"Poe! What's the matter, my man?"

"English." He couldn't help but slur. "I am very sorry that you see me thus indisposed."

"Let me help you home." He wiped gutter debris off him as best he could. Some of it appeared to be from a previous descent. Poe's old coat was now more tattered than ever.

"Your company is always welcome," Eddy managed to say. "You do know that this is not a habit with me."

"Any word from Burton?"

"None. I'm gonna publish my ad."

"I don't think you should. You will lose your job. Bide your time."

So he sobered up, waited another day, and drank another night. And English found him yet again, this time as he was giddily surveying the sidewalk in a series of triangles. Dr. Tom got him to walk fairly straight, but when he got him home, Muddy was at the door with an accusing glare. "You make Eddy drunk, and then you bring him home?"

"Good evening, Mrs. Clemm. I only found him meandering on Chestnut Street. I merely assisted you home, didn't I, Edgar?"

Eddy nodded, bowed, almost fell over. "Like a true gemman. Tomorrow I publish my ad, English. Goo' night."

62.

"No wonder you have written so much of balloons. You are full of hot air. You don't have the capital."

"I have plenty of backers. Many who admire my genius."

Burton shook his florid jowls. "Your genius is a cracked pate, Mr. Poe. I believe you are mad. On the verge of—"

"You are an arrogant, ignorant, whoring blaggard! If you think I am to be insulted with impunity, I can only assume . . . you are an ass." Eddy walked out. And instead of taking the long walk home to cool off, he went straight to the pub that was halfway there. After two large tumblers of ale he stumbled home, and staggering in the door he saw something like a ragged, jagged shadow coming toward him. He kicked it away—it was substantial, then, he felt it through his thin shoe, heard it screech with pain. The shape bounced off the wall and darted out the door.

"Damn you, cat. I mistook you for a demon."

"Is that you, Eddy?"

"Muddy, not now."

Sissy came running in. "What did you do to Circe?" She saw the cat still running up the road.

"I stepped on her tail. I didn't see her."

"That was a kick, Eddy," said Muddy. "I saw it. You have been drinking again. Was that Doctor English with you?"

"Circe? You forgive me, don't you? Come back." Eddy stumbled after the cat, as Sissy ran ahead of him. "I didn't mean it, puss."

"You'll have to do better than that, Eddy," Sissy yelled back to him.  "Circe! Come back!"  Suddenly out of breath, she had to stop running.

Muddy called out to her. "Virginia, come back here, it's chilly. You'll catch your death. Circe will come back." Sissy obeyed her mother, stepped back in the door, still panting.

But Circe did not return. "I am sorry about the cat," Eddy told his aunt and wife the next morning, "but I have more urgent news. I have quit The Gentleman's. Split with Bully Burton." As the women exchanged worried glances, he huffed himself up. "I am starting my own magazine." Quickly locking himself into his tiny study, Eddy sat at his writing desk and drank the remains of a hidden phial of gin. Then he put the finishing touches on the prospectus for The Penn. Its aim, chiefly, shall be to please, through versatility, originality, and pungency. The journal shall abound in novelty, vigor, and shall linger in the loftiest regions of literature.

He thought he saw her first out of the corner of his eye. Then he heard little feline plurping sounds as Circe leapt from floor to desk to shoulder. "Circe. You have come back." A little prickling from her claws, then she settled down, her tail tickling his back. He curled his arm around and caressed her. Putting the announcement aside, he knew what he must do. "I know, I know," he said to her, "I need to atone. Write a story that shows you are no demon. The demon is in me, not the gin, certainly not in you. I know," he stroked her spine. "I know."

63.

"She's never coming back," said Sissy that night in bed. He hugged her and tried to comfort her, but she shrank from him. She could forgive him for quitting his job, but not for kicking the cat.

"We'll get another cat," he said, regretting it as soon as it came out. It was possibly the stupidest thing he could have said to her. But he continued nonetheless, "And I can assure you it won't be black."

She slid as far away from him as she could without falling out of bed. It wasn't long before he fell asleep and dreamed of a very thin monklike figure, cowled in black and masked in gold, following him on a dimly moonlit road. He turned to confront the phantom, which was cradling a black cat in his arms. "She will be back. She needs to be near you when you die."

"Screeching like a banshee?"

"No. Skulking like a soul tracker."

"She is after my soul, then. She is a demon, leading me to perdition."

"Superstitious nonsense." Eddy jerked awake, in a sweat. Beside him, Sissy was coughing. Heaving and coughing, beads of sweat on her forehead gleaming in the moonlight that flooded through the window.

