Disquiet Heart Read online

  I recall, too, some talk about the city’s newest literary paper, the Pittsburgh Saturday Visitor, published by the abolitionist and suffragette Jane Grey Swisshelm and filled, said old man Gatesford, with “antisocial bile aimed at the ruination of the American hearth and home.”

  This led to a discussion of contemporary letters in general, and here Poe, enlivened by the warmth of Ms. Cavin’s doelike gaze, was encouraged to give free expression of his antipathy toward those who presumed to be America’s literary elite, the “titmice and tittlebats” of Gotham, the “Frogpondian euphuists” of New England.

  I had the sense that there was nothing Poe could utter that would not be nodded at and smiled upon by those gathered around him. He sat like a sultan in the midst of an adoring harem. I stood like a eunuch on the fringe, a quiet disgust slowly accruing inside me.

  IN TIME, though none too soon, the food was unpacked, and this in itself prompted a sudden detour in the conversation. Most prominent among the savories that Tevis laid before us were slices of roast lamb, the edges crisp and rosemary-crusted, the meat pink and sweet, still warm from the spit.

  “You will notice,” Brunrichter said to Poe as Tevis prepared the plates, “that we have sacrificed a spring lamb on your behalf.”

  “How very appropriate,” an older woman remarked, “so near to Easter!”

  “And a holy lamb to boot,” said the doctor, “supplied as it was by Brother Jarvis, and, we must therefore assume, as sinless as he is himself.”

  The monk gave a little bow of his head, totally unaffected by the doctor’s ironic tone.

  Vernon, the banker, was quick to seize on the opportunity for provocation. “What is it you people do with the blood?” he asked the monk. “You wash your hands in it, rub it on your doors, something similar to that?”

  Brother Jarvis smiled calmly. “If by ‘you people’ you mean we Catholics, we do neither. Not literally, in any case. You are thinking, perhaps, of the Jewish people and the original Passover. When they smeared lamb’s blood on their doors so that the Angel of Death would not visit their households.”

  “How disappointing it must be,” said Vernon, “that Catholicism provides no similarly colorful alternative.”

  Brunrichter said, “Ah, but they have an even better one. All Christians do. It is called cannibalism.”

  Said Vernon, “I was raised an Episcopalian, and might be one still had we ever practiced such a treat.”

  “Did you never take communion?”

  “I did.”

  “And what is communion if not a symbolic act of cannibalism? You eat the body of Christ, you drink his blood. Am I right, Brother Jarvis? Do you or do you not serve up your Lord on a platter every Sunday?”

  The monk rolled his eyes. Apparently this was not the first time he had been baited with this argument. “And every Monday we enjoy the leftovers with a soup.”

  This brought a chorus of howls and shrill laughter, a few hearty slaps on the monk’s narrow shoulders. The gaiety echoed over the meadow. I scarcely knew what to make of it all.

  “Tell me, Edgar,” Brunrichter said, “does the meat taste any sweeter for having been so vociferously blessed?”

  “It is sweet indeed,” said Poe, and with this raised his eyes to young Miss Cavin.

  Brunrichter continued. “Brother Jarvis brought the animal to us last night, leading it by a rope. And all the way here he prayed over it.” Now the doctor laughed, as if the memory were too delicious to stifle. “Even as Mr. Tevis sharpened his knife, Brother Jarvis kept muttering away—praying for the animal’s soul!”

  Brother Jarvis smiled. “Knowing what was soon to occur, perhaps I was praying for yours, Alfred.”

  “In either case, you were praying for something that does not exist.”

  The man named Delaney now held his plate out in front of him and cast a baleful eye at the small mound of meat. “Don’t tell me that you experimented with this animal as well,” he said.

  “And why not?”

  Delaney thought for a moment, then shrugged, then forked a slice into his mouth.

  Mr. Vernon said, “Ms. Cavin is fairly new to our happy little group, and I can tell by the furrows in her lovely brow that she has no idea what we are talking about. Should we enlighten her?”

