Mrs. Poe (5 page)

“I am my only charity, Mrs. Butler.”

She laughed again.

“I do not joke.” He stared at her until her brightness dimmed. “I never joke.”

Just then Miss Lynch called everyone’s attention to Mr. Whitman, who wished to read a poem.

Everyone gathered around with their teacups—Mr. Poe, I noticed, with Mrs. Butler.

I had no other chance to talk to him that evening. But had I been like the other moths fluttering to his light, I would have soon felt his withdrawal, for shortly after Mr. Whitman’s reading, Poe’s little wife, who’d been standing behind Mrs. Butler, began to cough. When Mrs. Poe could not regain her composure, Mr. Poe excused them from the gathering.

They left quickly, with his little bride holding a handkerchief to her mouth, but not before she had flashed Mrs. Butler the most
startling look. For a blink of the eye, her innocent young face twisted into a lacerating glare. Or had I imagined it? By the time I could mark it, it was gone, replaced by a cough, making me wonder what I’d seen. Then Miss Lynch pressed me into service to help refresh everyone’s tea and the thought was snuffed like a candle in the rain.

Four

Is there a name for the phenomenon in which once one’s attention is brought to a new word, subject, or acquaintance, one begins to see it everywhere? I experienced such with Mr. Poe and his bird poem during the weeks after I had met him. I heard two ladies swapping verses of “The Raven” as we waited at Broadway and Amity for the omnibus to pass. A gentleman standing outside an oyster cellar on MacDougal Street had a copy of the
Mirror
open to the latest reprint. Little girls skipping rope on the sidewalk of Sullivan Street chanted, “Quoth the raven, quoth the raven, quoth the raven, ‘Nevermore!’ ”

That very morning, at the Jefferson Market, as I struggled with frozen fingers to pinch some pennies from my reticule for some apples, I heard the grocer, yet another German, ask the man behind me if he’d read the parody of “The Raven” called “The Owl.”

“The Defil himself should be so clefer,” he said. “De Temperance Owl will not drink de whiskey—”

“Let me guess,” said the man. “—nevermore.”

I glanced up as they laughed. The grocer was watching my hands, unaware of the enviousness he had unleashed in me. Why couldn’t I have thought of writing a parody? Better humor than horror—the shivery sort of poem or story that Mr. Morris had requested was not exactly spilling from my pen. In fact, I did not like reading frightening stories let alone writing them. I did not enjoy how they openly played upon people’s fear of death, dying, and the dead. What was wrong with Mr. Poe that he should be so preoccupied with these subjects? Why should he be so dark? Why should people want him to be so dark?

Yet his fame was growing among unlearned and literary folk alike.
Just the previous evening, the Bartletts and everyone else I knew had gone to hear him give an address about American poetry at the New York Society Library. Although I had several poems in the collection he was to discuss, I had made my excuses to stay home, secretly unable to bear hearing him praise other, more important authors when my own writing was foundering. I did wonder, however, whom he had tomahawked, and so was sorry to find when I came down to breakfast that there would be no report. Eliza had gone out with her maid.

Now, by the front parlor window at the desk that the Bartletts had so generously set up for me, and after eating an apple, brushing and coiling my hair into a bun, and paring three pens, I turned back to the story I was trying to write. I picked up a pen, dipped it into the inkwell, stared at the blank paper, then set the pen down. A glance at the picture on the wall—a portrait of Mr. Bartlett’s stern grandfather, reminding me that I had no house of my own—caused me to pick it up again.

In an hour, I had a poem about a fallen angel. I hated it. That did not stop me from bundling up for a walk downtown.

•  •  •

Mr. Morris lowered my manuscript. “Angels, Mrs. Osgood? It is demons that are selling now.”

“Fallen angels are a sort of demon,” I said, not convincing even myself.

He tapped the top page. “Not yours. They are decidedly angelic. And your angel did not fall hard enough. People want to see
despair
. They want to see
horror
. They want the living daylights scared out of them.”

“I know,” I murmured.

“All this is,” he said, handing the manuscript back to me, “is sad.”

I put it in my reticule.

“Maybe you should stick to ladies’ magazines.”

“Thank you for your time, Mr. Morris.”

