The Port-Wine Stain (14 page)

He was not usually so honest about his art.

At a quarter to nine, I knocked at Poe's front door. Mrs. Clemm, hands red as boiled lobster, led me to the kitchen, where Edgar's shirts were, in fact, boiling on top of the stove. The room was pleasantly warm after my walk in the cold; the inside of its windows were dripping wet with steam.

“I must apologize, Mr. Fenzil,” she said, “for receiving you in this unseemly way. But today is washing day, and our straitened circumstances oblige me to make economies. In other words, what I used to pay others to do, I now must do myself.”

She sighed like one aggrieved who, nonetheless, takes pleasure in her martyrdom. I've known many, of both sexes, who delight in abasement: It bolsters their ego—a strange paradox.

She took a wooden paddle and stirred the steaming, soapy water. My nose stung a little because of the lye. She invited me to sit at the kitchen table and pour myself a cup of tea, if I were so inclined. I was not. My bladder was already incommoded, as Mütter used to say. I sat and watched her work, feeling a certain disdain, as though I were above such menial occupations. I was indulging a childish vanity, of course, for I did much worse than boil laundry: I got rid of bloody matter, rendered flesh from bone, and shoveled pigeon excrement. But that morning, I sat in the hot
kitchen with the pleasing realization that I was a man at liberty who needn't exert himself until Monday morning.

“My nephew is asleep,” she said. I thought I heard a mild reproof in her voice. But maybe not; perhaps I was the reproving one. Mrs. Clemm was devoted to her nephew and son-in-law. I have no doubt she believed in his greatness, if not in his abilities to earn an income for her daughter, Virginia. “He didn't come home last night until very late.”

“How is Mrs. Poe?” I inquired politely.

“She's also asleep. I fear for her health, Mr. Fenzil. She is frail and delicate. She sleeps in the afternoons. The doctor says she has consumption. I hope it's not so.” She fell silent, and then she asked, “Have you read my nephew's story ‘Life in Death'?”

Moran, you may know it as “The Oval Portrait,” the title Edgar later gave it.

“I haven't read it,” I admitted.

She appeared to be shocked by my ignorance of her illustrious son-in-law and nephew's work.

“It is a remarkable tale,” she said, putting down the paddle. “In it, a husband paints a portrait in oil of his youthful wife. He labors long and hard on it, and, while she sits day after day for him, she grows ever weaker, as if, with each brushstroke, he stole her vitality, giving it to the other woman in his life—she in his painting. When the picture is finished, the young wife is dead. I sometimes imagine that when Edgar has emptied his well—no genius is inexhaustible, Mr. Fenzil, not even his—when he has written his last word, my daughter will be dead, drained of life by his willfulness. I dare not protest; she adores him, and he
her. I don't doubt it. But his love for ‘the other woman' is too strong for Virginia to survive.”

I said nothing. What could I say? Before I'd met Poe. I'd have thought her raving. But I knew him now—his animal magnetism—and, aware or not, how he could captivate and destroy.

I asked to be remembered to Virginia. I left no word for Edgar. I was certain that we'd see each other again before too long. There was a strange affinity between us, remember. I wore its scabby symbol on my arm. Something told me never to show him it.

“I'll see myself out, Mrs. Clemm,” I said, leaving her to her laundry tub. “Good day to you.”

Walking through the front room on my way to the door, I happened to see a manuscript written in Poe's awkward hand, lying on his desk. I had time to read the title of a new tale: “The Premature Burial.”

A
T THE END OF
F
EBRUARY
, I attended a reading given by Edgar Poe of his newest work, which I'd seen in manuscript lying on his desk. I sat in the rear of the Walnut Street Theatre, pleased by its gilt and ornament, the gaslights providing an otherworldly atmosphere suitable for a gothic tale. Some two or two hundred and fifty persons had gathered on a bitterly cold night to hear Edgar's latest “research into the limits of experience,” as I had heard him say about his work. What would Jefferson and Lafayette have made of his dismal fantasies? They'd been among the spectators of the theater's first production, in 1812, of
The Rivals
. This
evening's program promised “a tale of unrivaled horror & dismay, the like of which has rarely been heard on the stage of this or any other theatre.” The fainthearted were advised to leave before the start of Mr. Poe's reading. The price of admission would be refunded without question. The screw to our anxiety had been cleverly turned by the time Edgar stepped into the footlights.

