The Port-Wine Stain

by Norman Lock

  Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim

  Thy growth, to be resolv’d to earth again;

  And, lost each human trace, surrend’ring up

  Thine individual being, shalt thou go

  To mix forever with the elements. . . .

  Strange the things we remember!

  “Life is short,” said Poe. “What I can’t abide is that it should not be ours.” He cut a piece of sausage. “This bit at the end of my fork was once a pig that had its mud wallow, its apple parings, its muck, and never doubted—if pigs entertain doubt or hope—that its days would go on and on, one just like another. Then came the day when it was hauled up by block and tackle, its throat cut, and its leg used like a pump handle to empty it of blood. It’s the same for us.”

  He chewed his meat and swallowed. The hairs of his mustache shone with grease.

  I didn’t know what to say, so I concentrated instead on a man sitting in the corner, whose nose had the purplish disfigurement known to medicine as rosacea. Here again, I thought, is a countenance marked like Cain’s—the stigma of a pariah, which, if physiognomy has any truth to it, must have marked the man himself. My eyes welled up because of pity or, more likely, the tobacco smoke that made them smart. Choking on a piece of coarse black bread, Poe coughed alarmingly.

  “Are you all right, Edgar?”

  He emptied his glass of beer in a single draft, massaged his gullet, sputtered, and said, “Yes, thank you. It went down wrong.”

  We finished our supper without another word. Afterward, we walked east on Spring Garden to North Tenth and thence to Buttonwood, where, in an alleyway, we stopped before a carpenter’s shop with a signboard reading: CABINET & COFFIN MAKERS. A black wreath hung on the door. The knocker, according to Poe, was a likeness of the hellhound Cerberus.

  I NOTED THE HOUR AND THOUGHT to remind my visitor that it had grown late.

  Moran, it’s time you were leaving if you want to catch the last ferry to Philadelphia, unless the general will forgive your tardiness.

  No, I wouldn’t expect a general to wait, especially George Armstrong Custer. I’ve heard he’s a vain and testy man. If you like and have time, you can come tomorrow and hear the rest of the story. It’s worth a little inconvenience, I assure you. The climax is remarkable. What do you say, Moran?

  Good! I’ll expect you tomorrow, then.

  PART TWO

  . . . that it might so have happened that we never had existed at all . . .

  —Eureka, E. A. Poe

  Camden, New Jersey, April 23, 1876

  LET’S HAVE THE WINDOW OPEN, Moran; the room is warm this fine April morning. Have you had breakfast? What would you say to coffee and a piece of cake? The woman who cleans for me makes the most delicious strudel.

  No? If you should change your mind . . . I hope the general wasn’t out of sorts last night.

  Good.

  To pick up the thread, it was the first night of February 1844. Having finished our supper, Poe and I went to a meeting of the Thanatopsis Club, held, from time to time, in a carpenter’s shop on Buttonwood Street. On the way there, Edgar had told me how, in what he called “an excellent jest,” he’d given each club member the name of an ancient god of death. That night, I’d meet the Babylonian Nergal, the Etruscan Orcus, the Chinese Bao Zheng, the Japanese Shinigami, the Egyptian Anubis, the Norse Odin, the Hindu Yama, the African Ikú, and the Roman Mors. Poe had named himself Thánatos, the personification of the death wish.

  Edgar had told me, while we walked from Herr Schmidt’s emporium of wurst, that the club was exclusive, its members drawn from the city’s outcasts—that is, anyone connected in a professional capacity with death. I never knew whether the Thanatopsis Club was meant to be a serious convocation or an ironical one. Without doubt, it precipitated my downfall.

  Philadelphia, February 1844

  Edgar introduced me to that strange assembly as Mictlantecuhtli, the Aztec god whose symbols are the skull and the bloody skeleton, “suitable,” said Poe with a poker face, “for the guardian of Death’s anteroom.”

  His fellow actors in the indecent burlesque made a showy obeisance to the master.

  “You may have noticed, Edward, that ordinary people have a distaste, even a disgust, for those who handle corpses or, in my case, write in an unseemly manner about them. You yourself must have seen people shy away from you as though you carried the plague.”

  I told him that I sensed a squeamishness in certain people when they learned that I worked for Dr. Mütter.

