The Port-Wine Stain (3 page)

I was one of Dr. Mütter's assistants when I first laid eyes on Edgar Poe, although I didn't know his name then. Mütter was too intent on showing off his specimens to think of introducing me. And so, having finished my catalogue notation on the skull of a bargeman with a large, high cranial vault, who'd died of cerebral apoplexy, I left them to themselves. I'd only glanced at Poe, but I was struck by a hectic light in his eyes. Moreover, I had the impression that his face, which later I thought handsome, was at that moment warped as if by a gigantic strain. I'd seen such faces and such eyes before, in patients strapped to the table when Mütter lifted one of his shining instruments from the crimson plush, like a priest offering the chalice to the Almighty.

Later that afternoon, while I was pickling a liver recently taken from a carpenter dead of cirrhosis, Mütter entered with a pleased expression. He had changed his waistcoat and stock—dandyism was his only folly. For all his fastidiousness, he was not an egotist. He was cultured and urbane and, like Poe, absorbed in problems of aesthetics—in his case, those of the human body. He understood that a disfigured face can cause suffering every bit as keenly felt by the patient as a disease of the organs or corruption of the blood. He brought home to America the innovations in reparative and reconstructive surgery he'd learned in Paris.

“Do you know who that gentleman was, Edward?” Dr. Mütter asked, rubbing his hands in satisfaction.

“No, sir, I can't say that I do.”

I was used to the sight of odd gentlemen ogling the exhibits.

“Edgar Poe.” I must have given him a blank look, for he went on impatiently. “Haven't you ever read one of his tales? ‘William Wilson' . . . ‘The Gold-Bug' . . . ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue.' He is our most celebrated author of the macabre; there's nothing to match him for the horrific effect rendered in the most accomplished style. His fame had already jumped the Atlantic when I was studying in Paris. You must get hold of his work, Edward. If I think of it tonight, I'll bring you my copy of Lowell's magazine,
The Pioneer
. It contains Poe's excellent story, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart.'”

“Thank you, Dr. Mütter, I'd like that.”

“You'll have a chance to see him for yourself. He's fascinated by our collection. It was the reason for his visit today. He said he would like very much to return, and I agreed he should. You'll give him every assistance when he does visit us again, Edward.”

“I'll be happy to do what I can, Dr. Mütter.”

T
HE FOLLOWING WEEK
, Poe did return, and I escorted him amid the cabinets, answering his many questions. He, too, was someone whose stomach could not be easily turned. His dark eyes were bright, but without the flashing intensity I had seen in them on his first visit. His black sack coat and hat were shabby, if carefully brushed. He appeared to be a gentleman who had suffered a reversal of fortune. A man of less than average height, he nonetheless carried himself
with the dignity of the sergeant major and, later, the West Point cadet he had been in his youth. He was only thirty-five when I knew him, but his youth was already far behind him. He looked used up. He'd been living with Virginia and Mrs. Clemm, his aunt and mother-in-law, in poverty that can only be described as abject, and, in five years' time, he would die of it. The
Baltimore Clipper
would report his demise, in that city, as the result of “congestion of the brain.” But it was poverty that killed him, Moran, and not insanity, opium, or drink, as his critics proclaimed and the world has been happy to believe. Ordinary people relish a scandal and delight in the fall of those greater than themselves.

Poe could be, at times, a drunkard and an abuser of ether and laudanum. I doubt any man in his circumstances and with his nervous temperament—he was an uncommonly nervous man—could have behaved otherwise. During the months I knew him, I took ether and laudanum and soused myself with rum and gin. Happily for me, my temperament does not favor addiction; I seldom drink now and use laudanum only for toothache. In truth, I sometimes stood at the brink with Poe, although I was sensible of the danger and drew back in time.

Did he find the view beautiful? Did he find life as it is lived by the majority of us deadening?

Yes.

Edgar saw a strange beauty in suffering. His imagination thrilled to the burlesque of existence. He seldom smiled when I knew him. I've seen the daguerreotype called “Annie,” taken in his final year. His face shows the gigantic strain I mentioned, as though it were about to come
asunder. He's cockeyed in the picture—the right orb oddly swiveled. His thin lips come together in a grimace. One sees such faces in the asylum. But I tell you, Moran, he was
not
mad—not when he set pen to paper. A madman could not have written as he did. Nor could a dope fiend or a chronic alcoholic. His faculties were concentrated, his mind clear, his hand steady.

