On Night's Shore Page 12

  Along the way I alternately convinced myself that I was the long-lost son of an Astor or Vanderbilt, destined any moment for rediscovery and re-eminence. Or I was the long-lost son of a gypsy king, a virtuoso of song and brilliant mischief. Or the long-lost son of the vilest man on the planet and destined myself to soon usurp my father’s throne.

  In truth I had only the common modifier correct: long-lost. I had been lost since birth and was even yet.

  And so I walked. Onto Broadway, through the sputter and glow of gaslights. Over cobblestones, past palatial silhouettes, around horse reek and tobacco splatter, a soft-footed boy in transit beneath the stars. I was not then and never have been afraid of the dark; the blacker the night, the surer the sanctuary—that was how I have always viewed it.

  I circled the Tombs twice that night, as if in a wide elliptical orbit around some larger mass, some gravity that called to me. But on the second pass I broke free. How to explain it? In my mind’s eye I saw the Bridge of Sighs arched over the inner courtyard; I saw a shadow man moving across that bridge, chained at the wrists and ankles, shambling toward the gallows. He paused at the arch’s peak and lifted his head and looked my way, and for just an instant, his dulled eyes flared with light, a strange white fire, and I felt—I know of no other word to describe this jolt—liberated.

  I turned away from the Tombs and, without a conscious thought, as if thrust away centrifugally, moved toward the north. I walked a few more minutes before admitting to myself that I was returning to Poe.

  With this acknowledgment I ceased cajoling myself with fantasies of wealth and notoriety and turned my thoughts to the subject that Mr. Poe and I shared, the one thing that bound us—Mary Rogers. I thrilled myself now with the boyish notion that I was being led back to Poe for a mighty reason, that somewhere along the way I was bound to trip across a treasure of evidence to carry back to him, a drunken confession overheard, the complete and total solution to the conundrum dropped plop into my hands like a bowl of birthday pudding.

  Thanks to my perspicacity, he had said. It was a term of praise, that was all I understood or needed to. The sweet lilt and ululations were comprehension enough.

  How I sucked every nutrient from the marrow of that word. But I had never been offered a birthday pudding, and I discovered no treasure of evidence in the dark of the night. Only the treasure of darkness itself, the blessing of invisibility.

  It must have been two or three in the morning when I trudged within view of Poe’s cottage. An oil lamp shone in the window that faced the lane. At first I thought this strange, a light burning so late at night, but soon I reminded myself of Poe’s nocturnal habits. He was at work on another manuscript, turning sentences on the lathe of cogitation, putting rhyme to philosophy, transforming misery to poetry.

  Not wishing to disturb his thoughts, I crept like a phantom onto the porch, and there sequestered myself in a leeward corner and curled myself up to await the morning. Within minutes I was joined by both General Tom and Aristotle. A while later, the stealthy Asmodaios slunk onto the porch. Tom snuggled into the crook of my knees while Aristotle curled at my ankles. So as to keep black Asmodaios from crawling onto my face and suffocating me in my sleep, I held him cradled to my heart.

  13

  A heavy hand jostled me awake. I reacted with a start, arms around my head, until I recognized her voice.

  “Augie, please, sit up,” said Mrs. Clemm. “Where is Mr. Poe?”

  I uncurled and looked up at her. She was there before me on one knee, her broad face gray with concern, eyes weary. Behind her the yard was still in mist, the trees backlit with the soft pink of dawn.

  “Is he out already?” I asked.

  “When did you arrive?”

  I sat up and rubbed my face. “Middle of the night.”

  “And Mr. Poe? He left you here and came inside?”

  We were making no sense to each other. Something tickled at my nose and mouth. Cat hair. I swiped at it with both hands. “Last time I sleep with cats,” I said.

  She leaned even closer. “Augie, listen. I need to know this. Did Mr. Poe say anything after he left you here? Anything about where he was off to next?”

  I finally understood what she was getting at. “There was a lamp lit. I thought he was already inside.”

