The Beautiful Cigar Girl

by Daniel Stashower

  Doubts persisted, however. In the pages of the Herald and elsewhere, speculation ranged from a single murderer to a gang of rowdies. The continuing mystery surrounding Mary’s companion, the “Swarthy Man,” also attracted a great deal of comment. Perhaps he, too, had been murdered by the gang that set upon Mary. If so, his body had not yet been discovered, and might well be lying at the bottom of the Hudson. Or perhaps he himself was the killer, having flown into a murderous rage when Mary rebuffed his advances. If that were the case, observed the Journal of Commerce, it was surprising that Mary should have tolerated his company at all, as he could only have been a very coarse and ill-bred sort of man. “A piece of one of the unfortunate girl’s petticoats was torn out and tied under her chin, and around the back of her head, probably to prevent screams,” the paper noted. “This was done by fellows who had no pocket handkerchiefs.” In other words, no proper gentleman could have had a hand in the matter, since a man of breeding would have used his own linen.

  As the contradictions and inconsistencies mounted, it became clear that the discoveries at Weehawken, along with the inconclusive results of Daniel Payne’s inquest, raised more questions than they answered. Several accounts of the items found in the thicket listed a pair of ladies’ gloves among the articles of clothing recovered, with the Herald going so far as to say that the gloves had been turned inside out, as if “forcibly drawn from her hands in a hurry.” This presented a troubling discrepancy with the reports of Mary’s corpse as it was pulled from the water at Castle Point. Several of these accounts reported that Mary’s gloves were found on her dead hands, with the Herald going so far as to remark on the “light gloves…with the long watery fingers peering out.” Although this attracted little notice at the time, it marked a substantial incongruity. Perhaps one or the other of the accounts had been in error, and the mistaken detail had simply been repeated in the other newspapers, but for the time being, the contradiction was difficult to reconcile. Meanwhile, the crowds continued to swarm over the grounds of the murder thicket, which no longer seemed quite as remote and isolated as Bennett had claimed. If, as Benjamin Day implied, Mrs. Loss had sought this notoriety to some degree as a means of increasing her business, the plan had succeeded brilliantly.

  Daniel Payne was laid to rest in New York on Monday, October 11, two days after the conclusion of the Weehawken inquest. When it became clear that his dramatic death would yield no solution to the Mary Rogers mystery, public interest in the drama slowly began to fade. Soon enough, the newspapers had a new sensation: the grisly ax murder of local printer Samuel Adams, whose mutilated corpse had been discovered neatly concealed in a packing crate, awaiting shipment to New Orleans. The trial and subsequent suicide of the killer, John C. Colt—brother of the famous firearms manufacturer—would hold New York spellbound for months to come.

  For the moment, Mary Rogers was yesterday’s news.

  XIV

  A Wave of Crimson

  IN PHILADELPHIA, where the newspaper reports from New York were widely reprinted, Edgar Allan Poe followed the Weehawken developments with keen interest. He remained intrigued with all forms of news from New York, though the struggles of his life there now seemed safely behind him. In contrast to the utter poverty and desperation of his household on Carmine Street, Poe now had cause for satisfaction. His salary of eight hundred dollars from Graham’s Magazine, though far from munificent, afforded him a sense of stability he had not known before in his adult life. By the end of 1841 he had moved with his wife and mother-in-law to a small townhouse on Coates Street at the northern edge of the city. As he had promised long ago in Richmond, he sought to provide Virginia with the comforts of privilege. The new house was furnished with a small piano, a harp, and a pair of songbirds in a gilded cage.

  On January 20, 1842, the day after Poe’s thirty-third birthday, a small group of friends gathered in the parlor of the house on Coates Street to hear Virginia sing and play upon the harp. “There was something peculiarly angelic and ethereal about this sight of Virginia playing the harp in the parlor by her own fireside, that almost transported Poe,” wrote an early admirer of the writer. “Dressed in white, singing in the glow of the lamplight, she became the personification of the Victorian heroine. The notes mounted higher, very true and clear—suddenly she stopped, clutched her throat, and a wave of crimson rushed down over her breast.”

