On Night's Shore Read online

  “Will your absence at home cause no consternation?”

  “I won’t be much missed, if that’s what you’re saying.”

  And suddenly there was Mrs. Clemm’s hand on my shoulder, warm and heavy. “I’ll show you where you can wash up,” she said. “Afterward, Mr. Poe could read to you if you’d like.”

  “Dickens is always good for the appetite,” he said.

  “I don’t need no help in that area,” I told him. In fact the prospect of prolonging the warmth of Mrs. Clemm’s touch, of spending an evening in a warm clean room and taking supper with her and Poe out here in the fresh-air silence of upper Manhattan, it was all so beguiling that for once in my life even the suggestion of soap and water did not revolt me.

  6

  I had no idea there was a person in the other room. For over an hour no sound had issued from behind the closed door, not so much as a squeak of bedsprings or the scuff of a footfall. But then the door opened as softly as an apology, and I looked up at the sighing sound and saw her there, and though but ten years old, I felt the first distant stirrings of a fancy that would haunt me for the remainder of my life.

  We were sitting as before at the small square table, Poe and I. He had laid a copy of his newspaper article flat in front of him and was reading through line by line and making notes to himself in the margins. From what I could ascertain, the notes were of two orders: the first, distinguished by question marks and exclamation points and by whole phrases underlined or circled, had to do with the accuracy of known or assumed facts in regard to Mary Rogers. He had his own shorthand, I suppose, and knew which of his marks indicated which facts to maintain and which to reconsider. The other notes were purely editorial—the writer’s compulsion to change words and syntax even after the story had been set in hot type and was irrevocably printed.

  He had given me a book with which to entertain myself—it was The Story of a Bad Boy by T. B. Aldrich, which Poe presented to me with the remark, “Here’s a book you might find amusing. I certainly did, though it contains not a single humorous line.” But I found his obsessive revision and reanalysis a far greater divertissement. I had never before witnessed a writer at work, and if invited to observe one, I would have thought the spectacle dull indeed, a furrowed brow and a scribbling fist, a secret smile and a scratching pen. But with Poe there was more to it than that. A tension, as of a spring coiling ever tighter. A profound and abiding discontent. A desperate and almost fevered sense of time trickling away. Here was a man, I thought, trying to reweave the fabric of the universe, one word at a time.

  We had been at this for perhaps thirty minutes—Poe writing, I watching, Mrs. Clemm stirring the soup—when the bedroom door came whispering open. We all wheeled at the sound, turning like a small flock of birds in sudden but harmonious tilt with a maverick breeze. She was not much more than a girl, certainly still in her teens, though perhaps a year or two older than she looked, and she looked to be a child, a cherub; she was plump and sleepy-eyed and not very tall, and her breasts were full and round and her skin was as pale, paler than that of any of the gaslight courtesans of Broadway. She exuded both innocence and sexuality. On her eyelids and hands the pale blue veins showed through, and on each of her cheeks a small scarlet blush that seldom faded, a tiny crimson carnation of blood beneath her skin.

  Poe was at her side in an instant. An arm around her shoulder, a hand smoothing back her hair, his voice murmuring. She looked up at him with adoring eyes. His daughter, I told myself. Poe and Mrs. Clemm have a daughter. And with that observation, a part of me claimed her for myself.

  But then the jolt. He led her closer to the table. A scent of musty sweetness rose off her pallid skin.

  “Sissie,” he said, which caused me to revise my observation, transform her from his daughter to his sister, “this is the resourceful young man I told you about last night. The one I met on the waterfront.”

  “Master Dubbins,” she said and held out her hand to me. I did not know what to do with it. But I took it just the same, seeing as my own hand was anomalously clean and would in all probability not long remain in that condition. Her hand was warm and plump and damp. I felt it reaching all the way inside me.

  “Augie,” Poe continued, “this is my wife, Virginia. My angel.”

  I could not help myself; I pivoted to shoot a look at Mrs. Clemm to see how she was taking this news, but she stood grinning ear to ear, beaming with such adoration for both of them that even her broad homely countenance seemed beatified.

