The Waterworks Part 7

"Sarah and Noah should make camp here, if Miss Tisdale will' have them. But I' ll tell everyone these are simply precautions. I' m sure now Tace Simmons has not fled the country. That' s all to the good, if we can get our hands on him, What is really odd is that as of midnight yesterday, I was fully reinstated in my duties." "What?"

"I' m as surprised as you are. Perhaps the Ring feel they want me where they can keep their eye on me. They have a lot to deal with."

Apart from the accelerating seriousness of all this, it was clear Donne was in his element. I envied him, being out of mine. What made matters worse, I was quite aware that I could, in the interest of protecting Martin and his family, I could give this story to a working reporter, or even do it myself on a free-lance basis for one of the dailies. If the account came out of Martin' s imprisonment in the Home for Little Wanderers, on whose board Tweed and his colleagues had served, and which happened to be where the suicide, Wrangel, was employed, who had been arrested for the killing of a street tough, why, even that broken-off part of the thing, with promises of more of the story to come, would freeze them in their tracks. Getting the news out would be no problem. I had not lost my standing, only my job. My resignation was looking better around the trade, though I had done nothing to explain it or publicize it. I had received a note from Mr Dana, the publisher of the Sun, asking me to come around for a chat. And one of my friends on the Telegram had told me the publisher thought the paper had gone down in quality since I' d left, and why would he have bruited that about unless he wanted me to hear it? completed, the story was not, reportorially possible, that there are limits to the use of words in a newspaper. Whatever the reason, I was a selfish son of a b.i.t.c.h and published nothing. I was everyone' s friend on Lafayette Place, and their secret betrayer. I was in an adventurous mood and prepared to take chances with other people' s lives.

It had not escaped my compet.i.tive notice that Martin himself, had, from some profound chastening of his ordeal, lost his keenness for following things any further. He asked no questions of us. He only ruminated on his own experience. This seemed to me a kind of proof of the soundness of my position.

And now Donne, in his researches for the collected money of the millionaires, came up with something interesting. He found an entry in the accounts of the city' s Water Department for the previous year published in the Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York - some twelve million dollars attributed to an 1869 bond issue for the improvement of the Croton Aqueduct. Yet, as he discovered, there had been no such bond issued on behalf of the Water Department. And why would the Ring let that glaring a.s.set sit when their method over the years was to understate their receivables and paid their disburs.e.m.e.nts? Donne thought this entry was in fact a portion of the fellows.h.i.+p' s investment. He thought he would look for similarly disguised entries in other city department accounts.

And then he had his brilliant and culminating insight. We stood under our umbrellas, on a gravel road, between the distributing reservoir and of the Croton Aqueduct, on a high, flattened hill in Westchester twenty miles north of the city. It was a miserable raw wet morning. The ma.s.sive granite waterworks with its crenellated turrets at the corners and so there was every reason to go ahead, except that - I confess it here - it was despicable, but I felt I had, time. The more of the story I could get, the more it would be, mine. Exclusively. Did that mean I found myself prepared to put the interests of the story ahead of the lives of the people involved in it? I' m not sure. Possibly it can' t be rationalized, but there is some instinct that prefers, unintruded - upon meaning. That whoever tells our moral history, must run behind, not ahead of it. That if, in fact, there is meaning, it is not tolled out by church bells but suffered into luminous existence . . .' Maybe I felt that to print the story now, or what I knew of it, would be an intervention, a trespa.s.s of the reporter into the realm of cause and effect, that would change the outcome. Still secret, these events could unfold naturally or unnaturally. If you' re not convinced, let' s just say that I didn' t think the story was reportable, accurately, until it was all in. That there was no story, until I saw Sartorius. In fact, even when these matters were closed, and the events concluded and the issues resolved, and I had my exclusive, I never ran it which may suggest I had a premonition that, even cathedral entrance doors of oak, was stained and streaked black by the heavy rain.

Behind us was the reservoir, its dark water stippled with white. It looked like a natural lake except for the lack of trees around its banks. I noticed at the water' s edge, not far from where we stood, the wreck of a toy wooden boat. It lay on its side and lifted and fell in the wavelets running against the embankment under the racing black clouds.

Donne had told me only to be ready to leave my house before dawn. I' d known nothing of where we were going. We had ridden by train up the Hudson to the town of Yonkers, and there a carriage met us that took us east through the country in the direction of Long Island Sound. When we' d come up the road to, I was astonished to see a whole troop of Munic.i.p.als spread out around the building.

