Mrs. Poe (20 page)

“And as such,” I said, my voice becoming strained, “do my wishes no longer matter?”

“It is the law, Mrs. Osgood,” said Mr. Bartlett.

“Samuel does not own me.”

“Legally,” said Mr. Bartlett, “he does.”

“Oh, Russell,” said Eliza, “must you make it sound so grim?”

He shrugged. “Facts are facts.”

“So I may make no decisions when my ‘owner’ is not present?” I stood before he could infuriate me further. “If you will please excuse me. I find that I need a little air right now.” I left without bothering with my hat. I was nearly to the Baptist church when Mr. Poe caught up to me.

“You should not have run out like that,” he said coolly. “You will give the impression that you are upset.”

“I am upset.” I turned onto Mercer Street and strode along the iron fence of the graveyard. The piney smell of the evergreen trees in the cemetery overlaid the refuse-tainted air. A carriage rattled by, more easily heard than seen in the faint gauzy glow of the
half-moon; the next streetlight was at the next corner, at Fourth Street.

“If you let your closest friends think that something foul is afoot,” Mr. Poe called from behind me, “what do you think your enemies will do with that same information?”

A barking dog bounded from a stable across the street, then receded with a low word from Mr. Poe. I turned down Fourth and kept going until I reached the corner of Washington Square. With an angry swish of skirts, I turned to confront Mr. Poe.

“I don’t have enemies.”

“I do. And if you are with me, they will become yours as well.”

“Am I with you? Or am I a pathetic love-starved married woman overreacting to some kisses and a few longing looks?”

Quietly, he said, “You know what you are to me.”

A man was coming our way down the sidewalk. I turned away until he had passed. “I don’t know what we are. Perhaps ‘something foul’ is exactly right.”

“I should not have put it that way.” In the lamplight, I could see the agitation in his dark-rimmed eyes. He was close enough that I could smell his masculine musk. “I didn’t know you cared so much for convention.”

“I have more than myself to worry about. What about my girls? What about your wife?”

Two more gentlemen approached from the university buildings just down the street. We remained silent until out of their hearing.

“If only I had not married Virginia,” said Mr. Poe.

“But you did.”

“I married her when she was thirteen.”

“Yes, I know. But you weren’t thirteen.”

“No. I was twenty-six—you’re right, old enough to know better. But at the time, Virginia was the more grown up of the two of us.” He paused. The wind whispered through the trees at the edge of the park. His voice was low and urgent when he continued. “I was at a desperate point in my life. I was too penniless to stay in the army and had been shut out of a home by the man I knew as a father. I thought I’d be a writer, but had nothing to show for it other than a childish epic poem that had been published when I was fourteen: “Al Aaraaf.” Even the
name was foolish. Virginia and Aunt Muddy offered stability. They looked up to me when no one else did. I was alone and vulnerable.”

“But you married her.”

“My marriage was not so much a union between two consenting adults as a hasty bid for security by two frightened children. Virginia was as poor as I was—no, poorer. Muddy had been scratching together a living by sewing and taking in boarders to supplement her paralyzed mother’s war-widow’s pension, but it wasn’t enough. They were frantic with want. It was a relief to be a hero to someone poorer and weaker than I. The problem is that while I have grown up, Virginia has not.”

“She’s young.”

“She’s almost twenty-three.”

“She’s sick.”

He stared at me.

“Her cough,” I said. “Is she improving?”

I could hear him breathing. At last he said, “I swear she doesn’t want to get well. Each cough is an accusation: I haven’t taken her to Barbados to take the air. I haven’t found her a good doctor. I haven’t bought her a house in which we didn’t freeze throughout the winter.”

“I think she’s very proud of you.”

He made a mirthless laugh. “She’s like a suit of clothes that no longer fits. It pinches and inhibits and makes me look foolish.”

“Her mother claims you two are just alike.”

He stopped breathing. At last he exhaled. “That’s how much she knows.”

“We must break this off.”

“Virginia doesn’t own me,” he said fiercely. “Does your husband own you?”

“If so, he does not think much of his possession.”