He accompanied me to the door. When I turned around to propose another idea, his wide form was already receding down the hallway.

I began the long trudge home. Few vehicles were on Ann Street, and most of them were on runners, the weather having turned frigid after a two-day thaw, thus hardening the slush on the streets and sidewalks into ice. On the way to the office of the
Mirror,
I had slipped several times and, in trying to avoid a fall, had pulled a muscle in my back. Now, without the prospect of a sale, I felt the pain of it more keenly. I minced along on the ice, racking my brains for the premise of a clever poem—no, a
ghoulish
poem or story.

I was looking at the banners draped from Barnum’s hall of hokum, trying to draw inspiration from his fantastical creatures, when I slipped and dropped like a sack of coal. In the moment that I sat there, the icy pavement chilling me through my petticoats, a gloved hand came into the view before my bonnet. My gaze trailed upward from a pair of neatly pressed trousers, up the buttoned front of a butternut-colored army greatcoat, to a pair of black-lashed gray eyes calmly regarding me from beneath the brim of a glossy hat.

“Take it.” Mr. Poe motioned with his hand. “I don’t bite.”

I reached up. He tugged me to my feet, then looked away as I straightened my garments.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He glanced back to verify if this were true. “That was a hard fall. I was just crossing the street when I saw you go down.”

“I must have been a sight.”

“Not so much,” he said. He tamped back a smile. His eyes were almost kind when lit with amusement.

Just then he glanced across the street. His smile retreated to his typical cold expression. “If you are certain you are well . . .”

“Yes. Thank you for your help.”

He tipped his hat, then strode down Ann Street.

I peered across Broadway. Margaret Fuller was waving from the sidewalk in front of the Astor House.

I made my way through a break in the stream of sleighs gliding down the street.

“How are you?” she said when I reached the other side. “I haven’t seen you since Anne Lynch’s little party the other week.”

“I’m well, thank you. And you?” Although Miss Fuller and I
knew each other socially, we hardly ever spoke. As someone known for children’s poetry, I did not carry much cachet. It was my husband who had attracted her attention on the occasions that we had seen her, with his charm and good looks and ability to dash off flattering sketches of the ladies.

“I saw you conversing with Mr. Poe just now,” she said without further ado. “Did he tell you how much he liked your last book of poems?”

I could feel my smile fade. Was she mocking me?

She peered from her bonnet with those bird-of-prey eyes. “Don’t tell me you haven’t heard about his lecture at the library last night. Were you there? I didn’t see you.”

“I couldn’t make it.”

“No one has told you about it?”

“Not yet.”

“My dear, you were the talk of the evening. Everyone wondered if you two were lovers.”

“What?”

“They were joking, of course. Tell your charming husband not to worry.” She laughed, then grasped my arm. “Come inside to lunch. I’ll tell you all about it.”

“I really can’t.” I could not bear for the hotel manager who had cast me out to see me.

At that moment a handsome sleigh pulled by four gleaming horses rounded the corner of Barclay Street. Its passenger was an older woman wearing a magnificent fur bonnet and cape.

“You wouldn’t think she’d gloat so openly about building her fortune on the heartache of women,” Miss Fuller said after the sleigh had passed. When she saw my puzzled face, she said, “Madame Restell.”

“I don’t know her.”

“I wrote a column about her last year. She keeps advertising in the
Sun,
claiming to know the ‘European secret’ of ending a pregnancy. I’ll tell you what the ‘secret’ is: abortion. Administered by someone without a shred of training.”

I watched the sleigh head up Broadway, a rich plum of a vehicle among workaday carts. What a gold mine she’d struck. As long as
women felt the pull of a man’s embrace, she would have plenty of trade.

“So,” said Miss Fuller, “what do you say to lunch? My treat. You’ll want to hear what Poe had to say.”

I let her tug me into the hotel.

•  •  •

Inside the overheated womb of the lobby, Miss Fuller raised her voice over the disconnected conversations echoing from the high ceilings. “You really should have come last night. Poe was in rare form. In his weird, polite way, he proceeded to rip through everyone’s work in
The Poets and Poetry of America
. He accused Mr. Longfellow of plagiarism.”

