Mrs. Poe Read Online Free PDF Page A

Lynch fed this mixed group simply: butter cookies and little dishes of Italian ice, washed down with cups of tea. There were no maids to serve us—everyone was on equal standing here. Nor was there planned entertainment. All that was offered was discussion and encouragement to read short clips from one’s recent work or to play one’s newest composition. Ideas were the centerpiece, Miss Lynch insisted. She herself dressed as if ready to teach class, which she did by day at the Brooklyn Academy for Young Ladies. Indeed, this humble scene of intellectual earnestness untainted by the crass influence of money would have been completely believable had it not been for the row of handsome carriages waiting outside in a queue that reached to Washington Square. But the illusion was nice.
    Now, an hour into the event, I sipped my tea, turning whenever a newcomer entered the orange-lit room. Like everyone else there, I anticipated the imminent arrival of Mr. Poe. He had the New York literati under his thrall. While the discussions that I listened in on that night may have started on the inhumanely crowded tenements of Five Points, where Irish immigrants were being packed threefamilies to a filthy windowless room, or on the growing problem of slavers who seized free black men from the streets of New York and sold them into bondage in the markets of Baltimore or Richmond, or on the continuing removal of the Plains Indians from their lands by the War Department, sooner or later, the conversation returned to Poe.
    “Do you know that he married his thirteen-year-old first cousin?” said Margaret Fuller, addressing the group next to whom I cruised. “I understand that they’ve been married ten years now.” Besides being the literary critic for Mr. Greeley’s New York Tribune, the best-read female in New England, and one of the few women in America to support herself by her writing, Miss Fuller was an expert on the Great Lake Indians. This evening she wore a Potawatomi bib of bones over her wool serge bodice. Indeed, with her hawklike nose and piercing black eyes, her face resembled an Indian war club.
    Helen Fiske, who herself was but fifteen years of age, butter-haired, and as soft as Miss Fuller was hard, said, “Perhaps all Southerners marry young.”
    Miss Fiske was quickly attacked all around for being ignorant of Southerners, who were just like us if not a tad more old-fashioned. The unspoken truth was that New Yorkers considered everyone in the world to be just a tad—well, more than a tad, a lot more than a tad—old-fashioned, compared with themselves.
    Mr. Greeley, who was also present, lifted his teacup. The nails of his thick fingers were permanently stained with printer’s ink, although as publisher of the Tribune, his days of setting type had long since passed. “I’ll tell you a new fashion that I find ludicrous: this notion of Free Love. Claiming that ‘spiritual holy love’ is more important than a legal marriage—I wish them luck with that.”
    “Hush,” said Miss Fuller. “Mr. Andrews can hear you.”
    The little group glanced toward the fireplace, where the founder of the Free Love movement, Mr. Stephen Pearl Andrews, was speaking earnestly to Miss Lynch.
    “Besides,” Miss Fuller said, “I’m not sure that Andrews is all wrong.”
    “Don’t tell me you’re one of those Free Lovers, Margaret,” said Mr. Greeley with a rubbery-faced grin.
    “No, but I do agree with him that marital relations without the consent of the wife amounts to rape.”
    Mr. Greeley seemed not to hear her. “We ought to ask Poe what he thinks of the Free Lovers. He seems to have an opinion on everything.”
    “I have heard that he was court-martialed from the army,” said the daguerreotypist Mathew Brady. Although a young man, he wore spectacles with thick round lenses that magnified his eyes to thrice their size, giving him the appearance of someone much older. When he sipped his tea, I saw that his hands were tinged