This, then, was Van Rensselaer’s solution. Hobbs would be banished to the splendors of Europe. As for Poe, all intimation that he had had a hand in Mary Rogers’s death was wiped away.
“Looks like Van Ren ain’t such a bad sort after all,” I observed.
Poe lowered his chin nearly to his chest and looked at me askance. “If he has done me any good, it was not out of goodness. He wants no more attention paid to the girl’s death, that’s all. My vindication is a necessary adjunct.”
The next morning was a slow one, subdued, gray, not threatening rain but not allowing much sunshine either. We lingered over breakfast, took our time cleaning up, took our time packing. I was sent to a neighboring farm to hire a man with a wagon to take us where nobody wished to go, back to the cottage off Bloomingdale Road, closer to the city in which Poe would still have to make his living.
And the sooner the better. On the previous afternoon I had voiced an opinion that we might be better advised to stay with Mrs. Curran awhile longer. She was eager to have us, and Mrs. Clemm and Sissie were eager to abide. But Poe insisted that the family move at once. He was in a hurry, I think, to validate himself in their eyes as a capable provider. And, in his own eyes, as a man who would not run and hide.
That is why his behavior once we were back at the cottage struck me as so odd, so contradictory. He came to the door carrying some small package, opened the door and looked inside, and then released the mightiest of sighs and turned and slouched onto his wicker chair on the porch. There he remained while the rest of us unloaded the wagon and dismissed the driver.
His behavior angered me, this sudden loss of all initiative. When I spoke to him, he merely grunted in reply.
“What’s made you so worthless all of a sudden?” I asked.
He would not even turn his head to look at me.
I reasoned as a child then that he was upset with me for some reason, because I would again be taking up precious space in his cramped cottage, or because I had somehow usurped his manhood by arriving at Mrs. Curran’s loaded down with packages when he had none. In any case I blamed myself, thought him fed up with my presence, and after the few belongings were returned to the cottage, I said to Mrs. Clemm, as blithely as I knew how, “Well, that’s done. Time for me to be heading back to the Newsboys’, I guess.”
Because we were in the kitchen at the time, not far from the front door, she drew me closer to the opposite wall and leaned close to me when she spoke. “Would you consider staying for a while?” she asked in a voice not much above a whisper. “Another day or so?”
She had looked once or twice at the open door when she spoke. I now did the same. “I think he’s gotten tired of having me around.”
“That’s not it at all,” she said. She stroked the back of my head and seemed, to my eyes, on the verge of tears.
“It’s just the way he gets at times. I can see it coming on him now. And I think it might do him some good to have you here. It might do us all some good.”
“What is it you see?”
“It comes over him from time to time. A shadowy kind of thing. An eclipse of his spirit. Because he tries so hard, you see, and never seems to get anywhere. His father had it too, his real father, the one who disappeared on him. It’s not his fault, Augie, so you must not think ill of him for it. He cannot help its approach. It comes over him sometimes like a great black bird, and there seems little he can do to hold it at bay.”
“A sadness?” I asked.
“More than that, deeper than that. He gets, sometimes, so that the thing he wants most in life is to cease all thought and being.”
“He wants to be dead?”
“More, more than that. He wants to have never been.”
46
For two days afterward, he wore his darkness like a woolen cloak buttoned tight around his shoulders. No word or gesture could bring him out of it. His gaze remained unfocused, weary of seeing, and drifted past each one of us with small glimmer of recognition.
I could not fathom his disposition. Had he not accomplished what he had set out to do? Should he not instead be exultant?
Mrs. Clemm explained it to me. “It is because we are back to nothing,” she said. “Yes, he has a few dollars in his pocket now, but in fact we are worse off than ever. Because his reputation has been stained with lies. But that, Augie, is just the outer reason. There must be inner reasons too, which none of us can know. We can only take care of him until the better part of this cloud passes over.”
She made it known that I was not to disturb him in his brooding. Leave him to his darkened bedroom at whatever hour he retreated there. Leave him to his mornings huddled on the porch, his short walks down to the mouth of the lane. Leave him to stand there alone for the better part of an hour, glaring, seething, his heart boiling over with a rage even he did not understand. And when the rage grew cold, reducing him once again to an emptiness, leave him to his exhausted sleep, his brief annihilation.
I was not to speak to him unless he asked something of me. My job was simply to keep an eye on him. Follow discreetly when he wandered away from the cottage.
Be there as he courted madness, this was what she implied. So that I might pull him back, if necessary, from the brink of the abyss into which he gazed so longingly. As if I would know how to do so. As if any of us would.
In the meantime, Virginia took up the broom and dust cloth as best she could. She tired easily and often lost herself in the middle of a task, drifting off into the ether of her own troubled thoughts. From time to time she sang something to him in their bedroom. Other times they sat side by side and held hands and quietly wept.
In the mornings, soon after her usual chores of breakfast and cleaning, Mrs. Clemm left the house for several hours. She had dragged a battered portmanteau up from the basement and filled it with Poe’s manuscripts. Poe, watching from his rocker, did nothing to arrest her, but said only, “There’s a new one in the bedroom.”
The manuscripts of his poems and tales and essays were carried by her into town and peddled from door to door. Equipped with a list of names and addresses from one of his notebooks, she called on every editor in Gotham who might be inclined to purchase his work. It was a remarkable sight to watch her marching out the cottage door with suitcase in hand, and to know what she was up to, this woman as big as a man, homely, work roughened, but magisterial in her determination, off to importune the nation’s leading editors and publishers to exchange a few dollars for her son-in-law’s words.
Had she been successful at this even once, had she managed to place a single poem, Poe’s mood would no doubt have brightened immediately. A picayune for a couplet would have been like a strong rope tossed into his miasma, and he would have scurried, I am sure of it, to pull himself from the muck.
A writer, you see, is fashioned less of flesh and bone than he is of faith—faith in himself, in his own ability to create something of worth. But faith by its nature is a slippery thing, slick and insubstantial, and each time it slides away, it is harder to regrasp; it separates like mercury and rolls off in all directions. And if it slides away often enough, then someday, no matter how desperately he reaches out, his hands will come back empty. In that instance, there is no writer left. There is only the empty container, hollow and brittle as an empty glass, a vessel now so fragile that it can be shattered by as little as a high-pitched sound.
Come Friday, midmorning, he walked as usual to the end of the lane. But this time, instead of standing there with hands stuffed in his pockets, as slack as a scarecrow, he stretched his arms out at the shoulders, rolled his arms, and stretched his spine. Instead of staring at the ground, he looked into the sky, a perfect summer’s sky so smooth and robin’s-egg blue. He was coming out of his ennui, crawling up from the pit.
It was such an agreeable sight to behold that, while he performed those few minutes of exercise, I closed the distance
between us, did not hang back my thirty yards but went to his side and, infused with hero worship once more, emulated his movements. He looked at me and grinned.
“Vegetables, fruit, water, and bread,” he began, quoting Sylvester Graham’s recipe for fitness.
I finished the quote. “Fresh air and hard work stand a man in good stead.”
We exercised a while longer. “Good,” he finally said. “Good enough for now.”
It was not long after that when we heard Mrs. Clemm trudging up behind us with the portmanteau. Poe reached out and took the suitcase from her hand. “Not today, dearest,” he told her. “Come Monday I will take up the lance anew.”
Her eyes lit up, her broad face beamed. “I won’t say no,” she told him. “Who would ever have thought a stack of words could be so heavy?”
“Think of the ones I carry in here!” he teased, and tapped the side of his head.
Before she returned to the cottage, there came the cloppity rumble of a conveyance approaching, and we all turned to watch it coming up Bloomingdale Road, heading north, a Dearborn pulled by a chestnut bay. Poe raised his hand as the vehicle passed to wave at the driver, a stout little bearded man who answered with a curt nod.
“I watched that same wagon go past last evening,” Poe said.
Mrs. Clemm mused, “Wouldn’t it be lovely to ride about in one of them all day?”
The Dearborn was a mere box of a wagon, nothing fancy, a covered shell with curtains enclosing the sides. But for Mrs. Clemm it must have represented the highest luxury she might aspire to.
“And someday you shall,” he told her. Arm in arm they returned to the cottage.
The rest of the day was passed in, if not high spirits, at least the hope of higher spirits to come. Poe retired to his bedroom but not to brood; he sat with a tablet of paper on his lap and made notes for himself, laid plans. His ambition was returning, a low fire yet but warming. By Monday he would once again be ablaze with it.
After our five o’clock supper, he was his old self again. “Fried bananas,” he said out of the blue.
Virginia clapped her hands together. “Oh yes!” she cried.
To me Poe said, “Master Dubbins? Shall we have fried bananas or shall we not?”
“It’s okay with me if we do.”
He rose from his chair, went to a cupboard, and took out the small pail used for carrying beer from the local grogshop. He came back to hand me a shilling, a dime, and some pennies.
“There’s a greengrocer on Bloomingdale Road at Sixtieth,” he said. “I would be pleased if you would go there for me, take the horsecar if you can find one, and bring us back a bunch of bananas. As many as you can buy. They must be ripe but not overly soft. In the meantime I will fetch a drink for my songbird, who perhaps will serenade us later as we feast.”
I took the coins but cut a glance at Mrs. Clemm. She smiled and told me with a small nod that he was all right now; this was not some odd brachiation in an unpredictable temperament.
And so down the lane we went once more, Poe swinging the beer bucket at his side. At the mouth of the lane, where I would turn right and he left, we saw again the same Dearborn that had passed us earlier, but this time stationary, pulled to the side of the road some forty yards north.
“In all likelihood a broken axle,” Poe said. “Those damnable cobblestones in town, and out here nothing but ruts and bottomless pits. They’ll break a man’s bones if he doesn’t tread carefully.”
“You’d think whoever owns that rig would unharness the horse,” I said. “Why walk for help when you can ride?”
Poe replied that he would survey the animal for signs of distress before returning home, and we parted company. In half an hour I was back at the cottage, out of breath from having trotted most of the way with a bunch of bananas under my arm.
Mrs. Clemm had a good fire going on the stove and had set out the skillet and sugar and fetched the butter from the springhouse. I laid the bananas on the table and then produced from my pocket a small paper sack. “Look what else the grocer gave me,” I said.
She opened the bag and peered inside. “Cinnamon!” she exclaimed.
“He told me I had to have it, wouldn’t take no for an answer. Said you couldn’t make fried bananas without it.”
Mrs. Clemm’s eyes were dancing. “Won’t Eddie be pleased!” she said. “Have you ever tried fried bananas, Augie?”
“No, ma’am, I haven’t.”
“Eddie makes them with so much caramel sauce you’d think we were as rich as maharajas.”
I nearly swooned at the thought of so much sweetness, coming, as it would, hard on the heels of such bitterness.
Virginia now joined us in the kitchen. “On Thanksgiving he likes to have it over bread pudding. That’s heaven too.”
“I never tasted bread pudding neither,” I said.
“Then you shall,” said Mrs. Clemm. “By Sunday at the latest.”
We were all three of us so anxious for the treat that we peeled and sliced the bananas and for a good while sat there staring at them as we awaited Poe’s return.
Finally the wood in the stove had burned down and the bananas were turning brown on the plate. Mrs. Clemm by this time had gone to stand at the door. Virginia had moved to the sofa and was sitting with her head laid back, eyes closed. She, finally, was the one to break our silence. She turned to me and smiled sweetly.
“Will you run out the lane for me, Augie? And remind Mr. Poe that we are waiting here at home for him?”
I knew full well what sometimes happens to men when they visit a grogshop. “What if he ain’t ready to come back with me yet?”
“Then you will do whatever you must, won’t you? Whatever you must to bring him home to us.”
I nodded and stood and headed for the door, slow of movement at first, uncertain, afraid of how Poe might react when he turned from his glass to see me standing there beside him. Afraid too of the way Poe might look at me then, a black look I had imagined gone with my mother, the curl of her mouth, the way her hand would come up, almost indifferently, to knock me aside.
But Virginia had asked this of me, and I would not fail her. Out into the dooryard I went, the summer night in full dusk. At the end of the yard I broke into a trot. Then at the end of the lane I turned toward the grogshop and immediately sensed some inconsistency in the air, something amiss in the balance of this crepuscular night, and I came to a standstill, stood motionless for a moment, then made a quarter turn, looked north, and understood.
The Dearborn was gone. I walked slowly toward where it should have been. Until finally I recognized the two dark objects lying on the ground. The first, innocuous, a bushelful of horse dung. But a few feet beyond it, the thing that gripped my heart—a small tin pail, overturned, and an ebony sheen of beer-soaked earth.
47
“It had to’ve been Hobbs’s doing,” I argued. “Who else could it’ve been?”
Virginia said, “A man like Hobbs would not ride in a Dearborn. Was it not a Victoria that brought his daughter here?”
“I’m not saying he was in there himself. He don’t get his own hands dirty. Besides, if he wanted to cart somebody off without being suspected, he wouldn’t use his own wagon, now, would he?”
She could not bring herself to imagine that her husband had been abducted. “You’re certain he is not in the grogshop yet?”
“The barman said he came in, he bought his beer, he left. Never even had a glass for himself. And now there’s the empty pail, still wet. Right there before your eyes.”
Still she shook her head. “An admirer, then. Who prevailed upon him for a ride in the country and a bit of conversation. Surely it cannot be—”
Mrs. Clemm interrupted. “Surely he would not toss away a brimming pail.”
“He will return home any minute now,” Virginia said. “He would not w
orry us like this.”
And so we sat. The fire in the stove died out. The bananas blackened and drew a speckling of tiny black fruit flies. Virginia fell asleep in Poe’s rocker with his favorite shawl drawn around her. A half hour later she awoke coughing, a racking, glutinous, wrenching cough that was calmed finally by Mrs. Clemm’s pounding on her back.
Virginia was exhausted by this, of course, and was soon tucked into bed.
Later her mother returned to stand awhile longer at the front door, gazing out into the darkness. “I wish you would eat those bananas,” she told me. “I can’t bear to have to throw them out.”
“I’m not hungry now,” I answered, though my belly was hollow with an old familiar ache.
We went out onto the porch and sat side by side on the deacon’s bench. General Tom came and walked from one end of the porch to the other, looking for Poe. I patted my lap, and the General leaped onto it and curled beneath my hand.
The night sky had clouded over, had gone from lavender to charcoal to a dull and uniform black. The moon was but a small and fuzzy slice of gray. We could see not a single star.
In time Mrs. Clemm admitted to herself what I already knew. “Something’s happened to him.”
It was the acknowledgment I had been waiting for. I leapt to my feet. “I’m going to town.”
She sat motionless, hands clenched. “Where would you search?”
“Hobbs has got him somewhere.”
“Where?”
“All I know is where to start looking. Where the shit begins.”
Instead of admonishing me, she stood and went into the house and checked on Virginia and a minute later came back onto the porch and eased shut the door. “Take me there,” she said.
• • •
We made decent time on the final leg of the trip by catching a ride in a drummer’s wagon; of course I had to empty out my pockets before the driver would agree to take us aboard. But by all appearances, we nevertheless arrived too late. The Hobbs mansion stood as black as a sealed tomb. We studied it from the street, disbelieving, as if we had fully expected to see Poe standing calmly behind a well-lit window, awaiting his rescue.
On Night's Shore Page 33