The Waterworks Part 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

d.i.c.k' s was the newsboys' Athenaeum, a cellar hole, down three steps. It was fitted out with plank tables and benches. Up front was the counter where a boy bought his mug of coffee and one of d.i.c.k' s blackened scones, split, and stuffed with a gob of b.u.t.ter. Earlier it had started to rain in the city. The cellar with its low ceiling stank of kerosene and rancid b.u.t.ter and the wet clothes of thirty or forty unwashed boys.

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

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

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

"Now, now," the sergeant called out.

""E beat you, Philly?"

"I' ll say, Knucks b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a shamefaced admission of sorts for the city editor of the Telegram. I heard a horse and carriage stop outside. I was not prepared to see the sergeant come in escorting, of all people, Harry Wheelwright. The artist was glum, surly, barely civil. "You again, McIlvaine!" he said. "I suppose I' ve you to thank for the captain' s interest in art." His evening clothes were askew. But as a confessed desecrator of graves he perhaps felt a certain obligation to the man he' d confessed to. Or was it that when you come clean, you' re committed, inescapably, to redemption?

Donne had had the inspired idea of having Wheelwright draw a pencil sketch, from the barkeep' s description, of the man who' d fought Knucks Geary. It was remarkable to see. Harry asking the precise questions, by way of clarification, only a trained artist would ask, and then adding more details from the little girl. As we all stood looking over his shoulder, he drew and erased and redrew for their recognition, and composed from the combined words, what we would not know until much later, was an astonis.h.i.+ngly accurate portrait of the driver of the white omnibus with its complement of old men in black, that Martin Pemberton had twice seen riding through the streets of Manhattan. So we were on my freelance' s case after all. Not, I emphasize, that we consciously knew it at the time. We did not look at the sketch and know it was Dr Sartorius' s driver and all around handyman, Wrangel. We were looking at a sketch of the stolid, shaven headed killer of Knucks Geary. But I was unaccountably elated. It had been a good night' s work. Donne was actually smiling. He bought a round of drinks, and tea for the child, and he congratulated Harry, who smiled sheepishly for his earlier bad humor and bought a round in turn, and placed his top hat on the head of the little flower girl, there in the Black Horse Tavern.

Fifteen.

I' M FAIRLY sure, I make the claim, Donne was the inventor of description - based portraiture for police purposes. Of course the idea of publis.h.i.+ng these so called composite portraits in newspapers came later, and was not Donne' s. He stubbornly insisted on police work as a profession, if not a calling, and would not think of advertising for the public' s help to apprehend a criminal - in effect deputizing the population of New York. You should remember that in this time we all held constantly in our minds images of the ragged western edges of civilization. Out there, where Mr Greeley of the Tribune was urging all young men to go, the law was anyone' s to devise, ad hoc, as circ.u.mstances required. In New York, by contrast, it should be demonstrated to be something like a civil religion, at least, as I interpret the priestly mind of Edmund Donne.

So the use of that sketch would be his alone, or his trusted sergeant' s, or one or another of the very few colleagues in the Munic.i.p.als he could rely on, as they patiently made their way into every depraved precinct of the city' s depths to find the strongman to match it.

But I realize now I may be giving you a false idea of Dr Sartorius, whom you know so far only as a name. I' m concerned that you should not have your first impression of him as a tactician, who had made a mistake. Sartorius mentioned his requirements and left it up to others to fulfill them, on the model, I suppose, of G.o.d giving free will to the human race. It was a of the degree of loyalty this doctor inspired that everyone in his employ was free to create what was needed to serve him. The driver of the omnibus and all round handyman of the place, or the cooks, the nurses, the members of the Board, and his hospital - if you want to call it that - administrator, Eustace Simmons, formerly in the employ of Martin' s father as slave trade expediter, all of them lived and worked with the relish of free people.

I withhold here the circ.u.mstances of our first sight of Sartorius. I want to keep to the chronology of things but at the same time to make their pattern sensible, which means disrupting the chronology. After all, there is a difference between living in some kind of day to day crawl through chaos, where there. is no hierarchy to your thoughts, but a raucous equality of them, and knowing in advance the whole conclusive order, which makes narration, suspect. I want you roughly in the same suspension we were in, as family and friends and counselors of the family, who understood this as a Pemberton matter, when in fact it was far more than that. The first actual details we had of this doctor, more than the sound of his name, came from the pract.i.tioner it was said he had replaced - Dr Mott, Thadeus Mott. What happened is that Sarah Pemberton, acting upon Captain Donne' s request, wrote to Dr Mott and asked him if he would provide her with his records of her late husband' s medical history. Another example of Donne' s love of doc.u.mentation, I don' t know how much she confided of her lamentable circ.u.mstances, but Dr Mott, a gentleman of the old school, replied with a fair copy by mail, and so we had a look at Augustus Pemberton' s insides.