 

Eddy tried to convince himself that his luck would improve in the absence of the black cat, for Circe did not return. And while he struggled to get enough subscribers and backers for the Penn, he wrote feverishly to bring in some money, and tried to keep his mind off Sissy's cold that never seemed to go away. By the end of December he was bedridden with exhaustion, but still assured his backers by letter that the magazine would be out in the Spring. In February, however, another financial panic hit, creating a run on the Philadelphia banks that forced him to postpone the Penn, as backers started backing out. Eddy had to get another job, this time reluctantly deciding to work for the very person to whom Burton had sold the Gentleman's, George Graham.

In spite of his resentment, Eddy had to admit that he liked the man. His amiable demeanor, his fuzzy chin and baby-smooth cheeks, and above all his enthusiasm made him so damnably likable that Eddy found himself eager to please, even though he found Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine overly genteel, with its fashion plates, contemptible pictures, and insipid sentimental tales. But Graham offered him $800 a year to be the magazine's chief editor and reviewer.

Muddy was happy when Eddy told her he'd accepted the offer. "Very much unlike Billie Burton," he said, "Graham's a gentleman as well as a man of capital."

64.

            Sissy coughed on the last word, and seemed to be choking between heaves. A paroxysm of coughing that paralyzed Eddy as though he were gripped in night terrors, helplessly watching her spasmodic convulsions that seemed to rend asunder her very body. Muddy was approaching her as one final cough sprayed blood well beyond poor Virginia's handkerchief, spattering the piano keys and breaking Eddy's paralysis. He was up like a shot, taking her in his arms, the blood on her dress now on his shirt.

"My dear, dear Eddy. I'm so sorry, I ruined the song."

"Never, Sissy, never."

"Am I dying?" she asked.

"Of course not," said her mother. "You coughed too hard and ruptured a blood vessel.  It will heal. Please go get the doctor, Eddy."

For the next two weeks she was bedridden. The room where she lay hardly able to breathe except when Muddy fanned her was so cramped, the ceiling so low over the bed that her head almost touched it. When concerned friends and neighbors showed up, Eddy would not allow a word about the danger of her dying—the mention of it drove him wild, as did the word consumption. When he overheard one neighbor whisper to another that Virginia had the "death-in-life disease," he stifled an impulse to thrash him and ran inside. He strode to her bedside and asked if she needed anything.

"My kitty," she said.

He bowed his head in shame. "I know, I know, it's my fault she's not coming back, or maybe she will after I atone—I've got notes for a story—but Sissy, maybe in the meantime I can find you a new cat."

"You said it wouldn't be black. That would be good, I wouldn’t want Circe to think I’m trying to replace her."

"It will be as different as I can find."

There were plenty of strays not far from Graham's office, and it didn't take him long to find a friendly little creature, a tortoise-shell cat who came right to him when he squatted in the alleyway offering a bit of beef. With all the splotches of color—reddish brown, tan, black, and a little white all mottled together—she was the exact opposite of the purely black Circe. When he picked her up she offered no resistance, and Graham was magnanimous enough to give him cab fare home.

"So now we know it's not the cat, it's the brew," said Eddy with a rare half-smile.

"There was only one magical cat in our life, wasn't there, dear?" said Sissy.

Eddy had no time to think if she was trying to make him feel more guilty. He had to come up with money fast, for doctors have to be paid, and Eddy was desperate as usual for funds. He asked Graham for a two-month advance on his salary. When he came home, he told Muddy, "He flatly refused! He wasn't even polite about it, said he couldn't afford it! After all I've done for him. His magazine has gone from 5000 to 40,000 subscribers since I signed on—that's no coincidence, Muddy."

"Of course it isn't, Eddy dear, and you'll get your reward, if not in this life certainly in the next. No one is more devoted to his family. Which is why I implore you, don't do anything rash."

"I'm just tired of making other men rich while I remain poor, tired of being the mastermind behind the scenes of other men's success."

"You are famous, Eddy," said Sissy from her bed. "You will be remembered when he is long forgot." She started to cough.

"Thank you, my sweet, but you had best not talk. Yes, I'm famous as a creator of cryptograms, an analyzer of autographs, a wielder of the critical tomahawk and a writer of wondrous tales. And yet here we are in a tiny house on the outskirts of the city, isolated by penury and . . . " He didn't say disease.

66.

