On Night's Shore Page 2

  But again, to the day in question. A fine July afternoon, midsummer, and as I’ve said a blue coral sky. A few mackerel clouds to the south but otherwise clear. I sat watching the slow progress of a double-masted ship tacking in. It was still a good ways out, not yet clear of Governor’s Island; the dock workers hadn’t yet appeared to stand ready at the slip.

  And then, to my left, a splash. I saw the ripples only moments before they faded. Something small had broken the water just beyond the tongue of a pier, but I could not see what it might have been, and there was no one standing nearby. But behind the pier, just a few yards off the water’s edge, stood a brick warehouse that should have been empty. A fire a few weeks earlier had blown out the windows and blackened all the pediments; the building would soon be razed. And from an upper window, somebody was leaning out, looking down to where the ripples sighed and broke and disappeared.

  I put a hand over my eyes and tried to make out the figure. It was a woman, a girl not much older than me. She had tossed something small into the water. I know now that it was probably just a stone, something to test her throw, to gauge how far an object would carry. Far enough, it seemed. For within a minute she disappeared from the window, bent down, that is, and then rose into view again, but this time with a baby in her arms. It was dressed in white and pale blue, just like the sky. Its head was bare.

  She hugged the infant to her shoulder, her cheek to the baby’s head, and held it tight, rocking back and forth. I knew even then what she was about to do. It was as if the thing had already happened. I did not look around to see if anybody else was witnessing this; it did not seem to matter. I did not think to call out; words were of no consequence either. This thing was already done. I sat and watched.

  She leaned out then, the window sash across her upper thighs. She leaned out as far as she could go without tumbling head over heels. Her arms extending down the face of the building formed a U, a cradle for the baby. She closed her eyes—though whether I was actually near enough to see this, I cannot say, but it is how I see it now—and for several seconds she did not move. And then with one smooth motion her arms swung outward, the half arc of a pendulum’s swing, and the baby sailed free and out against the coral sky, and down. In silhouette it seemed a falling crow, one wing bent, tucked, broken.

  The splash had barely sounded before somebody screamed, some woman on the ground. Then voices shouting, men running hard across the pier, leaping into the river. I looked toward the warehouse again, and the girl was standing on the window ledge, hands gripping the brick frame, leaning out. And then she too sprang into the sky. And what I remember now is the way her dress ballooned out around her slender legs, and how even as she fell, tilting sideways, she tried to hold the hem against her thighs, and the purling fluttering sound the fabric made, rippling like a torn kite, all the way to the water.

  I remember too an odd intriguing lethargy to her descent, as if no string of time were attached to the desperate act, a slow sweet timeless fall in the form of a song I had once heard and just then remembered, a harmony of clouds and water and sky and she was the lyrics somebody had sung slightly out of tune, yet a haunting rasp of song all the same, a slave song, a prison song, this was how it affected me then and affects me still; it broke my heart and it lifted me up.

  In less than two minutes they were dragged out of the water, first the girl and then the child, laid side by side atop a pier. I remember how, when I stood and moved closer, I saw the dark stain of water on the bleached wood and thought at first it must be blood. But it was only water. And just before they were carried away, I saw the girl move; she raised a hand to shield her eyes, because she could not bear to see the sky or could not bear to be seen. The baby never stirred.

  And I sat there for the longest time. The ship docked finally and its passengers disembarked, but I did not go to it. What kept me still was not that I could not fathom what had made the girl decide to jump. I could, and too easily. But that her misery, whatever it was, reminded me of my own, and for a while I felt fully infected by her lethargy. I was rendered all but motionless, somehow damned by the failure of her act of absolution.

  • • •

  Then came the early evening and the softening of light. I seemed to awake finally to recognize that the ship’s passengers were gone, dispersed. So too my hope for income for the day. Until I remembered the girl’s first offering to the Hudson. Again and again I replayed the simple action in my mind’s eye, as if that initial toss might explain somehow what had followed.

