The Waterworks Part 5

Seventeen.

THOUGH SERMONS were respectfully published in the newspapers, though churches were numerous and spires were everywhere on the skyline, not Christ' s but Tweed' s image inhered in the s.h.i.+fting formation of clouds, or in the light of each season, as the presiding image of our sense of ourselves, the face of our time. It was the struggle, or ordeal, of some of us - not enough of us, apparently-to cast off that terrible collective self-regard of which he was the apotheosis. I could imagine him in private moments of physical gratification of all his appet.i.tes sitting up on Forty third Street in his millionaire' s mansion a total triumphant success in, all his thieving enterprises and still affirm his essentially disembodied nature. I felt him as an awful presence riding lightly about our head and shoulders, or lodged in the roots of the jaw, behind the throat, as something vague but tenacious installed in us, the deity of our rampant extortions.

Not to try your patience, let me a.s.sure you that finally all the columns will be joined to be read across the page like cuneiform carved across the stele. I had summoned a freelance off the bench outside my office and a.s.signed him to go through the bas.e.m.e.nt morgue and look for any stories about men of wealth who had died penniless. Donne was doing his own research. We hoped in our pursuit of the truth to identify Augustus Pemberton' s companion riders, the lineaments of the, lodge, or brotherhood, the mortuary fellows.h.i.+p, of the white stage. But as to their motives we had no more idea than Martin had when they rode by him in the snow. G.o.d knew where they were. I knew only that they would not be found in their graves.

But even as our search for Martin Pemberton continued, Well, I should remind you we were not mathematicians working with pure numerical thought, We had jobs, duties We met our responsibilities, which always appeared to us as diverse. And at least one of us was trying to live with his affections.

A man named James O' Brien walked into my office one day. His t.i.tle was sheriff of New York County. This was a lucrative office because the sheriff kept all the fees he collected. He' d been appointed, of course, by Boss Tweed. O' Brien was one of the Ring, typically unlettered, crude, cunning, with that kind of brute intelligence of the politician, but with the additional righteousness conveyed by his office, which allowed him a generally punitive impulse in all his dealings. I knew that O' Brien had done a couple of things to challenge Tweed' s power in the Democratic party, and had failed, so when he arrived unannounced and sat down in front of me and wiped his bald head and lit his cigar, I closed my door to all the noise and distraction in the city room and sat behind my desk and asked what I could do for him.

Just at this time Tweed was beginning to chafe from the attacks on him by Harper' s Weekly and its political cartoonist, Nast. Most of his const.i.tuents couldn' t read and so he didn' t care what was written about him. But a caricature of him as a fat moneybagger with his foot on the neck of Liberty had a kind of, illumination to it. Harper' s also owned a book publis.h.i.+ng company. Their textbooks had suddenly been banned from the city schools. Tweed may have been irritated but he was more or less . invulnerable because all the criticism was deduction or surmise. n.o.body had any hard evidence. He controlled the whole of government, including the legal system, and he had the loyal~ if not love of the hoi polloi. He sent foreigners just off the boat into his courtrooms and his judges instantly naturalized them into voting citizens. He had seventy-five percent of the opposition county Republicans on his payroll. His bribes were legion and nothing like evidence had ever been produced against him. He said one day to some reformers, "Well, what are you going to do about it?"

And now here was the moody, truculent Sheriff O' Brien, sitting in front of me. I was put in mind of the great Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, written to instruct young sachems. One of the most important of its primeval lessons is that, if you would hold power, you must share the booty. Tweed' s was an ancient, savage politics, so who would know that lesson better? Yet here was this O' Brien, inexplicably scanted in Tweed' s patronage, and he held in his lap a bundle wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine, which he claimed held the records, a copied-out set of ledgers, that showed the true extortionate dealings of the Ring-all of it duly recorded in neat columns, the incredible amounts stolen, and under what pretexts, and how they were divided. MiG.o.d. "Why are you doing this?" I said to O' Brien. ' "The son of a b.i.t.c.h welched on me. Three hundred thousand simoleons. He won' t pay it."

"For what?"

"My fair share. I warned him."

He was a righteous blackmailer, O' Brien. I had to wonder: Tweed had many ambitious, overreaching men to deal with-why had this one become a problem? The colossal success of his fraud, the completeness of it, the systematization of it, as big and smooth working in its machinery as the Corliss steam engine, had impressed him into believing, not in his invulnerability - more than that. He must have begun to receive from his most private self reflections, intimations of immortality. I can think of no other explanation for what he' d done - waving O' Brien off, giving him no satisfaction at all. That is just what you cannot do to a co - conspirator. Sheriff O' Brien regaled me with una.s.suageable bitterness. He said he was looking for a newspaper that would publish the story the numbers told. I told him to leave his bundle with me. I told him I would study what he had, and if it was the truth, the Telegram would run it. You would not think from my matter of fact demeanor that I knew what I had just been given.

