Not Quite Dead (36 page)

The radical implications were alarming to men who had gone to the trouble of acquiring an education. Yet the sayings of Old Hickory made perfect sense to the common man—and in America, what the people believe is always true.

William McMullen was one of the first businessmen in Philadelphia to listen beyond the apocalyptic shrieks of the Whigs and to recognize the value of radical democracy to his own interests. With a platform in public office, an enterprising man could whip up for himself one enormous sphere of influence.

Like so many men with their eye on politics, McMullen had groomed himself to approximate the look of a general in the Mexican War—the drooping mustache, the shoulder-length hair, the goatee trimmed to an inch beneath the lip. A ginger-nut redhead and a former lightweight boxer, he sported an expensive suit and a broken nose. His skin seemed to have been rubbed raw with sand, and his features depicted a jagged, anxious, careworn character. Yet the moment he became
interested or incensed, his features took on a youthful, concentrated intensity, and it was said that he could deck a man twice his size with lightning speed.

McMullen faced Shadduck across the table as though for a game of invisible poker, nursing a glass of what appeared to be whiskey and milk.

“Cock yez up with it, Inspector,” he said. “And why I should give over good men to some fecky in the ninth in a fecked-up uniform over a fecking blackmail game? Pay the feckers and feck off is what I say.”

Shadduck paused before responding, though he had anticipated the question and his answer. “I reckon there be mutual interests here, Mr. McMullen, sir. Stability is vital. Public unrest is bad for businesses of all kinds.”

“You’re the fecking razzer, why come to me about it?”

“The rascals are Irish, sir. And they’re politicals. I thought this might interest you—in light of your future plans.”

“Mind yerself, Inspector. I rankle at Irish insults.”

“As do I, sir. I deplore intolerance of all kinds. But I reckon for a native-born American there is a distinction to be made. There is a difference between native Americans like yourself and the present inflow of Irish republicans. A powerful difference, sir. One you might wish the public to understand—should you proceed with your candidacy.”

The eyes flashed and Shadduck knew he had scored a point. “My candidacy? Did you get this fack from yer peaches?”

“A feller needs facts if he is to act in a proper manner. Being a Nativist and not a Whig, you need a firm position on the issue, sir.”

McMullen had not considered this. He was new to politics. “I’ll go to bail that they are not like us, and they fecking don’t want to be.”

“Worse, sir—they seek to bring their battles to the New World. They seek unrest and upheaval. They give the Irish a bad name. Or if I may say it man to man, it gives yourself a bad name, Mr. McMullin, sir.

“It is true if you go to that of it.” McMullen took a thoughtful sip of his milk. “Give it to me again why you are not using your fancy razzers.”

“Because they have no jurisdiction in Germantown, sir. And as it is a gang we face, I am hoping the presence of a superior force will
encourage desertion among the enemy. I am a peace officer, sir, and seek a peaceful resolution wherever possible.”

Another sip of milk, while McMullen waited for more.

“And there is the kidnapping victim,” continued the inspector. “It is a prominent gentleman is all I can tell you. If it were known he was taken prisoner by Irish, let alone put off his feet, it would cause … unrest. All in all, best keep it out of the public sector, sir.”

“Twelve firemen you want?”

“That would be just adequate, sir. I could do better with sixteen. The site might be well defended.”

“And what is the advantage to meself ? I know you mentioned it but I have forgotten.”

“The gratitude of the city, sir. A high position in the sight of respectable men. And a bright future for your own men as well. Should firefighting lose its appeal there is a fine career to be had in the police department.”

McMullen regarded Shadduck with speculation in his eye. “Inspector, where in the bowels of Christ did you get the nose on you?”

“Pardon, sir, I don’t get your drift.”

“Where are you after learning your fecking tacticals?”

“It was the war, sir. Alliances is everything in a war. With outside powers, and within the army itself.”

“Particular that last, I imagine.”

“You are correct, sir. A bad assignment in the field can be a death sentence. A man’s worst enemy can be the first lieutenant of his own regiment. Private excitements blaze even in the heat of battle. Men are shot in the back while not necessarily in retreat.”

