The Waterworks Part 3

"I see. And were you one of the gallants putting a torch to the place?"

"I was, Captain, and' twas one of your own rifles who nicked me in that skirmish when I was fighting for my honor against the illegal conscription."

"I understand now, Knucks."

"Yessir. And withal I pr' aps have said the wrong thing, given what I am to divulge, with your permission. But I' m an older and wiser sod now, and whilst childrens, black or white, are no affection of mine, I have more sympathy for every soul of G.o.d since'' - he generously turned to include me in the conversation - "all of us is G.o.d' s dear souls, ain' t that so? And so there have come to be things I see that I cannot countenance."

"There is hope for us all, Mr McIlvaine," said Donne. "In the old days Knucks here made his living by breaking bones, twisting necks, and tearing off the ears of people. Prison was a normal condition of his life."

"True enough, Captain," the fellow said with a grin.

"These days," Donne said, regarding the wretch but addressing me, "he makes his living no longer with his muscles but by his faculties of observation and deceit."

"Right as ever, Captain. Take this matter. I don' t know when I have been so alarmed to speak of something. But, sir, it is at some risk to meself that I have come here, and for all of that I am sorely in need of an oyster or two and a gla.s.s of Steinhardt' s German," he said, looking at the floor. "It' s the least for putting my life in danger."

Donne said, "What is it you have to tell me."

"It' s most horrible, sir. Even I know that. I aver an' detest there is a man going about these nights offerin' to buy up loose children."

"Buy them?"

"Exactly so. They must be sound and not older than ten nor younger than five. And it don' t matter if boys or girls but they must not be dark skin."

"He approached you?"

"Not me. I heard him at the Buffalo Tavern. He was talking to the barkeep, Tommy, with the red beard."

"What did he say?"

"Just that. He would pay a fat sum."

"Whom else did he speak with?"

"Well, I knew you would want me to so I followed him to two or three places, and watched him tell the same tale, and G.o.d help me, there he goes then right up to my own abode and enters in there and after a while I sneaks a look in the window, for you know my landlord Pig Meachum keeps the ground front for hisself, and there is the man at his table and Pig is nodding and taking puffs on his pipe while he listens."

"When was this"

"Not two nights ago."

Donne leaned forward and folded his hands on his desk. "He was not known to you?"

"No, sir."

"What did he look like"

"Why nothing special, Captain. A man like the rest of us."

"What was he wearing, Knucks?"

"Ah, now that was true, a straw with his linen suit. But he was no swell, of that I' m sure. He was not skittish, he looked like he could take care uv hisself."

Donne said: "I want you to find him and befriend him. Offer your services, you' re not without reputation. You will see what he' s up to and give me the tip."

"Ah, Yer Honor." The informer twisted his cap one way, then another. Suddenly added to the rankness of his unwashed person was the acrid smell of fear. "I don' t fancy that. I would rather not be party to that, if you please."

"But you shall."

"I have done a citizen' s duty. I am an old gimper, and the lowest street life takes its licks at me knowing I am not the Knucks r was. I must live by the wits alone these day, and the wits tell me a man mustn' t show himself too inquirous about such dark matters as these."

"Here," Donne said, removing a half dollar from his vest pocket. He snapped it down on the desk. "No harm will come to you. You are in the employ of the Munic.i.p.al Police of the City of New York."

When the sergeant had ushered the man out Donne stood, though it was more like an unfolding. He stretched his arms and then took himself to the window in his stately wading bird glide. Putting one hand over the other behind his back, he looked out as if there were a prospect worth seeing.

'' Such dark matters as these,'' he said in Knucks' s intonation. "Such dark matters as these," he said, as if by p.r.o.nouncing them he was investigating the words themselves, and then he quietly drifted into his own thought.

I myself was thinking that what I had heard was in the continuum of original sin, not pleasant to contemplate but not disconnected from anything else either. I was anxious for us to get back to the matter at hand. Then Donne asked me the question that flashed across my brain and spanned the poles of our dark universe: "Who do you suppose would want to buy them, Mr McIlvaine, when they are in the streets for the taking?" I know you will think this is the overwrought fabulation of an old man, but the means of human knowledge are far from understood, and I am telling you here, it was this question that afforded me my first glimpse of Dr Sartorius, or sense of the presence in our city of Dr Sartorius though it may have been nothing more than a moment' s belated awareness of the shadow cast by his name as it was uttered by Sarah Pemberton.

