The Waterworks Part 6

Twenty.

MEN HAD turned their fortunes over to Sartorius, betrayed their families. Politicians conspired in his behalf. The opportunistic Simmons had moved from Augustus Pemberton' s employ to his. He' d converted these men of the world, these, realists, into acolytes. He was a holy man, he commanded belief. In fact he was a major intellect-one of those brilliantly a.s.sured intellects to whom the world seems to exist for the sake of their engagement with it. I wanted to think we had disrupted his strange enterprise, that we might not exact redress in behalf of Sarah Pemberton and the other survivors of the, mortuary fellows.h.i.+p, but for the moment, at least, it could not function as it had. But how much more of it was there, that we knew nothing about?

I don' t know if I can portray the effect of an overriding mentality, this man I had never seen seemed to characterize the room where Martin lay. He took the shape of everything-the painted iron bed, the wooden chairs, the white plaster walls, and the chair rail, That we were here was willed by him. The calm, meditative face staring up from the pillow had been given its expression by him.

It was sheer misery not to have my paper, to read it every day and see that it was no longer mine. It did what I would not have done, it said what I would not have said. This too was Sartorius. He was my disempowerment.

I had not seen him, at this point, you understand, but I hold his image in my mind and I will a.s.sign it to him here, out of the chronology of things, to suggest the force of him, as if we were able to derive him from the disaster he had brought about.

A commanding figure, not tall, but military in his bearing, slender stature and with the stillness of consummate self confidence, wearing the customary frock coat, slightly puffed at the shoulder seams, and the vest with fabric covered b.u.t.tons, and the wide loosely tied cravat with stickpin. The overall impression is of neatness, self containment. Thick black hair cut short. His cheeks and upper lip and chin are dean-shaven; but burnsides frame his jaw and continue under the chin and curl around the throat like a woolen scarf tucked in under the collar. Black, implacable eyes, surprisingly opaque, with a kind of desolation in them, a harsh impersonality, reminding me of Sherman, William Tec.u.mseh Sherman. Good rounded forehead, slightly domed, thin, straight nose, thin lipped, abstemious mouth. I' ll animate him with an action: He holds a watch on a fob, glances at it, and slips it back into his vest pocket.

When Martin was finally well enough to leave the hospital, all our spirits rose. He was weak, and needed support as he walked, but he' d begun to recognize his surroundings, and he responded with a nod or a soft, barely uttered word to our questions. It was very gradual, and natural, his return to consciousness, by degrees, with the first responsive light in his eyes as they turned to Emily as she sat by him. But he still didn' t speak. Donne attempted, gently, to ask some crucial questions, but Martin could not or would not answer.

It was decided that he would convalesce at the Tisdales' . This was Emily' s proposal, to which her father, a good if wary Christian, consented, and Sarah Pemberton agreed. Sarah could not really offer a home Plat wasn' t hers. Martin' s own place was long since let to someone else, and my dark rooms where I lived then, three stories up on Bleecker Street, were dearly as unconducive to recuperation as Harry Wheelwright' s studio would be.

Those, first warm, honeyed afternoons of October, Martin Pemberton sat outside on a chaise with a plaid blanket over his legs. From the terrace at Lafayette Place, he could look out over the private park of his childhood. I had never seen Emily so happy. She went back and forth and fussed and brought tea and whatever else she could find to heal his spirit, or to signify her prayerful desire for her love to heal him. The leaves were beginning to fall, one by one, boating down on the breeze, and mooring themselves against the stone bal.u.s.trade. I came to see Martin almost every day, as did Edmund Donne. One day we were discussing Sartorius. Just for the sake of argument, I considered the possibility that he might have fled, like Eustace Simmons. That perhaps they had bought themselves a s.h.i.+p and taken themselves and their charges to where was it Donne had suggested? Portugal?

"No," Donne said. "He' s here. He wouldn' t run. He doesn' t have Simmons' s criminal soul."

"He doesn' t? What does he have then?"

I had been aware of Martin' s alertness to the conversation. In the moment before he spoke it occurred to me that he was in agreement with Donne, from the glance he gave him, or perhaps the set of the facial muscles in the instant before the mouth utters agreement.

"The doctor is not an immoralist," Martin said. We looked at him. He was gazing at a small bird who had hopped up on the tea caddy. "He never attempted to justify himself to me. Or to lie. Or indicated in any way that he felt, culpable."

It was an amazing moment, Pemberton was in total possession of himself, as if, all this time, he had been waiting for a subject of conversation that interested him. I decided immediately that I musn' t make anything of it, thinking he might be what? - frightened back into his catatonia. In the next moment Sarah Pemberton had come out on the, terrace with Noah, after calling for him at his school, and Martin recognized them both and held out his arms for the boy, we were all so astounded. Sarah Pemberton gasped. She called out for Emily to come quickly. She was overcome, she stood where Martin couldn' t see her and wept and turned to Donne and put her hands over her face while he held her to him. Martin meanwhile was asking Noah about his cla.s.ses.

