The Waterworks Part 1

The Waterworks.

by E L Doctorow.

One.

PEOPLE wouldn' t take what Martin Pemberton said as literal truth, he was much too melodramatic or too tormented to speak plainly. Women were attracted to him for this-they imagined him as something of a poet, though he was if anything a critic, a critic of his life and times. So when he went around muttering that his father was still alive, those of us who heard him, and remembered his father, felt he was speaking of the persistence of evil in general.

In those days the Telegram relied heavily on freelances. I always had my eye out for a good freelance and I kept a clutch of them on call. Martin Pemberton was the best of the lot, though I would never tell him that. I treated him as I treated them all. I was derisive because it was expected of me, I was funny so that I could be quoted in the saloons, and I was reasonably fair because that is the way I am but I was also interested in the language and wanted all of them to write it for my approval which, if it came at all, came barbed. Of course, none of this was particularly effective with Martin Pemberton. He was a moody, distracted young fellow, and it was clear his own mind was more company to him than people were. He had light gray eyes which spasmodically widened from the slightest stimulus. His eyebrows would arch and then contract to a frown, and he would seem for a moment to be looking not at the world but into it. He suffered an intensity of awareness-seeming to live at some level so beyond you that you felt your own self fading in his presence, you felt your hollowness or fraudulence as a person. Most freelances are nervous craven creatures, it is such a tenuous living after all, but this one was prideful, he knew how well he wrote, and never deferred to my opinion. That alone would have set him apart.

He was slight, with a well-boned, clean shaven face and pale thinning hair. He strode about the city with a stiff legged gait, like a man much taller. He would walk down Broadway with his Union greatcoat open, flowing behind him like a cape. Martin was of that post-war generation for whom the materials of the war were ironic objects of art or fas.h.i.+on. He and his friends made little social enclaves of irony. He once told me the war had not been between the Union and the Rebs but between two confederate states, and so a confederacy had to win. I am a man who will never be able to think of anyone but Abe Lincoln as president, so you can imagine how a remark like that stood with me. But I was intrigued by the worldview behind it. I was not myself exactly complacent about our modem industrial civilization.

Martin' s best friend was an artist, a big, fleshy fellow named Harry Wheelwright. When not importuning dowagers for portrait commissions, Wheelwright drew mutilated veterans he picked up off the street with pointed attention to their disfigurement. I thought his drawings were the equivalent of Martin' s tactless but informed reviews and cultural critiques. As for me, my newsman' s cilia were up and waving. The soul of the city was always my subject, and it was a roiling soul, twisting and turning over on itself, forming and re-forming, gathering into itself and opening out again like blown cloud. These young men were a wary generation without illusions, revolutionaries of a sort, though perhaps too vulnerable ever to accomplish anything. Martin' s defiant subjection to his own life and times was manifest but you didn' t know how long he could go on with it. I did not usually care to know anything about the background of a freelance. But in this case I couldn' t help knowing. Martin had come from wealth. His father was the late, notorious Augustus Pemberton who had done enough to shame and mortify their line for generations to come, having made a fortune in the war supplying the Army of the North with boots that fell apart, blankets that dissolved in rain, tents that tore at the grommets, and uniform cloth that bled dye. Our name for this was "shoddy," used as a noun. But shoddy wasn' t the worst of old Pemberton' s sins. He had made an even bigger fortune running slavers. You would think the slave trade was exclusive to the southern ports, but Augustus ran it from New York-even after the war had begun, as late as sixty two. He had some Portuguese as partners, the Portuguese being specialists in the trade. They sailed s.h.i.+ps to Africa right here from Fulton Street, and sailed them back across the ocean to Cuba, where the cargo was sold to the sugar plantations. The s.h.i.+ps were scuttled because the stench could not be got rid of. But the profits were so enormous they could buy another s.h.i.+p. And another after that.

