“Do you have appropriate dress?” he asked.
“I’m guessing that I do not. What would be appropriate?”
“A frock coat and cravat have been provided. You will find them in your chambers.”
“Thanks to the good doctor, of course.”
“Of course.”
With that he waved me inside with a subtle turn of his hand. I slipped past him into the foyer, started for the staircase but then paused, staring up at the amazing chandelier overhead. Tevis closed the door, then waited half a minute before speaking.
“Shall I assist you, sir?”
I had been mesmerized by own reflection in the chandelier’s crystal globe. The soft evening light, gone from lemony to amber, was coming through the glass window over the doors at just the right angle, coupled with the chandelier’s own illumination and the lights from the rest of the house, to show myself back at me, small and contorted by the curvatures of glass, a dwarf inside a fishbowl.
He asked a second time, “Sir? Do you require some assistance?”
I blinked, looked away from my warped image, saw a less disturbing one in the hallway armoire, and answered, “Thanks for the offer, but I can change my own drawers,” and bounded up the stairs two at a time.
Ten minutes later Tevis took me by carriage back down the hill. It was a brougham, driven from the outside, myself inside alone, which provided me no opportunity to talk with him further that night. I wanted to ask how Poe had seemed that day, whether nervous or calm, sickly or well, but since I could not I busied myself with fidgeting inside the clothes Brunrichter had provided, very nice clothes indeed but not what I was used to, so that even the silk cravat at my neck, soft and loose as it was, made me conscious of every nervous swallow of spittle. I was concerned not only about Poe’s performance but about my own when I delivered my news to him, for I had devised a small bit of theatrics myself, call it a ten-second soliloquy, which I believed would mend all resentments and bring Poe and me shoulder to shoulder once again, as close as brothers.
I knew neither Poe nor myself as well as I believed.
9
THE QUINTILLIAN Club held its bi-monthly meetings in what had once been a stone chapel adjacent to the Western University of Pennsylvania. I entered this building into an anteroom, a small lobby that opened onto the chapel, a room in the shape of a truncated triangle, wider where I stood, narrowing to the altar, lit principally with candles in wall sconces, plus here and there an attractive oil lamp with a glass shade the color of afternoon sky.
There must have been close to one hundred people crammed into that chapel, about half of them seated, the rest standing about in lively pockets of conversation. A long refectory table against one wall held several carafes of wine and platters of petits fours. From the air of festivity that came from the room, along with an occasional guffaw or shrill trill of laughter, I deduced that many of the guests had already helped themselves to the wine. I could only hope that Poe had not.
The chapel’s pews had been replaced by several rows of straightback chairs, each comfortably padded with a red velvet seat and back cushion. All icons of religious connotation, save for the stained-glass windows, had been removed. Now, instead of representations of Christ or the Virgin Mother, there were busts of Plato, Shakespeare, and other longdead masters of the rhetorical arts. The pipe organ, however, remained, as did a harpsichord. The smoke from the candles and oil lamps, and from the many pipes being puffed, clung to the rafters in a pinkish bellylit cloud.
Where the altar had been was now only a lectern. Poe and Brunrichter and a half-dozen others stood together just to the side and a step below the lectern. Brunrichter was beaming at Poe, who stood there weaving a tale of some kind, or so it seemed by the way he waved his right hand about, up and down through the air as if to simulate the rolling motion of the sea.
The moment he spotted me he held up a finger to his small audience, whispered to Brunrichter, and then came striding toward me. Not until he had weaved his way past the many people between us did I notice that an empty wine glass dangled from his left hand.
He clapped a hand on my shoulder and grinned, I thought, unnaturally. “My boy!” he said, his voice too loud. “I am so glad to see you here. I was worried you might miss my triumph.”
“Impossible,” I said, and tried to return his smile, but failed, for my mood was no match for his mania.
He read the concern in my expression. “One glass, Augie. Surely you would not begrudge me one glass in celebration. Even Muddy would have conceded one glass on a night such as this.”
