On Night's Shore Page 4

  In late afternoon, a heavy rain set in. A downpour that lasted half the hour was followed by a lighter but no less constant rain, as well as a shroud of fog that seeped in from off the river. By dusk these conditions had made the roadside all but impassable, the visibility reduced to less than a few yards. Mr. Payne assumed that under such conditions his betrothed would prefer to pass the night with her aunt, as, the widow Rogers assured him, Mary had done on previous occasions. And so he failed to keep his appointment with her.

  Come Monday morning, Mary Rogers was absent from her counter at Anderson’s Tobacco Shop on Wall Street, not far from its intersection with Broadway. Mr. Anderson assumed that she was ill, and he attended the counter himself in addition to his other duties. Mary’s mother and fiancé, who had as yet had no contact with Mr. Anderson, assumed that Mary had gone straight to work from her aunt’s house.

  Not until Mary failed to return home that evening were suspicions aroused. Mr. Payne made the short walk to the tobacconist’s establishment, only to find the store closed and locked for the evening. Finally, a full twenty-four hours after his appointed rendezvous with Miss Rogers, Mr. Payne arrived by carriage at the aunt’s home. Only to be there informed that the aunt had not been visited by Mary on the day previous, and that she had not in fact seen her since the last visit some three weeks earlier.

  Mr. Payne returned with this news to the boardinghouse. Whereupon the widow Rogers, Poe reported, was seized by an awful premonition which caused her to cry out that she would never see her daughter again. Unwilling to accept this prognostication as fact, Mr. Payne instituted a hasty search of the city, making inquiries well into the night at the homes of various of Mary’s acquaintances, stirring up widespread concern for her, all to no avail.

  On Tuesday morning, the constabulary was apprised of Mary’s disappearance, but there was little they could do. Until, Poe wrote, the afternoon of the day of her absence, when the body of Mary Rogers revealed itself in a lugubrious promenade down the Hudson.

  I do not know, did not know then and do not know now, why Poe chose to lop off from his narrative what to me was the most stimulating part, mainly my discovery of the body beneath the pier and his chilly baptism to free it from the pilings. No doubt his decision had something to do with one of his literary theories—most of which I would remain ignorant of until long after his own ignominious demise.

  I knew little of the man at this time and even less of the vagaries and trials of his past. His eyes betrayed a fire and a strangeness, and his voice at times conveyed a subtle drawl of disdain, but these characteristics proved insufficient, in light of the polymorphic nature of the city, to distinguish him as one of the more spectacular denizens of New York. He was a newspaperman—that was all I knew. And that he had treated me with greater equanimity than had any man before him.

  I assumed he had made a pretty penny for a story that had so stirred up the populace as to transform the riverfront, for the next few days, into as beguiling an attraction as the Broadway and Bowery theaters.

  It was Mr. Payne who identified the corpse as that of his betrothed. She had been lying ashore but a half hour when word of the tragedy was delivered to him by one Charles T. Andrews. Payne was little more than a mile away at the time, having embarked, with the aid of a coterie of Mary’s concerned acquaintances, Charles Andrews included, upon a canvassing of all establishments south of Union Square. Andrews was the first among them to catch wind of the news that the body of a young female had been discovered.

  At this point in Poe’s lengthy narrative, he described the appearance of the body in such detail that even a physician might have flinched. Not a physician myself, I flinched repeatedly upon reading the report. But it was the fashion of newspapers in those days not to shrink from a vivid recapitulation, nor from embellishment of known or assumed facts, nor from conveying in twenty words what might have been conveyed in five, and Poe, who had earlier theorized (I would later discover) that authenticity in narrative is best imparted through a flood of details, was an enthusiastic purveyor of this prolixity.

  (Perhaps more than a little of his style has rubbed off on me.)