The policemen had brought two of their Black Marias. There were several broughams besides. The vehicles were lined up in the road, the horses wretched in the rain, their feet planted foursquare, their heads hanging.

As I stood looking up at the building Donne' s realization slowly duplicated itself in my mind. Except for three bull' s eyes set high up near the roofline, the facade was uninterrupted by windows. The sky was tumultuous with billowing black clouds that took on a green cast as they sailed over the roof. It seemed to me everything was in motion except for the waterworks. Rain in striations, the clouds very low, very swift moving. The ground under me pulsed like a heartbeat. But this was the pumping waterworks machinery. Or was it? I couldn' t quite trust my senses because I thought I heard band music under all of this agitated nature. Under the rainfall' s hiss, the rumbling sky something insistent, pompous, rhythmical.

Motioning to one of the policemen, Donne approached the entrance. I followed. We waited as the policeman pounded the doors. After a minute they opened. No man from the Water Department, but a woman in a gray nurse' s uniform stood there. Her eyes went wide, not at the sight of the policeman, but in reaction, I thought, to Donne' s height, as she stared up at him, his umbrella aloft. She didn' t seem to understand him when he asked if we could come in, but she thought a moment and then she opened the door wide and we pa.s.sed through.

You know, at moments when our attention is painfully acute, we notice peripheral things, as if to reaffirm to ourselves our basic irresponsibility. The moment I was inside this stone entry hall, poorly lit, like a mine, with kerosene lamps, I felt the chill of entombed air and I heard the power of ducted water hissing and roaring in its fall, and I was aware, too, of the rap of our heels on a flight of iron stairs rising circularly about a giant grease coated gear shaft but what I attended to most keenly as I followed her was the movement of this woman' s uncorseted b.u.t.tocks under her nurse' s dress-a plain middle-aged woman of no beauty or station.

Donne and the policeman took their time coming up, as if they were memorizing every step of the way. Finally we reached the top, a narrow catwalk that pa.s.sed into a cavernous chamber at the bottom of which was a vast inner pool of roiling water churning up a mineral mist, like a fifth element, so that I could see, growing everywhere on the blackened stone walls, patches of moss and lichen and bearded slime.

We pa.s.sed through this, atrium to a corridor lit with gas jets and through another door, which the woman held open for us that led to a recognizable room. But the transformation was a shock, as in a magic trick. We were in an anteroom, or foyer, like any other, with painted white walls, parqueted floors, mirror and side tables, and a decorative urn. The woman pointed to a group of upholstered chairs, inviting us to be seated. Instead, Donne strode past her, knowing somewhere up here he should find Dr Sartorius.

At this level - the third storey? the fourth? - the band music was audible, like a parade one hears a block away. Donne' s head bobbing long legged glide down the corridor threatened to leave me behind. He ignored the closed doors of several rooms. One door I happened to see as I rushed by was open a crack, and I caught, a glimpse, the suggestion of a wall of books, a figured rug on the floor, a gas lamp, and a man sitting in a chair reading. I did not for some minutes register the intelligence of this, but rushed on after the policemen. I followed them up a broad flight of polished wood stairs with a carved banister. At the top of the stairs was a small landing, and double doors of steel with a wheel lock. Donne' s man turned the wheel, pulled open the doors, and the music rushed out at us like the wind.

Shadows of the storm clouds loomed and faded like a pa.s.sing armada on the translucent green roof. The steel ribs of the roof shot out like flying b.u.t.tresses. The orchestrion of oak and gla.s.s, as monumental as a cathedral organ, shuddered with its own music. The great golden disc revolved that beat the drum and shook the bells and plucked out the chords of a robotic waltz.

In the central terrace, women in gray nurses uniforms were dancing with each other.

Our presence interrupted nothing. Here and there, stretched out on a bench, or slumped across a garden table, or, in one case, lying across a gravel path under a tubbed tree, were fully dressed old men. Donne went methodically to each one and felt the pulse. They were all dead - five there were - but for one rasping out his death rattle.

The nurses, or nurse - cyprians, waltzed slowly around. Their faces were immeasurably sad. I thought their cheeks were wet with their tears, but as I looked more closely I saw this was the humid atmosphere on their skin, as it was on my own when I touched my face, the atmosphere that was produced from the vents in the slate floors, a suspension of droplets that adhered to the skin like an oil.

