E L Doctorow - The Waterworks

by One

  His was a lonely eminence. He was anywhere between forty and fifty. I knew nothing of his personal life. He had come up through the ranks, remaining always outside the order of connived loyalties that passes for brotherhood among policemen. This was not from any righteousness on his part, merely that he was not the sort to ask for confidences or give them. His skills, which were considerable, were not questioned, but in the perverse thinking of his fellow officers, they were part of the brief against him. He' d achieved the rank of captain slowly, through the administrations of several commissioners, who found him useful when they needed to advertise the Municipals' worthiness of the public trust. Since that was a periodic necessity, his employment was secure, if not comfortable. It helped also that some of us in the press had written about him from time to time. He never asked for this, of course. For us, too, he simply was what he was and went his own way.

  Donne was glumly at his work when I called on him in his office on Mulberry Street. He looked almost pleased to see me.

  "Do I interrupt something?" I said.

  "Yes, and I' m sure I' m grateful."

  His latest humiliation was to be in charge of the office that certified deaths in the city by age, sex, race, nativity, and cause - zymotic, constitutional, or sudden - and recorded them in an annual table for the city atlas that nobody ever read.

  I told him of the whole Pemberton matter - everything I knew, and also what I suspected. I had his interest. He sat hunched over his desk and was absolutely still. There was something else about Donne - he held the whole city in his mind as if it were a village.

  In a village, people don' t need a newspaper. Newspapers arise only when things begin to happen that people cannot see and hear for themselves. Newspapers are the expedient of the municipally dissociated. But Donne had the capacious mind of a villager. He knew the Pemberton name. He remembered the dismissed slave trading charges against Augustus, and the wartime congressional inquiry into his quartermaster contracts. He knew who Eustace Simmons was-he called him Tace Simmons-and understood immediately why I thought it would be nice to find him.

  But finding anyone in our city, how one went about finding someone in those days, was something of an art, as all reporters knew - especially if it was someone who didn' t have a professional or commercial life. You understand - there were no phones then. No phonebooks. No street by street names and addresses. There were listings of city officials, listings of doctors in the medical society rosters, lawyers and engineers could be found in their firms and socialites at their well known residences. But if you wanted to talk to someone you had to go where he was to be found, and if you didn' t know where that was, there were no general directories to tell you.

  '' Tace Simmons once worked for the port wardens," Donne told me. "There is a saloon on Water Street that they like. Perhaps someone will know something. Perhaps Tace comes around for old times' sake."

  He didn' t tell me what he thought, or if he believed my reasoning was well founded. He just went to work. I had to defer, of course, to his way of doing things, which was tiresomely, methodical. "First things first," he said, and asked me to describe Martin Pemberton in all the particulars - his age, height, eye color, and so forth. Then he turned his long back to me and began to file through the stacks of loose pages on the table behind him.

  The Mulberry Street headquarters is a raucous place. People flow in and out and speak only in raised voices, and with all the shouting and protesting and laughing and cursing drifting into Donne' s office, I was made aware of the necessarily practical view of mankind that is produced in a police building. It' s much like a newspaper office

  But for all the distractions, Donne might have been a scholar working in the silence of a library. A gas lamp hung from the center of the ceiling. It was lit now in the midmorning because the long narrow windows gave almost no light. The walls were a pale tan color. Against the walls, glass covered bookcases were bowed with the weight of law books, manuals of municipal regulations, and volumes of papers in their folders. The floor was covered with a threadbare Belgian carpet. Donne' s desk was a scarred and battered walnut. Behind the wooden chair where I sat a gated balustrade cut the room in two. I could see nothing that might have given a personal character to this office.

  After a length of time he was able to tell me there was no Caucasian male body of Martin Pemberton' s description that had not been identified and claimed.

  He was a very thorough fellow, Edmund Donne. We had next to take ourselves by hackney to the Dead House on First Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street and go through the holding rooms to look at the new arrivals. I walked the rows of zinc tables, where the livid bodies lay face upward under constant showers of cold water, until I was able to assure myself that my freelance was not among them. "This rules out nothing," Donne advised me, with his policeman' s logic. "But it rules out something."

