On Night's Shore

by Randall Silvis

  I tried to make not a sound as I came into the room and slowly walked about. I tried to appear nonchalant as I made my way from table to table and peered into the vacant faces. It seemed that the farther into the room I went, the quieter it grew. Even the accordion died out. Soon there was no mistaking that I was the center of attention, an anomaly and therefore worthy of their dulled curiosity. From most of the patrons I detected no malevolence, yet the foreboding remained, the prick of something sharp at the top of my spine.

  And then I heard him. The room was quiet enough finally to permit the sound to reach me, the steady, even rhythmic scrape of footsteps, the slow drag as regular as a narcotized heart. Contrapuntal to this dirge was a higher-pitched and irregular sound, not exactly a whimper but very whimper-like, the way a drunk will protest in his sleep, the way a madman will argue with himself.

  I stood stock-still in the middle of the room. Cocked my ear. Turned slightly this way and that, zeroed in on the sound. And then squinted into the shadows and past the hazy orbs of light. And saw, near the deepest corner of the room, the shadow figure of a man who seemed to be blinking on and off, exactly as a figure might appear in a slowly revolving diorama.

  Poe was walking round and round a pillar of wood, a support beam, trudging in and out of the dull illumination provided by the nearest lamp. He walked with his left hand outstretched so that his fingers rode in pivot around the pillar.

  All the while he continued a litany of mumbles. I went to within three feet of him and saw then how soiled were his clothes, how bits of filth clung to him from boot to tousled hair, as if he had been rolling on the ground. He wore no coat, and his shirt was torn halfway down his chest. The pockets of his trousers hung out like hounds’ ears, empty.

  He walked with his head down, drooping, limp. “Too wild for song,” he mumbled, his voice almost shrill, desperate but too weak for volume. His right hand lifted at his side and floated for a moment as if trying to gain altitude, hip level and no higher, then slid outward from his body, transecting some invisible meridian. “Then rolled like tropic storms along.”

  A moment later his hand fell to his side. I moved closer. “Mr. Poe,” I whispered.

  He paid me no mind, but continued his dirgelike revolution.

  I said it again, and again, each time louder. On the fifth “Mr. Poe!” his mumbling ceased. On the next turn I spoke again and this time put a hand to his shoulder. “Mr. Poe.”

  He stopped walking and stood abreast of me, but kept his hand outstretched in contact with the pillar.

  I positioned myself in front of him, so close that his downturned eyes could not help but see me.

  “Mr. Poe, it’s just me. It’s Augie Dubbins. I’ve come to fetch you home.”

  At this he began to mumble again, but I did not recognize a single word of it; it must have been French or Latin or a language only he could comprehend. I saw that the fingers of his right hand were fluttering against his leg, twitching as if with palsy. As much to stop this movement as to calm myself, I slipped my hand into his.

  He became very still for a moment and squeezed shut his eyes. In this position he muttered, “I could not love. Could not love. Not love except where death was mingling his with beauty’s breath.”

  A chill shot through me. I squeezed his hand in mine. “It’s time to get back now,” I said.

  He made no answer, but neither did he resist when I pulled on his hand and set us in motion away from the post. The room was now as still as death. I had dragged Poe forward only a yard or so when the man at the nearest table spoke, or rather snarled at me.

  “Mind you take him straight home, boy.”

  I cut him a look, but no lamp was close enough to illuminate him and he sat hunched forward, head turned away from me. I might have asked who he was and how he knew Mr. Poe but for the field of menace that surrounded him, that enclosed him like a deep pool, its black and sinister ripples radiating outward.

  And so, without a word, I led Poe slowly out of the Velsor Club, back onto the narrow lane, and by degrees homeward. We skirted the busier streets as best we could, with me manufacturing a smile each time a curious glance was turned our way, my smile trying for all the world to paint a happy picture, a father and son out for a stroll, a jaunt, my soiled hero muttering of death and stumbling along as docile as a beaten plow horse on a lead.

