The Pale Blue Eye: A Novel (17 page)

But when I dreamed about Leroy Fry, that night, he was in much better shape. The noose was still coiled round his neck, yes, but the hole in his chest was gone, and he was no longer in cadet gray but in officer blue. He held a lump of charcoal in one hand, and in the other a cage of blue-eyed birds, and whenever he spoke, his voice was the sound of birds. "I won't tell," they chanted, over and over. And from somewhere behind that sound came another: a woman singing in a high cracking treble. Through it all the West Point drums kept their cadence, and when I woke, the drum was in my chest, and the shades of my dream were still half visible in the dark. Well, it was a bit of fancy, Reader, nothing more. I mention it only to show some of the problems I faced in trying to get a good night's sleep. Sleep was hard won and easily lost in those days, and I've since wondered if my time at the Point wasn't all one continuous thread: dreaming into waking, waking into dreaming, no intervals. And no end points. Not yet.

The note was waiting for me when I awoke the next morning. Wedged under the door. No salutation, no name... but I knew who'd sent it the moment I saw it. He could have written it with his left hand, and I would have known.

Mr. Landor. I have made a most important discovery.

And two inches below that, in smaller but no less urgent lettering:

May I call on you at your home? Tomorrow?

Narrative of Gus Landor

14 November 7th

I was once a newcomer myself here, Reader. So I can imagine what it is to approach this cottage for the first time, as Poe did on that Sunday afternoon. First you cross a brook, twice. Then, you see, beneath the canopy of a tulip tree, a skinny square chimney made of Dutch bricks, and beneath that a roof of old-fashioned gray shingles, projecting over the gables on each side. The house isn't nearly so big as you thought from a distance. Twenty-four feet long and sixteen broad, with no wings. A grapevine has climbed nearly to the roof. There's no bell; you have to knock. If no one answers, make yourself at home.

That's what Poe did: strolled in as if I weren't even there. Not from any rudeness, I could tell that, but out of a need to see. Why this place should have loomed so large for him, I can't say, but when a cadet decides to make you the focus of his Sunday afternoon--the only moment in the whole week when he can take his liberty--you mustn't question him.

He moved in straight lines from object to object, fingering the Venetian blinds and the string of dried peaches, pausing before the ostrich egg that hung in the chimney corner. More than once he seemed on the verge of a question, only to be drawn on by something he hadn't expected and had to account for.

Visitors have always been a rarity here, but I can think of no other who has put the place to such a scrutiny. It left me ill at ease. I found myself wanting to apologize for my neglect or give every object its proper context.

Normally, Mr. Poe, these pots would have been full of flowers. My wife was a great one for geraniums and pansies. And that ingrain carpet? A thing of beauty before my boots got hold of it. The windows were all dressed in white jaconet muslin, and yes, that ground-glass lamp came with an Italian shade, but the shade got torn, I forget how...

Poe circled and circled--looked until there was nothing left to see. Then he went to the window, levered the blinds apart with his fingers, and gazed eastward, to the paling where Horse was tied, to the rock ledge farther on, and, farther still, to the Hudson's chasm and the shaggy pelts of Sugarloaf and North Redoubt.

"It's lovely," he murmured to the glass.

"You're very kind."

"And cleaner than I might have expected."

"I have someone who stops by now and then."

How droll that sounded to my ear: someone who stops by. Briefly there flashed through my mind the image of Patsy scrubbing pots in my kitchen in the middle of the night, her snowbreast streaked with sweat.

Poe was kneeling by the hearth now, peering into a marble vase. God knows what he expected to find there--twigs? flowers? ashes? Not this, I can be certain. He gave a whistle as he drew it out: a '19 model flintlock, 54 caliber, with a 10-inch smoothbone barrel.

"Fertilizer?" he asked, dry as sand. "A memento, that's all. The last time it was fired, Monroe was president. No balls in it, but there's still powder, if you'd like to make some noise."

Who knows? He might have taken me up on it if something else hadn't caught his eye.

"Books, Mr. Landor!"

"I do read, yes."

Not much of a library--a scant three rows in all--but mine. Poe's fingers glided along the bindings.