Until the last year of life he had suffered only from the normal variety of ailments of a man his age, including a moderate hearing loss, gout, prostat.i.tis, and occasional mild pulmonary insufficiency. Then, a few months before he took to his bed at Ravenwood he visited Dr Mott' s office in Manhattan with a complaint of fainting spells and loss of vigor. The preliminary diagnosis was anemia. Dr Mott wanted to put him in the hospital for observation. Augustus refused. So this was somewhat different from what Sarah Pemberton had understood. Her husband knew he was ill prior to his collapse at Ravenwood. What was not different was the old man' s reaction, on both occasions, to Mott' s diagnosis. Mott' s final words were that on the date he visited Ravenwood, he found Pemberton in the terminal stages of a virulent anemia, for which medical practice had only palliative treatment. I use the word virulent but it was a more specific term, some form of irreversible anemia that led to death, usually in under six months.

Now it turned out that the disparity between Mott' s account and Sarah Pemberton' s recollections was of no significance. The old man had simply hidden something else from his wife. But it did. Donne to call upon the doctor for the purpose of clarification. I went along, and when Donne introduced Sartorius' s name into the conversation Dr Mott said: "I am not surprised that he would take on a terminal case, probably with all sorts of arrogant expectations."

My heart skipped a beat. I glanced at Donne, who showed no emotion, but said, mildly, "Are you saying, Doctor, this Sartorius is a quack?"

"Oh no, not at all. He' s an excellent physician." I said: "His name isn' t in the registry of the New York Medical a.s.sociation."

"There is no rule that a doctor must be a member. The majority find it, meaningful, collegial, to join. It' s a worthy organization. Another credential, without question, but also good for medicine as a whole. We have conferences, symposia, we share our knowledge. But Sartorius had no regard for any of that."

"Where is his practice?" "I' ve no idea. I haven' t seen or heard from him in many years, though if he were still in Manhattan I think I would know." Dr Mott was a distinguished member of his profession. He was a handsome man, still trim despite his age - I would say he was close to seventy at this time - with dark gray hair and mustaches, and a Phi Beta Kappa key drooping across his vest. He wore a prince -nez, through which he regarded each of us in turn with the same thoughtful gaze he must have turned on his patients. We had called on him!. It his home on Was.h.i.+ngton Place.

Donne asked him when he had known Sartorius.

"He served on the Sanitary Commission of the Metropolitan Board of Health, of which I was chairman. This would have been in 1866, the commission antic.i.p.ated a major cholera epidemic that summer. We cleaned up the slums, we changed the manner of garbage collection and put through measures to discourage contaminations of the public water supply. We prevented a major outbreak, like the one of 1849. I' m not sure I understand why this is a police matter," he said.

Donne cleared his throat. "Mrs Pemberton ,is burdened with some estate problems, in which the munic.i.p.al government figures. We' re doc.u.menting what we can, by way of a legal resolution."

"I see." He turned to me. "And does the press usually sit in on such matters, Mr McIlvaine?"

"I' m here as Mrs Pemberton' s friend and adviser," I said. "It' s entirely personal."

