The Waterworks (14 page)

“Martin made me swear I would never tell anyone, which I was only too glad to do. The gravediggers closed the coffin and reburied it. I wanted to get out of there but Martin insisted that we stay until the job was done. I remember he tamped down the grass where it didn’t lie to his satisfaction.

“I saw him only a few times afterward … and now I don’t see him. He stopped coming around. I should run into him now
and then—we have the same haunts, after all—but I don’t see him. I don’t know where in hell he is … and I don’t want to know. It is dangerous being around him. Any curiosity on my part… what has happened to the body of his father, what the child is doing there in his stead … if I allowed myself to think about this … lurid … family struggle … Well, they deserve each other with their awful battles that they carry on past death…. I refuse to think about it…. It is a kind of deep moral damage that can be contracted by too close association, like the cholera. And to think who paid for that glorious evening! As to a man’s strength of character, I assure you Martin Pemberton has not been as good or great a friend as Harry Wheelwright, and never was and never can be…. Certainly he would not comport himself with the same grace and fortitude if, God forbid, the situation was reversed and it was a Wheelwright who escaped from the grave.

“But I do feel contaminated…. It has only gotten worse…. The image of that dead boy sits in my brain. I would paint it if I could.

“I will never tell of these things in my memoirs. When I write my memoirs I will be the subject of the narrative. I do not intend to go down as a passionate devotee and self-appointed secretary of the Pemberton family … that lived for a while … in the brilliant heart-quaking civilization of New York. My own fate will be another story … not this one.”

Fourteen

T
HE
tale as Harry told it was so clearly the kind that sold newspapers that Donne assumed my blood was up. When we left the artist’s studio, he suggested lunch in a nearby beer garden. He knew about my trade—that the reporter is a predator … and the story is something he brings back in his jaws and drops at his publisher’s feet. And since animals have no discretion and cannot act against their natures, he wanted to impress upon me the need for restraint. I wasn’t offended. After all, I had made Donne my partner in the enterprise. In a good partnership each is supposed to save the other from his worst instincts. I couldn’t imagine what his would be but I trusted I’d know when they cropped up. At the same time I wanted to make sure we understood each other.

“How will the Municipals dig up a body without the whole city knowing about it?” I asked him.

“I can’t order an exhumation unless I have the permission of the deceased’s family.”

“That would be Sarah Pemberton.”

“Yes,” he said. “And I can’t apply to Mrs. Pemberton solely on the basis of Mr. Wheelwright’s claims.”

“I believe him … liar that he is.”

“I believe him as well,” Donne said. “But I would want to go to a widow with something more.”

“What more?”

“That is the point. There are things that have to be found out, you see, corroborative things. This is the way it happens—you want evidence of what you already know. According to Wheelwright, the child was in a full-sized coffin, which suggests … a deception was intended. But we can’t rely on what he thought he saw. He was drunk and the light was bad. We still have to make sure a mistake was not made by the cemetery. I need to see their calendar of interments from that year. That there was not some misidentification … and that two bodies brought for burial on the same day were not placed in the wrong graves.”

“That’s hardly likely.”

“Systematically, step by step, Mr, McIlvaine. In a disciplined manner … beginning with the hardly likely. I need to see the death certificate for Mr. Pemberton. It will have a doctor’s signature. I would like the chance to speak with the doctor…. Also, in the Hall of Records, we want to go through the registries of deeds and contracts … to see what transactions were undertaken by Mr. Pemberton in the year, say, preceding his listed date of death … and so on.”

“Can you do these things without attracting the dogs?”

“I think so.”

We were talking hunched over a table, talking softly, conspirators ourselves. “Christ, you know what the newspaper business is. I want your assurance … I brought you into this … in the assumption you’d protect my interests.”

“I understand,” he said with a nod.

“This is an exclusive,” I told him. “This is mine—there wouldn’t be a story if I hadn’t found it.”

“Exactly so.”

“And if the moment approaches when you can’t keep it exclusively mine … you give me fair warning.”

“Agreed,” he said.

