The Waterworks

by E. L. Doctorow

  What else did I have to assure myself of a stable universe? Callaghan' s oak bar? Above me was the dark patterned tin ceiling, behind me the honest unpainted tables and chairs, and a floor of octagonal tiles with clean sawdust under my feet. But Callaghan himself, a florid man with a harsh wheezing breath, was an unfortunate patron of his own wares, and there had been more than one or two foreclosure notices in the window over the years. So much for solid oak. The newsboy, then? Piping his call at the door? But I lie if I say it was always the same one. Newsboys lived warring lives. They battled for their corners with fists and teeth and saps, they were cunning and brazen and brutal with one another. They made payoffs to get their papers early. They climbed stoops and rang doorbells, they muscled each other at the stage stops, they raced through the horse cars, and if they caught your eye, a folded edition was in your hand and the little palm under your chin before you could utter a word. In the trade it was said that newsboys were the statesmen and financiers and railroad magnates of the future. But no publisher wanted to admit that his weighty estate was carried on the small, rounded shoulders of an eight-year-old boy. If any financiers and statesmen were sprung from these urchins, they never made themselves known to me. A lot of them died of venereal and lung diseases. The ones who lived, lived to express the moral infirmities of their class.

  I could have thought of Martin Pemberton, the self impoverished son of a father he had disowned, or who had disowned him: I had come to appreciate his reliably tactless opinion-there was something assured! I wondered one afternoon, standing in Callaghan' s and finding my culture page flat and uninteresting, where in hell he had been lately, Pemberton, because I hadn' t seen him in several weeks. Almost at the same moment, at least I think so now, a messenger came through the door with a packet from my publisher. My publisher was always sending things around that he thought I ought to know. In this case there were two items. The first was the latest issue of that organ of Brahmin culture, the Atlantic Monthly, in which he' d flagged an article by no less a personage than Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holmes was railing at certain ignorant New York critics who were not sufficiently in awe of his fellow trinomials of New England literary genius, James Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Though he didn' t identify the offending critics, It was clear from his references that Martin Pemberton was one of them-I had run his piece on the subject early in the year, in which he had said of those men, and Mr Holmes with them, that their names were too long for the work they produced.

  Well, that was exhilarating but so was the second item, a letter from none other than Pierce Graham, the author of the novel Martin Pemberton had reviewed so thoroughly and I had published so promptly that rainy day in April.

  You would not know the name Pierce Graham; he had some brief notoriety as a literary figure who found his material in the territories, going among the frontier towns and mining camps or shooting Indians with the cavalry. He was a sporting man, a heavy drinker with a predilection for stripping to the waist in saloons and engaging in prizefight matches. Mr Graham, writing from Chicago, advised that unless a printed apology was forthcoming in the Telegram, he would bring suit for defamation and, to round things off nicely, come to New York and thrash the writer of the review to within an inch of his life.

  What a great day this was for the Telegram! Not before in my memory had we managed to offend both ends of the literary spectrum-bluebloods and redskins, the highborn and the low. Martin wrote his pieces and people were talking about them. Nothing else published in our paper had made anyone angry that I could remember.

  Of course Martin Pemberton would never apologize for anything he had written, and as long as I was running things, neither would I. I looked up from my reading. Callaghan stood behind his bar, with his smile of blessing for the communion of good men on their bar stools before him. But I envisioned tables and chairs pushed aside, an overhead lamp shining on the sawdust, Callaghan holding the bell, and, surrounded by a crowd of shouting men, my freelance, stripped to the waist, his ribcage his most notable attribute, raising one fist before the other as his gray eyes widened in contemplation of the posturing idiot hopping up and down in front of him. The image was so ridiculous that I laughed out loud.

  "Here, Callaghan," I called, "let' s have another. And one for yourself!"

  The next morning I sent a note to Pemberton' s rooming house on Greene Street, asking him to come around to the paper. He did not appear or reply by letter, so after a day or two I took myself over there after work.