  But to the condition of Mary’s body, which I will encapsulate from memory:

  Her face, wrote Poe, was a moon of palest blue, but suffused here and there with the adumbrations of dark blood, indications of blunt trauma about the forehead and cheeks. More blood was discovered in her mouth and nostrils and in the canal of her left ear. A slender chain of bruises, as might be made by a rope or the crimp of a man’s hands, ringed her neck, and a bracelet of bruised skin encircled each wrist. Dangling by its slender chain from her left wrist was a small brocaded purse containing a few coins, a vial of lilac water, and a lace handkerchief. No cuts or lacerations were discerned upon her flesh, so it was quickly ascertained that she had been done in by other than mechanical means.

  Likewise, though her frock was torn and much disordered, and the muslin slip also rent in no fewer than three places, and the strings of her bonnet tied about her neck not with a lady’s bow but a sailor’s knot, every article of clothing was more or less intact, including and especially the undergarments—all testimony, said the medical professional who, in the modest and perfunctory fashion of the day, examined her, to the fact that the young lady’s virtuous character, vouched for by her mother and Mr. Payne, remained intact.

  Mr. Jack Payne, though much grieved to do so, was ferried across the Hudson where he identified the body as being, beyond dispute, that of his beloved. The medical examiner classified most of her bruises as postmortem. The exception were those that ringed her neck. The death was attributed to strangulation—exacted, perhaps, by the strings of her own bonnet.

  As a matter of routine, and because Miss Rogers had been a citizen of Gotham proper, the body was then delivered to the city’s morgue. Early next morning it was turned over to Mr. Payne, who, on behalf of the young girl’s mother, accompanied the remains to a nonsectarian cemetery not far north from where Mary Rogers had lived, and there she was properly, if hastily, laid to rest.

  In conclusion, Poe presented the observation of the local gendarmes—which he, no doubt, being on the spot, had helped to formulate—that Mary Rogers had been the unfortunate victim of an unplanned assault by a gang of ruffians, packs of whom were known to frequent the woods and shaded byways along the fringes of the city. The assault would have taken place between nine and nine thirty on the Sunday morning of her disappearance; just prior to nine she was taking her leave from her mother’s boardinghouse, and after nine-thirty she would have arrived at her aunt’s domicile. By ten she and her aunt would have settled together in the fourth pew from the altar of the Methodist Episcopal Church (this being the chapel closest to the aunt’s house, though she was in fact a Catholic). Neither of these later chronologies was met.

  In all probability, Poe reasoned, Mary’s path had caused her to tread within earshot of where a gang of ruffians had passed the night. One or more of these thugs (and I shivered upon reading this passage, knowing myself to be a hair’s breadth from joining their ranks), still groggy from his night of debauch in a local doggery, had happened to glance up at her passing, the flash of creamy gingham seen through the trees, a glimpse of heaven ’midst the wood’s chill shadows.

  In any case, she was spotted. The assailant was seized, Poe wrote, “with an animal passion.” The pursuit could not have lasted long. In all likelihood, murder was not the thug’s intention, but merely to render Mary Rogers docile for a while. When she instead expired at his hands, when the last breath of air was choked from her lungs, when she went even limper in his hands than he had hoped for, the thug panicked. He and his fellows, if indeed there were any fellows, sequestered the evidence of their misdeed until nightfall, then, without bothering to weight the corpse with rocks, had tossed the body of Mary Rogers into the river and thought themselves done with it.

  In conclusion, Poe chided
the Common Council for their reluctance to establish a municipal police force, and pointed to Mary Rogers’s murder as but one example of the city’s escalating social and moral decay. Banditti, he said, were claiming as their empire more and more of Manhattan, while the numerous squads of privatized watchmen squabbled among themselves for docks to patrol, lamps to light, benches to doze upon. Savagery, he warned, was spreading like fire; without a unified professional police force to engage it, the fire would inevitably reduce our city to ashes.