And so that was the day we began to hear of it, everything, from the first sight of the white stage. What was it like? I think I was put in mind of a war hero. Yes, we listened to Martin as if he were a hero returned from the front. We were not inclined to be critical. These were his war stories, told for our wonderment. But I have to admit my euphoria didn' t last. I began soon enough to suspect that Martin' s recovery was not complete. When he referred to Sartorius he spoke of him without the slightest anger or bitterness. Overall, he spoke from some sort of peaceful resolution, or becalming, of the intensity in all his feeling. I was unable to tell how much of this to attribute to his physical ordeal. But his nature was changed, the characteristic impatience .., the suffered worldview, all of it softened, or chastened. He was tacitly, grateful. To all of us. He was appreciative! G.o.d forgive me - I could only think this spelled ruin for him as a writer.

Twenty-one.

"I knew the way to my father was through Eustace Simmons," Martin told us. "Simmons came out of the, maritime life. I went along West Street, around the Battery, to South Street, I went into every sailors' bar, every saloon, every dance hall in the Port of New York, with no luck. Then I thought, my father being, absent, Simmons would represent his interests around town. The situation elevated him, to the higher cla.s.sof thieves.

"One night I had the a.s.signment from the Tatler to go to the Astor House, where Boss Tweed and his friends were giving a testimonial dinner to a Tammany Club ward leader. They all wore the emblematic tiger in their lapels, the gold head of a tiger relieved in blue enamel, the eyes set with rubies. A very young girl danced on a table in a belted diaphanous gown, and at her feet, following her every move with the discrimination of a, connoisseur, was Eustace Simmons. I hadn' t seen him in many years but I knew him immediately. A Cadaverous man, dressed well but with the effect somehow of dishevelment, he was slouched back in his chair. The dimmed light brought out the ruin of his face - he is pitted and pocked, the skin under the eyes is black, the head of wiry hair graying and combed across from ear to ear, and the whole aspect of him, somehow, dirty looking.

"A few minutes later, I sat down in the chair next to his and could see he recognized me. Someone was making a speech. There was laughter and applause. I said in Simmons' s ear that I wanted to see my father. He gave no indication that he heard me, but after a pause to light his cigar, he rose from the table and sauntered out of the dining room. I followed as he trusted I would. "It was peculiar and it shocked me at first, but I respected him for not attempting to deny my father was alive. He has a quick mind, Simmons, and I think he knew within moments of my appearance what he would do.

"He got his hat and left the Astor House with me right behind him. His carriage was around the corner. In the light of the streetlamp I caught a glimpse of the driver I can' t adequately, express what I felt at the sight of him, the same driver of the white stage with my father and the other old men. I didn' t want to get into the hansom. Simmons shouted "Wrangel!" and the driver leapt down and locked a powerful arm across my throat so that I couldn' t breathe, though I could smell the onions on his breath, while Simmons caught me behind the ear with what I suppose was a sap. I saw a sudden bright light.

"I don' t know what happened then or how much time pa.s.sed. I was aware of motion, then of the motion conferred to a carriage by a team of horses, then of painful daylight, then of two or three small faces staring at me. I was looking at children. It was day, I tried to rouse myself, I was not tied but I could not move. I think on top of everything they must have drugged me. I couldn' t seem to get to my feet. I toppled over and a child screamed. Then I was on my back, looking at the battened ceiling, of what, in the moment before I pa.s.sed out entirely, I realized was a public omnibus of the Munic.i.p.al Transport Company.

"Let me say here that the driver Wrangel is of less consequence in all of this than you think. He is strong, fearsome to look at, with those colorless pupils, and I could barely speak or swallow after he' d put his armlock on me, but his appearance ought not be held against him. He' s like a good horse. That' s all he is, a loyal stolid soul who asks no questions. He' s a Prussian. They' re brought up to be that way, the Germans, with their strict parents and t.i.tled officers, who teach them obedience, obedience above all. Wrangel reveres Dr Sartorius. He served under him in the medical corps. His most treasured possession is their field hospital unit citation, signed by President Lincoln. He showed it to me one day. He thinks when Simmons tells him to do something, it is what Sartorius wants.

"The doctor himself I find difficult to represent to you. He doesn' t expend his energies on the formation of a, social self. He is quiet, almost ascetic in his habits, courteous, unprepossessing. He has no vanity that can be appealed to or flattered or insulted. You will wonder, as I did, how someone so careless, someone so uninterested in putting himself forward, or seeking advantage, could, marshall, the immense resources needed for his work. But he doesn' t-he simply allows things to happen around him. He takes what is to hand, he accepts what his, devotees press on him. It' s as if, there' s an alignment of historical energies magnetized on him which, for all I know, is probably all, that makes him visible.

"I wasn' t brought to him for another day or so after I recovered consciousness. I had no idea, and have no idea today, where this was, There was always, only indoor light. I never saw a window. Up dose, and third in a sequence after Simmons and Wrangel, Sartorius appeared to me in his modest demeanor as a mere medical attendant to Augustus Pemberton, a retainer, one of those doctors whose practice is limited to one or two wealthy patients.

