On Night's Shore

by Randall Silvis

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  Copyright © 2001, 2017 by Randall Silvis

  Cover and internal design © 2017 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover design by Derek Thornton/Faceout Studios

  Cover images © Stephen Mulcahey/Arcangel Images, ivangal/Shutterstock Images, ivansmuk/Thinkstock

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Apart from well-known historical figures, any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  Fax: (630) 961-2168

  www.sourcebooks.com

  Originally published in 2001 in the United States by St. Martin’s Paperbacks, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Silvis, Randall.

  Title: On night’s shore : a novel / Randall Silvis.

  Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks Landmark, [2017]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016008658 | (softcover : acid-free paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849--Fiction. | Private investigators--Fiction. | Journalists--Fiction. | New York (N.Y.)--Social life and customs--19th century--Fiction. | New York (N.Y.)--History--1775-1865--Fiction. | GSAFD: Historical fiction. | Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3569.I47235 O5 2017 | DDC 813/.54--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016008658

  CONTENTS

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Reading Group Guide

  A Conversation with the Author

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  This book is for my sons,

  Bret and Nathan,

  heart of my soul, soul of my heart.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  On Night’s Shore is a work of fiction. I have made every effort to remain true to the character of E. A. Poe and all other actual persons portrayed in this novel, and have striven to present an accurate picture of New York City in 1840, but I have on occasion been forced to choose between narrative unity and fidelity to chronological facts. In every case, story and drama won out over fact. The body of Mary Rogers, for example, was actually discovered in the Hudson River a year later than I have depicted here; the same holds true for the onset of Virginia Poe’s tuberculosis. Also, although Poe resided in or near New York City at various times throughout his adult life, he was not to my knowledge living in New York City in the summer of 1840.

  RS

  1

  The baby came sailing out of the window like a spider unwinding its silk, spinning down, slowly turning, an elegy in free fall.

  It was one of those sights which, even as you watch, you do not see the horror of the madness. Otherwise you would turn away. Or maybe because the sun was in my eyes that afternoon and cast the baby as a silhouette on coral sky, no more startling at first than the black frown of a crow’s wings. Or maybe because of the grace with which the infant fell, neither tumbling as you would think a baby might when thrown from thirty feet up nor undulating like a broad leaf but falling instead as a small shadow of negligible weight, a shadow drawn as we all are to the water, as if the river had been waiting there to catch the infant and carry it away, downstream and out to sea and into some vast and deep and swifter existence, a river positioned at the bottom of that moment like grief itself to swallow the child and the mother alike.

  Or maybe the infant only appeared to fall so slowly because a baby tossed from a window does indeed represent the epitome of human madness, all of mankind’s folly summed up in that brief descent, and so my mind to protect itself from too much recognition too soon slowed its intake of the world. I have come to believe since that day that bitter epigrams like this one are thrust before us from time to time, by whom or what I have ceased to speculate, but offered up on occasion for us to behold and consider, to remind us, warn us, prepare us for the life to come, the twisted road that lies ahead.

  Or maybe I make too much of what was, simply, a flash of horror on a lugubrious day. Maybe I see the infant plummeting so slowly because this is the way an old man remembers the strike of lightning that came out of clear sky to change him as a boy.

  • • •

  It was July 1840. I was approximately ten years old that summer. (My mother, when pestered into providing a year for my birth, might answer 1829, 1830, or 1831. When asked for a month, she was even less precise, and invariably placed my birth date several months into the future. That is, if I asked in April, she said November; if I asked in November, she said March. In truth the event of my birth had left little impression on her, and her answers were calculated less to inform my curiosity than to silence it.)

  But to July 1840. Another ship was easing toward the Battery, another boatload of wide-eyed immigrants, foreigners in rags or finery, exiles babbling or made mute by awe, but every last one of them an Ishmael come here to make a mark, leave some small impression on what they saw as a malleable world, a city that shone as brightly to their eyes as a new gold coin.

  The immigrants were not overwhelmingly Irish yet, as they would be in less than a year, and so for a ten-year-old boy (to choose the average of the options provided), ther
e was still some novelty in the approach of a ship, some excitement as I wondered what language I would dance to, what strange music of voice. I had picked up a few words here and there, enough to ask in pidgin German or Italian if the new arrival and his family needed a room, a place to stay, and by the accent of the answer I would know what kind of money to ask for when the cloud of confusion lifted from their eyes momentarily, to hold out my palm for lire or shillings or marks or guilders or tuppence.

