The Pale Blue Eye

by Louis Bayard

  “Did you kill Leroy Fry?”

  The question hung there for a good long time before he seemed able to interpret it. Dazed, he shook his head.

  I pressed on. “Did you kill Randolph Ballinger?”

  Another shake of the head.

  “Did you have anything to do with desecrating their bodies?” I asked.

  “No! May I be struck dead in my tracks if—”

  “One body at a time,” I said. “You don’t deny, I guess, that you threatened both men?”

  “Well . . . you see, as it relates to Ballinger, that was . . .” His hands began to twitch by his sides. “That was my choler speaking. I never meant it, not really. And as to Leroy Fry, why . . .” His chest swelled like a pigeon’s. “I never once threatened him, I merely . . . I declared my prerogatives as a man and as a soldier. We parted ways, and I never gave him another thought.”

  I squeezed my eyes into buttonholes. “Mr. Poe,” I said, “you have to admit, it’s a very disturbing pattern. Men who cross you somehow end up on the wrong end of a noose. With rather important organs carved out of their bodies.”

  He thrust out his chest again, but something must have popped inside him, for it wouldn’t swell quite as far this time. His head tipped to one side, and he said, in a soft and fatigued voice:

  “Mr. Landor, if I were to kill every cadet who had abused me during my brief tenure here, I’m afraid you would find the Corps of Cadets reduced to less than a dozen. And even those would remain on the barest sufferance.”

  Well, Reader, you know how it can be. You tilt with a man, you whang him with your lance, and then, out of nowhere, he throws off all his armor— as though to say, Here I am—and you see at once there was never any point in tilting. A whole world of pain has already been inflicted.

  Poe dropped into the rocking chair. Made a close study of his finger-nails. The quiet once more climbed round us.

  “If you must know,” he said, “I have been a figure of fun from my very first day here. My manner, my person, my—my aesthetics, Mr. Landor— everything that is purest and truest in me has, without fail, been held up to scorn and ridicule. Had I thousand lifetimes, I could not begin to redress all the injuries that have been done me. A man like me . . .” He paused. “A man like me soon gives up any thought of retribution and contents himself with aspiration. With rising, Mr. Landor. In that quarter alone lies solace.”

  He looked up at me, grimacing.

  “I know,” he said. “I am guilty of speaking out of turn. I’m sure I am guilty of a great many things—intemperateness, flights of fancy—but never that. Never murder.”

  And now his eyes bored into mine, sounding me as never before.

  “Do you believe me, Mr. Landor?”

  I drew a long breath. Stared at the ceiling for a time, stared at him again. Then folded my hands behind my back and made a single turn of the room.

  “Here’s what I believe, Mr. Poe. I believe you should take better care with what you say and do. Do you think you might manage that?”

  He nodded: the faintest pulse.

  “For now,” I said, “I can probably hold off Captain Hitchcock and the rest of the hounds. But if you tell me one more lie, Mr. Poe, you’re out in the cold. They can clap you in irons, and I won’t lift a finger to defend you, do you understand?”

  Again he nodded.

  “Well, then,” I said, casting my eyes about the room. “There’s no Bible to be had, so the oath will just have to be between ourselves. I, Edgar A. Poe . . .”

  “I, Edgar A. Poe . . .”

  “Do solemnly swear to tell the truth . . .”

  “Do solemnly swear to tell the truth . . .”

  “So help me Landor.”

  “So help me . . .” The laugh caught him midthroat. “So help me Landor.”

  “Well, that’s done, then. You may go now, Mr. Poe.”

  He stood. Took a half step toward the door and then surprised himself by taking a half step back. His face grew flushed, and a timid smile began to trouble those thin lips.

  “If it’s all the same to you, Mr. Landor, might I stay for a short while?”

  Our eyes met for a second, but it was a long second. Too long for him: he turned to the window and began to stammer into the cold air.

  “I’ve no particular purpose in staying. Nothing . . . particularly germane to add to your inquiries, I’ve just—I’ve come to enjoy your company more than anyone’s, really—except for hers, I mean. And lacking her, why, it seems the next best thing would be to . . .” He shook his head. “I’m afraid words are failing me today.”

  They failed me, too, for a short while. I remember looking everywhere I could—everywhere but at him.

  “Well, if you’d like to stay,” I said, airily, “that would be all right. I’m a bit strapped for company myself these days. Maybe . . .” I was already moving to retrieve my little cache from beneath the bed. “Maybe you’d care for a little Monongahela?”

  Impossible to miss it: the light of hope that sprang up in his eyes. The same light, probably, in mine. We were both of us men who needed to dull the sore spots.

  And that was how we rose to the next level of closeness: on fumes of whiskey. We drank each time he came, and in that first week, he came every night. Crept out of South Barracks and stole across the Plain to my hotel. The route might change, but once he reached my room, the ritual was the same. He would knock—just once—and then push the door open with great deliberateness, as though he were shouldering aside a boulder.

  And I would have his drink waiting for him, and we would sit—sometimes on furniture, sometimes on the floor—and we would talk.