For a moment I felt measured in the doctor' s scales. I modeled my impa.s.sivity on Donne' s and held my breath. Then Dr Mott leaned back in his chair. "We still don' t know the cause of cholera, although clearly the poison spreads through the diarrheal and vomitous discharges of infected persons. But the question of contagion, Well, there are two theories-a theory of zymotic infection, that is, that the disease spreads through an atmospheric miasma of poisonous matter, or a theory that a microscopic animal organism, called a germ, lives inside the body fluids. Dr Sartorius was an exponent of the germ theory, on the grounds that only something animate can reproduce itself without end, which it would be required to do to generate an epidemic illness. The choleric poison seems certainly to have this capacity, since those days, his point of view would seem to be gaining authority, especially from the fermentation experiments of Mr Pasteur, in France, and new rumors of the isolation by Dr Koch in Germany of a cholera vibrio. But in all his ideas, Dr Sartorius exhibited, well, a terrible intolerance for opposing points of view. He was rude in our meetings. He was generally scornful of the medical community, often mocking us as a cupping-and-leeching fraternity, even though the heroic procedures are no longer seriously maintained by most of us, I don' t customarily talk about a colleague in this way, but I am not questioning his competence. He was arrogant, cold, and, needless to say, quite unpopular with his brother physicians. Yet we would never put social quarantine on a man so brilliant, no matter how unfeeling as a person, in hopes of making a decent Christian of him. He withdrew from us, not we from him. I have to think with pity of his patients, a.s.suming he still practices. He was the kind of doctor who didn' t care what he treated, a man or a cow, and hadn' t a trace of the gift for the soothing word, the comforting a.s.surance, that patients need from us as much as our medications. I say all this in confidence, of course. If you do find him, he' ll probably refuse to see you. I remember, after that, walking down Broadway with Donne in the late afternoon heat. The air seemed suspended, unmoving, with a specific attar projected by each shop, store, restaurant, or saloon. Thus we walked through invisible realms of coffee, baked goods, leather, cosmetics, roasting beef, and beer, at which point, on no scientific authority whatsoever, I was willing to endorse the miasma theory of zymotic infection. We were both peculiarly elated. I found myself amused by the stick legged glide of Donne' s walk. His shadow was longer than anyone else' s. It was the late afternoon, visible columns of sun crossing Broadway at the intersections. The cross streets, lacking traffic, were corridors of sun, I could see the air, in cinders, s.h.i.+fting through the filigree of fire escapes and telegraph wires. Ladies, laden with their packages, were pouring out of the stores, the doormen of the hotels were blowing their whistles for the hackney cabs, the city was beginning its turn toward evening. We walked among all manner of men, striding, shuffling, limping, begging, ogling the ladies, telling stories, listening to stories, clasping their hands in moments of overwhelming piety. A legless Negro on his wheeled board pushed rudely through legs, A man dressed as Uncle Sam gave candy to children, A long-haired millenarian moved slowly among the shoppers, the gospel of the day printed in chalk on his sandwich board, The horsecars humming, the stages clopping along, In my elation over this new knowledge of this arrogant doctor, this cold scientist impatient with the ordinary men of his profession, I looked at the world around me with affection, I was filled with an uncharacteristic love for my city, I thought of it as my city, and lamented my missing freelance, that his Broadway was not this one, but a concourse for a white omnibus of ghosts. I suppose this was the thrill of pursuit, though I couldn' t have known it. It is a kind of cold, selfish feeling, you hold in abeyance all thoughts of suffering. The name Sartorius is Latin, of course, but it comes out of Germany. I learned that upstairs, on the compositors' floor at the Telegram. The compositors knew everything. They were older than the reporters, and remembered the early days, when they collected the news as well as set it in type, and so had nothing but scorn for the new profession of journalism. They drove me mad by freely editing what we sent up, but when I wanted to know something, it was to the compositors I went. And so I was instructed that as the bourgeois cla.s.s arose in the German Middle Ages, trade people who wanted to elevate themselves socially took the Latin forms of their names. The miller became Molitor, the pastor became Pastorius, and the tailor became Sartorius.

I reasoned then that our latinated German doctor could have come over in the great immigrations after the failed democratic revolutions of 1848. His medical education was European, which could explain, at least in part, his wish not to a.s.sociate with American-trained doctors. And if he was a forty-eighter he might have joined the Union army, as so many of them did. You know Was.h.i.+ngton, by the time the U.S. Army Medical Corps replied to our inquiries their information was of course of no practical use, But it does allow me to begin here to trace the arc of a vaulting soul. When Dr Wrede Sartorius took his examination for the medical corps in 1861 he posted first among the candidates. He was commissioned first lieutenant and a.s.sistant surgeon and attached to the 11th Infantry Regiment in the Second Division in the Army of the Potomac under General Hooker. These were the people who fought at Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spottsylvania, and Cold Harbor.

His army service was spectacular. Commendation after commendation. He operated in field hospitals under enemy fire. His innovations in surgical procedure were incorporated into the manual of the Army Medical Corps. I don' t remember all the details, but he became famous throughout the army. He could amputate a leg in nine seconds, an arm in six, and it sounds ghastly now but his skill and speed - especially when anesthetics weren' t available - earned him the grat.i.tude of hundreds of soldiers. He apparently invented procedures - excisions, exsections of the wrist, the ankle, the shoulder-that are still followed today. His skill in treating head wounds brought him into demand as a consultant to other surgeons. Some of his ideas that were resisted by his superiors were later adopted as evidence bore him out, all sorts of things, In those days they used collodion dressings. He said no-the wounds should be exposed to open air, even rain. He used creosote solution and later carbolic acid for asepsis, before anybody else. He designed a new kind of hypodermic syringe. He insisted, for postoperative therapies, on fresh food and daily replacement of hay pallets, which sounds obvious now, but he had to buck the whole medical bureaucracy to get these things. When he resigned his commission in 1865 he was a full colonel and surgeon. He was brilliant and masterful and brave. It' s important to understand this, among other things we are speaking of the n.o.ble lineaments of the grotesque. I am not interested in sentimentalizing Dr Wrede Sartorius' s career as a personal tragedy.

