The Beautiful Cigar Girl Page 4
The federal census of 1840 lists seven people living at 126 Nassau Street, including Phoebe and Mary Rogers, which suggests that the number of boarders at any given time would have been about four or five, though their names are not recorded. Although Phoebe was able to hire a servant girl to help with some of the household chores, the bulk of the daily duties fell to Mary, as her mother’s declining health left her unable to cope with the heavy lifting of running a household.
Although Mary’s circle of admirers had shrunk considerably from the heady days of Anderson’s Tobacco Emporium, she continued to exert a powerful fascination. It seems that none of the men who boarded on Nassau Street was impervious to her charms. A sailor named William Kiekuck was among the early lodgers, and though he would later claim that his relationship with Mary had been merely “one of tender friendship,” he continued to call on her for several months after he had left the premises.
Alfred Crommelin, who was variously described as “courtly” and “officious,” came on the scene in December of 1840. Tall and gaunt-faced, Crommelin impressed Phoebe Rogers with his fastidious table manners and polite manner of speaking. The exact nature of his occupation remains obscure, though it seems to have involved a clerkship of some type, possibly in a law office, and he appears to have been reasonably successful at it. His efforts at courtship also showed promise. On arrival at Nassau Street Crommelin found himself deeply smitten with Mary and began to plead his case almost from the moment he set down his valise. Mary found him agreeable, and for a short while she encouraged his attentions.
Archibald Padley, who formed a close friendship with Crommelin, found Mary to be a “worthy girl,” but there is no evidence that he ever pursued her, possibly out of respect for Crommelin’s feelings. Whatever Padley’s own intentions may have been, both he and Crommelin were soon cut out by the jovial Daniel Payne, who came to occupy the central place in Mary’s affections.
Daniel Payne worked as a cork cutter, a flourishing trade that served not only vintners and brewers but also doctors and chemists, who required durable and airtight stoppers for their glass bottles and ceramic jugs. Apart from his ability to cut cork, Payne had little to offer. He was known to be a heavy drinker even by the impressive standards of the day, when many considered alcohol to be a healthful alternative to disease-ridden water. At a time when it was not unusual to dispatch two or three bottles of claret at a single sitting, Payne’s habits were thought to be excessive, and he was often described as a “bibber” and a “tosspot.” Possibly he made an agreeable change, in Mary’s eyes, from the more straitlaced Crommelin. Whatever the case, in a very short time Payne had come to think of himself as Mary’s future husband, though it is by no means clear that he actually made a formal offer of marriage.
Alfred Crommelin was slow to accept that he had been replaced in Mary’s affections by Payne, a man he described as “dissipated.” Crommelin’s ill will toward his rival caused considerable discomfort around the breakfast table, with Padley describing the relations between the two men as “frosty.” Seeking an ally, Crommelin expressed his disapproval to Phoebe Rogers, hoping that their united approbation would force Mary to see the error of her ways. If anything, the plan had the opposite effect. Mary remained bound to Payne, and was often seen strolling arm in arm with him on Broadway. Crommelin, much to his distress, found himself treated as if he were a kindly uncle.
By June of 1841, Crommelin’s festering resentments came to a crisis. Returning from work one evening, he found Payne and Mary engaged in “unseemly intimacies” in the front parlor. Crommelin drew himself up into an indignant rage and began lecturing Payne on the duties and obligations of a gentleman. Payne responded first with a grin and then a sneer, which only increased the volume of Crommelin’s tirade. Finally Payne was moved to remark, while placing a hand on Mary’s knee, that Crommelin would do well to mind his own affairs, as he himself had better things to do.
This proved to be too much for Crommelin. Gravely affronted, he stormed upstairs and packed his bag. Reappearing a few moments later with his belongings in hand, he offered another string of cautions on the wages of sin while Payne sat grinning up at him. At length, when his indignation had spent itself, Crommelin turned and made a theatrical exit from the house. Somehow Crommelin’s friend Archibald Padley found himself caught up in the drama and was obliged to follow in Crommelin’s stormy wake. On the front steps, Crommelin paused and turned back to the house, where Mary stood watching. He declared himself to be “sorry for the step she was taking” and added that he still cared for her. He told her that “if she were ever in trouble” she was to call upon him for help. The declaration was undoubtedly heartfelt, but in the weeks to come, when Mary did in fact call upon him, Crommelin would fail her thoroughly.
