by Norman Lock
Fine! I’m glad you don’t find me tedious. Not yet anyway. You wouldn’t be the first to sit and squirm! But I like to reflect, as I go, because for me a tale’s use and interest lie exactly in the notions that come to mind as the narrative unspools. Try some of my tobacco, won’t you? Virginia spiced with perique. I bought it in New York the last time I visited Bellevue Hospital. I was there to see the marvelous job Dr. Smith’s doing for the insane.
“This Vogel who was hanged . . .” said Poe, stabbing at the catalogue entry with a finger, like a man stubbing out a cigarette. “I’d like to have been a thought inside his skull the moment the hangman dropped him. Time must have been in suspension during the body’s dying fall to the end of the rope and the snap of the neck. I’ve a feeling he had space enough to think with an intensity, a clarity, a rationality he’d never known before. Edward, I could write a book about that appalling moment, which was, for him, eternity, if I’d seen and thought what this young man did on his way toward extinction.”
A merry notion, Moran! But that was Edgar Poe’s way.
“It would be obscene!” I said, honesty momentarily subduing a false humility.
Poe shrugged. “The mind cannot help its thoughts.”
It can keep its mouth shut, I said to myself. His fantasy had horrified me.
Poe picked up Vogel’s skull and weighed it in his hands as if it were gold. I was struck by his admiration for the thing. He appeared suddenly to have been possessed by—well, I didn’t know what he found compelling, unless it was Czeslaw Vogel’s ghost, which had been shut up inside his skull like a genie in a lamp. I’d handled it many times, and never once had it incited in me anything other than a vague sympathy. To be honest, it was more my curiosity that would move me. Vogel meant nothing to me. Edgar’s curiosity was plain to see as he looked at what had been the face of a young man from Poland, who had come to grief in the Kensington ward of Philadelphia and had met his end on the penitentiary gibbet.
“His teeth were bad,” said Poe, running his finger over the dead man’s molars. “‘Possible abscesses,’ you’ve written here.”
“That’s right,” I said, leaning over his shoulder to read the annotation penned in my own fine cursive hand.
“A toothache can drive a person to distraction until there’s nothing in the world except the pain of it.”
I grunted in assent, remembering how I’d suffered from a carious incisor that not even oil of clove could calm. I felt the gap left by its extraction with the tip of my tongue and shuddered at the memory.
“An abscess is worse. Perhaps it was an agony too great to be borne,” Poe said as much to himself as to me. “For Vogel. Pain is not absolute: Each of us tolerates it as he can.” Poe tapped at a diseased tooth. “There is no telling what a mouth such as this could have done to his mind.” He was silent a moment. “What do you think, Edward? Could a man’s mouth turn him into a murderer? I can imagine killing even a wife if she was foolish enough to nag and vex a man while he was in the throes of a toothache.”
I had no answer for him.
“I put it to you, Edward: Is the good man’s goodness fixed and impossible to pervert—an unswerving moral compass? Or can it be turned aside by pain?”
He expected an answer, and I gave him one: “I suppose if the pain is great and the moral nature weak . . .”
“You’re being evasive, my friend. But let it go, for now.” He fell to studying Vogel’s skull again. “The body is not the only seat of pain. The mind, too, Edward—the mind can know pain more terrible than the body’s. Or have you never in your young life suffered doubt, envy, jealousy, bereavement, fear, desire, shame? I have. They have teeth, those emotions, and they gnaw and rend.”
I was beginning to regret that Dr. Mütter had charged me with satisfying Poe’s interest, which I found increasingly alarming. By now, I’d read “Ligeia” and “William Wilson,” besides “The Tell-Tale Heart.” I understood and even enjoyed Poe’s frightening inventions. But to see one taking shape before my eyes was quite another thing. I knew that a literary creation might scare the daylights out of me but that it could not harm me. I sensed, however, that what Poe, by his uncanny gifts, had been empowered to invoke was dangerous. All at once, I wanted to escape his influence and thought that if he were once more to catch my eye, I would be lost—an idea as far-fetched as his own crotchets. I let my eyes rest a moment on his alpaca coat, whose shoulder seam was in need of a needle and thread. Foolishly, I prayed that he would not turn around. I would be safe for as long as I did not see his face, nor he mine.