  Poe, no doubt no stranger to shock such as mine, explained, “Mrs. Clemm is Sissie’s mother.”

  “I thought you two was married,” I blurted out and wagged a finger between the two adults.

  Mrs. Clemm gasped and turned her face, but Poe never flinched. “In a sense we are,” he said. “In the deepest and purest sense, all three of us are married. Together we form a complete and single One.”

  For the next several minutes, then, both Poe and Mrs. Clemm fussed over Virginia. They made her comfortable at the table with a shawl across her lap and a pillow beneath her stockinged feet. When she spoke, which was not often, it was to thank Poe or her mother, to assure them that she was fine, they should go back to what they were doing, her voice as musical as a meadowlark’s but muted, as if the lark were singing not to the sky but to the ground. She did not seem so much weak as fragile, made of some rare and delicate stuff that her husband and mother were ever careful not to jar.

  I knew nothing then of her illness, of the white plague that had tattooed the crimson bloom of death to her cheeks. I thought the lassitude with which she moved, the dreaminess, a kind of sultry affectation, the little girl as actor, child pretending to be seductress.

  And finally supper, and none too soon. How to describe my first dinner with the Poes? Mere soup and bread, yes, except that there was nothing mere about it, the bread sliced thick and warm and as dense as soft wood, as fecund and filling as manna. And the soup, my bowl overflowing, filled twice to the brim from Mrs. Clemm’s generous ladle, the thick white floury broth in which floated islands of potatoes and carrot and wild onion and soft buttery chunks of seared rabbit meat. And to top it all off, my hands were clean. It was as near to a religious experience as I had yet enjoyed.

  After supper, Poe and Mrs. Clemm cleared the table. I had never before witnessed a man helping to wash the dishes—had seldom enough seen my own mother bother with it—and so I sat there awkwardly at the table, trying not to blush or fidget or pick at myself while Virginia smiled at me.

  “Please tell me what it’s like where you live,” she asked out of nowhere.

  When I failed to answer, tongue-tied, wishing suddenly that my clothes could be as clean as my hands, she asked, “Do you live with your mother and father?”

  “Well, most times,” I answered finally, “it’s just my mother more or less. Plus whoever she has with her that night. From what I can guess my pap’s in the Tombs.”

  At this Mrs. Clemm released a tiny moan. I could not look at her or at anyone else for the moment. I looked only at the tablecloth, the stain on white cotton where I had slopped my soup.

  “There was a man used to live next door to us,” I continued, unable to stop the river of words now that the sluice gate had been opened, “but he was always coming into the house whenever my pap wasn’t there. They had more than one go-round over it from what I can remember. Still the man wouldn’t stop coming round. Finally my pap come in one night and the man was there on the bed with her, and my pap picked up a board lying in with the coal, and he went after the man and didn’t let up until he had bashed his head to a pulp. They got my pap down on the bottom floor of the Tombs now is what she told me once, that time she said it was where I was going to end up myself sooner or later. Sometimes I ask her about him, but she just waves her hand away at me, so I don’t know what’s true and what’s not. I guess he’s in there though. They say they p
ut the bad ones on the bottom floor where it’s damp and you don’t get much light because they die quicker there. This was maybe five or six years ago when he went in. I imagine he’s hanging on all right though. I imagine it don’t bother him much.”

  When I finally lifted my eyes off the table, it was to find all three of them staring at me as if I were some alien thing. Which is exactly how I felt. Something hawked up and spat out. Virginia sat with a cream-colored handkerchief pressed to her mouth, Mrs. Clemm with both hands clasped beneath her neck, and Poe with one hand pressed to his cheek. But their eyes all said that they saw me differently than I saw myself; they could gaze upon something as ill-favored as me and not be revolted, but filled instead with a warm and illuminating pity, an emotion I did not yet know.

  I was ashamed of myself for talking so much and would have preferred to bury my head or at least turn away, yet I could not keep my gaze from returning to Virginia’s bosom, her round breasts heaving. It gave me a perverse kind of pleasure to suppose that something I had said could make her breasts heave so.

  Half a minute later Poe went to a cupboard and took out a small tin pail. With this in hand he crossed toward the door. “My evening stroll,” he said, “while yet the gloaming lingers.” There was more than a bit of the actor in him, in both him and his wife, I suppose, he with his histrionic flourishes of language, she with her swoonish demeanor. Mrs. Clemm, in size and temperament, was the rock to which both of them were anchored.

  “Augie,” Poe said at the door, “come stretch your legs with me.”

  We walked together out the lane and at the main thoroughfare turned east. Poe fiddled with a pipe, scraping out the bowl with a small knife, but he did not fill the pipe, and after ten minutes or so, he slipped it into a pocket. As we were approaching a roadhouse, he finally spoke.

  “Perhaps two or three ruffians,” he said, as if the subject of Mary Rogers had been on our lips all along, “who then swore an oath of silence. Knowing, of course, the dire consequences of careless talk.”

  I shook my head. “Careless talk where I come from is what makes you who you are. You do something, you make good and sure everybody knows about it. You put your name on the deed before anybody else can lay claim to it.”

  “And nobody has laid claim to Mary Rogers,” he said.

  “She was in too good of shape for the people I know. She’d of been stripped to the skin, and maybe even below that.”

  He nodded to himself but said nothing more. At the roadhouse he went inside and purchased a bucket of the local brew, and when he stepped back outside and my gaze went to the bucket, he made the only remark ever offered me about his wife’s condition. “A glass or two helps Sissie to rest,” he said.

  “So what is it that’s wrong with her?”

  He closed his eyes briefly, walked blind for two steps. I fell in beside him and asked nothing more.

  On our return to the cottage I silently formulated a dozen questions about this man who, by all indications, had opened a doorway in my life, questions I would be ill equipped to answer for a while. In time I grew to understand him better, I think, to piece together from his writings and from conversations with Mrs. Clemm the tragedies of his past, his parents’ lives as itinerant actors, his mother’s early death from tuberculosis and his father’s disappearance, the estrangement from and finally abandonment by his foster father, the self-destructive moods that seized him from time to time and regularly cast him in dishonor, the death by brain tumor, when he was fourteen, of the first woman he loved, the way he clung as if for salvation to his remaining family, his aunt Martha Clemm, his cousin and adolescent wife Virginia, both of whom were unabashedly devoted to him. And also the desperation of poverty, the destitution, the sense of hanging by his fingernails over the black abyss.

  All this, known only in hindsight, helps to explain how, in the face of Mary Rogers’s drifting corpse, he had remained so calm. And why the subjects most treated in his writings, the investigations he never finished probing, were of death and loss and madness. At thirty-one years of age he had already deduced from too much firsthand evidence that death was arbitrary and capricious and ubiquitous, that all sources of pleasure were as dandelion fluff in the sweep of an unseen hand, and that every human mind was capable of disintegrating into lunacy, that most in fact were already halfway there.

  I always wondered back then, but no longer, why he, a learned man, a Southern gentleman of grace and erudition, would deign to pass his time with a dirty-necked street rat such as myself. A clue to this mystery can be found in his own writings. Much of his life can be studied in his fictions. Take, for example, “The Man of the Crowd.” In this tale, the narrator relates, in a voice remarkably like Poe’s own, how he frequently sat at a coffee shop and watched the pedestrian traffic pass by on a busy street. The narrator doesn’t express but the reader can certainly intuit an atmosphere of alienation in the tale, the narrator’s sense that he does not fit with society, that he cannot participate but as an observer on the fringe. There is too a sense of superiority, of being more insightful, more intellectually alive than the clerks and gamblers and gentry and ruffians who pass the narrator’s table.

  But then the narrator’s gaze is arrested by the appearance of an old man, an old man dressed in rags that were once fine linen, who carries both a diamond and a dagger, a man whose gnarled visage suggests “the ideas of vast mental power, of caution, of penuriousness, of avarice, of coolness, of malice, of blood-thirstiness, of triumph, of merriment, of excessive terror, of intense—of extreme despair.” The narrator is so intrigued by this countenance that he leaps from his chair and follows the old man throughout the city, through the dark rain of night and into the gray of dawn, always where crowds are thickest and most boisterous, the old man milling about but never pausing, never coming to a halt. Finally the narrator is too weary to follow any longer. The narrator’s conclusion? That the old man is so driven to keep moving, even unto death, because he cannot stand to be alone for even a few minutes.

  The reader of this tale never knows who the old man is, but I think I know. The narrator of the story is Poe himself, of course, and the old man he chases is the person Poe fears he will become, the person he has every capacity to become. Poe, in the story, was following his own future, hoping to see where it might lead. And what he saw was terrifying: a wholly empty existence, the ceaseless peregrination of a man who though estranged from all humanity is yet compelled to a desperate if insubstantial intercourse with it, a man who, like Poe, cannot endure the hideous knowledge that he is utterly and irremediably alone.

  And so the night was ushered in. An aubergine night, smelling sweetly of a rain that did not come until the last hours of darkness, and then as softly as a mist. When Poe and I returned with the bucket of beer, we all retired for a while to the front porch and the coolness of descending night. And I, who knew little then of Poe’s misery or the nature of Virginia’s delicate coughs, I never felt sweeter than I did sitting there belly full on the porch steps, Poe with his pipe filled finally and the vague cherry scent of it, the fireflies winking through the trees, the gossamer stars; it was the truest moment I had ever lived, the most safe and painless even though precipitated by the corpse of a strangled woman, and I lived that night all the way through my body, from matted mop of hair right down to unwashed toes.

  Poe and Virginia sharing a deacon’s bench, Mrs. Clemm filling a straight-backed chair close to her daughter’s side, and me content to claim the bottom step, legs stretched out toward the flower bed. Poe took his wife’s hand into his lap and held it there and sometimes stroked it, and more than once, I saw out of the corner of my eye—wanting to watch them head-on but not wanting anybody to know how desperately I craved such tranquil scenes—I watched how he would lean close to her and with an open palm fan air into her face, she with mouth open slightly as she breathed the breeze in, pale lips making a small O to take in the shallow drafts, a low
and susurrus flutter in the back of her throat. I thought the sound amusing then, a kitten’s purr. Such a softness emanated from her, in voice and flesh and temperament and bearing, the gaze from her eyes the very soul of softness, that it would have been difficult for me to imagine any part of her as hard. But her lungs were hardening day by day, brittling, ossifying, and in due course she would cough them out a shard at a time.

  Most times she sat there with her head against Poe’s shoulder or leaned forward momentarily to sip from her glass of warm beer. I was fascinated by her and stole a lingering glance whenever I could. And it was more than the first flickers of a prepubescent fire she aroused in me; it was something I had hitherto not known, had until that night small occasion for, too wrapped up in my own survival, too desperate for myself to allow any true compassion for another human being. But Virginia brought out in me those feelings for all three of them, and at times that night I trembled in wonder and fear of this new deep stream that flowed through me.

  I imagined that Poe and I might continue our discussion of Mary Rogers that night, but he did not return to the subject, and I, after immersing myself in their rural serenity, was content to hold my tongue until morning. Certainly Virginia and Mrs. Clemm would have been well apprised of the murder by then, his investigation and consequent newspaper story, yet this was not the time or place to advance the discussion. From time to time Poe flashed me a small smile, a wink of complicity. We were the men here—this was what his wink told me. It took me in and made me a part of their tableau. It was our duty, his wink implied, to sit strong and silent in watchful protection of the women.

  I had no idea how much protection Poe himself would require in the days ahead.

  Early on in our evening, a red tabby came strutting around the corner of the house and leapt onto the porch. I drew back with a start, as surprised as if it were a mountain lion. In the next instant the cat was atop Poe’s lap and pushing its head under his hand.