The Waterworks (3 page)

Well, that was exhilarating but so was the second item, a letter from none other than Pierce Graham, the author of the novel Martin Pemberton had reviewed so thoroughly … the review I had published so promptly … that rainy day in April.

You would not know the name Pierce Graham; he had some brief notoriety as a literary figure who found his material in the territories, going among the frontier towns and mining camps or shooting Indians with the cavalry. He was a sporting man, a heavy drinker with a predilection for stripping to the waist in saloons and engaging in prizefight matches. Mr. Graham, writing from Chicago, advised that unless a printed apology was forthcoming in the
Telegram
, he would bring suit for defamation and, to round things off nicely, come to New York and thrash the writer of the review to within an inch of his life.

What a great day for the
Telegram
! Not before in my memory had we managed to offend both ends of the literary spectrum—bluebloods and redskins, the highborn and the low. Martin wrote his pieces and people were talking about them.
Nothing else published in our paper had made anyone angry that I could remember.

Of course Martin Pemberton would never apologize for anything he had written, and as long as I was running things, neither would I. I looked up from my reading. Callaghan stood behind his bar, with his smile of blessing for the communion of good men on their bar stools before him. But I envisioned tables and chairs pushed aside, an overhead lamp shining on the sawdust, Callaghan holding the bell, and, surrounded by a crowd of shouting men, my freelance, stripped to the waist, his ribcage his most notable attribute, raising one fist before the other as his gray eyes widened in contemplation of the posturing idiot hopping up and down in front of him. The image was so ridiculous that I laughed out loud.

“Here, Callaghan,” I called, “let’s have another. And one for yourself!”

The next morning I sent a note to Pemberton’s rooming house on Greene Street, asking him to come around to the paper. He did not appear or reply by letter, so after a day or two I took myself over there after work.

Greene Street was known for its prostitutes—a red-lamp street. I found the address—a small, clapboard house that was set back from the building line of ironfront machine shops on either side. It was badly in need of repair. The stoop leading to the front door was, in that way of grudging New York improvements, cast cement and without a handrail. A bent old woman, her whoring days long past, and with dugs hanging in her blouse to her waist and a pipe stuck in her jaw, answered my knock and pointed up the stairs with the slightest contemptuous gesture of the head, as if the person I had asked for deserved no more of anyone’s attention than that.

Martin among the Cyprians … I could imagine him in his top-floor room articulating his contempts on paper, while below his window his neighbors strolled all night long, singly and in pairs, and called their lascivious greetings to approaching gents. Inside, I was nearly overcome with the rank smell of cooking cabbage, which became even worse as I went up the stairs. There was no landing, but a single door at the top. My own letter lay unopened across the door saddle. The door opened to my touch.

The son of Augustus Pemberton lived in a small attic room filled with the intolerable stink of someone else’s cooking. I tried to open a window—there were two of them, set low to the floor and rising to waist level, and both stuck fast. The unmade bed was of the seaman’s sort, set sideways in an alcove and without headboard but with a storage chest underneath. Some clothes on pegs. Muddied boots flung in the corner. Stacks of books piled everywhere … a writing table strewn with manuscript. In the hearth, stuck by their points into a bed of cold ashes, were three unopened letters in uniform-blue vellum—in the dim light they looked like distant sails at sea.

Here was a boxed-in life, careless of the things of the world. Martin was ascetic, yes, but without the ascetic’s trim and tidy ways. Nothing I gazed at had been brought to the prim glory of the threadbare. The place was only a mess. Yet I saw his gallantry in the room. I saw the burden of an educated mind. I also saw that someone loved him…. I realized that I had come here without admitting to myself that I was magnetized by this wretch of a freelance. Here I was ready to put him on staff and give him a living wage … and where was he! I would not sneak a look at his writings. Back down the stairs and outside, breathing again, I found the old woman putting her garbage in a can. I heard from her that Pemberton owed three weeks’ rent and
that if he didn’t show up by tomorrow she was going to throw his things into the street.

“You have not seen him, in that time?”

“Not seen him, not heard him.”

“Has this ever happened before?”

“If it did, would I sit still for it again? Onc’t is bad enough, ain’t it? I live on this house, it’s my living, and a poor bargain it is with the bank paper over me and the city marshal standin’ in the shadows.”

She boasted that her rooms were highly sought-after, that she could rent his space for twice what she charged him. And he so high-and-mighty! Then her commercial cunning revived in her, and with one eyebrow cocked and the pipe pointed at me like a pistol, she asked if I wouldn’t like to cover the young gentleman’s obligation for the sake of his good name.

Of course I should have done just that to make sure the room was not disturbed. But this woman was offensive. She’d sent me upstairs knowing Martin was not there. I had no sympathy for her. And at the time, the premonition I felt was not a fully developed thing. It expressed itself as the faintest shadow on my own reasoning … that the moody young man, habitually in despair of the society in which he found himself, had finally cast me and the
Telegram
into municipal perdition. It was a measure of the powerful effect on me of his judgmental personality that I would read his abandoned room as, somehow, a comment on myself and my paper.

So I retreated in a disquieted state. It was small satisfaction that if I could not find him, neither would a drunk from Chicago, if it came to that.

My sense of Martin now was that the solitude in which he lived, as it brought him bruised and bloodied out of the rain, or broadcast itself in disdainful opinions, was inviolable. I found
myself thinking that night of his remark about his father during my last conversation with him. I heard it again, in his reedy voice … that his father was still alive, still among us … and though the inflection did not change, I was no longer so sure I was hearing it the same way.

