The Blackest Bird (36 page)

“Need I remind you such status has not stopped others before you, sir.”

“This is true,” Poe conceded.

“You loved Mary Rogers,” Hays said. It was not a question.

“And what, sir, if I did? I have already admitted as much to you.”

“And you traveled to Poughkeepsie with her at the time of her first disappearance.”

This, too, not a question.

“And what if I did that, sir?”

“In your own clever tale and indictment of we police, entitled the ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,’ Mr. Poe, you have charged whosoever was with Mademoiselle Marie at the time of her first disappearance must have been the villain in her second disappearance. What can you tell me, Mr. Poe, that will convince me you are not the assassin of Mary Cecilia Rogers?”

P
oe returned to the Brennan house in a state of extreme agitation. Trudging heavily up the outside stairs, he wrestled with the idea of alcohol as solution, momentarily considering a glass of sherry might do much to settle his nerves.

Before the arrival of the high constable, Poe had been relaxed, content with his recitation. His new poem had been the singular thought on his mind, a work years in progress. He had persuaded himself it to be the bit of doggerel to change everything for him—the verse of the black bird—a crow or raven, he still hadn’t quite decided which.

While he was reading to the Brennans, to Muddie and Sissy, the poem’s intrinsic power coursed through his blood and psyche, engendered his hopes. He knew what he had. Listening to himself recite, he felt privileged to witness the excitement reflected on the faces of his listeners, and with the unexpected appearance of the high constable, he actually relished the opportunity as well to watch the reaction of this man with no link to him, save as antagonist.

Although perhaps at first confused by his presence, Poe certainly knew immediately who the police constable was when he entered the room, after his eminence had been shown to his seat by Mrs. Brennan,
after he had excused himself to Muddie and settled beside her on the red love seat. Poe had looked up at a moment when he was most impressed with himself, as he pronounced a pilfered phrase he had heard uttered by a little boy while he, Poe, paced the paths of Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia some years before with the same poem occupying his mind, reciting to himself, repeating, trying the lines, the meter, the foot, and the boy, not more than eight or nine, minded by his guardian, preoccupied in the grass with a hoop, had overheard the poet’s mutterings and turned to him, saying in the most extraordinary childlike chirp something to the effect that he, the boy, “had never heard bird or beast with such a name as Nevermore,” and Poe, flabbergasted by the innocent, inadvertent poetry of the child, had immediately incorporated what the boy had said into the line, and here he was thinking now how beautifully his poem was playing out in all its song, as the scroll slowly unfurled to the floor, and there—out of where?—out of nowhere, was this police constable, this broad man of imposing figure, with large, powerful block torso set upon dwarfish legs, and a decidedly Semitic cast, being shown by the lady of the house, Mrs. Brennan, to the vacant spot next to Muddie.

Poe looked up and Hays’ boring stare caught his own eyes, and held. For a moment Poe flustered. Their looks were locked, and Poe felt an unsettling, the words of Muddie reaching him out of the near past that Old Hays was after him, had paid a visit to 130 Greenwich Street looking for him, but then Hays sat heavily and Poe fell back into his reading, the long paper scroll continuing to unfurl from his hands, all things considered, the poet undisturbed in a course that must inevitably lead to his triumph, and Poe smiled to himself in his secret heart, eternity to come in this guise of carefully crafted words with black bird.

So now Poe was returned to the parlor following his disturbing outdoor tête-à-tête with the detective, visibly agitated, in spite of himself, as he watched his dear aunt bustle about, helping Mrs. Brennan clean and straighten after tea and cakes, dinner preparation to follow,
his face ashen when he entered the room and paused in the threshold.

Upon his reappearance, pleasant conversation ceased. Sissy from her seat, warmed by a crocheted coverlet against her ceaseless inner chill, fluttered her fingers in his direction, motioned to him, her Edgar.

He came to her immediately, dutifully.

“What is wrong, Eddie dearest?”

A pure white handkerchief, certainly not silk, but pounded cotton, twice, or even thrice, darned, yet so neatly and carefully pressed giving the illusion of perfect newness, was clasped to her mouth.

He took his spot next to her on the brocaded sofa. Mrs. Clemm joined them. His two women now having taken their familiar spots to either side of him, his protectorate, each with one of his hands in theirs. Muddie with the left, Sissy with the right. Sissy stroking the soft hairs on the back of Eddie’s hand, admiring his long, sensitive fingers. Muddie patting his other hand reassuringly, lovingly, loyally.

“Everything will be all right, Eddie,” Muddie said. “All will be fine. There, Eddie, rest your humours. You are all a-boil. Everything will find its proper level. Is that horrible man gone?”

Poe stared at her for some seconds before answering. “No, he is not gone,” he said finally. “I fear he will never be gone. And he is not horrible, Muddie.”

Mrs. Clemm’s look bespoke her alarm. Then she collected herself. “Don’t worry, Eddie,” she tried another tack to soothe him. “This too will pass. Your magnetic fields are simply in a state. Now what in the world does he, this not-so-horrible man, want with you?”

