The Blackest Bird (45 page)

As part of the agreed marriage arrangement, Poe had promised Fanny to forevermore eschew drink. Now rumor had it here he was
already partaking. Finally, convinced by a claque of concerned and wary friends that her influence would matter to naught over her new husband, Mrs. Osgood agreed to rethink her engagement, as it were, come to her senses. Poe was summoned from his hotel by embossed letterhead to the Osgood family home, where he was informed by Mrs. Oakes Smith, who had hurried on such mission up from the city, of Fanny’s change of heart.

From his breast pocket Poe removed the currency procured from Colonel Colt, and waved the bills about the air as proof of his liquidity.

Staring across the parlor, unbelieving, he approached Mrs. Osgood and begged her not to deem this a final interview. He fell upon his knees, imploring her to reconsider.

“Say that you love me!” he begged.

Mrs. Osgood was worn out, about to faint and near hysteria. A handkerchief soaked in ether and supplied by Mrs. Oakes Smith was clasped to her mouth.

“I love you,” she murmured before Poe was rudely seized by Mr. Osgood, he who had been biding his time out of sight on the back porch at the ready for signal, his coattails full of pistols.

With Poe in iron hand, Mr. Osgood roughly escorted him to the station with the aid of several burly gentlemen, where a southbound train awaited.

R
ETURNED TO
N
EW
Y
ORK
in such circumstance, Poe once more assumed a state of nervous agitation. By the end of the day he appeared on Lispenard Street, at Olga Hays’ doorstep, on the verge of collapse. Old Hays answered his knock and was shocked to see the condition of the caller. He ushered him inside, but before calling for Olga as requested, told the man there was no chance he would be allowed to stay in the house or in the company of his daughter, whereupon Poe crumpled to the floor.

Over the next days, despite her father’s objections her patient
should be remanded to the care of the hospital at the Northern Dispensary, Poe stayed in Olga’s study. He was subject to spells of delirium and hours of wandering, sleeping twelve hours a day yet near the limits of exhaustion. Seeing him this way, Olga became truly alarmed, and again called in Dr. Francis from his home in Greenwich Village. The doctor examined Poe and quickly ascertained that his heart was beating irregularly. Observing that Poe’s sleeps resembled comas, Dr. Francis warned his patient that unless he gave up all stimulants and excesses, the end was near.

Poe dismissed Dr. Francis’s prognosis without denying his death might be imminent. Once more he took up Olga’s hand in his, Hays looking on, resigned to silence. “Unless some true and tender and pure womanly love saves me,” Poe swore, “I shall hardly last a year longer alone.”

The Hays home was not far from a church. That afternoon Olga and her patient sat in the pleasant little backyard overlooking the well-maintained garden where she enjoyed drinking her tea.

Poe complained that he had been contracted to write a poem but had no inspiration. Olga, in hopes of helping him, went for paper, steel pen, and ink. For a moment or longer they sat in silence, then the bells from the nearby church began to sound. To Poe’s jangled nerves the ringing was like an assault on his ears. He pushed the paper away harshly, declaring, “I dislike the noise of bells tonight. I am exhausted. I cannot write. I have no subject.”

Olga, exasperated with him, then took it upon herself to seize the blank paper from his hand and write:

Poe, seeing what she was about, pulled back the paper and with the same pen, snatched from her hand, finished the stanza, but in so doing his eyes rolled back in his head and he almost lapsed into a state of trance.

Olga then took the paper back from him a second time, upon which she wrote:

Fluttering his long, almost feminine eyelashes, Poe once more grabbed from her pen and ink and now finished in a scribble the verse, continuing through to end the two stanzas:

Following supper, Olga took the poet upstairs and installed him on the feathered mattress in her own bedroom, where he appeared to lapse into a very deep sleep, his breathing labored.

She returned downstairs. Her father wore a sour expression. “What?” she said, but Hays said nothing save he thought Dr. Francis should again be summoned.

