Vinnie shrugged, her braids riding her narrow shoulders. “You.”
Mrs. Clemm was in the back parlor with Eliza, sitting on the edge of the sofa, when I came in.
“There you are!” said Eliza, overly heartily. “Did you get any work done?”
Mrs. Clemm turned her head so that I could see within her white bonnet. Her eyes, round and blue as a child’s marbles, held their usual worried expression.
There came a thump from upstairs, then the shrill shouts of the youngest Bartletts. Eliza got up. “Will you two excuse me for a minute? I think I need to settle a small war.”
Mrs. Clemm folded, then refolded her gloved hands as Eliza walked away. “I’m sorry to interrupt. Mrs. Bartlett said you were writing.”
I faced my fear head-on. “How is Mrs. Poe?”
“I came on her behalf.”
“How can I help?”
She met my eyes, her foolish blue marbles filled with distress. “She’s so unhappy! Eddie hardly spends any time with her.”
“He works so much,” I murmured guiltily.
“I thought he might be here.” She peered toward the hallway as if I might be hiding him.
“He does visit with the family here, as you know. We all enjoy his company. We’d so like it if you and Mrs. Poe would come more often with him.”
“We don’t know where he is,” she blurted.
Had he not gone home after he’d left the Bartletts’ last night? “He must have gone to his office to work on his poem for the Boston Lyceum. That seems to weigh so heavily on his mind.”
“He wasn’t there.” Mrs. Clemm heaved a sigh. “I can’t be worrying about both of my children. I can only worry about them one at a time, and now it’s Virginia who concerns me most.”
Fear concentrated my mind. “Does she need a doctor?”
“She needs her husband.”
The very last place on earth I would wish to be was with Mrs. Poe, but guilt made me say it: “May I come to see her?”
She looked startled. “Well! I never thought— That is terribly kind of you, but you really needn’t.”
“I insist.”
“You really shouldn’t.” She guiltily met my eyes.
“I would like to help, Mrs. Clemm. It’s important to me. Please, let me come.”
She drew a shuddering sigh. “If you have to. . . .”
“I’ll get my hat and coat.” I went upstairs, relieved to be away from her, albeit for a moment.
How fitting, I thought as I tied on my bonnet, that I had to nearly beg her to do something I dreaded to my very marrow.
• • •
Mrs. Poe was sleeping on the sofa when we arrived. The pallor of her face shocked me. She’d become so thin that the blue network of veins stood out from her skin. You could almost see her skull.
“Hello, Mrs. Poe,” I said, just inside the doorway.
“Go closer,” said Mrs. Clemm. “She can’t hear you.”
Was she dead? I threw Mrs. Clemm a panicked glance.
“Go on.”
I took two steps closer. In the shadow of her black wing of hair, I saw the blood vessel in her temple gently pulsating.
“Mrs. Poe?” I whispered.
Fingers snapped behind me.
Her eyes flashed open. I jerked back, nearly stepping into Mrs. Clemm, who in turn stepped on the tortoiseshell cat. It screeched and ran away.
“You’re up!” exclaimed Mrs. Clemm, as if Mrs. Poe’s waking was extraordinary.
Mrs. Poe yawned as if awaking from a refreshing nap and then smiled at me. “I was dreaming about you.”
“Me?”
She coughed into her handkerchief. “It was a happy dream. I was you and you were me.”
I scanned the room as if to latch upon something normal, something stable, to speak about. The furnishings had grown plusher since Greenwich Street. Matching red satin chairs had been arranged around a rosewood table. An oil lamp dripped with pretty prisms. A bookcase groaned with volumes. Over the stairs, on the wall above the banister, hung a framed daguerreotype. I peered closer: it was my headless portrait.
Mrs. Clemm looked sheepish when she caught my shocked expression. “Eddie put it there.”
“Don’t lie, Mother,” said Mrs. Poe. “I put it there.”
I smiled stiffly. Regardless of who’d hung it, why had Mr. Poe allowed that macabre portrait to remain?
Mrs. Poe reached for the bottle on the stand by the sofa and poured herself a spoonful with shaking hands. She swallowed with effort. “Eddie doesn’t like that picture. But he’s not here long enough to have a say in it, is he?”
