new cognomen—Henri Le Rennet—by introducing myself to strangers at every opportunity

  It being a French name, pronunciation added to my implausibility in the role. And to be sure I did not like the name, although I could well understand the need for it. It had been one of Eddie’s several aliases when evading gambling debts, and might prove useful in contacting him through an advertisement in a Philadelphia newspaper.

  To me, the fact that I now had Eddie’s name seemed bitterly ironic. Elmira Royster and I could not step out of his shadow even for a moment. This knowledge enhanced my resentment over their “engagement,” and my doubt as to whether the association between them had been quite as spotless as claimed.

  Still, I did my best to pose as a gentleman whose history did not in the least resemble mine; on several occasions I caught myself imitating the little I knew about Frenchmen and how they behaved, and feeling like a complete fool.

  Elmira Royster suffered no such qualms as Mrs. Le Rennet. To be someone other than herself, and French to boot, gave her an almost sensuous delight as she elongated her vowels and pursed her lips, swanning about the vessel with Monsieur. Le Rennet in tow—the latter mostly silent, in the hope of appearing unable to speak English.

  The Richmond docked in Baltimore Harbor. We proceeded directly on foot to the Anchor Inn, I with a muffler covering the bottom part of my face, turning my head away from the steady traffic of carriages, gigs, drays, and an omnibus, any one of which might have contained a colleague or a former patient.

  We chose the Anchor Inn because it sat closest to the docks, where recognition would be unlikely, for the clientele would be seamen and other transients from away.

  The innkeeper greeted Mr. and Mrs. Le Rennet without misgiving—for if we were not the establishment’s normal clientele, our age and style of dress in no way implied an immoral association. From the saloon we were led up three floors to a tiny room beneath a gable, furnished with a bed, a chair, a wardrobe, a table, and nothing more. The bathroom and lavatory were situated at the end of the hall one floor down. I later learned that the amenity served forty-six rooms. Standing with our two suitcases, Mr. and Mrs. Le Rennet completely filled the room so that the innkeeper was obliged to stand in the doorway, enjoying our upper-class discomfort with tiny, impish eyes.

  “Do you have anything larger?” I asked.

  “And with a couch?” added Mrs. Le Rennet.

  “For that I recommends the Willard, ma’am,” he replied and retreated downstairs, laughing at his little joke.

  “I am sorry that it is not the Willard,” I said.

  “Oh, I don’t mind a particle,” she replied. “I am sorry you will have to sleep on the floor.”

  I SPENT A miserable night. Though Elmira Royster was most generous with the blankets, the floor was damnably hard, for I had little fat for cushioning, less so perhaps than ever before.

  The next day I had become so lame that she relented. The result of this was that we slept the next night in the bed with two suitcases separating us, like a knife and fork in a drawer both in position and rigidity.

  At the same time, she had no objection to occasional kissing, and there was never a doubt about our physical regard for one another. For this reason, and for the hand-holding, I put up with the Bible readings and the prayers on the train from Baltimore to Philadelphia. There is no limit to what a man will put up with, given desire and a shred of hope.

  FOR ANY NEWCOMER from the South on a walk down Chestnut Street, Philadelphia seemed almost impossibly flush and well fed, in fact even the hard up seemed comparatively healthy: the peddlers on the sidewalk (Sleeve buttons, three for five cents!), the cane men, toy men, toothpick men, the old woman squatted on the cold stone flags with her matches, pins, and tape, the young Negro mother, begging with coffee-colored twins on her lap; the omnibuses clanging down the street, the one-horse postal wagons crammed full of letter carriers in gray uniforms, not to mention the precise regularity of the streets—all combined to create the impression of a place where nature had truly been conquered and harnessed, and put to better use through the ingenuity of Man.

  Elmira Royster had a different view. “There is something terrible going on beneath the surface of this place,” she said, for no apparent reason at all.

  “What on earth gives you that idea?”

