The Port-Wine Stain (17 page)

“Why did you send Holloway my double's skull?”

“Did it disturb you?” he asked silkily.

“It did. Why did you send it?” I hoped I sounded righteously indignant, but I probably sounded fretful, like a sulking child. “Did Edgar Poe put you up to it?”

“He did. He thought you would enjoy having—what did he say? He thought you'd enjoy having your very own Yorrick to talk to. Isn't that right, Young Werther?”

The grave digger nodded. Having never once heard him speak, I wondered if he were a mute.

“Are you familiar with the Bard's greatest work,
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark?
There's a grave digger in it. Two, in fact. Isn't that right, Young Werther? More than once, I've read the play from beginning to end for my friend here. Helps to pass the long nights in the tomb. He keeps me company—don't you keep me company, Young Werther?”

Once again, the negro nodded his head.

“We pass the long nights together, drinking, reading,
reciting from the classics. People shy from us. They say we stink of death. Maybe we do, though I can't say I smell anything out of the ordinary. Young Werther and I think that the graveyard scene in
Hamlet
is the best of all. ‘There is no ancient gentleman but gardeners, ditchers, and grave-makers: they hold up Adam's profession.' Old Will called his two grave diggers ‘clowns,' which was a rude remark. Young Werther is no clown; he has the dignity of his sorrows to elevate him above most of them he plants. He got his tongue cut out for having the gall to ask his
ol' massa
not to sell his wife.”

The speechless grave digger drank deeply from the bottle, as if in honor of himself.

“And to pay him back in kind, and a little more, Young Werther stove his
ol' massa's
head in with a shovel. And don't you know that, after a terrifying journey to freedom through malarial swamps and towns dark with ancient anger, the Good Lord put a shovel in his hands and bid him dig graves? Mysterious are the ways of the Lord—mysterious and cunning!”

Young Werther drank deeply to the perplexities of life and death.

N
EXT MORNING, ITS BEING
S
ATURDAY
, I went to Edgar's house to have it out with him. A middle-aged colored woman answered my knock on the front door. She eyed me suspiciously. I suppose I gave a fairly good impression of a man with a grievance. I told her I wanted to see Mr. Poe.

“He ain't home,” she said curtly, beginning to close the door on me.

“Who is it, Aunt Sarah?” It was Virginia's voice arriving faint and small from inside the house.

“It's Edward Fenzil, Mrs. Poe,” I called. “Edgar's friend.”

I could be a plausible and fraudulent young man.

“Come in, Mr. Fenzil. Let the gentleman in, Sarah.”

Sarah grunted and let me pass.

Virginia was lying on the sofa, a tartan blanket covering her. The fire had been made up in the grate, but the room was damp on that March morning. Gloomy and chill, the house might have been decorated by Poe himself in a style suitable to his tales. Virginia made an effort to rise in order to greet me but sank once more into lassitude. I wondered if I ought to go to her and kiss her hand. In those days, I knew nothing of propriety. Not that I'm a hand kisser now, but I know enough to attend a sickbed in a rich man's house.

“Don't get up,” I said, in lieu of anything decorous.

She smiled at me—gratefully, I thought.

“Edgar's not at home,” she said. “He's visiting Mr. Lowell.” James Russell Lowell was, at the time, editing an abolitionist newspaper in Philadelphia. “My mother is at the stores. Aunt Sarah used to do our washing, and she's kind enough to sit with me when I'd be alone otherwise.”

Virginia lay on the sofa, weak and forlorn, and I forgot my anger. Despite her illness, she was pretty, and not much older than I. Seeing her pallor and listlessness, I felt foolish. I'd seen my dead twin; I'd handled his skull. What of it? My complaint was trivial. She closed her eyes; the lids were nearly transparent. She was so young, Moran! I wondered
what their life together was like, hers and Edgar's. I could not picture intimacy. She was frail and otherworldly, while Poe was ensorcelled by his own phantasms.

“Edgar is busy with his writing,” she said apologetically, to account for his absence. “He often visits Mr. Lowell, who understands it.”

“What do you think of it?” I asked, to have something to say.

“I think what the world thinks: That it is fine, although I confess, Mr. Fenzil, that I don't read it. It's too sensational; my nerves won't stand for it.”

She was like a child. But I couldn't imagine Poe as her father any more than I could as her husband. Brother and sister, then. She was his Sis, after all, his Sissie. There was in him something that defied categorization. He was an original. Maybe that's what it means to possess genius. He and Virginia must have passed their days and nights together, chastely, in the rarefied atmosphere of a sentimental novel. If he looked at her—he must have sometimes looked at her—it was not with desire, but with curiosity. I could picture him reading poetry to her—not his own—and her, at the piano, singing and playing “The Blue Juniata,” “The May Queen,” or “Sleeping, I Dreamed of Love.” She had done so up until two years before, when she'd broken a blood vessel in her throat. That was the beginning of her long illness. The piano was gone—sold, no doubt, to pay a debt. They would never, in their short lives, be free of financial crises and panics.

