Disquiet Heart Page 13

  His blue shirt was soaked through with perspiration, his broad face aglow with it. He appeared to take such joy in his work, humble as it was, that I could not help but feel a fondness for him.

  “And how’s a young man like yourself this fine Sunday morning?” he asked.

  Throughout our entire conversation he did not break stride or alter his exquisite rhythm of labor, but continued to haul the barrels from the wagon to the dock and there to stack them in rows three deep and two high.

  “I’m doing good,” I answered, and noticed, not without some twinge of nostalgic pleasure, how easily I’d slipped back into my former manner of speech, unadorned and perhaps ungrammatical, that sweet understatement of the streets.

  “Glad to hear it. On your way to church, are you?”

  “Doing my best to avoid that too, along with the beer and coffins. Too much of any of them just ain’t healthy.”

  He laughed. “Of the three, I’ll take the beer.”

  “And this beer you’re loading. Where’s it headed?”

  “Where does all beer go? Comes off the river one day, gets pissed back into it the next.”

  Now it was my turn to laugh. “You always work so hard on Sundays?”

  “Only when there’s money to be made from it.”

  On his next trip to the wagon he asked me, “Where’s that accent of yours coming from?”

  “I’m from Ohio lately. Ottawa County. But I was born in New York City. Lived there my first ten and a half years.”

  “And what’s brought you to Pittsburgh?”

  I must have pondered my answer too long, wondering which of my identities to reveal to him, for a half minute later he laughed so hard that a brace of pigeons burst into flight off the rooftop behind us.

  “I never seen a man trying so hard to figure out what he was up to!”

  I blushed hotly, but grinned all the same. “Truth is, I’m in the middle of trying to figure out that very thing. All I know for sure is, I’m on my way to Mexico before too long. I plan to get into that war down there before it’s over.”

  There was a hitch in his stride then, perceptible only if you were watching him as closely as did I. “Last keg,” he said, and heaved it onto a shoulder. “Time to sit and wait for the boat. Come down and join me if you’ve a mind to.”

  I followed him to the dock, sat beside him on a keg of beer. We faced north by northwest so that the morning sun did not blind us.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Gus. Gus Dubbins. And you?”

  “Buck Kemmer.” He offered me his hand, large and rough and warm. “So tell me this, Gus Dubbins. Who’s war is it you’re so eager to fight in?”

  “The war with the Mexicans.”

  “Not which war. I asked whose war.”

  “Zachary Taylor’s, I guess.”

  “So if it’s his fight, whyn’t you let Zachary Taylor do his own fighting? What’s he to you that you’re willing to get yourself shot for him?”

  “He’s our President.”

  Buck spit into the water.

  “You don’t like him?” I asked.

  “Don’t know him. Never met the man. Never expect to. All I can tell you on that subject is, Anytime I offer myself up as cannon fodder, I’m gonna first have a damn clear idea of who I’m doing it for and why I’m doing it.”

  “Well, it’s … it’s for the adventure of it, I suppose.”

  “Being run through with a Mexican sword, or having your head taken off by a punkin ball—that sounds exciting to you, does it?”

  “I don’t intend to let that happen to me.”

  He nodded. Then he put a hand on my back and patted my shoulder. I considered whether he meant to comfort or congratulate me. Before I could reach a decision, he shoved me forward, and I went flying headfirst, legs kicking air, into the Monongahela River.

  I came up spitting, spitting water but ready in a second or two to start spitting curses as well. He leaned forward and stuck out his baling hook for me to grasp, then hauled me out as easily as pulling a widemouth bass up by its gills, and deposited me in a dripping heap on the dock.

  “You intend to take that bath just now?” he asked.

  I was still too angry to speak.

  He knelt beside me. Looked me dead in the eye. Tenderly, then, with a delicacy I would not have thought his thick fingers capable of, he brushed a limp lock of hair from my eyes.

  “Bad things happen,” he said, his voice no longer loud, “whether we intend them to or not. Don’t make much sense to go looking for them, now does it, son?”

  Again I had no answer, though this time it was not anger that stopped my tongue.

  A moment later a voice came to us from the riverbank, a voice that struck my ears with the same delicate tones as those of a church bell chiming over a springtime countryside. “And how am I supposed to panfry that?” she asked.

