The Waterworks

by E. L. Doctorow

  E L Doctorow - The Waterworks

  One

  PEOPLE wouldn' t take what Martin Pemberton said as literal truth, he was much too melodramatic or too tormented to speak plainly. Women were attracted to him for this-they imagined him as something of a poet, though he was if anything a critic, a critic of his life and times. So when he went around muttering that his father was still alive, those of us who heard him, and remembered his father, felt he was speaking of the persistence of evil in general.

  In those days the Telegram relied heavily on freelances. I always had my eye out for a good freelance and I kept a clutch of them on call. Martin Pemberton was the best of the lot, though I would never tell him that. I treated him as I treated them all. I was derisive because it was expected of me, I was funny so that I could be quoted in the saloons, and I was reasonably fair because that is the way I am but I was also interested in the language and wanted all of them to write it for my approval which, if it came at all, came barbed. Of course, none of this was particularly effective with Martin Pemberton. He was a moody, distracted young fellow, and it was clear his own mind was more company to him than people were. He had light gray eyes which spasmodically widened from the slightest stimulus. His eyebrows would arch and then contract to a frown, and he would seem for a moment to be looking not at the world but into it. He suffered an intensity of awareness-seeming to live at some level so beyond you that you felt your own self fading in his presence, you felt your hollowness or fraudulence as a person. Most freelances are nervous craven creatures, it is such a tenuous living after all, but this one was prideful, he knew how well he wrote, and never deferred to my opinion. That alone would have set him apart.

  He was slight, with a well-boned, clean shaven face and pale thinning hair. He strode about the city with a stiff legged gait, like a man much taller. He would walk down Broadway with his Union greatcoat open, flowing behind him like a cape. Martin was of that post-war generation for whom the materials of the war were ironic objects of art or fashion. He and his friends made little social enclaves of irony. He once told me the war had not been between the Union and the Rebs but between two confederate states, and so a confederacy had to win. I am a man who will never be able to think of anyone but Abe Lincoln as president, so you can imagine how a remark like that stood with me. But I was intrigued by the worldview behind it. I was not myself exactly complacent about our modem industrial civilization.

  Martin' s best friend was an artist, a big, fleshy fellow named Harry Wheelwright. When not importuning dowagers for portrait commissions, Wheelwright drew mutilated veterans he picked up off the street with pointed attention to their disfigurement. I thought his drawings were the equivalent of Martin' s tactless but informed reviews and cultural critiques. As for me, my newsman' s cilia were up and waving. The soul of the city was always my subject, and it was a roiling soul, twisting and turning over on itself, forming and re-forming, gathering into itself and opening out again like blown cloud. These young men were a wary generation without illusions, revolutionaries of a sort, though perhaps too vulnerable ever to accomplish anything. Martin' s defiant subjection to his own life and times was manifest but you didn' t know how long he could go on with it. I did not usually care to know anything about the background of a freelance. But in this case I couldn' t help knowing. Martin had come from wealth. His father was the late, notorious Augustus Pemberton who had done enough to shame and mortify their line for generations to come, having made a fortune in the war supplying the Army of the North with boots that fell apart, blankets that dissolved in rain, tents that tore at the grommets, and uniform cloth that bled dye. Our name for this was "shoddy," used as a noun. But shoddy wasn' t the worst of old Pemberton' s sins. He had made an even bigger fortune running slavers. You would think the slave trade was exclusive to the southern ports, but Augustus ran it from New York-even after the war had begun, as late as sixty two. He had some Portuguese as partners, the Portuguese being specialists in the trade. They sailed ships to Africa right here from Fulton Street, and sailed them back across the ocean to Cuba, where the cargo was sold to the sugar plantations. The ships were scuttled because the stench could not be got rid of. But the profits were so enormous they could buy another ship. And another after that.

