by Louis Bayard
I was still awake when the morning drumbeat came. Awake, but with a curious feeling of shuffled senses. It seemed to me, sitting up in my bed, that the cinder of dawn outside my window had a smell, like boot blacking, and that the coverlet tasted of mushrooms, and that the very air around me had the substance of clay. I was, in short, somewhere between clarity and exhaustion, and after a time, the exhaustion held sway. I fell asleep still sitting up, and woke a little after noon.
Dressed in a hurry and stumbled over to the mess hall and stood for a moment watching the cadet-animals devouring their dinner, so lost in my several thoughts that I didn’t notice Cesar the steward approaching. He greeted me like an old friend and asked if I wouldn’t rather eat with the officers in the ordinary upstairs, yes, sir, the ordinary was a much better place for a gentleman like me. . . .
“And I’d be most obliged,” I told him, smiling. “But I was looking for Mr. Poe, would you know what happened to him?”
Oh, Mr. Poe had told the mess-hall captain he was feeling poorly and might he be excused to report to the hospital. That was some half an hour ago.
Report to the hospital? Well, I thought, he’d used that ploy before. He hadn’t prepared for his sectional, maybe. Or else he was haunting Lea’s doorstep, begging for an audience.
Or . . .
Yes, it was an idea that might have been lifted from one of Mrs. Poe’s melodramas. But in my defense, I had very little experience in breaking other people’s hearts, and it threw me out of whack, I think—the idea that Poe might take the Romantic way out. And so I hurriedly thanked Cesar and pressed a coin into his palm and heard him say as I was turning:
“You don’t look good, Mr. Landor.”
I didn’t stay to argue. I was already hurrying toward South Barracks. Bounding up the stairs to the second floor, taking ten long strides down the hallway. . . .
There, just outside Poe’s door, stood a man I’d never seen before. An older man, three inches shy of six feet, lean and bristly with a long proud hawk nose and a pair of shaggy brows that looked to belong to someone much older. His arms were crossed like swords, and he was . . . lounging, I was going to say, but though he inclined against the wall, his body didn’t bend an inch, any more than a ladder would bend if you leaned it in a corner.
Seeing me, he tipped himself perpendicular. Inclined his head and said:
“I wonder if you could tell me where I could find a Mr. Poe.”
A high flinty voice, with the ghost of a Scottish burr rising up through every r. I stared at him, I’m afraid. He didn’t belong here! No uniform, no notion of the Academy’s schedule. And a testiness about the place, as though it were a maze thrown in his path by an evil djinn.
“Do you know,” I answered at last, “I was wondering the same thing.”
And what sort of business would you have with Mr. Poe? That was the question that beetled from his pale high-boned face. It was the question, anyway, that I fell over myself answering, like a plebe before the Board of Examiners.
“He’s been . . . I suppose you’d call it assisting the Academy in some— some inquiries I’m undertaking. Or he was assisting. . . .”
“Are you an officer, sir?”
“No! No, I’m just . . . I’m a fellow they keep around. For the time being.” Stuck for words, I extended a hand. “Gus Landor,” I said.
“How do you do? I’m John Allan.”
I don’t know how to describe it, Reader, except to say it was a bit like watching a fairy-tale figure crawl from the page. I knew him only through the medium of Poe, you see, and like all the figures in Poe’s past, he had a fantastical quality in the telling, and I would have no more expected to meet him than get knocked down in the street by a centaur.
“Mr. Allan,” I said, in a half whisper. “Mr. Allan of Richmond.”
The hawk eyes flashed. The thatches of brow merged. “I see he has mentioned me, then.”
“Only in terms of highest . . . respect and honor. . . .”
He put out his hand then. Turned slightly away and said, with stiff accents, “You’re kind to say so, I’m sure. I know full well how the boy speaks of me to other people.”
Oddly enough, I warmed to him then. A little. It can’t always be nice, I thought, being a fairy-tale figure. And so I opened the door to Poe’s quarters and suggested we both wait inside. I took his coat for him and draped it on the mantel. I asked him if he had just come up from New York.
He nodded with some pride. “I managed to catch one of the last steamers of the season. Had to argue down the fare, naturally. If all goes well, I intend to catch the next one back. It was suggested I stay at the hotel, but I see no point in having my pocket picked by some military provisioner when the government does a good enough job already.”
There was not a trace of whining in these words, I should say that. Everything he said reeked of principle, fixed in tablets. I suppose, more than anyone else, he reminded me of Thayer, with this difference: Thayer had made himself hard for an idea, not a sum.
“Well, now,” I said. “I understand you’ve recently remarried.”
“That is so.”
He accepted my congratulations, and then we were quiet, and I was already composing words of farewell when I saw a tremor pass over Allan’s face. Found him gauging my own face.
“See here,” he said. “Mr. Landor, is it?”