  I looked first at Buck, who was grinning ear to ear. “I’m not all that convinced we should keep this one,” he called to her. “Strangest-looking fish I ever pulled out. Seems to me we’d better hand it over to one of them professors you know. Let him cut it open, see what’s in its stomach.”

  I turned to face her then.

  And maybe because I faced fully into the sun at that moment, and took the sudden glare of it unshielded in watery eyes, maybe that was why I felt physically struck by her visage, literally thumped by it. Poleaxed, square between the eyes.

  She was not beautiful. Yet she was beauty itself to me. She was not perfect. Yet she was perfection personified. If I had thought I’d been emptied by a morning’s writing, made hungry by a good morning’s work, my first glimpse of this young woman turned me inside out with hunger.

  She was a girl of average height, somewhat more pretty than plain, with green eyes nearly emerald bright, a few pale freckles tossed across her cheeks. Her hair, beneath the wide-brimmed hat, was something like the umber of autumn, something like a sienna sunset. She was not a child—sixteen, I would later learn—but her smile was still young, too young for any trace of cruelty on those lips, those lips as full as summer itself.

  (I have recently read, and tend to believe, now that I am old, too old for much of anything other than reading, and nearly too blind for that—I have recently read that what I felt on that afternoon, so sudden and startling, so impossible to predict, suppress, or re-create at will—I have recently read that what I experienced was nothing more than an animalian reflex, some imperative of self-duplication blasted from the medulla oblongata down the central nervous system and radiated into every cell. Something primitive and elemental, common to every living thing. This may well be true. Nevertheless, it is a magic.)

  Of the conversation that followed between myself and Buck Kemmer’s daughter, whose name was Susan, of our few minutes together as she delivered her father his noonday meal packed in a straw basket, nothing of the words that passed between us needs to be recounted here. What needs describing but never can be, can only be alluded to, approached obliquely, too huge for words, is this approximation of what I felt: Upon my first glimpse of her, nothing else mattered.

  WHAT DO we know of passion and love? What do we know that can be authenticated as fact, verified from individual to individual, tested and proven time after time by the most rigorous of scientific methods?

  Not a whit.

  Of passion and love we do not even know if one is a variety of the other. Or if the two are distinct, though they sometimes come into confluence. Is one to the other like a tumor on the brain, but a tumor whose tentacles have so enveloped and infiltrated the brain that they themselves become pathways for thought?

  If, prior to my first exchange of glances with Miss Susan Kemmer, I had wanted to be a writer so as to fashion myself in some elliptical way more like Poe, I now wanted to be a writer for her alone, so as to impress upon her my gentlemanly facility with words. If previously I had craved the glory of battle among scorpions and sand, I now craved only the glory
to be found as the object of her lingering gaze.

  Was a baser desire tangled up with this as well? Even if my mouth denied it, the subequator of my body could not. But the fact remains: Suddenly, all life entered me through my longing for her. Every moment wore her smile superimposed upon it.

  As adults, we are formed by our earliest passions. I, in the space of one week in my seventeenth year, discovered two unlike any others I had ever felt. Both would bless and curse me for the remainder of my life. One I would wear like a warm and rainproof cloak. The other like a thorn in my heart.

  AND NOW, the third important incident of the day, an incident colored, one might even say defined, by the previous two, for we perceive each moment not in its own light but in the light left over from its immediate past.

  I do not mean to imply by this a belief in a cause-effect paradigm to our existence. Short-term, perhaps, a sequence of order can sometimes be identified. But in the longer scheme of things, accident and chance prevail. A life is shaped by the thing we call coincidence. An unexpected meeting. A coin found on the street. A sudden downpour that drives us into the nearest doorway.

  Had I not been so pained by the sight of drowning elephants, for example, would I have felt compelled to find a means for expiating sorrow? Would I ever have dreamed of myself as a writer?

  If a respected physician had not one morning happened to notice in his shaving mirror a resemblance there to the face of a writer he admired, would Poe and I not still be in Philadelphia, or perhaps New York?

  The chain of all changes begins with chance.

  It was chance, was it not, that had me return to Brunrichter’s estate just at that moment, midday, when he and Poe were about to sally forth?

