E L Doctorow - The Waterworks

by One

  Donne said: "We did not find Augustus Pemberton."

  "I think Mr Simmons must have taken him away, when it became apparent that, the experiment could not continue. Apart from my vitalizations," he said in his surprisingly boyish voice, "the interesting truth is in the great losses that human life can sustain its individuation of character, its speech, its volition - without becoming death. You learn this first as a surgeon in terms of what can be cut away. It is possible that a working familiarity with the mechanics of the human body engenders cynicism. More likely it cleanses the natural scientist of ennobling sentiments, pieties which teach us nothing. The old categories, the old words, for what is, after all, a physically very modest creature, though self impressed."

  I was sitting shoulder to shoulder with Sartorius, and felt his own physical modesty through the cloth of my coat.

  "He is alive, then?" Donne said.

  "Who?"

  "Mr Pemberton."

  "I can' t tell you if at this moment he is alive or not alive.'' Without treatment his time is limited. I find your concern amusing."

  "What does it matter, after all?" I said to Donne.'

  Sartorius apparently mistook my meaning. "Whatever their state of being, they were hardly more pathetic than people you will find strolling on Broadway, or shopping in Washington Market, all of them severely governed by tribal custom, and a structure of fantasies which they call civilization, Civilization does not fortify the membranous mind, or alter our subjection to the moment, the moment that has no memory, The person who grows old, or halt, has no past in the eyes of others, The gallant soldier on the battlefield one day is the next day the amputated beggar we would rather not look at on the street corner. "We live subject to the moment according to cycles of light and dark, and weeks and months. Our bodies have tides, and flow with measurable impulses of electric magnetism. It may be that we live strung like our telegraph wires in fields of waves of all kinds and lengths, waves we can see and hear and waves we cannot, and the life we feel, the animacy, is what is shaken through us by these waves, Sometimes I cannot understand how these demanding questions of truth do not impel everyone - why I and a few others are the exception to the mass of men so content with their epistemological limitations that some even make poetry of them."

  And so we made our way through the rain back to the city.

  Twenty-four

  HERE IS Sartorius as I dream of him.

  I stand on the embankment of a reservoir, a vast squared body of water cratered in a high plain overlooking the city. The earthen embankment rises up from the ground at an angle that suggests the engineering of an ancient civilization, Egyptian, or perhaps Mayan. The light is bad, but it is not nighttime, it is storm light. The water is sea-like, I hear the violent chop, the insistent slap of the waves against the embankment. I' m watching Sartorius, I have followed him here. He stands out a ways in the darkening day, he is gazing at something on the water, my black bearded captain, for I think of him as that, as a man of the sea, the master of a vessel. He holds his hat brim. The wind takes the corner of his long coat and presses it against his leg.

  He knows I' m watching him. He acts on the presumption of partnership, as if he were on watch for our mutual benefit. What directs his attention is a model boat under sail, rising and falling on heavy swells, disappearing and then reappearing at an alarming heel, water pouring off her deck. She rises on a crest, dives, and rises again. I am lulled by the rhythm of her shuddering rises and swift, pointed descents. Then it happens that I wait for her to reappear and she does not. She' s gone. I am as struck in the chest by the catastrophe as if I were standing on a cliff and had watched the sea take a sailing vessel.

  Now I am running after him across a wide moat of hardened earth that leads to the waterworks. Inside I feel the chill of entombed air and I hear the hissing and roaring of water in its fall. The walls are stone. There is no light. I follow the sound of his footsteps. I reach a flight of iron stairs rising�circularly about a giant gear shaft. Around I go, rising to a dim light. I find myself on a catwalk suspended over an inner pool of churning water. The light drifts down from a translucent glass roof. And I am standing next to him! He is bent over the railing with a rapt expression of the most awful intensity.

