Esther Stories (4 page)
T
HEY WERE BOTH
in town impersonating Edgar Poe. You’d see one or the other charge down the street in a ragged morning coat, cape, and cravat, with a similar wavy crop of unruly hair and wide forehead, but one would be silent and smiling, the other growling like something rabid. Originally, they were part of a festival honoring Poe, but the festival, after a while, became irrelevant. In time, it felt as if they’d always been with us, those two who stomped our streets, hunched and shrouded in black. They gave respective one-man shows on alternate nights, except Sunday. Growling Poe performed on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; Smiling Poe on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Both performances were sparsely attended. In one famous instance, Growling Poe did a beseeching, raging version of his show for one deaf senior citizen who hadn’t even come there for Poe. The woman had stumbled down into the dark catacombs on a far different mission. She was looking, she told the angry, pacing, furious-haired man, for her beloved kitty. Growling Poe was already irate that nobody had shown up that night and imagined that she’d been sent by his enemies to make a clown of him. He repeated her question in a diabolical whisper:
Have I seen your kitty?
This confused the old woman, because she could read lips. “Yes, that’s what I asked. Have you seen my cat? She likes to roam down here. This isn’t the first time. Naughty pussy crawls in through a window.”
And Growling Poe said it again, except this time it wasn’t a question. “Have I seen your kitty. My dear, Muddy, I’m afraid I have. Something’s happened.”
“To Punim?”
“Yes, to Punim.” He jabbed a finger toward a folding chair. “Sit.” And as the old bird watched in terror, begging him to return Punim alive, Growling Poe launched into his second act, an abbreviated telling of “The Black Cat,” cutting right to the moment when the pet assassin reaches down and gouges out the eye of the feline who torments him with love.
Although on the surface at least, Smiling Poe was a kinder man than Growling Poe—all the merchants downtown would tell you this—Smiling Poe didn’t have much better luck luring people down to the catacombs for his shows. So why, you ask, an Edgar Allan Poe Festival in our town when our idea of theater is the high school’s annual abomination of
Li’l Abner
? It’s a good question, but if you have to ask, you don’t know Rita Larry-Pontewitz. Rita Larry-Pontewitz is famous for being a thrice-widowed eccentric with incurable boredom and more money than our town’s two savings-and-loans can handle. She likes to pretend that we care more about culture than we actually do. Thus, every few years or so she pours a little of her fortune into a project designed to bring us culture and tourist revenue. “Gonna put us on the map,” she shouts, as she cruises down our sidewalks in her golf cart, handing out flyers for the ballet, the opera, ancient Chinese table dancing. She’s never asked us if we wanted anybody to find us or not, but we tolerate her because she often donates money for things we do need, like a new monorail system connecting our downtown with our new mall and the reconstructed driving range and put-put center we named in her honor.
In the beginning, we were even excited about the festival and hauled out our forgotten copies of Poe from cardboard boxes in the basement and stayed up nights rereading “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Oblong Box,” “Hop-Frog,” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” after which we were again surprised and mildly annoyed that those killings were all an innocent monkey’s havoc. We dutifully attended the art exhibitions and the Vincent Price movies, and we happily bought tickets for the one-man shows given in the basement of our Historical Society, which the society president and chief tour guide, Hal Hodapp, renamed the catacombs. The catacombs were a dank, cramped basement filled with stacks of molding telephone books that made people sneeze so loudly and profusely during performances you sometimes couldn’t hear either Poe. But Hal Hodapp, who serves also as Rita Larry-Pontewitz’s unofficial propagandist, circulated the story that the basement of the Historical Society had been an execution chamber back when beheading was still legal in our county. (New Hampshire Puritans don’t mess around.) So the catacombs it was, no matter how much mold, and Hal, who shared Rita’s desire to put us on the map, placed signs along the I-73 corridor to attract tourists to the festival.
SEE NOT ONE BUT TWO EDGAR A. POES IN CHAMBER OF LOST HEADS.