That night I sat at my desk reading the ledgers of the most brazen and colossal cabal in the history of the Republic. I will never forget that night. Can you imagine what it meant to a newspaper wretch to have it in black and white under his reading lamp? After all, what do we live for? Not wealth, certainly, not philosophical enlightenment, not for art, or love, and not in any hope of salvation, certainly We live for proof, sir, we live for the doc.u.ment in our hand The glory we seek is the glory of the Revelator. And here it was, all recorded in neat columns. I think I wept for joy - I felt as privileged as a scholar holding in his hands fragments of Mosaic scrolls, or a parchment of Homeric verse, or a Shakespeare folio.

Well, not to prolong the pain, You know, one reason I kept so many freelances out on the bench and had so few reporters on staff is that Tweed almost always got to the staffers. I had a man in Albany, covering the state legislature, who wrote favorably one day about a bill designed to make the monopoly of gas companies report their true earnings and reduce their prices, and the next day wrote about this bill as if it had been devised by European communists. Regulation of the gas companies had wide support in both houses, but in the same twenty-four-hour period in which my man changed his views, the Tweed people, who had paid him off, and most every other reporter up there, paid off the legislators. So I am not saying our press stood clean and s.h.i.+ning apart from the ordinary life of the city. Tweed committed advertising to our pages-unnecessary, and very profitable, city advertising. I knew that, I knew all of it but I thought, I thought, this story was so monumental the truth so overwhelming .in its demands, and the condition of the city so precarious, that journalistic honor would prevail. But on instructions of our publisher, the editor-in-chief would not let me run the biggest story since the War of Secession. Let me compose myself a moment, To this day the memory buffets my poor soul.

Not just the Telegram - paper after paper looked at the evidence and refused to print it. The eminent Sun under the eminent Richard Henry Dana carried the mayor' s messages to the people, as advertising, They had a contract for city legal notices in eight point type at a dollar a line. Either the publishers needed Tweed, or they counted themselves his friends. Others were afraid of what he would do to them - there were all sorts of reasons.

What would save American journalism from infamy would be the death of a member of the Times board who was a partner in Tweed' s printing firm. This left the surviving director, George Jones, and Louis Jennings, the editor, free to run the material.

As for me, I am a lifelong bachelor. I had no wife and children to worry about. I thought about it a day or so, I had not been able to move my publisher, Mr Landry, I had gone rus.h.i.+ng up to his sanctum to protest, to appeal. He listened quietly enough to my ranting and raving. Tweed' s effect on the city had been like a vampire' s arterial suck. I saw him in every seeping mound of garbage, in the sewers emptying into the streets, in the moving shadows at night of the rats in their furtive numbers in the plodding city wagons of people dead of the diseases of filth . I emptied my desk and left the best job I' d ever had, took my hat and coat off the rack and walked out of my city room. But that is not to speak of here. After the accounts were published in the Times, that fall there was a public rally at the Cooper Union on Astor Place and a citizens committee was formed that brought a taxpayers suit, and the Ring began to crack. Connolly, the Ring' s comptroller, said he would cooperate, and a grand Jury was formed to bring indictments.

All h.e.l.l seemed to be breaking loose. The collapse of a system, even a system that subjugates them, unsettles folks, and there was an agitation all through the city, like a storm blowing this way and that, tearing up the store awnings, turning people around in the street, spooking the horses, Three banks that had Tweed on their boards went under. Dozens of small newspapers that had lived on his largesse ceased to publish. Businesses of all kinds closed their doors. Strangers were getting into fistfights, something like a deep hum was coming up through our feet, like the roaring down from the mountains of a flash flood, as if despite ourselves, we were going to have to face up to the truth, all of us who made up this town of calamitous life.

I would not say Donne was not diverted by the imminent doom of the Ring, but neither was he distracted. This was all anybody in the city could talk of, and he had to have been personally gratified - he had lived in a kind of professional slavery to this culture, and now it was crumbling. Yet he was not given to triumphing - that was not his nature, he did not make of all this an occasion to think of himself. What I did see in his face was an intensity, almost like feverishness, as he went through these same revealing account books, which I entrusted to him before I reluctantly turned them back. I remember thinking how odd it was of him when he said afterward, at dinner, that what he found meaningful was not the usually inflated sums warranted to this or that transaction, but the Occasional entries that seemed legitimate in their accounting. The Ring' s books recorded not only the transactions in which the city was the ostensible buyer of goods or services, but also those in which it was the seller, and in these cases very often of legal ent.i.tlements or charters it had no legal right to sell. How out of character, he said, to find an entry where a piece of legal paper was signed without apparent compensation.

"Like what?" I asked him.

"Thereis a newly founded orphanage, the Home for Little Wanderers, with an address up on Ninety-third Street by the river. Yet the ledger reveals that no money pa.s.sed hands to expedite a charter."

I thought this was rather a peculiar observation in the context of a great scandal, and my own misfortune. But you see, Donne was taller than most men and so he had a better view of the lie of the land. In a day or two he' d found the charter doc.u.ment and certificate of incorporation in the Hall of Records. The Home for Little Wanderers was a nondenominational orphanage that was to be scientifically managed according to the latest child - raising principles. Mr Tweed and the mayor and Comptroller Connolly were members of the board of trustees. Eustace Simmons was listed as director. Wrede Sartorius, MD, was the attending physician.

