Mrs. Poe (37 page)

“Footsteps sounded on the attic stairs. A man came and chopped the tree to pieces, then took them downstairs and put them on the family room fire. The tree sighed as the flames went up, each sigh as sharp as a pistol shot. The children, playing nearby, stopped to listen. With each pop, the tree sighed with the memory of his days in the forest, of the days when he was growing big and green, of the Christmas Eve on which he’d shone so bright. One of the children found the torn
paper star, lying on the floor, and pinned it on his breast. He ran off to play, wearing the star that had adorned the tree on what had been the happiest day of its life.”

The gathering at the table had gone silent except for Vinnie’s sniffing. There was fear in the eyes of the children who were not actually crying.

“Some tale, Poe,” Samuel said.

“It’s Mr. Andersen’s, not mine.”

Samuel gave him a disgusted look then turned to the children. “Who would like to hear ‘A Visit from Saint Nicholas’?”

A tearful cheer went up.

Mr. Poe did not stay for the lighting of our tree. I walked him outside when the family was waiting for Mr. Bartlett to finish dessert so they could leave the table and let the festivities begin.

“Such a sad tale,” I said.

“I did not mean to upset the children, but it’s not a tale. It’s me. If I had known that our night together would be our only one, I would have not have let you go that morning. I would have shanghaied you on Astor’s boat to China, or whisked you off to a castle in Scotland—taken you to a place where you could be mine forever more.” He settled my thick paisley shawl higher upon my shoulder, protecting me from the wind. “Now I must content myself with the memory of the only night I had truly lived.”

“You are the toast of the town, Edgar. You are followed by admirers on the street. You have sole ownership of your literary journal. You have everything you ever wanted.”

He narrowed his eyes in pain. “I have nothing without you and you know it. This night of joy is a torture to me.”

I drew in a breath. “How is Virginia?” I asked.

“Must you destroy any shred of happiness that we might find tonight?” He sighed. “I’m sorry, Frances.” I could feel him trying to lighten his voice. “It’s Christmas.”

In the glow of the streetlight, I could see the bleakness in his eyes. “I wish that it didn’t have to be this way,” I said softly.

“Virginia will not last long.”

“Don’t say that! Do you think I will wait like a ghoul for her to die? No, Edgar, it’s wrong.”

“But when she dies—”

“We cannot think like that. It poisons what is good about us.”

I felt the pain in his silence. How I wished to bury myself against him, the wish made more intense by knowing I could not. Why are we doomed to crave most that which we cannot have?

A horse clopped by, its clouds of breath snatched away by the frigid night.

“I am not the heartless creature that you think I am,” said Mr. Poe.

“I know you aren’t.”

The bells of the Dutch church in Washington Square tolled nine, their sonorous clanging infusing the night with melancholy. It was Christmas Eve. Good husbands and wives were chuckling at their exuberant children, dashing around the house until it came to tears. In the morning the loving couples would smile at each other as their wee ones raced to their stockings hung by the fire to find a doll or top or ball. They would eat their toast and marmalade, smiling at each other in sweet contentment, then afterward, upon bundling the children in boots and mittens and mufflers, would take a walk, during which they would nod to neighbors fond of both them and their family. Such a simple dream. And so impossibly beyond reach of Mr. Poe and me.

I was shivering from the cold. He drew in a deep breath, then tucked my shawl tighter. “We must be patient, my love.”

I sighed. “Oh, Edgar.”

“You must trust me. It will be right someday.”

Vinnie appeared at the door. Mr. Poe’s hand slid from my shoulders.

“Mamma! They’re going to light the tree!”

“Yes, Vinnie.”

“Now, Mamma!”

“Yes, Vinnie. I’m coming.”

When I turned back around, Mr. Poe was striding down Amity, a single dark figure on a street bright from the festive lights burning from within every house. He looked as alone as an orphan on Christmas. That was exactly what he was.

Winter 1846

Thirty-three

A new year, a new start. I was at the desk in the Bartlett’s front parlor, trying to resurrect my writing. I
had
been a writer, before becoming consumed by my love for Mr. Poe. If I were to become known again as a serious poet, and not just for the gossip spun around Mr. Poe and me, I must produce something of worth soon. Now, more than ever, it was important for me to make my bread at it.