I felt the oppression of a universe of water, inside and out, over the dead and the living.

The old men were shrunken, unnaturally darkened and sunken in on themselves, like vegetable husks. I looked at each face carefully, but I did not find one I recognized as Augustus Pemberton.

We searched the suites where the old men had slept and the rooms where they had been ministered to, doctor' s surgery, treatment rooms, dispensary. All unoccupied. I said to Donne that on the floor below I had seen a man reading in what looked like a library.

Donne' s expression was puzzled. It was not that the music had drowned out my voice but that my voice itself, which I could hear, had a peculiar, gargled quality to it. I repeated what I knew as he bent his head to listen. A moment later he was rus.h.i.+ng back down the stairs. Halfway down the corridor that door was still ajar. Donne' s policeman flung it open, slamming it against the wall.

Sartorius looked up from his reading. He closed his book, stood, adjusted his tie, tugged the points of his vest, A slender figure, not tall, but military in bearing, unhurried, with a supreme authority about him. He wore a black frock coat, a fas.h.i.+onably wide, loosely tied cravat with stickpin. The dark hair was closecropped, the gaunt face clean-shaven, but for black burnsides framing his jaw and continuing under the chin to cover the neck and throat like a fur collar. The dark implacable eyes with a kind of desolation of knowledge in them, the thin lipped, abstemious mouth, He regarded us, with his rigorous impersonality and removed his watch from his fob pocket and glanced at it as if to see if we had arrived more or less at the time he thought we would.

Why hadn' t he tried to run? I have thought about this for many years. Society, as I' ve said, made no impression on him. He did not see himself in any relation to it. Certainly not to its laws. He had marched and ridden through the worst of our Civil War unscathed either by its cannon and shot or by its issues. The seemingly endless carnage ended upon the table before him in his field surgery as one continuously fascinating' " wonderfully tom and broken and dying body, with endless things to be fixed, He may have thought that whoever in the city had backed him would protect him now and see to it that he was restored to his work, so that, though his experiments had been disrupted, they would be resumed. Or he may not have thought that at all.

But I' ll tell you here, it is the nature of villainy to absent itself, even as it stands before you. You reach for it and close on nothing. You smash your hand on the mirror. Who is this looking back at you? Perhaps you' re aware by now of the elusiveness of my villains. This is a story of invisible men, dead men or men indeterminately alive, of men hidden, barricaded, in their own created realm behind the thick walls of the brownstones of New York, You have not seen them, except in the shadows, or heard them speak, except in the voices of others. They' ve been hiding in my language, men who are only names in your newspapers, powerful, absent men.

I remember as we drove away from I was the one who turned and peered through the oval window of the brougham, streaming with rain, for a last glimpse of this hideous industrial monument, so utilitarian, and yet penthoused for a voluptuary consciousness. A few policemen had been left on watch. We made a parade of our wet, plodding departure, one of the Black Marias behind us filled with the cyprian - nurses and odd. attendants and personnel of , and the other, now a kind of hea.r.s.e, policemen ahead of and behind us in their carriages, a procession in. the name of crime and punishment, except that Sartorius, sitting between Donne and myself, might have been talking to friends and admirers at a dinner party.

"When young Pemberton first arrived at my laboratories he was outraged, whether because I had kept his father alive or had not kept him alive enough, I couldn' t determine. In either case, he was blinded by his own moralism. But after a while he began to understand. There was no integrity in the lives of my patients, they were self - submitted to me for my use. They are notable for proving to me so far only how terribly membranous the mind is, so easily breached, with a drug, with a kind of light, or a degree of heat or cold, They did not agree to give themselves to my care in a uniform condition, you understand. The illnesses varied, the ages, the prognoses. Though all the illnesses were fatal. Yet I had them conformed to a degree of existence I could lower or raise by my application, as you quicken or dampen a gas flame with a turn of the wrist. I reached only this early stage, that I could keep them biomotive, that is, where they did not stop breathing, to the extent that I did not over endow them with self sustaining energies. This, of course, was not what they had dreamed of for themselves. On the other hand, they had, in this state, all the time in the world, didn' t they? All the time in the world, "

Donne said: "We did not find Augustus Pemberton."