  I remembered the way the object had sparkled as it fell (or, after a dozen re-creations, I began to see it sparkling as it fell), a quick glittering tumble. It must have been a coin she threw, I told myself.

  But wait—a coin? No; the more I thought about it the more I convinced myself that it had to have been some small thing of symbolic value, so that the toss became a gesture of dismissal, an act of closure, a way of saying It’s over; it’s done. The object could not have been anything as practical as a stone or as mundane as a coin. It must have been a small piece of jewelry. Maybe a ring? Of course! Wasn’t that the cliché, the way all relationships ended? And wasn’t I just a boy who thought all clichés new?

  Ten more minutes of runaway speculation and I could have told you the size of the ring as it fell from the warehouse window, the way the gold band had spun as it fell, spinning like a tiny sun. If I stared hard enough I could see the indentation it had left in the water. If I stared even harder I could detect a dull golden glow eight feet down in the river mud. Only a fool would hesitate to retrieve it.

  I kicked off my shoes and went in. The water was cool, not startling but bracing. All the stickiness of the day washed off me. I thought I knew precisely where the ring lay, and by the time I ducked my head underwater, the object had blossomed in my imagination from a gold band to a diamond ring, a fortune, despite the fact that the girl’s clothing had not been of Chinese silk but New Jersey gingham.

  Unfortunately the current was strong, and before I could reach the mud where I expected to spot the glint of sudden fortune. I was pulled several yards downstream. Time after time I surfaced and dove, fighting my way north, feeling along the river bottom, kicking up silt, pulling my way past the murky pilings.

  It was then I saw it, not a ring but what seemed a glow beneath a pier, something that caught the cracks of light, something wedged there, as huge, it seemed to me, as a horse, but only if horses were made of gossamer and wore ribbons of glowing light, and no horses I had ever seen had been so attired.

  Imagine if you can an object six or seven feet long, its girth at the center maybe two feet around, the ends tapered but constantly changing shape, tattered and fluttering. I was four or five feet downstream of the object, and it seemed to be reaching out for me from both ends, one end nearly as brown as the water and somewhat blunted but the other end tendriled and white. I thought at first of a horse because of its size, and because it would not have been uncommon for a dead horse to have been disposed of in the river, but this thing beneath the pier was more like the ghost of a horse, one end shredded, the entire object festooned with tentacles of opaque white, each one flapping at me and pulsing with the poise of the current while my own pulse hammered in the gasp I dared not free from my chest.

  Those two things conspired then—the magnifying power of water and the magnifying power of a boy’s imagination and fear—to make the thing more horrific than it was. (Though there would be no shortage of horror when it was dragged into full light.) I had heard enough stories of mermaids and sea monsters, of giant squid and spectral sharks, to know that a glimpse of the thing was all I needed to want solid earth beneath my feet again. The water had become like ice, my limbs slow and thick and stiff with fear.

  I splashed to the near edge of the dock, as far as I could get from the thing lodged beneath the boards. I pulled myself up, and, reluctant to even tread above the horror, I hopped across
it—I snatched up my boots and leapt toward the foot of the pier and sprinted onto land. There, with warm ground beneath my feet, I shook like a dog and tried to convince myself that I shivered because the water had been cold.

  I pulled on my boots and sloshed uptown. I wanted to forget about what I thought I had seen beneath the pier, and so I concentrated instead on my stomach. I called its hollowness hunger. I ascribed my nausea to the water I had swallowed, a rancidness I kept trying to spit away, a revulsion I thought I could suffocate with food. A few hours remained before I could sneak safely home and into bed—plenty of time to steal a piece of fruit and a bucket of oysters for my supper.

  2

  We were drawn to the dock like flies to a ripe carcass. By nine the next morning, half of New York had come to peer up at the window from which the baby had been tossed and to peer down at the water where mother and child had landed. I was quick to spot my advantage in this, in our natural curiosity of the macabre—or does it seem now, so many years down the road, a macabre curiosity of the natural?—and I assumed the persona of a sideshow barker. In lieu of a baton, I flailed my arms for emphasis.