“Will you have tea, Mr. Fenzil?” she asked. “Sarah will bring it if you like.”

“No, thank you. I have to go. An appointment.”

“So soon?”

She looked relieved. I suppose she wanted to shut her eyes again.

“Don't get up, Mrs. Poe. I'll let myself out.”

“I'll tell Edgar you paid us a visit. He'll be disappointed to have missed you.”

I nodded, smiled, and moved toward the door. My gaze fell on a stack of writing paper on Poe's desk. A new story—
one dedicated to me
! I looked at Virginia; her eyes were closed; and, hesitating hardly at all, I purloined the manuscript. On the desk, a tintype of my dead other, reunited with me, glared from under glass, inside a frame of yellowed ivory. The smudge of his—or its—disfigurement was just visible on the cheek.

At home that evening, I sat by the fire while my mother sewed and gabbled as inconsequentially as the pigeons in Mütter's coop. She insisted on recounting the minutia of her day: what the butcher had said to her and how she'd answered him; how she'd nearly turned an ankle on the front step, whose bricks needed pointing; the state of poor Mrs. Murphy's lumbago and Mr. Crowther's gout; the saucy color of Anne-Marie's wool stockings poking out from the skirt of her dress for all the world to see. And then there were the questions: When did I think my brother, Franklin, would come home and in what condition would he drag himself upstairs to bed? Had I been to see Ida lately, and did I care any for her? Did it snow last year this time, or was she thinking of the year before? What was I reading? If I weren't careful, I'd end up looking through
spectacles. She took hers off and rubbed the indentations on either side of her nose.

“I ruined my eyes to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table,” she grumbled.

I nodded without taking mine from the manuscript.

“What is that you've got on your lap, Edward?” she said, putting her sewing on hers.

“It's a new story by Edgar Poe.”

“I don't like you going around with that man,” she complained. “I do believe he's a worse influence than the men your brother associates with, and the Lord knows what shiftless idlers and roughnecks they are. Miss Paulson, who is so
very
refined and plays the organ at First Methodist, says Poe's stories are scandalous and unfit to be in a Christian house. For God's sake, Edward, burn it on the grate and shame the devil! On second thought, it probably contains enough foul wickedness to call up the devil in the smoke. I don't know what you see in him to admire, Edward!”

I kept quiet, knowing that her indignation would soon sputter and go out.

“Well, if you're going to sit there and read all night, I might as well go to bed before your brother comes home and upsets the furniture.”

She folded the sewing—a little white First Communion dress—and, having put it in her basket, she went upstairs.

After she'd shut the bedroom door behind her, my ears rang as silence was abruptly restored to the house. Not having grasped the pages that I'd tried to read during her nattering, I turned to the beginning of the manuscript and began again.

The Port-Wine Stain;

A Tale by Edgar A. Poe

For E.A. Fenzil

       
For I do not agree with those who have recently begun to argue that soul and body perish at the same time, and that all things are destroyed by death.

—Cicero,
Laelius de Amicitia

       
A
man is bound to his double, even should he never learn of its existence, by the umbilical of an ancient grudge.

—Sir Launcelot Canning,
The Mad Trist

I

In the City of London, at that gallery famous for its lifelike grotesques, Edward F------, a resident of Philadelphia, beheld his visage in the waxen face of a murderer
.

[Poe struck out that first sentence and began his tale anew.]

In London, at that gallery famous for its lifelike grotesques in wax, I saw my face reflected—as it might have been by a mirror into which I had casually glanced—by the face of a murderer. I had arrived in that ancient city, three days earlier, from Philadelphia, where I was, by profession, a teacher of ethics at one of its universities. My purpose in coming to London was to read
Super Ethica
, by Albertus Magnus, in the
Opera
Omnia
edition, published in Lyon in 1651, and, at the time of my visit, residing in the rare book collection of the British Library. My first transatlantic crossing was to have been a pilgrimage, in that this supreme work of moral philosophy had long been a touchstone (if I may be permitted an allusion to Magnus's alchemical studies) of the philosophical literature of friendship. I was interested, especially, in his notion of the
consensiom
, the movement within the human spirit that produces, like a sympathetic vibration, a harmony between things divine and human. It is the moral goodness that Cicero believed to be the very essence of friendship.*

[Poe added a footnote here, stating, “Magnus affirmed three types of friendship: the first is founded on usefulness (
amicitia utilis)
, the second on pleasure (
amicitia delectabilis)
, the third and finest on unqualified goodness (
amicitia honesti, amicitia quae fundatur super honestum
).” The tale continues.]