So that was Martin' s father. You can understand why a son would choose, like a penance, the deprived life of a freelance. Martin had known everything the old man had done and at a still young age had arranged to be disinherited-how I will explain presently. Here I will point out that to run slavers out of New York, Augustus Pemberton had to have the port wardens in his pocket. A slaver' s below decks were carpentered to pack in as many human beings as possible, there was no headroom-n.o.body could board a slaver and not know what she was. So it was hardly a surprise that when Augustus Pemberton died after a long illness, in 1869, and was buried from St. James Episcopal, on Laight Street, the city' s leading dignitaries showed up at the funeral, led by Boss Tweed himself, along with the members of the Ring-the comptroller, the mayor-several judges, dozens of Wall Street thieves and that he was honored with major obituaries in every daily paper, including the Telegram. 0 my Manhattan! The great stone steles of the bridge to Brooklyn were rising on both sh.o.r.es of the river. Lighters, packets, and freighters sailed into port every hour of the day. The wharves groaned under the crates and barrels and bales of the world' s goods. Standing on any corner I could swear I heard the telegraphy singing through the wires. Toward the end of the trading day on the Exchange the sound of the ticker tapes filled the air like crickets at twilight. We were in the post-war. Where you' ll find mankind not shackled in history is Heaven, eventless Heaven.

I don' t make any claims for myself as a seer of the future, but I remember what I sensed years before, when President Lincoln died. You will just have to trust that this, like everything I tell you, has a bearing on the story. They marched his catafalque up Broadway to the railroad depot and for weeks afterward remnants and tatters of the funeral muslin flapped from the windows along the parade route. Black dye stained the building fronts and blotted the awnings of the shops and restaurants. The city was unnaturally still. We weren' t ourselves. The veterans who stood in front of A T Stewart' s department store saw coins rain into their tin cups.

But I knew my city, and I waited for what had to come. After all, there were no soft voices. All speech was shouted, words flew like shot from our double cylinder printing presses. I' d covered the riots when the price of flour went from seven to twenty dollars a barrel. I followed the armed bands of killers who fought with the army in the streets and torched the Colored Orphan Asylum after conscription was ordered. I' d seen gang riots and police riots and was there on Eighth Avenue when the Hibernians attacked the Orangemen on parade. I' m all for democracy but I' ll tell you that I' ve lived through times in this town that have made me long for the stultifying peace of kings the equanimity that comes of bowing and sc.r.a.ping in the dazzling light of regal authority. So I knew some regnant purpose was enshrouded in Mr Lincoln' s death, but what was it? Some soulless social resolve had to work itself out of his grave and rise again. But I didn' t antic.i.p.ate it would come through my young freelance, with his Union greatcoat lying on his shoulders heavy as sod, who stood in my office one rainy, wet afternoon and waited while I read his copy. I don' t know why it always seemed to be raining when Martin came around. But this day this day he was a mess. Trouser legs muddied and torn, the gaunt face all sc.r.a.ped and bruised. The ink on his copy had run, and the pages were blotted with mud and a palm print of something that looked like blood lay across the top page. But it was another contemptuous review, brilliantly written, and too good for readers of the Telegram.

"Some poor devil took a year of his life to write this book," I said. "And I gave up a day of my life to read it." "We should say that in a sidebar. The intelligentsia of this great city will be grateful to you for saving it from another Pierce Graham novel." "There is no intelligentsia in this city," said Martin Pemberton. "There are only ministers and newspaper publishers."

He came behind my desk to stare out the window. My office looked over Printing House Square. The rain streamed down the pane so that everything out there, the schools of black umbrellas the horse cars, the plodding stages' seemed to be moving under water. If you want a favorable notice, why don' t you give me something decent to read," Martin said. "Give me something for the lead essay. I' ll show my appreciation." "I can' t believe that. You hate everything. The grandeur of your opinions stands in inverse ratio to the state of your wardrobe Tell me what happened, Pemberton. Did you run into a train? Or shouldn' t I ask?". This was met with silence. Then Martin Pemberton in his reed voice said: "He' s alive." "Who is alive?" "My father, Augustus Pemberton. He is alive. He lives."

I pluck this scene from the stream of critical moments that made up the newspaper day. A second later, a cas.h.i.+er' s voucher in his hand, Martin Pemberton was gone, his copy was on the dumbwaiter to the compositors' room, and I was looking to lock up the issue. I don' t fault myself. It was an oblique answer to my question as if whatever had happened was meaningful only as it evoked a moral judgment from him. I interpreted what he had said as metaphor, a poetic way of characterizing the wretched city that neither of us loved, but neither of us could leave.

