And to think that Tocqueville had had the nerve to suggest that New Yorkers are indifferent to the arts.
41
About his two-hour visit to Blackwell’s Island, Poe needed no invitation to speak. He was paled and shaken by what he had experienced there and, upon setting foot on the bigger island once more, required only the arch of my eyebrows to let loose his narrative.
“Hell is not so well ordered as Dante would have us believe,” he said. “So I do not know which of the nine circles Blackwell’s inhabits. But I doubt I shall ever forget the sound of that place. It rings in my ears even yet.”
We walked southward, but slowly. I did not inquire of our destination; the destination was his story.
The first sound to resonate from Blackwell’s Island, he told me, was the terrible silence of fear. An eerie silence signaled from the onset by the boats’ crewmen, who were not permitted to utter a word lest they be assailed with the cat-o’-nine-tails. And from the massive stone edifice of the penitentiary itself came even more of the chilling stillness, for the thousand men and women imprisoned there suffered under the same rule of silence.
To the south of the penitentiary, near the tip of the island, sat the main hospital complex, two fine granite buildings with mansard roofs, plus a number of smaller wooden structures. Here the city’s charity cases were brought, as well as those being treated for typhus, smallpox, ship’s fever, and other communicable diseases.
Here too the day’s visitors were registered by name and directed according to their mission to one of the island’s several facilities. Poe, who had no idea in which of these purgatories Miss Adelia Blaine resided, was forced to perpetrate a subterfuge.
He registered as the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin and affected for the benefit of the registrar—a soft-voiced mole of a man, Poe said, who blinked and sniffed, blinked and sniffed—a subtle accent to suggest the vineyards of Burgundy.
“I have been informed that my niece is recently arrived here,” he told the registrar. “I have arrived of late myself, though from much farther afield than she. I do not know to which facility she has been assigned. I know only that she is my niece, and I bring her news of her grand-père. If you would be so kind as to point me in the proper direction. Merci.”
After long study of the patient list, Poe eventually ascertained the information he needed. The clerk offered to have Poe rowed to the northern end of the island in another jail boat, but, the island being less than two miles long, Poe decided in favor of a stroll along the wagon path that ran the western shore.
“I was none too reluctant to quit that building,” Poe told me. “Despite the magnificence of its exterior, the interior, of which I could view but a portion from the anteroom, offered small comfort.
“The entire place,” he said, “could benefit mightily from Muddy’s mop and broom. And from a few more windows, or candles at the least, for the air is rancid and heavy there and the atmosphere overall is pervaded by a rankness of odor. The hallways are crowded with patients who either shuffle about aimlessly or stand stock-still as if frozen in place, and from all of these, who do not or perhaps cannot be made to endure the prison’s rule of silence, emanates a continuing moan and babble. It is a veritable symphony of wretchedness, I tell you. A dreadful, dreadful place.”
Outside again he thought of abandoning his mission and turning for home. If the hospital, where individuals were presumed on the road to better health, could be so dreadful, what of the island’s other facilities where no such hope pertained?
He was emboldened finally by the knowledge that he could at any moment call off his journey and return to the bosom of his family, if not back to his rocking chair and his home impeccably clean, at least to an atmosphere sweetened by the presence of his beloveds. And so he set forth on the wagon path, again past the penitentiary, on whose grounds no person was allowed to set foot without authorization.
Guards were stationed here and there adjacent to the path. Other guards patrolled the river in small boats. Between the hospital to the south and the almshouse north, the penitentiary stood as an island unto itself, grim and mute.
Poe thought the almshouse bore a kind of Protestant handsomeness to its facade. In its two large stone buildings, one for men and the other for women, were housed the city’s triply cursed: the aged, destitute, and infirm. A goodly number of them were seated about the grounds on hard chairs and stools and benches, enjoying the sunlight. A few who were able raised their hands to Poe as he passed.
“Because it was such a pleasant day,” he said, “there was a salutary air to this scene. But imagine it in winter, when the window panes are sealed and frosted shut, and the heat from the furnaces can scarcely ascend to the third floor, and the entire island becomes like a stick of wood frozen in the river’s slush and ice. The place must seem then like nothing so much as a grave.”
And he had not yet reached the worst of it.
Next came the workhouse. At this point in the narrative, he turned to me and said with a wry smile, “If ever you find it necessary to take up residence on Blackwell’s Island, this is the place to do so.”
Here some fifteen thousand souls found themselves living each year, albeit briefly, the usual stay being about ten days long. Drunkenness, vagrancy, disorderly behavior—these were the offenses to prompt incarceration. But here the imprisonment was an active one, with every prisoner obliged to work, for there was no end to the island’s maintenance: the sewing and cooking and washing and cleaning, the carpentry and masonry, the cultivation of gardens and the construction of seawalls and buildings, and the grading of the wagon paths. Here too the rule of silence prevailed, but not so rigidly enforced as at the penitentiary, or so Poe speculated, having witnessed no guards patrolling while armed with the dreaded cat.
Then came the lunatic asylum. “If the hospital farther south could be known by its groans and sighs and all manner of miserable articulations,” Poe said, “you need only amplify these sounds a hundredfold to appreciate the aurality of the asylum.” Even from behind the great, heavy walls, the inmates could be heard. “A choir of a thousand,” he said, “in their ceaseless dissonance and gloom.”
And finally, his objective. It stood alone at the island’s northernmost end, outcast, the hospital for incurables. Here lived those whom society thought it best to remove from their midst, those who required no treatment other than the erosion of time. The wards of this hospital were distinct and various. Visitors were rare here, and those who braved contagion were cautioned against physical contact with all persons and objects therein.
Poe, after registering again at the main office and reiterating, disingenuously, the purpose of his visit, was directed to a small gallery outside the venereal disease ward. Here were two chairs separated by a bare wooden table. A mutton tallow candle in a sconce on the wall gave the room its only illumination, a gray and greasy light. Poe seated himself in the chair facing the door, and there awaited the arrival of Miss Adelia Blaine.
“When finally she appeared,” he said, “and came to sit before me, she seemed less a human being than the personification of the single human emotion of abject despair. There was a terrible lethargy to her every movement, even to the gaze with which she considered me. No doubt she was once a comely woman, once fulsome and gay, with hair and eyes as sleek and brown as chestnut hulls. There was this suggestion to her appearance, at least, the hint of it but now veiled, enshrouded, if you will, by a cloud of doom, a cloud that cast her smallest gesture in somber shadow.
“I could not look upon her,” he said, “at this specter she had become, emaciated not so much by her disease, which was only recently discovered, as by her knowledge of the disease, the presentiment of how certainly she was damned—I could not look upon her without envisioning the Adelia Blaine of an earlier day, of a Saturday in June, perhaps, and how her laughter must have rung as sweet and clear as that of my own dear Sissie, and
shone in eyes that her suitors must have seen as incandescent. And then to juxtapose this joyful ghost upon the woman seated before me, a woman in wait for the madness and agonies to come.”
He said nothing for half a minute. Then only, “There is no end to the misery of this world.”
I steered him back to his narrative. “It was the French pox then?”
He nodded grimly.
Next he recounted how he had leaned close to Adelia Blaine and revealed in a whisper that he was not who he had presented himself to be, not Auguste Dupin nor any long-lost relative but merely a man in search of a sepulchered truth. Her eyes, he said, registered neither surprise nor indignation.
“I cannot tell you much about myself,” he explained to her, “for my life too now hangs in the balance. But it has been suggested to me that you alone might shed some light on the mystery I now pursue. The mystery of the death of Mary Rogers.”
At the mention of this name, a light shot through the dark clouds of Miss Blaine’s eyes.
“You knew Mary Rogers,” he said.
“She was my friend.” Her voice was flat, her mouth without expression.
“You know how she died?”
To this she gave no answer.
“You were very good friends then? You and Mary?”
“Since childhood,” said Miss Blaine.
“And you maintained that friendship all these years.”
“We did.”
“Were you with her on the Sunday of her disappearance?”
Again, the silence of a stone.
And now Poe had little idea what line of questioning to pursue. There was but one thing he wished to hear—the name of Mary Rogers’s murderer. A confirmation of what he already knew. Perhaps, as well, a motive.
“Her fiancé, Mr. Payne,” Poe said. “I have met with him but briefly, twice, and on both occasions he struck me as a man laid low by genuine grief.”
“As well he should be.”
There was something in her tone that seemed amiss to Poe, some faint hint of animus.
“You did not approve of their betrothal?”
“He is an ignorant man.”
“How so?”
She blinked, a cold, reptilian gesture. “He saw only what he chose to see.”
“And this was?”
“A pretty young woman to become his wife. To provide him with children. To round out the life he envisioned.”
“He treated her badly? Is this what you imply?”
“Not badly, no. But he was indifferent to her as a woman.”
Poe thought he knew what she meant by this, yet struggled then, as he did now in the re-creation for my benefit, with how to clarify the matter so as to permit no misunderstanding.
“And so, for that,” he said, “she sought the company of Lieutenant Andrews?”
Her answer was a vacuous stare.
“Miss Blaine,” he implored, “I was led to believe that you would provide for me this information. I was told by the barman at the roadhouse in Weehawken—”
And suddenly her stoicism cracked like thin glass. At the mention of the barman, her face screwed up into a mask of pure misery, and she threw herself forward and buried her face in her hands and she sobbed so hysterically that Poe was at a loss as to how to comfort her. He could not wrap her in his arms or even stroke her hair, for he had been admonished that they must not touch.
He could only murmur to her, “Miss Blaine. Miss Blaine, please.” Words to no avail except to exacerbate the sobbing to the extent that she was soon gasping for air, as if she were suffocating on her own tears.
He paused in the narrative now to gaze into the distance, to scrutinize some distant notion. At length he asked, “Does life not sometimes strike you as more a dream than as the wakeful portion?”
I thought back to my days and nights at the Old Brewery, much of it blurred together already as a single nightmare.
He said, “Even when one knows in his heart that life is not poetry, that it lacks the beauty and order of poetry, still it comes as a shock to learn how thoroughly deplorable this life can be.”
In years since, I have often recalled the look on Poe’s face when he made this remark, and have used it as a measure from time to time of my own misery, and have, strangely, derived some solace from it. For I have come to learn that there are three kinds of individuals in this world. The first is blind to all life’s corrosive and degrading forces, and goes about in blithe ignorance until struck head-on by one of them, and is thereafter irremediably broken and crippled by the fear that another blow waits lurking just around the corner. The second type is able to accept life for what it is, imperfectible. With this acceptance comes the possibility of happiness, of moments stolen where and how one can, exquisitely precious because of their very transience. The third type of individual views the world’s imperfection as a personal affront to his aesthetics and logic, and can never fully immerse himself in its transitory pleasures for he is more attuned to the transience than to the pleasure, and every day of imperfection exacerbates his frustration, his need to provoke change, until either his spirit or his body is broken by an ambition that can never be fulfilled.
I consider myself fortunate to have become, in my middle years, the second kind of individual. The shit of life, if you will excuse this vulgarity, no longer clings to me as it did to Mr. Poe.
In any event, to return to Blackwell’s Island. To that brown, bare room with insufficient light and a stifling air of doom. A place neither Poe nor Adelia Blaine wished to be.
And so, painful as it was for him to prod her, he did so. “You tell me that the lieutenant and Mary Rogers were intimately involved,” he said. “Yet Mr. Andrews denies any such relationship.”
With a fingertip she wiped one eye and then the other. “I never said they were involved. Never even said I knew anything about the man.”
“I recall that you did.”
“Then you recall wrong. I never mentioned his name. It was you that said it.”
“Is this now your claim?” Poe asked. “That you are as ignorant of him as he is of you?”
“I know a lot more about him than he would want me to.”
“And where did you come by this knowledge?”
“From Mary, of course.”
“It is she who told you of their love affair?”
She put a hand to the collar of her blouse, fussed with a button or pin. “I never said anything like that.”
“I remember distinctly—”
“It was you who said it, not me. You only think I agreed to it because it’s what you believe. But believing don’t always make it so, does it?”
“Miss Blaine,” he said evenly, “my patience is wearing thin. I have covered every block of Gotham already, but I assure you that I will not let this matter fade. If need be, I will provide the police with both your name and the name of the barman who first directed me to you.”
“You let him out of it!”
Again, the chink in her armor. He thrust in his dagger.
“I assume that Madame Lehnort is unaware of her employee’s disease.”
She leaned across the table as if to spit on him. “And if she finds out, we’ll know who told her, now, won’t we?”
“I have no intention of—”
“Because if you think I don’t have friends out there, you’re wrong. I have friends of all sorts. And some of them you don’t never want to meet.”
“As I said, I have no intention of revealing your secret. He is not the man I hope to bring to justice.”
She glared at him a few moments longer, then settled back in her chair and sat with arms folded over her bosom, a hand at her throat.
“How long have you two been sweethearts?” Poe asked.
She sat silent for a full minute. In the end her need to
talk, to reconnect with the world of tenderer emotions, prevailed. “It would be a year this November.”
“Did you first meet him at the roadhouse?”
She shook her head. “The Sportsman’s.” She read Poe’s silence as censure. “And he wasn’t like you neither. He didn’t judge me ruined for it.”
“Nor do I.”
She gave him a searing look.
“The point I endeavor to make,” Poe told her, “is this. I have no desire to involve this man unnecessarily. But if he is indeed involved in—”
“He had nothing to do with any of it! Didn’t I tell you that already?”
“Then who, Miss Blaine, are you striving to protect? Not Mary Rogers certainly. Unlike the rest of us, she is well beyond retribution now.”
“She is, but I’m not.”
He felt he had no choice but to state the obvious. “How more miserable can you be made?”
She did not move.
“And if you think your silence is protecting the barman,” he told her, “you are mistaken. He is a very frightened man, Miss Blaine, I can tell you that. And with good reason. I have already seen one man whose throat was slit as protection of the lieutenant’s secret.”
She fingered her collar; she shook her head slowly back and forth. In the dim light he could not read her mouth as either a smile or a scowl. “You got it all so wrong,” she told him. “You don’t have any idea.”
“I am here to learn.”
“And what good will that do anybody? What good will it do for Mary’s mother? Answer me that. And Mr. Payne, who even though I don’t like him much never treated Mary bad. And Mary’s aunt. And Mr. Anderson at the tobacco shop. Just think what this would do to all of them.”
“How can I think it when I know not what this is?”
She sat there shaking her head back and forth.
“The one you most protect with your silence,” Poe said, “is the murderer himself.”
She lowered her eyes, looked at the table. “I did it to her myself,” she said.
On Night's Shore Page 29