The Waterworks Read online

  But I do feel contaminated, it has only gotten worse, the image of that dead boy sits in my brain. I would paint it if I could.

  I will never tell of these things in my memoirs. When I write my memoirs I will be the subject of the narrative. I do not intend logo down as a passionate devotee and self-appointed secretary of the Pemberton family, that lived for a while, in the brilliant heart - quaking civilization of New York, My own fate will be another story, not this one.

  Fourteen

  THE TALE as Harry told it was so clearly the kind that sold newspapers that Donne assumed my blood was up. When we left the artist' s studio, he suggested lunch in a nearby beer garden. He knew about my trade-that the reporter is a predator, and the story is something he brings back: in his jaws and drops at his publisher' s feet. And since animals have no discretion and cannot act against their natures, he wanted to impress upon me the need for restraint. I wasn' t offended. After all, I had made Donne my partner in the enterprise. In a good partnership each is supposed to save the other from his worst instincts. I couldn' t imagine what his would be but I trusted I' d know when they cropped up. At the same time I wanted to make sure we understood each other. "How will the Municipals dig up a body without the whole city knowing about it?" I asked him. "I can' t order an exhumation unless I have the permission of the deceased' s family." "That would be Sarah Pemberton." "Yes'' he said. "And I can' t apply to Mrs Pemberton solely on the basis of Mr Wheelwright' s claims." "I believe him, liar that he is." "I believe him as well," Donne said. "But I would want to go to a widow with something more." "What more?" "That is the point. There are things that have to be found out, you see, corroborative things. This is the way it happens - you want evidence of what you already know. According to Wheelwright, the child was in a full sized coffin, which suggests, a deception was intended. But we can' t rely on what he thought he saw. He was drunk and the light was bad. We still have to make sure a mistake was not made by the cemetery. I need to see their calendar of interments from that year. That there was not some misidentification, and that two bodies brought for burial on the same day were not placed in the wrong graves." "That' s hardly likely." "Systematically, step by step, Mr McIlvaine. In a disciplined manner, beginning with the hardly likely. I need to see the death certificate for Mr Pemberton. It will have a doctor' s signature. I would like the chance to speak with the doctor, Also, in the Hall of Records, we want to go through the registries of deeds and contracts, to see what transactions were undertaken by Mr Pemberton in the year, say, preceding his listed date of death, and so on." "Can you do these things without attracting the dogs?" "I think so." We were talking hunched over a table, talking softly, conspirators ourselves. "Christ, you know what the newspaper business is. I want your assurance, I brought you into this, in the assumption you' d protect my interests." "I understand," he said with a nod. "This is an exclusive," I told him. "This is where there wouldn' t be a story if I hadn' t found it." "Exactly so'' . "And if the moment approaches when you can' t keep it exclusively mine, you give me fair warning'' . "Agreed'' he said.

  My blood was up, but so was Donne' s. He' d gotten a new light in those mournful eyes, there was a blotch of color on those ascetic cheekbones. The fact of the matter was that I concurred with his plan of investigation and may have protested as I did because it was something he expected of me. I was saying what he thought a journalist would say. In Edmund Donne' s thoughtful company you found yourself wanting to be what he expected you to be. Isn' t that what happened to Harry Wheelwright? Donne had expected him to tell what he knew and so he had.

  At this point I believed that, someday, I would have to apologize to Wheelwright. I understood about the arrogance of this generation of young men, that they kept to themselves, as a separate community of the Sane, with neighbors usually their own age to be recognized by sight walking on the same street. But Martin' s behavior had struck to the heart of that pretense; he' d put them under the same suspicion as the rest of mankind. So I felt sympathy for the artist. And gratitude, though that I would never express. His story was overwhelming. But truly, if you think about it, the precise way to lose my exclusive was to run it prematurely, in imitation of Martin Pemberton' s own heedlessness. As a member of the journalistic profession Martin knew he could have applied the same careful methods Donne was now advocating. Instead, he' d leapt over all of them and-desperately, awesomely-had dug up a grave at night. But if I followed, I would end up standing in that grave, and every reporter in town would be in there with me.

