by Joel Rose
So while the battle of Irish and native gangs raged on the streets in front of them, the vast majority of Tommy Coleman’s mourners understandably repaired to one or another of these local Paradise Square emporiums to eat and drink while keeping in view the pitched brawl.
The general alarm had by now been most thoroughly sounded. Old Hays considered wading into the fray, as he once had, the brash maneuver for which he had once been renowned, but he was not that young man any longer. He did have his constable’s staff in hand, but he chose, at least for the moment, to stay the high ground and wait for the support of guard and his constabulary.
After fifteen minutes of bloody clashing, the Bowery Butcher Boys managed to break free from the pack and circumvent the flank of the Plug Uglies, overwhelming these hated toughs and pushing them back with one sweeping effort.
Eventually the natives rushed the Irishers’ clubhouse on Mott Street with every intention of rendering maximum destruction and harm to this abhorred brotherhood’s residence. But the resilient papists, with the help of the surly Dead Rabbits and Chichesters, beat the natives into retreat, and by means of a brilliant counterattack forced their fierce and detested adversaries north on Orange and east down Hester, out of the Points and back into the Bowery, where they took refuge deep in the bowels of a building on Rivington Street.
The Irish horde charged in behind the Rabbit standard (on this day the corpse of a snow-shoed hare held aloft on a twelve-foot pole), wrecking the place, angrily tearing apart seventeen apartments in two separate tenements.
Reports reached Hays. One city marshal, he was told, had come on the scene. Recognizing his duty, the man had waded into the fray. The Irish ruffians were on him in an instant. They stripped him naked and beat him to the sidewalk. Ultimately he managed to get his assailants off him. He staggered all the way to the station house on North William Street, there to raise the alarm.
The constabulary responded in force to drive the warring factions back to their respective neighborhoods, but it did more harm than good. The fighting was broken up but the gangsters, both Irish and native-born, now spread, and instead of venting their anger and frustration on each other, they became indiscriminate and began to waste the city at large.
At the beginning of the day the sun had been out and an unaccustomed warmth had been in the air. Citizens were tempted to doff their coats and shawls to revel in the mild air. But suddenly and without warning the weather changed. Whereas it had been warm, now it grew cold. In the space of little more than four hours, the temperature plummeted forty degrees. And by the next day had dropped to a bone-numbing seventeen below zero.
In the hands of criminals, the Second, Fourth, Sixth, and Seventh wards burned as unrest raged. The rioters turned their fury on all they encountered: stables, car barns, private homes, tenement apartment buildings, offices of public finance, wagons, hacks, drays, carryalls, trucks, omnibuses, even fellow citizens.
For the general public there was no recourse, because the very gangsters who were burning the city manned the fire companies whose charge it was to put the fires out. Even honest folk found themselves milling about, marauding and looting. In a car barn on Catherine’s Slip one ginger-haired individual, said to be a hod carrier apprehended in the act of torching a hayloft, was hanged from a streetlight arm, and the police proved unavailable to cut him down, or even to make an appearance on the scene. The man’s thoroughly frozen body, stripped of clothing save his blue woolen pants, bunched at the ankles, dangled there for three miserable days.
46
Sergeant McArdel
Edgar Poe, since slipping from Hays and his barouche at the farm depot on the upper Bloomingdale Road, had wandered for a week through woods, pastures, and shantytowns in the city’s upper reaches, finally blindly finding his way back to the city proper, sick and hungry. On Doyers Street, at the crook of Murderers’ Bend, he had managed a small bottle of ether from a half-Chinese, and now, through a hangover haze, stood in front of the hanged man’s desiccated body.
As he watched the dead man sway, Poe recalled vividly the most frightening thing he could imagine when a boy was to feel an ice-cold hand laid upon his face in a pitch-black room.
At the time the image had so terrified him he would often keep his head buried under the covers until he nearly suffocated himself.