  15

  Poe spent the rest of that day and until darkness the next abed. By which I mean he slept in the chair beside Virginia’s bed, feet propped up on a footstool, a quilted blanket tucked around his chest and shoulders. Twice during these hours I carried a bowl of broth to Virginia so that she could spoon it to him. His face was gray and his hands too shaky to guide the spoon himself. He seemed barely able to keep his eyes open and had not a word for any of us the entire first day.

  In the meantime, Mrs. Clemm insisted on mending my shirt and washing my clothes again. She slathered a slippery ointment on the welt down my cheek and rubbed a handful of it into my back. Not once did she ask me how I had come by my marks, and I volunteered no information.

  She kept me busy in the garden and at the woodpile, sent me off once to fill a basket with huckleberries, though the season was past, and another time sent me up the road with a burlap sack to be filled with plums from an abandoned orchard.

  Nor did she speak of the incidents surrounding Poe’s disappearance and return until, after supper of the second day, as Virginia sat with Poe behind the closed bedroom door, I assisted Mrs. Clemm as a scullery maid, wiping each plate or bowl dry after she had scoured it clean.

  She made a small wet sound then, a kind of sniffling moan, which made me look up at her. A tear track shone on each broad cheek.

  A sense of helplessness washed through me at this sight, a feeling of insignificance as enervating as a midnight wind. I did a strange thing then, strange for me, awkward and alien—I reached out and patted her arm.

  She nodded, acknowledging the touch. She sniffed loud and long, then composed herself. “If you are going to be his friend, Augie, you must learn to take better care of him.”

  I did not remind her that it was Poe who had sent me away from him at the boardinghouse, or that not until a day later, in the Velsor Club, did it become apparent to me that he required any caretaking.

  In response I said, “The old lady claims he only had a glass of sherry with her. He must’ve gotten hold of a lot more back in town.”

  “He cannot have a single glass, not even one. It acts so strangely upon him and is in every way unpredictable.”

  “He’ll go off like that after just the one? I never heard of such a thing.”

  “And how many men of genius have you known?” she asked.

  It struck me as a terrible affliction, to be so blessed with intelligence. To be so sensitive to life, yet so tortured by it. It made me wonder if perhaps I was better off as the dolt my mother identified me as being.

  It wasn’t long before the bedroom door came open and out came Virginia with the half-empty soup bowl. She came directly to my side. “Mr. Poe would be grateful for your company now,” she said.

  “He wants to see me?”

  She smiled.

  I did not know how to approach him. I felt I should crawl on my hands and knees, nose scraping the floor. Because despite my weak protestation to Mrs. Clemm, I did indeed consider myself responsible for his troubles. If he had tumbled from the grace of perfection in my eyes, it was I who had pushed him.

  “Come in, Augie, please.” It was little more than a whisper. I stepped over the threshold and into the dark, into a room where but a sliver of evening light sneaked through the drawn curtains.

  “Come sit on the bed,” he told me.

  Virginia’s fragrance filled the room, the scent of lilacs, yes, but also the warmer body smell, deep and rich and tragic; it made my heart feel doubly bruised.

 
I perched on the edge of the bed, hands clasped between my knees.

  “I want only to ask your forgiveness,” Poe said.

  I cocked my head at him.

  “I should never have sent you back to that place.”

  “You mean to see the aunt? Why, there wasn’t nothing wrong with—”

  He raised a finger to silence me. “The Old Brewery.” His hand turned palm upward then and came toward me another inch, a subtle gesture but clear enough. He was pointing at me, showing me myself as explanation.

  I knew then that although Mrs. Clemm had said nothing to me about my beating she had said plenty about it to Poe. No wonder he sat gazing at the side of my face with such a mournful look. No wonder each time Virginia turned her eyes on me she was barely able to suppress a grimace.

  “This ain’t nothing,” I told him. “You don’t need to worry about something like this.”

  “It will be rectified,” he said.

