E L Doctorow - The Waterworks

by One

  It must have been about four that afternoon when Donne told everyone to look sharp. I lifted my glasses - the yard gate was open. Coming into the street was a two-horse team harnessed to a white omnibus of the Municipal Transport Company. One of Donne' s men had run quickly to unhitch their own team, which was off the road, behind the trees. Then, we were racing downhill in the police wagon and Donne was leaning out the window and shouting, "Don' t stop them, don' t stop them!" I did not understand what was happening, but when we reached the level avenue and caught up to the white stage there was a battle going on. Donne' s men at the corner of First Avenue and Ninety fourth Street had intercepted the stage and were holding the rearing, snorting horses by their bridles and the man up on the box was laying out his whip over them horses and police, whatever he could reach.

  How can we recall sudden and violent action? I remember the sound those horses made in their fear and pain - it was such a human sound, brought up from their chests, as they turned to go forward and then were backed into the whip. We had now all joined the fray. One of Donne' s men had fallen to the ground and was rolling desperately to get away from the hooves. A policeman climbing up to unseat the driver received a kick from his boot heel and fell to the street on his back. You have to understand, our police in those days did not routinely carry pistols or rifles, which were issued only for emergencies, riots and so on. They did carry nightsticks, which are considerable weapons, and these were being raised now against the driver' s legs. But he was enormously strong, a man in a black suit and boots and a soft felt hat. The hat flew off to reveal a shaved head. Dust rose from the feet of horses and men. It was a beautiful warm sunny afternoon that seemed quickly to be filling with haze. I can recall the painted scene on the side of the stage, a Hudson River view with the Catskill mountains beyond. Above the scene, in the windows, faces appeared and disappeared, faces that mad~ no impression on me except that I noted the mouths were open and I seemed, after a delay, to relate them to the screams I heard coming from the inside. The police had stopped the stage and this melee had resulted. How odd. I have seen much street violence in my life, I am not shocked by it, I' m made distant, reflective, and it always appears to me, finally, to be, inexplicable. So it was now. I can' t even remember what I was doing in the midst of all of it. I can tell you what I saw but not what I did. Perhaps I did nothing, though I would like to believe that in some way I was being helpful. I knew of course that this was the stage that Martin Pemberton had seen in the snow, and on Broadway in the rain, but it was such a solid piece of coachwork, all nicked and scratched and scraped with the heavy usage of route driving, an ordinary city stage, one of the dreary omnibuses of New York.

  Donne was used to confrontation in a different way, and took a very efficient, practical approach to it. With an agility that surprised me, he got that lanky frame up the rear ladder and onto the coach roof, and as the driver realized he was there and turned to look up at him, he brought a stick smartly down on the bald skull. I don' t know if I can convey the particular sound of a nightstick on a skull. I' ve heard it innumerable times. It can resemble a rock falling into a pool of water, a soft sound, not pleasant, Other times it has a cheerful, hard, woodpecking quality, cheerful because of the tonal simulation of emptiness inside the skull. At such moments you' re relieved of wondering about the effects of the blow on the encased brain, which is always of course quite terrible, no matter what it sounds like. Here the s6und was simple, blunt, definitive. The driver fell from his perch and landed at my feet in a great oomph of dust. He was a huge man, very strong. The blow had neither killed him nor rendered him unconscious. He pushed himself to his knees and held his head in his hands, but without making a sound, and before Donne was able to come down and order them to stop, the men had surrounded him and given him additional whacks about the shoulders and arms for the temerity of his reaction to them, though the issue had dearly been decided by that one blow.

  Later, I would ask Donne why, coming down the hill, he had shouted after his men not to stop the white stage, but to let it go on. "I don' t know," he said, very noncommittal. "I suppose I wanted to see where it would go." As it turned out, that would have been very useful. But then you have to understand, though I didn' t realize this till much later, till it was too late to confirm, this was the reaction of someone who had known the white stage was sequestered behind that brick wall and would eventually be used, who had known enough to have the confidence to let the stage go on, because he understood who was riding in the coach and who the driver was before he lifted the mans chin, as he did now as I stood there and we looked at the same oyster eyes and bouldered head that Harry Wheelwright had drawn from the descriptions of Knucks Geary' s killer.

  This is the question that I will never be able to resolve to my satisfaction, the conjunctions of which Edmund Donne was capable. What information did he depend on? I can never know. But at this moment the shock to my system was stunning.

  The policemen had found the rear door of the carriage padlocked. They knelt beside the groaning driver and took the key from his vest pocket, and, they went and opened the door upon six bawling and terrified children. The horses had been quieted but now the children were pushing out the door, trying to get away. One of them did get through and began to run down the street.

  "Get that boy," Donne shouted, and the bewildered policeman who had come out of the kiosk tried to intercept him. But the lad cut into the field. No adult can run uphill after a street rat of eight or ten and expect to overtake him. I remember thinking, moments later, seeing his diminishing figure on its way back to the city, dashing up through the fields of pumpkins, toward Park Avenue, the boy was healthy to run that well. I suppose someone in a carriage could have caught him. But there was great confusion now. Though the neighborhood was sparsely populated, people were coining up First Avenue to see what all the police were doing there, and down from Second Avenue, farm families came out on their porches to see, this confrontation of black and white wagons in the dust of the street, and the milling men in blue uniforms.