I should have kept my mouth shut. Who was I to set myself up as his caretaker? But the events of the day, and my inflated opinion of myself, fueled my impudence. “The wonderful thing about wine,” I said, “is that a single glass of it can be very soothing to the nerves—”
He leaned close and interrupted in a confidential tone. “And despite all appearances, my nerves are in great need of a soothing influence.”
“If it’s only one glass then. So that your natural brilliance can flow more freely”
“But not so freely as to become a torrent of nonsense, am I right?” He squeezed my shoulder and laughed with his mouth wide open.
I should have known then from that single gesture, so anomalous on that thin, sad mouth, I should have known then that he was already intoxicated. But I, like Poe, like all of us, I suppose, saw life with my eyes focused primarily on myself.
“I have some good news to share with you,” I told him. “But after the reading. When you have a few moments to yourself.”
“Good news? Tell me now!”
“I think later would be better.”
“Never keep good news until later,” he said. “Good news can sour with time. So tell me now, and make this evening even brighter for both of us.”
Nearly all of the audience in the chapel, those seated as well as those standing, were looking our way, smiling benignly, expectantly, as if my conversation with Poe was a part of the festivities. I stepped around Poe so that my back faced the chapel. I wanted this moment to be between only the two of us.
“Do you remember,” I asked, “the first time I came to your house? The cottage you had out on Bloomingdale Road?”
“Of course,” he said. But there was a vagueness in his eyes, and though I wondered for a moment if he did indeed remember that day, I quickly pushed my doubts aside. “It was the morning your story about Mary Rogers was published in the Mirror. You gave me a percentage of the money you had earned from that story.”
“As you well deserved,” he said.
I reached into my pocket then and pulled out the coin I had placed there. “I would like now,” I told him, “to return the courtesy.” I took his free hand in mine, turned it palm up, and laid a silver dollar in the middle of it.
He continued to grin at me. “The money I gave you was not a loan, Augie. There is no need to repay it. Besides, this is several times the amount—”
“This is not a loan either. It’s a payment to my collaborator.”
“On what did we collaborate?” he asked, still amused.
“On my story. I sold it to the Pittsburgh Daily Chronicle.”
And now his smile twitched. “Your story?”
“About the elephants. The one you helped me to write.”
A look of pain, quick as an arrow, flashed across his eyes. He glanced beyond me then, out over the heads of the audience, up into the smoke. Then fixed his gaze on me once more.
“Augie,” he said evenly, all trace of humor gone, “you did not inform them at the Chronicle, did you, that I had a hand in crafting that piece, that … ?”
“I told them I wrote it myself.”
His face relaxed a bit. “As you did.”
“Yes, but … but if you want your name attached to it—”
“No! No, it will be bad enough, a piece like that, just to have people assuming that I wrote it for you, a story about elephants of all things … .”
“Why would anybody assume that you wrote it?”
“How could they not? I’ve introduced you as my protege, haven’t I?”
“The byline won’t carry my name.”
He cocked his head.
“I chose to use a pen name. As a way of, I don’t know, starting a new life for myself.”
Again he looked up into the rafters. His voice was dark then, almost malevolent. “What name?”
I think he expected to hear a variation of his own name, or one that would similarly identify him with me. But I told him, “James Dobson.”
His head jerked away as if slapped. His eyes came down out of the smoke, but filled with it. “James? You chose to call yourself James?”
“It’s a lot better than Augie, isn’t it?”
“Why not Jamie?” he demanded, his voice much shriller now, louder, his eyes injured and chin thrust high. “Why not christen yourself James Fenimore Dubbins and be done with it?”
“I wasn’t even thinking of him,” I said.
