The Pale Blue Eye: A Novel (13 page)

"You knew," he said, quietly.

"Knew what, Mr. Poe?"

"The solution to the puzzle. You knew it all along."

"I had an idea, that's all."

He was silent for a long while, and I wondered then if I'd lost him for good. He might bridle at the notion of someone's getting the better of him. He might accuse me of using him for sport (and weren't you, Landor?). Might even sever the tie altogether.

In fact, he did none of those things. His climbing had taxed him more than he let on, and he stayed quite still in his rocker, never once even rocking--and when I sent remarks his way, he answered them simply, with no ill will or need to embroider. We passed an hour in this way, saying very little at first and then, as he got his strength back, talking more and more of Leroy Fry.

I've always regretted that the people most likely to tell you about a dead man are the people who knew him least--that is, the ones who knew him in the last months of his life. To unlock a man's secrets, I've always thought, you must go back to that day when he was six and wet his pantaloons in front of the schoolmistress, or to the first time his hand found its way to his nether parts... the small shames driving us on to the big ones.

At any rate, the only thing Leroy Fry's cadet friends could agree on was that he was quiet and had to be drawn out. I told Poe what Loughborough had said about Fry's falling in with his "bad bunch" and then seeking the comforts of religion, and we asked ourselves what sort of comfort he might have been seeking on the night of October the twenty-fifth. And then our talk turned to other matters... sundry topics... I couldn't tell you what they were because at around two in the afternoon, I fell asleep. Strangest thing. One minute I was talking--a bit lazy in the head, but talking. Next minute I was sitting in a dusky room--a place I'd never been before. A bat or a bird fluttered behind the curtains; a woman's petticoat grazed my arm. The air was frigid on my knuckles, and something was pricking my nostrils, and a vine was swinging from the ceiling, grazing the bald space on my head, and it had the feel of fingers.

I woke with a gulp of air... to find him still watching me. Cadet Fourth Classman Poe, at my service. A look of biding he had, as though I'd been in the middle of a joke or a story.

"Very sorry," I mumbled.

"Not at all."

"Don't know what..."

"Never fear, Mr. Landor, I myself must be contented with no more than four hours of sleep a night. The consequences have on occasion been dire. One night, I fell dead asleep during guard duty and remained for a whole hour in a somnambulistic trance, during which I evidently came within a whisker of firing on another cadet."

"Well," I said, standing. "Before I start firing on cadets myself, I should be getting on. I want to get home before nightfall."

"I'd like to see it sometime. Your home."

He spoke lightly and never once looked at me. As though to say whether or not I honored his request was a matter of huge indifference to him.

"It would give me the greatest pleasure," I said, watching him brighten.

"And now, Mr. Poe, if you would please leave by the door and then by the stairs, you would spare an old man a great deal of unnecessary worry."

He rocked himself out of the chair, then drew himself up in stages. "Not so very old," he said.

And now it was my turn to brighten: the faintest flush in my cheeks. Who could have guessed I'd be so easy to flatter?

"You're very kind, I'm sure, Mr. Poe."

"Not at all."

I expected him to leave then, but he had other ideas in mind. Once more he reached into his coat. Once more he drew out a piece of paper--a more elegant specimen, folded once--which he opened to reveal a fine regular cursive. He could barely suppress the tremor in his voice as he said, "If it is indeed a woman we seek, Mr. Landor, I believe I may be credited with a sighting of her."

"Is that so?" It was, I would soon learn, one of his tics, the way his voice dropped in volume as he became more excited, lowering to a buzzing, crackling mutter, veiled and not always intelligible. On this particular occasion, though, I heard every word.

"The morning after Leroy Fry's death," he said, "before I knew anything of what had passed, I awoke and at once began inditing the opening lines of a poem--lines that speak of a mysterious woman and an obscure but profound distress. Here you see the result."

I admit I resisted at first. I had read enough of his poetry by now to consider myself immune to it. It came down to this, I suppose: he insisted. And so I took the paper from his hands, and I read:

'Mid the groves of Circassian splendor,

In a brook darkly dappled with sky,

In a moon-shattered brook raked with sky, Athene's lissome maidens did render

Obeisances lisping and shy. There I found Leonore, lorn and tender,

In the clutch of a cloud-rending cry. Harrowed hard, I could aught but surrender

To the maid with the pale blue eye To the ghoul with the pale blue eye.

