“Of course,” I said, though I wanted to keep silent.
“And just think of the good that can be done for their cause by a famous man who has nothing to lose. A man with nothing to lose has nothing to fear, am I correct? And this is the quality, precisely the quality that renders a man a hero. Think of the glory to be attained! Imagine such a man bravely leading a charge, grinning, as it were, in the teeth of Death. Eventually he will be struck down, certainly. But until that moment he would appear immortal. And afterward … A man such as that would be remembered forever. No critic would ever dare castigate his name.”
He sat smiling at me now, waiting for my collaboration, my acquiescence of his dreadful plan. His smile was black and his eyes were black and the air of that very room was black and thick with dreams of death.
I gave it consideration, I admit to that. But I had no intention of dying in Mexico. To be an agent of death, yes, of course. To slash and shoot until all the hatred had been expunged from me. But beyond that, all I could think of were the many pleasures of life I had not yet sampled, all the places and wonders not yet experienced, the sensual delights, the joys of the flesh. Cigars, thick steaks, fine wines, pastries dripping with icing … . My revenge, somehow, on Deidendorf.
And women. Women and revenge—the thought of either made me flush with desire. Even the battles I hoped awaited me in Mexico, even these I had thought of as pleasures to come.
As for Poe, I considered it best to placate him. He was in no state for disagreements.
“You make a good point,” I told him. “And we must discuss it further. Lay out our plans. In the meantime, I have to eat, I’m starving. Come out with me. Or at the least, downstairs.”
“No, no, I can’t. There is too much light this time of day. My eyes are weak.”
“You’ve been inside too long.”
“Tomorrow perhaps. If the sun is not so bright.”
I knew that he would not be moved. “I will bring something back for you.”
“I have no appetite, Augie. Go tend to yourself. But come back, you must come back. The bed is yours. I am more comfortable in the chair.”
It was how he had slept with Virginia all those years, in a chair pulled close to her bed. And now, to see him reduced like this, virtually wallowing in his mire of loss …
Not that I had ever succumbed to blind hero worship. Even as a boy I had been too clear-eyed and cynical for that. But his flaws as much as his virtues were what I had admired, his bullheadedness and arrogance, an uncompromising belief in himself. Yet he sat now thinking wistfully of death, of suicide at the hands of a Mexican soldier as his last chance for glory.
Those slow swirls of nausea in my stomach—they were not caused by hunger.
“So tell me,” I said. “Since last I heard from you, what have you written?”
Poe laughed, sourly, something very like a snarl on his lips. “My own epitaph. ‘Here lies Poe. Nobody saw him go.’”
“Seems to me,” I began, then paused, searching for the right approach, the least accusative way to say this, and then finally gave up on circumlocution. “You might feel better if you were to go back to your writing. Didn’t you tell me once that a man’s work is his dignity?”
“If there is dignity to be had. Which there is not. Not in this business of writing. Publishers cheat you, editors coerce you, critics assail you, the public ignores you.”
“Then perhaps you should find other work.”
“I am not suited for other work. Augie, please, I do not wish to be angry with you. But you are attempting to discuss a subject of which you have no knowledge. Therefore it is a subject you should let drop.”
But I could not. “Aren’t you the man who wrote ‘The Raven’? Gordon Pym? The Masque of the Red Death?” With every title mentioned, he flinched.
He said, “Dip your bucket all you wish, but the well is dry.”
In the end, so as to avoid further argument, I went out. But not without qualms, as if, somehow, in the space of thirty minutes, I had become his keeper. It was a role I did not much relish, but who else remained? Virginia was gone, Muddy had returned to Richmond. And Poe was one of those unfortunate men who can never be complete when alone, who must always have a student, a reader, an editor, a mirror in whose eyes he can see himself reflected and therefore know himself to exist. He needed always another person in life to provide him ballast, lest he fall sideways off the world and slip away on his own gravity, engulfed in the blackness of his own bottomless pit.