  So that was Martin' s father. You can understand why a son would choose, like a penance, the deprived life of a freelance. Martin had known everything the old man had done and at a still young age had arranged to be disinherited-how I will explain presently. Here I will point out that to run slavers out of New York, Augustus Pemberton had to have the port wardens in his pocket. A slaver' s below decks were carpentered to pack in as many human beings as possible, there was no headroom-nobody could board a slaver and not know what she was. So it was hardly a surprise that when Augustus Pemberton died after a long illness, in 1869, and was buried from St. James Episcopal, on Laight Street, the city' s leading dignitaries showed up at the funeral, led by Boss Tweed himself, along with the members of the Ring-the comptroller, the mayor-several judges, dozens of Wall Street thieves and that he was honored with major obituaries in every daily paper, including the Telegram. 0 my Manhattan! The great stone steles of the bridge to Brooklyn were rising on both shores of the river. Lighters, packets, and freighters sailed into port every hour of the day. The wharves groaned under the crates and barrels and bales of the world' s goods. Standing on any corner I could swear I heard the telegraphy singing through the wires. Toward the end of the trading day on the Exchange the sound of the ticker tapes filled the air like crickets at twilight. We were in the post-war. Where you' ll find mankind not shackled in history is Heaven, eventless Heaven.

  I don' t make any claims for myself as a seer of the future, but I remember what I sensed years before, when President Lincoln died. You will just have to trust that this, like everything I tell you, has a bearing on the story. They marched his catafalque up Broadway to the railroad depot and for weeks afterward remnants and tatters of the funeral muslin flapped from the windows along the parade route. Black dye stained the building fronts and blotted the awnings of the shops and restaurants. The city was unnaturally still. We weren' t ourselves. The veterans who stood in front of A T Stewart' s department store saw coins rain into their tin cups.

  But I knew my city, and I waited for what had to come. After all, there were no soft voices. All speech was shouted, words flew like shot from our double cylinder printing presses. I' d covered the riots when the price of flour went from seven to twenty dollars a barrel. I followed the armed bands of killers who fought with the army in the streets and torched the Colored Orphan Asylum after conscription was ordered. I' d seen gang riots and police riots and was there on Eighth Avenue when the Hibernians attacked the Orangemen on parade. I' m all for democracy but I' ll tell you that I' ve lived through times in this town that have made me long for the stultifying peace of kings the equanimity that comes of bowing and scraping in the dazzling light of regal authority. So I knew some regnant purpose was enshrouded in Mr Lincoln' s death, but what was it? Some soulless social resolve had to work itself out of his grave and rise again. But I didn' t anticipate it would come through my young freelance, with his Union greatcoat lying on his shoulders heavy as sod, who stood in my office one rainy, wet afternoon and waited while I read his copy. I don' t know why it always seemed to be raining when Martin came around. But this day this day he was a mess. Trouser legs muddied and torn, the gaunt face all scraped and bruised. The ink on his copy had run, and the pages were blotted with mud and a palm print of something that looked like blood lay across the top page. But it was another contemptuous review, brilliantly written, and too good for readers of the Telegram.

  "Some poor devil took a year of his life to write this book," I said. "An
d I gave up a day of my life to read it." "We should say that in a sidebar. The intelligentsia of this great city will be grateful to you for saving it from another Pierce Graham novel." "There is no intelligentsia in this city," said Martin Pemberton. "There are only ministers and newspaper publishers."

  He came behind my desk to stare out the window. My office looked over Printing House Square. The rain streamed down the pane so that everything out there, the schools of black umbrellas the horse cars, the plodding stages' seemed to be moving under water. If you want a favorable notice, why don' t you give me something decent to read," Martin said. "Give me something for the lead essay. I' ll show my appreciation." "I can' t believe that. You hate everything. The grandeur of your opinions stands in inverse ratio to the state of your wardrobe Tell me what happened, Pemberton. Did you run into a train? Or shouldn' t I ask?". This was met with silence. Then Martin Pemberton in his reed voice said: "He' s alive." "Who is alive?" "My father, Augustus Pemberton. He is alive. He lives."