  The character of this odd, misplaced policeman, misplaced for life, is an important piece of my story. The way enlightenment comes, is in bits and pieces of humdrum reality, each adding its mosaic bit of glitter to the eventual vision. It is almost mysterious to me now that I sought him out, this carefully stepping creature bowed by his own height. I had other recourses in a city of almost a million souls, and at the beginning of our cooperative inquiry, I admit, I was prepared to go on to them, except that he was so engaged by the problem I had brought as to take possession of it. I saw immediately that his interest had nothing to do with his lack of serious duties. In fact he had all sorts of investigative pursuits of his own that he had not abandoned since leaving his previous command of the woeful, understaffed Bureau for the Recovery of Lost Persons. There was something else, something else, a look of recognition in the eye, as if he might have been waiting for this, waiting for me to arrive, with what he was expecting.

  So now we are in his office, after two or three nights of a so far unproductive search for a sign of Eustace Simmons on the waterfront - walking from one tavern to another, along the East River under the looming prows of the packets and clippers that lie at berth with their bowsprits in the chalky night casting shadows, on the cobblestone, some hidden language in the sound of creaking mast and groaning hawser, the riverfront stink of fish and ordure suggesting to me a crawl through the city' s nether parts. So, as I say, we are in his office midway through my glorious summer holiday, and I have thought for the first time to tell Donne about Martin' s allusive conversation with Harry Wheelwright at the St. Nicholas Hotel.

  But now a sergeant enters, pushing before him through the gate another diversion - a muscular fellow in a dirty sweater and haggy trousers, white haired and with a face well pounded, the nose and cheekbones flattened, and the ears curled up on themselves like floral blossoms. He stood before the desk in his considerable redolence, twisting the cap in his hands and smiling at nothing in particular as he waited to be acknowledged.

  Donne had been reading some sort of document - whether to do with my subject or not, I had no idea. He glanced at me, then he arranged the papers neatly on his desk, and only then did he look up at the man before him.

  "Well, look at this. It' s Knucks has come calling."

  "Yes, Captain," said this Knucks with a deferential nod.

  "So we' re restored to the good opinion of crime," Donne said to the sergeant, who laughed in response. "And how is your health?" Donne said to the man, as if they were club members together.

  "Oh, I' m doin' poorly, thanking you, Captain," said the old tough, taking the question as an invitation to seat himself on the edge of the chair next to mine. He grinned, showing his gapped and blackened teeth, and his face lit up appealingly, like a boy' s, with the perverse charm that is given sometimes to the brainlessly amoral. "This leg o' mine," he said, stretching out the offending limb, and rubbing it vigorously. "It aches terrible and sometimes won' t be trod upon. It ain' t never healed right from the war."

  "And what war was that?" said Donne.

  "Why, Yer Honor, the war betwix the Sta
tes."

  "I never heard you had gone for a soldier, Knucks. And where did you see your action?"

  "It was on the Fifth Avenue - I took a ball by the steps of the nigger orphanage there."

  "I see. And were you one of the gallants putting a torch to the place?"

  "I was, Captain, and' twas one of your own rifles who nicked me in that skirmish when I was fighting for my honor against the illegal conscription."

  "I understand now, Knucks."

  "Yessir. And withal I pr' aps have said the wrong thing, given what I am to divulge, with your permission. But I' m an older and wiser sod now, and whilst childrens, black or white, are no affection of mine, I have more sympathy for every soul of God since'' - he generously turned to include me in the conversation - "all of us is God' s dear souls, ain' t that so? And so there have come to be things I see that I cannot countenance."

  "There is hope for us all, Mr McIlvaine," said Donne. "In the old days Knucks here made his living by breaking bones, twisting necks, and tearing off the ears of people. Prison was a normal condition of his life."

  "True enough, Captain," the fellow said with a grin.

  "These days," Donne said, regarding the wretch but addressing me, "he makes his living no longer with his muscles but by his faculties of observation and deceit."

  "Right as ever, Captain. Take this matter. I don' t know when I have been so alarmed to speak of something. But, sir, it is at some risk to meself that I have come here, and for all of that I am sorely in need of an oyster or two and a glass of Steinhardt' s German," he said, looking at the floor. "It' s the least for putting my life in danger."

  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 r 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

  OR 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, Ille 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 I 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. Blit 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 iron front on West Fourteenth Street, the equivalent of one large room, and with a bank of windows characteristic of the iron fronts.

  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 he 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 was bearing down upon her from the background of solemn umber. The whole painting was done in grays and blacks and browns.