I swallowed back the dismay rising in my throat. I shouldn’t have come.
Mrs. Clemm showed me to a seat by her daughter. “You two have a nice chat. I’ll be
right outside sweeping.” She bustled out the door, released from her sickbed duty.
Mrs. Poe eased back down until she was lying on her side. She watched me with too-bright eyes.
What did I say to this creature? “Have you been able to write?”
Her sigh rattled the fluid in her lungs. “Oh, thank you, Mrs. Osgood. Nobody takes my writing seriously. May I share my poem with you?”
“Of course.”
She pointed to a wooden box in the bookcase. “In there.”
I went to it. The box had once done service holding gloves, according to the advertisement for “finest handwear” from Brooks Brothers clothing store glued to the lid. I removed the top and extracted the first page. “May I read it aloud?”
She sighed, bringing on a cough. “Please.”
I smiled, sickening myself with falseness, and began:
Ever with thee I wish to roam—
Dearest my life is thine.
Give me a cottage for my home
And a rich old cypress vine,
Removed from the world with its sin and care
And the tattling of many tongues.
Love alone shall guide us when we are there—
Love shall heal my weakened lungs;
And Oh, the tranquil hours we’ll spend,
Never wishing that others may see!
Perfect ease we’ll enjoy, without thinking to lend
Ourselves to the world and its glee—
Ever peaceful and blissful we’ll be.
I looked up when I finished.
She coughed, her eyes, overlarge in her wasted body, unblinking. “If you take the first letter in each line, it spells ‘Edgar Allan Poe.’ ”
“Oh, I see now. Very nice.”
“It’s every bit as good as the poems he publishes of yours.”
We stared at each other. A violent rush of terrified guilt swept over
me, leaving every pore of my body bristling with fear. She knew about Mr. Poe and me. She blamed me for his neglect of her, for taking him away when she needed him most. She knew and she was going to make me suffer. As long as she clung to life, she would make me pay.
I clasped my hands to stop their tremor. “I fear my poems are just foolish pieces of fluff next to this.” My voice sounded thin in my ears.
“Well,” she said with a smile, “I have an idea for you.”
As much as I yearned to, I could not look away from her.
“Write about what’s on your mind. My husband has made his fortune upon it. His work might seem to be about black cats or birds or mansions tumbling down, but in the end, it’s all about him. You just need to know what to look for to see it.” She barked into her handkerchief. When she finished, her smile sharpened. “Do you know what to look for, Mrs. Osgood? Do you know my husband as well as you think you do?”
I stood up. “Thank you for sharing your poem with me.” I walked toward the door.
“Why don’t you write about a woman whose husband is so busy writing love poems to his lover,” she called after me, “that he doesn’t see that his wife is dying?”
I stopped, my hand on the doorknob.
She finished my thought as neatly as if it had come from her own head. “You’re quite right. That is incorrect. He
does
see that she is dying. And so does his lover.” She lifted bony shoulders in a shrug. “But somehow that would make the story less nice, don’t you think?”
I could pretend no more. “Good-bye, Mrs. Poe.” I fled out the door, nearly colliding with Mrs. Clemm, sweeping the porch step.
She stepped aside, her silly blue marbles puzzled within her bonnet. “Come back soon!”
I paused at the curb before their house, to cross the street behind an ice wagon. I saw something shining in the gutter. I leaned down. A smooth silver locket. I picked it up and turned it over. On it were initials: VP.
At that moment the horse pulling the ice wagon jerked forward. The rear door sprang open. A block of ice the size of a stove slid out and smashed against my shoulder. It dropped to the gutter with a crunching thud.
Mrs. Clemm dropped her rake and hustled to my side. I rubbed my throbbing shoulder—was it dislocated?—and stared at the mammoth block, chopped from the North River last winter. A fish that had been frozen in it gaped at me with cloudy eyes.
The mustachioed driver came running from the neighbor’s house.
“Look what you’ve done!” cried Mrs. Clemm. “You could have killed her!”
