The Blackest Bird (44 page)
Authors: Joel Rose
“I failed miserably. I threw myself into the cards with a recklessness of nature and abandon which acknowledged no restraint. By Christmastime, when I returned home for the holidays after not yet even one full semester, I estimated my indebtedness to my stepfather as approaching twenty-five hundred dollars.
“His reaction bordered on apoplexy. He immediately informed me that he was removing me from the university. If he had ever had an ounce of respect for me, he told me, he had none now.
“That night, my first back at my boyhood home, I attended a party
at the residence of the Royster family, only to find the celebration in honor of Elmira’s engagement in marriage to another, an individual much older than she, a man called Shelton.
“I attempted to have a word with her, but found myself rudely blocked by her father, and removed bodily from the dwelling.
“Once home in my room, dejected and betrayed, I made the decision to no longer abide by the law of my stepfather, John Allan. I went downstairs to confront him. A fight of enormous proportion ensued. Although it did not start that way, my debts now became the focus of this disagreement, and I found myself threatened with prison by a man I had once trusted and called ‘Father.’
“‘You have misled me,’ I remember shouting at him. ‘You have restricted me. You have rejected me. You have betrayed me. And now I have heard you say you have no affection for me.’
“And so with no choice I left.”
Because of his indebtedness, Poe told Olga, he was forced to use aliases. He told how he masqueraded as one Henri Le Rennet from Boylston Street in Boston, or when to his advantage, Paris, France. Eventually he enlisted in the army as Edgar Allan Perry.
During this time his brother, William Henry Leonard Poe, dying from acute alcoholism in Baltimore, wrote an unflattering ostensible fiction, a story entitled “The Pirate,” in which he had seen fit to plagiarize Edgar’s affair with Elmira Royster and the frustrating outcome.
This fiction met with surprising success, even seeing the stage; the result a great deal of notoriety, Poe saying it was at this juncture, noting the accolades afforded his elder sibling, where began his own immersion into short-form tale-telling, the short story, and the transcendence (or not) that such tale-telling has brought him.
“But for my life, although married to my darling wifey, the undeniable thrill I felt for Mary Rogers”—tears welled in his already red-rimmed eyes— “the vibrance of Mrs. Osgood, I never knew a love as was my first love of Elmira.”
W
ORD REACHED POE
at his cottage on February 22 that although he had been unable to testify on his own behalf because of his grief in a lawsuit for libel (unfounded reports of insanity and institutionalization) brought by him against the
New York Herald
, he had nevertheless prevailed, and been awarded judgment of $225.06 in damages, plus $101.42 in court costs, to be paid immediately by the
Herald
’s owner and publisher, James Gordon Bennett.
With this news Olga commented to her father she saw an immediate change come over her patient. Upon the arrival of the funds, his health immediately began to respond. Poe said he felt not only vindicated, but rich. Visitors to the cottage now found him much rejuvenated, even amused.
A new rug appeared in the house. The table was suddenly laden with delicacies. A bright and shiny silver-plated coffeepot stood on the stove.
Taking a walk with Olga and friends in the woods, the men engaged in a jumping competition in which Poe split his pants. He grew sideburns and waxed his mustache. He wore his elegant mourning clothes with newly found dignity.
He declared himself well. Better. Best.
Visiting Olga on Lispenard Street, he offered Old Hays unasked-for advice based on recent personal experience.
For his part, Hays kept private his own thoughts about his visitor and his daughter.
“I now rise early,” Poe announced to him, “eat moderately, drink nothing but water, and take abundant and regular exercise in the open air.”
He glanced at Olga, then leaned close to confide in her father that in retrospect he now knew what had driven him mad. It was nothing less than the impending and prolonged death of his wife, the interminable fear of losing Sissy. This fear led him to drink, and out-of-control behaviors.
“She died time and time again,” he explained. “I was subjected to unfathomable torture, long oscillations between hope and despair. It was,” he said, “an unceasing, constant source of anxiety that only alcohol could subdue.”