"Of course, it's unfinished," he said. "For the time being."

"I see." I handed the paper back to him. "And why do you believe this poem is connected with Leroy Fry?"

"The air of concealed violence, the--the suggestion of unspeakable duress. An unknown woman. The timing of the thing, Mr. Landor, that can surely be no accident."

"But you might have woken up any morning and written this."

"Ah yes, but I didn't write it."

"I thought you--"

"What I mean to say is that it was dictated."

"By who?"

"My mother."

"Well, then," I said, a current of laughter bubbling in my voice. "By all means, let's ask your mother up. I'm sure she'll be able to shed no end of light on Leroy Fry's death."

I will always remember the look he gave me then. A look of the deepest surprise, as if I'd forgotten something that should have been as known to me as my own name.

"She's dead, Mr. Landor. Dead nearly seventeen years." Narrative of Gus Landor

10

November 1st

"No, over here... that's right... a little more... oh, that's fine, Gus... Mmm..."

When it comes to the female mystery, there's nothing like a measure of instruction. I was married for some twenty years to a woman who gave me little more in that regard than a smile. Which was, of course, all a man needed in those days. Patsy, by contrast--well, she makes me feel, at the age of forty-eight, a bit like those cadets who are forever mooning after her. Takes me by the hand. Straddles me as straightforwardly as a teamster mounts his mule and draws me in entire. There's something tidal in her motion--it has that feeling, I mean, of something that's been going on forever. And at the same time, she's so terrestrial in person-- a big girl with sprouts of black hair on her arms, strong haunches--heavy in the breast and hips, short in the leg--you can wrap your hand round her and feel, for a moment, that this thigh, this soft floury belly are yours and can't be taken away. Only, I would say, in her eyes, which are large and the color of butterscotch and lovely, only there is anything held apart.

Reader, I confess it now: Patsy was the reason I was so eager to leave Poe behind that Sunday. She and I were to meet back at my cottage at six, and she was to stay or leave, depending on how she felt. That night she felt like staying. When I woke, though, around three in the morning, there was no one on the other side of the bed. I lay in the half-glow of the night lantern, feeling the straw where it bunched beneath me, waiting ... and soon enough I heard:

Scroonch. Scroosh.

By the time I got out of bed, she'd scooped out all the ashes and swept the fireplace clean, and she was sitting on the edge of the sawbuck table in the kitchen, scrubbing the life out of an iron kettle. She'd thrown on the nearest thing to hand--my nightshirt--and in the blue kitchen light, her creamy breast, flopping through the vent, was the closest thing to a star. And that sweat-licked aureole, yes, the midnight sun.

"You're out of pine wood," she said. "Brush, too."

"Would you kindly stop?"

"And I've given up on the brass. It's too far gone. You'll need to hire someone."

"Stop. Stop."

"Gus," she said, lifting her voice into a singsong as she sent the horsehair brush dancing. "You were snoring to wake the dead. It was either go home or see to this room. Which is a disgrace, you know that. Don't worry," she added, "I'm not moving in."

That was the refrain she always fell back on: I 'm not moving in, Gus. As if that were the thing I feared most in the world, when in fact, there could have been worse things.

"You may like setting up house with spiders and mice," she said, "but most people prefer them out of doors. And if Amelia were here--"

The other refrain.

"If Amelia were here, she'd be doing the same, believe you me."

So funny to hear Patsy go on this way, as though she and my wife were old comrades working toward a common end. I should resent it, probably, hearing Amelia called by her given name, seeing her mantle snatched up so easily (if only for an hour or two every week or two). But I can't help thinking how much Amelia would have liked this young woman: her industry and calm, her delicate ethics. Patsy thinks through all her positions. Lord knows how she aligns herself round me.

I went back to the bedroom, found myself a tin of snuff, and carried it back to the kitchen. Her brows angled up when she saw me.

"How much you got left?" she asked.