AN HOUR or so later I returned to his room, belly full and pockets crammed. A small sausage pie wrapped in brown paper. A half-loaf of pumpkin bread. And the letter from Dr. Brunrichter.
Initially I laid only the food atop the little table at the foot of his bed.
Poe, now seated in the chair I had earlier vacated, looked at the parcels with his head cocked, a hand to his cheek, his eyebrows raised as if he expected the food to do something other than just sit there.
I was pleased to see that he had washed his face in my absence and had run a brush through his hair. He had even put on a shirt beneath his banyan, though he had not bothered with a collar. Still, if my presence could precipitate even this much activity at first, then perhaps I could do him some good after all.
“You should taste the meat pie,” I told him. “While it’s still warm. I had two of them myself.”
It took him awhile to stand and cross to the table. He put a finger and thumb to the pie’s wrapping, then laid the paper back to expose the browned crust. “My stomach is uneasy,” he said. “I appreciate your kindness, but …”
“Try a few bites at least.”
He did not look at me when he asked, “Have you brought anything to wash it down with?”
“I think maybe you’ve washed down enough for a while.”
He turned a harsh eye on me then, but found me smiling. And in a few moments he smiled in return. “As outspoken as ever in your advanced age, I see.”
“Please eat,” I told him. “I’m standing here stuffed to the gills, but you—you look as if you haven’t had a meal in days. If you are hoping to starve yourself to death, you might as well know that it isn’t going to work. Because the moment you lapse into unconsciousness, I’m going to cram you full of meat pies.”
I delivered this statement with the lightness of a joke, and was pleased to see his smile widen by an inch at one corner. But then he held the smile too long, until his mouth began to quiver. He drew a hand through his hair, pushing hard as if to drive a thought away, his eyes growing damp. I saw him then as a man on the very edge of collapse, and I went to him, I laid a hand upon his arm.
He said, “There is such an emptiness inside of me now. So vast, so …” He shook his head. “And not only because of Sissie, not only that. But everything. All of it. The full frivolity of it, the folly of my life. Such a sorrowful little have I accomplished. So little good have I managed to do.”
“Not true,” I began, but he drew away, turned away from me and lurched back to his chair and fell into it. “My life, Augie, the whole of my life. It has been nothing but a mistake, beginning to end.”
What was I to say to this? Should I have pointed out his accomplishments? Counted off the stories and poems and essays written, the books published? He would have opened his hands and spread them palm up to show me what all that work had won for him. A cheap room and a checkered reputation. No, I could point to nothing in his past that might bring him pleasure.
“I must go to Mexico,” he said.
“Then fine, we’ll go together. There is surely an office in Philadelphia where you can apply for your commission. And in the meantime—”
He held up a hand to cut me off. “I deserve no commission. No honors for me.” And now he nodded, strangely pleased with himself. “I will go peddling my wares in the morning. I will sell every manuscript I have, if necessary, for a penny a page. In exchange for my passage south.”
“I have a better idea. We can
leave for Mexico from Pittsburgh.” At this I lifted Brunrichter’s letter from my pocket and tossed it onto Poe’s lap.
His movements were lugubrious and painful to watch. I willed myself not to move nor say a word as he first gazed down at the paper without touching it, then cocked his head slightly so as to better read the lettering, then slipped a finger along the edge so as to lay the letter open.
“I went looking for you at Godey’s,” I explained. “A Mr. Longreve gave me that letter. We had hoped it might shed some light on your whereabouts. Otherwise we would not have opened it.”
He did not nod, gave me no absolution for invading his privacy. What he did was to turn toward the window, better to catch the fading light. He then shook the folded paper open, and read.
I watched his eyes. They narrowed at first, but soon began to widen. It wasn’t long before the corners of his tired mouth began to lift. The furrows eased out of his forehead.
There was life in him yet.
