The Circe Spell

by Joe Andriano



91.






14. The Raven’s Despair

Fordham, NY, November 1846

 

He was more famous now, and more broke. And some would add, more broken.  When "The Raven" hit New York by storm a year and a half before, he'd been a sensation. He became the darling of literary salons and the women who hosted them. And yet the Raven, as they dubbed him, lived in a little three-room cottage, barely bigger than a birdcage, which his aunt kept perfectly neat while his wife lay dying.

Standing over her, her cold hand in his, as she coughed and wheezed until the laudanum calmed her down, he thought how peaceful she seemed there now sleeping, how death would end her suffering, and his too—then hating himself for hoping her death was near. Sissy was already pale as a corpse, her face having shrunk so much to bone that her eyes seemed too big, like Ligeia's, he thought, I should never have written that story, self-fulfilling prophecy.

"I'm going to take a walk," he told Muddy, who was vigorously kneading dough in the kitchen.

She stopped her work. "Mrs. Gove will be here soon, Eddy dear, and you've been sick in bed for almost a week. Are you sure you can walk?"

"I’m not a cripple, Muddy. It will do me good. And I'll look for Mrs. Gove."

The tiny cottage was high on a wooded hill, thirteen miles north of New York, the great city he'd almost conquered with "The Raven"—and The Broadway Journal, which he'd co-edited, then owned, then quickly lost. He could walk around the acre or so of fenced-in greensward and get peeks of the Bronx River, the distant apple orchards, and the hills now red, purple and orange with fall foliage. He pondered a nearby elm with a double trunk and thought it an emblem of his own fame, now bifurcated into renown and infamy.

           He was perhaps as glad as Sissy and Muddy to get away from all the gossip and rumors over Fanny Osgood, whose poetry he'd excessively praised and published in The Broadway Journal. Some claimed the baby girl she had recently given birth to was Poe's child. Not even remotely possible, thought Eddy, although the dalliance with Fanny was the closest he had ever come to infidelity. Lowest of the low, he thought, to seek out of desperation the active love Virginia can no longer give, to seek vitality while she fades away. Where is that bottle? Thought I lined it up with that tree. Remembering fondly the many times he and Fanny gravitated together at Anne Lynch's soirees and conversaziones, often drifting away into a cozy corner.  He couldn't help himself, he was charmed by Fanny's upturned childlike face as she fell under his wizard spell.



92.

But guilt prevailed and he'd started avoiding her, and then began drinking again to compensate. Longing for more adulation, he found himself pursuing yet another poetess, Elizabeth Ellet, and the cycle may have continued indefinitely had she not broken his spell out of jealousy over some love letters from Fanny that Elizabeth just happened to read in the cottage, where she had come to visit Virginia. She claimed Sissy pointed her to the letters, left out in plain sight. A complete fabrication. When he told her in front of her brother, as she fumed in a jealous fit over Fanny, "You'd best look after your own letters," Eddy was talking about the trash she wrote and thought it literature, fancying herself a woman of letters. But her brother didn't get it. Thinking Elizabeth had written love letters to Eddy, he demanded Eddy produce them, even though they did not exist. I'll kill you, he said, if you don't turn them over.

Besides the scandal, the worst that had come of the sordid business was the end of Eddy's friendship with his old drinking buddy Tom English, from whom he had merely attempted to borrow a pistol for self-defense. "Why not just give him the letters?" asked English. Rather than admit that they did not exist, Eddy demanded the pistol, then started looking for it in various drawers and cabinets in English's rooms. When he tried to stop Eddy, Eddy pushed the bigger man away, only to have him come charging at him. What a fight! I gave him a flogging he will remember to the day of his death! But that will be nothing compared to my review of anything he might come to write. A nasty cut from English's ring over Eddy's left eye had left a small semi-circular scar. Not unlike Circe's!

Thanks to English and Horace Greeley, most of New York assumed that Edgar Poe had managed to scandalize two eminent literary ladies, and almost got himself horsewhipped or shot. All water under the bridge now, he thought, even as he knew he'd been burning too many bridges. He could blame John Allan for disinheriting him, his mother and various mother figures for abandoning him, all the friends turned enemies for persecuting him and denying him even a decent livelihood, but it ultimately came down to that perverse little imp inside him he couldn't control—the imp that turned the polite, neatly dressed, civil gentleman praised by New York's literati into the disheveled, slovenly, degenerate drunk vilified by the same genteel crowd he both courted and despised. The imp that made him his own worst enemy. The imp that led him now to his hidden flask, buried in grass against a fencepost.