"In this view I felt I had every right to my anger. I was Augustus' s son, after all, with the contemptuous att.i.tude of the line. I was loud and righteous. I demanded to know if I had been manhandled under standing orders from my father.' How like him to put others between us!' I said.' Is he still afraid to face me? Is he still afraid to answer to me?' Sartorius was calm. He asked, as if simply to satisfy his own curiosity, how I had learned my father was alive.

"' I have seen him, sir. Do not patronize me. I have seen everything. I have seen the grave in Woodlawn where a child is interred in his place.'

"He wasn' t cowed-on the contrary. He leaned forward and peered at me. I told him how I had gone to Woodlawn and dug up the coffin. I then felt it necessary to tell him why I had come to that, desperate measure, beginning with my sight of the white stage, in the snow going past the reservoir. I didn' t quite understand how the conversation had turned so that I was, confiding in this man. Yet I was, and with relief. "He said' The possibility always exists of exciting notice, of course, though, I think you are an exception to most people, in acting upon your illusions.' This was said in a tone of approval.' What is your profession, Mr Pemberton?'

"You understand at no point, then or afterward, did Sartorius attempt to deny anything, or to equivocate. He never tried to justify himself to me. My appearance had aroused his interest, not his concern. At moments during our interview I felt myself a specimen that had swum into his field of vision. He' s a scientist. He does not think of defending his actions. He is not weakened with a conscience. Once I inquired of his religion. He was raised a Lutheran, but Christianity he regards as no more than a poetic conceit. He doesn' t even bother to criticize it, or mock it or disavow it.

"' If you want to see your father, of course you may,' Sartorius said to me.' I doubt you will get satisfaction. This is something for which you cannot have prepared yourself. The perceptions of a merely moral intelligence, even of filial love or hatred, won' t suffice. I suppose it is no business of mine. But what will you say to this, papa, you thought was a dead man?' "

"Of course that was the question I had never permitted myself to ask. He must have read the desperation on my face. What indeed could I do? Embrace my father? Celebrate his resurrection? Cry with joy that he was alive? Or did I just want to tell him, that I knew? That I knew, And salute him for having found a depth of human deceit and betrayal beyond my conceiving.

"What was my purpose? Everything and nothing. I didn' t know if I' d get down on my knees and beg him to provide for his wife and son, or fall on him and tear his throat out for having given me this life of endless contemplation of his hideous being.

I said to the doctor by way of a rational answer. "' I thought my father was merely a scoundrel and a thief and a murderer.' He seemed to understand. He rose and told me to follow him. "I stumbled along in a daze. I became aware of the atmosphere of his laboratories, without seeing anything in particular going on there - two or three rooms with doors open between them, and a faintly chemical smell in the air. All the light came from gas jets, there were gla.s.s cabinets for instruments, stone-top cabinets inset with iron sinks, boxy machines on wheels with cables and gears and tubing. I remember a square wooden chair with leather straps at the and rests and an iron head brace, The walls were draped in some brownish napped material, velour or velvet. To me all this was the menacing furniture of science.

"He has a wonderful library, Sartorius. After we came to our understanding, he allowed me to use it. I spent many consoling hours occupying myself with learning more of what he knew, by reading what he was reading. It was a foolish idea, no more than a kind of homage, really.

"He is fluent in several languages, the scientific journals and papers lay in piles on the floor where he threw them. I made it a task of my own to keep them in order. Books, monographs from France, from London, from Germany, arrived in packing boxes. He knows everything going on in the sciences, in medicine, but he reads impatiently, looking always for something he doesn' t know, something to surprise him, a line of inquiry, a critique. His library is not a collector' s. He doesn' t read for pleasure. He has no particular respect for books in themselves, their bindings, and so on, and he didn' t handle them carefully. He read the philosophers, the historians, the natural scientists, and even the novelists, without differentiating their disciplines in his mind. Looking, always looking, for what he would recognize as true and useful to him. Something to get him past whatever it was that confounded him, past the point in his work where his own mind had been, stopped.

I think sometimes he was looking really for a companionable soul. He certainly didn' t surround himself with intellectual equals. He lived in solitude. When he entertained, as far as I could tell, it was at the strong urging of Eustace Simmons: the guests were usually politicians.

"He led me to an elevator, which rode us upward in a bra.s.s cage. He drove the thing but made no fuss about it. The floor above consisted of rooms and suites where the clientele resided the electors, the fellows.h.i.+p, the funeral society of old men. There were living quarters for them and treatment rooms with leather top tables, and there were rooms for the women who attended them. Later, after we worked out the terms of my captivity, I had the freedom of the place and came to understand and distinguish all of this. My first impression was only of a corridor of deeply shadowed rooms, all of which happened to be empty. The decor was simple, like a monastery or a mission.

"It was when I was elevated to the rooftop and saw, in all its humid green glory, Dr Sartorius' s - what? - facility for biologized wealth? - that I knew this is where I would find my father. I was so stunned I wonder if since then I have been under the sort of spell laid upon those who look on the forbidden.

