“Fine,” Poe said. He took one of the gold eagles from his pocket and handed it to me. “Take this and have yourself a good supper somewhere. I will look for you come nightfall in the basement of the church.”
“And where are you off to in the meantime?”
“I believe another visit to Weehawken would not be unwarranted. There are more layers to the Red Onion than are immediately visible.”
“Then I’m going with you.”
“I think it is best if—”
“I’m going with you. So here, take your money back.”
“Keep it,” he said. “Better not to put all our resources in one pocket.”
“So I can come with you then?”
“Perhaps you should,” he said. “Perhaps you should.”
The truth is that I needed his company as much as he, for his own safety, needed mine. There were layers of intrigue at work here that even Poe did not suspect, those concerning my mother’s death and the cover-up by fire, both perpetrated no doubt by Hobbs’s ghoulish manservant. This was my secret knowledge, and while the hoarding of it imparted to me a sense of authority and privilege, it also blew a dank breath across the hackles of my neck.
• • •
It was not yet five when we arrived on the New Jersey shore, the sun still white above the trees. We disembarked from the Burachs’ boat, and I could hear songbirds in the woods, the scolding chitter of a squirrel. It struck me as an odd but somehow beautiful dichotomy, the discernible music and the inaudible agonies concealed in those woods; the trees so tenuously green, as temporarily lush as are we all, as marked for decay; while at my back the mercurial river, its mud and weed-choked bottom; the symmetry of shadows and light; the balance, not always fair, of evil and good.
In front of the roadhouse we found that the rotting skiff had not been moved, though the bogus oarsman and his chair were nowhere to be seen. Poe peeked into the Red Onion’s front window and saw the same scowling barman behind the counter, but no sign of Tarr/Lehnort.
Around the back there was a wooden staircase leading to a doorway on the second floor. Poe stood staring up at the blank face of that door for half a minute. As he did so, I watched the anger in him rising closer to the surface, his thirty years of rage. “Stay here,” he finally said. Then he climbed to the door and knocked.
It was not long before the door swung open. And there stood the oarsman, smiling for just a moment, long enough only to recognize Poe. At the same moment, he moved to fling shut the door, Poe lunged inside and seized him by the wrist.
“Mr. Lehnort,” Poe said and used his own body to prevent the door from closing, “you will not hide from me. I will have my answers, sir, or you will answer to the police.”
Lehnort attempted to jerk free, but Poe held fast. “My name’s Tarr, I told you that. Now let me loose or you’ll be the one’ll be sorry.”
Poe gave the man’s wrist a turn so that the palm faced upward. “From the looks of your hands, you have done very little rowing in your life. How do you account for that?”
There was a brief tug-of-war then, with Lehnort jerking to free himself while Poe, one foot braced to the door frame, looked for all the world like he was attempting to yank the man out and over the railing.
Then suddenly Poe’s hand flew into the air, back toward his own shoulder. A moment later I saw why. A long knife, its wide flat blade at least nine inches long, was thrust within an inch of his throat. And the individual wielding it, the person who now backed Poe out of the doorway, was a small, plump woman in a blue gingham dress. She was white-haired and stout as a barrel. She had a face like a fighting pug from one of the pits back in town.
“You had your warning,” she growled at him. “You won’t get another.”
Poe backed to the rail but did not descend the stairway. “You are protecting a murderer,” he said.
She jerked her head toward the interior of the room, where the bogus oarsman had retreated. “He never hurt a soul in his life. Never would.”
“I refer to Lieutenant Andrews, Mrs. Lehnort.”
Her pause was a beat too long. “I don’t know any such person.”
“Your son does; of that I am sure.”
“What my son knows or don’t know is none of your business. Now get down off my steps. You’re not welcome here.”
“I advise you not to compound your involvement in this crime.”
“And I advise you,” she said, and moved closer, and spoke to him in a hiss that struck me as all too gleeful, “you back away from this here and now. Or else your little boy there is going to find you dead in the street one of these fine days.”
Poe’s movement was so quick I could not follow it. I blinked, and there stood Poe with his fingers clamped around the woman’s fist, the knife tip turned away from his own throat and pointed toward the bridge of her nose.
“If that be the case,” he told her, “I intend to have some company.”
I have never seen such eyes as theirs burn into one another. I was frightened by both pairs of them.
Poe used his free hand to pluck the knife free. He carried it with him halfway down the stairway, and there, with a sidelong thrust, left it stuck vibrating in a clapboard.
He did not look back at her, as I did, as we crossed to the corner of the building and turned toward the road. Her door slammed shut, and I jumped a bit. Just as I did when, as we breasted the front corner of the roadhouse, the barman, who had been waiting outside his door, his back pressed hard to the wall, clicked his tongue at us.
Poe stopped in his tracks and turned. I stood on heel and toe, ready to run.
“Adelia Blaine,” the barman whispered.
Poe studied him for a moment, cut a glance toward the upstairs window, then moved closer to the barman. “Sir?”
“You talk to a woman named Adelia Blaine. Worked at the Sportsman’s Hall over there.” He jerked his chin toward the river and the city beyond.