She took a single dip. Her head tipped back as the powder turned to vapor and filtered through her sinuses, and she stayed like that for a while, drawing in the air and releasing it in a long stream.

"Did I mention, Gus? You're out of cigars. And the chimney's smoking again. And the root cellar's got squirrels."

I braced myself against the wall and sank down until I was sitting on the stone tile. It had the same effect as jumping into a lake. A splash of cold rising through the tailbone and scalding my spine.

"While we're awake, Patsy..."

"Yes?"

"Tell me about Leroy Fry."

She swept her arm across her brow. In the candlelight, I could just make out the lines of sweat along her jaw, around her collarbone, and the blue veins of her breast...

"Oh, I've talked about him before, haven't I? You must have heard me."

"As if I could sort out every beau of yours."

"Well," she said, scowling a bit, "there's nothing to tell. He never said a word to me, never so much as grabbed. Couldn't hardly stand to look at me, that's how bad it was. He used to come in nights with Moses and Tench, and they'd be telling the same jokes, and he'd be laughing the same way. That's what he was there for, to laugh. Kind of a peeping sound, like a wren makes. He drank only beer. Now and again I'd glance over, and he'd be looking at me, and he'd just yank his head away. Like this, Gus. Like someone had a noose round him--"

Too late she caught herself. Her brush froze. Her lips folded in.

"I'm sorry," she said. "You know what I meant." " 'Course."

"He was, I think, the fastest blusher I ever saw. But maybe I only say that because he was so fair."

"A virgin?"

Oh, the glare she gave me then. "Now, how would I know?" she asked. "No good test for a man, is there?" She grew quiet then. "I could just about see him with a cow, maybe. A big, motherly, pushy kind of cow. With a fat udder."

"Don't go on," I said. "You'll make me miss Hagar."

She began to dry the pot with a cotton towel. Round and round her arm went, and I found myself staring at those hands of hers, the tiny undulations of skin that the soap and the friction had made. An old woman's hands on a young woman's bare rich arms.

"It seems Fry was going to meet someone the night he died," I said.

"Someone?"

"Man, woman, we're not certain."

Without raising her head, she said, "Are you going to ask me, Gus?"

"Ask you... ?"

"Where I was the... what night was it?"

"Twenty-fifth."

"Twenty-fifth." She eyed me tightly.

"I wasn't going to ask, no."

"Well, never mind, then." Down her eyes went. She plunged the towel into the pot's center and gave it a fierce turn and then mopped her face one more time and said, "I spent the night at my sister's. She's getting those terrible headaches again, and someone has to stay with the baby till his fever passes, and the husband is no earthly use, so... that's where I was." She gave her head an angry shake. "I should be there now."

But if she were there now, she wouldn't be here, and that would be... what? Did she want me to say what that would be?

I took another dip of snuff. Such a clean feeling racing through my head. A fellow in such a state could make affirmations, couldn't he? On an autumn night, to a young woman standing not five feet away? But there was something hard and clotted in my head. I didn't know what it was until the image came back to me: two hands clutching the window lintel at the Cozzens hotel.

"Patsy," I said. "What do you know about this Poe fellow?" "Eddie?"

That was a shock. Hearing him reduced to that little endearment. I wondered if anyone had ever called him that before.

"Sad little thing," she said. "Beautiful manners. Beautiful fingers, have you noticed? Talks like a book but holds his liquor like a leaky pail. Now there's your virgin, you ask me."

"Something odd about him, that's for sure."

"Because he's a virgin?"

"No."

"Because he drinks a bit?"

"No! He's--he's full of the most senseless fancies and... superstitions. Imagine this, Patsy. He shows me a poem, claims it has something to do with Leroy Fry's death. Claims it was dictated to him in his sleep by his dead mother."

"His mother."

"Who I'm sure has better things to do in the afterlife--assuming it exists--than go whispering bad poetry in her son's ear."

She drew herself up then. Placed the pot on the wood-block counter. Proudly drew her bosom back inside my nightshirt.

"I'm sure, if she'd known it was bad, she'd never have whispered it."

She was so very solemn I thought she was having me on. She wasn't.