Atlantis: Three Tales (14 page)

Sam seized the hand to shake—in his own hand with their nails like helmets curving the tops of the enlarged first joints, their forward rims like visors. “Sam.” He shook vigorously—let go, and put his hands down beside him. “My name is Sam.” No, the man was not particularly looking at them. “My birthday's just coming up—” he felt suddenly expansive—“and it happens during the transit of Mercury.”

“Does it now? And the last year of construction on this bridge, here—in 1882—took place under the last transit of Venus! A fascinating
man,” the man said, leaving Sam for a moment confused. “When you live in the same room as someone, realize when you go to the bathroom, or leave by the front door, or simply stop to gaze out the window, you're doubtless doing exactly what he did, walking the same distances, seeing what he saw, feeling what he felt, it gives you an access to the bodily reality of a fellow you could never get at any other way—unless, of course, you went out in a boat on the river yourself, and, underneath, stood up, pulled down your pants, and let fly into the flood!” Playfully the man hit at Sam's shoulder once more, then turned to the water, sniggering.

At contact, realizing what the man was referring to, Sam felt the anxiety from the bridge's Brooklyn end flood back. Perhaps, he thought, he
should
excuse himself and go.

But the man said, snigger now a smile and face gone thoughtful: “Sam—now
that's
the name of a poet. There's the biography I should
really
write.”

A tug pulled out from under the traffic way's edge—as the dinghy had floated out when Sam had been nearer Brooklyn.

“Pardon?”

“A marvelous, wonderful, immensely exciting poet—named Sam. Another kraut. Roebling—John Augustus—was born in Prussia—Mühlhausen!” He pronounced it with a crisp, German accent, like some vaudeville comic (Mr. Horstein?) taking off Kaiser Wilhelm. “But Sam was born in Vienna. His parents brought him here when he was seven or eight. No grammar, no spelling, and scarcely any form, but a quality to his work that's unspeakably eerie—and the most convincing gusto. Still, by the time he was your age, Sam was as American as advertising or apple pie. He died about seven years ago—I never met him. But—do you know Woodstock?”

“Pardon?” Sam repeated.

“Amazing little town, in upstate New York—full of anarchists and artists and—” he leaned closer to whisper, the snigger back—“free lovers!” He sat back again. “It's full of all the things that make life really fine in this fatuous age. It's a place to learn the measurement of art and to what extent it's an imposition—a fulcrum of shifted energy! It's a
town where, on Christmas Eve morning, leaves blow in a wailing, sunny wind, all about outside the house, over the snow patches. It's a good place to roast turkeys and dance till dawn. A good place to climb mountains, or to curl up with a volume of the
Bough
—though you can get bored there, sweeping, drawing pictures, masturbating the cat . . . Well, that's where I spent this past winter. That's where I discovered Sam—somewhere between making heaps of apple sauce and cooking the turkey in front of an open fire in a cast-iron pig! I've been growing this mustache since about then. How do you think it looks?”

“It looks fine.” It looked rather thin for all that time—certainly thinner than Hubert's. “You found Sam's books?”

“Alas, poor Sam never
had
a book. But I found his notebooks and his manuscripts—a friend of mine had them. He let me borrow them so I could copy some of them out.”

“He lived in Woodstock?”

“Sam? No, he lived right here in the city—within walking distance of the bridge.” This time he gestured toward Manhattan. “Oh, Sam was very much a city poet. He lived just on the Lower East Side, there. Went to P. S. One-sixty at Suffolk and Rivington Street. Worked in the sweatshops—stole what time he could to go to the Metropolitan Museum, take piano lessons. He played piano just beautifully—that's what my friend said. And drew his pictures; and wrote his poems. He wrote a poem once, right here, while he was walking across the bridge with his oldest brother, Daniel—there were eight boys in the family, I believe.” Again the man spread his arms along the bench back; one hand went behind Sam's shoulder. “Late in November—just a month before Christmas—they were walking across, from Brooklyn, talking, like you and me, when Sam pulled out his notebook and started writing.” He closed his eyes, lifted his chin: “ ‘Is this the river “East”, I heard? / Where the ferry's, tugs, and sailboats stirred / And the reaching wharves from the inner land / Outstretched like the harmless receiving hand  . . . / But look! at the depths of the dripling tide / That dripples, re-ripples like locusts astride / As the boat turns upon the silvery spread / It leaves
strange—a shadow—dead

Through the cables, the dark, flat, and—yes—dead green spread behind the tug. Ripples crawled to the wake's rim, like silver beetles, to quiver and glitter at, though unable to cross, the widening borders.

“The river's very beautiful,” Sam said, because beauty was the aspect of nature and poetry it seemed safest to speak of.

“Oh, not for Sam the poet. If anything, for him it was terrifying. He was to die, looking out at it, from a window of the Manhattan Hospital for the Destitute, up on Ward's Island. They keep the dying there—and the insane. It's only an island away from Brother's, where the
General Slocum
beached after it burned up a thousand krauts and drenched them till they drowned, back in 'aught-four—makes you wonder what we needed a war for. It was the dust and the airless walls of his brother Adolf's leather shop where he worked that first seated in the floor of Sam's breath that terrible, spiritual, stinking illness—have you ever visited anyone dying of TB? They do stink, you know? Here in the city, you learn to recognize the stench—if you hang out in the slums. Nobody ever talks about that, but—
Lord!
—they smell. The lungs bleed and die and rot in their chests; and their breath and their bodies erupt with the putrefaction of it—in a way it's a purification too, I suppose. But before he was nineteen, Sam had already learned the rustle of nurses around his bed, like the husks of summer locusts. All the nuns—and he'd been reading Poe, the ghoul-haunted woodlands, that sort of stuff—once made our rogue tanton bolt St. Anthony's at Woodhaven, in terror for his life. That's where they first packed him off to die. For a while after that he stayed in New Jersey—Paterson—with Morris, another brother. But a few months later, he was back in another hospital—Sea View this time, on Staten Island.” Without closing his eyes, again the man recited: “‘And the silvery tinge that sparkles aloud / Like brilliant white demons, which a tide has towed / From the rays of the morning sun / Which it doth ceaselessly shine upon.' But that was written some years before, when he was well—walking across the bridge here with Daniel. Still: ‘loud, brilliant white demons . . .'? He had a very
excitable poetic apprehension—like any true poet would want to or—really—must have. Don't you think?”

By now Sam was feeling somewhat sulky there'd been no praise of his own eccentric bit of electrical information. He was not about to condone all this biography. “It doesn't sound all
that
good of a poem.”

“Well, in a way, it's not. But it's what poetry—real poetry—is made of: ‘ . . . The dripling tide that dripples, re-ripples . . .' Really, for any word-lover, that's quite wonderful! Words must create and tear down whole visions, cities, worlds!” (Sam was not sure if he was saying Sam—the other Sam—did this or didn't.) “And then, Sam was only a child when he died—twenty-three. I'm twenty-four now. A year older than Sammy. But I suppose he was too young, or too uneducated—too unformed to make
real
poems. But then, Keats, Rimbaud—all that material: you can feel its sheer verbal excitement, can't you?” He chuckled, as if to himself. “Twenty-four? In a moment I'll sneeze—and be
older
than Keats!”

Sam looked at the face now looking past his; at first he'd put it at Hubert's age. But there was a dissoluteness to it—the skin was not as clear as it might be, the eyes were not as bright as they should be; and, of course, just the way he spoke—that made the man seem older than twenty-four. Sam asked: “Don't poems have to make sense, besides just sounding nice?” A teacher down in Raleigh had once explained to them why Edgar Poe was not really a good poet, even after they'd all applauded her recitation of “The Bells.” Apparently Poe had not been a very good man—and people who were not good men, while they could write fun poems, simply
couldn't
write great ones.

“Oh, do they, now? But there're many interesting ways to seem not to be making sense while you're actually making very good sense indeed—using myths, symbols, poetic associations and rhetorical gestures. I never wrote my mother about Sam—just as I never wrote her about Jean's scooting off with Margy. I haven't written her about Emil yet, either—but I'll have to do that, soon. I wonder if I'll write her about you? Grace proffers the truth in a regular Sunday Delivery, and I send her back lies—of omission mostly. (Can you imagine, telling her about
some wild afternoon I had at Sand Street, skulking down behind the piled-up planks and plates beside the Yard?) So I just assume they can be corrected later. I dare say it's all quite incoherent to you. But it's leading up to something—a bigger truth. I just have to get my gumption up to it. At any rate—” he chuckled—“Sam was not only a poet. He drew pictures. He played the piano beautifully, as I said—at least that's what my friend who'd known him told me. You see, it was a poetic sensibility in embryo, struggling to express itself in all the arts. Do you play an instrument?”

“The cornet.” Playing the cornet, Sam had always figured, was like knowing about electricity in Hartford and the number of stories in the Woolworth Building. Or maybe a couple of magic tricks.

“Well, then, you see?” the man said. “You and little Sammy Greenberg are very much alike!”

“He was a jewboy!” Sam exclaimed—because till then, for all he'd been trying to withhold, he'd really begun to identify with his strange namesake who had once walked across the bridge and had seen, as had he, the water dripple, re-ripple . . . 

“Yes, he was, my young, high-yellow, towering little whippersnapper!” The man laughed.

Once more Sam started, because, though he knew the term—high-yellow—, nobody had ever actually called him that before. (He'd been called “nigger” by both coloreds
and
whites and knew what to do when it happened. But this was a new insult, though it was given so jokingly, he wondered if it was worth taking offense.) Sam put his hands on his thighs again, then put them back on the bench, to arch his fingertips against the wood, catching his nails in weathered grain. Was
this
man, Sam wondered a moment, Jewish? Wasn't there something Semitic in his features? Sam asked: “Do you write poems, too?”

“Me?” The young man brought one hand back, the slender fingers splayed wide against the sweater he wore under his corduroy jacket. “Do I write poems?
Me?”
He took a breath. “I'm in advertising, actually. Ah, but I
should
be writing poems. I
will
be writing poems. Have I ever written poems?” He scowled, shook his head.
“Perhaps
I've written
poems. Once I found a beautiful American word: ‘findrinny.' But no American writer ever wrote it down save Melville. And since it never made it from
Moby-Dick
into any dictionary (I've looked in half a dozen), I've finally settled on ‘spindrift.' Go look
it
up! It's equally lovely in the lilt and lay of what it means. Believe me, if I wrote a real poem, everyone would be talking about it—writing about it. When I write a poem—find its lymph and sinew, fix a poem that speaks with a tongue more mine than any you'll ever actually hear me talking with—you'll know it! Boni and Liveright did
Cane
last year,
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
this year; I just wonder when they'll get to me. I can promise you—Crane,” he said suddenly, sat forward, and scowled. “Isn't that endlessly ironic?” He shook his head. “Crane—that's whom they're all mad about now. Someone showed me the manuscript. And, dammit, some of them are actually good! They're planning to get endorsements from Benêt and Nunnally Johnson—he lives in Brooklyn, too.”

“A poet? Named Crane?” Sam asked.

The man nodded, glancing over. “Nathalia Crane. She lives in Flat-bush, out where it builds up again and Brooklyn starts to look at least like a town; and she's in love with the janitor's boy—some snub-nosed freckle-cheeked mick named Jones.”

“In the heart of Brooklyn?” Sam said.

“If Brooklyn can be said to have a heart. I wonder why, no matter how hard I try to get away, I always end up working with sweets—Dad makes chocolates, you see. Well, I've lived off them long enough. Personally, I think Brooklyn, once you leave the Heights, is a heartless place. For heart, you go downtown into the Village. Really, the irony's just beyond me. She's supposed to be ten—or was, a couple of years ago. They go on about her like she was Hilda Conkling or Helen Adam. And they actually gave me the thing for review! I mean, I told them—under no
circumstances
would I! Could you think of anything more absurd—
me
reviewing
that?
If I liked it, people would think I was joking. If I hated it, they'd think I was simply being malicious.
They
thought it would be fun. No—I said; I certainly wouldn't be trapped into
that
one. Poetry's more serious than—” Again he broke off and turned, to regard
Sam with a fixity that, as the silence grew, grew uncomfortable with it. “I mean, any poem worth its majority must pell-mell through its stages of love, meditation, evocation, and beauty. It's got to hie through tragedy, war, recapitulation, ecstasy, and final declaration. But sometimes I think
she's
got more of the Great War in her poems than I do. I wonder if that makes the geeky girl a better poet? No, I'm not going to be able to take these engineering specifications, instruction manuals, and giant architectural catalogs much longer—Lord, they're real doorstoppers! Soon, I'm going to leave that job—the only question is, at my behest or theirs?”