On Night's Shore Read online

  “But what I require is the authentic and complete story,” he said and held a coin in the cup of his hand. “So shall we say…a tuppence for the truth?”

  I leaned toward him and plucked the coin from his palm. He had long and slender fingers, well-cared-for hands. Not a workman’s claws thickened and grimed with common labor, but neither were they weak. The thumb and forefinger were stained with ink.

  What made me trust him, though, was something other than the sureness of his hands, something all the more palpable for being insubstantial. I would not be able to put a name to it until years later, until I read, long after it had been penned, the phrases composed by another unheralded writer, Melville, in his description of his first meeting with Hawthorne, and realized that I too had experienced “the shock of recognition” that strikes when two strangers suddenly behold themselves in each other’s eyes.

  As I fingered the coin and drew it back and slipped it quickly into a pocket, he remained entirely still, palm yet outstretched but empty now, thin mouth smiling. In that moment, I knew him as well as I have ever known any man. I understood him in a way that did not require words, a way to which no words could be put until years later, when, in the stillness of loss, a remembered moment suddenly describes itself, and I felt how the rivers of his soul had flowed with sadness, and how the currents of his soul had tugged at mine.

  And so I told him all that I had witnessed; I described how the girl had made a cradle of her hands, the awkward toss, the child’s slow descent, the girl’s modesty as she too fell. I told him all the things that no one else had wanted to hear.

  “You have a writer’s instincts,” he told me when he finished his notes.

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “Every gift its curse,” he said and smiled again. “You never found what it was she threw the first time? The ring, if that indeed is what it was?”

  “It’s buried in the mud by now.”

  He nodded. “If only you had found it, though. The inconsequential details are invariably the ones of greatest consequence.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about, but I was flattered by his assumption that I did. I wondered whether to take a chance and tell him of what else I had seen in the river, the true source of the gravity that held me there, a pull more strong and black and strangulating than a child’s graceful fall.

  But then he turned my way and held out his hand to me. “I am grateful for your time, sir.”

  I took his hand, but awkwardly; it was the first hand I had ever shaken, the first time I had felt a grip on me so firm and yet unmenacing. “If you should remember any further details,” he said, “please come see me at the Mirror. Ask for Poe. We might even find a few more pennies for you.” He pushed himself to his feet.

  I looked up into the sun. “I seen something else,” I said.

  A moment passed. I had the feeling he was considering the tenor of my voice, reading it for authenticity. Then he squatted down beside me again. He plucked another blade of grass. This one he did not tear apart but merely drew through his fingers in patient repetition.

  I watched four times before I spoke. “Underneath the dock,” I told him. “It’s why she jumped, I think. It wanted her. Or the baby. I’m not sure which.”

  I expected him to laugh. At least to smile in that scornful way of every other smile ever bestowed on me. Instead he laid a hand on my filthy pant leg. “Why don’t you show me,” he said.

  Despite the constriction rising in my chest, my instincts took over. “How much is it worth to you?”

  “That will depend on the quality of what you show me.”

  He stood again, then held out a hand and pulled me up. “Perhaps it’s time I knew your name,” he said.

  “Dubbins,” I told him. “Augie. It’s short for August. But don’t nobody call me that.”

  He put a hand on my shoulder. I nearly reeled from all the contact. “Lead the way, Master Dubbins,” he said.

  And so I took him to the pier.

  3

  I was not confident it would still be there; I hadn’t looked that day. A part of me hoped, I suppose, that it had dissolved somehow and might therefore disintegrate too from my dreams, so that I would not have to cower so tightly that night within my pillow of darkness.

  Gingerly I walked the length of the pier, glimpsed nothing unusual, and felt both disappointment and relief. But the sun was angling low by now, and the light was soft and even my shadow elusive. There was a trembling to the sunlight, a dizzying oscillation due to the river and my own nerves, but disconcerting whatever the source. And a dreamlike distance to the work transpiring all around us, the scraping and banging of all manner of freight, the chorus of disconnected voices, the music of the docks which now struck me as grating and discordant.

