It is almost indecent, the ease with which a woman can induce a man to explain himself fully. Were I to attempt the same feat I might have cajoled the patient for hours, bullied him with my education, frightened him with his grim prognosis and their terrible cures; as a physician I might have emptied my entire arsenal, and accomplished less than the baring of a woman’s wrist.
“Are you acquainted with Philadelphia, ma’am?” Griswold asked in muted tones, as though about to provide directions to his club.
“I am surely a stranger here,” she replied. “A Southern lady new to the city.”
“When you are settled in you will note that every street is laid out at right angles. As a native Vermonter and a man of artistic bent, I seek respite from the stultifying regularity that has been imposed upon the city by the founders. Being sensitive to ugliness in all its forms, I am frequently drawn to Dock Street as it winds its irregular course, like a country road, to a land of the imagination.”
It is impossible to adequately portray the self-congratulatory unctuousness of the man. He reminded me of a clergyman who has taken up the selling of miracle cures.
“Every evening at eight o’clock,” Griswold continued, “I have made it my practice to leave the office and take a stroll. Dock Street at night, free of the commercial bustle, with its wet cobblestones aglimmer in the intermittent gaslight, becomes a tonic for what I like to call the poetic sensibility.”
“Aglimmer?” I asked, being unable to restrain myself.
“Aglow,” he tersely replied, and returned his attention to Elmira Royster, who appeared, of course, utterly rapt.
“I confess that in such moments, alone in the city, I feel closest to what I like to call the poetic muse. It is a level of sensitivity very much to be striven for. But of course, once found, it must be expressed morally and responsibly, and true to our covenant with our Lord. In this I am sure you agree, ma’am.”
To my horror, it seemed almost as though they were about to kiss.
“I could not possibly agree more,” she whispered, her vowels like honey on a stick.” And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength’ “
At this, Griswold’s excitement reached such a pitch that he nearly sprang from his chair. “The first commandment! How could I have missed it?”
“‘They on the rock are they, which, when they hear, receive the word with joy …
“Don’t tell me … I have it—Luke! Luke …” Unable to name CHAPTER and verse, Griswold literally blushed.
“CHAPTER eight, verse thirteen,” she replied, and smiled down at him as though it was their shared secret.
I confess I could barely listen to this pompous, sanctimonious banter. “Is that why you so disapproved of Edgar Poe?” I asked, with no good objective in mind.
“Of course,” snapped Griswold. “He did not glorify the Lord. He directed the reader’s attention to ungodly thoughts, and a morbid cast of mind.”
“Because of your dislike for him, did you hound him with a newspaper clipping and a bag of teeth?”
Griswold turned to Dr. Rush: “Is this gentleman a fellow patient?”
Before Dr. Rush could summon a response, Elmira Royster intervened. “I do agree completely, Mr. Griswold,” she said, while her eyes sent me an unmistakable message: Shut up.
A period of sulking on Griswold’s part followed; she smoothed his hackled fur until he deigned to continue.
“It was in that poetic state of mind, attuned with the poetic muse, that I became immersed in the gathering night, the stars above in their ancient transcendence. By some instinct I turned—and there was a gentleman on the walkway some distance behind. I could discern neither his face nor form; I could not even tell whether he was moving or standing still. He was an outline against the sky, framed by the warehouse at the curve of the street.
“Even at that distance, I knew that he was looking at me. And against all reason, I knew exactly who he was.
“I turned away with a shudder and quickened my pace forward. When I felt I had covered sufficient distance I turned around again—
“The figure had decreased the distance between us by half!
“My unease surrendered to panic as I broke into a dead run, glancing behind me at intervals, at the trim figure in the frock coat, whose face I could discern more clearly each time he passed under a lamp, and who was gaining on me with every step.
“I stopped, exhausted. I cried out, bent forward, hearing no sound but my lungs crying out for air.
“With the fatalism of a man caught in a guillotine, I turned my head—and he was gone. May the Lord be praised!”
“Amen,” echoed Elmira Royster.