  My first tack was to crowd onto the jetty and announce myself as preeminent witness and offer to unfold the tragic events in proper chronological horror for a penny or two. But I was brushed aside by the merchants and businessmen in their handsome suits, ignored like a smelly dog with nothing to offer but his stench.

  I had better luck farther inland. There, some twenty yards from the wharf, I would hasten to catch a carriage stopped along the avenue, or a pedestrian pausing for a long glance before turning toward town. “Did you come to see where the girl jumped?” I would ask, and before an answer could be received, I would continue, “I was down there on the dock—the baby went sailing right over my head. You want to hear about it, I’m the one who saw it all, beginning to end. A penny’s all it will cost you.” By noon, when the trade waned to a trickle, I had a pocketful of pennies and a bellyful of biscuits.

  The girl survived, I heard. She would be taken to the Bloomingdale Asylum north of town, on a site now occupied by Columbia College. I had seen the grand stone building myself, refuge for those tired souls who had lost all tolerance of the world, all forbearance—a flat-faced palace some sixty feet long and three stories high, surrounded by its wide yards and shade trees. It seemed to me more of an English castle than a hospital, and so I had not a lot of pity to waste on the girl. If anything, I envied her the luxuries she would find behind those strong walls, the walks in the fragrant garden, regular meals, an undisturbed bed. I was too young at the time to know that even the most splendid physical comfort can be rendered misery by a tiny grain of grief.

  As for the baby, there was speculation on the dock that it had been dead even before its slow fall to the Hudson. No water in the lungs, I heard one man say. But then another man wanted to know why, if this were so, the mother had not held the child to her bosom as she leapt, as any loving mother, no matter how distraught, would do; an embrace, as it were, into the unknown. I could not speak to what a loving mother would do in that or any other circumstances, and said nothing. Not that I would have been listened to anyway.

  In this manner then, the day waned. The business of the city boiled away behind me, fortunes being made, fortunes stolen, inventions that would change the world, inventions never to be seen, pages of fact and fabrication composed by writers and poets unheard of, never to be heard of, soon to be famous, soon to be forgotten.

  As for me, I passed much of the day in dilatory contemplation, chewing alternately on a sassafras twig and on an augury of the nature of curiosity, whether the predominant effect of tragedy is to titillate or enervate, whether the desire to come gawking to a place like this suggests that the soul is folding in upon itself, or straining to come open.

  Does another person’s tragedy make us spectators feel somehow lucky? I wondered. Make us feel spared and therefore singled out for good fortune? This was how I felt as a naive boy. Or is tragedy meant to touch us deeper than that? Should it remind us of other forces atremble in the world, forces that lurk behind the corners, forces that might at any given moment spring out to toss any one of us off the ledge and into the abyss?

  I also spent a good many moments wondering in a sidelong way, safe in the grass near the Bowling Green, about the thing beneath the dock, that which only I had seen, had dreamed of all the night, both awake and sleeping. In my childish mind, I connected it to the girl who had jumped, cause and effect. This is what we do with mysteries too big or awful to embrace, what children and even grown men do—we ascribe to them a supernatural element. The thing beneath the dock had called to the girl, seduced her somehow, beguiled her to fling herself and child into the river.

  On the dock, men spoke of the girl’s poverty, her sinful state, her numbing grief. None of these explanations satisfied me. But the thing beneath the dock… I sat there waiting, hour after hour, believing at any moment that it would soon call out to me too, a damp breeze, a watery hiss in the shape of my name. And I worried about my strength to resist, to not be pulled off the grass, for all I had to anchor me to land were a few last pennies in my pocket.

