The Port-Wine Stain

by Norman Lock

“With Edgar Poe, I suppose.” His voice was neutral, calm; his eyes revealed nothing.

  “Yes, sir. I’ve been observing him, as you suggested,” I said, without, I hoped, a trace of irony.

  “For your enlightenment,” said Mütter.

  I nodded soberly.

  “There’s blood on your shirt.”

  I had not wanted to tell him about my tattoo, but there was no help for it. He rolled up my sleeve and saw the evidence of my folly. He neither smiled nor frowned. When he spoke next, I couldn’t tell whether he meant to chide me or encourage me. His tone was, if anything, clinical.

  “Your empathy is exceptional, Edward, and I commend your dedication. It’s dangerous to forget oneself, however; you must know who you are. And you must keep the wound clean until it’s healed. I wouldn’t want to see you in the pit, your gangrenous arm in the strap, waiting for my saw. Who would carry it to the incinerator afterward?”

  I smiled wanly, feeling an exhaustion stealing over me. I had slept only a little, and that badly. And my damned arm hurt! Had I been alone, I would have cried in pity for myself. I was like someone who sees in the distance a wreck, the great waves washing over its ruined deck, soon to be seen no more. I couldn’t see my life whole, couldn’t see a future, and did not care to see what I was making of the present. My eyes were on the muddy toes of my shoes. I saw in them a token of my failure and my wretchedness. Well, Moran, I was sick with drink. Dr. Mütter knew I would be useless all the morning.

  “You might as well go home and sleep,” he said. “It’s Saturday, in any case. I’ll see you Monday morning.”

  “The pigeons,” I said, remembering my avian subjects on the roof.

  “I’ll do it. I want to see how they’re getting along.”

  I was grateful to him. The sight and smell of their guano—a green and oozing mess—would have brought me to my knees in a fit of vomiting. I rolled down my bloodied sleeve, put on my coat and hat, and left, wondering where Poe had spent the night.

  ON THE WAY TO POE’S HOUSE, I stopped at a lunchroom on Spruce Street and made a breakfast of scrambled eggs and ham, chased with coffee so strong, I feared my spoon would melt. But it was what I needed, or at least my head did, which felt as if it were bound by a slowly tightening iron band. The ingenuity of the Inquisition has been matched only by our southern overseers and the modern surgeon, whose purpose is surely different but whose methods are much the same.

  Did you ever see the “Pear of Anguish,” Moran? It’s a grim device of iron spikes, a spring, and a key. An instrument of torture, it’s not far removed from the cervical dilator, the tonsil guillotine, or the hernia tool.

  All this to say, I had a headache, the body’s own chastisement for its abuse. While I sat contritely, eating for my body’s good, a young medical student, whom I knew at the college, came into the lunchroom. Seeing me, he asked if he might share my table. My eyes indicated that he could. He did. He spoke his order to the man standing at the stove. He smiled at me in that exaggeratedly affable way of his, which always made me squirm.

  “Good morning to you, Fenzil.”

  “Morning, Holloway.”

  “Nothing doing in the pit or at ‘Madame Tussaud’s’?”

  He meant, of course, Dr. Mütter’s museum.

  “I’ve already been.”

  “Unwell, are you? I must say, Edward, you look like hell. If I were a gambling man, I’d wager you were out all night.”

  “I was,” I said, unwilling to elaborate.

  “I’m on my way home. I was on duty until seven o’clock this morning,” he said self-importantly.

  Unconcerned, I went on with my breakfast.

  “You know we’re all envious of you.”

  “Of me?” I said, surprised.

  “Of your intimacy with the great man. We mere medical students are seldom honored with his confidences. You have the god’s ear, Fenzil, and the god has yours.” Holloway sighed like an acolyte or a lovesick girl. “Shame about Nathaniel Dickey. And after a brilliant piece of surgery, too! I tell you, Fenzil, we in the gallery were in awe of Mütter that afternoon.”

  I wiped the grease from my lips with a threadbare napkin and asked, “What about him?”

  “Haven’t you heard? The poor fellow did away with himself. I’m surprised you didn’t know. Old Meigs said Mütter took it hard.”

  “He said nothing to me.”

  “No?”