  “I’ll run ahead and secure the room,” I would say and give a smile and a phony address before racing off with my day’s wages, straight to the nearest money changer, who would then cheat me in turn.

  Employment, therefore, my livelihood of fraud, was one of the reasons I was on the waterfront that afternoon. I was on the waterfront nearly every afternoon because it was my primary place of business, where the hoodwinking began, two steps off the gangplank. This was America after all, and I believed the mythos too; I believed I had the sovereign right to lie and cheat in the service of self-improvement. Such was the precedent I observed in every direction; the road to greatness had been paved with dissimulation.

  In those days there was more activity along the wharves and slips than there was on Wall Street and Broadway, and to a boy it seemed a more robust activity, more promising and salubrious, loud with the barked curses of stevedores climbing over and around the forest of barrels and crates and great heavy trunks—a forest that was built and dismantled and rebuilt daily. And in every trunk a treasure, or so I believed back then.

  And when the activity of the docks slowed, there were other entertainments. In those days there were still lots of birds along the shore, not just the noisy gulls or boring ducks but more interesting birds as well, the slow and patient gangly bird I called a stork but found out later was a great blue heron, fascinating to me with its long snake’s neck and pterodactyl wings. And the turkey buzzards that circled singly or in flocks as large as a dozen, those graceful dark vultures who gleaned the unpaved shores of every carcass left too long in the sun.

  Nor was the wildlife restricted to the air. Sometimes I could hear wild turkeys gobbling from the New Jersey woods. Once, I watched the carcass of a white-tailed deer float by, a stag as bloated as the pigs’ bladders some boys kicked across open fields. On occasion a yellow dog would trot past with a greasy wet rat clamped in its teeth. Or a red fox would streak about in a dither, trying to remember where it had hidden its burrow. Or a bandit-faced raccoon would squat at the water’s edge and delicately rinse off some pilfered morsel.

  Life came and went under the aegis of the river, was conveyed or halted at the river’s discretion, was dragged under or floated into view, was nourished or destroyed. Whatever the outcome, it was intriguing to me, I flinched from none of it, I took it all in precisely because I was a child and had not yet learned to fear too far into the future, still believed in the inevitability of change, the unavoidable prospect of good fortune.

  The waterfront was a wild place born anew in the gray light of every dawn, and all the brighter because I was allowed to be wild in it. Like half the children in New York, I seldom attended school, and then only in winter when I needed to warm myself for a few hours. And as long as I brought home a few pennies each night, I could rest easy that my mother’s threats to send me off to the House of Refuge would remain only that; I understood that she left the door unlatched each night in anticipation of my pennies rather than of me. There was currency then as now in both copper and flesh but less work involved in converting the former to victuals and drink. Yet there was some comfort too, albeit easily soured, usually soured, in knowing I had a dry corner to return to when too much darkness of one kind or another drove me off the streets and into the den of thieves I called my home.

  It was this home that made the waterfront an Eden to me. How can I convey the scene of my residence politely, in a manner that will not offend? It was called the Old Brewery, and it sat like a canker on Cross Street, midway between Pearl and Orange, the crowning insult to the squalor known as Five Points. Picture a tall and rambling building rotten in every board, and cram into it a thousand souls of every color and accent, every infirmity of body and spirit. All told, the place was too much for the senses.

  Visually: the building and everything in it was layered over with a patina of shadow like a Rembrandt painting, but in this case, the shadow was accumulated filth, every surface darkly reflective, but only because it was also greasy to the touch. Olfactorily: every breath drew rankness into the lungs, the sour smell of the brewery’s former life ingrained in the wood, the effluvia of excrement and rum and vomitus and blood and tobacco smoke, the slaughterhouse reek of bodies that had lain in their rooms nearly to putrefaction before being buried beneath the dirt floor of the lower basement. These smells became a kind of gustatory experience as well, so that I spat a dozen times each morning on my way to the river, hawking up what I could of the night before. And finally, there was the auditory assault: the wet, glutinous coughing that never ceased, the rattle of ossifying lungs, the breaking and smashing and poundings of a despair whose only release was in violence and violent fucking, the moans and sighs and curses and farts and the general bellicosity that passed in our building for polite conversation.