  Ashen-faced, Poe carried his wife upstairs and laid her on the bed, then turned and ran for a doctor. Poe must have known, even before the doctor’s grim confirmation, that his wife’s hemorrhage signaled the onset of what was often described as “death-in-life,” or tuberculosis. He would also have realized that her prospects for survival were slim. Tuberculosis accounted for nearly one-quarter of all deaths in nineteenth-century America, and the limited treatments available—such as lengthy removals to healthful climates and sanatoriums—were beyond the resources of an editor making eight hundred dollars a year.

  Virginia would spend two weeks in precarious health, scarcely able to breathe except when fanned with fresh air. At times her coughing grew so severe that it seemed she would choke to death, and more than once the bleeding resumed. Heartsick, Poe remained at her side, brooding over the hand-to-mouth existence that had left his wife weakened and vulnerable. More than one visitor observed that the cramped and musty house in which they lived—luxurious by their usual standards—could only have made Virginia’s condition worse. The room in which the patient lay was so tiny that the sloping roof all but pressed down on her head.

  George Graham, Poe’s employer, observed that Poe’s “love for his wife was a sort of rapturous worship of the spirit of beauty which he felt was fading before his eyes. I have seen him hovering around her when she was ill, with all the fond fear and tender anxiety of a mother for her first-born, her slightest cough causing in him a shudder, a heart-chill that was visible.”

  Soon enough, Virginia’s illness would throw its shadow across Poe’s work. In “The Masque of the Red Death,” published just a few months after Virginia’s first attack, Poe dwelled on themes of plague and contagion, along with the “horror of blood,” and concluded with a grisly affirmation of death’s “illimitable dominion over all.” In “Eleonora,” also written during the early stages of the illness, Poe returned to the theme and meditated on the grim new circumstances of his life. The story featured a young man living an idyllic life with his young cousin, Eleonora, and her mother in a paradise known as “the Valley of Many-Colored Grass.” All too soon, however, Eleonora tearfully exclaims that “she had seen that the finger of Death was upon her bosom—that, like the ephemeron, she had been made in perfect loveliness only to die.”

  In the months to follow, Poe wavered between cautious optimism and absolute despair. “My dear little wife has been dangerously ill,” he told one friend in February, “but to-day the prospect brightens, and I trust that this bitter cup of misery will not be my portion.” By the summer, however, he was referring to Virginia’s “renewed and hopeless illness,” and declaring that “I have scarcely a faint hope of her recovery.”

  For a time Poe threw himself into his work, contributing reviews, poems, and stories to Graham’s Magazine, and finding advantage in his growing reputation. When he learned that Charles Dickens would be touring Philadelphia in March of 1842, Poe wrote to request an interview, sending along a copy of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. Poe also included copies of his past reviews of Dickens’s work, attesting to the sincerity of his admiration for the writer he once called “the greatest British novelist.” Among these was an article offering comment on the murder intrigue of Barnaby Rudge, written shortly after the early chapters began to appear in serial form. Although the book’s conclusion would not be published for several months, Poe had been able to predict, correctly, that “Barnaby, the idiot, is the murderer’s own son.”

  Poe made a powerful impression on Dickens. The visiting author gave two lengthy interviews to Poe at Philadelphia’s United States Hot
el on March 7, 1842. Dickens took particular note of Poe’s reviews, and would later describe the young critic as a man “who taketh all of us English men of letters to task in print, roundly and uncompromisingly.” Although the meeting took place under the auspices of Graham’s, Poe was not bashful about turning it to his personal advantage: By the end of the interview, Dickens had agreed to help Poe find a publisher in Britain. The work of Dickens would continue to make itself felt in Poe’s work, not least in the case of a loquacious raven that figures in the pages of Barnaby Rudge. In his review of the novel, Poe mused at length on the manner in which this detail might have been used to greater effect: “Its croakings might have been prophetically heard in the course of the drama.”