Eighteen AT THIS time, the city north of Seventy-second Street was no longer country, but not yet City either. The houses were few and far between. Whole blocks had been sc.r.a.ped clear and laid out with surveyor string, but nothing was on them. You would see two or three of the usual row houses with their granite stoops, and, after a gap, two more sharing a side wall, but none of them occupied. Here was a street set with paving stones that stopped at the edge of a pasture, there was a scaffolded half-risen apartment house through whose unframed windows you saw the sky, or a Beaux Arts mansion going up alongside a cl.u.s.ter of shanties with a pig and goats rooting about. And everywhere were great piles of brick, or stacks of lumber under tents of flapping canvas. Steam cranes stood in fields of gra.s.s and shrub. Somehow there were never any workers to be seen, as if, with a mind of its own, the city was building itself.

From Park Avenue and Ninety third the unpaved road ran downhill in a gentle slope to the river. In the fields on either side pumpkins were scattered and trees were beginning to turn. The sounds of the city were distant, almost imperceptible. Donne and his men were encamped beneath a stand of yellowing weeping willow halfway between First and Second avenues. Their tunics were unb.u.t.toned, they had canteens of water and lunchboxes, and their acc.u.mulated refuse was held in a cardboard carton at the foot of the tree. They could not be seen from the riverside. The road went past them downhill, and where it leveled off was the stone mansion Home for Little Wanderers.

A police kiosk stood on the sidewalk by the front gate. Donne said, "We have kiosks at the diplomatic missions. We have them in front of Mr Vanderbilt' s place, and at Tammany Hall, these must be very important children."

All together, out of the whole force of Munic.i.p.als, Donne had managed to commandeer twelve or thirteen men who were loyal to him. Another contingent stood watch from a shed on Ninety fourth, a block north of the mansion on First Avenue, and a third a block south.

But I didn' t understand what they were doing - which was, apart from using their binoculars, nothing. I had joined them on the second day of their watch. Here and there in the field around us birds were scooting about in their dust baths or hopping from brush to tree. High up over the river an undulant arrow of geese pointed south. I wondered if I had come all this distance to join a covey of birdwatchers. I suppose I must have said something to that effect.

"Whom shall we arrest?" Donne said.

"Everyone, whoever you find."

"So Pm to enter without a warrant?"

"Would any of their judges give you one?"

"What will the charge be?"

"What does it matter, as long as we can see what' s going on in there that needs a police guard to keep people away."

"That is the way they would do it," Donne said quietly.

He handed me the binoculars. I saw the mansion s.h.i.+mmering in the magnification. It was a Romanesque structure of red stone trimmed in granite and with the turrets and small windows of an armory. The bottom half was obscured by a brick wall. A cast iron gate gave on to a courtyard. It looked its part - a very substantial building, lending substance to those who lived there. It was an outpost of our advancing civilization, like all our other inst.i.tutions out at the edges - poorhouses, asylums for fallen women, homes for the deaf and dumb.

Behind the Home for Little Wanderers the river surged powerfully southward toward the harbor, the color of silver. Perhaps I was only feeling the despair of the unemployed, but at this moment I, the denizen of alleys, dead ends, and saloons three steps down, the reporter who disdained the great national story of the West to make stories out of paving stones pounded with horse droppings, and the street birds picking out their meals there, a fellow whose music was the cries of rag pickers, the din of the organ grinders, who could watch the cat with curved paw lift the lid of a garbage pail and feel that was as much nature as he needed, I fervently wished there were no buildings of any kind on this island. I envisioned the first Dutch sailors giving up on the place as a mosquito - infested swamp, and returning in their long boats to their s.h.i.+ps.

It must have been about four that afternoon when Donne told everyone to look sharp. I lifted my gla.s.ses - the yard gate was open. Coming into the street was a two-horse team harnessed to a white omnibus of the Munic.i.p.al Transport Company. One of Donne' s men had run quickly to unhitch their own team, which was off the road, behind the trees. Then, we were racing downhill in the police wagon and Donne was leaning out the window and shouting, "Don' t stop them, don' t stop them!" I did not understand what was happening, but when we reached the level avenue and caught up to the white stage there was a battle going on. Donne' s men at the corner of First Avenue and Ninety fourth Street had intercepted the stage and were holding the rearing, snorting horses by their bridles and the man up on the box was laying out his whip over them horses and police, whatever he could reach.

