The Port-Wine Stain (8 page)

My eyes about to wander to the window, I fixed them purposefully on Mütter's own.

“Mesmer wrote of the effect of celestial gravitation on physiology. While a student in Paris, I attended Deleuze's lectures and was persuaded of the existence of a magnetic fluid—Mesmer's ‘imponderable fluid' distributed uniformly throughout the universe, which makes actions at a distance possible. If there's a soul, Edward, perhaps it resides in that magnetism, and evil—to speak in the idiom preferred by our friend Edgar Poe—in contagious effluvia.”

He grew pensive and played absentmindedly with a jawbone, which he kept on his desk. The mandible, with its row of uneven teeth, had been dug up in a field by the
college porter's dog. Nothing more of what had once been a woman in her twenties had been recovered, although the police had turned over the lot with rakes and shovels. If her skull had been found intact, she might have called to her scattered remains. In my mind's eye, I watched them tunnel through the earth and make her whole again. Such were the morbid thoughts of a young man—a fickle moon orbiting the poles of the worldly Thomas Mütter and otherworldly Edgar Poe.

“What does not bear thinking about, however, is that human beings are no better than marionettes. There must be a countervailing individual will—a mind able to resist.”

Dr. Mütter hoped to find a faculty of navigation in his pigeons independent of animal magnetism or the body's “factors,” units of inheritance proposed a decade earlier by Gregor Mendel. He wished to show men and women that they were more than automatons doing the bidding of stronger wills than theirs, or of a legacy willed them by the past, or of the stars. He wanted to prove that the birds
chose
to fly home. I've always thought that this same ambition was the true meaning of his plastic operations: to free us from the urgencies of plan or accident or, at least, to oblige us to grapple with them, however unequal we may be to the struggle and uncertain of the outcome.

How naïve! Poe, the pessimist and fatalist, would entertain the idea and quickly dismiss it, saying, “Each human being believes that he occupies the center of the
universe
, but it is only the center of a
spider's web
. He's blessed if he lives and dies in ignorance of his ensnarement.”

I was too tired and, frankly, too bored to hear more
of Mütter's disquisition. He handed me several pages of handwritten instructions for the birds' care, feeding, breeding, and training and then bid me good night. I gave him mine and left him to his thoughts.

Outside, the lamps had been lit; their lights fell uncertainly on streets and sidewalks, any suggestion of warmth in their yellowish glimmer dampened by newly fallen snow. The college building hulked, black against a bleached sky, its windows dark except for those of Dr. Mütter's laboratory. Tomorrow, he would operate on Nathaniel Dickey's face.

I tightened the muffler around my neck and walked to the streetcar that would take me to a Bridesburg rooming house “for Christian ladies,” near the Frankford Creek ferry dock, where Ida lodged in dreary austerity. I hurried like a man pursued, the hunter a nameless anxiousness harrying me through the ether.

Ida and I had been childhood sweethearts, living, at the time, a street apart in Northern Liberties. Her father and mine had been friends and workers, both of them, in the cotton mill. She'd been a pretty, lively girl; was pretty yet, but the liveliness had gone. Maybe it was the inevitable result of having grown into a woman—she seemed much older than I, though she was just twenty—or perhaps the religion of the Calvinists had sobered her. There was no gaiety in her, and she talked of God as though He were a resident of Mrs. DeVries's boardinghouse on Ann Street, a man—venerable and avuncular—who shared in their fish or mutton at the ladies' dinner table. It was, I knew, a mistake to visit her. There would be little comfort and even less joy as we sat together in the parlor, with its confused
scent of pine needles, moth flakes, lavender sachet, and asafetida bags.

No, Moran, it wasn't desire that drew me to her that chilly night—the chaste particles of our two bodies attracted by a subtle spirit, to borrow from Sir Isaac Newton, who understood animal magnetism, if not love. I was afraid to be alone; to have gone home and sat with my mother or to have gone to Noonan's taproom to drink with Franklin would not have made me feel any less lonely or afraid.

What was I afraid of?