Sixteen.

EARLY THAT September, Edmund Donne, with the report of the official exhumation in his breast pocket, invited Sarah Pemberton for a stroll around the holding reservoir. It happened to have been a lovely warm day, one of those autumn days in New York that are what the summer should have been, There is a sort of stillness to such days, as there is on water between tides, and the light of the sun angles in to make every edifice-every stone and brick and window-intensely, meaningfully, vivid.

Donne had prepared carefully for the occasion but the weather was his good luck. It was just past four in the afternoon. Noah Pemberton, a new student in public school, had been brought home by his mother at three, Donne arrived at Thirty-eighth Street with a beautiful model boat of polished mahogany and presented it to the boy. It was rigged as a sloop with linen sails and a swinging boom, bra.s.s capstans, and a spoked helm that really worked the rudder-a considerable boat that must have set him back a fair sum. Noah held it in both his arms as they all walked to the reservoir.

Donne had asked us to arrive at the house by five in order to be there before they returned - Dr Grimshaw, Emily Tisdale and myself - for this inverted wake. He had a few days before on an earlier visit, in uniform, spoken to the servants. In the absence of Lavinia Thornhill - who' d gone abroad - they might have been emboldened to represent her interests as they saw fit, except that they were made to understand Mrs Pemberton and her son were now under the protection of the Munic.i.p.al Police, which m a manner of speaking was true.

The fact is, that in the course of the two or three conferences Donne had had with Sarah Pemberton, as well as a more or less daily correspondence, they had become alerted to each other with that peculiar sort of attention characteristic of matched pairs, whether of birds or grazing animals or people. For my part, I long ago became content to live alone with my feelings and judgments but I recognize that life s.h.i.+fts as desires are contained and released, and that situations do not remain stable. I am not sure I was entirely aware of what had developed between them before this day I speak of, but when they returned from the reservoir and we three were there waiting, and there was a tea the English style ready to be served, it was as clear to me as if I had read a headline in the paper.

Many years later, over dinner, Noah Pemberton suggested to me that he thought his mother and Captain Donne had known each other earlier in their lives, that perhaps Donne was even his father' s rival for her hand in marriage - the unequal rival, if that was so, since he had no fortune. This was on the basis of a remark or two Noah had overheard of their conversation that day at the reservoir: "' Now both of them are missing, Mrs Pemberton , and time has moved backward to turn you into the impoverished girl you were, and the fellow with his head in the stars is again blessed to be sitting by your side,' " or embarra.s.sing words to that effect. But I am not convinced. By his own description, Noah' s state of mind that day was, beleaguered. Also, Donne' s impa.s.sivity when I first came to him with the news of the Pemberton family' s ordeal would have verged on the inhuman.

In any event, at the reservoir he showed the boy how to watch the puffs on the water to get the sense of the wind, and to set the sail and rudder according to the tack he wanted for her. "Then," Noah told me, "I got down on my belly and launched her with a gentle push. Oh, what an excitement that was! I' d often watched children sail their boats in the reservoir. Now I had my own and it was better than any of them. I ran along the embankment, following her, running around the great square to meet her where I thought she would make her landing. I saw she sailed swiftly before the wind and discovered that didn' t please me as much as a tack into the wind or crosswise to it. I experimented, back and forth, and finally achieved the perfection of a slow but resolute sail that showed her mettle, how she could take water over her bow and still keep coming. I lay on my side in the sun on the embankment with my head propped in my hand and waited for her on her slow sure pa.s.sage across this, ocean, of floating light, is how it seemed'' .

