“I could strike a dramatic pose for him.” She stuck out her narrow chest and called in a booming stage voice, “MIS-TER POE!” The cat took the opportunity to leap from her lap as Mrs. Poe thrust her face near mine. “ ‘Would you mind staging a play for charity?’ ”
Her imitation astonished me. “You must be an admirer of Mrs. Butler.”
She shrugged. “No.”
“You sounded very much like her,” I said, trying to keep the mood light.
“Virginia’s a quick study.” Mrs. Clemm poured herself another cup. “Every bit as smart as Eddie.”
“I’m sure you are,” I murmured.
Mrs. Poe began to cough. She handed her cup to her mother, who could be seen to visibly stiffen. But although the paroxysms seemed to come from deep within her, on this occasion the attack was short in duration. By the time Mrs. Clemm had rushed into the back room and returned with the bottle, Mrs. Poe’s spell was over.
Mrs. Poe continued speaking as if there had been no break in the conversation. “If you are interested, I have written some poems.”
I sighed inwardly. So that is why she wanted to meet me. Like so many others, she thought that because I had work published, I held the key to the secret of success. Little did she know how hard I scrambled to get my own work in print. I could hardly help myself, let alone help someone else. But why would she come to me if she were eager to publish her poems? Surely her husband had better connections.
“I would love to see them,” I said.
With that, Mrs. Poe dove from sight. She resurfaced with a sheaf of papers, retrieved from under the sofa. She was handing them to me when the door opened.
Mr. Poe entered, his top hat and the shoulders of his tan military greatcoat spangled with ice.
“Eddie!” Mrs. Clemm exclaimed.
“Dearest!” cried Mrs. Poe.
Mr. Poe removed his greatcoat, hat, and gloves. As he was doing so, Mrs. Poe snatched the papers from me and shoved them back into their hiding spot.
He came over and kissed both aunt and wife, then nodded gravely at me. “Mrs. Osgood.”
“You don’t have to work?” asked Mrs. Poe.
The cat trotted out. Mr. Poe picked it up and began to pet it. I could hear its loud purrs from where I sat on the sofa.
“We had all the manuscripts for the issue on time for once. It’s in the typesetter’s hands now. I thought I would come home.”
“Mrs. Osgood is here.”
“Yes.” His demeanor became more reserved. “I see.”
“Did you know that her husband was a famous painter?” asked Mrs. Poe.
“You are most kind,” I murmured.
“A painter?” Mr. Poe stroked the cat. “That sounds like an interesting line of work.”
“He does portraits,” said Mrs. Poe. “I asked her if he would paint me.”
Mr. Poe put down the cat and took the coffee offered by his aunt.
“How soon might he do one?” Mrs. Poe asked me.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I don’t know when he will return to town.”
“Might I be next when he comes home?”
“I can ask him.”
She clapped her hands. “I have never had a portrait done. Eddie has had his done lots.” She gave her mother a nod, which prompted Mrs. Clemm to jump up and trot out of the room. She returned with a hatbox full of magazines and newspaper clippings, then rifled through them until she found what she was looking for. She folded open a magazine and held it out to me. “This is from last month’s
Graham’s.
What do you think?”
The engraving of Mr. Poe made him look like a jolly office clerk in possession of a curiously sloping forehead. Save for his generous sideburns, his face was as smooth and hairless as an egg.
“Very nice.”
“I look to be made of wax,” said Mr. Poe, “and have been placed too long next to the fire. Muddy,” he said to his aunt, “put it away. I am ugly but not that ugly.”
Mrs. Clemm examined the picture closely. “I think you look very sweet. You look better without a mustache.”
Mrs. Poe rubbed her lips. “He
feels
better without a mustache, too.”
Mr. Poe pointedly turned to me. “Has your husband painted you often?”
My mind went back to the gallery of the Boston Athenæum. I saw myself sitting for Samuel; he was dabbing at my portrait on his canvas. Even as two old women examined the pictures around us, I was fixated upon Samuel’s hands, so active and strong. I yearned for them to be upon me. Hours passed—or was it minutes?—before finally the ladies strolled into the next gallery. The moment they were gone, he threw down his brushes, stalked over, and swept me off my feet. He pressed his mouth and body hard against mine. The pleasure had been excruciating.
“He did, once.”
Mr. Poe stared at me as if he could read my mind.