Martin would not let you settle your hopes on him, but neither would he be ignored. You can see how contradictory my feelings were … half the reporter’s, half the editor’s … the one’s alertness to this strange young man and his visions … countermanded by the other’s … sentiment that the same young man should establish himself comfortably in the newspaper business. I believed in ambition—why couldn’t he? At the same time I think, in the final analysis, I must have known that if there are people of such intense character as to call down on themselves a lurid fate, my freelance was one of them.

Four

N
OW
I think I have mentioned that I saw Martin Pemberton once more before he disappeared … though on that occasion I did not have the chance to speak with him. You understand, of course, a freelance relies on several employers. In Martin’s case the assignments he got from the
Telegram
were probably the best he could expect. More often he had to demean himself by working for the weekly rags … the
Tatler
or the
Gazette
… from which he would get a couple of dollars for filling a column with the inane social doings of the class of new wealth which had once counted him a member. This had to be more of an abuse of his sensibilities than the bad novels I gave him to review.

At any rate, a few weeks after he turned in his wet and blooded copy I saw him at a ball at the St. Nicholas Hotel. I have to say … I detested balls. They had them almost every night of the season … presumably from the boundless need of arrivistes to place themselves in the good graces of the earlier arrivistes. My publisher, Joseph Landry, felt it his duty to subscribe … and then it was the duty of his luckless employees to stand in for him. And so on this occasion I came grumbling and
muttering to what I remember was the annual fete of the New York Improvement Society. To make the best of a bad bargain, I believe I invited my sister, Maddie, a spinster who taught grade school, and who didn’t get out often.

I’m sure it was the Improvement Society because behind the police cordons, aflame in the gaslight, a brilliant street assemblage of drunks, louts, and harridans made insulting remarks, some of them very funny, about each and every couple who stepped down from their carriage and walked into the hotel. Glorious laughter, hoots, jeers from the people in whose behalf the Improvers were sacrificing themselves! I held Maddie’s elbow and steered her through the doors, feeling in spirit like one who belonged behind the cordon, and knowing I would be fully deserving if a rock came flying through the air and knocked my top hat off.

You wouldn’t remember the old St. Nicholas on Broadway. It was about the best in town. They had the first elevators. And their grand ballroom was the length of the block.

Imagine the roar sent up by the conversation of fifty or sixty tables—something resembling a tropical volcano, with the clatter of dishes and the popping of corks like stones landing at one’s feet. A chamber orchestra plays under the marble arch at one end of the room. The fiddlers saw away, and the harpist does her rolling hand gestures, but you can’t hear a note, they could be lunatics from the asylum and no one would know the difference.

Our table companions were other editors and writers for the
Telegram
, men I saw all day and felt no desire to speak to. Like good newsmen everywhere, they knew what was important and homed in on their dinners. On the menu there would have been fresh oysters, inevitably, all of New York was crazy about oysters, they were served in hotels, in “oyster bars,” in
saloons, they were sold from pushcarts in the street … wonderful fresh oysters in abundance, cold, whole, alive, and dipped in a sharp red sauce. If we were a nation they were our national dish … And rack of lamb that you could rely on not to be served, as you understood the term, but, more nearly, thrown. The odor of the unwashed sommelier tinctured the bouquet of the wine he poured. But no matter. The newsmen were an island of quiet absorption in the roar.

Then I happened to see Pemberton in his limp black tie and dimmed shirt moving among the tables. As I say, the dailies didn’t give an affair like this more than a paragraph, but the weeklies made it a momentous event. In the stifling heat of the ballroom my freelance looked peaked, wilted, almost greenish. Should I catch his eye or would it be kinder not to?

And then he was at the table behind me, where there sat a large woman in an extravagant gown about which my sister, Maddie, had earlier whispered in amazement. I heard Pemberton introduce himself and ask this woman if she would describe what she was wearing for the enlightenment of his readers.

“This is my rose satin,” the woman shouted. “The brocade is white, with three flounces, quilled and tucked, in gradation one above the other, with headings of blond lace on top of each flounce.” That is the precision with which such things were spoken of by our ladies.

“Your … rose … satin,” Pemberton mumbled.

“The train is fringed in llama bordered by seed pearls, which go all up the skirt, you see, and around the Greek sleeves. Everything, bodice and skirt and train, is lined with white silk.”

“Yes, the train of llama, thank you,” Pemberton said, and attempting to disengage himself, he backed away.

I felt a jolt. The woman had risen abruptly, her chair banging into mine. “My shawl is Brussels lace,” she said. “My
fan is jade enamel. My handkerchief is point d’Alençon, and this stone,” she said, lifting a pendant teardrop diamond from between her bosoms, “was presented to me on this occasion by my dear husband, Mr. Ortley.”

She pointed to a beaming mustachioed gentleman across the table. “Although it is of such considerable carat that I suppose you had better not mention it. Shall I spell ‘Ortley’?”

Pemberton caught sight of me, blushed, gave me an angry look, and obliged himself with a glass of champagne from the tray of a passing waiter. I could not keep from laughing. I admit I was almost gratified to see how vulnerable he was in this life. Luckily, Mrs. Ortley was diverted by the appearance of the evening’s baritone. The applause rose. The waiters trimmed the lights. I told Maddie I was going for a smoke and followed Pemberton, who had disappeared into the arcade encircling the ballroom.

In the shadow of a potted palm, I paused to light my cigar … and heard him say: “And which one is it who’s refusing immortality?”

A reply came from the rotund silhouette I recognized as his artist friend, Harry Wheelwright. “That stupid manatee over there. Mrs. Van Reijn. The one in blue.”