As he drank he saw something moving in the woods beyond the fence. Circe? No, not black, a fawn perhaps. Circe had surely abandoned him. And soon Sissy would as well. He could no longer labor under the illusion that the blood vessel rupturing while she sang had just been an accident from which she did seem to slightly recover at first. But after a year the vessel ruptured again, and again she'd partially recovered. Then again rupture and recovery, and again and even once again at varying intervals that kept driving him to drink, to sober up, then to drink yet again. Now it was quite clear to him they were both being consumed, she by the dreaded disease whose name he had never allowed uttered in his or her presence, he by his own brain, its convolutions as ruptured as her lungs, its tissue riddled by lesions all the ale, gin, and rum must by now have carved.

           At least I brought her Catterina, he thought, she's such a comfort to her, and keeps her warm as well. Circe was good at that too. Sissy called Catterina "Kate," one syllable saving precious breath. The cat favored Eddy so much she would go on hunger strikes when he was away more than a day, but when he kept transferring her from his lap to Sissy's, Kate figured out that he wanted her to comfort Sissy. Snuggling up next to her, Kate was content to cuddle until the coughing erupted, sending the cat leaping off the bed. Eddy would pick her up and place her gently by Sissy, whose caresses always convinced Kate to stay. At least I know I'll never kick Catterina and make her run away. Poor Circe! Why didn't you show up after I wrote "The Black Cat"? I kicked you and called you a demon, but then I atoned and wrote that you were the victim of a deranged nightmare version of myself, the madman I would have become had I not written the tale. Didn't I show quite clearly that all demons are within the human mind? Gin is no demon, the cat that damns the narrator to the gallows no demon—the imp of the perverse impelling him to murder was the only demon. So why have you not returned? You could always find me before. I thought I saw you that time near the Hudson, when I was walking with Mary. Must have been the D.T.s. Perhaps it's just as well you never come back. Sissy might be frightened. Catterina would run away.



93.

He saw a carriage through the trees that lined the road leading up to the cottage. Mrs. Mary Gove had arrived to visit Sissy and help in any way she could. Eddy hid the bottle away and walked across the field to greet her at the porch. She had been to the cottage a couple of times before, usually with her husband, but this time she came with a dark-haired bright-eyed young woman she introduced as Louise Shew.

"It is a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Poe."

Eddy kissed her gloved hand, hoping she couldn't smell him. "Mrs. Shew is a country doctor's daughter," said Mrs. Gove. "She has learned much from her father."

"I'm here to help in whatever way I can," she said.

"Welcome to my humble home, Mrs. Shew."

"Please call me Loui. Or Louise if you prefer."

"Come meet Virginia." Eddy ushered the two women through the door. Sissy lay sleeping on a straw bed covered with a white sheet. She was blanketed by Eddy's old gray army coat, rather moth-eaten and tattered but the only thing besides Kate that could keep her warm. Loui felt her forehead. "Poor darling. She's burning up." She held Sissy's hands, then felt her feet. "Her extremities are cold, though. Can you warm her up, Mr Poe?"

Eddy held his wife's feet with his warm hands, while Muddy now held Sissy's hands as she woke, shivering. She looked at Loui. "Are you an angel?" she asked.

Several days later Loui came in a large carriage and had the driver bring in a featherbed, a down comforter, and a box of medicinal wine. For the last two months of Sissy's life the recently-divorced Loui devotedly cared for her, and also helped raise money for the family, practically destitute since Eddy lost The Broadway Journal. His desperate poverty was pitilessly thrust before the public by well-meaning friends, but his charity case also served to comfort his enemies, who gloated over his misfortune. He'd managed to mock most of "The Literati of New York" in Godey's Lady's Book, but they were merciless in their counter-attacks.  Former friend Tom English portrayed him as both a drunk and a madman called "Marmaduke Hammerhead," author of "The Black Crow." The satire was serialized in The New York Mirror, where English in a "review" also accused Poe of fraud and forgery. So, while Virginia lay dying, Edgar Poe sued Tom English and The Mirror for libel.