"Here was the site of the experiment, the heart of the researches, the conservatory Sartorius had designed himself. It was in the nature of an indoor park, with gravel paths and plantings and cast-iron benches. It was all set inside a vaulted roof of gla.s.s and steel which cast a greenish light over everything. The conservatory was laid out to effect a forbearing harmony and peacefulness. At the center was a kind of courtyard paved in brownstone, and terraced up from that in single steps were smaller squares with filigreed chairs and tables. Enormous day urns sprouted profusions of fronds and leaves that I knew on sight were not native. A kind of tepid steam or diffusion of watered air hissed out of ports or valves inset in the floor, so that the atmosphere was cloyingly humid. I could feel through the floor vibrations of the dynamo that was responsible. The centerpiece of the brownstone square was a sunken stone bath, a bathing pool with water, ochre in color and overhung with a sulfurous mist. An old man, terribly withered, was bathing, with a pair of women attending him. I have not mentioned the statuary, here and there, pedestaled or large enough to stand alone, but consistent in erotic subject, with heroic copulations, nudes of both genders in states of pa.s.sion, and so on, yet all notably graceless and unidealized, as we are - the sort of pieces an artist would not show in public but only to his friends.

The effect of all of this, was of a Roman bath, had Rome been industrialized. The greenish light from the conservatory roof seemed to descend, it sifted down, it had motion, it seemed to pulse. Gradually I became aware that I was hearing music. First I felt it as the pulse of the air, but when I realized it was music, it broke over me, swelling and filling this vaulted place, It was as if I had stepped into another universe, a creation, like an obverse Eden. Its source was an orchestrion standing like a church organ against a far wall-an enormous music box behind gla.s.s that sprung from tines of its slowly turning disc the sounds of a concert band.

"I had a premonition of the pitiful truth as I looked for Augustus Pemberton among the quiet and coddled old men of this place, these idlers and their companions, silently listening like people in the park, in their black frock coats and with their hats upon the tables.

I found my father in a kind of gra.s.sy alcove, sitting on a bench, slumped in this misted pleasure-grove in al kind of vacuous despondency or infinitely trusting patience, which I would soon learn was steadfast, as it was with the other gentlemen in residence around him, despite the vitalistic therapies applied to them, inside and out.

My primitive father bluntly, powerfully selfish, stupid, intransigent, with his crude appet.i.tes and gross taste and stylish cunning, whom I tried to speak with and wept in front of and prayed to have restored in all his force, rather than as this shrunken soul lifting his eyes to look at me, without recognition, at the urging of Dr Sartorius:'' Augustus? Do you know who this is? Will you say h.e.l.lo to your son?"

Twenty two MARTIN LAPSED into silence. None of us said anything. I felt the breeze, looked out over the Tisdales' autumn garden, listened to the ordinary sounds of the street, with, I suppose, grat.i.tude. Martin closed his eyes and after a few moments it became apparent that he had fallen asleep. Emily adjusted his lap robe, and we left him there and went inside.

It was unfortunate that the ladies had heard his account. Sarah Pemberton, quite pale, asked Emily if she could rest a moment somewhere. She was accommodated, and later, when Emily went to see to her, Sarah confessed she had developed an intense headache, in her silent forbearing way containing the effect of her knowledge as a private matter, but the pain was so severe, Emily had to send for a doctor. He prescribed something for the pain that didn' t entirely work, and that night, at Emily' s insistence, Sarah Pemberton stayed over, and Noah as well, and Emily Tisdale found herself running a small sanitarium.

Donne and I decided to leave. He gave an anxious look up the stairs, but there was nothing we could do but get in the way. Seeing us to the door, Emily said: "I am terrified. Who are these, malignities of human life in our city? I want to pray but my throat closes up. Can our lives ever be the same? What is to be done, do you know, Captain? Is there something for us to do that will, restore the proportions of things? I cannot think of one. Will you think of one? Will you do that, please?"

Donne and I walked over to Pfaff' s saloon on Broadway. The raucous good humor there seemed to me callow. We sat in a corner and had several whiskeys. I was thinking of the desperate impertinence of this league of old gentlemen, so unsatisfied with the ways of their G.o.d as to take their immortal souls into their own hands, how pathetic, not to trust their Christian theology, but to ensure things for themselves. How brazen and how pathetic. Donne thought of things in a more practical manner. "It is a kind of new science, I suppose, part of the knowledge of modem times. But it seems to require enormous sums, to go forward. It is a complex enterprise. Expensive to run. They bought that mansion and fitted it out as an orphanage. They had the protection of the Munic.i.p.als, the endors.e.m.e.nt of the city fathers. There is another establishment, where this conservatory is, another entire establishment with a staff. All of this has been funded by the - what would you call them? - patients?"

"Yes, at best, to the tune of thirty millions."

"Is that a reasonable estimate?"

"Twenty five, then, at least that."

"Well, it must be banked somewhere under someone' s name. It can' t be all gone."

"No."

"It would be one of Mr Tweed' s banks. I have been talking to the federal district attorney. I' m trying to get him to issue subpoenas. But he needs something specific."

"Why would the Ring not steal it for themselves?"

"They will if they have to," he said. "I imagine they hope for something more."

"What more?" I said, and the moment I did I realized what he meant. The Ring, with their vaulting ambition, would carry ambition to its ultimate form. They were nothing if not absurd, ridiculous, simpleminded, stupid, self aggrandizing. And murderous. All the qualities of men who prevail in our Republic.