“A frequent occurrence in Philadelphy these days,” said McMullen. “I’ll go to bail that soon there will not be an honorable man in the county who does not have a fecking knife in his back.”

“We in the police force are in a similar scrape, sir. It is a feller’s duty to make the most of himself. Yet he who seeks his fortune takes on the cares of the world.”

“Who said that last?”

“It was my mother, sir.”

McMullen’s expression softened—as would the face of any American man at the mention of
mother
—and he extended his hand.

“Shadduck, you are some can of piss. Should I make the decision to enter public service, I hope I can count on your support.”

“You will have it, sir. That is for certain.”

Shadduck felt the barrel of the Texas Paterson against his thigh and it felt a mite silly now. In civilian life, not all power comes from the barrel of a gun.

CHAPTER
THIRTY-ONE

Economy Manor

M
r. Dickens, suh, am I to understand that
David Copperfield
is now complete?” Poe said this with a concealed weariness indicating a loss of patience with something.

“Of course it is. I should never have come to America without having submitted the final number. I worked day and night on it. We meet our deadlines, sir.”

Poe seemed not to care about deadlines. “Then I take it, suh, that you know how the story ends?”

“Certainly, sir. That is what outlines are for.”

“I do not do outlines myself. For me they inhibit the poetic spirit.”

“That is all well and good with the writing of poems. Try it with a novel and you will find yourself in an unholy mess.”

“Point taken, suh. Then perhaps you can be of assistance to me on a number of themes.”

“Am I to believe that you wish me to assist you in fabricating my work? In palming it off to the public as my own? What an obscene suggestion.”

“I suggest to you, suh, that your work will be stolen from you in any case.”

“Yes, well, in a sense that is true. But I give up on that one, Mr. Poe. I am sick to death of the copyrights issue, it will never be solved in my lifetime; I simply wish to go home.”

“Since you have nothing to gain or lose from its publication in America, is it not to your advantage, as an artist, that your tale be told in the way that you mean it to be told? I am a different sort of writer, suh, with a different outlook on life. Do you really want me to tell your tale for you? For that is what I am obliged to do, or someone dear to me will suffer grievous harm.”

“Isn’t that curious?” said Dickens. “It never occurred to me that
anyone might be held hostage other than myself. A self-centered occupation—hostage.”

At this Poe laughed, perhaps for the first time since he won a swimming contest as a lad some twenty-five years ago.

It was by now clear to Dickens that he was in a grim situation and might need Poe’s assistance to come out of it in one piece. In life, as in politics it seems, one must learn to rise above principle.

“Very well, Mr. Poe, I shall help you to complete your damn forgery. But under protest.”

Poe nodded gravely, then preceded to finger through the manuscript before him the way a bank teller counts a pile of dollar bills. He had marked specific pages by turning over the corners; every few pages he stopped at a notation, gave it long consideration, muttered something, and carried on. Having worked his way through the entire document, he stopped, sighed, and turned to Dickens with the look of a lawyer on a bafflingly complicated case.

“Mr. Dickens, as you can imagine, I have many technical queries about your protagonist. I take him to be in some measure yourself; therefore, it is probable that Mr. Copperfield’s inconsistencies are also your own. Well and good. Yet one development baffles me completely: The incest, suh.
Where in hell’s kitchen are you going with the incest?”

Dickens opened his mouth but no sound came forth. Had he been asked about the last time he fornicated with sheep, it could not possibly have produced a deeper glaze of incomprehension and alarm.

Poe handed Dickens a cigarette, which he accepted readily, and was grateful for the proffered lucifer, that his companion would not observe his hands trembling.

“Mr. Dickens,” continued Poe, “you may write for the pulp trade, but you are not an author who treats his reader as a fool. And yet again and again you hint at deeper, darker currents just beneath the surface, without revealing precisely what they are. Setting aside the amative, may I say erotic, affinity between David and Steerforth, I would be most grateful if you would explain the incestuous love between Agnes Wickfield and her father. To be certain, you have seeded it masterfully throughout the text; yet how does it end, suh? How does it resolve itself?”

