The Port-Wine Stain (7 page)

          
B
ONES
: Yessuh?

          
I
NTERLOCUTOR
: Let's sing Tambo one of our humorous songs.

          
B
ONES:
Tha's a good idea, Mr. Interlocutor!

          
B
ONES
and M
R
. I
NTERLOCUTOR
(singing together):

               
Love, sweet love, is the poet's theme—

               
Love, sweet love, is the poet's dream;

               
But all of this of which they sing

               
Is only a nightmare, a dreadful dream.

          
(Tambo weeps all the more.)

          
B
ONES
: He didn't like that song much, Mr. Interlocutor, suh.

          
I
NTERLOCUTOR
: Then I'll sing him another one.

          
(Singing, while Bones accompanies him with the bone “clackers.”)

               
Now the tambo and the bones are forever laid away,

               
The fiddle and the banjo are unstrung;

               
But I often heave a sigh for the happy days gone by,

               
And the times I used to have when I was young.

          
(Tambo weeps some more.)

The wind had emptied its cheeks with a sigh that blew flakes of snow against my own. It had begun to snow again. Turning from the iron door opening onto the street to take a last look at the place where we had stood—a threshold between life and its dismal opposite—I saw how the sunken footsteps in the yard and on the gallows' stairs had nearly
filled with snow. In a moment, it would be as if none of us had ever walked there and trembled in fear and impatience. The door shut behind us. Life was suddenly everywhere in the street, boisterous and gay. Edgar took my arm. I shook it off and hurried down the pavement.

“Y
OU
LOOK TERRIBLE,
E
DWARD
,” said Dr. Mütter while I was hanging up my coat and hat on the clothes tree in a corner of the dissecting room.

I noticed that the aspidistra on the windowsill was dead. This is a dreadful place to spend one's days, I said to myself. I should have let my brother find me a job on the wharf. I'd rather dream of dank holds and bilges than atrocities. I could as well have been a grave digger or an undertaker's boy as the keeper of a chamber of horrors.

“I went to a hanging,” I said, unable to hold his gaze, which always put me in mind of a straight pin through an insect's thorax.

“With Edgar Poe?”

I nodded.

“I'm told he has acquaintances throughout the Philadelphia netherworld,” said Mütter. “He's a regular visitor to the city morgue and God knows what other unsavory haunts. I suppose he must do so for the sake of his art. Had he been Dana, Cooper, or Melville, his disposition would be no less grim, but, relieved of his penchant for the sordid, his literary efforts would be more wholesome. Still, you have to admire him. I do, for we have something in common.”

I didn't bother to ask him what. Honestly, Moran, I was sick to death of Edgar Poe and his “literary efforts.”

“Did you learn anything useful?” asked Mütter.

“Learn anything?” I repeated stupidly.

“At this morning's hanging. I understood you to have an interest in anatomy. I can think of no better introduction to the subject—short of dissecting a corpse—than a hanging.”

Mütter liked to make unconventional remarks. Usually, I would laugh to show him my loyalty—a different thing altogether from servility, at least in my own mind as it was constituted then. That afternoon, however, I made my face a mask suitable to the numbness of my heart. The spectacle had shaken me, Moran! I had yet to be hardened—coarsened—by war's butchery and the bloody “pit” of the operating theater. I wanted a drink and might have thrown a beaker's worth of medicinal alcohol down my gullet to anesthetize my frayed nerves. There were times when I felt myself to be the boy I was and wanted others to see me thus. Feeling my eyes begin to moisten in self-pity, I grew angry. We act by contrariety, Moran. We advance and retreat.

Mütter pretended not to notice my distress. “It's fascinating to see the human body at the limits of its structural integrity. In his own way, the hangman is an anatomical empiricist. If he makes the rope too long, the condemned man's head will be torn from his shoulders at the end of the drop; too short, and his neck won't break. Death won't be instantaneous—that is, merciful—but an agony of slow asphyxiation.”