  Holloway’s eyes shone to find out I was not so much in the doctor’s confidence as he had supposed. He smiled in spite of himself and the sad news of Dickey’s suicide. Holloway enjoyed childish pranks, like stuffing the fingers of my gloves with phalanx bones or putting a shaving mirror among a row of skulls, so that I’d wince to see my face among the faces of the dead when I went to dust them.

  “Why would he do it?” I asked, shaken.

  “Don’t know,” said Holloway, buttering his toast. “They fished his body out of the river yesterday. The color of a Maryland blue claw, he was. He looked as though the crabs had made a meal of him.”

  The students prided themselves on their gallows humor. I looked away in distaste.

  Dr. Mütter never did mention Dickey to me, and I knew enough not to pry. I left Holloway to finish his breakfast. At the lunchroom door, I turned in time to see his wolfish smile.

  Later, I asked Poe what could possibly have driven Dickey to take his own life.

  “Before the operation,” he said thoughtfully, “Dickey was a monster—a prodigy of nature, to be kind. He occupied a category of being all his own, like a gnome or troll—or the Minotaur, solitary on its island, at the center of its Labyrinth. Incomparable, Dickey may have been unmoved by others, their condemnation and disgust. He was a thing to be feared, in the same way as a creature out of myth is feared. Our fear of him gave him strength and a kind of arrogance.”

  Poe’s fancy seemed absurd and insensitive. In my experience, artists show little respect for human suffering. They’re too absorbed by their own creations. Somewhere he wrote, “The pure Imagination chooses, from either Beauty or Deformity.” In the pages of a tale, one quality is like another: Both produce a single powerful effect on the imagination. Beauty or deformity—it was one and the same to him.

  “The operation on his face made him merely ugly in the sight of others and in his own mind, as well,” said Poe, touching his own. “By it, he forfeited his uniqueness, his sui generis condition. He could not stand to see the horror in the eyes of strangers or the pity in the eyes of those who may have loved him. God grant there was someone to love him! It may have been the look on his mother’s face that sent him to the river. Mütter made him an ordinary man, and that’s what did him in. The mind is a perilous swamp, Edward, worse than Bunyan’s Slough of Despond, which refers only to the loss of faith. The loss of reason—now there is a subject for our time! There is no science to explain it adequately. My tales concern the mind breached and overwhelmed, but what is the anguish of literary characters to that of real men and women?”

  He was not usually so honest about his art.

  At a quarter to nine, I knocked at Poe’s front door. Mrs. Clemm, hands red as boiled lobster, led me to the kitchen, where Edgar’s shirts were, in fact, boiling on top of the stove. The room was pleasantly warm after my walk in the cold; the inside of its windows were dripping wet with steam.

  “I must apologize, Mr. Fenzil,” she said, “for receiving you in this unseemly way. But today is washing day, and our straitened circumstances oblige me to make economies. In other words, what I used to pay others to do, I now must do myself.”

  She sighed like one aggrieved who, nonetheless, takes pleasure in her martyrdom. I’ve known many, of both sexes, who delight in abasement: It bolsters their ego—a strange paradox.

  She took a wooden paddle and stirred the steaming, soapy water. My nose stung a little because of the lye. She invited me to sit at the kitchen table and pour myself a cup of tea, if I were so inclined. I was not. My bladder was alrea
dy incommoded, as Mütter used to say. I sat and watched her work, feeling a certain disdain, as though I were above such menial occupations. I was indulging a childish vanity, of course, for I did much worse than boil laundry: I got rid of bloody matter, rendered flesh from bone, and shoveled pigeon excrement. But that morning, I sat in the hot kitchen with the pleasing realization that I was a man at liberty who needn’t exert himself until Monday morning.

  “My nephew is asleep,” she said. I thought I heard a mild reproof in her voice. But maybe not; perhaps I was the reproving one. Mrs. Clemm was devoted to her nephew and son-in-law. I have no doubt she believed in his greatness, if not in his abilities to earn an income for her daughter, Virginia. “He didn’t come home last night until very late.”

  “How is Mrs. Poe?” I inquired politely.

  “She’s also asleep. I fear for her health, Mr. Fenzil. She is frail and delicate. She sleeps in the afternoons. The doctor says she has consumption. I hope it’s not so.” She fell silent, and then she asked, “Have you read my nephew’s story ‘Life in Death’?”

