Before retiring to my chamber for the night, I work up the courage to approach Pa’s room and rap upon his door.
“Come in,” he says from within.
I do as he asks and find him draped in his emerald robe, lounging, as usual, in his armchair in front of the Revolutionary War musket and the crossed medieval swords that reflect the flames undulating in his fireplace.
He looks up from the leather-bound book he’s reading. “What is it, Edgar?”
“I’m dying, Pa.”
He sniffs. “You sound more like you’re on the verge of complaining.”
“My soul is dying in your counting room.”
“Dear Lord.” He rubs his eyes with the palms of his hands. “Must you always speak with such a dramatic flair, Edgar? Your parents’ theatrical blood has poisoned your veins and turned you into a malcontent whom no one is going to tolerate for long.”
“This is why I’m dying.” I drop my hand from the latch of his door. “You never cease to abuse me.”
“I don’t abuse you. Stop saying that I do.”
“What do you call your actions toward me at the university?”
“I paid for your education.”
“You paid for only part of it. You left me stranded there and forced the other students to view me as destitute. I’ve heard you tell Ma when you think I’m not listening that you have no affection for me.”
“I’ve never said that.”
“I’ve heard you, Pa! Why did you take me in as a child when you could have let someone else raise me? Why did you do that if you didn’t want me? You should have sent me to my grandparents in Baltimore instead.”
Ma coughs in her bedroom across the landing.
Pa stands up. “Shut the door so Ma doesn’t have to hear your ingratitude.”
“I want to return to the university.”
“Well, you can’t. Constables in Charlottesville are waiting to throw you in jail.”
“And who’s fault is that?”
“Yours, Edgar! You’re the one who gambled everything away. I want you to succeed as a responsible member of society, don’t you see that? I want you to experience success.”
“Well, our definitions of success differ vastly, Pa. You see me as a frivolous poet who wastes time and money. I see myself as a scholar who’ll thrive in a life of letters.”
“But you’re young and fool—”
“You see yourself as a prosperous merchant,” I continue. “I see you as a failed businessman, a failed family man, who’s lucky—damn lucky—his uncle dropped dead and left him the largest share of his fortune.”
Pa glowers down at me with his chin raised high in the air. I debate slithering out the door before he can hurl his book at my head—or worse—but then he says, “Do you know what I genuinely see when I look at you, Edgar?”
My eyes brim with tears, for I know whatever he declares will hurt a thousand times worse than the verbal injury I just inflicted upon him. I back away toward the door.
“I see the little boy my wife desperately wanted to take in after she learned she couldn’t bear children of her own,” he says with a gulp. “I see the hope in her eyes when we brought you into our home as a curly-haired orphan with inquisitive eyes. That’s what you meant to her, Edgar: hope.”
His voice has softened.
A tear leaks from my right eye.
“But”—he drops his book to his chair—“hope is nothing more than folly. Hope wastes time. Hope refuses to face truths. Hope . . .” Again, he lifts his chin. “Hope inevitably leads to disappointment.”
“I know . . .” I clasp a hand around my throat to keep from choking on tears. “I know I’m a disappointment to you . . .”
“I taught you to aspire, but I didn’t mean for you to aspire to live the life of a character in a novel. You’re not Don Quixote or Gil Blas.”
“I know I’m not a character in a novel, Pa. Stop treating me like I’m ignorant and delirious. I understand reality all too well—that’s the source of all my pain.”
“You’ve been writing all these nights you’ve been back home, haven’t you?”
“If I don’t write . . .”
“If you don’t write, you’ll what?”
I cover my mouth to hide the chattering of my teeth. He’s done it again—reduced me to a groveler, an insubordinate, a dog cowering at his owner’s feet.
“Wipe your tears,” he says, “clear your throat, and answer me like the eighteen-year-old man that you are, not a child. Don’t tell me that if you don’t write, you’ll die, Edgar. No man has ever died from stifling his muse.”
“I love her.”
“Who?”
“My muse. If you kill her, Pa—”
“Is she in your room right now?”
I stiffen and strain my ears for signs of Lenore across the house. “No.”
“Are you certain?” Pa surveys my frozen stance. His gaze runs up and down my figure.
Before I can cough up a response, he grabs the musket that’s mounted on his wall.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
He drops a musket ball down the barrel and twists open a flask of gunpowder from the mantle.
“She’s not in my room,” I say, for I haven’t seen her tonight and believe it’s the truth—I pray it’s the truth. “This is absurd.” I fly toward him. “Stop loading that musket. You’re not killing my muse.”
He twists away from me and rams down the powder with a rod.
“Pa!” I grab the musket from his hands.
Something crashes to the floor in the direction of my room. Our shoulders jerk, and we both swing around toward the doorway of Pa’s chamber.
“What was that, John?” asks Ma from her bedroom.
Instead of answering, Pa tugs the musket away from me and bolts toward my bedroom at the end of the lamp-lit niche beyond the staircase.
“If you’re in there, Lenore, get out!” I cry out before he can fling the door open. “Get out! He’s coming!”
Pa hurls open the door, and I rush up behind him.
The room within proves empty.
My fireplace poker lies across the bricks of the hearth, as though the metal crashed down from careless positioning.
I breathe a sigh of relief, although my heart skips a beat when I notice a soft rustle of the purple curtain shielding the door to the portico, as though someone just vacated the room.
“What does she look like?” asks Pa, his musket still positioned to fire.
“Put that weapon down, Pa. Good Lord!” I sidle past him with care and hang the poker with the other cast-iron tools for the fireplace. “The poker fell. That’s all that you heard.”
Pa lowers the musket to the floor and heads toward the writing box sitting on my table.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
He opens the drawer and tugs out poems, school notes, and sketches, throwing papers to the rug in a blizzard of parchment that snows my handwriting across the floor.
“Leave my work alone. Let me go to bed, Pa. I don’t want you here in my room, digging around in my personal belongings.”
He freezes. “Is this her?”
I creep toward him to see whom he means—knowing whom he means.
He clutches my sketch of a fiendish young woman in a black dress of mourning—a girl with snaking tendrils of ebony hair, smirking lips, a strong chin, raised in defiance, and a pair of deep-set eyes that tease: I dare you to show me to the rest of the world. I dare you to show them your morbid fancies, Eddy Poe.
“I met her last winter,” he says. “She claimed to be my muse. She called herself Cassandra, and I foolishly believed her for a short while.”
I rip the sketch from his hands, tearing the page in my haste, leaving him half of Lenore.
“Instead of bullying me for dreaming and writing poetry, Pa,” I say, “why don’t you leave me alone and tend to your own art?”
“I shoved my muse into a blazing kitchen fire back in Scotland years ago.” He crumples up his half of the drawing and tromps toward the flames of my hearth.
I leap toward him. “No, don’t!”
I’m too late. He tosses the paper into the grate before I can grab his arm. The flames hiss like a fist curling around the parchment and shrink Lenore down into a glowing ball of orange.
I unbutton my shirt and tuck the rest of the drawing against my breast. “Please let me go to bed, Pa.” I hug my shirt closed. “Take that damn loaded musket and your disappointment out of my room and leave me be. I have a long day of work ahead tomorrow.”
“Aye, that you do.” Pa grabs up his musket and ambles away with a slam of my door that, once again, knocks the poker across the bricks of the hearth with a clatter.