Disquiet Heart

by Randall Silvis

  “A hanging!” said Poe, suddenly reanimated.

  I almost leapt from my seat, so shrill was Poe’s exclamation.

  Brunrichter grinned at him, then reached across his armrest to pat Poe’s knee.

  And now Poe swiveled toward me. He waved his cigar at the doctor. “These Presbyterians, they take their pleasures sadly. Or was it seriously, Alfred—how did you put it?”

  “Above all else, we take them humbly.”

  “Yes, yes, that was the word. I’ve never had much use of that word myself, you know.”

  “Nor should you, a man of your talents.”

  “Precisely!” said Poe.

  And with that, a moment later, his body sagged again and he sank back into his chair, and his gaze returned to the fireplace.

  Both Brunrichter and I watched him for a moment. Then the doctor leaned forward and spoke to me, softly, as if Poe, seated between us, could not hear.

  “I can sense your concerns, Mr. Dubbins. And I share them. But I firmly believe—and I pray that you will come to appreciate this as well—I believe that Edgar is in a precarious state of health right now. He suffers grievously from the loss of his wife. For that reason, I think it best that he remain here in my care, and in the company of those who will delight in his gifts.”

  When I saw no flicker of awareness from Poe, no sign that any of the doctor’s words had reached Poe’s ears, I said, “He shouldn’t be drinking. Sometimes all it takes is one drink and … there is no predicting the effect it may have on him.”

  Brunrichter nodded. “He is not a well man, I agree. I do believe, however, that, given time, I might alter the course of whatever it is that afflicts him.”

  “Well, I’m all for that,” I said, and kept an eye on Poe’s face, alert for any sign that our words had reached him, a twitch of his mouth, a curling of his lip. There was no such sign. “But to take him to a hanging? Is that wise?”

  “He asked if he might accompany me. How could I refuse? He is, after all, an honored guest.”

  “And why do you have to go?”

  “As a physician, it is one of my duties. To pronounce the condemned man dead. Hearing of it, Edgar thought it a wonderful opportunity for himself, because of the kind of tales he writes. You, of course, are more than welcome to accompany us. And to the picnic as well. It goes without saying that you will be a most welcome addition to each and every event. I might even say an essential addition. From what Edgar has told me, and he has told me much, you provide a stabilizing influence in his life. Perhaps the last remaining one.”

  I had no idea what to say to all this. I had made my plans and was eager to hold to them. But there sat Poe, the man I felt closer to than any other; the man who had witnessed far too much of the macabre already in his life, and had imagined all the rest of it; a man who could not be trusted to have a single drink. Yet there he sat, thoroughly besotted, as enthused about a hanging as about his own literary presentation. And, by all appearances, the very things he should be avoiding had in fact sedated him.

  In all the hours we had been together, both earlier in New York and more recently on this trip, I had never before seem him so obviously at rest. His body was slack, even limp in the chair, his left arm hanging so low that the snifter with its ounce of brandy was resting on the floor. The cigar in his right hand, its ash long ago grown cold, had slipped from his fingers and lay on the carpet. His eyelids were open but heavy. His mouth, as if somehow it had slipped the bonds of its own natural gravity, turned up weightlessly at both corners. He had been in the home of Dr. Brunrichter for but a few hours, a half day, and, for the first time ever in all the time I had known him, the restless fire in him burned low. He looked content.

  Who was I to refute a word the doctor had said?

  “As you wish,” I told him.

  Brunrichter raised his glass to me. And then, like co-conspirators, we drank.

  8

  I SLEPT late the next morning and awoke to a different house, a different climate. Whereas the previous evening had been distinguished by a dearth of human sounds, the morning, only an hour or so after sunrise, was clamorous by comparison. At the pitcher and basin in my room I splashed water over my face and slicked back my hair, then brushed my teeth, pulled on my clothes for the day, and ventured downstairs.

  In the kitchen, from whence most of the clamor originated, I found Mrs. Dalrymple skittering like a waterbug between her cookstove and worktable, frying eggs and ham at one, kneading a huge bowl of dough at the other, all the while singing sweetly off-key.