He wore his black frock coat—he owned no other—a deep burgundy cravat, and a freshly laundered shirt, which, doubtless, had been recently boiled in Mrs. Clemm's wash-tub. His unruly hair had the sheen and blackness of a raven, if you'll pardon an obvious simile; it was combed more carefully than was usual for him. Standing alone onstage, he seemed a small, vulnerable man. But as he began to read, raising his eyes from time to time to meet ours across the gaslit footlights, I saw how sure he was of his work, if not of himself. His voice was neither powerful nor weak; its peculiar intonation had little to do with Edgar's mildly southern drawl. He spoke in a low register—I'd never known him to raise it, not even in anger or excitement—that was beautifully modulated—musical, even. We hung on his every word as he read “The Premature Burial.” We made hardly a sound while we listened raptly to the hideous story of a man who believed himself coffined up and entombed while in a cataleptic trance. I heard echoes of what I'd told Poe concerning the horror of my own unnatural confinement earlier that month.

I have it here, Moran. I have all his tales. Let me see. . . . Here it is: “The Premature Burial,” published in Philadelphia's
Dollar Newspaper
, in 1844. For a good many years, I
couldn't bring myself to think about it, much less read it. Now I can. I'm over the terror of that night when I suffered my own premature burial. I wonder that Poe didn't have me put into the coffin with a sheet of paper, a pencil, and a candle so that I might have written the tale myself. It is always this way for those of us who lack genius: We're made to serve them who possess it.

Here's the passage that finally drove me from the theater.

               
I could not summon courage to move. I dared not make the effort which was to satisfy me of my fate—and yet there was something at my heart which whispered me it was sure. Despair—such as no other species of wretchedness ever calls into being—despair alone urged me, after long irresolution, to uplift the heavy lids of my eyes. I uplifted them. It was dark—all dark. I knew that the fit was over. I knew that the crisis of my disorder had long passed. I knew that I had now fully recovered the use of my visual faculties—and yet it was dark—all dark—the intense and utter raylessness of the Night that endureth for evermore.

               
I endeavored to shriek—, and my lips and my parched tongue moved convulsively together in the attempt—but no voice issued from the cavernous lungs, which, oppressed as if by the weight of some incumbent mountain, gasped and palpitated, with the heart, at every elaborate and struggling inspiration.

I felt sweat dampen my face, my hair, my palms—the body's response to fear. Edgar continued to read his tale; its sentences gathered relentlessly toward an overwhelming outcome.

“The movement of the jaws, in this effort to cry aloud . . .”

To have my night at the Thanatopsis Club revived in me was more than I could bear. I left the theater before Edgar had reached the end of his story. As I hurried toward the door, I noticed Dr. Mütter and Mary. He was gazing at me in amusement.

I wanted company, Moran! I wanted to feel life—at least its phantom—move inside me. I didn't want to drink. Lately, I'd indulged too much and too often, and the alcohol induced in me a sensation nearer death—how I imagined it—than life. Only once before had I been with a woman; it had not gone well. But I hurried toward a woman now as a freezing man would a fire. I knew I would regret it afterward, but I rushed through the streets toward the house where my brother had taken me for my manly initiation, my trial by combat. The streets were fairly empty, with the cold and the hour, which was well past the close of the Saturday business day. I watched the breath come out of my mouth as if I were giving up the ghost.

Built in a style known as “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost” because of its three rooms, one atop another, the house stood near the corner of Dock and Carters streets. At that time of night, it lay in an unrelieved darkness conducive to plots and illicit meetings, criminal or amorous. The “visitors” to the house were mostly sailors, porters, road menders, and other laboring men. The three rooms smelled of carbolic
soap, musk, stale tobacco, and sweat. The reek nauseated me, but I held down my rising gorge and followed a fat woman up the stairs. I didn't care to look closely at her face.

I remember a lumpy bed, the smudged chimney of a badly trimmed oil lamp, a stack of damp newspapers, the smell of an unemptied chamber pot. I will say this, Moran: The grossness of the scene drove all thoughts of burial from my mind. Terror had given way to numbness.

