A European professor, indeed, reigns over my seven o’clock Italian lecture in the school of Modern Languages—a German fellow named Blaettermann of rough build and sweaty orange hair.
It’s so agonizingly early that dawn hasn’t yet broken. The fire in the hearth yawns and stretches as much as we do. A corps of candles and wall sconces illuminates the room, perfuming the pavilion with a scrim of smoke that hangs between us and the professor.
“We are going to concentrate on the poets of Italy this month,” he says in a harsh Saxony accent, his round head weaving and bobbing in and out of the shadows.
A student at a back table mimics the professor in an exaggerated version of his accent, clipped and guttural, with a barrage of buzzing Zs.
The other students in the back howl with laughter. Professor Blaettermann curses at them in German and shakes a fist in their direction, but then he proceeds to list on a blackboard the Italian poets we’ll be reading. The students shake their fists back at him, mocking his shouts, and someone throws a shoe that bounces off the board in a shower of chalk.
I bend over my notebook and write down the poets we’re to study, so anxious about my outstanding fees that I don’t dare risk expulsion due to a poor disciplinary record. Most every other student in the classroom wears the light-gray coat and striped pantaloons of the university’s uniform, but I’m sitting here in my black frock coat and brown trousers, unable to pay for any such garments.
My stomach groans. Breakfast won’t be served until the eight o’clock recess of the lecture.
Someone throws another shoe—a fine, polished black one that would probably pay for my uniform and more.
The flame of the candle burning on my table sizzles and bends my way.
Do you think these fellows all believe themselves better than you? I wonder with a glance at my classmates. Do they know you’re the orphaned son of an actress and a drunk? Do they smell the stink on you? Can they detect that directly after class, you’ll need to write to a man in Richmond who despises you—a man who’s never even legally adopted you—and beg him for money, pleading with him to pay the remainder of your fees so you won’t be hauled away in shame?
I focus my full attention on Professor Blaettermann’s voice and pray for my survival in this madhouse. Despite the chaos writhing within the white walls of this pavilion—despite the explosions of either fireworks or gunfire that woke me up late last night—I would prefer, without a doubt, to live here instead of Moldavia.
Dear God, please don’t let anyone drag me away before the session ends in December.
I swiftly make friends, at least—Miles George, Thomas Goode Tucker, William Burwell, Zaccheus Collins Lee, among others. A few of these new chums also claim that they’re runners, so I challenge them to foot races across the Lawn during the afternoons after the lectures, never mind the snow and the tumbles we take when our feet slip out from under us.
None of these fine lads know that I’ve written to Pa with a request for more money and a detailed account of the expenses incurred, so Pa won’t think I’m inflating the amount. They don’t even know that I’ve mailed a letter to Elmira Royster that expressed the ardor of my passion, and they most certainly aren’t aware that I’m secretly engaged to her, a girl whose father believes I have the marriage potential of a horse turd in the street. I can’t risk gossip about my engagement traveling back to Richmond. Miles might know Elmira—or have acquaintances who know her family.
Saturday night, after a long week of lectures and settling into my surroundings, I invite Miles, Tom, and Will to my room to test out their opinions of my work. The fellows pile into my dormitory, freed from their gray uniforms, clad in coats of their own desired colors and styles, which they peel off and toss onto my bed.
Tom Tucker, a pasty fellow with short black hair and the face of a twelve-year-old, pulls a decanter filled with liquid out of a pocket in his overcoat. “Do you like peach and honey, Poe?”
“I’ve never tried it.”
“You’re not a true University of Virginia student until you do.” Tom plunks the decanter onto my table, directly in front of where I’m sitting.
Alcohol the color of liquified gold sloshes before my eyes. Tom pulls out the glass stopple, and the fumes of a sweetened peach brandy consume my nose.
Miles and Will dig crystal snifters out of their coat pockets on the bed.
“Where did you get those?” I ask with a laugh. “Your grandmother’s cabinet of heirlooms?”
“You’re not far off,” says Will, the shortest of our group, but his lion’s mane of red curls adds at least three inches to his height. He lines the snifters on the table as though they’re delicate jewels.
“Shall I pour,” asks Tom, “or would you prefer to do the honors as our esteemed host, Poe?”
I eye the golden temptress waiting in the glass before me, unsure whether I’m yet comfortable enough to quaff spirits in front of these gentlemen.
