In this manner the negotiations continued. After a long while Susan stepped forward to intervene. I have no doubts that with a single smile and a few soft words she could have melted away all resistance and obtuseness in the man, but I was seventeen and had many things to prove, not only to her and the world but to myself. I pulled out my wallet and nonchalantly displayed a sizable stack of paper money—my entire life savings, hard-earned over seven years of field work, moon-shining and petty thievery.
“I will pay twice your normal rate, sir, if you can have a carriage ready within the next five minutes. Plus a dollar extra for your trust that, two hours from now, I will return the carriage to the barn and put your horse back in her stall, all without having to wake you from your sleep.”
“Without waking me from my sleep,” he said. He nodded, tongue sweeping off the walls of his cheeks, until finally the gist of my offer struck home, and his eyes lit up, and he turned toward the barn door and hastened to lift the latch.
Before long Susan and I were moving briskly up Liberty Street. Our horse’s clops on the cobblestones were the only sounds in the night, other than those of the howling dogs alerted by our passage.
“You handled that very well,” Susan told me.
“I was hoping you would notice.”
“You were hoping I would notice,” she repeated solemnly, and then we rocked against one another laughing.
A few moments later she laid a hand on my arm. “You seem older than you are,” she said. “Father thinks so too.”
The words thrilled me nearly as much as her touch. “Older than your professor?”
“He isn’t my professor, Augie. And he is nearly thirty years old.”
“Have you kissed him?”
“August Dubbins! Don’t be impertinent.”
“I’m just curious is all.”
“Curious? Only curious?”
“Only curious,” I said, and watched out of the corner of my eyes for her reaction, which was precisely the one I longed for, a slight pouting of her lips.
I added then, “Curious as to whether I will have to shoot the man or not.”
She laughed again. What music! “You shall not have to shoot anyone on my account,” she said.
“No one?”
“None worth shooting, in any case.”
We rode in silence for a few moments. The night was aglow, so warm on my cheeks, such a fire in my heart.
“And me?” I finally asked.
“And you what?”
“When will another man have cause to shoot me?”
“Why, never, I hope.”
“What I mean is … your professor, for example. If he felt the same way I do, that is. About having to shoot someone …”
“Your wit and candor suddenly desert you,” she said with a smile. “Why is that?”
“I’m glad to be able to amuse you.”
“What is it you really wish to say to me, Augie?”
I pulled in a deep breath. “I want to kiss you, Susan Kemmer.”
She said nothing. Smiled a slow, delicious smile.
I waited as long as I could. “Well?”
“Well what?” she asked.
“Well, how do you feel about what I just now told you?”
“It pleases me,” she said.
“And?”
“And what?”
“Damn it, Susan—”
She turned suddenly, eyes glaring.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to curse.”
“I think you did.”
“You’re right, I did. In fact I feel like doing it again.”
Instead of making her angry, my response appeared to defuse all anger. Her smile returned but was directed at the road ahead. I decided to let the matter drop for a while, to savor the smile as the most I was likely to get.
But not two minutes passed before she asked, “Do you still want to kiss me?”
I turned to her, unflinching. “I will never stop wanting to kiss you.”
If any of my words that night had the potential to sway her, those, I thought smugly, would surely do it.
She did not sway.
My frustration was explosive. “Well?” I demanded.
Her smile was cherubic. “Just curious,” she said.
23
THAT CARRIAGE ride, as I now look back on it, marked the end of our innocence. We rode through the hard dismal gray of Pittsburgh and into the bucolic hills, up out of the haze of smoke, moving at a clop ever closer, we thought, to the stars overhead. We did not realize that the stars will appear even brighter when gazed upon from Hell.
Music came to us through the windows of the doctors house, music as bright as the gaslights twinkling through the glass. The closer we approached, the louder was the laughter, too, and the chatter of all the celebrants inside, some two dozen or more. There was no room at the long hitching post for another carriage, so I tied our horse to the wheel of a Dearborn.
