Mrs. Poe Read Free Page A

Prince, the fashion was to show off one’s newly minted money by constructing a castle in the neighborhoods north of Houston Street. It was in this vaunted district that I turned westward on Bleecker. In boots made to stroll across a manicured square, not march up a mile and a half of flagstones, I minced painfully past ranks of stately brick houses at LeRoy Place, in many of which I’d had tea. Near the writer James Fenimore Cooper’s ostentatiously large former home on Carroll Place, about which his wife liked to complain often and loudly that it was “too magnificent for our simple French tastes,” I veered right onto Laurens Street.
    With an end in sight, I picked up my pace as much as my cursed corset and destroyed feet would allow. I hobbled elegantly by a tumbledown row of stables, smithies, and small wooden dwellings meant for those who served the denizens of the palaces around them, until at last, a block short of Washington Square, I came to Amity Place, yet another enclave of new four-story Greek Revivaltown houses caged in by black ironwork fences. From a third-story window, through an oval that had been cleared in the frost by the sun, peered two young girls.
    My heart warmed. I opened the wrought iron gate, climbed the steep flight of six stone steps, and pushed open the door.
    Five-and-half-year-old Vinnie was running down the narrow staircase as I entered the hall. “Mamma, did he buy your poem?”
    “Hold on to the railing!” I exclaimed. Behind her, my elder daughter, Ellen, three years older than her sister and worlds more cautious, took the stairs at a more judicious rate.
    Vinnie threw herself against me. A loud crash descended from an upstairs room, followed by a wail and the exasperated voice of my friend Eliza.
    Ellen made a safe landing and held out her arms to take my mantle and hat. “Henry is being bad.”
    I glanced above her. “Yes, I can hear him.”
    “Mamma,” Vinnie demanded, “did the man buy your poem?”
    “He didn’t buy that one. But he did ask to see more.” I opened my gloved palm, upon which lay two peppermint drops. I had taken them from a dish on Mr. Morris’s desk when I had waited for him to arrive.
    Vinnie’s grin revealed a newly naked arch in her upper gums. She popped in the candy.
    Ellen shifted my things in her arms, then took her piece. Not yet seven and she was as somber as a Temperance lady on Christmas. “You should write more stories for children,” she said as I peeled off my gloves. “They always buy your children’s stories.”
    “I’m trying to spread my wings. What do I say about birds who don’t spread their wings?”
    The candy rattled against Vinnie’s remaining teeth as she moved it to her cheek to speak. “They never learn to fly.”
    “You don’t need to fly, Mother,” Ellen said. “You need to make money.”
    How did she know these things? At her age, I was dressing paper dolls. Blast you, Samuel Osgood, for stunting her with worry and spoiling her childhood. I could spin all manner of tales about his care and concern for us and she always saw right through them.
    “What I need to do now is to help Mrs. Bartlett,” I said cheerfully. “Vinnie, how is your ear?”
    She gingerly touched the ear with the tuft of cotton sprouting from it. “Hurts.”
    Just then, a young boy in a rumpled tunic trampled down the stairs, followed closely by a plain but kindly looking gentlewoman of my age, who was in turn followed by a pretty red-cheeked Irish maid carrying a toddler.
    “Fanny!” cried Eliza. “Thank goodness you’re back. I have news!”
    Although I had lived with Eliza Bartlett and her family for several months, my heart still swelled with gratitude at the sight of her. She and her husband had taken me in when the Astor House had turned me out. It seemed that prior to decamping for lusher pastures in November, Samuel had not paid the bill for the previous three months. After I showed up on Eliza’s doorstep with my shameful