He stared at Old Hays, his eyes blinking rapidly, then at Olga, as if waiting for their judgment. “Truth be told, I did become insane,” he concluded, “with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
Later that afternoon when it came time for him to return to Fordham, he claimed to be unable to move. He was put to bed, with Hays looking on, and Olga again administering to him.
Wiping his brow in the course of nursing him, Olga warned he must learn to live a more prudent and settled life. She urged him to find a woman fond enough and strong enough to help him manage his work and its remunerations for his best good.
Through his dyspepsia, Poe suddenly sat bolt upright and swore on his oath that if he sought a righteous woman, she, Mary Olga Hays, was the one he sought.
Although Olga smiled at his absolution, she swore she was not.
He would not take no for an answer. He reiterated his realization: she, most singular and worthy exponent of her gender, could only have been put on this earth for him, Edgar Poe, and only him.
“I tell you, beloved, when I love, I love desperately, and know no other way. I can only remind you my favorite name is Mary, and Mary is your name, dearest Mary Olga.”
Again, this time with increased deliberation so that even he, who she recognized as diminished, might hear her and understand, Olga stressed, although gently, then stressed additionally, that this savior of whom he spoke, his savior, put on this earth by grand plan otherworldly or otherwise, for him or not for him, was decidedly, emphatically, not she.
That evening, Poe finally asleep, Olga shared with her father what Poe had said, the words familiar to him from his deposition of Mary Jenkins and unsettling.
Hays stressed to his daughter that although he deeply hoped not, there still might be chance that individual lying ailing upstairs a murderer. Hays implored his daughter to send him on his way, the gentleman unsupportable, cerebrally damaged, no prospect, to which she responded, as much as she loved her father, respected and revered him, she would do what she saw fit, and there was nothing in this world that would see her influenced any differently.
70
T
he next morning Poe called to Olga from upstairs. She came and he said he needed to talk to her. He confided he had come to realize “crying will do no good.”
Discordant, he claimed he was broken by Olga’s resolve to remain estranged from him, taking it upon himself then to get out of bed at least, and, with some newfound strength and apparition of good health and optimism, to travel to Albany, paying fifty cents to board the steamship
Henry
at the Ossining dock.
Word had reached him that Mrs. Osgood had delivered her baby. It was a little girl, and she had named the infant Fanny Fay, “fay,” a Middle English singleton for faerie, a reference to a poem, “The Diamond Fay,” they had endeavored to write together for an ill-starred presentation in Boston. The child was said to have come into this world unwell.
The wealth of sick feelings—the deep—
the pure. With strength to meet
sorrow, the faith to endure
Fair Lulin, listen while I sing
Thee legend of this diamond ring
I found this story quaint and old,
In fairy archives, where it’s told
Of a mortal maiden heed
A quiet heart your soul may need.
Mrs. Osgood had seen advantage in resuming residence with her husband. She and Mr. Osgood had been estranged, but now they were back as man and wife, residing in Albany, New York, although not everything was entirely comfortable between them, and Mr. Osgood was not present at the time of Poe’s visit.
Arriving at the Hudson River dock, Poe proceeded straightaway to Mrs. Osgood’s home to get down on his knees and beg her to be with him.
“I love you,” he said, “and you must love me.”
Fanny knew not how to respond to such entreaty after such ruination, the calamitous public spectacle of their most intimate and innermost feelings.
At that moment a nurse brought the infant child into the room, interrupting them. Poe scrambled to his feet and looked at the little girl. Extremely small for her age, she was crying, inconsolable.
Her mother lamented that she did not know what was wrong with the baby, nor did the doctors. She took nourishment, but none of it seemed to nourish, and she could not gain weight. Fanny told Poe, her eyes glistening with emotion, to see her daughter suffer was the most grievous punishment a woman could bear.
Within a week of Poe’s return home, news reached him at Fordham the infant had died. He went outside and paced the porch. As he drifted from one end of the cottage’s little portico to the other, his overcoat draped over his shoulders, he contemplated the passing of this baby girl, his innocent child, undersized, undernourished. He observed the stars, remaining on the porch until long after midnight, his mind shaping something, a treatise that would transform human thought, revolutionize the world of physical and metaphysical science.