  “You wear Mütter’s ‘pickling’ agent like a rare perfume,” said Poe with a smile.

  I snuffled involuntarily at my shoulder.

  “In the spring of last year, I decided to gather some of these pariahs—my work brings me into contact with the ‘underworld’—into a coterie of specialists. I founded the Thanatopsis Club, if for no other reason than it affords us an opportunity and the privacy to discuss the business of our trades and, most important of all, to satisfy our addictions without fear of censure. We drink; we take ether; some of us ‘eat the lotus’ to our hearts’ content. While we are in camera, we enjoy life in the midst of death—enjoy it all the more for death’s dread warrants.”

  The workroom, which smelled wonderfully of freshly planed lumber, was decorated with memento mori: funereal crepe, sable ribbons, jet plumes worn by an undertaker’s horse, a stuffed bird of ill omen, bizarre wall sconces fashioned of skulls, eye sockets fitted with candles, made even more cadaverous by an accumulation of wax over bone. The light shone dimly on a long table, set with bone china plates, an ironic touch of Edgar’s, German cutlery whose handles bore a death’s head, and pewter mugs inscribed with words from the Dies Irae: “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine”

  “Welcome to our merry little club!” Poe said, taking my coat and hat.

  I was greeted pleasantly by Death’s journeymen: a coroner; an embalmer, called by his fellow Eschatologists Anubis, the jackal-headed god of mummification; the dour hangman I’d seen send Rudolph Holtz, or Heinz, on his not-so-merry way; a negro grave digger, called Ikú in honor of his ancestors; a taxidermist; a morgue attendant; a professional mourner with a girlish face; a rat killer employed by the city; and a grizzled older man whose handiwork—“petites maisons” Poe called the pine boxes—rested self-importantly on trestles, waiting for tenants.

  “No shortage of customers in this town,” the carpenter said with relish. “I can hardly keep up with demand.”

  “It’s the times we live in,” declared Orcus, the hairy bearded giant of the Etruscan netherworld, with a sigh.

  The taxidermist and the hangman made room on the bench, and Edgar and I took our places at the table, presided over—so help me, Moran!—by a wickerwork mannequin dressed in widow’s weeds.

  “Drink up, gentlemen,” said the embalmer, filling our mugs with bitter ale. “We have an hour’s start on you.”

  I glanced at the clock, whose pendulum was unmoving and whose hands, stayed for all time, pointed to twelve—the midnight hour, of course.

  “To your good health, Anubis!” said Edgar, raising his mug first to him and then to the other renegades sitting around the table. “And to all my friends in the jolly dance of death.”

  “I see that you’ve been admiring my raven,” said the taxidermist named for Odin, who was known in Norse legends as the raven god. “I stuffed it in honor of our very own Thánatos.” He bowed his bald head reverently to Poe. “To Thánatos!” he said, and drank.

  “To Thánatos,” his fellow ghouls cheered and did likewise.

  “A clever fellow, your friend Mr. Poe,” said the coroner, Yama, whose original had passed judgment on the Hindu dead. “If it weren’t for him, we would be all alone in the world.”

  “Among gods, Thánatos is chief,” said Nergal, the rat catcher, nibbling a piece of malodorous cheese.

  In this fraternity of grim reapers, I sensed that the rat catcher was the lowliest; the men sitting to either side of him appeare
d to shrink from him, as if their sensibilities were offended by something other than overripe Stilton.

  Poe was gracious in his acceptance of Nergal’s compliment. He turned to Bao Zheng, renowned during the Song dynasty for his nimble execution of criminals, and said, “My friend Mictlantecuhtli, whose bloody namesake was feared even by the Aztecs, witnessed your last performance on the gibbet’s little stage.”

  The sullen hangman glared at me as if expecting criticism. Intimidated, I mumbled some piece of flattery, which appeared to satisfy him.

  “He is a prince among executioners,” said Poe grandly. “If ever I must wear the hempen cravat, I can only hope it is our friend and companion who ties it.”

  “Here, here!” shouted the cabinet and coffin maker, the club’s so-called Shinigami, who thumped the tabletop with the butt of his knife. Like most of the others present, he was on his way toward the little death of drunkenness that passed for the sacrament of Communion among them.