Twelve.

OR ELSE, as I had brought in the protagonist for my quest, he brought with him, like his shadow, his opposite.

Taking Edmund Donne into my confidence would put the whole matter of my freelance' s disappearance into another realm, making it the concern of a particular cla.s.s of people in our society. For think, now, of the community we made - the press, the police, Ille clergy the family and the childhood lover waiting to bear his children. All of us against everything else. Yet I wasn' t quite aware of this. In fact I found myself thinking just the opposite, that I confiding in Donne reduced my chances of understanding the truth of the situation, that the introduction of a munic.i.p.al officer into things compressed my thought into the small s.p.a.ce of law enforcement. He wanted us to speak immediately with Martin' s friend Harry Wheelwright. Of course that was the logical next step. Blit I felt peculiar leading him there. I felt as if I was giving up my diction for his. As astute as Donne was, he was a policeman, wasn' t he? With a policeman' s simple tools of thought? In a way it was like having Dr Grimshaw as a partner - I mean with that sort of theological rope around my neck. How perverse of me that having solicited Donne' s help, I would then deplore it.

You didn' t need an appointment to see Harry Wheelwright, he kept an open house, I suppose to make it convenient as possible for collectors to stop by. He occupied the top floor of a commercial iron front on West Fourteenth Street, the equivalent of one large room, and with a bank of windows characteristic of the iron fronts.

The windows, which faced north, were covered with a sort of crystallized grime. The light that came through was diffused, a flat white light that fell evenly over everything injudiciously. A big bed, loosely covered, was on one wall. An armoire next to it, a sink and icebox half hidden by a folding screen, a lithography or etching press of some sort, odd pieces of furniture, whether to be lived in or used for props, it was hard to tell. And all of it on a splintered wood floor that appeared never to have been swept.

When we arrived he was at work with a live model , an unfortunate skinny young man who was seated on a packing crate, s.h.i.+rtless, but with the dark blue uniform trousers and boots of the Union army. Galluses hung from his bare shoulders, and an enlisted man' s cap sat upon his head. The poor wretch had one arm cut off above the elbow, the reddened skin of the stump sewn together like the end of a sausage, and he was smiling at me, with his broken and stained teeth, enjoying the shock I suppose my face registered at the sight.

But when I introduced Harry to Donne, who was in mufti, so that I gave his rank with the Munic.i.p.al Police, the model stood up with an expression on his face of absolute horror and struggled to put on his s.h.i.+rt. "Wait - keep the pose, stay where you are!" the artist shouted, going toward him. There was a flurry of remonstrations, curses, and the one-armed man was fleeing down the stairs.

Harry looked at us balefully with his bloodshot bulging blue eyes.

"We' re here about Pemberton," I said.

"I see." He tossed his paintbrush across the room. "How like Martin to ruin a day' s work." He went behind the screen and I heard the clink of gla.s.s and bottle.

The place was a pigsty, but on the walls were exhibited the artist' s meticulous habits of observation - oil paintings and sketches in oils - of his society. His subjects, along with the maimed and disfigured veterans painted in unflinching detail, were the more academic portraits or fas.h.i.+onable New York scenes designed for the market. So it was really quite visible, the same conflicted mind I saw in Martin Pemberton - the critique, and the necessity of earning a living, side by side. And there were sketches I had never seen before, drawings on paper tacked up there unceremoniously, of the squatters shanties on the West Side, people scavenging the garbage scow at the dock off Beach Street, the vagrant children of the Five Points warming themselves over a steam grate, the mob at the Exchange, the traffic of Broadway with its drays and stages and two in hands all pressing forward under a net of telegraph wires with the sun lighting up the store-window awnings in squares and rectangles, sketched and painted and etched and pulled, the sensibility given to his era flung out and spattered into the civilization I recognized as the one I lived in.