  For obvious reasons Donne wanted to get the children and the stage back into the grounds of the orphanage. The gate had been bolted by someone inside. A policeman scaled the wall and shortly thereafter we were all pouring into the courtyard. I felt part of an invading force and indeed we were treated as such by the staff and children who were running through the rooms in every direction, screaming, sobbing, trying to get away, or hiding in closets. What must they have thought! Donne ordered his men to herd everyone into the dining room on the ground floor. I went with him back through the center hall, back past the pantries and the kitchen to a rear door that led out to a flagstone terrace bordered with a fence of cast iron. Here there was a drop of ten or twelve feet to the ground. A jetty of large and jagged boulders went right to the water' s edge. In the river a man in a dinghy was rowing away frantically against the swift current. By the looks of it, he was making for Blackwell' s Island, but the East River channel is so narrow in places that it forces the flow into rolling downriver waves, and this is what he was struggling with. As we watched he gave up, using the oars only to keep his boat from spinning. At that point he began rapidly to move south, with the river. He shipped one of the oars and waved, an indolent, mocking gesture. He wore a black derby. Donne watched him, his hands grasping the fence.

  I wondered aloud if it might be the doctor, Sartorius, sailing away. Donne said nothing. We went back in and, over the course of several minutes, as order was gradually restored among the children, it became apparent from the answers hesitantly, timidly, or angrily supplied by members of the staff to Donne' s questions that Sartorius was barely known to these people, whereas, on the other hand, they referred continually to Mr Simmons, looking around uneasily to see where he was. So now I knew who was in the boat.

  Donne ordered names taken. There were two teachers, a housekeeper, a nurse, the cook, four general attendants, a kitchen helper, all women, for the thirty children boarded her
e. We searched the establishment. Outside, off the courtyard, was a carriage house and stable and a smaller outbuilding, all in the same architectural style. The ground floor of the main building was fitted out for classrooms, dining room, a playroom with a new upright piano, and a modest library. All the furniture was new primary school oak. The readers and instruction books were in good condition.

  We mounted a wide stairway of polished black walnut whose steps were fitted with rubber pads, to find two large dormitory wings, a boys and a girls, everything neat and fresh and clean, several baths, and smaller rooms for the adult staff on this floor and the top floor. On the top floor was also a dispensary with locked glass cabinets equipped with the usual implements, bandages, prescription bottles, and so on.

  I had seen the insides of many orphanages, mission homes, houses for the poor, vocational institutes. They usually gave clear indication of the impoverished, hand-me down nature of charity itself. This place shone like a preparatory school in New England, except that given the architecture - the Romanesque character - most of the windows were small and deeply alcoved, and the rooms, being for the most part wainscoted in walnut, were dark and gloomy.

  The kitchen contained two cookstoves, a bank of washing tubs, kettles and long handled pots hanging from a ceiling frame a wooden icebox and open shelves of tins and boxes and jars and in a corner, a bin of hard coal. It was a kitchen large and well equipped, enough to feed an army.

  If a commission had come to inspect here, officials of the aid societies, and looked at the conditions under which these children were kept, they could not have been anything but impressed. The orphans were all dressed in simple, clean clothes and new shoes. They were scrubbed and groomed. The staff, under questioning, seemed to be capable and honest servants of the establishment. It was all very puzzling.

  The most disconsolate feeling came over me, something more of what I had felt up on the hill, looking at this place through the binoculars, it was not fear or dread, but a desolate bleakness, diffuse, unattached, not yet precise as despair. In an office beside the kitchen, Donne found the house account books. The ledgers recorded routine housekeeping matters - payments to suppliers, payrolls. He asked the housekeeper, a large middle aged woman with a great knot of hair coiled atop her head, if she kept the books. "No," she said, "that is done by Mr Simmons." When Donne opened the key box on the wall he found several sets of keys on rings, and the housekeeper obliged him by specifying what each key opened. But one set she knew nothing about.

  There was a locked closet door behind Simmons' s desk. One after another Donne tried the keys from this set on the door.

  Finally the knob turned. The closet held oak filing cabinets, each with its own lock. But on one side a few items of clothes hung from a bar. He was pushing these aside to see what was behind them when I saw a coat hanging there, an old Union army issue, I said, keeping my voice as calm as I could, "Martin Pemberton wore a coat like this."

  If it was pursuit I was sworn to, I wanted no part of it now. With a police torch Donne led us down a flight of stairs from the kitchen to the basement, the one area left for our inspection. The basement walls were stone, but it was sectioned into storage areas with wooden walls and locked doors, like hatches in the hold of a ship. The keys he held worked for these doors. We passed through two of the areas, the air close, suffused with coal ash. In the third we came upon what looked like a coal bin fitted out with bars, It was a cell, a windowless cell. The air was foul. Donne bent over and held up the lamp. And there, on a palette, something moved, scraggly bearded, weak eyed and blinking, lifting a skeletal arm against the light, a poor soul, nothing but rags and bones, whom I had, difficulty recognizing.

