The Port-Wine Stain (2 page)

No? Rye it is, then. You strike me as a man who's used to roughing it. For all your apparent youthfulness, you look worn to the bone. I've seen it before on the faces, in the postures, of soldiers of the late war, fought to stitch up or rend asunder the Union, as the case may be. You have the lean and haggard appearance of a prospector or a settler.

I thought as much. After the war, I returned east and have never left it. Yes, sir, your autobiography is written in the lines on your face, Moran. You might have stepped right out of Whitman's book, out of one of those poems celebrating, ad nauseam, the common man. Frankly, I don't much care for common men, though I care for them when they're sick, or for democracy, either, when it comes to that. Poe died on election day, in Baltimore, having several times sold his vote for drink—which is just as it should have been. A great man—and I believe Edgar Poe to have been one, though his gifts were perverse—was deserving of more than a single vote. I'm only half in jest. Toss a rope to a drowning specimen of the common man—a Mississippi roustabout, say—and once he's back on land and has knocked the water from his ears, he's liable to use it to lynch the first negro
who fails to show him his respect. I can see on your face that you find my cynicism grotesque. I'm afraid experience has spoiled what pleasure I might have taken in life as it's lived by most people.

I started to tell you about the seance. Edgar Poe, Frances Osgood, a poetess, a bald and whiskered gentleman who looked like General Burnside, a young woman with catarrh, and I sat around Sarah Whitman's dining table while she rapped out messages from the dear departed. Do you believe in a talkative dead, Moran?

You're right to do so, but I would insist that, once the dead have been summoned, we ought not to be satisfied with inanities, as if the afterlife were no more mysterious than a trip by train to Atlantic City. Of all we might've learned on that winter afternoon at Mrs. Whitman's “talking table”—the answers to questions that have vexed theologians and philosophers for millennia—we heard only tittle-tattle from the Other Side, unless you consider worthwhile the peevish complaints concerning Poe's unwholesome character and addiction to laudanum voiced, telegraphically, by Sarah's late husband, John. He was clearly prejudiced against Poe and held him in contempt, in spite of John's having been himself a poet. Envy, I suppose, made him heap abuse on Edgar, emphasized by a furious pounding on the black walnut table. The young lady suffering from an overproduction of phlegm, a Miss Turner, of Boston, fainted dead away, while the gentleman who looked like Burnside pulled his whiskers and, upsetting the chair, ran out of the house, never to return. An obscurity in this life, there was no one to spare a word for me in the next.

Have you ever attended a seance, Moran?

Well, one doesn't need tricks and hocus-pocus to conjure. During the months I spent in Poe's company, I sometimes felt the unseen presences inhabiting this world, as you might an electric current in Faraday's induction ring. You thrill to a spark of something vital and alarming when you read the stories. I also sense it when I stand before Eakins's big canvas and see myself engulfed by a turbid atmosphere of paint. I suppose it's the macabre, which Eakins's picture and Poe's work share—in my opinion—that connects them, no matter how divergent their art and personalities. One feels dismay . . . terror—
I
feel reason overthrown by pigment and oil. By words scattered on a page. I'm amazed how skillful writers have the power to create worlds, invoke the dead, make phantoms and figments that persuade us, apparently without effort, of their materiality. I'm a doctor; my art is practical, not magical. I make nothing new; I repair what's been broken or decayed. I cannot make life out of nothing or raise the dead. I mend, Moran, like any seamstress.

Help yourself to the whiskey. No doubt you think me a poor storyteller to take so long to begin. But I like to let the thread unspool slowly, taking its own time and finding its own end. I like to take my time over a meal, a glass, a pipeful of tobacco, a tale. I'd like to hear yours, Moran, if only there were time. But you have a general waiting for you in Philadelphia, and generals cannot be kept waiting by their subalterns. Will you go west again and fight the Indians?

I don't envy you. Custer is a vainglorious man, self-serving and callous.

Have you ever seen a likeness of Edward Hicks's painting
The Peaceable Kingdom
? There the wolf does lie down with the lamb, and the leopard with the kid. There and nowhere else on earth. Poe once said to me, “The turmoil in men's souls is the prelude to a universal catastrophe. Beside ourselves with fear, we claw at one another and, unsated, gnaw at our own vitals.” If you want to know humankind at its worst, read Edgar Poe. For virtue, read Whitman.