I think that the dread I felt had been encouraged by the residue of the tales of his I had read, by the skulls and pathological exhibits surrounding me, and by the sudden obscurity into which the room was plunged. The low sun was hidden by a shoal of clouds, and the gaslights had yet to be lit. I reminded myself that the person who sat in front of me, poring over the cranial souvenir of Czeslaw Vogel, was only a poor scribbler dressed in a shabby suit of clothes. He may have been a gentleman, a graduate of a fine university, and a former West Point cadet, but, as docent of Mütter’s freak show, I earned enough money to buy a chesterfield coat, a shawl-collared vest, a fancy cravat, and leather gaiters. While not turned out so elegantly as Dr. Mütter, I was a fashion plate next to this broken-down scribe.
“If only it could talk!” cried Poe, musing on the Polish skull. “What a tale it would have to tell! It would outdo anything my mortal imagination could contrive, and I’d gladly be its amanuensis if only it would speak its mind. Think of it, Edward! It could betray the secrets of the grave. What wouldn’t I give if poor Yorick here could only work the hinges of its jaw and speak! I’d make a Faustian bargain to gain the knowledge locked within this bone.”
He knocked absurdly on the skull like a man impatient for a door to open. His eyes glazed over. He appeared to be in the grasp of something beyond reach of ordinary mortals.
“Time is slowing,” he said in a leaden voice. “Each moment grows and fattens like a drop of rain on a window sash, waiting to fall.”
His words were wild, and I trembled to hear them. And then he placed the skull upon the table and began to run his fingers over it, as though he meant to read Vogel’s character in the fleshless face.
“Edward, I can almost see the man himself, as he used to be.”
In spite of myself, I found myself drawing nearer. I watched Poe’s shapely fingers caress what was left of Vogel. The room grew darker, a dog barked outside in the distance, and a door in a remote corridor of the hospital closed audibly. I might have stepped into a gothic novel or one of Poe’s own literary horrors. I was deliciously frightened and enthralled.
“He was miserably poor,” said Poe, his fingertips in motion around the contours of the skull. I noticed that his eyes were shut, the lashes long and dark. A handsome man, I thought, now that I see him clearly, if a strangely fashioned one. “An intelligent man, who spoke English poorly and must, of necessity, take menial jobs that were beneath him and that he resented. A sad and lonely person, driven by demons and want to murder—a girl, perchance, who had spurned him, or a man, an overseer, who had insulted him. And so he was hanged.”
With his slender fingers, Poe encircled the place where, in life, Vogel’s throat had been. “I feel the rope around my neck.” With a finger, Poe circled the empty sockets of bone, first the right, then the left. “Here, where his eyes used to be, I see the executioner, an inmate standing behind a barred window overlooking the gray stones of the prison yard, the gallows, a bird, a cloud, a patch of jimsonweed, a newspaper tucked under the warden’s arm, the shadow under the chaplain’s lean jaw, the slow ascent of a poplar tree as I float from the scaffold down toward an earth that I will never walk upon again and in which I will never rest. Instead of a grave, I am fated to spend the afterlife here, on a shelf—the godlike part of me that used to think.”
I found myself wondering if, by a rare sympathy, Poe had not provoked Vogel’s ghost to speak, so cunni
ngly had he thrown his voice into the skull. He fell into a reverie, and in the abruptly restored silence, I heard myself cough to break the eerie spell.
“A pretty figment, eh?” he said. “I might work it up into a story.”
“You’re as good a ventriloquist as Harrington, who played the Chestnut last year.”
“It is your imagination that makes it seem so. Nevertheless, I thank you.”
He stood and wound his muffler around his neck. “I’ll leave you now to your mute and shameless admirers. Virginia will have my supper waiting. You must come to our house on North Seventh, Edward. Sissie will be very pleased to meet you.”
“Thank you, Mr. Poe. I will.”