Two.

THIS would have been sometime in April of 1871. I saw Martin Pemberton only once after that, and then he was gone. Before he disappeared he informed at least two other people-Emily' Tisdale, and Charles Grimshaw, the rector of St. James, who had eulogized the old man-that Augustus Pemberton was still alive. I did not know this at the time, of course. Miss Tisdale was Martin' s fiancee, though I found it hard to believe he' d give up his wild storms of soul for the haven of marriage. In this I was not far wrong: apparently he and Miss Tisdale were having a difficult time and their engagement, if that' s what it was, was very much in question.

To a certain extent both she and Dr Grimshaw a.s.sumed, as I did, that Martin could not have meant the statement to be taken literally. Miss Tisdale was so used to his dramatics that she merely added this startling example to her acc.u.mulated fears for their relations.h.i.+p. Grimshaw, taking it a step further, thought Martin' s mind was at risk. I reasoned, by contrast, that Augustus Pemberton had been nothing if not a representative man. If you can imagine what life was like in our city. The Augustus Palmerton' s among us were sustained by a culture.

We are in the realm of public life now-the cheapest commonest realm, the realm of newsprint. My realm.

I remind you William Marcy Tweed ran the city as no one had before him. He was the messiah of the ward politicians, the fulfilment of everything about democracy they believed in, He had his own judges in the state courts, his own mayor, Oakey Hall, in City Hall, and even his own governor John Hoffman, in Albany. He had a lawyer named Sweeny as city chamberlain to watch over the judges, and he had Slippery d.i.c.k Connolly to handle the books as comptroller. This was his Ring. Beyond that maybe ten thousand people depended on Tweed' s largesse. He gave jobs to the immigrants and they stuffed the ballot boxes for him.

Tweed held directors.h.i.+ps in banks, he owned pieces of gasworks and of omnibus and street-rail companies, he owned the presses that did the city' s printing, he owned the quarry that supplied marble for her public buildings.

Everyone doing business with the city-every contractor carpenter, and chimney sweep, every supplier, every manufacturer paid from fifteen to fifty per cent of the cost of his service back to the Ring. Everyone who wanted a job, from the school janitor to the police Commissioner, had to pay a fee up front and then forever kick back a percentage of his salary to Boss Tweed.

I know what people of this generation think. You have' your motorcars, your telephones, your electric lights and you look back on Boss Tweed with affection, as a wonderful fraud, a legendary scoundrel of old New York. But what he accomplished was murderous in the very modern sense of the term. Manifestly murderous. Can you understand his enormous power, the fear he inspired. Can you imagine what it is like to live in a city of thieves, raucous in its dissembling, a city falling into ruin, a society in name only? What could Martin Pemberton have thought, as a boy, learning bit by bit the origins of his father' s wealth, except that he had been sired from the urban grid? When he went around saying his father, Augustus, was still alive, he meant it. He meant he had seen him riding in a city stage up Broadway. In misunderstanding him, I found the greater truth, though I would not realize it until everything was over and done. It was one of those intuitive moments of revelation that suspend themselves in our minds until we come around to them by the ordinary means of knowing.

All this is by way of digression, I suppose. But it is important for you to know who is telling the story. I spent my life in the newspaper business, which makes the collective story of all of us. I knew Boss Tweed personally, I' d watched him for years. I fired more than one reporter whom he' d bribed. Those he couldn' t bribe, he bullied. Everyone knew what he was up to and n.o.body could touch him. He would come into a restaurant with his entourage and you could literally feel his force like a compression of air, He was a big ruddy son of a b.i.t.c.h, he ran about three hundred pounds. Bald and red-bearded, with a charming twinkle in his blue yes. He bought the drinks and paid for the dinners. But in the odd moment when there was no hand to shake or toast to give, the eye went dead and you saw the soul of a savage.

