The Waterworks (4 page)

“Paint my Mrs. Ortley in her gown,” Martin said. “You’ll be our Goya.”

“I could do this whole damn ballroom and be our Brueghel,” said Harry Wheelwright.

They stood in contemplation of the scene. The baritone sang lieder. Lieder were an obligatory taste of the Improvers…. Was it Schubert’s “Erlkönig”?
“Du liebes Kind, komm, geh mit mir! Gar schöne Spiele spiel ich mit dir
” … “You lovely child, come, go with me, such pretty games we’ll play …”

“To hell with art,” Harry said. “Let us find a decent God-fearing saloon.”

As they moved off Martin said: “I think I’m losing my mind.”

“It is no less than I would expect.”

“You haven’t spoken to anyone—”

“Why would I? I never want to think of it again. It’s struck from the minutes. You’re fortunate I even speak to you.”

This last exchange had dropped in tone to a conspiratorial mutter. Then they were out of hearing.

I had Maddie to take home or I would have followed them to their saloon. As to their two kinds of drinking, Martin’s was the sort that turned him sodden and brooding with a single concerted intention, whereas Harry Wheelwright’s was that of the voluptuary—assertive of its appetites, but easily disposed to laugh or cry or feel deeply whatever the moment called for. Wheelwright might have been rowdier and more full of bluster, as well as larger than his slightly built friend, but Martin had the stronger will. All this would become clear to me by and by. At that moment I felt only that sudden sensitivity to the unknown that makes it a … specific unknown … as if we discern in the darkness only the dim risen quality that draws us toward it. Nothing more. I would barely realize in the coming weeks that I was not seeing Pemberton in the office. I would notice that the books I wanted for his review had turned into a small stack … and then days later I would notice that the stack had risen. In modern city life you can conceivably experience revelation and in the next moment go on to something else. Christ could come to New York and I would still have a paper to get out.

So it was by the grace of the
Atlantic
and Pierce Graham that I had become concerned about my freelance. I didn’t know
why he was gone and I felt a certain urgency to find out. There might be a simple explanation, a dozen of them, in fact, though I couldn’t finally persuade myself of that. The obvious thing for me to do was to track down the friend and sharer of his secrets, Harry Wheelwright. Yet I balked at the idea. I knew Harry Wheelwright and didn’t trust him. He was a drinker, a chaser of women, and a society toady. Under his unkempt, curling mass of hair were the bloodshot eyes and fat cheeks and fleshy nose and mouth and double chin of someone who managed to feed and water himself quite well. But he liked to portray himself as a martyr to Art. He’d studied art at Yale. Quite early he’d made something of a name doing war engravings for
Harper’s Weekly
. He took the rough sketches artists sent back from the field and made steel-points in his studio on Fourteenth Street. That in itself was no crime. But when people admired the engravings thinking that he’d done them under fire, he didn’t tell them … that he had never been under fire from anyone but his creditors. He liked to fool people, Harry, he lied for sport. Wheelwrights having preached from their cold pulpits a hundred years before the Revolution, I couldn’t believe, finally, that his pose of ironic superiority to those he made his living from was entirely uncorrupted by the snobbism of his New England lineage.

By contrast, my freelance’s cold dissidence was the honest thing, purely and profoundly of his generation. There was an integrity to Martin. His eyes sometimes took on a wounded expression which seemed at the same time hopeful that the world could in the very next moment fulfill his expectations of it. It seemed to me that if I was really concerned about him I should grant him his integrity and give renewed thought to what he had said about his father. I would act privately on what I knew, on what he had told me, with due regard for the standards
of the profession we shared. To tell you the truth, apart from everything else, I smelled a story. If that is the case you do not, first thing, go to someone in whose interest it might be to see that you don’t get it. So I chose not to speak to Harry at this point but to test the original hypothesis. And when you want to know if someone is still alive, what do you do? You go to the morgue, of course.

Five

O
UR
high-speed rotaries had come along around 1845, and from that moment the amount of news a paper could print, and the numbers of papers competing, suggested the need for a self-history of sorts, a memory file of our work. So that we would have at our disposal a library of our past inventions, and needn’t always spin our words out of nothing. At the
Telegram
this enterprise was first put in charge of an old man down in the basement, whose genius it was to lay one day’s edition on top of another, flat, in wide oak cabinet drawers, which he kept immaculately polished. Only when the war came, and it became apparent to the publisher that salable books could be made of collections of war pieces from the paper, did cross-reference filing begin in earnest. Now we had three or four young men sitting down there with scissors and paste pots who were never more than a month or two behind—fifteen New York dailies a day were dropped on their tables, after all—and I could go to a file drawer fully confident of finding a folder marked
Pemberton, Augustus
.