WHEN I FIRST MET VIRGINIA, whom Poe called “Sis” or “Sissie,” she was a pretty, dark woman of twenty-two, whose porcelain complexion was beginning to show the warrants of consumption. Nearer my own age than Edgar’s, she had been thirteen when they married; he, twenty-six. They were first cousins. Consanguinity may have made them shy. They adored each other, exchanged tender words in my presence, but never, during my visits to their house that winter, did I see them betray, by so much as a glance, the amorousness evident in even a modest young husband and wife who are in conjugal matters of one accord. I don’t believe they ever redeemed their pledges with their bodies, however twined their two souls might have been. Whether the fault, if fault it was, lay with her or with him or had been by tacit agreement enshrined among their covenants, I don’t know. In the beginning of their union, she might have been too young. Now, near its end, she was probably too sick to ruddy the marriage bed. What I mean to say, Moran, is that Virginia died a virgin. This, anyway, is the opinion of those who knew her.
Is it, also, mine?
I know no more of what passed between them than anyone does of the private lives of men and women together. But I would guess that was the case.
Were they happy?
Good Lord, I hope so! They seemed to be that winter. I never believed the rumors.
Ha! So you’re not a man who despises scandal and gossip as the staple of idle women and mollycoddles? Well, sir, when, in 1847, she climbed into her death bed, Virginia—I will not call her “Sissie”—claimed with her dying breath that Elizabeth Ellet, one of Edgar’s sweethearts—I can’t say if they were lovers—had poisoned her. Edgar was not the only person in the Poe household to have been preoccupied with murder. He was a philanderer, if a puerile one: He liked the ladies, and the ladies liked him. But did he bed any of them? Opinion concerning that question is divided.
No, Moran, I’ll keep mine to myself.
Sometime later, I saw a likeness of Virginia, rendered after her death, in watercolors, that caught her fragile beauty. I was sorry for her. To have died at twenty-four, even in an age of early death, was a tragedy that, I believe, haunted the pages of Edgar’s late prose and poetry and, I’m certain, his mind, which was always overcast by melancholy.
That rainy, cold evening when I visited the Poe house for the first time, Virginia greeted me at the door and led me without ceremony—my boots wet and my coat dripping—to the fire crackling in the grate. She took my coat and hat and gave me one of Edgar’s shawls to chase the January chill from my bones. In a moment, he appeared with a smile—I noted the small, even teeth—and a pewter pitcher. He drew the red-hot mulling poker from the fire, and with a merry hiss, orange peel, cinnamon, and clove gave up their aromatic ghosts to the Poes’ small candlelit front room. Shortly, I felt the goodness of an excellent rum punch coursing through my veins. I wish I’d some to give you. But I suppose a hard-bitten man like you enjoys his whiskey more.
“Sit down, Edward,” said Poe cordially, indicating the arm chair nearest the fire, whose imps had turned the hearthstone black. “Stretch your legs toward the warmth.”
Virginia had disappeared into the kitchen, where Mrs. Clemm, her mother and Poe’s aunt, skirmished noisily with a cast-iron pot and a roasting pan, in which four plucked quails lay in state. She was a quiet, capable woman of middle age who had kept house for Edgar and Sissie ever since they’d married. After he’d lost his position at Graham’s Magazine, the widow became the chief contributor to the household’s always slender means. I recall little of the meal. Virginia made only a slight impression on me; she was shy and appeared to be in awe of her husband. Her mother left none at all, beyond a vague recollection of a gingham apron and a ladle with which she spooned pan juices over the roasted birds.
I, too, was in awe of my host, who, that evening, was genial, even jaunty. I’d seldom see him thus, unless he was the worse—or better—for drink or ether. He spoke on diverse subjects: the arrest of Jacob Snively and his Texas freebooters, a pro-slavery mob’s attack on Frederick Douglass in Indiana, Charles Dickens’s latest installment of The Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewitt, and the publication of Poe’s own tale “The Gold-Bug” in Philadelphia’s Dollar Newspaper, for which he received the one-hundred-dollar prize. He would leave Philadelphia for New York City in April, with four dollars and fifty cents in his pocket. I also recall a gaudy parrot, rocking in its cage in a corner of the dining room, squawking “Nevermore.” Poe was encouraged by the mimic bird to recite “The Raven” from memory while Mrs. Clemm and I ate plum cake and Virginia raptly attended to her husband’s melodramatic recitation.
One line remains with me. “Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!” Maybe the rain, which had increased enough to rattle the sashes and submerge the dimly lit room in a tide of shadows, gave the injunction emphasis. The night was magical; we might have been dining in a submarine grotto.
