The Waterworks (10 page)

“Noah, first… this is Mr. McIlvaine,” she said, tilting her head in my direction. Noah turned and said his how-do-you-do. He received my greeting, standing with his hand possessively upon her shoulder … more like a lover than a son.

She gazed up at him, her mother’s passion a kind of all-encompassing calm. “Noah is used to the broad halls and porches and wide-open spaces at Ravenwood. He needs lots of room to move about in. He can hardly wait till we settle all this.” And then to him: “On the front steps, but don’t wander off, please, sir.”

The book the boy held was a novel of Scott’s,
Quentin
Durward
, a quite grown-up book for a nine-year-old. When he had left, his mother went to the window and moved the curtains to see him safely settled.

“Martin said he would come and spend some time with Noah and show him around the city. Noah adores him.”

She turned back to the room and sat down. Here was the flaw in the woman, that odd calmness, that steady forbearance in the face of trouble that made her deny that anything could be wrong … that convinced her there was a reasonable explanation for Martin’s absence … even after she had heard from Grimshaw that his mental state might be fragile … and had to understand from this visit of an … employer … the concern other people had. But Sarah’s voice never faltered, nor did a tear come to her eye. What had happened—was happening—to her family couldn’t have been more distressing, and the words conveyed this, but in tones so quiet, so self-possessed—and with the expression on the beautiful face never more extreme than … thoughtful—that I wondered if she was emotionally … sluggish … which would be a failure of intelligence, finally.

But she admitted Martin had asked her an odd question when she’d seen him last. He wanted to know the cause of his father’s death. “It was a blood ailment, an anemia…. Augustus had begun to have these periods of weakness … when he could hardly lift himself from the bed. And one day he fainted. I thought Martin knew.”

“This was—”

“This last time, a month ago. It seemed such an urgent matter in his mind.”

“No—I meant when Mr. Pemberton fell ill.”

“That would have been three years ago last April. I sent a telegram to his doctor, who came up on the train from New
York. Martin wanted to know the name of the doctor. It was Dr. Mott, Thadeus Mott. He is an eminent physician of the city.”

“Yes, I know Mott.”

“It was Dr. Mott who made the diagnosis. He wanted my husband removed to the Presbyterian Hospital. He said it was a most serious illness. Did you know my husband, Mr. McIlvaine?”

“I knew of him.”

She smiled. “Then you would know what his reaction would be. He wouldn’t hear of going to the hospital. He told Dr. Mott to give him a tonic and that he’d be up and about in a few days. And so they argued until the doctor’s back was to the wall Augustus always put people up against…. So Dr. Mott told him.”

“Told him what?”

She lowered her voice. “I was not in the room, but in the gallery outside the door I could hear every word…. He told Augustus his disease was progressive and usually fatal … that in rare cases it reversed itself but he probably had no more than six months.

“Augustus called Dr. Mott a fool and assured him he had no intention of dying at any foreseeable time in the future and then shouted for me to show him out. He was sitting there against the pillows with his arms folded and his jaw thrust out…. The doctor withdrew from the case.”

“So he did not see it to its end?”

“He said he wouldn’t take responsibility where he couldn’t prescribe the treatment. I wanted to bring in someone else, but Augustus told me the illness was nothing. I couldn’t admit to him I had heard what had gone on. After a few weeks had
passed and it became apparent to him that he was weakening, he decided on another consultation. He sat outside, wrapped in blankets on a chaise at the far end of the lawn … near the bluff, where he could look out over the river and see the gulls flying below him.”

“What doctor did you consult?”

“Not I—his secretary arranged it. Mr. Simmons, Eustace Simmons, my husband’s secretary. He conferred with him every day. Augustus conducted his business out on the lawn. Simmons would sit next to him on a shooting stick with a dispatch case across his knees and receive instructions, and so forth…. When Martin heard me mention the name Simmons he could not keep still. He jumped up and began to pace back and forth. He became … almost happy … even giddy.

“One morning I found Augustus’s things packed. A carriage was at the front door, and I was informed by my husband that he would be taking a course of treatment at a sanitarium in Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks. Simmons was to travel with him. He would write in due course. Noah and I stood on the piazza to watch him go. His attentions to Noah were never … lavish … and were negligible during his illness. Noah loved his father … how can a child not love his father? They would rather blame themselves for a parent’s conduct toward them. In any event that was the last time we ever saw him.”

“You told Martin this—about Saranac?”

She nodded.

“But I’m having trouble understanding—Saranac is for tuberculars. Did this doctor say Mr. Pemberton was consumptive?”

Sarah Pemberton turned her calm gaze upon me. “That is exactly what Martin asked. But I never spoke with the doctor.
I was able to learn his name, Dr. Sartorius, but that was all. I never spoke with him. I was never allowed to visit. I did receive his telegram … not three months had passed … informing me of my husband’s death and expressing his condolences. The body was brought back to the city by train and Augustus was buried from St. James. He did entrust me, my husband … in his will … with fulfilling his wishes regarding the funeral arrangements.”

Sarah Pemberton lowered her eyes. But then with the slightest of smiles, as if to herself: “I’m quite aware of the impression an outsider must have from all this, Mr. McIlvaine. I understand … I’m told … there are marriages between equals … who live, unthinking, in simple devotion to each other.”

It was quite astonishing—the effect upon me of Mrs. Pemberton’s soft-spoken admission of the contempt in which she was held by the man she had given her life to. His universal contempt made no exception of her. What I had supposed was her recessive nature—was it not rather an aristocrat’s training? What did I know of these things … the grace that enables you to ritualize your pain … and lay it out quietly through your sentences?