  Talk for many hours in succession. Almost never, I should say, about the inquiries. And freed of that burden, we could wend in any direction, argue any point. Had Andrew Jackson been wrong to reload his gun during that long-ago duel with Dickinson? Poe said yes; I took Jackson’s side. And that aide of Napoleon’s who killed himself because his promotion was late? Poe said he was noble; I took the view he was an ass. What was the handsomest color on a brunette? Me: red. Poe: aubergine. (He would never have said “purple.”) We argued over whether Iroquois were fiercer than Navaho and whether Mrs. Drake was seen to best advantage in comedy or tragedy and whether the pianoforte was more expressive than the clavichord.

  One night, I found myself having to defend the position that I was without a soul. I wasn’t even aware it was my position until I declared it, but that’s what happens when two men are talking the dark into a truce: they take hold of a line, and they follow it all the way to the end. And so I told Poe we were all just bundles of atoms, crashing against one another, retreating and advancing and then finally stopping. Nothing more.

  He advanced any number of metaphysical proofs against me. I was impressed by none of them. At last, driven to distraction, he began to wave his hands. “It’s there, I tell you! Your soul, your anima, it exists. A little rusty from disuse, yes, but . . . I see it, Mr. Landor, I feel it.”

  And it was then he warned me it would rise up one day and confront me head on, and I would realize my error, ah, too late!

  Well, he could go on in that vein for hours. But we were keeping our tongues quite pickled with the Monongahela. And under its cool fire, I could let go at times and listen, with a kind of relief, to Poe venturing down his tangents: the Beautiful and the True, the transcategorical hybrid, Saint-Pierre’s Etudes de la Nature—oh, it makes my head throb now to think of it all, but at the time, it passed through my hair like a zephyr.

  I don’t know when it happened exactly, but at some juncture, we ceased to refer to each other as “Mister.” The titles simply dropped away, and we became “Landor” and “Poe.” It sounded to my ear like two old bachelors renting adjoining rooms—harmless madmen living off the remnants of our family fortunes, lost in a kind of unending speculation about things. True, I had never known anyone to do that except in books, so over time, I began to wonder about this book Poe and I were wr
iting. How long could it go on? Wouldn’t the Army step in at some point? Wouldn’t his superiors catch Cadet Poe some night as he floated back to South Barracks? Trap him just as Ballinger had done? Or, at the very least, ask questions?

  Poe had the usual bravado about such things, but he listened with interest when I informed him there was a young enlisted man who was itching for pocket change. The very next morning, with my blessing, he took a hoard of quarters to Private Cochrane, and from that night on, he had an Army escort to steer him safely to and from my hotel. In the execution of this duty, Cochrane showed gifts we would never have suspected. He could crouch like a panther and scout terrain like an Indian, and once, when he saw a cadet guard approaching, he dragged Poe straight into the nearest hollow, where they both lay, flat as alligators, until the danger had passed. Poe and I were always trying to show our gratitude, but every time we asked Cochrane up for a nip of whiskey, he declined on account of laundry.

  You may imagine, Reader, that jawing on as we did night after night, Poe and I were bound to exhaust the world’s subjects and turn, like cannibals, on one another. And so I asked him to tell me about swimming the James River and serving in the Junior Morgan Rifleman and meeting Lafayette and studying at the University of Virginia and going to sea to seek his fortune and waging war for Greece’s freedom. There was no limit to his fund of stories, or maybe there was, for every so often he would, by way of resting, inquire after my humble history. That was how he came to ask me, one night:

  “Mr. Landor, why did you ever come to the Highlands?”

  “For my health,” I said.

  It was true. Dr. Gabriel Gard, a Saint John’s Park physician with an income earned largely from never-quite-dying invalids, had diagnosed me with consumption and told me my only hope of living another six months was to leave the miasma and travel up—up—to the Highlands. He told me of a Chambers Street land speculator who had, in the eleventh hour, heeded the same advice and was now plump as a turkey and giving thanks on his knees every Sunday in the Cold Spring chapel.

  I was more inclined to die where I was; it was my wife who agitated for a move. The way Amelia figured it, her family bequest would pay for the new house, and my savings would cover the rest. And so we found our cottage by the Hudson, and it was Amelia who, by some quirk of fate, grew ill—very ill—and died before another three months had passed.

  “And to think,” I said, “we came here for my health. Well, Dr. Gard was right, after all. I got better and better, and today”—I tapped my chest— “today I’m nearly clear. Just a little bit of rot in the left lung.”

  “Oh,” said Poe, dark as tar. “There’s a bit of rot in all of us.”

  “And for once,” I said, “we’re in agreement.”

  Poe, as I’ve said, could hold forth on many subjects, but he had only one Subject: Lea. And how could I blame him for wanting to talk about her? What point was there in telling him how compromising love could be, how it kept a man from doing his job? And what possible point could there be in revealing the truth about her condition? He would learn it soon enough, and until then, wasn’t it just as well to leave him his illusions? Illusions die hard in any case, and Poe was, like every young lover, supremely uninterested in what anyone else had to say on the subject—unless it agreed with his own findings.

