The Port-Wine Stain

by Norman Lock

  He handed me a slip of paper. “I’ve an errand for you. Take the dogcart to the Union Street pier. I ordered some birds that will keep you busy: three conjugal pairs of domesticated rock pigeons from Belgium.”

  I stuffed a bill of sale into my pocket and put on my coat and hat again. I would rather have confessed to murder than to show Mütter my curiosity, which, at that moment, I regarded as something sordid and repugnant—a voyeurism broader than a man’s natural interest in sex—an unnatural, shameful fascination for what is properly left to obscurity. I was a Christian, Moran. I suppose I still am in whatever organ belief, however adulterated, resides. I don’t think we can ever be rid of doctrines instilled in us in childhood. Our characters are tells: history’s deposits laid down one on top of another by time. Outwardly, we are modern men and women, but you have only to dig to discover the primitive state from which we came. While I mock hell, in my marrow, I quake in fear of it.

  The cobbled streets jarred me as I drove the cart, on iron wheels, eastward toward the river. I let the horse have its way, being in no hurry to get back to the college. Flaming in the western-facing windows of the city’s buildings, the sun felt almost mild on my face. The wind having lessened, the afternoon was warm for January. The snowy lots on either side of the road were ugly with ashes and soot, the curbstones stained yellow by horses’ stale.

  I gave myself up to passing fancies of a kind alien to Poe’s and Mütter’s grotesque imaginations: fresh snow in the shape of an elephant’s head clinging to the brick wall of the American Sentinel building on Sansom Street; my father’s dark, mysterious member exposed when he climbed out of the galvanized tub in the shed, soapy rivulets streaming from his hairy body; my mother’s face when she leaned toward the candlelight to turn the page of her book; the tattooed anchor livid on my brother’s arm; Ida’s pretty neck, white and slender as a swan’s where it rose demurely above the collar of her Sunday dress. I realized with a start that I wanted very much to see her. Did I care for her, or was she only an antidote for my poisoned heart? I would always be unsure of myself in love, that most complicated of emotions.

  I tied the horse to a hitching post outside the warehouse and stood awhile on the wharf to watch the river traffic. The Delaware was already darkening as the sun declined toward evening. I imagined that the Atlantic, on the far side of New Jersey, was already drained of light, its wide beach gray as ash. I watched stevedores walk carefully down a ship’s wet gangway, their backs bent under burlap sacks of coffee beans. I sensed weakness in my body’s small bones and felt inferior to those brawny men and afraid that I’d prove unequal to the toils of life. I wished that, like my brother, Franklin, I’d inherited my father’s sturdy frame and regretted that I’d treated Dr. Mütter coldly earlier in the afternoon. At all costs, I must hold on to my position at the medical college, for I might not find another so comfortable. The horse nickered and pawed at the snow, which had grown on the post tops, the railings, and on the docked ships’ sheets and rigging like a delicate white moss. Out in the channel, a clipper, riding high in the water, sped upriver toward the mills; three sailors hauled on a line to warp a packet boat against the current; and steaming out from the Camden dock, a ferry commenced its crossing.

  Inside the shipping company’s warehouse, which smelled pleasantly of oakum, tar, hemp, Indian spices, and coffee, a clerk, his fingers and cuffs inky, was writing in a ledger, all the while cursing the clotted nib. I slid the bill of sale across the counter, and, after leisurely finishing an entry, he deigned to raise his eyes to mine.

  “First time I ever saw pigeons come by boat from overseas.” He spoke with the sarcasm of a man whom chance, fate, nepotism, or the civil service had made emperor of the tiniest of realms, who never missed an opportunity to lord it over anyone who happened there. I felt like cudgeling him with the marlin spike he used as a paperweight but tempered my resentment with the thought of those muscled stevedores who might come rushing to his aid. I nearly blushed to think how I must have looked to them in my dandy’s rig and congress boots. “Ain’t Philadelphia pigeons good enough, you had to send to Belgium for some?”

  “They’re for the chief surgeon of Jefferson Medical College,” I said haughtily.