How can we recall sudden and violent action? I remember the sound those horses made in their fear and pain - it was such a human sound, brought up from their chests, as they turned to go forward and then were backed into the whip. We had now all joined the fray. One of Donne' s men had fallen to the ground and was rolling desperately to get away from the hooves. A policeman climbing up to unseat the driver received a kick from his boot heel and fell to the street on his back. You have to understand, our police in those days did not routinely carry pistols or rifles, which were issued only for emergencies, riots and so on. They did carry nightsticks, which are considerable weapons, and these were being raised now against the driver' s legs. But he was enormously strong, a man in a black suit and boots and a soft felt hat. The hat flew off to reveal a shaved head. Dust rose from the feet of horses and men. It was a beautiful warm sunny afternoon that seemed quickly to be filling with haze. I can recall the painted scene on the side of the stage, a Hudson River view with the Catskill mountains beyond. Above the scene, in the windows, faces appeared and disappeared, faces that mad~ no impression on me except that I noted the mouths were open and I seemed, after a delay, to relate them to the screams I heard coming from the inside. The police had stopped the stage and this melee had resulted. How odd. I have seen much street violence in my life, I am not shocked by it, I' m made distant, reflective, and it always appears to me, finally, to be, inexplicable. So it was now. I can' t even remember what I was doing in the midst of all of it. I can tell you what I saw but not what I did. Perhaps I did nothing, though I would like to believe that in some way I was being helpful. I knew of course that this was the stage that Martin Pemberton had seen in the snow, and on Broadway in the rain, but it was such a solid piece of coachwork, all nicked and scratched and sc.r.a.ped with the heavy usage of route driving, an ordinary city stage, one of the dreary omnibuses of New York.

Donne was used to confrontation in a different way, and took a very efficient, practical approach to it. With an agility that surprised me, he got that lanky frame up the rear ladder and onto the coach roof, and as the driver realized he was there and turned to look up at him, he brought a stick smartly down on the bald skull. I don' t know if I can convey the particular sound of a nightstick on a skull. I' ve heard it innumerable times. It can resemble a rock falling into a pool of water, a soft sound, not pleasant, Other times it has a cheerful, hard, woodpecking quality, cheerful because of the tonal simulation of emptiness inside the skull. At such moments you' re relieved of wondering about the effects of the blow on the encased brain, which is always of course quite terrible, no matter what it sounds like. Here the s6und was simple, blunt, definitive. The driver fell from his perch and landed at my feet in a great oomph of dust. He was a huge man, very strong. The blow had neither killed him nor rendered him unconscious. He pushed himself to his knees and held his head in his hands, but without making a sound, and before Donne was able to come down and order them to stop, the men had surrounded him and given him additional whacks about the shoulders and arms for the temerity of his reaction to them, though the issue had dearly been decided by that one blow.

Later, I would ask Donne why, coming down the hill, he had shouted after his men not to stop the white stage, but to let it go on. "I don' t know," he said, very noncommittal. "I suppose I wanted to see where it would go." As it turned out, that would have been very useful. But then you have to understand, though I didn' t realize this till much later, till it was too late to confirm, this was the reaction of someone who had known the white stage was sequestered behind that brick wall and would eventually be used, who had known enough to have the confidence to let the stage go on, because he understood who was riding in the coach and who the driver was before he lifted the mans chin, as he did now as I stood there and we looked at the same oyster eyes and bouldered head that Harry Wheelwright had drawn from the descriptions of Knucks Geary' s killer.

This is the question that I will never be able to resolve to my satisfaction, the conjunctions of which Edmund Donne was capable. What information did he depend on? I can never know. But at this moment the shock to my system was stunning.

The policemen had found the rear door of the carriage padlocked. They knelt beside the groaning driver and took the key from his vest pocket, and, they went and opened the door upon six bawling and terrified children. The horses had been quieted but now the children were pus.h.i.+ng out the door, trying to get away. One of them did get through and began to run down the street.

"Get that boy," Donne shouted, and the bewildered policeman who had come out of the kiosk tried to intercept him. But the lad cut into the field. No adult can run uphill after a street rat of eight or ten and expect to overtake him. I remember thinking, moments later, seeing his diminis.h.i.+ng figure on its way back to the city, das.h.i.+ng up through the fields of pumpkins, toward Park Avenue, the boy was healthy to run that well. I suppose someone in a carriage could have caught him. But there was great confusion now. Though the neighborhood was spa.r.s.ely populated, people were coining up First Avenue to see what all the police were doing there, and down from Second Avenue, farm families came out on their porches to see, this confrontation of black and white wagons in the dust of the street, and the milling men in blue uniforms.

For obvious reasons Donne wanted to get the children and the stage back into the grounds of the orphanage. The gate had been bolted by someone inside. A policeman scaled the wall and shortly thereafter we were all pouring into the courtyard. I felt part of an invading force and indeed we were treated as such by the staff and children who were running through the rooms in every direction, screaming, sobbing, trying to get away, or hiding in closets. What must they have thought! Donne ordered his men to herd everyone into the dining room on the ground floor. I went with him back through the center hall, back past the pantries and the kitchen to a rear door that led out to a flagstone terrace bordered with a fence of cast iron. Here there was a drop of ten or twelve feet to the ground. A jetty of large and jagged boulders went right to the water' s edge. In the river a man in a dinghy was rowing away frantically against the swift current. By the looks of it, he was making for Blackwell' s Island, but the East River channel is so narrow in places that it forces the flow into rolling downriver waves, and this is what he was struggling with. As we watched he gave up, using the oars only to keep his boat from spinning. At that point he began rapidly to move south, with the river. He s.h.i.+pped one of the oars and waved, an indolent, mocking gesture. He wore a black derby. Donne watched him, his hands grasping the fence.