  Below, in the yellowing rush of spumed currents and water plunging into its mechanical harness, a small human body is pressed against the machinery of one of the sluice gates, its clothing caught as in some hinge, and the child, for it is a miniature, like the ship in the reservoir, slams about, first one way and then the next, as if in mute protest, trembling and shaking and animating by its revulsion the death that has already overtaken it.

  I find myself shouting. Then I see three men poised on a lower ledge as if they have separated from the stone or made themselves from it. They are the water workers. They heave on a line strung from a pulley fixed in the far wall, and by this means advance a towline attached to the wall below my catwalk where I cannot see. But then into view comes another of the water workers, suspended from a sling by the ankles, his hands outstretched as he waits to be aligned so that he can free the flow of the obstruction.

  And then he has him, raised from the water by his shirt - an urchin, anywhere from four to eight, I would say, drowned blue and then by the ankles and shoes, and so, suspended both, they swing back across the pouring currents, rhythmically, like performing aerialists, till they are out of sight below me. Outside, at the entrance doors to the waterworks, I watch Sartorius load the wrapped corpse into a white city stage, leap onto the driver' s perch, and layout over the team of horses a great rolling snap of the reins. He glances back at me over his shoulder as the carriage races off, the bright black wheel' s spokes brought to a blur. He smiles at me; as at a complicitor. Above him the sky is a tumultuous rush of billowing black clouds shot through with rays of pink and gold.

  Finally you suffer the story you tell. After all these years in my head, my story occupies me, it has grown into the physical dimensions of my brain, so, however the mind works, as reporter, as dreamer, that is the way the story gets told. Here is the dream' s conclusion: The rain begins. I go back inside. It rains there too. The water workers are dividing some treasure among themselves. They wear the dark blue uniform of the municipal employee, but with sweaters under their tunics and their trousers tucked into their boots. I imagine in their lungs the same fungus that grows on the stone. Their faces are flushed, their blood urged to the skin by the chill, and their skin brought to a high glaze by the mist. They break out the whiskey for their tin cups. I understand there is such a cherishing of rituals too among firemen and gravediggers. They call out to me to come join them. I do.

  Or else I began suffering this dream long ago, years before these matters I' ve been describing to you, before I knew there was a Sartorius, when on the embankment of the Croton Reservoir, I think now I imagine, I' m convinced-is it possible? - he rushed past me with the drowned boy in his arms.

  There are moments of our life that are something like breaks or tears in moral consciousness, as caesuras break the chanted line, and the eye sees through the breach to a companion life, a life in all its aspects the same, running along parallel in time, but within a universe even more confounding than our own. It is this other disordered existence, that our ministers warn us against, that our dreams perceive.

  Twenty-five

  SHORTLY AFTER reaching Manhattan, Captain Donne found a judge through the local precinct house and procured a court order remanding Dr Sartorius, for observation, to the Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane on 117th Street and Eleventh Avenue. The rest of the procession continued south into the city but Donne and I were driven by carriage to the New York Central station at Inwood, near the Spuyten Duyvil, and caught a train that would take us to Tarrytown, thirty or so miles up The Hudson. We had risen before dawn but Donne showed no sign of weariness. In fact he could barely sit still. He walked the length of the train several times and finally came to rest standing on an open pl
atform between cars and inhaling the wet wind.

  I didn' t know what a capture felt like to a policeman. My own sense of things was that we had drummed the prey into the net, the undeniably brilliant intellect of Dr Sartorius rendered him, paradoxically, a wild animal in my mind, a pure unreasoning product of nature. But Donne seemed not even to be thinking of Sartorius. He would not talk about the morning' s work. He' d decided that he knew where Simmons had taken the dying Augustus Pemberton. He was supremely confident, as why should he not be? He: said: "Even they have sentiments. Their sentiments parody the normal person' s, but I suppose, after all, it makes them human."

  I felt worn down with gloom. After seeing the inside of the waterworks I grieved for Martin Pemberton, He had been awed by Sartorius and then repelled by him, and then subjected to slow starvation in solitary darkness, which he saw as a kind of penance. I wondered if it was a mistake to expect of him anything more than a continuing and deep state of shock.