  Unimpressed, the clerk grunted, rang a bell on the counter, and, when a colored man appeared from a back room, directed him to carry two wicker hampers out to the dogcart. I turned on my heel without another word to the sneering fellow and left him to his smudges.

  I gave the negro a penny and climbed up onto the seat. Inside the hampers, Mütter’s pigeons mumbled and beat their stiff wings nervously against the wickerwork. I snapped the reins, and the horse clopped onto Front Street, its nostrils flaring at a sudden rankness of dead fish. At the end of a pier, a rope, made taut by the outbound current, had tightened around the neck of a rusty bollard capped with snow.

  At the delivery door behind the college building, two porters carried the hampers inside, the jostled pigeons complaining. After having assured myself that they had survived the jolting trip from the wharf, I went to find Dr. Mütter, determined to make myself agreeable.

  “I brought you your birds,” I said affably.

  “Excellent!” he replied, rubbing his hands together like an excited boy contemplating the destruction of a rat’s nest. “I trust they’re alive and well after their journey?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, smiling plausibly.

  “I had a coop built on the roof for them. You may have noticed it.”

  “No, sir, I didn’t,” I said, still smiling with an exaggerated cheerfulness. My jawbones were beginning to ache, as they will when you’ve been playing the Jew’s harp.

  “The birds will live and mate there.”

  “I’m curious, Dr. Mütter, what you mean to do with them.”

  “I want to know how it is they can find their way home.”

  “Can they, sir?”

  “They’re no ordinary pigeons, Edward. They’ve been bred to fly home from as far away as a thousand miles, even over mountains.”

  So that he would know that I was duly impressed, I whistled in astonishment.

  “Science affirms a medium of attraction—ether, spiritus, pneuma, call it what you like—that conveys, across space, the influence of one thing on another. Newton described it as ‘a subtle spirit which pervades and lies hid in all gross bodies; by the force and action of which spirit, particles of bodies attract one another.’ It would explain the effect of the moon on tides and on the womb, the transmission of light, heat, and sound, the curious affinity of twins, the uncanny ability of some rare individuals to will objects to move as if by themselves, the eerie instances when a thought seems to jump wordlessly from one mind to another, the apparently collective intelligence of a flock of birds or a cloud of gnats that causes it to swerve en masse, perhaps the influence of facial features on character, and even the periodic incidence of various diseases.”

  My eyes about to wander to the window, I fixed them purposefully on Mütter’s own.

  “Mesmer wrote of the effect of celestial gravitation on physiology. While a student in Paris, I attended Deleuze’s lectures and was persuaded of the existence of a magnetic fluid—Mesmer’s ‘imponderable fluid’ distributed uniformly throughout the universe, which makes actions at a distance possible. If there’s a soul, Edward, perhaps it resides in that magnetism, and evil—to speak in the idiom preferred by our friend Edgar Poe—in contagious effluvia.”

  He grew pensive and played absentmindedly with a jawbone, which he kept on his desk. The mandible, with its row of uneven teeth, had been dug up in a field by the college porter’s dog. Nothing more of what had once been a woman in her twenties had been recovered, although the police had turned over the lot with rakes and shovels. If her skull had been found intact, she might have called to her scattered remains. In my mind’s eye, I watched them tunnel through the earth and make her whole again. Such were the morbid thoughts of a young man—a fickle moon orbiting the poles of th
e worldly Thomas Mütter and otherworldly Edgar Poe.

  “What does not bear thinking about, however, is that human beings are no better than marionettes. There must be a countervailing individual will—a mind able to resist.”

  Dr. Mütter hoped to find a faculty of navigation in his pigeons independent of animal magnetism or the body’s “factors,” units of inheritance proposed a decade earlier by Gregor Mendel. He wished to show men and women that they were more than automatons doing the bidding of stronger wills than theirs, or of a legacy willed them by the past, or of the stars. He wanted to prove that the birds chose to fly home. I’ve always thought that this same ambition was the true meaning of his plastic operations: to free us from the urgencies of plan or accident or, at least, to oblige us to grapple with them, however unequal we may be to the struggle and uncertain of the outcome.