  I had no argument with Poe’s conclusion. Why, then, could I not shake a disconcertion, an uneasiness that, the more I picked at it, finally revealed itself as two-pronged? In the first case, I was unsettled by Poe’s description of the body as it lay ashore in New Jersey. For all his attention to the state of her clothing and flesh, why had he made no reference to mitigating details, what the French call the ambiance of her situation? Not that I had even glimpsed the body myself, save for its distorted and magnified glow when submerged beneath the dock, then as a grotesquerie freed to float along the hungry current—but I saw it many times in my imagination, a thousand times. I see it even yet, a scene unbidden and as clear in my mind’s eye as if I had been standing there with Poe myself while Mr. Jack Payne bent over the body to perceive in it the countenance of his beloved. I smell the fetor of river mud, the rank odor of decay. I see the way the afternoon light slants in through the branches and is broken into thick splinters of light and how the shadows of the men closest to the river lie stretched out thin and quivering upon the mottled water. And I see the small white moths, five of them, that flutter over Mary Rogers’s face, moths that alight for a moment upon her hair or atop her forehead or along the rigid length of her body. I hear the water and the muted muds of activity from across the water. I hear a songbird from deep in the woods, the call of a crow even more distant.

  They are inconsequential details, you might argue, and they do not contribute to the singularity of effect that Poe was always striving to achieve. But without them, to my eyes, Mary Rogers is diminished.

  As for the second prong of dissatisfaction with Poe’s narrative, a simpler point, but sharper:

  I read Poe’s article and laid the paper aside, and then I carried his words in my head for the next hour or two. Until finally, incontrovertibly, they jelled into my own hard observation: he had gotten it wrong. The medical examiner, Poe, the consensus achieved by all those men who had bent over the body of Mary Rogers as it lay on the New Jersey shore, all those calloused and unshakable men who stood with their handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths while five white moths fluttered about her, they had gotten it wrong. No murderer was skulking through the woods of upper Manhattan. No illiterate thug cowered silent in tremulous shadows. The murderer was standing there among them.

  5

  The offices of the Mirror were shadowy and crowded and stank of onion sandwiches and old cigars, and the dim clamor of the place brought my flesh alive with an excitement of gooseflesh, my arms and neck stippled with it as if I had made my way into the caverns of Delphi where the world was not only comprehended but perhaps fashioned, perhaps kneaded and molded here in the fists of strange gods.

  A dozen or more men were at work in the main room, a few of the men rushing about as if late for an appointment that would change their lives, others huddled in whispered conference, and the rest scribbling alone at scarred and cluttered desks. They were hunched and coiled and flannel-cheeked men, ruby nosed, men with darting eyes and greasy flocks of hair, one man chewing on the butt of a corncob pipe and another coughing smoke though no pipe or cigar was visible in his hand or on his desk. All told it seemed a cramped and adumbrated place, a cavern stained with smoke and ink and curses and black stories spilled from broken lives.

  It looked like home to me.

  I crept along toward the rear of the room, blinking like a mole in a maze, until one man raised his hand and stopped my progress and asked me what I was up to. I told him, “I’m here to see Poe.”

  “Pa?” he said.

  “Poe.”

  He said without smiling, “What’s a po?”

  I showed him the leaf from the morning’s paper and laid it across his desk and pointed to the story about Mary Rogers. He looked me up and down and grinned finally and jerked his head toward the door at the end of the room. Half the door was made of milk glass, and painted on it in gold letters was the name Edmund Neely and the words Managing Editor.

  I was not then familiar with the civilities of polite or even journalistic society and so I did not knock on the door; I put my hand to the glass knob and twisted it and shoved the door open. With Neely’s initial harpoon of a glance, I knew I was about to be shouted off the premises, so I held up the newspaper and announced, “I’m here to see Poe. He wrote this story about the dead girl they pulled out the river.”

  Three ticks of a clock, like huge dominoes crashing into one another. He considered me a while longer. Then, “She your girlfriend or your long-lost mother?”