You said that Whitman visited you during the war, in the hospital at Washington City.

I'm glad you haven't forgotten him, Moran. He's a kind, compassionate man. A great and mighty heart has Whitman. He's dying of it, you know. Oh, it was a stroke that turned that robust, lusty man into an invalid, but to me it is his compassionate heart that is coming asunder. One can die of an excess of love, just as readily as one can perish of misanthropy, as was the case with Poe. By the time you get back from the Badlands, if you do, you may not find Walt Whitman still among the living. But if any soul can persist after the body's death, his can.

I said that the soul is a kind of organ, although I never saw it when I had to lay bare men's innards in field hospitals. Scenes of the slaughterhouse are common when our kind bares its fangs. You might expect to see the soul gleam along a scalpel's edge, like a light trembling in anticipation of extinction. I saw it dead in the heaps of amputated limbs, the shattered bones, the stony eyes, the bright unfurling of intestines—caught death's sharp scent from pails of blood and excrement, the putrefaction of gangrene. But I don't need to tell you, Moran: You lost an eye to the soul's
disease. It was venomous in those days, when we were visited by a plague of enmity. How else can we explain Shiloh, Antietam, Stones River, Gettysburg, Andersonville but as a sickness to which few might claim immunity? The death of a man or woman is no more than a rehearsal for Armageddon, which will come, Moran, if not in our own time, then in a future too terrible to imagine. Maybe the soul has always been as Poe disclosed its baleful influence in his tales and in the perturbations of his characters.

I was an army surgeon, a student of Dr. Thomas Dent Mütter's, a friend to Edgar Poe, who made me a character in his nightmares. How could I be otherwise than a pessimist?

Poe was not the wicked man Griswold claimed in his scurrilous biography. I remember his obituary on Poe's death, published in the
New York Tribune
: “Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it.”

I grieved, Moran, and I had every reason not to. And if I no longer read his stories, it's only that I'm afraid to lose myself in them once more. One can, you know, when gazing into a mirror.

Philadelphia, January 1844

I met the man whom I would later know to be Edgar Allan Poe at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, where I was employed in Dr. Mütter's laboratory. At the time, I was living with my mother and brother in a small
house in Northern Liberties, one of the city's river wards. My father had died some years before, when I was seven or eight years old. He'd been a hand in one of the mills along the Delaware and died, I would guess, of sarcoidosis or some other disease of the lungs. I remember his cough, the deep cuts on his hands, the cotton lint in his hair. Of his death, I recall the gaunt body laid out in a coffin set on trestles in the front room of our house. I can still see the undertaker's hearse, the mournful ride to Palmer Cemetery over Frankford Road's loaf-shaped cobbles, an iron gate, the raw earth, black and sodden with December rain, the steamy breath of the mourners, the wet clay thudding onto my father's wooden box, my mother's face hidden by a heavy veil—properties of a melodrama or a gothic tale. A superb needlewoman, she sewed fancy clothes for rich ladies. Franklin, my elder brother, worked as a stevedore on the coal wharves. I was a grocer's boy. Our means may have been straitened, but, thankfully, we were not destitute. By renting the back room to a German cigar maker, we could keep our little house on Oak Street.

At seventeen, I was hired as a porter at the medical college. The following year, I was made custodian of Dr. Mütter's medical curiosities. I'd been to school and could read; I was likable, willing, and, fortunately, a not overly sensitive young man. There was little in that hospital that could turn my stomach. Dr. Mütter collected oddities and freaks of nature: dried tissue, skeletal remains where the initiated could “read the bones” for illness and trauma, waxed models of hideous deformities, body parts, cysts, tumors, kidney and gallstones, brains, embryos—all
put up in jars, in alcohol, as if they were your mother's brandied peach preserves. I was so often among those ghastly remnants of suffering that, during the last war when I sawed off a man's leg for the first time or sewed up a shrapnel-riddled bowel, my iron constitution was proof against squeamishness.

