The Beautiful Cigar Girl Page 6

  By this time, however, Poe had grown weary of army life, especially after the tedious stretch on Sullivan’s Island, which he would describe as offering “little else than the sea sand.” With three years remaining on his five-year term of enlistment, Poe realized that he had reached a dead end. He confided in his sympathetic commanding officer, Lieutenant Howard, revealing not only the unhappy circumstances that led to his enlistment, but also his true age. The lieutenant allowed as how a discharge might be possible, but it carried a condition that Poe must have dreaded: a reconciliation with John Allan, whose permission was required.

  Clearly the prospect was unwelcome to Poe, no matter how much he may have wished to escape the drudgery of three more years in the army, so it fell to Lieutenant Howard to write and broach the subject with Allan. Apparently Poe’s long absence had stirred no fondness in Allan’s heart. He coldly informed Lieutenant Howard that Poe “had better remain as he is until the termination of his enlistment.”

  It was hardly the reconciliation Poe might have wished for. Nevertheless, he now undertook to write to Allan directly, attempting over the course of several letters to make a case for leaving the army and returning home. “I am altered from what you knew me,” he insisted, attempting to distance himself from the sins of Charlottesville, “and am no longer a boy tossing about on the world without aim or consistency.” However, like the boy he had been, Poe was not above resorting to veiled threats that he would be “driven to more decided measures if you refuse to assist me.”

  When these letters went unanswered, Poe changed tactics. Instead of leaving the army, he now sought Allan’s help in advancing further through the ranks. Acting on the advice of Lieutenant Howard and others, Poe asked Allan’s support in securing a place at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Having already completed artillery training, and shown himself to be a capable soldier, Poe expected to complete his cadet training in only six months. Unfortunately, the new plan of action carried a familiar refrain: “Under the certain expectation of kind news from home I have been led into expenses which my present income will not support,” he wrote, adding that he was “at present in an uncomfortable situation.” Worse yet, he ended with another of his dark threats. He would await Allan’s response with impatience, he declared, for it meant a choice between “the assurance of an honourable & highly successful course in my own country—or the prospect—no certainty of an exile forever to another.”

  Perhaps the only grace notes of Poe’s letters to Richmond had been his consistent and genuine concern for the well-being of Frances Allan, his foster mother: “My dearest love to Ma—it is only when absent that we can tell the true value of such a friend—I hope she will not let my wayward disposition wear away the love she used to have for me.” Mrs. Allan’s health, always fragile, had gone into a slow and painful decline during Poe’s army stint. In March of 1829 Poe received the unhappy news that she had died at the age of forty-four. In her final illness, she had repeatedly expressed the desire for a reunion with her foster son.

  Poe secured a leave from the army and traveled to Richmond, where the grieving John Allan welcomed him in a spirit of reconciliation, even buying him a suit of mourning clothes. By the time Poe returned to duty, Allan had given his consent to the plan to leave the army and enter West Point. On his discharge forms, Poe declared himself to be John Allan’s “son & heir.”

  All that remained was to finalize the discharge, a task Poe mishandled. Regulations required him to arrange for a substitute to serve the remaining years of his enlistment. Although the standard payment for this service was only twelve dollars, Poe would have had to remain until his superiors returned from furlough to secure a man at this price. Unwilling to wait, he rashly offered seventy-five dollars to an ex-soldier to take his place immediately. The substitute received twenty-five dollars in cash and a promissory note for the balance. As with his departure from the University of Virginia two years earlier, Poe now left the army with a debt he had no means of honoring. When John Allan learned of this, the truce with his prodigal foster son began to unravel.

  Fourteen months would elapse before a place opened up at West Point. John Allan made it clear that Poe was not especially welcome in Richmond—“I am not particularly anxious to see you,” he wrote—so Poe passed several months in Baltimore, living mostly at the home of a cousin. He spent much of his time assembling his West Point application materials and letters of recommendation, at one stage walking some thirty-seven miles to Washington to plead his case to John H. Eaton, the secretary of war.