I put down my pen, bracing myself as a wave of nausea broke over me. I had been feeling sick for the past ten days. I had thought at first it was indigestion from all the rich Christmas foods, but when it had not gone away after a week, and a general weariness began to overwhelm me, I began to worry about other possibilities. A consultation with the calendar solidified my fears.

Now a fresh onslaught of panic-tinged nausea induced me to snatch up my pen again. I glanced outside as if grasping for a lifeline. In the street, the children were throwing snowballs under the bored supervision of Catherine, who did not share in the maternal instinct that Mary once had. Eliza was, at this moment, at the domestic help bureau, to see about getting a replacement for Mary, who would not, she had written recently, be coming back. Mr. Bartlett was up in his study, working on his dictionary, I presumed. I had the morning to myself, something, I reminded myself, that I would not have once a baby came.

I shied from this sobering thought. I must create a shivery story that would help me be independent. As much as I did not relish the macabre, the public taste called out for such. I
would
impress Mr. Morris and his gelatinous curl. I could do anything that I set my cap to. I had to, now.

The image of Madame Restell swam into my mind. I saw her swathed from head to toe in furs, totting up her accounts upon an evening at her rosewood desk. She was stacking coins into even piles of gold, when she began to hear voices.

The practical side of my writer’s brain intervened. Voices? Whose voices would this Madame Restell character hear? I thought of the women who must cross her door each day: Servants impregnated by their employers. Women with child by abusive husbands. Women in intolerable situations whose last desperate hope was to place their lives in Madame Restell’s untrained hands. Women who died on her table.

I had written three much-crossed-over pages, when Mr. Bartlett said, “New poem?”

I jumped, tipping over my inkpot. It splashed onto a finished page before I could catch it.

“Sorry!” He whipped a handkerchief from inside his coat and began blotting. “I’m sorry, I think I’ve ruined it.”

I caught my breath. The page I’d been working on was destroyed. Could I remember what I had written?

He peered at where he was dabbing. “Not a poem, I see. What’s it about?”

A snowball hit the window, startling us both. “Hey, knock it off!” he shouted.

We could hear the children’s laughter through the glass. Catherine moved to scold them, making them laugh harder still.

He turned back to me. “So what is it about?” he asked again.

I pursed my lips.

“A secret?” He grinned.

I shook my head. “Not really. But it has been tricky. It’s about a character based on Madame Restell.”

His face changed color with the alacrity of an alarmed squid. He turned as red as Vinnie’s mittens.

I’d offended him. Why had I not believed that a piece based on Madame Restell would offend everyone? I could never sell it.

I moved to stuff the remaining page into my leather notebook. “It’s a foolish project, really. Mr. Morris at the
Mirror
wanted me to write something ghoulish. I’m not very good at it.”

“No.” He stopped my hand.

I looked up.

He pulled away when he saw my discomfort. “You’ll smear your pages.”

“It doesn’t matter. He won’t buy it.”

He stared out the window as I put away the manuscript and capped the inkpot.

“What do you know about Madame Restell?” he asked.

“I suppose what everyone else knows.”

He swallowed, then turned a darker shade of red. “What does everyone know?” He stared back at me in defiance when I tried to read his face.

The corners of his mouth turned down severely. “I told her not to go there. They would have butchered her. Didn’t she know that I would not have that on my head?” His shoulders drooped as if a weight had slid off them. “I love her. I love that child. How could she have given it away?”

Bang! A snowball hit again. He jerked as if shot. “Blast you kids!” He raged to the door, but not before I saw the tears glittering in his eyes.

•  •  •

The chatter of the children, cheerful from plastering each other with snow all morning, allowed me to steal surreptitious looks at Eliza as I ate my soup at the noontime meal. Mr. Bartlett had taken his lunch up in his study—he had taken pains to avoid me after his startling revelation. Surely Mr. Bartlett did not mean that Eliza had gone to Madame Restell. Even though she had gravely suffered with the loss of her children, Eliza wanted more, I knew she did. I feared that he wasn’t talking about Eliza. But if it wasn’t Eliza, who was it? They’d had a child together?

