Page 8 of Beneath the Poet's House

It hits Saoirse suddenly that she’s past the point of mere hunger. There’s a headache starting behind her right eye and, after spending the morning in this place where so many memories were formed, grief has settled over her shoulders like a shroud. She wants to be alone, to walk home, climb the stairs to her new bedroom, and disappear under the blankets for the rest of the day. Instead, she forces a smile and says, “Sure.”

Leila darts past several stacks and cuts right. Saoirse hurries to keep up. Three more strides and they’re ensconced in one of the alcoves that run along the library’s outer walls. Leila makes a sweeping gesture at the space, and Saoirse stares at the multipaned windows, the bust on the sill, the straight-backed chair pushed neatly against the empty desk. “What exactly am I looking at?” she asks a moment later.

“On December 23, 1848,” Leila says, “two days before their planned Christmas Day wedding, Poe and Whitman were sitting in an Athenæum alcove when an unnamed messenger handed her a note telling her that Poe had been drinking the night before and that morning. Whitman called off the wedding and rushed to her house, where she drenched her handkerchief in ether—she did this often, on account of her medical condition—threw herself on the sofa, and attempted to lose herself in unconsciousness. Despite Poe’s attempts to rouse her, she merely murmured ‘I love you’ before fainting away.

“The two would never see each other again,” Leila continues, “and Poe was dead within a year. Whitman would live for close to another three decades, spending much of her time here at the Athenæum. Didyou know the house she inhabited is on this very street, half a mile up the road? And while no one can be certain it wasthisalcove they were in when Sarah learned Edgar had broken his promise of sobriety, I like to think it was. The morning light is best in this one, and the adjacent shelves used to hold a slew of works by writers Poe admired: Coleridge, De Quincey, Byron, Shelley, Keats.”

Saoirse looks around again, trying to imagine the figures from the Art Room photographs sitting in this very space, flipping through a book of poems by Lord Byron and whispering conspiratorially. “The lightisgood here,” she admits. “Thank you for showing me. You’re right, it is amazing.”Amazing, and, in conjunction with the last twelve hours, overwhelming.

Leila nods fervently. “It’s my pleasure.”

Saoirse takes a step toward the mouth of the alcove. “I look forward to seeing the Poe exhibit once it goes up. For now, though, I think I’m going to head home.” She refrains from sprinting out of the suddenly claustrophobic space. The more time she spends here, the more she feels as if she’s in a haunted house. “Apologies again for being in the Art Room earlier.”

“It’s all right. Oh, and make sure you take an October brochure on your way out. It includes descriptions of all the events going on at the Ath this month.”

“I will,” Saoirse says. The books feel slick and heavy and—as if a heartbeat pulses from within them—aliveunder her arm. “Well, goodbye.” She turns and walks away from Leila, sneakers thudding on the shiny oak floorboards.

Just like a librarianto go on and on about a subject they’re interested in,Saoirse thinks. Jonathan, though technically more historian than librarian—at least, before he’d received his JD from Princeton University and become assistant university counsel there—was renowned for it. He could rattle off facts about textile production or the history of Gothic Revival architecture until dinner party guests’ eyes grew glassy. At thethought of it, Saoirse swallows a groan, aware that Leila may still be nearby.

A fly buzzes by her head, and Saoirse stops, goose bumps rising on her forearms.What’s the matter?a voice from inside her head asks mockingly, and Saoirse’s heart rate increases.Unsure if the little buzzy bugger is real or in your head?It’s the first time she’s heard the voice since leaving New Jersey, but she hadn’t held out any real hope that the move would silence it for good.

She waits, refraining from slapping at the air, but the buzzing doesn’t return, and she grows annoyed for succumbing, once again, to paranoia. As she nears the stairs, however, annoyance is replaced by the distinct sensation of being watched. Instantly, she recalls Aidan slinking out from beneath the weeping willows in the cemetery but just as quickly forces the image from her mind. She keeps her head down, but the sensation persists. When she looks across the library, a bust of Poe stares back.

I don’t care what I told Leila Rondin.I’m not coming back for that exhibit.She’s two stacks away from the stairs, and still, the skin along her neck and upper back tingles. Saoirse glances over her shoulder, almost dropping her books in the process. This time, a different pair of eyes meets hers.

Jonathan!So his ghost resideshere—not in their home in New Jersey—among the stacks and tomes, where history is held in alcoves and secrets lorded over by silent portraits. Saoirse swallows, resisting the urge to cry out, but as she gapes at the man, adrenaline shooting through her veins, she sees it is not her husband. She’s projected his likeness onto someone who—with his dark hair and dark eyes, a face made slightly asymmetrical by the tilt of his eyebrows and the way he holds his mouth—possesses similar characteristics. Someone who, like Jonathan, though she never noticed, never had cause to notice, looks uncannily like a modern-day version of Edgar Allan Poe.

The man stares at Saoirse across the open air of the second floor of the Athenæum. His gaze is penetrating, stark, and unabashed. It leavesSaoirse feeling exposed and vulnerable and completely unsettled. It’s not just his appearance but his intensity. He’s looking at her as if he wants to gaze upon her forever, to speak to her every day for the rest of their lives, to possess her. As if healreadypossesses her.

She holds the beguiling—and terror-inducing—gaze another moment, then jerks her head back in the direction of the staircase. She rounds the rail and starts down the steps as fast as she can move her feet. On the last step before the bottom, she looks up again. The man is moving away, toward the Art Room. As Saoirse hurries toward circulation, she sees the man disappear into the stacks.