"Swift, who better suited? The lamentable Cooper. Knickerbocker's History, of course, every library must... must... oh, and Waverley! I wonder if I could even bear to read that again." He leaned closer. "Well, this is intriguing. Essay on the art of deciphering, by John Davys. And there's Dr. Wallis and Trithemius--a whole row of cipher studies."

"My retirement pastime. Harmless, I hope."

"If there's one thing I would never accuse you of, Mr. Landor, it's harmlessness. Let me see now. Phonetics, linguistics, those stand to reason. Natural History of Ireland. Geography of Greenland. You must be a polar explorer... Aha!" He grabbed a blue volume from the topmost shelf and wheeled back on me, eyes shining. "You have been found out, Mr. Landor."

"Oh?"

"You gave me to understand you didn't read poetry."

"I don't."

"Byron!" he cried, thrusting the volume straight to the ceiling. "And if you'll excuse me for saying so, it looks terribly well thumbed, Mr. Landor. We appear to have more in common than I ever realized. Which is your favorite? Don Juan or--or Manfred ? The Corsair, I've a particularly boyish attraction to--"

"Please put it down," I said. "It's my daughter's."

I made every effort to keep my tone level, but something must have broken free, for he flushed a deep red and, from pure awkwardness, let the book fall open. In that instant, a brass chain spilled from out the pages, and before he could catch it, it landed with a ping on the wooden floor. The air took up the sound and made it repeat.

Face crumpling, Poe knelt down and snatched up the chain. Cupped it in his palm and held it out to me.

"This is--"

"My daughter's, too." I saw him swallow, hard. I saw him tuck the chain back into the book and set the book back on the shelf. He dusted off his hands. He walked to the maple settee and lowered himself onto the cane seat.

"Your daughter is no longer here?"

"No."

"Perhaps she's--"

"She ran off. Awhile back."

His hands had formed a knot: loosening and tightening, loosening and tightening.

"With someone," I said. "You want to know if she ran off with someone. She did."

He shrugged, looked at the floor.

"Was it someone you knew?" he asked after a time.

"In passing."

"And she's never to return?"

"Not likely."

"Then we're both alone in the world."

He said this with half a smile on his face, as though he were trying to recollect a joke someone had told him.

"You're not alone," I said. "You have your Mr. Allan of Richmond."

"Oh. Well, Mr. Allan is spoken for elsewhere. He has just fathered a pair of twins, in fact. And is on the brink of marrying again--not, alas, the woman who bore his twins. It doesn't matter, I'm little to him now."

"And your mother, you still have her, yes?" I tried to keep the barb out of my voice, but failed. "She still speaks to you, at any rate?"

"From time to time, yes, I do believe that. But never directly." He held out his hands. "I've no real memory of her, Mr. Landor. She died before I was three. My brother, however, was four at the time, he's told me things about her. How she carried herself. Oh, and the scent of her, she always smelled of orrisroot."

It was here, Reader, that something strange began to happen. I can describe it only as a change in the barometric pressure. I felt for all the world as if a storm was brewing--right over my head. My skin prickled, my eyes pulsed, the hairs in each nostril stood on end.

"You mentioned she was an actress," I said faintly.

"Yes." "A singer, too, maybe?"

"Oh, yes."

"What was her name?"

"Eliza. Eliza Poe."

Uncanny! To feel this pressure building in my temples. Not pain, not even discomfort. Just a warning that left me braced for the next thing. Wanting it.

"Tell me more," I said.

"I don't know where to..." His eyes made a circuit of the room. "She was English, I suppose that's the first thing to say about her. She came to America with her mother in 'ninety-six, still a girl. Eliza Arnold was her name then. Began in brat roles, moved on to ingenues and leading ladies. Oh, she played everywhere, Mr. Landor: Boston, New York, Philadelphia... Always rapturously received. She played Ophelia before she was finished. Juliet, Desdemona. She did farce, melodrama, tableau vivant. There was nothing she couldn't do."

"And what did she look like?"

"Lovely, that's what they tell me. I have a cameo of her, I'll show you sometime. Very petite, but of a good figure, with... dark hair." He fingered his own locks. "And large eyes." He caught himself in the act of expanding his own eyes. Grinned puckishly. "My apologies, it comes over me whenever I talk about her. I believe it's because whatever is good in me, Mr. Landor--in person, in spirit--comes from her. I do believe that."