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

At this point I believed that, someday, I would have to apologize to Wheelwright. I understood about the arrogance of this generation of young men … that they kept to themselves, as a separate community of the Sane, with neighbors usually their own age to be recognized by sight walking on the same street. But Martin’s behavior had struck to the heart of that pretense; he’d put them under the same suspicion as the rest of mankind.

So I felt sympathy for the artist. And gratitude, though that I would never express. His story was overwhelming. But truly, if you think about it, the precise way to lose my exclusive was to run it prematurely … in imitation of Martin Pemberton’s own heedlessness. As a member of the journalistic profession Martin knew he could have applied the same careful methods Donne was now advocating. Instead, he’d leapt over all of them and—desperately, awesomely—had dug up a grave at night. But if I followed, I would end up standing in that grave … and every reporter in town would be in there with me….

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

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

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

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

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

I had staked out my claim to a story, in effect negotiating with the police for my rights in it … but, after all, how phantom it was … no more than a hope for words on a page … insubstantial words … phantom names … its truth and actuality no more than degrees of phantomness in the mind of another phantom.

Yet I will tell you now about the seven columns of the newspaper. In those days we ran stories straight down, side by side, a head, subheads, and story. If you had a major story you ran it to the bottom of column one and took as much of the next column as you needed. It was a vertical paper, no heads shooting across the page, no double-width columns, and few illustrations…. It was a paper of seven columns of words, each column supporting its weight of life, holding up, word by word, another version of its brazen … terrors. The first papers were commercial sheets, mercantile advices, with cotton prices and ship sailings—sheets you could serve on a dinner plate. Now we ran off eight pages of seven columns, and only if you stretched your arms wide could you hold the paper taut to its full width. And we had readers of the city accustomed to this
… who scanned our columns the instant they got them, hot from the hands of the newsboy … as if our stories were projections of the multiple souls of a man … and no meaning was possible from any one column without the sense of all of them in … simultaneous descent… our life of brazen terrors spending itself across seven word-packed columns of simultaneous descent… offered from children’s hands for a penny or two.

So in this news story, now, my, this … yesterday’s news … I warn you, the sense is not in the linear column but in all of them together. Of course I would not find any Dr. Sartorius in the registry of doctors … any more than I had found Eustace Simmons in the waterfront saloons … or Martin Pemberton up the stairs in his room in Greene Street. Linear thinking would not find them. But then one morning, looking through the police blotter for items I would print, I read that the body of a Clarence “Knucks” Geary, age unknown, had been found floating in the river off the pier at South Street—unless I was mistaken, the same hoodlum I had seen in Donne’s office—and I was diverted for the second time, by this brainlessly amoral charmer, from what I had rather been thinking about.

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

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

I had not expected Edmund Donne to be so terribly upset. But he was—he was distraught, though this was only measurable as a more grim … impassivity. He laid the head back down with what I thought was undue respect, an inappropriate gentleness. What odd affections grow up in this city … like the weeds that spring from cracks in the pavement. Knucks’s death was the only matter he would talk about. I waited for the moment when he would return to our mutual concern, but it didn’t come. I was disappointed to see Donne’s … vulnerability. He could only think of the thug, for whose death he felt responsible. And whatever else was on his mind, he went about immediately trying to find the possible meaning or justice from the thing … as if this pathetic hoodlum had been the most important personage in the city.

For my part I was stymied by not having gotten any further on my own—after Harry’s revelations I thought the truth would tumble out. I found myself irritated by how easily Donne had been diverted from our search. I didn’t appreciate that he was like a walking newspaper who could carry the stories simultaneously in their parallel descents. He said, without giving me the reason, that he needed to speak to all the newsboys he could find. I remember how startled I was. Shocked into an impassivity of my own, I took him and his subaltern sergeant to Spruce Street, to Buttercake Dick’s, where the newsboys went for their supper at the end of a night’s work.

Dick’s was the newsboys’ Atheneum, a cellar hole, down three steps. It was fitted out with plank tables and benches. Up front was the counter where a boy bought his mug of coffee and one of Dick’s blackened scones, split, and stuffed with a gob of butter. Earlier it had started to rain in the city. The cellar with
its low ceiling stank of kerosene and rancid butter and the wet clothes of thirty or forty unwashed boys.