"While Sartorius is free, the money is sacrosanct," Donne said.

"That' s why if we hope to recover anything for Sarah - for Mrs Pemberton and her son-we must find the accounts and impound them more or less at the same time we, impound him. It will take months for the Ring to be put on trial. Until then they are not without hope of preserving their last, best secret." I was comforted by Donne' s a.n.a.lysis of this strange cabal, as if it was a legal, practical concern, a problem. to be solved, a matter of fact, whereas my mind was beset by this thing, The images from the conservatory, loomed in me. I could not sleep, I was haunted, not by ghosts, but by Science. I felt afflicted with intolerable reality. All my fears were compounded into a fear of the night. I was without my profession, my reason for being, my c.o.c.kiness. Somehow, deprived of the means to report it, our life and times, I imagined myself at its mercy. Life seemed to be an inevitable disease of knowledge, a plague that infected all who came in contact with it.

The most terrible thing was that the only hope in dealing with it was in acquiring more of it, more of this dead spirit of knowledge. I imagined, to give myself courage, that it all might be initiatory, a kind of spiritual test in a world ruled by G.o.d after all and that at its worst, at the moment of its greatest most unendurable terror, it would end, in a kind of light and peace, that we could stagger about in, like happy drunks, until we died. But as a lapsed Scotch Presbyterian, I couldn' t really believe that. What I did was pretend to have the same practical, matter of fact att.i.tude as Donne. We convened at the Tisdales' and put our minds to hearing as much from Martin as we could. We had first of all, of course, to know where that conservatory was. And there were other questions. Martin seemed to have been seduced by the doctor' s intellect, to the point of working for him. But we had found him dying in the cellar of the orphanage. What had happened? Donne was reluctant to put him under hard questioning-he didn' t seem strong enough for it. The best course, if the most exacting, was patience.

We sat with him over several days, alone, the two of us. We did not think it advisable for the women to hear any more of it. Martin told us that in a very short time he had come to think of Dr Sartorius in Sartorian terms-that is, with the disinterest of a scientist. "I forgot what was personal," he said. "My father? An abstraction, an unsouled creature, beyond my caring. It was only his body as a field for scientific experiment that was of interest, The doctor never tried to persuade me of anything, he wanted nothing of me really. Once we had made our gentlemanly agreement, I felt it was to my advantage to know him and hear him speak his thoughts."

"What was the agreement?" Donne asked.

"Only that I would make no attempt to leave, or interfere with the work. In return I could have the freedom of the place, Pd be treated as a guest. Simmons was not entirely happy with the arrangement. Apart from understanding the, sensitivity of his work, Sartorius, as far as I could see, depended on others to a.n.a.lyze what was in his interest. He lacked cunning, he was not wily. I think there was just enough ordinary humanity in the man that he liked someone to understand what he was doing.

"Seven gentlemen were in that, league of immortals. One day one of them died, truly died, and Sartorius invited me to observe the autopsy. This was performed in his surgery, on an iron table with turned-up edges and a drainpipe at one end. A flexible shower fixture hung from the ceiling to keep the corpse cold with running water. He asked me to take the faucet from its cradle and direct the stream at effluvia, created in the course of his observations. I don' t know if his procedures were those of a coroner, I doubt if they were. He opened the chest and examined the lungs and bronchia, and held the heart, and declared all of it normal, unremarkable. The corpse seemed serenely undisturbed by its dissection. The face was beardless, unlined, the expression composed and incorrupt. He was a man of middle age, younger than the others, which surprised me. Sartorius talked as he worked.' When Mr Prine came to me he' d been diagnosed as an epileptic. He was given to convulsions, and episodes of paralysis. I knew from certain signs on the scalp that he was, in fact, syphilitic.' Sartorius examined the scalp and then raised it away from the skull with his lancet. Then he applied the trephine and removed a portion of the skull. I was not made ill by any of this. In his presence you relinquished yourself to his state of mind - in this instance his keen interest in the post mortem. The opened body released such fetid, foul stinks, But I was somehow inured, I felt this was some sort of clockwork to be disa.s.sembled, the face after all remained at rest and indifferent, a mask, a machine' s costume. I was avid only to know what the doctor would discover. The whole inner table of the skull had a rough, eroded appearance. He pointed out three separate depressions where the bone had thinned, so that when he held it up to the lamp, light could be seen through it. These depressions corresponded to three hard and irregular coral-like growths on the surface of the brain as if the brain itself had absorbed the bony material. He almost chanted his comments about what he found, talking either to himself or to me, it was not clear, Though he used the terms of physical medicine, each reference was quite specific. I watched his long, delicate hands and was so concentrated in my attention, that I imagined at moments it was the hands that were speaking. These adhesions about the fissure of Silvius, see how they bind the anterior and middle lobes into one ma.s.s.' His accent was very slight, nothing more than an intonation, yet it was there.' And the dura mater in this area adheres to the brain tissue.' I saw what he made me see, The most awful thing was a suppurating, yellowish cheesy deposit, shaped like a pyramid, which he deftly cut out and laid with his bare hands on a small scale, to determine its weight. He put his instruments down and held his hands under the shower faucet.' Yet you have noticed how much of the brain and the skull are healthy. Unfortunately I can' t determine the extent to which we may credit the treatments he received here. All we can say by way of consolation is that Mr Evander Prine, who was a terminal syphilitic, remained alive longer than he had a right to. But I confirm Ricord' s Treatise on the Venereal. Under tertiary symptoms we must place nodes, deep-seated tubercles, tubercles of cellular tissue, caries necrosis.' His diction was so unemotional that when he made a personal remark, it came almost as a shock.' Too late,' he said,' too late, even for Sartorius.'