"And her name was Eliza Poe?"

"Yes." A queer look came over his face. "Something is troubling you, Mr. Landor."

"Not exactly. I saw her perform once. Many years ago."

A confession, Reader. I haven't read many fine books. I've rarely been to the opera or the symphony or the lyceum. Haven't traveled anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon. But I have been to the theater--many times over. From the moment I could choose among all the sins my father warned me against, that was the one I chose more than any other. In later years, my wife would say it was the only mistress she ever feared. I would bring home playbills like coquettes' fans, and at night, with Amelia snoring by my side, I would relive the whole bill in my head, from the fire juggler to the burnt-cork comedian to the tragedy queen. In my time on earth, I have been privileged to see Edwin Forrest and a dancing three-legged horse, Mrs. Alexander Drake and a burlesque dancer named Zuzina the Hittite, John Howard Payne and a girl who could wrap her entire leg around her head and scratch her nose with her toes. I knew them all by name, as surely as if I had fraternized with them in the local taverns. And today you need only speak one of those names to call up for me a whole climate of association: sounds, sights... smells, for there is nothing like a New York theater on a November afternoon, when the smell of candle wax melds with the odors of rafter dust and spitcongealed peanut shells and sweat-heavy wool to make something pure as any drug. Well, that's what happened when I heard the name Eliza Poe. In a mere instant, I had tumbled back twenty-one years and landed in a fifty-cent seat--eighth row orchestra, Park Street Theatre. It was winter, and the place was cold as charity. The whores hanging from the top gallery shivered in their shawls. During that evening's performance, two rats scuttled over my boot, and a woman ten rows back pulled out her breast to feed her squalling baby, and a small fire broke out in the rear benches. I scarcely noticed: I was watching the play. It was something called Tekeli; or The Siege of Montgatz. A melodrama about Hungarian patriots. I recall very little of the plot: Turkish vassals and star-crossed lovers, I think, and men in fur hats named, oh, Georgi and Bogdan, and women traipsing about in Magyar vests with braids of artificial hair that swept after them like brooms. But I do remember the actress who played Count Tekeli's daughter.

She struck you first by how tiny she was--frail shoulders and wrists, a fifelike voice--far too slight a figure, you would have thought, for such fierce labor. I remember the way she ran across the stage and threw herself round the portly middle-aged actor who was playing her lover--she was fairly swallowed by him. The stage had never seemed so terrifying a place for a young woman.

And yet as the play went on, I could feel something dauntless coming out of her, and it enlarged her and seemed even to enlarge the other actors around her, so that her chubby lover was slowly changed into the lover of her vision, and this play with all its contrivances and death scenes bore the impress of her spirit. Her conviction carried all, and I ceased to fear for her and began in a way to long for her, to wish her back on stage the moment she left. Nor was I alone in my admiration, for there was a ripple that greeted her whenever she came on, and a couple of outright wails went up over her death (collapsed, like Juliet, atop her dead lover's body). And when the curtain had fallen on poor old Tekeli, bewailing his crimes against a free Hungary, it came as no surprise that the only player called out for an encore was her.

She stood in front of the curtain, amber light flickering over her hair and hands. She smiled. And it was then I realized she was not as young as I'd thought. Her face was gaunt and lined, the skin had shrunk round her hands, her elbows were patched with eczema. She looked altogether too weary for an encore, and her eyes were nearly blank, as if she'd forgot where she was. But then she nodded to the conductor in the pit and, with only two bars of preamble, began to sing.

Her voice was as small as she was. Too slight a voice, surely, for such a vast space as the Park. But this also ran in her favor, for everyone fell silent the better to catch what she was singing--even the whores in the gallery ceased their chattering--and because her voice was so clean and unadorned, it carried farther than a thicker voice might have. She stood entirely still, and when she was done, she dropped a curtsy and smiled again and gave us to know, by certain gestures, that there would be no second encore. And then, as she was about to take her leave, she took a backward step, as though a sudden wind had tugged her by the petticoat. Caught herself quickly--made as though it were a part of her farewell--and walked carefully toward the wings, waving her hand one last time as she disappeared.