“Yes.”
“You wouldn’t mind a bit of friendly advice?”
“Not at all.”
“I believe you mentioned the Academy has enlisted Edgar in some— some inquiries, I think you said.”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“I cannot emphasize too strongly that this boy is not to be entrusted with high responsibilities.”
“Oh.” I stopped. I blinked. “Well, I must say, Mr. Allan, I’ve found him to be most sincere and—obliging . . .”
I couldn’t finish because he was smiling at me now, for the first time, and because this smile could have lanced a boil.
“You must not know him well then, Mr. Landor. I regret to tell you he is one of the least sincere, least truthful fellows I have ever met. Indeed, I make a point of refusing to believe a single thing he says.”
I would have guessed that to be his last word on the subject—it had been close enough to my own last word. What I didn’t count on was the relish with which Allan would warm to this particular theme.
“Do you know,” he said, jabbing the air, “before that boy came to the Academy, I gave him a hundred dollars—a hundred dollars!—to pay his Army substitute. I was told it was the only way the Army would release him to come here. Well, two months later, I received the most vile and threatening letter from this same substitute, a Sergeant Bully Graves.”
I wish you could have heard him pronounce that name, Reader! As though someone had dragged offal into his parlor.
“This Sergeant Bully Graves informed me that he had never received his payment. He informed me that when pressed, Edgar had said, ‘Mr. Allan would not part with the money.’ Mr. Allan would not part with the money,” he repeated, pounding each word into his palm. “Oh, but that is not all. Our Edgar made a point of telling Sergeant Graves that I was ‘not very often sober.’”
He came toward me then, as though the words had come straight from my mouth. Stood two feet away from me and smiled. “Do I appear sober enough to you, Mr. Landor?”
I replied that he did indeed. Unappeased, he went to have words with the window.
“My late wife was fond of him, and for her sake, I have put up with his profligacy and his snobbery—his affectations. Even his rank ingratitude. No longer. The bank is closing, Mr. Landor. He must stand on his own feet or give way altogether.”
And in that moment, it was as if Poe and I had joined ranks in some curious way. For hadn’t we both, at some time or other, tried to bend ramrod-straight fathers who could never in a million lifetimes be bent?
“Well,” I said, “he’s awfully young, i
sn’t he? And I don’t believe he has any other means of support. The Poe family, I’m told, has fallen on hard times.”
“He has the United States Army, does he not? Let him finish what he started. If he lives up to the terms of his appointment—an appointment, by the way, that I secured for him—if he completes his four years, then his future will be assured. If not, well . . .” He turned his palms up. “It will be one more in a string of failures. And I will shed not one tear.”
“But you see, Mr. Allan, your son—”
That was as far as I got. His head snapped round, and his eyes got small as pins. “What did you say?”
“Your son,” I repeated, faintly.
“So he’s told you that, too?” A new tone now: slow-kindling, all-suffering. “He is not my son, Mr. Landor, I wish to make that clear. He is no relation to me whatever. My late wife and I took pity on him and housed him just as one would a stray dog or an injured bird. Never once did I adopt him, nor did I ever give him to understand that I would. Such claims as he has on me are the same as any other Christian soul. No more, no less.”
The words poured right off the wheel. He had made this speech before.
“From the time he reached his majority,” Allan continued, “he has been a continual irritant to me. Now that I have remarried and taken on the claims of genuine relations—flesh-and-blood relations—I see no point in carrying him any longer. From this day forward, he must go his own way. And that’s what I mean to tell him, by God.”
Of course he does, I thought. And this is just the dress rehearsal.
“What I was trying to say before, Mr. Allan, is that your—your Edgar has been under some strain in recent days. I don’t know if this would be the best time to—”
“Now’s as good a time as any,” he said, flatly. “The boy’s been mollycoddled long enough. If he wishes to be a man, then let him give up these childish dependencies.”
Well, it happens sometimes, Reader. Someone is speaking, and you hear suddenly an overtone, which is not their voice at all but the echo of someone else’s, and you know then that these same words were spoken many years earlier, wielded like a mace against the very man who’s wielding them now, and you understand these words are the truest legacy any family can have, and the worst. You know all of this, and still you hate these words, and you hate the man who’s saying them.
And realizing that was the same as being free. I found I no longer had any need to appease this merchant, this Scotsman, this Christian. I no longer had any need to pretend he was taller. I could stand squarely on my feet and peer straight into his goat eyes and say:
“So, Mr. Allan! You will slap this young man down and wash your hands of him and the past twenty years in, oh, five minutes—four, if he doesn’t talk back—and then be on the next steamer back. Oh, you are a frugal man.”
His head tilted an inch to the side.
“See here, Mr. Landor, I don’t like your tone.”
“And I don’t like your eyes.”