  Here I lived in a single small room with my mother and a continuous parade of itinerant men whose names I never bothered to learn.

  Small wonder then that to me the blunted tip of Manhattan was the most dynamic and potent part of the city, wide open and brightly lit. One day there might be a fire, and an entire block would vanish in a roar of flames and a mad spectacular swirling of sparks. Even a quarter of the city might disappear overnight, as in the fire of 1835, when nearly every building east of Broad Street was destroyed.

  But fire was not the only agent of change. Just two years earlier, the first foreign steamship, the Sirius, had docked in New York City. A day later, the Great Western arrived. By 1840 most of the ships still came under sail or with auxiliary steam power, but the ratio was closing daily, and that summer I could watch both kinds traversing the Hudson and East Rivers, the sailboats gliding by in full rigging, the steamships belching black smoke from their stout stacks, paddle wheels churning the water into a wide avenue of froth. This was change, the reach of civilization. The lurch of progress before my very eyes. And I, if only as spectator, penny-ante grifter, was a part of it all. How could I help but be emendatory about what I saw as a general elevation of mankind?

  Even in what was typically a slow procession to port, spectacle was possible. In January the steamship Lexington burned and sank in Long Island Sound; one hundred and twenty lives were lost. But even those poor souls seemed less substantial to me than the cargo that washed ashore and barely had time to touch land before it was seized and rifled by scavengers. For a full month afterward, I hawked copies of a print of the tragedy made by the lithographer Currier; sales were brisk, as they usually are for glimpses of disaster, and with my proceeds every afternoon I was able to buy myself a treat at Mead’s Soda Water Shoppe and still have sufficient sedation in hand to quiet my mother’s tongue and to keep the leather strap dangling cold from the peg beside her bed.

  In calamitate, opportunitas. It wasn’t the official motto of New York City in those unpredictable times, but it might as well have been. It was certainly my own.

  With this hope, conceived of then in much simplified language, I awoke each morning. With luck I could rub the sleep from my eyes and grab my brogans and slip out of the room before my mother stirred. Across Little Water Street to Anthony, then north along Centre until I struck Franklin. A less than direct route to the Hudson, yes, but only by a couple of blocks. A diversion made twice daily, once going to the waterfront and once returning, in order that I might pass by the Tombs, that fortress of brick and stone and misery wherein I assumed my father resided.

  I envisioned him then as a quiet man amidst the shrieks and curses, a man with powerful
secrets he would someday bequeath to his son. And I intended to be there on the day he was released, on that morning or afternoon when a man with my eyes and my sidelong way of taking measure of the world would come striding out between the four front columns and down the steps to the sidewalk, perhaps blinking in the unenclosed brightness but wearing his own small smile, a knowing smile to be matched with my own. With a nod I would steer him away from the Old Brewery; he would know just by looking at me that we did not belong in that haven of vermin and vice; we had our own place to find, someplace downriver, westward, the two of us perched together on the bow of the roiling ship of progress.

  And so I came daily to the waterfront, the west side this particular day, about midway between Rector Street and the Bowling Green. The Tombs to my rear, Castle Garden to my far left. There were many other people milling about along the streets at my back, I’m sure; there always were. Though not as many as you might expect, for in those days downtown was not the clamorous place it would all too soon become, not yet “one of the most racketing cities in the world,” as Washington Irving would describe it in just a few years.

  On this Sunday afternoon, in fact, it seemed to bear an air of tranquillity, of unhurried expectation. Picture a small southern port today, or a sleepy midsize town along the New England coast, and you will have the proper tone of Sunday life away from the docks. Now add, as you move farther inland, an ever stronger scent of horses, of leather and stables and those fine sweating animals pulling omnibuses and carriages and wagons along Broadway, the horses raising clouds of dust with every clopping step, or releasing their sour issues of piss and manure. And now you have the proper fragrance—which tells you, perhaps, why I preferred the squawk of gulls and the scent of moving water.

  Altogether, then, this was the city of New York, soon to vie with Paris and London as the hub of the world but still overwhelmingly rural, bucolic as far north as Fourteenth Street, and beyond that not much more than swamp. A Victorian city replete with that uneasy duality of gentility and vulgarity, wealth and dire need, fine ladies daintily lifting their petticoats to step over gobs of tobacco spat upon the plank sidewalk.