His stepfather, John Allan, had little sympathy for his shenanigans. He scolded the lad, lecturing that the boy picked up such nonsense from lazing about the slave quarters with his friend, the house nigra, Dabney Dandridge, listening to the foolish ghost stories stupidly regaled by the Negro slaves while sitting about in the dark around their dying cookfires, scaring themselves, and him, half to death.
Allan, a Scots mercantilist, scoffed and told the child, a laddie he would never consider his son, to cease and desist from such nonsense or face the consequence.
Yet even now, so many years removed from his boyhood, he stood remembering those days, distraught in the icy cold, shivering and ailing, unable to rid his mind of another time, when passing a graveyard, he jumped into his stepmother Frances Allan’s arms, begging, “Save me! Save me! They will run after me and drag me down.”
Powerless to tear his eyes away, he moaned. In front of him swung the deep-frozen body of an individual he could not imagine ever having known; yet something about the dead so familiar. Still, on that spot identification seemed beyond his fevered ken as the body, suspended from its rope, twisted in the ghastly gale.
Icicles hung from the dead man’s closed eyelids, from his splayed nostrils, from his twisted blue lips. Hoarfrost pocked his cheeks and chest. Urine and feces, the bodily fluids frozen solid, ran from shriveled member and mottled purple marbleized haunches down thick, hairy, naked legs.
Like the twin blades of scissors, the cold sliced off the East and North rivers, converging on the lower island, snipping off far below the root all hope for human comfort. Poe pulled his old West Point greatcoat tighter to his emaciated body. He coughed up sputum, green and black, hawked on the hardscrabble ground. The wind blew the expectorant back into his face. He wiped himself with his coat sleeve.
“Time to go home,” he addressed the aggrieved body of the dead man, and suddenly remembered him, Sergeant McArdel of the Night Watch, from the Tombs. Of course. The man had oft escorted him through the corridor to John Colt’s cell. The ginger hair was the giveaway. “If Muddie will have some soup, Sergeant, it will surely be our body guard,” Poe addressed the corpse. “I feel a bout of ill health coming on. Do you?”
He broke away from his transfixion, leaving him of the frozen-stiff ginger hair and grotesquely stretched neck twitching in the wind, and started north, hugging the East River docks.
The city had become quiet in the aftermath of the last days’ melee. The Twenty-seventh Regiment was now in attendance on the streets and corners. The rioters had finally gone home. Along the waterfront, a splintered wake of broken slats and rowboats in dry dock, smashed windows of warehouses and feed bins, overturned barrels, and whinnying horses, stood the legacy of urban warfare. But this evidence soon gave way only to frozen swamp as Poe made his plodding pilgrim’s progress.
He had set his destination as Weehawken Street, to an inn he knew called the Lubber’s Friend, where he had a recollection someone, an acquaintance (could it have been John Colt’s brother Sam?), had vouched him a room.
Was it not here, at this destination, the Lubber’s Friend, where he had once stayed with she who was no longer of this earth?
Could he remember? For the life of him, could he?
Upon first setting out, every few steps he turned, peered back over his shoulder, heard the creak of the rope as Sergeant McArdel of the Night Watch slowly spun. Then it was gone, out of earshot, out of sight, and he was beyond the river bend where it turned west-northwest at Houston Street.
He took Lewis Street, past the shipyards, reached Eighth Street via that route, continued due west, and soon was crossing the expanse of land once th
e farmstead of Peter Stuyvesant. He cut up two blocks and looked in at the St. Mark’s churchyard, the spot where seven nights before he had laid watch beneath the twin Dutch elm trees, his eyes trained on the still-open grave of John Colt, holding his breath lest the spirits of the graveyard enter his body.
In self-absorption the poet thinks everything is known. His eyes aglow, a fire beyond malnutrition burns, madness, imbalance, within.
When finally he reaches a place of warmth, the poor inn on Weehawken Street (indeed there is a bedstead reserved for him, and paid in full besides), he slumps immediately at the writing table and composes a letter to his Muddie in Philadelphia.
“Oh my dear, darling Mother,” he writes, clutching his brow. “It is now three weeks since I saw you, and in all that time your poor Eddie has scarcely drawn a breath except in intense agony. My clothes are horrible and I am so ill.”
47
For His Soul
For his soul he could not have told you what he was doing on the riverbank. By a path obscure and lonely he made his way, until he stood on the rocky shore, gazing out on the water.
To the south the harbor lies, molten liquid pewter.
In the pit of his stomach he feels something—a queasiness—an unease.
He wades out into the low reeds, soaking his shoes, his wool trouser legs. The waves rise and fall, the river a chop. Nausea descends, momentarily dispelled by the relentless cold water lapping. The unrest returns, seizing his intestines, twisting them.
He closes his eyes, and he has a vision. He sees a hand, a woman’s hand, his Mary’s hand, break the water, reach out, beckon.
Hatless, dressed in black, he stumbles back into the woods, trying to remember where he is going, but cannot. He remembers his once-fiancée, Mary Starr, from Baltimore, but now married, with the name—he has learned—of Jenkins, and living somewhere in Jersey City. He has already crossed the Hudson three times that day looking for her. When he knew her, she was going by the name Mary Devereaux. He finds the path along the shore back to the ferry quay, past the Sybil’s Cave, past the lovely Elysian Fields.
At the dock, the ferryboat is waiting. He crosses back to the city again, pacing the deck, asking everyone he meets, do they know the lovely Mary Devereaux? do they know where the lovely Mary Devereaux lives?
He has already been to her husband’s place of business once that day to find her address, but now the information has wriggled from his mind and he is at a loss. The boat arrives at the Courtland Street docks in New York City. He rides it back to Jersey City without getting off, then back to New York, then back to Jersey City, with him still on board, still inquiring of anyone and everyone, do they know Mary Devereaux, he means Mary Jenkins, mumbling he will go to hell for the address of his Mary whateverhernameis, if he must.
Finally, he finds a deck hand who takes him at his word (later, when Mr. Jenkins, the husband, a merchant tailor, shows up on his way home from work, the navvy will tell him a crazy man was looking for his wife) and says he knows the place where she resides.
No one is at home. Mrs. Jenkins is shopping in the city with her sister when Poe arrives. Upon their return, from inside the house the door opens as if by its own volition, and Eddie stands beneath the jamb to greet them.
Mary, who has not seen him in a number of years, since she visited him and his child wife in Philadelphia, immediately sees he has been out on one of his sprees. His eyes do not focus, and his mouth is awry.
“Well,” she says, “Edgar, so nice to see you.”
His eyes flash, and he spits the words. “So you have married that cursed man!”
She is taken aback. “Yes, I have married,” she admits, “but he is not cursed. No, he is kind, and he is attentive.”
A slow smile creeps on Poe’s face. “Do you love him truly?” he asks.
“Truly?”
“Did you marry him for love?”
She is affronted. “That is nobody’s business. That is between my husband and myself.”
“You don’t love him,” he persists. Then his voice takes on a different tone, almost pleading. “You do love me.” He very nearly weeps. “You know you do. Oh, Mary!”
They stand and stare at each other.
Finally her face softens. She asks him if he would like to stay for tea.
He takes his seat at the table but eats nothing, and becomes so distracted by a bowl of radishes he seizes a table knife and with quick, hacking strokes so that pieces fly all over the table, reduces the red radishes to mincemeat.
At first Mary and her sister are stunned, but then Mary laughs, and her sister follows, and then so does Poe.
He insists she sing the song she knows to be his favorite, “Come, Rest in This Bosom,” penned by the Irish poet Thomas Moore, and so she does:
“I know not, I ask not, if guilt’s in that heart?
I but know that I love thee, whatever thou art.
Oh! What was love made for, if ’tis not the same
Through joy and through torment, through glory and shame.”
Almost immediately upon completion of this canticle, Poe gets up to leave. He compliments her, telling her she still sings with wondrous sweetness, and it is only a few days later his aunt, Mrs. Clemm, shows up at her door looking, she explains, for “Eddie dear.”
Mrs. Clemm tells Mrs. Jenkins she has tracked her son-in-law from Philadelphia to New York to New Jersey, and now finally to her home. She says Virginia is beside herself with anxiety and worry. “If he does not write her twice a day,” she confides, “my poor daughter begins to fret and descend into a state until she is nearly crazy, refusing to eat or drink, despite anything I can do.”
A search party is organized. Within hours Poe is found with twigs and leaves in his hair, and moss and brambles stuck to his clothing, not far from the Sybil’s Cave, wandering in the woods on the northernmost outskirts of Jersey City.
“What a thing it is to be pestered with a wife!” he gripes when told of Sissy’s concern.
Undaunted, Mrs. Clemm corrals him to take him back to their home in the City of Brotherly Love, where she puts him to bed. He remains in delirium, distraught, for the better part of a week, moaning one word, the proper name “Mary,” over and over again, through his fever.
A Year and a Half Later
APRIL 13, 1844
48
The Hunt for the Murderer of Mary Rogers Resumes
What was it?
Images of her death never left him.
But of her murderer?
He could not picture him. Was it Poe? Was it another?
Some fourteen months before, in February of 1843, the third installment of the author’s “Marie Rogêt” story had appeared after a month’s delay in Snowden’s Ladies’ Companion.
Olga had impressed on the same printer’s imp of her acquaintance, even before that number hit the newsstand, securing proofs in January, only hours after the type had been locked down.
She returned home that day and pored over the galleys.
But what had come of it?
Hays, awaiting his daughter’s scrutiny, had hovered over her.
There was no real way to know what had been cut or added to the original text. It was clear Poe had afforded no real answer to any murder.
After much close scrutiny Olga made case at least for the final two paragraphs having been tacked on.
“I venture the original story stopped right here”—she pointed out the words “With God all is Now” to her father. “The following paragraph after this sentiment takes up, ‘I repeat, then, that I speak of certain things only of coincidences…’
“Papa, here, at least in part, I would wager, is last-minute addition. To my thinking, this passage is out of character for Mr. Poe. Repetition of a nature so crude and poorly executed is not his style. He is far too elegant for such self-conscious stumbling. Not to mention, within the context, he digresses from Marie, names Mary Rogers, and labels her fate ‘unhappy.’ To my judgment, he has
made sloppy work of his emotions and uncertainty, evidencing his confusion.”
Hays considered. “Is there more, Olga?” he had asked.
“He names no murderer,” Olga answered, “if that is what you are asking, Papa. He makes only sketchy reference to Marie dying in an aborted attempt to terminate a pregnancy. It would seem in the previous draft he made claim of a lover killing her in the clearing. I doubt Mr. Poe was in much condition to do much additional. Nor does it seem that he had the time. A single paragraph earlier where he makes clumsy case to charge, then excuse, the clearing as the scene of the crime. But, truthfully, even this is misconstrued. In my opinion, Papa, Mr. Poe has been taken up short by Mrs. Loss’s admission during her delirium that Mary Rogers died during the administration of a premature delivery.”
Hays hesitated. “So in the end, Olga, would you say Poe has exonerated himself or implicated himself?”
“By tone alone, his own ineptitude exculpates the author. If pressed, Papa, I would declare Mr. Poe an innocent. His crime not one of secret insight and murder, but of short time and poor writing.”
Studying his daughter, Old Hays noted the skill of her delving, the certitude of her thinking, the concert of her personal emotion.
He took her wisdom; his investigation, for what it was, going elsewhere (and nowhere) until some fourteen months later, in the early afternoon of April 13, 1844, sitting at his Tombs office, the high constable received official summons instructing him to report without delay to the office at City Hall of the newly elected mayor of the metropolis, the Honorable James Harper, the same James Harper of the Harper Brothers publishing firm.
THE NEOPHYTE MAYOR-ELECT sat large and lugubrious behind his polished black teak desk, carried over from his publishing house. He stood when Hays entered and extended his hand. “Good to see you again, High Constable,” he said.