  No, Martin had sworn his friend to secrecy, and the secret would remain intact with us, with Donne and me. I wanted my freelance and my story, the one I secretly coveted, the writing of which might transcend reporting. Harry' s confession was, among other things, the rendering of an inspired pursuit. To me it was - to use Donne' s word - corroborative. It was evidence of what I already knew. My freelance was alive, but had simply disappeared now into that region where the fact of people' s existence, or nonexistence was, inconclusive. He was there, together with his father, and with his father' s factotum Tace Simmons, and perhaps as well with the doctor who was supposed to have treated Augustus in his last illness, that shadow doctor, Sartorius.

  I was now certain I knew as much as Martin Pemberton knew when he disappeared. It seemed to me that I could continue my own pursuit in keeping with the magnitude of his. Certainly I had not given Donne any assurances that I wouldn' t. When I resumed work at the Telegram - this must have been not more than a day or two after seeing Wheelwright in his studio-I immediately sent off a wire to our political reporter in Albany and asked him, in a quiet moment-perhaps when the esteemed legislators of New York State, exhausted from the effort of passing Mr Tweed' s bills, had recessed for some recreative poker - to take a trip up to Saranac Lake, for a possible series we were thinking of doing oil the achievements of modern American medicine. I wanted the names of the sanitaria, their physicians, the kinds of medicine they practiced, and so on.

  He mailed his notes a few days later: There were two small sanitaria for consumptives. Tuberculosis was the sole disease treated. The leading doctor of the better institution was a Dr Edward Trudeau, himself a consumptive, who had discovered the salutary effects of the Adirondacks mountain air when he had come up there one winter. The list of names of the attending physicians did not include a Dr Sartorius.

  In no way was I surprised, having reasoned that whatever Augustus Pemberton told his wife would be a lie. But the name Sartorius was unusual, and if it was fabricated, it was not by Pemberton or his business manager, neither of whom had the wits to fabricate so specifically.

  There were always freelances sitting about on the bench outside my office hoping for assignments. I sent one of them over to the New York Medical Society Library on Nassau Street to check the name Sartorius in the registry of New York physicians. It was not listed.

  I had staked out my claim to a story, in effect negotiating with the police for my rights in it, but, after all, how phantom it was, no more than a hope for words on a page, insubstantial words, phantom names, its truth and actuality no more than degrees of phantomness in the mind of another phantom. Yet I will tell you now about the seven columns of the newspaper. In those days we ran stories straight down, side by side, a head, subheads, and story. If you had a major story you ran it to the bottom of column one and took as much of the next column as you needed. It was a vertical paper, no heads shooting across the page, no double width columns, and few illustrations.

  It was a paper of seven columns of words, each column supporting its weight of life, holding up, word by word, another version of its brazen, terrors. The first papers were commercial sheets, mercantile advices, with cotton prices and ship sailings sheets you could serve on a dinner plate. Now we ran off eight pages of seven columns, and only if you stretched your arms wide could you hold the paper taut to its full width. And we had readers of the city accustomed to this, who scanned our columns the instant they got them, hot from the han
ds of the newsboy as if our stories were projections of the multiple souls of a man and no meaning was possible from anyone column without the sense of all of them in, simultaneous descent, our life of brazen terrors spending itself across seven word-packed columns of simultaneous descent, offered from children' s hands for a penny or two.

  So in this news story, now, my, this, yesterday' s news, I warn you, the sense is not in the linear column but in all of them together. Of course I would not find any Dr Sartorius in the registry of doctors, any more than I had found Eustace Simmons in the waterfront saloons, or Martin Pemberton up the stairs in his room in Greene Street. Linear thinking would not find them.

  But then one morning, looking through the police blotter for items I would print, I read that the body of a Clarence' Knucks' Geary, age unknown, had been found floating in the river off the pier at South Street - unless I was mistaken, the same hoodlum I had seen in Donne' s office - and I was diverted for the second time, by this brainlessly amoral charmer, from what I had rather been thinking about.

  I suppose it was that same afternoon that I stood with Donne in the Dead House on First Avenue, a regular venue of his, and fast becoming one of mine, and looked down at the body of that poor sod Knucks: The boyish blue eyes were opaque. Circles of coagulated blood outlined the nostrils of his flattened boxer' s nose. His lips were curled back over his teeth, as if he had attempted a smile at the moment of death. Donne held the head up by the hair under the spray of water. The neck had been broken.

  "You see its girth?" Donne said.'' And look at his chest, these shoulders. He' s built like a bull. Even catching him unaware, you know the strength someone would need to break a neck like this?"

  I had not expected Edmund Donne to be so terribly upset. But he was - he was distraught, though this was only measurable as a more grim impassivity. He laid the head back down with what I thought was undue respect, an inappropriate gentleness. What odd affections grow up in this city, like the weeds that spring from cracks in the pavement. Knucks' s death was the only matter he would talk about. I waited for the moment when he would return to our mutual concern, but it didn' t come. I was disappointed to see Donne' s, vulnerability. He could only think of the thug, for whose death he felt responsible. And whatever else was on his mind, he went about immediately trying to find the possible meaning or justice from the thing, as if this pathetic hoodlum had been the most important personage in the city. For my part I was stymied by not having gotten any further on my own-after Harry' s revelations I thought the truth would tumble out. I found myself irritated by how easily Donne had been diverted from our search. I didn' t appreciate that he was like a walking newspaper who could carry the stories simultaneously in their parallel descents. He said, without giving me the reason, that he needed to speak to all the newsboys he could find. I remember how startled I was. Shocked into an impassivity of my own, I took him and his subaltern sergeant to Spruce Street, to Buttercake Dick' s, where the newsboys went for their supper at the end of a night' s work.

  Dick' s was the newsboys' Athenaeum, a cellar hole, down three steps. It was fitted out with plank tables and benches. Up front was the counter where a boy bought his mug of coffee and one of Dick' s blackened scones, split, and stuffed with a gob of butter. Earlier it had started to rain in the city. The cellar with its low ceiling stank of kerosene and rancid butter and the wet clothes of thirty or forty unwashed boys.

  Donne and I sat just inside the door, the sergeant went to the middle of the room and spoke. The boys had fallen silent, as schoolchildren in the presence of the principal. They stopped eating as they listened to a matter whose seriousness did not have to be proven to them.

  They had known Knucks Geary, just as they knew every other adult who muscled in on them. Apparently, one of Knucks' s schemes in his declining years involved working for the newspaper carriers, or jobbers. I hadn' t known this, Donne hadn' t told me, though it particularly implicated my profession. Knucks threw the baled papers off the horse cart at a boy' s corner, or stood dispensing copies at the trucking platform of the press buildings. He was the middleman' s middleman. The carriers paid a dollar seventy-five a hundred and charged the boys two dollars. Knucks added a surcharge for Knucks. So this professed moralist of the plight of street children had, during certain hours of the working day, been stealing from them.

  "Rot in' ell," one of the boys said. "I' m glad he got hisself croaked."

  "Now, now," the sergeant called out.

  ""E beat you, Philly?"

  "I' ll say, Knucks bastard."

  "Me too, Sergeant. If' n you doan payoff,' e goes' n slams yer."

  There was a general agreement, the boys all talking at once. The sergeant shouted for order. "Never mind that. Worse for you if the sharp who killed him takes his place. Now we' re talking about yesterday' s paper. Speak up if you saw Knucks Geary and what time that was."

  I was not comfortable here, at the most shameful point of the newspaper business. New Yorkers got rousing good fun out of their newsboys, but looking at them in this yellow light, as yellow as the butter in the scones, I saw only undersized beings on whose faces were etched the lines and shadows of serfdom. God knows where they slept nights.

  Slowly, reluctantly, they began to testify. A boy would look at his mates and get some sort of confirming glance and then he would rise and speak his piece. "I got me papers four o' clock by the Stewart' s Dry Goods same as always." Or "He dropped me mine by Broad Street at the Stock Exchange." As more of them spoke up I was able to see in my mind a street map of Knucks' s last journey: Starting from Printing House Square, he went downtown along Broadway, over to Wall Street, and then east to the river, Fulton and South streets.

  A small, weakish boy rose and said he saw Knucks hop off the rear of the carrier' s dray in front of the Black Horse Tavern. It was dark by then, the streetlamp was lit.

  The boy sat: The sergeant looked around. No one else spoke. The room was silent. Though the questions had come from the sergeant, it was Donne' s intelligence behind them. Donne rose from his chair. "Thank you, lads," he said. "You will all have another coffee and cake on the Municipals." And he laid two dollars on the counter. Then we were off to the Black Horse.

  I prided myself on my knowledge of the city' s saloons but I did not know this one. Donne led us right there. It was on Water Street. There was little about the city he didn' t know, perhaps because he was so estranged from its normal life. He' d cultivated his skills in the face of bitter lifelong employment, perhaps that accounted for it, the knowledge that comes with estrangement. God help me, I could not spend ten minutes trekking after him without feeling myself estranged too, as if this roaring, teeming city thrumming with the steam pistons and cog wheels and rotating belts of a million industrial purposes was an exotic and totally inexplicable culture.

  The Black Horse was an old clapboard house from the Dutch days, with a gable and shuttered windows. When they' d made a tavern out of it, an entrance door had been cut athwart the corner and introduced with a stone step so as to be visible from both Water and South streets. The sergeant waited outside while Donne and I went in.

  It was a quiet, dark, dead place, with the harsh excoriating smell of whiskey rising like a vapor from the creaking floorboards. A few of the regulars sat drinking. We sat at a table and I took the opportunity to have a dram or two. Donne left his shot untouched in front of him. He was oblivious of the glances the barkeep and the patrons sent his way. He was lost in thought. He did not seem to be looking for anything, he made no attempt to ask any questions. I respected his silence, granting it a specific purpose - which, as it turned out, he did not have. He was merely waiting, as policemen do, for what, he didn' t know, except, as he would tell me much later, he would know it when he saw it.

  And then a child came in the door, a girl of six or seven, with a basket of wilted flowers, a scrawny little thing. She bowed her head in shyness or abject fear, as if she could only come toward us by pretending not to mean anything
by it. Her face was smeared with dirt, she had the slack lower lip of the slow witted, her lightish hair was lank, her smock torn, and her overlarge shoes were clearly from the trash heap. She came right up to us and in the tiniest of voices asked Donne if he would buy a flower. All at once the barkeep was shouting and coming round from the bar. "Here you, Rosie, I toldjer doan come in here! I toldjer doan let me catch you in here. Diddin you cause enough trouble! I' ll teach you to listen-" Or words to that effect. The child made no attempt to run, but cringed, raising one shoulder and tucking her head behind it, and screwing her eyes tight in anticipation of a blow. Donne of course held up his hand to stay the man. He spoke softly to the child. He asked her to sit down and gently and with great deliberation withdrew from the basket three of the least-fresh flowers. I don' t know what they were-they were the flowers of penury, the drooping faded flowers of the land of orphans. "I would like to buy these, Rosie, if you please;" he said. He placed some coins in the small palm.

  And then Donne looked up at the hapless barkeep, who was standing behind the child, red in the face, and clutching fitfully at his apron. "And what trouble did she cause, bartender? What sort of trouble can a child bring to the Black Horse?"

  Donne called the sergeant in and they took the barkeep into a back room for their interrogation. A few minutes later the sergeant left the Black Horse. Donne had asked the little girl to stay with me. She was sitting across the table and keeping her eyes averted and swinging her foot. I chafed at being kept out of things. Apparently, Donne could confide in me one moment and exclude me the next. We could be associates in one enterprise, and police and press in another. I was aware at this point of no more than shadows, my own misgivings, a certain unsettled feeling of ominousness. But I was angry too that Donne could become so obsessive, or feel so guilty, about the death of a worthless thug.