“Or so I thought at the time. I continued on my stroll, though no longer attuned to the poetic sensibility, until I reached the corner of Spruce Street, where a passing omnibus caught my eye—and I swear to Almighty Christ that in one window was the face of Edgar Poe! Oh, Ludwig! What have you done?”
“Ludwig?” I asked involuntarily, completely thrown, while Elmira Royster nodded slowly to herself, as though a suspicion had been confirmed.
“I will never be rid of him, thanks to you!” cried Griswold, and abruptly fell into a fit.
Already Dr. Rush was calling for assistance as the patient writhed on the floor, his mouth literally foaming, while his limbs twitched in the way of an insect on its back. A leather restraint was placed between his teeth, but before it could be tightened, Griswold managed to croak out the name Ludwig once more.
“Has this happened with him before?” I asked Dr. Rush.
“More than once,” replied the resident, with a sigh of gentle perseverance. “Ludwig appears to him as sort of demon.”
“I do believe I know why,” said Elmira Royster.
“Do tell, ma’am,” replied Dr. Rush. “I am darned eager to hear what you have to say.”
“Ludwig was the author of Eddie’s beastly obituary. It made him nearly go mad to read it…”
Desperately I signaled Elmira Royster to proceed no further, and thank heaven she complied.
“Do you mean to say,” asked Dr. Rush, retrieving his notebook and pencil, “that Ludwig is a pen name Mr. Griswold has used in the past?”
“It is indeed, suh,” she replied. “If the patient is possessed, it is by a part of himself.”
“I believe you have a study there,” I said to Rush. The Pseudonym as Doppelganger. It could justify a piece in the Scientific American.”
“By heaven, that is an excellent title,” said the resident, writing it down, while Rufus Griswold twitched at his feet, leather straps pinning his arms to his ribs and a restraint in his mouth. In a moment, two orderlies placed him in a stretcher and carried him away for a rendezvous with the tranquilizing chair.
ELMIRA ROYSTER HAD insisted that we stay at the United States Hotel for two reasons, neither of which could I disagree with.
In the first place, accommodations at the United States included a small parlor and a couch. This was for the best, for I was beginning to become groggy from lack of sleep. It is not an easy thing to sleep beside a woman with no contact permitted. It is not only the avoidance that rankles, but the fact that, when on occasion inadvertent touches do occur, one lies for hours in a rigid, inflamed state, with sleep a laughable impossibility.
Her second reason for choosing our accommodation was that it would discourage Eddie from cutting shines. At the United States Hotel, the lobby and halls would be packed with bookworms and newspapermen, eyes peeled for the author Charles Dickens. With recognition a virtual certainty, Eddie would not attempt something clever or dramatic. He enjoyed a risk, but was not about to jump off a cliff.
The letter arrived with surprising promptness by the evening post, addressed to M. Henry Le Rennet, United States Hotel, Philadelphia, in Eddie’s punctilious yet elegant hand. (At school he would practice his handwriting for hours at a stretch on the F’s and S‘s
alone.)
Mr. Le Rennet,
Must urgently meet with you alone at the Black Horse Saloon on McAfee Court, Moyamensing, at two in the afternoon. Commend me to Mrs. Le Rennet, with whom I shall speak at an early opportunity.
Most truly yours,
Mr. R. A. Perry
“I declare, that I am at a loss as to why he would wish me absent. We are, after all, engaged.” This, in a tone not of outrage but curiosity.
Elmira Royster reclined fetchingly on the Empire recaimer, where I had slept, or rather squirmed, the previous night—a mahogany piece by Quervelle, outrageously carved with rosettes and paw feet, on which a hunchback dwarf might get a good night’s sleep.
“Doubtless he is concerned for your safety,” I replied, though I doubted his concern for anyone but himself. “Moyamensing is a district not unlike the docks in Richmond. Women who venture onto its streets carry knives, if they go out at all.”
“Perhaps I shall do missionary work there,” she replied, a bit petulantly. “Surely there are souls to be saved in such places.”
“As a Protestant, ma’am, missionary work would be an excellent way to have your throat slit in Moyamensing.”
“Such gallantry,” she said, exaggerating her vowels. “I hope the sight of my blood won’t be too much for you.”
