The Port-Wine Stain (4 page)

“Never mind, Edward. These ‘sciences' may be only a fantasy indulged in by novelists and mountebanks. Let us see what story the catalogue has to tell,” he said, glancing at its pages. “And bring me the skulls to which these notes refer, if you please.”

I fetched eight of what Hamlet had pondered in the graveyard at Elsinore. All in a row, they made a ghastly totem. To unearth a single skull is a surprise; to ponder a heap of them, a shock. It is the same with all things macabre.

“Thank you, Edward.”

I stood slightly behind him and watched as he contemplated each skull in light of its ledger entry. He caressed the polished bone like a blind person taking the measure of another's face. His touch was full of tenderness. He might have been stroking his beloved or the death mask of a man he'd venerated. The sun, which had strengthened as it escaped the net of bare poplar trees across the street, made the memento mori gleam eerily. Although I had often held them in my hands, I shivered. Looking back on those days, I realize there was in Poe a
vital connection
with death. There's sense in the oxymoron: He was never so alive as when he mused on extinction. I couldn't have said then which entranced him more: his subject matter or his art. Now I know they were indivisible.

Having surveyed the skulls, he read their sordid particulars in a voice usually reserved for memorials to the honored
dead. I thrilled at each fatal entry like a boy stirred by a martial air.

          
Name, age: Unknown

          
Gender: Female

          
Place of Origin: Unknown

          
Cause of Death: Suicide

          
Description: Metopic suture, nasal crest, low cranial vault

          
Name, age: Thorvald Becker, 51

          
Gender: Male

          
Place of Origin: Saxony

          
Cause of Death: Cut his throat because of extreme poverty

          
Description: Catholic. Frontal grooves, multiple supraorbital foramina

          
Name, age: Adrao Rabi, 40

          
Gender: Male

          
Place of Origin: Galicia

          
Cause of Death: Died of trauma in the Charity Hospital

          
Description: Railway worker. Continuous brow ridge

          
Name, age: Mirjam Dekker, 46

          
Gender: Female

          
Place of Origin: Holland

          
Cause of Death: Phlebitis, complicated fracture of the femur

          
Description: Prominent brow ridge, rhomboid orbits

          
Name, age: Czeslaw Vogel, 26

          
Gender: Male

          
Place of Origin: Warsaw

          
Cause of Death: Hanged

          
Description: Murderer. Dental pathology (possible abscesses)

          
Name, age: Menno Kira, 24

          
Gender: Male

          
Place of Origin: Friesland

          
Cause of Death: Gunshot wounds

          
Description: Sailor

          
Name, age: Nada Sokić, 17

          
Gender: Female

          
Place of Origin: Croatia

          
Cause of Death: Smallpox

          
Description: Mill hand. Tooth edges straight and continuous

          
Name, age: Biktop Shamo, unknown

          
          
Gender: Male

          
Place of Origin: Krasnoe, Ukraine

          
Cause of Death: Self-inflicted removal of testicles

          
Description: Member of Russian sect believing in castration. Dual left supraorbital foramina

From time to time, he would address a question over his shoulder to where I stood leaning over his. I had to clarify the anatomical descriptions and show him the places on the skulls to which they referred. He was amazed by
the violent deaths that many of their former “owners” had suffered.

“More likely than not such men and women as these used to be were left with no one to mourn them,” he said thoughtfully. “If any did grieve, I imagine they would have done so alone, like an animal crawling off into the bushes to give birth or to die.”

I nodded and, despite my affectation of nonchalance, I felt the corners of my mouth turn down. I was nineteen, remember, and, though my family's means were meager, we were happy, and I had yet to have my optimism blighted. It would take a winter with Poe, the hell he opened up to me, and, much later, a war to make me sullen and afraid. I smiled and assumed a cheerful countenance, determined to ingratiate myself. Why I should have cared, I don't know, unless it was his eyes—what I saw in them: a depth of knowledge or, rather, of experience far beyond me and the confines of my life, no matter how I might have been surrounded by monstrosities, sickness, and death.