Earlier in my career, I had been struck by the similarity of Magnus's
consensiom
and Mesmer's notion of an “imponderable fluid,” which transmits influences among beings and objects in the universe. By this ethereal machinery, angels inspire men and devils incite them, the moon affects the tides and the womb and the brain the movement of the hand. And by its invisible workings, two persons are conjoined in that most perfect of harmonies: friendship. Logically, the inverse must also be the case:
Disharmony
will produce enmity transmitted by Mesmer's fluid, which is everywhere present in the universe, including the microcosm that is a man, a woman, or a beast. If we agree with Cicero, and the
faithful of every religious belief, that the soul persists after its “house” has been destroyed, we must conclude that the soul does not cease to exert, in death, an influence—for good or ill—on an animate body to which it is joined
by virtue of an extraordinary affinity
. This thesis, which, on face value, appears to be no more than the stuff of Gothic fiction, is, in actuality, an evolution of the idea of the
dop-pelgänger
, and neither more nor less strange than encountering one's double alive in the world.

And so it was that, in the year 18——, while on sabbatical in London, I fell under the evil persuasion of one William Boyle, lately of Crouch End, who, during the spring of that year, had murdered six young women living near the City of London. With nothing provable against their characters, they must be considered innocent victims of Boyle's hatred—of what, if anything, we can only surmise. The brass plaque affixed to the plinth on which his wax effigy stands—in the gruesome pose of a strangler—informs the visitor to Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors, on the upper floor of Baker Street Bazaar, of the sensational, if brief, history of the figure's original:

WILLIAM BOYLE

BORN 1799

HANGED 1832

DID MURDER, IN COLD BLOOD,

SIX YOUNG WOMEN

IN THE PARISH OF HORNSEY

If ever a man or woman can be said to have fallen instantly in love or into a fit of madness,
I
fell under that dead man's
malign influence. I did not, at first, realize the effect he, or his blasted soul, had on me. (It was very like love, strange to say, and also like madness.) I was not visited, all at once, with a compulsion to murder, in emulation of him. Rather, the hold he had on me—unbreakable like the adamantine chains of gravity—made itself felt, to begin with, in a curiosity impossible to resist. What was the nature of this curiosity? Boyle presented to the eye an utterly faithful
facsimile
of myself, with the exception of a port-wine stain on his cheek, a stigma I had been spared by a more auspicious birth. I was not the only person to notice the uncanny likeness between our two selves, apparent, notably, in the face of each. Indeed, I was not the first one to observe it.

I had been invited to Madame Tussaud's waxworks by a man with whom I had a slight acquaintance, owing to a mutual interest in the Neoplatonism of Augustine of Hippo. We had enjoyed a pleasant and instructive correspondence for several years prior to my trip to England. Indeed, it was Frederick Z---------- who had made the arrangements for my first visit abroad. On an afternoon, conspicuous in my memory for its rain and general dreariness, he offered to show me a few of the city's popular attractions and spectacles. (I confess to have been suffering, that day and the day before, from a surfeit of intellectual pleasure, amply provided by the library and the British Museum, and jumped eagerly at Frederick's suggestion as a means to allay my
ennui
.)

At quarter past two o'clock (after Welsh rarebit at the George and Vulture Inn, in St. Michael's Alley, Cornhill, a favorite of Mr. Pickwick's), I found myself viewing, without haste or method, minutely painted replicas of Voltaire,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and our own Benjamin Franklin, in addition to assorted royalty, cutthroats, and their victims, including those who had lost their heads to the guillotine. (Their death masks had served Marie Tussaud, the waxwork's artist and impresario, as models for the faces of her
macabre
figures.) I looked upon them with the interest a boy might take in a collection of butterflies: indifferent, or nearly so, to the colorful patterns on their wings but morbidly fascinated by the pin stuck through their abdomens. Still, I was glad to have escaped, for one afternoon, the library's fusty reading room and happy to have my mind lie idle and adrift. I had just come
ois-à-ois
with the notorious poisoner of Glatz, with the accordion name of Sophie Charlotte Elisabeth Ursinus, when Frederick called to me in no little excitement.

“Edward, come at once!”

Disconcerted to hear my name shouted among a crowd of persons, famous and infamous, in the grip of eternal inertia (eternal until the paraffin melts), I hurried to where my friend stood, mouth agape and finger pointing to the effigy of William Boyle, to whom the reader has already been introduced. A person of even meager sympathies will instantly apprehend the horror with which I beheld, in Boyle's face, the image of my own, except that his countenance was marred by a port-wine stain (as I have stated already in my deposition). The horror of that recognition was not absolute, however; there was an alloy of fascination, even
amour-propre
, in the gaze which I cast on that vicious and degenerate soul. (One sees, in the inadvertent application of the word “soul” to my dead and accursed double, how—even at our first meeting—I acknowledged, albeit unconsciously, the totemic power of
his waxen effigy over my immortal portion.) Like the mysterious movement of the spirit through a living body or of a Mesmeric transmission through the ether, the connection between us was imperceptible. (A distant commotion of midges above a river may sometimes be neither seen nor heard by humankind; the hungry trout rises to them, nonetheless.) At that electric moment inside the Chamber of Horrors, Boyle and I were bound as surely as the Siamese twins Chang and Eng, which are among the medical anomalies to be found in Dr. Thomas Dent Mütter's collection, at Jefferson Medical College, in Philadelphia.