  Yet I did not want to fail Poe, who waited at the foot of the dock, lips pursed in a small yet encouraging smile. I wanted both his money and his respect, yet more than that, I wanted to prove myself not a fool.

  Onto my hands and knees I sank. Breathlessly I began to crawl toward the end of the pier. I could feel my heart dangling like a clapper in my chest, hammering hard. As I crawled, I squinted into each crack in turn, every sliver between the planking.

  And suddenly the liquid glow, as sharp as a prick in the eye. I jerked away.

  “Have you found it?” Poe asked.

  I stood and stepped back and thrust my chin at the boot-worn boards.

  He came forward and knelt to put his eye to the crack. He turned this way and that, moving his body so that it did not block the trembling light. “Find me a twig,” he said without rising.

  I raced back to the Bowling Green—it was my legs that trembled now and not the light—soon to return with a long sassafras switch from which I had stripped the leaves. I whipped it through the air as I came onto the slip, the thin quick whistling sound adamant and shrill: I thrilled at handling a switch from the butt end for a change. Then I passed it to Poe, and he worked the shank between the boards and poked at whatever was snuggled there. It gave a bit, but the thing was solid; no water ghost at least. I let out a quivering breath.

  He sat up after a few minutes of work and stretched his back. There was no one else besides us on that particular slip, but we were being watched; any anomalous action will draw attention, and Poe’s activity was certainly that—a grown man on his knees on the dirty boards, jabbing at the water with a long stick as if spearfishing through a crack. But Poe gave not a thought to the onlookers. He paused only long enough to twist a kink from his shoulders, then he bent to the task again. I saw by his movements that he had soon hooked something and was trying to work it up through the crack.

  “Can you get your fingers down there?” he asked, meaning that he wanted me to reach between the boards and pull forth the white thing he had snagged.

  In answer I backed away another step. I imagined that I could smell it now, a scent unloosed, something dank and foul and best left hidden in the darkness.

  Poe twisted the stick and nearly bent it flat against the dock before trying to elevate the fishing end. In this way he managed to work a tuft of gray into view. I remember seeing it in those few moments as a flap of skin, something slimy and translucent. This he seized between finger and thumb and firmly pulled. It tore away immediately. He was left holding a piece no bigger than a maple leaf.

  He held it to the light. “Muslin,” he said.

  A few moments later, he looked to me. His eyes were sparkling now. “It’s a fine afternoon for a swim, don’t you think?”

  My body ached to move even farther away, far beyond the realm of such a crazy suggestion. But I held my ground and told him, “Would. Can’t swim a lick, though.”

  He smiled and considered me for a moment with his chin tucked low. Finally he answered, “Fair enough. You hired on as guide and nothing more.” Then he stood and took off
his coat and handed it to me.

  “Watch out for the current,” I told him. “It’s strong.”

  “And how would you know that, having never tested it yourself?” But he continued to smile all the same.

  “You can see just by looking at it how fast it is.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said as he pried off his shoes. “I once swam seven and a half miles in a heavy tide. I think I can handle the Hudson River.”

  He removed his tie and collar and rolled up his sleeves, and I saw then that he was more muscular than I had first assumed. In his heavy waistcoat, he had even looked frail, but perhaps this was a result of the delicacy with which he always moved. In truth he was lean and sinewy, his shoulders strong.

  The last thing he did was to empty his pockets and lay their contents on the dock: his notebook, two stubs of pencil, and a few coins—fewer even than in my own pocket. Then, in trousers and shirt he slipped into the water on the upriver side of the dock. Submerged to his neck, he held to the boards and looked back at me. “If I haven’t emerged in four minutes,” he told me, and smiled again, “you will have to come in and rescue me.”

  I backed away. “If that thing gets you…too bad. But it ain’t getting me.”

  He winked, he took a deep breath, and he sank away.