"I think Mr Simmons must have taken him away, when it became apparent that, the experiment could not continue. Apart from my vitalizations," he said in his surprisingly boyish voice, "the interesting truth is in the great losses that human life can sustain its individuation of character, its speech, its volition - without becoming death. You learn this first as a surgeon in terms of what can be cut away. It is possible that a working familiarity with the mechanics of the human body engenders cynicism. More likely it cleanses the natural scientist of enn.o.bling sentiments, pieties which teach us nothing. The old categories, the old words, for what is, after all, a physically very modest creature, though self impressed."

I was sitting shoulder to shoulder with Sartorius, and felt his own physical modesty through the cloth of my coat.

"He is alive, then?" Donne said.

"Who?"

"Mr Pemberton."

"I can' t tell you if at this moment he is alive or not alive.'' Without treatment his time is limited. I find your concern amusing."

"What does it matter, after all?" I said to Donne.'

Sartorius apparently mistook my meaning. "Whatever their state of being, they were hardly more pathetic than people you will find strolling on Broadway, or shopping in Was.h.i.+ngton Market, all of them severely governed by tribal custom, and a structure of fantasies which they call civilization, Civilization does not fortify the membranous mind, or alter our subjection to the moment, the moment that has no memory, The person who grows old, or halt, has no past in the eyes of others, The gallant soldier on the battlefield one day is the next day the amputated beggar we would rather not look at on the street corner. "We live subject to the moment according to cycles of light and dark, and weeks and months. Our bodies have tides, and flow with measurable impulses of electric magnetism. It may be that we live strung like our telegraph wires in fields of waves of all kinds and lengths, waves we can see and hear and waves we cannot, and the life we feel, the animacy, is what is shaken through us by these waves, Sometimes I cannot understand how these demanding questions of truth do not impel everyone - why I and a few others are the exception to the ma.s.s of men so content with their epistemological limitations that some even make poetry of them."

And so we made our way through the rain back to the city.

Twenty-four.

HERE IS Sartorius as I dream of him.

I stand on the embankment of a reservoir, a vast squared body of water cratered in a high plain overlooking the city. The earthen embankment rises up from the ground at an angle that suggests the engineering of an ancient civilization, Egyptian, or perhaps Mayan. The light is bad, but it is not nighttime, it is storm light. The water is sea-like, I hear the violent chop, the insistent slap of the waves against the embankment. I' m watching Sartorius, I have followed him here. He stands out a ways in the darkening day, he is gazing at something on the water, my black bearded captain, for I think of him as that, as a man of the sea, the master of a vessel. He holds his hat brim. The wind takes the corner of his long coat and presses it against his leg.

He knows I' m watching him. He acts on the presumption of partners.h.i.+p, as if he were on watch for our mutual benefit. What directs his attention is a model boat under sail, rising and falling on heavy swells, disappearing and then reappearing at an alarming heel, water pouring off her deck. She rises on a crest, dives, and rises again. I am lulled by the rhythm of her shuddering rises and swift, pointed descents. Then it happens that I wait for her to reappear and she does not. She' s gone. I am as struck in the chest by the catastrophe as if I were standing on a cliff and had watched the sea take a sailing vessel.

Now I am running after him across a wide moat of hardened earth that leads to the waterworks. Inside I feel the chill of entombed air and I hear the hissing and roaring of water in its fall. The walls are stone. There is no light. I follow the sound of his footsteps. I reach a flight of iron stairs risingcircularly about a giant gear shaft. Around I go, rising to a dim light. I find myself on a catwalk suspended over an inner pool of churning water. The light drifts down from a translucent gla.s.s roof. And I am standing next to him! He is bent over the railing with a rapt expression of the most awful intensity.

Below, in the yellowing rush of spumed currents and water plunging into its mechanical harness, a small human body is pressed against the machinery of one of the sluice gates, its clothing caught as in some hinge, and the child, for it is a miniature, like the s.h.i.+p in the reservoir, slams about, first one way and then the next, as if in mute protest, trembling and shaking and animating by its revulsion the death that has already overtaken it.

I find myself shouting. Then I see three men poised on a lower ledge as if they have separated from the stone or made themselves from it. They are the water workers. They heave on a line strung from a pulley fixed in the far wall, and by this means advance a towline attached to the wall below my catwalk where I cannot see. But then into view comes another of the water workers, suspended from a sling by the ankles, his hands outstretched as he waits to be aligned so that he can free the flow of the obstruction.