You may think you are living in modem times, here and now, but that is the necessary illusion of every age. We did not conduct ourselves as if we were preparatory, to your time. There was nothing quaint or colorful about us, I a.s.sure you, New York after the war was more creative, more deadly, more of a genius society than it is now. Our rotary presses put fifteen, twenty thousand newspapers on the street for a penny or two. Enormous steam engines powered the mills and factories. Gas lamps lit the streets at night. We were three quarters of a century into the' Industrial Revolution.

As a people we practiced excess. Excess in everything pleasure, gaudy display, endless toil, and death. Vagrant children slept in the alleys. Rag picking was a profession. A conspicuously self satisfied cla.s.s of new wealth and weak intellect was all aglitter in a setting of ma.s.s misery. Out on the edges of town, along the North River or in Was.h.i.+ngton Heights or on the East River islands, behind stone walls and high hedges, were our inst.i.tutions of charity, our orphanages, insane asylums, poorhouses, schools for the deaf and dumb, and mission homes for magdalens. They made a sort of Ringstra.s.se for our venerable civilization.

Walt Whitman was the city' s bard, among other things, and not all that unknown. He went around dressed like a sailor in a peacoat and watch cap. A celebrant, a praise singer, and, in my opinion, something of a fool in what he chose to sing about. But he has these confessional lines about his city, less poetic than usual, like a breath he is taking before singing the next encomium: Somehow I have been stunned. Stand back! Give me a little time beyond my cuffed head and slumbers and dreams and gaping...

The War of Secession made us rich. When it was over there was nothing to stop progress-no cla.s.sical ruins of ideas no superst.i.tions to r.e.t.a.r.d civil republican ardor. Not so much had to be destroyed or overturned as in the European Cultures-of Roman towns and medieval guilds. A few Dutch farms were razed, villages melded into towns, towns burned into precincts, and all at once block and tackle were raising the marble and granite mansions of Fifth Avenue, and burly cops were wading through the stopped traffic on Broadway, slapping horses on the rumps, disengaging carnage wheels, and cursing the heedless entanglement of horse cars, stages, drays, and two-in-hands, by which we transported ourselves through the business day.

For years our tallest buildings were the fire towers. We had fires all the time, we burned as a matter of habit. The fire wardens telegraphed their sightings and the volunteers came at a gallop. When the sun was out, everything was blue, the light of our days was a blue suspension. At night the flaming stacks of the foundries along the river cast torchlight like seed over the old wharves and packing sheds. Cinderous locomotives rode right down the streets. Coal stoked the steams.h.i.+ps and the ferries. The cookstoves in our homes burned coal, and on a winter morning without wind, black plumes rose from the chimneys in the s.h.i.+mmering forms of citizens of a necropolis.

Naturally it was the old city that tended to go up, the old saloons, the hovels, the stables, beer gardens, and halls of oratory. The old life, the past. So it was a pungent air we breathed-we rose in the morning and threw open the shutters, inhaled our draft of the sulfurous stuff, and our blood was roused to churning ambition. Almost a million people called New York home, everyone securing his needs in a state of cheerful degeneracy. Nowhere else in the world was there such an acceleration of energies. A mansion would appear in a field. The next day it stood on a city street with horse and carriage riding by.

Three.

IN ONE sense it' s regrettable that I became personally involved in what I' ll call, for the moment, this Pemberton matter. Professionally you try to get as close to things as possible, but never to the point of involvement. If journalism were a philosophy rather than a trade, it would say there is no order in the universe, no discernible meaning, without the daily paper. So it' s a monumental duty we wretches have who slug the chaos into sentences arranged in columns on a page of newsprint. If we' re to see things as they are and make our deadlines, we had better not get involved.

The Telegram was an evening paper. By two or two thirty in the afternoon the issue was set. The press run was over by four. At five I would go to Callaghan' s around the corner and stand at the big oak bar with my stein and buy a copy from the lad who came in to hawk them. My greatest pleasure reading my own paper as if I had not constructed it myself. Summoning the feelings of an ordinary reader getting the news, my construed news, as an a priori creation of a higher power-the objective thing in itself from heaven poured type.