“What I mean to say is that I shall be hard-pressed to look out for my own neck, let alone yours.”
“I see that your priorities are clear, suh.”
“Forgive me, please …” I said as I stepped up to that dreadful recamier, grasped her shoulders, and planted my mouth upon hers. For a moment it almost seemed as though her lips moved gently with mine, but the mind can play tricks.
“You need to be put in a cage,” she said, swanning from my grasp. She entered the bedroom and closed the door, leaving me sitting on my ugly couch, staring out the window at the grand, hollow husk that was once the Bank of the United States.
CHESTNUT STREET TEEMED with traffic, every sort of truck, wagon, cart, and coach, grinding along. The cobbles had worn away at the edges, so that the hard wheels of the carriages bounced and lurched, creating an incessant rattle and din that would drive you mad.
Between the larger vehicles, two-wheeled delivery carts threaded their way along at reckless speed, obeying no rules, causing more broken legs than all other carriages combined. To me it seemed as though the sheer acceleration of life in Philadelphia necessitated myriad violent outcomes that would have been avoided at a slower pace.
Everywhere I looked, I saw evidence of an underlying inhumanity. On the corner of Sixth Street, I observed a policeman looking on benignly while a cart ran clear up onto the walkway, and nearly took a child beneath its wheels before the horrified eyes of its mother. This was none of the policeman’s business; his main function being to settle disputes between drivers with the aid of his club. Meanwhile, in the intersection at Market Street a small company of wretched sweepers risked life and limb so that the combined excrement would not form an insurmountable barrier and stop traffic altogether.
No wonder Eddie resorted to the bizarre; what excitement can mere fiction add to such an environment?
Despite my unfamiliarity with the city, I had no difficulty in locating the omnibus to Moyamensing. Once underway, the wheels rumbling beneath our feet, I was surprised by the prevailing silence among the passengers, who scrupulously avoided each other’s gaze, each one seeming to fear the other, though there were no Negroes in evidence.
Looking back, I see that I had stumbled upon one of the many differences between the North and the South: in the South, the assumed menace was a member of the black race; in the North, it was any stranger at all.
Moyamensing had once been a separate township with its own central square. Then, Philadelphia began expanding like floodwater, blurring boundaries between constituencies, then absorbing them entirely; meanwhile the exponential growth in population entailed constant destruction, construction, and renovation. As a result, signs of Moyamensing’s once independent character had all but disappeared. Homes had been long ago divided into apartments, then subdivided into rooms, while gardens gave way to shanties, enlarged as the need arose into tenements, constrained by no law other than brute necessity.
If Philadelphia seemed cold-blooded, to my eye this was a hellhole, and I felt the impulse to return to the United States Hotel— which I would have done well to follow.
Under a cloud of menace I circumnavigated the square: around the periphery, children picked through accumulations of garbage piled a foot or two high; while a Gothic procession of exhausted women, old and injured workers, and gaunt, dangerous young men shuffled along between piles of manure. A cart rumbled past, pulled by dray animals in appalling condition, splashing my trousers with filth. A mule with what looked like scabies, sipping from a crude trough in front of the saloon, looked up at me and made a sound like a steam whistle.
A pessimist by habit, I entertained little hope of persuading Eddie to behave like a friend. On the contrary, in our thirty-year acquaintance he had done so precisely once, the day he admitted me into the Butcher Cats—and for that he had extracted more than a pound of my soul.
And yet, a quarter of a century later, I still felt in his debt— because he treated me as a human being.
Fool!
I suppose I hoped to persuade him into breaking off his engagement with Elmira Royster. I suppose I based this hope on the tenuous assumption that, as a Virginian, he understood the position in to which he had forced her, and retained a shred of honor toward the weaker sex. Surely it was unacceptable that a woman should be held to an engagement with a dead man!
Unless Eddie did not intend to remain dead.