He seized the front of my coat so violently that two of the buttons popped off and clattered to the floor. He then rammed the silver dollar into my pocket, yanked his fist clear, and held it before him, between us, as if he wanted to strike me with it. Instead, after a few seconds frozen in this posture, his hand flew open, empty, fingers splayed, and he jerked away from me, took a long step past me and back toward the crowd. I turned to speak to him but could not, everyone was watching, every voice now silent and every eye on the two of us.
Poe was at that moment standing oddly postured, head low and shoulders awkwardly hunched, looking as if he had taken a stroke or two from a stiff cane against the back of his neck. His hand remained upraised before him, and though it was no longer aimed in my direction I could feel the threat of it even yet, holding me off, pushing me away.
And soon Poe, too, must have remembered the crowd so breathlessly waiting, for suddenly he pulled himself up straight, unnaturally straight, and marched stiffly toward the altar, where Brunrichter was waiting for him with a fresh goblet of wine.
I REMAINED in the anteroom throughout Poe’s reading. And every time he faltered during his recitation of “The Raven,” my own eyes stung with shame. Twice then he forgot the proper phrases to his “Bridal Ballad,” and as he stood there muttering, blinking, running a hand through his hair, I wanted to shout the words out to him, but bit down hard on my teeth and suffered the sour burn of my chest in silence.
He had floundered at readings before, this I knew from Muddy’s letters. But tonight I was to blame for it. The consternation I had caused him. The sense of betrayal.
After “Bridal Ballad” he announced that he would next recite his “Sonnet—To Science,” but instead meandered in his introduction and eventually launched into a rambling just short of incoherence. I could not fathom most of what he uttered, delivered either sotto voce or in a rapid tumble of words that obscured all meaning. But a few phrases emerged, provocative phrases that caused more than one head in the audience to cock sideways, elicited more than one startled gasp from a listener.
“A theory of everything,” he said. “The Particle Proper we call God …
“A limitless succession of Universes …
“A plot of God …
“The annihilation and renascence of the Universe …
“With every throb of the Heart Divine …”
He went on like this for most of an hour. Initially I was embarrassed for him; to my eyes he appeared more of an insentient drunk than a literary genius. But perhaps the acoustics of my little room did not allow me to experience his presentation as the others experienced it. Or perhaps they had come to this chapel on that evening fully hoping and expecting a night of eccentricity. Certainly Poe’s reputation for unpredictable behavior had preceded him here. So maybe his audience sat so intrigued for the very reason that he made no sense to them, and they, not willing to admit to themselves or others that the ramblings of genius were beyond their ken, nodded in approval, and even applauded enthusiastically from time to time.
What he delivered extemporaneously that night was the gist of a treatise called “Eureka,” an attempt to unify all Art and Science. It was what he had been contemplating and composing in that dark room in Philadelphia all the days following Virginia’s death, his explanation of God. The essay (of which I knew nothing at the time) was by then fully conceived but not yet published. Poe believed it to be his masterwork, the piece by which he would not only be remembered but by which he would rewrite the laws of Science and the perceived reality of all existence.
Nearly three-quarters through his presentation he happened to look up and notice the thrall in which he held his audience. If to my eyes he appeared bedraggled and nonsensical, to these Pittsburghers he was a prophet. It did not injure his case any that early on in his rant he denounced New Yorkers for their lack of receptivity to this same material, their “unparalleled obtuseness masquerading as arrogance.” With the next breath he praised Pittsburgh for its “generosity of intellect” and its “raw and innate openness to Truth.”
By the end of the evening they were on their feet for him. Ladies waved lace handkerchiefs in the air, while gentlemen pounded their palms together. Poe pushed the hair out of his eyes and smiled crookedly, as stunned by this reception, I think, as was I. Brunrichter mounted to the lectern to stand beside him while the applause continued, the doctor applauding as heartily as any.
