Mrs. Poe (25 page)

She nodded. “You might actually owe her a thank you. For trying to save you.”

I swallowed, not wanting to remember. “That’s not all.”

She picked up my empty broth cup. “What?”

“When I was down in the water, I think—” I stopped, knowing how outrageous I was going to sound. “I think she hit me with an oar.”

Eliza’s plain good features formed the picture of disbelief. “Surely that was an accident. Was she trying to offer the oar as a lifeline? She doesn’t look very strong—maybe she dropped it and hit you inadvertently.”

The image of Mrs. Poe leaning over the water, her pretty face terrible with hatred, flashed through my mind. “It’s just that her expression—” I broke off. Who would believe me? I could hardly believe it myself.

“Really, Fanny, in all the confusion, how can you know what you saw? Why would she try to hurt you?”

I pulled the quilt closer. “You’re right.”

“You really don’t want to believe something like this if it’s not true,” said Eliza. “Could you ask the children what they saw?”

“I hate to scare them.”

She stood with a rustle of skirts. “Well, the important thing is that you are all right.”

“Yes,” I said, far from convinced. “That’s true.”

•  •  •

The next morning, I stationed myself at my desk in the front parlor, ready to work. What a difference a night made. Except for the slight sore throat with which I’d awakened, I felt no worse for the wear from my dunking. In fact, I was exhilarated. It was as if I’d had come out victorious from a match with a formidable foe. I had not lost Mr. Poe—far from it. I didn’t know how we were to be together, but he wanted me and I wanted him. We were not done. Not at all. He said he was considering a solution. That there seemed to be none did not stop my soul from rejoicing. Oh, dear, dear Edgar—I could still feel the intensity of your gaze when you had clasped my hand as we hid. I could still hear the urgency in your voice when you said that you had changed for me. I could still
see the vehemence of your concern when you’d rushed me home from the river, as if you could not live if anything should ever happen to me. Never had Samuel cherished me so much, not even in the beginning. Now, surging with happiness, I felt I could do anything, even write a frightful tale for Mr. Morris. I was charged with the power of love.

The ring of the doorbell jarred me from my jubilation. I peered out the window. Mrs. Poe and her mother were standing on the stoop.

Instinctively, I ducked, then felt like child. I eased back upright. They waved at me as Catherine answered the door.

Trapped.

I waited for Catherine to bring in the silver calling card tray, then took up their cards, so lavishly feathered. The stationer must have had a good chuckle when he sold them these.

I drew a deep breath. “Please show them in.”

Mrs. Poe flitted into the room. “Bonjour! Bonjour!” she wheezed between little coughs.

Mrs. Clemm tottered in behind her. “I hope we aren’t intruding. How are you feeling, dear?”

So they had come on a sick visit, then. Perhaps they would leave more quickly if I played the part. “Not like myself—thank you for asking. I do believe I must go back to bed.” That evening.

“But you were writing,” said Mrs. Poe. “I saw you.” With eyes so disturbingly like her husband’s, she watched me squirm. “Eddie says that etiquette demands that you return my call before I came here again, but I couldn’t wait. I’m here on a very special mission.”

My insides shrank with dread. “Oh?”

“We are looking for a new home!”

My heart dropped. Mr. Poe could not be leaving. “In the city?”

“Where else? We had to get out of our part of town.” She scowled. “The houses are so old.”

“Yes,” I said, “I suppose they’re dangerous. I hear one caught fire near your home.”

She stared at me, strangely defiant. “Where?”

Her mother tugged at the lappets of her widow’s bonnet, for once keeping her silence.

It didn’t seem possible that they would not have heard the
commotion two doors down when Madame Restell’s home burned. The bellows of the fire chief directing his crew, the chug of the engine as the men pumped in ferocious teams, and the crash of breaking glass and chopping axes would have been unmistakable.

“At least it wasn’t in winter,” I said to fill the frigid pause. “I once saw a blaze in January where the water glazed the house with icicles, then froze in the firemen’s hoses. The house burned to the ground and took the neighboring homes with it.”

She did not seem to hear me. “Guess what.”

We were playing children’s games now? Suddenly, I was deathly weary.

“There is a house on this very street that we are considering.”

