Disquiet Heart Page 2

  “If you find him,” was the last thing Longreve said to me, as he pressed a dollar into my hand, “send a wire immediately. If he has no intention of returning, or can’t, well … the man’s not indispensable. Tell him that for me.”

  But he was as worried about Poe as I; his eyes shone dark with concern.

  I walked away, exhausted. Poe alone in Philadelphia—the implications were staggering. He was not a man cut out for the solitary life. Bereft of Virginia’s adoration, devoid of Muddy’s steadying solidity, the only place Poe could turn for succor was to his own mind. Unfortunately, that dark labyrinth concealed far fewer pleasures than pitfalls.

  2

  NEXT MORNING I left for Philadelphia by rail and arrived in the city midday. Straightaway then to the address Longreve had supplied. An editor informed me that he had indeed spoken with Mr. Poe, who had come to inquire of the newspaper’s interest in publishing “a longish piece” not yet composed.

  The gist of the proposed composition, which Poe had described as a poetical essay, was not, the man told me, easy to grasp. “He claimed it to be an explanation of the universe in toto.” The editor smiled and shook his head. “Only a man in Poe’s condition would ever presume to conceive of such a work.”

  “His condition being what?” I asked.

  His answer was to lower his chin so as to look at me over the rims of his spectacles.

  “Are you saying that he was in his cups?”

  “I am saying what I said.”

  I nodded. The man would say no more because even a drunken Poe inspired a degree of respect. I asked, “Did he happen to mention where he is making his residence while in Philadelphia?”

  “He did not. But it could not have been far. I asked that he commit his plan for the composition to paper so that I might better understand it. He agreed to do the same that very evening. And, seeing as it was nearly dark already, I offered to convey him there in my carriage. He demurred. Said that he could be seated at his desk, writing, before I could summon a hack.”

  He turned in his chair then, facing the window, and pointed south. “The closest hotel is there across the street. But I would suggest that you try two blocks farther on. The rates, you know. More moderate. More … suitable to his means.”

  “And since that day a fortnight ago. You have not seen him since?”

  He eyed me critically for a moment, as if trying to determine whether to speak freely or to hold his tongue. I think he read the worry in my eyes.

  “You know Mr. Poe well, do you?”

  “I think I know him as well as anyone can.”

  He wanted to smirk at that remark, that presumption from a stripling, but confined his mouth to all but a twitch at one corner. One of Poe’s most endearing qualities is that every person he meets, whether in person or through his compositions, soon comes to believe that he or she, better than any other, has peered into the very heart of the man. In truth they have had only a fleeting glimpse into their own heart.

  “I did see him one other time, yes. A few days after we spoke.” Again he turned to the window. “He was right out there. Standing dead still in the middle of the street.”

  “He had paused in the middle of the street?”

  “Paused? Yes, call it that if you will. He had paused in the middle of the street, at the busiest hour of the day. Horses and carts and carriages and omnibuses coming and going in both directions. Drivers and passengers alike giving him an earful. Yet there he stood, hands clasped behind his back. Coat unbuttoned. Hair uncombed. For all appearances, deaf to the world.”

  Something in the man’s tone, some slight edge of ridicule, made me long to throttle him, to feel my fists against his face. Instead I asked, “And you did not go to him?”

  Had he offered me any type of smug retort, I would have bashed him. I stood ready to do so. But he said nothing. He continued to stare out the window.

  I turned on my heels and started for the door. He mumbled something, and I stopped.

  “Pardon me?”

  “I should have,” he said, still not looking at me. “I wish that I had.”

  Pity and contempt, these were the emotions Poe so often aroused. Admiration and disdain.

  I vacated the office without another word.

  As for Poe, I found him two hours later. The Nevens Inn. A tavern and dining room on the first floor, “Sleeping Quarters for Travelling Gentlemen” on the second and third. It was not the most objectionable of such establishments in the city, but few could have bested its air of dishabille, its foot-worn, uneven hallway, the peeling flocked paper on its walls, the piebald ceilings brown-stained and sagging. Odors of fried fat and spilled ale accounted for at least half of the breathable atmosphere.