  In spite of the advantages of his position at Graham’s, Poe quickly fell into the same resentful frame of mind that had led to his difficulties at Burton’s and the Southern Literary Messenger. He confided, shortly after joining the magazine, that “notwithstanding Graham’s unceasing civility, and real kindness, I feel more & more disgusted with my situation.” Poe had cause for indignation. The magazine’s extraordinary success was reaping a fortune for Graham, but Poe’s earnings remained fixed at their original level, which he now considered meager to the point of insult. As the gloom of Virginia’s illness took hold, Poe’s bitterness deepened. On the morning after the initial hemorrhage, Poe asked Graham to advance him two months’ salary to help ease the expected burden. Graham refused, and the family soon fell back into a state of penury.

  At the same time, the success of Graham’s rekindled Poe’s hopes for a magazine of his own. His friend Thomas Holley Chivers, a Georgia poet who took a keen interest in Poe’s welfare, went out of his way to flatter these ambitions. “It is not my opinion that you have ever been, or ever will be, paid for your intellectual labours,” Chivers declared. “You need never expect it, until you establish a Magazine of your own.” Here, too, Poe nursed a personal grievance against his employer. Graham had promised, when Poe joined his magazine, that he would help to launch Poe’s own Penn Magazine within a year. As Graham’s grew in circulation and profitability, however, the promise was forgotten. Poe recognized that he had been a victim of his own success. “Every exertion made by myself,” he wrote, served to make Graham’s a “greater source of profit” and left its owner “less willing to keep his word with me.”

  Matters reached a crisis in April of 1842. Following a brief illness, Poe returned to his desk to find that his duties had been assumed by Charles Peterson, an associate editor. It may well be that Peterson had simply acted to cover for Poe in his absence, but Poe found cause for offense. Always sensitive about his status as an editor, he believed he had been slighted and perhaps passed over for promotion. Soon, he took his leave of the magazine. As with Poe’s earlier editorial positions, there would be a difference of opinion as to whether he left voluntarily or was fired. “Either Peterson or Poe would have to go,” Graham said at one stage, “the two could not get along together.” Poe insisted that he had resigned to pursue his own interests, citing disgust with the “namby-pamby” character of the magazine and the “insulting” salary. In contrast to his earlier hostility toward Thomas Willis White and William Burton, however, Poe felt no great animosity for the “very gentlemanly” Graham, with whom he claimed to have “no misunderstanding.”

  Whatever the reasons, Poe’s departure from Graham’s marked a return to abject poverty. With Virginia’s illness adding to his burdens, one can only wonder why he took such an ill-advised step. “Probably the whole truth as to Poe’s resignation of this editorship will never be known,” wrote one of Poe’s early admirers. “Doubtless it was due to a combination of causes. There was the constitutional restlessness—the ‘nervous restlessness which,’ as he acknowledges, ‘haunted me as a fiend,’ and which at times overpowered him, and drove him from place to place in a vain search for the El Dorado of his hopes; there was the ever-lingering desire to found a magazine of his own, and, what must be confessed, the beginning of those ‘irregularities’ which, during the remainder of his life, at certain more or less lengthy intervals, destroyed his hopes and placed his reputation in the power of implacable foes.”

  These “irregularities” took hold almost at once. For the most part Poe had abstained from drinking during his tenure at Graham’s, but now he returned to the bottle and suffered devastating consequences. All accounts agree that Poe had a dramatically low tolerance for alcohol. At a time when dram shops and rum holes lined the streets, and the phrase “Let’s liquor” was a common greeting, Poe’s constitution left him uniquely vulnerable. He was unable to stop at a single drink, and the first glass was sufficient to transform him from a personable gentleman to a coarse and staggering “good fornaught.” His friend Frederick Thomas observed that “if he took but one glass of weak wine or beer or cider, the Rubicon of the cup was passed with him, and it always ended in excess and sickness.” The French poet Charles Baudelaire, himself no stranger to stimulants, would note that Poe “did not drink like an ordinary toper, but like a savage, with an altogether American energy and fear of wasting a minute, as though he was accomplishing an act of murder, as though there was something inside him that he had to kill.”