“Mr. Wickfield? Ah yes—Mr. Wickfield,” replied Dickens,
thinking back. For the surname had changed several times before publication.

Poe shuffled through the manuscript, produced a number, and continued. “You wrote this CHAPTER, sir, I have it in its entirety. It is entitled,
Agnes.”

“Agnes was the name of our cook,” said Dickens. “She was a good cook, and I thought she would be chuffed by it.”

“Accepted, Mr. Dickens. Yet listen to what Mr. Wickfield, her father, says about the relations between them. All I ask is that you tell me what it means.”

Turning up the lamp, Poe read from the manuscript:

My love for my dear child was a diseased love, but my mind was all unhealthy then. I say no more of that. I am not speaking of myself, Trotwood, but of her mother, and of her. If I give you any clue to what I am, or to what I have been, you will unravel it, I know.

A long silence followed, and Poe grew impatient. “Come, suh, surely you cannot deny the self-loathing in the speech. Its manner of expression suggests a man who cannot bring himself to say where his ‘diseased love’ for his daughter led him. At the very least, suh, what does he do next?”

“Whose speech is that, did you say?” asked Dickens.

Poe’s enormous eyes rolled with impatience. “Mr. Wickfield, suh. The father of Agnes—”

“Ah yes. Agnes. Gentle Agnes.”

“Gentle Agnes, exactly so—who, unless I am very much mistaken, is to marry David, and they will grow old together in a state of connubial bliss.”

“That is a rough approximation of what happens, yes.” Dickens never liked plot summaries of his work, thinking that they revealed his innate shallowness. He always felt he showed better in the details.

“Which brings me again to the question, suh—what is to be the outcome of incest? What natural justice will put it to rights and settle the score? Will Agnes murder her father by giving him a sleeping draft that is a bit stronger than usual? Will he hang himself? Or does Agnes’s mother return in some way—in a dream perhaps, or as a
ghost, or as an awakened corpse, to confront Mr. Wickfield with his sin, whereupon he is found in his bed the next morning, dead, and on his face an expression of ineffable horror?”

Dickens struggled to recall writing the passage. What, indeed, had he been thinking of? “Sir, were I to take your approach and question every line I wrote, I should have found myself confined to the writing of short tales—
extremely
short tales, if I may say so.”

“Are you telling me that Mr. Wickfield’s speech means nothing, suh? That he might as well have been singing ring around the rosy”?

“Mr. Wickfield feels remorse over his employment of his daughter during her most marriageable years to take the place of his dead wife. Otherwise he would not so willingly give her up in marriage to Copperfield and lose her companionship. Sir, my deadline was drawing very near and I needed a resolution.”

Or perhaps, Dickens thought, it was something he scribbled down during a sleepless night. He had known many such nights at the time. If he wrote it in that state of mind, there was no telling what he was getting at.

“Yet incest explains everything, suh, does it not? Did not Mr. Wickfield drink himself to sleep each night? Did he not gaze upon Agnes repeatedly with an expression of anguish? There is only one satisfactory narrative, suh: a man in the throes of grief looks upon his daughter, who suddenly becomes his wife incarnate. He succumbs to passion, and only when the deed is done does he realize that he has violated his own flesh and blood …”

“Stop!” cried Dickens. “Good God, man, what the devil are you talking about? That is not the world of David Copperfield! That is not benevolent, sad Mr. Wickfield. Many men take to drink in their later years, and not because they have committed incest.”

“Then what
is
the reason for his drinking, suh?”

“Surely you can’t expect me to answer for a character’s every twitch …”

“If you will pardon me, suh, for a man to violate his daughter is a bit more than a twitch.”

“Please, Mr. Poe. From the bowels of Christ, I beg you to put that line of inquiry out of your mind. There is no incest in
David Copperfield
. I pledge to you that no thought of any such nature crossed my mind in the writing of the tale.”

“My love for my dear child was a diseased love
…” I ask you only to tell me, What does it mean?”

“I admit that I cannot tell you off the tip of my tongue. Perhaps it slipped in of its own accord.”