  By now, midafternoon, the rain had stopped, but the heavy black clouds were still with us, moving low and seeming to keep pace with the locomotive on its journey up the Hudson. In Tarrytown we boarded the river ferry to Sneeden' s Landing, where we hired an open carriage and asked directions of the livery boy, and in a short while were making our way uphill through the forested road, and then along the western bluffs of the river to Ravenwood.

  The Hudson is a magnificent wide silver river at this point, and riding along the sheer bluffs with a view of the river southward, and the enormous black agitated sky rushing up from Manhattan, I found myself thinking not that this was the home territory of Augustus Pemberton. I thought instead of Tweed - I felt these excursions out of the city limits were tracing Tweed' s beginning campaigns against the larger nation.

  At Ravenwood you came in off the road onto a wide gravel path that went along a quarter mile or so through the woods, very dark that afternoon, like the cavernous inside of something, past some shadowy outbuildings, to a curving drive that circled around enormous hedges, to the entrance steps at the foot of the portico. Here, when the horse was reined and stood still with a soft shudder, and we no longer had in our ears the sound of its footfalls or the crackle of the carriage wheels on the gravel path, the silent presence of the Italianate mansion made itself felt. It was unlit. Every window was boarded. The great greensward leading down to the river was overgrown with grass that had fallen over on itself. The light was bad-it gave us none of the detail of the house, but only its extent, its length of porch, and, as we sat in the carriage, not realizing that neither of us was in a hurry to get down, a sense of commanding wealth.

  I imagined Sarah Pemberton and Noah in residence here. I saw them in the lighted rooms, appearing in one window, and after a moment in another.

  Perhaps Donne was thinking along similar lines., I could not ignore the energy of his pursuit, that it had to do with Sarah. It was really a romance they had made for themselves out of this unholy matter, and I saw an intrepid spirit in it, I suppose, a human means of resistance to the darkest devilishness, the way people have of combining for strength, through their feelings, though I doubt if their understanding of their feelings had been expressed in many words or included, as yet, any declared intentions.

  Donne had bestirred himself and was now on the deep porch, walking from one end to the other. I heard him try the front door. I heard his footsteps. It was getting dark rapidly. I got down from the carriage on the riverside, and looked down the long dark slope to the peculiar implication of a river in the lighter sky between the bank and the far bluffs. But then I thought I saw something in the grass about two thirds of the way down the slope.

  After a few feet my pants legs were soaked. The rains had left the grounds swampy. It was some consolation that after sloshing my way down there, I found the corpse of Augustus Pemberton propped on a rattan chaise that was faced toward the river. He, or it, was soaked too, with his bony legs ridged in his trousers, his large bluish feet bare, the toes pointing to heaven, his hands folded, his fingers intertwined, a man at peace, who had lived in the limbo of science and money. The head was turned to the side, as if from its own weight, and I could see the wen on his neck, which had apparently maintained its health amidst the general wasting away. I was not repelled, only curious, and in the fading light was able to see that the bonework of his large head had stretched the skin so taut, and it was so empurpled, that this was no longer a human face possessed of character, and I could not believe it to have been the source of any kind of affection in the heart of a woman of the quality of Sarah Pemberton, or obsessive fascination in the heart of the young Martin Pemberton. I tried to perceive the tyrannic will in these remains, but it was gone, just part of the estate.

  With the encroaching darkness the wind began to pick up. I called to Donne. He came down and knelt beside the body, and then stood and peered in every direction, as if something of Augustus Pemberton that should have been there was missing. The wind seemed to be blowing the darkness in upon us. "We need light,'' Donne said, and strode back up the slope.

  I stood for some minutes beside the body on its chaise, as if it were my orientation in this, wilderness. My camp, my base. I had always made a distinction between what was Nature and what was, City. But that was no longer tenable, was it? The distinction was between all of God' s endless provision, and the newsroom. I longed to be back now in my newsroom, sending the story up to the compositors. Not in this wild - I was not one for the wild.

