by Pete Hamill
“You can’t do nothin’ for them folk, Mist’ Co’mac,” Beatriz said, following the direction of his gaze.
“I could do more than I do,” he said, finishing the coffee.
“Mist’ Quaco tol’ me long time ago jes’ what you done, Mist’ Co’mac. You done plenty.”
He smiled, took a deep breath, stopped himself, exhaled.
“When are you going to pose for me, Beatriz?”
She giggled. “I’m too old to get naked for no man, Mist’ Co’mac. Not even you. And you the man never gets old.”
73.
For months now, starting in the unseasonably hot days of late April and through the scalding summer, Cormac was like the abandoned Africans on the streets: He longed for water. He did not mind the heat; some secret part of him, chilled by the arctic winter of his Irish youth, would always be cold. He did mind the filth. The aroma that came from his own filthy body. The itching dirtiness of his hair. He wanted to be hot and clean, and wanted the same for all the others in the town: the ancient Africans, the children, the women. In dreams he turned and rolled among dolphins in the ocean sea. He was scoured by salt. He was perfumed by the sun. Upon waking, he washed from the tepid water that waited for him in a bowl. The ritual did not help. There were more and more people in the city and the same small amount of water.
“It’s like money, Mist’ Co’mac,” Beatriz said one morning. “They jus’ ain’t enough to go around.”
At the Evening Post, Cormac could not convince the editors to make New York water as important a cause as independence for Greece or the compromise in Missouri over slavery. Still, Cormac made notes about the scandal of water. He wrote articles that were not published. “Everybody knows that,” said one white-haired editor. “It’s not news.” But no water yet ran from the taps of New York. There were, in fact, very few taps, and they were in the homes of the rich, fed by water tanks erected on the roofs of their private fortresses. For all others, water was still drawn from parched wells and did not run into bathtubs or sinks or toilets; it was dipped, splashed, heated on hearths. It did not run as the rivers ran. And in the articles he wrote, and held in a desk drawer when they were not published, he made clear that the reason was corruption.
The major agent of the corruption was called the Manhattan Company. For decades after the redcoats sailed away, it had controlled all water supply in New York through a corrupt charter. Even Burr and Hamilton had been allies in the swindle, and its outline was simple. The spring of 1800, the turn of the new American century, the newspapers full of Napoleon in Europe… that year, the Manhattan Company was awarded two million American dollars by Albany for this water project. A generous arrangement, said the Federalist newspapers. An intelligent act of faith in the future of the fine little town at the mouth of the Hudson. Blah, they said, blah, they repeated, blah blah blah. But the deal had a nasty clause: It allowed the directors to use all unspent moneys for whatever purpose they desired. Before supplying a drop of water to citizens, they founded a bank. The aim was to make money. Or more money. For themselves, of course, not for the citizens. So they spent one hundred thousand dollars on water and used the rest of the two million to start their bank. The Manhattan Bank.
All of this Cormac wrote in his unpublished articles. All of it he urged upon his editors. All of it he spoke about to friends in taverns and women in bed. Water, he kept saying. Water is a problem of money. And he was laughed at.
“This is New York,” one editor said. “This is the way it is. If people are so desperate for a bath, let them move to Boston. And besides, the Manhattan Bank advertises in this newspaper.”
That was the key to the silence: advertising. The new El Dorado for the twenty-three newspapers struggling for profits. In the years after the charter, nobody would have cared too much about the Manhattan Bank if the Manhattan Company had only supplied the water. But they gave the growing city only a trickle. They hammered together some wooden pipes, which rotted and collapsed. They dug deeper into the existing wells. They used slaves to carry water from the slimy depths of the Collect Pond, right up to the day when the pond was filled with the dirt and gravel of the hangman’s hill.
The result was the stinking city through which Cormac still moved each day. Many thousands of human beings were shitting and pissing in privies, emptying slops into the streets. Garbage was piled in the streets to be gathered later, and the mounds served as wormy meals for pigs and dogs and goats and rats. Rain turned the mounds to a vile gray paste; cold froze the mounds; snow buried them. And the animals burrowed noses and snouts and teeth into the mounds, and in summer Cormac saw flies the size of butterflies buzzing above them. While the directors of the Manhattan Bank kept counting money.