  I pluck this scene from the stream of critical moments that made up the newspaper day. A second later, a cashier' s voucher in his hand, Martin Pemberton was gone, his copy was on the dumbwaiter to the compositors' room, and I was looking to lock up the issue. I don' t fault myself. It was an oblique answer to my question as if whatever had happened was meaningful only as it evoked a moral judgment from him. I interpreted what he had said as metaphor, a poetic way of characterizing the wretched city that neither of us loved, but neither of us could leave.

  Two

  THIS would have been sometime in April of 1871. I saw Martin Pemberton only once after that, and then he was gone. Before he disappeared he informed at least two other people-Emily' Tisdale, and Charles Grimshaw, the rector of St. James, who had eulogized the old man-that Augustus Pemberton was still alive. I did not know this at the time, of course. Miss Tisdale was Martin' s fiancee, though I found it hard to believe he' d give up his wild storms of soul for the haven of marriage. In this I was not far wrong: apparently he and Miss Tisdale were having a difficult time and their engagement, if that' s what it was, was very much in question.

  To a certain extent both she and Dr Grimshaw assumed, as I did, that Martin could not have meant the statement to be taken literally. Miss Tisdale was so used to his dramatics that she merely added this startling example to her accumulated fears for their relationship. Grimshaw, taking it a step further, thought Martin' s mind was at risk. I reasoned, by contrast, that Augustus Pemberton had been nothing if not a representative man. If you can imagine what life was like in our city. The Augustus Palmerton' s among us were sustained by a culture.

  We are in the realm of public life now-the cheapest commonest realm, the realm of newsprint. My realm.

  I remind you William Marcy Tweed ran the city as no one had before him. He was the messiah of the ward politicians, the fulfilment of everything about democracy they believed in, He had his own judges in the state courts, his own mayor, Oakey Hall, in City Hall, and even his own governor John Hoffman, in Albany. He had a lawyer named Sweeny as city chamberlain to watch over the judges, and he had Slippery Dick Connolly to handle the books as comptroller. This was his Ring. Beyond that maybe ten thousand people depended on Tweed' s largesse. He gave jobs to the immigrants and they stuffed the ballot boxes for him.

  Tweed held directorships in banks, he owned pieces of gasworks and of omnibus and street-rail companies, he owned the presses that did the city' s printing, he owned the quarry that supplied marble for her public buildings.

  Everyone doing business with the city-every contractor carpenter, and chimney sweep, every supplier, every manufacturer paid from fifteen to fifty per cent of the cost of his service back to the Ring. Everyone who wanted a job, from the school janitor to the police Commissioner, had to pay a fee up front and then forever kick back a percentage of his salary to Boss Tweed.

  I know what people of this generation think. You have' your motorcars, your telephones, your electric lights and you look back on Boss Tweed with affection, as a wonderful fraud, a legendary scoundrel of old New York. But what he accomplished was murderous in the very modern sense of the term. Manifestly murderous. Can you understand his enormous power, the fear he inspired. Can you imagine what it is like to live in a city of thieves, raucous in its dissembling, a city falling into ruin, a society in name only? What could Martin Pemberton have thought, as a boy, learning bit by bit the origins of his father' s wealth, except that he had been sired from the urban grid? When he went around saying his father, Augustus, was still alive, he meant it. He meant he had seen him riding in a city stage up Broadway. In misunderstanding him, I found the greater truth, though I would not realize it until everything was over and done. It was one of those intuitive moments of revelation that suspend themselves in our minds until we come around to them by the ordinary means of knowing.

  All this is by way of digression, I suppose. But it is important for you to know who is telling the story. I spent my life in the newspaper business, which makes the collective story of all of us. I knew Boss Tweed personally, I' d watched him for years. I fired more than one reporter whom he' d bribed. Those he couldn' t bribe, he bullied. Everyone knew what he was up to and nobody could touch him. He would come into a restaurant with his entourage and you could literally feel his force like a compression of air, He was a big ruddy son of a bitch, he ran about three hundred pounds. Bald and red-bearded, with a charming twinkle in his blue yes. He bought the drinks and paid for the dinners. But in the odd moment when there was no hand to shake or toast to give, the eye went dead and you saw the soul of a savage.

