The Port-Wine Stain (22 page)

To this end, we were permitted to walk unhindered within the asylum walls, to breathe freely out-of-doors, to enjoy and cultivate the gardens, aesthetic interests, and the manual arts. We were not ourselves free, of course; the walls, bars, restraints, and the segregation of the two sexes were constant reminders of our confinement. But we learned to regulate our thoughts and emotions, so that, for all but the incurable among us, reason was eventually restored and we were allowed to go home. I didn't object to being there. I was a model inmate—tractable and affable—and never acknowledged, by word or gesture, that I bore the port-wine stain on my cheek.

Edgar visited me once. He forgave me, he said, for having destroyed his manuscript, and he presented me with an autographed copy of his newest published work,
The Prose Romances of Edgar A. Poe
. James Lowell visited me shortly afterward and gave me a copy of his new book,
Miscellaneous Poems
, also signed. The conceit of some writers who think their books sufficient to cure the woes of the
world and the wretched people in it! Ida also visited me, once, making me a gift of
Institutes of the Christian Religion
, written by John Calvin in 1536—not signed. I was sick of books, stories, and of all who feel obliged to inflict them on the world. I consigned them to the netherworld beneath my cot, next to the bedpan.

At least once each week, Dr. Mütter visited the asylum. I called it the “seminary” because dark minds were remade there. He brought me tobacco for my pipe and would always offer me a drink of brandy from his flask. For these useful gifts, I was grateful, and grateful still more for his goodwill. It was by virtue of his generosity that I was a patient of the Asylum for the Relief of Persons Deprived of the Use of Their Reason instead of locked up in the charity hospital for the insane poor. The asylum was a private institution. Dr. Mütter was one of its patrons and paid the cost of my maintenance and cure from out of his own pocket. When I had recovered my wits and was restored to life as it is generally lived, he gave me back my old job as his assistant, and, as I've said, in years to come he would see me enrolled in and graduated from the medical college. Dr. Mütter was my great benefactor, and I was sorry for the unkind thoughts I'd had of him. I mourned him when he died in ‘59 of the gout. His remains did not end up in jars or under glass for boys to dust, but are entombed in the family vault in Charleston.

I remember one conversation we had in the azalea garden just inside the asylum's main gate. It was early May. The bushes were scarlet. The new grass underneath the dogwood trees was white with blossoms brought down by
recent rain. We sat side by side on an ornamental iron bench and watched the robins tug up worms from the sodden earth.

“The mind gives up its secrets as reluctantly as the ground does those worms,” he said in the gnomic manner that I very much used to resent. It pleased me now, however, to hear him take the roundabout. I waited for him to come to his point; I knew he had one. Dr. Mütter was never anything less than serious where the body or the mind was concerned. He was an eminent doctor, surgeon, teacher of medicine, and connoisseur of its oddities. “Your mind has suffered, Edward, and I feel partly to blame.”

His contrition surprised me, Moran!

“I should not have thrown you and Poe together as I did. I should've known better than to encourage a friendship with a man whose own sanity was balanced on the edge of a knife. It was partly for your own good, but mostly for mine: I was curious to see the effect he'd have on you. I introduced you to an unstable element, and this is the result of my recklessness.”

His roving eye took in the asylum and, here and there on the grass, persons ensnared in the various phases of lunacy. It was easy to imagine them as little boats set rocking by the sea's local disturbances—the sea's entirety drawn by the moon's own animal magnetism, causing the “moon sickness,” which had brought us there. None of these airy thoughts occurred to me then; my mind, even before it had become obscured, was largely unformed and unused to speculation. It lacked . . . subtlety, the devil's gift to man, as wonderful and damnable as fire.

“His story was stronger than yours, Edward,” said Mütter in conclusion.

L
OOK OUT THE WINDOW
, Moran, at the people in the street. Smiling or frowning at one another or, more likely, buried in a private dream—a dishonorable fantasy, perhaps—rarely do they ever sense the spirit that moves them this way or that. And if they do sometimes sense it, they delude themselves into believing that it is their own that moves them. We tell ourselves a story we call our life.

I've come to believe that the world is papered over with stories. The most convincing of them become, for each one of us, reality. I knew a man in the asylum who believed he was an adjutant on Winfield Scott's staff during the War of 1812. He would be executed by the British, he told me, at the Battle of Lundy's Lane, on July
25
, 1814. On that day in July—in
1844
—he hanged himself. He died believing he was in another man's story. His mind was deranged, the story untrue for him, but the rope was real enough to make it true. My double's story very nearly did me in. But I got the better of him, and, lately, I've been able to make him do my bidding.

See what I have here, Moran, in this silk pillowslip. He likes the feel of silk, you know, and I see no reason not to make him comfortable.

Yes, it's my old skull, the one I buried years ago. Recently, I dug it up. It was dirty, like an unearthed potato, and I had to scrub it clean. There was something green sprouting from the socket. I'd like to dig up Edgar Poe and talk
to him. When he was alive, I didn't appreciate his gifts. He was the object of my first powerful attraction and the author of a second, greater one. I've been fortunate in my life to have known two men endowed with superior minds: Edgar Poe and Thomas Dent Mütter—both deceased.

