On Night's Shore

by Randall Silvis

  Poe did not respond to this but went bursting out into the sunlight. “He was standing right over there,” I said, “looking straight at me.”

  “He must have gone down Wall Street.”

  An instant later, Poe was sprinting through the traffic with me hard on his heels. He came onto Wall Street and abruptly stopped and, while surveying the crowd of pedestrians, asked me, “Just what am I looking for, Augie? How will I know the man?”

  “There!” I said, because I had spotted him now; he had removed his hat, but he was leaning out slightly from the doorway of the Merchants’ Exchange. He could no doubt see Poe through the crowd, but he could not see me.

  “Is he looking our way?”

  “You bet he is.”

  “Then let us retreat.”

  “Do what?”

  “Follow me,” Poe said. “Back around the corner.”

  We retraced our steps until we had turned the nearest corner. We found our own doorway and concealed ourselves therein. “You think he’ll come looking for us?” I whispered.

  “Hush now. But alert me when he passes.”

  “Don’t you worry about that,” I said.

  We waited barely a minute before Glendinning came striding past the doorway. I leapt out behind him and seized the tail of his coat and yelped, redundantly perhaps, “Glendinning!”

  The man spun on me, but Poe was already there. With an outstretched arm, he moved me back a step and interceded between us.

  Poe was smiling. “Mr. Glendinning,” he said. “What a pleasure that at last we meet.”

  The man licked his lips but did not speak. His eyes darted from Poe to me to some distant point in the city. And finally back to Poe. “Sir?” he said.

  “I understand I have you to thank,” Poe said.

  The man steadied himself. “Pardon my confusion, sir. Do I know you?”

  “Do you?”

  “If the question is mine to answer, then I would have to answer no. Though perhaps if you will remind me where we met…”

  Poe’s gaze never faltered, his smile never cracked. “Is this the man, Augie?”

  “If he ain’t, I’m a blind baboon.”

  “My young friend here feels certain that he knows you as Glendinning.”

  “Your young friend is mistaken. My name is Nostrand.”

  “You are not the gentleman who went asking after me at the home of Sarah Rogers?”

  “That name is as unknown to me as yours.”

  “Nor are you the man who later directed my young friend to my whereabouts?”

  “Again, sir, I can only repeat that you are mistaken.”

  “And you’re a horse’s ass,” I said.

  Poe held up a hand to silence me. “In that case, Mr. Nostrand, my apologies. I trust that we will not be meeting again.”

  “I see no reason why we should.”

  “Good day, sir.”

  “And to you.”

  Nostrand touched the brim of his bowler, then turned sharply and strode away. Neither Poe nor I moved until Nostrand had disappeared around a corner.

  “You know he’s lying, don’t you?” I asked.

  Poe said, “It is the only thing I know.”

  18

  Whether in good spirits or gloom, Poe was a man who enjoyed walking, who adored walking, who regularly walked long and hard whether there was a place to go or not, who walked often for the mere freedom of movement and the easier flow of thoughts that walking engendered.

  As for me, I was too young to appreciate the cogitative advantages of peripatetics. Get there and get on with it, that was my philosophy. I indulged Poe in his bipedalism without too much complaint as far as the foot of Fulton Street, but there I looked out across the white-stippled water and grumbled, “Now what? I suppose we’re going to turn around and go back the other direction?”

  He surprised me by digging deep into his purse and coming up with the coins for our round-trip fare to Brooklyn, and only then did I suspect our destination. Soon after boarding the steam ferry, I left Poe at the rail while I perambulated among the other pedestrians and the carriages and wagons and eavesdropped on sundry conversations, hoping to overhear of an itinerary that matched our own; in other words, I was searching for a means to keep me off my feet the remainder of the journey.

  In the end it was Poe who provided the means to our conveyance. I had been gone from him less than three minutes, half the trip across the East River, when I spotted him in conversation with an earnest young man who could have been his brother—a lean and melancholy fellow who stood with a slight stoop, though one more temperamental than congenital.

