Author Summary: This excerpt is Chapter 6 from the novel “She Was a Child.” It concerns the friendship, courtship and marriage of Edgar Allen Poe and Virginia Clemm, first cousins, from the time they meet when she is eight years old to her death from consumption when she is 24.
Richmond, May 16, 1836
Delayed by a squall that crossed the James at morning’s light and stalled over the city, the minister and his wife are late by half an hour. They descend from their coach murmuring contrition, umbrellas unfurled then furled again, bowing, shaking hands, hanging hats and coats on hooks in the entrance hall. The parlor is filled with candles that help dispel the morning gloom and emit a powerful scent of bees’-wax that reminds the minister of student days at Yale some 40 years ago, sitting up late with a volume of penitential divinity, candle stubs burning down to the dripping nub.
The groom and the minister and the minister’s wife wear black, the touch of relief being the minister’s clerical collar. The bride’s mother, too, wears black, an old dress it seems, unfashionable but dignified, clean and neat, like the unpretentious widow’s bonnet that partially conceals her graying hair. Only the petite bride stands in white like a beacon in the center of the room, though her hair is black – a poet of the time would call it ebon – braided for this happy event and twisted into knots at the back of her head, exposing a pale neck of flawless fragility. For bouquet, she grasps a clutch of scarlet poppies and white and purple cosmos, harvested from a field or nearby yard. A picture, she seems, from a fairy tale book, or what the assembled guests might imagine such a thing would be, something French, thinks the minister. For veil, white ribbons in the bride’s hair will do.
On the sideboard, here in the parlor of Mrs. Yarrington’s boarding-house, the candle-glow works magic on a glass punch bowl, turning it into a great brimming jewel, and gleams on cups and silver ladle, a pewter tray holding miniature white cakes, dishes of cashews and hazelnuts and, hidden behind the punch bowl, a carafe of dark ruby-colored Port and another of glowing amber-gold Madeira, all poised with effortless purpose, as in a Dutch still-life painting.
The groom, who writes his age in the register as 26, is slight, neither short nor tall, and his angular features are fixed into a serious expression that could denote devotion to his bride or apprehension at the momentous step he is taking, though he moves through the room with the ease and efficiency that imply military training. His dark hair is brushed to one side, with a curl above the left ear, and his collar is Byronic, the cravat, a scarf, really, tied twice around and then in a double knot with the ends left flowing. Sideburns fletch his jawbone like dark furze on a stone. He looks as if he had stepped from the pages of Goethe. Slighter still, alarmingly child-like, is the bride, and her girlish quality is not merely the radiance of innocence or appropriate lack of sophistication. The minister has children in his Sunday school class who seem older than this one who stands arrayed for the bridal before him. He asks her age and the girl asserts, in a soft but clear and lilting voice, that she is 21. The minister looks sharply at the bride’s mother.
“It’s true, Reverend,” says the older woman, stepping forward in her crepuscular finery and extending a document for his perusal. “She has sworn to be 21 before a notary.”
The minister marks the odd phrasing, glances over the stiff paper and sees that indeed the girl’s stated age is 21 and that the necessary seals and official slogans are in place. He has presided over uncountable weddings, in the church, in his office, in front parlors, a few more meager than this one and many far more opulent, befitting the city’s cultured citizenry. He has witnessed hundreds of brides of every class and physical variation and age, the hopeful and hopeless female generations, but he never performed the rites of marriage for a girl as young, as vestal-like as this one seems, an untouched, uncorrupted flower in every sense, fresh as the wild blossoms she carries in her small fist. She is of an age where her bosom scarcely swells. Still, the emphatic document was signed and sealed by a notary who is an old friend at the courthouse as well as a parishioner, so the minister folds the paper, hands it back to the girl’s mother and intones, “Let us proceed then,” though he feels that he is colluding in a conspiracy. His wife, standing piously behind him, folds her hands and holds them to her chest, as if she were sewing herself together.
The ceremony is brief, a series of time-worn and custom–honored questions and answers, assertions and promises, all delivered under the aegis of a Heavenly Father and His Blessed Son and the propriety of state and county law, well-rehearsed, long practiced, still oddly moving, as most beginnings and many conjoinings are. Not a few eyes are damp among the guests, discreetly touched by a handkerchief. The couple states their names and intentions: Edgar A.Poe. Virginia Eliza Clemm. (For it is the wedding of these first cousins that we observe.) I will. I do. Suffice unto the day. Till death. When the ritual concludes, the minister says to the groom, as he has said to legions of grooms, “You may kiss the bride.”