“He’s a fool.”

We began walking along the fence surrounding the park. The new shoots on the trees added their earthy scent to the night-cooled air. What did I expect him to say—that he would leave his wife? To do so was the province of fiction. Real life was not as easy as that.

We came to an entrance to the park. Although it was dark—too dark to be proper for a man to be escorting a woman who was not
wife—we passed wordlessly through the iron archway. Conscious of the unspoken decision that had been made, I continued on by his side, our presence obscured within the grove of ancient elms that had been there when the land had been part of the paupers’ burial ground. Only the sounds of hooves clopping on cobblestones through the neighborhood, strains of far-off fiddle music, and an occasional disembodied shout in the distance intruded upon our dark and private Eden.

We stopped under a sleeping giant. Gently, Mr. Poe tipped up my chin. Even in the fallen light, I could sense him smiling into my eyes. He kissed me tenderly. I could feel my spirit giving in to him.

Voices arose nearby. We froze, listening. When the group of young men passed—Irish toughs, by the sound of them—he turned me around and folded me against him. I melted at the touch of his body.

“Do you see that lit window on the third floor?” he said. His breath was warm against my ear.

Through the trees I could see the moonlit outline of the Gothic towers of New York University. I could hardly think with his body against mine. I could feel the strength coiled within his arms. “Yes.”

“Those are the rooms of Samuel Morse.”

I sighed deeply, not wanting to talk, knowing each moment that we spent together was precious and dangerous and possibly our last.

“You may know him for his work on the telegraph, but he was an artist before that.”

I savored the vibration of his voice against my back as he spoke.

“A few years ago, he was in New York, working on the commission of a lifetime—the portrait of the Revolutionary War hero, the Marquis de Lafayette. He was deep at work on his painting when a horseman arrived, carrying a one-line message from his father in New Haven: ‘Your wife is unwell.’ ”

I looked up over my shoulder at him.

“Morse dropped his things and rode to her directly. But when he arrived, his wife was dead. She had been buried the previous day.”

I sighed. “No.”

He kissed my temple. “The thought of his wife’s lonely death devastated him. He vowed to create a means of long-distance
communication so that this would never happen to anyone again. At the university”—he nodded through the trees—“he found some men who had developed a way of sending electric impulses through wire. It was up to him to create a language for this new medium, and so the Morse code was born.”

I closed my eyes, drawing in his sweet spicy musk. What were we doing?

“They are stringing lines now between here and Washington City. Messages will be sent instantaneously between the two cities. Soon wires can be strung all over the nation, and long-distance communication will be more than a dream—all because a man failed to reach his wife in time.”

He looked down at me. “You and I, we need no devices or codes to communicate over distance. You feel it, don’t you?”

I rested my cheek against his arm, storing up his scent and the feel of his shoulders as I gathered the strength to part from him. “Yes.”

His chest rose against my back. “I can be at work on a story, or walking to my office, or just brushing my coat, and I can feel your longing for me. If you ever need me, just bend your thoughts toward me, and, Frances, I shall come.”

“If only that were true.”

“It is true, as long as you believe that it is.” He stroked my throat. “Animals can do it. Have you not heard tales of them coming to their masters’ need, even when separated by great distances? Why should it not be for us”—he kissed where he had stroked—“if we but turn our wills toward it? All we must do is to believe in the power of our bond.”

I drank in one long last draught of his touch, then pulled from him, although the pain of doing so left me nearly breathless. “We cannot do this.”

He drew back as if slapped. I could sense his hurt, and then felt it quickly harden into anger.

“It’s too dangerous,” I pleaded.

“As you say.”

“It’s not the way I want it.”

“Evidently, it is.” He led me from under the trees into the lamplight.

I looked into his proud, wounded face. “We must break with our spouses if we are to truly be together. Make this an honest relationship, although we will be reviled by all”

His voice was harsh: “We can’t.”

“Why?”

He stared as if wishing to speak, then, with a resolute exhalation, took my elbow and guided me home. We walked in silence. I would not apologize for wanting what was right.

