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2004 Season
 John May has combined a business career with a lifelong love of books and writing. He received his MFA degree from Bennington College and is chairman of the board of directors of the University of North Carolina-Greensboro Friends of the Library. He lives with his wife in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Poe & Fanny (2004)
Chapter 1
t Willis y
New-York Mirror Friday, December 27, 1844
The end of the world. - It is with a collective sigh of relief that New Yorkers anticipate the New Year, grateful that the world did not end as the Right Reverend William Miller of the Adventist Church in Chrystie Street prophesied.
For those unfamiliar with Mr. Miller, he apparently reckoned the apocalypse by way of an aptitude for the mathematical. From the Prophecy of the Book of Daniel and precise calculations of the intervals between epochs, he determined that the world would end in early December give or take a fortnight.
The effect was remarkable. My bootmaker, for example, reduced his prices reasoning that, if the world ends, what good is profit from the sale of footwear. But it seems that pinpointing the final conflagration requires more Art than Science; therefore, we of the Mirror, being as we are, disciples of the Art of Discourse, shall be so bold as to declare our own prophesy:
The World will Not End in 1845.
-not at least for the majority of mortals upon this earth. On the contrary, we predict that the new year will be the best ever-that notion consistent with our conviction that the march of time brings more good than ill.
Willis set his pen in its cradle. Rising from his chair, he walked to one of the windows facing Ann Street and stared at the cold, overcast sky above St. Paul’s. As it was nearly two o’clock, he decided to stop for lunch; the interval would allow his thoughts to wander. He had a knack for bringing a piece full circle despite its meanderings.
Noticing his reflection in the windowpane, he drew in his stomach and squared his shoulders. In three weeks, he would turn thirty-nine, though his reflection seemed as youthful as ever. He was clean-shaven, and a lock of brown hair that showed not a trace of gray fell across his forehead. Women had always found him attractive in a mischievous sort of way, not just for his looks, but also for his wit, which one critic, as he suddenly remembered, had recently called trifling-“the trifling wit of Nathaniel Parker Willis.” Though he had ignored it at the time, the recollection irked him now. Who was lobbing missiles at him? He returned to his desk, considering a retort in his column. Appeal to my readers, he thought. He could cite the column-it was the Star, wasn’t it?-and promote a shower of irate letters. At the corner of the partner’s desk he shared with General Morris, he leafed through the stack of periodicals until he found the correct issue. Turning its pages, he dismissed the idea. He was being vain, and intuition told him not to reveal too much of himself. His readers adored his flirtatious style, and they didn’t care that he was middle-aged, but vanity would disappoint. He flung the Star into the trash basket.
Trifling or not, Willis’s wit attracted more readers than any other writer in America.
He walked to the coat rack, put on his gloves and seal-collared overcoat, deciding on the Astor House for lunch, a beefsteak and potatoes, steaming hot as befit the weather. Where was Morris? He should have returned from the printer’s by now. Willis hated to dine alone.
“Hiram,” he said, turning to Morris’s assistant, who was hunched over a worktable and wiping paste from his fingers. “Tell General Morris I’m at the Astor House.”
Hiram Stoddard nodded as Willis looped a muffler around his neck. He fitted his beaver top hat snugly on his head to withstand the wind that would be blowing down Broadway; then he reached for his walking stick and descended the stairs.
Upon opening the door to the street, he encountered a small boy huddled in the doorway out of the wind, his arms hugging his knees for warmth. The boy wore an old woolen mackinaw with a yarn of faded purple shot through the pattern-a color so unexpected, it caught Willis’s eye. Covering his feet was a bundle of magazines tied with string. Thinking to shoo him away, Willis noticed that the bundle hid bare feet.
“Afternoon, sir,” the boy said in a shivery Irish accent, looking up with wary eyes. He was not more than five.
Just up Ann Street toward Broadway, another boy, an older brother by the look of him, hawked the same magazine the younger one used as a foot warmer. The brother wore an ill-fitting pair of men’s boots.
“What’s this?” Willis asked, tapping the bundle with his walking stick.
Pulling one of the magazines from under the twine, the boy handed it to Willis, who studied the masthead: The Aristidean, Vol. 1, No. 1. Who was Aristides, Willis wondered, Whig or Democrat? As he read, he tucked his cane under his arm and reached into his pocket; then, glancing down at the coins, he selected a shilling and thumbed it into the newsboy’s palm, getting a strong whiff of him. No doubt the boy had never had a bath, and Willis suspected he lived in Five Points, which smelled of the cesspool on which it had been built.
“Go down to Grand Street,” Willis said, “and get a pair of secondhand shoes. You can find a decent pair for a nickel.” He saw by the look in the youngster’s eyes that he could not come home with shoes unless he had permission first-not even secondhand shoes. “Does your brother share his boots with you?”
The boy nodded and turned back to the bundle covering his feet.