  “He didn’t return here with you last night?”

  “I came back late. I thought he was home already.”

  She leaned away and drew in a wearisome breath. “When did you last see him?”

  “Midday. At Mrs. Rogers’s boardinghouse.”

  “And what were his plans—did he say?”

  “To interview the girl’s aunt. Then back to the boardinghouse to talk with the other two. The lieutenant and the boyfriend.”

  She leaned even farther back on folded knee, head laid back and eyes on the porch ceiling. With an open palm, she patted her chest as if patting air into her lungs. “Sissie will sleep another hour or so,” she said. “Will you stay with her awhile?”

  I rolled onto hands and knees and stood and stepped out of the shadowed corner. “I’ll find him for you.”

  I thought she was about to embrace me, such was the gratitude that came into her eyes. Perhaps I even leaned toward her a bit. But she had scarcely touched my shoulder before she became suddenly still.

  “Your cheek,” she said. “Your lip…”

  I flinched, remembering.

  “Your shirt is torn. The buttons—one, two…three buttons missing.”

  “I tripped coming back in the dark. Fell into a bush,” I said.

  She laid a healing finger against my cheek. “This was done by no bush, boy.”

  To stop the inquiry, I moved away from her. “Don’t you worry, I’ll find him and bring him home again. I know just where to look.”

  But she was soon on her feet and had a hand around my wrist. “You’ll need some breakfast first. And a change of shirt. And a washrag.”

  She paused to gaze out through the trees. “I’m sure he’s fine,” she said, though her eyes betrayed her words.

  “I’ll take a piece of johnnycake if there’s any to be had. That’s all I need.”

  Ten minutes later I was galloping down the lane, chewing on a brick of corn bread as I trotted into the mist.

  • • •

  At Mrs. Rogers’s place I was importuned to join the house for breakfast, but though the corn bread had done little more than whet my appetite, I declined. I remained on the porch and there asked the kindly widow what time Mr. Poe had left the premises the night before.

  She had seen him but the one time early in the day, she said.

  He had not returned to speak with the gentlemen?

  He had not.

  I then obtained directions to the home of the aunt, the spinster Sarah Rogers, and was on the move once more.

  Mid-distance between the boardinghouse and the spinster’s cottage, I came to a copse of hardwood trees, and through this copse, a footpath ran. Not much wider than a deer trail, it twisted and turned through dark woods into which the light came broken and soft, slender yellow shafts aquiver with dust and insects. It seemed to me a spooky place, haunted even in full morning. Tired as I was, every creak of limb and snap of twig pushed me that much faster.

  As it was, I made the spinster’s cottage in fair time and found her hoeing in a garden at the side of the house. She was startled to see a breathless boy come running up to her low gate, so I wasted no time in informing her of my mission.

  “St. Joseph and Jude,” she said. “Sure he’s not been lost out in the woods all night?”

  She was a slender and bent old woman, even exceedingly so. The wide bonnet cast her face in shadow, but not so darkly I could fail to notice the prominence of her nose and chin. But if she bore a brittle and witchlike countenance, it was all but compensated for by the melody of her voice, s
oft and almost whispered but resonant with Irish lilt.

  “What time was it,” I asked, “when he took his leave of you?”

  “It was well before supper,” she said. “I came outdoors for a bit of hoeing afterward and saw by that it was not yet four.” On the word that, she had aimed her hoe at a sundial mounted on a small stone pedestal.

  “Did you notice which direction he went off toward?”

  “I did not,” she said. “I left him at the door and then went straight to the washstand. I can’t have dirty glasses sitting around unwashed. That’s the way I am and always have been.”

  “You had something to drink before he left?”

  “I always take a glass of sherry an hour before my supper. It’s good for the blood, you know. A glass before supper and a glass before bed. That and three green onions a day and you’ll never have need of a doctor, young man.”

  “And Mr. Poe—he had a glass too?”