And then he has him, raised from the water by his s.h.i.+rt - an urchin, anywhere from four to eight, I would say, drowned blue and then by the ankles and shoes, and so, suspended both, they swing back across the pouring currents, rhythmically, like performing aerialists, till they are out of sight below me. Outside, at the entrance doors to the waterworks, I watch Sartorius load the wrapped corpse into a white city stage, leap onto the driver' s perch, and layout over the team of horses a great rolling snap of the reins. He glances back at me over his shoulder as the carriage races off, the bright black wheel' s spokes brought to a blur. He smiles at me; as at a complicitor. Above him the sky is a tumultuous rush of billowing black clouds shot through with rays of pink and gold.

Finally you suffer the story you tell. After all these years in my head, my story occupies me, it has grown into the physical dimensions of my brain, so, however the mind works, as reporter, as dreamer, that is the way the story gets told. Here is the dream' s conclusion: The rain begins. I go back inside. It rains there too. The water workers are dividing some treasure among themselves. They wear the dark blue uniform of the munic.i.p.al employee, but with sweaters under their tunics and their trousers tucked into their boots. I imagine in their lungs the same fungus that grows on the stone. Their faces are flushed, their blood urged to the skin by the chill, and their skin brought to a high glaze by the mist. They break out the whiskey for their tin cups. I understand there is such a cheris.h.i.+ng of rituals too among firemen and gravediggers. They call out to me to come join them. I do.

Or else I began suffering this dream long ago, years before these matters I' ve been describing to you, before I knew there was a Sartorius, when on the embankment of the Croton Reservoir, I think now I imagine, I' m convinced-is it possible? - he rushed past me with the drowned boy in his arms.

There are moments of our life that are something like breaks or tears in moral consciousness, as caesuras break the chanted line, and the eye sees through the breach to a companion life, a life in all its aspects the same, running along parallel in time, but within a universe even more confounding than our own. It is this other disordered existence, that our ministers warn us against, that our dreams perceive.

Twenty-five.

SHORTLY AFTER reaching Manhattan, Captain Donne found a judge through the local precinct house and procured a court order remanding Dr Sartorius, for observation, to the Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane on 117th Street and Eleventh Avenue. The rest of the procession continued south into the city but Donne and I were driven by carriage to the New York Central station at Inwood, near the Spuyten Duyvil, and caught a train that would take us to Tarrytown, thirty or so miles up The Hudson. We had risen before dawn but Donne showed no sign of weariness. In fact he could barely sit still. He walked the length of the train several times and finally came to rest standing on an open platform between cars and inhaling the wet wind.

I didn' t know what a capture felt like to a policeman. My own sense of things was that we had drummed the prey into the net, the undeniably brilliant intellect of Dr Sartorius rendered him, paradoxically, a wild animal in my mind, a pure unreasoning product of nature. But Donne seemed not even to be thinking of Sartorius. He would not talk about the morning' s work. He' d decided that he knew where Simmons had taken the dying Augustus Pemberton. He was supremely confident, as why should he not be? He: said: "Even they have sentiments. Their sentiments parody the normal person' s, but I suppose, after all, it makes them human."

I felt worn down with gloom. After seeing the inside of the waterworks I grieved for Martin Pemberton, He had been awed by Sartorius and then repelled by him, and then subjected to slow starvation in solitary darkness, which he saw as a kind of penance. I wondered if it was a mistake to expect of him anything more than a continuing and deep state of shock.

By now, midafternoon, the rain had stopped, but the heavy black clouds were still with us, moving low and seeming to keep pace with the locomotive on its journey up the Hudson. In Tarrytown we boarded the river ferry to Sneeden' s Landing, where we hired an open carriage and asked directions of the livery boy, and in a short while were making our way uphill through the forested road, and then along the western bluffs of the river to Ravenwood.

The Hudson is a magnificent wide silver river at this point, and riding along the sheer bluffs with a view of the river southward, and the enormous black agitated sky rus.h.i.+ng up from Manhattan, I found myself thinking not that this was the home territory of Augustus Pemberton. I thought instead of Tweed - I felt these excursions out of the city limits were tracing Tweed' s beginning campaigns against the larger nation.

