The Blackest Bird

by Joel Rose

  Olga continued. “Twenty-four footnotes have also been added to the story. Most simply identify the author’s research, the true-to-life participants, the newspapers cited, the varied venues. For example, Madame Deluc is noted as Frederika Loss, the Seine as the Hudson, Jacques St. Eustache as Payne, Monsieur Beauvais as Crommelin, et cetera. Allow me to read this to you, Papa.” She referred to her notes, proceeding to a place in the text.

  “‘Ultimately,’” she begins her reading, “‘let us sum up now the meager yet certain fruits of our long analysis. We have attained the idea’—and here is perfect example of Mr. Poe’s calculated change, Papa—‘either of a fatal accident under the roof of Madame Deluc, or’—and here he resumes from the original Snowden’s—‘of a murder perpetrated, in the thicket at the Barrière du Roule, by a lover, or at least by an intimate and secret associate of the deceased.’”

  “I see. And there you have it: if one chooses to believe Mr. Edgar Allan Poe, as author, perhaps as criminal, not about to get caught; not in one role, not in another.”

  “Let me read you, additionally, the first footnote, because that is really the only one of any interest. As far as I can ascertain, each of the fifteen changes made in the manuscript by the author, from one version to the next, are simply designed to absolve Mr. Poe of some kind of self-perceived ignorance to the true nature of the crime. In other words, Mr. Poe had it wrong to start, but now, with no reference to the first published draft, he desires for his reader to hold no other belief than he has had it right from the start and always. It is all about him; it is about no other; in my opinion, nothing more nefarious. Here it begins: ‘Upon the original publication of “Marie Rogêt,” the footnotes now appended were considered unnecessary; but the lapse of several years since the tragedy upon which the tale is based, renders it expedient to give them, and also to say a few words in explanation of the general design. A young girl, Mary Cecilia Rogers, was murdered in the vicinity of New York; and although her death occasioned an intense and long-enduring excitement, the mystery attending it had remained unsolved at the period when the present paper was written and published.’”

  “It bereaves me it is so. Does Mr. Poe provide a date for that, Olga?”

  “He does. November 22, 1842.”

  “Four days following the date of the Colt execution.”

  “Yes.”

  “Go on. Excuse me for having interrupted. I was under the impression it was his editor who insisted these changes upon him.”

  “Knowing the way a publishing house works, doubtful,” Olga said. “His editor, Mr. Duyckinck, might have made suggestion, but ultimately it is the author’s choice, Papa. It is Mr. Poe’s name attached, not his editor’s. Again, I quote: ‘Herein, under pretense of relating the fate of a Parisian grisette, the author has followed, in minute detail, the essential, while merely paralleling the inessential, facts of the real murder of Mary Rogers. Thus all argument founded upon the fiction is applicable to the truth: and the investigation of the truth was the object.’”

  Hays made a sour face. “Is there more?”

  “Indeed there is. The author continues in what might be seen as an effort to exculpate himself. This is interesting, Papa. I must say, almost as if Poe finds necessity to provide himself alibi. Here is what he writes: ‘“The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” was composed at a distance from the scene of the atrocity, and with no other means of investigation than the newspapers afforded. Thus, much escaped the writer of which he could have availed himself had he been upon the spot and visited the localities. It may not be improper to record, nevertheless, that the confessions of two persons (one of them the Madame Deluc of the narrative), made at different periods, long subsequent to the publication, confirmed, in full, not only the general conclusion, but absolutely all the chief hypothetical details by which that conclusion was attained.’”

  “Is it so much he is providing alibi for himself, or, rather, does he make gesture to pat himself on the back? As I am coming to see it, first, above all else, his intent was to appear to his readers as if he had special knowledge, but now, with Old Hays breathing down his neck, he wishes me to think his information all comes from the public prints.”

  “He protects himself. He knows your reputation.”

  “Perhaps,” he said.

  “He has employed you in his latest story, Papa.”

  “What?” Hays stared at his daughter. “How so? What do you mean?”