“You have an admirable tolerance for the products of misery,” Dr. Mütter once said to me. He had passed a reeking dish of some yellowish matter under my nose and had insisted that I smell it. I snuffled and, despite its noxiousness, did not reveal to him my disgust. He would often test my resolve in this highly empirical manner. “The pathologist can sometimes diagnose a disease by its stench,” he said. “The Chinese physician will adjust the body's humors according to the odor of the stool. We can learn much from Oriental medicine.”

I admit to a fascination verging on the morbid for Mütter's pickled monstrosities, which P. T. Barnum would have coveted for his American Museum. I've often wondered what it might signify about me as a man, apart from the physician I am, to have been drawn to what the world calls horror. When I dusted the specimen jars, polished the oak cabinets, and rid the glass cases of the fingerprints of the curious, I would thrill at the varieties of abnormality that nature, in her capriciousness, had produced.

There's a curiosity, Moran, comprised of pity, of joy in having been spared nature's enormities, and of a perverse thrill of disgust, that causes us to gaze in fascination at the ugly. The beautiful can preen themselves in it, while we others can smile at ideal Beauty's overthrow. I've always
thought it strange that Edgar Poe, who valued beauty and good taste above all other aesthetic qualities, should have found the horrific attractive. He was like a physician charting the course of a grave illness. He was obsessed by the pathology of the human soul, which he could not cure. But his record of its disease is a masterpiece of elegance, reason, and intuition worthy of his own detective, M. Dupin.

“Read this book, Edward,” said Mütter, handing me a much-used copy of
Elements of Pathological Anatomy
, which had been published a few years before. It was written by Samuel Gross.

Yes, Moran, the same Dr. Gross painted by Thomas Eakins in '75. He replaced Mütter when he resigned because of ill health. My years have taught me not to be surprised by the apparently happenstance needlework that stitches the fabric of the universe together. In time, its pattern will become evident. Edgar wrote, “And (strange, oh strangest mystery of all!) I found, in the commonest objects of the universe, a circle of analogies.”

Dr. Mütter was pleased with the interest I showed in his collection and, later, put me to work in the surgery, where I would clean up after an operation and carry pails of diseased tissue, bone, and bloody bandages to the incinerator. The good man would one day surprise me by paying my tuition to attend the medical school—class of 1853. In time, I became his protégé, taking notes during surgery, seeing to the instruments, and, later, administering diethyl ether or nitrous oxide under his direction. I'm very much in his debt, although I sometimes wish I had chosen another profession. The practice of medicine is gratifying for those
who cherish a high opinion of themselves. But beyond the vainglory, there's a danger of overly valuing one's skill, of becoming too self-assured in the presence of life. Edgar, to the contrary, seemed at home in its absence.

What I mean by life, Moran, is the fuse lit by the Creator and snuffed out by Death. The best of us can alleviate suffering and sometimes extend life, but we cannot hope to understand it, no matter how many corpses we pick apart. I saw too many during the war to think otherwise. They soured my sense of a priestly vocation, to which I'd been called, with the vinegar of pessimism. If I'd not been an army surgeon, if I'd not performed so many amputations in the field and lost so many men at the moment of their Calvary, who knows but I might have been cheerful.

In 1844, I had not yet drained the bitter cup. I was a frank and friendly young man. I endeared myself to Dr. Mütter, who was esteemed by his patients as much for his genial manner as for his surgical finesse. My God, the man's hands were a blur during an operation, astounding his students and peers alike! Ambidextrous, he could work twice as fast as any other Jefferson surgeon, perhaps any other practitioner in the city. I vividly recall the operation to reconstruct Nathaniel Dickey's monstrous facial deformity: The instruments flashed under the gaslights as the unfortunate young man endured twenty-five minutes of scarcely imaginable agony, sitting in a chair, with nothing to mitigate the pain except for Mütter's calm, gentle eyes to fix his own upon. That surgery was the closest thing to a miracle I've ever seen. Equally transfixed, Poe was sitting in the visitors' gallery. When Mütter held up a shaving
mirror and Nathaniel smiled for the first time in his life to see a human face reflected there, Poe exclaimed, “Eureka!”