“And why,” Poe whispered, “would I be talking with her?”
“She’ll tell you what you want to know.”
“But you will not?”
He gave Poe a look, indistinguishable—it could have been either grief or derision. Then he turned and went back inside the building and softly closed the door.
40
“I must create a disguise,” Poe said. “Else some nefarious character might remember me from my previous visit and suspect what I am up to.”
“You don’t need to go inside. You can get her to come out to you.”
“How so?”
We were heading east from the waterfront, closing in on the Bowery and the Sportsman’s Hall.
“There’s a boy I know works as a kind of scout for them,” I said.
“A scout for whom?”
“Whoever’s willing to pay him for it. He helps sporting men find what they’re after.”
“This is a service he provides? A boy?”
“The way it works is, he’s got these little picture cards he sells. You buy one, see? And then maybe you work around to the subject of the real thing. You slip him a couple of bits and he’ll direct you to what you’re looking for. Even get things all set up if you want him to. He knows all the girls from the Sportsman’s and some of the other clubs. Plus a bunch of girls who don’t have a regular place of their own.”
“You are telling me that this boy you know is a procurer.”
“All I know is what he does. If that’s the word for it, then that’s what he is.”
“And how does it happen that the two of you are so well acquainted?”
“Not as well as all that, but I know him to see him. He cribs at the Newsboys’ House.”
“And you will provide the introductions?”
“Better you just talk to him yourself. Maybe like a customer, right? The two of us don’t re
ally get along.”
I did not care to tell Poe how much I feared Moonie Weaver, that big moon-faced slob of a boy with a zeal for making smaller boys cry and bleed.
“And where will I find this young entrepreneur?” Poe asked.
“This time of day he won’t be far from Five Points. Probably somewhere along Anthony Street.”
“Then that is where we must go.”
It did not take long to find Moonie Weaver. I recognized the hulk of his profile from thirty yards away. Despite his thick back and shoulders, his head sat ponderously atop but a stub of grimy neck, and he was longer in the torso than in the legs, an oddly shaped and top-heavy boy who half a lifetime later was destined to be shot through the larynx (with an exit wound through the back of his skull) for pummeling an unfaithful sweetheart at the Haymarket Dance Hall.
On some days, and this was one of them, he earned a few extra cents and concealed his principal trade by handing out flyers for legitimate entertainments. But even in this endeavor, he kept one eye on his more lucrative craft and approached only those gentlemen who, identifiable by a glint of circumspection in their gaze or by the lopsided lift of a knowing smile, might be sold a second or even third diversion.
“That’s him down there,” I told Poe while I hid myself behind the corner of a building.
“How best do I approach him?”
“Just go on down there and take whatever it is he’s handing out. Then maybe, if he don’t say something first, you might ask if there’s anything else he’s got to offer. He’ll be suspicious of you, not having done business with you yet—do not tell him your name or mention mine—but if you look like you know what you’re up to, he’ll bring a deck of cards out of his pocket for you to look at. You’ll need to buy at least one of them.”
“For not an insignificant amount, I presume.”
“He’ll say the cards are a dollar each, but you can jew him down to a couple of shillings. After that you can ask him to go fetch Adelia Blaine and have her meet you somewhere. You’ll have to slip him at least another fip for that.”
Poe was patting his pockets, checking his resources. “Why don’t I simply offer to send the boy to Harvard?”
“And one last thing. About those picture cards.”
He looked down at me with a kind of fatherly amusement. “I have already formed my assumptions as to what is depicted thereon,” he said.
“I just don’t want you looking shocked is all.”
He patted my shoulder. “Thank you, Uncle August.”
And then he strode off down the street.
I clung to the corner of the building, my cheek to the wood, and watched the transaction from a safe distance. Poe dipped into his change purse but twice, and when he returned up the street three minutes later, he came with a picture card palmed in his right hand, a flyer rolled in his left, and a brow so furrowed that it could have been used as a washboard.
“I knew those pictures was going to take you by surprise,” I said.
He handed me the flyer. “It was not the pictures but the news concerning Miss Blaine.”
“Won’t he set up a meeting?”
“He would no doubt be happy to do so were she in the vicinity.”
“She’s not at the Sportsman’s no more?”
“She is not.”
“So where’s she working now? I can get you in to most any place in town.”
“She is no longer employed,” he said.
“She ain’t dead, is she?”
“She is a resident of Blackwell’s Island.”
“TB?” I asked without thinking, and saw the way he flinched.
“Master Weaver was very thrifty with his details. I do not know the nature of her residency. Nor whether it is voluntary or not.”
“Looks like we take another ferry ride,” I said, my own enthusiasm at the prospect more than balanced out by his look of trepidation.
“It would seem I have no choice. But tomorrow. I do not wish to navigate the Bowery in full dark.”
And so we headed for the Rivington Street Presbyterian Church. Along the way, Poe handed me the rolled-up flyer, which I barely glanced at before folding it in half three times and storing it in a pocket for future review. I waited eagerly for him to hand me the other treasure as well, but Poe soon closed his hand over the picture card and then dropped it into a refuse barrel outside a grogshop.
From that point on, my mind, I admit, was turned to nothing else. I had glimpsed a few of those cards before, but a few is never sufficient to a growing boy. At the first opportunity I excused myself from Poe’s company so as to attend the call of nature, circled the block, and a few minutes later caught up with him again, but this time with the pleated card now safely tucked into my boot.
A few minutes before nightfall we joined a dozen other itinerant souls already stretched out in the basement of the church. We were given a blanket and a piece of molasses cake and a folded broadsheet with which to read ourselves to sleep by the greasy light of three oil lamps dangling from the ceiling. Poe, an avaricious reader, took to his tract like a stray dog to a pound of sausage but, after ten minutes of reading, sighed aloud, overstuffed, and laid the paper aside.
For my part, the tract had the opposite of its desired effect. Already inflamed with a desire to gaze long and hard upon the illustrated playing card still wedged into my boot, I found the tract’s admonitions more inflammatory than deflating. Like Graham’s and Van Rensselaer’s proselytizing, the tract cautioned against a reckless spending of one’s energies, especially those that might result in pleasure. Drinking, flesh eating, impure thoughts—all would lead to dissipation, insanity, ruin. The release of sperm was particularly destructive and was to be avoided except in marriage, and even then achieved sparingly and, it seemed, grudgingly.
I dreamed that night that my soul was leaking out of me to dribble on the floor.
Morning came none too soon, though I awoke to see Poe already sitting upright against the wall, the thin blanket drawn tight around his shoulders. I rubbed the crust from my eyes and asked, “Don’t you ever sleep? How long you been up?”
“Long enough to know that the chorus of a dozen men’s snores is in no way soporific.”
“You should of heard the Old Brewery at night. This ain’t nothing compared to that.”
He gave me a small smile and patted my head.
In those days I awoke fully alert and ready for adventure. Half a minute later I was on my feet. “There’s a little yard out back,” I told him. “Meet me there in fifteen minutes, and I’ll have some breakfast for you.”
“Which you will purchase legally,” he said.
“But—”
“We are not beasts, Augie. Even if we appear to be beasts and are beginning to smell like beasts, we must never allow ourselves to behave like beasts.”
“Mooooo!” I answered and was halfway to the door before I looked back at him and saw him grinning, and was warmed by the notion that I was capable of engendering happiness, however destructive the Presbyterians thought it to be.
We breakfasted on apples and a small loaf of pumpkin bread. The morning was still, the air cool, the churchyard veiled in a vaporous mist. “No other hour is like this one,” Poe mused. “At this time of day, the city is almost tolerable.”
He was reluctant to get on with the day’s business. “Once this is over with,” I told him, “you’ll be able to skedaddle for good.”
I don’t think he believed it anymore. He strove constantly for better fortune, but never in the deepest parts of himself fully countenanced it as his due. The truth is that he could be soothed but not comforted. Sissie’s tender, small voice could soothe him, her hand on his arm. Muddy’s solidity and unwavering faith. Even I on occasion could soothe him with a joke, the eager look on my face. But nothing could comfort him. Nothing could extinguish fore
ver his darkness.
Sometimes the fear would swirl in him; I would see it in his eyes. It would rise in him like a swirling tide, the fear that failure was about to engulf him, drag him under and into its maelstrom. He expected failure and feared it most at the height of his brief successes. There was a sense in him always that the ground he walked on was slippery, wet; it might drop from beneath him at any moment; he would fall and fall forever.
By eight o’clock we were on the march again, this time northward to Turtle Bay. We followed the horsecar tracks up Fourth Avenue as far as Forty-Second Street, and there Poe informed me that I was not to accompany him to Blackwell’s Island. “It is a place not fit for a healthy child,” he said. “Not if he wishes to remain healthy.”
“Ain’t there lots of children there already?”
“None of their own volition,” he said.
Had I not been burning to examine in detail the painted playing card in my boot, as well as the flyer announcing an exhibition of oddities, I might have argued against him, but I did not. At Turtle Bay Poe was fortunate enough to catch one of the boats used by the Department of Charities and Corrections to ferry goods and personnel to that long splinter of misery in the East River. The boat was manned by a crew of four, all sporting the black and tan stripes of the penitentiary.
The bosun, one of the prison guards, made room for Poe among the various crates and three other passengers. I stood near the water’s edge long enough to watch the boat pushed off on its slow pull toward the penitentiary docks, then found for myself a grassy spot to sit and pass the time in the consideration of the artistic pursuits of New York City.
On the garish card, the visual arts: a buxom cancan girl so bent and twisted at the waist that both her posterior and anterior endowments appeared in full display. And on the flyer, the lively arts: the announcement of an exhibit at the Vauxhall Gardens, where a man named Barnum was charging five cents admission to a world of exotic wonders including but not limited to a tattooed marvel—“Ninety thousand stabs! And for every stab, a tear!”—a kangaroo, a reptile girl, a living skeleton, a two-brained baby in a bell jar.
On Night's Shore Page 28