  How naïve! Poe, the pessimist and fatalist, would entertain the idea and quickly dismiss it, saying, “Each human being believes that he occupies the center of the universe, but it is only the center of a spider’s web. He’s blessed if he lives and dies in ignorance of his ensnarement.”

  I was too tired and, frankly, too bored to hear more of Mütter’s disquisition. He handed me several pages of handwritten instructions for the birds’ care, feeding, breeding, and training and then bid me good night. I gave him mine and left him to his thoughts.

  Outside, the lamps had been lit; their lights fell uncertainly on streets and sidewalks, any suggestion of warmth in their yellowish glimmer dampened by newly fallen snow. The college building hulked, black against a bleached sky, its windows dark except for those of Dr. Mütter’s laboratory. Tomorrow, he would operate on Nathaniel Dickey’s face.

  I tightened the muffler around my neck and walked to the streetcar that would take me to a Bridesburg rooming house “for Christian ladies,” near the Frankford Creek ferry dock, where Ida lodged in dreary austerity. I hurried like a man pursued, the hunter a nameless anxiousness harrying me through the ether.

  Ida and I had been childhood sweethearts, living, at the time, a street apart in Northern Liberties. Her father and mine had been friends and workers, both of them, in the cotton mill. She’d been a pretty, lively girl; was pretty yet, but the liveliness had gone. Maybe it was the inevitable result of having grown into a woman—she seemed much older than I, though she was just twenty—or perhaps the religion of the Calvinists had sobered her. There was no gaiety in her, and she talked of God as though He were a resident of Mrs. DeVries’s boardinghouse on Ann Street, a man—venerable and avuncular—who shared in their fish or mutton at the ladies’ dinner table. It was, I knew, a mistake to visit her. There would be little comfort and even less joy as we sat together in the parlor, with its confused scent of pine needles, moth flakes, lavender sachet, and asafetida bags.

  No, Moran, it wasn’t desire that drew me to her that chilly night—the chaste particles of our two bodies attracted by a subtle spirit, to borrow from Sir Isaac Newton, who understood animal magnetism, if not love. I was afraid to be alone; to have gone home and sat with my mother or to have gone to Noonan’s taproom to drink with Franklin would not have made me feel any less lonely or afraid.

  What was I afraid of?

  I had heard too much talk from Poe and Mütter about things better left unsaid. Life is complicated and dangerous without making it more so by intimations of mysterious, unseen forces that might not bode well. I’m a doctor. I talk to other doctors. I read medical journals. I’ve peered through a microscope and seen van Leeuwenhoek’s bacteria and Karl Weigert’s malevolent stains. How lovely, even beautiful, are those organisms that cause us to sicken and die! I shudder at the thought of them! I wish I’d never seen them. It’s heresy or backwardness to regret knowledge. We eradicate sickness; we lengthen the span of life by making visible what once was invisible. But it doesn’t help me fall asleep at night to imagine the teeming world of illness and death. To count bacilli like sheep going over a stile. At heart, I’m a simple doctor, who feels happy and useful setting broken bones, listening to a man’s or a woman’s chest, and examining the sputum. As ghastly as it sounds, there was something clean and satisfying about taking off a man’s shattered arm or leg in a field hospital. The moment was clear, unambiguous, calm. I sawed the blasted bone and cauterized the wound and knew that I’d done a workmanlike job of saving the fellow’s life. But that’s enough of this, Moran.

  I went to visit Ida, and we sat in the boardinghouse parlor, speaking of this and that—childhood reminiscences, her day in the knitting mill, my afternoon jaunt to the river, the cold, the snow, the Methodists’ split over slavery. I said nothing about the morning’s hanging. It was one of the things I wanted to forget. The clock on the wall marked the tedium of my visit. I wanted to take her hand. That would have been enough. But my will had no power over my arm’s muscles. Or maybe it was that my muscles would not answer the call of my will. For whatever reason, I left my hand where it was, on the arm of the chair, covered with a tatted antimacassar. The rag rug on the floor between us might as well have been the ocean or an Arctic chasm. I smiled at her, and she answered it with one of her own—sincere, well-meant, and virginal. I looked at the clock, the oil lamp, the miserly fire in the grate, the picture of John Calvin on the wall. I could think of nothing else to say, and so I wished her good night and, having put on my coat and hat, walked all the way to my mother’s house—pondering the homing faculty of pigeons as I passed through the pneuma of an icy rain.