But the piece that struck me most was a large unframed portrait half hidden by another in a stack of canvases leaning against the wall. A young woman. He had posed her in the broken down armchair that still stood in the middle of the room. She wore a plain dark gray dress, simply cut, with a white collar, a young woman seated without coyness, in full presentation of the honest self, but also, from the way he laid the light upon her face, and in her eyes, he' d gotten her genuine virtue, the loyalty of her spirit and even more difficult, what I had noticed about her when I had met her, the erotic moral being. And he had also caught in her expression the first signs of an unrewarded schoolmarm life that I had myself seen in our interview, as if a darker mood was bearing down upon her from the background of solemn umber. The whole painting was done in grays and blacks and browns.

"Emily Tisdale," I said.

"Yes, good for you, McIlvaine, that is indeed Miss Tisdale." I explained to Donne this was the young woman whom everyone, including herself, had presumed to be engaged to Martin Pemberton. Behind me I heard the artist' s robust laugh.

Now I knew it was not in itself remarkable that someone who would know Martin would know Emily, but I was struck here as if by an extraordinary coincidence. Perhaps it was an effect of the art - it was of such intimacy, this portrait - but I felt that I had stumbled upon the inner workings of this generation who were all so different from my own, each in his own character, to be sure, but with this common quality of creating gaps in my understanding of what was happening to them, of what fate they were seeking for themselves as if I had lost some of my hearing and could not always get the sense of their words, though the tones were clear enough.

The artist had come up behind us. He had set out some chipped and dirty tumblers and a bottle of brandy. It was not yet noon. There was a slight whistle to his respiration. He was really stout, Harry, with large pudgy hands, and he reeked of tobacco and his unwashed smock. "It' s good, isn' t it?" he said. "Notice I didn' t pose her leaning forward with chin up, ankles crossed, and hands in her lap, which another painter would have done. Emily' s grace is her own, it is not trained. I let her seat herself in the chair and that' s the pose she took, the feet flat on the floor before her, with her skirt draping the thighs, you see, and her arms at rest on the arms of the chair and looking straight at you with those clear brown Siberian eyes."

"Why Siberian?" said Donne.

"The cheekbones are high, and see here? the way they seem to lift the eyes at the outer corners? Don' t tell old man Tisdale, but somewhere in his line of pious Protestants was a wild woman of the steppes. Yet I' m constrained from acting upon it by the simple minded friends.h.i.+p that some women a.s.sume and install between you like a chast.i.ty belt."

Harry was a boor. It has been my experience that artists are invariably boors. That is the paradox a mysterious G.o.d lets them paint what they will never understand. Like all those Florentines and Genoans and Venetians who were scoundrels and sybarites, but whom this G.o.d trusted to give us the angels and saints and Jesus Christ himself through their dumb hands.

"And not constrained by your friends.h.i.+p with Martin Pemberton?"

Donne said as we continued to look at the painting. "Oh, that too, of course. If you insist. I mean I have acted toward him as a friend, though by now I would rather not be his friend. And I am Emily' s friend, though I would rather be more than her friend. And she is Martin' s lost friend yes, I think that more accurately describes it."

"Why is she lost?" said Donne.

"Because she stubbornly insists on it," Harry said, triumphant, as if he had just given the answer to a riddle. He offered us chairs and poured us each a drink, though we had not asked for one.

I had told Donne what I thought he should know about Harry Wheelwright. That the best of him would be on the wall. That he was totally untrustworthy, that he lied for sport, that we would not get the truth from him even if he knew what it was. Donne sat in the same upholstered old chair Emily had posed in. His knees rose up before him and he placed his elbows on the chair arms and pressed the fingertips of his hands together and asked a question or two, in a tone of voice that didn' t exactly demand an answer but was irresistibly confident that he would receive one. I' m not sure that was all there was to it, but he got Harry talking.

"I don' t know where in G.o.d' s name Pemberton may be, or what he is up to, nor do I want to. You can believe me -I have no more curiosity in this matter," Harry said. "I' m through with that d.a.m.ned family."

"Well, he hasn' t been to his job in some weeks. He' s arrears in his rent. What do you think can have happened?"

"Nothing worth worrying about. Not to Martin Pemberton. You know when harm has come to someone that there was a susceptibility there. But that can' t be so with my imperial friend. It is not in his nature to be deprived of his full measure of what life, even the life of ideas, has to offer."

