The Dante Club

by Matthew Pearl

  “If he does not satisfy me at once, I shall carry him directly to the police and tell them everything!” Lowell said. “Haven’t I known he was pulling the wool over our eyes all along, Longfellow?”

  “Ha! Bring the police, do!” said Bachi. “They can help me collect! You wish to know my business? I’ve come for payment from that deadbeat rag in there.” His thick Adam’s apple rolled with the shame of his purpose. “Aye, you might guess I’m growing not a little tired of this tutoring line.”

  “Tutoring. You gave her lessons? In Italian?” Lowell asked.

  “The husband,” answered Bachi. “Only three sessions, some weeks ago—gratis, as far as he seems to think.”

  “But you returned to Italy!” Lowell said.

  Bachi laughed wistfully. “If only, signore! The closest I have come was to see off my brother, Giuseppe. I am afraid I have, shall we say, adversarial parties that make my own return impossible, for many moons at least.”

  “You saw your brother off! What cheek!” Lowell exclaimed. “You were in a mad rush on a boat and were going to meet the steamer! And you were armed with a satchel full of bogus money—we saw it!”

  “Now, see here!” Bachi said indignantly. “How could you know where I was that day?”

  “Answer me!”

  Bachi pointed accusingly at Lowell but then realized by the imprecision of his extended finger that he was queasy and rather drunk.

  He felt a wave of nausea travel up his throat. He caught it and choked it back inside, then covered his mouth and belched. When he was able to speak again, his breath was noxious, but he was tamer. “I met the steamer, yes. But not with any money—queer or otherwise. I wish to Jove I had a bag of gold dropped on my head, Professore. I was there that day to give my manuscript to my brother, Giuseppe Bachi, who had agreed to escort it to Italy.”

  “Your manuscript?” asked Longfellow.

  “A translation into English. Of Dante’s Inferno, if you must know. I heard about your labor, Signor Longfellow, and of your precious Dante Club, and at that I must laugh! In this Yankee Athens, you men speak of creating a national voice for yourselves. You plead with your countrymen to revolt against the British command of libraries. But did you ever think I, Pietro Bachi, might well have something to contribute to your work? That as a son of Italy, as one who has been born of its history, its dissensions, its struggles against the heavy thumb of the Church, there might be something inimitable in my love for the liberty sought by Dante?” Bachi paused. “No, no. You never asked me to Craigie House. Was it the malicious talk of my being a drunkard? Was it my disgrace from the College? What freedom here in America? You happily send us away to your factories, your wars, to waste into oblivion. You watch our culture trampled, our languages squelched, your dress become ours. Then with smiling faces you rob our literature from our shelves. Pirates. Damned literary pirates, every one of you.”

  “We’ve seen more of Dante’s heart than you can imagine,” Lowell replied. “It is your people, your country that orphaned him, might I remind you!”

  Longfellow motioned for Lowell to hold back, then said, “Signor Bachi, we observed you down at the harbor. Pray explain. Why were you sending this translation to Italy?”

  “I had heard that Florence was planning to honor your version of Inferno in the year’s final Dante Festival but that you had not yet finished your work and were in danger of missing the deadline. I had been translating Dante off and on for many years in my study, sometimes with the aid of old friends like Signor Lonza, when he was well enough. We thought, I suppose, that if we can show ourselves that Dante could be as alive in English as in Italian, we too could thrive in America. I had never considered seeing it published. But when poor Lonza died in the care of strangers, I knew nothing else but that our work must live. On the condition that I found a way to print it myself, my brother agreed to deliver my translation to a binder he knew in Rome and then take it to the Committee personally and plead our case. Well, I found a printer of gambling pamphlets and the like here in Boston to take the translation to press a week or so before Giuseppe was to leave—and for cheap. Wouldn’t you know the idiot printer did not finish till the last minute, and probably wouldn’t have finished at all had he not been in need of even my paltry coin. The rogue was in some sort of trouble for counterfeiting money for the use of local gamblers, and from what I understand, he was obliged to lock his doors in a hurry and lope.