  In the hallway of the uppermost floor I stood outside room 6, having been directed there by the barman downstairs, who, though he did not recognize Poe’s name, recognized him by my description. Poe’s was one of only two rooms on this truncated level, a level that was in fact an attic, now partitioned into a pair of tiny rooms. From behind the door of the adjoining room, two feet to my left, came the rasp of a phlegmy cough. And I could not help thinking to myself that even in this city, the Athens of America, Poe had managed to ensconce himself in an external ambiance to match his inner one.

  I rapped on the door, and was answered with silence.

  I knocked a second time. “Mr. Poe, it’s Augie Dubbins,” I said. “I apologize for not getting here sooner, but I left Ohio the moment I received—”

  Before I could finish the door flew open. And there stood Poe. He was dressed only in an old dun banyan, an overcoat, over cotton undergarments and stockings. How frail he looked, how pale and thin. He had the eyes of a ghost.

  Yet as he stood there and scrutinized me, his hand still on the door but otherwise unmoving, as we took each other in, as we allowed the images of a seven-year-old memory to juxtapose themselves upon the realities there before us, his eyes began to glisten, as did my own. Neither of us moved for several moments. Until finally I smiled.

  And then Poe did what I had never before seen him do, and never saw again. He began to tremble, to quiver head-to-toe with a frozen rigidity. And then to weep.

  And then this man who had long ago offered me the first hand I had ever shaken, this man who had been the first to treat me as a human being, who in a few cherished days had lavished sufficient attention and affection on a cast-away boy to see him through another hard spell of abuse, this man held out his arms to me, he wept at the sight of me, and he staggered forward into my hungry embrace.

  WE NEEDED little time to get reacquainted. Too many of the past seven years could be reduced to a few sentences. My time had consisted wholly of hard work, day in and day out. With each passing year, more work had been piled on. As for Poe, despite his sudden but nonetheless unremunerative success with “The Raven,” he was still battling editors and publishers for every dime, still trying to stretch that dime the length of a dollar. He had worked for various magazines but always departed in a rush out the same dark door, the one sprung open by harsh words and accusations, intemperance and an inability to compromise. And, each time, he had straggled home to be faced with his wife’s decline, to watch her soft pale face contort, those eyes of purest sweetness squeeze shut, every time she coughed up another piece of her lungs.

  “The peculiar thing,” he confided to me, huddled in his banyan on the edge of the narrow plank bed, having insisted that I take the only chair in the room, my back to the sooty window, “the peculiar thing is that it is all over now, all of that life, and I … I am at a loss as to know how to feel about it. The times I thought her dead, Augie, I could not count for you the times. I would look at her motionless on her bed, and put my hand to her cheek and feel only coldness. And I would grieve, I would keen like an old woman. Only to have her look at me again, and smile, and whisper hoarsely that she was merely resting for a while. Other times, for days at a time, she seemed on the very precipice of death. So many times
I thought to myself, She will not last the night. But then, suddenly, a morning or two later, there was my Sissie back again, sitting up and asking for some tea.”

  He put both hands to his unshaven cheeks, and rubbed hard, pulling the skin up and down as if he hoped to rub away his own countenance. “For years now, Augie, years, I have lived through her death every few months or so, every few weeks. And now that it has finally happened, can you imagine what I feel?”

  “I cannot. Only what I feel.”

  “You feel loss,” he said. “As do 1. A bottomless, swirling loss that is trying its best to pull me in.” He now leaned toward me, leaned forward and laid both hands atop my knees, gripped them hard, and spoke in a hiss of breath, with nothing but a sour contempt for himself and his words, “But I also feel … relief.”

