“We have again been discussing the local mystery,” Brunrichter told me. “Are you sure you won’t join us?”
“Thank you, no. It’s been a rather long day.”
“What we cannot agree upon,” the doctor said, “is the motivation for the crime. Have you an opinion on that?”
“Not, I’m sure, an original one. Seven young girls disappear. The motivation seems obvious.”
Brunrichter smiled at Brother Jarvis. “Another vote for carnality.” He then turned to me and asked, “What of simple loneliness? A desperate and excessive loneliness, to be sure, but might that not, too, motivate a man to force a woman’s company?”
“Seven times?” I answered. “I cannot fathom such a need.”
“Perhaps,” Brunricher said. “Perhaps not. My point being simply this: There must be numerous other reasons, in addition to that of a sexual compulsion, why a man might commit such acts.”
“I cast my vote for monetary gain,” said Brother Jarvis. “It is my contention that the young women have been sold into a kind of slavery—”
“Ah, carnality again,” Brunrichter interrupted.
“Yes, Alfred, a slavery of carnality. Whether they remain on this continent or another, it’s impossible to predict.”
The doctor lay his head back against the chair but kept it turned so that he could look my way. “The greatest flaw among religious men is that they view every act in either black or white. If it isn’t good, it must be evil.” He smiled, awaiting my response. He wanted me to join him, I think, in attacking the monk. But I had no enthusiasm for an attack. I merely shrugged.
“What about anger as a motivation?” Brunrichter asked. “What about hatred? Inquisitiveness? Dementia? Perhaps, even, in a twisted way, love itself?”
Brother Jarvis said, “Perhaps even demonic possession.”
“Oh, please,” Brunrichter groaned.
He continued to gaze at me a few moments longer, softly smiling, then turned his head slightly and stared at the ceiling. “As Edgar himself agreed not ten minutes ago, the human mind is a very complex mechanism.”
“As is the human heart,” Poe mumbled.
He had been listening after all! I was startled to hear his voice, muted though it was.
“Thus spake the poet,” said Brunrichter. There was no mistaking the derisive tone of his words. Then, “The human heart, my friend, as I have attempted to show you, is a small piece of machinery. Nothing more.”
“The heart,” said Brother Jarvis, “is the seat of the soul.”
At this Brunrichter laughed, a loud, scoffing, chuckling sound. He sat forward in his chair again and aimed a finger at the monk. “This is the point at which all your beliefs inevitably collapse,” he said, and went on to chastise Brother Jarvis for his reliance on faith as a source of knowledge, for attributing all good to God and all evil to Satan, both unprovable entities, mere conjectures, superstitions of a lazy mind.
I soon became invisible to the three men, even as I lingered in the doorway. Their conversation shifted now to a debate about the nature of the human soul, where in the body, if not the heart, it might be situated, and of what material it might consist, how much it weighs and whether or not it purveys an odor. These questions were all offered up by the doctor, of course, who repeatedly challenged the monk to answer in specifics and to avoid any “abstract declarations of faith.” Poe joined in the conversation only when questioned directly, and seemed, to my ears, to cast his allegiance to whichever side posed the question.
Later that evening, in my room, I was overtaken by a profound melancholy as I wondered about the paradox at work within my own soul, the way I so enthusiastically courted stories of human tragedy by day and sought the purest of loves by night. And I wondered too what effect this dichotomous behavior might have on me, what I might have lost in becoming a new man, this James Dobson. I wondered whether what I hoped to gain by it would be irremediably tarnished or diminished by what I had given up.
20
CAME THE night of Poe’s second reading in Pittsburgh. I had spent the morning scouring the city for tales of misfortune—I was already filing one story every other day, writing with the raw ferocity of a man possessed—and had passed the first part of the afternoon at Mount Airy, questioning a new prisoner there, a particularly perfidious individual in whom so many of Pittsburgh’s hopes were invested.
Earlier that day, while I ambled through the courthouse, poking my head into this or that room to inquire of recent crimes, accidents, litigations and freakish events, a clerk in the High Constable’s office informed me that a man named English had been apprehended during the early hours of morning after a ruckus at a waterfront pub. Within minutes of being manacled he had confessed to the murder of the seven young women.
“What’s the evidence against him?” I asked.
To which the clerk replied, “The man confessed. Even told how he did it.”
I had been wrong about Vernon, that was the first thought that came to me. And with it, a disappointment, because I had wanted so badly for the banker to be the villain. On the heels of this thought came an opportunistic one: Be the first to get the story. Of course I raced next door to Mount Airy and arranged for an interview with the prisoner (and, even as I did so, wondered with a kind of awe about this detachment in me; wondered why my first or even second thought had been of anything other than compassion for the families of the missing girls. Maybe this James Dobson was no different than the gutter rat after all).
Accompanied by a guard I was led down the short hallway off the main lobby and into a small anteroom, empty but for the plain wooden table where two more guards sat playing dominoes. A heavy door was unlocked at the end of this room and I was escorted into the cell block and down another corridor, this one lit by gaslight. It was flanked on each side by a half-dozen thick doors of solid oak.