“Not again,” I murmured, looking around. Plush drapery clotted the windows, snuffing out any natural light that might have supplemented the artificial orange glow cast by the gas chandeliers. In this otherworldly dim, well-dressed ladies and gentlemen moved languidly, as if suspended in some kind of fluid. I was relieved to not see Colonel Stetson, the proprietor who had presented me with our unpaid bill, among them.

Miss Fuller nodded. “Oh, yes. Again. He called Bryant ‘trite.’ And the poor defenseless dead Davidson sisters—dear me, he destroyed them. You should have heard what he said about Rufus Griswold. Poe crushed him for choosing such poor work for his collection. Rufus was sitting next to me. His face was something to see. These sofas aren’t as red.”

“A shame.”

“That’s why I was excited when I saw Poe just now. I wanted to get him to make a statement for my column. He was bound to say something outrageous. But then he ran off. Did he say what the matter was?”

“We didn’t really speak. He was just helping me up—I had fallen on the ice.”

Miss Fuller’s nose was even more hawklike in the strange light. “Are you sure?”

“I don’t think he remembered me from Miss Lynch’s party.”

She dismissed me with a snort. “Don’t kid yourself. Pretty girls like you are always remembered.”

We reached the table d’hôte, a room that was as excessive in its use of heavy wood as the parlor was of marble and satin. How had I ever stood living in this place? Its opulence suffocated me.

Our wraps were taken, revealing that Miss Fuller was not wearing her Potawatomi bib on this occasion, but a bracelet that looked to be made of bone. “No one was immune from Mr. Poe’s vitriolic,” she said after we were seated. “Except one person.” She blinked with a flash of white lids. “You.”

“I really don’t understand.”

She laughed harshly. “Your modesty is a good role for you. Men love that sort of thing. Wish I could adopt it.”

She continued before I could protest. “In his entire lecture, you were the only poet he consistently spoke highly of. He said you had a ‘rosy future.’ Do you know what a feather in your cap that is? It made me want to scramble to get a copy of your works. Surely you have some connection with him. Poe wouldn’t crow like that for the sport of it—the man hates to puff. Do tell, Frances. It can be off-the-record if you wish.”

Denying a connection would be throwing away an opportunity to climb the ladder to professional recognition. But recalling his unaffected smile, even though it had been at my expense, made me feel a twinge of protectiveness toward him. “Unfortunately, we have no connection whatsoever. I met him briefly at Miss Lynch’s conversazione. That is all. As I said, I don’t think he recognized me just now, although he seemed almost nice.”

“Poe? Nice? I knew something was up. Poe is never ‘nice.’ ”

The waiter came. I cringed—I knew him from my stay there. To my great relief, he inquired politely about my husband and daughters as if we were guests of good standing. Still, I wondered what Miss Fuller knew about Samuel. The woman seemed to have antennae for scandal.

The waiter had just served us our soup when the maître d’hôtel came to our table and, bowing as if he, too, knew nothing of my empty coffers, presented me with a folded newspaper.

“From the gentleman, madam.”

I looked over my shoulder. Just inside the entrance to the table d’hôte, Mr. Morris’s diminutive partner, Mr. Willis, saluted in his hasty
manner. With his slightly flattened balding head and his forward-pitched posture, he reminded me of a grasshopper.

“Tell him to come over,” Miss Fuller instructed the maître d’.

I unfolded the paper. It opened to a copy of ‘The Raven.’ The hair raised on my arms.

Miss Fuller gave me a conspiratorial smile. “Last chance to come clean about Mr. Poe.”

Mr. Willis sprang across the room. “Sorry to interrupt. I was leaving the office just now when Mr. Poe came in. He asked me to give you his poem, Mrs. Osgood, and to ask your opinion of it.”

“My opinion?”

He crossed, then recrossed his arms, then put them down altogether, as if aware of the twitchy appearance he was making. “He said you might tell him in person. I believe, Mrs. Osgood, that this is our dear Mr. Poe’s way of saying he would like to speak with you.”

Why
?

Miss Fuller lifted her brows. “If you really don’t know him, Frances, you ought to take him up on it. He would be useful to have as an acquaintance. Your husband won’t object, will he?”

“I don’t believe so.”