I absorbed the jolt.

“We’d be neighbors!” cried Mrs. Clemm as her daughter coughed. “Can you imagine?”

“No!”

Mrs. Poe lifted her babyishly rounded chin in self-importance. “Would you recommend the neighborhood to us? We want the very best.”

Almost every millionaire in town lived within a few blocks. “Washington Square seems to be pleasant enough.”

“We can afford the best, you know. Eddie is growing more famous by the day. He’s been working on a scary story that’s his finest yet.”

“About the lunatic asylum?”

Mrs. Poe stiffened. “What do you mean?”

“Perhaps I am mistaken,” I said. “I thought I heard— Please excuse me. I must be confused.”

The tall clock in the corner ticked unconcernedly. Mrs. Poe’s sudden stillness seemed to suck the air out of the room.

“I must be thinking of someone else,” I said.

“She knows a lot of writers, Virginia,” said Mrs. Clemm. “Being one herself.”

“Shhh! Mother!”

I could feel Mrs. Poe’s stare boring into me.

“What is his new story about?” I asked gingerly.

She would not look away. “Mesmerism. About a dead man kept alive by mesmerism.”

“Doesn’t that sound good?” cried Mrs. Clemm.

Mrs. Poe ignored her. “There’s nothing in it about a lunatic asylum. I read every word that he writes and I would know.”

“I misspoke,” I said. “I do apologize.”

“Sissy’s his first reader,” said Mrs. Clemm. “Always has been. Eddie counts on her.”

“You must be so pleased with how well his work is being received, then,” I said. Dear God in heaven, why did she keep staring?

“Do you know where Eddie is going this afternoon?” she asked.

I braced for another blow. “No.”

She smiled. “Delmonico’s restaurant. With Miss Fuller.
She’s
going to write the article about us.”

I felt the relief one does when a carriage accident has just been narrowly avoided. Glad for a safe subject, and to no longer have a part in the article, I found myself blathering on about Delmonico’s food, its decor, even its grand entranceway with the pillars that had come all the way from Pompeii.

“What’s Pom Pay?” asked Mrs. Poe.

“A city in ancient Rome. It was destroyed when a volcano erupted.”

“Blown to pieces?”

“Not exactly. Volcanic gases snuffed it out. Then ash came down and preserved everything exactly the way it was—the food on the table, dogs on the chain, people on the street, everything—until it was discovered in the last century. Engineers have unearthed much, including people caught in the middle of what they were doing when the tragedy struck.”

“Mercy!” cried Mrs. Clemm.

Mrs. Poe stood. “I wonder what people would be caught doing if a volcano erupted in New York?”

Mrs. Clemm clucked as she arose next to her. “Virginia, what an awful thought! You and Eddie are two peas in a pod.”

I accompanied Mrs. Poe to the parlor room door. She stopped just short of it.

“Do you think, Mrs. Osgood, people would behave differently if they knew that they could be captured in the act?”

She watched my face as I made myself smile. “Fortunately, there are no volcanoes anywhere near here.”

“Thank goodness!” bleated Mrs. Clemm.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Poe. “Thank goodness.”

She left in a swish of ribbons, her mother trundling after her. I leaned against the door.

The second girl, Martha, came up the stairs with a brush and ash pan to clean out the fireplaces. She halted when she saw me. “Are you well, ma’am?”

I pushed away from the door. “Of course. Thank you.”

I went back to my desk, picked up my pen, looked at the blank paper, then put it down again. Every last drop of my creativity had evaporated.

Twenty-one

Mid-May in New York: the season for foolishness. We were all of us giddy with having the fangs of winter released completely from our hides. On Saturdays, crowds gathered to view the militias drilling in Washington Square. It took surprisingly little to encourage men who wore staid business black during the week to parade in red sashes, white pants, and plumed patent-leather hats. On Sundays, families turned out into the countryside, an easy walk from my part of town. My own group liked to head up Broadway to note the fine new homes springing up around Union Square. We then made our way eastward down the recently opened Seventeenth Street, chasing disgruntled pigs and indignant geese down the dirt road before us. Passing under the shanties teetering on outcrops not yet leveled by the street workers’ picks, we then came to the meadows that were once part of a Dutchman’s farm, where we could spread our blankets among the other picnickers’. Who would imagine, while the crickets strummed and rabbits bolted from their hiding holes and the sweet grassy smell of crushed clover permeated the air, that neither outcrop nor meadow would exist the following spring?

