Dante Club

  Holmes still remembered a time when Boston was known as Ticknorville by the literary set: If you were not invited to Ticknor’s library salon, you were nobody. That chamber had once been known as Ticknor’s Throne Room; now, more often, Ticknor’s Iceberg. The former professor had fallen into disrepute with much of their society as a refined idler and an anti-abolitionist, but his position as one of the city’s first literary masters would always remain. His influence could be revived to their benefit.

  “My life is worn by more creatures than I can endure, my dear Holmes,” Fields said, sighing. “The sight of a manuscript is like a swordfish nowadays—it cuts me in two.” He looked Holmes over for a long moment, then agreed to send him in his place to Park Street. “But remember me kindly to him, won’t you, Wendell.”

  Holmes knew that Fields was relieved to pass on the task of speaking with George Ticknor. Professor Ticknor—that title was still insisted upon, though he had taught nothing since his retirement thirty years earlier—had never thought much of his younger cousin, William D. Ticknor, and his low opinion extended to William’s partner, J. T. Fields, as he made clear to Holmes after the doctor was led up the winding staircase of nearby 9 Park Street.

  “The noisy shuffle of profits, viewing books as sales and losses,” Professor Ticknor said with dried lips puckered in revulsion. “My cousin William suffered that malady, Dr. Holmes, and infected my nephews too, I’m afraid. Those who sweat over labors must not control the literary arts. Don’t you believe so, Holmes?”

  “But Mr. Fields has something of a brilliant eye, though, doesn’t he? He knew your History would flourish, Professor. He does think Longfellow’s Dante will find an audience.” In fact, Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature found few readers outside of the contributors to the magazines, but the professor thought that an exacting measure of its success.

  Ticknor ignored Holmes’s loyalty and delicately pulled his hands out of a bulky machine. He had had the writing machine—a sort of miniature printing press, as he described it—built when his hands began to be too shaky to write. As a result, he had not seen his own handwriting in several years. He had been at work on a letter when Holmes arrived.

  Ticknor, sitting in his purple velvet skullcap and slippers, let his critical eye take in, for the second time, the cut of Holmes’s clothes and the quality of his necktie and handkerchief.

  “I’m afraid, Doctor, that while Mr. Fields knows what people read, he shall never quite understand why. He grows carried away by the enthusiasm of close friends. A dangerous trait.”

  “You always said how important it was to spread knowledge of foreign cultures to the educated class,” Holmes reminded him. With the curtains drawn, the old professor was lit faintly by the library’s wood fire, which in its subdued light was merciful to his crow’s-feet. Holmes dabbed his forehead. Ticknor’s Iceberg was in fact rather boiling from the always stoked hearth.

  “We must work to understand our foreigners, Dr. Holmes. If we do not conform newcomers to our national character and bring them in willing subjection to our institutions, the multitudes of outside people will one day conform us.”

  Holmes persisted, “But between us, Professor, what do you think the chances for Mr. Longfellow’s translation to be embraced by the public?” Holmes had such a look of resolute concentration that Ticknor paused to genuinely deliberate. His old age had bought, as a defense to sadness, a tendency to offer the same dozen or so automatic replies to all questions concerning his health or the state of the world.

  “There can be, I think, no doubt that Mr. Longfellow shall do something astonishing. Is that not why I selected him to succeed me at Harvard? But remember, I too once envisioned introducing Dante here, until the Corporation made my post a farce . . .” A mist clouded Ticknor’s jet-black eyes. “I had not thought it possible that I would live to see an American translate Dante, and I cannot comprehend how he will accomplish the task. Whether or not the ungloved masses will accept it is a different question, one that must be settled by the popular voice, as separate from that of scholarly lovers of Dante. On that bench of judges, I can never be competent to sit,” Ticknor said with unrestrained pride that brightened him. “But I grow to believe that when we hold out hope that Dante shall be read widely, we fall prey to pedantic folly. Do not misunderstand, Dr. Holmes. I have owed Dante many years of my life, as Longfellow does. Do not ask what brings Dante to man but what brings man to Dante—to personally enter his sphere, though it is forever severe and unforgiving.”

  IV

  Beneath the streets that Sunday, among the dead, Reverend Elisha Talbot, minister of the Second Unitarian Church of Cambridge, held a lantern high as he weaved through the passageway, sidestepping the staggered coffins and heaps of broken bones. He wondered whether he required the guidance of his kerosene lantern at all by now, for he had grown quite accustomed to the elaborate darkness of the winding underground passage, his nasal contractions invincible to its unpleasant stew of decomposition. One day, he dared himself, he would conquer the way without a lamp, with only his trust in God before him.

  For a moment, he thought he heard a rustle. He spun around, but the tombs and slate columns did not stir.

  “Anyone alive tonight?” His famously melancholy voice struck the black air. It was perhaps an inappropriate comment coming from a minister, but the truth was he was suddenly scared. Talbot, like all men who lived most of their life alone, suffered many closeted fears. Death had always frightened him beyond the normal measure; this was his great shame. This might have provided one reason he walked the underground tombs of his church, to overcome his irreligious fear of corporeal mortality. Perhaps it also helped to explain, if one were to write his biography, how anxiously Talbot upheld the rationalistic precepts of Unitarianism over the Calvinist demons of the older generations. Talbot whistled nervously into his lantern and soon approached the stairwell at the far end of the vault, which promised a return to the warm gaslights and a shorter route to his home than the streets.

  “Who’s there?” he asked, swinging his lantern around, this time certain he had heard movement. But again nothing. The movement was too heavy for rodents, too quiet for street urchins. What the Moses? he thought. Reverend Talbot steadied the humming lantern at eye level. He had heard that bands of vandals, displaced by development and war, had lately taken to congregating in abandoned burial vaults. Talbot decided he would send for a policeman to look into the matter the next morning. Although what good had it done him a day earlier, when he had reported the robbery of a thousand dollars from his home safe? He was sure the Cambridge police had done nothing about it. He was only glad that the thieves of Cambridge were equally incompetent, neglecting to take the safe’s valuable remaining contents.

  Reverend Talbot was virtuous, always doing right by his neighbors and his congregation. Except there were times when he was perhaps too zealous. Thirty years before, early in his stewardship of the Second Church, he had agreed to recruit men from Germany and the Netherlands to move to Boston with the promise of a place to worship in his congregation and a well-paying job. If Catholics could pour in from Ireland, why not bring some Protestants? Only the job was building the railroads, and scores of his recruits died of overwork and disease, leaving orphans and derelict widows. Talbot had quietly pulled out of the arrangement and then spent years removing any trace of his involvement. But he had accepted “consultation” payments from the railroad builders, and though he had told himself he would return the money, he didn’t. Instead, he locked it out of his mind and made each decision in life with an eye toward thoroughly skewering the wrongheadedness of others.

  As Reverend Talbot took drawn-out, skeptical strides in reverse, he stumbled against something hard. He thought for a moment, as he stood transfixed, that he had lost his inner compass and steered into a wall. Elisha Talbot had not been held by another person, or even touched—except for shaking hands—for many years. But there was no doubt now, even to him, that the warmth of
the arms wrapping around his chest and removing the lantern belonged to another being. The grasp was alive with passion, with offense.

  When Talbot came to consciousness again, he realized, in a brief moment of eternity, that a different, impenetrable blackness surrounded him. The pungent odor of the vault persisted in his lungs, but now a cold, thick moistness brushed against his cheeks and a saltiness he recognized as his own sweat crept into his mouth, and he felt tears streaming from the corners of his eyes onto his forehead. It was cold, cold as an icehouse. His body, deprived of all garments, was shivering. Yet heat ate into his numb flesh and furnished an unbearable sensation never before known. Was it some horrible nightmare? Yes, of course! It was that awful rubbish he was lately reading before bed, of demons and beasts, et cetera. Yet he could not remember climbing out of the vault, could not remember reaching his modest peach-painted clapboard house and fetching water to his washstand. He had never emerged from the world below to the sidewalks of Cambridge. Somehow, he realized, the beating of his heart had moved upward. It was suspended above him, pounding desperately, plunging the blood in his body down into his head. He breathed in faint ejaculations.

  The minister felt himself kicking his feet in the air madly and he knew by the heat that this was no dream: He was about to die. It was strange. The emotion most distant from him at this moment was fear. Perhaps he had used it all up in life. Instead, he was filled with a deep and raging anger that this could happen—that our condition could be such that one child of God could die while all others went on unbothered and unchanged.

  In his last moment, he tried to pray in a tearful voice, “God, forgive me if I’m wrong,” but instead a piercing yell burst forth from his lips, lost in the merciless thundering of his heart.

  V

  On Sunday, the twenty-second day of October 1865, the late edition of the Boston Transcript contained on its front page an advertisement offering a reward of ten thousand dollars. Such bewilderment, such halts of clanging carriages at newspaper peddlers’ had not been known in what seemed like a lifetime since Fort Sumter had been attacked, when it was certain that a ninety-day campaign could end the South’s wild rebellion.

  Widow Healey had wired Chief Kurtz a simple telegram to reveal her plans. The use of the telegram made her point, for it was known that many eyes in the police station house would see it before the chief’s. She was writing to five Boston newspapers, she told Kurtz, describing the true nature of her husband’s death and announcing a reward for information leading to the capture of his murderer. Because of past corruption in the detective bureau, the aldermen had passed regulations prohibiting policemen from receiving rewards, but members of the public certainly could enrich themselves. Kurtz might not be happy, she admitted, but he had failed in his promise to her. The late edition of the Transcript was first to carry the news.

  Ednah Healey now imagined specific machinations by which the villain might suffer and repent. Her favorite brought the murderer to Gallows Hill, but instead of hanging he was stripped bare of clothes and set on fire, then permitted to try (unsuccessfully, of course) to put out the flames. She was thrilled and terrified by these thoughts. They served the additional purpose of distracting her from thinking about her husband and from the rising hate she felt toward him for leaving her.

  Mittens were bound to her wrists to prevent her from scratching off more skin. Her mania had become constant, and clothing could no longer cover the scars of her self-mutilation. In the fit of a nightmare one evening, she had rushed from her bedchamber and desperately found a hiding place for the brooch containing the lock of her husband’s hair. In the morning, her servants and sons searched all of Wide Oaks, from under the floorboards and to the skeleton rafters, but couldn’t find anything. It was for the best. With those thoughts dangling from her neck, Widow Healey might never have slept again.

  Mercifully, she could not know that during those cataclysmic days, during that autumn heat spell, Chief Justice Healey had slowly mumbled “Gentlemen of the jury . . .” again and again as hungry maggots bore by the hundreds through the wound into the quivering sponge of his brain, the fertile flies each birthing hundreds more flesh-eating larvae. First, Chief Justice Artemus Prescott Healey couldn’t move one arm. Then he moved his fingers when he thought he was kicking his leg out. After a while his words weren’t coming out right. “Jurors under our gentlemen . . .” He could hear it was nonsense but could do nothing about it. The portion of the brain that arranged syntax was being tasted by creatures who did not even enjoy their feeding, but needed it nonetheless. When sense returned briefly during the four days, Healey’s anguish made him believe he was dead, and he prayed to die again. “Butterflies and the last bed . . .” He stared at the shabby flag above him and, with the little sense left to his mind, wondered.

  The sexton of the Second Unitarian Church of Cambridge had been recording the week’s events in the church diary in the late afternoon after Reverend Talbot departed. Talbot had performed a riveting sermon that morning. He spent time in the church afterward, basking in glowing notices from the church deacons. But Sexton Gregg had frowned to himself when Talbot asked him to unlock the heavy stone door at the end of the wing of the church that held their offices.

  It seemed as though only a few minutes had passed after that when the sexton heard a rising cry. The noise seemed to come from nowhere and yet was clearly rooted somewhere in the church. Then, almost whimsically, with thoughts of the long buried, Sexton Gregg put his ear to that slate door that led down to the underground burial vaults, the church’s bleak catacombs. Remarkably, the noise, though now gone, did seem from its reverberations to originate from the hollowness behind the door! The sexton, taking his clattering ring of keys from his belt, unlocked the door as he had done for Talbot. He sucked in his breath and stepped down.

  Sexton Gregg had worked there for twelve years. He had first heard Reverend Talbot speak in a series of public debates with Bishop Fenwick on the dangers of the rise of the Catholic Church in Boston.

  Talbot had argued vigorously three chief points in these discourses:

  1. that the superstitious rituals and lavish cathedrals of the Catholic faith constituted blasphemous idolatry;

  2. that the tendency of the Irish to cluster in neighborhoods around their cathedrals and convents would give rise to secret plotting against America and signaled resistance to Americanization;

  3. that popery, the great foreign menace controlling all aspects of the Catholic operation, threatened the independence of all American religions with its proselytizing and its goal of overrunning the country.

  Of course, none of the anti-Catholic Unitarian ministers condoned the acts of enraged Boston laborers who burned down a Catholic convent after witnesses said that Protestant girls had been kidnapped and kept in dungeons to be made into nuns. The rioters chalked HELL TO THE POPE! on the rubble. That was less a disagreement with the Vatican than a warning to the Irish increasingly receiving their jobs.

  On the strength of his debates and his anti-Catholic sermons and writings, Reverend Talbot was encouraged by some to succeed Professor Norton at the Harvard Divinity School. He declined. Talbot enjoyed too greatly the sensation of entering his crowded meetinghouse on a Sunday morning, coming in from the Sabbath quiet of Cambridge, and hearing the solemn peals of the organ as he stood over the pulpit robed grandly in his plain college gown. Although he had an awful squint and a deep, melancholy intonation with the perpetual character that one’s voice assumes when a dead person is lying somewhere in the house, Talbot’s presence at the pulpit was confident and his pastorate loyal. That was where his powers mattered. Since his wife had died in childbirth in 1825, Talbot had never had a family and never desired another one, because of the satisfaction brought by his congregation.

  Sexton Gregg’s oil lamp timidly lost its luster as he lost his courage. When the sexton had to exhale, mist encased his face and tingled his whiskers. In Cambridge it was still autumn, but in the Second Church?
??s underground vault it was the dead of winter.

  “Anyone about here? You ain’t supposed to . . .” The sexton’s voice seemed to have no physical bearing within the vault’s blackness, and he shut his mouth quickly. Strewn along the edges of the vault he noticed small white dots. When their number increased, he stooped down to inspect the litter, but his attention was redirected by a sharp crackling from up ahead. A stench horrible enough to subdue even the air of the burial vault reached out to him.

  With his hat held in front of his face, the sexton continued ahead between the coffins lining the dirt floor, through the sad slate archways. Gigantic rats scurried along the walls. A flickering glow, not from his own lamp, illuminated the way ahead of him, where the crackling was a continuous sizzling.

  “Someone there?” the sexton continued cautiously, gripping the dirty bricks of the wall as he turned the corner.

  “Upon the Eternal!” he cried.

  From the mouth of an unevenly dug hole in the ground up ahead projected the feet of a man, the legs visible as far as the calf, with the rest of the body jammed inside the hole. The soles of both feet were on fire. The joints quivered so violently that the feet seemed to be kicking back and forth in pain. The flesh of the man’s feet melted, while the raging flames began to spread to the ankles.

  Sexton Gregg fell on his backside. On the cold ground beside him was a pile of clothing. He grabbed the top garment and batted it against the blazing feet until they were extinguished.

  “Who are you?” he cried out, but the man, who was just a pair of feet to the sexton, was dead.