The Blackest Bird (40 page)

Young and bold author Herman Melville, sporting big boots, strode in with the daguerreotypist Mathew Brady, eager, he informed everyone and anyone who would listen, to talk to Mr. Poe about a proposed sitting at his studio at 205 Broadway.

The great Norwegian virtuoso violinist Ole Bull arrived with his instrument, quickly unsheathed it, and began to saw away.

During Bull’s recital, Horace Greeley himself, not dressed like the other men, he an iconoclast, trudged up the stairs alone, in a grimy white coat, his canvas pants tucked into his boot tops. He arrived at the entrance, wheezing loudly, trying to catch his breath, surveying the crowd before he caught Hays’ eye. At once he inserted himself past several people to shake the policeman’s hand.

“I am surprised to see you here, High Constable,” he said in a hushed voice underneath Bull’s mad fiddling.

Still huffing for breath, Greeley turned to Olga, confessing to her, “I used to be a vegetarian, but of late I find I need meat more and more to keep up my energy.” He mumbled something additional, unfortunately (or fortunately) lost to both her and her father. “Although this might sound unduly cynical,” Greeley freely continued, “in my view, the purpose of a gathering such as this can only be singlefold: to bring together the two aristocracies of ‘brain’ and ‘pocket.’ What in your erudition say you to that, Miss Hays?”

Without waiting for an answer, but with a comforting departing pat to Olga’s forearm, the former vegetarian wandered away in search of what he loudly announced as a link of blood sausage or a satisfying Cabernet.

All about Annie Lynch’s rooms were adorned with the strong and perfumed personae of those women of the literati, those whom Olga had referred to as the “starry sisterhood.”

For the most part, these eager young women wore elaborate evening ball dresses, each skirt bordered with triple embroidery of gauze and colored silk, gold upon a white background; the professional gossip Mrs. Ellet, her hair parted in the middle with cascading thick water curls, was dressed expensively in bird-of-paradise yellow satin upon which were mounted embroidered flowers of lace, encircled with light silver thread, producing an effect calculated and very beautiful when worn over a skirt of shimmering silver, as it now was. Whereas Mrs. Oakes Smith, a would-be poetess whose husband had paid Poe one hundred dollars to instruct his wife, favored a light blue hoopskirt with ostrich-plume headdress, her hair immaculately arranged beneath in heavy, taffy-like loops.

“So what do you think of all this, High Constable?” The mayor had come up unnoticed upon Hays. He waved his hand to take in the general direction of the ever-growing crush of visitors, crammed now into Miss Lynch’s parlor. “It all seems perfectly glorious, wouldn’t you say, Mr. Hays, if you are a poet, of some compromised character, and all
these proper gents and ladies have come to hear you recite your latest effort. It warms my heart to see so much attention foisted on one so deserving.”

“Mr. Harper, your sarcasm aside, with all due respect, I was telling my father how two weeks ago, in these very rooms, we sat as a group, you included, and listened to Mr. Poe recite as if transfixed, did we not?”

Harper cleared his throat. “We did, Miss Hays.”

“And tonight finds you back! You must have found the evening enjoyable despite your snide cynicism toward Mr. Poe. As I recall, that evening the good poet’s voice took on a charm, an absolute and remarkable resonance that bespoke the intervention of something more than mere man.”

“I’m afraid, young lady, you will soon find it requires more power to raise a demon to heaven than to drag an angel down to hell. I have it on good authority Poe’s poem is written for people who don’t like poetry. It is a poem calculated and insincere.”

Although the author under discussion still had not made his appearance, by this time many of the city’s most illustrious publishing concerns were well represented. Not only the mayor, with his three brothers in tow, and the estimable Mr. Putnam, and his chief editor, Mr. Duyckinck, but also the accomplished Messrs. Scribner, Wiley, Van Nostrand, Dodd, and Mead were present, among still others, including James Gordon Bennett of the
Herald
and Moses Beach of the
Sun
, Ned Buntline of
Buntline’s Own
, Mr. Graham from
Graham’s
Magazine
, Clark from the posh
Knickerbocker
, and Mr. Park Willis and Mr. George Pope Morris of the
Mirror
.

“Poe is a pathetic critic mad with love and hate,” enjoined Joseph Harper as he stood not far off at the end table pouring for himself a fresh glass of port. “His jealousy of other writers has grown to a mania.”