"Now you know through all of this, change of our circ.u.mstances," Noah said, "my child' s innocence had acted as something of a governor on all my fears and hurts. What I understood without being able to express it in so many words was that we had dropped down in cla.s.s. We were living on the charity of my aunt, an elderly woman with a wig, who had no taste for children. At school, though I was better dressed than most of my cla.s.smates, I stood in the same lines and was pushed and shoved about with a, breezy evenhandedness. I realized soon enough that in a cla.s.s of forty children I would not be recognized by my teacher for the charm of my mind, I' d been instructed at Ravenwood by tutors whose constant praise and sheer pedagogical delight in my achievements were tributes to my father' s wealth. But to tell the truth I was not cowed by public school and in fact was, livened by it, I developed a keenness for the boisterous ways of public school children, though I didn' t confide this to. my mother. She took me there each morning, to Primary School Number 16, and met me at the entrance every afternoon to see me home. She worried about the harm that might come to me from being with the other children. She distrusted the city and everything about it.

"At any rate, as I watched my marvelous s.h.i.+p of the ocean, my mother and Captain Donne sat talking on the bench behind me. I had half heard bits and pieces of their conversation as they strolled after me and I ran back and forth to meet them and report what my s.h.i.+p was doing. Now, in my happy drowse, I heard more of it. I received it without thinking, I believe it was the strangest, most frightening, conversation I had ever heard. Only gradually did its meaning come through. I thought the sky was growing dark, though it was still quite blue. It was as if my child' s joy was, draining out of the universe. I imagined the voices were from my s.h.i.+p, that it was my s.h.i.+p talking as it sailed toward me with a cargo of adult secrets and sickening mysteries, I was learning that my father had impoverished us in a willful act. It had been deliberate. We were poor and without a home because he wanted it that way. And all his money he had put somewhere else-n.o.body knew where.' The police captain had found this out, he had chosen to bring us this most awful news out in the sun by the reservoir. Someone, a colonel, or a coroner, I was not sure who, had written a report. And that had the worst news of all. What was it? Was my brother, Martin, dead? I could hardly breathe. Were we all going to die? Had somebody killed my father and my brother - who was now coming after me?

"I sat up and looked back at my mother. She was holding a sheet of paper on her lap and reading from it, all bent over as if she had trouble seeing. Her hand went up to comb her hair back away from her eyes. I heard her gasp. She raised her head and gazed at me, My calm and beautiful mother had turned ashen. The captain took her hand.' Both men are missing now, Sarah, and time has moved backward to turn you into the impoverished girl you were, and the tall fellow with his head in the stars is again blessed to be sitting by your side.' I looked for my s.h.i.+p in the dazzle of watered light. I hoped it had gone down. I was angry at the captain for bringing me a boat to play with as if I were a stupid child.

My recollection is that when they returned, Noah went immediately upstairs with his boat. In Mrs Thornhill' s absence Sarah felt free to draw open the sitting room curtains and raise the windows and let some of the balm of the evening in. The tea was served and we sat there like mourners, contriving to speak the comforting words of continuing daily life to each other, though the bereaved had just heard that her husband was among the living. Donne had previously informed Emily Tisdale and Dr Grimshaw of the essentials. That Augustus Pemberton' s death had apparently been feigned, for what purpose was not known. That he had been ill, seriously ill, but had made preparations that indicated the self concern of someone, continuing. That Martin had in fact seen him and was believed to have sought a confrontation with him, and had disappeared, where or how n.o.body yet knew.

Donne' s idea was that in the face of such revelations Sarah Pemberton would need the support and comfort of friends of the family, such despair, such despair, the family itself, its idea, its name, blasted from her. Yet she sat with her back straight and chin lifted, its implications of an, indolence erased by the pose, and with her hands folded upon her lap, her handsome face drained of all color, but otherwise undistorted by the contemplation of this, news. Of course, she had been toppling into it by degrees. She' d had an inkling when she' d agreed to the exhumation. She kept losing her husband, as he died, as he lived. Her impoverishment had been confirmed as a deliberate act. Her pale blue eyes glimmered but her beautiful full mouth did not tremble. She was a woman in the profound humiliation of an entirely fooled life. But she had the composure of a queen who' s been informed that one of her armies has been defeated.

And what Edmund Donne hadn' t considered, or relied on, in his diffidence, was his own importance to her as another kind of news in her mind. He could not stop looking at her. And while she spoke to all of us in her calm alto, it was clear from her glances, or in some of the hesitations of their conversation with each other, Well, what shall we call this common thing? - that aliveness to another person thar comes unbidden, unsought, and is composed of the idea of a future?, For if you think about it, we live mostly by habit, waiting, sustained by temporary pleasure, or curiosity, or diffuse hopeless energies, including malice, but not by that sustaining idea of a future that only comes humming in the secret aliveness that everyone can see except the two, idiotic starers. So there was news of Sarah' s future alongside the columns of her devastation.

