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This was the part that had caused her the most worry. This was the part she’d wanted to warn him about but hadn’t gotten the chance. But they’d had to think of some way to involve Varen so he wouldn’t just be sitting there, some way that he would pick up on. This part, Isobel remembered, had been Danny’s one and only contribution, suggested during the ten seconds he could stand to keep his game on pause.
“Uh, yeah,” Varen said, shifting in his seat.
She nodded, pressing on, “Perhaps your most famous work, though, was and still is the narrative poem ‘The Raven.’ Can you talk a little bit about your success with that particular piece?”
“Indeed,” Poe said, crossing his legs, leaning back in the chair. He raised a finger to brush the tarred crest of the limp fake raven. “That poem became more widely read than I could ever have dreamed. My success was, I must say, nothing short of stupendous. I became a sort of . . . literary Elvis, if you would.”
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.”
