Varen blanched at the comparison.
“You disagree, Professor?” asked Poe.
“No,” he said, “except that Poe never made any money off ‘The Raven.’”
Poe sat up, gripping his seat, the bird jiggling. “Certainly I made a profit!”
“Fifteen bucks.”
An outright burst of laughter broke through the room.
“That, sir,” Isobel’s dad said, leaning back in his seat and straightening his jacket, “is beside the point.”
“So it’s true that you were very poor,” Isobel went on, ad-libbing.
“In terms of money, yes, I was poor,” her father said, glowering in Varen’s direction. “I see that since my death, America has changed little in its obsession with the dollar.”
“Is it also true that you drank to excess?” Isobel asked, flipping to the next index card.
Poe scoffed at the question, his response simply “Nyeh.”
Varen’s head snapped so quickly toward her father that Isobel was surprised the sunglasses hadn’t flown off.
“Well, sometimes,” Poe corrected himself. Shifting, he stooped in his seat.
Varen’s stare remained.
“Often,” Poe growled, angling away, pulling his already tight jacket around himself even tighter.
This time Isobel thought she even heard Mr. Swanson chuckle. Good, she thought. Maybe that meant he’d let this whole thing fly.
“Though you can’t say that I wasn’t, at heart, a gentleman,” Poe argued, this directed outward. “And not to excuse myself, but when I drank, it was only to drown out the sorrowful pain brought on by the blackest despairs of my life, such as the long illness and ultimate demise of my dearest Virginia.”
Wow, Isobel thought, impressed, so he had remembered something after all. “After your wife Virginia’s death,” she said, “you attempted to remarry, correct?”
“Well, for a short while, I courted Miss Sarah Helen Whitman.”
“And Annie,” Varen interjected.
Poe paused, smiling. He lifted a finger to loosen his cravat. “And . . . Annie,” he conceded.
“Who was married.”
“See, that’s an interesting story indeed. I—”
“And then Elmira.”
“And then Elmira, yes, fine.” Poe crossed his arms, slumped, and looked away. There came a mix of laughter and several teasing “ooh’s” from the back of the class.
“What can I say?” Poe muttered. “Chicks dig the mustache.”
Laughter again. Isobel shut her eyes and held them closed, trying to halt the crawl of color over her face. Take it down a notch, Dad, she thought toward him, opening her eyes again.
Then she grinned in spite of herself, because the plan was working better than she had hoped. As she asked more questions, Varen continued to interject between her father’s misty replies, supplying the real facts, eliciting laughter with his dry coolness. Soon they had only one subject left to cover: death.
“Mr. Poe, the details of your end are, at best, cloudy.” Her mom had told her to phrase it that way, though Isobel thought it made her sound like a cheesy soothsayer. “No one knows exactly what happened to you on that fateful night. There are theories ranging from rabies to murder.”
“Mmm. Murder,” Poe mused, “that most hideous yet somehow fascinating of human pastimes.”
“You admit that you were somehow involved in foul play?”
“I admit nothing,” Poe said. “I enjoy mysteries too much. I invented them, remember? And so I am obliged not to reveal the answer to the riddle of my death.” He stood slowly and began pacing, hands clasped behind his back. “Besides, I fear I cannot fully recall what happened to me that night so long ago, so many eons ago. . . .” He reached a quivering hand out toward his audience, his fingers curling into a rueful fist. Isobel rolled her eyes. She never would have thought he had it in him!
“I was on my way from New York to Richmond.”
“Richmond to New York,” Varen corrected.
“That’s right,” Poe whispered, bringing his hand toward his brow, bracing his head. “The musty air of the grave! The lull of death’s sleep. These things can congest the brain, clog the memory—but you’re right. I was leaving Richmond, yes, where I had finally become engaged. I was to be married. Yes, married. But first! First I was to return to my home in New York to collect my dear aunt Moody.”
“Muddy.”
“That’s what I said.” Poe stopped then, tilting his head as though listening to something far off. “I remember traveling by train with my trunk full of manuscripts and lectures. The train stopped and then I . . . I . . .”