I wondered aloud if it might be the doctor, Sartorius, sailing away. Donne said nothing. We went back in and, over the course of several minutes, as order was gradually restored among the children, it became apparent from the answers hesitantly, timidly, or angrily supplied by members of the staff to Donne' s questions that Sartorius was barely known to these people, whereas, on the other hand, they referred continually to Mr Simmons, looking around uneasily to see where he was. So now I knew who was in the boat.

Donne ordered names taken. There were two teachers, a housekeeper, a nurse, the cook, four general attendants, a kitchen helper, all women, for the thirty children boarded here. We searched the establishment. Outside, off the courtyard, was a carriage house and stable and a smaller outbuilding, all in the same architectural style. The ground floor of the main building was fitted out for cla.s.srooms, dining room, a playroom with a new upright piano, and a modest library. All the furniture was new primary school oak. The readers and instruction books were in good condition.

We mounted a wide stairway of polished black walnut whose steps were fitted with rubber pads, to find two large dormitory wings, a boys and a girls, everything neat and fresh and clean, several baths, and smaller rooms for the adult staff on this floor and the top floor. On the top floor was also a dispensary with locked gla.s.s cabinets equipped with the usual implements, bandages, prescription bottles, and so on.

I had seen the insides of many orphanages, mission homes, houses for the poor, vocational inst.i.tutes. They usually gave clear indication of the impoverished, hand-me down nature of charity itself. This place shone like a preparatory school in New England, except that given the architecture - the Romanesque character - most of the windows were small and deeply alcoved, and the rooms, being for the most part wainscoted in walnut, were dark and gloomy.

The kitchen contained two cookstoves, a bank of was.h.i.+ng tubs, kettles and long handled pots hanging from a ceiling frame a wooden icebox and open shelves of tins and boxes and jars and in a corner, a bin of hard coal. It was a kitchen large and well equipped, enough to feed an army.

If a commission had come to inspect here, officials of the aid societies, and looked at the conditions under which these children were kept, they could not have been anything but impressed. The orphans were all dressed in simple, clean clothes and new shoes. They were scrubbed and groomed. The staff, under questioning, seemed to be capable and honest servants of the establishment. It was all very puzzling.

The most disconsolate feeling came over me, something more of what I had felt up on the hill, looking at this place through the binoculars, it was not fear or dread, but a desolate bleakness, diffuse, unattached, not yet precise as despair. In an office beside the kitchen, Donne found the house account books. The ledgers recorded routine housekeeping matters - payments to suppliers, payrolls. He asked the housekeeper, a large middle aged woman with a great knot of hair coiled atop her head, if she kept the books. "No," she said, "that is done by Mr Simmons." When Donne opened the key box on the wall he found several sets of keys on rings, and the housekeeper obliged him by specifying what each key opened. But one set she knew nothing about.

There was a locked closet door behind Simmons' s desk. One after another Donne tried the keys from this set on the door.

Finally the k.n.o.b turned. The closet held oak filing cabinets, each with its own lock. But on one side a few items of clothes hung from a bar. He was pus.h.i.+ng these aside to see what was behind them when I saw a coat hanging there, an old Union army issue, I said, keeping my voice as calm as I could, "Martin Pemberton wore a coat like this."

If it was pursuit I was sworn to, I wanted no part of it now. With a police torch Donne led us down a flight of stairs from the kitchen to the bas.e.m.e.nt, the one area left for our inspection. The bas.e.m.e.nt walls were stone, but it was sectioned into storage areas with wooden walls and locked doors, like hatches in the hold of a s.h.i.+p. The keys he held worked for these doors. We pa.s.sed through two of the areas, the air close, suffused with coal ash. In the third we came upon what looked like a coal bin fitted out with bars, It was a cell, a windowless cell. The air was foul. Donne bent over and held up the lamp. And there, on a palette, something moved, scraggly bearded, weak eyed and blinking, lifting a skeletal arm against the light, a poor soul, nothing but rags and bones, whom I had, difficulty recognizing.

Ever since this day I have dreamt sometimes, I, a street rat in my soul, dream even now, that if it were possible to lift this littered, paved Manhattan from the earth, and all its torn and dripping pipes and conduits and tunnels and tracks and cables - all of it like a scab from new skin underneath - how seedlings would sprout, and freshets bubble up, and brush and gra.s.ses would grow over the rolling hills, entanglements of vines, and fields of wild blueberry and blackberry, There would be oak trees for shade against the heat, and white birches and weeping willows, and in winter, snow would lie everlastingly white until it ran off as pure and glistening as spring water. A season or two of this and the mute, protesting culture buried for so many industrial years under the tenements and factories, would rise again, of the lean, religious Indians of the bounteous earth, who lived without money or lasting architecture, flat and close to the ground - hunting, trapping, fis.h.i.+ng, growing their corn and praying, always praying in solemn thanksgiving for their clear and short life in this quiet universe. Such love I have for those savage polytheists of my mind, those friends of light and leaf, those free men and women, such envy for the inadequate stories they told each other, their taxonomies, cosmologies, their lovely dreams of the world they stood on and who was holding it up.