  “Have you ever loved someone, Landor?” he asked one night. “The way I love Lea, I mean? Purely and—and inconsolably and . . .”

  That was as far as he could go. He fell into a kind of trance, and I had to speak a little louder to be heard.

  “Well,” I said, tapping the rim of my whiskey glass, “do you mean romantic love? Or love of any sort?”

  “Love,” he answered, simply. “In all its incarnations.”

  “Because I was going to say my daughter.”

  Funny that her face should have presented itself. Before Amelia’s. Before Patsy’s. And it was a sign of something—trust? drunkenness?—that I could allow myself to climb out on that particular limb. And feel safe there! For a few seconds.

  “Of course,” I added, “it’s a different sort of feeling when it’s your child. It’s total, it’s . . .” I stared into my glass. “It’s helpless, it’s doomed . . .”

  Poe watched me for several moments, then leaned forward and, with his elbows jabbing his knees, threw a whisper into the dark.

  “Landor.”

  “Yes?”

  “What if she were to come back? Tomorrow? What would you do?”

  “I’d say hello.”

  “No, don’t evade me now, you’ve come too far. Would you forgive her? On the spot?”

  “If she came back, I’d do much more than forgive her, I’d . . . yes. . . .”

  He was delicate enough to leave it there. Only much later in the evening did he raise the topic again. In a voice hushed with awe, he said:

  “I believe she will come back, Landor. I believe we create . . . magnetic fields for the people we love. So that no matter how far they travel—no matter how much they resist our pull—they must come back to us in the end. They cannot help themselves, any more than the moon can stop orbiting the earth.”

  And I said—because it was the only thing I could think to say—“Thank you, Mr. Poe.”

  God knows how we survived, getting so little sleep. I could at least steal some winks the next morning, but Poe had to be up at dawn. I don’t think he ever got more than three hours. Sleep, if it wanted him, would have to come and get him. Some nights it took him in midsentence. His head would wobble, his eyelids would slam down, his brain would be snuffed like a wick . . . but the glass would never stir from his palm, and he might wake up ten minutes later, ready to finish the thought just where he had left off. One night, while I was sitting in the rocking chair, I saw him fall asleep on the floor right in the middle of reciting “ To a Skylark.” His mouth dropped open, his head rolled to one side and came to rest on my foot, pinning it to the ground. Here was a quandary: to wake him or leave him lie?

  I took the latter course.

  The tapers had dwindled down by now, the fire had died, the shutters were closed . . . but it was warm there in the dark. All that talk, I thought, stoking the furnace. I looked down at that sleeping head with its thin, rumpled hair, and I realized then that I had come to organize my days around—around Poe, I guess, or at least around these moments. They had become part of my mind’s calendar, and I depended on them, the way you depend on seasons to follow one another or the back door to stick or your cat to grab the same splash of sunlight every afternoon.

  He woke twenty minutes later. Sat up, rubbed the sleep from his eyes. Gave the room a bleary smile.

  “Were you dreaming?” I asked.

  “No. I was thinking.”

  “Still?”

  “I was thinking it would be delightful if we could all leave this infernal place. You and I and Lea.”

  “And why would we do such a thing?” I asked.

  “Oh, there’s nothing to keep us here any longer. I have no great affection for this Academy, any more than you do.”

  “And Lea?”

  “She will follow Love, won’t she?”

  I didn’t answer. But I couldn’t pretend that I myself had never thought of leaving. Or that I hadn’t thought—from the very moment I found the Byron engraving in his trunk—that Cadet Fourth Classman Poe might be better served by new masters.

  “Well, then,” I said. “Where should we go?”

  “Venice.”

  I raised an eyebrow at that.

  “Why not Venice?” he carried on. “They understand poets there. And if a man isn’t a poet, Venice will make him one. I swear, Landor, before you’ve spent even six months there, you’ll be penning Petrarchan sonnets and epics in blank verse.”

  “I’d settle for a nice lemon tree.”

  He was striding round the room now, trying to corner his vision. “Lea and I will be married—why not? We could find one of those old mansions, one of those wonderfull
y decaying Faubourg Saint-Germain sorts of places, and we’d all live together. Just like this, with the shutters closed. Reading and writing . . . endless conversation. Creatures of the Night, Landor!”

  “Has a gloomy ring to it,” I said.

  “Oh, there would still be crimes, old soul, you needn’t fear. Venice has plenty of that, even their crime has poetry, it has passion! American crimes are all anatomy.” He brought his hands together in a decisive motion. “Yes, we must leave this place.”

  “You forget one thing: this little job of ours.”

  It would keep intruding, this Academy business, no matter how much we tried to ignore it. Poe actually welcomed the interruptions more than I did. There was, I remember, a florid, almost greedy look to him when he asked me if I’d seen Ballinger’s body. He most definitely wanted to know what it had looked like.