The Pale Blue Eye: A Novel (52 page)
Well, once started, there was no stopping me. I worked day and night, like Gouverneur Kemble's foundry, and I no longer minded so much that people stayed away. Visitors would only have been a bother.
Oh, I still ventured out on occasion--to Benny's, more often than not, though in the daytime so as not to encounter cadets. Nothing, though, could keep me from running into Patsy, who greeted me with the same cool courtesy she had always shown me in public. Which was, all things considered, the best I could have hoped for.
It was from Benny's regulars that I got word of Poe, who had become a particular favorite of theirs. Sometime after the Christmas holiday, they told me, Poe had mounted his final campaign against West Point. A very quiet sort of campaign it was, consisting of... not showing up. Not showing up for French or mathematics. Not showing up for church parade or class parade. Not showing up for roll call or guard mounting. Missing everything he could miss, ignoring every order he was given... a perfect paragon of nonobedience.
Within two weeks, Poe had what he wanted: a court-martial. He offered next to no defense and was, that very day, dismissed from the service of the United States.
He told Benny he was going straight to Paris to petition the Marquis de Lafayette for an appointment in the Polish army. Hard to see how he'd get there--he had no more than twenty-four cents to his name when he left the Point, and he'd given Benny his last blanket and most of his clothing to pay his bar bills. When last seen, he was cadging a ride from a teamster bound for Yonkers.
He made it out, though. And he managed to leave behind a legacy, in the form of a small local legend.
None of Benny's regulars saw it happen, so I can't vouch for it, but the story goes that on one of his final days at the Academy, Poe was ordered to turn out for drill armed and in crossbelts. Well, that's just how he turned out: armed and in crossbelts... and nothing else. Stood there on the Plain naked as a frog. Benny says he was just wanting to show off his South Point. Me, I think he was probably making an argument against shoddy language. If it really happened, that is, which I doubt. Poe never could abide the cold.
I didn't hear from him again, not in person. At the end of February, though, I got, addressed in his hand, a clipped item from the New-York American. Which read as follows:
Melancholy Occurrence.--On the evening of Thursday last, Mr. Julius Stoddard was found hanged in his chambers on Anthony Street. No letter was discovered on his person, and no one was seen to enter or leave the premises. It is reported, however, that Mr. Stoddard was overheard by Mrs. Rachel Gurley, a neighbor, in animated conversation with another gentleman, of unknown identity. The connexions of the unfortunate Mr. Stoddard are considered highly respectable, and certain relics discovered about his person appear to indicate that he was lately a Cadet of the United States Military Academy.
I've read it countless times since, and with each reading, I find new questions swarming round me. Was Poe the gentleman caller? The one who was having such an animated conversation with Stoddard in those final moments? Was it Poe who fastened that rope around his neck and hauled him to the rafters and slipped out again when no one was looking? Could my Poe begin to do such a thing--even in the service of old alliances?
I'll never know.
Not long after, I got another package addressed in his hand. Again, no letter, no note. A little volume, that was all, in yellow-gray cloth: Poems by Edgar A. Poe.
It was dedicated to the U.S. Corps of Cadets, which I assumed to be a joke until Blind Jasper told me that Poe had somehow wangled half the corps into being his subscribers. That would come to some 131 cadets, each shelling out upward of a dollar and a quarter for the privilege of seeing Poe's verses into print.
Well, it's true what they say: no cadet ever missed a chance to spend his pay. I'll bet they were disappointed, though. Not a single squib about Lieutenant Locke in the whole damned book. Jack de Windt said he saw a bunch of cadets hurling their copies from Gee's Point. No doubt those volumes will be found centuries from now, layered in silt and sailor's bones at the bottom of the Hudson, still awaiting a Reader.
One thing else I noticed: the epigraph. From somebody named Roche Foucault. Tout le monde a raison. I had to dig around for Mattie's old French dictionary, but once I'd found it, the translating was quick work.
Everybody is right.
Which is either the most wonderful or the most terrible thing I've ever heard, I can't decide. The more I chew on it, the more it gets away from me. But I can't help thinking of it as a private message from him. Whatever the hell it means.
** *
Sometime in March, I received my first visitor in a long while: a fellow named Tommy Corrigan. He was one of a gang of two hundred Irishers who, on a certain night back in '18, invaded the Tammany wigwam. They were plenty tired of being kept off the ticket, and they kept shouting "Down with the Natives!" and "Emmitt for Congress!" and, yes, breaking furniture and tearing down the fixtures and making a grand mess. Tommy, sad to say, was accidentally knifed by one of his own and died before the night was out. I remember, though, how he shivered one of the windows with a chair and then popped the glass away, fragment by fragment, with his pinkie finger. A dainty gesture. Strange I should recall it after all these years, but on that current of memory he came riding in. Stayed at least three weeks, too. Kept badgering me for shandy.