This was the dismal muck he found himself mired in during the last two months of Sissy's life. The Knickerbocker, another magazine he detested, had published an unsigned piece of doggerel, "Epitaph on a Modern 'Critic.' Aristarchus P'oh," which made it an even question whether his "mortal sin" had been "excessive genius or excessive gin." While his enemies thus abused him, his friends came to his aid, Loui scrounging up sixty dollars to help the poor family get through the cold late Fall. And then Eddy had to face the winter on display again before the public, as the New York Morning Express announced his plight, calling on readers to come to his aid. "Is it possible that the literary people of the Union will let poor Poe perish by starvation and lean-faced beggary in New York?"

            Many of them had already lent him money before, only to see him binge-drink much of it away.



94.


January-February 1847

Sissy now ventured from bed only as far as the parlor, to sit on the old armchair in front of the tiny fireplace there. The bitterly cold winter accelerated her decline, so rapid now that Eddy wrote a desperate note to Loui, who had an actual life to lead in the city but told him she would come back as soon as she could. My poor Virginia still lives, he wrote, although failing fast and now suffering much pain. May God grant her life until she sees you and thanks you once again! Her bosom is full to overflowing—like my own—with a boundless—inexpressible gratitude to you. Lest she may never see you more—she bids me say that she sends you her sweetest kiss of love and will die blessing you. But come—oh come tomorrow!

Eddy placed Catterina in Sissy's lap and sat on the chair arm, his hand caressing her hair. "Can you do one last thing for me, dear Eddy?" she asked.

"I'll do many more things for you, my darling. Don't talk like that."

"Write to Mary. Beg her to come. I would love to see her before I—I would like for her to be here."

Eddy was confused. "Mary Gove? She'll be back soon, I'm sure. Louise too." Muddy had just posted his letter, but he decided not to mention that.

"No no. Mary Starr. She loves us both, you know."

Mary Starr, his old flame, whose passion had been so intensely erotic that he'd fled from her into Virginia's arms, afraid that the fires of Eros would consume him. I needed a muse then, not a lover. But the last time he'd seen Mary, he'd made a drunken fool of himself, on that spree that ended up with him hallucinating Circe and wandering in the woods outside Jersey City looking for the phantom. "You forgive Mary, then?"

"Forgive her for loving you? There's nothing to forgive, dear Eddy."

"You didn't always feel that way."

"True, but things are . . . different now."

"Very well, then," he said. "I'll ask Louise to look her up in Jersey City."

Her hand, warm from Catterina's body, took his. "Thank you, my dear, dear Eddy."

"Since you're in a forgiving mood, let me ask you, Sissy: Do you forgive me? For driving Circe away. For kicking her like the drunken brute I was—but will no longer be, that's my promise to you."

"Oh Eddy, that's long forgotten." She gently stroked the cat. "You brought me little Kate."

He almost smiled. Muddy emerged from the kitchen barking, "She's not so little anymore. Isn't she too heavy there, on your bosom?"

"Oh no, Muddy. She's very light. For months she's kept me warm, her purring has pumped life into my breast. Now I feel her only slightly. I’m fading away, ain’t I, Kate? Your purrs are losing their power."

"I do believe you've had too much of that medicine, dear Virginia," said her mother.

At the end of January, after almost five years of suffering, Sissy was failing fast, too weak now even to get out of bed. Loui Shew and Mary Starr arrived together to tend to Virginia in her final hours. Eddy was relieved that Mary had not come before Loui; this way he avoided being alone with Mary, even though he knew he should apologize to her for drunkenly referring to her husband as a ninny.

Mary was now holding Sissy's hand as she lay panting, and Loui gave her a little of the cordial concoction her father had made, which calmed Sissy's breathing a little. Enough for her to talk. With her free hand she took Eddy's as he stood helplessly by the bed wishing he could drink some of her medicine. Sissy now placed Mary's hand in Eddy's. "Mary, be a friend to Eddy, and don't forsake him; he always loved you—didn't you Eddy?"

          Mary blushed. "It's a good thing Mrs. Clemm is in the kitchen." She smiled. "Don't you worry, my dear Virginia," speaking louder now so Muddy could hear her from the kitchen, "I will always be a friend to Eddy."