Yes, yes, Moran! I speak to the skull, and it speaks to me. Handsome, don't you think? You can almost see it smile. It lacks only a layer of skin over the bone to prove its resemblance to me. More than an uncanny likeness, it would be a faithful copy. You'd see a port-wine stain exactly like my own. Eakins was kind not only to make me appear younger in his painting but to omit my disfigurement. Everyone pretends there's nothing there. I would not have believed people could be so sympathetic.

Not that I mind the mark anymore. I've lived with it for such a long time. The stain has become part of me; you could no more separate it from me than you could a bruise from the skin of a pear. Dr. Mütter tried—that is, he pretended to. He thought that a pretense of the restorative surgery in which he excelled would remove the monomania from my mind. I went along with his fraud for my future's sake, and when I awoke from the oblivion of an ether sleep and beheld my face in the mirror, I cried in my happiness. The tears were crocodile, and the port-wine stain had been as vividly present in the mirror as before. No surgeon's knife or mesmerist's power of suggestion can remove it. A counterstory might, but who is there to write one? I had no wish to return to the asylum, and I understood that normality dazzles those who are afraid to appear different from their neighbors. And so it
has been. I've kept the secret locked up—here—inside my brain and inside this skull, whose gaze I still find riveting. No one has ever heard a complete account of my strange and eventful history until now.

What do you think, Moran? Have I told it well? Are you convinced of its truthfulness?

I might write it up as a reminiscence. I've written some factual accounts of the war. My book
A Field Surgeon's Notes
is in the Jefferson Medical College library. I wonder what Dr. Mütter would have said to that. I dedicated it to Walt Whitman so that he'd be sure to read it. He praised its poetical style. Yes, I really ought to pen an account of our meeting. Maybe I'll include “The Port-Wine Stain” as an apology to Edgar for having robbed him of his manuscript. His story would help mine to be published—don't you think?

You're leaving, Moran?

By all means, you don't want to miss the exposition. Be sure to visit the Army Post Hospital and see Eakins's great picture of Dr. Gross's clinic. When you stand in front of it, look for me among the young men sitting bemused in the painted darkness. But hold fast to your own story, Moran, because it's all too easy to become lost in someone else's.

       
There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction.

—“The Premature Burial,” E. A. Poe

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

My gratitude remains constant for those who have been steadfast in their devotion to me or to my work (they are, to my mind, indivisible): my wife, Helen; my children, Meredith and Nicholas; their spouses, Andy and Alexis; my mother, and (felt even now) my late father; as well as my publisher (and friend), Erika Goldman, and extended family at Bellevue Literary Press—Jerome Lowenstein, M.D., Leslie Hodgkins, Crystal Sikma, Molly Mikolowski, Joe Gannon, and Carol Edwards.

I ought not to forget to acknowledge the past American literature that, in recent years, has nourished me and my own attempts at contributing to it. It bears discovering or, as in my own case, rediscovering, if not for its relevance, which readers of my own time may dispute, then for its expression of the mind of its age, whose thoughts have gone toward the making of our own. I would not wish to be a literary conservationist, nor would I be a satirist. I would hope to be a twenty-first-century writer of American novels that speak to my own time through the literature that preceded them and, inevitably, give them shape and substance.

I acknowledge a debt to the historical record and ask forgiveness of those who will see in this novel certain liberties taken with it. Most flagrant of these instances may be my having brought forward, in time, the year of Poe's first
meeting with Sarah Whitman (from 1848 to 1844). Dickey's suicide is another case of license taken. While I have been mostly careful of fact, I have written a fiction clad in history for the sake of verisimilitude. Mr. Poe, I beg your pardon for this concession to storytelling and also for my having borrowed some of your words and for having given you and Dr. Mütter mine to mouth.

Much of the text for the paragraph concerning the cause and treatment of insanity was taken verbatim from
Proceedings on the Occasion of Laying the Corner Stone of the New Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane, at Philadelphia, Including the Address by George B. Wood, M. D., Senior Member of the Medical Staff of the Pennsylvania Hospital, etc. etc
., published in Philadelphia by T. K. and P. G. Collins, Printers, 1856. I found this informative pamphlet in the digital collection of the US National Library of Medicine.

Regarding form and influence, my use of an Interlocutor and end men has more to do with John Berryman's
Dream Songs
than to a discredited minstrelsy. I ask my contemporaries to pardon it and also my use of certain nouns and pronouns that are unacceptable in our own era but were common usage during the years when my narrator was flesh and a living voice. I can only wish that the vices of the past had not survived into the present, which seems—in Berryman's words—a “funeral of tenderness.” I can only hope (forlornly) that virtue—a word so old-fashioned as to sound ridiculous to our ears—will shed a benign influence over us through the “imponderable fluid that is everywhere present in the universe.”

A
BOUT
THE
A
UTHOR

Norman Lock
is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage, radio, and screenplays. His most recent books are the short story collection
Love Among the Particles
, a
Shelf Awareness
Best Book of the Year, and two previous books in The American Novels series:
The Boy in His Winter
, a re-envisioning of Mark Twain's classic
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
, which Scott Simon of NPR
Weekend Edition
said, “make[s] Huck and Jim so real you expect to get messages from them on your iPhone,” and
American Meteor
, an homage to Walt Whitman and William Henry Jackson named a
Publishers Weekly
Best Book of the Year.

Lock has won The Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award,
The Paris Review
Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and writing fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey, where he is at work on the next books of The American Novels series.

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ITERARY
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