Nineteen.

HE HAD all the answers to our questions, but wasn' t able to deliver them. He did not speak, or act sensibly. He was mute and uncomprehending. Sarah Pemberton had him admitted to the Presbyterian Hospital on Seventy first Street and Fourth Avenue under the care of Dr Mott, the same doctor who had diagnosed Augustus' s illness, and there each day we came to stand watch. The diagnosis was that Martin was suffering from starvation, and the attendant breakdowns of function. He was also dehydrated. The women, who had been so joyous at the news he' d been found, that he was alive were all the more horrified to see him in this state, unresponsive as death. He lay on his back gazing at the ceiling, terribly pale but with red blotches on the skin, the aquiline features stressed to unnatural prominence, the light hair and beard matted and long. The form he made under the bedcovers was shockingly, small. But it was the lack of thought in the eyes, and the absence of that Pemberton personality, that were so devastating. This was not my Martin.

Over a period of days, as he was able to take nourishment, he began to look better, but the profound, remoteness continued. He was not comatose, according to Dr Mott, who had determined that he responded to sound and turned his head toward light. It was as if he were engaged in some philosophic meditation that rendered the other demands of consciousness insignificant. I remember sitting by his bedside' " and wondering what a philosophical meditation was, exactly. What its content would be some depth of thought that allowed you to hear G.o.d, perhaps, or his music. You know, there are severe limits to a newspaperman' s metaphysics. I understand our breed, and not just from myself. We start out young, full of beans, with a dislike of routine, order, and repet.i.tion - all the virtues of American commercial life and a boyish, irresponsible love of the new, of the ever changing, challenge. My first job in the business was to ride the pilot boats out to Sandy Hook, and try to get the European news from the transatlantic s.h.i.+ps before anybody else. After a while we had our own boats, our news boats, but as I say, all this means we are souls much too, in life, our life and times are all and everything. We' re totally occupied with social and political urgencies, and death, death is no more than an obituary. Anyone' s death, including our own, is yesterday' s news.

But now here he was, my freelance, neither dead nor alive, in much the same philosophical place as his father, which gave me considerable misgiving in my newspaperman' s soul, testing my belief in the magnificent mess of life, that it did not after all go out to the edges of, whatever was possible. I realized now that I had been, depending on Martin, as perhaps we all were following his signs, for some months now working out the routes he had designated as a guide, some distance ahead. I felt, such loss, I felt abandoned. I could easily have gone into a corner and thrown a shawl over my head and sunk to my knees, in bitter despair of this living death.

I had the consolation, every day, of seeing Miss Emily Tisdale seated on the other side of his bed, as he lay between us. She had left her cla.s.ses. She confided in me, spoke to me over his open eyed dream sleep, words she would not dare to speak to him. "When Martin disappeared and was gone, when it was possible that I would never see him again," she said, "I wanted to fill my mind with my schoolwork, with facts and ideas and declensions, with the very sound of words and the appearances of them in their lines, to evict him, to have him dispossessed. G.o.d help me. I longed to be rid of him in my mind, his qualities, how he looked at me, the voice, the stem judgments. But in every small accomplishment in my cla.s.ses at the Normal College, I found I still hoped for his approval. He inhabits me, and there' s nothing I can do about it. This I suppose is love," she said, glancing a moment at his face. Her hands were folded on her lap. "But it' s an awful and decidedly unpleasant fate, altogether unnecessary, isn' t it, Mr McIlvaine?" she said with a laugh, though her dark brown eyes were s.h.i.+mmering with tears. I agreed with this honest, beautiful, plain girl that it was unnecessary.

"Yes, an invention of G.o.d' s that needs improvement," she said. "You know, it' s not right to do that to children, because that' s when it happens, it comes on one as a child, when there is such tender skin, such clear, reception of the light from another child' s eyes, and when the world' s arrangements, the accidents of adult business, seem to children so, destined for their own sake."

"Yes."

"So we are chained. I have always been chained to Martin. Through all his tempests, his struggles, here or not here, it' s all equally disastrous to me, and if he dies, I' ll be the same shackled girl, whether made love to by a man or a ghost, what is the difference?"

And so we sat our watch. There was an anteroom where we stayed most of the time, only peeking in now and then, as if Martin were asleep and shouldn' t be disturbed, although the doctor had said the sounds of life might do him good.

The Reverend Grimshaw each day prayed for a few minutes by Martin' s bed. Emily' s father, Amos Tisdale, came once or twice, shaking his head less in sadness or worry than regret for the continuing deplorable situation. Sarah Pemberton brought her calm conviction with her that, Martin having been found, he would in time be well. She sat by his side, knitting. I felt, watching her white hands, that if they stopped moving, she would lose her mind. Once Noah came with her, but the boy didn' t want to go into the room where Martin lay. He stood by the window and looked stolidly at the street. But all of us were suspended in this strange, lurid business. It had stopped life.