"It was easy to misunderstand him - to perceive him as only a physician, with the interests and the regrets of a physician, to give him ordinary motives, One day he asked if I' d permit him a small experiment on my person. I lay down upon his dispensary table and he attached two anodes of a small magneto to my head, one at each temple. These were connected by wires to a pair of needles with their points resting against a revolving wax cylinder set in a wood box. He explained everything as he went along. The cylinder was turned by a gear' shaft attached to a small bra.s.s steam engine. The entire procedure didn' t last a minute, and as he had promised, I felt no sensation at all- no pain or anything else. Afterward he showed me on the wax drum what he said was a graphic representation of the electric impulsings of my brain, a fairly regular figuration similar to the path of the sine and cosine in mathematics. This remarkable picturing device was of his own invention. He told me he was a.s.suming for purposes of his inquiry that I was a mentally fit person, though I might have my own doubts of this, and then showed me by comparison another cylinder, that recorded the activities of the brain of a man afflicted with a terrible disease whom he had brought into this place after having seen him wandering about on the street. This was the unfortunate known to us as Monsieur, a tic ridden, stuttering, spastic, full of grimaces, grins, and wild eyed faces, a continuous hysteric whose presence you couldn' t endure for more than a few moments, he was so relentless in his mimicking behavior, this poor soul, giving back to you every fleeting expression on your own face, including, and especially, your repugnance or pity for him. Every gesture, everything that caught his eye, Monsieur gave back in compulsive imitation, and he was never still a moment, it was a kind of helpless raging theatrics of behavior that Sartorius said had to arise from a defect of the brain tissue, When you a.n.a.lyzed it, he said, it was merely an acceleration and intensification of normal human activity. The cylinder showed a wild disarray of peaks and valleys, irregular, jagged, profuse.

"He kept this unfortunate in a dark room by himself and maintained him as you would a horse in a barn. The interest for Sartorius was not charitable. He showed me what happened when Monsieur was brought in among the fellows.h.i.+p of elderly gentlemen. He became calm, placid, and even allowed the attendants to bathe him - but only so long as he had in his field of vision the old men sitting about in their vacant, expressionless way, indifferent to everything around them. After a while, he took on their stillness. And astonis.h.i.+ngly, at the same time they began, mysteriously, to stir, and show irritability, one or two of them were even taken with small palsies of the hand or foot, No, this is no mere physician, You know, while I' ve always posed as an intellectual, and am in fact well read and informed in the crucial questions to be asked, nevertheless, I have never had that vitality, that marks a great intellect. I make an invidious comparison here. I' ve never occupied the convictions of my thought but suffered them as a man might pick up something that' s too hot to handle. You couldn' t know this, Mr McIlvaine, because the att.i.tude I always brought to you, along with my work, was a calculated, arrogance. But I was overwhelmed in the presence of this man' s mind. Dr Sartorius is not a doctor, except as medicine engages with the workings of the world. He thinks with pieces of the world. He sees into its structures. If he has one working principle, I think, it is to connect himself to the amoral energies human life in society generates, irrespective of its beliefs.

"As you know, I always felt like a foreigner in my own country, estranged, a born alien, disynchronous with my times, so that every stone street of this city, and every stone mansion, I saw at times as a kind of Ptolemaic ritual of madmen, so that what you thought of as your homes, with their hearth lights inside, I could imagine as the temples of cruel and savage cults, and then you set these temples one next to another on avenues, and drove your iron engines between them and strung your wires overhead and ,set your wires humming, and I was no more than a phantom on this grid, born without the faith, the body, to make this obsessionally ruled, tracked, and wired, exchange, my native city.

"So I was, available, to his influence. It was like coming ash.o.r.e on the freshened winds of a newfound land. The manifest thoughts of Sartorius were a field of gravity, drawing me to him. What I saw in him was an aristocratic dominance over men like my father. He was supreme, indifferent to everything but his work, so lacking in self-consciousness that he didn' t even take the trouble to record his experiments - he knew what they were, and how they went, it was all written in his mind, and since he lived in himself as the sole occupant, he had no thought for Science, that he would contribute to its history-or for posterity, that he would even require a name on his gravestone, when it came to that. His marvelous brain was oblivious to its own feats.

"It was my idea that he should have a secretary, a personal historian, it was my idea, my initiative. Dr Sartorius, lacking vanity, didn' t think about these things.