He felt himself ready to unveil the mysteries of being and nothingness, baring nothing less than the secret of eternity.
He hungered for the companionship of women. He could not bear to attend the funeral of little Fanny Fay. Again he approached Olga Hays. “I swear,” he implored her, “I believe wholeheartedly, that I have been born to suffer and this suffering has only served to embitter my whole life,” telling her he despised ignorant people and held no stock for trifling or small talk. He told her in the presence of her father, once again echoing words Hays had heard from Mrs. Mary Jenkins, that she had the most beautiful head of hair in the world. “They are the locks poets rave over,” Poe said, smiling weakly. “They are the tresses I adore.”
Again he was rebuffed.
Saying he was humbled, after pining alone for several weeks, he decided he must try once more with Mrs. Osgood, beg her to be with him. He traveled by train back to Albany, where he intended to throw himself on her.
When he appeared at Fanny’s door, professing love, she acted not surprised at all to see him. She said he was expected, that a local seeress had foreseen his coming. With all that had happened, they embraced and she wept for their departed baby. She spoke wistfully, recalling their first meeting in the Astor House. They sat on her front path, under the garden trellis, bathed in moonlight. She said she had composed a poem for him, and she recited it from memory whilst they sat amidst the honeysuckle:
Oh! Thou grim and ancient Raven,
From the Night’s plutonic shore,
Oft in dreams, thy ghastly pinions
Wave and flutter round my door—
Romeo talks of “White doves trooping,
Amid crows athwart the night,”
But to see thy dark wing swooping
Down the silvery path of light,
Amid swans and dovelets stooping,
Were, to me, a nobler sight …
Then, oh! Grim and ghastly Raven!
Wilt thou to my heart and ear
Be a raven true as ever
Flapped his wings and croaked “Despair”?
Late that evening he proposed marriage but admitted confusion, confessing he still suffered grief over the loss of Virginia.
She swore it mattered not to her, after all, she was still married to Mr. Osgood.
“I shall speak to your husband.” Poe rose, clasping her hands in his.
“No, no,” she insisted, “I shall see to him,” and again she began to cry.
H
E RETURNED JUBILANT
to Fordham to inform Muddie he would shortly be returning to live in their tiny cottage with a new bride.
Mrs. Clemm was so alarmed by this crazed and abrupt declaration, suspicious of the circumstance and unsaid implication of the forthcoming union to an already married woman, the stark revelation that Mrs. Osgood, as Eddie’s new bride, would now be coming to live a penniless existence to which she could be in no way inured, a life of deprivation and hardship that to Muddie’s mind had led to nothing less than the forfeiture of the very life of her own daughter, upon hearing the news, collapsed in the cottage’s
petit foyer
.
Poe dismissed his aunt’s apprehension. He swore to her Fanny would present no problem. “Mrs. Osgood loves me too deeply,” he contended.
Muddie retreated. Regrouping, she urged her son-in-law, if he must marry, to thoroughly warn Fanny of his circumstance, and what the reality of an existence lacking necessary funds for even ordinary sustenance would soon mean.
He scoffed at her but bussed her cheek, his aunt who remained very cold to him, and, saying goodbye, swore he had a plan and would make all well.
He left Fordham by rail but did not proceed directly to Albany and the arms of Mrs. Osgood. Instead, he made a side trip, heading east and disembarking the train in Hartford, Connecticut, to proceed directly to the newly founded factory works of Samuel Colt on Pearl Street.
In Whitneyville, where the Colonel had shared enterprise and premises with the junior Mr. Eli Whitney, he had chosen to take no cash profit out of their revolver business, but rather shrewdly took his end in the new machinery procured by him and his partner in order to see to the manufacture of the firearms in the first place.
Before the delivery of the second batch of government orders, Colt broke the partnership with Whitney and moved his share of the factory works, including this new machinery, from Whitneyville to Hartford. It was here on Pearl Street where Poe came.
With no wait whatsoever, he found himself ushered into the Colonel’s office, an amalgam of rich Central American woods and fine East Indian carpets.