I had heard too much talk from Poe and Mütter about things better left unsaid. Life is complicated and dangerous without making it more so by intimations of mysterious, unseen forces that might not bode well. I'm a doctor. I talk to other doctors. I read medical journals. I've peered through a microscope and seen van Leeuwenhoek's bacteria and Karl Weigert's malevolent stains. How lovely, even beautiful, are those organisms that cause us to sicken and die! I shudder at the thought of them! I wish I'd never seen them. It's heresy or backwardness to regret knowledge. We eradicate sickness; we lengthen the span of life by making visible what once was invisible. But it doesn't help me fall asleep at night to imagine the teeming world of illness and death. To count bacilli like sheep going over a stile. At heart, I'm a simple doctor, who feels happy and useful setting broken bones, listening to a man's or a woman's chest, and examining the sputum. As ghastly as it sounds, there was something clean and satisfying about taking off a man's shattered arm or leg in a field hospital. The moment was clear, unambiguous, calm. I sawed the blasted bone and cauterized the
wound and knew that I'd done a workmanlike job of saving the fellow's life. But that's enough of this, Moran.

I went to visit Ida, and we sat in the boardinghouse parlor, speaking of this and that—childhood reminiscences, her day in the knitting mill, my afternoon jaunt to the river, the cold, the snow, the Methodists' split over slavery. I said nothing about the morning's hanging. It was one of the things I wanted to forget. The clock on the wall marked the tedium of my visit. I wanted to take her hand. That would have been enough. But my will had no power over my arm's muscles. Or maybe it was that my muscles would not answer the call of my will. For whatever reason, I left my hand where it was, on the arm of the chair, covered with a tatted antimacassar. The rag rug on the floor between us might as well have been the ocean or an Arctic chasm. I smiled at her, and she answered it with one of her own—sincere, well-meant, and virginal. I looked at the clock, the oil lamp, the miserly fire in the grate, the picture of John Calvin on the wall. I could think of nothing else to say, and so I wished her good night and, having put on my coat and hat, walked all the way to my mother's house—pondering the homing faculty of pigeons as I passed through the pneuma of an icy rain.

A
S SOON AS
M
ÜTTER HAD FINISHED
operating on Nathaniel Dickey, I left the theater and, without a word to Poe, hurried to the pigeon coop. I dreaded his enthusiasm, the fervent interest he would show in “Mütter's miracle.” He'd insist on teasing from the tangle of his recent sensations a
thread of sense to dwell on—glory in—and to deduce from it a narrative. Whether it was the somberness of the short winter days or the unwelcome impressions lately made on my immature mind, I felt a kind of bruise on the soft tissues of my sensibility that wanted nursing in solitude, or, at most, in the company of Mütter's pigeons, which possessed their own acute sensitivity but did not confide in me their inner peace or turmoil.

Later on, after I had succumbed to Poe's influence, we would spend long evenings by some tavern fire arguing the result of Mütter's surgery. Poe and I believed that—having been born an outcast and sentenced to a profound estrangement from his kind, a tormented being whose disfigured face relegated him to a shadow life—Nathaniel Dickey must have also been
inwardly
deformed, his mind turned from thoughts of ordinary life, his disposition soured, and his soul—let the word stand—in jeopardy. Our surmise was no more than physiognomy, which we accepted without question. In my opinion, however, Dr. Mütter had done more than to operate on a face: He'd rescued the man who had worn it like a mask covering his true self.

Poe, of the contrary opinion, could not allow himself to find a happy outcome in tragedy. To his mind, redemption was impossible in this life or the next. Humankind was damned at the outset—if not by original sin, as he didn't think in orthodox Christian terms—then by congenital perversity, wickedness at the heart of the race, a self-regard at the center of each one of us that makes us blind to others' selves and deaf to their pleas.

I argued against his cynicism, but his unsentimental
attitudes were too strong, his defense of them too vigorous and articulate for me to counter. I was hardly yet a man and could only stumble after him as he rushed impetuously forward through a thicket of ideas and a wildness of talk. I would soon give up. In all my dealings with Poe, I suspect that he saw the world from the viewpoint of his art, which was a universe in miniature, obedient to its own logic and to its own physical laws. The gravitational attraction between his fiction's characters and the places where they led their lives was stronger than that of actuality. His tales bristle with their own charge.

“Edgar Poe was looking for you,” said Mütter, startling me by his abrupt appearance at the door to the coop. “I had the feeling he wanted to talk to you about the operation. His eyes were fairly glittering with excitement, or else wickedness.”

