Poe shadow (58 page)

“But, leaving behind the Baron’s tales of the coop, we return to our so-called coincidences. Given that George Herring would have some knowledge and perhaps acquaintance with Poe through Henry Herring, upon seeing Poe in distress, Monsieur George would almost certainly send for Monsieur Henry Herring. Our mere coincidence, the presence of George Herring and Edgar Poe in the same tri-purpose building, gives rise very naturally to our second incident, the odd arrival of Henry Herring before Snodgrass has called for him.

“And what mean the subsequent events that led to Poe’s being sent to the hospital? Snodgrass has offered to engage a room upstairs in the hotel portion of the building. George Herring would not want Poe to stay at Ryan’s in poor condition, for as Whig president he would want to avoid
precisely
the sort of accusations of fraudulent or rough use of voters that the Baron would in fact later allege. Henry Herring was not particularly a boon companion to Poe, as the Baron is right to say—and would rather not invite Poe to his house, where Monsieur Henry still remembers with disapproval Poe’s courtship of his daughter Elizabeth years before. Snodgrass could not remember whether there were one or two relatives of Poe’s at Ryan’s—this is almost certainly because both Henry and George Herring stood before him. Poe is therefore sent to the hospital, whose attendants then send word to Neilson Poe.”

“If there was nothing insidious, if the Herrings did nothing, Monsieur Duponte, then why would Henry Herring and Neilson Poe, cousin to Henry Herring as well as Edgar Poe, be so reluctant to speak on the matter, or for the police to make inquiries?”

“You have answered your question in asking it, Monsieur Clark. Because they did nothing—that is, strikingly little—they had no wish to call attention to the matter. Think of it. George and then Henry Herring were present even before Dr. Snodgrass, and did nothing. When something was done, it was to send Poe to the hospital alone, in the prostrate position across the carriage seats. They forgot, even, to pay the driver, as you heard from Dr. Moran. They have sealed his fate, too, by assuming Poe was merely boozy, and excessively in liquor, for they no doubt passed this assumption to the doctors through the note that accompanied Poe to the hospital—so that the care given to the patient, rather than for the complex illness and perhaps multitude of illnesses that have set in from his exhaustion and exposure, would be that superficial kind given to all those who come in with too much drink. Neilson Poe came to the hospital, but could not even see the patient.

“This narrative is not one of pride for the family, particularly for an ambitious man like Monsieur Neilson, who did not want to tarnish the name Poe. This explains, too, the lack of attempt from the family to produce a larger funeral. They would not wish to draw attention to their roles in his final days, nor wish to remind anyone that Edgar Poe himself had formerly said caustic words about both Henry Herring and Neilson Poe. There is some ‘shame’ in it, which is the word Snodgrass writes in his poem on the subject. The methods by which it is often necessary to understand someone’s motives are not by what they have done, but what they have simply omitted to do and neglected to consider.”

“And yet,” continued Duponte, “the Baron is not wholly misguided in looking to the fact of Poe’s discovery falling on an election day as more than
chance.
The Baron wishes to find cause and effect; we, on the other hand, shall look for cause and cause. How, monsieur, would you describe the city of Baltimore on days elections are held?”

“A bit unpredictable,” I admitted, “wild at times. Dangerous, in certain quarters. But does this mean Poe was
kidnapped
?”

“Of course not. The mistake of men like the Baron, who apply their giddy thoughts to creating violence, is to imagine that most violence contains sense and reason, when, by its nature, this is just what it is lacking. Yet we must not dismiss the
secondary
effects that may come from outside disruptions. Think of Monsieur Poe. Exposed to the deplorable weather, having failed to secure the ready money from Philadelphia, his constitution weakened and confused by his single glass of spirits, Poe would have been vulnerable to the greatest detriments to our health: first, fear, and second, dread.

“Now, those local newspapers that you went out to collect shortly after our arrival from Paris, will you put them on this table?”

The first cutting that Duponte selected was from the Baltimore
Sun,
October 4, the day after the election.
Very little excitement,
it read, reporting the events of the election.
We heard of no disturbance of the polls or elsewhere.

Another cutting from the same day read as follows:

Yesterday afternoon a fellow with about as much liquor in him as he could conveniently carry, stationed himself at the foot of Lexington market, and for an hour assailed and assaulted every man that passed by, all of whom, very fortunately for the poor inebriate, appeared to be exceedingly good-natured, or they would have “tripped him up.” He struck several of them in the face, but they forbore to resent it on account of his having “seen the elephant.” He afterwards went in a tavern, and thence proceeded to the office of Justice Root, which was closed (it being dinner hour) seeking perhaps for justice.

And finally this, reported of the same afternoon:

Assault. About dusk on Wednesday evening, as a carriage containing four persons amongst whom was Mr. Martin Rudolph, engineer of the steamer
Columbia,
was proceeding past the corner of Lombard and Light Street, some atrocious miscreant threw a large stone, which struck Mr. R on the head, fortunately occasioning nothing more than a severe bruise.

“The first article,” Duponte said, “insists there was
no disturbance
anywhere in the city. Yet here, separately, we find some samples of what we can only label disturbances. You see, in a newspaper, especially the finest ones, one hand hardly notices the other or, rather, one column hardly notices the other, and so only by reading the entire newspaper—never just a single article—can we claim to have done any reading at all. They likely were told of the lack of disturbances by some policeman. Police in Europe want all criminals to know they are there; police in America want people to believe there are no criminals.