Most people in town saw both Growling Poe’s and Smiling Poe’s show at least once. All well and good. We clapped and clapped and we clapped. That was that. Our literary interlude was over. We tromped our books back down to the basement, because they crowded our shelves. Then an odd thing. They didn’t leave. Even after the rest of the festival packed it up and moved on to Ossipee. Even after Rita herself lost all interest in Edgar Allan Poe and disparaged him and his impersonators in the streets, a mother casting stones at her babies. “All right, enough already!” she yowled from her golf cart. “Besides, the real one was a drunk and married his eight-year-old sister! Is this the kind of role model we want to encourage for today’s lusty youth?” She’d already begun to plan her next project, a tribute to our town’s glassblowing heritage. To his credit—though he began to do Rita’s bidding by inventing a glassblowing heritage, complete with an archaeological dig behind Shaw’s—Hal Hodapp stuck with the Poes and didn’t, despite Rita’s thunder, evict them from the catacombs. Hal maintained that their voices kept the rats from coming upstairs and gnawing the carpet.
Neither Poe ever spoke to the other. We assumed, without giving it much thought, that the nature of being Poe is such that there can’t be more than one of you. Why they both decided to stay is anyone’s guess, but I’d say the two Poes agreed on one thing: that art need not be seen by human eyes to be art, even when it’s drama. Still, it was funny to see two identically dressed men in period clothes pass each other on the street without a word, Growling Poe glaring, Smiling Poe raising the corners of his mouth—slightly—but enough for us to notice and remark that the more he smiled, the worse he looked.
They kept at it, week after week, month after month, depending on handfuls of tourists. Hal told us that in February there was no audience for either show for two weeks running. But every weeknight and Saturday they went on anyway, performing entire shows for rows of empty folding chairs. Hal knew because he lived upstairs at the Historical Society and admitted, when Rita Larry-Pontewitz wasn’t around, that he liked to listen to the Poes from the open door of an old laundry chute.
At this point, I should confess, though I am no one important, that I felt there was something not quite right about Smiling Poe. He had, if this is possible, too much talent for his work. For me, Growling Poe was easier. He was a simple, vengeful man and therefore consistent. His openly hostile demeanor when he walked our streets matched his stage presence. His show was mostly shouted fury. Growling Poe’s Poe anticipated that the world would turn against him—and the world delivered as promised. When I saw Growling Poe’s show, I was depressed, anxious, pessimistic, but never
afraid.
I didn’t fear death to the degree of a constant squeezing pressure against the temples. Growling Poe didn’t overcome me with dread. But isn’t dread what we ask of a Poe? I, who have never had anybody to lose and am still waiting, know that even Growling Poe’s delivery of “The Raven” was complacent. It was as if he’d always expected to lose Lenore. Growling Poe reveled in the easy and dismal; what could this misery known as life bring you other than the loss of the only one you ever loved? And so, he enjoyed his own anger too much to feel a single word of the poem he had memorized, acted so beautifully. He missed the point. Wasn’t it Emerson who said that every single word is a poem? If anyone ever has, the real Poe understood this too well, as his hand stiffened and he could no longer hold his pen to write even one more of Emerson’s sacred words in that cold house of his. And you know damn well that he couldn’t reach for his wife’s precious little hand, because she, young thing, was as cold as he was, and after that she was dying, and the dying have no warmth to give the living. Forgive me for getting carried away. Because we know all this, don’t we? We’ve heard it all before. We die alone, and the real Poe wrote this out in his own blood, and though Growling Poe had done all his homework (in his program notes he wrote that he’d read all the books in Roderick Usher’s library, including, of course, the
Directorium Inquisitorium
by the Dominican Eymeric de Gironne), he never understood how quickly our anger at being left dissolves into a loneliness no words can describe, not even words on the page. You can’t take hold of the powdered hands of the dead, and this is what Smiling Poe understood too well. Embedded in his quiet smile was always the aloneness of grasping for a hand that’s gone.
He was a short, bulbous man, much smaller than Growling Poe, with a missing front tooth. When he spoke, his voice whistled out in a soft hiss. He had the accent of a far-off place which we couldn’t, even with an atlas, identify. Somebody said he might be from Missouri, but somebody with an Aunt Leona in St. Louis insisted that if he was from anywhere, he was from south of Cape Girardeau. We never asked him directly. None of us ever spoke to either Poe, and Smiling Poe was even more unapproachable than Growling Poe, who, though he spoke harshly to our grocers, florists, and stationers, at least made pretense of conversation. For instance, Growling Poe would say things like: “You call this an avocado?” or “Is there a particular day of the week you don’t cheat people? The Lord’s Day, perhaps?” Smiling Poe, on the other hand, always spoke politely, but always at, never
to.