I push the decanter toward Tom. “You pour. I’ll wait to drink until after I pay homage to dear Professor Blaettermann on my wall.”
“On your wall?” asks Miles, brushing his blond hair out of his eyes again.
I nod. “On my beautifully bare wall.”
“Oh, I can’t wait to see this.” Miles takes a seat on the floor next to the pile of firewood that’s run me several more dollars into debt.
Will sits down beside him and removes his socks and shoes, as though settling in for the night.
Tom pours the peach and honey.
I slide open the drawer of my writing box and fetch a charcoal crayon. The flame of my tabletop candle wriggles in anticipation of my eminent performance.
“Gentlemen,” I say with a leap upon my bed, brandishing the charcoal like a nubbin of a sword, “I present to you an ode to the esteemed professors of Jefferson’s university.”
“Here, here!” says Miles with a raise of the glass he’s just received from Tom. “Shower us with your brilliant criticism of asses that I’ve heard so much about in Richmond.”
I grin and blush. “Oh, you’ve already heard about my satires, then?”
“Our young Edgar Poe here,” says Miles to the others, “is famous for chasing a bastard out of town when said bastard insulted him.”
“Did you challenge him to a duel?” asks Will with a rasp after taking a swig of his drink.
“No, it was no duel,” I say, digging my feet into my mattress, steadying my balance. “I ridiculed the ass with an anonymous poem—a rapier-sharp lampoon that I named ‘Don Pompioso’ and plastered across the city.”
The boys snort into their brandies. Tom scoots the chair away from my table and plops himself down on it while taking a drink. Liquor dribbles from his chin to his pantaloons, and the aroma of alcohol overpowers the air.
“Is everyone comfortable and ready?” I ask.
“Yes!” says Will after another gulp.
I clear my throat and lift the charcoal crayon with a theatrical flourish, envisioning myself on a stage, candlelight shining down on my head from a brass chandelier.
“Here’s a thing I’ve wondered since I was quite small and young,” I say. “Why are we enamored with the sound of British tongues? Why are our professors all imported from abroad? All they need to do is belch, and, God, we all applaud!”
The fellows clap and whistle while balancing their brandies on their laps, and the flame of my tabletop candle stretches five splendiferous inches into the air. In fact, every lamp in my room burns with more vigor, illuminating the canvas of my wall.
I draw Professor Blaettermann’s round head on the plaster.
“Keep going!” calls out Miles.
“More! More!” shouts Tom.
With a smile, I draw a droopy pair of eyes, a turned-up nose, and wild patches of hair, and I proceed with my versification:
“Latin spills like satin from those European lips,
‘We don’t care if they can’t teach, just send them on your ships!’
That’s the rule of bon ton fools in Yankee Doodle Land,
‘Lord help any child taught by a Yankee Doodle man!’
Even though we broke from England in a bloody war,
British education is the method we adore,
Some say Southern accents tear the classics into shreds,
I say, ‘That’s a damned, old lie embedded in your heads,’
So, I ask again—and I will shout it from my lungs—”
I pause to draw three plump little hairs sticking out from Blaettermann’s chin mole. Then I turn toward my audience, arms raised in the air, and call out:
“Why are we enamored with the sound of British tongues?”
“Huzzah!” shouts Miles, smacking his palms together, and the others follow suit, whooping and belching from the brandy.
I bow from atop my bed, my right hand pressed flat against my stomach, but I freeze at a troubling whoosh that intrudes upon my room—the sound of a sudden surge of fire.
I lift my face, and my mind muddles. My brain, for some reason, insists on miscalculating the number of young men seated inside my room, and I wonder if I’ve already swallowed a draught of the brandy without my realizing. I straighten up and count their heads once again.
Tom sits on my chair, but three fellows, not two, now occupy my floor.
I jump off the bed. “Who’s that sitting next to Will?”
The lads cease applauding and look to their left. They’ve all drained their first glasses, so no one even attempts to offer a coherent explanation for the sudden appearance of this fourth person, who’s clad in the university’s uniform, his face tipped downward, his eyes hidden beneath the low brim of a gray silk hat with the feathers of a mockingbird sticking out from a black band.
“How did you get in here?” I ask.
“You invited me,” says the stranger in a voice not unlike my own.