Unlike her husband—but very much like Poe—the man’s expression never shifted or softened. Saoirse did not see the smallest hint of a smile flash across his face.

Chapter 4

Three days after her impromptu trip to the Athenæum, Saoirse sits on the third-floor balcony overlooking the rose garden, eating an orange. She finally has groceries in the house, though she didn’t get them that first morning she went out. She was too tired, and felt too haunted after her experience at the library, and spent the rest of the day in bed. The afternoon is unseasonably warm—in the high seventies—and she wishes she brought a glass of something cold out with the fruit. It’s not laziness that keeps her from going inside for a can of seltzer but the paralysis that comes with crushing boredom. And, if she’s being honest, this pervasive inability to rouse herself comes from being depressed too.

She hasn’t beencompletelyuseless the past few days. She managed to unpack and to transfer the utilities into her name. She also wandered out to the graveyard to explore the two-hundred-year-old tombstones, drawn by the feeling that the cemetery existed on some other plane, that the cracked granite and other signs of age were illusions meant to deceive the casual passerby. She was disappointed to find that the lichen crumbled corporeally between her fingers, that the hanging boughs did not disguise a shimmery barrier between this world and the past.

Saoirse sighs. Sheshouldcall her mother, longs to speak with her beyond theMade it here safetext she sent upon arriving Friday evening, but then she’ll feel like she needs to call her father as well, and she doesn’t want to do that. There’s a show on Netflix that’s captured her interest, but it always makes her feel more depressed to binge something in themiddle of the day. Her old therapist would suggest she do a meditation exercise, or maybe make a list of all the things she can control versus those she can’t, but Saoirse’s done trying to implement Dr. Fitzpatrick’s handy-dandy tricks of the trade, and besides, she’s no longer her patient anyway. She could read, but the novel she started—well, about a month ago now, if not longer—isn’t really meeting her expectations.

Though ... the disappointing novel isn’t the only reading material she has. With the sensation that she’s about thirty years older than she is, Saoirse pushes herself up from the wicker chaise and goes in search of the books on Poe and Whitman she borrowed.

In the living room, she pauses to marvel at the bold colors and large windows, the damask-patterned floor and lofty ceiling. She is struck—as she has been every day since moving in—by the way the space feels both contemporary and old-fashioned, by the poetic balance between order and chaos: a double-handled vase centered neatly on a desk in one corner faces a bookcase in another, its shelves scattered with shells, fossils, the compact skull of a small animal, a bird’s nest, and several pressed, dried flowers. The leather-bound gold-leaf books appear well curated and well read, the quaint daguerreotypes suitably cloudy. Who knew “fully furnished” could equate to such inspired decor?

She finds the library books on the coffee table beside the silk roses and her cell phone, and sinks onto the settee. OpeningPoe’s Helen Remembers, she begins to read.

An hour later, she’s scrolling an article on her phone detailing the couple’s short but intense relationship. It seems Poe had first seen Sarah Whitman in the backyard of this very house in 1845, tending her rose garden under a midnight moon, while he’d been walking with the poet Frances Sargent Osgood. Three years later, on September 21, 1848, Poe met Sarah officially for the first time, again at 88 Benefit Street. The two shared the same birthday—January 19, though Sarah was six years Poe’s senior—and a love of literary criticism, and began corresponding with one another, culminating in plans for what was to be an “immediate marriage” at the end of December. Poe wouldn’t spend much time at88 Benefit Street; Sarah’s mother detested him. Here, the article picked up with what Leila Rondin had relayed at the Athenæum, and Sarah’s reasons for breaking off the engagement.

Amending the wording of her original search, Saoirse brushes up on the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe. She’d forgotten, since high school, or maybe from the courses she took as an English major, of the writer’s marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia, who died of tuberculosis, and of the degree to which he struggled with substance abuse. Though, claims of Poe’s dependence on drugs were apparently unfounded, propagated by a high-profile obituary published by literary rival Rufus Wilmot Griswold. The reasonPoe’s Helen Rememberseven existed was because biographer John Henry Ingram appealed to Sarah Whitman for help in writing a redemptive account of her once-love. She accepted and would spend the rest of her life working to repair Poe’s reputation whenever the chance arose.

Saoirse can see why Roberto, Mia, and Lucretia are fascinated by the poet. Sarah Whitman was a woman of knife-edged intellect and fierce loyalty; she was genuinely kind, independent, and unconventional. Saoirse slides farther down on the settee, considering the walls around her with new interest. Sarah might have written those letters defending Poe from this very room. Satisfied—for now—with what she’s learned of the couple, Saoirse closes the browser.

Before she can think about what she’s doing, she’s opened a text message draft. Is it Mia who has the smartphone? No, Mia uses a landline, and Roberto, a flip phone. Lucretia is the one who admitted to enabling a slew of content blockers on her iPhone to keep her from wasting time.

Saoirse starts to type, but a floorboard pops behind her, followed by a quiet rustle on the air. Saoirse whips around, squinting into the shadows. What had Mia said when Saoirse had asked if the house was haunted? That she would find out soon enough? She stares a moment longer into the darkened corridor beyond the living room, unsure ifshe’d prefer Aidan to step from the gloom or a chain-weary specter. Nothing further comes, but Saoirse still can’t relax.

Jumpy, are we?the voice in her head asks, and she shakes herself, then types a quick message to Lucretia and sends it before she can change her mind. The reply comes instantly, so Lucretia—if her claim that she doesn’t carry the phone around with her is truthful—must be home:

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