  “In the nick of time,” said Poe from the steps of the veranda, on his way down. Brunrichter, two steps below, held lightly to Poe’s elbow, steadying Poe’s descent—an unnecessary courtesy, it seemed to me, though there was a vague unsteadiness to Poe’s gaze, a certain lassitude in his smile. Mr. Tevis waited just off the porch, a large and overfilled straw basket in each hand, a woolen blanket folded and laid over one shoulder.

  The doctor smiled at me but said nothing.

  “Come join us,” Poe said. “We’re off to have a picnic.” He, like the doctor, was rosy-cheeked already. I did not think this bloom the result of Pittsburgh air.

  “I’ve had a busy morning,” I told them. “I was thinking of taking a short nap.”

  “Mrs. Dalrymple has prepared a substantial repast. Enough to feed one more, isn’t that right, Doctor?”

  Brunrichter did not answer for a moment, as if distracted. Then, “Of course,” he said. “You will be most welcome.”

  Poe waggled a finger at my clothes, still limp and damp. “You mustn’t put Augie close to a river. He cannot resist the urge to swim.”

  He then turned to Brunrichter and, as if I were no longer there, recounted his first meeting with “the boy,” and told how the “grimy-faced urchin” had discovered, by way of a dunking in the Hudson River, the body of a young woman named Mary Rogers.

  “Not the Mary Rogers depicted in The Mystery of Marie Roget?”

  “The very same,” said Poe. “More or less.”

  “How intriguing!” Brunrichter said, and turned to me. “Do all of your adventures involve the death of a young woman?”

  Before I could answer, he spoke to Poe. “Has he told you, Edgar, of the happenstance of two nights past? How he happened to be in the exact location from which the latest of our own missing girls disappeared?”

  “I would not call it the exact location,” I said. “I was in the vicinity.”

  “But at the very hour she disappeared. More or less?”

  I said nothing.

  “An intriguing coincidence, would you not agree, Edgar?”

  Poe smiled. I had the unsettling suspicion that he was seeing me again as a grimy-faced urchin. “Don’t tease the boy, Alfred.” But he could not leave it at that. “Unlike ourselves, he has shown no interest of any kind in attractive young women.”

  At this they laughed, Brunrichter heartiest of all. I was about to turn away from them when the doctor said, “Then by all means you must not join us, for we intend to surround ourselves with a bevy of young women through all this afternoon. Is that not what picnics are for, Edgar?”

  “So you tell me,” answered Poe.

  “You would only be bored, Augie, in the presence of so much delicate flesh. Better to stay behind,” he chuckled again, “and entertain yourself.”

  Was it this sophomoric challenge that caused me, in sophomoric response, to wave my hand with a flourish and answer, “Lead the way”? Or was it because both men were intoxicated, and I yet felt responsible for one of them? Was it because I sensed how much happier Brunrichter would be if I did indeed decline his invitation, and some truculent part of me wished to deny him that happiness, even at the expense of my own fatigue?

  I did not know the answer then, and do not know it now. The human mind, for all its insights, can seldom see itself.

  THE PICNIC was held on a grassy ridge a bit more than a quarter mile to the rear of the mansion. From this promontory the Allegheny River was clearly visible in the valley below, a wide green serpent slowly coursing down greening valleys. On another elevation, slightly lower than our own and maybe seven hundred yards farther north, the grounds of St. Gregory’s Benedictine monastery were visible—a stone chapel and four smaller wooden structures. The monks’ herd of goats was to thank for keeping the grass of this rolling meadow cropped short, and also for supplying the monks’ livelihood in milk and cheese and a sugary confection flavored with vanilla bean. The monks, Brunrichter told us, hoped to one day charter a college on their grounds.

  Other than the monastery and the Brunrichter estate to the south, the land was clear of all buildings save one, the Brunrichter family mausoleum some fifty yards back toward the mansion. Brunrichter had walked us past it on our way to the picnic grounds, though it was not directly along our path.