What else did I have to a.s.sure myself of a stable universe? Callaghan' s oak bar? Above me was the dark patterned tin ceiling, behind me the honest unpainted tables and chairs, and a floor of octagonal tiles with clean sawdust under my feet. But Callaghan himself, a florid man with a harsh wheezing breath, was an unfortunate patron of his own wares, and there had been more than one or two foreclosure notices in the window over the years. So much for solid oak. The newsboy, then? Piping his call at the door? But I lie if I say it was always the same one. Newsboys lived warring lives. They battled for their corners with fists and teeth and saps, they were cunning and brazen and brutal with one another. They made payoffs to get their papers early. They climbed stoops and rang doorbells, they muscled each other at the stage stops, they raced through the horse cars, and if they caught your eye, a folded edition was in your hand and the little palm under your chin before you could utter a word. In the trade it was said that newsboys were the statesmen and financiers and railroad magnates of the future. But no publisher wanted to admit that his weighty estate was carried on the small, rounded shoulders of an eight-year-old boy. If any financiers and statesmen were sprung from these urchins, they never made themselves known to me. A lot of them died of venereal and lung diseases. The ones who lived, lived to express the moral infirmities of their cla.s.s.

I could have thought of Martin Pemberton, the self impoverished son of a father he had disowned, or who had disowned him: I had come to appreciate his reliably tactless opinion-there was something a.s.sured! I wondered one afternoon, standing in Callaghan' s and finding my culture page flat and uninteresting, where in h.e.l.l he had been lately, Pemberton, because I hadn' t seen him in several weeks. Almost at the same moment, at least I think so now, a messenger came through the door with a packet from my publisher. My publisher was always sending things around that he thought I ought to know. In this case there were two items. The first was the latest issue of that organ of Brahmin culture, the Atlantic Monthly, in which he' d flagged an article by no less a personage than Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holmes was railing at certain ignorant New York critics who were not sufficiently in awe of his fellow trinomials of New England literary genius, James Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Though he didn' t identify the offending critics, It was clear from his references that Martin Pemberton was one of them-I had run his piece on the subject early in the year, in which he had said of those men, and Mr Holmes with them, that their names were too long for the work they produced.

Well, that was exhilarating but so was the second item, a letter from none other than Pierce Graham, the author of the novel Martin Pemberton had reviewed so thoroughly and I had published so promptly that rainy day in April.

You would not know the name Pierce Graham; he had some brief notoriety as a literary figure who found his material in the territories, going among the frontier towns and mining camps or shooting Indians with the cavalry. He was a sporting man, a heavy drinker with a predilection for stripping to the waist in saloons and engaging in prizefight matches. Mr Graham, writing from Chicago, advised that unless a printed apology was forthcoming in the Telegram, he would bring suit for defamation and, to round things off nicely, come to New York and thrash the writer of the review to within an inch of his life.

What a great day this was for the Telegram! Not before in my memory had we managed to offend both ends of the literary spectrum-bluebloods and redskins, the highborn and the low. Martin wrote his pieces and people were talking about them. Nothing else published in our paper had made anyone angry that I could remember.

Of course Martin Pemberton would never apologize for anything he had written, and as long as I was running things, neither would I. I looked up from my reading. Callaghan stood behind his bar, with his smile of blessing for the communion of good men on their bar stools before him. But I envisioned tables and chairs pushed aside, an overhead lamp s.h.i.+ning on the sawdust, Callaghan holding the bell, and, surrounded by a crowd of shouting men, my freelance, stripped to the waist, his ribcage his most notable attribute, raising one fist before the other as his gray eyes widened in contemplation of the posturing idiot hopping up and down in front of him. The image was so ridiculous that I laughed out loud.

"Here, Callaghan," I called, "let' s have another. And one for yourself!"

The next morning I sent a note to Pemberton' s rooming house on Greene Street, asking him to come around to the paper. He did not appear or reply by letter, so after a day or two I took myself over there after work.

Greene Street was known for its prost.i.tutes-a red lamp street. I found the address-a small, clapboard house that was set back from the building line of iron front machine shops on either side. It was badly in need of repair. The stoop leading to the front door was, in that way of grudging New York improvements, cast cement and without a handrail. A bent old woman, her whoring days long past, and with dugs hanging in her blouse to her waist and a pipe stuck in her jaw, answered my knock and pointed up the stairs with the slightest contemptuous gesture of the head, as if the person I had asked for deserved no more of anyone' s attention than that.

