The Waterworks (21 page)

“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.”

“Yes.”

“So we are chained. I have always been chained to Martin. Through all his tempests … his struggles … here or not here … it’s all equally disastrous to me … and if he dies … I’ll
be the same shackled girl … whether made love to by a man or a ghost … what is the difference?”

And so we sat our watch. There was an anteroom where we stayed most of the time, only peeking in now and then, as if Martin were asleep and shouldn’t be disturbed, although the doctor had said the sounds of life might do him good.

The Reverend Grimshaw each day prayed for a few minutes by Martin’s bed. Emily’s father, Amos Tisdale, came once or twice, shaking his head less in sadness or worry than regret for the continuing deplorable situation. Sarah Pemberton brought her calm conviction with her that, Martin having been found, he would in time be well. She sat by his side, knitting. I felt, watching her white hands, that if they stopped moving … she would lose her mind. Once Noah came with her … but the boy didn’t want to go into the room where Martin lay. He stood by the window and looked stolidly at the street. But all of us were suspended in this strange, lurid business. It had stopped life.

The driver, Wrangel, was being held in the Tombs for the murder of Knucks Geary. He would not answer any questions, he simply refused to speak … like a western Indian, with his arms crossed. Donne, with Grimshaw’s help, had arranged for the Little Wanderer children to be transferred to the Orphans’ Home and Asylum of the Protestant Episcopal Church at Lexington Avenue and Forty-ninth Street. Three attending physicians and a dentist examined them and judged that they were all healthy and well nourished. Emily Tisdale had gone over there to see them, and from her experience as a student teacher at the Normal College she thought them uncharacteristically quiet children, with wary, fearful eyes. The ones who had been taken from the padlocked stage had been placed in quarters separate from the rest and questioned by a nurse attached to the Municipal
Police, with Donne in attendance. The children were not forthcoming. They were on average six to eight years old. They thought they had been going for a ride to the country … that was what they had been told. How long had they been at the Home? They didn’t know. Had anyone ever beaten them or mistreated them? No. Had Mr. Wrangel, the handyman? No. Had Mr. Simmons, the director? No. How had they come to the Home? They didn’t know.

Over a period of days Donne questioned each member of the staff. Martin’s incarceration in the basement was a shock to them. They were all newly employed—the orphanage had been operating for just a few months. All had been hired by Mr. Simmons after answering classified advertisements in the newspaper. One of the teachers, a Miss Gillicuddy, who was retired from the public school system, had created the curriculum and the teaching plan. It was her enlightened view that children, simply because they were from the street, should not be presumed to be capable only of vocational training…. Donne was satisfied the staff were not party to a conspiracy.

“You mean,” I said, “they knew nothing of what was going on?”

“What was going on?” he said.

“That these were children kidnapped from the streets?”

“Not all of them, apparently. Some were referred by the children’s aid societies.”

“But there was some purpose to all this!”

“Yes.”

“Where did the teachers and the monitors think the children were going on their ride that afternoon?”

“The children went off with Wrangel periodically, by turns. Simmons said it was for their medical examinations.”

“Then why was the stage padlocked?”

“For the children’s safety.”

“Where is Sartorius? Where does he practice?”

“Nobody can tell us.”

“The children—”

“The children give me blank stares.”

Now this was all… late September, I suppose. Perhaps a bit later. The first stories exposing the malfeasance of the Tweed Ring were coming out in the
Times
. The city was in an uproar. The events up at Ninety-third Street had not, thank God, caught the eye of the press. Martin Pemberton had been carried up from his basement prison and taken away in an ambulance after darkness had set in. Donne had closed down the orphanage and had it sealed by the city marshal on the basis of what he certified only as “irregularities.” Irregularities found in the running of an orphanage were not news in our city even in the quietest of seasons. A brief item about the closing appeared only in the
Sun
. Martin was not mentioned.

I wondered how long it would be before questions about the Home for Little Wanderers began to drift up on the whispers of the staff members who had lost their jobs … the people who had seen the scuffle in the street in front of the Home … the authorities from the Episcopal orphanage who had taken over the maintenance of the children … and the nurses at the hospital, who could not reconcile Martin Pemberton’s state of near-starvation with the numbers of people—family, friends, pastor, and even a police official—who were so concerned about his recovery. How had they allowed him to come to this in the first place?

As a jobless editor I was still jealous of my exclusive. Sitting there in the hospital room, I experienced additionally the feelings of a private person who shudders in contemplation of the prospect … of serious matters of his own intimate knowledge
… subjected to the low standards and deplorable practices of the newspaper profession. I reasoned that I had a month, maybe six weeks, before the whispers would ignite … until the smoke of this fire would be seen down on Printing House Square. That would be the length of time it took for people to grow weary of the Tweed Ring scandals. Until then the rule would prevail that the press, like the public, has room in its brain for only one story at a time.

So this is how things stood in this infernal city in the autumn of 1871. Private motives and intentions began to stir in and about our misfortune … as worms in a grave. Harry Wheelwright in his great girth came to visit, late one afternoon. His eyes were already blasted and his speech slurred … but he found the gallantry to escort Miss Tisdale home. Am I too harsh? It would not seem inappropriate for Martin’s friends to band together for mutual comfort. But I didn’t trust the fellow. He’d seen too much of Emily in that portrait… his observation was … tumescent. He’d painted his lust.

I simmered in my bachelor state, a bachelor too long, and too old, to do anything but simmer. Perhaps my jealousy was a function of idleness. I had worked since the age of fourteen. I didn’t know what it meant not to work. And I had always worked for newspapers. Yet there I sat, stupidly jealous on behalf of my supine and oblivious friend, imprisoned in my own meditations, paralleled in idleness…. I could not bring myself to look for a job. I would not go to the usual haunts at night … making myself visible for pity or gossip. I was now totally involved in this matter, as a life work.