Mounted on each door at approximately five feet off the stone floor was a rectangular panel that could be slid open or, as all were at present, bolted shut. The guard led me to the last cell on the right side, unbolted the panel and slid it open with a bang. Cautiously he peeked inside. It took him awhile to locate the prisoner.
“Look for him under his bunk,” he told me, then stood to the side so that I could peer into the cell.
The small room was neither bright nor exceptionally dim. A shaft of dusty light slanted down from somewhere high above the center of the cell, but I, with my field of vision circumvented by the size of the panel, could not locate the source of illumination. The prisoner, on the other hand, was distinguishable as a long shadow beneath the plank bed secured to the wall on my right.
“Mr. English?” I called into the cell. “My name is James Dobson, I write for the newspaper. I’d like to ask you a few questions if I could.”
“My name is James Dobson, I write for the newspaper!”
The man’s voice when he said this was higher than I expected it to be, almost feminine, and there was a lilt to it, an undulating music not indicative of the local tongue. I guessed him to be a native of the British Isles.
To the guard, who was grinning broadly, I said, “Is his name English? Or is that his citizenship?”
“Whyn’t you ask him?” he suggested.
I put my face to the opening again. “Could you tell me your name, sir?”
“Pudden’n tane! Ask me again and I’ll tell you the same!”
“Is your surname English?”
“Is your surname Dobson?”
“Yes, it is. And my first name is James. What’s yours?”
“Marco Polo Ponce de Leon!”
Again I cast a jaundiced eye at the jail guard, whose head was bobbing up and down now as he chuckled at my reaction.
“The man is insane,” I whispered.
The guard replied, “All the same, he’s the one. Just ask him. Ask him if he done it or not.”
“Mr. English?” I said. “You are being held here for kidnapping the seven missing girls. Did you
do it?”
His response sent a shiver as sharp as a dagger down my spine. “Elma, Harriet, Kizzie, Linda, Mercy, Penelope, and Wilda.”
Not only had he correctly identified the first names of each of the missing girls, but he had put those names in alphabetical order.
“Didn’t I tell you?” the guard said.
I asked him, “The names have all been printed in the papers, have they not?”
“What is that supposed to prove?”
I addressed the prisoner again. “And what did you do to the girls, Mr. English?”
“Same as you would. Same as any man.”
“Which is what, exactly?”
“I kissed their titties and made them cry!” His laugh was as shrill as a nail scratching slate.
I spent another twenty minutes with the man, posing one question after another, but no candor could be coaxed from him. I went away from Mount Airy uncertain if Mr. English was thoroughly mad or brilliantly disingenuous.
Afterward I found a quiet spot to the rear of Grant’s Hill to make some notes for myself. Unfortunately, I had been apprised at Mount Airy that I had not been the first to learn of Mr. English’s incarceration and therefore would not be the first to report of it. This absolved me of any obligation I might have felt to write of it, and for that I was grateful, for I was not convinced that English was the culprit he claimed to be. Not especially eager to be made a fool of again by saying in print that he was or wasn’t the girls’ kidnapper, only to be proven wrong, I concentrated instead on outlining another story I had been told, that of a woman who reputedly was living four to five leagues north of Pittsburgh as the common-law wife of three brothers, to whom she had borne five children thus far. But there was something about that story, too, that made me uneasy, and I finally realized that the source of my unease was the phrase with which this family had been described, “as happy as ducks in water.” I was finding it difficult to equate their happiness with either criminality or sin. And since my editor had not charged me with reporting on situations of happiness, no matter how unconventionally obtained, I eventually scratched that story idea from my list and decided to allow the family their peace.
The one good thing that had come out of my few minutes in Vernon’s bedroom was that I now questioned how far I might go in pursuit of a story, to what lengths I was willing to descend. It had occurred to me that, to be an effective writer of the type I hoped to be, I must also become at times a criminal of sorts, a pickpocket of secrets, a thief of dignity and privacy.
The dilemma handcuffed me as I sat there atop Grant’s Hill. I scribbled a few worthless notes for myself but could decide on no story to write, could find no firm moral ground on which to stand. In mid afternoon I decided to return to the mansion on Ridge Avenue. Brunrichter, I knew, would still be at the hospital, and Poe, I knew even better, would be on pins and needles as he anticipated the evening’s presentation. He was to speak that night at the Old Drury Theater, a venerable old stage house, and to an audience much larger than that of the Quintillian Society. Brunrichter had told him to expect a gathering of at least three hundred eager admirers.
I found Poe in his room, in just the condition I had expected, as nervous as a bug in a hot skillet. The door to his room stood open, and I came upon him as he stood before the mirror, already dressed for the evening in a finely made black frock coat, a stiff white shirt and black silk cravat, a look of quiet terror in his eyes.
I tapped lightly on the doorframe. He reacted with a start.
“Only me,” I said.
He released a feathery breath. “Come in, my boy, come in. I am so glad to see you. I am rather at loose ends here, with nothing to do but to worry.”
I went to the small padded bench at the foot of his bed, sat there and said nothing, watched him fuss with his cravat for a while, then unbutton and rebutton his coat. No matter which way he pulled at his clothing, the fit did not satisfy him.