  “Experience, suh, and instinct. Anything this perfect has something to hide.”

  MR. AND MRS. HENRI LE RENNET wish to speak to MR. RICHARD A. PERRY on a matter of utmost urgency. Currently residing at the United States Hotel, Philadelphia.

  LOCATED IN A warehouse near the river, the offices of the Philadelphia Morning News consisted of a huge room with frosted windows along one side. One window had apparently been broken, then temporarily covered over with newsprint. A cloud of smoke shrouded all within so that one could see the occupants’ legs with perfect clarity but little else. At the center of this cluttered, confusing space stood a huge worktable, at one end of which two women appeared to be drawing illustrations; behind them, at an upright table like an artist’s easel, a compositor, in a smock that might once have been white, arranged small bits of metal in what looked to be a huge, segmented cigar box. At intervals, two husky young men came to fetch the full boxes and replace them with empty ones. Everyone worked or walked with a slight slouch, as though oppressed by the rhythmic clatter of the iron printing press in another part of the building, like an assembly of metal skeletons performing a jig, all the day long.

  The remainder of the room—that which was not littered with stray paper, dropped pencils, and empty bottles—consisted of small wooden tables piled with paper, behind each of which burrowed a man, like a rodent taking shelter. Other men occupied chairs at varying distances from a battered potbellied stove, reading newspapers in a forward position, as though about to spring to action at any moment, with hats and coats on despite the stifling heat. Each consumed a form of tobacco, whether gnawed between the teeth or swelling one cheek like a squirrel. Beside each chair sat a spittoon.

  At the reception counter, Mr. and Mrs. Le Rennet awaited service for an absurd amount of time, and no amount of bell ringing seemed to make a difference.

  Eventually a lantern-jawed woman lumbered up to the counter, with an inky apron and a scowl that would wither a plant. “What?” she asked succinctly, her meaty hands splayed out on the counter’s scarred surface, arms braced as though prepared for a stiff wind.

  “My wife and I wish to place an advertisement in your newspaper,” I said. “Perhaps we have come to the wrong place. Perhaps we should speak to the Inquirer.”

  “No you ain’t,” she replied, immune to any insult short of a blow to the
head. “Give it here.”

  I produced the text, which I had labored over all night. Our lady of the flowers calculated the price for one week’s notices, and the transaction was complete.

  “There was just one other thing if you please, ma’am,” said Elmira Royster, exaggerating her accent slightly. “We have always been so admiring of one of your correspondents.”

  “Which one?” asked the woman, startled by the thought that someone here might be worthy of admiration.

  “I believe his name is Mr. Rufus Griswold.”

  “Land sakes, woman. Haven’t you heard?” Her eyes widened, her voice lowered to a scandalized whisper, and she became almost girlish in her dismay. “Mr. Griswold is possessed by the devil. Mine own eyes have seen it.”

  “How terrible for you,” replied Elmira Royster, with an encouraging frown.

  “It turned out a blessing. For I have found the Lord since.”

  “God love you for it,” replied Elmira Royster, taking her hand, “and may He welcome you into His arms on Judgment Day.”

  “Amen, Sister,” and the two appeared about to embrace.

  “Forgive my interruption,” I said, fearing that the conversation had gone off-track. “Where did Mr. Griswold suffer his breakdown?”

  “Here in this very office. Mr. Griswold were troubled, uncommon troubled, days before, mumbled to himself, stared at nothing much. Then he come in first thing one morning, hollering that the fiend chased him clear up Dock Street, then starts to bawl about something laying for him, wouldn’t let him sleep, come at him from the mirror or the window, or just out of thin air. Then he took a fit, threw a chair right through the window over there, land sakes, it nearly fell on a gentleman walking by outside—well, if that ain’t possessed, you tell me what is.”

  “I don’t doubt you for a second,” I asked. “But possessed by what?”

  “Fellers here says it was Mr. Edgar Poe as died lately. They say he had a good reason. But I say it was the work of the devil.”