The Waterworks (12 page)

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

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

“Buy them?”

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

“He approached you?”

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

“What did he say?”

“Just that. He would pay a fat sum.”

“Whom else did he speak with?”

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

“When was this?”

“Not two nights ago.”

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

“No, sir.”

“What did he look like?”

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

“What was he wearing, Knucks?”

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

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

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

“But you shall.”

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

“Here,” Donne said, removing a half-dollar from his vest pocket. He snapped it down on the desk. “No harm will come to you. You are in the employ of the Municipal Police of the City of New York.”

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

“‘Such dark matters as these,’” he said in Knucks’s intonation. “Such dark matters as these,” he said, as if by pronouncing them he was investigating the words themselves … and then he quietly drifted into his own thought.

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

Twelve

O
R
else, as I had brought in the protagonist for my quest, he brought with him, like his shadow, his opposite.

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

You didn’t need an appointment to see Harry Wheelwright, he kept an open house … I suppose to make it convenient as possible for collectors to stop by. He occupied the top floor of a commercial ironfront on West Fourteenth Street, the equivalent of one large room, and with a bank of windows characteristic of the ironfronts. The windows, which faced north, were covered with a sort of crystallized grime. The light that came through was diffused, a flat white light that fell evenly over everything … injudiciously. A big bed, loosely covered, was on one wall. An armoire next to it… a sink and icebox half hidden by a folding screen … a lithography or etching press of some sort… odd pieces of furniture, whether to be lived in or used for props, it was hard to tell. And all of it on a splintered wood floor that appeared never to have been swept.

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

But when I introduced Harry to Donne, who was in mufti, so that I gave his rank with the Municipal Police, the model stood up with an expression on his face of absolute horror and struggled to put on his shirt. “Wait—keep the pose, stay where you are!” the artist shouted, going toward him. There was a
flurry of remonstrations, curses … and the one-armed man was fleeing down the stairs.

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

“We’re here about Pemberton,” I said.

“I see.” He tossed his paintbrush across the room. “How like Martin to ruin a day’s work.” He went behind the screen and I heard the clink of glass and bottle.

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

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

“Emily Tisdale,” I said.

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

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

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

“Why Siberian?” said Donne.

“The cheekbones are high, and see here? the way they seem to lift the eyes at the outer corners? Don’t tell old man Tisdale, but somewhere in his line of pious Protestants was a wild woman of the steppes. Yet I’m constrained from acting upon it … by the simpleminded friendship that some women assume … and install between you like a chastity belt.”

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

“And not constrained by your friendship with Martin Pemberton?” Donne said as we continued to look at the painting.

“Oh, that too, of course. If you insist. I mean I have acted toward him as a friend, though by now I would rather not be his friend. And I am Emily’s friend, though I would rather be more than her friend. And she is Martin’s lost friend…. Yes, I think that more accurately describes it.”

“Why is she lost?” said Donne.

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

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

“I don’t know where in God’s name Pemberton may be, or what he is up to, nor do I want to. You can believe me—I have no more curiosity in this matter,” Harry said. “I’m through with that damned family.”

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

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

“You last saw him—when, did you say?”