The Blackest Bird (38 page)

F
or a long while after Poe’s departure and her father retired to bed, Olga remains at her mother’s former sewing table, now functioning as her desk. Above her on the shelf, where once stood stored needles, brass thimbles, tape measure, and variety of threads, now resides her library. As she gazed upon these volumes, her eyes lit on her well-worn childhood copy of Susanna Rowson’s novel
Charlotte Temple
, and she remembers vividly, as if it were now, her Sunday afternoon pilgrimage, at her persistent insistence, with her father, hand in hand, to Trinity churchyard to visit Charlotte’s grave.

In her mind, she recalled the day chill with no rain but much moisture in the air. The sky dark, black, with low, ominous clouds, yet a large crowd, mostly stony-faced fathers and bemused mothers accompanying impassioned little girls, had assembled in front of Charlotte’s grave. Much weeping, many flowers, a plethora of handwritten notes, each of endearing love, sympathy, and support, suffused the grave bed and stone.

“I am so sad,” little Olga had uttered, looking up into the broad, dark face of her father, dark as the sky, dark as the clouds. His expression was set, and as she began to sob softly, he took her hand more firmly and led her off some distance.

“Young lady,” he said sternly then (she must have been nearing nine, no more), “it is the duty of a good papa to tell the truth to the daughter he loves so much and treasures.”

She waited, damp eyes wide and expectant.

“You know who Charlotte Temple is, Olga?” he said.

“Yes,” she answered dutifully.

“And who, might I ask, is she?”

“She is a girl who was done wrong. She suffered and died for her sins, and she is buried here at Trinity Church.”

“No,” he said. “Charlotte did not live. She did not die. Charlotte is not real, Olga. She is a figure out of the imagination of Mrs. Rowson, the authoress.”

“Charlotte
is
real,” Olga had emphatically corrected him. “And she has been laid to rest here. It is a tale of truth,” she insisted, evoking the novel’s oft-repeated subtitle.

“No, no,” her father said. “Not truth, dear, merely an apocryphal tale. It is made up, Olga. It is a story. Granted, a pointed story with strong moral, meant to instruct, nothing more.”

“Then who is buried here in Trinity churchyard in Charlotte’s grave?” asked Olga.

Her father shook his head. “No one is buried here,” he said. “This grave is empty. It is but a mockery, a stone unveiled at the insistence of Mrs. Rowson’s readers, those who adored her creation, your Charlotte Temple.”

Back in her study, Olga cringes, almost felt embarrassment to have ever been so heartfelt and passionate, so naïve. She ran her hands through her hair, considering Edgar Poe, recent visitor to her home, his weakness for women, for love. She thought of the murdered segar girl, Mary Rogers, her first disappearance, her second, the circumstance of pregnancy, of virtue. She wondered of her father’s motive in bringing Mr. Poe home. She knew her father. He wanted her to see something, be aware of something, judge something.

Here Olga pauses for a moment. Why did she pause? She was not sure.

Who had killed Mary Rogers? Under what circumstance?

Then, shaking herself free from this torrent of formless impressions cascading down upon her, she rises from her makeshift desk and enters the kitchen. From the counter she takes a full head of cabbage, places it on a planked board, and begins to chop with an unexplained vigor. Earlier that morning she had made egg dough. Finishing with the cabbage, she flattens the dough, dips her knife into water, and cuts long, half-inch-wide lengths for noodles. When finished, she dices an onion, freshly stokes the fire, and sets the onions in a pan to lightly brown. She then adds the green chopped cabbage leaves, a good deal of dark red paprika, damp gray salt, and coarse black pepper. She pours in a cup of Croton water and stirs a few times with a wooden spoon as the cabbage, water, and spice begin to cook down.

When the cabbage is evenly stained orange-red with the paprika, she returns to her mother’s sewing room. Revisiting her thoughts, she asks herself again could this man she knows somewhat vaguely but admires, this most curious fellow, this brilliant gentleman some seem so ready to condemn (including her own father?), this Mr. Edgar Poe, truly have performed so heinous an act on such a girl as Mary Rogers?

And if not he, who?

M
eanwhile, sometime later that morning, he, the author and poet in question, and under suspicion, appears at the New York office of
Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine
, his former employer in the Quaker City, now resituated on Manhattan’s lower Broadway, with the idea to sell, in his estimation, the only thing he has worth anything, his new poem of the black bird.

The present number of the magazine was in production and the noise of the handpresses was overwhelming. George Rex Graham was a native of Philadelphia. He had been publisher of that city’s
Casket
when he bought out Billy Burton and changed the name of his periodical from
Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and American Monthly
Review
to
Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine
.

The new owner had sought Poe out specifically and retained him in his capacity of editor. For his part, Edgar had eagerly gone to work for Graham at his newly located offices at Third and Chestnut, earning a satisfactory, renegotiated yearly salary of eight hundred dollars.