  Moran, you may know it as “The Oval Portrait,” the title Edgar later gave it.

  “I haven’t read it,” I admitted.

  She appeared to be shocked by my ignorance of her illustrious son-in-law and nephew’s work.

  “It is a remarkable tale,” she said, putting down the paddle. “In it, a husband paints a portrait in oil of his youthful wife. He labors long and hard on it, and, while she sits day after day for him, she grows ever weaker, as if, with each brushstroke, he stole her vitality, giving it to the other woman in his life—she in his painting. When the picture is finished, the young wife is dead. I sometimes imagine that when Edgar has emptied his well—no genius is inexhaustible, Mr. Fenzil, not even his—when he has written his last word, my daughter will be dead, drained of life by his willfulness. I dare not protest; she adores him, and he her. I don’t doubt it. But his love for ‘the other woman’ is too strong for Virginia to survive.”

  I said nothing. What could I say? Before I’d met Poe. I’d have thought her raving. But I knew him now—his animal magnetism—and, aware or not, how he could captivate and destroy.

  I asked to be remembered to Virginia. I left no word for Edgar. I was certain that we’d see each other again before too long. There was a strange affinity between us, remember. I wore its scabby symbol on my arm. Something told me never to show him it.

  “I’ll see myself out, Mrs. Clemm,” I said, leaving her to her laundry tub. “Good day to you.”

  Walking through the front room on my way to the door, I happened to see a manuscript written in Poe’s awkward hand, lying on his desk. I had time to read the title of a new tale: “The Premature Burial.”

  AT THE END OF FEBRUARY, I attended a reading given by Edgar Poe of his newest work, which I’d seen in manuscript lying on his desk. I sat in the rear of the Walnut Street Theatre, pleased by its gilt and ornament, the gaslights providing an otherworldly atmosphere suitable for a gothic tale. Some two or two hundred and fifty persons had gathered on a bitterly cold night to hear Edgar’s latest “research into the limits of experience,” as I had heard him say about his work. What would Jefferson and Lafayette have made of his dismal fantasies? They’d been among the spectators of the theater’s first production, in 1812, of The Rivals. This evening’s program promised “a tale of unrivaled horror & dismay, the like of which has rarely been heard on the stage of this or any other theatre.” The fainthearted were advised to leave before the start of Mr. Poe’s reading. The price of admission would be refunded without question. The screw to our anxiety had been cleverly turned by the time Edgar stepped into the footlights.

  He wore his black frock coat—he owned no other—a deep burgundy cravat, and a freshly laundered shirt, which, doubtless, had been recently boiled in Mrs. Clemm’s wash-tub. His unruly hair had the sheen and blackness of a raven, if you’ll pardon an obvious simile; it was combed more carefully than was usual for him. Standing alone onstage, he seemed a small, vulnerable man. But as he began to read, raising his eyes from time to time to meet ours across the gaslit footlights, I saw how sure he was of his work, if not of himself. His voice was neither powerful nor weak; its peculiar intonation had little to do with Edgar’s mildly southern drawl. He spoke in a low register—I’d never known him to raise it, not even in anger or excitement—that was beautifully modulated—musical, even. We hung on his every word as he read “The Premature Burial.” We made hardly a sound while we listened raptly to the hideous story of a man who believed himself coffined up and entombed while in a cataleptic trance. I heard echoes of what I’d told Poe concerning the horror of my own unnatural confinement earlier that month.

  I have it here, Moran. I have all his tales. Let me see. . . . Here it is: “The Premature Burial,” published in Philadelphia’s Dollar Newspaper, in 1844. For a good many years, I couldn’t bring myself to think about it, much less read it. Now I can. I’m over the terror of that night when I suffered my own premature burial. I wonder that Poe didn’t have me put into the coffin with a sheet of paper, a pencil, and a candle so that I might have written the tale myself. It is always this way for those of us who lack genius: We’re made to serve them who possess it.

  Here’s the passage that finally drove me from the theater.