  He read the look in my eyes. “It is shocking to myself as well,” he said. “Shocking and loathsome. I have done all I can to exorcise the feeling, but sometimes, upon waking, when I first remember that she is gone, it rushes over me, this sudden ease, a sense of freedom, and then, just as suddenly, just as powerfully, comes the contempt I feel for having allowed myself such a thought. The certainty that I am a wholly detestable man.”

  “But surely, after such an ordeal … it isn’t so unnatural a sentiment as you imagine. It is an honest sentiment. She no longer suffers. Her anguish is over. It is for Sissie that you are relieved.”

  He waved this away, chased it away with a fling of his hand. He did not wish to be absolved.

  Then his hand dropped onto his own lap again and his body sagged. He closed his eyes as if expelling a last breath, and sat motionless, crumpled over. Half a minute later he lifted his head and looked at me anew, and tried hard for a smile.

  “But enough of this for now. Tell me about yourself. I cannot believe how tall you’ve grown, a full three inches taller than me, if my eyes are not mistaken. With you, at least, it appears that I did something right. That my efforts were not misdirected.”

  If he needed to take some credit—or solace, compensation, whatever you wish to call it—for the fact that I was now a healthy young man nearly six feet tall, I was not about to deny him it. So I said nothing about the hatred I felt for the man and his wife in whose care I had been placed. Both were severe and coarse individuals. Together they possessed not a drop of human kindness, but measured out their days, and mine, in the number of bales stacked in their barn, the bushels of grain and corn and potatoes hauled off to market, the pounds of bloody meat slaughtered, the miles of intestines stuffed and strung up to dry. I had measured those same days in bloody blisters, broken fingernails, sunburn and thirst, headache, and hunger.

  There had been three of us who worked the farm for Deidendorf, and I the youngest, the only hand under thirty, so all of his bullying had fallen upon me. His favorite motivational tool was his carbine, which he carried in a sling over his back wherever he went. When I was not moving quickly enough to suit him, or whenever he was bored, he liked to fire a shot at my feet, sending up dirt and splinters of rock to pelt my pant leg. The two other farmhands, Pike and Wiley, assured me over exhausted games of euchre that they had received similar treatment, but only as long as they had allowed it to continue.

  “One of these days you’ll have had enough,” they told me. “Soon’s you’re at the right age for it. He’ll be doing the same things he’s always done, and you’ll have had your fill of it all of a sudden for no other reason than that you’re sick of yourself for taking it so long. And he’ll see that look in your eyes when you turn and look at him. And he’ll stop.”

  “What look?” I had asked.

  “The one that says, ‘You ever do that again and I’ll take it as an invitation to break your goddamn neck.’”

  “I’d like to do that already. To him and his ugly wife both.”

  “You’d like to but you ain’t ready to.”

  “I’m ready,” I told them.

  “Not yet. Won’t be long though.”

  But instead of committing a double murder I slipped away in the middle of the night. I stole his favorite saddle and tossed it horn down in the middle of a creek. But I still wanted to kill him. I still dreamed of driving a pitchfork into his chest. And just last night, the night before I had located Poe, as I slept I’d heard that familiar gunshot exploding in my ear, felt the sting of dirt splattering my leg, and I had all but leapt out of my bed, blinded by rage.

  None of this, of course, could I share with Poe, lest he assume that guilt on top of the burden he already shouldered.

  I told him, “It was just as you promised. Do you remember what you used to tell me? Hard work and fresh air would stand me in good stead. Well, I had plenty of both.”

  He smiled and nodded. “I cannot tell you how pleased I am to hear of it. And you have kept up with your reading?”

  “Thanks to you and Muddy and Sissie, I did. I only wish I could have brought all your books back with me.”

  “They are your books, not mine. Besides, you did indeed bring them all with you, did you not?” With a fingertip, he tapped the side of his head.

  “Yes, and it is getting to be a crowded place in there. Aristotle, Plato, Thucydides. Dante, Homer, Hawthorne, Shakespeare … It’s like one big literary salon in there, everybody talking at once.”