  Said Brother Jarvis, “The good doctor conducts experiments on animals.”

  “Oh my,” she said.

  “Indeed.”

  Hesitantly she asked, “What kind of experiments?”

  “Experiments in galvanism. He removes the head and attempts to keep it alive with electrical stimulation.”

  Her eyes grew wide. In short, she provided the horrified expression the men had hoped to induce in her.

  Brunrichter said, “As always, Vernon, you oversimplify.”

  “You connect the head to a voltaic pile and try to make it talk. Or, in this case, baaaaa!”

  Everybody laughed, except for Miss Cavin, who was looking a bit squeamish.

  Brunrichter told her, “I excite arterial and muscular contractions.”

  “For what purpose?” she asked, her voice meek and strained.

  “Because it reminds him of his first girlfriend. Baaaaa!”

  The doctor allowed the laughter to subside. “Now that you mention it, the sound is remarkably reminiscent of a woman’s cry. So much so that last night, when our lunch for today was first introduced to the knife, its bleating all but caused Brother Jarvis to drop to his knees with both hands clapped over his ears.”

  The bleat of a lamb outside my window—was this the cry I had heard in my dream?

  I cast a look at Poe then, to see how he was taking all this banter. Was I the only person present who found this dialogue unsettling? Was this the way the civilized world behaved, this mutual exchange of insults and demeaning remarks? Poe, apparently, saw nothing amiss in it, for he continued to smile amiably at Miss Cavin and once reached out to delicately pat her hand.

  “To answer your question,” the doctor soon told her, and waited a moment for an appropriate silence to befall, and assumed a more somber expression. “The body,” he then explained, “all bodies, are maintained by a number of organs, the greater two being, in ourselves and most other animals, the mind and the heart. Each works independently, ungoverned by the other. Sadly—and to my mind, this represents the major flaw in our anatomy—the most important of these two organs, the mind, cannot survive for long after the lesser one fails.”

  An older woman, the most outspoken of the group, now looked directly at Mr. Vernon. “Though I have known the lesser one to continue a full forty-seven years in the total absence of a mind.”

  Many of the women applauded. Mr. Vernon stood and took a bow.

  When the banker was once again seated, Brunrichter continued. “It is my contention, Ms. Cavin, and I am not alone in this belief—in fact the work of Helmholtz and duBois-Renyard all but verify the same—my contention is that the activity of the heart supplies electrical impulses necessary to keep the mind functioning, in the way that a strong horse is needed to pull a carriage through the streets. But what if that carriage were made able to move of its own accord?”

  “I don’t understand,” the young woman said. “What good is a mind without a body?”

  “Hearts fail,” said Brunrichter. “And when they do, the mind fails as well. But it needn’t be so. What we will someday soon discover, I predict, is that the heart, in fact the body itself, is irrelevant.”

  “With the exception, of course, of your body,” Vernon told her, and reached out to hold Miss Cavin’s foot, which she immediately drew away.

  “Well, sir,” said Mr. Kane, as thin and stiff as a stork, “I won’t believe it until I can walk along Liberty with Randolph Gatesford’s head tucked under my arm while he and I enjoy one of our usual Wednesday night arguments.”

  Old Randolph Gatesford, his voice a croaking tremolo, said, “I am looking forward to that as well. I’ll get around a lot faster then than I do on my own. L
ong as you don’t get upset with me for being right all the time, and give me a good kick into the river.”

  Brunrichter said to Poe, “Mr. Gatesford has volunteered to be my first human subject. But not, we hope, for a good many years. When my research is further along.”

  “Better speed things up,” said Gatesford. “I can’t wait forever.”

  The conversation, I admit, had made me woozy. I had in the last few days begun to think of myself as a man of the world, yet here on a hillside in Pittsburgh people were speaking of things I had never imagined and wished that no one else had either.