I glanced away, flushed, as Mrs. Poe cried to her husband, “Is it so very much for me to ask to have one portrait done before I die?”
Desperation passed through Mr. Poe’s eyes, then vanished as quickly as it had come. “We have decades in which to have dozens made of you, Virginia, if that’s what you wish.” He looked at me. “What does your husband think of daguerreotypes? Does he fear for his business?”
The conversation shifted to the safe subject of daguerreotypes versus portraits done in oils: Mr. Poe arguing for the daguerreotype’s accuracy in depicting a subject, and I defending my husband, astonishingly enough, by arguing for the artist’s ability to capture the essence of a person in a way chemicals processed in a tray never could.
Mr. Poe had taken a seat next to his wife, and with the cat upon his knees, had to speak over the upright animal to address me. “You would argue that the way a person is perceived by an artist might differ from what a daguerreotype mechanically records?”
“As strange as it seems,” I said, “yes. Gilbert Stuart, my husband’s mentor, was said to have ‘nailed his subject’s soul to the canvas.’ That was the highest compliment a critic could pay him. And it’s true—Stuart’s subjects seem lit with an inner light. You don’t get that from daguerreotypes.”
He stroked his purring cat. “To say that he ‘nailed a subject’s soul
to the canvas,’ ” he said quietly, “makes the assumption that we persons, as well as artists, can see one another’s souls.”
“Maybe we do,” I said. “Maybe we all have the ability to perceive another’s soul, and do so every day, only we take it for granted and don’t even know it when we’re doing it. We call it knowing someone’s ‘character’ or ‘personality.’ ”
Mr. Poe stared at me as if I had said something profound.
I could feel Mrs. Poe looking between us as I sipped my coffee. She gave me a small odd smile. “Then I must have my portrait painted. I should like to have my soul pinned to a canvas.” She turned to her husband. “Then you could have my essence forever, Eddie. Even when I’m gone.”
Mr. Poe seemed to cringe, although he had not outwardly moved a muscle.
“This is very fine talk!” cried Mrs. Clemm. “Pinning things to canvases. I can think of nothing so very ghoulish!” She hopped up from one of the cheaply made chairs. “We should celebrate Mrs. Osgood’s visit and your coming home at this hour with an early dinner. Eddie, you must be half-starved, hurrying out of here this morning without breakfast. Do you have a half dime? I will run down the street and get us a meat pie.”
The cat jumped down when Mr. Poe reached in his pocket to pull out a few small coins.
I started to rise. “I should be going.”
“No!” cried Mrs. Poe. “It won’t be a treat without you.”
“Yes, do stay,” said Mrs. Clemm. “It’s so nice to have you here.”
“Please,” said Mr. Poe. “Stay.” In spite of his rigidly polite demeanor, he suddenly looked so desolate that I sat back down.
Mrs. Clemm retreated to the back room, returned in a dusky pelisse that was fraying at the cuffs, and after taking a coin from his palm, hurried out the door.
At Mrs. Poe’s insistence, we looked at the clippings that her mother had brought out, with Mrs. Poe recalling what she had been doing when he had composed the various stories and poems, and Mr. Poe staring at the words. The only time he responded strongly was when she produced a faded watercolor from the bottom of the pile and held it up to the light.
“Behold, the most important place in the entire world—at least according to my husband.” She gave him a sidelong smile.
I peered closer. “The Boston Harbor?”
Without a word, Mr. Poe took it from her hands, rose, and then stalked up the stairs, the cat strolling after him.
“Caterina, you’re such a traitor,” Mrs. Poe called after the cat. “You can at least pretend to like me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, nonplussed. “Did I offend your husband?”
“Don’t worry, he won’t hurt
you
.”
Just then Mrs. Clemm returned with a meat pie. There would be no escape for me. The table was set, Mr. Poe was restored to us, and dinner, meager as it was, was served.
Over a pork pie oozing with grease, Mrs. Poe chattered on about the games she and “Eddie” played as children. Mr. Poe seemed to have regained his equanimity, for he quietly ate as his wife explained how they had spent much of their childhood apart, she growing up in Baltimore, he living with foster parents in Richmond and England. It wasn’t until after he returned from military service at West Point, Mrs. Poe said as Mr. Poe cut his pie into tiny bites, that he renewed his acquaintance with her. Again I wondered what I had questioned when I’d first seen them at Miss Lynch’s salon: How had they gone from being cousins playing blindman’s bluff at Christmas to lovers who wished to marry?