  “He has absconded with some very select but recognizable attributes of your personality and added them to the fictional chevalier Dupin.”

  “Attributes of personality?”

  She could see from her father’s face that he was perplexed.

  “Such as what?” he very nearly growled.

  “For one, from the ‘Rue Morgue’ to ‘Marie Rogêt’ to this third tale to which I refer, ‘The Purloined Letter,’ Monsieur Dupin now blows his clouds of smoke from a pipe. But more than that bit of all-too-familiar idiosyncrasy, let me again cite from his text. This is Dupin himself speaking:

  “‘When I wish to find out how wise, or how stupid, or how good, or how wicked is any one, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.’”

  She looked up from the written word and grinned at her father, whose hard countenance registered both annoyance and confusion.

  He glanced away. Outside in the night air, rain seemed to be pelting off the window. “Mr. Poe is an expressive writer. He listens well.”

  “Yet he perceives himself above all others. To prove to be anything less than all-seeing would strike him an enormous personal failure. I verily admire his power of observation, his clear, calculating approach. As an author he is masterful. In his three tales of mystery and logic thus far, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,’ and now this new effort, ‘The Purloined Letter,’ he uses the clever device of a seemingly simple character, employed as narrator and foil, a veritable everyman, to bring out his sly detector, the chevalier Dupin. In each of these works, he illuminates the pointing finger of unjust suspicion, and the detective’s penchant for deducing, by putting himself in another’s position, concealing by the obvious, posing an ever-enticing puzzle which we cannot possibly unravel. Papa, this is an exceedingly shrewd individual. From my perspective, Mr. Poe cannot possibly conceive that he is not somehow integral to Mary Rogers’ death, and this self-importance leads to feelings of guilt and paranoia—each and all, part of his grandiosity.”

  Hays had listened. Now he spoke, wondering, “Since when, Olga, does grandiosity preclude murder?”

  55

  A Carman

  If Mrs. Clemm had given her nephew Old Hays’ message, delivered to her by the high constable himself for the author at their Greenwich Street boardinghouse, no matter, Poe never saw fit to appear at the Tombs as requested.

  Hays returned to the rooming house after waiting patiently three days. When he did, the landlady informed him the Poe family had moved out. She claimed she did not know where they had gone, only that they had hired a carman to carry their belongings. She suspected, she whispered, not for the first time, behind her hand of bent fat fingers, from something she admitted she had (not entirely) inadvertently heard, that the family had left the city.

  It took Hays three days more to locate the carman. He made yet another request of Olga, this time to make the rounds, to place an advertisement in each of the penny prints and sporting papers seeking that individual who had moved a family from 130 Greenwich Street to some location outside the city, giving his address at the Tombs for respondents.

  A gaunt man came forward to claim the reward, although no reward had been offered. A Scandinavian with long, stringy yellow hair, wearing much-battered canvas pants, he said he had taken several bags, a trunk, and some
wooden boxes containing books for a family of three: a gentleman, suited in black, his young invalid wife, and her mother, a mannish woman, her plain dress, as he remembered, fronted by a white bib, to a farm on the Bloomingdale Road at Eighty-fourth Street. He said he had been paid a pittance for his trouble. At the last, the black-clad gentleman claimed to be short of funds. The carman said he accepted what trifling was offered. The pecuniary indignity of thirty-seven cents, he spat, better than nothing.

  56

  The Brennan Farm

  In his time as high constable, Jacob Hays had given considerable thought to the manner in which a suspect was to be approached. If Old Hays had settled on Edgar Poe as a true murderer, a simple abetter, or just some tormented sam-rip, he had vacillated enough. All he felt of himself was his frustration, his concentrated desire to come to resolve what had befallen Mary Rogers. The crime had eaten at him enough. So it was on a late Sunday afternoon that he appeared at the rear door of the Brennan family farmhouse, some feet off the Bloomingdale Road, without benefit of strong-arm, but leaning on his large ash staff, knocking politely. When a child answered, he asked in his most even tone, “Good day, young lady. I am seeking a family by the name of Poe. Do they reside here?”

  He waited patiently at the door, facing west, staring out at the river, recalling his first time here with his suspect, Poe, the night of the Morningside Heights debacle, while the little girl, gay pink and white ribbons in her caramel-colored hair, went off in search of her mother.

  Between the house and the Hudson spread the proliferation of outbuildings. A number of hearty men worked the busy produce depot. Behind the curtained window Hays saw the rear door led into a mud-room through which one entered the kitchen of the downstairs apartment. Hays could smell pie baking, apple with cinnamon, if he was any judge, and for a moment it made him mourn his deceased wife, and he found himself imagining, and even longing, to live with his daughter Olga in a setting safe and outside the city proper where an apple cinnamon pie so baked and placed to cool on such a windowsill would not be purloined, and a young woman, innocent and hardworking, would not be subject to the sordid and criminal. His thoughts then went to his daughter specifically, and he felt an uncomfortable hollow and longing to deliver her from him, her own overloving and protective father, to whom she was inordinately loyal. He felt compromised by age. He tormented himself why Olga had never married. He worried why she had chosen her father over a life with husband and children of her own. He wanted, once and for all, to solve the mystery of the murder of Mary Rogers, and then he would stop, quit the city force gladly; he and Olga would go away, move to the Hudson Valley, far from the nature of evil and the consequence of sin.

  Patiently he waited with his thoughts so engaged. The lady of the house, Mrs. Brennan, eventually came to the door, and to Hays’ inquiry made her explanation.

  “Mr. Poe is in the parlor reading to the family,” she said, her little daughter in her ribbons, matching pink dress and crinoline, hiding behind but peeking past her mother’s apron.

  Hays asked Mrs. Brennan would she not say to Mr. Poe that Jacob Hays, high constable of the city of New York, was here to speak with him.

  She fixed him with a curious eye before saying that she would indeed, at first opportunity, although making it clear she could not interrupt Mr. Poe unduly.

  He told her he would be grateful.

  She left, returning a few moments later.

  “There is no way to disturb him in mid-breath,” she apologized. Would High Constable Hays like to come into the parlor and listen to the recitation until Mr. Poe is through? “It is from a poem he has only lately written and works on still in his upstairs study,” she gushed. “Also there will be tea and cakes afterwards.”

  She led him inside. Through the kitchen (he left his boots in the mudroom), through the dining room, a big plank yellow pine table, a cherrywood breakfront displaying the Sunday family dishes, yellow-glazed with painted blue enamel flowers, very sunny, the floor scratched, and in some spots even splintered where chair legs had marred the soft yellow pine as the farm men must have pulled away from the table or leaned back in their bentwood chairs, patting their full bellies after finishing up their Sunday supper.

  The scene he encountered in the sitting room took Old Hays up short. What exactly he was expecting, he probably could not have said. He was a quick-witted man, prideful, cagey, he thought somewhat cultured. But an author reading his work on a Sunday afternoon in such an idyllic setting as this sunny living room presented, what was that? He had not seen Poe since the night of the grave robbery at St. Mark’s churchyard. Consequently, what remained in Hays’ head in regard to the man after the verbal character attack on him by James Harper, not to mention the workings of his own insinuated imagination, might have been just that, mere conjury.

  In the Brennan parlor the listeners sat enraptured in front of the fire, immersed in the spell of the literary work. The black-clad poet, a pearl gray stock at the neck, stood with his back to the blaze. The room was not the least chilly. Poe’s young wife had been given a seat of honor, closest to the warmth. The assembled surrounded the reader. They were fully attentive. In circles of society and even in law enforcement conversation there was of late much talk of the Viennese medical physician Franz Anton Mesmer. (Olga was certainly fond of mentioning this radical medical practitioner, regaling her father, telling him even Poe was said to be a fanatic.) The expressions on the faces in this room qualified to Hays as nothing less than “mesmerized.” The attendants in the parlor were that well entranced. Even the children.