  “My final resting place,” he had said of the huge octagonal tomb. Its Gothic dome would have made the building look mushroomlike and ridiculous standing alone there in the meadow, but for the sandstone porch that encircled the mausoleum, and the wide border of pink-white seashells that encircled the porch like a moat, the porch roof supported by a dozen marble colonettes, all surfaces filigreed and carved with intaglios, the entire edifice crowned with a bronze angel, kneeling, her wings spread and palms raised and eyes turned toward Heaven.

  “Fit for an emperor,” Poe remarked.

  “My mother and father are inside,” said Brunrichter, to which we said nothing, though Poe put out a hand and touched the doctor’s shoulder, and we all stood motionless, reverent, for the next thirty seconds or so.

  Then Brunrichter said, cheerfully, “No visit from me today, however! Today we have a picnic!” With that he turned away from the tomb and marched off happily through the low-grown meadow. “Careful where you step, Edgar. There is deer and goat shit everywhere.”

  BY THE time we reached the picnic grounds, Tevis had already spread the blanket and was busily setting out the lunch. A half-dozen carriages sat side by side some twenty yards away, the horses staked and contentedly munching grass. The carriages’ passengers, at least twenty in all, three-fourths of them female, were seated on their own blankets in a semicircle around the one Tevis had laid for Brunrichter and Poe, twenty eager faces all turned to watch Poe’s approach. A pair of young spinsters—sisters, judging from the similarities of their broad Teutonic faces—actually applauded.

  Despite the panoramic view and the serene atmosphere of the place, I regretted coming. I could tell by the crowd assembled that this picnic was to be another of Poe’s public appearances, nothing more. No doubt he would recite a half-dozen poems. The young women would sigh, the matrons would smile and pat their bosoms, the men would nod sagely.

  And I? I would linger long enough to eat—there was roasted pheasant
in those baskets, and a leg of mutton—then slip quietly away. That there were indeed several young women in attendance, many of them quite comely, interested me not at all. There was but one young woman with whom I cared to share a word or glance or anything more, and this I intended to do, as soon as I could devise a way.

  14

  THE PICNIC proceeded much as I expected, at least in the beginning, sedate and polite. Introductions were made by Brunrichter, but only for Poe’s benefit, since everyone present already knew who he was, and Brunrichter deemed myself, like Tevis, unworthy of an introduction. The distaff side of the group was comprised of the daughters and wives of several prominent merchants, plus a few unescorted young ladies, all in frilly dresses and sunbonnets. Among the men were a Mr. Vernon, the vice president of the Bank of Pittsburgh, a Dr. Delaney, publisher of the literary paper called The Mystery, a Mr. Kane, publisher of the Western Literary Magazine, an elderly man named Gatesford, and a monk named Brother Jarvis from the nearby monastery. All were dressed for a casual day in the country, save for the monk, a rather slight and soft-spoken man, who wore a pair of gray trousers beneath a coarse brown cassock.

  A red woolen blanket had been laid out for Poe and Brunrichter near the center of all the other blankets. Poe reclined there on an elbow, occasionally sipping from a glass of claret. In the beginning he spoke only when questioned directly, content to let the conversation wander through a series of local topics, its flow meandering like a stream over new ground, seeking its course. There was talk of the turmoil at the new cotton factory, of how local labor disputes had incited the women and boys employed there to demand the outrageous wage of three dollars per week—my own recently earned half eagle grew suddenly heavier in my pocket—and of how a few of those boys, their demands denied, had vented their frustration by smashing out a large window, only to be hauled off to the new jail adjunct to the courthouse on Grant’s Hill.

  Someone then called for the latest news concerning a young Mr. Foster, and an attractive young lady seated at Poe’s feet, introduced as Miss Lydia Cavin and a close acquaintance of the Pittsburgh songwriter, was importuned to serenade us with one of Mr. Foster’s compositions, a melodious ballad entitled “Open Thy Lattice, Love.” She did so admirably enough, but it was, I think, the nervous quiver in her voice, coupled with a healthy figure and milk white complexion, that engaged Poe more. No doubt he heard an echo of Sissie’s own dulcet tones in that serenade, for he was immediately taken by Miss Cavin, and his gaze, through all the ensuing talk of how sublime were Mr. Foster’s melodies and lyrics, how tragic that he be forced to earn his daily bread in the outpost of Cincinnati, kept returning to her, his wistful smile a continuing compliment to her comeliness.