Martin among the cyprians. I could imagine him in his top floor room articulating his contempt' s on paper, while below his window his neighbors strolled all night long, singly and in pairs, and called their lascivious greetings to approaching gents. Inside, I was nearly overcome with the rank smell of cooking cabbage, which became even worse as I went up the stairs. There was no landing, but a single door at the top. My own letter lay unopened across the door saddle. The door opened to my touch.

The son of Augustus Pemberton lived in a small attic room filled with the intolerable stink of someone else' s cooking. I tried to open a window-there were two of them, set low to the floor and rising to waist level, and both stuck fast. The unmade bed was of the seaman' s sort, set sideways in an alcove and without headboard but with a storage chest underneath. Some clothes on pegs. Muddied boots flung in the corner. Stacks of books piled everywhere a writing table strewn with ma.n.u.script. In the hearth, stuck by their points into a bed of cold ashes, were three unopened letters in uniform-blue vellum-in the dim light they looked like distant sails at sea.

Here was a boxed-in life, careless of the things of the world. Martin was ascetic, yes, but without the ascetic' s trim and tidy ways. Nothing I gazed at had been brought to the prim glory of the threadbare. The place was only a mess. Yet I saw his gallantry in the room. I saw the burden of an educated mind. I also saw that someone loved him I realized that I had come here without admitting to myself that I was magnetized by this wretch of a freelance. Here I was ready to put him on staff and give him a living wage and where was he! I would not sneak a look at his writings. Back down the stairs and outside, breathing again, I found the old woman putting her garbage in a can. I heard from her that Pemberton owed three weeks rent and that if he didn' t show up by tomorrow she was going to throw his things into the street.

"You have not seen him in that time?"

"Not seen him, not heard him."

"Has this ever happened before?"

"If it did, would I sit still for it again? Once is bad enough, ain' t it? I live on this house, it' s my living, and a poor bargain it is with the bank paper over me and the city marshal standin' in the shadows."

She boasted that her rooms were highly sought after, that she could rent his s.p.a.ce for twice what she charged him. And he so high and mighty! Then her commercial cunning revived in her, and with one eyebrow c.o.c.ked and the pipe pointed at me like a pistol, she asked if I wouldn' t like to cover the young gentleman' s obligation for the sake of his good name.

Of course I should have done just that to make sure the room was not disturbed. But this woman was offensive. She' d sent me upstairs knowing Martin was not there. I had no sympathy for her. And at the time, the premonition I felt was not a fully developed thing. It expressed itself as the faintest shadow on my own reasoning, that the moody young man, habitually in despair of the society in which he found himself, had finally cast me and the Telegram into munic.i.p.al perdition. It was a measure of the powerful effect on me of his judgmental personality that I would read his abandoned room as, somehow, a comment on myself and my paper.

So I retreated in a disquieted state. It was small satisfaction that if I could not find him, neither would a drunk from Chicago, if it came to that.

My sense of Martin now was that the solitude in which he lived, as it brought him bruised and bloodied out of the rain, or broadcast itself in disdainful opinions, was inviolable. I found myself that night thinking of his remark about his father during my last conversation with him. I heard it again, in his reedy voice that his father was still alive, still among us and though the inflection did not change, I was no longer so sure I was hearing it the same way.

Martin would not let you settle your hopes on him, but neither would he be ignored. You can see how contradictory my feelings were half the reporter' s, half the editor' s the one' s alertness to this strange young man and his visions countermanded by the other' s sentiment that the same young man should establish himself comfortably in the newspaper business. I believed in ambition-why couldn' t he? At the same time I think, in the final a.n.a.lysis, I must have known that if there are people of such intense character as to call down on themselves a lurid fate, my freelance was one of them.

Four.

Now I think I have mentioned that I saw Martin Pemberton once more before he disappeared though on that occasion I did not have the chance to speak with him. You understand, of course, a freelance relies on several employers. In Martin' s case the a.s.signments he got from the Telegram were probably the best he could expect. More often he had to demean himself by working for the weekly rags the Tatler or the Gazette from whom he would get a couple of dollars for filling a column with the inane social doings of the cla.s.s of new wealth which had once counted him a member. This had to be more of an abuse of his sensibilities than the bad novels I gave him to review.