But he had no luck in New York. After failing to find a publisher, he was coaxed by his friend Bill Wilcox into a tavern where Bill bought him mint juleps, after several of which he decided to look up his old flame, Mary Starr, now married. Over a decade ago when he’d lived in Baltimore they had been lovers, until one night he’d shown up drunk at her mother’s house, practically assaulting Mary like a drunken lout, revealing to her mother quite crudely that he and Mary were already intimate, had been for months. The ensuing breakup was so unpleasant, involving her intervening uncle whom Eddy thrashed with a cowhide, that Mary refused to see him for years, until after they both were married. Since she had always been Sissy’s friend, she eventually forgave him for his ungentlemanly behavior.

When he found her in New Jersey, he went to her house about as drunk as he’d been a decade ago. As she greeted him on her front porch, he noticed how beautiful she still was, her auburn hair only slightly streaked with gray, her dark brown eyes warm upon him, actually glad to see him, he could tell.

"Eddy! After all these years, you come yet again unannounced."

"I was in the neighborhood. How are you, Mary?"

"I am well, thank you. Quite happily married to a sober gentleman."

 "I have something to show you. Won’t you come with me, on a little excursion along the Hudson River? There’s a place, a spot not far from here I’ve been wanting to see."

"I’ll come," she said, "as long as you don’t talk about the past. Our past."

"I promise not to, Mary. I know I ruined everything between us. Why would I want to dredge that up?"

So they went for a walk along the river, and he showed her the exact spot where the body of another Mary, the infamous cigar girl Mary Rogers had been found.

"Why show me this, Eddy?"

"Because I wrote about her. The police found her right here, a year ago almost to the day. They were all wrong about her killer, though. They thought it was a gang of thugs, not a crime of passion. Wait until you read The Mystery of Marie Roget, it's coming out soon, look for it in The Ladies' Companion. You'll see the truth, Mary. The truth is in the fiction. It's a tale of ratiocination." He had a hard time pronouncing the word, which came out largely as spit.  "A whole new form of forensic fiction I invented. And what do I get for it?"

"Edgar, we better be getting back," said Mary. "My husband will be home soon."

"Mary, Mary, what are you doing with that ninny? And what am I doing with Virginny?" He gave her a look of longing as he remembered their weeks of luxurious and furtive lust, the only time in his life he had given himself over to such abandonment. "Remember what we had?"

"Of course I do. But I told you not to bring it up. It was all wrong, Eddy."

"No, no. It wasn't. Such passion I have never known since!"

"I have, in marriage. As you should have, too."

"You with the ninny and me with Virginny."

"You’re drunk, aren’t you Eddy? You haven’t changed a bit."

At that moment, he thought he saw something moving just down the river, at the edge of the woods. A black undulation against green and brown brush. It resolved into a black cat, skulking after some prey along a fallen log. "I'll be damned," he cried. "I think it's Circe!"

"Are you coming, or do I have to walk back alone?"

"Go be with your ninny." He ran off toward the cat. When it saw him it darted into the woods. "Circe! Circe, come back!" Stumbling along, going deeper into the woods, he completely lost her—and himself. He had no idea where he was, what direction even the river was in.  When he looked up, the canopy of thick summer foliage made him dizzy. It was her, I'm sure of it. She is reminding me I still haven't atoned, still haven't written the story that will demonstrate she is no demon, the demon's right in here. He hit himself in the forehead with his palm and plopped down on the base of a tree, where he passed out. He was found the next day, still wandering aimlessly through the woods, by Mary's husband Jennings “the ninny,” who put him on a train back to Philadelphia.

That spree did not attract as much attention as the next. This time in D.C., where he went with his old drinking buddies Jesse Dow and Fred Thomas, who had connections in President Tyler's administration. Thomas tried to get Poe a government position, but once again Eddy drank too much and made a fool of himself, insulting Tyler's son and several other prominent people.

Back in Philadelphia, Eddy made excuses as his fame began to morph into notoriety. The literary wizard had become an abusive drunk, even appearing, thinly disguised, in a temperance novel—The Doom of the Drinker—as a dunce and a jester. He blamed his friends for giving him mint juleps and ale even though they knew that, unlike them, once he started he could not stop—until he was totally out of control. He blamed Graham, and before him Burton, and before him White, all his "bosses" who used him to better themselves. Above all he blamed ill fortune, its crushing wheel, squeezing the sweet breath out of Sissy, her sickness which would go on and off, swing back and forth between rally and ruin, a horrible never-ending oscillation between hope and despair.

It was in this mood that he sat down, finally, and wrote the atonement tale. Remembering that he would have named Circe Pluto if she had been male, he decided to call the cat Pluto. His article about the smart black cat who could open doors had been little more than an anecdote, a fact which demonstrated that humans shouldn't feel so superior to "brutes." But only fiction could disclose the darker truth.

 

The Black Cat

For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief.