“Of course!” I exclaimed.
He went on. “Muddy, being also a former resident of Philadelphia, would understand this and find nothing strange in Poe’s instructions that appear so peculiar to us. Poe’s apparently outlandish fear that he would not receive a letter sent by Muddy to Philadelphia is, in fact, completely reasonable. If Edgar Poe presented himself with his own name at the Philadelphia post office, there would surely be nothing waiting for him, for any such letter branded with his name would have been sent away; however, if he offers a fictitious name, arranged in advance with his correspondent, and a letter has been sent to that name, he would duly receive it.”
“But what of his instructions to Muddy not to sign the letter?”
“Poe has been anxious. Muddy is the last remnant of his family connections. Write immediately in reply, he says. Receiving this letter is crucial, and here he exhibits signs of some excess of care—once again, not of illogic, but of excessive rationality. He knows that, in the process of folding and sealing a letter, the signature and the address may be confused. If such a confusion were to take place, and the Philadelphia postmaster mistakenly believed the letter addressed to Maria Clemm, rather than signed by her, the letter, once again, would take route directly back to New York. You might notice that Monsieur Poe was generally anxious about mail in your own occasional correspondence with him, when at several points he expresses worry that a letter was lost or misplaced. ‘Ten to one I misdirected the letter, for I am very thoughtless about such matters,’ he writes in one instance (if I rightly recall) when speaking of someone who had not replied to one of his letters. We know, too, from Poe’s history that his first infamous heartbreak was caused when his letters as a young man never reached his young love, Elmira; and that another early courtship, of his cousin Elizabeth Herring, was disrupted by Henry Herring reading the letters, which contained his poetry. Indeed, the confusion over the placement of a letter, the anxiety over who possesses it, and the perplexing variety of folding and addressing through which a letter’s identity might be misapprehended form the topic of one of Monsieur Poe’s better tales of ratiocination and analysis, with which I know you are quite familiar.
“Still there is the question of the pseudonym that Poe chooses, this E. S. T. Grey. In truth, it matters not what name he chooses as long as it is not Edgar Poe, and is not so common as a George Smith or a Thomas Jones, which would put it at risk to be taken up by another person in a pile of other mail. Thus, Monsieur Poe desires Muddy to use a name with not one but two middle initials so that it may be that much more likely to reach him.
“Still you desire more significance to the name, I suppose? Very well. You will see, in some of the late numbers of the failed magazine Broadway Journal, of which Poe was editor, that he twice inserts an advertisement asking for capital to help secure the (doomed) future of that publication. In these notices he asks that correspondence for such purposes be addressed to ‘E. S. T. G.’ at the office of the journal. Perhaps he wished to be discreet in the collection of any money. At all events, when he writes Muddy this letter four years later, he is once again engaged in a hopeful attempt to control his own magazine—this time The Stylus—and the same nom de plume of E. S. T. Grey perhaps automatically recurs to him from the similarity of his situation, and the corresponding position of his hopes for his delayed success. The letters of the name themselves—E. S. T. G.—need no more meaning, no more code, than the connection they hold for him between the two epochs of his life. Codes and symmetries are for those who think too much of thinking. The mystery of Poe’s instructions to his mother-in-law, then, we have entirely dismissed.” Duponte, with a hint of satisfaction, returned the papers related to the topic to the trunk.
“Except…” I began. Seeing a flash in Duponte’s eyes, I stopped myself.
“Except?”
“Did you not once say, Monsieur Duponte, that this point would form a second piece of proof most sure that Poe did not arrive at Philadelphia?”
“I did. You will remember that one of the obituaries you collected after Poe’s death was from the Philadelphia Public Ledger? I believe you will find it also in the selection I’ve brought from Glen Eliza.”
The obituary was in an issue of the Ledger from October 9, 1849, two days after Poe’s death in Baltimore. I located the newspaper and passed it to Duponte.
He handed it back. “What is this?”
“Why, the very paper you asked for, Monsieur Duponte!”
“I asked for no such thing! I merely stated that it would be found in the trunk. Return it there. This obituary of Monsieur Poe in itself is as flimsy as most of the others. But you will not fail to remember that I instructed you, soon after our arrival in Baltimore, to retrieve all issues of newspapers a week before and after each article.”
“I cannot fail to remember,” I agreed.
“It is the set of numbers prior to that obituary to which you should direct your interest. As you find them, recall that you have already read Poe beseeching his Muddy to ‘write immediately in reply’ to his letter. In the very same note, he closes by pleading again, as though she could forget: ‘Don’t forget to write immediately to Philadelphia so that your letter will be there when I arrive.’ Surely she could not ignore his urgent entreaties to hear a kind word from her along his journey.”
I took up all the issues of the Philadelphia Public Ledger I could find in the contents of the chest. Duponte instructed me to open the paper dated October 3, 1849—the very day Poe was discovered at Ryan’s inn in Baltimore. He directed me further to the post office column on the last page—the place in the paper where the postmaster cataloged names of persons with letters waiting to be retrieved. List of Letters Remaining in the Phil. Post-Office, it said. There, in the small print of the lengthy gentlemen’s list, I found the following entry:
GREY, E. S. F.
Turning quickly to the next date that contained a post office’s advertisement of remaining letters, I found the same name again.
“It must be him!” I said.
“Of course it is. Here we see E. S. F. Grey, rather than E. S. T. The letter F, we may be sure, may be readily mistaken for ‘T’ in the hand of those who write with flare, as Poe exhibits in his letters to you, Monsieur Clark. Muddy mistook Poe’s T for an F; or the Philadelphia post office mistook her own T for an F; or the Ledger mistook the postmaster’s T for an F. Poe’s changing name has changed again—but have no doubt. This is Muddy’s very letter to Poe, arriving in Philadelphia precisely, if one were to calculate the speed of mail, at the expected time after Muddy would have received Poe’s letter of September 18 and, in ordinary haste, composed and deposited her letter in reply to Monsieur Grey with the New York post office.”
“And the Ledger lists it on two separate days.”
“Significant, Monsieur Clark, if I understand the regulations of your postal office as you have explained them.”
“That’s true. The first time a letter must be advertised one is charged two cents additional in postage. If it must be advertised a second and final time, one will be required to pay another two cents. Soon after, it becomes a ‘dead letter’—discarded by the postmaster.”
“October 3, when the letter is first listed in the Philadelphia Ledger, was the last day Poe was ever to see outside a hospital room again,” Duponte mused absently. “On that day, we could have idly strolled through the door of the Philadelphia post office and announced ourselves as E. S. T. (or F., if you please) Grey—Esquire—for you are no less Grey than Poe was—and received this letter.”
“Likely this was the last letter ever written to Edgar Poe,” I said sadly, looking again at the name of the addressee, and thinking it sadder still that this last, unseen, and now long-abandoned letter did not even have his name on it and, presumably, went unsigned with the name of that woman who loved him.
“Likely it was,” Duponte said, nodding.
“I would like to have seen it.”
“But you need
not. I mean, not for our purposes. This listing in the newspaper demonstrates that, for the period reflected by the postmaster’s advertisements, Edgar Poe was not in Philadelphia. For remember how strongly he insisted that Muddy write immediately so the letter would be there at the point of his arrival; if his arrival had occurred, we must not doubt, he would have called there with an eager heart.”
“Therefore we have another reason to confidently testify that Poe did not reach Philadelphia,” Duponte continued. “But we have many reasons, as we already enumerated, to believe he would have tried, and we may believe him to have come close.”
“But if he tried and did not make it there, what happened?”
“You remember what we have said of Poe’s drinking habits.”
“Yes. That Poe was not intemperate but constitutionally intolerant to a degree unknown to most people. The fact that Poe’s entire nature could be reversed by a single glass of wine, as attested by numerous people who knew him well, indicated not that Poe was habitually intoxicated, but rather the opposite—that Poe carried a rare sensitivity. Too many persons, in disparate places and times, have testified to this fact for one to believe it is only a polite excuse by those friendly to him. One glass, we have learned, was enough to produce a frightful attack of insensibility which could lead him to other uncertain and uncontrolled behavior. Could this have happened before he arrived to Philadelphia?” I proposed.
“Let us see in a moment. We have now surmised, using all the information available, both that Poe would have in all likelihood attempted to travel to Philadelphia and yet, despite this, that he would not have arrived. The question remains how Poe returns to Baltimore. The Baron, if his reasoning had reached this far, would then proclaim a guess, no doubt, that once Poe was aboard the train to Philadelphia, a rogue accosted him and forced him, for some inconceivable malicious motive, to return on another train to Baltimore, where Poe was later found. The Baron is romantic in the same way the writers of love tales and sketches are. It would make no sense at all for an assailant of any stripe to put Poe back on a train to Baltimore.
“Yet this does not mean that someone else, someone with no malicious motives, did not do so. In fact, it is an activity that a railroad conductor engages in regularly for a variety of reasons, for persons who are unruly, unconscious, sickly, stowaways, and the like. Far more likely than meeting such an aggressor on the train for someone who, like Poe, has previously lived both in the point of origin, Baltimore, and in the destination, Philadelphia—is to meet an acquaintance that is traveling on the same route.
“It is not much more than a guess, you will say, but sometimes that is all that is there, Monsieur Clark, to make sense of events. We speak of the word as inferior to trained practices of reasoning—in fact, to guess is one of the most elevated and indestructible powers of the human mind, a far more interesting art than reasoning or demonstration because it comes to us directly from imagination.
“Now, we shall imagine Poe meeting an acquaintance, rather than an enemy; and that acquaintance, by nature someone who is acquainted with Poe but does not know Poe intimately, inviting him for a drink on the train, or in an intervening railway station. We can imagine Poe, perhaps hoping to procure further financial support for his magazine, accepting the invitation, the insistence from this potential benefactor, of one drink—presented, no doubt, by one unfamiliar enough with Poe as an adult not to know his problems with the intake of spirits. Perhaps, then, a childhood friend, or let us say a classmate from West Point since, more than any other institution, former members of the army are likely to be scattered throughout the different states. Or, perhaps, a classmate from earlier, in Poe’s days at college. Perhaps we have heard the name of one of such school-friends already in the facts we have collected.”
“Z. Collins Lee!” I said. “He was a classmate of Poe’s from college and is now the district attorney, and he was the fourth man who attended Poe’s funeral.”
“Monsieur Lee is an interesting possibility, a member of the funeral party we have overlooked for three others who have been more readily notable. Consider this. Besides the sexton, Mr. Spence; the undertaker; the grave digger; and the minister, there were exactly four mourners at Poe’s small funeral ceremony.”
“Yes—Dr. Snodgrass, Neilson Poe, Henry Herring, and Mr. Z. Collins Lee. Those were all who came.”
“Think of what the first three mourners have in common, Monsieur Clark—that they knew Edgar Poe, of course. But this would be true for many people in Baltimore, certainly more than four individuals, since Poe lived in this city for several years. Former teachers, lovers, friends, other relatives. No. More notable is the common fact that each of the three was involved in some way with Poe’s final days. Monsieur Herring was at Ryan’s hotel, where Poe was discovered and where, afterward, Snodgrass was called to assist; and Neilson Poe was present at the hospital after being notified of his cousin’s condition. The funeral was not announced in advance in the newspapers or by other means and, surely, these three gentlemen could have encouraged more people to attend if they wished.
“Should we not think it highly likely, then, noticing what is true of all three other mourners, that our Z. Collins Lee would also have seen Poe sometime in his last days before his death? Lee is a wealthy man, and indeed as good a candidate as any to have been on the train and, remembering college days, which are always rather debauched, taken a single drink with Poe. Poe, on his part, would know Monsieur Lee was a person of consequence in the field of law, and would seek to be convivial in order to solicit needed support for his magazine campaign. If true, this would instantly explain two facts: not only the incident on the train, but Monsieur Lee’s presence at the funeral about which so few people knew. After their meeting, if we continue, Poe begins a bout of insensibility, as you term it, from this single indulgence. This is what our other temperance group, the Richmond Sons of Temperance, to which your Monsieur Benson belonged, did not wish to accept long enough to complete their inquiry. They wished Poe not to drink a drop as much as the other traders in temperance wished him to drink a barrel. Thus Monsieur Benson seemed to you to be hiding something. No doubt he had discovered, after arriving to Baltimore so soon after Poe’s death, this small incident.”
“But stay! Back to the one drink on the train. Would not the friend,” I said indignantly, “whether Mr. Collins Lee or someone unknown to us, tend to Poe when he fell ill?”
“If, as we might envision, this friend knows nothing of Poe’s special circumstance in relation to drink; and if Poe, embarrassed by it, attempts as much as possible to suppress his mental and rational degradation for the sake of his personal dignity, then the friend may walk away, having little or no indication of leaving behind a person in distress. Though Poe may still feel abandoned by such an incident, that would be hardly noticeable to the innocent acquaintance. A man like Z. Collins Lee, a much-occupied attorney, might only discover something wrong days later, upon encountering his fellow attorney Neilson Poe and mentioning having seen Neilson’s cousin earlier. Recall for a moment how the poet responds, if you would, when Dr. Moran at the Baltimore hospital, thinking to soothe his distressed patient, promises to find Poe’s friends?”
“The best thing my best friend could do would be to blow out my brains with a pistol!”
“Yes! A friend, it seems to Poe at this late moment, can only harm him, Monsieur Clark. Can we not tell why? Can we not find the origin of these sentiments in the final footsteps of the poet? He ventures to find Dr. Brooks, and instead finds only homelessness. He meets an old friend on the train, only to feel obligated to partake in a dangerous temptation. He mentions his friend Dr. Snodgrass once he is at Ryan’s, only to be confronted with Snodgrass’s disapproving stares and obvious, if silent, accusations that Poe is a drunken sot. His own relative Henry Herring stands over him at Ryan’s, but rather than bringing him to his own house, sends him alone to a declining hospital.
“Do you believe, we should ask the temperance
press as an aside, that Poe would have summoned Dr. Snodgrass, of all people on earth, were he indeed in the midst of this supposed spree? We shall not deny that Monsieur Poe confessed to excessive drinking during periods in his history, and also will readily admit that he established a pattern of reforming himself alternating with a return to excess. Yet it is because of this, as an experienced drinker and reformer, that we can intelligently interpret his specific mention of Snodgrass made to Monsieur Walker at Ryan’s—we can read this mention with proper spectacles. Were Poe in the middle of a binge, were he breaking his pledge, the last person he would name is a principal leader of the local temperance movement like Snodgrass. Moreover, Poe may have overheard in a conversation around Ryan’s, while there, that Monsieur Walker was attached in the capacity of a printer to the Sun, so that Walker would be a direct witness to his situation. Moreover again, had Poe read any numbers of the recent papers, he would see that Snodgrass had only one day earlier been forced to renounce his organization’s candidate, John Watchman, for drinking, and would be seeking to counterbalance this event as would any politician. No, Poe said Snodgrass’s name to Walker as a message, as if to remark in so many words: ‘I have not been in the cups; in fact, I have been so moderate, if not quite wholly abstemious, that the one name I shall single out to come to my aid will be an avid and strict temperance man, and I shall do so to a fellow who works for the press.’”
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