Her mom had done a good job with the white makeup, Isobel thought. His paleness and the circles under his eyes looked too real. Then again, they had stayed up most of the night, so they probably were real. She thought the black wig they’d gotten from the costume aisle at Walmart looked a little hokey, but she figured she’d done an okay job cutting and styling it. Her father wore the tux he’d gotten married in, and being more than just a little tight now, the pant cuffs hiked up over his black socks like high-waters. A long white dish towel tied around his neck served as a cravat, and a little hair left over from the wig had been glued onto his upper lip that morning with spirit gum. The whole getup (combined with his “woe is me”
expression) might have been genuinely impressive, if not for the plush toucan, spray-painted black, hanging limply off his right shoulder, where it had been fastened that morning with Velcro. The bird bobbed stupidly as he strode into the room, prompting an outburst of laughter and applause.
Isobel stood up from the desk and reached out to shake hands with the fake Poe. Then her dad took the open chair next to Varen, who stared, his grip tightening on the armrests of his own chair. Her dad seemed to get the message and didn’t offer to shake.
“Welcome, Mr. Poe,” said Isobel, trying to get past the tense moment. The room quieted down, everyone eager to see what would happen next.
“Thank you, thank you,” Poe crooned in a goofy Southern accent. “Always a pleasure to return to the realm of the living.”
Isobel flipped through her stack of index cards to the one she needed first. She’d written almost all her questions out in a backward fashion, giving the facts first, asking for confirmation rather than information. It couldn’t, after all, come off looking like her dad had done the work. He hadn’t, either, Isobel reminded herself. Mostly he’d spent the night goofing off, parading around the living room, answering every single question with “Nevermore!” and coming up with ways to incorporate horrible Poe puns. Given the way he was currently hamming up the part, Isobel couldn’t help but wonder if he’d remember a single authentic thing she’d told him.
“So, Poe,” she began, “how’ve you been these past one hundred and fifty plus years since your untimely and mysterious death in the fall of 1849?”
“Weary.”
“And how’s Night’s Plutonian shore these days?”
“Dreary.”
More laughter. Isobel watched as Varen’s head turned slowly toward her father. She couldn’t exactly tell with the sunglasses, but she somehow knew that he had to be staring down the false Poe with one of his most penetrating “you are the essence of lameness” expressions.
Isobel plowed on. “I would just like to say that we are so glad to have you here on the show today, Mr. Poe and Professor Nethers.” She plastered on a big cheer smile. “Mr. Poe, your major works include such stories as ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ ‘The Pit and the Pendulum,’ and ‘The Masque of the Red Death.’ All of these feature themes of death and elements of the supernatural. Is it also true that you are considered to be the father of the modern detective story?”
“Oh, yes, of course,” said Poe, gesturing loosely with one hand. “Indeed I am. I hear that I am also considered by many in this day and age to be ‘America’s Shakespeare.’” Her dad beamed at Varen. “Isn’t that correct, Professor?”
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.”
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.”