The change was immediate. That first evening together, while he nibbled at the sausage pie and pumpkin loaf, nibbled until both had disappeared—rediscovering with every nibble, it seemed, his appetite for the next—he spoke with greater and greater animation, holding to his original plan of ending this grievous journey of life in Mexico, but now with the added diversion of Pittsburgh and the money he would earn there, enough to secure our passage in comfort on a steamboat down the Ohio, then onward down the Mississippi, all the way to the land of scorpions and saguaro. He spoke of leaving a last impression of himself as a writer and a thinker, of triumphing at the lectern, chilling his audience with the final awful cadences of the raven’s beak against the window glass, of driving that beak into their hearts. He was well aware of the effect his poem could have on an audience, and knew well the macabre enhancement of the effect that had been provided by Sissie’s death.
By the end of his first hour of speculation he had once again deemed himself worthy of a commission in the army, had all but appointed himself a lieutenant, with me as his adjutant. By the close of the second hour we had captured Santa Ana and were wondering aloud what to do with him.
He held Brunrichter’s letter aloft and shook it in the air. “This!” he said. “This is my manifest destiny! Who would ever have thought salvation would call to me from a place such as Pittsburgh?”
In the celadon dimness of the room, with the sun now lost below the horizon, I answered with a smile. Had I possessed but an inkling of the actual destiny that awaited both of us in Pennsylvania, the agonies of flesh and heart that lay ahead, I would have torn that letter from his hand and reduced it to indecipherable pieces.
3
HE AWOKE me early, a light tug on my wrist. I opened my eyes to see him standing washed and dressed beside the bed, he in his black trousers and coat, the boiled shirt not radiantly clean but with collar attached, the room pink with morning light—the first sunrise I had missed in a good many years.
“A busy day ahead,” he told me. “While you pull yourself together I’ll be sending a wire to Dr. Brunrichter in Pittsburgh, informing him of our arrival within the week. If you will meet me downstairs in thirty minutes, there will be tea and buckwheat cakes waiting on the table.”
I pushed myself onto an elbow. “You’re looking spry this morning.”
“Spry?” He laughed and slapped my hip. “I’ve returned from the maelstrom!” With that he went out the door and left me to make myself ready for the day.
And what a day it was. By the time I joined him in the tavern downstairs, its walls and ceiling smoke-stained, floor none too clean, the whole of it dimly illuminated by a few oil lamps and a dull-looking fire in the fieldstone fireplace, he was still grinning, apparently pleased to be alive again, even proud of himself for his feat of self-resuscitation.
As I pulled a chair to the table I asked, “You sent the wire?”
“And made a stop at the White Swan Hotel as well, where the Pioneer Transportation Line maintains an office. I have booked two seats for the Monday departure”—this day was a Friday. “We shall be in Pittsburgh by suppertime Thursday.”
“I don’t know much about Pittsburgh,” I said.
“I expect to find it a primitive place. But stimulating nonetheless.” He poured tea from a small cast-iron pitcher into a large clay mug, and slid the mug into my hand.
I nodded at the bulging satchel beside him on the floor. “Your laundry?” I asked.
“And I thought I could escape my critics by fleeing New York!”
He laughed at his own joke, to which I smiled, but uneasily, for there seemed something vaguely off balance about his humor that morning, something excessive and unhealthy. I was reminded of the bright blush of Virginia’s cheeks when I first met her, a rosy glow placed there, I’d thought, by her soft femininity, only to discover that the source of her coloring was the same disease that would kill her.
“I intend to leave most of these manuscripts with an editor here in town,” he told me. “If he pays me as little as a dollar a pound, it should be sufficient to defray the cost of our trip.”
“You needn’t worry about the money,” I told him while slathering a half crock of butter over a mountain of buckwheat. “I’ve got more than enough for both of us.”
He cocked his head, gave me a quizzical look. “My understanding was that you would be paid for your labor in room and board only, and that your patrons would see to your education.”
