Mrs. Poe by Lynn Cullen Page B

brief.”
    She smiled. “What are they like together?”
    I looked longingly toward the entrance of the salon. “Like any other married couple.”
    “Which is . . .?”
    “Very kind to each other.”
    She laughed. “That’s not the sort of behavior I have observed in your typical married couple. Our friend Greeley won’t even live with his wife, although they reside in the same city. She has the house on Turtle Bay. He has rooms in the Astor House. Ditto for five other gentlemen I could name.”
    “They seem happily married.”
    “The Reverend Mr. Griswold lived cities apart from his wife while she was alive. It wasn’t until after she died that he developed a yearning for her. I’ve heard that when he got home he had to be forcibly pried from her dead body, then after the funeral, he wouldn’t leave her grave until a relative intervened. As if that weren’t gruesome enough, he had her dug up forty days after her burial. He clipped locks from her hair then clung to her blackened corpse, sobbing like a baby. Guess he had a bad case of regret.”
    “Horrid.” With her prying ways, she had to know about Samuel’s abandoning me.
    We came to the entrance to the salon. “Look around,” she said as if she owned the room and everyone in it.“For every married person here there is a story of rejection and betrayal. Some stories are sadder than others. But everyone has their wounds.”
    “Not necessarily.”
    She studied me a moment, then walked me toward the other guests. To my relief, Miss Fiske of the heavenly feathers, and her dreamy-eyed young friend visiting from Massachusetts, Miss Louisa Alcott, came forward to greet us. Miss Fuller soon stepped away—evidently there were bigger fish to fry than these young ladies. Even as the three of us compared mutual acquaintances in Boston, I commended myself again for submitting a small cache of unpublished poems to Mr. Poe’s journal under a pen name, with a note explaining to him that I preferred for my identity to remain unknown. If he accepted them and published them as mine, Miss Fuller, with her taste for scandal, would be sure to make a sensation of it.
    I was just breathing easier when Miss Fuller marched up and latched on to me again. She guided me over toward the table where the tea was soon to be dispensed.
    “You don’t strike me as naïve, in spite of your books for children.”
    I felt my anger welling up. If that was a compliment, it certainly felt like an insult. Who was she to push me around Miss Lynch’s party? I’d had just about enough of it.
    “I’ll come to the point, Frances: I am looking for an article on the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Poe.”
    “An article?”
    “Yes. From you. I want scandal. How much is he drinking? What do they do in private? What’s behind his buttoned-up appearance? You can’t tell me that the man is not ready to explode.”
    “I can’t—”
    “You’ll get your own byline in my column in the Tribune. If it’s money that you need, I’m prepared to pay you ten dollars in advance and ten dollars upon submission.” She paused. “Not that you need it.”
    That was a great deal of money. My unstable situation pressed itself upon my mind. Payment for my poems at The Broadway Journal —if Mr. Poe accepted them—would go only so far. Terrifying stories for Mr. Morris were not yet flowing from my mind. Two of the scant handful of women who supported themselves by their writing in America wrote columns for periodicals, Miss Fuller for the Tribune and Mrs. Sarah Hale for Godey’s Lady’s Book in Philadelphia. I must give Miss Fuller’s offer, as repugnant as it was, my serious consideration. Perhaps my future was as a magazinist.
    “If I would take on this project, it would be at the consent of the Poes.”
    She shrugged. “If you wish to jeopardize your chances, by all means, ask them.”
    Mr. Greeley arrived, all shining top hat and rubbery smile, with the happy effect of drawing Miss Fuller’s attention