At Ravenwood you came in off the road onto a wide gravel path that went along a quarter mile or so through the woods, very dark that afternoon, like the cavernous inside of something, past some shadowy outbuildings, to a curving drive that circled around enormous hedges, to the entrance steps at the foot of the portico. Here, when the horse was reined and stood still with a soft shudder, and we no longer had in our ears the sound of its footfalls or the crackle of the carriage wheels on the gravel path, the silent presence of the Italianate mansion made itself felt. It was unlit. Every window was boarded. The great greensward leading down to the river was overgrown with gra.s.s that had fallen over on itself. The light was bad-it gave us none of the detail of the house, but only its extent, its length of porch, and, as we sat in the carriage, not realizing that neither of us was in a hurry to get down, a sense of commanding wealth.

I imagined Sarah Pemberton and Noah in residence here. I saw them in the lighted rooms, appearing in one window, and after a moment in another.

Perhaps Donne was thinking along similar lines., I could not ignore the energy of his pursuit, that it had to do with Sarah. It was really a romance they had made for themselves out of this unholy matter, and I saw an intrepid spirit in it, I suppose, a human means of resistance to the darkest devilishness, the way people have of combining for strength, through their feelings, though I doubt if their understanding of their feelings had been expressed in many words or included, as yet, any declared intentions.

Donne had bestirred himself and was now on the deep porch, walking from one end to the other. I heard him try the front door. I heard his footsteps. It was getting dark rapidly. I got down from the carriage on the riverside, and looked down the long dark slope to the peculiar implication of a river in the lighter sky between the bank and the far bluffs. But then I thought I saw something in the gra.s.s about two thirds of the way down the slope.

After a few feet my pants legs were soaked. The rains had left the grounds swampy. It was some consolation that after slos.h.i.+ng my way down there, I found the corpse of Augustus Pemberton propped on a rattan chaise that was faced toward the river. He, or it, was soaked too, with his bony legs ridged in his trousers, his large bluish feet bare, the toes pointing to heaven, his hands folded, his fingers intertwined, a man at peace, who had lived in the limbo of science and money. The head was turned to the side, as if from its own weight, and I could see the wen on his neck, which had apparently maintained its health amidst the general wasting away. I was not repelled, only curious, and in the fading light was able to see that the bonework of his large head had stretched the skin so taut, and it was so empurpled, that this was no longer a human face possessed of character, and I could not believe it to have been the source of any kind of affection in the heart of a woman of the quality of Sarah Pemberton, or obsessive fascination in the heart of the young Martin Pemberton. I tried to perceive the tyrannic will in these remains, but it was gone, just part of the estate.

With the encroaching darkness the wind began to pick up. I called to Donne. He came down and knelt beside the body, and then stood and peered in every direction, as if something of Augustus Pemberton that should have been there was missing. The wind seemed to be blowing the darkness in upon us. "We need light,'' Donne said, and strode back up the slope.

I stood for some minutes beside the body on its chaise, as if it were my orientation in this, wilderness. My camp, my base. I had always made a distinction between what was Nature and what was, City. But that was no longer tenable, was it? The distinction was between all of G.o.d' s endless provision, and the newsroom. I longed to be back now in my newsroom, sending the story up to the compositors. Not in this wild - I was not one for the wild.

I felt a perverse admiration for Mr Pemberton, and for his colleagues of the mortuary fellows.h.i.+p, Mr Vanderweigh, Mr Carleton, Mr Wells, Mr Brown, Mr Prine. I saw Sartorius, for all his imperial achievement, as their servant. They, not he, had ridden up Broadway with the news, that there was no life, no death, but something that was a concurrence of both.

Actually, when the hearing was held to decide if Sartorius should be permanently committed to the insane asylum or put on trial, this same idea, his servitude to wealth, was brought up by Dr Sumner Hamilton, one of the three alienists on the Commissio de Lunatico Inquirendo. But I will get to that. Donne came running back with a kerosene lamp he had found by breaking into a gardener' s shed. In the light of the lamp I saw Augustus' s gray hair receding at the front of the skull but rising in a billow at the crown.'' Someone had to close the eyes,'' Donne said, and holding the lamp over his head, he made his way to the land' s edge.