  I ATTEMPTED to quiet the fluttering of my stomach by stuffing it with food. Yet the sour taste at the back of my throat would not be swallowed. Eventually I told myself, One more pickled egg and off I go. There was a heaviness in my chest and a lightness in my head, as if, atop that small hill, the air was insufficient to fill my lungs or sustain a coherent thought. I wanted to be elsewhere, on a simpler plane, at the level of water and mutual courtesy.

  I was helping myself to that last egg, bent over near the corner of the blanket, hand reaching down, arse in the air, when the lady seated to Poe’s left, middle-aged and stout, said (innocently, I assumed), “Wasn’t that a wonderful piece about the elephants! In the Chronicle, wasn’t it? Did you happen to read it, Mr. Poe?”

  I froze, fingers pinching the egg. My gaze slid sideways and there met Poe’s. His eyes glinted like gray glass. “I did,” he told her. “I did indeed.”

  “And wasn’t it wonderful?” she asked. “Didn’t you find it so? I do not mean what happened to those poor beasts, of course, but the manner in which it was recounted. Didn’t you very nearly feel that you were there to see it happen, Mr. Poe?”

  He continued to smile at me. “The feeling was undeniable.”

  One of the gentlemen asked, “Who is this Dobson fellow? Does anybody know?”

  “He’s new, I can vouch for that. I read the papers cover to cover every day and this was the first I ever heard of him.”

  “I wasn’t as charmed by his piece as you were, Anna. It struck me as somewhat flat in places.”

  “Flat? How could such a story be flat?”

  “How did you find it, Mr. Poe?”

  By now I had, with an excruciating self-consciousness, plucked the egg off its plate and retreated to stand several feet to Poe’s rear. My face was burning, ears buzzing. Only gradually did it dawn on me that not a single eye deemed me curious. All eyes remained on Poe.

  “I found it,” Poe said, and paused, giving my heart time to beat a half-dozen times, had it been beating at all, “a promising start.”

  Brunrichter cut me a sidelong glance, a sardonic smile on his lips. “I would be interested to learn, Edgar, how you were able to discern that the piece represents a start. After all, we know nothing of this mysterious Mr. Dobson. Mightn’t he be an old hand from a Philadelphia paper, for example?”

  “The author is obviously quite youthful,” Poe remarked, playing along. “This is not to say that, in his ability to craft a narrative, he is without talent. On the contrary. But the talent is raw. Unformed. Incipient.”

  “Amazing that you can deduce so much from the words alone!”

  “Remember whom you are addressing,” said the doctor. “Here before you sits the master deducer himself. The father of Auguste Dupin.”

  “An astounding creation,” somebody said.

  “Thoroughly original.”

  “The most fascinating character in all of modern literature.”

  The sycophancy was turning my stomach. Suddenly the vinegary smell from the half of pickled egg still in hand, its slimy texture, made me nauseated. (Maybe, in truth, I wanted the subject to return to my own writing and not to be so easily dismissed, flicked out of the conversation like a crumb flicked off the blanket.)

  “Shall we perchance get to see the chevalier in a novel someday?” Ms. Cavin asked, the middle finger of her right hand stroking the hollow of her neck, her left hand toying with a lock of hair.

  “Ah, a sustained work,” said Poe. “A sustained work requires sustained concentration. Of which I find myself, regrettably, incapable.”

  “Hogwash!” blurted old Gatesford. “What about Pym?”

  “The work of a younger and more energetic man.” Poe swirled the wine in his glass. “These days, I’m afraid, there is a vague awareness in me, underlying all I do, that I am a fraud.”

  This was answered with a hail of vehement denials.

  Brunrichter shushed the group, then held up a finger, providing Poe with the silence to continue.

  “I am known for my hoax stories, am I not?” asked Poe. “That is how I began, in any case. My stories were intended to fool the feeblest of minds. The more feeble the stories, however, the more successful they were.

  “I had always hoped that, along the way, I might engage in more honest writing. All I accomplished, unfortunately, was to dig my hole of fraud even deeper. Until now, when I am all but buried by my own trickery.”