I' m not suggesting this was a practical measure for her, relying on Donne, and on what he could do for her. If what Noah told me years later, if he was right, and they were reanimating their feelings for each other, hers would be bathed in mortification, atonement, a perception of her life with Augustus Pemberton as sweet justice for the wrong choice, for the love not heeded. If this was so, I think I would have seen it. On the other hand, there should have been an unbreachable difference in cla.s.s between the wife of Augustus Pemberton - a van Luyden - and a policeman from the street. And there certainly was not. If the situation was as Noah described it, could Donne have been destined for something other than a career as a munic.i.p.al worker? Was she the cause of his devotion to an unsuitable life? I don' t know, I don' t know. But it was, of course, the others who needed comforting. In the midst of the small talk Emily Tisdale said to Donne, "You still don' t know where Martin is - why aren' t you looking for him?" Before he could reply she was on her feet, pacing back and forth the way Martin paced when he thought aloud, balling her hands into tiny fists and roving the sitting room. "They fought. He was disowned. It was sad, it was unfortunate, but it happened. Why wasn' t that the end of it! Still, they go on! Who can live! - who is allowed to live - when these, unnatural things go on? Martin has such honor in him," she cried out in that appealing cracked voice. "There' s no telling what he could have done if not for this awful pit, he' s been trying to climb out of all his life. Yes, it' s like a pit he' s fallen into. Where is he, what has happened to him?" Donne said: "It' s reasonable to a.s.sume he would have sought out Eustace Simmons, Mr Pemberton' s, business a.s.sociate." "Yes, well then let us seek him out, this business a.s.sociate." "Having been found once, Simmons cannot easily be found again."

"What is to be done! They are all, somewhere, aren' t they? Living or dead? Find him! I don' t care-G.o.d, please, let it be one or the other, I can understand one or the other. I am ready to marry Martin or grieve for him. I am ready to go into mourning. Why can' t they let me do, even that, this monstrous, monstrous family?"

By way of agreement, Sarah Pemberton said to the girl, "And yet, it' s so peculiar, I can' t think even now that I' m ~ot one of them, " at which point Emily threw herself down beside her on the sofa and wept. Sarah held the girl to her bosom and looked over to Donne. "We' ll find Martin, won' t we, Captain? I will not think I' ve offended my G.o.d so that he' s designed in me some, declivity of soul, some pocket flaw in which calamities collect and collect."

All this time the Reverend Grimshaw had said nothing. With a frown on his face and his arms folded, he' d sat staring at the floor. I didn' t know what he' d been doing since I' d first seen him counseling Sarah? consoling Miss Tisdale? - but I felt at this moment the superiority of my own role insofar as I had brought Donne in and got the issues clarified, at least as far as this. I suppose it was an uncommon experience for a newspaperman, to feel for a moment more righteous than a minister.

But he spoke up now, fretfully, clearly disconcerted. "This is beyond any Christian understanding. I admit I' m unable to understand it from my faith, which is a test of faith itself. As you know, Mrs Pemberton, I had the greatest respect for your husband. He was my friend. A vestryman of St James. I' m not claiming he lived a blameless life, but he loved you and he loved the son you gave him. I heard this from his own lips."

The minister tuned to Donne. "Augustus was rough hewn, not always aware of the impact of his words on gentler sensibilities. There' s no question of that. I' m even willing to grant you a lack of clear moral criteria in the conduct of business, a tendency to keep his Christian soul here" - Grimshaw indicated a place in the air above his head - "and his business methods there," he said, indicating the floor. "Let us grant that, he was like most men of his interests - investors, founders of business, captains of industry - complicated, contradictory, and capable of the full range of human feeling, from the n.o.blest to the most reprehensible. But this, conspiracy you suggest! That he has pretended to die merely to abandon his family and leave them dest.i.tute? though for some reason or cause you cannot account for, I simply cannot reconcile this, paganism - I don' t know what else to call it - with what I knew of Augustus Pemberton, for all his Christian, imperfections."

I wanted to leap in at this, but Donne raised his hand. He was seated, ridiculously, in one of Mrs Thornhill' s needlepoint side chairs, his body folded up behind his vaulting knees. "We' re not ascribing the motive to Mr Pemberton" that he contrived his death to abandon his family."

"Then what is it you' re doing, sir! What is the purpose of your, speculation?"