The driver, Wrangel, was being held in the Tombs for the murder of Knucks Geary. He would not answer any questions, he simply refused to speak, like a western Indian, with his arms crossed. Donne, with Grimshaw' s help, had arranged for the Little Wanderer children to be transferred to the Orphans Home and Asylum of the Protestant Episcopal Church at Lexington Avenue and Forty ninth Street. Three attending physicians and a dentist examined them and judged that they were all healthy and well nourished. Emily Tisdale had gone over there to see them, and from her experience as a student teacher at the Normal College she thought them uncharacteristically quiet children, with wary, fearful eyes. The ones who had been taken from the padlocked stage had been placed in quarters separate from the rest and questioned by a nurse attached to the Munic.i.p.al Police, with Donne in attendance. The children were not forthcoming. They were on average six to eight years old. They thought they had been going for a ride to the country, that was what they had been told. How long had they been at the Home? They didn' t know. Had anyone ever beaten them or mistreated them? No. Had Mr Wrangel, the handyman? No. Had Mr Simmons, the director? No. How had they come to the Home? They didn' t know.

Over a period of days Donne questioned each member of the staff. Martin' s incarceration in the bas.e.m.e.nt was a shock to them. They were all newly employed-the orphanage had been operating for just a few months. All had been hired by Mr Simmons after answering cla.s.sified advertis.e.m.e.nts in the newspaper. One of the teachers, a Miss Gillicuddy, who was retired from the public school system, had created the curriculum and the teaching plan. It was her enlightened view that children, simply because they were from the street, should not be presumed to be capable only of vocational training, Donne was satisfied the staff were not party to a conspiracy.

"You mean," I said, "they knew nothing of what was going on?"

"What was going on?" he said.

"That these were children kidnapped from the streets?" "Not all of them, apparently. Some were referred by the children' s aid societies."

"But there was some purpose to all this!"

"Yes."

"Where did the teachers and the monitors think the children were going on their ride that afternoon?"

"The children went off with Wrangel periodically, by turns.

Simmons said it was for their medical examinations."

"Then why was the stage padlocked?"

"For the children' s safety."

"Where is Sartorius? Where does he practice"

"n.o.body can tell us."

"The children -"

"The children give me blank stares."

Now this was all, late September, I suppose. Perhaps a bit later. The first stories exposing the malfeasance of the Tweed Ring were coming out in the Times. The city was in an uproar. The events up at Ninety-third Street had not, thank G.o.d, caught the eye of the press. Martin Pemberton had been carried up from his bas.e.m.e.nt prison and taken away in an ambulance after darkness had set in. Donne had closed down the orphanage and had it sealed by the city marshall on the basis of what he certified only as "irregularities." Irregularities found in the running of an orphanage were not news in our city even in the quietest of seasons. A brief item about the closing appeared only in the Sun. Martin was not mentioned.

I wondered how long it would be before questions about the Home for Little Wanderers began to drift up on the whispers of the staff members who had lost their jobs, the people who had seen the scuffle in the street in front of the Home, the authorities from the Episcopal orphanage who had taken over the maintenance of the children, and the nurses at the hospital, who could not reconcile Martin Pemberton' s state of near starvation with the numbers of people - family, friends, pastor, and even a police official - who were so concerned about his recovery. How had they allowed him to come to this in the first place?

As a jobless editor I was still jealous of my exclusive. Sitting there in the hospital room, I experienced additionally the feelings of a private person who shudders in contemplation of the prospect, of serious matters of his own intimate knowledge, subjected to the low standards and deplorable practices of the newspaper profession. I reasoned that I had a month, maybe six weeks, before the whispers would ignite, until the smoke of this fire would be seen down on Printing House Square. That would be the length of time it took for people to grow weary of the Tweed Ring scandals. Until then the rule would prevail that the press, like the public, has room in its brain for only one story at a time.

So this is how things stood in this infernal city in the autumn of 1871. Private motives and intentions began to stir in and about our misfortune, as worms in a grave. Harry Wheelwright in his great girth came to visit, late one afternoon. His eyes were already blasted and his speech slurred, but he found the gallantry to escort Miss Tisdale home. Am I too harsh? It would not seem inappropriate for Martin' s friends to band together for mutual comfort. But I didn' t trust the fellow. He' d seen too much of Emily in that portrait, his observation was, tumescent. He' d painted his l.u.s.t.

I simmered in my bachelor state, a bachelor too long, and too old, to do anything but simmer. Perhaps my jealousy was a function of idleness. I had worked since the age of fourteen. I didn' t know what it meant not to work. And I had always' worked for newspapers. Yet there I sat, stupidly jealous on behalf of my supine and oblivious friend, imprisoned in my own meditations, paralleled in idleness, I could not bring myself to look for a job. I would not go to the usual haunts at night, making myself visible for pity or gossip. I was now totally involved in this matter, as a life work.