  In his hands, Poe held a long, partially unfurled roll of blue foolscap on which was penned in neat and exact script his text. On the floor at his feet, temporarily discarded, was a snippet length of red ribbon used to hold the manuscript in a tight cylinder before it was unrolled.

  Hays stood quietly motionless in the arch leading from dining room to parlor until Mrs. Brennan, touching his elbow, ushered him to be seated.

  Mrs. Clemm, alone, occupied a rose-hued velvet love seat. Now, from across the room, as she registered the high constable, the color drained from her face. She shot him a look that bespoke a certain panic, but as Mrs. Brennan ushered him into the room, she moved over uncomfortably to make space.

  Hays silently half bowed and mouthed apology. He sat carefully, his intelligent eyes quickly taking in the other adult listeners, all female, all enraptured.

  At the same time, Poe looked up from his recitation and saw him, Hays, perhaps without recognition.

  Six children, including the one who had answered the door, were present, the youngest fidgeting, but not the most mature, an open-faced teenaged girl, who sat as utterly transfixed as her elders by the fascinating, if macabre, poesy of Mr. Poe, a gentleman she must have thought quite romantic from the starry look in her eyes.

  Poe’s wife sat quietly, her delicate hands folded in her lap. Upon seeing her in this light, Hays was again struck: she was indeed so much younger than her husband, a mere child, not much older than the Brennan girl who sat with such excitement permeating her countenance.

  The wife coughed.

  Hays shifted slightly as she pulled from her sleeve and used a delicate lace handkerchief to dab her mouth. Her eyes momentarily lifted and met his, then lowered. Hays switched his gaze, following her adoring eyes back to drinking in her husband as he recited. A young bride, the high constable observed, absolutely loving and devoted.

  57

  Mr. Poe, Do You Remember Me?

  In the Brennan parlor, the high constable waited until the wan poet finished reciting; his final word, charged yet familiar to Hays from that night on the Heights, hanging in the air: “Nevermore.” After that Poe’s wife Virginia rose unsteadily from her chair, came to her husband, and fell to her knees, scrambling to take up the unfurled foolscap scroll and reroll it. The good Mrs. Brennan came up to the writer then and whispered to him, and he looked toward the detective, and then he nodded ever so slightly that he
understood, and Hays took this as a signal and rose himself.

  Having regained his boots, Hays stood at the kitchen door waiting to be joined by Poe. While he waited he surveyed the backyard in the late afternoon sunlight. In front of him stood a cluster of three small sheds, excluding the privy, and a larger barn to the right. Holding pens for livestock, some with a few stray beasts, stood behind the barn. The orchards extended down to the railroad tracks. A line of trees, a windbreak, stood at a right angle at the far side near the river’s edge. In the crisp light Hays could see clear to the water, and in that entire expanse on this Sunday afternoon at this hour no one was to be seen, although earlier the place had been teeming with busy men.

  The high constable’s mind wandered. He mulled over how, at another time, he might have found it pleasant to sit, as he just had experienced, in a sunny and cozy farmhouse parlor, listening to a forlorn poet read his curious poem about a talking black bird in high dramatic voice intoned, to sip strong East Indian tea and munch hot scones, fresh from the oven, slathered with jams boiled from fresh fruit culled off the backyard orchard trees. For a moment he was taken off guard by the resounding loneliness and emptiness that had suddenly come over him in such setting, the debilitating sense of loss and uneasy despair he felt all at once for his departed wife.

  Hays trudged down the rickety boardwalk from the kitchen door, listening to the resonance of his own heavy feet on the tread in the still air, the faint bleating of a sheep from the pens—or was it a kid goat?—despondency and utter fatigue having taken the animal over.

  He stood still for a moment and it was in this brief interim, with the unseen beast keening, that he sensed Poe approaching. He turned. Yes, here he was, dressed in black, traipsing heavily through the barnyard muck toward him.