"You last saw him-when, did you say?"

"Here, Martin came up here. When Emily was sitting, in fact. Came barging right in. It was June but he was still wearing his d.a.m.ned coat over his shoulders and pacing back and forth with that locked knee gait of his. It broke her concentration. Her eyes followed him, her head moved. Women love Martin, why I can' t imagine. After he got himself disowned I used to take him home for dinner. We roomed together at Columbia, you know. He was exactly the same then. I think he was born striding about, pale and thinking metaphysical thoughts. Contemptuous of his fellow students, hating his professors in every way superbly, brilliantly, insufferable."

"You were good friends?"

"Well, I found him amusing. But, you know, I never cared to see him without a s.h.i.+rt, with that white and concave chest of his that I thought an ideal vessel for consumption. But when I brought him home, my mother and two sisters were delighted with him. They fed him and listened to his ideas. They adored him. Perhaps because he is far too serious to ingratiate himself with women or solicit their good opinion. Yes, that must be it. Women trust a man who seems not to notice them as women."

But why had Martin interrupted the sitting?

"I don' t know - to interrupt it, I suppose. To inflict his mood on us. He upset her. They argued."

"About what?"

"Who knows? Even if you' re sitting right there listening, you can never tell what lovers are arguing about. They don' t know themselves. But the subject appeared to be fidelity. Not infidelity, mind you. Martin was attacking Emily for her faithfulness.' You see?' he shouts as she sits in my chair there, weeping.' Every time we meet I try your patience and abuse your nature. It doesn' t seem to matter. You wait for the next time! Don' t you understand what h.e.l.l you face? If I give myself to you in my present state, with nothing answered, nothing understood? You will ache with longing for your unhappiness of waiting, you will long to be back in that d.a.m.ned garden of our childhood with its stupid child fantasies of life.' And so on, endlessly, like that."

"So Emily knew of Martin' s, visions?"

"Oh, yes. He generously shared them with everyone."

"What did he mean,' ... with nothing answered, with nothing understood' ? Did he use those exact words?" Donne had almost whispered this last question, and with a concern that somehow had the effect of illuminating Harry' s youth. I realized again how young they all were. It is harder to see someone' s youthfulness who is so portly, and double chinned, but Harry was not yet thirty. He sighed. He poured himself another inch of brandy and held the bottle aloft. "This is very civilized - you sure you won' t have another?" And then he looked at each of us in turn. "This doesn' t all have to be unpleasant, does it? I think Martin meant he had seen Augustus Pemberton and then missed seeing him."

"What do you mean?"

"I can' t say anything more. He made me swear to it." Harry settled his bulk onto a wooden chair. We were silent while he composed himself to break his oath. He stared at the floor and a low moan escaped from him. He said: "When I write my memoirs I myself will be the subject of them. I do not intend to go down as a mere chronicler of the Pemberton family. I absolutely will not. My paintings will hang in museums. My own fate is another story, not this one. Not this one."

Thirteen.

SO NOW we come to it. I knew we would come to it. I knew we would.

Well then, we were sitting one night in a saloon on East Houston Street where the ladies who come in without escorts are not necessarily professional but merely restless, or foolish- yes, Harry Hill' s, that saloon of impeccable manners. A violin and a harmonium played for the dancing. This was this past June, toward the end of the month, because I remember the papers had proclaimed the summer solstice. Papers make much of what n.o.body thinks twice about, you have to admit that, Mr McIlvaine, Martin on this particular night conceived the notion of going up to the Woodlawn Cemetery and seeing his father. He wanted me to go along, then and there, to go to the cemetery and open the coffin and look upon the glories within. It was past midnight, I was quite drunk, and I remember thinking it was not an idea that particularly interested me, digging up Augustus Pemberton. I had met him once or twice in his life and would not on my own have thought to renew the acquaintance. But Martin said he wanted to make sure the old man was all right. There was a stout woman at our table and she was laughing uproariously. I pointed out to her that Augustus Pemberton, being dead, was surely all right, that in fact his state of being might be described as a kind of perfection. Before I understood what was happening, Martin had grabbed my arm and we were climbing into a hack and galloping up to the Central Railroad Terminal, where we managed to catch the last train of the night - or was it the first train of the morning? But we had an entire car to ourselves, and we rode to the village of Woodlawn. It is there the old man is buried, at the cemetery in Woodlawn. You know it, all the wealth and money likes to be buried there, it is a fine and fas.h.i.+onable graveyard.