  “By the time I got to the piers, I had to beg some shady Charon at the wharf to row me out in a small boat to the Anonimo. After I dropped the manuscript aboard the steamer, I returned directly to shore. The whole matter amounted to nothing, you shall be happy to hear. The Committee was ‘not at this time interested in further submissions to our festival.’” Bachi smirked at his own defeat.

  “That’s why the Committee chair sent you Dante’s ashes!” Lowell turned to Longfellow. “To assure you that your translation’s place in the festivities as the American representative would be secure!”

  Longfellow thought for a moment and said, “The difficulties of Dante’s text are so great that two or three independent renderings of it will be most acceptable to interested readers, my dear signore.”

  Bachi’s hard face cracked. “Do understand. I have always held dear the trust that you showed by hiring me at the College, and I do not question the value of your poetry. If I have done anything to shame myself because of my situation—” He stopped suddenly. After a pause, he continued: “Exile leaves none but the dampest hope. I thought perhaps—only perhaps—there was an opening for me to make Dante alive in a New World with my translation. Then how differently they would think of me in Italy!”

  “You.” Lowell accused him suddenly. “You cut that threat into Longfellow’s window to put a scare into us so Longfellow might stop the translation!”

  Bachi flinched, pretending not to understand. He removed a black bottle from his coat and heaved it to his lips, as though his throat were just a funnel to somewhere far away. He trembled when he finished. “Do not think me a sot, Professori. I never drink more than is good for me, at least not in good company. The mischief is, what is a man to do all by himself in the dull hours of a New England winter?” His brow darkened. “Now. Are we through here? Or do you wish to fag me further over my disappointments?”

  “Signore,” said Longfellow. “We must know what you taught Mr. Galvin. He speaks and reads Italian now?”

  Bachi threw his head back and laughed. “As little as you please! The man couldn’t read English if Noah Webster were standing by his side! He always dressed in your American soldier’s blue duds and gold buttons. He wanted Dante, Dante, Dante. It did not occur to him he must learn the language first. Che stranezza!”

  “Did you lend him your translation?” Longfellow asked.

  Bachi shook his head. “It was my hope to keep that enterprise entirely secret. I am sure we all know how your Mr. Fields reacts to any who try to rival his authors. In all events, I tried gratifying Signor Galvin’s strange wishes. I suggested we conduct the introductory Italian lessons by reading the Commedia together, line by line. But it was like reading alongside a dumb beast. Then he wished me to give a sermon on Dante’s Hell, but I refused on principle—if he wanted to engage me as a tutor, he must learn Italian.”

  “You told him you would not continue the lessons?” asked Lowell.

  “That would have given me the greatest pleasure, Professore. But one day he stopped calling on me. I have not been able to find him since—and have still not been compensated.”

  “Signore,” said Longfellow. “This is very important. Did Mr. Galvin ever speak of individuals in our own time, our own city, whom he envisioned in his understanding of Dante? You must consider whether he ever mentioned anyone at all. Perhaps persons connected in some way with the College who are interested in discrediting Dante.”

  Bachi shook his head. “He hardly spoke at all, Signor Longfellow, like a dumb ox. Is this something to do with
the College’s present campaign against your work?”

  Lowell’s attention perked up. “What do you know of it?”

  “I warned you of it when you came to see me, signore,” Bachi said. “I told you to take care of your Dante class, didn’t I? Do you recall when you saw me on the College Yard some weeks before that? I had received a message to meet a gentleman for a confidential interview—oh, how convinced I was that the Harvard fellows wanted me to return to my post! Imagine my stupidity! In truth, that blasted rogue was on some assignment to prove Dante’s ill effects on students, and wished me to assist.”

  “Simon Camp,” Lowell said through clenched teeth.

  “I almost punched his face in, I can tell you,” Bachi reported.

  “I wish to God you had, Signor Bachi,” Lowell said, sharing a smile with him. “He yet may prove the ruin of Dante through all this. What did you reply to him?”

  “How was I to respond? ‘Go to the Devil’ was all I could think to say. Here I am, barely able to buy my bread after so many years with the College, and who in the administration hires that jackass?”

  Lowell snickered. “Who else? It was Dr. Mann—” He stopped suddenly and whirled around with a significant glance at Longfellow. “Dr. Manning.”