I nearly choked on his use of the word “patrons,” but kept my bile to myself. Fortunately, too, I had a mouthful when he spoke, the chewing of which allowed me time to formulate an answer. “I was able to take on an extra job every now and then. There was always somebody wanting something done, and willing to pay four bits to get it done quickly. Building a country, you know.”
This seemed to satisfy him. I found it endearing, though a bit embarrassing, that he was so ready to view me as an honest man.
He nibbled at some toasted bread spread with apple butter. “My only complaint is that you wrote too infrequently. Muddy nearly wore out your each and every letter from the reading of it.”
“I guess there just wasn’t much to write about. One day was pretty much like the others.”
“Indians,” he said. “Did you encounter any?”
“Shawnees mostly. Now and then a few Miamis. Deidendorf did some trading with them. In fact there was one family in particular I got to know fairly well.”
He wanted to know all the details of our bartering, so I relayed the gist of it, substituting words here and there, not because I considered him a prude—I had seen too much of him for that—but because I was reluctant to have him view me as I did myself, a creature born to the underhanded and devious, a festering soul too ugly for the clean white light of day.
And he found my reiteration of our commerce fascinating, the simple exchange of goods for goods, no filthy lucre to soil one’s hands or heart. I wondered how fascinating he might have found the truth, however, that the goods Pike and Wiley hauled out to the Indians’ camp every fortnight or so—always on a Sunday evening when all good sinners were rattling the rafters with songs of praise and remorse—was a wooden keg filled with potato whiskey distilled in a small operation deep in the oak woods. Or that as far as I was concerned, the most lucrative reward of those trips was not the few dollars I made each time, money the Indians made from selling skins and hides, but that hour or so in the early evening when Pike and Wiley would sit around a roaring fire with our hosts, sharing the contents of the keg while I, accompanied by an Indian girl named Lula, sat on a log just far enough from the fire that its light did not illuminate the movement our hands made beneath the blanket thrown over our laps.
My relationship with Poe had not yet ripened to the point where I might share this experience with him. (And indeed, some experiences are never meant to be shared, but can only be diluted by the telling.) So we passed the rest of our breakfast time with plans for the day.
The first sig
ht I must see while in Philadelphia, he announced, was Philosophical Hall in Independence Square. “The greatest minds of the country, from Ben Franklin on to this day, have been members of that society.”
I tried to keep a jaundiced look to myself, but it did not escape Poe’s eye. He said, “Perhaps the seven-pound wen on display at the Pennsylvania Hospital would be more to your liking.”
“Seven pounds?” I asked, incredulous. “That’s not an exaggeration?”
“That’s what you wish to do after breakfast? Gaze upon a tumor?”
“But seven pounds! Where in the world did it come from?”
“From the neck and cheek of a very unfortunate individual.”
“One more of these cakes and we can be on our way.”
“If that is to be the tenor of our day,” Poe said, “then I suppose I should scratch from the list certain architectural delights of the city.”
“Such as?”
“The home of Betsy Ross.”
“Scratched.”
“The home of George Washington?”
“Scratched.”
“The Second Bank of the United States? It’s a lovely example of Greek Revival architecture, one of the finest around.”
“Is that all you have to show me? A bunch of buildings?”
“There’s always Peter the Mint Eagle,” he said.
“An eagle sounds interesting.”
“This one is stuffed. It used to frequent the Mint, as the story goes. Until one day its wing was seized in the flywheel of a coinage press.”
“Now that sounds interesting,” I told him, because we were both playing a game by then, he in the role of self-indulgent father, myself as mischievous son.
“Am I to show you nothing edifying?”
“You don’t think a tumor and a dead eagle can be edifying?”
“I know what you might enjoy,” he answered. “Down along the waterfront, on Carpenter Street, stands a high tower. Molten lead is poured through a mesh at the top of the tower. Can you guess why?”
Disquiet Heart Page 3