But she had such patience for everything—patience for the monstrous thieving husband … patience for the absent stepson … patience for her current, enigmatic situation, of which I was now made aware. It was so terribly oppressive in that old woman’s sitting room, you see. I did not appreciate why someone with a country estate would choose to be in Manhattan at this time of year. But Sarah Pemberton was destitute. From obligations signed by her late husband that she still did not understand, the wife and legatee to the Pemberton fortune had not only lost the family home, Ravenwood, but, with Noah,
was reduced to living upon the charity of her sister-in-law. There was no end to the surprises this family had in store for me.

“Are you sure you won’t have some tea, Mr. McIlvaine? They grumble, but they bring it.”

Eleven

I
COULD
not sleep that night after my meeting with Sarah Pemberton. I confess that as I thought about it, I found her endless capacity to suspend judgment … very attractive. I mean … the recessiveness of spirit that made her so lovely, even gallant, would appeal to any man who wanted endless reception, endless soft reception of whatever outrage he could conceive. But then there was the boy: I hadn’t realized I was so moved by him—a sturdy, solemn, forbearing boy reading his book, a reader—was that it?—does the old bachelor merely have to see a child reading a book to lose his critical faculties?

Augustus had been worth millions. How was it possible? I had asked the woman. What on earth had happened?

“Every day I speak with this lawyer, or that, and ask the same question. It’s become my life’s work. My husband was a very secretive man. For different matters he hired different attorneys. In that way no one would know more than a part of his business…. We, Noah and I, are the sole heirs, according to the will. That is not in question … but exactly what happened to our legacy … where it went … is not clear. I’m sure at least some of it is recoverable. We’ll leave here as soon as I sort it all
out. We’re on the top floor and have to tiptoe about like mice.”

She believed a mistake had been made. What else could it have been?

I would later have occasion to see Ravenwood. Rising from a bluff over the western bank of the Hudson, it was a large shingled mansion with many windows and bays and a piazza running around three sides under coupled columns … a sprawling house, all its important rooms facing the river or the sky over the river, the roof gabled and crowned with a belvedere. The bulk was Victorian but the spirit vaguely Italianate Queen Anne. It came with several outbuildings and a tract of a thousand acres. Its command of the river completed the effect of defiance that you get from much money when it combines with little taste.

I thought at the time of the boy, Noah, growing up there. Would he have had town children to play with? The children of staff? His compensations were the trails through the great woods behind his home … or the broad halls and porches that his mother mentioned, where he could hide, or spy, or listen for his father’s footsteps. The front lawn was overgrown when I saw it. It went downward in a long gentle reach to the bluff … which was more like a palisade. And then there was a great caesura of air, a gorge of sky that implied the Hudson. And then the land resumed again with the bluffs of the eastern bank.

This … Ozymandias of the slave trade. He had built his Ravenwood as a monument to himself. And he had implanted his beautiful wife and son there as monuments to himself.

There was a rail line running through the village a few miles away, but also a river sloop that came right up to the landing at the foot of the bluff when the hand flag was raised at the stairhead. I was sure that was the way they had left their home. I found myself … imagining them opening the big oak
doors with the insets of oval glass, coming down the wide porch steps, and crossing the gravel carriageway, the mother and son, their luggage preceding them down the sward to the river … steamer trunks and cedar chests strapped to the backs of the men who were tracking the thick grass of the sloping lawn like porters on safari in one of the boy’s adventure tales. At the land’s end, sheer, without warning or fence, I stood for a moment to experience what they would have felt … the illusion of living in the sky. It was true, I was higher than a pair of gulls beating their way south over the river.

A slanting cut led to the stairhead, and the long descent by a scaffolded stairs of wood planks and railing…. As for Sarah, she was leaving the house where she had learned about love from Augustus Pemberton. As for Noah, he would of course be thrilled by the boat, not thinking he was leaving the only home he’d ever known.

The catastrophic loss of that home would finally occur as the event of a few moments’ duration. I imagined them walking to the cliff’s edge, climbing down the stairs to the river pier…. Noah would go aboard first and find them seats at the port rail, where the wind was keen. And while Sarah tied a kerchief over her hat and under her chin, and other passengers stared, he would stand beside her, his hand on her shoulder.

The captain tips his hat, the lines are cast, and the sloop slowly slides midstream into the sun and points for Manhattan.

I have traveled downriver, on Day Line side-wheelers from Poughkeepsie and Bear Mountain…. The wind and current together would speed them along to New York, so that it might seem to Sarah their fate was rushing toward them. In an hour or so they would see the sky over the city stained black from the smoke of chimneys and stacks and steam locomotives. Southward, the masts of the sailing ships in their berths on the river
would look like a kind of stitching of heaven to earth. Then, as the packet came to the northern reaches of the island, she would see the world glare up much larger. It is a strange feeling. Your boat is … humbled. You are all at once in a churning traffic of ferries … the very water hurries and plashes like New York … and moving past the piers of tall masts, hearing the shouts of the stevedores, you come around at the Battery with the harbor rolling with sail and funnel, proud clippers and India-men and coastal steamers and lighters with iron hulls, which sometimes pass so close the sky is blocked out by their black bulk and they resound with great echoing booms in the slap of the waves.

And so Mrs. Pemberton and her son had sailed down into our city, and in my terrible insomniac visions I saw the boy swept into the life of nameless children here. I define modern civilization as the social failure to keep all children named. Does that shock you? In jungle tribes or among the nomad herders the children keep their names. Only in our great industrial downtown they don’t. Only where we have newspapers to tell us the news of ourselves … are children not assured of keeping their names.