I left him to his drollery and walked into the exhibits room. I had a mind to take Vogel from the shelf and search
his eye sockets for news of his brother Heinz, or Holtz. But I shook off the fancy. At that moment, I wanted nothing to do with Poe or Mütter or anyone else whose mind was not commonplace and whose wit would make a woman blanch. The doctor followed after me.

“You must learn to ignore it,” he said. I gave him my blankest look. “The disgust, the dismay a good soul feels in the presence of obscene horrors, which are everywhere. You've only to open your eyes, Edward, and see—around every corner, underneath every stone, just beyond the vanishing point—what cannot be endured. But we must endure it, Edward—you must if you intend to become a physician. I know that's your ambition, and it is a noble one. I can help you. But you won't last—I would not have lasted for as long as I have—without a counterbalancing emotion: humor, irreverence, blasphemy, even. Do you see what I mean?”

I did, but I kept silent.

His disappointment was evident. Squirming, I felt the specimen pin of his penetrating gaze.

“You'll learn stoicism, Edward, or you will surely fail. If you had Edgar Poe's gift, you might write your horrors down and make a few dollars. I don't foresee a long or happy life for our friend. By the way, I invited Edgar to view the restorative surgery on Nathaniel Dickey's face. He's written that he'll come. I knew he would. The organ where his curiosity is seated is degenerate. As a surgeon, I would advise him to have it out, if only I knew where to cut. He'd refuse, of course. Men like him must cling to their perversities; they are what define them. Can you imagine Poe as a clergyman? No, not even a Unitarian. Demons have eaten into
his vitals; his heart is cankered. His reason, I suspect, is perpetually in the balance. I wouldn't recommend his life or his example. You're better off here, where hearts no longer beat or minds think.”

He handed me a slip of paper. “I've an errand for you. Take the dogcart to the Union Street pier. I ordered some birds that will keep you busy: three conjugal pairs of domesticated rock pigeons from Belgium.”

I stuffed a bill of sale into my pocket and put on my coat and hat again. I would rather have confessed to murder than to show Mütter my curiosity, which, at that moment, I regarded as something sordid and repugnant—a voyeurism broader than a man's natural interest in sex—an unnatural, shameful fascination for what is properly left to obscurity. I was a Christian, Moran. I suppose I still am in whatever organ belief, however adulterated, resides. I don't think we can ever be rid of doctrines instilled in us in childhood. Our characters are tells: history's deposits laid down one on top of another by time. Outwardly, we are modern men and women, but you have only to dig to discover the primitive state from which we came. While I mock hell, in my marrow, I quake in fear of it.

The cobbled streets jarred me as I drove the cart, on iron wheels, eastward toward the river. I let the horse have its way, being in no hurry to get back to the college. Flaming in the western-facing windows of the city's buildings, the sun felt almost mild on my face. The wind having lessened, the afternoon was warm for January. The snowy lots on either side of the road were ugly with ashes and soot, the curbstones stained yellow by horses' stale.

I gave myself up to passing fancies of a kind alien to Poe's and Mütter's grotesque imaginations: fresh snow in the shape of an elephant's head clinging to the brick wall of the
American Sentinel
building on Sansom Street; my father's dark, mysterious member exposed when he climbed out of the galvanized tub in the shed, soapy rivulets streaming from his hairy body; my mother's face when she leaned toward the candlelight to turn the page of her book; the tattooed anchor livid on my brother's arm; Ida's pretty neck, white and slender as a swan's where it rose demurely above the collar of her Sunday dress. I realized with a start that I wanted very much to see her. Did I care for her, or was she only an antidote for my poisoned heart? I would always be unsure of myself in love, that most complicated of emotions.

