On Night's Shore Page 16

  It is not possible now to look back on that afternoon, to remember the buoyancy with which Poe strode on, the gait so jaunty with triumph as to give the impression of levitation, without juxtaposing upon it another perambulation, weightier, and another Poe, spectral, adjoined to the first like a reflection from a candlelit mirror. This second Poe is in Baltimore, 1849. His life on that day too had seemed to be coming together finally, and in celebration of this turnaround, he has spent the previous night carousing, or so one can only assume in consideration of his appearance now, wan and haggard, hands atremble. He, like us, does not know precisely where he spent the previous night; he has only a vague understanding of where he is now headed, though eventually to New York to compose his affairs, then to Richmond to wed the woman to whom he was engaged at the age of eighteen, all this eventual, somewhere out there in the fog, while now he wanders through the crepuscular light from one lamppost to the next, one flickering glow to another, as he mumbles bits of poetry, fragmented memories, until he stumbles and falls and this time does not get up; I am not there to guide him home. I have wondered ever since how long he lay conscious in that gutter before the blessing of darkness was bestowed on him.

  Of course that is how I now envisage one momentous afternoon of 1840 as juxtaposed upon his final one nine years later. At the time, I noticed not a single one of the hundred shadows lurking in our futures, tugging at our sleeves. I felt a millionaire already, though the vouchsafed dollar was not yet even in my pocket.

  We continued up Nassau to Barclay Street and, from there, to the public garden below Tammany Hall. There on the greensward we sat facing the Hudson. Quite a while passed before he spoke, and then with deliberation, hushed, his gaze going out long and wistful down Park Row.

  “Let me begin,” he finally said, “by stating that I observe in you a high intelligence. A capacity for acute observation. A resourcefulness that on its present course—were you and I to now part company, that is—would likely lead you to great heights of criminal behavior. I say heights rather than depths because I have every confidence that you would excel at your craft. And excellence of any type, in view of humanity’s proclivity for mediocrity, is to be admired.”

  His import was not all clear to me, but I got the gist of it.

  “I am prepared, however, to offer you an alternative to your present path.” He now turned to look at me. He held my gaze a moment, gave me one of those quiet smiles of his, then looked toward the distant river again.

  “What if I told you,” he said, “that you have in your possession the capacity for great things. That through a diligent application of your talents you might someday wear fine clothes and live in a fine house. As a man whom others respect and even admire.”

  I grappled with that notion.

  “It is not beyond your reach, Augie.”

  There was a pause then, a stillness from each of us. “My own youth,” he said, “was, through no efforts but my own, a frittering away of similar possibilities. I was too attached to an idealization of life to avail myself of the more practical approaches laid before me.”

  I watched an elegant Victoria coming toward us up Park Row, and tried to imagine myself ensconced in such luxury.

  “We have much in common, you and I. A certain recklessness of spirit. A sensitivity to detail. A sense of being apart. Alone. A vague awareness that some significant portion of ourselves has been amputated. This, I believe, because we have been forced to grow up without fathers. To fend for ourselves. These are a few of the burdens we share.

  “But what I am proposing, Augie, is that despite these burdens, perhaps because of them, you yet may prosper. If you are willing to do what is necessary.”

  I finally found my tongue. “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning divesting yourself of the past. Separating yourself from all the corrupting and demeaning influences that surround you.”

  He paused for a moment, then continued. “The Old Brewery, Augie. It will sooner or later engulf you.”

  And so I told him. “I already decided. I’m quits of that place.”

  He studied me for a moment and stroked his chin. “And what of your mother?”

  He did not hurry my response, but waited until I could string together the words. “I don’t see no reason to think about that.”

  “This is not a decision to be quickly made. A mother, even a less than perfect one…”

  “Shit,” I said.

  He blinked at that, but waited.

  “Shit piss fuck.”

  I do not know what made me say it. What putrefying emotion made me retch up those words. But the tears that streaked my face brought a new sting to the old welt on my cheek.

  He looked at the ground then. It was awhile before he spoke. “I have found a comfortable place for you to live,” he said.

  I admit that my heart fell at the remark. I had spent the past few nights in a comfortable place and wanted only to continue spending my nights there.

  He seemed to read my thoughts. Or had anticipated them. “In some ways your prospects there will be even more secure than my own now are. My current home, as you know, is very small, and if I do not secure a more permanent position, we shall no doubt have to relocate once again. And Virginia…” He could not bring himself to finish the thought, to give words to her illness.

  “We would of course accommodate you if possible. But I am confident that these other arrangements will, in the long run, prove superior.”

  I wiped my nose with finger and thumb. “What kind of arrangements are they?”

  “You will have a bed of your own in a room you share with several other boys. You will be fed and clothed as needed. You will be schooled in the merits of a regular, disciplined life. And in a few months’ time, a position will be found for you on a farm in the Midwest. Where you will have all the same and more. Hard work, fresh air, and the opportunity to mold your life as you see fit. The choice, of course, is yours and yours alone. I merely lay before you the expedience.”