Now, as I have said, there was a narrow cut downward to a scaffolded wood stairs that had been built down the sheer bluff to the beach several stories below. In this bad light, from the top platform, we did not at first see the broken railing halfway down. What we saw below was a skiff blowing about at anchor a few feet off the sh.o.r.e, its unfurled sail dragging in the water. While I waited there, Donne went down the stairs. I watched as the light descended, growing brighter in itself but casting less and less illumination for my benefit with each of his steps. Then he called, and telling me to tread cautiously and stay to the ~all side, he bid me come down, which I did. We stood on a platform perhaps two thirds of the way down: the railing here was entirely gone, and resumed, jaggedly, half way down the next flight of steps.

We got down the rest of the way and found a man on his back with his head almost entirely. pounded into the sandbank by a seaman' s footlocker, which, nevertheless, he continued to hold in his arms as the object of his love. Donne said quietly it was Tace Simmons. There was a great mess of blood and matter around the head, which had struck some sort of rock under the sand. One of the eyes had been dislodged from its socket. When we pulled the footlocker out of the stiffened arms, the latches, which had no padlocks, fell open with a clink. Donne opened the top of the chest back on its hinges, and there, filling it from top to bottom, were stacks of greenbacks, federal gold certificates of every denomination, and even s.h.i.+nplasters, notes for amounts less than a dollar. Donne remarked that apparently not all of Mr Pemberton' s fortune had been turned over to the enterprise of endless life. "Cunning to the end" was what he said by way of eulogy, but with respect to the factotum Simmons or to the old man up on the bluff, I could not tell.

Twenty-six.

THE LAWS of New York State held-for all I know they still do - that a person committed to an insane asylum by anyone other than a legal relation has to be examined by a board of qualified alienists, to determine if the commitment is appropriate. Sartorius had no living relations. The doctors at the Bloomingdale facility having recommended his confinement in the New York State Inst.i.tution for the Criminally Insane on Blackwell' s Island, a state appointed Commissio de Lunatico Inquirendo, as the alienists themselves so delicately put it, was called into session. All this in a matter of weeks. It was unseemly haste on the part of the medical community! The Commissio was not a court and had no obligation to make its hearings public. I was beside myself. Try as I might, I couldn' t sit in. At one point, I know, they adjourned to the waterworks to examine Sartorius' s facilities. They called on Martin Pemberton for his testimony, and somehow Dr Grimshaw, terribly exercised by the thought that Sartorius might not stand before a court for his crimes, arranged to be heard before them. Donne was not called, nor was I.

No written record was made of their deliberations. The report of the Commissio was sealed by court order and to this day has never been released. But let me tell you about inst.i.tutional thought. Whatever the inst.i.tution, and however worthy or substantive, its mind is not an entirely human mind, though it is made up of human minds. If it were really human it would be capable of surprises, if it were wholly human it would be motivated by all sorts of n.o.ble or ign.o.ble ideas. But the inst.i.tutional mind has only one mental operation: It abhors truth.

The head of the Commissio was Dr Sumner Hamilton, a leading psychiatrist of the city. He was a stout, heavily jowled man who waxed his mustaches and combed his thin black hair crosswise, ear to ear. He loved good food and wine, as I was to learn, after footing the bill for our dinner at Delmonico' s years later, when he was quite willing to talk.

"I had of course heard rumors of a scientific orphanage." Hamilton' s voice was a very deep, resonant ba.s.s. "Somewhere up on the East River, or north of the Central Park, or in the Heights, I didn' t know exactly what scientific was supposed to mean. On the other hand, an orphanage presumably set up to test modem theories of behavior or health or education seemed likely, even inevitable, given everything going on in New York, everything changing, modernity driving all before it."

"Had you ever met Sartorius?"

"No."

"Had you heard of him?"

"Never. But I' ll tell you, I knew he was a good doctor the minute I laid eyes on him. I mean, you would trust him to do what had to be done. Not the personality. No bedside manner there. But the quality of mind. Very strong, powerful. He answered only the questions he felt deserved an answer. We ended up trying to formulate questions he respected! Can you imagine? I thought, if I poke around his disinterest, the pure science he seems to, exemplify, I might get a rise out of him. Crack him a bit, see what' s underneath. I suggested that he was one of those doctors who attached themselves to the wealthy. There are not a few like that, who take their practice to the money, I can tell you. I was deliberately rude. I asked if, after all, he was no more than a kind of medical valet.