"It is hardly speculation, Reverend. In the Hall of Records a contract is registered showing that a year or so before Mr Pemberton' s final illness she mortgaged Ravenwood to a partners.h.i.+p of dealers in properties in the amount of a hundred and sixty five thousand dollars, We find also that he sold his seat on the Exchange and his interest in a Brazilian maritime firm, among his other interests. We have to conclude that after he knew he was seriously ill, Mr Pemberton sought to liquidate his a.s.sets." "Who are you to conclude anything, sir!" And to Sarah he said "Why do I hear of such things from, policemen? Why has Mrs Augustus Pemberton tainted herself with such a.s.sociations. The policeman" - glancing at me - "the press, G.o.d help us all my dear woman, is the loss of your home so bitter that you would not consider any recourse but the desecration of your husband' s grave?"

"His grave," Donne said, "was not desecrated, since he was not in it. We desecrated someone else' s grave."

Donne had said this matter of factly he would do nothing else in the situation, but Grimshaw heard otherwise. "So in your view as a functionary of the esteemed and brilliant church of the Munic.i.p.als, Martin Pemberton is our prophet, and the shade of Augustus rides a city omnibus on Broadway!"

"Perhaps, Reverend, you would like to consider the circ.u.mstances all together, as I have," said Donne. "Neither father nor son where they should be, one dead but not in his grave or certified dead in the public records, the other, a presumed lunatic, off chasing his phantom, the surviving family, heirs to a fortune that no longer exists, And tell me your interpretation." Emily had sat up at this and the two women; side by side, were reasonably composed as they waited - as we all waited-for Dr Grimshaw' s reply. In this moment I understood, as they must have, that Donne' s researches had provided an answer of a kind, that where, before, all had been chaos and bewilderment and hurt, now it was clear that something understandable, an act, had been committed, a deliberate act or series of acts, by which we could recompose the world, comfortingly, in categories of good and evil. And I felt the first stirrings of some communal perception that the missing son and fiance might be embarked on something heroic.

Grimshaw' s small neat face was entirely, uniformly flushed under his thatch of silver hair. I imagined I could see the little vessels of blood rus.h.i.+ng up to the skin like paris.h.i.+oners filling the pews. He looked at each of us in turn. He was in this instant of his anguish unnecessarily physical in my awareness. I didn' t like to see that occupational cross hiking itself up his vest with each sharp shallow breath. His mouth was slightly open. He removed his spectacles and ma.s.saged them with a handkerchief, and it was as if he had taken all his clothes off. I would have liked to suppose his bright blue eyes were an unalterable theological composition. He had believed himself the ceremonial authority on life and death. How must it have felt, to be as much a victim as Sarah and her son? To understand the depth of humiliation, as if you had never understood Christ before?

He reset his gla.s.ses and returned his handkerchief to his pocket. In his light voice he said, "I am ordained to seek out suffering and to embrace it, to take on the burden and sink to my knees under it. I will console and pray and absolve and celebrate as a priest of Christ' s church, where suffering comes round as regularly as day and night. But this, this toIls inside me as something cataclysmic. I am not prepared, I am not prepared. I feel the need to pray to begin to understand, and to call upon G.o.d, to let me hear the soft summons of Jesus Christ somewhere from this, from this, this family of G.o.dless Pemberton' s - here he raised his eyes to Sarah - "that is so magnetically awry as to threaten to destroy all of us who have circled about them, including the ministry."

Of course he was wrong, the Reverend, in thinking this was only a Pemberton family matter. We were all wrong insofar as we thought these misfortunes were circ.u.mscribed in one, G.o.dless family. I would not have extended myself now, at my advanced age, if this were just the odd newspaper tale I had for you, of aberrant family behavior. I ask you to believe - I will prove - that my freelance, finally, was only a reporter bringing the news, like the messenger in Elizabethan dramas, the carrier of essential information, all eyes upon him delivering the dire news, but for all his gallant duty, only the messenger.

Our little gathering had turned out not quite as Donne intended. As a result he decided to make practical use of the occasion, and to hear once again Martin' s descriptions of the white omnibus going by in the snowstorm on Forty second Street, and north on Broadway in the rain. He had heard it all third hand, my version, which reported what Martin had told Emily and Charles Grimshaw. Now he questioned the Reverend and the girl directly. And so once more the stage rode by in snow, in rain, in our minds, and by the time we' d adjourned, I was thinking not of Augustus Pemberton but of the other old men in that dark cabin with him.