At any rate, a few weeks after he turned in his wet and blooded copy I saw him at a ball at the St. Nicholas Hotel. I have to say I detested b.a.l.l.s. They had them almost every night of the season presumably from the boundless need of arrivistes to place themselves in the good graces of the earlier arrivistes. My publisher, Joseph Landry, felt it his duty to subscribe and then it was the duty of his luckless employees to stand in for him. And so on this occasion I came grumbling and muttering to what I remember was the annual fete of New York Improvement Society. To make, the best of a bad bargain, I believe I invited my sister, Maddie, a spinster who taught grade school, and who didn' t get out often. I' m sure it was the Improvement Society because behind the police cordons, aflame in the gaslight, a brilliant street a.s.semblage of drunks, louts, and harridans made insulting remarks, some of them very funny, about each and every couple who stepped down from their carriage and walked into the hotel. Glorious laughter, hoots, jeers from the people in whose behalf the Improvers were sacrificing themselves! I held Maddie' s elbow and steered her through the doors, feeling in spirit like one who belonged behind the cordon, and knowing I would be fully deserving if a rock came flying through the air and knocked my top hat off.

You wouldn' t remember the old St Nicholas on Broadway. It was about the best in town. They had the first elevators. And their grand ballroom was the length of the block.

Imagine the roar sent up by the conversation of fifty or sixty tables-something resembling a tropical volcano, with the clatter of dishes and the popping of corks like stones landing at one' s feet. A chamber orchestra plays under the marble arch at one end of the room. The fiddlers saw away, and the harpist does her rolling hand gestures, but you can' t hear a note, they could be lunatics from the asylum and no one would know the difference.

Our table companions were other editors and writers for the Telegram, men I saw all day and felt no desire to speak to. Like good newsmen everywhere, they knew what was important and homed in on their dinners. On the menu there would have been fresh oysters, inevitably, all of New York was crazy about oysters, they were served in hotels, in "oyster bars," in saloons, they were sold from pushcarrs in the street wonderful fresh oysters in abundance, cold, whole, alive, and dipped in a sharp red sauce. If we were a nation they were our national dish and rack of lamb that you could rely on not to be served, as you understood the term, but, more nearly, thrown. The odor of the unwashed sommelier tinctured the bouquet of the wine he poured. But no matter. The newsmen were an island of quiet absorption in the roar.

Then I happened to see Pemberton in his limp black tie and dimmed s.h.i.+rt moving among the tables. As I say, the dailies didn' t give an affair like this more than a paragraph, but the weeklies made it a momentous event. In the stifling heat of the ballroom my freelance looked peaked, wilted, almost greenish. Should I catch his eye or would it be kinder not to?

And then he was at the table behind me, where there sat a large woman in an extravagant gown about which my sister, Maddie, had earlier whispered in amazement. I heard Pemberton introduce himself and ask this woman if she would describe what she was wearing for the enlightenment of his readers. "This is my rose satin," the woman shouted. "The brocade is in white velvet, with three flounces, quilled and tucked, in gradation one above the other, with headings of blond lace on top of each flounce." That is the precision with which such things were spoken of by our ladies.

"Your rose satin," Pemberton mumbled.

"The train is fringed in Llama bordered by seed pearls, which go all up the skirt, you see, and around the Greek sleeves. Everything, bodice and skirt and train, is lined with white silk."

"Yes, the train of Llama, thank you," Pemberton said, and attempting to disengage himself, he backed away.

I felt a jolt. The woman had risen abruptly, her chair banging into mine. "My shawl is Brussels lace," she said. "My fan is jade enamel. My handkerchief is point d' Alencon, and this stone," she said, lifting a pendant teardrop diamond from between her bosoms, "was presented to me on this occasion by my dear husband, Mr Ortley." She pointed to a beaming mustachioed gentleman across the table. "Although it is of such considerable carat that I suppose you had better not mention it. Shall I spell' Ortley' ?"

