"I know what my father would say!" I protested. "He was my father, Peter! Do you not think I keep a memory of him as strong as yours?"

Peter glanced away. He seemed embarrassed by the question, as though I was challenging his very existence, though in fact I sincerely wished to know his answer. "You have been like a brother to me," he said. "I mean only to see you contented."

A gentleman obliviously interrupted us, ending our discussion. I refused his offer of tobacco, but I did take a glass of warm apple-toddy. Peter was right. Unspeakably right.

My parents had given me a post in society, but it was now my place to earn its luxuries and fine associations. What dangerous restlessness had I been dandling! It was to be able to enjoy the comforts and delights of good circles that I labored at our law practice. To enjoy the company of a lady like Hattie, who never failed as a friend and a steady influence. I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds-friendly sounds of contentment, which cordially surrounded me from every side and drowned out my riotous thoughts. In here people knew themselves, and never doubted for a moment that they understood the others around them and that they themselves were perfectly understood in return.

When Hattie returned to the room, I signaled her to come to me. To her surprise, right away I took her by the hand and kissed it, then kissed her cheek in front of everyone. The guests one by one fell silent.

"You know me," I whispered to her.

"Quentin! Are you unwell? Your hands feel warm."

"Hattie, you've known my feelings for you, whatever those who babble about me say, haven't you? Haven't you always known me, though they gape and simper? You know I am honorable, that I love you, that I loved equally yesterday and today."

She took my hand in hers and a thrill ran through me to see her so happy merely by a few honest words from me. "You've loved me yesterday and today. Tomorrow, Quentin?"

At eleven o'clock on this night, her twenty-third birthday, Hattie accepted my marriage proposal with a simple nod. The match was declared suitable by all present. Peter's smile was as wide as anyone's; he forgot entirely about his rough words to me, and more than once he took credit for the arrangement.

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.

4

WHAT I HAD imagined: 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.