Poe must die

“Miles Standish.” Poe’s hands dropped from her shoulder. Miles, with his historic name, was the lawyer for Rachel and her husband, a man Poe knew had too much interest in the dead. He was obsessed by the medical profession and spent hours watching the dissection of cadavers. He was wealthy, educated and he would be responsible for arranging for the ransom money to be withdrawn from Rachel’s accounts. Poe, who felt that Miles’s interest in Rachel was growing more personal than professional, did not like him. It was more than jealousy; on first meeting, Standish had made fun of Poe’s threadbare clothes and Poe had retaliated with a cutting remark that had drawn laughter from those present. Poe knew Miles Standish would never forgive him for this public humiliation.

He said, “Did Miles arrange for you to become involved with-?”

“Oh Eddy.” She walked away from him. “Miles wants me to be happy.” She stood looking through a window out onto Fifth Avenue at a hay wagon moving slowly on the cobbled street. “Hay is expensive, Eddy, did you know that. Thirty dollars a ton.”

“Damn the hay!” He gripped her shoulders and turned her around to face him. “Rachel!”

Her face was streaked with tears. “I will die without him, Eddy. Please bring him back to me. Please.”

“Rachel, I-”

“You know how it feels, you know the hurt, the emptiness. You told me.”

Poe bowed his head. “What do you want me to do?”

“I trust only you, none other. Go to Mr. Standish tomorrow. He is away today on business. I shall give you a note. Speak to him about the ransom. Tell him to begin arrangements now, to have the money ready so that, so that…”

“I shall.”

“Thank you.” She touched his cheek with one hand. “Tell him to see me when he has spoken to my bank. I do not want him in this house until he has done as I asked. Please let him understand this.”

“A question.”

“Yes.”

“Who is the spiritualist in whom you have placed your trust?” And your funds, he thought.

She hesitated.

“Rachel, you ask much of me and I do it willingly. But in turn, you must be honest with me.”

“Paracelsus. He calls himself Paracelsus.”

Poe threw back his head and laughed. “Paracelsus. To hear this name is worth my trip this morning through the snow. Paracelsus.”

Poe continued to laugh until he again sat down on the green velvet couch. “I raced from my sleep, such as it was, to arrive here early enough to make my report and now you tell me that a spiritualist calling himself Paracelsus has promised to reunite you and-”

“I will not have you scorn him!”

Poe quickly stood up. “My apologies, dearest Rachel. It is just that the name is of such magnitude that I could not help but be impressed. The original Paracelsus was one of the most startling figures in magic. A sixteenth century Swiss university professor, brilliant, arrogant. He was magician, physician, alchemist, philosopher. It is said he achieved miraculous cures-”

“I do not want to hear more. You mock me.”

“I do not.”

“Then you will do as I ask?”

He nodded slowly.

“I thank you, Eddy.”

And even though she stood in front of him, she had closed a door and Poe was no longer able to touch her.

“Rachel-” He had to make her see that the dead do not return.

She walked back to the window.

Outside in the February cold, Poe pulled his cloak around him and waited for an omnibus which would take him to a train. From there he’d leave for the country, for his small cottage in Fordham where there was work to do. Mrs. Clemm, his mother-in-law, the dearest friend left in his life, lived with him and it was she who found these horrid and untalented women who paid her a few dollars to have Poe praise and edit their poems. Humiliating labor but it put bread on the table.

More than once, Poe had sat alone on a rock near his tiny cottage and muttered of his “desire to die and get rid of these literary bores” with their fluttering fans, huge crinolines and handkerchiefs soaked in ether against the odors of dead horses and manure clogging Manhattan streets. He and dear Muddy needed the money, so do it and be done. Then rest and tomorrow, Miles Standish.

Eddy Poe, “a soul lost,” “a glorious devil” in the eyes of women who collected lost souls, now had less than one dollar in change in his pockets. He turned to see Rachel staring through the window at him and when she saw him looking back, she vanished.

Someone called his name.

Poe quickly brought his head up from his chest. He was awake and listening.

He was in his cold, bare cottage and seconds ago, he’d fallen asleep in the small sitting room, chin on his chest and slumped on a wooden chair. His sleep was fitful, uneven, a tortuous escape from reading the wretched poetry of women whose hands should be removed to prevent them from ever picking up a pen again. Believe the Talmud when it says-Who can pro-test and does not, is an accomplice in the act. Poe’s protest against this drivel had been to slip into uneasy sleep.

Someone called his name.

Poe’s cloak was around his shoulders, his greatcoat across his knees; he lacked money for firewood. Two cheap candles sputtered and dripped wax on a tiny table covered with sheets of poetry, and though some of the sheets were perfumed, all reeked with the odor of incompetence. Poe was to read, edit and may God forgive him for doing so, praise these miserable musings.

It was almost midnight with dear Muddy asleep upstairs, widow’s cap covering her snow white hair and Poe was now awake and listening. Someone had called his name. Or had he dreamed-”

“Eddy! Eddy!”

He heard it clearly. A woman’s voice coming from outside the cottage.

“Eddy, come to me! Come to me!”

Who?

“Eddy it is I, it is your beloved Sissy!”

His wife. His dead wife.

Poe was on his feet, to the door and tearing it open, staring out into the night and seeing her by the snow covered lilac bushes near the road. His heart was about to shatter; he could barely breathe. The agony was incredibly exciting.

“Eddy it is I, Virginia. I love you. Come to me!”

He saw the slim, cloaked figure of a woman, her pale thin face made whiter by moonlight and in Poe’s tormented mind, weakened by illness, by sorrow, by unending disappointment, the line between real and unreal disappeared. His heart was seized by well-remembered grief and he leaped from the front porch, falling to his knees in snow, screaming her name.

“Sissy! Sissy!”

He crawled towards her, reached for her with trembling hands. He got to his feet, stumbled through knee high snow, every inch of his body and mind aching to touch her. For one touch, one touch, he would give his soul and more. He fell face down in the snow, his eyes now blinded by the icy softness and when he struggled to his knees, she was gone.

“Sissy!” Her name echoed in the night.

He looked down at the footprints in the snow, saw the blood in them. His wife had died of a ruptured blood vessel in her throat and that had been one year ago and she’d died in his arms.

Still on his knees, Poe pressed handfuls of the blood stained snow to his lips and cried out his wife’s name again and again.