  “He did, he did. Not that he finished it, though; I had to pour it back into the bottle. Got distracted, he did. And there he was recitin’ for me a poem of his own devisin’, a lovely piece of a thing, he called it ‘Romance.’ He was right in the middle of it, it seemed to me, when he up and all of a sudden remembered what he was about. He set down his glass then and thanked me for my time, like as if there was any value to it a’tall.”

  She looked at me awhile longer, smiling, then turned to her garden and bent over a mound of vines and whacked at the dirt with her hoe blade.

  “And then?” I asked. “What then?”

  She continued hoeing. “Oh he has a mighty waterfall of words, that one, doesn’t he now? All of it fairly gushin’ off his tongue, it was a wonder to behold. More’s the pity to have it wasted on an ignorant old woman who couldn’t make heads nor tails of it, isn’t that so?”

  “And afterward?” I asked again. “What did he say or do before he left?”

  “Nothin’ a’tall,” she said. “He was up and out the door just like his clothes was on fire. Said he had too much to do as yet to be enjoyin’ himself so completely with my company.”

  At this a rosy blush came into the old leather of her cheeks. “’Tis no wonder everybody wants to find the man and comes here lookin’ for him,” she said, “such a scoundrel with words as he is. I swear your Mr. Poe could charm the hee-haw right out of a donkey if he’d a mind to.”

  At the moment I was little concerned with Poe’s charm. “Who’s this everybody you’re talking about?”

  “Why, that other fella who was here not an hour before you.”

  “What other fella?”

  “The one come looking for him, same as you.”

  “Somebody came here? Asking after Poe?”

  “As dignified a gentleman as you would ever want to meet. Ma’am this and ma’am that. Quiet as a deacon and handsome as a viceroy.”

  “Did he tell you his name?”

  “And took off his hat when he did it. Glendinning, he said. A Mr. Glendinning. Now isn’t that a lovely name for a man? Reminds me of church bells ringin’, don’t it you?”

  I did not know what to make of this but felt certain it would be a waste of time to attempt to wring more information from her. By my reckoning she had been into the sherry already that day. What mattered now was the chill prick of foreboding that was inching up my spine. The name Glendinning, though one I had never heard before, sounded not half as lovely to my ears as it did to the old lady’s.

  Seconds later I left her to wreak havoc upon the weeds. I returned to the woods, retracing my steps, but this time at a blind gallop, for I was tired and hungry and my mind a confusion of possibilities. If this Glendinning had been in search of Poe only an hour or so earlier, then who was responsible for Poe’s disappearance? Was Poe himself the cause of our worry—could his taste of sherry have been all he needed to send him scurrying toward town and a grogshop?

  I scoured every field and vista on the long jaunt back to town, surveyed every barn lot and cow pasture for the figure of a man in black coat and trousers. I gazed up and down every avenue and lane. I poked my head into every grocer’s shop and bakery, every tavern and roadhouse.

  “Poe, are you in here?” I would call. “Mr. Poe? Anybody here seen Mr. Poe?” Even as I did so, a dark presentiment grew in the pit of my stomach, a cold hard lump of certainty that my actions would prove fruitless.

  I was making my way down Broadway, nearly to Canal, when my fortune changed. I stepped out in front of the Cockscomb Saloon, nearly dizzy with frustration, hunger, and fatigue; made a weary left turn; and ran smack into a man positioned there by the side of the building.

  “You’re looking for Poe?” he said. His voice was deep but not much softer than a whisper. And there was little breath behind the words, as if he had been piling up as many miles as I in the past few hours and had all but reached the limits of his endurance. He was a man of average height and girth but was dressed in a crisp black suit and wearing a stiff felt hat. The side of his face, all that I could see of it, was shiny with perspiration.

  “You might try the Velsor Club,” he said. He did not look at me when he said this, nor ever grant me more than a partial view of his features.

  I spoke in his presence for the first time. “Not the one on Centre Street.” It was a notorious hovel in the darkest heart of Five Points, only spitting distance from the Old Brewery but so nefarious a den of thieves and cutthroats that I, who prided myself on my boldness, had never once dared to peek inside its door.