"And what was this work, at least as I could fathom it? What was its driving principle? I saw him transfuse blood from one living being to another. I saw him with a hypodermic tube inject cellular matter into deadened brains. I saw first one, then another, of the orphan children begin to age, like leaves turning yellow. Was this the work? Though I saw some of it, I was in crucial matters kept ignorant. For all the freedom I was given, I was not admitted to the surgery for certain procedures, which took hours. And all the life in the building was presumed salutary, from top to bottom, everything for a purpose, for life' s purpose, whatever the agency of man could do was done here.

"But the customs of New York, like the past. life of the old men, were invoked, they were used, as everything was used, for their therapeutic value. There were dinners, dances, What you must understand about Sartorius is that he was never committed to one therapy, he made corrections constantly, he was truly disinterested, arid as ruthlessly critical of his own ideas as of others' . He sought out what was aberrant in brains and bodies, as if the secrets of living beings could be more easily exposed there. Normality obstructed the scientific vision, it suggested a self a.s.surance of, form that life had no right to claim. But where existence was afflicted and grotesque, it announced itself as the truly unreasoning thing it is. He regularly examined people who made their living from their deformity. He went downtown to their museums of living wonders and freak shows on Broadway. Dwarfs, midgets, acromegalies, mermaid claimants, so - called wolf men. Gyandromorphs, poor souls imperfectly partic.i.p.ating in the anatomies of both s.e.xes. He drew their blood. I came to understand the pure scientific temperament as it shone from this man. It produced a mind that was unshockable, a man for whom there was no sacrilege, a being whose life was not staked on any fixed or unchanging idea that he had therefore to defend for the value of his life, in the way, you' d expect, for example, from Dr Grimshaw. "So, similarly, and just as rides were given in charged weather in public transport through the active streets of the city, b.a.l.l.s were held. And we all were elevated to the conservatory, lit green by the industrial sconces on the walls, and serving for a ballroom. While the orchestrion disc revolved and tined out its lumbering waltzes, boosted with automatic ba.s.s drum and cymbals, the creatures of the immortal fellows.h.i.+p danced in their black ties, with their caretaker women. It was a medley of the waltz tunes of the day, to which the old men, led by their cyprians, made their obedient slow shuffles, including my father, doing his dutiful dance in a way that absolved him in my mind of all his criminal cunning. He had forgone the dignity of death, as they all had. He was reduced to a vacant old man I could look in on. Augustus Pemberton, that cold, blunt brute of greed, it had never occurred to me that he could have had any unsatisfied desires, even megalomaniacal ones. But here he was, a mindless dancer enacting this ritual, this sacrament for a religion that did not yet exist. "So ,everything was Sartorius' s triumph. Though he scrupulously fulfilled his part of the contract, he was entirely without care or concern for his patients except as they were the objects of his thought. What he warranted was only his scientific attention. But this was all! And from it he was recomposing their lives piece by piece, swaddling them like infants, riding them, dancing them, schooling them in an a.s.semblage of life' s cycles, and with his emollients, and powders, and fluid injectants from the children, reconst.i.tuting them metempsychotically as endless beings."

Twenty-three.

OF COURSE I' m compressing everything Martin said, or everything I remember of what he said, over several days. We would go over there in the afternoon and sit with him. He was always glad to see us. He had the grat.i.tude of the recovering invalid. Sometimes he was silent for long minutes, with his eyes closed, till we' d begin to wonder if he was asleep. But these were reflective pauses. Sarah Pemberton worried if it was wise to have him relive his experiences to this degree. She asked us not to encourage him to overtax himself, or to sit so long with him. This was her way to deal with things, by leaving them to swell the brain. Donne pointed out to her the absolute necessity of learning everything we could, and I pointed out the benefits of reliving every moment, if possible that Martin seemed to want to talk about what had happened and that there was nothing as good for him, for anyone, as getting the story told, turning it into an object made of language, for everyone to lift and examine.

One day Donne felt he was able to ask Martin when and why the gentleman' s agreement with Sartorius was ended.

"I' m not sure I know," Martin said. "There was a woman a.s.signed to look after me, who would bring me my meals when I was to eat alone, and provide me with the essentials and clean my room, and so on. She never said anything-none of them did - though she was friendly enough, with her smiles and nods. She was an odd-looking woman with spa.r.s.e hair under her nurse' s cap, she wore the nurse' s gray, the uniform all of them wore. One day I asked her her name. I asked how many were on staff here. I was curious about everyone and everything going on. She didn' t answer-she shook her head and smiled. The proportions of her face were not normal. It was a broad face with flattened features, but somehow over endowed with bone on the right side. On the left side her ear seemed smaller than it should be. I asked a few more questions, each of which she answered with small shakes of her head while she waited politely and shyly smiling until she could go, and I realized she was deaf and dumb. They were all of them on this staff, deaf and dumb, as if they' d been recruited from one of the inst.i.tutes for these unfortunate people, I realized that the only person who actually spoke in the place, to whom I could speak, was Sartorius himself. This, once I became aware of it, became oppressive to me, I suppose I might have given him some indication.

"Then at one point Sartorius asked me if I would submit to another procedure. He had already, with my permission, siphoned off some of my blood. He warned me it was not quite as painless as that had been, or the recording of my brain electricity had been, and therefore would require anesthesia. The procedure involved the withdrawal of bone marrow from my leg, I told him I' d like to think about it. This was not an answer in the scientific spirit, which he must have understood before I did.