The woman spoke perfunctorily, as if she'd been hired to carry rubbish to the ash heap. I wished to find in my imagination a spark of affection, but it was quenched by actuality. There is no disillusion like that caused by a visit to a brothel. Her breast felt strange in my hand, like a lump of raw dough. Her hair was brittle, her mouth a gash that made me think of poor Nathaniel Dickey's ruined face. I toiled between her thighs until my mind's blankness became a screen on which a garish phantasmagoria appeared: By turns, I saw myself as Dickey, Poe, Mütter. By turns, the bawd beneath me became Virginia, Mary in her “Sally cap,” and Ida. I watched in horror and in fascination while my varied selves clamped onto the bodies of these three virtuous women until I'd emptied myself of seed.

It was disconcerting, Moran, to say the least. The thought revolved in my mind: What might be the issue of this misspent night? A monster, a prodigy, or merely what a frightened young man can sire on the body of a whore? Combinations so wayward and perverse must, of necessity, produce an unholy outcome.

Listen to this, Moran; it's from one of the master's essays—“On Imagination,” published in the 1849 issue of
the
Southern Literary Messenger
, the year he died. I wish I could have been a fly on the wall to see if he received the dreadful visitor with a welcome or a whimper.

“. . . the Imagination is unlimited. Its materials extend throughout the universe.” Like the imponderable fluid! “Even out of deformities, it fabricates that
Beauty
which is at once its sole object and its inevitable test.”

To imagine Beauty resulting from my having coupled with a prostitute is laughable! Had she a heart of gold (who can say she did not?), what seed would a man in my condition have sown? I was no better than she and, perhaps, a good deal worse. Edgar knew everything about literature and nothing about living men and women, who are not redeemed by the imagination as readily as its figments safely ensconced between the covers of a book.

I slunk away from the house of ill fame, ashamed for having pictured in my mind Poe's wife, Mütter's, and Ida, the chaste and inviolate. I thought nothing at all about the poor drab who had exchanged her body for a pocketful of coins. Generally, we don't give a damn about anyone, man or woman, whom circumstances have ruined. A whore is no better than she should be—so it was said by men and by women. In my time, Moran, I've seen a few on the mortuary slab, transformed by disease, drowning, or murder into something less than human.

Lying in my own bed, I couldn't sleep for thinking about what I'd done—no, not about what I'd
done
, but what'd I'd
imagined
doing. In the morning, shame still gnawing at a troubled conscience, I went to the German Reformed Church on Race Street, where Ida was a member of the
congregation. I sat in a back pew and watched her shine in glory with the rest of the elect. I knew I would never be among them, would never taste God's mercy. According to Calvinism, as I understand it, to struggle against a nature conceived in “reprobation” is futile and pointless. God's grace is arbitrary, and those to whom it is withheld are damned. No surgeon, alchemist, or powerful juju can undo poor Adam's curse.

I soon became distracted and ceased to hear the niggling exhortations of a stout man wearing a Geneva gown who spoke for the Almighty of Days every Sunday morning at ten o'clock.

Do you know Poe's tale “The Imp of the Perverse”? It's a parable about compulsion. The narrator murders another man using a poisoned candle in a shut-up room and inherits the dead man's estate. Years later, he's struck by the thought that nothing stands in the way of his enjoyment of the fruits of his crime but his confession. Forthwith, he's seized, perversely, as if by an “invisible fiend,” with an overmastering desire to confess. He does and is hanged. Sitting in church that Sunday, while sin and salvation played out their eternal drama—in High German—I was
made
to picture Virginia, Mary, and Ida ravished by four grotesques, one of them myself.

Ravished
is a nice word found in sentimental novels. Between us, Moran, the word that stuck in my mind like shit to the bottom of a shoe was
fucked
. The thought of my having fucked, in the guise of Mütter, Poe, and Nathaniel Dickey, those three good women horrified me, but the more I entertained it, the more I could not let it go. If ever in His
wildest imagination, God might have thought to show me mercy, I knew that, by silently intoning
fucked, fucked, fucked
in church while the choir lifted its voice a cappella in praise of Him, I'd blasted all hope of salvation.