I dug the scuttle into an opened burlap bag and filled the trough with dried feed corn.

“He's not a man you can ignore or hide from,” said Mütter, buttoning his coat against the cold. “He'll find you whether you choose to meet with him or not.”

I knew what he meant: Poe's thought would seek me out and, by the affinity of our two minds, which was already apparent, entangle me. It was a fantastic notion, of course, and hardly in keeping with the sensible work I did at the college of medicine. But it was true nonetheless.

“I'm troubled in his presence,” I grumbled.

Mütter laughed. “It is always so in cases of adoration.”

“I don't adore him!” I nearly shouted, incensed.

“What, then?” Mütter's eyes sought mine. Had I been a
pan of water, I'd have come to a boil with the intensity of his gaze.

I spoke without hesitation, aware for the first time of the quality of my attraction to the strange, magnetic personality named Edgar Allan Poe. “I fear him.”

Mütter shrugged. “Fear and adoration are part and parcel of the same thing.” I must have given him a quizzical look, because he continued in explanation. “The helpless feeling we have for great men or women.” I would have scoffed, but he left me no time to object. “Edgar Poe is a great man who has in him the tragic seeds of his downfall. I've said it before, Edward: He will not last.”

I shuddered—an involuntary movement I would often make when I thought of Poe.

“How are the birds?” asked Mütter, whose genius contained an element of caprice.

“They seem all right.”

“Have they settled in?”

Seems so.

I looked at the fresh boards caulked with tar, the chicken wire, where wisps of down clung, the planked floor carpeted with manure, and the nesting boxes waiting for offspring. In May of the following year, I'd take the pigeons on the first of their trips away from home and, that fall, consign the wicker hampers to the Burlington and Bristol Railway freight agent to load onto a wagon car. The birds would be released at ever-more distant towns, whence they'd fly back to their roost. However Mütter would cover their eyes with falconry hoods or their nostrils with paraffin to disable perception, they still found their way to the coop again. Only
a few were ever lost to storms or exhaustion, to hawks or hunters mistaking them for passenger pigeons, which are delicious roasted.

No . . . it wasn't
those
birds; they ended badly. Other pigeons would take their place, multiply, and row home through the ether. All during 1845, Mütter tried to discover how they navigated, unerringly, back to the college roof, as if by nostalgia for their mates, their young, the smell of pine boards and creosote, the stink of their own dung, the pattern of grit and dried corn scattered on the floor, for the familiar images mirrored by their tiny brains, for their phantom selves milling peevishly inside the coop while their real selves circled the sky, waiting to feel their way home.
Home
, Moran. I doubt you feel about home even so much as a pigeon does—not for the Brooklyn tenement where you scrabbled for light and air and affection till you were old enough to escape. Nostalgia is a sickness whose cause is time and whose remedy is death; your unhappy childhood is proof against it.

Mütter studied the brains of numerous pigeons after I had wrung their necks—the most humane method of dispatching them—but he could find nothing to account for their navigational ability. To call it “instinctual” would have been as unsatisfactory as “ethereal.” I suppose that he'd hoped to discover an organ of free will. Poe—incurable fantasist!—called him “the Martin Luther of medicine,” in that he wanted to remove God from His heaven and put Him in one of the heart's small rooms. Mütter published his disappointing conclusions in
The Zoist: A Journal of Cerebral Physiology and Mesmerism
.

“It must be as Newton thought,” he wrote. “Affinity acts at a distance on unseen particles inherent in objects by a transmission of influence analogous to rings spreading across the surface of a pond. Homing pigeons must ‘sense,' in the imponderable fluid within the hollows of their bones, the magnetic attraction of home
and be irresistibly drawn to it
.”

Edgar had reached the same conclusion without needing to slaughter birds. He relished the fantastic obverse of the doctor's conjecture: The pigeon coop's magnetic particles answered to the birds' own. Had it not been ponderous and anchored to the roof, it might have moved, albeit slowly, like an inchworm through a field, toward them. I know Poe to have been at work on a revenger's tale in which a corpse, left in a shallow grave, did, after many years, make its way finally to the murderer of its flesh and blood self and strangle him with its bony fingers.