  You may think you are living in modem times, here and now, but that is the necessary illusion of every age. We did not conduct ourselves as if we were preparatory, to your time. There was nothing quaint or colorful about us, I assure you, New York after the war was more creative, more deadly, more of a genius society than it is now. Our rotary presses put fifteen, twenty thousand newspapers on the street for a penny or two. Enormous steam engines powered the mills and factories. Gas lamps lit the streets at night. We were three quarters of a century into the' Industrial Revolution.

  As a people we practiced excess. Excess in everything pleasure, gaudy display, endless toil, and death. Vagrant children slept in the alleys. Rag picking was a profession. A conspicuously self satisfied class of new wealth and weak intellect was all aglitter in a setting of mass misery. Out on the edges of town, along the North River or in Washington Heights or on the East River islands, behind stone walls and high hedges, were our institutions of charity, our orphanages, insane asylums, poorhouses, schools for the deaf and dumb, and mission homes for magdalens. They made a sort of Ringstrasse for our venerable civilization.

  Walt Whitman was the city' s bard, among other things, and not all that unknown. He went around dressed like a sailor in a peacoat and watch cap. A celebrant, a praise singer, and, in my opinion, something of a fool in what he chose to sing about. But he has these confessional lines about his city, less poetic than usual, like a breath he is taking before singing the next encomium:

  Somehow I have been stunned. Stand back! Give me a little time beyond my cuffed head and slumbers and dreams and gaping...

  The War of Secession made us rich. When it was over there was nothing to stop progress-no classical ruins of ideas no superstitions to retard civil republican ardor. Not so much had to be destroyed or overturned as in the European Cultures-of Roman towns and medieval guilds. A few Dutch farms were razed, villages melded into towns, towns burned into precincts, and all at once block and tackle were raising the marble and granite mansions of Fifth Avenue, and burly cops were wading through the stopped traffic on Broadway, slapping horses on the rumps, disengaging carnage wheels, and cursing the heedless entanglement of horse cars, stages, drays, and two-in-hands, by which we transported ourselves through the business day.

  For years our tallest buildings were the fire towers. We had fires all the time, we burned as a matter of habit. The
fire wardens telegraphed their sightings and the volunteers came at a gallop. When the sun was out, everything was blue, the light of our days was a blue suspension. At night the flaming stacks of the foundries along the river cast torchlight like seed over the old wharves and packing sheds. Cinderous locomotives rode right down the streets. Coal stoked the steamships and the ferries. The cookstoves in our homes burned coal, and on a winter morning without wind, black plumes rose from the chimneys in the shimmering forms of citizens of a necropolis.

  Naturally it was the old city that tended to go up, the old saloons, the hovels, the stables, beer gardens, and halls of oratory. The old life, the past. So it was a pungent air we breathed-we rose in the morning and threw open the shutters, inhaled our draft of the sulfurous stuff, and our blood was roused to churning ambition. Almost a million people called New York home, everyone securing his needs in a state of cheerful degeneracy. Nowhere else in the world was there such an acceleration of energies. A mansion would appear in a field. The next day it stood on a city street with horse and carriage riding by.

  Three

  IN ONE sense it' s regrettable that I became personally involved in what I' ll call, for the moment, this Pemberton matter. Professionally you try to get as close to things as possible, but never to the point of involvement. If journalism were a philosophy rather than a trade, it would say there is no order in the universe, no discernible meaning, without the daily paper. So it' s a monumental duty we wretches have who slug the chaos into sentences arranged in columns on a page of newsprint. If we' re to see things as they are and make our deadlines, we had better not get involved.

  The Telegram was an evening paper. By two or two thirty in the afternoon the issue was set. The press run was over by four. At five I would go to Callaghan' s around the corner and stand at the big oak bar with my stein and buy a copy from the lad who came in to hawk them. My greatest pleasure reading my own paper as if I had not constructed it myself. Summoning the feelings of an ordinary reader getting the news, my construed news, as an a priori creation of a higher power-the objective thing in itself from heaven poured type.