  Greene Street was known for its prostitutes-a red lamp street. I found the address-a small, clapboard house that was set back from the building line of iron front machine shops on either side. It was badly in need of repair. The stoop leading to the front door was, in that way of grudging New York improvements, cast cement and without a handrail. A bent old woman, her whoring days long past, and with dugs hanging in her blouse to her waist and a pipe stuck in her jaw, answered my knock and pointed up the stairs with the slightest contemptuous gesture of the head, as if the person I had asked for deserved no more of anyone' s attention than that.

  Martin among the cyprians. I could imagine him in his top floor room articulating his contempt' s on paper, while below his window his neighbors strolled all night long, singly and in pairs, and called their lascivious greetings to approaching gents. Inside, I was nearly overcome with the rank smell of cooking cabbage, which became even worse as I went up the stairs. There was no landing, but a single door at the top. My own letter lay unopened across the door saddle. The door opened to my touch.

  The son of Augustus Pemberton lived in a small attic room filled with the intolerable stink of someone else' s cooking. I tried to open a window-there were two of them, set low to the floor and rising to waist level, and both stuck fast. The unmade bed was of the seaman' s sort, set sideways in an alcove and without headboard but with a storage chest underneath. Some clothes on pegs. Muddied boots flung in the corner. Stacks of books piled everywhere a writing table strewn with manuscript. In the hearth, stuck by their points into a bed of cold ashes, were three unopened letters in uniform-blue vellum-in the dim light they looked like distant sails at sea.

  Here was a boxed-in life, careless of the things of the world. Martin was ascetic, yes, but without the ascetic' s trim and tidy ways. Nothing I gazed at had been brought to the prim glory of the threadbare. The place was only a mess. Yet I saw his gallantry in the room. I saw the burden of an educated mind. I also saw that someone loved him I realized that I had come here without admitting to myself that I was magnetized by this wretch of a freelance. Here I was ready to put him on staff and give him a living wage and where was he! I would not sneak a look at his writings. Back down the stairs and outside, breathing again, I found the old woman putting her garbage in a can. I heard from her that Pemberton owed three weeks rent and that if he didn' t show up by tomorrow she was going to throw his things into the street.

  "You have not seen him in that time?"

  "Not seen him, not heard him."

  "Has this ever happened before?"

  "If it did, would I sit still for it again? Once is bad enough, ain' t it? I live on this house, it' s my living, and a poor bargain it is with the bank paper over me and the city marshal standin' in the shadows."

  She boasted that her rooms were highly sought after, that she could rent his space for twice what she charged him. And he so high and mighty! Then her commercial cunning revived in her, and with one eyebrow cocked and the pipe pointed at me like a pistol, she asked if I wouldn' t like to cover the young gentleman' s obligation for the sake of his good name.

  Of course I should have done just that to make sure the room was not disturbed. But this woman was offensive. She' d sent me upstairs knowing Martin was not there. I had no sympathy for her. And at the time, the premonition I felt was not a fully developed thing. It expressed itself as the faintest shadow on my own reasoning, that the moody young man, habitually in despair
of the society in which he found himself, had finally cast me and the Telegram into municipal perdition. It was a measure of the powerful effect on me of his judgmental personality that I would read his abandoned room as, somehow, a comment on myself and my paper.

  So I retreated in a disquieted state. It was small satisfaction that if I could not find him, neither would a drunk from Chicago, if it came to that.

  My sense of Martin now was that the solitude in which he lived, as it brought him bruised and bloodied out of the rain, or broadcast itself in disdainful opinions, was inviolable. I found myself that night thinking of his remark about his father during my last conversation with him. I heard it again, in his reedy voice that his father was still alive, still among us and though the inflection did not change, I was no longer so sure I was hearing it the same way.

  Martin would not let you settle your hopes on him, but neither would he be ignored. You can see how contradictory my feelings were half the reporter' s, half the editor' s the one' s alertness to this strange young man and his visions countermanded by the other' s sentiment that the same young man should establish himself comfortably in the newspaper business. I believed in ambition-why couldn' t he? At the same time I think, in the final analysis, I must have known that if there are people of such intense character as to call down on themselves a lurid fate, my freelance was one of them.