I spooned in my soup. It seemed impossible that Mr. Bartlett should have a lover. Yet who would ever dream that Frances Osgood, daughter of a well-to-do Bostonian and a fixture of New York’s brightest literary circles, would have lain with a married man in a hotel? I was living proof that what we do in private is often unbelievable.

After lunch, I decided to walk over to Miss Lynch’s house to see if she was having her customary Saturday night conversazione in spite of the snow, which was falling again. I felt the desperate need to do normal things, act in normal ways, as if clinging to normalcy would make my pregnancy go away.

Stinging crystals of snow were sprinkling down as I shuffled along the shoveled sidewalk, my skirts crushed within the narrow two-foot high tunnel made in the snow. Within moments my toes ached from the cold radiating up through the soles of my boots. The snow had a deadening effect on sound, muffling the scraping of my skirt against the ice tunnel, muting the steady huffing of my breath. The unplowed streets were still as death. Save for a single cardinal huddled atop an iron fencing paling, I was the only creature out laboring in the frozen landscape.

I neared Mr. Poe’s home, one of a row of cheaper houses built flush with the sidewalk. Had he gone out today? I marveled like always at how brazen he had been to move his family so close to the Bartletts’. How it must have hurt Mrs. Poe to know that a mere stone’s throw away, her husband had been wooing another woman. No wonder she rarely went out, even had she been well. In the face of such humiliation, I would have withdrawn, too.

Yet, as I minced down the frigid tunnel, hating myself for causing such misery to Mrs. Poe, so ill in body and mind, the imp in me could not help but think: Was Mr. Poe at home?

The instant I was beside his window, I turned to look in.

I met the dazed face of Eliza’s girl, Mary.

I stared at her, shocked, for one long moment before she fell away from the window as if someone had drawn her back.

“Mary?”

The curtains swished closed.

Before I could think, I knocked on the window. “Mary? Mary?”

My call was swallowed by the silent snow.

My heart thumped in my ears. There was no mistaking—it was Eliza’s Mary. Yet she looked so strange, her expression so vacant. Although she looked straight at me, I wasn’t entirely sure that she had registered my presence. Something was terribly wrong.

“Frances?”

I nearly jumped from my skin.

Arm in arm to keep their balance, Mrs. Ellet and Reverend Griswold had turned the corner from MacDougal and were hobbling toward me at top speed. A more unwelcome pair I could not imagine.

I glanced over my shoulder.

“Frances!” Mrs. Ellet demanded. “Wait!”

The angry look on her face made me want to do anything but.

“I should have known you’d be sneaking out here to get your letters when you thought no one could see you. What did I tell you, Rufus?”

“Letters?” I asked. “What letters?”

Slowly Reverend Griswold smiled with half of his mouth. “I think you know, Mrs. Osgood.”

The malice in his expression shriveled my insides. “I don’t.”

Mrs. Ellet leaped in. “Don’t you play dumb with us, Frances. Mrs. Poe read me one this morning. You all but ravished Mr. Poe on the page. It was
disgusting
.”

“But I have never written such a letter!” It was true. I had written love poems, dozens of them, all for “publication,” and yes, I had ravished and been ravished by Mr. Poe, but not once had I written a lover’s letter. Not even the notes that had accompanied my poems spoke of my love for him. My poems had done my talking.

“Poor deranged woman—she
laughed
when Mr. Poe came home and ripped it from her hands. When I told him what I thought of you and your indecent letter, he told me that I had better take care of my own letters.”

I turned toward the window, ill. I saw movement behind the curtains.

“
My
letters were just sweet poems,” she cried. “They weren’t really to
Poe.
I simply wanted him to publish them in his journal. They were to any man”—she noticed Reverend Griswold’s frown—“to my husband.”

“What did Mr. Poe do?”

“I told you. He insulted me.” She clamped her lips shut. Her mouth quivered until the words came boiling out. “He’s a fraud. Worse than a fraud—a moral bankrupt! I can’t believe that I ever admired the man. I am warning everyone I know about him. . . . And you! I am warning them about you, madam!”