Pemberton caught sight of me, blushed, gave me an angry look, and obliged himself with a gla.s.s of champagne from the tray of a pa.s.sing waiter. I could not keep from laughing. I admit I was almost gratified to see how vulnerable he was in this life. Luckily, Mrs Ortley was diverted by the appearance of the evening' s .baritone. The applause rose. The waiters trimmed the lights. I told Maddie I was going for a smoke and followed Pemberton, who had disappeared into the arcade encircling the ballroom.

In the shadow of a potted palm, I paused to light my cigar and heard him say: "And which one is it who' s refusing immortality?"

A reply came from the rotund silhouette I recognized as his artist friend, Harry Wheelwright. "That stupid manatee over there. Mrs Van Reijn. The one in blue."

"Paint my Mrs Ortley in her gown," Martin said. "You' ll be our Goya."

"I could do this whole d.a.m.n ballroom and be our Brueghel," said Harry Wheelwright.

They stood in contemplation of the scene. The baritone sang lieder. Lieder was an obligatory taste of the Improvers, Was it Schubert' s "Erlkonig"? "Du liebes Kind, komm, geh mitmir! Gar schiine Spiele spiel ich mit dir", "You lovely child, come, go with me, such pretty games we' ll play"

"To h.e.l.l with art," Harry said. "Let us find a decent G.o.dfearing saloon."

As they moved off Martin said: "I think I' m losing my mind."

"It is no less than Iwould expect."

"You haven' t spoken to anyone''

"Why would I? I never want to think of it again. It' s struck from the minutes. You' re fortunate I even speak to you." This last exchange had dropped in tone to a conspiratorial mutter. Then they were out of hearing.

I had Maddie to take home or I would have followed them to their saloon. As to their two kinds of drinking, Martin' s was the sort that turned him sodden and brooding with a single concerted intention, whereas Harry Wheelwright' s was that of the voluptuary-a.s.sertive of its appet.i.tes, but easily disposed to laugh or cry or feel deeply whatever the moment called for. Wheelwright might have been rowdier and more full of bl.u.s.ter, as well as larger than his slightly built friend, but Martin had the stronger will. All this would become clear to me by and by. At that moment I felt only that sudden sensitivity to the unknown that makes it a specific unknown as if we discern in the darkness only the dim risen quality that draws us toward it. Nothing more. I would barely realize in the coming weeks that I was not seeing Pemberton in the office. I would notice that the books I wanted for his review had turned into a small stack and then days later I would notice that the stack had risen. In modem city life you can conceivably experience revelation and in the next moment go on to something else. Christ could come to New York and I would still have a paper to get out.

So it was by the grace of the Atlantic and Pierce Graham that I had become concerned about my freelance. I didn' t know why he was gone and I felt a certain urgency to find out. There might be a simple explanation, a dozen of them, in fact, though I couldn' t finally persuade myself of that. The obvious thing for me to do was to track down the friend and sharer of his secrets, Harry Wheelwright. Yet I balked at the idea. I knew Harry Wheelwright and didn' t trust him. He was a drinker, a chaser of women, and a society toady. Under his unkempt, curling ma.s.s of hair were the bloodshot eyes and fat cheeks and fleshy nose and mouth and double chin of someone who managed to feed and water himself quite well. But he liked to portray himself as a martyr to Art. He' d studied art at Yale. Quite early he' d made something of a name doing war engravings for Harper' s Weekly. He took the rough sketches artists sent back from the field and made steel points in his studio on Fourteenth Street. That in itself was no crime. But when people admired the engravings thinking that he' d done them under fire, he didn' t tell them that he had never been under fire from anyone but his creditors. He liked to fool people, Harry, he lied for sport. Wheelwrights having preached from their cold pulpits a hundred years before the Revolution, I couldn' t believe, finally, that his pose of ironic superiority to those he made his living from was entirely uncorrupted by the sn.o.bbism of his New England lineage.

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 bas.e.m.e.nt, 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 a.s.sume 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 munic.i.p.al office of course and the source of a reliable income for the Tweed Ring. Simmons would have shared in that and been a.s.sured of a long, profitable employment, which meant Augustus Pemberton' s offer had to have been very attractive to lure him away.