It surprised us both, I think. That I should grab him by his marseille waistcoat and throw all my weight against him until he was flat against the wall. I could hear the window frame shudder behind me. I could feel the good hard flesh beneath his coat. I could smell my breath on his face.
“You bastard,” I said. “He’s worth a hundred of you.”
And when was the last time, I wonder, that anyone had dared to lay a hand on Jock Allan? Not for a generation, probably. Which may explain why he put up so little fight.
But then I had not much fight left in me, either. I freed his waistcoat and took a step back and said, “If it’s any consolation, Mr. Allan, he’s worth a thousand of me.”
By the time I left South Barracks, my eyes were stinging, and it was a relief, honestly, to feel the cold north wind sweep in and set my whole face aflame. I walked quickly, and I didn’t look back until I had reached the officers’ quarters. And it was then I saw, bearing in a slow, straight line toward his barracks, the tiny figure in torn cloak and leather shako. Head tucked into the wind. Moving toward his latest doom.
Narrative of Gus Landor
35
December 12th
TAKE COURAGE
That was the only thing I could think to tell him in the end. I scrawled it on the back of a trade bill and left it the only place I could be sure he’d find it: under our secret rock in Kosciuzko’s Garden.
And having accomplished that, I lingered there, I don’t know why. Maybe it was just having the place to myself. I sat on that stone bench, gazing out across the Hudson, listening to the bubbling of the spring in its basin—and asking myself what, what did I mean by leaving such a message? Why should Poe hearken to anything I said? And if I was just trying to clear my conscience, how could I expect a pair of words to perform such heavy labor?
Questions, one upon another, and pricking through the questions, shards of the scene that lay at my feet: a blush of feldspath, a marbling of water, an ear-shaped peak disappearing into a beard-shadow.
“Good morning.”
Lea Marquis stood before me. Flushed with walking. Her cape hanging negligently on her, as though someone had hurled it at her as she passed. Nothing on her head but a bonnet of the palest rose, toppled to one side.
My surprise kept me from locating my manners straight off, but I was on my feet before too long, motioning toward the bench.
“Please,” I said. “Please sit down.”
She took care to leave a yard of space between us and did nothing more at first than rub her slippers against each other.
“Not so very cold today,” I said. “Not so cold as yesterday, I think.”
I remembered then—too late—how it had gone for poor Poe when he tried to talk about the weather. I braced myself for the rebuke . . . but none came.
“Well,” I said after a while, “I’m glad for the company. It doesn’t feel right after all, keeping such a sweet spot to myself.”
She nodded, briefly, as though to reassure me that she was, in fact, hearing me. Then, frowning into her lap, she said:
“I’m sorry Edgar and I coaxed you into our little spectacle at Uncle Gouv’s. We were having a bit of sport, and we weren’t . . . we didn’t properly consider the consequences. For other people, I mean.”
“There were none on my side, I assure you, Miss Marquis. And even Mr. Poe, I’m told, escaped all—”
“Yes, I know.”
“So there’s . . . not really . . . but I do thank you. . . .”
“Of course,” she said.
And having fulfilled that duty, she looked up once more, and her eyes now actively sought mine, and in those pale irises a peculiar luster had taken hold. It seemed to quicken her whole frame, so that I felt her in a way I never had before.
“Mr. Landor, I see no point in coyness or dissembling. I followed you here with a mission in mind.”
“Then by all means, carry it out.”
She paused to work her mouth around it. “I know . . .” Another pause. “I know that my brother has been, for some time now, the object of your inquiries. I know you suspect him of doing terrible things. I know you would place him in arrest, if you had proof.”
“Miss Marquis,” I said, blushing like a boy. “You must understand, I—I can’t discuss—”
“Then allow me to speak plainly enough for both of us. My brother is innocent of anyone’s death.”
“Spoken like a true sister. I’d have expected no less of you.”
“It is the truth.”
“Then it will out.”
“No,” she answered. “I’m not certain that it will.”
Abruptly, she stood. Advanced toward the river and stared down the escarpment.
“Mr. Landor,” she said, her back still turned to me. “What will it take to call you off ?”
“Why, Miss Marquis, I’m surprised at you. Surely we’re not well enough acquainted to be bribing each other.”
She wheeled round, took a step towa
rd the bench.
“Would you like that?” she cried. “ To be better acquainted?”
What a sight she was then, Reader! Cruel in the lips, hard in the eye. A positively indecent flare to her nostrils. All icicles, with a volcano underneath. In every way, magnificent.
“Actually,” I said, “I’d prefer to leave you to this view.”
And just like that, all the fire, all the ice were consumed. She stood there with her arms hanging limp.
“Ah,” she said, in a chastened tone. “I was right, then. You weren’t after that.” She laughed. “I’m afraid you will have to go down as one more of Mother’s failed intrigues. Very well, then, what if I promise you will never have to marry me? Or set eyes on me again?”