  I felt a perverse admiration for Mr Pemberton, and for his colleagues of the mortuary fellowship, Mr Vanderweigh, Mr Carleton, Mr Wells, Mr Brown, Mr Prine. I saw Sartorius, for all his imperial achievement, as their servant. They, not he, had ridden up Broadway with the news, that there was no life, no death, but something that was a concurrence of both.

  Actually, when the hearing was held to decide if Sartorius should be permanently committed to the insane asylum or put on trial, this same idea, his servitude to wealth, was brought up by Dr Sumner Hamilton, one of the three alienists on the Commissio de Lunatico Inquirendo. But I will get to that. Donne came running back with a kerosene lamp he had found by breaking into a gardener' s shed. In the light of the lamp I saw Augustus' s gray hair receding at the front of the skull but rising in a billow at the crown.'' Someone had to close the eyes,'' Donne said, and holding the lamp over his head, he made his way to the land' s edge.

  Now, as I have said, there was a narrow cut downward to a scaffolded wood stairs that had been built down the sheer bluff to the beach several stories below. In this bad light, from the top platform, we did not at first see the broken railing halfway down. What we saw below was a skiff blowing about at anchor a few feet off the shore, its unfurled sail dragging in the water. While I waited there, Donne went down the stairs. I watched as the light descended, growing brighter in itself but casting less and less illumination for my benefit with each of his steps. Then he called, and telling me to tread cautiously and stay to the ~all side, he bid me come down, which I did. We stood on a platform perhaps two thirds of the way down: the railing here was entirely gone, and resumed, jaggedly, half way down the next flight of steps.

  We got down the rest of the way and found a man on his back with his head almost entirely. pounded into the sandbank by a seaman' s footlocker, which, nevertheless, he continued to hold in his arms as the object of his love. Donne said quietly it was Tace Simmons. There was a great mess of blood and matter around the head, which had struck some sort of rock under the sand. One of the eyes had been dislodged from its socket. When we pulled the footlocker out of the stiffened arms, the latches, which had no padlocks, fell open with a clink. Donne opened the top of the chest back on its hinges, and there, filling it from top to bottom, were stacks of greenbacks, federal gold certificates of every denomination, and even shinplasters, notes for amounts less than a dollar. Donne remarked that apparently not all of Mr Pemberton' s fortune had been turned over to the enterprise of endless life. "Cunning to the end" was wha
t he said by way of eulogy, but with respect to the factotum Simmons or to the old man up on the bluff, I could not tell.

  Twenty-six

  THE LAWS of New York State held-for all I know they still do - that a person committed to an insane asylum by anyone other than a legal relation has to be examined by a board of qualified alienists, to determine if the commitment is appropriate. Sartorius had no living relations. The doctors at the Bloomingdale facility having recommended his confinement in the New York State Institution for the Criminally Insane on Blackwell' s Island, a state appointed Commissio de Lunatico Inquirendo, as the alienists themselves so delicately put it, was called into session. All this in a matter of weeks. It was unseemly haste on the part of the medical community! The Commissio was not a court and had no obligation to make its hearings public. I was beside myself. Try as I might, I couldn' t sit in. At one point, I know, they adjourned to the waterworks to examine Sartorius' s facilities. They called on Martin Pemberton for his testimony, and somehow Dr Grimshaw, terribly exercised by the thought that Sartorius might not stand before a court for his crimes, arranged to be heard before them. Donne was not called, nor was I.

  No written record was made of their deliberations. The report of the Commissio was sealed by court order and to this day has never been released. But let me tell you about institutional thought. Whatever the institution, and however worthy or substantive, its mind is not an entirely human mind, though it is made up of human minds. If it were really human it would be capable of surprises, if it were wholly human it would be motivated by all sorts of noble or ignoble ideas. But the institutional mind has only one mental operation: It abhors truth.