We stopped at the iron gate before the house.

“Is it because your wife is so ill?” I asked. “I do honor that. I would not take a man from a wife who needed him.” I sighed. “Maybe we are not meant to be.”

“We
are
meant to be,” he said fiercely. “I feel it in my very marrow.”

“I feel it, too.”

He opened the gate.

“I am sorry,” I said.

“Good night, Frances,” he said firmly.

I would not enter. “What can we do?”

“There is nothing more to say tonight.”

I saw that he was closed to me. I would not beg.

I forged up the steps, although my heart was aching. Why did he punish me for wanting what was right?

Seventeen

The hummingbird inserted her needle beak into each plum-speckled foxglove trumpet, drank, then darted to the next. Lashing her tongue like a gossamer whip, she collected her drops of nectar, oblivious to me, poised on a wicker chair in Eliza’s narrow backyard garden. Perhaps the hummingbird was too hungry to notice me, or maybe she sensed my benevolence. She was impossibly beautiful, a living jewel. At rest, her wings, emerald shields just right for a fairy warrior, cloaked the plump white lozenge of her body. Flying, they were a silvery blur between which she floated, busily acquisitive among Eliza’s flowers. I wondered if I could tempt her to linger with a dish of sugar water.

The back door opened. The hummingbird zoomed up and away over the garden wall as the parlor maid, Catherine, approached with the silver tray reserved for callers. I picked up the topmost card, a fancy specimen edged with a fringe of black feathers:

MRS. EDGAR ALLAN POE

A chill went over me.

I discovered underneath a similar, feathered card:

MRS. WILLIAM CLEMM, JR.

“Thank you, Catherine. Are they here?”

“The lady said she would wait for your response.”

“Please send her out.”

I hastily turned over the paper on my lap desk, and then, on
second thought, buried it beneath some blank pages. I had been working on a poem. A love poem. For Mr. Poe. Oh, I had addressed it to someone else, “To S—,” in a move designed to throw off the suspicion of others, but he would know it was for him, I’d make sure of it. I was to take it with me that evening in hopes of presenting it to him after his lecture at the Society Library—our first communication in more than a week. Wrong as it was, I could not let him go, not completely, no matter what I had told him. I was addicted to the thrill of his attention. And now words were all I had to keep him.

Mrs. Poe, pale within a spring bonnet trimmed inside with roses, slipped out onto the porch, her mother trailing like a lumpy shadow.

“You’re home! Eddie said you wouldn’t have time for me.”

I got up. “Of course I do!” I said with clumsy brightness. She had managed to throw me before I’d had a chance to say hello. We kissed the air by one another’s bonnets.

“He said never to bother you, that you are too busy.”

“I always have time for you,” I protested. “I’m glad that you came. Hello, Mrs. Clemm.” I caught the smell of old hair when I leaned in to kiss Mrs. Poe’s mother. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit, ladies?”

“You!” cried Mrs. Poe.

“How nice.”

Mrs. Clemm’s perpetual worried expression was undimmed within the scorched lappets of her widow’s bonnet. “We’re sorry if we interrupted your writing.”

“We know how writers need to be left alone.” Mrs. Poe coughed for a moment, then added, “Eddie chases us off all the time.”

“You’re not interrupting. Please have a seat.” I indicated the wrought iron chairs opposite me on the flagstones.

“What were you writing?” Mrs. Poe asked.

“Nothing much. Would you like some coffee? Let me ring for Catherine.” I rang the bell on the table next to me. In spite of the wind rattling the flowers, I was perspiring.

Catherine appeared so quickly that she must have been listening just inside the back door. I asked for coffee to be served.

When she’d gone, Mrs. Poe said, “Are you writing a story?”

“A poem.”

She noticed my hesitation. “For children?”

I would not lie if I could help it. “I find that if I talk about things before they are finished that it spoils them.”

She stared at me.

There was a rustling in the clump of foxgloves bordering the flagstones. The kitten, Poe, appeared, stalking a beetle lumbering across the stones.

“Is that the cat you named after my husband?” asked Mrs. Poe.