  I eased my way back to them and learned that they were discussing a writer named Hawthorne, whose personal peculiarity Poe admired, because, as he said, “to be peculiar is to be original, and there is no higher literary virtue than true originality.”

  The young man nodded at this as a puppy will nod at its mother, as if to say, Yes, yes, I’ve had my turn at the teat, but can’t I have more? I want more, please, more!

  It was yet another reaction to Poe, the first of its kind I had witnessed, that of the fawner, the sycophant, the Grand Obsequier. Apparently he had recognized Poe from a poetry reading in the city, and here on the confines of the ferry had mustered the nerve to approach the man himself, that wonder of wonders, a published writer. And Poe, never quick to turn away from flattery, now had the young man all but intoxicated on Poe’s own peculiarity.

  In any case, I recognized the young man as salvation for my feet. And off the bow loomed Brooklyn, less than one minute away. I walked straight to Poe’s side and tugged at his sleeve and whined, “Why do we have to walk all the way to Vinegar Hill?”

  Poe’s look gave me to know that I would later pay for this breach of civility. He then introduced me to the young man as his good friend and colleague, Master August Dubbins. I flinched at the public utterance of my Christian name, but only for an instant. The young man seemed delighted by it.

  “Just like in Pym!” he said. “Augustus being the great friend of Arthur Pym, A. P., whereas your own initials are E. A. P., and this young man’s name is August!”

  “True, true,” Poe said, more amused, I think, by the fellow’s hysterical enthusiasm than impressed with the synchronicity of names and initials.

  The short of it is that, over the course of the next hour, Poe was to receive his fill of idolatry. For when the sycophant learned that we were on our way to the Navy Yard on Wallabout Bay, he insisted on the honor of conveying us there in his phaeton. True, he was headed himself for the Heights, and he pointed out his family’s estate from the rail. But it would be the high point of his week, he said—no, make that his life…

  We rode in comfort to Wallabout Bay. I, at least, was comfortable. Poe for some reason felt compelled to roll his dark eyes at me on more than one occasion while our chauffeur peppered him with questions, then responded to each of Poe’s answers with a reverent “Yes! Quite so! How absolutely trenchant!”

  Suffice it to say that we attained the Navy Yard none too quickly for Poe. I too was pleased to view it up close for the first time, then but a hamlet of shacks and piers and shops, more a village of boats than of buildings, and therein its appeal to me, the appeal of far-flung adventures in places I could not yet even imagine. It was the very place where twenty years hence the ironclad Monitor would be assembled stern to bow in a mere one hundred and one desperate days, the Union’s vanquishing weapon.

  For now, the sight of so many traditional vessels lined up at the slips, plus the chorus of hammers and saws and rasps and chisels that floated from every shack, was enough to unhinge my jaw.

  “Don’t that beat the Dutch,” I said. “Look at that boat there. Now that’s a beauty for sure.”

  “It is,” Poe said, “though it is not a boat. It is a ketch. A fast an
d supple ship, much favored by the privateers of the Caribbean.”

  “What’s that one there?” I asked.

  “The one with three masts? A bark. And the larger one farther out, also square-rigged, that’s a brig. Now look over here—you see the single-masted craft? That one is a sloop.”

  “I’d like to have me one of those. I’d sail away to some strange land and never look back.”

  Poe smiled, remembering perhaps his own flirtations with the exotic. “And that one anchored just off the slip, Augie. What kind of ship is that?”

  “Another sloop?” I said.

  “Look closely now.”

  “The only thing different is where the masts are set. That second one’s farther back.”

  “Farther astern,” Poe said. “Which makes it not a sloop but a cutter.”

  He went on like this for several minutes, naming and elucidating upon every ship within view. My days on the waterfront had, of course, educated me in the various configurations of sailing vessels, but until Poe came along, I had had no tutor and therefore recognized more configurations than I had names for.