A resentment began to swell in me then, and I did not like it. Such a roil of contradictory emotions. I resented Poe for not appreciating my own accomplishment of the day and for accusing me of a deliberate betrayal, the furthest thing ever from my mind. I resented Brunrichter for his sycophancy and for the contagion of that disease throughout the whole of the audience. I even resented Brunrichter’s physical resemblance to Poe. Most of all I resented the fact that I was left to stand there alone in the back of the room, clothed in Brunrichter’s clothing, isolated from the one man, the only man, whose approval mattered to me.
I did a stupid thing then. While much of the audience was still applauding and the rest of it inching forward to surround Poe, I strode into the chapel and pushed my way through to the refectory table. There I snatched up a bottle of wine and, eyes blurring with anger, I marched back into the anteroom and out the door. I looked back just once before exiting and saw Brunrichter’s eyes following me, Poe oblivious to my egress. But as I rammed the door with my shoulder and shoved it open, I had a dizzying moment, as if I were drunk already, and said to myself But wait! Maybe that was Poe watching you, and Brunrichter oblivious. I did not pause to look back and corroborate this notion, however, but allowed my momentum to keep me racing forward into the night, bottle swinging up to my lips, as I set off toward the Monongahela, on the path of my undoing.
10
SEVERAL HOURS later. In golden light I climbed the streets back toward Ridge Avenue, all of Pittsburgh now quiet, a cool March morning, the light still soft enough for sleeping. I was quiet myself, a sweet inner quiet after a roisterous night.
I had fled Poe’s reading to go trolling for the kind of company I knew best, and found it without much searching down on Front Street, one street back from the wharf. I made my first stop at a groggery called The Blind Dog, a place filled with burly, cheerful men and the women they loved or hoped for a chance to love, if only for an hour or so. I entered in a sour mood but soon found my temperament ill-suited to the place. Prosperity reigned in Pittsburgh, even for these wharf dogs, their whores and serving girls.
It was there I discovered the local brew, a weightless lager they called Iron City in homage to the foundries that were popping up all along the river. I discovered, too, that a mug of Iron City will blunt the bitterness of angry words, but two mugs will dissolve those words and wash them clean away. And by buying a few mugs for others in my vicinity I was quickly able to dispel the suspicion aroused by a newcomer and to make myself a welcome addition to the neighborhood.<
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I danced and sang, I ate and drank and danced some more. Other than my name, little was asked of me all night, and my name but infrequently. No longer an Augie, nor ready yet to be an August, and not spiteful enough, I suppose, to assume in corporeality the byline of James Dobson, I gave my name as Gus Dubbins. It was an easy enough name, plain and inoffensive. The first woman who asked it of me promptly converted it to Gussie, a diminutive I did not mind in the least, seeing as how she was twice my age and, perhaps more important, was seated warmly on my lap at the time.
This party continued on through the evening, from The Blind Dog to a second and a third tavern, all the way down to Try Street at the end of the wharf. There, at close to five in the morning, the countertop was cleared of beer mugs to make room for platters of fried eggs and thick slices of buttered bread, plus pots of coffee and tea and pitchers of buttermilk. By that hour I had already spent the last squawk of my gold half eagle, and I felt all the better for it.
A few minutes before sunrise I bid my few remaining celebrants good night and slipped away to meet the dawn alone on Roebling’s Bridge. There I passed another quarter hour facing southwest, imaging myself on a steamer churning its way past the Point and into the Ohio, then down the Mississippi, where I would disembark just short of the Gulf of Mexico, James Dobson, wartime correspondent riding on horseback through sand and saguaro, high in the saddle on his way to his first bloody assignment.
Then back across the bridge and into Pittsburgh I hiked, not yet the James Dobson I wished to be but neither wholly Augie Dubbins, up Smithfield Street to Liberty, up Liberty to Ridge, sweetly exhausted, sweetly resolved (as only a youth can be) to the certainty of my future.
I entered Brunrichter’s front lobby with all the stealth I could muster, meaning to steal quietly up the stairs, into my bed for an hour, then to rise and pack and be on my way again. My only regret was that I would not remain in Pittsburgh long enough to see my first story published.
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