  Caroline Manning swept up broken glass. “Jane—mop!” She called out to the maid for the second time, sulking at the pool of sherry drying on the rug of her husband’s library.

  As Mrs. Manning made her way out of the room, a ring sounded at the door. She pulled back the curtain just an inch to see Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Now, where was he coming from at this hour? She could hardly look at the poor man these last years the few times she saw him around Cambridge. She did not know how one could live through so much. How undefeatable he seemed. And here she was with a dustpan, looking positively like a housekeeper.

  Mrs. Manning apologized: Dr. Manning was not at home. She explained that he had earlier been expecting a guest and had wished privacy. He and his guest must have gone for a walk, though she found this a bit queer in such ghastly weather. And they had left some broken glass in the library. “But you know how men drink sometimes,” she added.

  “Could they have taken the carriage out?” Longfellow asked.

  Mrs. Manning said that the horse distemper would have precluded that: Dr. Manning had strictly forbidden even the brief removal of their horses. But she agreed to walk Longfellow to the barn.

  “For Heaven’s sake,” she said when they found no trace of Dr. Manning’s coach and horses. “Something is the matter, isn’t it, Mr. Longfellow? For Heaven’s sake,” she repeated.

  Longfellow did not answer.

  “Has something happened to him? You must tell me at once!”

  Longfellow’s words came slowly. “You must remain at your house to wait. He’ll return safely, Mrs. Manning. I promise.” The Cambridge winds had grown blustery and painful to the skin.

  “Dr. Manning,” Fields said with his eyes downcast on Longfellow’s rug twenty minutes later. After leaving the Galvin house, they had found Nicholas Rey, who had secured a police carriage and a healthy horse, which he used to drive them to Craigie House. “He has been our worst adversary from the beginning. Why didn’t Teal take him long before this?”

  Holmes stood leaning on Longfellow’s desk. “Because he is the worst, my dear Fields. As Hell deepens, narrows, the sinners become more flagrant, more culpable—less repentant for what they have done. Until reaching Lucifer, who initiated all evil in the world. Healey, as the first to be punished, would have been hardly cognizant of his refusal at all—that is the nature of his ‘sin,’ which rests upon a lukewarm act.”

  Patrolman Rey stood tall in the center of the study. “Gentlemen, you must review the sermons given by Mr. Greene in the last week so we can discern where Teal would take Manning.”

  “Greene started this series of sermons with the Hypocrites,” explained Lowell. “Then he went on to the Falsifiers, including Counterfeiters. Finally, in the sermon witnessed by me and Fields, he went to the Traitors.”

  Holmes said, “Manning was no Hypocrite—he was after Dante inside and out. And Traitors against Family have no bearing on this.”

  “Then we are left with the Falsifiers and the Traitors against One’s Nation,” said Longfellow.

  “Manning did not engage in any real trickery,” Lowell said. “He concealed from us his activities, true, but this was not his primary mode of aggression. Many of the shades in Dante’s Hell have been guilty of cartloads of sins, but it is the sin that defines their actions which determines their fate in Hell. The Falsifiers must change one form to another to incur their contrapasso—like Sinon the Greek, who tricked the Trojans into welcoming the wooden horse.”

  “The Traitors against Nation undermine the good of one’s people,” Longfellow said. “We find them in the ninth circle—the lowest.”

  “Fighting our Dante projects, in this case,” said Fields.

  Holmes considered this. “That’s it, isn’t it? We’ve learned that Teal dresses in his uniform when involved in his Dantesque mode, whether he is studying Dante or preparing his murders. This shines light into the landscape of his mind: In his sickness, he swaps guarding the Union with guarding Dante.”

  Longfellow said, “And Teal would have witnessed Manning’s schemes from his caretaker post in University Hall. For Teal, Manning is among the worst betrayers of the cause he now sets himself at war to protect. Teal has saved Manning for the end.”

  Nicholas Rey said, “What would be the punishment we’d be looking for?”

  They all waited for Longfellow to answer. “The Traitors are placed wholly in ice, from the neck down, in ‘a lake, that from the frost the semblance had of glass, and not of water.’”