  Poe also devoted time to a second collection of poetry, even placing a few of his verses in literary journals, where they drew some backhanded praise: “though nonsense, rather exquisite nonsense.” In May of 1829 Poe wrote to Allan with “a request different from any I have ever yet made,” asking for one hundred dollars to indemnify a publisher against loss if they agreed to publish his new volume of poems. In this way, Poe believed, he could “cut out a path to reputation” without derailing his plan to enter West Point.

  The request was not entirely outlandish—guarantees of this type were fairly common at the time—but John Allan, who had chided Poe for studying literature at the University of Virginia, made an unlikely patron of the arts. Allan not only refused, he wrote to Poe and strongly censured his conduct. Undeterred, Poe took the manuscript to a small Baltimore firm whose owners did not require a surety. The seventy-two-page Al Aaraaff, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems was published at the end of 1829 in an edition of only 250 copies. The twenty-year-old poet set aside the anonymous “Bostonian” pseudonym of his earlier collection and published the work as Edgar A. Poe. This was the name he would use henceforth, neither abandoning nor fully acknowledging his uncertain claim on the name of Allan.

  The new collection fared slightly better than Poe’s first effort, even drawing a small smattering of reviews, and Poe now described himself as “irrecoverably a poet.” By this time, however, his application to West Point had advanced through the bureaucracy. As he had promised Allan, he would not allow the demands of poetry to divert him. In June of 1830, Poe traveled to New York to enter the United States Military Academy.

  It is commonplace to observe that this fragile and melancholy poetic genius was ill suited to the rigors and harsh discipline of West Point. During Poe’s time, regulations specifically forbade cadets to “read novels, romances or plays,” suggesting that the academy was inhospitable to the artistic temperament. As he sought to restore himself to his foster father’s good graces, however, Poe had few options. It was natural that he should attempt to capitalize on his earlier success as an enlisted man, and West Point seemed to offer, as he told Allan, the promise of achieving distinction.

  Upon arrival, Poe was immediately thrown into the difficult period of summer encampment: sleeping rough in crude tents and undergoing a seemingly endless round of drills and weapons training beginning each day at 5:30 A.M. When the academic year began in September, Poe and his fellow cadets moved into spartan barracks and divided their time between class work and military exercises until ten at night. Not surprisingly, Poe excelled on the academic side, but after the comparatively light duties of his army service, he found the training to be intolerably difficult. He was not alone in this opinion; the class size would dwindle from 130 to some eighty-seven cadets in barely six months.

  A fellow cadet named Timothy Jones would recall that Poe seemed “given to extreme dissipation” shortly after arrival. “At first he studied hard and his ambition seemed to be to lead the class in all studies,” Jones noted, but after a few weeks “he seemed to lose interest in his studies and to be disheartened and discouraged.” Poe sought refuge in a nearby tavern, whose proprietor he would recall as the “sole congenial soul in the entire God-forsaken place.”

  Poe had expected, as he told Allan, to “run thro”’ his training in a mere six months. Now he faced the deadening realization that he, like all the rest of the cadets, would be required to sp
end four full years before receiving his commission. If three more years in the army had seemed intolerable, four years at West Point was the stuff of nightmares.

  Worse yet, Poe’s fragile détente with Allan had begun to fray. Although Allan had permitted a brief visit to Richmond once Poe’s appointment to West Point was secure, the visit had gone poorly, with old grievances boiling to the surface. Allan, meanwhile, had other calls on his attention. Barely a year after the death of Frances Allan, he made plans to marry Louisa Patterson, a woman twenty years younger than himself, with whom he would go on to have three children. Almost at the same time, another of Allan’s paramours, his longtime mistress, gave birth to twin sons. For Poe, toiling away at West Point, the implications were obvious. Although he had identified himself as Allan’s “son & heir” on his army discharge papers, he now found himself in a crowded field.

