The Port-Wine Stain (12 page)

I broke my silence. “You've no idea of the terror your ‘little ceremony' caused me.”

“Ahem.”
He made a noise as if to clear his throat or to introduce a theme that might upset me.

“You betrayed me!” I shouted, determined to nurse my grievance.

“I had no idea, Edward, that you would carry on so.” He sounded as though he meant to belittle me. At that moment, I could have leaped at his throat. He saw the rage
in my eyes and repented. “If I'd known of your aversion . . . I see that I overstepped the mark, Edward. You have my sincerest apologies. I see now that I presumed. Forgive me.”

Earlier in the day, I'd told Dr. Mütter of what Poe and his ghouls had put me through. I'd trembled as I spoke; my hands had shaken as if with ague. My fear intrigued him. He took my pulse and temperature; he questioned me closely on my “symptoms”: How had I behaved inside the coffin? Had my heart raced? Had I perspired? Had I felt hot or cold? Had my ears rung? Had I heard the sound of my blood sluicing in the chambers of my heart? He took down my answers. I was . . . annoyed. To be treated like a specimen angered me. But I dared not show it. He was my mentor; I was his protégé. My future depended on his goodwill and charitable disposition. I was ambitious, and I lacked the wherewithal to advance myself. I told him what he wanted to know. I may have even invented or embellished. In all honesty, my recollections of the night before were muddled. I could recount sensations; the experience itself was hardly recountable. Similes, figures of speech came more vividly to mind. But Mütter was no poet. Edgar Poe would write the tale, the thieving magpie.

“He's good for you, Edward, however much he appears to be the opposite,” the doctor had said, fixing me with his gaze. “Anyone who has something to teach, to show you about life and death, is important to a doctor. I've seen you poring over our skulls. Admit they fascinate you, Edward.” I nodded. “How then could a man like Edgar Poe fail to intrigue you, as well?”

I had agreed even though, at the time, I'd resented Poe and Mütter both.

Now, inside the coop, the pigeons were gossiping while they milled about the gritty floor, sometimes stopping to peck at our shoes. To think they possessed an intelligence was absurd.

“Forgive me,” Poe repeated earnestly.

I nodded coldly. I was not above acting like a child; I was hardly more than one.

“I want you to have this,” he said, fishing a gold watch and chain from his pocket. He took a step toward me. I stood my ground. He closed the distance between us, the timepiece in his hand. “It belonged to my father, David Poe—
not
John Allan, who fostered me but would not adopt me. My real father was David Poe, Jr., the actor. It's said that he abandoned my mother and me. It's a lie. He died—too young: He was only twenty-seven.”

I accepted the gift. It felt substantial in my hand. In spite of myself, I was pleased to have it.

“Good,” said Poe, having effected our truce. “When you tell the time, you will think of me, and, in time, I hope you'll forgive me.”

This is the very watch and chain, Moran. Inside the lid, you can still make out the inscription:

To David From His “Eliza” September 1807

“Thank you, Edgar. I'll treasure it.”

I didn't mean it, but I've kept it with me all these years. Why, I'm not exactly sure. Not for love of Edgar Poe. I
respected him; I admired him; I pitied him—perhaps that most of all. But I didn't love him and may not have even liked him. Dr. Mütter was right, however; Poe would fascinate me my entire life, and I do think it was important to have known him.

“It's the only thing I have of my father's,” said Poe.

Looking back on it, I realize the full meaning of the gift: The watch and its heavy gold chain, in effect, bound him to his past, his paternity. To have given them to me was like cutting himself off from his original self. He was so very much a man adrift, cast off, and pushed to the margins of life, so that all that remained to him was an empty sheet of paper to fill up with words.

The pigeons scratched at the grit on the floor, making the sound of a pen on paper.

“I might have pawned it,” said Poe about his gift to me, but I thought I owed you something for last night. Consider it a pledge of our friendship.” He looked at the watch resting grandly on my palm with regret, as though he'd have liked to take it back.

“Thank you,” I repeated while I scratched an itch on my cheek.

One night, while we were walking past a line of ships docked at the naval yard, Poe returned to my initiation into the afterlife—a rough sketch of what's to come.