  Four

  Now I think I have mentioned that I saw Martin Pemberton once more before he disappeared though on that occasion I did not have the chance to speak with him. You understand, of course, a freelance relies on several employers. In Martin' s case the assignments he got from the Telegram were probably the best he could expect. More often he had to demean himself by working for the weekly rags the Tatler or the Gazette from whom he would get a couple of dollars for filling a column with the inane social doings of the class of new wealth which had once counted him a member. This had to be more of an abuse of his sensibilities than the bad novels I gave him to review.

  At any rate, a few weeks after he turned in his wet and blooded copy I saw him at a ball at the St. Nicholas Hotel. I have to say I detested balls. They had them almost every night of the season presumably from the boundless need of arrivistes to place themselves in the good graces of the earlier arrivistes. My publisher, Joseph Landry, felt it his duty to subscribe and then it was the duty of his luckless employees to stand in for him. And so on this occasion I came grumbling and muttering to what I remember was the annual fete of New York Improvement Society. To make, the best of a bad bargain, I believe I invited my sister, Maddie, a spinster who taught grade school, and who didn' t get out often. I' m sure it was the Improvement Society because behind the police cordons, aflame in the gaslight, a brilliant street assemblage of drunks, louts, and harridans made insulting remarks, some of them very funny, about each and every couple who stepped down from their carriage and walked into the hotel. Glorious laughter, hoots, jeers from the people in whose behalf the Improvers were sacrificing themselves! I held Maddie' s elbow and steered her through the doors, feeling in spirit like one who belonged behind the cordon, and knowing I would be fully deserving if a rock came flying through the air and knocked my top hat off.

  You wouldn' t remember the old St Nicholas on Broadway. It was about the best in town. They had the first elevators. And their grand ballroom was the length of the block.

  Imagine the roar sent up by the conversation of fifty or sixty tables-something resembling a tropical volcano, with the clatter of dishes and the popping of corks like stones landing at one' s feet. A chamber orchestra plays under the marble arch at one end of the room. The fiddlers saw away, and the harpist does her rolling hand gestures, but you can' t hear a note, they could be lunatics from the asylum and no one would know the difference.

  Our table companions were other editors and writers for the Telegram, men I saw all day and felt no desire to speak to. Like good newsmen everywhere, they knew what was important and homed in on their dinners. On the menu there would have been fresh oysters, inevitably, all of New York was crazy about oysters, they were served in hotels, in "oyster bars," in saloons, they were sold from pushcarrs in the street wonderful fresh oysters in abundance, cold, whole, alive, and dipped in a sharp red sauce. If we were a nation they were our national dish and rack of lamb that you could rely on not to be served, as you understood the term, but, more nearly, thrown. The odor of the unwashed sommelier tinctured the bouquet of the wine he poured. But no matter. The newsmen were an island of quiet absorption in the roar.

  Then I happened to see Pemberton in his limp black tie and dimmed shirt moving among the tables. As I say, the dailies didn' t give an affair like this more than a paragraph, but the weeklies made it a momentous event. In the stifling heat of the ballroom my freelance looked peaked, wilted, almost greenish. Should I catch his eye or would it be kinder not to?

  And then he was at the table behind me, where there sat a large woman in an extravagant gown about which my sister, Maddie, had earlier whispered in amazement. I heard Pemberton introduce himself and ask this woman if she would describe what she was wearing for the enlightenment of his readers. "This is my rose satin," the woman shouted. "The brocade is in white velvet, with three flounces, quilled and tucked, in gradation one above the other, with headings of blond lace on top of each flounce." That is the precision with which such things were spoken of by our ladies.

  "Your rose satin," Pemberton mumbled.

  "The train is fringed in Llama bordered by seed pearls, which go all up the skirt, you see, and around the Greek sleeves. Everything, bodice and skirt and train, is lined with white silk."

  "Yes, the train of Llama, thank you," Pemberton said, and attempting to disengage himself, he backed away.

