I hated gossip about Eddy living with his \u201cchild cousin.\u201d\u00a0 I wasn\u2019t a child but a young lady only three months short of fourteen. \u00a0Eddy still made sure our marriage bond said I was twenty-one.\u00a0 That afternoon in May 1836 a smiling minister married us in our boarding house.\u00a0 My mother and our landlord and Eddy\u2019s publisher Mr. White also seemed at ease.\u00a0 But I knew Eddy was very nervous about our honeymoon.\u00a0 I wanted to be alone with him the first time but he kept saying we should bring my mother.\u00a0 I usually agreed with everything but this time told him, \u201cWe\u2019re going alone.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mother stayed home while we went to a hotel in Petersburg, and I ran in and jumped on the biggest bed I\u2019d ever seen and said, \u201cCome here, Eddy.\u201d<\/p>\n
He edged over and I grabbed both his hands and pulled.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cPlease.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNot now.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cTonight?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cToo soon.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cTomorrow?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe really mustn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought I\u2019d told you.\u00a0 I\u2019m amazed I haven\u2019t.\u00a0 We must wait till you\u2019ve matured.\u00a0 You understand, don\u2019t you?\u201d<\/p>\n
I pushed my face into the covers, and both nights Eddy stayed on the floor.\u00a0 It was all right.\u00a0 Back in Richmond I continued sleeping with Mother and we were all happy as before and I especially enjoyed when Eddy tutored me about math and English and when I got to swing and jump rope with children in the neighborhood.<\/p>\n
In December 1836 I was very angry Mr. White failed to publish The Messenger and blamed my husband.\u00a0 Eddy became nervous and sick about that and his lack of independence and the low pay and took the only medicine he could and by January said we were going to New York, a big city with many opportunities.<\/p>\n
Eddy was brighter than anyone there but lots of editors and writers were jealous and wanted revenge for things he\u2019d written in The Messenger and wouldn\u2019t give him a job.\u00a0 Eddy probably wouldn\u2019t have needed them if the bank panic of 1837 hadn\u2019t ruined his novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,<\/em> which was a great sea adventure about mutiny and rescue and barbarism and would have been published and made us lots of money.\u00a0 Thankfully, my mother got work running the meal table at our boarding house and we survived.<\/p>\n Eddy said things would be better in Philadelphia but he found only hackwork so started training then working as a lithographer, a horrible job that kept him bent over and wheezing all the time.<\/p>\n \u201cYou have to quit, Eddy, or that\u2019ll be the end,\u201d Mother said.<\/p>\n \u201cA proper fate, if I can\u2019t support you.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI mean for all of us, Eddy.\u201d<\/p>\n He quit, and I tried to help, often sitting nearby as he wrote and making sure his pens and papers were ready, and in July 1938 I hugged him when The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym <\/em>was finally published and later told him not to worry about slow sales and to keep working on what he called his masterpiece story, \u201cLigeia\u201d, and kissed him when the American Museum magazine in Baltimore paid ten dollars, and assured him our daily meals of bread and molasses were still good enough.<\/p>\n \u201cYou know this kills me,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cWhy don\u2019t you write to Neilson?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ll sooner entreat Satan than Neilson Poe.\u201d<\/p>\n He tried anyway but our cousin replied he could no longer help me since he was \u201cpushed himself.\u201d\u00a0 Mother and Eddy wrote or personally asked others for loans.\u00a0 That wasn\u2019t working.\u00a0 Eddy needed a job.\u00a0 He\u2019d been corresponding with William E. Burton, an actor from England, who in Philadelphia published Burton\u2019s Gentleman\u2019s Magazine.\u00a0 When Eddy received Burton\u2019s offer of ten dollars a week, in May 1839, he showed me the letter and said this proved I\u2019d been right to come with him, that he really could take care of Mother and me, and that he loved me more than he could say, and I said I felt the same about him and was but three months from my sixteenth birthday and wanted to be a real wife.\u00a0 That night I moved from my mother\u2019s room to Eddy\u2019s and we tried.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I hated gossip about Eddy living with his \u201cchild cousin.\u201d\u00a0 I wasn\u2019t a child but a young lady only three months short of fourteen. \u00a0Eddy still made sure our marriage bond said I was twenty-one.\u00a0 That afternoon in May 1836 a smiling minister married us in our boarding house.\u00a0 My mother and our landlord and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[127,181,216,128,129],"tags":[],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\n