  “It really ain’t nothing.”

  He did not speak or move for a moment, then gave me a little nod. “In the meantime,” he said, “you might be interested to know that I am in possession of an intriguing fact. Did Mr. Anderson not inform us that, on one previous occasion nearly a year past, Miss Rogers was absent from her duties because of the catarrh?”

  “That’s what he told us anyway.”

  “And did not Mrs. Rogers inform us that her daughter came down with the illness, diagnosed by her as a stomach ailment, while visiting the aunt, and thus spent her convalescence in the aunt’s domicile?”

  I was comforted to hear that his expedition to Gotham’s Gehenna had done nothing to dilute his funny way with words. “I remember that too, sure enough.”

  “What would you make, then, of the spinster’s claim that, to her recollection, Miss Rogers was never ill in her presence, and that the niece at no time passed as much as a single night in the cottage?”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Not this last time and not the earlier time neither?”

  “Precisely.”

  “And you don’t think maybe the aunt’s just playing fast and loose with the truth?”

  “I do not. Do you?”

  “Don’t see why she would,” I said. “Or maybe has a habit of forgetting the facts?”

  “Did she strike you thusly?”

  “She seemed a little distractible maybe, though her memory weren’t the problem as much as the sherry was. But she remembered you fine enough, and every word you said to her. Same as with that Glendinning fellow.”

  “Glendinning, yes. According to Virginia, this is the gentleman who directed you to the Velsor Club.”

  “Though what I don’t understand is why he didn’t just fetch you out himself. What kind of a friend would take you to a place like that and then just leave you there?”

  “I know of no one named Glendinning. This morning was the first I heard of him.”

  “He come looking for you at the aunt’s, she said. And then he must of tracked you down somehow, since it was him told me where to find you. So I guess it couldn’t of been him took you to the Velsor in the first place.”

  “As Virginia related your description of him, it was not. The man who intercepted me at the boardinghouse gate was by all appearances a scoundrel.”

  “So why’d you go with him into Five Points then?”

  “Because he promised me information. All I needed to know, he said—in exchange for a mug of rum. And I…I am ashamed to admit that I was predisposed to accept his invitation.”

  “And did he have the information he promised?”

  “He did. He did indeed.”

  I waited with eyebrows raised. But Poe was apparently reluctant to satisfy my curiosity.

  “This Velsor Club,” he said. “I could never have conceived of such a…a maelstrom of depravity. It was at once repulsive and intoxicating. Such a wealth of perniciousness.”

  He leaned closer now and whispered so that the women would not hear. “Were I to write of what I witnessed in that place, I would be labeled a madman.”

  “It’s a pit, all right. They don’t come much worse.”

  And suddenly the dark gleam left his eye. “Would I be wrong in thinking it indicative of the milieu in which you have lived?”

  “Depends. What’s a mill-you?”

  His smile was pale and miserable. “You are as strong as I am weak,” he said.

  I took no pleasure in hearing him speak that way. I wanted him strong and confident. I wanted him bold and unassailable.

  Moments later Poe nodded to himself and drew in a slow breath. “We will continue our work in the morning,” he said. “If, that is, you are so inclined.”

  “I’m with you all the way. Just so long as I can be of some use to you.”

  “You have proven your worth a dozen times over.” And now he reached out a hand to pat my knee. “My fidus Achates.”

  “Someday you’re going to have to teach me what all those fancy words mean.”

  “A duty and a privilege, sir.” His eyes became heavy then, and it seemed to me that he was falling asleep. I leaned a bit closer and saw that he had not closed his eyes but had only averted them.

  “My problem, young friend, is that I cannot think and feel at the same time. This work requires both facilities. Therefore, if, when I am doing the one, you will do the other, we shall perhaps achieve our goal.”

  “How will I know which one I’m supposed to be doing—the thinking or the feeling?”

  “You will know. A whole person always knows.”