  Poe’s reasons for drinking were plain enough—Virginia’s illness, his return to poverty, his literary disappointments—but his recourse to alcohol served in turn to make each of these problems significantly worse. Over the course of fourteen months at Graham’s, Poe had earned roughly a thousand dollars in salary and contributor’s fees. His literary income over the course of the next three years would amount to only $121. Once again Poe considered abandoning his writing, or at least supplementing it with some presumably less taxing form of employment. Although he remained hopeful of launching his own magazine, now recast as The Stylus, he also pursued the possibility of a government sinecure with the Philadelphia Customs House. After failing to win an appointment locally, he traveled to Washington in hopes of pleading his case directly to President Tyler, whose son Robert had expressed admiration for Poe’s criticism. Anxious at the prospect of the important interview, Poe attempted to quiet his nerves with a glass of port. Not long afterward, he was spotted stumbling around the capital with a greenish pallor, and his coat turned inside out. Poe did not meet the president, and failed to make a favorable impression on anyone else who might have helped him find employment.

  As circumstances pushed him back to the writing desk, Poe sought new publishers for some of his magazine stories. Earlier, from the offices of Graham’s, he had written to Lea & Blanchard, the publishers of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, to offer a revised collection of his work, expanded to include newer stories such as “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” The publisher declined, explaining that they had not yet “got through” the earlier edition. In spite of the refusal, Poe had hopes for future dealings with Lea & Blanchard. “I am anxious that your firm should continue to be my publishers,” he told them. That being the case, Poe is likely to have kept an eye on the types of books that found favor with the firm. It is perhaps significant, then, that in early 1842, as Poe made his exit from Graham’s, Lea & Blanchard published a book by William Gilmore Simms entitled Beauchampe. Simms was a prominent editor and novelist of the day, and the author of numerous volumes of poetry. Although Poe would have occasion to denigrate his “inaccurate English” and “proneness to revolting images,” he nevertheless considered Simms to be “immeasurably the best writer of fiction in America.” Beauchampe would have been especially likely to engage Poe’s attention. Like Norman Leslie, the book took inspiration from a real-life murder case, and the source of Beauchampe was especially close to Poe’s heart. Simms had based his story on the 1825 Beauchamp-Sharp murder case, the so-called Kentucky tragedy that had also been the inspiration for Poe’s blank-verse drama “Politan.” Poe was clearly aware of the book, and even offered a brief comment in Graham’s, published after his departure: “The events upon which this novel is based are but
too real. No more thrilling, no more romantic tragedy did ever the brain of poet conceive than was the tragedy of Sharpe and Beauchamp.”

  Poe undoubtedly took note of the manner in which Simms crafted the material into a popular novel, in contrast to his own seventeenth-century Italian intrigue. At the same time, he must have found it galling that Lea & Blanchard had accepted the Simms book—and made a success of it—while declining Poe’s own collection of stories. It seems entirely possible, in the uncertain days following the loss of his editorial post, that the popularity of the Simms book turned Poe’s mind in the direction of writing a story based on a celebrated crime.

  Poe had every reason to feel that his credentials in this arena were as good or better than those of Simms. Beginning with “Maelzel’s Chess-Player” he had made a particular specialty of solving puzzles and posing conundrums to his readers, ranging from the coded messages of his popular cryptography series through the “insoluble mystery” of his most recent success, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” He remained sensitive, however, to the charge that “Rue Morgue,” though undeniably clever, suffered from the artificial contrivance of its solution—a puzzle, as he would later write, created “for the express purpose of unraveling.” In a sense, Beauchampe also suffered from a preordained solution, since the grisly outcome of the Kentucky tragedy was well known and would not come as a surprise to the reader. It is possible that this defect suggested a new possibility, a means by which the artistry of “Rue Morgue” might be combined with the analytical rigor of “Maelzel’s Chess-Player.” If Poe fixed his attention on a crime that had not, as yet, been solved, all of these objections would be answered. He could not be accused of constructing his own puzzle, nor would the reader know the solution until Poe himself supplied it. This would not only make the story dramatically satisfying, but it would also provide a striking and altogether unique example of ratiocination, or the power of analytical reasoning.