“Isn’t this exciting?” Susan asked as I led her onto the veranda. “The night seems so magical—I can’t stop trembling.”
I sensed something in the night as well, a certain disquietude that struck me, vaguely, as not so magical as she imagined, and, had Susan been any less enthusiastic, I might have paused before flinging open the door, might have taken an extra moment to ascertain if the trembling, mine as well as her own, should be interpreted as an inducement or a caution. But I wanted to give her happiness. I wanted her to think me a man who lived in the very heart of it.
I escorted her into the foyer, where she gawked wordlessly at the massive chandelier blazing with the brightness of a dozen tiny suns. For a moment I was content to gaze upon her face, my own source of wonderment, until some of the laughter from the adjacent library took on the quality of a shriek, and I turned toward the threshold, and she with me.
I do not know how to describe the scene we beheld there without lapsing into caricature. What the room contained was itself a caricature of gaiety and licentious behavior. It goes without saying that I was not then a prude and never would be, and were it not for Susan’s presence at my side I would surely have looked differently upon the scene, would probably have thrown myself eagerly into the fray. But there was a delicacy to Susan that I cherished and wished to protect. She was unsullied by the world, and I, who had been drenched in its sullying influences from the moment of my first breath, I wanted her to remain that way. She seemed to me like light itself in a pitch-black world. How could I allow that light to be dirtied?
A quartet played in the corner of the library, the musicians deliberately oblivious to everything but their music—I think it was one of Mozart’s chamber pieces they played—a countermelody to the behavior of Brunrichter’s guests. Extra divans and chairs had been squeezed into the room, extra individuals squeezed onto each one of them. Suffice it to say that wine and rum were in no short supply, that men had thrown off their coats and ties to stride or sit or sprawl in shirtsleeves and suspenders, many with women at their sides or in their laps, every body lax and unstable, men and women alike puffing on fat cigars. A few individuals sat stretched out nearly supine, a pad of gauze still over their noses and mouths, having recently been visited by or anticipating a visit from Mr. Vernon, the banker, that pillar of society, who with a small bottle and dropper in hand moved about the room administering dose after stupefying dose.
Poe’s reception had degenerated into an ether folly. Those guests not stupefied by ether were wild with alcohol or intoxicated by those components of the smoky haze that smelled nothing like tobacco. The host, Dr. Brunrichter, was nowhere to be seen. As for the guest of honor …
Susan spotted him a moment before I did. Her fingers tightened around my arm so that I turned from the scene of a young woman who, having undone her bodice, was fanning the two halves back and forth. She was the same young woman who, less than a week earlier, had struck me as so demure and reverential at the picnic for Poe. Miss Lydia Cavin. Now she was cooling herself by openi
ng and closing her dress in the face of a corpulent man bent over close to her breasts, a glass of wine in each hand, held out as if for balance.
In any case, Susan’s small gasp turned my attention to her. When I looked her way she said, “Behind the violinist. On the floor.”
(I am failing at this description, I know. It no doubt strikes you as a comic scene, a roomful of inebriated fools. You would have to know Poe as I did, you would have to know his weaknesses and failings, the darkness he carried, to understand the malevolence of this tableau. All of this was as poison to him, but a poison he could seldom resist.)
Poe had collapsed in the corner between the violinist and the wall. He was on one knee, forehead pressed into the corner, one hand braced against the wall, the other arm limp at his side, his fingers occasionally fluttering up and falling helplessly down. I could see him in profile, saw how his eyelids fluttered, how the side of his coat and one pant leg was soiled because either he or somebody else had been sickened by the ether or alcohol or another of the drugs.
“Wait for me outside,” I said to Susan, and without turning to watch her exit I strode into the room, shoving men and women aside. I was angry but it was a cold, unswervable anger. I seized the startled violinist by an arm and firmly but calmly made him rise and move aside. He looked once into my eyes and then complied without protest. Then I leaned over Poe and slipped my hands beneath his arms.