This was something that Donne had been thinking and wondering about for some time. But to me it came as a revelation. I will say here by way of addendum that from this day of his despair, Charles Grimshaw' s rectors.h.i.+p of St James took a turn for the better. Pm not sure it was the shock to his faith of his vestryman' s empty grave, or if all those millenarian prophets parading past his empty church - Shakers and Adventists, Mormons and Millerites - had anything to do with it, but the pastor who cherished historical confirmations of biblical events stepped up to the pulpit the next Sunday and delivered a blazing sermon that was reported in several newspapers. I myself reported it for the Telegram, not that I intended to, having gone to St. James that morning in the luxurious state of mind we call suspicion. I had been wondering if Grimshaw knew more than he had let on of our haunting concern and I had wanted to have a leisurely look at him.

Quaint as it may seem, sermons in those days were considered newsworthy. The Monday papers were filled with them, substantial excerpts or even whole texts of representative sermons delivered from pulpits around town. The clergy were considered dignitaries of the city, and religious diction was a.s.sumed to be applicable to the public issues of the day. We had reformer churchmen like Reverend Parkhurst who were out to unseat the Tweed government, and well known theatricians like the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom' s Cabin. My own Charles Grimshaw was not so eminent, but what he said was picked up that day by a few of us and brought some new faces to the following week' s services and thus began a run, as it were, of increasingly well-attended Sundays, the major attraction of which was the novelty of a pastor' s conversion to his own Episcopal cert.i.tudes.

"From all sides are we a.s.sailed, my friends, from all sides, by natural scientists whose science is unnatural, by religious scholars whose scholars.h.i.+p is blasphemous-so that these learned, oh-so-learned, men close around us like a circle of pagan =dancers around a missionary being prepared for the pot."

His voice still lacked resonance, but fire flashed from his prince - nez I thought he rose a bit higher over his lectern, that perhaps he had made himself a platform of hymnals to stand on. "For what do they tell us: that mankind, whom G.o.d gave dominion over the birds and beasts and the fish of the sea, is really only descended from them, so that the first ape stood up on the hind legs of a mammoth, and when he shed his hair, there stood Abraham and Isaac and, G.o.d forgive them, Jesus himself.

"Or, according to those scholars who look for corroborations of the Word of G.o.d in foreign tales, or who a.n.a.lyze his style that Moses is not the author of the Pentateuch, but several writers after, who added on, added on, each with his own version of the Word, until hundreds of years later, all was amended and revised by the ultimate author, R, the Redactor! No, my friends, not the Revelator, not the Revealer of all truth and being, not the Resurrected G.o.d of every breath that has ever been breathed, not the Reigning Creator of the Infinite Realm, but a mere redactor, a wretched bookworm who, with his dictionaries and etymologies, took upon himself the establishment of our religion.

"My dear friends, it is so astonis.h.i.+ng-we should all laugh heartily if these self-important, pagans did not get respectable hearings in our academies and divinity schools.

"But take heart, for even within their impious professions ,are scientists and scholars who, undaunted, claim the faith, and find in the latest scientific evidence only more of the glory of G.o.d. So this is our good news, this morning: In the first instance, that the story of G.o.d' s creation of the universe in seven days, as is written in Genesis, is not disproven by the geologist' s tabulation of rocks thousands of years in formation, or the zoologist' s dating of the ancient fossils in those rocks, because the Hebrew word for day does not define any particular length of time, and the creative days of G.o.d could have been separated by aeons of his thought, infinite thought from verse to verse. Thus, not in human chronology, but G.o.d' s, came the burgeoning of his designs, for can anyone imagine that everything we study, from the depths of the oceans to the constellated stars in its chemical composition, in its taxonomy, and in its, evolution is the happenstance of chaotic event? That it is not G.o.d playing his pen who draws us, in our dominion over all living creatures, out of the slime of the earth? So this is what our true natural science says, and to that we may say, Amen. "And in the second instance, of our scholars of the Bible in the divinity schools, who are become literary stylists, and place their own false idol, their infamous Redactor, their anti-Christ, in his place, We may watch them, as their claims split into further claims, finding tales, discarding other tales, and burrowing their way back through the Greek, Aramaic, Sumerian, and Hebrew dialects, in their endless search for, authentication, and there will be a hundred of them tomorrow, and a thousand the day after, all babbling away in their learned tongues, that we will thunderously silence in our hymns of praise to the only Author of the only Book, and will pray for, unto our Lord, whom we entreat to have mercy upon us all, in the name of His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, who died for our sins. And to that we say, Amen."