  I felt a jolt. The woman had risen abruptly, her chair banging into mine. "My shawl is Brussels lace," she said. "My fan is jade enamel. My handkerchief is point d' Alencon, and this stone," she said, lifting a pendant teardrop diamond from between her bosoms, "was presented to me on this occasion by my dear husband, Mr Ortley." She pointed to a beaming mustachioed gentleman across the table. "Although it is of such considerable carat that I suppose you had better not mention it. Shall I spell' Ortley' ?"

  Pemberton caught sight of me, blushed, gave me an angry look, and obliged himself with a glass of champagne from the tray of a passing waiter. I could not keep from laughing. I admit I was almost gratified to see how vulnerable he was in this life. Luckily, Mrs Ortley was diverted by the appearance of the evening' s .baritone. The applause rose. The waiters trimmed the lights. I told Maddie I was going for a smoke and followed Pemberton, who had disappeared into the arcade encircling the ballroom.

  In the shadow of a potted palm, I paused to light my cigar and heard him say: "And which one is it who' s refusing immortality?"

  A reply came from the rotund silhouette I recognized as his artist friend, Harry Wheelwright. "That stupid manatee over there. Mrs Van Reijn. The one in blue."

  "Paint my Mrs Ortley in her gown," Martin said. "You' ll be our Goya."

  "I could do this whole damn ballroom and be our Brueghel," said Harry Wheelwright.

  They stood in contemplation of the scene. The baritone sang lieder. Lieder was an obligatory taste of the Improvers, Was it Schubert' s "Erlkonig"? "Du liebes Kind, komm, geh mitmir! Gar schiine Spiele spiel ich mit dir", "You lovely child, come, go with me, such pretty games we' ll play"

  "To hell with art," Harry said. "Let us find a decent Godfearing saloon."

  As they moved off Martin said: "I think I' m losing my mind."

  "It is no less than Iwould expect."

  "You haven' t spoken to anyone''

  "Why would I? I never want to think of it again. It' s struck from the minutes. You' re fortunate I even speak to you." This last exchange had dropped in tone to a conspiratorial mutter. Then they were out of hearing.

  I had Maddie to take home or I would have followed them to their saloon. As to their two kinds of drinking, Marti
n' s was the sort that turned him sodden and brooding with a single concerted intention, whereas Harry Wheelwright' s was that of the voluptuary-assertive of its appetites, but easily disposed to laugh or cry or feel deeply whatever the moment called for. Wheelwright might have been rowdier and more full of bluster, as well as larger than his slightly built friend, but Martin had the stronger will. All this would become clear to me by and by. At that moment I felt only that sudden sensitivity to the unknown that makes it a specific unknown as if we discern in the darkness only the dim risen quality that draws us toward it. Nothing more. I would barely realize in the coming weeks that I was not seeing Pemberton in the office. I would notice that the books I wanted for his review had turned into a small stack and then days later I would notice that the stack had risen. In modem city life you can conceivably experience revelation and in the next moment go on to something else. Christ could come to New York and I would still have a paper to get out.

  So it was by the grace of the Atlantic and Pierce Graham that I had become concerned about my freelance. I didn' t know why he was gone and I felt a certain urgency to find out. There might be a simple explanation, a dozen of them, in fact, though I couldn' t finally persuade myself of that. The obvious thing for me to do was to track down the friend and sharer of his secrets, Harry Wheelwright. Yet I balked at the idea. I knew Harry Wheelwright and didn' t trust him. He was a drinker, a chaser of women, and a society toady. Under his unkempt, curling mass of hair were the bloodshot eyes and fat cheeks and fleshy nose and mouth and double chin of someone who managed to feed and water himself quite well. But he liked to portray himself as a martyr to Art. He' d studied art at Yale. Quite early he' d made something of a name doing war engravings for Harper' s Weekly. He took the rough sketches artists sent back from the field and made steel points in his studio on Fourteenth Street. That in itself was no crime. But when people admired the engravings thinking that he' d done them under fire, he didn' t tell them that he had never been under fire from anyone but his creditors. He liked to fool people, Harry, he lied for sport. Wheelwrights having preached from their cold pulpits a hundred years before the Revolution, I couldn' t believe, finally, that his pose of ironic superiority to those he made his living from was entirely uncorrupted by the snobbism of his New England lineage.