“Those with none to claim them end up in the almshouse cemetery or, if they're lucky, here, in Dr. Mütter's ‘cabinet of horrors'—begging your pardon, Mr. Poe.”

I winked drolly and would have done a comic gig suitable for the music hall to gain his favor. I must have appeared ridiculous, but I was determined that he should see me as a plucky lad uncowed by my gruesome occupation or his celebrity.

“Why should they be lucky?”

I wondered if he would reprove me for my nerve but went on just the same. “It's more pleasant for their mortal remains
to spend the next life, such as it may be, in the warmth and light. I hate to think of myself put into the ground, with no other company than beetles and worms.”

Poe was amused, so I continued to jolly him.

“Anyone would be glad to have his leftovers cleaned and dusted regularly by a smart young man like me. And isn't it a privilege for them to advance the cause of science when, more than likely, these skulls did nothing in life but think where their next drink was coming from?”

“You are a scoundrel, Mr. Fenzil.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said, bowing. “I value your good opinion.”

Composing himself, he returned to his cranial examination. I, in turn, examined him further. The curls of his hair fell romantically over a frayed high collar. His shoulders were narrow, but I'd been mistaken in my first impression: Poe was not delicate, although many of his lady admirers thought him so. In his slender, erect frame, there was vigor, a strength of sinew consonant with tenacity and grit. He'd been a soldier, and, impoverished, he lived much of his mature life among ruffians and hard men. He knew how to get on with all sorts. During the winter of ‘44, we visited low haunts and did things good Christians would have seen us jailed for, if not hanged. But I had the feeling that he did what he did for the sake of his art and not for any relish of vice. He wasn't vicious. He might have been weak—his troubles made him so—but he was not the moral degenerate some people say, no more than Dr. Mütter was for doting on nature's freaks.

“Even now, after boiling and bleaching, this skull
has secrets it won't tell,” said Poe while he held Mirjam Dekker's mortal portion in his hands and peered into the empty eye sockets.

“It has nothing anymore to tell them with,” I said flippantly.

“The truth will out, regardless.” He put the bone down on the table. “In its shape, it is as ancient as the mountains and, like them, keeps the time of the firmament and of the first atom.”

Poe had a conscience; he wrote about its crises—and something more: the dread that slowly erodes the better part of us with the inevitability of water dripping on a rock. Who of us can stand between the pit and the pendulum and not give way? I believe that this was the human tragedy that fascinated him—not evil, but the faulty center, the rot in the roof beam, the crack in the keystone, an almost inevitable flaw at the heart of every human character, made to beat in a “story” that is not of its making and not entirely within its control. This is the awful truth that Edgar Poe realized, what he labored under, what he wrote about, and what the poor man died of. Not alcohol, brain congestion, opiates, consumption, cholera, rabies, or suicide did him in, but his embattled senses and embittered virtue, together with a lack of means and prospects. He was Micawber without optimism. I knew Edgar Allan Poe for only a short time; I was a principal character in one of his horrors.

I no longer blame him. I was too impressionable, too ready to fall under his spell, his dark enchantment, too young, too inexperienced to resist. I tell you, Moran, I lost myself that winter! Now, each morning, I look at my face
in the shaving mirror to assure myself that I am still here. I and my unsavory—you are kind to take no notice of it.

Peering in a mirror is the nearest most children come to magic, or madness; for them, the looking glass alters, if only slightly, the world submerged in its depths. The boy in my mother's cheval glass, staring at me with quizzical, even frightened, eyes was not me. I had momentarily lost myself in it! Each time, I would come away feeling diminished and afraid. And yet, I would return to stand and look—helpless to do otherwise—as I do now at Eakins's picture.

When does the last ferry to Philadelphia leave?

Six o'clock tonight. Will that give you enough time to meet your General Custer?