95.

Sissy took something from under her pillow. It was a small portrait of Eddy, looking young, bright, dashing. She gave it to Loui, then found in a portfolio also hidden under her pillow an old letter, foxing yellow, with a brown curved edge where it had started to burn. "It's from Mr. Allan's second wife. Eddy threw it in the fireplace without opening it. He had just heard that he was left out of Mr. Allan's will." Sissy was losing her breath again. "I . . . saved it from the flames!" She handed it to Eddy. Louisa Allan had not abandoned him, she had simply ignored him, refused to get to know him, and never once encouraged his so-called foster father to forgive him for being such a disappointment. I'm so sorry, Edgar. He now read the words she had written soon after Allan died. I want to make amends. It was all my fault Mr. Allan never answered your last letters. I could have softened his heart, but I didn't. A sin of omission for which I wish to atone. I want to see you. I want to help you. Please write back. That was thirteen years ago. If he had only read and answered the letter instead of assuming she was a mere appendage of her cruel husband; if only he had agreed to see her, she could have saved him from abject poverty. His whole life would have been different. Hers too.

"Promise me you'll keep that letter," Sissy said.

"Why? It's too late now. Why didn’t you show it to me years ago? What good will it do me now?"

"I thought you would’ve been upset with me for not letting it burn. Please, Eddy, please." She started coughing now, without inhaling, just gasping and hacking.

"I certainly will keep it, dear Sissy," he said, struggling against unmanly tears as he put the letter into the portfolio and took it to his desk. "I understand," he said, sobbing and wishing even more for a drink.

"Everyone thought you a disgrace," said Muddy, "when you got yourself thrown out of West Point. Mrs. Allan's letter shows that you did not deserve to be treated that way."

"Darling, darling Muddy," Sissy was struggling even more to speak. "You will console and take care of my poor Eddy—you will never, never leave him? Promise me, then I can die in peace."

"Where would I go? To Neilson? Don't worry, my child."

Sissy seemed to relax as a serene smile appeared for a second or so. Then she started gasping for breath, heaving, exhaling without inhaling.

          He held her just as she gasped one last time. His hands came away and her head turned slightly, before sinking into the pillow.






96.


Loui and Mary took care of all the funeral arrangements. Good thing, since Eddy was a total wreck. Loui paid for the coffin, the linen grave clothes, and even a decent mourning suit for Eddy.

Muddy was grateful. "If not for you, Louise, my darling Virginia would be laid in her grave in cotton instead of that lovely linen."

"What does it matter?" Eddy snapped. "Her soul has fled. It is only her soul that matters. And you call yourself religious."

"You have been drinking, Eddy," said Muddy. "Where did you get it?"

"What good is your God?" he asked, then walked over to his desk, where he picked up the copy of The New York Herald that Loui had brought. There it was in the obituary, the disease's name he had refused to hear, partly because his own mother had died of it when she was about Virginia's age. He forced himself to read it. On Saturday, the 30th, of pulmonary consumption, in the 25th year of her age, Virginia Eliza, wife of Edgar A. Poe. Her friends are invited to attend her funeral at Fordham, in Westchester county, on Tuesday next. . . . The cars leave New-York for Fordham, from the City Hall, at noon.

By the time Muddy discovered one of his bottles hidden against the fence posts, he was already in oblivion's sweet caress, out of which he would emerge on occasion to weep bitter tears. He was on one of these crying jags during the funeral, on that day so cold Mary stayed inside.  He was dimly aware of his friends and their condolences, of Muddy supported by Loui while their landlord John Valentine kept Eddy on his feet, of the minister's empty prayer to which everyone but Eddy responded "amen." Instead he whispered too feebly for anyone but Valentine to hear, "nevermore," and started crying again.

