Read Online The Port-Wine Stain by Norman Lock - Free Book Online Page B

the yard and on the gallows’ stairs had nearlyfilled with snow. In a moment, it would be as if none of us had ever walked there and trembled in fear and impatience. The door shut behind us. Life was suddenly everywhere in the street, boisterous and gay. Edgar took my arm. I shook it off and hurried down the pavement.
    â€œY OU LOOK TERRIBLE, E DWARD ,” said Dr. Mütter while I was hanging up my coat and hat on the clothes tree in a corner of the dissecting room.
    I noticed that the aspidistra on the windowsill was dead. This is a dreadful place to spend one’s days, I said to myself. I should have let my brother find me a job on the wharf. I’d rather dream of dank holds and bilges than atrocities. I could as well have been a grave digger or an undertaker’s boy as the keeper of a chamber of horrors.
    â€œI went to a hanging,” I said, unable to hold his gaze, which always put me in mind of a straight pin through an insect’s thorax.
    â€œWith Edgar Poe?”
    I nodded.
    â€œI’m told he has acquaintances throughout the Philadelphia netherworld,” said Mütter. “He’s a regular visitor to the city morgue and God knows what other unsavory haunts. I suppose he must do so for the sake of his art. Had he been Dana, Cooper, or Melville, his disposition would be no less grim, but, relieved of his penchant for the sordid, his literary efforts would be more wholesome. Still, you have to admire him. I do, for we have something in common.”
    I didn’t bother to ask him what. Honestly, Moran, I was sick to death of Edgar Poe and his “literary efforts.”
    â€œDid you learn anything useful?” asked Mütter.
    â€œLearn anything?” I repeated stupidly.
    â€œAt this morning’s hanging. I understood you to have an interest in anatomy. I can think of no better introduction to the subject—short of dissecting a corpse—than a hanging.”
    Mütter liked to make unconventional remarks. Usually, I would laugh to show him my loyalty—a different thing altogether from servility, at least in my own mind as it was constituted then. That afternoon, however, I made my face a mask suitable to the numbness of my heart. The spectacle had shaken me, Moran! I had yet to be hardened—coarsened—by war’s butchery and the bloody “pit” of the operating theater. I wanted a drink and might have thrown a beaker’s worth of medicinal alcohol down my gullet to anesthetize my frayed nerves. There were times when I felt myself to be the boy I was and wanted others to see me thus. Feeling my eyes begin to moisten in self-pity, I grew angry. We act by contrariety, Moran. We advance and retreat.
    Mütter pretended not to notice my distress. “It’s fascinating to see the human body at the limits of its structural integrity. In his own way, the hangman is an anatomical empiricist. If he makes the rope too long, the condemned man’s head will be torn from his shoulders at the end of the drop; too short, and his neck won’t break. Death won’t be instantaneous—that is, merciful—but an agony of slow asphyxiation.”
    I left him to his drollery and walked into the exhibits room. I had a mind to take Vogel from the shelf and searchhis eye sockets for news of his brother Heinz, or Holtz. But I shook off the fancy. At that moment, I wanted nothing to do with Poe or Mütter or anyone else whose mind was not commonplace and whose wit would make a woman blanch. The doctor followed after me.
    â€œYou must learn to ignore it,” he said. I gave him my blankest look. “The disgust, the dismay a good soul feels in the presence of obscene horrors, which are everywhere. You’ve only to open your eyes, Edward, and see—around every corner, underneath every stone, just beyond the vanishing point—what cannot be endured. But we must endure it, Edward—you must if you intend to become a