“It's the fault of an unquenchable curiosity, which has been a burden and a curse since I was a boy. Without it, I couldn't write; because of it, I
must
write.” He shrugged, unwilling to say which of the two punishments he preferred. Maybe he didn't know. He shrugged again and went
on. “I couldn't help myself, Edward, although I was sufficiently distressed to hide in an ether-induced sleep.” He paused and then admitted, “I find it hard to sleep in the ordinary way.”

What a marvelous thing is sleep! Much more useful than Macbeth supposed when he praised its power to “knit up the ravell'd sleeve of care.” It's a darkness in which to forget, to hide, and, for a time, to let the world go its way without you.

“I sleep like a log,” I said to hurt him.

He looked at me with yearning, as though I were Morpheus, god of sleep, instead of the custodian of a charnel house. That's what I was, Moran. A caretaker of the dead. I hadn't the sense to know that I was no more exalted than the rat catcher or the negro grave digger, for all my fancy clothes.

“Tell me, Edward: What was it like to wake up in a coffin? I have to know, but the dread of confined spaces has prevented me from attempting the experiment. My fellow Eschatologists, I'm afraid, are too unimaginative to come back from death's threshold with anything like a story to tell. You can imagine what such dark knowledge would mean to a writer of horror tales.”

“Didn't you dream it?” I asked mordantly. “Or were you too fuddled by ether to receive my mesmeric transmission from inside the coffin?” Never mind my screams, I thought, but did not say.

I could see the contest being waged within him: whether to grab the manure shovel hanging on the wall of the coop and cudgel my brains out or else to offer me some other bribe.

In the end, I told him what he wanted to know. Why should I have denied him access to my deepest emotions, my most private experience, to the secrets that I should have been allowed to take with me to the grave? Was he not the illustrious Edgar Allan Poe? Should his writer's curiosity have been left unsatisfied? Who was I to frustrate the desire of an eminent man of letters—or of medicine? I was a nobody, a protégé—not even that. I was Mr. Bones. I told Poe what he wanted to hear, just as I had told Dr. Mütter.

“The master of this ship is an acquaintance of mine,” said Poe.

We'd halted on the naval yard dock before a two-masted brig, the USS
Grampus
. Poe hailed the second officer, who was on deck, lounging against a rail. The man recognized him and bid us come on board. We climbed the gangway and were escorted below to the captain's cabin.

“Whenever he's in port, he sends me word, and we drink a glass or two of rum in his cabin,” said Poe as we descended the companionway. “He's been everywhere and knows a great many stories.”

“Good evening, Edgar!” cried the captain, whose name was Simon Phillips. “I'm happy to see you. I hope you and Virginia are well.”

“Well enough, Simon. I'd like you to be acquainted with my young friend here, Mr. Edward Fenzil, of this city.”

The captain bowed with military courtesy, which made me ashamed not to be in uniform. America was at peace, momentarily. We would go to war with Mexico in two years' time, and I would put on an army captain's uniform in ‘63. In this country, one will always have his chance to
play soldier and to die in earnest. By your one remaining eye, Moran, you yourself are nearly proof of that observation.

“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Fenzil,” said the captain affably.

“No need to stand on ceremony,” said Poe. “We're all friends here.”

“So we are, Edgar. Edward, Edgar—a glass of the good Jamaican?”

“If you please,” said Poe, rubbing his hands together briskly.

“Thank you, Simon,” I said, blushing to my very roots to hear myself speak casually to the master of a United States ship of the line.

The captain was untroubled by my familiarity, but Poe smiled at me—sardonically, I thought.

We sipped the rum in silence. I felt its pleasant fire invade me, belly and limbs. I favor rye whiskey and like a glass of gin for the smell of juniper. But in my experience as a drinking man, there's nothing quite so gently warming as rum taken hot or as it comes from the bottle.

“I was telling Edward that you are a master storyteller,” said Poe, leaching a trace of liquor from his mustache with his tongue.

The captain gave a self-deprecating laugh. “High praise indeed from one of the greatest of our living authors!”

Poe made a
tch, tch
sound meant to deflect the captain's compliment. I thought his show of modesty was less than sincere. I noted his always pale face had not colored in modesty.