“Stand up with me,” I told him.
He turned his head slowly, lifted his baleful eyes at me. He muttered something but it made no sense and did not matter. All that mattered was that his eyes were so clouded with sadness. He was lost in despair.
He offered neither resistance nor cooperation. I pulled him to his feet. At that moment he seemed so slender and frail in my arms. I could feel the sharpness of his ribs beneath my hands.
Moving backward then, neither of us fully upright, I half dragged, half carried him toward the foyer. If an individual blocked my path I let him know by a thrust of my shoulder that I would not be constrained. Near the threshold Mr. Vernon interposed himself in front of me. He stood there grinning, and raised up his bottle of ether in one hand, a white handkerchief in the other. I went rigid with anger.
“Move out of my way,” I told him, “or you will soon wish you had.”
He gave this a moment’s consideration, just long enough for the fool in me to form a thought about the petticoat, to think about uttering some reference to it. Fortunately, Vernon’s hesitation lasted no longer. He turned aside to let us pass, and I managed to keep my mouth shut.
I managed to pull Poe out into the foyer and beneath the blazing chandelier. I backed us to the stairway, climbed to the first and then the second step. As I dragged Poe toward me, lifting his heels clear of the first step, I happened to lift my gaze to the entrance, the open doorway. There, watching, fingers to her lips, was Susan.
I did not hear Brunrichter descending behind me. Until he spoke. “Mr. Dubbins. You have decided to join us.”
I turned sharply, pivoting as much as I was able so as to look him in the eye. He stood two steps above me. “What have you given him?” I demanded.
“Nothing he didn’t request, you can be sure.”
“You know his condition!”
“Better than you,” he said.
I jerked my chin toward the library. “This is a disgrace.”
“Do not lecture me, young man.”
“This is contemptible. And so are you. Get out of my way.”
He smiled at me but he did not move. He then raised his right hand above his shoulder and flicked his fingers, summoning, I now saw, Mr. Tevis, who had been waiting at the turn of the stairs above. Tevis came down quickly, and, for just a moment, I glimpsed behind him, before he ducked away behind the corner, the face of Brother Jarvis, the monk.
I had no opportunity to puzzle out this situation, however, before Tevis was upon me. He seized the back of my coat and jerked me away from Poe, who sat down heavily on the stairs. Brunrichter slid past me before I could recover, and in a moment had taken Poe by the hand to lead him back into the library.
As for me, I had no fondness of being handled roughly, and so returned the favor as quickly as I could regain my balance. I grasped Tevis by the lapels and, squatting suddenly, hauled him toward me, ducking my head between his legs so that he tumbled over me headfirst, thumping to the foot of the stairs.
He righted himself in an instant and came at me again, but now Brunrichter emerged from the library. “Stop!” he said.
Tevis froze but kept his grim eyes locked on mine.
Brunrichter smiled. He nodded toward the doorway, where Susan yet remained. “You are frightening your lovely young friend,” he told me.
“And you are killing Poe.”
“Don’t be silly. I am his doctor and his friend.”
“His doctor? He has no need for a doctor.”
“He does indeed. His melancholia, his lethargy, the pains in his abdomen, his oversensitivity to sound and touch—you look surprised. Could it be that I see him more clearly than you do?”
“You see what you choose to see.”
“I know him as well as I know myself. For that reason I, and only I, have been able to identify his disease. And I am treating him accordingly.”
“I’m taking him out of here tonight.”
“You will not.”
“Do you think you can stop me?”
“You have been stopped already. And if you persist, Mr. Tevis shall be obliged to stop you permanently.”
Tevis stepped toward me then, putting his back to Susan, blocking her view as he unbuttoned his jacket and pulled it aside to reveal the ivory handle of a small pistol protruding from his vest pocket.