I tied the horse to a hitching post outside the warehouse and stood awhile on the wharf to watch the river traffic. The Delaware was already darkening as the sun declined toward evening. I imagined that the Atlantic, on the far side of New Jersey, was already drained of light, its wide beach gray as ash. I watched stevedores walk carefully down a ship's wet gangway, their backs bent under burlap sacks of coffee beans. I sensed weakness in my body's small bones and felt inferior to those brawny men and afraid that I'd prove unequal to the toils of life. I wished that, like my brother, Franklin, I'd inherited my father's sturdy frame and regretted that I'd treated Dr. Mütter coldly earlier in the afternoon. At all costs, I must hold on to my position at the medical college, for I might not find another so comfortable. The horse nickered and pawed at the snow, which had grown on the post tops, the railings, and on the docked
ships' sheets and rigging like a delicate white moss. Out in the channel, a clipper, riding high in the water, sped upriver toward the mills; three sailors hauled on a line to warp a packet boat against the current; and steaming out from the Camden dock, a ferry commenced its crossing.

Inside the shipping company's warehouse, which smelled pleasantly of oakum, tar, hemp, Indian spices, and coffee, a clerk, his fingers and cuffs inky, was writing in a ledger, all the while cursing the clotted nib. I slid the bill of sale across the counter, and, after leisurely finishing an entry, he deigned to raise his eyes to mine.

“First time I ever saw pigeons come by boat from overseas.” He spoke with the sarcasm of a man whom chance, fate, nepotism, or the civil service had made emperor of the tiniest of realms, who never missed an opportunity to lord it over anyone who happened there. I felt like cudgeling him with the marlin spike he used as a paperweight but tempered my resentment with the thought of those muscled stevedores who might come rushing to his aid. I nearly blushed to think how I must have looked to them in my dandy's rig and congress boots. “Ain't Philadelphia pigeons good enough, you had to send to Belgium for some?”

“They're for the chief surgeon of Jefferson Medical College,” I said haughtily.

Unimpressed, the clerk grunted, rang a bell on the counter, and, when a colored man appeared from a back room, directed him to carry two wicker hampers out to the dogcart. I turned on my heel without another word to the sneering fellow and left him to his smudges.

I gave the negro a penny and climbed up onto the
seat. Inside the hampers, Mütter's pigeons mumbled and beat their stiff wings nervously against the wickerwork. I snapped the reins, and the horse clopped onto Front Street, its nostrils flaring at a sudden rankness of dead fish. At the end of a pier, a rope, made taut by the outbound current, had tightened around the neck of a rusty bollard capped with snow.

At the delivery door behind the college building, two porters carried the hampers inside, the jostled pigeons complaining. After having assured myself that they had survived the jolting trip from the wharf, I went to find Dr. Mütter, determined to make myself agreeable.

“I brought you your birds,” I said affably.

“Excellent!” he replied, rubbing his hands together like an excited boy contemplating the destruction of a rat's nest. “I trust they're alive and well after their journey?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, smiling plausibly.

“I had a coop built on the roof for them. You may have noticed it.”

“No, sir, I didn't,” I said, still smiling with an exaggerated cheerfulness. My jawbones were beginning to ache, as they will when you've been playing the Jew's harp.

“The birds will live and mate there.”

“I'm curious, Dr. Mütter, what you mean to do with them.”

“I want to know how it is they can find their way home.”

“Can they, sir?”

“They're no ordinary pigeons, Edward. They've been bred to fly home from as far away as a thousand miles, even over mountains.”

So that he would know that I was duly impressed, I whistled in astonishment.

“Science affirms a medium of attraction—ether,
spiritus
, pneuma, call it what you like—that conveys, across space, the influence of one thing on another. Newton described it as ‘a subtle spirit which pervades and lies hid in all gross bodies; by the force and action of which spirit, particles of bodies attract one another.' It would explain the effect of the moon on tides and on the womb, the transmission of light, heat, and sound, the curious affinity of twins, the uncanny ability of some rare individuals to will objects to move as if by themselves, the eerie instances when a thought seems to jump wordlessly from one mind to another, the apparently collective intelligence of a flock of birds or a cloud of gnats that causes it to swerve en masse, perhaps the influence of facial features on character, and even the periodic incidence of various diseases.”