  Apparently Allan was anxious to get on with his new life and marriage, and felt fully prepared to consign Poe to a place among his late wife’s discarded effects. By the end of the year, he had engineered a final rupture, hastened by his anger over the unnecessarily large sum Poe had paid his substitute when leaving the army. The substitute, a man named “Bully” Graves, had sent several letters to Poe attempting to collect the balance of the money owed to him. Poe, in attempting to explain his inability to pay, offered some ill-advised comments, claiming that Allan always “shuffled off” his requests for help, and was “not very often sober—which accounts for it.” Somehow these remarks found their way back to Allan, who sent Poe a furious letter in which he requested “no further communication with yourself.”

  Poe, the trained artificer, loaded up his heavy artillery. In the past he had always made some effort, no matter how clumsily handled, to preserve the flickering embers of his benefactor’s goodwill. Now, seeing that Allan had truly turned his back, Poe fired off a blistering four-page tirade, cataloguing complaints and accusations dating back to childhood: “Did I, when an infant, solicit your charity and protection, or was it of your own free will that you volunteered your services in my behalf?” He concluded with a typically dramatic and self-destructive flourish: “You sent me to W. Point like a beggar. The same difficulties are threatening me as before at Charlottesville—and I must resign.”

  Although Poe had already soured on the idea of four full years at West Point, it is likely that he perceived his resignation as a final means of punishing Allan. Unfortunately his withdrawal required Allan’s signature, and Poe warned that if his foster father failed to grant “this last request” he would actively court dismissal by neglecting his duties. Poe had already accrued an impressive number of bad conduct points by this time, and it is possible that he launched this threat as a means of accounting for misconduct already committed. Be that as it may, when Allan failed to respond, Poe mounted an active campaign of negligence, failing to report for duty on numerous occasions, and missing classes. On January 28, 1831, Poe was brought up on charges of neglect and disobedience. He offered no defense, thereby assuring his discharge. “I have been dismissed,” he wrote to Allan, “when a single line from you would have saved it.”

  Astonishingly, Poe’s former West Point classmates now extended aid where John Allan had refused. In his early days at the academy Poe had established himself as a satirist, lampooning West Point’s commanders and traditions in verse. A fellow cadet recalled that “he would often write some of the most forcible and vicious doggerel, have me copy it with my left hand in order that it might be disguised, and post it around the building.” Apparently these efforts made quite an impression. After Poe’s departure, more than a hundred of his classmates contributed to a fund to underwrite his third collection of poems, amassing more than $150. The resulting volume, entitled simply Poems, appeared in May of 1831 in an edition of five hundred copies. Although it featured a grateful dedication to the “United States Corps of Cadets,” the volume was met with disappointment in the barracks, as it contained none of Poe’s military spoofs. “This book is a damn cheat,” wrote one cadet.

  In time, the disgruntled cadet’s outburst came to be the minority opinion. The volume reflected Poe’s growing maturity, forged in the crucible of desperate circumstances. With chilling clarity, the twenty-two-year-old poet announced the themes that would dominate his life and career:

  And so, being young and dipt in folly

  I fell in love with melancholy,

  And used to throw my earthly rest

  And quiet all away in jest—

  I could not love except where Death

  Was mingling his with Beauty’s breath—

  Or Hymen, Time, and Destiny

  Were stalking between her and me.

  Although barely out of his teens, Poe had managed to give voice to a sense of loss and wretchedness that would echo in nearly every poem and story he would ever write. Poe’s early bereavements—the desertion of his father and the death of his mother—had created a wound that was not permitted to heal under John Allan’s wavering affections. “For God’s sake pity me,” Poe had once written to his foster father, “and save me from destruction.” It is impossible to say whether anyone could have saved Poe from his own self-destructive impulses—what he later termed “the human thirst for self-torment”—but there can be little question that the upheavals of his early years had created a vision of the world in which beauty and death would always shadow one another. It was a theme that Poe would find in every corner of his life, and it would soon lead him, perhaps inevitably, to Mary Rogers, the most celebrated and tragic young beauty of the age.