“Poe!” Samuel Colt exclaimed upon laying eyes on him and clamoring to his feet. “My God, man,” he shouted, clapping him on the back like a long-lost brother and seeming genuinely pleased. “After what I’ve read in the public prints and heard tongues wag, I was not sure I would ever see you again alive.”
“I am well,” Poe smiled, adding what had become something of his easy mantra, “Better. Best. Mr. Colt, with all due respect, I need to talk to you, sir,” he said.
“You are here, my good man. You have my ear. Please have a seat.”
“Thank you, sir.” After arranging himself, Poe said, “Although not on me at present, I have in my possession a manuscript with which I think thou must be interested. I am sure it is penned by none other than your brother, and I am sure it is of recent vintage. Do you know anything in regard to this matter, sir?”
Colt pursed his lips sourly. “My brother is dead,” he said softly yet firmly. “I am hoping you have no thought otherwise. In no way should you be in receipt of any proof that he is anything other!”
“No, no,” Poe stammered, and coughed. Colonel Colt’s eyes were indeed intent upon him. “What I have in my possession must surely have been written before John’s tragic passing, a poor replication, and I shall swear to that at any inquisition, to any inquisitor. I am only looking for your reassurance and support, sir. This work has most assuredly only now come to me. From whence I cannot be sure. I thought it was you, but perhaps his wife.”
“I am hopeful you are not going to be a problem, Mr. Poe. My brother’s widow has returned to resume her life in Europe. She may have sent it. I cannot say.”
“I swear to you on the soul of my own poor wife, I shall do my best to see”—he cleared his throat— “the memory of your brother John well protected. My assessment is there can be but one reason these poems have reached my hands, and that is to see them well published. But if this is not the case, in his best interest, or in the best interest of you, sir, and your family, I am here to abide by your decision, an individual so strong-willed and clearheaded. We all shall see justice done, sir. In all actuality, Colonel Colt, that is what has prompted my visit, why I am here. I don’t know if you know this, sir, but my darling wife, God rest her soul, has died.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Colt said, his eyes steady on Poe.
“Thank you. I am now engaged to be married to someone else. A wonderful woman, I might add. A poetess, charming and intelligent. Sissy, my departed wife, I know, would be pleased with my choice.”
“I’m happy for you.” Colt crossed and uncrossed his legs. He had clearly grown impatient with this conversation, although Poe was not aware enough to perceive anyone else’s discomfort save his own.
“Thank you again, sir. I regret to be forced to tell you, however, that I have a problem. I see how efficient and well you are doing here in your munitions factory, and I sit in admiration of you and your prosperity. The life of a writer is something else entirely. I know you desire
to keep your brother’s legacy bright. To this most estimable end, could you see fit to advance me funds against royalties of any publication of his work, only so that my family and the family of my intended will not look upon me with such skepticism and loathing? You see, all concerned seem to be unsure of my financial situation and distrust me. I have assured my auntie and wife-to-be many times over that I am solvent, but, not unreasonably, they have all voiced their doubts. Funds from you in my pocket would surely cure all of this ill will.”
“You want money?”
“Only against my editorial skills as rendered on behalf of the manuscript in my possession, sir. Mine is in no way the venture of a highwayman.”
“I see. I am relieved, yet confused. And what exactly is your intent, Poe?”
“As you wish, Colonel. I shall see your brother’s admirable efforts well published in an acceptable manner, as I perceive my charge to your brother’s estate and memory … or, if you prefer, I can make the manuscript disappear and it shall never be heard from again. It’s entirely a decision I make yours.”
Colonel Colt remained momentarily motionless. “I see, Poe,” he finally said, nodding ever so slightly. “I see what you have in mind, and I see, sir, what must be done.”
U
PON ARRIVAL
in Albany, Poe found much licentious talk going round that city in regard to him and the prospects of any upcoming marriage ceremony to Mrs. Osgood, fueled in part by malicious tales that he had, already since his arrival, been seen drinking red wine in the company of several friends at the River House in downtown Albany. (He claimed them to be Sergeant Bully Graves from his days at Fort Moultrie and some old West Point comrades up from Bear Mountain.)