“It is utterly fantastic!” exclaimed Frederick, polishing the lens of his spectacles on his sleeve. “How can one explain so singular a phenomenon?”

I could not explain it, although I knew the concept of the
doppelgänger
from Shelley's
Prometheus Unbound
and Lord Byron's unfinished work,
The Deformed Transformed
. While in London, I re-read Mary Shelley's novel
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
with especial dread, sensing in the doctor's relation to his misbegotten creature a similarity to that of Boyle's and my own. Until that instant, among the
bizarreries
of Madame Tussaud's, however, I had never encountered a
doppelgänger
, in flesh or wax, much less one who could—with good reason—claim me as its own! Had Boyle's painted likeness winked at me with a waxen lid, I could not have been more astonished!

“It
is
strange,” I answered my friend with a deliberate, if unfelt,
sangfroid
.

In truth, to say that I was alarmed would be as wide the mark as to call a hawk a lark. I was terrified! Had a thunderbolt
smote the ground nearby, I could not have been more shaken. I am not sure what compelled me to pretend otherwise to Frederick; I can only guess that I wished to keep my excitement a secret from him and any others who might discover my resemblance to a creature who was known, in North London, as the “Devil's Boil.” There was about my terror, which was real, an equal element of
frisson
. I was like a boy who climbs to the top of an ancient oak tree and surveys the neighborhood in fear and wonder—
fear
of falling from so great a height and
wonder
at his daring. I sensed, in my
rencountre
, a perilous outcome. In the tensed muscles of my legs, I felt the urge to run from William Boyle, but was rooted to the spot. (I would speak of him thereafter as if he had not been hanged at Newgate, but stalked yet the lanes and alleys of Hornsey.) It might have been my own house, afire, with a wife and children inside, that I was viewing, with horror and an irresistible fascination, instead of the wax sculpture of a hateful dead man.

Frederick must have intuited something of the sort, because he laid a hand on my sleeve and—roughly, I thought—pulled me away from Boyle. He made an unconvincing show of amusement, and then he said, with an earnest fervor whose hidden import I could not mistake, “I've had enough of monsters! Let us visit the bears at Regent's Zoo. They ought to be more amusing than
these
.” He waved his arm at what, in his mind, had assumed the status of an atrocity. “What do you say, Edward?”

“Yes, I am feeling much provoked by this chance encounter with myself.”

Clasping my hand like someone wishing to confirm a palpable reality amid phantasms of delirium, Frederick
expostulated, “You are a gentleman scholar from Philadelphia and not a murdering villain from Hornsey!”

We left Madame Tussaud's theatre of illusion and, for all my friend knew, I would spend the remainder of my stay in London in the reading room of the British Library. I am certain he would not have wished to know the truth: Each day I returned to the Chamber of Horrors and stood—enraptured and with an uneasy conscience—staring into the face of William Boyle, who, though he had not yet spoken to me, had ensnared me.

[There is, here, an interruption in the tale. The top third of the manuscript page has been ripped off, presumably by Poe himself, for what reason none will ever know, and the following clause struck out.]

. . .
with the unerring instinct of a homing pigeon whose hollow bones contain an imponderable fluid responsive to magnetic north
.

[The tale goes on from there.]

By my fourth visit to Madame Tussaud's, I had attracted the notice of a man dressed to impersonate Antoine Louis, inventor of the guillotine. (Although his name is eponymous with the instrument of execution favored by the French, it was M. Louis, and not Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, who conceived it.) The task of the impersonator, in powdered wig, cravat, and breeches, was to serve as the waxwork's
cicerone
, ushering visitors among the historical
facsimiles
, as if he himself had only recently been galvanized into life, in order to satisfy curiosity about their originals. His courtesy did not conceal his suspicion, which I could not fault, since
my attention, during each of my later visits to the “chamber,” had been paid exclusively to William Boyle. It was my habit to arrive, at about two o'clock in the afternoon, at his replica, given pride of place between two contemporaneous villains, both Bavarian: Andrew Bechel, fortune-teller and fetishist, and Anna Maria Zwanziger, who referred to arsenic poison as “her truest friend.” Sitting on an ingenious contraption, combining a walking stick and a stool (known as “a museum chair”), I would give myself up to the contemplation of Boyle.