Alone in the flat on Cortlandt Street, Cormac was sometimes overwhelmed by rage. Rage against the men who had betrayed the Revolution. Rage against those who had turned all that sacrifice of the brave into empty rhetoric. Rage against the Manhattan Bank. Rage against private deals made in secret clubs. The stinking odor of the town felt moral, a sign of its spreading corruption. And it was personal too, for his own body carried a stench that he could not bring to even a casual coupling with a woman. For months at a time, he was celibate. He made drawings of women from memory, for the drawings did not send out an odor. And he brooded about the impossibility of forging a connection with any woman. They came and went in his life, temporary presences, as fleeting as the seasons. They told him their stories. They revealed their bodies to his pencils and brushes. But how could he truly promise to live with a woman for the rest of his life? That was a ghastly joke. A woman would want children, as he would himself. But how could he bring a child into this world so densely stained by human excretions, solid and moral? And besides: He had learned across the decades that he might never be a father. The way other men were fathers. He entered a woman’s body as any man did; he erupted in ecstasies of the flesh, as any man did; but his seed did not flourish. He did not know if this would always be true. Perhaps it was a curse conferred on him by Bridget Riley or Mary Burton or both. An Irish form of voudon. They still came to him in dreams, smiling in knowing ways, stoking his fears, beckoning, retreating, betraying. The two-headed Irish hydra. Awake, he shrugged them away. But when he met a new woman, when he began to calculate the risks of love and the temptations of hope, they came to him again in the night, whispering of vengeance. Time did not erase them. Sometimes, trying to make himself believe in happiness, Cormac thought that if he did finally trust a woman’s love, he might tell her the story of the gift he was granted in a northern cave. The secret of his life. The guarantee that he would love her for the rest of her life, if not the rest of his own. But he never reached that moment. He could not be certain about the way the woman would react. She could pack up, as so many humans now did in the exploding city, and abruptly vanish. Or she might laugh, mocking him, questioning his sanity, offering to volunteer him as a performer at Mr. Barnum’s museum of freaks on Ann Street.
Sometimes he even stopped drawing and painting. In those times, the longing for beauty seemed trivial in a city drowning in shit. Most of the time, he found refuge in journalism. He took his notebook in hand and moved among other people, merging his odor with theirs, recording their lives and their deaths. He was sure, on this day of smothering heat and rising stench, that Inspector Ford would eventually tell him that Dubious Jones was named by her father, a mechanic in Troy who did not trust his wife’s fidelity, and that her killer was an unemployed Hungarian whose name had more consonants than vowels and who had a wife and four children in Budapest. He killed her, as usual, because he loved her. The details were always different, in the lives of other people. The stories were always the same.
Today, as his body felt sickened in every waking hour, he became obsessed with water. Today, he wanted to be clean. Today, he wanted to taste clean female flesh. Today. The rich had water, of course, bringing hogsheads in by cart from country wells to fill those rooftop tanks. But ordinary folk ha
d no water for washing clothes or sheets or themselves. No water for scrubbing floors or sidewalks or the windows of stores. The little water they could find was used for boiling potatoes. They had that trickle, measured by the bucket, some still drawn from the ancient Tea Water Pump on Chatham Street, and little else. And in winter there was often less than a trickle, as the pond froze and the pumps froze and women melted ice and snow in pails. At all hours in all seasons, the city gave off this rotting stench.
The miasma, they called it.
The hod carrier emerging from a house on Hudson Street: “Sure the miasma’s not bad today, is it, Mick?”
Or Beatriz, presiding over mocha and biscuits: “Damn miasma eat your heart out today, Mist’ Co’mac.”
Women tried to erase the miasma with perfume. Self-proclaimed gentlemen carried perfumed handkerchiefs in their sleeves. When theaters were allowed to flourish after the Revolution, the longer plays were shortened, there were many intervals to allow a breeze to cleanse the rancid air, and there were no plays at all in summer. As the town filled up, and then doubled and tripled in population after the opening of the Erie Canal, the stench grew worse. Crowded Sunday churches used lots of incense to overwhelm the stink of the faithful, and when August broiled the city, sea captains claimed that they could smell New York six miles out to sea.