Up until then, Poe had been known more as a critic than a poet, but he had a newly burgeoning reputation as a fiction writer, approaching his notoriety as a critic. To his detriment, Poe began to moan in print that the effect of his personal analytic brilliance was illusory.

As a result, critics maligned him, charging he was on a mission to subject the whole of American letters to his own personal critical authority.

Bewildered Graham ordered his editor to soften his stance.

Trying to appease his boss, Poe argued his need to defend himself. “I would never allow my personal feelings in regard to literary personalities to cloud my critical judgment about their work,” he protested to Graham’s counsel.

Poe declared ruthlessly he could neither tolerate nor work under such subjugation. He said he had already been put in a place where he was forced to praise ninnies. He quit in a fit, although some observers, less generous, claimed he was fired over matters of drunkenness and ineffectuality. Making matters worse, hired in his place was his rival for arbiter of American poetic taste, the pinch-faced Reverend Rufus Wilmot Griswold (sometimes called “Rufe,” sometimes called “Griz,” sometimes called “Animal”), at a salary of one thousand dollars per annum, two hundred dollars more than Poe had been getting paid.

No matter. On this day, as he received entry into the inner sanctum of Graham’s newly located magazine publishing facility, head bowed for fullest dramatic effect, all would be forgiven and forgotten in Poe’s mind.

After being warmly greeted by his ex-employer, Poe took Graham aside and whispered he had something most pressing to reveal. He admitted tearfully that he was destitute of funds, his wife ailing, both she and his aunt home, starving. Brightening somewhat, he announced he had a copy of a new poem he would like Mr. Graham to see and consider for publication in his magazine. From his breast pocket he pulled the same script from which he had read the previous afternoon at the Brennan farm. The scroll, carefully copied out in his own neat hand, was passed between Graham and his fellow publisher, Louis Godey of the
Godey’s Lady’s Book
, who happened to be present in the office at the time. Thankfully, Griswold was not.

After reading, one over the other, neither man was much
impressed, both saying the poem was evocative of Dickens’ work in
Barnaby Rudge
, where like
avis
, the raven named Grip, is mentioned.

Godey nimbly quoted from that popular work, his face lit with boyish glee: “‘Grip, Grip, Grip!’” he cried. “‘Grip the clever, Grip the wicked, Grip the knowing—Grip, Grip, Grip!’”

Graham laughed with his fellow publisher’s cleverness. “‘I’m a devil,’” he yelped in his own feat of memory, exercising what Poe considered a rather pathetic imitation of a raven’s caw. “‘I’m a devil I’m a devil. Never say die. Hurrah! Bow wow wow! Polly put the kettle on and we’ll all have tea.’”

Godey then guffawed heartily with this rather spirited spectacle, to be joined by Graham, although Poe failed to see the humor in it, he, too, being perfectly capable of reciting the bird’s nonsense lines verbatim.

Seeing Poe’s pained and confused reaction, Graham shrank back and tried to right himself. He pronounced Poe’s poem “eerie,” but if he meant this as a compliment remained unclear to Poe. He who considered himself word master felt in the unenviable position of having to defend himself.

He rose up, insistent on the verse’s merits. Again he mentioned (he said, reluctantly) his financial difficulties. “It would not do to let us poor devil authors absolutely starve,” he bitterly argued, “while you publishers grow fat on our backs.”

“Poe—” Graham protested.

Spiritually wounded, Poe waved him off to continue. “That a man has any right and title either to his own brains or the flimsy masterly firmament that he chooses to spin out of them, I ask you,” he begged. “How can I endure?”

In recognition of the poet’s state and in deference to his stature, the rest of the magazine’s staff was called in and Poe, seizing the manuscript out of Godey’s hands, angrily read the verse to Graham’s gathered ink-fingered imps, printer’s devils, and abused office clerks after having agreed to abide by their decision.

Poe was shocked and outraged when Graham’s staff concurred with the opinion of their boss and his visiting associate, Mr. Godey.

Poe’s entire countenance darkened. “A young author,” he spoke morosely, “struggling with despair itself in the shape of ghastly poverty which has no alleviation—no sympathy from an everyday world, or from the likes of you that cannot understand his necessities—this young author is politely requested to compose and read in hopes that he will be handsomely paid. But with no result. Is that it? I ask you: Is that how you want it, sirs? Is this the sum of a literary life?”

Never might he have imagined that those gathered would not give him their full attention. He tried to have them listen again, this time more carefully, but Graham said they had all heard quite enough for one afternoon, they were on deadline, and it was time to get back to work.

With some embarrassment a newsboy’s hat was passed among those still present, and although the black bird poem was not accepted for publication, Poe was awarded a sum of fifteen dollars for the benefit, he was told, of his wife and his saintly auntie, Mrs. Clemm.