Disquiet Heart Page 21

  “Where are we going?” I asked, still in a daze.

  “Where do you think?”

  Only by the tone of her voice could I know that she was angry with me. As to why she might be—I sat quietly for a few moments and picked splinters of memory out of the confusion.

  “Who was it hit me?” I finally asked.

  She flashed a scathing look.

  “It wasn’t Brunrichter, was it? I would’ve seen it coming.”

  “Why did you behave like that?”

  “He had his hands on you.”

  “We were talking! He was introducing himself. Apologizing for the misunderstanding that had occurred between you two.”

  “There was no misunderstanding,” I said.

  Once again she whipped her head my way, only long enough to administer another stinging lash with her eyes. Then she faced the street again. “Why did you attack him?”

  I found it incredible that she could be so obtuse. “You have never held my hand like that.”

  “You have never reached for it,” she said.

  So I reached for it.

  She jerked away. “Pinch your nostrils,” she said. “And just please be quiet.”

  We rode in silence to her front door. There she laid the reins in my lap, climbed down and went inside. I did not move, unsure of what was expected of me. Did she mean to leave me in this manner, without so much as a word of good night?

  She had left the door standing open, which I took as a good omen. Through it I watched as she lit a lamp, then carried it into her tiny kitchen. A moment later she returned to the carriage with the lamp in one hand, a dampened cloth in the other.

  She climbed up beside me and held the lamp to my face, looked me over critically, then laid the cloth—I might even say she shoved it—against my nose.

  “Clean yourself up,” she said.

  The cloth was cold and dripping. With it I scrubbed at the blood caked under my nose and over my chin. “Why are you so angry?” I asked.

  “Why am I so angry? Why are you so stupid?”

  It did not seem a question begging to be answered. I said nothing.

  “Your shirt is ruined,” she said. “You have blood all over you.”

  “I think it’s stopped now though.”

  “Your nose might well be broken.”

  “He didn’t hit me all that hard.”

  “Oh, just stop it,” she said.

  “Who was it hit me anyway?”

  “The man in the foyer earlier. The one you knocked down the stairs.”

  “Tevis,” I said.

  “I do not know his name, we were not introduced. Introductions were not conducted—or don’t you remember that either?”

  Now that our movement had ceased, the pain caught up with me, a ballooning throb of pain all along the side of my face. Even my teeth hurt. And in my stomach a sour nausea was building. All of this I attempted to hide behind a stony expression, for I did not want her to see me grimace, did not want her to see me weak.

  “You know what was going on in that room,” I told her. “You didn’t really want to go in there, did you?”

  “We could have just left. We could have just had another nice carriage ride together.”

  I pressed a hand to my stomach. The sickness was coming. I wanted to stay with her forever, but I had to leave, and soon. “May I call on you tomorrow? To apologize?”

  “I never would have taken you for a ruffian,” she said.

  “Susan, it’s very complicated. You need to understand.”

  “Please don’t start making excuses.”

  “If your father were here—”

  “You are not my father’s escort, you are mine! So tell me. Why should I forgive your deplorable behavior, whether tomorrow or ever?”

  Did she need to hear it said? Apparently so. “Because my heart is not my own.”

  “And what is it you mean by that?”

  “How many ways must I say it? I am in love with you!”

  Why, I wonder, does that phrase, no matter the intonation, have such a halting effect on us?

  Why do we not employ it more often?

  She leaned back and looked at me. The night was dark, but she was luminous.

  “Come back tomorrow,” she finally responded, and softly. “After you have washed your face and changed your shirt. I will consider your apology then.” With that, she started to climb down.

  “Wait, I have a gift for you. The one from Poe.” I patted the front of my jacket, felt nothing in the pocket, and then remembered. “But it was in my bag. I must have left it—”

  “Your bag is here,” she said, and produced it from under the seat.

  I reached for it but she said “Wait,” and nodded toward my bloody hands. “May I?”

  “Of course. It’s on the very top.”

  She opened the bag and took out the book, held it, I thought, a bit too reverently. I found it more than a little irksome that she should appear so overwhelmed by a mere object, and for the first time I was truly jealous of Poe’s talent, I wanted it and more for myself. And, of course, I felt immediately guilty for those thoughts, betrayer of a friend.

  “There’s an inscription,” I told her. “But don’t read it here.”

  She held the book to her chest. “Will I ever have an opportunity to thank him?”

  Him, I thought. Why not you? But said, “I will make certain of it.” And then I continued, because it was necessary for all of us, “The way he was tonight. The way you saw him …”

  “I understand,” she said.

  “That was not his doing. I’m convinced of it. He would never degrade himself like that.”

  “Augie, I understand. He is a very great man. I think no less of him.”

  I let a moment pass. Then asked, “And of me?”

  She considered her response. “I think you are more unpredictable than I first assumed.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  She said nothing for a moment and kept her eyes lowered. Then she picked up the lamp, held it low so that I could not see the full expression of her face, and stepped away from the carriage.

  “Come back tomorrow,” was all she said.

  She went inside then and closed the door. I watched the light move across the window, watched it steady as she set the lamp on the table, knew that she was pulling out a chair now, laying open the book, leaning over it.