Upon arrival the medical man sat at Poe’s bedside, Olga watching, noting his symptoms. “His pulse is weak and very irregular.”

Afterwards, downstairs in the kitchen, Dr. Francis spoke quietly to Hays and his daughter the caregiver. “He has heart disease, and will die early in life.”

Two days later, alone in the rear garden, Poe tried to kill himself by ingesting a large quantity of laudanum, more than an ounce. (He claimed to have procured two ounces of the elixir, mumbling to Hays, who found him prostrate on the blue stone, he planned to save the second dose to administer while in the presence of Fanny Osgood should he survive the first.) The ingested narcotic, something more than thirty times a normal dose, did not take fatal effect. With the help of a mustard mixture, poured down his throat by Hays, he vomited, thus saving himself.

“Forced to endure,” he forswore to he who had saved him, “the awful horrors which succeeded.”

His reason gone, in a state aghast, his hand trembling, with Hays standing behind him encouraging him, the high constable’s two strong hands on his shoulders, the poet somehow managed to take pen to paper and write his beloved auntie, although disguising his true affliction from her. “My dear, dear Mother, my dear Muddie,” he began. “I have been so ill—have had cholera, or spasms, or something, quite as bad, and can now hardly hold a pen.”

Still, he engendered hope, telling Muddie, again at Jacob Hays’ insistence, he was to undertake a change of air, one last expedition. In receipt of an invitation from the
Southern Literary Messenger
, a magazine for which he had worked as a young man, he was to travel to Richmond, Virginia. His days may be numbered, and he may have been regressing, but he would make his way home again to the city where he had been brought up by John and Frances Allan.

On the steam train heading south, in a state of the occult or paranoia, he thought he was being followed, although each time he turned around abruptly, he could catch no one lurking.

Upon arrival in Richmond he hurried to his hotel and mailed a second missive back to his aunt at the Fordham cottage:

In spite of his weakened health, once back in the Virginia city, he found his way to visit old friends from his youth, a poetic figure always clad in black, slender, erect, the lines of his face continually fixed as if in deep, impenetrable meditation.

His schedule, arranged by Mr. White, editor of the
Messenger
, called for him to give three lectures on the nature and state of contemporary American poetry. But upon delving into his trunk on the occasion
of the evening of the first event, to his utter consternation he found his notes and pages missing. Not only that, but he could not find the John Colt manuscript which he had chosen to carry with him for safekeeping and had carefully sequestered.

Momentarily he panicked, thinking of the apparitions on the train, before finding the notes stuffed into his boot, and the Colt manuscript laid out unceremoniously beneath his underwear.

The next day, while walking Broad Street, he heard a familiar voice call out to him.

“Mars Eddie!”

He turned, and the corners of his mouth broke upward in an unrestrained grin. It was his boyhood companion, the loyal slave of the Allan family, Dabney Dandridge, whose ghost stories had entranced him as a child.

His former ally hugged Poe and kissed him as if he were his own long-lost son. “I am the property of Miz Myra now,” Dab explained. “She bought me after Massa Allan passed.”

It was a warm Sunday afternoon. Poe’s lost love of his happy youth, Sarah Elmira Royster, was now known as the Widow Mrs. Shelton. Her husband, older than she by twenty-five years, had died some years before of a heart aneurysm, leaving her at present with two grown children and a substantial estate, the deceased spouse having been in life a very successful merchant.

The Widow Shelton had matured into a handsome, pious woman, middle-aged but of substantial carriage. Informed that she had a gentleman caller, she came downstairs immediately from her chambers, dressed and ready for church.

Poe rose upon seeing her. “Oh, Myra,” he exclaimed, “is it you?”

The widow and her poet had reached a rapid understanding. It seemed finally that he would be delivered. As an impressionable and ardent young man, he had gone off to Thomas Jefferson’s university at a time when their love had been very much in flower. It was his hardhearted stepfather, and her own wretched, overprotective parent, who had kept his impassioned letters of youthful love from her. At the time, neither could ever have known what these two sour, vindictive individuals had conspired against them, and it was only now in fervent conversation that they both came to realize fully what had happened all those many years ago.