  At the time, I thought he had called me a hole person. But such was the power of his presence that even that odd phrase struck me as complimentary. I did not know if he meant that I was adept at seeing into holes or in filling or exploring holes or that I had managed to crawl out of a hole; I only knew that he had praised me somehow. He had with his praise and wan smile transmogrified a Brewery rat into a valued companion. He had made me, in a word, significant.

  I knew too that he needed to rest. I rose and went to the doorway and saw that Virginia was waiting just off the threshold, a cup of tea in her hand. She looked as weak as Poe. Beyond her sat Mrs. Clemm with her broad silent back to the bedroom.

  “And, Augie,” Poe said. “You must rest assured. Remedies will be made.”

  I nodded, knowing not what to answer, and stepped out of the bedroom. Virginia slipped inside and eased the door shut behind herself. I went to sit beside Mrs. Clemm, who was busy as always, this time darning a black sock.

  “I don’t know what he meant by that last remark,” I told her.

  “Whatever he meant, he meant it absolutely. He will not fail you.”

  I cannot adequately describe for you the vertiginous effect of such attention. To be regarded in that house with such tenderness, such solicitude, I was made mute by it. Tenderness was then as alien to me as moon water. Neither, to my knowledge, existed in fact. But Poe’s promise, though I knew not yet what to make of it, touched me in a way I could not assimilate. I could ascribe no metaphor to it until years later as a fully grown man, when I first held in my hands the bare wires attached to a parlor novelty, a small hand-cranked electrical generator. As I held those wires, just as years earlier I had sat and watched Mrs. Clemm’s patient hands, I felt a rippling of force so exotic that it made me want to cry out in pain. Yet the pain was so exquisite that I wanted never to release those naked wires from my grip.

  16

  The widow Rogers was no less happy to see us this time than on the previous occasion. She was of the opinion that Poe and Poe alone would identify the ruffians who had assaulted her daughter, and that he, with the stroke of his Olympian pen, would bring down justice. As witness to her desperate faith, I was struck by the disparity of opinions in which Poe, the writer, was viewed: by Mrs. Rogers and Mrs. Clemm as godlike; by Messrs. Cooper an
d Irving as more a Pluto than a Zeus; by his readers as the font of all knowledge and wisdom; and by his editors as a nuisance.

  In any case, it was Mrs. Rogers’s opinion holding sway at the moment. We arrived at her boardinghouse at approximately 10:00 a.m., the establishment empty of boarders. She insisted on setting out a plateful of small ginger cakes and in brewing up a fresh pot of tea.

  Hays’s watchmen, she told Poe, claimed to be hard at work on the case when in fact they were doing nothing at all. They claimed to be amassing evidence when in fact they were waiting for it to be dropped into their laps. One leatherhead had in fact told her as much: they were too busy unsnarling traffic on lower Broadway to be questioning every b’hoy and street arab in Gotham. Besides, their methods of questioning typically resulted not in cooperation but in mutually exchanged curses and no small amount of hemorrhaging.

  “While we await the tea,” Poe said, “perhaps I could make of you a rather indelicate request.”

  “You may ask me anything,” she said.

  “It is not my intention to appear indecorous. But this is a necessary matter, I think.”

  “If it is necessary, it can hardly be indecorous.”

  “I should like to visit your daughter’s quarters.”

  “You want to see her bedroom?”

  “By observing your daughter’s milieu, as it were, of which her boudoir is a significant component, it is possible that certain insights might be attained.”

  “It only matters to me that those ruffians be caught and hanged.”

  “If truth is justice, madam, our objective is one and the same.”

  With that she practically pulled him up the stairs. I followed along behind, one ginger cake stuffed in my mouth and another in my pocket.

  Mary Rogers’s room was on the second floor, a small but sunny room that faced the street. A rather tiny bed, I thought; a single oil lamp; a bureau on which were a hand mirror and hairbrush, a wooden jewelry box, and a porcelain statuette perhaps four inches high, painted white and pink, in the form of a robed and winged woman, an angel.