“I shall not say no to that,” agreed the unctuous Bennett.

“You only agree, sir,” Olga glared at the cross-eyed editor, “because Mr. Poe has taken his occasion to attack you personally, Mr. Bennett. What is it that Mr. Poe said? Dear me, allow me to recall. Oh yes!
That you, Mr. Bennett, are noticeable in the world except for the markedness by which you are known for nothing?”

Old Hays took surprise at the blunt vehemence of his daughter’s retort, yet knowing her well enough to fully understand she felt compelled to defend Poe, who was not present to defend himself.

There was more than one nod and laugh from the gathered at Olga’s cleverness, and by the time of this progression still many others seemed all too eager to join the discussion, including the Reverend Griswold, compiler of the much-in-evidence
Poets and Poetry of America
anthology, who had not so nimbly inserted himself close enough to the center of the oral fray to have trod painfully on the bunions of the feet of Old Hays.

“Not a whit of the author’s true emotion is involved in his raven poem,” Griswold commented through his rather long nose.

The culprit was a thin, lanky man with a scruffy beard and an unbecoming stoop to his shoulders, giving off an unpleasant (repellent to Hays) soured-milk odor. “The repetition in the verse forms nothing more than a singsong,” he continued. “True, it enforces the words to stick in one’s mind, but it is merely a bit of trickery, chicanery really, on the minds of all who read it.”

“Ah, pish on you!” Olga’s anger at the lot of them was rising by the second. She stood face to face with the reverend. “Give Mr. Poe his due, Mr. Griswold. In the realm of the imagination he has been able to create something new and unique.”

“You can’t be serious, Miss Hays?”

“But I am, Mr. Griswold.”

Griswold glared at Olga, ostensibly for her sheer audacity at having disagreed with him. “Dear girl,” he said haughtily, “there is no realism in his work, no resemblance to anything in the real world. An ogre lives in his pages with a trough of dead ladies.”

At this comment, some of those very ladies, standing nearby, presumably neither quite stone-cold yet nor at trough, blushed and tittered.

T. D. English, a lawyer Hays knew from the police court, and
counted by Poe as a friend, rose from their midst. “Miss Hays is right,” he declared. “Edgar Poe has created nothing less than a new Nowhere in the empire of literature. Like it or not, my dear Griz, the man is the Shakespeare of America.”

“As a poem his damnable crow will not bear scrutiny,” the Reverend Griswold whined back. “It might do well as a song, a unique musical piece, but as poetry it will not stand.”

The assembled were growing impatient for Poe (or “the Raven,” as more than some of their number were pleased to call him) to arrive.

At the hour of nearly nine-thirty, the lithe and childlike poetess Mrs. Fanny Osgood arrived alone, somewhat flushed from either the weather or exertion. Seeing her as she entered, Olga nudged her father. They watched as the overstuffed Bennett jumped up, abruptly abandoning a much-animated conversation with the equally overstuffed Buntline in mid-sentence to run to greet her, bending to whisper conspiratorially in the lissome little woman’s ear, the gesture striking Hays as overly familiar.

For her part, Mrs. Osgood laughed, looked up into the unpleasant editor’s broad and harried face with seeming adoration, and took his arm, whereupon he led her into the excitement and confusion of the room. They crossed to where Mr. Bennett settled himself dramatically back down on the silk divan he had only moments before abandoned. Mrs. Osgood fell on an ottoman at his feet in front of the coal fire, laughing gaily, but almost too loudly.

She was a striking, delicate creature. Her gown, tight-laced at the waist, was colored an attractive ethereal blue. Her hair had been so arranged with flowers and loops of ribbon worn over the left side of the coiffure and face, so placed as to almost conceal her left eye. A gold heart-shaped locket glistened in the hollow of her neck. If Hays were pressed, he would have to say her appearance, not to mention her laughter, designed singly to attract male attention unto herself. She appeared slender, almost fragile because of her small height, graceful, with black glossy tresses and clear, large, luminous gray eyes, showing a wide capacity for expression.

“Papa, if you have not already surmised, Mrs. Osgood prides herself a worshipper of the
beautiful
,” Olga confided in her father’s ear, observing him closely studying Mrs. Osgood. “By her own estimation, dear girl, so ardent! So sensitive! So impulsive!”

“You sound very nearly bitter, Olga,” he remarked. “If I didn’t know better, I would say you jealous.”