  I almost blurted out, “I’m the one found the body,” because a part of me wanted credit for it, credit for any act deserving of applause or at least a redirection of Neely’s hard cynicism. But I thought better of it and told him, “I’ve got some more information for Mr. Poe.”

  “More?” Neely said. He looked at me with his broad head slightly cocked, the gaslight on the near wall flickering in the dampness of his brow.

  This time I decided to keep quiet. What I sensed then and have since confirmed about the society of journalists, about all scribes and scribblers in fact, is that the successful ones are equipped not only with a keen eye and ear and an innate sense of drama but with a fair degree of rapaciousness as well, a desire to transform every story into their own, to possess it by transcribing it, setting the abstract into the concrete of words and thereby making it real, in essence creating it, and with every new composition creating a bit more of themselves.

  “And what’s the nature of your information?” Neely asked.

  Once again I thought it best to hold my tongue. The murder of Mary Rogers was the hottest story in town. I nodded over my shoulder to the roomful of writing desks. “I didn’t see him out there.”

  “Nor are you likely to,” he said.

  And now confusion. Poe’s byline was there on the story, E. A. Poe. Yet he was not employed here?

  I was saved by a hulking presence at my back, somebody else with business for the editor. Someone obviously more significant than me, for after a nod at the man looming over me, Neely dismissed me with, “You’ll find him at home, no doubt.”

  “And where’s that?”

  He had already looked away from me and now had to cut his eyes back in my direction. “Fordham,” he said. Then to the man behind me, “Come on in, Frank. Kick out the cat and close the door.”

  As quick as a cat, I slipped beneath the man’s hand and made my way back through the room and observed to myself, From mole to cat in two minutes; not bad.

  Out on Broadway again, I snagged a ride on a horse railway car. By hanging off the side, I was able to duck the five-cent fare. The smaller omnibuses charged ten cents to each of their twelve passengers, and those conveyances lumbered along at a clopping pace, rattling like bloated stagecoaches over rough ground. In comparison the horse railway seemed a futuristic wonder as it glided over metal rails, and though I seldom availed myself of the upholstered benches inside, I yet found the ride invigorating and a miracle of progress.

  It was an experience all the more wondrous for the scenery, past the rebuilt Trinity Church with its single tall spire groping for the magnificence of Heaven, past the sarcophagus-like splendor of Astor’s Opera House, past Washington Hall and Gothic Hall and the New York Hospital, and eventually under the arched stone bridge at Canal Street and leaving all the fashionable shops behind. Before long, though, the car made its turnaround, and I was forced to go clopping out of t
his center-of-gravity on foot again, from graded street to irregular horse path, the ground as often slimy now as it was dry.

  North of Canal there was little to catch a boy’s eye, and after Union Square, I followed Fourth up to Fifty-First, just because I wanted to gawk at Madame Restell’s Palace again. Not that I could quite yet grasp the nefarious deeds Madame Restell had perpetrated to acquire such wealth—for me at ten years old, sex was (and, sadly, has more or less become again) a fantasy of lying naked in a dark room and touching womanly parts whose function and appeal I insufficiently comprehended—but her marble mansion never failed to inspire me with the knowledge that even an uneducated drudge could rise to grandeur in this city. All success required was ambition and cleverness. Thus Caroline Ann Trace had transformed herself from a maid in Gloucester to a dressmaker in New York City, then to a pill maker, then rechristened herself as the physician Madame Restell, whose Preventive Powders, advertised in the Sun and the Herald, sold so briskly as to bring her not only notoriety as an abortionist but also great wealth.

  I will not go into details here of how in the mind of a ten-year-old boy the mechanics of intercourse and procreation and abortion were convoluted into a Gordian mess, but suffice it to say that just the sight of Restell’s Palace would bring a twinkle to my eye and put a bounce in my step. But if Madame Restell’s example of the potential for acquiring wealth energized me, it was with an energy that contained a negative charge as well, for I could not gaze upon her mansion long without at least one grimace when I recalled what was so often said about it, that every brick represented the skull of an unborn child.