With the departure of Crommelin, Daniel Payne settled into his new role as Mary’s unchallenged suitor, though he would have little time to enjoy it. Phoebe Rogers disapproved of the young cork cutter. Though Payne was unfailingly cordial and eager to please, Phoebe considered him a wastrel. Her daughter, she believed, could do better for herself. For the moment, however, Payne was unaware of the gathering storm.
Although Mary no longer entertained the young men who came to “preen and squawk” in Anderson’s Tobacco Emporium, the quarrel between Payne and Crommelin indicates that life on Nassau Street was not substantially quieter than it had been at the cigar store. If further reminders were needed, Mary’s employment as the “beautiful seegar girl” had left a considerable legacy of turgid prose and bad poetry in the newspapers of the day. A typical example could be found in the Sunday Morning Atlas in September of 1838, which displayed an engraving of “The Cigar Girl” on its front page, as part of a series of New York character sketches called “Portraits of People.” The illustration showed Mary in profile, with careful attention given to the “captivating eyes” and “perfectly symmetrical features” mentioned in other publications, as well as the pleasing figure that had so delighted Anderson’s customers. The Atlas accompanied the engraving with a brief and largely irrelevant history of cigars before turning to the real business at hand: a thinly veiled cautionary tale based on the notoriety of an attractive cigar vendor. The story concerned the misfortunes of a lovely young woman named Ellen Somers, who, finding herself in reduced circumstances, is obliged to take a position in a cigar emporium, over the earnest objections of her mother: “You would be exposed to the gaze of every creature, who in laying out his beggarly trifle, expected that the exhibition of a pretty girl was included in his charge, and that he had paid for the privilege of staring you out of countenance.”
Under the looming threat of absolute destitution, Ellen reluctantly assumes her post at the cigar shop, only to find her virtue under assault by a pair of leering young customers “known in common parlance as gentlemen,” while a “gentle, modest” suitor named Henry Wilkinson watches with mounting concern. The two young cads even go so far “as to bet upon who should be the happy man to make the divine creature his goddess of pleasure,” but the virtuous Ellen repels their advances. Having shown herself to be “a superior being,” Ellen performs her daily tasks with maidenly decorum, only to find herself abducted by Henry Wilkinson, who proves to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Lying in wait outside the shop, he bundles her into his coach and speeds off through a dark and stormy night. Ellen, fearing death and “perhaps worse,” pleads for her release. “I have gone too far to recede,” Wilkinson snarls. “It is useless for you to oppose my wishes. What can you do?”
The cigar girl’s reply is chillingly prophetic:
“I can die,” she answers.
II
I Tremble for the Consequence
AT 169 BROADWAY, no more than a dozen blocks south of Anderson’s Tobacco Emporium, stood a dark and forbidding bookseller’s shop known as the Long Room. The proprietor, an eccentric Scottish immigrant named William Gowans, preferred to deal with “readers of serious intent” rather than common browsers, and it was know
n in the neighborhood that “freedom of Gowans’s bookstore was not presented to every passer-by.” The chosen few who gained admittance found a massive but haphazard inventory, ranging from rare texts on Greek horology and Roman funerary practices to the latest European novels. Gowans opened the shop in January of 1837 and soon filled the floor-to-ceiling oak plank shelves to capacity. As additional volumes accumulated they were stored first in wooden crates stacked on a pair of battered deal tables, then on chairs scavenged from a previous tenant, and finally in teetering stacks on the floor. The impression created, recalled one early visitor, was that of a “Minotaur maze of books.”
In time, Gowans would become one of the most respected book dealers in the city, renowned as “one of the most truthful and uncompromising of men.” In the early days of his business, however, he had few friends or acquaintances, and kept mostly to himself. One of his few companions was his landlady’s son-in-law, Edgar Allan Poe, also known to some members of the household as “Eddy.”