  Ever since this day I have dreamt sometimes, I, a street rat in my soul, dream even now, that if it were possible to lift this littered, paved Manhattan from the earth, and all its torn and dripping pipes and conduits and tunnels and tracks and cables - all of it like a scab from new skin underneath - how seedlings would sprout, and freshets bubble up, and brush and grasses would grow over the rolling hills, entanglements of vines, and fields of wild blueberry and blackberry, There would be oak trees for shade against the heat, and white birches and weeping willows, and in winter, snow would lie everlastingly white until it ran off as pure and glistening as spring water. A season or two of this and the mute, protesting culture buried for so many industrial years under the tenements and factories, would rise again, of the lean, religious Indians of the bounteous earth, who lived without money or lasting architecture, flat and close to the ground - hunting, trapping, fishing, growing their corn and praying, always praying in solemn thanksgiving for their clear and short life in this quiet universe. Such love I have for those savage polytheists of my mind, those friends of light and leaf, those free men and women, such envy for the inadequate stories they told each other, their taxonomies, cosmologies, their lovely dreams of the world they stood on and who was holding it up.

  Nineteen

  HE HAD all the answers to our questions, but wasn' t able to deliver them. He did not speak, or act sensibly. He was mute and uncomprehending. Sarah Pemberton had him admitted to the Presbyterian Hospital on Seventy first Street and Fourth Avenue under the care of Dr Mott, the same doctor who had diagnosed Augustus' s illness, and there each day we came to stand watch. The diagnosis was that Martin was suffering from starvation, and the attendant breakdowns of function. He was also dehydrated. The women, who had been so joyous at the news he' d been found, that he was alive were all the more horrified to see him in this state, unresponsive as death. He lay on his back gazing at the ceiling, terribly pale but with red blotches on the skin, the aquiline features stressed to unnatural prominence, the light hair and beard matted and long. The form he made under the bedcovers was shockingly, small. But it was the lack of thought in the eyes, and the absence of that Pemberton personality, that were so devastating. This was not my Martin.

  Over a period of days, as he was able to take nourishment, he began to look better, but the profound, remoteness continued. He was not comatose, according to Dr Mott, who had determined that he responded to sound and turned his head toward light. It was as if he were engaged in some philosophic meditation that rendered the other demands of consciousness insignificant. I remember sitting by his bedside' " and wondering what a philosophical meditation was, exactly. What its content would be some depth of thought that allowed you to hear God, perhaps, or his music. You know, there are severe limits to a newspaperman' s metaphysics. I understand our breed, and not just from myself. We start out young, full of beans, with a dislike of routine, order, and repetition - all the virtues of American commercial life and a boyish, irresponsible love of the new, of the ever changing, challenge. My first job in the business was to ride the pilot boats out to Sandy Hook, and try to get the European news from the transatlantic ships before anybody else. After a while we had our own boats, our news boats, but as I say, all this means we are souls much too, in life, our life and times are all and everything. We' re totally occupied with social and political urgencies, and death, death is no more than an obituary. Anyone' s death, including our own, is yesterday' s news.

  But now here he was, my freelance, neither dead nor alive, in much the same philosophical place as his father, which gave me considerable misgiving in my newspaperman' s soul, testing my belief in the magnificent mess of life, that it did not after all go out to the edges of, whatever was possible. I realized now that I had been, depending on Martin, as perhaps we all were following his signs, for some months now working out the routes he had designated as a guide, some distance ahead. I felt, such loss, I felt abandoned. I could easily have gone into a corner and thrown a shawl over my head and sunk to my knees, in bitter despair of this living death.

  I had the consolation, every day, of seeing Miss Emily Tisdale seated on the other side of his bed, as he lay between us. She had left her classes. She confided in me, spoke to me over his open eyed dream sleep, words she would not dare to speak
to him. "When Martin disappeared and was gone, when it was possible that I would never see him again," she said, "I wanted to fill my mind with my schoolwork, with facts and ideas and declensions, with the very sound of words and the appearances of them in their lines, to evict him, to have him dispossessed. God help me. I longed to be rid of him in my mind, his qualities, how he looked at me, the voice, the stem judgments. But in every small accomplishment in my classes at the Normal College, I found I still hoped for his approval. He inhabits me, and there' s nothing I can do about it. This I suppose is love," she said, glancing a moment at his face. Her hands were folded on her lap. "But it' s an awful and decidedly unpleasant fate, altogether unnecessary, isn' t it, Mr McIlvaine?" she said with a laugh, though her dark brown eyes were shimmering with tears. I agreed with this honest, beautiful, plain girl that it was unnecessary.

  "Yes, an invention of God' s that needs improvement," she said. "You know, it' s not right to do that to children, because that' s when it happens, it comes on one as a child, when there is such tender skin, such clear, reception of the light from another child' s eyes, and when the world' s arrangements, the accidents of adult business, seem to children so, destined for their own sake."