  “How is it that you know so much about the navy and about ships in general?” I asked.

  “It is a writer’s duty to know as much as he is capable of knowing. As to the genesis of this knowledge, I acquired it principally at the West Point Academy.”

  “Why is it you ain’t in the navy yourself?”

  “My talents,” he said, “do not include a receptivity to the regimented life.” A master of omission, he failed to add that he had been court-martialed at West Point. So I knew nothing then of his earlier disgrace or of his lingering fascination with the sea, or of his long narrative of the Pym who shared his two initials and my first name, or of how remarkably that tale would prefigure Melville’s definitive novel of men at sea, of Poe’s strongly physiqued and dangerous Dirk, Melville’s Queequeg, Poe’s vast and annihilating and God-concealing whiteness of Antarctica, Melville’s God-as-white-whale.

  How immensely those insights might have filled that casual moment between us! But what I knew then was pathetically little. What any of us knows at any moment in time is pathetically little. The irony of life is that when we have finally learned enough to live passably well, to live deliberately and with a finely focused purpose, with all the spindrift blown away (and most of life is spindrift), it is time for us to die.

  “There it is,” Poe said and pointed to a ship anchored near the end of a long pier.

  “Andrews is aboard?”

  “We shall soon discover.”

  It was the American brig Somers, a school ship on which Lieutenant Andrews gave instruction to young men interested in a naval career. Had I been a few years older and from a more respectable address I might have spent my own days there in preparation for a life at sea. In which case I too might have been aboard the Somers in 1842 when it set sail on its first training mission in open waters, and I too, given my bent toward insubordination, my own lack of receptivity to the regimented life, might have swung from the yardarm with the three other boys who were hanged for inciting mutiny.

  But forgive me. This stirring up of time and incident is a hazard of old age. If only this, if only that. I have come to a point in my life where nothing exists but the past, and as I gaze back on it, the demarcations of place and chronology seem of far less significance than they did when first encountered. What matters most, what resonates throughout our lives like a struck gong, the tone not even audible after a while but still sending forth its rippled waves, is the effect of the moment. Every moment. What Poe might have referred to as its totality.

  As for the Somers, I was, to my continuing relief, not destined to dangle from its yardarm like a fly from a spider’s thread. Poe, as it would soon turn out, had other plans for me.

  In the meantime, he hailed a seaman aboard the brig and inquired if Lieutenant Andrews was at the moment aboard ship. When answered in the affirmative, Poe requested that word be delivered to Andrews that the journalist Edgar Poe would be grateful for a moment of his time.

  Minutes later, the lieutenant appeared at the ship’s rail. He struck me immediately as a tall and elegant man, his face thin and angular but not in the least thorny or severe. A very good-looking man, so neat in his starched blue uniform that I felt suddenly ragged in my cut-down clothes.

  But there was as he looked down on us, as he stood with both hands as still as roots around the polished rail, a tightness in his eyes, a woodenness I could only later attribute not to their depth of oaken color but to the grain and brittleness of his fear.

  “Mr. Andrews,” Poe called up to him from across the stretch of water. “I apologize for the intrusion. My name is E. A. Poe; I am a journalist affiliated with—”

  “I know your work, sir,” the lieutenant said.

  There was a beat then, a shuddering pause, as each man regarded the other.

  “You have come, I hope, to inform me that the arabs responsible for Miss Rogers’s demise have been apprehended?”

  “I wish it were so. But no, the investigation continues. To which end, perhaps, you might now assist me?”

  “How so?”

  “A few questions, sir. After which we will leave you to your duties.”

  “I have only a minute to spare.”

  “Then I apologize in advance if I strike you as brusque. But to the point. How was it, sir, that you happened to be so near the site where Miss Rogers’s body was discovered?”

  “I was participating in a search at the behest of my friend Mr. Payne. Who as you know was the young lady’s betrothed.”