“You may not know this, young man, but, last year, when I discovered that Edgar Allan Poe lived in Philadelphia, I sought him out when the
Grampus
was in dry-dock for repairs. He wrote my favorite sea story,
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
. Strange, isn't it, that the brig in that tale should have been named the
Grampus
, too?”

We drank to the strangeness of it.

“Tell us a story, Simon. It's a cold night worthy of a weird tale and a warming glass of rum.”

Captain Phillips eased back in his chair and stretched his long legs toward the brazier. He searched his memory awhile, staring out the aft window toward the black river, where a steamer sowed bright sparks into the starless, moonless night. I admired the captain's gold-fringed epaulets and, on the desk, his naval hat, whose form suggested to me the very ship he commanded. The cabin smelled of Oriental tobacco, tar, cordage, lignite, and wet wool. The captain's cabin was a manly space, where great outcomes were bravely decided with aplomb.

I wondered what it would be like if I were to enlist in the navy. Then the ship creaked and lurched, and I recalled my fear of confinement and of climbing trees and ladders. However much I could picture myself strolling the quarterdeck, wearing a boat-shaped hat, I could not—for all the tea in China, as is said—imagine scampering barefoot up the ratlines or lying down, exhausted in every muscle and bone, in a berth no roomier than a coffin. There was more of the coward about me than the hero. In those days, I was often afraid. I knew my place: to submit to better men, to envy them the footlights and to lurk in the shadows of their
eminence. Since then, I've distinguished myself in the field and have performed surgeries that required the steadiest of hands and nerves, but I'm still afraid.

You may wonder why I choose to make so unmanly an admission to you, a stranger. I'm usually reserved and circumspect. I've told only a few others this long and rambling story of my winter with Poe and never before have I betrayed my fears and weaknesses. But I like your face, Moran, and I sense in you someone who has not been altogether brave, in spite of your ferocious eye patch! I never got the chance to spoon out an eye during the war.

Aboard the
Grampus
, Phillips charged his briar pipe with tobacco imported, he said, from Anatolia. He'd first smoked it while on duty with the Africa Squadron, and he kept a supply in his cabin for special occasions.

“I'm pleased,” said Poe, “that you count this rendezvous a special occasion. And now—Captain, if you please—a story to commemorate it.”

Phillips glanced at his friend cordially while he drew on his pipe. I heard the tobacco crackle in the bowl, and we were soon engulfed in a heady cloud of smoke. His preparations completed, the captain leaned back in his chair again, tugged at his ear, and began his story.

“This excellent tobacco reminds me of a time three years ago when we sailed with the squadron. We'd departed New York for the Portuguese archipelago and had provisioned the ship in Madeira; thence we'd made for the west coast of Africa. We were charged with stopping any British or American vessel suspected of carrying slaves. We'd been out four months when we went aboard the United States
merchant ship
Patuxent
, carrying sugarcane, according to her manifest. We found the cane and, down in the depths of the hold, a shipment of scared blacks. Her captain claimed they were ‘blackbirds.'”

Do you know the term, Moran? It was used before the war by those who hoped to circumvent the prohibition on slave running by claiming that the Africans were ‘blackberries,' meaning they were paid a wage and, therefore, were not slaves. It was a subterfuge employed by those who meant to steal, within the letter of the law, other human beings. Greedy, immoral men will always find a way to enrich themselves. I beg your pardon, Moran: High-mindedness is intolerable in anybody other than oneself.

“We boarded the
Patuxent
and took the Africans—men, women, and children—onto the
Grampus
. We fed and clothed them and, later, put them ashore at Cape Colony to fend for themselves. We could do no more. They'd come—God only knows the anguish of their capture—from up and down the coast and, many of them, from the interior. We could not entirely undo the injustice—feeble word—done them. We did, however, put the
Patuxent
's master in chains.

“Sailing northerly toward Lisbon to resupply, the ship entered a fog bank like no other in my experience at sea. It seemed to have no end and was illumined by a peculiar glow such as that which torches make on mica at the bottom of a mine shaft or mashed fireflies leave on the palms of thoughtless children. After a time that might have been hours or days, so muddled were we all by—to call it ‘fog,' gentlemen, is to give no true impression of its murk and obscurity.”