One day the freelance I had asked to delve into the morgue for predicaments similar to Sarah Pemberton’s appeared at my door with the results of his researches. It did not matter to him that I was no longer city editor—he’d done the work and
wanted his wage. I paid him out of my own pocket and was glad to do it. He’d come up with a half dozen obituaries, printed since 1869, of men who were thought to be financially sound but left a pauper’s estate.

I’ll tell you their names: Evander Prine, Thomas Henry Carleton, Oliver Vanderweigh, Elijah Ripley, Fernando Brown, and Horace W. Wells.

Of course quick rises and falls of fortune were not unusual in New York. People lived beyond their means. Barouche-and-fours and town houses took some keeping up. In the last ten years tax levies had risen over five hundred percent. The markets were volatile, we were on a paper standard, so there was a speculative market in gold…. When Jay Gould and Jim Fisk conspired to corner the gold, brokerages failed … people on the Street lost everything…. No, it was nothing to see swells around town with silk hats and diamond shirt studs who were gone the following day.

But here I was looking at men centrally situated in the quiet of long-term success. And nobody related to them seemed to know where their money had gone. Carleton and Vanderweigh were bankers, Ripley ran a transatlantic cargo business using leased steamships, Brown had built locomotives, and Horace W. Wells was a dealer in city real estate whom Tweed himself had appointed deputy commissioner of streets and sewers. Their collective worth when alive was somewhere, I would say, in the neighborhood of thirty million nineteenth-century dollars.

Two of them were bachelors who had simply vanished, and their holdings with them. All of them, married or single, were of an advanced age. The family of one, Evander Prine, had been found living in hardship on Forty-sixth Street, west of
Longacre Square, a neighborhood of whorehouses. They had come to the attention of one of my feature writers because they had put up Mr. Prine’s sixty-three-foot racing yacht for sale … their only remaining asset… and had had no takers. And so there were Mrs. Prine and her children, living in a boardinghouse for prostitutes, whose husband had in fact been an associate of Gould’s and would have been expected to leave his family in, at the least, comfortable circumstances.

Perhaps in a society less raucous, less contentious, its heart not pounding the earth like a giant steam hammer, the oddly congruent fates of these men might have been noticed. But their anguished heirs had all sunk away in time … just as the dead do, under the flat weight of days and years and later editions … leaving Donne and me to unearth a major conspiracy. Because when I showed Donne my names, he showed me those same names … along with Augustus Pemberton’s … written down on a piece of paper he’d found folded in Eustace Simmons’s ledger … at the Home for Little Wanderers.

So we had more of the detail. Yet we could go no further. Everything ran headlong into Martin Pemberton’s silence. Donne sat by the bedside and listened as if Martin had paused in the middle of a sentence and the conclusion would be spoken momentarily.

About a week or ten days after Martin’s rescue Donne was suspended from duty pending an internal investigation by the Municipals: He had had no legal basis for stopping the white stage in the street … and he had entered the premises of the Home without a warrant. They couldn’t do anything more … public than that. No city judge issued an order to unseal the Home and return the children. No lawyer came to the Tombs to see Wrangel… or to file for a preliminary hearing. The fact
was that Martin’s rescue—his incarceration in the basement—was a problem for them. Donne also had Eustace Simmons’s records. He could be ordered to turn them over to a court … but Simmons would know he knew there were discrepancies—in the handling of funds, first of all, but, more important, in that not all the children who had been admitted to the Home … could be accounted for. And the division of responsibility among the staff, the teachers and dormitory monitors, was such that only Simmons would have known that anything was out of the ordinary.

If the Tweed government had not been in the process of collapsing … and its major figures had not been so distracted, and fearful … they would, with all of their power, have dealt with this crisis brutally and summarily. As it was, their agent, Simmons, had no recourse but to flee. In his office desk he had left a cash box with seventeen thousand dollars. Suspended or not, Donne had the loyalty of his men. He’d put them on a round-the-clock watch. Night and day a man sat in the darkness of the Home for Little Wanderers. Donne could only hope the sum was large enough to draw Simmons back.

“Large enough! Migod,” I said, “that is more than double your and my salaries per annum together!”

“It’s all relative, isn’t it? It may have been his petty cash. You see how he took to the water. He’s run slavers. He thinks of the ocean as a passage. Simmons may be on his way to Portugal.” Then Donne looked at me and smiled. “What salaries?” he said.

We were all in these oddly reduced circumstances…. What an odd collegiality we had … in our disfranchisement … sitting in that hospital anteroom hour after hour—a defrocked policeman … an impoverished widow and her
child … a student at the Normal College for grade school teachers … and an unemployed newspaperman. As if our lives were suspended … until the resolution of this awful matter. Only Donne and I knew the extent of it. The others had merely to endure their bewilderment and grief.

Twenty

M
EN
had turned their fortunes over to Sartorius … betrayed their families. Politicians conspired in his behalf. The opportunistic Simmons had moved from Augustus Pemberton’s employ to his. He’d converted these men of the world, these … realists, into acolytes. He was a holy man, he commanded belief. In fact he was a major intellect—one of those brilliantly assured intellects to whom the world seems to exist for the sake of their engagement with it. I wanted to think we had disrupted his strange enterprise … that we might not exact redress in behalf of Sarah Pemberton and the other survivors of the … mortuary fellowship … but for the moment, at least, it could not function as it had. But how much more of it was there … that we knew nothing about? He had resources….