“During that time I saw much of him, and had an opportunity of conversing with him often,” Gowans wrote many years later, “and I must say, that I never saw him the least affected with liquor, nor even descend to any known vice, while he was one of the most courteous, gentlemanly, and intelligent companions I have met with during my journeyings and haltings through divers divisions of the globe. Besides, he had an extra inducement to be a good man as well as a good husband, for he had a wife of matchless beauty and loveliness; her eyes could match that of any houri, and her face defy the genius of a Canova to imitate.”
If Gowans sounded defensive of his young friend’s character, he had good reason to be. Though not yet thirty, Poe had already made powerful enemies in New York, many of whom dismissed him as an unreliable drunkard. Poe had already begun to publish his poetry and tales, but his modest reputation at that time rested chiefly on his literary criticism, published in Richmond’s Southern Literary Messenger and elsewhere.
Poe was a gifted critic, but a controversial one. Although his skill and insight were undeniable, many readers were put off by the astonishing venom he displayed when he went on the attack. He became so notorious for his bile that a contemporary caricature showed him brandishing a tomahawk. “I have scalped him!” he would say after completing an especially vicious review, adding that “feeble puffing is not my forte. It will do these fellows good to hear the truth, and stimulate them to worthier efforts.” In Poe’s view, the criticism of the time suffered from an excess of bland civility. He believed that his broadsides would rouse his fellow critics from their stupor and attract the notice of the insular literary establishment of New York and Boston.
The strategy succeeded to a certain extent. Poe’s tirades soon found favor with the editor of a new journal called the New York Review, who invited Poe “to fall in with your broad-axe amidst this miserable literary trash which surrounds us.” With his wife and mother-in-law in tow, Poe moved to New York from Richmond in February of 1837. By some accounts, the three of them were subjects of curiosity as they wandered the streets in their “Southern garb,” looking for lodging. The new arrivals eventually found rooms in a dilapidated building at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Waverly Place.
Soon enough, however, Poe’s hopes of employment vanished amid the upheavals of the banking panic of that year, a consequence of the same grim economic conditions that had brought Mary Rogers and her mother to the city. Several newspapers and magazines suspended publication as a result, including the New York Review. Over the course of fifteen months in New York, Poe would manage to publish only two stories. As his prospects dwindled, he considered abandoning literature altogether and training for a career in lithography. At times, the household subsisted on bread and molasses for days at a stretch.
Circumstances improved marginally when the family moved from Waverly Place to a small house at 113½ Carmine Street, near Washington Square. There, Poe’s mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, hit upon an idea to help the family stay afloat. “The hard times of 1837, with insistent force, had been knocking at Poe’s door,” wrote one early chronicler, “until Mrs. Clemm found it wise to turn her attention to keeping a few boarders to meet the expenses of daily needs.” Like Phoebe Rogers, Mrs. Clemm believed that running a boardinghouse would offer a measure of stability in worsening times.
Among Mrs. Clemm’s boarders was the affable William Gowans, who seems to have taken a warm interest in the family’s welfare. “For more than eight months one house contained us,” Gowans would recall, and “one table fed us.” Gowans, who came to regard Poe as a “gifted but unfortunate genius,” soon offered to use his connections to introduce the young critic to the New York literary set. On March 30, 1837, Gowans brought Poe as his guest to a formal Booksellers’ Dinner at the City Hotel on lower Broadway. The event drew a number of literary notables, including Washington Irving and the poet Fitz-Greene Halleck. Gowans recalled that the evening “was a brilliant one and marked the first appearance of the young Southern critic and poet among the Knickerbockers.” Conscious of the opportunity to make an impression, Poe stood and proposed one of the evening’s toasts, raising his glass to “The Monthlies of Gotham—Their distinguished Editors, and their vigorous Collaborateurs.”