He was the one who scared us, and although his show was slow in spots, especially during his ten-minute attack on that vapid Professor Longfellow, the horror of emptiness, the sadness of the tomb, lurked in every word he softly uttered. During “The Cask of Amontillado” you could hear drunken Fortunato’s groans for mercy as if they were pleading from your own chest. It wasn’t pleasant, Smiling Poe’s show, but it was necessary. Yet, twice was enough dread, even for me. Who wants to be reminded more than that that we’re all Fortunato? That we’ll all, every one of us, beg the joke over as the mason walls us in?
The fact of his being still down there began to grate—and it went beyond my nerves. Other people had the same notions, but nobody dared talk about it. You didn’t need to see his show more than once to feel his presence all over town. Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, that same death drifting up out of the basement. Monday, Wednesday, Friday were an imitation—this we could tolerate. We started ignoring Smiling Poe harder. When we saw him haunting the sidewalks, we ducked into insurance agents’ offices or the dry cleaners to avoid seeing his face and that missing tooth. Growling Poe got blithery about parking tickets and bad vegetables and bird shit on the hood of his rented Toyota and, though not a stellar actor, was at least
human.
Smiling Poe walked above us with that grin that jutted from his lips like a knife blade, and after thirty weeks of it we began to sympathize with Rita Larry-Pontewitz’s campaign to ban the real Poe from the library and his impersonators from our city limits. Growling Poe if only because his clothes and big forehead reminded us too much of Smiling Poe.
And still they gave shows—ticket prices had long since been slashed in half—always to unsuspecting tourists hungering for a bargain (who cared what it was?) who’d been lured to town by Rita and Hal, who had put us on the map. We were starting to become known as the town that couldn’t get rid of its Poes. Until. Isn’t there always an “until” in stories of death? And what story is not, finally, a death?
It happened on a Tuesday night during Smiling Poe’s show. It was almost spring, and after a long winter, tourist attendance for the shows had actually been picking up. That night Hal Hodapp, who was handing out flyers in the Historical Society foyer advertising our glassblowing exhibition, had counted five people descending into the catacombs when he noticed that one of them was Growling Poe in disguise. Hal said it wasn’t a very good disguise, but different enough for him that he looked like a new man. He was dressed as an average guy about our town, his hair combed forward, wearing a faded Izod shirt, circa 1972. Hal was curious, because to his knowledge neither Poe had ever seen the other’s show, so he followed the short line downstairs. He told us later at the Blue Parrot that it was a virtuoso performance, the best he’d ever seen in person or listened to from the laundry chute. That Smiling Poe looked like he’d lost weight, that his face had begun to shrivel, raisin-like, and his one front tooth gleamed a hideous yellow in the shallow light. Two cats rubbed against his legs, and what was so terrible, Hal said, was that Smiling Poe acted kindly toward the cats, that often in the middle of the show he reached down with his skull-colored hands and rubbed them. Those cats. Hal said all he wanted was to leave and go upstairs and curl up with his electric blanket turned all the way to twelve, because Smiling Poe emanated cold, even as his hand stroked the cats. But he had stayed because he wanted to watch Growling Poe’s reactions. And at our table at the Blue Parrot, Hal said Growling Poe’s face during the show reminded him of the men he’d imagined about to be beheaded in that very room. Because his eyes never moved, never twitched.
No one will ever know if he planned it in advance or if it came to him in a sudden jolt of jealous inspiration, but during Smiling Poe’s almost entirely whispered “Raven,” Growling Poe threw his voice at the very moment of the bird’s first “Nevermore.” Growling Poe was as mediocre a ventriloquist as he was an actor, Hal said, but it was good enough, and Smiling Poe looked up at the corner to the left of the papier-mâché bust of Pallas, and he didn’t stop, didn’t say, “Nevermore,” just went on with the poem. Each time it was the bird’s turn to talk, he let the corner do it. Hal said that by the third or fourth time, all four tourists from Bangor knew it was the guy in the third row, in the pale golf shirt, but by that time Smiling Poe believed in the voice.