  For half a minute, I listened to his movements beneath my feet, the scraping sounds as he maneuvered in close to the thing, the slap and splash of his kicking feet as he fought to hold his position against the current. Then there was a pounding sound, as like a fist on wood under water, and I thought immediately about screaming out for help, calling to a stevedore to rip up the boards and rescue Poe before he could be dragged away beyond salvation. But a life of attempted invisibility is not easy to surrender even in a moment of fear, especially when I myself was in no apparent jeopardy. And so I stood, fifty inches of cowardice, and did little more than wonder in what manner the thing down there was doing Poe in—would it strangle him or rip him apart? Or would it merely hold him under until his body went limp? Would it wrap long tentacles around his neck, or sink a pointed beak into his heart?

  The only thing I knew for certain was that there was something dramatic going on underneath me, something that felt for all the world like a struggle to the death. The boards trembled, and at one point the entire pier seemed to shake. Though maybe that was just my knees. I wanted to run but kept telling myself that the thing couldn’t break through the dock or it would have done so already. In any case I moved two steps closer to the street. And now and then counted the seconds. It seemed a quarter hour passed in the next two minutes.

  I meanwhile kept an eye on Poe’s small pile of coins; the vibration of the dock had caused one of them to slide closer to a crack. I had almost convinced myself to hurry forward, grab the coins, and be off, when Poe’s head broke the surface of the water on the downriver side of the dock. The splash and his explosive exhalation nearly made me shriek out loud.

  “Augie,” he said and took two more quick breaths, “come give me your hand.”

  I could not move.

  “Up onto the deck,” he said and held out a hand to me. Long strands of black hair hung over his eyes, and his pale hand was trembling. I could see that he was exhausted. But what if he pulled me in there with him? I could not yet convince myself to trust him completely; a lifetime of experience is not so easily undone.

  In the end he hauled himself out, hoisting his body up with a last great effort to lie half on the dock, feet still in the water, his face against the boards. “You were right,” he said. “The current’s strong.”

  But I had already moved past him by then, had walked by slow degrees to the very end of the pier. I no longer feared the thing beneath the boards, because it was no longer there; it was floating away, glowing more brightly than ever now that its white shape had broken the surface and I could see clearly what it was, the long torn ribbons of cloth trailing after it, undulating in the current, as pale and transparent as a snake’s old skin, the body turning as gently in the water as the baby had glided through air the day before, drifting away from us, out into the darker depths.

  Poe, who had been facing upriver, now drew in his legs and pushed himself onto his hands and knees. “I tried to break it loose,” he said, “but I think I will need some assistance. Go find us a couple of willing stevedores, Augie.”

  When I did not answer or move, he finally looked my way. I heard him crawl to his feet then and come to stand beside me. I pointed toward New Jersey.

  Together we watched the body moving like a sleeping mermaid toward the opposite shore, no longer a monster and yet fearful all the same, the long brown hair flowing back like seaweed, the white dreamlike flutter of the woman’s dress, the utter tranquillity and perfection of death, all terrifying in its beauty and mystery. I shivered, completely dry. And Poe, dripping wet, shivered beside me.

  It wasn’t long before the body was spotted by others as well. Men on shore began to shout at one another, gesticulating. Down on the Battery, two men pushed a bumboat into the river and went in pursuit, their paddles chopping at the water as at a great blue block of ice, spraying rainbow splinters into the air.

  Poe turned away from me. He bent down over his small pile of coins, picked up the only piece of silver there, the rest dull pennies, and then returned to where I stood. “For that discovery, Master Dubbins,” he said and he held the coin out to me, a thin slice of brilliance glinting in the sun, “for that you deserve a half dime.”

  Whereupon we both returned our gazes to the river and to the fey but radiant flotsam being ferried to the distant shore.

  4

  Her name was Mary Rogers.