  Holmes groaned. “Every puddle in New England has frozen over in the last two weeks. Manning could be anywhere, and we have but one tired horse with which to search!”

  Rey shook his head. “You gentlemen remain here in Cambridge and look for Teal and Manning. I shall drive to Boston to find help.”

  “What shall we do if we see Teal?” Holmes asked.

  “Use this.” Rey handed them his police rattle.

  The four scholars began their patrol of the deserted banks of the Charles River, of Beaver Creek, near Elmwood, and of Fresh Pond. Looking out by the weak halos of gas lanterns, they were at such high mental alert that they barely noticed how indifferently the night passed without granting them the slightest advance. They wrapped themselves in multiple coats, not marking the frost collecting on their beards (or in Dr. Holmes’s case, on his dense eyebrows and sideburns). How strange and silent the world seemed without the occasional clap of a horse’s trot. It was a silence that seemed to stretch all the way across the North, interrupted only by the rude belches of bulging locomotives in the distance constantly transporting wares from one stop to the next.

  Each Dantean imagined in great detail how at that very moment in time Patrolman Rey pursued Dan Teal through Boston, apprehending and shackling him in the name of the Commonwealth, how Teal would explain himself, rage, justify, but yield peaceably to justice, Iago-like never to speak of his acts again. They passed each other several times, Longfellow and Holmes and Lowell and Fields, offering encouragement as they circled the frozen waterways.

  They began to talk—Dr. Holmes first, of course. But the others also comforted themselves with the exchange of hushed tones. They spoke about writing memorial verses, about new books, about political doings they had not been attuned to as of late; Holmes retold the story of the early years of his medical practice, when he had hung out a sign—THE SMALLEST FEVERS GRATEFULLY RECEIVED—before his window was smashed by drunkards.

  “I’ve talked too much, haven’t I?” Holmes shook his head in self-admonishment. “Longfellow, I wish I could make you talk more about yourself.”

  “No,” Longfellow replied thoughtfully. “I believe I never do.”

  “I know you never do! But you confessed to me
once.” Holmes thought twice. “When you first met Fanny.”

  “No, I don’t think I ever did.”

  They traded partners several times as though they were dancing; they traded conversations, too. Sometimes all four walked together and it seemed that their weight would crack the frozen earth below. Always they walked arm in arm, bracing each other.

  It was a clear night, at least. The stars sat fixed in perfect order. They heard the hoof taps of the horse conveying Nicholas Rey, who was shrouded by the steam of the animal’s breath. Each silently envisioned the sight of unrestrained achievement in the young man’s striking countenance as he approached, but his face was steeled. No sightings of Teal or Augustus Manning, he reported. He had recruited a half-dozen other patrolmen to comb the length of the Charles River, but only four other horses could be secured from quarantine. Rey rode away with admonitions of care to the Fireside Poets, promising to continue his search into the morning.

  Which of them suggested, at half-past three, to rest for a spell at Lowell’s house? They spread out, two in the music room and two in the adjoining study, the rooms mirroring each other in their layout and with back-to-back hearths. Fanny Lowell was drawn downstairs by the puppy’s anxious barks. She made tea for them, but Lowell explained nothing to her and only mumbled about the blasted distemper. She had been worried sick over his absence. That made them finally realize how late it was, and Lowell dispatched William, the hired man, to deliver messages to the others’ houses. They settled on a thirty-minute lull at Elmwood—no longer—and drifted off at the two firesides.

  At the hour of a motionless world, the warmth fell squarely on the side of Holmes’s face. His entire body was so deeply fatigued that he hardly noticed when he found himself pulled to his feet again to tread softly along a narrow fence outside. The ice on the ground had begun to thaw rapidly with a sudden rise in temperature, and slush clotted the streams of water. The ground under his boots was set at a steep incline, and he felt himself crouch forward as though going uphill. He looked out on the Cambridge Common, where he could make out the Revolutionary War cannons coughing out billows of smoke and the massive Washington Elm that, with its thousand-branched fingertips reached in all directions. Holmes looked back and could see Longfellow gliding slowly toward him. Holmes motioned for him to hurry. He did not like Longfellow to be alone for too long. But a rumble drew the doctor’s attention.