  It was midday when he arrived, the most interesting and, it seemed to me, most interested spectator. I had been dozing with my face in the sun and was awakened by a stevedore’s curse, an epithet not meant for me except in the dream I had been wading through, a recurring nightmare of a stern schoolmaster chasing me around his glutinous room. The curse woke me, and I sat up blinking, wanting to keep running but my legs not yet fully composed beneath me, and I looked around for the schoolmaster and saw instead a less penumbral man, one of normal size and standing thirty yards to my left.

  From a distance, he appeared well dressed, the dark waistcoat and silk tie, the long loose trousers. A slight and slender man, almost dainty in his movements, he stood in the garden at the Bowling Green for a full twenty minutes, peering upriver. His hair was shiny black and hung ragged across his neck, in long lank strands over a high forehead and large eyes, which, depending upon how the light fell upon them, were either charcoal gray or Stygian black. Now and then he scribbled something in a little notebook he carried. At first I pegged him for an uptowner slumming for a story with which to shock his cronies over dinner, so imperious was his posture, chin held high, back rigidly straight. But distances can be deceiving.

  After a while, he came walking past where I sat. I saw then that his cuffs and sleeves were frayed, the waistcoat neatly patched in several places. And his eyes, those darkened windows I had thought imperious, they glanced my way as he passed and I saw instead a reflection of my own uncertainties.

  He spent another fifteen minutes on the dock, slowly walking the boards, then standing on the edge, watching the empty water. Then ten minutes facing the warehouse, studying the window as if yet waiting for the girl to jump. Then, before he came off the pier at last, he looked my way again. And with that glance, something jumped in the pit of my stomach, some sudden recognition that we were the same, this stranger and I, gawkers like all the others but different from them in our—what shall I call it?—our affiliation with the girl. The others came quickly and just as quickly left, as if a moment’s glance were sufficient to them, they needed stay only long enough for the requisite shudder, a quick fix of fear that would melt away soon as they leaned over their supper plates of steak and buttered potatoes and mumbled their Glory to God Amen. But this other stranger and I, we lingered. No, we were made to linger there. Compelled.

  He came and sat on the grass within a yard of me. He smiled once, then wrote in his notebook for a while. When he finished writing, he opened to a blank page and began a sketch of the docks, the water, and of a ship in full rigging that wasn’t there.

  Only after he had laid the notebook aside, after he had leaned back on his hands and gazed again toward the warehouse, did he speak. “You mustn’t let it disturb you,” he said witho
ut looking in my direction. His voice was soft, like slow water over rocks. With just a trickle, the slight meander of a Southern accent.

  At first I assumed he was speaking to himself, trying to quiet with the reassurance of his own voice some secret trepidation. Or perhaps he was talking to a spirit only he could see, the mere shadow of an acquaintance. In any case, I offered no reply. But I did keep watching him out of the corner of my eye, intrigued and yet cautious that some further strangeness might soon manifest itself in more volatile behavior.

  “Sometimes a foreign discontent can catch us unawares,” he said.

  I felt myself leaning toward him with head cocked, ear turned. There was music in his voice, a soft dirgelike tone, and though the music for all I knew was not aimed at me, the words only half understood by me, I was drawn by the slow dark rhythms.

  “It will blow across us from out of nowhere,” he continued, his eyes still on the warehouse window, the scorched pediment, the empty rectangle as gray as smoke, “a murky breeze meant to stir the limbs of some other tree. But there we sit directly in its path, and we have no option but to take the chill of it.”

  He paused for a moment and plucked a blade of grass. He slowly split it down the center vein. “It would be a mistake, however, to let some stranger’s chill become your own affliction.”

  I still imagined that he was speaking to his own mind. But then he turned to me and smiled.

  He had such a delicate face, the small mouth and tapering chin, the high broad forehead. The gaze was what held you, though—as dark and wretched a gaze as ever I have seen, save on a wounded animal. “Will you tell me what you saw?” he asked. He was already reaching into a pocket. “A penny, if I’m not mistaken.”

  And now I knew, at least, what he was referring to.