  “‘On Springfield mountain there did dwell a lovely youth, I knowed him well. Too-roo-dee-nay, Too-roo-dee-noo, Too-roo-dee-nay, Too-roo-dee-noo …’”

  I remained on the threshold for a minute or two, grinning to myself. When finally she spoke, she didn’t even look in my direction. “If you think you’re hiding around that corner, Mr. Dubbins, you’d be wrong. I smelled those clothes of yours coming from halfway down the stairs.”

  I stepped into the kitchen. “That fragrant, am I?”

  She wrinkled up her nose. “Let me get these dough dodgers to frying, and then I’ll find you something to put on that doesn’t smell like it came from inside a dead dog.”

  “I doubt the doctor’s clothes will suit my style.”

  “Are you suggesting that you have a style?” she asked.

  There was nothing malicious in her tone nor in her character, so it was not possible to take offense. Nor could I rebut her observations. “First things first,” I said. “Privy out that door there?”

  “Back where you came from,” she said.

  “Pardon me?”

  “The privy is indoors. Down the hall from your room.”

  I had never before heard of such a thing, and told her so.

  “Go see for yourself. And when you’re finished, pull the chain hanging from the ceiling.”

  With that she plucked a handful of dough off the ball, flattened it to the size of her palm and laid it in a skillet of sizzling lard. She did this twice more, every movement precise. With the third dough dodger frying, she turned to a shelf to seize a plate in her left hand, turned to the stove where, with her right hand, she picked up a flat ladle and flipped the fried eggs and a slab of ham onto the plate, flipped the dough dodgers over in their grease, slapped the plate down onto the table, seized the coffeepot and filled a mug half with coffee and half with cow’s milk from a white ceramic pitcher, set the mug down beside the plate, turned back to the stove and, using a long fork this time, speared all three dough dodgers up out of the skillet and shook them onto the plate with the eggs and ham and then turned to me and said, “You going upstairs or aren’t you?”

  I had my eyes on the food—my eyes, my nose, my mouth and my stomach. “No hurry,” I said.

  She watched me a few moments longer, grinning, maybe waiting to see how long before the drool dropped out of my mouth. Finally I turned to her with plaintive eyes.

  “Go on then,” she said, and I, like a hound let loose from his chain at last, dove for the table.

  She reminded me so much of Mrs. Clemm that I could not stop smiling even as I shoveled in the food. I was halfway through the feast before I paused for a breath. “Shouldn’t I maybe wait for Poe and Dr. Brunrichter?” I asked.

  “If you’re angling for two breakfasts,” she said, “you can think again.”

  I returned to my food.

  “Besides which, the doctor is off to the hospital already. Left while you were still snoring like a baby. Mr. Poe will be taking breakfast in his room this morning.”

  “Is he ill?”

  “Working on his speech is what I was told.”

  I nodded. “These appearances don’t sit easy with him. He confided to me once that he now and then suffers from stage fright.”

  “Lord, and who wouldn’t, what with all those faces staring up at you every second?”

  We spoke no further until I was sopping up the last puddle of greasy yolk with the last pie
ce of fried bread. “And you,” she said. “What do you intend to do with this day?”

  “Thought I’d maybe just sit right here until dinnertime.”

  “You’d better think again,” she said.

  “In that case, I have some plans for myself.”

  “If they don’t require smelling like a wet dog six days dead, I suggest you let me do something about those clothes you got on. In fact, here’s what you do. You go on upstairs and find that privy. There’s a bathtub in there too. You put the stopper in the drain, then push on a big red button you’ll see on the wall there. I’ll start filling up your tub from down here.”

  “From here? How is that possible?”

  She motioned for me to follow, then led me to the adjacent pantry. Here she showed me a large copper tank of water, a kind of boiler mounted over a small woodstove. She had me place my hand on the tank; it was hot to the touch. Connected to this tank was a hand pump.

  “I fill the tub from here,” she said.

  “I never saw anything like this in Ohio.”

  “You won’t find many of them in Pittsburgh either. But you can always count on the doctor to be trying something new.”