She met her father’s gaze of inquiry, retorting acidly. “No, Papa. Not bitter. Not jealous. I acknowledge the woman, the very soul of truth and honor, present recipient of everything Poe, arbiter of all—”

He nudged her. “Hush, Olga, she comes.”

And indeed Mrs. Osgood approached, on the heavy arm of the newspaper maven Bennett.

“High Constable Hays, my dear friend Mr. Bennett has only just pointed you out to me, and I insisted he introduce me at once to a man of such renown and courage. So here I am, monsieur.
Enchantée
.”

Following these icebreaking cordialities, Mrs. Osgood soon began to speak in a veritable gush of the guest of honor. “Edgar Poe is the most gentle, sweetest, most poetic of men,” she proclaimed.

Hays inquired how she had come to know him, she spoke so familiarly, and she said it was through the kind auspice of the very generous Mr. Willis, Mr. Poe’s onetime boss and patron at the
Evening Mirror
. She said that shortly after the publication of “The Raven,” she had been told (by Willis) that Poe had spoken of her favorably at a public gathering at the New York University. She had promptly sent a thank-you note to him, and he in response had written back, including a copy of his poem and requesting her personal views of its merit. She beamed with the acknowledgment.

“I shall never forget the morning when I was summoned to the Astor House by Mr. Willis, to the hotel’s drawing room to meet him,” she said. She spoke, gazing directly into Hays’ eyes as if into a crystal ball, her hand gripping his forearm, not unpleasantly.

She had by now sent Bennett off, shooing him in search of wine. “You can only imagine his magnificence, sir,” she continued after her devotee’s departure. “With his proud beautiful head erect, his dark
eyes flashing with the electric light of feeling and thought, an inimitable blending of sweetness and hauteur in his expression and manner, he greeted me that memorable afternoon calmly, gravely, almost coldly, sir. Yet with so marked an earnestness that I could not help being deeply impressed by it.”

Falling back, she smiled, first at Hays, then made a peculiar face, so childish, at Olga, as if to swoon.

Frances Sargent Osgood, known to her intimates as Fanny, Hays knew, was wife of Samuel Osgood, the portrait painter. A number of people in the know had remarked right now her husband, on commission, was painting a likeness of Poe for the New-York Historical Society.

Olga had informed him Mrs. Osgood’s poetry had often been maligned—labeled bombastic, rhetorical, sentimental by her more strident critics, and even her peers—but Olga did admit there was a certain grace, and it was with that grace which Poe evidently seemed to have been taken.

She was author not only of
The Poetry of Flowers and Flowers of
Poetry
, but also of a reworking from the French of Perrault’s classic
Puss in Boots
, as well as what she admitted to be a slightly sentimental collection entitled
The Casket of Fate
.

“At the very least,” Olga explained to her father as Mrs. Osgood abruptly showed them her back, “deservedly or not, he has taken up her defense and praised her.” Because now, finally, Poe had made his entrance into the apartment. He was in the company of a tall gentleman outfitted in a long black swallow-tailed coat. Hays recognized him at once from the stage, the dramatic figure Mr. Edwin Booth, the actor.

Poe’s eager admirers gathered around him quickly, but not Mrs. Osgood, who started to approach but, seeing the crowd, seemed now to make a point of remaining off to one side and aloof, before ultimately returning to hold her ground with Hays, taking up his hand.

Both stood silently, watching Poe pass pleasantries among those who pressed so eagerly to be near him. His slender form, intellectual
face, and uncommon expression of eye never failed to arrest the attention of even the least observant. His storied associations with various women appeared tantalizing to some, and now many, a veritable bevy—Mrs. Ellet, Mrs. Oakes Smith, even the transcendentalist feminist Miss Fuller—gathered around him and vied for his attention.

He made the round of the room, offering his greetings and obvious good feelings. When he reached Hays, his eyes may have widened slightly in surprise, seeing him, the high constable, unexpectedly present at this venue.

After a moment’s hesitation, however, he nodded before greeting Mrs. Osgood, who had remained with Hays, hand in hand.

“Hello, so nice to see you again so soon, Mrs. Osgood,” he said to her.

“Hello, Mr. Poe. So very nice to see you.”

Why did this seemingly innocent exchange strike Hays as so disingenuous? He noticed at once there was something more than familiar transmitted between them, something complicit, even conspiratorial.