One day the freelance I had asked to delve into the morgue for predicaments similar to Sarah Pemberton' s appeared at my door with the results of his researches. It did not matter to him that I was no longer city editor-he' d done the work and wanted his wage. I paid him out of my own pocket and was glad to do it.

He' d come up with a half dozen obituaries printed since 1869, of men who were thought to be financially sound but left a pauper' s estate.

I' ll tell you their names: Evander Prine, Thomas Henry Carleton, Oliver Vanderweigh, Elijah Ripley, Fernando Brown, and Horace W Wells.

Of course quick rises and falls of fortune were not unusual in New York. People lived beyond their means. Barouche and fours and town houses took some keeping up. In the last ten years tax levies had risen over five hundred percent. The markets were volatile, we were on a paper standard, so there was a speculative market in gold, When Jay Gould and Jim Fisk conspired to corner the gold, brokerages failed, people on the Street lost everything, No, it was nothing to see swells around town with silk hats and diamond s.h.i.+rt studs who were gone the following day.

But here I was looking at men centrally situated in the quiet of long-term success. And n.o.body related to them seemed to know where their money had gone. Carleton and Vanderweigh were bankers, Ripley ran a transatlantic cargo business using leased steams.h.i.+ps, Brown had built locomotives, and Horace W. Wells was a dealer in city real estate whom Tweed himself had appointed deputy commissioner of Streets and Sewers. Their collective worth when alive was somewhere, I would say, in the neighborhood of thirty million nineteenth century dollars.

Two of them were bachelors who had simply vanished, and their holdings with them. All of them, married or single, were of an advanced age. The family of one, Evander Prine, had been found' living in hards.h.i.+p on Forty sixth Street, west of Longacre Square, a neighborhood of wh.o.r.ehouses. They had come to the attention of one of my feature writers because they had put up Mr Prine' s sixty three foot racing yacht for sale, their only remaining a.s.set, and had had no takers. And so there were Mrs Prine and her children, living in a boardinghouse for prost.i.tutes, whose husband had in fact been an a.s.sociate of Gould' s and would have been expected to leave his family in, at the least, comfortable circ.u.mstances.

Perhaps in a society less raucous, less contentious, its heart not pounding the earth like a giant steam hammer, the oddly congruent fates of these men might have been noticed. But their anguished heirs had all sunk away in time, just as the dead do, under the flat weight of days and years and later editions, leaving Donne and me to unearth a major conspiracy. Because when I showed Donne my names, he showed me those same names, along with Augustus Pemberton' s, written down on a piece of paper he' d found folded in Eustace Simmons' s ledger, at the Home for Little Wanderers.

So we had more of the detail. Yet we could go no further. Everything ran headlong into Martin Palmerton' s silence. Donne sat by the bedside and listened as if Martin had paused in the middle of a sentence and the conclusion would be spoken momentarily.

About a week or ten days after Martin' s rescue Donne was suspended from duty pending an internal investigation by the Munic.i.p.als: He had had no legal basis for stopping the white stage in the street, and he had entered the premises of the Home without a warrant. They couldn' t do anything more, public than that. No city judge issued an order to unseal the Home and return the children. No lawyer came to the Tombs to see Wrangel, or to file for a preliminary hearing. The fact was that Martin' s rescue- his incarceration in the bas.e.m.e.nt-was a problem for them. Donne also had Eustace Simmon' s records. He could be ordered to turn them over to a court, but Simmons would know he knew there were discrepancies - in the handling of funds, first of all, but, more important, in that not all the children who had been admitted to the Home, could be accounted for. And the division of responsibility among the staff, the teachers and dormitory monitors, was such that only Simmons would have known that anything was out of the ordinary.

If the Tweed government had not been in the process of collapsing, and its major figures had not been so distracted, and fearful, they would, with all of their power, have dealt with this crisis brutally and summarily. As it was, their agent, Simmons, had no recourse but to flee. In his office desk he had left a cash box with seventeen thousand dollars. Suspended or not, Donne had the loyalty of his men. He' d put them on a round-the-clock watch. Night and day a man sat in the darkness of the Home for Little Wanderers. Donne could only hope the sum was large enough to draw Simmons back.

"Large enough! MiG.o.d," I said, "that is more than double your and my salaries per annum together!"

"It' s all relative, isn' t it? It may have been his petty cash. You see how he took to the water. He' s run slavers. He thinks of the ocean as a pa.s.sage. Simmons may be on his way to Portugal." Then Donne looked at me and smiled. "What salaries? "he said. We were all in these oddly reduced circ.u.mstances, What an odd collegiality we had, in our disfranchis.e.m.e.nt, sitting in that hospital anteroom hour after hour-a defrocked policeman, an impoverished widow and her child, a student at the Normal College for grade school teachers, and an unemployed newspaperman. As if our lives were suspended, until the resolution of this awful matter. Only Donne and I knew the extent of it. The others had merely to endure their bewilderment and grief.