“Let us examine these two separate disturbances. First, we have a loud and rude fellow, alleged to have struck
in the face
several men passing by, and yet left without molestation by his fellow citizens. While the editor from the leisurely position of his desk would prefer to believe that the lack of outrage from the surrounding public was caused by the fact that the inebriate was ‘good-natured,’ I would ask how many good-natured fellows have been classified to be so after they punched men in their faces. Rather, we can safely surmise that the nature of the disturbance, remarkably, was common enough that day as to not sufficiently arrest the attention either of the authorities or the common people. That is, there were so many like this one that he could not claim much public response. This may give us more idea of the goings-on during election day in the rest of the city than the editors imagine.

“Taking now the third extract, describing a scene not far in distance, I believe, from the location of the polling station where Poe was discovered on Lombard and High; read again this cutting, which describes an engineer and his fellow carriage passengers being struck by a large stone thrown by some miscreant. We may imagine Poe, too, having to dodge a tempest of wild stones on those streets or, perhaps, now ill from the drink, the terrible exposure of many hours to the weather, and complete lack of sleep, Poe may have himself been disoriented enough to be throwing stones at perceived or real villains, thugs, and rascals that filled the streets that day. It hardly makes a difference if we think of Poe as target or as targeting, or involved in this incident not at all. What we know is that Poe would likely possess a manic fear at this point in reaction to whatever wild and disorderly actions he might witness along the streets that day. The polling station, rather than being a dark dungeon of cruelty—as your Baron finds it necessary to envision it—may well have been seen by Poe as a sanctuary, a place where there would likely be the semblance of some order. Poe went in for help that, alas, was too late to be found. In this way, we have thoroughly followed Poe from his disembarking to his futile rescue by Snodgrass.”

“But Poe’s words from the hospital,” I said. “His shouts of ‘Reynolds’—could this not be an indication of some responsibility or knowledge on the part of Henry Reynolds, that carpenter who served as ward judge for the election in the location where Poe was found?”

Duponte’s face broke out in genuine amusement.

“Do you not believe it?” I asked.

“I haven’t a reason to disbelieve it as a factual possibility, if that is your meaning, Monsieur Clark. Others will think they can guess what is unusual in Poe’s mind—an impossibility to do for anyone, much less for a genius. To do that, read his tales, read his poems; you shall get all that is extraordinary and singular—that is, not repeated in mental currents outside of Poe. But to understand the steps in his death, you must accept what is ordinary in him, in anyone, and in all around him that crash into his genius—these will be answers.

“That Poe called this word, ‘Reynolds,’ for many hours the night of his death in the hospital is exactly what we should
not
pay attention to—if our purpose is to understand how he died. Poe was not in his clear mind, arising from the joining of disparate circumstances that we have already enumerated. That the Baron, that other observers might fixate on it demonstrates the common lack of understanding about how and why people think and act as they do. Even without profound consideration of the matter, we may remember that Poe is in a state of feeling completely alone. In truth, he could have been calling for anybody. It might have been the last name he had heard, perhaps belonging to that same carpenter who visited us in your parlor, or it might have been the name of a man whose part in a deadly affair of several years past renders it far too dangerous for either of us to speak about.
^*2
Most likely, though, it has something to do with a matter far distant from his death that we must never know about, for that is what Poe would be thinking about, just as a man trapped in a pit would be thinking of escape, not of the pit. Not about the death that is all too close upon him, but about life left behind.

“You understand now. All this, all that he did in the days since stepping off the boat from Richmond, was an escape from Baltimore—from his lack of home. This city had
once
been his home, the land of his father and grandfather, the birthplace of his wife and adored mother-in-law, whom he called Muddy, Mother, yet he had no home there any longer—

“I reach’d my home
—
my home no more
—

Here Duponte seemed ready, quite unconscious of me, to recite more of Poe’s verses, but stopped himself. “No, he had no home here. Not this Baltimore, where he did not trust his remaining relatives of the name Poe even to inform them of his presence, and indeed they were afterward ashamed enough of their response to his demise to say so little about it as to appear suspicious. Nor was home New York, where his wife, Virginia, was dead and buried and he was preparing to flee forever; not the city of Richmond either, where the marriage with a childhood love was still only a plan, however attractive, and his memories of losing that place as a home once before and losing his mother and adoptive parents were still strong. Not Philadelphia, where he once resided and wrote, where he was obliged to use another name or risk losing the last loving letter of the one relation still devoted to him, where somehow he found now that he could not even reach it on a train.

“You see clearly now the map of Poe’s attempted movements in his last epoch of life—from Richmond to try to go to New York, from Baltimore trying to go to Philadelphia—it is no small fact that these four cities were all ones where he had once lived and was rolling incessantly between. If there were twenty men named Reynolds standing around in his hospital room, Poe’s Reynolds, man or idea, would still be far away from there—not of sickness, not of death—somewhere he would
long to be.
That name, monsieur, reveals to us nothing of the circumstances of Poe’s death, and will ever remain the possession only of Poe himself. In that way, it is the most crucial and most secret of all the particulars.”