  III

  Left Home on Sunday

  ON THE MORNING OF SUNDAY, July 25, 1841, with the temperature climbing toward 93 degrees, Mary Rogers rose before dawn and helped to prepare breakfast for the lodgers in her mother’s Nassau Street boardinghouse: boiled eggs, oatmeal porridge, and milk toast. Next, she saw to the morning laundry, stoked the fires, and swept the halls. After three hours, with her morning chores completed, she prepared to go out for the day. She dressed in her Sunday finest: a white cotton frock with a bright blue scarf tied at her neck. Anticipating a hot day, she chose a light straw hat and carried a summer parasol.

  “The quiet of a Sabbath morning in the city is in marked contrast to the confusion and hubbub of the week,” wrote a diarist of the time. “On Sundays it is as quiet as a cathedral. Broadway, on which Old Trinity stands sentinel at one end, and aristocratic Grace at the other, is swept clean and is deserted. An occasional coach, bringing to the hotels a Sabbath traveler, or a solitary express wagon loaded down with baggage, is all that breaks the solitude. The broad, clean pavement of Broadway glistens with the morning sun, and is as silent as the wilderness. The revelers, gamblers, the sons and daughters of pleasure, who ply their trade into the small hours of the morning, sleep late; and the portions of the city occupied by them are silent as the tomb.”

  Shortly before ten o’clock, Mary knocked at the door of her fiancé Daniel Payne’s room. Payne, who was in the middle of shaving, spoke to her through a half-opened door. Mary informed him that she had made plans to visit her aunt, Mrs. Downing, and accompany her family to church. Mrs. Downing lived on Jane Street, fifteen minutes away by omnibus (the horse-drawn coach that carried commuters up and down Broadway). Mary told Payne that she planned to return in the early evening, so he arranged to meet her at the corner of Broadway and Ann, in front of Barnum’s Museum, so that he might escort her safely back to Nassau Street.

  Nothing in Mary’s behavior struck Payne as out of the ordinary. She appeared to be, as he would later insist, “cheerful and lively as usual” and very much looking forward to her day out. “Very well, Mary,” said Payne. “I will look out for you.” With that, Mary went down the stairs and stepped out onto Nassau Street.

  Although Payne had no reason to be suspicious, there was much about Mary’s story that would not have stood up to scrutiny. It would subsequently emerge that she had not told Mrs. Downing of her plan to visit, and, in fa
ct, her aunt was not at home that morning. Perhaps Mary had planned to drop in unannounced, but it is worth noting that this pretext for leaving the house—a visit to Mrs. Downing—was the same excuse she had used to cover her disappearance three years earlier, when her unexplained absence from Anderson’s Tobacco Emporium had caused such a stir.

  Whatever else may have been in Mary’s mind that morning, it’s clear that she was having second thoughts about Daniel Payne. Phoebe Rogers disliked the hard-drinking cork cutter, and two days earlier Mary had been overheard making a “positive promise” to her mother that she would break off their relationship. Alfred Crommelin, whose stormy departure from the premises had occurred the previous month, may have been mentioned as a more suitable prospect.

  On the same day that Mary promised to stop seeing Payne, Crommelin received a note asking him to call at the boardinghouse. The message struck him as odd: It was written in Mary’s hand but signed with Phoebe’s name. Uncertain of what to do, he showed the note to his friend Archibald Padley as the two men walked together toward Crommelin’s office. Whatever Mary wished of him, it must have been a matter of some urgency—when Crommelin arrived at his office, there was a second message written on the chalk slate that hung beside the door. This time the message was signed by Mary, and it repeated the request to call at the earliest convenience. As a further token of her visit, and perhaps as a signal of her feelings toward him, Mary placed a red rose through the keyhole of the door.