  I did not know what to say to this. It was too much. With one hand he seemed to be offering me the world, and with the other hand pushing me out of his. I wanted to turn to him, fold myself in his arms, weep like a child. But I had not been such a child for a good many years. I sat as still and cold as a stone.

  I only said, “I don’t need no dollar for that story of yours.”

  “It is as much your story as mine. You, as it were, discovered it.”

  We sat a while longer, but I knew already that the decision had been made. A better life, that was what it boiled down to. He saw in me his own nature, his own failed potential, and he did not want me to grow up in the same miasma of want and misery. It was no less than any father—most fathers, at least—would desire for his son.

  Of course he did not mention that I would spend five years as little better than an indentured slave, that I would be worked until I dropped, pushed like a field nigger, housed in a shack, treated like chattel. He did not suspect such a fate for me any more than he suspected his own awaiting him in Baltimore, else he would never have pointed me in that direction. For despite the black pool of despair in which Poe often floundered, he maintained at other times a resolve to force life toward the better, to wrestle from it some concession of goodness much as Jacob wrestled the penurious Angel of God. And one does not usually engage in such a wrestling match with the foreknowledge of utter defeat.

  20

  The Newsboys’ Lodging-House at the corner of Nassau and Fulton was as solemn a place as a cemetery. Such was my first impression of the stolid brownstone, whose rooms, I would discover, were as dark as its facade. The entrance hall through which I walked with Poe was empty of furnishings, with not even a small rug to enliven the hardwood floor. The side rooms were very nearly as spartan, each housing perhaps a pair of straight-backed chairs, a sideboard or armoire, a body-worn sofa.

&nb
sp; At the end of the long hall, positioned as if to block entry to the dining room and kitchen, were a desk and a chair in which sat, like a combination concierge and traffic cop, a pinch of a man, bald and bent, so wasted of body that his bones seemed about to come poking through his clothes.

  This was MacGregor, whom I would eventually learn was not as frightening as he appeared. Like those of us half a century younger, he had been taken in by the founders of the House and given a position. His duty, which he upheld miserably, was to protect the cupboards from juvenile raiders.

  Nor was the building the mausoleum I first assessed it to be. Half of the sixty or so boys who at any one time called it home were scattered out across the city, earning their daily dues by hawking papers. At this time of day, these were the older boys, aged nine through eleven or twelve. An unwritten code among newsboys allowed that the regular editions were reserved for these lads, while the extras were the purview of arabs younger than nine. In every case, the newsboy would purchase from the printer as many newspapers as he could carry, then sell them individually for a meager profit. Of this profit, five pennies a day were contributed toward his board and lodging.

  Poe had explained all this to me on our way to the lodging house. Residents of all ages, I learned, were expected to return to the house by nightfall, at which hour the massive front doors were barred. All boys were required to participate as well in the building’s housekeeping duties, plus a few hours of regulated activities each week. Otherwise all were free to pursue individual interests.

  It was not a jail, Poe explained, but, like any home, a house with certain rules and standards of behavior. A life without discipline, he said, was like a cup with no bottom—it could never be filled.

  We arrived in the midst of one of the mandated activities, which explained why a houseful of boys could be so still. We were directed by MacGregor to a large common room on the second floor, and there came upon a scene of such burlesque that it might have run for several weeks at the Bowery Theater.

  Picture a battalion of small boys, all in ill-fitting if clean kit, engaged in military-style calisthenics, rhythmically jumping with legs spread while flailing outstretched arms back and forth, nearly three dozen such boys all in the same room and therefore slapping and knocking one another about, deliberately or not, falling and righting themselves and falling again, but doing all this as mutely as possible, suppressing giggles and curses and yelps, their enthusiasm held just short of hysteria by the humorless gaze of a ramrod of a man who stood apart from them against a side wall, and by the booming voice of their exercise leader, a sinewy barefoot fellow clothed neck to ankle in flowing white linen, gray-haired and muttonchopped.

  “Vegetables, fruit, water, and bread,” he shouted to the beat of his lunges, “fresh air and hard work stand a man in good stead.”

  I looked up at Poe, ready to laugh out loud, surprised as I was to hear the man’s words echoing Poe’s advice to me from thirty minutes earlier. But Poe’s somber countenance held me in check, and I merely snorted once or twice.

  Again and again the drill instructor barked out the same message or some amplification of it. (In a week’s time it would become as natural to me as a pulse beat, which is no doubt precisely what was intended.) His name was Sylvester Graham. He was in his midforties and had but a decade left to his life when I first beheld him. From nose down, his face seemed squeezed together, the thin lips and slightly hooked proboscis pinched toward a receding chin. A former Presbyterian minister turned vegetarian fanatic, he preached a revolutionary theory to all who cared to listen—and often, as he strolled through town in bathrobe and swim trunks on his way to a daily swim in the river, to those who would rather not listen.

  He had small beady eyes that flared when he spoke, eyes as wild as I have ever seen, wilder even than Poe’s. If at times Poe’s eyes were smoldering coals of passion and bitterness, Sylvester Graham’s were firecrackers in a constant state of fulmination.