“Who are you?”
“Garland O’Peale.”
I shiver at his name, although I’m not entirely sure why.
“Do I know you from Richmond?” I ask.
“The question is,” says the stranger, “does Richmond know you from me?”
He raises his face, and I witness a ring of fire radiating from his pupils, throbbing out to the edges of a pair of amber irises.
My legs give way. I stagger over to my table and fall against the wood, nearly knocking over the glass of peach and honey waiting for me.
“Are you all right, Poe?” asks Tom, rising to his feet. “You seem used up already. Did you drink before we got here?”
I dare another glance at Garland and see a clean-shaven face that resembles my own, with the same long but sufficiently good nose, narrow chin, and uninspiring mouth. His eyes, like mine, are large and framed in jet-black lashes, but their bright amber hue looks inhuman. I know what the fire pulsing inside them signifies, but I want nothing more to do with muses clamoring for attention.
I grab the snifter and dump the brandy down my gullet in a single gulp that stings my tonsils.
“Bravo!” says Will, and another round of applause ensues to revere my bold drinking style. No one else seems bothered by Garland O’Peale.
I pound my glass to the table and brace my hands against the wood, enduring a disorienting wave of dizziness that makes me rock back and forth. The world tastes of peaches and fire.
Garland belches, which irks me. I’ve just suppressed my own belch by pinning my lips together and holding my breath, and yet he has the gall to go and belch for me.
“Edgar?” asks Miles with a nervous laugh. “Are you ill?”
A gust of wind slams against my window and whistles beneath my door, and the atmosphere shifts. My bitterness eases, yet my passions awaken. I gaze up at the plastered wall above Miles’s head, noting its blankness, its possibilities, and I believe I see, staring out at me from the shadows, the eyes of Jane Stanard with their heavy lids and pale lashes. With my charcoal crayon in hand, I plod across the floorboards, the air a thick stew that hinders the movements of my legs, and the gentlemen on the floor part to let me to pass.
I draw my Helen’s eyes right there on the wall, and then I add her slender brows, her petite lips, her regal nose, and the curves of her cheeks and chin, but her eyes are out of proportion—much too large for her face. She’s staring at me in anguish, in agony. She’s the version of Mrs. Stanard I only heard about from her son, my younger friend Rob.
I think my mother might be going mad, he told me before we entered Master Clarke’s school one autumn morning when I was fourteen. Something’s wrong with her brain. She’s not well at all.
Using my crayon, I immortalize the soft curls of her hair that fell across her forehead like clusters of hyacinths, but my hand soon rebels and turns her locks into a frenzied mass of black tangles that snake away from her head. She’s wild and tortured, not at all the gentlewoman who invited me into her garden with her son and asked me about my poetry.
“Once I loved a woman, whom they buried in the ground,” I say, my voice whispery and deep. “During the splendorous spring of my darling’s short life, she invited me inside her garden walls and asked me to sit with her in a bed of lilies.”
My charcoal crayon has now desecrated my angel into a rotted specter, resurrected from the grave, reminding me that beauty is fleeting, death conquers all—it always conquers all. I can’t bear to see her this way, so I thicken her brows and her mouth and shorten her slender neck by drowning her throat in a sable collar. She’s not Mrs. Stanard—my Helen—she’s someone sinister, sensuous, beguiling . . .
“And when she died,” I continue, darkening her lips, “she invited me inside her churchyard walls and asked me to sit with her in a bed of lilies. She pulled me down into the ground, into the chilling, charmless churchyard ground, thrilling me, killing me, robbing me of breath, and there I now lie, beneath a bed of lilies.”
I finish my creation and sink back on my heels, my fingers smutted with charcoal, my soul a pound lighter.
Behind me, the green door of my dormitory now stands ajar—I know this for a fact without even turning around, for the wind snuffs out two of my candles, and my teeth chatter from the briskness of the air. I hear gasps of horror circulating among my friends.
“What is that?” asks Miles, the timber of his voice higher than usual, and I imagine the expression of disgust on his face.
The charcoal falls from my hand and chips against the floor. I press my forehead against the wall, and without turning around, I feel Lenore standing in my doorway, her arms hanging at her sides, river water dripping from her river-grass hair, the glass heart of her necklace beating, bleeding against the soot of her dress for all to see.