  “Were I you,” he said, “I would not tarry.” The man put a hand to the brim of his bowler and gave it a little tip. Then he turned fully away from me and started off.

  “You’re Glendinning, ain’t you?” I called.

  His only answer was a slight hitch in his stride.

  “What is it you want with Mr. Poe?”

  His pace quickened at this, and he hurried away from me.

  I could have chased after the man, and wanted to, except that his identity was the less urgent of my two mysteries. The first was this: what had Poe gotten himself into now, and was it too late to get him out of it? And so I bolted back toward that neighborhood I had vowed never again to set foot inside. The very thought of the place filled me with dread.

  Vows, I have learned, should only be made with one’s final breath.

  14

  At Anthony I veered due east off Centre Street. Within a block the very air seemed dimmer, as if not even sunlight wished to soil itself here. The streets throughout Five Points were little more than a greasy maze, and increasingly so the closer one came to the Old Brewery. Slapdash shacks, thrown together from boards scavenged from stabler buildings, often sprang up overnight to block what a day earlier had been a narrow lane.

  Legitimate businesses were not absent from the neighborhood, but they were businesses catering to the transient and poor—butchers who sold more pigs’ knuckles and tripe than filet of beef; taverns where after a mug of rum you could have a leech applied, get a tooth yanked, a boil lanced; plus a wide assortment of hucksters’ shops where on Monday you might buy clams freshly dug from the beach, on Tuesday a bundle of rags begged from the rich, on Wednesday herbs and damp roots gathered from an empty lot, on Thursday a silver teapot that had somehow found its way off Fifth Avenue and was available for quick sale at a fraction of its value.

  The citizens who worked these shops and who frequented them were, quite literally, of a different hue than those just a few blocks south. Here one could find Chinese tars mixing with Irish sailors, black sawyers, cockney chimney sweeps, and stout Polish prostitutes. All shared the same amenities, the same vices and diseases. If the rest of Gotham was Protestant capitalism in full swing, Five Points was the essence of democracy—which is to say that a citizen was just as free here to butcher a pig as he was to steal, cheat, beat, rape, or butcher a neighbor. Hays’s troop of brutal leath
erheads would not dare set foot in Five Points.

  Nowhere was the community’s virulence more consolidated than at the Velsor Club. It stood on Cross Street, just west of Orange, a squat, dark, slanting building that still stank of the abattoir it once had housed. There were two broad windows on the front face, but they had long since been broken out and replaced with wood and sheets of tin. From the half-open door came a wheeze of accordion music and a garbled strain of voices.

  The door was being held open by a slattern who had come to the light to better pick at a pimple on her left breast. She saw me watching her and cupped her breast with one hand and motioned me closer with the other. I took a step back. She laughed, then turned away and slunk back into the interior and let the door fall shut.

  After a while I went to the door and squeaked it open. “Mr. Poe?” I called inside. A few of the voices fell silent, but the accordion music continued as before, a sluggish kind of melody, almost funereal, pulled almost wholly out of bass notes.

  I called him twice more but received no reply. No one came to the door to inquire of my mission. No one offered assistance. I had no choice but to venture inside.

  At first I could make out nothing in the darkness but for the oily glow of a half-dozen lamps placed here and there. As far as I could tell, the building consisted of a single room. The floor felt no different beneath my feet than that of the trammeled lane outside. The difference was in the odors, the crackery stench of unwashed bodies, the acrid stink of old meat and spilled beer, the effluvia of farts and cigar smoke, and the mingled spices from the breath of five or six of the world’s beleaguered races.

  Within a minute or two my eyes adjusted to the outline of dark bodies, most seated at low tables scattered here and there. I saw now that the oil lamps were hung on the wall or dangled from the ceiling. There were men and women alike in here, some whose eyes glowed like small white moons, and others as yellow as a possum’s. Around a few of the oil lamps hung a blue cloud of smoke, opium sweet. I felt as excited as I was terrified.