  AS SOON AS MÜTTER HAD FINISHED operating on Nathaniel Dickey, I left the theater and, without a word to Poe, hurried to the pigeon coop. I dreaded his enthusiasm, the fervent interest he would show in “Mütter’s miracle.” He’d insist on teasing from the tangle of his recent sensations a thread of sense to dwell on—glory in—and to deduce from it a narrative. Whether it was the somberness of the short winter days or the unwelcome impressions lately made on my immature mind, I felt a kind of bruise on the soft tissues of my sensibility that wanted nursing in solitude, or, at most, in the company of Mütter’s pigeons, which possessed their own acute sensitivity but did not confide in me their inner peace or turmoil.

  Later on, after I had succumbed to Poe’s influence, we would spend long evenings by some tavern fire arguing the result of Mütter’s surgery. Poe and I believed that—having been born an outcast and sentenced to a profound estrangement from his kind, a tormented being whose disfigured face relegated him to a shadow life—Nathaniel Dickey must have also been inwardly deformed, his mind turned from thoughts of ordinary life, his disposition soured, and his soul—let the word stand—in jeopardy. Our surmise was no more than physiognomy, which we accepted without question. In my opinion, however, Dr. Mütter had done more than to operate on a face: He’d rescued the man who had worn it like a mask covering his true self.

  Poe, of the contrary opinion, could not allow himself to find a happy outcome in tragedy. To his mind, redemption was impossible in this life or the next. Humankind was damned at the outset—if not by original sin, as he didn’t think in orthodox Christian terms—then by congenital perversity, wickedness at the heart of the race, a self-regard at the center of each one of us that makes us blind to others’ selves and deaf to their pleas.

  I argued against his cynicism, but his unsentimental attitudes were too strong, his defense of them too vigorous and articulate for me to counter. I was hardly yet a man and could only stumble after him as he rushed impetuously forward through a thicket of ideas and a wildness of talk. I would soon give up. In all my dealings with Poe, I suspect that he saw the world from the viewpoint of his art, which was a universe in miniature, obedient to its own logic and to its own physical laws. The gravitational attraction between his fiction’s characters and the places where they led their lives was stronger than that of actuality. His tales bristle with their own charge.

  “Edgar Poe was looking for you,” said Mütter, startling me by his abrupt appearance at the door to the coop. “I had the feeling he
wanted to talk to you about the operation. His eyes were fairly glittering with excitement, or else wickedness.”

  I dug the scuttle into an opened burlap bag and filled the trough with dried feed corn.

  “He’s not a man you can ignore or hide from,” said Mütter, buttoning his coat against the cold. “He’ll find you whether you choose to meet with him or not.”

  I knew what he meant: Poe’s thought would seek me out and, by the affinity of our two minds, which was already apparent, entangle me. It was a fantastic notion, of course, and hardly in keeping with the sensible work I did at the college of medicine. But it was true nonetheless.

  “I’m troubled in his presence,” I grumbled.

  Mütter laughed. “It is always so in cases of adoration.”

  “I don’t adore him!” I nearly shouted, incensed.

  “What, then?” Mütter’s eyes sought mine. Had I been a pan of water, I’d have come to a boil with the intensity of his gaze.

  I spoke without hesitation, aware for the first time of the quality of my attraction to the strange, magnetic personality named Edgar Allan Poe. “I fear him.”

  Mütter shrugged. “Fear and adoration are part and parcel of the same thing.” I must have given him a quizzical look, because he continued in explanation. “The helpless feeling we have for great men or women.” I would have scoffed, but he left me no time to object. “Edgar Poe is a great man who has in him the tragic seeds of his downfall. I’ve said it before, Edward: He will not last.”

  I shuddered—an involuntary movement I would often make when I thought of Poe.

  “How are the birds?” asked Mütter, whose genius contained an element of caprice.

  “They seem all right.”