Damn it, Moran, the room wasn’t like that! Memory makes it so—addled by time and besotted by Romantic and gothic tales! Ours is the age of the pathological imagination, and I’m as guilty of it as the next man or woman infatuated with the novels of Ann Radcliffe and Clara Reeve. Eighteen hundred and forty-four was a long time ago. I’ve lived several lives since then. I scarcely recall Poe’s little house. It was dark and damp, like most houses—like my own on Oak Street. There was a parrot. The parrot did say “Nevermore.” Poe did recite “The Raven,” or perhaps he read it. The mulling poker hissed. The rain was noisy on the roof. We talked about the events of the day in the words I’ve used or some others. I’ve kept the essence of that winter, here, in my heart, to speak rhetorically. I don’t know where the soul would reside, should there turn out to be one after all. Heart or brain or beneath the sternum, which, I suppose, is analogous to the wishbone, although you won’t find such a fanciful comparison in Baillie’s The Morbid Anatomy of Some of the Most Important Parts of the Human Body. But what last wishes might be heard thrilling in the wishbone! What panicky music in that unstrung harp when the last light gleams on the ax’s blade—an overture to the dinner gong!
After our dinner, Poe and I sat in the parlor, smoking cigars and letting the fire weave stories of its own. Our legs were gilded by it. I think we were silent. The hearth fire has a charming influence; it can anesthetize the agitated mind; play a lullaby to quiet jangled nerves. Perhaps I dozed. Thinking back on that night, I experience a sensation of calm; I must have been content. I wonder if I fell asleep, and if I did, was there time enough to dream? And if I’d had a dream, Moran, what might it have been? What phantasms chased each other down the corridors of my sleeping brain? I’d like to remember them. So much that is important gets lost. What a tired old adage that is! Slow and irreversible loss is the quintessence of old age, whose essence is the germ of death implanted at our birth. A doleful thought! But I am speaking of the most doleful of men: Edgar Poe and I.
I roused myself, or he roused me. In any case, he was offering me a tumbler of brandy. He had his in the other hand.
“A color rich as a Virginia copper halfpenny,” he said, holding his glass up to the firelight.
I drank mine off at once and felt the pleasant heat against my tongue. I was reminded of the book I’d brought for him and asked to have my coat. Poe called to Virginia, who cam
e from the kitchen with the brandy bottle. Poe was pleased to have his glass filled up again. I declined.
“May I have my coat?” I asked her. “I must be going.”
She fetched my coat and stood shyly next to a maple slant-lid desk.
“Dr. Mütter wanted you to have his book in gratitude for the gift you made him of yours,” I said, rooting out the volume from my coat’s ample inside pocket.
On his second visit to the college, Poe had given him a morocco-bound copy of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, inscribed with the words:
PRESENTED TO THOMAS D. MÜTTER, WITH RESPECT & GOODWILL, FROM HIS ADMIRING FELLOW GROTESQUE, EDGAR A. POE 5™ OF JANUARY 1844
Before I left Poe’s house that night, I gave him Dr. Mütter’s Cases of Deformity from Burns, Successfully Treated by Plastic Operations, which had been published by Merrihew and Thompson, of Philadelphia, the year before. The doctor had returned Poe’s compliment with an inscription of his own on the flyleaf:
PRESENTED TO MR. E. A. POE, IN RECOGNITION OF OUR COMMON MANIA, THOMAS DENT MÜTTER, M. D. 14™ OF JANUARY 1844
Edgar opened the book to a suite of illustrations showing a woman whose face Mütter had surgically reconstructed after an appalling burn. Her once-pleasant features appeared to have been restored, as if by magic. The medical “wizard” retains the magic wand in the form of a scalpel. I hadn’t witnessed the operation, nor had I met the woman, but I’d seen the doctor perform miracles of plastic surgery, an innovation of the school of Paris, where Mütter’s native gifts had been given luster. The pages captivated Poe, who sensed in their revelation a story, which he proceeded to sketch for me.
No, on second thought, it was in a barroom on Green Street, near the public landing, several days later, where he wondered aloud about the “meaning” of the woman’s transformation.
“Dr. Mütter’s book has opened a door through which I never thought to look,” said Poe, staring into his glass at the yeasty play of foam.