  My chest felt swollen, my heart too big for its cage. I picked up the reins and gave them a snap.

  24

  “THE HOURS of folly are measured by the clock,” said William Blake. “But of wisdom, no clock can measure.”

  After leaving Susan’s house I relived the minutes of my own folly that night, relived and tried without success to reconfigure them as I drove slowly about the town, aimed for no destination other than wisdom itself, which, if it existed at all on that particular night in that particular city, eluded me without fear of capture.

  I had acted impetuously, yes. Without deliberation. I had acted out of passion, not logic. And for my bellicosity, two consequences: First, I was further separated from Poe, and so driven away from him now that the rift might never be mended. Second, I had proclaimed my feelings for Susan, and saw, or imagined I did, heard in the softening of her tone and in the sudden dimming of her anger, the possibility of reciprocated feelings.

  Did the second end balance out the first? Did it justify the means?

  I was torn between misery and bliss.

  In the end, after an hour or two of purposeless driving, the only wisdom I glimpsed was this: The distance between misery and bliss is no wider than a heartbeat.

  I returned the carriage to its barn, as per my agreement with the livery master. The gelding was unhitched and led to an empty stall, where, as it nibbled from a trough of oats, I wiped it down with a rag I found hanging from a nail. I was in no hurry to leave the earthy warmth of the stable, to retire from the friendly nickerings and the hay and horsy smells, becaus
e I had nowhere else to go. In the morning I would find a boardinghouse, some place close to Susan, some simple room overlooking the river, no ostentatious mansion on the hill. But for the remainder of the night I found comfort among the beasts—among which I counted myself as one.

  I lay in a corner made soft with hay. My satchel, my life’s belongings, became, that night, a pillow. My only other possession was the dampened cloth given to me by Susan to clean my face. I accomplished that task as best I could, scrubbed the blood off my face and hands, then folded the cloth over, the stain of my blood inside, and slept with its coolness against my mouth, the scents of water and blood like a subtle camphor to my swollen nose, as well the fragrance too of Susan’s hand—a scent, I hoped, that by morning might mend all that was broken in me.

  I AWOKE with the horses, who started their nickering before first light. Minutes later I was out on the street, searching for more permanent lodgings. And what a comfort there was to that notion of permanence, of settling down in this roisterous city with a wife, a family, of becoming a newspaperman with a regular beat. Maybe, with time, I might become even something more. Me, a fat and satisfied burgher, bouncing grandchildren on my knees!

  A few days earlier I had been anxious for slaughter, for bullet and bayonet. Now all that had been erased by a young girl’s smile.

  Three streets off the Monongahela Wharf, smack between Smithfield and Wood, I came upon the Second Street Temperance House. Its hand-lettered sign in the yard advertised comfortable beds for travelers, private rooms for families. A thin white smoke came wafting out the kitchen chimney, which told me that the proprietress was up and about, probably frying great slabs of ham and setting the coffee to boil.

  I was not in the least put off by the establishment’s title. Though I had never been of a temperant nature in the past, the notion of abstinence was one that would surely please Susan (and amuse her father). Besides, the boardinghouse could not have been more ideally situated, ten minutes each from the Kemmer home and the offices of the Chronicle, and a mere twenty-minute stroll from Miss Jones’s School for Young Ladies. (When you are in love, every coincidence seems ideal.)

  I crossed the yard, moving jauntily despite my bruised and swollen face, strode to the back door and, with the new sun bleeding orange all across the horizon at my back, I rapped on the door frame.

  The woman who answered the door was tall and shapeless, not old but haggardly, gray of hair and eyes and complexion, her liveliest color the raw redness of knuckles on both otherwise sallow hands.

  I smiled and told her, “I’m looking for a room for a few days. Maybe more.”

  She did not answer immediately, perhaps had not even heard me. Her gaze was locked on my shirt front, her mouth grim.

  I plucked at the blood-stiffened cloth, flicked my fingers at the blackened stains. “I had a … bit of trouble last night. Nothing serious.”

  She considered my smiling countenance, nose as red as a beet, lip swollen and cracked, the blue of a bruise beginning to color my jaw. “We’ve got no room here for sporting men.”

  “I wasn’t drinking,” I told her.

  “You’ve been brawling.”

  “Not a brawl, no. A misunderstanding.”

  She studied me a moment longer, then began to back away, to close the door.

  I wrapped a hand around the door frame so that she would be forced to crush my fingers in order to shut me out. “Missus, please. I am not a brawler or a drinker, I assure you. Present appearances to the contrary, you will get no trouble from me. And to prove that I am a man of honor, may I pay you now for two—no, let’s make it three nights’ lodging?”

  Even as I reached for my wallet, she backed away from the door. By now she was standing near the center of the kitchen, a warm and smoky room. I could hear meat sizzling in a skillet, could smell not only meat but coffee on the boil, biscuits in the stove. I stepped over the threshold and set down my satchel. With my other hand pulled out my wallet and flipped it open. Smiled my most fetching smile (though swollen-lipped and sore).