  I learned this fact well after it was announced to the rest of New York, for it was not my habit in those days to use a newspaper for anything other than chinking for a leaky boot or a drafty window. Not that the printed word was burdensome to me; I could read with the same ease I could sort out the mess of foreign and American coins that passed through my hands. I had a sharp ear for accents and a keen eye for dissembling. But except for tales of derring-do or catastrophe, the incidents discussed in the news, like those discussed in schoolrooms, seemed unrelated to my existence.

  (It would not be long, however, before I would uncover, thanks in no small part to Poe, an avidity for the written word, an avidity that before the dawn of adolescence would bloom into an avarice, so that now, as I sit here in the cusp of my fourth score of years, an ancient ivory-barreled pen in hand—the very one I lifted from Poe’s pocket before they laid him under, after which his brief but fiery charge through life would remain as misunderstood as ever—with this pen in hand I can now gaze in any direction and see nothing but the written word, a house constructed of the written word, and furnished by it a line at a time, a large house and a long life both circumscribed by the one human compulsion that might, if any will, get the race of man onto at least the greensward of Heaven.)

  But I stray from the narrative. (In my own defense, I never swore fealty to Poe’s thesis regarding the unity of effect in a tale. And especially not in a tale as crenellated as this one.) Let me be returned to the path by the call of her name: Mary Rogers.

  Even now it stirs me. Upon first reading that name, I was struck by its simplicity. A plainness so stark as to obtain elegance. A name, I hasten to add, that scarcely seemed to fit the form Poe had dislodged from beneath the pier, a form that must surely be the human physiognomy at its most ignominious, the bloat and pallor, as if the body were attempting to regress to the shape of something antecedent and elemental, an ovum housed in a translucent membrane, an egg without a shell.

  The name was better fitted to the girl who had leapt from the warehouse ledge. Or to the leap itself, unadorned and desperate, a failed embrace of a merciful end.

  But it belonged to the other girl instead. The one whose body had been stuffed by Nature beneath the dock, an
act devoid of all grace and poetry and simplicity of intent. She was twenty-two years old. A shopgirl. Her mother’s only child. All this I read in a leaf from the Mirror left behind when an omnibus of gawkers pulled away from the Battery the following afternoon. They had come like dozens of others all that day—the analogy of flies to carrion is again most apt—as I myself had come. To peer at the current that had carried her across. To wonder at the current of a life that had directed her demise. To squint at the far shore where she had finally been grappled and dragged. To play out some vague scenario in the mind’s eye: seeing themselves transposed onto her corpse, or their daughters or wives or mistresses juxtaposed, their homesickness, fear, uncertainties, or reading into it a cautionary tale to carry back to one’s own hearth, or to keep buried in the embers of one’s own heart.

  Poe had authored the account, of course. There was no mention of his role in freeing the body from its watery box. No mention of my own. No mention of the girl who had tossed herself and the child into the river the day before, an unrelated incident, precipitant from a personal point of view but inconsequential from a public one. Poe’s story began with the two men in the bumboat. They had spotted the body turning in the current midriver, a gruesome sight to behold on such a lemony afternoon. They had rowed in pursuit of it then, rowed abreast of it finally, only to be too appalled to reach overboard and secure it. And so they had put the boat downstream of her, its hull hard to her shoulder, and in this manner maneuvered both the boat and the corpse of Mary Rogers to the New Jersey shore.

  Poe had left my side the previous afternoon to garner the disparate pieces of this story and, thus, had sewn up his narrative with details and statements provided not only by the men in the boat but by the police and Mary Rogers’s own mother.

  On the day of her discovery, Poe wrote, the girl had been missing for four days. According to the widow Rogers, who ran a boardinghouse on Nassau Street, Mary had departed their home at approximately nine on Sunday morning, meaning to spend the day with an aunt who lived some two miles distant, north along Manhattan’s western shore. Before setting out, Mary had knocked at the room of one Jack Payne, a boarder in the Rogers’ house, to inform him of her plans. Mr. Payne, Mary’s betrothed, agreed to call at the aunt’s domicile at dusk that evening so as to escort Mary home.