On the divan, Poe abruptly pulled away from his aunt, snatching his hand back from his wife. He clutched his head and murmured to himself, rocking back and forth, before requesting salts of Mrs. Brennan to relieve the terrible ache encapsulated in his skull.

M
rs. Brennan prepared dinner of freshly killed lamb shank and boiled potatoes for her family and the Poes. High Constable Hays was graciously invited to this meal. He took his place at the near end of the table along with the cojoined families of landlord and boarders and three weathered farm depot workers, already seated.

From his place the high constable ate moderately while occasionally, unobtrusively, observing Poe.

When it came to attending to his ailing wife, as far as Hays could tell, Poe was beyond reproach. He made himself sensitive to her needs and, invested in her health, made overtures to all her comforts.

She, in turn, seemed indeed a delicate creature, very pale with feverish consumptive eyes, eyes that in their infirmity appeared to Hays almost otherworldly.

After supper, a substantial meal despite its simplicity, there came a time when the poet called on her, his wife, to sing. He clapped his hands once to gain the attention of the assembled, and announced it was in honor of his guest, High Constable Hays of the New York City Municipal Police, that Sissy would sing, and so she, somewhat abashed, rose unsteadily.

Hays immediately protested, saying he felt no necessity to be entertained.

“Sit, child. Sit,” he instructed her. In his mind he was verged on volunteering himself in her stead. He had only a half-bad voice, as Olga fondly at times reminded him.

But before he could launch into his treasured rendition of “Tiddly Aye-Aye for the One-Eyed Reilly” or the absolutely riveting “Widow McGinnis’s Pig,” Martha Brennan, the eldest of the comely Brennan children, sprang to her feet and eagerly offered herself up instead.

Sissy would not have it. Whatever her ailments, she made a few tentative steps to the sideboard, picking up the concertina with a sidelong look of smug satisfaction toward this rival for her husband’s affections, Martha Brennan, that fervent, robust, healthy farm girl, four years her junior.

Hays had to admit Mrs. Poe made a striking figure, round-faced, pouting lips, arguably a forehead too high and broad for beauty (must this not have been a Poe family trait? he wondered), big, dark eyes, raven black hair, contrasting, almost startling, with her white, translucent, virtually colorless complexion.

She was outfitted for the evening in a simple white dress when she stepped to the middle of the warm little room and announced proudly, “My husband’s favorite.”

So began her rendition of the hymn “Come, Rest in This Bosom,” sung in that very high-pitched manner known as trilling, which struck Hays’ ears in such a curious way as to almost cause pain. Yet the high constable certainly sat in stark admiration of the sheer range of human sound of which the young woman was capable.

With the exertion of this caliber performance, her face now took on color. Earlier Mrs. Poe seemed to Hays a ghostly presence, but here in front of him as she performed she began to transform, to turn uncannily red.

Unsuitably red.

The hue became very deep indeed. Truthfully, it was the first time Hays had seen such progression of shade in a human being.

When she reached the part of the song that went, “Rest your head on my bosom, my warm comforting bosom…” at the start of the second refrain it became evident that all was not right. She gagged. Her eyes became wild, and a gummy eruption of bright blood suddenly spewed from her mouth in forceful projection. She moaned and collapsed on the floor.

All leapt to their feet.

“She has burst a blood vessel!” Poe cried, looking to Hays helplessly. “Her left temple,” he sobbed. “My God, don’t you see?”

Evidently, right then and there, Mrs. Poe had suffered some kind of stroke. Hays pushed the panicked, ineffectual husband out of his way and began to massage her temple, then applied direct pressure to what was pointed out by Mrs. Clemm as the point she took as the prime locus of disturbance. The horrified girl was conscious. She looked up into Hays’ eyes momentarily, murmuring his effort a comfort, but her skin was so very transparent that Hays could nearly see through the thin veil of flesh, blood flowing seemingly with no outlet, pooling from the pulsing ruptured vessel beneath the epidermis.

Almost apologetically, as the high constable knelt over his wife and continued his work, Poe tearfully admitted that something similar had happened once before. His panicked explanation, the cause of this catastrophe being her choral effort, his contention his wife’s meticulous high-pitched trilling an absolute exertion of a magnitude sufficient to put her down.

“Then why let her do it?”

“I do not know. Forgive me.”

Poe could not take his eyes off her. He wiped the blood from her lips and chin, tearfully swabbed it from where it ran in red rivulets down her white dress front.

In return, she gazed up at him, her eyes wide with love and fear.

The thought came to Hays then that if this is what it took, if Mrs. Poe had ever been in danger of losing him to any woman, the healthy teenaged Brennan girl, the beautiful and spirited Mary Rogers, whomsoever, any other game coquette, she had learned to use her illness as love’s elixir, she had won him back with this tactic—if illness could in any way be called tactic.

In the confusion and panic of the moment, despite the blood running from the corner of her mouth and the dreamy look in her eyes, by Hays’ judgment, Virginia Poe seemed very much aware of her victory.