"He said - and I can' t give you that accent, it was so slight, vaguely European, but he might have been a Hungarian or a Slav as easily as a German - he said:' Do you imagine, Dr Hamilton, I would have as a purpose merely to keep certain wealthy men alive? That that end would interest me, of itself? I maintained them in the context of my larger interests, not as a physician but as a natural scientist. Whatever their own desires, or grandiose intentions, I told each of them exactly what I would endeavor to do, that might, incidentally, be to his advantage, and that is just what I have done, Whether this one hoped for a normal recovery, or that one for extended life, or another cherished a vision of eternal life, that was their business. I offered them something they understood quite well, an investment. They were qualified for my attention not by their wit or the importance to mankind of their continued life, the gifts they had to give for the benefit of society, or the fact that they were good and kind, but precisely by their wealth. This work cannot be done unless it is endowed. It requires money. They were qualified subjects by reason of their wealth and self qualified by their rapacity - these seemed to be the essential things, and not at all in short supply in the city of New York. But in addition, each one of my gentlemen was given by nature to secrecy, to conspiracy, they were ultimate conspirators, this amiable circle, they not only wanted what I offered, they wanted it only for themselves.'

"Put me in my place, I can tell you. He was, impressive.

He' d spent a couple of weeks up there in Bloomingdale. It showed in his suit, which was somewhat the worse for wear. He' d not been permitted to shave, and so on. But it didn' t matter. He had this upright horseman' s posture. He didn' t plead, needless to say, or attempt to sway us one way or another. He didn' t choose to demonstrate to us, however subtly - and I know how subtle some of these maniacs can be - that he was sane, or for that matter insane. We were there to commit him, or to hang him. Since neither alternative was desirable, he didn' t seem to care which it was.

"But I kept pressing the point, in vain, of course. He couldn' t be shaken. He said the proof of a scientific proposition was that it was universally applicable. If an experiment of his was valid, it could be repeated by others to yield the same results. He said that in the war he had devised surgical procedures for the wounds of high -ranking officers, that were now standard medical corps procedures for all ranks. When I asked him, pointedly, if he was saying someday his researches would be to the benefit of, street children, he smiled and he said:' You' re not suggesting, Doctor, that I am to be distinguished from you or your colleagues, or indeed anyone else in the city, in observing the laws of selective adaptation, that ensure survival for the fittest of the species.' "

I said to Dr Hamilton: "How can a procedure be repeated if no one knows it exists? Martin Pemberton told me Sartorius kept no records of his work."

"It' s not true that he kept no records. We found his notebooks, stacks of them, locked in a cabinet in his dispensary."

"What happened to them? Where are they?"

"I won' t tell you that."

"Did you read them?"

"Every word. He wrote in Latin. It was breathtaking. We were able to understand some of his, equipment only by referring to the notebooks. I will say this to you: He was a man ahead of his time."

"So you didn' t think, then, he was truly insane?"

"No. Yes. My profession was implicated. There was something in this, quite crucial to all of us. It happened in our midst. The behavior in question appeared to be criminal, at least. Let us say it was. But it was, consistent with the man' s whole medical achievement. He was a brilliant pract.i.tioner. He kept going! That is the point-he kept going, through, beyond, sanity, whatever that is. Or morality, whatever that is. But in a perfect line with everything he' d done before.

"Good G.o.d, as to what is sane or insane, I' ll tell you about the state of knowledge in the profession of psychiatry: Give me an old man making his will and let me ask him a question or two and I' ll tell you if he is competent. I am sufficient to the task. I know in a lunatic asylum to instruct staff to stop punis.h.i.+ng the poor souls. To give them good food and clean beds, and fresh air. To get them doing things with their hands, knitting, or weaving, or drawing their mad little pictures. There you have the level of psychiatric knowledge today. And no less culpable for the handsome living I make from it. The degree of the man' s behavior was - what? - excessive? Whatever the system of thought behind it, the behavior was excessive. Insanely excessive. The deeper question was-should we let th~ public know? This city had recently suffered several shocks to its spirit, if I may call it that. There was some question as to whether it could suffer another. The district attorney all but said to us, If he is sane a charge is drawn, the legal machinery begins to move. A preliminary hearing is held in a courtroom. In the courtroom are members of the press, "

"He was under Tweed' s protection."

"Tweed was finished anyway.

"So you knew Sartorius was sane?"