On such a Sunday afternoon, a gentleman in goggles was preparing a hot-air balloon for a flight, his limp apparatus spread across our field. I was relaxing on a rug with the Bartletts and our children, watching the gas ripple through the balloon like a pulse, when Miss Fuller drove up in her little gig. This day she was up to her chin in a tight collar of white beads. I wondered which tribe wore this uncomfortable style.

She nodded to the balloonist. “Where’s he going?”

“We don’t know,” Eliza called back cheerfully. She grinned at her
boys, galloping around our rug on hobby horses, with Mary futilely trying to hush them. “We don’t much care.”

Miss Fuller frowned at me. “Your Poe would say it was going across the Atlantic. I can’t believe people actually swallowed his balloon hoax in
The Sun
last year. As if a ‘flying machine’ could ever cross the ocean, let alone in three days’ time.”

My Poe?
My hackles tingled with guilty fear. Mindful of our circumstances, I had limited my contact with Mr. Poe in the past several weeks, as excruciating as that was to do. I had not received him at the Bartletts’ nor had I gone to any of his lectures or to those that he might attend. I had avoided Miss Lynch’s conversaziones. I had curtailed my promenades down Broadway. Only one type of communication had I allowed between us: poems. Sent to him to be published under false names in his
Broadway Journal
.

I knew that I shouldn’t be doing it. Yes, they were only words, but I am a poet. Words are my currency. I know their value. How much more passionate I could be in poems, how terribly much more bold, than I could ever be in civil conversation. All Mr. Poe had to do was to read between the lines. Oh, I knew full well what my poetry would unleash in him. He was a poet, too. I knew just what I was doing when I begged him in “Love’s Reply”:
Write from your heart
to me.

He did. In spades. He wrote back calling me “beloved,” his “bright dear-eye,” and his “one bright island” in a tumultuous sea. Although the poems were addressed to “Kate Carol” or “F—” or other such, I knew who they were meant for. Each week when a new issue of the
Journal
came out, my hands shook as I searched through the pages for his responses. I would greedily read his poems to me, then hold the magazine to my breast as if it were the man himself. Because, in a most true way, it was.

“Poe wrote that hoax last year, wasn’t it?” Mr. Bartlett helped himself to a dish of the first of the season’s strawberries. “Upset a lot of people.”

“Edgar is a master at stepping over the line between reality and fantasy,” said Miss Fuller. “What made people angry is that they believed him, and then they felt stupid afterward for having been duped. Nobody likes to be tricked.”

At that moment a band marched up Seventeenth Street, preceded
by a frenzied goose flapping to get out of its way. The blaringly out-of-tune tootling of the trumpets and tubas drew our instant attention to a dapple-gray horse plumed like a militiaman and the red-painted barred wagon that it pulled. In the wagon, under a banner reading,
VISIT BARNUM’S MUSEUM
, paced a brawny tattered creature.

“A lion!” Vinnie cried.

“Barnum,” said Mr. Bartlett. “Is there anywhere he isn’t? If explorers ever penetrate the heart of Africa, they might expect to find him there.”

“Too late. He’s already been,” said Miss Fuller, “and has robbed more than a few noble beasts of their freedom. It’s unconscionable how he exploits his fellow man. That poor little Stratton boy, being paraded around Europe as General Tom Thumb. In spite of his fine clothes, the child is no better off than this poor beast.”

“Can we go see the lion?” Eliza’s older boy begged. The other children added a chorus of pleases.

“Go with them,” Eliza told her husband. “Mary will help you.”

“Not unless you go.” He pulled Eliza up by the hand. “The music frightens me more than the lion.”

“Do you want to come?” Eliza asked Vinnie and Ellen.

They didn’t need to be asked twice.

When I got up to join them, Miss Fuller patted the seat next to her in her trap. “Frances, care to join me for a moment?”

To say no would be rude. Reluctantly, I climbed up.

“I’ve enjoyed your poems in
The Broadway Journal,
” she said as I settled in.