“But de door, I latch!” he cried in a thick accent. “Before I go in, I latch.” He whipped off his flat-topped cap, leaving his few sparse strands of hair in disarray, then knelt beside me. “Madam, did I hurt?”
“No.” I touched my tender shoulder. I could move it. “I’m fine.”
I looked up at the porch. Mrs. Poe was leaning against the doorjamb, watching. How long had she been there?
“Here.” I held out the locket to Mrs. Clemm. “Is this yours?”
The knobs of her cheeks reddened. “Goodness me, thank you! How did Virginia’s locket get out here?”
One troubling word sprang to mind:
coincidence
.
Twenty-eight
Three days passed. To my girls’ dismay, Samuel remained gone, as I knew he would. Mr. Poe did not come to the Bartletts, either, time enough for Mrs. Poe’s troubling words to take hold. Time enough for me to seize upon his works and pore through them for clues about the man with whom I was inextricably linked. A chilling theme emerged. In tale after tale, “The Black Cat,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Imp of the Perverse,” an innocent person was murdered, the body was hidden, and the culprit went free. The murderer then lived the life of his dreams until slowly, driven mad by his own relentless guilt, he crumbled. He ended up revealing his own crime, bringing on his own complete and utter ruin.
I recalled Mr. Bartlett’s phrenological reading, when he pronounced Mr. Poe to be unstable and capable of violence. He said that Mr. Poe’s very head shape indicated a man on the brink of explosion. Deny it as I might, there was already evidence of such. Mr. Poe’s brutally scathing assessments of other writers were unprecedented in our field. The narrators of his stories so often committed heinous crimes. And although I did not wish to admit it, I could now see his terrible struggle for self-mastery when goaded by his wife. Was part of the real Mr. Poe contained in his wrenching stories?
Yet, to me, Mr. Poe was nothing but ardently adoring. I had never been so cherished, so valued, so worshipped by a man. Although clearly frustrated by convention, he struggled to restrain himself within the rules of civility. I did not know which he was: The guilt-ridden man-beast, capable of murder? Or the respectful, loving mate of my soul?
I could not bear another moment of sitting at home that afternoon,
reading his stories. It being a crisp day in October, I took a stage down to Battery Park with the thought of clearing my head. I wanted to walk among boring fashionable people, persons with no other worries than if they got mud upon their shoes or if they’d dressed sufficiently for the chill.
I was at the waterfront by Castle Garden, standing among the crowd that had gathered to see an exotic Chinese junk come into port, when I felt a touch upon my elbow.
“A delivery for Mr. Astor?”
I turned around. Mr. Poe stood behind me, his black hair whipping in the wind. The gladness in his eyes nearly melted me.
“I shudder to think,” he said, “how many bears and beavers paid for that ship.”
I must not return his smile. Where had he been these past days? Yet, I had no real claim on him. I had no right to ask.
I kept my voice level. “Your wife has been looking for you.”
The joy drained from his face. “I’m sorry. I should have told her. I should have reported in with you, too. I was thrilled to have seen you here.”
“Coincidence,” I said coolly, even as I marveled at the chances, in a city of thousands, of coming upon one another like this.
“The truth is, I have been wandering the streets for days, thinking to drive an idea for the Boston presentation into this skull of mine.” He sighed deeply. “So far, I have nothing.”
Concern for him overrode my other emotions. His address at the Boston Lyceum was in three days, the address at which his success was so important to him. For whatever reason, impressing the Bostonians was the dream of his lifetime. He had nothing for it?
“Is it necessary that you write something new?” I asked. “Surely there’s a poem lying in a trunk at home that you can dust off and make brilliant.”
“The Bostonians will recognize if I’ve merely reworked something. They are diabolically smart, damn them.”
“Bostonians are like everyone else. They ride only one horse at a time, just like the rest of us.”
“They aren’t like everyone else”—he blew out a sigh—“and they know it.”
I did pity him. “You’re from Boston,” I said softly. “You can beat them at their game.”
The wind tugged his neck cloth from the collar of his coat, adding to his wild appearance. “Being born there isn’t enough. I’m an imposter and they sense it.”
“As someone who grew up with Bostonians,” I said, “I can tell you, for a fact, that you are far superior to any of them whom I have met.”