Matthew Pearl - The Poe Shadow

By the end of the evening, I had hardly even seen Hattie again, we were so bombarded on every side. My head was clouded by drink and exhaustion together with a feeling of satisfaction that I had done what was perfectly right. Peter had to gingerly put me in a carriage and direct the driver to Glen Eliza. Even in my stupor, though, I took the slender Negro driver aside before he left me at my house.

"Can you return first thing in the morning, sir?" I asked.

I laid down an extra silver eagle to ensure our rendezvous.

The next day, the driver was there at my pathway. I almost sent him away. I was a different man than the morning before. The night had impressed me with what was real in this life. I would be a husband. It seemed, in this light, that I had obviously already gone far beyond any acceptable interest in the final hours of a man whose own cousin did not care a pin. And what of that Phantom, you ask?-why, it seemed obvious now that Peter was completely right about him. The man had been some uneasy lunatic who happened to have heard my name before in a courtroom or some public square, and merely was babbling to me. Nothing to do with Poe! With my private reading! Why had I let it (and Poe) drive away my peace to such a degree? Why had I felt so grand when thinking I could find an answer? I could hardly think about it at all now. I decided to send the carriage away. I think if the honest driver had not looked so anxious to please me, I would have done so; I would not have gone. I wonder sometimes what would now be different.

But I did go. I directed him to the address of Dr. Brooks. Here would be my last errand in that "other world." And as we drove, I thought about Poe's tales, how the hero chose, when there were no longer any good choices, to find a certain impossible boundary-as did the fisherman traveler lost in "A Descent into the Maelström," plummeting down into the whirlpool of eternity-which most would not dare cross. It is not the simplicity of a tale like Robinson Crusoe's, who chiefly must survive, which is what we would all try accomplishing; living, surviving, is only a beginning for a mind like Poe's. Even my favorite character, the great analyst Dupin, voluntarily and cavalierly seeks entrance uninvited into a realm that brings unrest. What is miraculous is not only the display of his reasoning, his ratiocination, but that he is there at all. Poe once wrote in a tale about the conflict between the substance and the shadow inside of us. The substance, what we know we should do, and the shadow, the dangerous and giggling Imp of the Perverse, the dark knowledge of what we must or will do or secretly want. The shadow always prevails.

As we passed through shady avenues among some of the most elegant estates, heading to Dr. Brooks's house, I was suddenly jostled forward out of my seat.

"Why have we stopped?" I demanded.

"Here, sir." He came around to open my door.

"Driver, that cannot be."

"Wha'? Sir…"

"No. It must be farther, driver!"

"Two-seven-zero Fayette, as you asked. Right here."

He was right. I leaned far out the window, looking upon the scene, and steadied myself.

WHAT I HADimagined: conversation with Brooks, perhaps a dish of tea. He talking of Poe's visit to Baltimore, recounting the poet's purposes and plans. Revealing Poe's interest in finding one Mr. Reynolds for some urgent purpose. Perhaps Poe even having mentioned me, the attorney who had agreed to protect the new magazine. Brooks offering all the particulars of Poe's demise that I had thought Neilson Poe could have provided. I would convey Brooks's story to the newspapers, whose reporters would grudgingly correct the languid reporting made since his death…

That was the encounter for which I had been prepared when I had first heard Brooks's name.

Instead, outside No. 270 Fayette, the only person in sight was a free black, solitary and determined, dismantling a piece of the charred, broken wooden frame of the house…

I stood before the address of Dr. Brooks and wished again that it were the wrong number. I should have brought the city directory itself to be certain I was at the right place-although I had even written the address on two slips of paper now in separate pockets of my vest. I checked one slip-

Dr. Nathan C. Brooks. 270 Fayette st.

then reached into my pocket for the other-

Dr. N. C. Brooks. 270 Fayette.

This had been the house. Of course.

The lingering stench of burnt, damp wood threw me into a fit of coughing. Broken china and charred scraps of ruined tapestries seemed to compose the floor inside. It was as though a chasm had opened up beneath and pulled out all the life that had been there.

"What happened here?" I asked when I had regained my breath.

"Pray God," the joiner, a type of carpenter skilled in woodwork, repeated to himself under his breath. Thank the Lord, he said, the Liberty engine company had prevented more destruction. "If Dr. Brooks hadn't hired himself an unskilled man first," he told me, "and without the blasted rain, the repairs would long be done, and splendidly." In the meantime, the owner of the house was living with relatives, but the joiner did not know where.

The laborer was able to tell me further that the fire had occurred about two months earlier. I rapidly compared the dates in my mind and realized with numbness what it meant. The fire would have been just around the time…the very time Edgar Poe arrived in Baltimore looking for the house of Dr. Brooks.

"What is it you wish to report?"

"I have told you, if you could call for the officer, I shall give all the particulars." I was standing in the Middle District police station house.

After several exchanges similar to this, the police clerk brought out an intelligent-looking officer from the next room. All of my urges to see something done had returned forcefully, but with an entirely different bent. As I stood in front of the police officer and narrated the events of the last weeks, I felt a wave of relief. After what I'd seen at the Brooks house, after having breathed the last traces of destruction and looked upon the sleepy, now-vacant windows and the scarred tree trunks, I knew that this had surpassed me.

The officer examined the newspaper cuttings I handed to him as I explained the questions the press had neglected or misunderstood.

"Mr. Clark, I know not what can be done. If there were reason to believe there had been some wrongful act associated with this…"

I grasped the officer's shoulder as though I had found a lost friend. "You believe so?"

He looked back faintly.

"Whether there was a wrongful act," I repeated his words. "It is precisely the sort of question for which you must find an answer, my good officer. Just that! Hear me. He was found wearing clothes that did not fit him. He was shouting out for a ‘Reynolds.' I know not who that could be. The house he went to upon his arrival burnt down, perhaps near the very same hour he arrived at it. And I believe a man, one I had never seen before, tried to frighten me from inquiring into these matters. Officer, this mystery must not remain untreated a moment longer!"

"This article," he said, returning to the newspaper cutting, "says Poe was a writer."

Progress! "My favorite author. In fact, if you are a magazine reader, I would wager you have come upon his literary work." I listed some of Poe's best-known magazine contributions: "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt," "The Purloined Letter," "‘Thou Art the Man,'" "The Gold-Bug"…I thought the subject matter of these tales of mystery, dealing in crime and murder, might hold special interest to a police officer.

"That was his name?" The clerk who had greeted me upon my entrance interrupted as I recited my list. "Poe?"