Right after that, it was Naphthali Judah, an old sachem who'd helped himself to tens of thousands of dollars from the Medical Science Lottery and once gave me a cast-off lamb'swool coat. Wanted it back now, he said. Said his wife needed it, her lining was wearing out.
A day later, it was Alderman Hunt, dead these seven years, and the day after that, my late mother, who marched in as if she owned the place and started cleaning exactly where Patsy had left off. Next day, my old Newfoundland retriever. Next day, my very own wife, too busy arranging tulips to pay me much mind.
I should have been more troubled, I suppose, entertaining such a crowd, but you see, I had come to a new way of thinking about time. It's not the hard and fixed thing we imagine it to be, no, it's something soft and pleated, and under extreme pressure, it folds... so that people generations apart are knocked together, forced to stand the same ground and breathe the same air, and it no longer makes sense to speak of "living" or "dead," because no one ever does one thing or the other, not completely. Lea studies at the foot of Henri le Clerc, Poe writes verses with Mattie Landor, and I--I chew the fat with Alderman Hunt and Naphthali Judah and Claudius Foot, who still wants me to know it was the damned Baltimore mail he robbed, not the Rochester mail.
They don't take up much space, these guests of mine, and mostly they leave me to my work. In truth, I find it heartening to see them still carrying on the business they had in life. No heavenly choirs for them. No flames of hell, either; there's too much to do. I wonder if they'll still be here when I'm gone. Maybe I'll even get to join them, in which case we might carry on together for all time.
And maybe Mattie will be there, too. It's possible. It makes it easier, at any rate, to think about the end. Which is now.
Epilogue
April 19th, 1831
The work is done. Everything's been written that can be, and now there's only judgment.
I set down my pen. I leave the manuscript in the back of my desk drawer, behind a row of inkwells. It won't be found by the first comer. No, it will require a more curious eye to look for it. But it will be found.
I wave to my wife, sifting ashes by the hearth. I bid good day to Alderman Hunt and Claudius Foot. I give my Newfoundland a scratch behind the ears.
It's lovely outside. The first warm weather of the year: winter light yellowing with pollen; tulip trees steaming with pink; a gang of robins in the meadow. I think it's always best to leave when the world is at its glory. You can be sure your mind is clear.
I follow the same path that Mattie and I once took. I stand on that same bluff, staring down into the river. Even from this great height, you can see how the Hudson carries itself. The winter crust has been shrugged off, and the water comes charging from the north, froth on its gums.
I'll have to go like this, I think: looking straight down, eyes open the whole way. Because I don't have your faith, Mattie. I can't fly into his arms when I don't know he'll be waiting... when I don't know anyone will be waiting. Isn't that what I always used to declare? We close up like shops, and nobody comes calling. Nobody even remembers the street.
So here I stand. Tell me now, daughter. In your own voice. Tell me. Tell me you'll be waiting, too. Tell me it will be all right. Tell me.
Acknowledgments
My duty to history requires me to point out that no cadets were ever murdered, or even seriously injured, under Sylvanus Thayer's tenure. Thayer, Hitchcock, Kemble, and other real-life personages do find their way into these pages, but they are conscripted in a purely fictional enterprise, as is Edgar Allan Poe himself, who, to the best of my knowledge, killed only on paper.
Of the many sources I consulted, the most helpful was James Agnew's Eggnog Riot, which may be the only other novel set at West Point in the 19th century. (Salut to Colonel Agnew's spirit.) I am very grateful for the help of Abby Yochelson at the Library of Congress, USMA historian Steve Grove, and Army historian Walter Bradford. Any historical errors are to be laid at my door, not theirs.
Special thanks go to: Marjorie Braman, a remarkable editor who understood my story better than I did; my publicist, Michael McKenzie, the hardest-working man in show business; and my agent, Christopher Schelling, who makes me spit up with laughter on at least a weekly basis. My brother, Dr. Paul Bayard, provided pro bono consultations on medical details. My mother, Ethel Bayard, offered her editorial eye; my father, retired Lieutenant Colonel Louis Bayard (USMA '49), gave his blessing. Don did the rest.
About the Author
Louis Bayard is the author of Mr. Timothy, a New York Times Notable Book, which the Washington Post called "clever... sly and wonderful." A writer and book reviewer, whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and on Nerve.com and Salon.com, among others, Bayard lives in Washington, D.C.
Also by Louis Bayard
Mr. Timothy
Fool's Errand
Endangered Species
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