  In his white shirt and trousers and starched white collar, he jumped about in the front of the room, barking his mantra. It was easy to see why much of the city—indeed, much of the eastern seaboard—regarded him as, at best, vaudevillian and, at worst, a dangerous crank. Even seventy years later, his philosophy of healthful living has not been fully vindicated. His sweetened bran crackers might become a favorite of children and piecrust makers, but most adults even now consider beer and wine and fatty beef the staples of a nutritious diet.

  Poe and I watched these exercises until most of the boys lay panting on the floor. Sylvester Graham, who showed no signs of fatigue other than the flaming splotches on his cheeks, finally relented and yielded the floor to the somber man who had been standing against the wall. This transaction was the equivalent of fire giving way to ice.

  In contrast to Graham, Jacob Van Rensselaer appeared glacial in his movements. At first glance I had recognized him as the man Poe spoke with briefly in editor Neely’s outer office. A large man, broad of chest and shoulders and with a shaggy white head, top heavy, thick handed, with not a hint of merriment in his arctic blue eyes, he moved to the front of the room and stood before the group and fixed his gaze like a bayonet about to cleave the room down its center. He kept himself as far from the nearest boys as possible considering the confines of the room, and kept his hands, gloved in bleached doeskin, laid one atop the other on his sternum.

  His voice was deep and slow and resonant; it rattled the unsheathed soul. In any case, it rattled mine. He did not mince words nor did he flinch from suggesting that every boy present was a base creature at his core, a vile animal, who, unless subdued by the higher faculties of reason and discipline, could without a moment’s notice succumb to his natural tendency toward gluttony, avarice, excess of every kind and color.

  His voice was half as loud as Graham’s, and nearly as monotonous, but all the more hypnotizing for it, all the more chilling. “If meats, alcohol, and tobacco will lead, as Mr. Graham predicted, to digestive misery and a sullenness of spirit—and they will, they surely will—such degradation is trivial when held against what awaits your eternal souls, boys, do you not forswear not only the above-mentioned pleasures but also the gross indecency of onanism and the defilement of fornication.”

  (So penetrating was this promise that even years later, each time my hand in the darkness of my bed slipped netherward, the imp of my conscience would take up a chant, a Graham/Van Rensselaer duet of prescription and prohibition, masturbation mastication, mastication masturbation, an auger in my conscience until the horrors of Antietam finally cleansed me of any guilt over indulging in whatever small pleasures we might be able to lay hold of along this twisted road of life.)

  But to the point, the story, my tenure at the newsboys’ refuge house, whose founders stood before me. (My future radiated out from this hub in so many directions, like myriad spokes on the wheel, that every small incident reminds me of a connection, an after-effect, so that I feel compelled, like an old man reminiscing—which is exactly what I am—to bring it forth. But my larger goal is a narrower one, a more linear story with not myself but Poe at the forefront, and this I will henceforth attempt to limit myself to, and save the remembrances for the private hours, of which I have no shortage.)

  Van Rensselaer’s sermon left the room mute. It’s true that some of the boys were asleep, others numbed by boredom, but a few of the more impressionable ones, myself included, were paralyzed by guilt and fear and a resolve to ascribe at least some portion of the admonitions to their own lives. What had been suggested to me by the end of the hour was just what Poe had suggested earlier—the concept of choice. I could, to some degree at least, mold Augie Dubbins, the guttersnipe, into whatever kind of man I desired.

  With a hand on my sleeve, Poe held me behind until the large room emptied, with first Van Rensselaer and then Graham and then the herd of boys tromping out. He then looked down at me with eyebrows raised. I understood his question.


  I asked, “Just how often would I have to put up with what we seen here?”

  “My understanding is that Mr. Van Rensselaer, the second gentleman, comes by twice a week. It was he whose approval I sought concerning your residency here. Mr. Graham, when he is not lecturing elsewhere, speaks to the boys as many as four times a week. But there is in every case an exercise session daily, conducted when necessary by one of the older boys. Besides Mr. MacGregor, there are two matrons responsible for meals and decorum. You will be expected to keep your bed, your personal belongings, and yourself organized and clean. You will be schooled regularly in reading and ciphering.”

  The longer he talked, the more my face screwed up.

  “It is no more, Augie, than is expected of every merchant’s child. No more than was expected of me by my foster parents. No more than I would expect from a child of my own.”

  I gazed deep into the gray of his eyes. “You’re telling me I can leave anytime I want to?”

  “You will be as free as you ever were. The discipline here is intended to be self-imposed.”

  “But I’m expected to get a regular job.”

  “Not immediately. I have pledged to pay in advance for two months’ room and board, as soon as my funds from Mr. Neely are forthcoming, which might be as early as tomorrow. You will also have the silver eagle I will pay you for your assistance thus far. But it seems to me that selling newspapers is not all that different from your other employment along the waterfront. You might even sell your newspapers to passengers of ships and barges as they arrive in port.”

  I pretended for a while longer to be mulling it over. As if this were a difficult decision. As if deliberation were required before a boy could choose between squalor and cleanliness, between unpredictable violence and routine if sometimes didactic security.