  The androgynous mourner, Mors, a Roman god of death whom the Latin poets had idealized as feminine, stood up, staggered outside into the alleyway to vomit, and did not return.

  “He has gone to keen over some poor soul,” said Poe, who was, by now, also in his cups.

  “Chances are I shall examine the remains in the morning,” said Yama, the coroner.

  “And you, master Ikú, shall bury him or her, for Death in his or her awful majesty does not discriminate between the sexes,” said Poe.

  “After I’ve boxed ’em up!” shouted the graying Shinigami, once again banging the table with his heavy knife, like a hungry man waiting for his meat.

  Having been done out of the prospect of a fee by a draft of ether, Anubis, god of funerals, was whimpering in Duat, land of dead Egyptians, where his spirit had gone before him in search of corpses.

  Most of the club’s members had exchanged their mugs for glasses of ether, drunk neat, with a water chaser. Have you never heard of “ether frolics,” Moran? They were in vogue in the 1840s, especially among Irish Catholics in order to satisfy the church’s prohibition against strong drink. The result was identical: unconsciousness. Dr. Crawford Long, whom I knew slightly at the time, introduced it as an anesthetic to the pit of the University of Pennsylvania Hospital after having experienced it at a frolic. One man’s poison is another man’s balm.

  Not to be unsociable, I tippled my portion of ether and woke—God save me from the memory—inside a coffin!

  Imagine it, if you can, Moran: the cramped space, the wood squeezing your shoulders, the impossibility of raising your head or arms. Blackness darker than any night. The atmosphere, if you can call the thin air inside a coffin by so spacious a word, was compounded of the rank odors of sweat and of the lime pit where poxy corpses are thrown—thus it seemed to my feverish and overwrought imagination. While I struggled against the box, a part of me wished for—prayed for—quick annihilation, while another part screamed for help.

  I fainted, only to awake instantly to the horror that, moment by moment, increased. The anguish I felt, Moran—you’d have had to be buried alive, walled up, or shut away in a tomb to know its sharpness. My lips were parched; my tongue felt swollen in my mouth. I couldn’t speak. I screamed for mercy’s sake to be let out. I felt the blood run from under my broken nails, with which I’d tried to claw my way through the wooden lid. I’d have broken my teeth in gnawing if only I could have raised my head to bite at it. I was wet with the perspiration that starts from every pore when you’re afraid, with the tears that will fill a man’s eyes in desperation, with my own stale. I could scarcely breathe; I felt a weight upon my chest. I thought I must die; felt I could not survive a moment’s longer. And then I heard the screech of iron nails as, one by one, they were clawed out with a hammer, and, in a moment, I saw the taxidermist’s smooth face as he lifted the lid.

  “Now you’re one of us,” he said, grinning like one of the room’s waxen skulls, whose illumination was as feeble and uncertain as the light in hell.

  He and the rat catcher helped me from the coffin. They had not taken ether, or else I would have been shut up still. The others were slumped at the table, their heads on their arms, profoundly insensible.

  I stood on the rough-planked floor and shook uncontrollably, chilled by fear and my own urine-stained trousers. If I’d had Death’s scythe, I would have laid waste to them all, awake or sleeping. I have never in my life known hatred equal to what I felt for those men. I cursed them.

  “It was your initiation,” said the rat catcher, smiling. “We all went through it. You were only in there a short while.”

  “We counted to a hundred and let you out,” said the taxidermist, plunging his ear with a dirty finger.

  One hundred! I tell you, Moran, it was an hour, a day, a week, an eternity that I spent inside the coffin. There is no measure of time to reckon the length of my imprisonment in that box that is worse than any jail or madhouse cell.

  “You’re a liar!” I stammered, in the grip of terror yet.

  “I counted to a hundred and let you out,” the man repeated stubbornly.

  “True, true,” said the rat catcher. He was leaning against a wall, and his arm and shoulder had vanished in shadow. “The same as for all of us.”

  “And him,” I said, pointing to Edgar Poe, where he rested in tranquil oblivion at the table. “Did you count to a hundred for him?”

  “No, he never did lie down inside the box. He’s scared of tight places. He said he’d lose his wits if ever he was put inside a coffin and the lid nailed shut. Mr. Edgar’s founder of our club. I guess we can made an exception for him.”