For weeks after the funeral, Eddy would steal away from the cottage in his stocking feet so Muddy wouldn't hear and he would stagger through the snow, his toes turning numb, to Valentine's vault in the Old Dutch Reformed churchyard where Virginia was buried. He would talk to her in flat contradiction of his stated belief that her soul had fled, that it lingered no longer in this sphere but in the limbo of lunary souls, awaiting its next incarnation. He talked to her, and told her he would recover, be healthy again because she would want him so. He would recover for Muddy's sake too, and for his own, he thought as he headed back to the cottage. He looked up at the clear moonless night. For the first time, my Sissy, you know more than I. Do you drift now among all those stars? The universe is your bed now, my love, you don't need Loui to prop you up. The universe of nebulas and stars. I haven't thought of it for so long, not since that time on the train. But it's been revolving in my brain, or what's left of it, and now that I know my love's beautiful soul is somewhere out there, I am ready to write my vision of the cosmos. Remember what I said to you, my love, you always kept my spirit alive, the demon at bay. I fear the demon now surfaces, I must write my masterpiece before the demon devours me. And then I will join you, my Sissy. Wait for me there, sweet Virginia, in the limbo of lunary souls, on the night's Plutonian shore.

Muddy on the porch ghostlike in her white nightdress. "Eddy, please get in here. You'll catch your death. And then what will I do? You're all I have now."

He stepped into the house without wiping his feet. "You should have gone to live with Neilson. I'm worthless to you now." He flopped onto the bed Sissy had died in. The hooded figure he had dreamed before was at the foot of the bed, then glided to his side. She'll be coming back to you soon.

"Sissy?"

"She's gone, dear Eddy." Muddy was suddenly where the phantom had been. "Go to sleep now, you'll feel better in the morning."

             No, not your wife. Circe. She knows you cannot last much longer. She needs to be near you at the moment of our soul's release. It is only through her that I can continue to track it. I must, so I can fuse with it when the time is right. In the dismal state that you have made of it, now is surely not the time. Rally, man, rally. Your soul is in no state for a strong exit.



97.

Having drunk all the gin he had stashed in the yard, he spent a week in bed, tended by the indefatigable Loui Shew. As she nursed him back to some semblance of physical health, she offered advice about his more precarious mental health. "Of course you should mourn her loss, Eddy. But when mourning becomes wallowing, that pendulum blade you so vividly described starts swinging down again. Thinking about joining Virginia, that is not the way. Think about Mrs. Clemm, she needs you. And the wonderful magazine you so desperately want. What's its new name?"

"The Stylus," he croaked.

"A goal I know you can attain. You see you still have much to give the world. It is up to you, Eddy, not Virginia. She is not the lost Lenore. And you are not the student of despair. Look at me!  ‘The Raven’ is a poem, a great poem. There is so much more you can still achieve!"

After such pep talk, Eddy began to feel well enough to go to town with Loui and see a doctor, who agreed with her that he probably had a lesion on one side of his brain, worsened by a brain fever resulting from hunger, cold, alcohol, and despair. He also had developed an irregular heartbeat. "The pulse beats ten and intermits," she told the doctor, who agreed that Eddy was dangerously ill, and that his only hope was sobriety and stability. When she drove him back to Fordham, his eyes were heavy and his gait unsteady, and he couldn't even remember why they had gone to town.

Still, with Loui's help and his own resolve to write his masterpiece, Eddy rose from the pit. Even fortune smiled on him briefly when he learned that he had won his libel suit. The two hundred and some odd dollars he was awarded went a long way toward making him presentable again, as he bought new clothes, started appearing in public, even accompanied Loui to church. So eager was he to please her after all she had done for him and his family, that he stood next to her and sang psalms as though he believed. But he stopped going after a breakdown that was also a breakthrough. It happened at Christmas in church, when they were singing the words "he was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief." He turned to Loui and whispered, "I will wait for you outside," then got out of there as quickly as he could without appearing to flee.

Leaning against the building, he thought acquainted? I have been married to grief. It is time for divorce! Sissy isn't waiting for me. I knew it already in "The Raven" before she was even gone. I will never see her more. Simple as that. The dread burden I carry. I know that death will make me forget, but so will love! I need a woman's pure love. What I had with Fanny, not Mary. Mutual admiration for body, soul and mind. With Mary it was body, with Sissy it was soul. I need intellectual stimulation. Loui, it can't be you, you're too pious. Your Lord has no place in my cosmos.

He still needed her friendship, though, her devoted care. It almost amounted to mothering, he knew, even though she was thirteen years younger than he.

I must stand up straight now, not lean against this church.


Click here for Chapter 15