Once, I saw it for myself, Moran: how he wrote—with what extraordinary application. He believed me to be asleep in a chair in the corner of his room. Bent over the foolscap, his hand seemed a thing apart, so still he was except for it. The fingertips of its fellow rested on his forehead—that lofty brow signifying ratiocination, imagination, determination, all of which a mind at the acme of possibility is capable. He was someone rare and untrammeled by convention. Like a man with a rope and pulley, he could raise himself
above
himself. He had the gift to stand outside of the little empire given us at birth and see it clearly. Anyone else would have gone insane, but I tell you, Poe did not! It was I who did. For a time, I was at my wit's end, in thrall to Edgar's magnetic personality.

That was thirty years ago and more; Poe's been dead for over a quarter of a century. I'm a careful observer of the body's minutest motions, its fevers, crises, maladies, disturbances, but however clearly I seem to see my past, I can't be certain that what I remember of it is the truth. Memory is as liable to blight as the soul, both of which survive the departed—the one, in fame or infamy, the other in eternity, if there's such a thing. As a surgeon and an unconvinced Christian, I tend to doubt it.

To be honest, Moran, I don't believe in the immortal soul or in God's heaven, except as a solace against the terror at midnight. Next to annihilation, Poe's horrors are only whimsies. No, I've poked about in too many innards. If the soul were there to be seen, I ought to have seen it—at least some evidence of its having been, as the scorch mark evinces the quenched flame. Even after my three months with Poe, I find it hard to accept the immaterial realm—or, perhaps, my skepticism is the result of the time I spent with him. What cannot be seen smacks too much of his fancies, which I detest. The supernatural, the supersensual, is what I also find objectionable in Eakins's picture: the intimation of a world beyond the senses, at the end of the tunnel and in the painted murk of the spectators. If I would open the palm of my hand with a knife, I'd see the actuality of what lies hidden from view.

At nineteen, I might have believed myself to be Poe's disciple and apprentice, but I doubt I was ever truly suited to the role. Even now, I accept the bituminous quality of the world—unmalleable, black, flammable—but I don't cultivate despair or find it seductive. No, I prefer the light of day to darkness, the music of Mozart to Bach, a comical story of Mark Twain to a somber one by Hawthorne, Melville, or by Edgar Poe. This is, however, to be my story of the winter months I spent with him. And I swear to you, Moran, I will tell it, if not straight out—I can't help meandering—then truly—if the truth can be known and told with so insufficient a means as words. I ought to have been a dauber. I'd like to spend the rest of my days painting luminous landscapes like Bierstadt's
Among the Sierra Nevada
and Thomas Cole's
The Oxbow
. I'd leave hellish scenes to the gloomy apostles of Hieronymus Bosch or the German Dürer.

O
N HIS THIRD VISIT
to “Mütter's museum,” as the students called it, Poe asked to see the catalogue of skulls. He was dressed exactly as he'd been on his previous visits and as he would be when he watched Nathaniel Dickey's transfiguration and shouted his “Eureka!”—which, later, he'd retract. Despite the threadbare condition of his clothes, Edgar was always immaculately groomed. That day, I had the opportunity to study him. His sunken eyes might have persuaded me that the irises were black, had I not seen clearly that they were gray and flecked with tiny amber lights. The chestnut hair curled to the point of unruliness, but, except for a scraggly mustache, his face was cleanly shaved. His chin was classically molded, the face a pale oval, the brow imposing, lofty, intelligent. The physiognomists have made much of Poe's high forehead.

Do you believe that our qualities—our souls, if you like the word—can be read, like Braille, in the bumps on top of our heads? Aren't you convinced that the countenance betrays character, its quirks, inclinations, passions, humors, and that the shape of the cranial skull determines our mental faculties?

No? Then you're an enlightened man; the sciences of physiognomy and phrenology, refined in the last century by Franz-Josef Gall, are only now being questioned. In 1844, we believed in the Austrian anatomist's mapping of the brain according to its functions, and in Lavater's
insistence that outer appearance reveals inner character. Poe took it as a matter of course. He'd read
Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe
and Sir Thomas Browne's treatises. Poe's tale—the one I stole from him and in whose composition I was intimately involved—had everything to do with those doubtful sciences. He spoke of them at the college, after I had taken the catalogue from the shelf and laid open its pages to his devouring eye. He was sitting at a large table, whose polished oak shone in the sun of a mild January afternoon. His nicely shaped hands fluttered eagerly and then settled on the folio pages crowded with script and illustrations done in India ink.

“Mr. Poe,” I said, having taken a backward step or two in respect for his privacy.

“Thank you, young man,” he said kindly. “Did you make these entries?”

“I did, sir.”

“You have a fine hand, almost feminine in its graces.”

His manner was genial, even courtly. I was surprised to be the object of a gentleman's goodwill. He
was
a gentleman, Moran; he would've been one had he been dressed in rags.

“Before I ever went to school, my mother had taught me to make my letters.”

“One can read something of a man in his penmanship. Something secret and otherwise hidden. Jacob Böhme believed in the doctrine of signatures, meaning God marked the things of this world with signs indicating their purpose. Do you think he was right—what is your name?”

“Edward Fenzil.”

“A good German name.”

“My father came here from Bavaria.”

“I never knew mine, or my mother, either. So, Edward, do you believe that the human face bears the warrants of its personality?”

“Yes, Mr. Poe, I do.”

“Charles Dickens's characters—you are acquainted with Mr. Dickens's stories?”

“I read
Oliver Twist
.”

“Fagin, Bill Sikes, Nancy, Mr. Brownlow—their faces are an index to their souls.”

“What do you see when you look at mine?” I asked him.

I knew it was an audacious question; Poe might have bridled at my familiarity on such slight acquaintance. But he had shown me unusual courtesy; moreover, I saw in
his
face, which was a puzzling mixture of the beautiful and strange, not the slightest reluctance or ill will. If anything, he appeared perfectly willing to accept me—boy that I was—as a person worthy of his consideration. Whether he was at heart comprehensive in his affections, like Walt Whitman, or exclusive, I don't know. But that winter the two of us hobnobbed with men and women the world finds objectionable, even depraved, and he never carped or raised an eyebrow in disdain.

He gazed at my face awhile. He went so far as to follow its features with his fingertips and then feel with them the contours hidden beneath my hair. As he looked at me, I studied his eyes, lively and lambent with curiosity. The gray irises appeared to darken, assuming an almost violet tint difficult to describe. Their effect on me was magnetic:
He held my eyes with his own, which did now seem black as pitch. I grew uncomfortable under his gaze but could not look away—did not wish to. I felt—I was too absorbed by his will to say that I “thought”—I was drowning—no, not drowning, buried. Entombed. It was nonsense. I had imagined it all. His eyes were not on mine; they were roving the landscape of my face. Poe was no mesmerist. He was, I saw after I had broken my fixed stare, a prepossessing man, slender, compact, amiable. A man of unusual gifts, who would soon befriend me.

“I am a poet,” he said, apropos of nothing.

“I've read two of your stories.”

“Not my poems?” When I shook my head, he seemed disappointed. “Well, Edward, your face is a good one, and I see in it a pleasing nature and an intelligence above the ordinary.”

“I'm glad to hear it, sir.”

His expression suddenly altered as grasslands will when a cloud moves against the sun.

“Is something the matter, Mr. Poe?”

“There was something, Edward. . . .”

“What is it?”

“On your temple, immediately above the right ear, I felt a pronounced inclination toward destructiveness. Mind you, phrenology reveals only propensity, not necessity. I imagine most men's skulls would tell a similar tale. Women's, too, for what I've known of some of them.”

To this day, I don't know if he was amusing himself with me or if those traits were really stamped upon my face and skull. In time, I'd have proof of Lavater's doctrine
to make me wish I'd never met Edgar Poe: proof that outward appearance and the heart's secret places are bound by filaments as unbreakable as the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge.