The Waterworks Page 3

  By contrast, my freelance' s cold dissidence was the honest thing, purely and profoundly of his generation. There was an integrity to Martin. His eyes sometimes took on a wounded expression which seemed at the same time hopeful that the world could in the very next moment fulfill his expectations of it. It seemed to me that if I was really concerned about him I should grant him his integrity and give renewed thought to what he had said about his father. I would act privately on what I knew, on what he had told me, with due regard for the standards of the profession we shared. To tell you the truth, apart from everything else, I smelled a story. If that is the case you do not, first thing, go to someone whose interest it might be to see that you don' t get it. So I chose not to speak to Harry at this point but to test the original hypothesis. And when you want to know if someone is still alive, what do you do? You go to the morgue, of course.

  Five

  OUR high speed rotaries had come along around 1845, and from that moment the amount of news a paper could print, and the numbers of papers competing, suggested the need for a self-history of sorts, a memory file of our work. So that we would have at our disposal a library of our past inventions, and needn' t always spin our words out of nothing. At the Telegram this enterprise was first put in charge of an old man down in the basement, whose genius it was to lay one day' s edition on top of another, flat, in wide oak cabinet drawers, which he kept immaculately polished. Only when the war came, and it became apparent to the publisher that saleable books could be made of collections of war pieces from the paper, did cross-reference filing begin in earnest. Now we had three or four young men sitting down there with scissors and paste pots who were never more than a month or two behind - fifteen New York dailies a day were dropped on their tables, after all - and I could go to a file drawer fully confident of finding a folder marked Pemberton, Augustus.

  He' d first come to our attention as one of the witnesses called before the Subcommittee on War Profiteering of the Senate Committee for the Army and the Navy. The item was dated from Washington in April of 1864. There was nothing on the story subsequent to this - what Augustus had in fact testified to, or what the outcome of his testimony was, or indeed if the subcommittee had ever again met for any purpose whatsoever, I would not learn from my dear Telegram.

  A local item the same year afforded another glimpse of Pemberton' s business affairs: One Eustace Simmons, former deputy chief clerk in the Office of the Port Wardens on South Street, had been arrested in the Southern District of New York, along with two Portuguese nationals, on a charge of violation of the slave laws. His bond was made by his employer, the well known merchant Mr Augustus Pemberton.

  In this instance there was a following story, dated six months later: The case against Mr Eustace Simmons and his two Portuguese partners for violation of the slave laws had been dismissed for insufficient evidence.

  Our reporter was clearly irritated by the ruling. He described the proceedings as extraordinarily casual, given the seriousness of the charges. The defendant Simmons had not looked terribly concerned before the judge' s decision, and not terribly elated afterward, and though the Portuguese gentlemen had embraced each other, Mr Simmons had stood up with only the slightest smile to indicate his emotion, an angular man with a face marked by the pox and barely nodded to the lawyers before he followed indolently after his employer, Augustus Pemberton, who was striding out of the Courtroom, presumably to the next item of business on this ordinary business day.

  Well, perhaps I embellish things a bit. But my impression of the reporter' s feelings is accurate. We did not feel it so necessary to assume an objective tone in our reporting then. We were more honest and straightforward and did not make such a sanctimonious thing of objectivity, which is finally a way of constructing an opinion for the reader without letting him know that you are. Simmons had been a deputy chief clerk in the Office of the Port Wardens when the Augustus Pemberton Trading Company hired him away. The port wardens did the onboard surveys of the condition of sailing vessels, inspected the cargoes on the wharves, and in general policed the maritime commerce of both rivers. It was a municipal office of course and the source of a reliable income for the Tweed Ring. Simmons would have shared in that and been assured of a long, profitable employment, which meant Augustus Pemberton' s offer had to have been very attractive to lure him away.

  I' ll say here, this Simmons was the unwholesome fellow who was with Augustus Pemberton to the end, although now we tread on treacherous ground. I have occasionally to tell you things not in the order in which I learned them. But it was from the young widow Pemberton, Sarah, Augustus' s second wife and the stepmother of Martin, that I would hear how much closer Eustace Simmons lived to the central affection of the man than either she or Augustus' s first wife and how Simmons knew it, and made it clear to her. "No woman would feel right in the presence of Mr Simmons," Sarah Pemberton told me when I had gained her confidence. She colored slightly speaking of the matter. "It was nothing he actually said, he never spoke out of turn. But he had a tone of voice that I found suggestive. I don' t think that' s too strong a word. He made me feel incidental. I assume he didn' t have much regard for women in general."

  She told me this when Martin' s disappearance was no longer an isolated matter but had compounded itself with others just as unsettling. While I had no pictures of the father and his factotum, I had their moral photographs clearly enough, from their relationship to each other, and the indicative choice we make of a right hand man. And that the larger evil sustained them, I had in the numbers and quality of the municipal dignitaries who came to Augustus' s funeral and, to be fair, in the obsequious tones of the Telegram' s account.

  So; in black words on this white paper, Mr Augustus Pemberton, merchant and patriot, had died at age sixty nine of a blood ailment, in September of the year 1870, and was seen to his rest from St. James Episcopal. We celebrated the fact of his arrival in America as a penniless, unschooled Englishman who hired himself out as a house servant under a contract that required his labor for seven years. We admired him for never glossing over these humble beginnings. In his later years, as a member of the Surveyors Club, where he lunched frequently at the Long Table, a major conversational theme was the example of his life as a fulfillment of the American ideal. Christ, what a bore he must have been, in addition to everything else.

  An obituary is no place to reflect that in domestic service you come to value things, and you learn all the refinements of taste and style that you can aspire to. But I could imagine Augustus' s sentimental education in money and property. At the end of his indenture he became a coach builder' s apprentice and subsequently bought out the business of the man who had hired him. Then he sold it and reinvested his profit in a ship' s chandlery thus establishing a pattern of loyalty not to any one business, but to the art of buying and selling them. These practices and other investments brought him in his late thirties into prominence as a merchant of the city. No mention of slave trading, of course. Only that he was brilliant at brokerage and was soon applying its principles to abstract materials-commercial debentures, stocks, bonds, and federal notes. He came into possession of a seat on the New York Exchange by default. We made out the old scoundrel as a kind of frugal, down to earth Yankee. He didn' t advertise his place in the city' s commercial life with elaborate or ostentatious business quarters and did not carry on his ledgers a large complement of employees. I' ll bet he didn' t. "It' s all up here anyhow" was his famous line, delivered as he pointed his index finger at his head. "My own mind is my office, my warehouse, and my account book."

  He would never have read Tom Paine, of course, who said "My own mind is my church." But where deism, even in the 1870s, was a scandal, self-idolatry, if it left an estate of several millions, was an example to us all.

  According to his eulogist, Dr Charles Grimshaw, glory was bestowed on Augustus Pemberton in the War of Secession, when he put his skills to the service of his country, supplying the Union quartermaster with goods whic
h he commissioned and delivered from mills as far away as Peking, China. Apparently, from their role as beggars, churchmen develop the same sympathies for the moneyed class as politicians do. Someone in Mr Lincoln' s administration was no less forbearing: I sat in our morgue with the forlorn feeling of an orphan as I read that Augustus Pemberton was among the select group of merchants given thanks by a grateful nation in a dinner at the White House with the president in 1864.

  Six I KNEW Charles Grimshaw and to be fair to him he was one of the abolitionist pastors in the 1850' s of our copperhead city, and saw a chunk of his congregation fall away because of that. But was in his prime then, and though never the orator and moral eminence of our more renowned preachers, he had the respect of his peers and the cosy devotion of his well- to-do parishioners. By the time of Augustus Pemberton' s death, the rector and his church had both seen better days. The well-to-do had rushed to the wider streets and sunnier neighborhoods north of north of Thirty Fourth Street, and then past the Forty Second Street reservoir. Commercial buildings replaced the homes and where once St James had towered over the city, it now stood in shadow half the day. Its solemn brownstone dignity had become quaint, its little parish graveyard, with its worn stones leaning just a little farther aslant in their inch by inch topple through the ages....so the Augustan funeral was a remembrance of its glory, and for an hour or two St. James was restored to fashionable High Churchiness. It is not hard to understand why the pastor' s eulogy was excessive

  I should have though there were enough poor people you could find to fill your pews. But as the Reverend explained to me in his halting, high pitched voice, poor people were not generally disposed to the Anglican communion. The new immigrants, for instance, were largely Irish and German Catholics. But Catholicism was not the problem. "They have been here longer than we have," he said - here on earth, I supposed he meant. No, what made him clutch his crucifix and pace the floor of his study were the proselytizers abroad in the city - Adventists and Millerites, Shakers and Quakers, Swedenborgians, Perfectionists, and Mormons,

  "There is no end to them, they come down from the burned out district and parade along Broadway with their eschatology boards slung from their shoulders. They accost people in the beer gardens, they take over the street in front of the opera. They board the ferries. Do you know, yesterday I had to chase one away who stood on our doorstep to preach - before Christ' s church, mind you! Speaking for God makes these people brazen. Christ forgive me, but do I need to doubt their sincerity to say, for all their invokings of the name of our Lord, they are plainly and simply not Christian?"

  He had the fairest skin, the Reverend Grimshaw, the skin of a beautiful old woman, paper-thin and very white and dry, and very small regular features, with a nose barely sufficient to perch the pince-nez there, and bright birdy eyes still vigorous and alert, and thin waved silver hair through which you could see the pinkness of the pate. He was clean shaven, and trim and small, everything from the little feet that marched him to and fro to the tiny flat ears was in proper proportion. It is a stature that wears clothes well, even clerical collars and shiny black bibs.

  Here I will confess, if that' s the appropriate word, I myself am a lapsed Presbyterian. It' s the diction that did it, finally, the worn thin, shabby, church-poor words, so overused they connote to me a poverty of spirit, not the richness of it. My own feeling about the street preachers from the burned out district was, why not? To claim God, accept dispossession. He might even be truer unhoused, the property of the bearded maniacs with their eschatology boards. Why was he appropriately addressed inside a church, but outside in the gutter to speak of him with the carriages going by and the horses dropping their dung was clearly madness? I will say also that churches themselves, of whatever denomination - I can' t speak as authoritatively for our temples and our mosques, but throw them in too-whether they are built Gothic, Romanesque, tiled oriental, or red. brick, all smell the same inside. I think it' s the smell of candlelight, or perhaps rectitude, or that sourness that comes of convened heated bodies condensing their glandular odors of piety against cold stone year after year. I don' t know what it is, but it was here in Grimshaw' s study as well, with its shelves upon shelves of the Book of Common Prayer, that must of sanctification.

  As you might suspect, I confided nothing of these feelings. Grimshaw had received me, readily enough, the evening of the same day I' d sent a note to him. I waited patiently through his fulminations. When they were done and he had sat back in his chair and was quiet, I brought up Martin' s name. I said nothing about my fears for him only that he had one day said to me his father was still alive. "Yes," Grimshaw said, "that seems to be a worry of his." "You are disapproving." "Let me just say this: Martin Pemberton is one of those troubled souls yet to look up and see his Savior awaiting him with open arms." "When did you see Martin?" "He banged on the rectory door one night." "This would have been - ?" "During those heavy rains. In April. He was the last person I would expect to see in the rectory. He didn' t wait to be announced but pushed past my housekeeper. His appearance was, derelict, God help us all. A filthy coat worn over his shoulders, his suit muddied and torn. Half his face covered with an ugly bruise. Yet he sat himself in the chair you are sitting in and offered no explanation, but regarded me from under his brow as if he was a general of the armies and I was something his soldiers had taken in battle. He said:' I have seen something that I will describe to you, Dr Grimshaw, and then I will ask you what I need to know, and then you will think I' ve lost my wits, I promise you.' That' s what he said. Well, when he' d barged in, I was reading a monograph on the subject of certain Sumerian cuneiforms, recently deciphered, which give an account of the same Flood described in Genesis, I needn' t tell you - it was something of a wrench from the Sumerian."

  Here the doctor shot me a glance suggesting that as a newspaperman I would not let something that good go by. I obliged, saying I hadn' t known he was a biblical scholar. "Oh, heavens," he said with a self-deprecating smile to himself, "not in any sense of the term. But I do maintain a correspondence with those who are. The scholarship now, particularly from Europe, as to Scripture and the life of our Lord is quite exciting. This Sumerian text is significant. If you think your readers might want to know a little about it, I' d consider it no trouble at all-" "What had he seen?" "Seen?" "Martin. He told you he had seen something." It was another wrench from the Sumerian. The Reverend cleared his throat and composed himself. "Yes. I have learned over the years about souls in need of pastoring, how they often bristle, or present a superior attitude. This was the case with Martin, of course. He could not bear to ask something of me without excoriating me first. What was it he said?' I affiliate you with death, Reverend, not merely because you' re the family eulogy, but because you' re the priest of a death cult.' Can you imagine?' Your Jesus is all death and dying, though you attribute to him everlasting life. Every communion partakes primevally of his death, and the presiding image of him, even right there dangling down your vest, is his painful, agonized, endless death. So I come to the right place, Tell me, is it true that the Romans themselves later banned crucifixion some years anno domini, because it was so cruel as to create legends?'

  "Well, this may surprise you, but such a Christology is not unknown to me. Faith hears it all, Mr' McIlvaine, faith is unshocked by such challenges, true faith is surprisingly intimate with the foulest of conceits, Besides, you don' t come under a roof of God' s to blaspheme unless your state of mind is tenuous. I think I was ready to concede he' d lost his wits without having to hear the question he would put to me.

  "' Well,' he says after a long pause of staring at the floor,' so be It. I am sorry I' ve offended you. My mind races. I suppose I' d rather speak of anything except the thing that has brought me here.' "' What is that, Martin?' "He leaned forward and peered into my eyes and said in a tone o voice I could not determine to be either serious or joking: Reverend, will you swear my father is dead?' "' What?' I said. I didn' t know what he meant. I was terr
ibly alarmed. I did not like the looks of him or the sound of him. "' It is simple enough. We are either alive or dead, one or the other. I ask you to classify my father. When I continued to gaze at him, not knowing what to say, he raised his hands in exasperation.' Oh God, for some light in this brain-do you understand the English language, Doctor? Answer me! Has my father, Augustus Pemberton, died? Is this something you will swear by your God to have happened?' "' My dear young man, this is not seemly. I was your father' s friend and I was his pastor. I gave him extreme unction and beseeched our Lord Jesus Christ in his mercy to receive him.'' "' Yes, but is he dead? I know I did not see him dead!'' "This is an unusual consolation you seem to require. Perhaps you recall the obsequies . . .' "They have no standing in this court. Your sworn testimony, Dr Grimshaw!'

  "I told him, feeling that I was talking to a madman, that, alas, it was so. His father was deceased. He gave a deep sigh.' Fine. That wasn' t too hard, was it? Now that you have said so, I' ll tell you something has happened and you will say what you will have to say and we will think no more of the matter. And I' ll be able to sleep.'

  "He strode back and forth across the room and told his tale. It was extraordinary. Back and forth he went, talking as much to himself as to me. Describing it all in the most vivid terms, the most vivid terms, so that it was as if I was there, with him. That very morning, before the rain, he was walking down Broadway, en route to Printing House Square. Of course to the Telegram. To you! He had in his pocket a book notice he had written. Is Martin a good writer, does he write as well as he speaks?" "He may be the best I have," I said truthfully. "Well, that is something. At least I can say of him that he lives by his wits. He has never regretted his act, insofar as it cost him the considerable inheritance that was his. He has taken responsibility."