“Well, you can’t stay here,” Willis said. “Sorry, but this is a place of business.” For his part Willis might have let him stay, but Morris would be furious. He watched the boy lift his bundle, cut him a surly glance, and trudge after his brother.
Another new magazine, Willis thought, following the two young hucksters toward Broadway. A deluge of print swamping the five hundred thousand residents of New York City, only a quarter of whom read with any hope of comprehension. Deciding this opinion was grossly unfair, he considered adding arrogance to vanity on his list of faults, and he chided himself. But it was ridiculous-a new magazine every week. How would he and Morris make a go of it with all these publications nibbling at their heels? At the corner of Ann and Park Row he heard a chorus of hucksters. “Here, sir, buy the Herald.” “Have the Express, madam. Only a penny.” The Sun, the Tribune, the Star, the Mirror . . . Newsboys besieged the crowd standing in line at the horsecar terminal. It was the best place in the city for selling newspapers, but the competition was intense.
Continuing his column in his head, Willis considered a second prediction for the new year, one regarding the number of new periodicals. He would predict a new one every week and the market already flooded, so flooded as to require a veritable Niagara of street urchins to provide distribution. Liking the word, Niagara, he began phrasing a sentence. Yes, he thought, that idea might work, and as he crossed through City Hall Park to avoid the mud and manure of the terminal, he smiled, thinking how grateful he was for this amazing gift of his-the parallel tracks on which his mind traveled, one experiencing life and the other describing it-and he recalled General Morris warning him to stop writing about the beautiful women he encountered on horsecars or at the theater, but Willis couldn’t stop. Beautiful women were like a melody playing in his mind to which he added lyrics.
He crossed Broadway and climbed the steps to the Greek Revival front portico of the Astor House, the five-story hotel where he lived. Built by John Jacob Astor, the Astor was the finest hotel in New York. As he opened the door, he met two women just leaving.
“Anna!” one of them exclaimed. “It’s Willis. Didn’t I say you’d meet him if you came?”
“Fanny,” Willis said, smiling, closing the door behind him and removing his hat.
Fanny offered her gloved hand, which Willis kissed, savoring its perfume.
“This is my sister, Anna,” she said, reaching for her companion, “Anna Harrington. And this is the famous N. P. Willis-or should I say, the infamous Willis-adored by every woman in America.”
Fanny stood just five feet tall, and, though in her early thirties, from a distance she could have passed for a girl in her teens. As bright and fresh as a shop window, she had dark brown, glossy hair and large, expectant eyes. She wore a scarf of purple satin neatly tucked beneath the collar of her gray woolen overcoat and, on her head, a bonnet tied under her chin with matching purple ribbons.
“Anna is from Albany,” Fanny continued, tilting her head slightly to one side as if sharing a secret. There was nothing in the least artificial or affected in the gesture. It was as if she longed for Willis to believe that what she said could not be truer-Anna Harrington was indeed from Albany and nowhere else.
“I am a devoted reader, Mr. Willis,” Anna said.
“It’s Willis-everyone calls me Willis,” he said, just as he had a thousand times, smiling and in his mind putting his admirer at her ease.
“Are you coming to Lynchie’s tomorrow night?” Fanny asked, referring to Anne Lynch, whose Saturday night conversaziones at her home in Greenwich Village were a literary institution in New York City.
“Of course,” Willis said, Fanny’s petiteness making him feel taller than his six-foot frame. “But it’s bitter cold. Stay and join me for lunch. I’ll go up and get Mary, and we’ll make a party of it.”
“Thank you, but no,” Fanny said. “We’ve lunched already. I’m taking Anna to Lynchie’s. I want her to meet all my New York literary friends. Will you read something for her, Willis? Please! One of your pencilings. Don’t let her to go back to Albany disappointed. Everyone there is so . . .” she broke off, almost out of breath, and turned to Anna as if Willis’s presence alone were proof of her boasting and she wished to see her reaction. Then Fanny turned back to him and smiled. “We’re on our way to Stewart’s to buy Anna a pair of gloves.”
“I saw Sam recently,” Willis said as he reached to open the door for them. “Is he still in town?” By Fanny’s reaction, he regretted the question. It was hard to know what to say. He knew she and Sam lived apart; in fact, Fanny and her two girls were the Willises’ near neighbors; they lived just down the hall from the Willises’ suite on the fifth floor. From this and things he had heard, Willis inferred that Fanny was somewhere between marriage and divorce, but divorce was still diYcult and expensive in New York.
“No,” she said. “Sam has gone to Baltimore and from there, south. He left yesterday. He will paint Mr. Elliot in Beaufort, then he’s on to New Orleans. We shall not see him encore une fois,” she paused, searching for a couplet, “ere ripens red la fraise du bois,” and she seemed to revel in the triumph of her rhyme.
Continued...
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