We got off at this dark station and didn' t have any idea of how to get to the place or what we would do once there. I was cold. I was s.h.i.+vering. There is no question about that, I don' t see why the weather has to kowtow to your calendar. We had nothing left to drink. I urged Martin to reconsider. The waiting room was unattended but a coal stove was still warm from the night before and I thought we could sit beside it and wait for the train going back to the city. I knew it had to come eventually. Or perhaps I argued that we should wait for daylight to desecrate his father' s grave so that at least we would be able to see what we were doing.

I understood why he was possessed by this peculiar idea, he had told me of these odd sightings all spring, and I knew it was nonsense but could not make up my mind whether it would be better for him to actually see his papa' s corpse or not to, so I was irresolute. Martin was as drunk as I, but it was a drunkenness of hard, concerted intention, as if drink had not dulled his wits but brought them to a sharper focus. The fact is that when my dear Martin sets his mind on something you cannot argue with him. He has a powerful presence and a way of considering you that, even as he needs you and your help, makes you feel foolish or inconsequential in one way or another, as someone lacking resolve or moral vision or even simple courage. So we had this drunken dispute and I, who had secretly to concede myself to be without any one of these qualities - I of course gave in and was persuaded, and dragged my sodden and surly self after him as he went looking for the family mausoleum.

I remember it was a walk uphill that left me short of breath the village street was an unpaved lane with a few houses and a general store and a clapboard church. There was light from a half moon. We pa.s.sed an alley where there was a livery stable and we heard the snort and shudder of a horse, at which point Martin described his sightings once again, as if I hadn' t already heard about them, and asked me why he always saw the white omnibus when the weather was bad. I couldn' t begin to think of an answer. Only when we were beyond the village and going along a high retaining wall did the full meaning dawn on me, finally, that my friend had every intention of exhuming his father. Good G.o.d! These are modern times! Our city is lit in gaslight, we have transcontinental railroads, I can send a message by cable under the ocean, We don' t dig up bodies anymore!

I think I was sobering rapidly, which one experiences as the appreciation of consequences. We went in by the main gate, and eventually Martin found in the hills of the Woodlawn necropolis a modest marker, considering, a single marble angel on a tall thin pedestal, and a footstone telling the name and dates and protesting the goodness of the departed in that trite way people go about speaking to posterity. I had expected something equal to the man, a monumental vault, fenced about to separate Augustus from the surrounding folk and richly carved to advertise his life' s splendor. Martin too was taken aback by the modesty of things, so much so that he thought this might be a different Augustus Pemberton and looked about for the actual one. But we knelt again in the moonlight before the stone and Martin said these were his father' s dates and that it would be too terrible a joke if there had been two Augustus Palmerton' s living in the world at the same time. And so we knelt there in drunken puzzlement, not being able to understand why modesty and economy would be the choice in death of such a man.

And somehow or other, as I sat there with my teeth chattering, I could now see the shadowiest outlines of the surrounding trees, and then as I peered through the dark, of the hillsides and the stones upon them, and then I understood it was not darkness I was looking into but the milkiest mists of the minutes before dawn. Everything was wet, the air painted the skin of my face with its wet mist, and as I stood and brushed the wet dirt that clung to my trousers, I saw Martin coming down the lane out of this dripping gray light with two fellows behind him, one with a shovel on his shoulder, the other with a pick. Apparently I had fallen asleep against a stone, He had gone searching and found these habituof the graveyard, as if they were known always to be on call to disinter loved ones for anyone who requested it. To this moment I do not know where he found them or what he told them. But I know I paid for them since I was the one with money that night.