  “All I’ve got is a bed on the second floor,” she told me in a tone meant to suggest that the bed might be flea-infected, or worse. “You’d have to share it with Hirsch. Works for Bakewell. He’s a fair-sized man. Would make nearly two of you.”

  But I was not to be put off. The perfumes of breakfast had already seduced me. “That will do just fine.”

  “Two other beds in the same room. Two men a bed.”

  “An equitable distribution,” I said.

  She gave me now a curious look. My vocabulary struck her as at odds with my appearance. Which was precisely the effect I had hoped for. If she could find no words to welcome me, neither could she find the ones to send me away.

  I saw her looking at my hair then, and I put a hand up in the direction of her gaze, felt something as stiff as a broom straw in my hair, and pulled away a slender stalk of hay. When I looked at it I saw, as surely she did too, the dried blood caked under my fingernails.

  “A man made unwanted advances toward my fiancée,” I told her. “I intervened, of course, only to have one of his confederates punch me in the nose. That was the extent of the brawl. All this blood you see is my own. It’s not as bad as it looks.”

  All the while I continued to smile and to hold my wallet open before me.

  Eventually, her gaze came down to my wallet and the paper stuffed inside. A few moments later she nodded. “You can’t go up to the room yet. Not till the others are up and around.”

  “I have all morning to wait.” I nodded toward the stove. “And breakfast?”

  Again, that pause. And then, “Three nights, you said?”

  The rates were posted on the sign out front, one dollar a day, breakfast and supper included. I withdrew the script from my wallet and held it out to her. She balled it up in a fist. “Pump out back where you can wash up,” she said.

  I thanked her with another smile, left my satchel on the floor and made my way to the rear yard. First to the outhouse surrounded on three sides by lilac bushes, still brittle and bare. Then to the pump with its frost-limned handle, as cold as a toothache in my hands as I worked the lever up and down until a heavy gush of water gurgled out and into the wooden tub set there to catch it. The tub leaked at such a rate that it was necessary to fill the tub to the brim so that I had time to hunker over it and splash my face a few times before the tub had drained. The water was as close to ice as water can be without freezing. Three quick splashes were sufficient to rob me of all breath and set a black dizziness aswirl in my head.

  I was anxious to shed my blood-stiff shirt and wash all trace of blood from my body, but that would have to wait until my belly was full and I could better tolerate the prick of icy water. For now a general dampening would have to do.

  Teeth chattering, I returned to the back door, slapping my cheeks so as to spark a little warmth and feeling into my face and fingertips. Strangely, the kitchen now stood empty. And the coffeepot was boiling over on the stove.

  I went in and found a rag and lifted the pot off the stove. And now I smelled the biscuits burning. I opened the oven door, pulled out a tray of blackened lumps. She had moved the skillet, however, so the slab of ham as large as the frying pan had survived. It lay there in its pool of grease. I stared at it and wondered what to do.

  Only one solution occurred to me. I found a plate, a fork and a knife, and I carried the ham to the table, and there sat, and administered to the ham the fate it deserved.

  Several minutes later, with nothing but a shallow gleam of grease remaining on the plate, I turned my thoughts to the ruined biscuits, and was wondering if some part of them might be salvaged so as to sop up that grease, when a noise at the door interrupted my musings. There in the doorway stood a man in a square blue jacket and black trousers. Sewn onto his jacket was the blue-and-white patch of a ward constable. He was not a tall man, not as tall as the mistress of the house, who was standing there behind him, but he was twice as broad as
her, his stomach as wide as his shoulders, his buttocks even wider. He was a comic-looking pear-shaped man and I would have smiled a bit more broadly had his eyes reminded me more of a man’s and less a snapping turtle’s.

  “You always eat other peoples food, do you?” he asked.

  “I’m a boarder here. Isn’t that right, missus?”

  The constable plunged ahead two steps, one thick trunk of leg stabbing forward, the other dragged and swung to follow. He stopped but one pace from my chair. “What’s your name?” he demanded.

  I started to turn in my chair so as to better face him, but with a lunge he closed the final distance and stood behind me, put a thick hand to the back of my head and shoved it around so that I faced the table again, my body bent slightly forward under the weight of his grasp.

  “Eyes forward! Now what’s your name?”

  “August Dubbins,” I told him.

  At this, some noise from the woman, a kind of grunt and exhalation.

  I tried to crank my head around so as to look at her—Why would my name provoke such a response?—But the constable’s thumb and pinkie held my neck in their claw, his three middle fingers splayed across the back of my skull. And then, unbidden, an anger welled in me to be handled in such a way, held like a boy by the scruff of the neck. I stiffened, felt every muscle balk at the man’s touch, felt the muscles of my legs pushing up, felt the violence ballooning inside me, and even as my body thrust itself up against the man’s hand, driving it back, my brain commanded it to Sit still!, and might have been heeded had I simply been allowed to rise to my feet, to stand and respond to this insult like a man. But before my knees could unbend, before the seat of my pants had barely cleared the chair, the constable’s hand came off my skull, and an instant later something exploded against the side of my head, a fulmination of blackness that devoured every thought in its thunderous crack, and all further inquiry into the matter was silenced.

  25