Perhaps the spell of him was wearing off, but I began at night to dream of that frowning nut-brown boy in my father' s coffin at Woodlawn, I was dreaming of him, but it was a kind of awakening, or reawakening to the specific therapies by which Sartorius contrived to exempt the old gentlemen from death.

"I cannot explain it - how I had, known but not known. How I had conveniently, forgotten. As if I had performed on myself some excision of a portion of the brain. But the effect upon me now, of becoming aware of what I' d known all along, was overwhelming. I was sickened, so terribly self traduced, I could literally taste and be nauseated by, my own moral rot.

I' m not sure I actually considered trying to escape, from what? But I did begin to feel the need to, breathe. Like that child in the coffin, Iwas buried too. This was a windowless, gaslit place, with its machinery always humming, and a humidity in the air that made me feel sometimes Iwas underwater, or that this was a hermetic undersea vault I was sealed in. Perhaps Sartorius saw my disturbed state, and found it - l don' t know - disappointing in some way. But he seemed to lose interest in me. He did not ask again to perform the procedure. I was not invited to watch or partic.i.p.ate as often as I had been. Iwas left to my own devices, I felt finally he had forgotten I was there, his mind had moved on without me.

"It was Eustace Simmons, I think, who took the initiative. He came in one day with the woman I' d asked all the questions, and sat across the table from me as I ate. I had by then stopped taking my meals upstairs with the, community. I was spending most of my time in the library. I was surprised to see Simmons you didn' t see him that much. He chatted as if he was making a social call.

"The next thing I knew, I was in complete darkness, my head aching, and it was a different atmosphere, close, with the smell of burned air, of ashes and soot, I could hear the sound of footsteps over my head. And when I stood to get my bearings I found my hands holding the bars of a cell. I thought, finally, that was just."

He' d been brought back to the orphanage, and could not tell us how long a journey it was, or what direction he' d come from, or anything else that would give us some idea of where this place was that was the heart of the enterprise.

"Why do you suppose Simmons didn' t just, do away with you?" I asked him.

"It was probably what he would have preferred. Simmons is a kind of dark stepbrother to me, you know. Much older, just as I am much older than Noah, but spiritually, my father' s son, and right hand, as I never was. He became the doctor' s right hand. He has the utmost respect for Dr Sartorius, He has the soul of a factotum, for all his cunning. He needs someone to work for. So, the doctor might conceive of another use for me. I had the time to think about this. How long was I down there before my mind began to, drift. But I heard the footsteps of those children over my head. I knew they were children - you can' t mistake the footsteps of children. I shouted and screamed to them, to get away, to run, knowing they couldn' t hear. I was one of them, you see. After all. I understood that." Martin was more than a few times in these recollections on the verge of tears. I think this was a moment when he couldn' t help himself. He put his hand over his eyes and he wept. As I have said, we were well into the autumn of the year. Somewhere in the middle of October. And now several things happened, more or less simultaneously. I arrived one afternoon for my visit with Martin and found a policeman standing guard at the Tisdales' door. I had to identify myself in order to be allowed to ring the bell. Emily admitted me. Behind her, her white haired father was coming down the hall. "Newspapers! Police! What next, what next! I' m an old man, don' t you people understand? I am not used to this!" Emily saw me into the parlor and excused them both for a moment, and I heard their voices retreat upstairs, his louder than hers, but hers prevailing apparently because in a few minutes she was back downstairs without him.

She said: "The man who was arrested has been found dead at the Tombs. The omnibus driver? Wrangel, is that his name? He hanged himself in his cell."

"Where is Donne?"

"He has gone to get Noah from school;"

"Where is Martin?"

"He is upstairs in his room. His mother is with him." My blood was racing now. One could antic.i.p.ate a certain degree of desperation on everyone' s part. The previous evening there had been the citizens' meeting I think I have mentioned, at the Cooper Union. A raucous meeting with calls for Tweed' s scalp. Instea4 they formed a committee of seventy, eminent men, to bring a taxpayers' suit against the mayor and his administration. This was to enjoin the Ring from issuing bonds or paying city money to any supplier until an investigation was held. I didn' t know what judge would give them their injunction, but it was electrifying news that the attempt would even be made. I waited anxiously for Donne. When he returned safely with Noah and had seen him upstairs, we were able to talk alone for a few minutes. Of course he had not believed Wrangel had hanged himself. He told me there were bruises on the driver' s skull. He' d been struck unconscious before he' d been strung up. "Who would be employed for that?"

"It' s not an unknown practice, for the Munic.i.p.als to save the judiciary the bother of an actual trial.".

"Are the Palmerton' s in danger?"

"I don' t know. It depends on who' s attending to this. I have to a.s.sume they could have traced Martin through the hospital. They may not have. They may be thoroughly occupied with their further troubles, Wrangel may be sufficient for them for the time being. Or he may not. Conceivably, they could be engaged in a general, extirpation of the evidence. Of course, you shouldn' t go into this with the others."

"Of course. Though your police guard seems to have unsettled the whole household."