  I could not summon courage to move. I dared not make the effort which was to satisfy me of my fate—and yet there was something at my heart which whispered me it was sure. Despair—such as no other species of wretchedness ever calls into being—despair alone urged me, after long irresolution, to uplift the heavy lids of my eyes. I uplifted them. It was dark—all dark. I knew that the fit was over. I knew that the crisis of my disorder had long passed. I knew that I had now fully recovered the use of my visual faculties—and yet it was dark—all dark—the intense and utter raylessness of the Night that endureth for evermore.

  I endeavored to shriek—, and my lips and my parched tongue moved convulsively together in the attempt—but no voice issued from the cavernous lungs, which, oppressed as if by the weight of some incumbent mountain, gasped and palpitated, with the heart, at every elaborate and struggling inspiration.

  I felt sweat dampen my face, my hair, my palms—the body’s response to fear. Edgar continued to read his tale; its sentences gathered relentlessly toward an overwhelming outcome.

  “The movement of the jaws, in this effort to cry aloud . . .”

  To have my night at the Thanatopsis Club revived in me was more than I could bear. I left the theater before Edgar had reached the end of his story. As I hurried toward the door, I noticed Dr. Mütter and Mary. He was gazing at me in amusement.

  I wanted company, Moran! I wanted to feel life—at least its phantom—move inside me. I didn’t want to drink. Lately, I’d indulged too much and too often, and the alcohol induced in me a sensation nearer death—how I imagined it—than life. Only once before had I been with a woman; it had not gone well. But I hurried toward a woman now as a freezing man would a fire. I knew I would regret it afterward, but I rushed through the streets toward the house where my brother had taken me for my manly initiation, my trial by combat. The streets were fairly empty, with the cold and the hour, which was well past the close of the Saturday business day. I watched the breath come out of my mouth as if I were giving up the ghost.

  Built in a style known as “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost” because of its three rooms, one atop another, the house stood near the corner of Dock and Carters streets. At that time of night, it lay in an unrelieved darkness conducive to plots and illicit meetings, criminal or amorous. The “visitors” to the house were mostly sailors, porters, road menders, and other laboring men. The three rooms smelled of carbolic soap, musk, stale tobacco, and sweat. The reek nauseated me, but I held down my rising gorge and followed a fat woman up the stairs. I didn’t care to look closely at her face.

  I remember a lumpy bed, the smudged chimney of a badly trimmed oil lamp, a stack of damp newspaper
s, the smell of an unemptied chamber pot. I will say this, Moran: The grossness of the scene drove all thoughts of burial from my mind. Terror had given way to numbness.

  The woman spoke perfunctorily, as if she’d been hired to carry rubbish to the ash heap. I wished to find in my imagination a spark of affection, but it was quenched by actuality. There is no disillusion like that caused by a visit to a brothel. Her breast felt strange in my hand, like a lump of raw dough. Her hair was brittle, her mouth a gash that made me think of poor Nathaniel Dickey’s ruined face. I toiled between her thighs until my mind’s blankness became a screen on which a garish phantasmagoria appeared: By turns, I saw myself as Dickey, Poe, Mütter. By turns, the bawd beneath me became Virginia, Mary in her “Sally cap,” and Ida. I watched in horror and in fascination while my varied selves clamped onto the bodies of these three virtuous women until I’d emptied myself of seed.

  It was disconcerting, Moran, to say the least. The thought revolved in my mind: What might be the issue of this misspent night? A monster, a prodigy, or merely what a frightened young man can sire on the body of a whore? Combinations so wayward and perverse must, of necessity, produce an unholy outcome.

  Listen to this, Moran; it’s from one of the master’s essays—“On Imagination,” published in the 1849 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger, the year he died. I wish I could have been a fly on the wall to see if he received the dreadful visitor with a welcome or a whimper.

  “. . . the Imagination is unlimited. Its materials extend throughout the universe.” Like the imponderable fluid! “Even out of deformities, it fabricates that Beauty which is at once its sole object and its inevitable test.”

  To imagine Beauty resulting from my having coupled with a prostitute is laughable! Had she a heart of gold (who can say she did not?), what seed would a man in my condition have sown? I was no better than she and, perhaps, a good deal worse. Edgar knew everything about literature and nothing about living men and women, who are not redeemed by the imagination as readily as its figments safely ensconced between the covers of a book.