He had been greatly shocked upon returning home to find her poised to marry another. Looking back, he reflected miserably, “Who is to say this was not the beginning of the end for me? In truth I have never recovered from this betrayal of the heart.”

“Oh, Edgar,” she breathed, and clasped his hand to her bosom.

Now, quite by serendipity, things looked bright for him again. Almost with the renewed fervor of youth, he regained his stamina. He was, after all, a man of certain fame. In Richmond he was welcome in society and found himself looked upon favorably. The Widow Mrs. Shelton took him to a fashionable haberdashery in downtown Richmond and bought for him a sparkling new white suit.

With the prospect of being married and living back in his once home
city with no financial worries, once more feeling comfortable and whole, the poet could finally hope to achieve all that he had long sought.

“I know the winds have changed for our Eddie,” Myra wrote in a second note to Mrs. Clemm. “I trust a kind of Providence will protect him now, and guide him in the way of truth, so that his feet will never again slip.”

Holding each other’s hands, she and Eddie whispered of him returning to Fordham to pack his belongings. She urged him to ask Muddie to come back to Richmond with him.

Their last meeting would be one marked extraordinarily by nature and the cosmos. They were standing in the portico of her home, at which point he paused and turned and lifted his hand to her in final adieu. At that very moment, as she looked upon his handsome countenance with much awe and love, a meteor appeared in the sky directly over his head before disappearing. It would be the final image she would hold of him.

O
N THE WATERFRONT
the following morning, he appeared at 4 a. m., visibly showing strain to his bearing and psyche. He boarded a steamer, poised to embark north for Baltimore and ultimately New York.

The trip to Gotham took forty-eight hours. Stops, one after the other, included Eppe Island, Windmill Point, Powhatan, Sandy Point, Hog Island, Day’s Point, Old Point Comfort, Rappahanoc River, Smith’s Point, Point Lookout, Patuxent River, Cove Point, Sharp’s Island, Herring Bay, Annapolis, a second Sandy Point, and finally North Point, Baltimore.

On board there was a bar forward for the refreshment of gentlemen travelers. Poe took his cabin, installed his trunk in the hold, and before the first Sandy Point, remanded to this saloon.

He stood at the bar in his white suit facing the mirror behind the bartender. He failed to order when asked, however, merely staring off at his reflection in the silvered glass.

At Cove Point a group of five young toughs boarded the boat. They were rough, stringy men, ill dressed, who at first kept to themselves, and had an air of menace. One was a cripple, with a withered arm and leg. Another’s name was overheard to be Pugsy. There was also Boffo and Ossian. They all wore soft caps. They split up and circled the deck, forward and aft.

When Poe was spotted in the barroom, the noticer, the cripple Tweeter Toohey, went limping after his fellows. They returned, three strong, Tweeter and Ossian left standing watch on deck.

One, dressed a thimblerig bully with velvet waistcoat, fancy neckerchief, gilt chains, soap-locked hair, and filigreed buttons, seemed familiar to Poe.

“From where do I know you?” he asked, the response being, with no hesitation, “The Tombs.”

“And your name is?” even though he knew the answer.

“Tommy Coleman.”

The poet half bowed. “I have the honor.”

“You know me then, mate?” said Tommy Coleman.

There arose in Edgar Poe then, confused and paradoxically within his mind, the ideas of vast mental power, of caution, of penuriousness, of avarice, of coolness, of malice, of bloodthirstiness, of triumph, of merriment, of excessive terror, of intense, supreme despair. “Sir,” he inquired of the youthful gang leader, “who among us has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not, you and I, a perpetual inclination in the teeth of our best judgment to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such? This spirit of perverseness is the unfathomable longing of the spirit to vex itself, to offer violence to its own nature, to commit that deadly sin which would so jeopardize its own immortal soul.”