Some young New Yorkers didn’t care, for they’d been born into the smell of shit. It stained their days and nights, and unless they traveled into the wild country to the north, those patches that had escaped ax and saw during the war, they could not imagine a world that did not smell of shit. The hoariest New York joke (Cormac must have heard it thirty times in two weeks) was about the New Yorker who wandered into the open country, collapsed of some infirmity, and revived only when a handful of shit was held under his nose. New Yorkers told the joke on themselves. It always got a laugh. But Cormac had known the sweet smell of grass in Ireland and the salt air of the sea. And so he never got used to the miasma. It began to feel like the walls of an unseen jail, a trap, a punishment, a purgatory.
Nobody mentioned this in the churches, which Cormac sometimes visited as a reporter on the state of the New York soul. Filth, after all, enforced celibacy. The fanatics on the Common, assembled near the new City Hall, preached that man was in essence filthy and the only hope of true cleanliness depended upon a Christian death and the eventual embrace of pristine angels. They were all offspring of the Rev. Clifford, whose days had ended in the old lunatic asylum on Chambers Street. Their visions brought some small relief. Apparently the angels greeted all new arrivals with tubs, soap, and clean towels. Cormac laughed to himself at the notion that the only way to get a bath was to die. All the while, in spite of the stench, babies kept being conceived and born. They all entered the world of the miasma.
Meanwhile, men and women shit in pots. They shit in boxes. And Cormac was one of them. What they did, he did. There was no choice. He shit in bags and carried them to the privy in the yard behind the house in Cortlandt Street. The landlord finally built a privy, four feet deep, a lined tub. Once a week, teams of filthy men came around to collect the tubs of shit and dump the contents into the rivers. But after the canal opened, the number of shit collectors did not increase. The businessmen who ruled the town through the Common Council didn’t want to spend the money, and the people could do nothing because in this glorious democratic city; they were not allowed to choose the mayor. The overwhelmed shit collectors worked more and more slowly. They dumped their cargoes into the East River too late for the tides to flush them out to sea. The stench then rose from the sluggish river. Indians stopped coming to town. The last of the deer and wolves retreated to the forests of the Catskills and Adirondacks, appalled by the odor of humans. Fish and oysters died. The otters died. Whales remained out past the Narrows now. Ships that had been scoured by the harsh Atlantic came to the New York docks for a few days, unloaded, loaded, and departed coated with shit and slime.
“I hate coming to this town,” one sea captain told Cormac. “I end up puking for a week after I’ve left it and can’t get the stink out of me skin.”
“Try living in it,” Cormac said.
“I’d cut me feckin’ t’roat first.”
The corrupted water made New York a hard-drinking town. Taverns opened everywhere, two or three on the same block. Cormac entered them with other newspapermen, but he didn’t drink, because the taste of alcohol now sickened him. His companions drank his share. They drank beer and rum and flip. They loaded drinks with molasses and brandy and plunged hot pokers into the mess on bitter winter nights. This added the odor of vomit to the miasma. Many drunkards brawled in streets and gutters, and on public holidays such as the Fourth of July or Evacuation Day they celebrated with swords and pistols and increased the number of widows in the town. Others went home to fearful wives and fucked them brutally and passed out, while some went off to the brothels, where even the most forlorn whores backed away from them and their stinking flesh.
The shit and the piss and the rot brought infection and death. The old Africans had carried immunities with them across the Atlantic, and Cormac was certain those immunities had been passed to him through Kongo’s blood, for he never was infected. But his rage was fed by that too. For decades, the Africans saved many white lives during yellow fever seasons, but were seldom honored, and until 1827 in New York, were not given freedom. The old, immune Africans were almost gone from New York, dying in frozen winter streets, begging for alms on stinking summer afternoons. Death huddled in the city’s shit, and in 1832, it had risen in full fury.