  In short, I spent the next hour or so reveling in the pleasures of indoor plumbing. No outhouse or washtub could ever thrill me again.

  Later, newly outfitted in the dark blue trousers and plain white shirt Mrs. Dalrymple had laid outside the privy door, I set forth to discover what other wonders the city of Pittsburgh might have in store for me.

  Dr. Brunrichter’s estate, situated as it was on Ridge Avenue, in an unpopulated area that would later become the city’s Eleventh Ward (at the time there were only five wards), enjoyed a commanding view to its west of the Allegheny River. From the front veranda I could see down to the Merchant Street Bridge, the Pennsylvania Canal Aqueduct and even the Hand Street Bridge. To the east, though perhaps twice as distant, lay the deeper Monongahela River. Where the two rivers converged at a place called, unpoetically but appropriately, The Point, here was where the tumult of the rivers’ business climaxed.

  Upon my arrival the day before, I had glimpsed enough of this business, the congestion and din and hurry, to want to see the rest of it. Pittsburgh’s topography of hustle and confusion reminded me of the Manhattan I had known as a boy, and there was still enough of that boy in me that I longed to experience the familiar freneticism again. Besides, I did indeed have some plans for myself that day, and, in fact, for my every day in Pittsburgh. Plans that would, I naively hoped, ensure my future. What those plans did not include and were calculated to prohibit were my being, here or anywhere else, a mere appendage of E. A. Poe. I no longer delighted in the notion of being his valet—not his or anyone else’s. What I intended to do, what I believed myself ready to become, was a man in my own right.

  And so I set off toward the Point, the nexus, my beginning, my birth as a man, the place where that man would be born fully formed between the flow of two rivers.

  But in every birth, a death, as Poe would have said. For every gift, its curse.

  OF THE remainder of that day there is little to remark. Not that I, with eyes so long narcotized by the dreary flatness of Ohio, failed to find much of it remarkable. Heading straight for the Allegheny from Brunrichter’s estate, I first crossed a wide grassy area, drained by the downslope but still slippery with dew. Then across an unpaved lane called Ferguson Road where, in advance of the first real street, called Liberty, lay an undeveloped expanse in the process of becoming the Pennsylvania Railroad Depot. Then down Lumeer Street, also dirt, on its dive toward Duquesne Way and the Allegheny River.

  I was chased halfway to the water by a pig, a huge spotted sow who, once she had burst through a forsythia bush and set all that snorting lard and bacon into motion, had all she could do to keep her stubby legs in advance of the caboose as she pursued me down the hill. At one point she was so close to me, snorting spittle at my heels, that I swung into a side lane lest I be run over by her hurtling hams. She, unable to alter direction, kept going. She skidded and rumbled another thirty yards before managing to put the brakes on. When finally at a stop, she sucked air through her quivering snout for a while, and then, albeit reluctantly, she turned and, struggling like a hod carrier under a double load, plodded back uphill.

  When we passed on opposite sides of the street she gave me a sideways glance and a snort, as if to insinuate that I was the cause of all her troubles. I laughed, unaware that, before the day was out, her sentiment would have spread.

  To dispense, however, with the morning. Along the cobblestones of Duquesne Way I followed the river south, strolling first past the Merchant Street Bridge, and then, five blocks later, under the aqueduct, between the thoroughfares of Penn and Liberty. Here the major retail trade of the city was conducted, the glut of hotels and restaurants and taverns, the tailors and milliners, tobacconists, confectioners, stationery vendors, button shops, patent medicine shops, hackneys for hire, drays and handcarts, carriages and wagons—every conveyance conceivable, every imaginable product for sale.

  Even here a few pigs wandered about at will, and perhaps twice as many chickens. I saw more dogs than either of these two, however, and more rats than dogs. No one but me appeared to give any of these animals so much as a glance.