Fine! I'm glad you don't find me tedious. Not yet anyway. You wouldn't be the first to sit and squirm! But I like to reflect, as I go, because for me a tale's use and interest lie exactly in the notions that come to mind as the narrative unspools. Try some of my tobacco, won't you? Virginia spiced with perique. I bought it in New York the last time I visited Bellevue Hospital. I was there to see the marvelous job Dr. Smith's doing for the insane.

“This Vogel who was hanged . . .” said Poe, stabbing at the catalogue entry with a finger, like a man stubbing out a cigarette. “I'd like to have been a thought inside his skull the moment the hangman dropped him. Time must have been in suspension during the body's dying fall to the end of the rope and the snap of the neck. I've a feeling he had space enough to think with an intensity, a clarity, a rationality he'd never known before. Edward, I could write a book about that appalling moment, which was, for him, eternity,
if I'd seen and thought what this young man did on his way toward extinction.”

A merry notion, Moran! But that was Edgar Poe's way.

“It would be obscene!” I said, honesty momentarily subduing a false humility.

Poe shrugged. “The mind cannot help its thoughts.”

It can keep its mouth shut, I said to myself. His fantasy had horrified me.

Poe picked up Vogel's skull and weighed it in his hands as if it were gold. I was struck by his admiration for the thing. He appeared suddenly to have been possessed by—well, I didn't know what he found compelling, unless it was Czeslaw Vogel's ghost, which had been shut up inside his skull like a genie in a lamp. I'd handled it many times, and never once had it incited in me anything other than a vague sympathy. To be honest, it was more my curiosity that would move me. Vogel meant nothing to me. Edgar's curiosity was plain to see as he looked at what had been the face of a young man from Poland, who had come to grief in the Kensington ward of Philadelphia and had met his end on the penitentiary gibbet.

“His teeth were bad,” said Poe, running his finger over the dead man's molars. “‘Possible abscesses,' you've written here.”

“That's right,” I said, leaning over his shoulder to read the annotation penned in my own fine cursive hand.

“A toothache can drive a person to distraction until there's nothing in the world except the pain of it.”

I grunted in assent, remembering how I'd suffered from a carious incisor that not even oil of clove could calm. I felt
the gap left by its extraction with the tip of my tongue and shuddered at the memory.

“An abscess is worse. Perhaps it was an agony too great to be borne,” Poe said as much to himself as to me. “For Vogel. Pain is not absolute: Each of us tolerates it as he can.” Poe tapped at a diseased tooth. “There is no telling what a mouth such as this could have done to his mind.” He was silent a moment. “What do you think, Edward? Could a man's mouth turn him into a murderer? I can imagine killing even a wife if she was foolish enough to nag and vex a man while he was in the throes of a toothache.”

I had no answer for him.

“I put it to you, Edward: Is the good man's goodness fixed and impossible to pervert—an unswerving moral compass? Or can it be turned aside by pain?”

He expected an answer, and I gave him one: “I suppose if the pain is great and the moral nature weak . . .”

“You're being evasive, my friend. But let it go, for now.” He fell to studying Vogel's skull again. “The body is not the only seat of pain. The mind, too, Edward—the mind can know pain more terrible than the body's. Or have you never in your young life suffered doubt, envy, jealousy, bereavement, fear, desire, shame? I have. They have teeth, those emotions, and they gnaw and rend.”

I was beginning to regret that Dr. Mütter had charged me with satisfying Poe's interest, which I found increasingly alarming. By now, I'd read “Ligeia” and “William Wilson,” besides “The Tell-Tale Heart.” I understood and even enjoyed Poe's frightening inventions. But to see one taking shape before my eyes was quite another thing. I knew that a
literary creation might scare the daylights out of me but that it could not harm me. I sensed, however, that what Poe, by his uncanny gifts, had been empowered to invoke was dangerous. All at once, I wanted to escape his influence and thought that if he were once more to catch my eye, I would be lost—an idea as far-fetched as his own crotchets. I let my eyes rest a moment on his alpaca coat, whose shoulder seam was in need of a needle and thread. Foolishly, I prayed that he would not turn around. I would be safe for as long as I did not see his face, nor he mine.