“Shall we continue this discussion in private?” Brunrichter asked.
“I have nothing to discuss with you.”
“Then I bid you good night.”
“I’m taking my things. I won’t stay here any longer.”
“As you wish,” he said.
“I’ll be coming back tomorrow for Mr. Poe.”
“He will be here. But he will not wish to leave.”
A dangerous thought then occurred to me, and I lacked the maturity to hold it back. “Perhaps I’ll bring James Dobson along as well. Will that make a difference?”
He flinched. Then, imperiously, “Why would the presence of a newspaper hack matter in the least?”
But my intimation had struck home; I saw it in his momentary lapse of aplomb.
And with that, plus an ill-considered smirk, I turned away from him, strode up the stairs to my room. There, in the darkness, I gathered up my few possessions and stuffed them into my bag. Last to go was Poe’s slender volume of stories, which he had inscribed to Susan. I paused by the window to open the book, to read by moonlight what he had written there, his first overt expression of love for me.
On that same page, as a kind of bookmark but so much more, I had placed a small black feather. A year earlier that feather had been mailed to me in a letter from Muddy, sent, she said, as a memento from Poe, his way of acknowledging his debt to me, as he conceived it, for my part in the inspiration for “The Raven,” a poem composed one raindark, windy night in Poe’s cottage off Bloomingdale Road. Mine was a minimal inspiration yet one I cherished, the good fortune that had put me there in the room with him as he, slumped over the kitchen table, came halfway out of a troubled sleep, convinced that Death himself was rapping on the window, come early to whisk Virginia away, and then the relief in Poe’s eyes when I told him, “It was just a crow, don’t worry, I chased it away.”
For a moment I considered removing that feather from the book, keeping it my own. But to give it to Susan would not be giving it away, merely passing it forward to another part of myself. And so I closed the book, feather inside, then placed the book in my bag, and I left that room forever.
Poe was no longer in sight downstairs, not, as I expected, in the library, where the cele
bration continued unabated. The front door had now been closed, but through the etched glass I could see shadows on the veranda, and upon exiting I found Susan there in conversation with Brunrichter, he with one hand on her elbow, the other holding her hand lightly by the fingers, holding it with all the nonchalance I had never been able to muster. That he, who had known her only minutes, knew her in fact not at all, felt privileged to take that hand into his own when I, longing impotently to do so all these days …
In an instant I was enraged, and saw the world through a tincture of blood. I barreled into him, shoulder first, and sent him flying against the porch rail.
“Augie!” Susan cried. She might have said more, I heard nothing but the roar inside my head.
I was deaf and blind to everything but my rage and the object of my rage. Without a moment’s hesitation I dropped my bag and was upon him, seizing his coat so as to haul him up off his knees. Strangely, even as I drew back a fist, he was grinning at me.
And then, an explosion against the side of my head. Tevis’s swing had come over my right shoulder, a blast of thunder on the corner of my mouth, rattling my jaw and spinning me away. I staggered hard against the wall, head full of sudden lightning that blinked as suddenly out. Pitched in blindness, I felt my legs caving in beneath me, my field of vision flooded with a blackness broken only by the red swirls of pain.
How I made it to the carriage, I do not remember. Two recognitions eventually returned to me: the sense of movement, of jouncing along at a brisk gait, my bottom bouncing on the seat board; and, secondly, of a slick heat in my hand, its trickling tickle on my wrist.
We were on our way down Bedford, not yet as far as the Basin, whose stink I would have noticed had my nose not been full of blood. My hand, held to my nose, was full of blood as well, my sleeve soaked with it. I could feel the front of my shirt sticking to the skin.
“Put your hand back over your nose!” Susan scolded me. “Tilt your head back!”
She was driving the carriage, reins in one hand, other hand atop the brake lest our horse, trotting vigorously downhill, should be spooked by the carriage pushing hard from behind.
Disquiet Heart Page 20