This terrible worm of a suspicion had been gnawing at the back of my mind for several days, and now it presented itself in all its degraded glory. What a fool I had been to take Eddie’s stated intention at face value! To find out the truth? To prevent the taking of innocent lives? To, in effect, sacrifice his life for the good of another? Had I not (though I would forever deny it) read the same sentiments in his Collected Tales? Was the pattern not obvious—the hysteria, the sentimentality, the gore? Was it not clear that this was just another of Eddie’s phantasms, brought to life?
Fool! In my misguided loyalty to a cad, I had made myself a criminal, while Eddie, who had initiated the whole ghastly mess, risked no penalty at all. In America, there is no law against disappearing. On the contrary, given the size of the country and the freedoms it claims, one is positively encouraged to do so.
It is often the way that two thoughts follow one upon the other with such rapidity that they constitute a pair. Thus, with the bitter realization of having been duped came the wickedly satisfying notion that Eddie might be induced to disappear—from the face of the earth. In short, I wished to murder him. This might seem excessive to some, yet it made a terrible sense, for in one decisive stroke I might thereby obtain Elmira Royster and my own happiness, and put an end to the tyranny of Eddie Poe.
Predictably, there remained the how. I was not so dedicated to causing Eddie’s death that I would willingly pay for it with my own. On the contrary, for the first time in my memory, life did not present itself as a chore—if I could gaze at the face and form of Elmira Royster.
Immediately, a third realization took its place like a perfectly aimed dart—you are a doctor.
One could be killed by medical treatment, it happened more often than not. I had enough ammunition in my father’s medical bag to dispatch half the population of Moyamensing. Death due to natural causes—Oh, happy phrase!
Yet the prospect was a dream, a phantasm. Eddie had not driven me to murder—not yet.
The Black Horse Saloon stood as the centerpiece of the square by comparison to its neighbors, which were poor constructions, their windows bandaged with mattress ticking, leaning precariously against one another like wounded men. Improbably narrow lanes spread like fingers off the square; down each passageway, lines of ragge
d wash dangled a few feet overhead for as far as the eye could see—a testament to the resourcefulness of womanhood, there being no running water.
On the saloons covered veranda stood two boys not yet in their teens, with the pale, pinched faces of street urchins. Sporting top hats and duster coats, they leaned on rough walking sticks like miniature men about town, saying nothing, gazing in every direction but mine. I did not make anything of this, other than that the youth gangs of Philadelphia seemed unusually well turned out.
The far end of the saloon’s interior consisted of a long bar backed by an enormous mirror, which had the effect of doubling the size of the establishment, and its supply of liquor as well. In front of the bar, an open area provided space for dancing and fighting. Around the open area, tables had been crammed back to the walls so close together that the shoulders of adjacent cardplayers actually touched; an excellent arrangement for fleecing the sailors who formed the bulk of the clientele—rootless and untraceable, with nothing to do until departure but make marks of themselves. (It occurred to me that the presence of sailors might explain the young men outside as well. However, I was wrong in this.)
Tobacco smoke poured from each table as though a series of small campfires had been lit. In the nonexistent space in between, four barmaids, aged between twelve and sixteen, wearing short dresses and boots with bells attached, threaded their way through the room with customers in constant, crude contact, a shabby imitation of the girls at the Atlantic Garden in New York.
By pressing my back against the wall I squirmed my way around the room to where Eddie sat, at a small corner table next to a rear exit, alone. I recognized him instantly, for he had scarcely bothered to disguise himself other than to lose weight and shave his mustache. Surprisingly, the latter adjustment altered his appearance substantially. Shaped like a black arrow, Poe’s mustache had forced one’s gaze upward to those enormous, ineffably sad eyes and the brooding forehead looming above—the picture of author gravitas. Sans mustache, however, the face assumed the perfectly normal proportions of a blandly handsome gentleman of military bearing, with a longish nose, a prominent chin, and a tight, almost prim mouth. He looked like the sort of man you occasionally meet at horse races and gentleman’s clubs—the risk-taker who loses every wager and lives for a change of luck. Likewise, his clothing—the ancient beaver hat, carefully brushed and oiled, the threadbare yet blindingly white collar, the tattered neck cloth and mended gloves—suggested a gambler in extremis.
Not Quite Dead Page 22