  “That’s so,” said the stuffer of birds and purveyor of ghastly souvenirs.

  I shouted what used to be called “a soldier’s oath,” some vile obscenity, and wished that they, one and all, would perish on the spot. And then I left Poe to his ether dreams and hurried home to my mother’s house like a child who has seen a ghost.

  “YOU WERE UNHAPPY LAST NIGHT at our little ceremony,” said Edgar Poe—brazenly, I thought.

  He stood in the doorway of the coop, like the angel Gabriel when he appeared to Mary in a radiant atmosphere, although—more fitting for a devil—the light, draped over Poe’s narrow shoulders, was fouled by swirling dust and pigeon molt. I was still furious with him and his cohort. Had there been another door, I’d have walked through it and left him to consider how he had abused me. I looked him in the face and glared, afraid to speak in case I’d stammer again in fear. It would take time, Moran, to forget that night—longer than it took for my broken nails to grow. What am I saying? It would never be forgotten. I’ve only to ride past a graveyard or see a funeral in the street to remember those sensations. I’ve only to stand inside a dark closet and pull the door closed after me to begin to suffocate.

  Poe reacted to my silent disdain with an uncommon show of humility. He shuffled his feet on the feed-strewn floor; he looked through the window at the tarred roofs across the street; he made a catarrhal noise in the back of his throat that might have been caused by dust but was more likely to be evidence of his embarrassment—at least that is how I chose to interpret it.

  I broke my silence. “You’ve no idea of the terror your ‘little ceremony’ caused me.”

  “Ahem.” He made a noise as if to clear his throat or to introduce a theme that might upset me.

  “You betrayed me!” I shouted, determined to nurse my grievance.

  “I had no idea, Edward, that you would carry on so.” He sounded as though he meant to belittle me. At that moment, I could have leaped at his throat. He saw the rage in my eyes and repented. “If I’d known of your aversion . . . I see that I overstepped the mark, Edward. You have my sincerest apologies. I see now that I presumed. Forgive me.”

  Earlier in the day, I’d told Dr. Mütter of what Poe and his ghouls had put me through. I’d trembled as I spoke; my hands had shaken as if with ague. My fear intrigued him. He took my pulse and temperature; he questioned me closely on
my “symptoms”: How had I behaved inside the coffin? Had my heart raced? Had I perspired? Had I felt hot or cold? Had my ears rung? Had I heard the sound of my blood sluicing in the chambers of my heart? He took down my answers. I was . . . annoyed. To be treated like a specimen angered me. But I dared not show it. He was my mentor; I was his protégé. My future depended on his goodwill and charitable disposition. I was ambitious, and I lacked the wherewithal to advance myself. I told him what he wanted to know. I may have even invented or embellished. In all honesty, my recollections of the night before were muddled. I could recount sensations; the experience itself was hardly recountable. Similes, figures of speech came more vividly to mind. But Mütter was no poet. Edgar Poe would write the tale, the thieving magpie.

  “He’s good for you, Edward, however much he appears to be the opposite,” the doctor had said, fixing me with his gaze. “Anyone who has something to teach, to show you about life and death, is important to a doctor. I’ve seen you poring over our skulls. Admit they fascinate you, Edward.” I nodded. “How then could a man like Edgar Poe fail to intrigue you, as well?”

  I had agreed even though, at the time, I’d resented Poe and Mütter both.

  Now, inside the coop, the pigeons were gossiping while they milled about the gritty floor, sometimes stopping to peck at our shoes. To think they possessed an intelligence was absurd.

  “Forgive me,” Poe repeated earnestly.

  I nodded coldly. I was not above acting like a child; I was hardly more than one.

  “I want you to have this,” he said, fishing a gold watch and chain from his pocket. He took a step toward me. I stood my ground. He closed the distance between us, the timepiece in his hand. “It belonged to my father, David Poe—not John Allan, who fostered me but would not adopt me. My real father was David Poe, Jr., the actor. It’s said that he abandoned my mother and me. It’s a lie. He died—too young: He was only twenty-seven.”

  I accepted the gift. It felt substantial in my hand. In spite of myself, I was pleased to have it.