The thought reminded me of Miss Fuller, waiting for my report. My pie turned in my stomach. In spite of Mr. Poe’s fame, the pair made me feel out of sorts and sad. In one of the busiest cities in the world, they seemed to exist on a bleak island of their own making, their backs turned against the social tide lapping at their battered door.
• • •
After our meal, Mrs. Clemm spooned out a dose of medicine to Mrs. Poe, who soon got so sleepy that I excused myself and left.
Outside, the weather had improved. Although it was cold, the sky was that crisp, joyful blue that is only possible after a storm. Down the block from the Poes’ temporary lodgings, a band of children had taken to the street. They were gathered around a boy whose shaved
head indicated a recent bout of lice. He held something in his cupped hands. As I grew closer, I saw what it was: a gray kitten, perhaps a month or two old.
Another boy, dirtier and smaller than the ruffian with the kitten, ran up with a gunny sack. He held it open. The bigger boy dropped in the kitten, took the bag, and slung it over his shoulder.
He marched off, the other children following. I watched in growing horror as the ragtag band paraded past a saloon and a row of houses to a blacksmith’s workshop, where they stopped before the watering trough. The boy suspended the bag over the water.
Before I could scream, Mr. Poe rushed over and snatched away the bag. I had not heard him leave his house.
“That’s mine!” cried the boy.
“Not anymore,” said Mr. Poe.
“You can’t have it!”
Mr. Poe gave a stare that made most of the children run. Only the boy remained, fists doubled up like a Five Points brawler.
“You must not know,” Mr. Poe said calmly, “that if you kill a cat, it will have its revenge.”
“That’s not true!”
“No?” Mr. Poe smiled. “I have seen it happen. You cannot keep them down. I saw one black cat come back to haunt its murderer even after it had been bricked inside a wall. Its mauled, dead body yowled from behind the bricks: Meow. MEOW.
MEOW
.” He stamped at the boy.
“HISS!”
The boy pelted away.
Mr. Poe delved into the sack and pulled out the kitten, which clung to the burlap with its clear pink claws.
I hesitated, then approached Mr. Poe as he extricated it. “I saw you save the kitten.”
He looked up, stroking the crying animal.
I touched the fur that grew in fine furrows on the top of the kitten’s head. “That was an excellent tale to scare the bully off.”
“It’s from my story, ‘The Black Cat,’ changed a bit for the occasion.”
I had not read the story—in truth, of his works, I’d only read “The Raven,” as I did not want his style to influence mine. Even that poem
had been enough to get a view through his dark, severe lens. But he did not seem to see my look of embarrassment for he turned the kitten to his face and said, “What to do with you?”
“It seems that your wife was better today.”
He glanced up sharply.
“Her cough was better.”
“Do you think so?”
His expression was so bleak that I said, “Yes. Much better than when I saw her last.”
He stroked the kitten’s cheek. Weary from its ordeal, it had stopped mewing and had closed its eyes.
I smoothed the kitten’s face in a similar manner. “Poor little fellow.”
“I appreciate your coming,” said Mr. Poe. “This is the best day we have had in a long time.”
With all his recent success? But I saw that he was serious.
He regarded me deeply, as if trying to speak with his eyes. “I was touched,” he said quietly, “by your remark about seeing one another’s souls.”
“Do you believe that’s possible?”
“First you must believe there is a soul.”
“Do you?”
“If by a soul one means the creature who lives within each of us, a creature born loving, born joyful, but who with each worldly blow shrinks more deeply into its shell until at last, the poor desiccated thing is unrecognizable even to its own self, yes. I do.”
I could feel him gazing at my face, urging me to look at him.
“Our soul is as much a part of us as our hands or our voice,” he said quietly, “yet we are terrified to acknowledge it. Why is that?”
Slowly, I lifted my eyes to meet his. I would not look away even though it was wrong for me to interact with a married man in this intimate manner. And what I saw within his dark-rimmed eyes—not just with my own eyes, but perceived powerfully, clearly, with an unnamed sense—made my chest ache with joyous recognition. A smile of wonder bloomed simultaneously upon our faces.
I became aware of the blacksmith leading a horse toward his shop. Mr. Poe glanced away, then shielding the kitten, stepped aside. The smith and horse passed.