The newly minted husband and wife, so far chaste in regard to kissing — she is 13 — turn toward each other. The groom takes his bride’s right hand and bends to her, bringing his face within an inch or two of her soft, upturned mouth. From where they stand on three sides, the guests feel as an unimpeachable presence the force of the charged air that minutely separates and yearns to bring together those mouths, the man’s lips slightly open, the girl’s pursed as if she were about to kiss a puppy. She closes tremulous lids over dark childish eyes, squeezing out a glinting tear. The moment burns with awe and strange virtue and unclaimed desire, and the room feels lit by a gravity of attraction that dims the flaring candles in their holders. The two mouths meet – the assembled company holds its breath! – the girl’s lips now parted, with glorious yielding, the bride blushes, the groom is pale, and a sigh fills the room urgently, surreptitiously, as if a moth had touched flame, clapped its plush charred wings and fallen to the floor. The clergyman looks back at his wife, who seems to have slipped into slumber, standing in her accustomed place behind her husband and to his right, a silent and unconscious witness. The groom raises the bride’s hand to his mouth and gently kisses her slender fingers. He straightens, reaches into his jacket and with courtly discretion hands the minister an envelope and asks if he and his reverend wife would like to stay for a festive lunch.
“Oh, do!” pleads the bride, now all animation. “We are having oysters right out of their shells and something called hock, which Muddy says I may have one tiny tiny glass of and Eddy may have none because drink crazes his brain, and a baby lamb that some darkies are cooking outside in a hole in the ground they dug this morning and lined with bricks. And a whole pan full of black-eyed peas boiled with fat-back and relishes and potatoes blackened on the hearth. And a special cake filled with cream and berries. It’s our wedding feast!”
The spell – was it magic? demonic? – is released, and neighbor-women hand around glasses of red punch and thimble-sized servings of Port and Madeira in stemmed glasses of aching delicacy. The groom, as his bride predicted, does not partake of any spirituous beverages, though one might think that he would toast his new wife; perhaps that honor waits for the luncheon. A barefoot boy, black as swamp-night and wildly attired in a shabby blue velvet frock-coat and knee-breeches, elevates the tray of cakes and carries it to each person in the room as if he were offering ceremonious bites of sugary manna. The bride, holding her husband’s hand – she is fully a foot shorter than he — her flowers stuck in the bodice that frames her shallow chest, sips from a crystal acorn of Madeira, wrinkles her nose and giggles like the child she obviously is. The minister accepts a glass of Madeira to settle his stomach, or his nerves, and he sees that the bride has placed a doll, a rather smug and smartly dressed little creature, on the sideboard with the cups and trays. It’s time to leave.
The bride, though, catches his arm. “There will be dancing tonight after we clear away lunch! There’s a fiddler coming, an old man, tall as a scarecrow, he fought in the Revolutionary War! And a blind boy who toodles on a clarinet and a girl — a girl! — who taps and scratches on a drum. I saw them once, at the market, playing for pennies. And Eddy invited them to come and play for our wedding, later, when we dance. They seem very poor, and we’re going to give them supper too.”
The minister croaks, “Very charitable, I’m sure.” He looks around the clamorous parlor for his wife and sees that she has acquired a glass of Port in one hand and a glass of Madeira in the other and stands in rapt attention listening to the groom intone about the relationship of nocturnal light to poetic composition. The minister signals to her in one of those private gestures long-married couples understand and moves toward the door, hoping they can depart without notice. The bride’s mother — also the groom’s aunt — glides toward the minister with the imperturbability of a black-clad admiralty ship to fetch their coats and umbrellas. They are assisted, they are jostled, help is offered, hats are found, the little footman offers a last cake for remembrance, the bride – oh, the bride runs on tiptoe into the hall holding her white dress above thin ankles and bare feet and thrusting her doll before her sings, “Annie wants to say goodbye.”
The minister looks around the dim crowded hallway in terror. The doll’s complacent face and slightly slanted eyes give her the air of a priest-baiting imp of the perverse, but the bride pulls the minister’s head to her face, nestles the doll against his ear and whispers, “You’re a good man. Bless you,” and dances away. Does he require this unorthodox, unasked-for benediction? He manages to grab his wife’s pliant arm as he mutters inane salutations and his own trite blessings and drags them together down the front stoop to the sidewalk. The rain has ceased, and the clouds have departed toward the coast. Sunlight gilds the brick chimney-pots of Richmond, urging undulating flocks of sparrows and swallows to the sky. The coachman scuttles from his perch like a bug sliding down a sink, filling the air with “Reverend Sir” and “Madame Reverend,” hoists them into the seat and closes the door. A smell of mildewed leather and wet dog fur pervades the coach’s interior, and the minister thinks that if he doesn’t get home soon he’ll retch up what little he has eaten and drunk this alarming day. With a jingling and creaking of harness and grinding of wooden wheels on cobblestones, they are off with a powerful lurch, rushing lickity-split past the city’s tidy, upright houses, as if elves and goblins hurried screeching and braying behind them.
*****
Fredric Koeppel has had poetry and fiction published recently in Right Hand Pointing, One Sentence Poems, Painted Bride Quarterly, Many Mountains Moving, Moving Force Journal and other print and online journals. He is a free-lance writer in the areas of arts and culture, food and wine. He lives in Memphis, where he and his wife attempt to manage a pack of rescued dogs.