  “Indeed,” said Poe. He put a hand to his chin. “I daresay you know the currents of the Hudson quite well.”

  The lieutenant blinked once, but otherwise did not move. “Your implication, sir?”

  “None whatsoever. An observation, nothing more.”

  “Then if we are finished here…”

  “I wonder,” said Poe. “Do you recall your whereabouts on that Sunday morning two weeks past?”

  If my eyes did not deceive me, I witnessed Andrews’s stillness crack at that moment, a scarcely perceptible movement of his head, a stiff and tiny twitch.

  “And on the date of Miss Rogers’s attack of catarrh two years previous,” Poe said, “when according to her mother she was abed at the home of an aunt, though according to the aunt she was not? Do you recall your whereabouts on that date as well?”

  And now the crack widened, became a fissure in the lieutenant’s composure. He cocked his head slightly and lowered his gaze.

  Poe said, “Though perhaps this last is too much to ask of one’s memory. I only bring it up because it was you who informed the young lady’s mother of her daughter’s illness. Or have I been misinformed?”

  The lieutenant nodded as if to himself. Thirty seconds later, he lifted his eyes to Poe once again. “My apologies, Mr. Poe. I have left my charges unattended too long. They are after all only boys.”

  With that he turned his back to us and walked away.

  I looked up at Poe. “Now what?”

  “Now,” he said, “we know.”

  “We do?”

  He nodded, lips pursed, and squinted long and hard at the empty rail where Andrews had been standing. “The sailor’s knot,” he said. “The lieutenant’s coincidental proximity to the body when it was discovered. The lieutenant’s role as messenger of the girl’s sickness, when in fact she was not ill. Lastly, the testimony of the witness.”

  “What witness?”

  “The man who escorted me to the Velsor Club. Despite the condition in which he left me there, he left me also with a sworn declaration of having seen the lieutenant in the company of the deceased on the very day of her disappearance.”

  “Well don’t that fix the flint.”

  “Precisely.”

&nb
sp; Finally he turned to me. He blinked once, as if to change the picture before his eyes. “And now, Master Dubbins, we attend to the second rectification of the day.”

  “Meaning what?”

  And he said, “Meaning you.”

  19

  Our first stop upon returning to Manhattan was the lion’s den of editor Neely, a man who was both Poe’s nemesis and his lifeline. I waited in the warren of outer offices, keeping one eye on the editor’s closed door, the other on the scriveners smoking and scribbling, men weaving as if from the threads and skeins of tobacco haze a fabric of words, a patchwork of pages that would become a newspaper, that flimsy compilation of ink and pulp that in turn wove together the fabric of the city, even the world.

  It was a moment of revelation for me, not a lightning-bolt revelation but a slow seeping in of wonder, that out of this craft of common men, out of this alchemy in which bits of observation were mixed with pieces of fact, then spun into sentences, headlines, sketches, would come a singular voice from a chorus of voices, a voice to become an identity for the whole, to create a sense of community, a personality pieced together from a scattering of disconnected lives. Feeling as I did the least connected creature of any on the earth, the vaporous possibilities of that room filled me, at that particular moment, with a quivering awareness I can only describe as magical.

  And then here came Poe striding toward me. His smile—never wide, never more than a slight ascendancy at one corner of an otherwise grim mouth—was augmented by the merriment of his eyes. As he came abreast of me, he even winked, a gesture of complicity so thrilling that I all but bounded after him as he headed for the street.

  “You look like you had some good news,” I said.

  Out the door he headed north up Nassau. “Would you call six dollars good news?”

  “He gave you six dollars for the story?”

  “I am to be paid six dollars, yes. And one of those dollars is to be yours.”

  I would say that this news struck me like a blow except that the connotation carries a negative, even punitive weight. And I felt no punishment from this blow—paralysis, yes, but the paralysis of glee. I stood as if nailed to the sidewalk, mouth hanging open as Poe continued on, his head thrown back like that of a long-distance runner on his victory lap.