  He was not posing now, was not milking the group for their sympathy or applause. How to account for this sudden detour into naked self-exposure I cannot say—unless it was the resemblance of the young woman, whose question had precipitated his turn toward misery, to his own lost Sissie—only that every person present felt how keen was his sense of failure.

  Brunrichter was the first to speak. “It must be quite natural, from time to time, for a writer to grow weary of his own fabrications.”

  “You have given us so much pleasure, Mr. Poe. Surely you are aware of that.”

  “In my house, sir, we read your stories and poems aloud. We never tire of them.”

  “If you should ever stop imagining such tales … What a sad day it would be for us!”

  Within minutes, the tone had turned funereal. I wanted to leave but I could not abandon him in this atmosphere, beset by sudden gloom.

  I said, not loud, not anxious to direct attention to myself, “I remember what Mr. Poe once told me. He said that the finest writing emerges from the blackest turmoil. And that is why I anticipate that he will soon produce a masterpiece.”

  “Here, here!” came the cheers.

  Poe turned at the waist and lifted his eyes to me. For just a moment then I saw in them the old affection we had shared. (Had I suspected at that moment how our relationship had and would be damaged, I wonder if I would have proceeded as I did.)

  (And I wonder this too: What use is hindsight, when all it brings is regret?)

  In any case, Brunrichter seized upon my statement to remark, “Indeed! His recent misfortunes notwithstanding, Edgar Poe is too much a genius not to turn calamity into art.”

  And now the coquettish Ms. Cavin spoke again. She gazed as adoringly as ever at her hero. “I have been meaning to ask you, Mr. Poe …”

  “Edgar,” he said.

  She blushed. “I have been meaning to ask you. Is it your opinion that an … eventful life … is a requisite for a writer? Or is imagination alone sufficient?”

  “An eventful life?” he repeated, amused. “Well, I suppose it is true that there is an allure, a romantic allure, to what you call an eventful life. But I can assure you, dear girl, and with all the confidence of an expert, that poverty and drunkenness and flights of madness are all more glamorous in theory than in the actual practice thereof.”

  Because his smile was so genuine, his audience laughed at this, though softly and respectfully. The girl, I can only assume, had been alluding to a whole different genre of romantic events than the ones with which Poe was most intimate, but she had the good taste not to correct his misinterpretation of her question, and indeed her gaze, still fixed on him, flamed ever brighter with hunger. He returned her look, and I thought to myself, now filled with magnanimity toward the man, This is what he needs. This will do him good.

  How little I knew!

  Brunrichter then said, “To return to the matter of Auguste Dupin. You might very soon see the great ratiocinator at
work once again. Though not in a fictive capacity.”

  “And what do you mean by that?” somebody asked.

  “Edgar and I have forged an alliance, if you will. We have agreed to join minds so as to discover and bring to justice the vile creature who has been terrorizing the young women of our lovely city.”

  “Bravo!” the old man said.

  But Mr. Vernon chuckled. “I think what you will discover is that all six of these girls—”

  “There are seven now.”

  “Seven?”

  “The latest just Friday evening last.”

  “I hadn’t heard. Howsoever, I still predict that all seven of these young women can best be discovered through a thorough search of the sporting houses of Manchester.”

  “A search for which you volunteer, no doubt!”

  “Thank you for the invitation. I shall not take my duties lightly.”

  The men laughed heartily, the women hid their amusement behind mock gasps. I blushed, unnoticed, to hear this repetition of an earlier exchange between Mrs. Dalrymple and myself.

  “Truthfully, though. Would you not agree, Mr. Poe, that in all likelihood these young women have disappeared only from the world, as it were, of virtue?”

  “That is indeed a possibility.”

  “In which case, with my apologies to Brother Jarvis here, whose duty it is to exercise compassion and forgiveness, it strikes me that they are perhaps better left disappeared.”