“You look fine,” I said.
“Too tight and I cannot breathe. The air gets stuck in my throat and my voice goes as high as a woman’s. Too loose and I appear a sloven.”
“You should try to relax. There are four hours left before the reading.”
He groaned. “Two hours before dinner. Another two before the reading. I will never survive without a glass or two of wine.” He turned away from the mirror. “Come and join me downstairs.”
“Could we stay here for a minute or two? And speak privately?”
He looked down into my face, saw something there that touched him, something that took him out of himself for a while, beyond his own fears. He then went to the rocking chair by the window, turned it to face the bed, pulled it to within a few feet of me, and sat.
“We haven’t had much time together lately, have we?” he asked.
“You’ve been busy,” I answered.
“In truth, not at all. Except for the reading last week and the activities of the weekend, what have I done?”
“I assumed that you have been getting to know the city. Seeing its sights.”
“Only those that can be seen from my window,” he said.
“Have you been writing?”
“If so, I have been doing it in my sleep.”
“Well, sleep is good for you. It’s been a long, rough spell for you.”
“I worry that I sleep too much. It is sometimes noon before I awaken, and another full hour or more before I feel anything but dullness in my brain. By the supper hour I feel reasonably fit again, but then, afterward, the lethargy returns, the dullness, and the next thing I know I am awakening, dully, to yet another day. Somehow I have lost a full two-thirds of the time we have spent in this house; I cannot account for it at all.”
“You’ve been ill since the last of January,” I told him. “You’re recovering still.”
I had reminded him, without thinking, of the date of Sissie’s death. Not that he required any help in recollecting it. “Sometimes,” he said, “I sit here in this room, hour after hour, and I think of her. It is all the energy I can muster, just to hold her in my thoughts.”
“How could you help but to think of her? I do as well.”
“But is it healthy to dwell on her as I do? That is what I wonder.”
“Does it bring you comfort?”
“Truly? I would have to answer no. It brings me … it brings me something other than comfort, that I should be enjoying a room like this, a house such as this, when, all those years, I was able to give her so little.”
“You gave her everything you had.”
He sat with one elbow on a knee, and rubbed a hand across his eyes.
We sat in silence for a while. A minute or so later he lifted his face away from his hand and sat a bit more upright. “But you,” he said. “Was there something you wanted to discuss with me?”
“Everything,” I told him.
At this he smiled. It was good to see that, for a while at least, the old Poe could be resurrected.
“In general, though, I came to keep you company through the afternoon.”
He wagged a finger at me. “You know my proclivities well.”
“We all have our proclivities,” I said.
For just a moment his countenance darkened. “Some more nefarious than others.”
He could be moved so easily from one emotion to its opposite, swung by just a nuance of word from optimism to despair, from selflessness to self-pity.
“In truth,” I said, “I have a request of you.”
Again he brightened. He liked nothing better than to be of use.
“I have a friend who would very much like to attend your reading tonight. With your permission, of course.”
“My permission is hardly necessary.”
“I would like it all the same.”
“And of course you have it. My permission, my blessings, my whatever you need. Did you imagine you would offend me somehow by bringing a guest unannounced?”
“It seems that everything I
do of late has that potential.”
Even as I said this a warmth ballooned in my chest, while another one stung my eyes. The look on his face suggested that he was experiencing a similar heat.
“It isn’t true, Augie. Though if it seems that way, then the fault is mine. And I apologize.”
“Maybe it’s just that I’m feeling, I don’t know, in the way here.”
Poe leaned closer to me and spoke just above a whisper. “Dr. Brunrichter tends to exert a rather proprietary influence, does he not?”
I nodded.
He slapped my knee. “But not on my heart, young man. Never on my heart.”
And now the warmth was in my throat. I swallowed hard.
“Speaking of the heart,” said Poe, and he leaned back in his chair now and gave me a devilish smile, “tell me of your friend.”
“Her name is Susan,” I said.
“And is that all you know of her?”
But no, I knew more. I knew so much and yet so little. I knew every lift and turn of her mouth by now, but I did not know the taste of that mouth, the way her lips might part when pressed to mine. I knew the rise and fall of her breasts when she smiled at me from across the supper table, but I did not know the sculptured beauty of those breasts beneath their layers of cotton and muslin, did not yet know the way their flesh would fill my hands and their warmth would fill my soul. I knew the way her fingers, so lovely, long and thin, would hold a cup, a fork, a patent pen, but I did not know the way that hand might fit my own, knew only that the fit, when at last our fingers dovetailed, must surely be seamless and divinely precise.
What I related to Poe, of course, were all the superficial facts I knew about her. He understood the rest without being told.
“She is a great admirer of your work,” I said. “If you could speak to her tonight, just a word or two …”
At this he stood, so quickly that it startled me, and went to his satchel beside the bed, rummaged through it, then pulled out a volume, his Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, published the same year I first met him in New York. He carried this to his writing desk, where he wrote an inscription on the flyleaf. He fanned the ink with his hand, then brought the book back to me, held open so that I might read:
Disquiet Heart Page 18