  This much, at least, was true. The sun-baked brown of my skin and the roughness of my hands, the hard musculature of my shoulders and back, all these marked me as a commoner, a laborer. But thanks to Poe I was a peasant with the mind of a professor. I could speak the idiom of a prim New England Bible-thumper as easily as the vernacular of the unwashed illiterate. Either one while, boiling away inside of me, beat the heart of a murderer.

  “And what next for you?” he asked. “You cannot go back to the farm now, can you? It is time for you to move on, to move forward.”

  “Speaking of which, how about if you get dressed and we go out for a bite to eat.” His room was dark and chill and stale, it stank of alcohol, it reeked of despair. I wanted both of us out of it.

  “You go,” he said. “I have no appetite.”

  “We’ll take a walk first. You can show me the city.”

  He shook his head. “I have no strength for the kind of idle walking we used to do.”

  “It needn’t be idle. Isn’t this a city of museums, of art and science and all the nobler pursuits of man?”

  “You would never know it by me,” he said.

  Whether he meant by this that he had not availed himself of those pleasures here, or if the nobler pursuits no longer existed in him, I did not know. But in either case I considered it imperative to get him moving again, despite the weariness of my own legs. Our best times together, the ones I most liked to recall, were of when he and I were on the march. Side by side we had traversed every acre of Manhattan. And now he had imprisoned himself in this one tiny cell.

  “Take me to see the Liberty Bell,” I said.

  “Augie, I have no strength for it. The truth be told, I have no interest. It all smacks of futility to me. Futility and arrogance. Every puny endeavor of man.”

  “But I’m staying only a day or two. And then I’m off to Mexico.”

  At this his eyes brightened. I was more wary of than pleased by the sudden smolder in his eyes. “You intend to join the fray?” he asked.

  “I do.”

  “I have considered the same myself. And why not? What holds me here?”

  “You mean … you wish to fight?”

  “You think me incapable? Too old? I can hold a carbine and wield a saber, I promise you that.” His voice had risen with this declaration, grew adamant. But now he paused. His face softened. He smiled like a man imagining a restful sleep. “Not that I would have to do so for long, of course.”

  A shudder ran through me. “We need to get out of this room, sir. We need to find some good air and some good food.”

  “I have been following the dispatches,” he said. “The accounts in the newspaper. Do you know
how many West Point men are there already? A man named Lee, Robert Lee, the son of Light Horse Harry, he is there with General Scott. His chief engineer. He graduated from West Point one year before I entered. I could be there with them now had I kept my wits about me. I could have been with Taylor at Buena Vista. And I should have been, Augie. I realize that now. This other life I chose, this effete, cerebral life … what has it availed?”

  “You are a writer, not a soldier.”

  “Not what I am but what I might have been!” he raged, his answer an explosion that set me back in my chair. “Had I not disgraced myself! Had I not frittered away every opportunity! Well, I have one opportunity left, and I mean to take advantage of it.”

  I had nothing to say. I sat there stunned by his outburst.

  But just as quickly as the storm had raged, it now dissipated. His voice softened, and once again he leaned toward me and spoke in little more than a whisper, as if to plot a conspiracy. “Which of the men down there, do you think, will be best remembered?”

  “Are you asking me for a name?”

  “Not a name but a deed. Whom will posterity preserve and cherish in its memory? The many who march en masse—doing their duties as good soldiers, but only that duty and nothing more—dying, as soldiers often do, by the hundreds?”

  I waited.

  “Or those few who will lead the charge? Those few out front who drive the point of each attack?”

  So this was what he had been thinking about through all his dark hours. This was the worm that had burrowed into his brain.

  “I could win a commission, Augie, I am certain I could. An old West Point cadet—even one so disgraced. Who are they to turn me away? And my name—I am not unknown, Augie. I have a certain fame. A West Point man is a well-read man; they will have heard of me.”