  I myself was more an object of curiosity to Pittsburghers than were their stray animals. Merchants sweeping the stones in front of their shops would pause to give me the once-over. They might grunt a hello in response to my own, but it was a grudging acknowledgment. Women, on at least three occasions, crossed the street so as not to walk too close to me. I was a stranger, a new face, and all new faces were regarded with suspicion, all appraised with the silent question, Is he the one? Is he the murderer in our midst? I wonder how they might have scrutinized me had I not bathed and put on fresh clothes that morning.

  Three long blocks later I passed under the Hand Street Bridge. (I wonder now if, as I did so, I might have felt something tugging at my heart, might have felt some ineffable pull from a dark brick building up on Penn Street. I cannot now think of that building underneath the bridge, Miss Jones’s School for Young Ladies, without having to swallow something hard and sharp that rises into my throat, something I can only assume to be a broken splinter of my heart.)

  Then under the St. Clair Street Bridge and to the Point, where Duquesne Way rounded the blunt tip of land and became Water Street. From the Point as far up the Monongahela as Try Street, well past Roebling’s wire suspension bridge, Water Street was piled high with freight, some of it coming, some of it going. On this side of Pittsburgh was conducted the bulk of the city’s import and export trade. The Monongahela, thanks to a series of locks, was more routinely navigable than the Allegheny, so the long wharf here was lined with one large steamboat after another, at least two dozen of them on that particular morning, as well as long trains of barges filled with sand for the glass works, coal or pig iron for the foundries.

  I sampled it all, every scent and sight and sound of the raucous city. Knowing myself an innocent, I was scarcely bothered by the suspicion with which I was regarded. For how I loved the music of the dock workers’ curses and shouts, the creak of overloaded wagons, the clop of horses’ hooves. This was a roisterous symphony I could dance to.

  I danced an even livelier step after an hour-long visit to an office on Fulton Street, my lone objective for the day. Livelier because I emerged from those dim rooms with my clothes stinking of the intoxicating perfume of tobacco smoke and ink, and with, more importantly, a new half eagle in my pocket, a five-dollar gold piece. I emerged, I imagined, as a whole new man, re-created and rechristened inside that office, and for the remainder of the day I did nothing but bask in the glow I thought I emanated—a glow, I thought, to banish the smoke and haze of odoriferous Pittsburgh, to freshen every breath I breathed. A glow, I thought, to render my seven years of servitude in Ottawa County inconsequential, my ugly boyhood in the sewers of Gotham as distant as a month-old dream
. A glow, I thought, that might even cast a bit of healing light into a corner of Poe’s midnight soul.

  DESPITE MY elevated spirits all the day, or perhaps because of them, I chose not to return to the mansion on Ridge Avenue until the supper hour had passed. I was determined not to be treated as an appendage of Poe, fed because Poe was fed, welcomed because Poe was welcomed. But he would be expecting me at his reading before the Quintillian Society, and in that I could not disappoint him.

  Upon my return to Gingko Castle, I was met in the front lobby by Brunrichter’s manservant, Mr. Tevis. He must have been stationed there to watch for me, for I was yet six paces off the verandah when the door came open, and he, with one broad arm holding the door against the wall, addressed me by name. He was not a tall man, an inch or so shorter than me, but broad of face and shoulders and chest, broad all the way down to the soles of his brogans. Nor was he corpulent. He moved with a lightness, even a delicacy of step. I might say that he was bearlike and possessed of an ursine grace. The heavy black suit he wore buttoned close to the neck, the heavy black hair and muttonchops, the thick stubble of whiskers that, though his face was cleanly shaven, adumbrated his countenance—all this, even the deep brown luster of his eyes, all this added to the bearish illusion. I liked him immediately.

  “Have you had your dinner, Mr. Dubbins?”

  “I have, thank you.”

  “Would you care for a bit extra before the evening? Mrs. Dalrymple tells me that you have a hearty appetite.”

  “It’s been well appeased, thank you very much.”

  “In that case, sir, I have been instructed to convey you at your convenience to the Quintillian Club.”

  “You have, have you?” I remained standing on the porch, rather amused by his formality.

  “At Mr. Poe’s request. If you are so inclined, sir.”

  “Oh, I am inclined, all right. I have been inclined all day.”