It is reasonable to suppose that Poe made other attempts to ingratiate himself with his distinguished and vigorous colleagues. If so, there would have been a number of avenues open to him. In addition to the famous Shakespeare Tavern, the newly opened Anderson’s Tobacco Emporium was fast establishing itself as a literary gathering place. Poe may well have called in to mingle with other men of letters, and perhaps make purchases from Mary Rogers, the haunting young woman behind the cigar counter. A young police constable named George Walling, later to become New York’s chief of police, would recall that Poe had been one of a host of literary men who were “acquainted with the dainty figure and pretty face where they bought their cigars,” though it is worth noting that Walling had not yet joined the police force at that time. Even so, it is pleasant to imagine Poe rubbing elbows with Irving and Cooper, and perhaps basking in the “glimpse of heaven” afforded by Mary Rogers and her dark smile. If so, he could little have imagined, as he would later write, “the intense and long-enduring excitement” that would soon develop over the beautiful cigar girl’s fate, or how intimately his own fortunes would be bound up in hers.
“I THINK,” Poe once wrote, long before his arrival in New York, “that I have already had my share of trouble for one so young.” It was one of the few occasions where he might have been accused of understatement. It is often said that Poe lived a life as bizarre and tortuous as one of his own tales of the imagination, though perhaps the story would have fit more comfortably in a Gothic melodrama. David Poe, Edgar’s father, had been destined for a career in law when he spied a young actress named Eliza Arnold across the footlights of a theater in Norfolk, Virginia. Instantly smitten by the “fetchingly girlish” performer, he abandoned his legal studies and gave himself over to life on the stage, much to his father’s displeasure. In time, David Poe managed to join Eliza Arnold’s theatrical troupe, where he wooed and won the recently widowed actress.
Eliza Arnold Hopkins was only nineteen at the time, but she was already a ten-year veteran of the stage. A celebrated beauty, her only known portrait shows a round yet fragile face, with large, liquid eyes framed by dangling curls. Reviews often made mention of her “interesting figure” and “sweetly melodious voice.” The appearance of David Poe was also pleasing to critics, but it seems that his abilities as an actor left much to be desired. Writing in 1806, the year of the Poes’ marriage, one critic observed that “the lady was young and pretty, and evinced talent both as singer and actress; the gentleman was literally nothing.”
In January of 1807, nine months after the marriage, the young Mrs. Poe gave birth to a son, Henry. Two years later, on January 19, 1809, Edgar was born in a boardinghouse near the Boston Common, not far from where the troupe was appearing. By this time a h
eavy strain was evident in the Poes’ marriage. David Poe, resentful of his wife’s success, proved to be quick-tempered and hard-drinking, especially when affronted by criticism of his acting skills. On one occasion he berated an audience from the stage, and on another he presented himself at the home of a critic to take issue with a hostile notice. As his behavior grew more and more erratic, the burden of providing for the family fell on Eliza, who was obliged to continue performing until the week of Edgar’s birth, and to resume some two weeks later.
A third child, Rosalie, arrived the following year. By this time Henry had been sent to live with his paternal grandparents, while Edgar and his newborn sister spent much of their time in the care of nursemaids, one of whom, according to a family friend, “fed them liberally with bread soaked in gin” and “freely administered…other spirituous liquors, with sometimes laudanum.” This, the nurse believed, would “make them strong and healthy.”
David Poe abandoned his wife and three children in July of 1811 and is said to have died, alone and destitute, five months later. By this time the unhappy circumstances had also taken a toll on Eliza. For a brief time she struggled alone in failing health, only to die of tuberculosis in Richmond, Virginia, on December 8, 1811, with her children at her side. Edgar was not quite three.
During their mother’s final illness, Edgar and his sister Rosalie had been under the care of kindly actor friends by the name of Usher, but the couple were unable to take permanent custody. The children’s maternal grandparents had died years earlier, and the paternal grandparents, who already had custody of Henry, had suffered a financial reverse that made it impossible to accept responsibility for the two younger children. A home was found for Rosalie with a Richmond family by the name of Mackenzie, while Edgar was taken into the care of an enterprising merchant named John Allan.