Matthew Pearl - The Dante Club

Teal’s head spun and he ran outside and vomited in the mall at the Common: Dante required protection! Teal listened in on the conversations of Mr. Fields and Longfellow and Lowell and Dr. Holmes and gathered that the Harvard College board was attacking Dante. Teal had heard around town that Harvard, too, was looking for new employees, since many of its regular workers had been killed or disabled in the war. The College handed Teal a day job. After a week of work, Teal managed to change his assignment from yard gardener to daytime caretaker in University Hall, for it was there, Teal learned by asking the other workmen, that the College boards made their all-important decisions.

At the soldiers’-aid home, Reverend Greene shifted from general discussions of Dante to more specific accounts of the pilgrim’s journey. Circles separated his steps through Hell, each leading closer to the punishment of the great Lucifer, the possessor of all evil. In the anteroom of Hell, Greene guided Teal through the land of the Neutrals, where the Great Refuser, the worst offender there, could be found. The name of the Refuser, some pope, did not mean anything to Teal, but his having turned down a great and worthy position that could have ensured justice for millions made Teal burn with anger. Teal had heard through the walls of University Hall that Chief Justice Healey had point-blank refused an assigned position of great importance—a position that asked him to defend Dante.

Teal knew that the bookish adjutant from Company C had collected thousands of insects during their marches through the swampy, sticky states, and had sent them home in specially crafted crates so they would survive the trip to Boston. Teal purchased from him a box of deadly blowflies and maggots, along with a hive full of wasps, and followed Justice Healey from the courthouse to Wide Oaks, where he watched the judge say good-bye to his family.

The next morning, Teal entered the house through the back and cracked Healey’s head open with the butt of his pistol. He removed the judge’s clothes and stacked them neatly, for man’s garments did not belong on this coward. He then carried Healey out back and released the maggots and insects onto the head wound. Teal also speared a blank flag into the sandy ground nearby, for under such a cautionary sign Dante found the Neutrals. He felt at once that he had joined Dante, that he entered the long and dangerous path of salvation among the lost people.

Teal was torn up inside when Greene missed a week at the soldiers’-aid home due to illness. But then Greene returned and preached on the Simoniacs. Teal had already been alarmed and panicked at the arrangement made between the Harvard Corporation and Reverend Talbot, which he had heard discussed on several occasions at University Hall. How could a preacher accept money to bury Dante from the public, sell the power of his office for a rotten one thousand dollars? But there was nothing to be done until he knew how it was to be punished.

Teal had once met a safecracker named Willard Burndy during his nights at back-alley public houses. Teal did not have trouble tracking Burndy down at one of these taverns, and though infuriated by Burndy’s drunkenness, Dan Teal paid the thief to tell him how to steal one thousand dollars from Reverend Elisha Talbot’s safe. Burndy talked and talked about how Langdon Peaslee was taking over all his streets anyway. What harm would it do to teach someone else how to open a simple safe?

Teal used the fugitive-slave tunnels to cross into the Second Unitarian Church, and he watched Reverend Talbot as he excitedly descended each afternoon into the underground vault. He counted Talbot’s steps— one, two, three –to see how long it took him to cross to the stairs. He estimated Talbot’s height and made a mark on the wall with chalk after the minister left. Then Teal dug a hole, precisely measured, so that Talbot’s feet could be free in the air when he was buried headfirst, and he buried Talbot’s dirty money beneath. Finally, on Sunday afternoon, he grabbed Talbot, took his lantern away, and poured the kerosene oil on his feet. After he punished Reverend Talbot, Dan Teal had a cloudy certainty that the Dante Club was proud of his work. He wondered when the weekly meetings were held at Mr. Longfellow’s house, the meetings Reverend Greene had mentioned. Sundays, no doubt, Teal thought—the Sabbath.

Teal asked around Cambridge and easily found the big yellow Colonial. But looking into the window on the side of Longfellow’s house, he did not see signs of any meeting taking place. In fact, there was a loud uproar from inside soon after Teal pressed his face against the window, for the moonlight had caught the buttons on his uniform and now glowed. Teal did not want to disturb the Dante Club if it was gathered, did not want to interrupt the guardians of Dante while they were on duty.

How bewildered Teal was when Greene again failed to show at his post at the soldiers’-aid home, this time without forwarding any excuse of illness! Teal asked at the public library where he might take lessons in the Italian language, for Greene’s first suggestion to the other soldier had been to read the original in Italian. The librarian found a newspaper advertisement from a Mr. Pietro Bachi, and Teal called on Bachi to begin lessons. This instructor brought Teal a small armload of grammar books and exercises, mostly ones that he had written himself—these had nothing to do with Dante.

Bachi at one point offered to sell Teal a Venetian century edition of the Divina Commedia . Teal took the volume, bound in hard leather, in his hands, but had no interest in the book, regardless of how Bachi rambled on about its beauty. Again, this was not Dante. Fortunately, soon after this, Greene reappeared at the soldiers’-aid pulpit, and there came Dante’s astounding entrance into the infernal pouch of the Schismatics.

Fate had spoken loud as cannon thunder to Dan Teal. He, too, had witnessed this unforgivable sin—splitting apart and causing schisms within groups—in the person of Phineas Jennison. Teal had heard him speaking of protecting Dante at the offices of Ticknor & Fields—urging the Dante Club to fight Harvard—but had also heard him condemning Dante at the offices of the Harvard Corporation, urging them to stop Longfellow and Lowell and Fields. And Teal led Jennison, by way of the fugitive-slave tunnels, to the Boston harbor, where he took him by the point of his saber. Jennison begged and cried and offered Teal money. Teal promised him justice and then cut him into pieces. He wrapped the wounds carefully. Teal never thought of what he was doing as killing, for punishment required a length of suffering, an imprisonment of sensation. This was what he found most assuring about Dante. None of the punishments witnessed were new. Teal had seen them all in large and small ways in his life in Boston and on the battlefields across their nation.

Teal knew that the Dante Club thrilled at the defeat of its enemies, for suddenly Reverend Greene offered a flurry of ecstatic sermons: Dante came upon a frozen lake of sinners, Traitors, among the worst sinners the jour-neyer discovers and announces. So were Augustus Manning and Pliny Mead sealed in ice as Teal watched in the morning light, clothed in his second lieutenant’s dress uniform—just as a uniformed Teal had watched Artemus Healey, the Neutral, writhe naked under his blanket of insects and had watched Elisha Talbot, the Simoniac, squirm and kick his flaming feet, his damned money now a cushion under his head, and had watched Phineas Jennison quiver and shake as his body hung shredded and snipped.

But then came Lowell and Fields, and Holmes and Longfellow—and not to reward him! Lowell had fired his gun at Teal, and Mr. Fields had cried out for Lowell to shoot. Teal’s heart ached. Teal had assumed that Longfellow, whom Harriet Galvin adored, and the other protectors who gathered at the Corner embraced the purpose of Dante. Now he understood that they did not know the true work needed from the Dante Club. There was so much to complete, so many circles to open in order to make Boston good. Teal thought of the scene at the Corner when Dr. Holmes fell into him—Lowell had followed from the Authors’ Room, yelling, “You have betrayed the Dante Club, you’ve betrayed the Dante Club.”