So they removed their jackets but not their caps, and spit upon their hands and rubbed them and went to work. Martin and I stood side by side, a bit uphill on a knoll, and watched them, the pick first loosening the sod, then the shoveller piling it off to the side, and so, picking and shoveling, and making a gradual sort of descent into the hole they dug around themselves. I noticed as they worked that the sky was getting lighter and whiter, and the mist was lightening into a visible fog, for which I thanked G.o.d, for I was of course anxious that we not be discovered, prisons being what they are these days. I tried in my mind to rationalize this awful thing we were doing. I tried to believe this act was not entirely bizarre, and given Martin' s lifelong struggle as Augustus' s son, that it made a kind of peculiar sense, as if by seeing the old man' s remains Martin would be relieved of his sick, visions, and find some peace for himself, if that was ever possible.

And then there was a different sound, of the shovel hitting the box, and I felt Martin' s hand, like a claw, in my shoulder. Now that the moment was here, he could not move. I enjoyed that. You know, I have no fear of looking at dead things. I have drawn dead things all my life - dead insects, dead fish, dead dogs. Cadavers in anatomy cla.s.s. I told him to wait where he was and I went down to the rim of the pit. The men had constructed earthen ledges on which they could crouch, and from these ledges they sc.r.a.ped the top of the coffin clean, and with great effort they were able to pry up the lid with a small sledgehammer and an iron wedge they had known enough to bring with them. I wondered if there was a craftsmen' s guild for such things. The lid came off and was hoisted up and slid aside. On my friend' s behalf I summoned up a steadfast heart. I knelt and looked. A figure lay there in some disarray on its padded white silk couch. And. I tell you now, Captain Donne, I tell you this with impunity because the greater crime was not committed by us. It was a very shrunken corpse, in odd clothing, with a tiny leathered face with its eyes closed and lips pursed, as if it was trying to understand something or recall something it had forgotten. The light I had for my examination was not actual daylight, you understand, I had to see through it, as if through a milky suspension. The air was wet, the ground was wet, and even as I looked, the silken folds of the shroud cloth darkened from the atmosphere. I looked on stupidly, wondering at the arms, one of which lay upon the chest, the other dropped to the side, with their small hands extended from a cuffless sleeve. There was no cravat or collar or frock coat but a short jacket and white s.h.i.+rt with a red bow tie. The trousers came to the ankles. The feet were not booted but wore patent - leather shoes. I tried to reconcile these odd data with what I remembered of Augustus Pemberton. I heard Martin' s whisper,' For G.o.d' s sake, Harry.' It seems to me now that an eternity pa.s.sed before I realized I was looking at the corpse of a child. It was a dead boy in that coffin.

The diggers hoisted themselves out of the grave. My stovepipe fell across my face and into the box and it landed upright on the chest. It looked as if the boy was holding a hat over his heart, perhaps at a pa.s.sing parade. I laughed, I thought it was funny.

' Here, Martin,' I called,' come say h.e.l.lo to our young friend.'

"I was not as sober as I thought, who knows now what he would have preferred to see there through the white fog in Woodlawn Cemetery. Once he was bent on discovery the result would be terrible, no matter what it was. He came down the knoll and got to his knees and peered in, and I heard a moan, an awful ba.s.so sound, not in his voice at all, but brought up from the lungs of a s.h.a.ggy ancestry, a million years old. My bones resonated. I never want to hear such a sound again. Martin made me swear I would never tell anyone, which I was only too glad to do. The gravediggers closed the coffin and reburied it. I wanted to get out of there but Martin insisted that we stay until the job was done. I remember he tamped down the gra.s.s where it didn' t lie to his satisfaction.

I saw him only a few times afterwards, and now I don' t see him. He stopped coming around. I should run into him now and then - we have the same haunts, after all - but I don' t see him. I don' t know where in h.e.l.l he is, and I don' t want to know. It is dangerous being around him. Any curiosity on my part, what has happened to the body of his father, what the child is doing there in his stead, if I allowed myself to think about this, lurid, family struggle, Well, they deserve each other with their awful battles that they carry on past death, I refuse to think about it, it is a kind of deep moral damage that can be contracted by too close a.s.sociation, like the cholera. And to think who paid for that glorious evening!. As to a man' s strength of character, I a.s.sure you Martin Pemberton has not been as good or great a friend as Harry Wheelwright, and never was and never can he, Certainly he would not comport himself with the same grace and fort.i.tude if, G.o.d forbid, the situation was reversed and It was a Wheelwright who escaped from the grave.

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 pa.s.sionate 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.