Omens preceded the dying. For nine straight mornings in June, old Africans showed Cormac two black spots, like angry eyes, in the scarlet face of the rising sun. “This is very bad,” one said in Yoruba. “Many will die.” There was a report of red water churning from the depths of Hell Gate. A thousand dead fish rose one afternoon from the bottom of the harbor, and the seagulls would not touch them. At the Battery one morning, anxious for a cleansing breeze, Cormac saw a raven.
For months in the offices of the Evening Post, he read ominous reports from abroad. They told of Asiatic cholera in France and then in England, killing thousands, then leaping the Atlantic to Canada. The Common Council read short versions of the same newspaper reports and did nothing. When Cormac approached them for comment, they shrugged and moved away from him as if he were infected. They didn’t even clear away the filth on the streets, for that would have cost money. “They don’t want to hurt business in the city,” said William Cullen Bryant, a dry young poet who was the new editor, “and, of course, they’re correct.” Normalcy was the byword, even when it was a lie.
Then, on a Tuesday morning in June, Cormac heard a tale from a Nassau Street barber. He lived on Cherry Street. The night before, a neighbor named Fitzgerald came home from work as a tailor, and within an hour was simultaneously puking and shitting and bending over with cramps. He went quiet for a while, then groaned with headache, laughed in a giddy way, then drowsed in a jittery slumber. He jerked awake and vomited, heaving hunks of undigested food upon the floor, and then hacked up phlegm that was sticky and glistening in the candlelight. He screamed in thirst: “Water, give me cold water.” His eyes went dull as lead, and his face turned pale blue and his eyes and mouth and skin pinched in tightly and the skin of his hands and feet grew as dark and wrinkled as a prune. And then the body shuddered and the man was very still and quite dead. Five hours after the first symptoms.
Hearing this account, Cormac reached for his copy of Boccaccio. In The Decameron, the good doctor had wondered in the fourteenth century as the Black Death raged in Florence how many gallant gentlemen, fair ladies, and sprightly youths, “having breakfasted in the morning with their kinsfolk, acquaintances and friends, supped that same evening with their ancestors in the next world!”
Cormac rushed to see Bryant, waited an hour while the editor chatted with some visiting politician, and, after citing Boccaccio as a way to get Bryant’s attenti
on, explained what he’d been told by the barber. Bryant then was in his early thirties, with a sharp nose and piercing eyes, and was not yet encased in the pomposity that all would remember later. Bryant listened, his eyes narrowing, and whispered, “Good God, it’s the cholera.”
Bryant sent Cormac to the City Hall for more information, but nobody would confirm or deny what had clearly happened on Cherry Street. Back in the office, Bryant told him to wait. To write nothing. To wait for more facts. Above all, to avoid spreading panic. That night Cormac’s friend the barber died, along with his mother, aunt, and oldest child.
They became numbers, as first two died each day, and then twenty, and then the epidemic could no longer be hidden. Too late, the Council began to clear the pestilential mounds of infested garbage. Too late, the slum buildings were emptied and scoured and whitewashed. Old women awoke one stinking morning and then fell back dead. Infants died. Children died. One of Cormac’s friends died, a fine African musician named Michael George; he might have become one of the first great American composers and became instead a corpse at twenty-nine.
As in all plagues, as in Boccaccio, as in Daniel Defoe, all manner of quack and charlatan appeared with cures they were happy to sell. Opium was peddled openly as a curative, along with laudanum, and cayenne pepper, and camphor and calomel. Doctors offered bleedings. People drank salt or mustard, hot punch and hartshorn, or enveloped themselves in tobacco smoke. They still died. The God Cure revived for a week or so, with bellowed pious demands for prayer and fasting and repentance. But then the preachers joined the rich in the flight to the countryside, leaving the souls of the poor to the personal judgment of God. As always, the dead and the dying were blamed for their own fate. Many were Irish, and Cormac heard them condemned by the rich as their carriages trotted away to safety. A filthy lot, the Irish (said one perfumed auctioneer). Papists too. Animals as low as the pigs and rats. In the empty streets at night, Cormac could hear wailing songs in Irish (for many could not speak English) and garbled prayers and the jerking sounds of horror at still another death. Many must have imagined the consolations of the Otherworld or the Christian Heaven. Hundreds died.