He’d first come to our attention as one of the witnesses called before the Subcommittee on War Profiteering of the Senate
Committee for the Army and the Navy. The item was dated from Washington in April of 1864. There was nothing on the story subsequent to this—what Augustus had in fact testified to, or what the outcome of his testimony was, or indeed if the subcommittee had ever again met for any purpose whatsoever, I would not learn from my dear
Telegram
.

A local item the same year afforded another glimpse of Pemberton’s business affairs: One Eustace Simmons, former deputy chief clerk in the Office of the Port Wardens on South Street, had been arrested in the Southern District of New York, along with two Portuguese nationals, on a charge of violation of the slave laws. His bond was made by his employer, the well-known merchant Mr. Augustus Pemberton.

In this instance there was a following story, dated six months later: The case against Mr. Eustace Simmons and his two Portuguese partners for violation of the slave laws had been dismissed for insufficient evidence.

Our reporter was clearly irritated by the ruling. He described the proceedings as extraordinarily casual, given the seriousness of the charges. The defendant Simmons had not looked terribly concerned before the judge’s decision, and not terribly elated afterward, and though the Portuguese gentlemen had embraced each other, Mr. Simmons had stood up with only the slightest smile to indicate his emotion … an angular man with a face marked by the pox … and barely nodded to the lawyers before he followed indolently after his employer, Augustus Pemberton, who was striding out of the courtroom, presumably to the next item of business on this ordinary business day.

Well, perhaps I embellish things a bit. But my impression of the reporter’s feelings is accurate. We did not feel it so necessary to assume an objective tone in our reporting then. We were more honest and straightforward and did not make such
a sanctimonious thing of objectivity, which is finally a way of constructing an opinion for the reader without letting him know that you are.

Simmons had been a deputy chief clerk in the Office of the Port Wardens when the Augustus Pemberton Trading Company hired him away. The port wardens did the onboard surveys of the condition of sailing vessels, inspected the cargoes on the wharves, and in general policed the maritime commerce of both rivers. It was a municipal office, of course, and the source of a reliable income for the Tweed Ring. Simmons would have shared in that and been assured of a long, profitable employment, which meant Augustus Pemberton’s offer had to have been very attractive to lure him away.

I’ll say here, this Simmons was the unwholesome fellow who was with Augustus Pemberton to the end, although now we tread on treacherous ground. I have occasionally to tell you things not in the order in which I learned them. But it was from the young widow Pemberton, Sarah, Augustus’s second wife and the stepmother of Martin, that I would hear how much closer Eustace Simmons lived to the central affection of the man than either she or Augustus’s first wife … and how Simmons knew it, and made it clear to her. “No woman would feel right in the presence of Mr. Simmons,” Sarah Pemberton told me when I had gained her confidence. She colored slightly speaking of the matter. “It was nothing he actually said, he never spoke out of turn. But he had a tone of voice that I found suggestive. I don’t think that’s too strong a word. He made me feel … incidental. I assume he didn’t have much regard for women in general.”

She told me this when Martin’s disappearance was no longer an isolated matter but had compounded itself with others just as unsettling. While I had no pictures of the father and
his factotum, I had their moral photographs clearly enough, from their relationship to each other, and the indicative choice we make of a right-hand man. And that the larger evil sustained them, I had in the numbers and quality of the municipal dignitaries who came to Augustus’s funeral and, to be fair, in the obsequious tones of the
Telegram
’s account.

So: In black words on this white paper, Mr. Augustus Pemberton, merchant and patriot, had died at age sixty-nine of a blood ailment, in September of the year 1870, and was seen to his rest from St. James Episcopal. We celebrated the fact of his arrival in America as a penniless, unschooled Englishman who hired himself out as a house servant under a contract that required his labor for seven years. We admired him for never glossing over these humble beginnings. In his later years, as a member of the Surveyors Club, where he lunched frequently at the Long Table, a major conversational theme was the example of his life as a fulfillment of the American ideal. Christ, what a bore he must have been, in addition to everything else.

An obituary is no place to reflect that in domestic service you come to value
things
, and you learn all the refinements of taste and style that you can aspire to. But I could imagine Augustus’s sentimental education in money and property. At the end of his indenture he became a coach builder’s apprentice and subsequently bought out the business of the man who had hired him. Then he sold it and reinvested his profit in a ship’s chandlery, thus establishing a pattern of loyalty not to any one business, but to the art of buying and selling them. These practices and other investments brought him in his late thirties into prominence as a merchant of the city. No mention of slave trading, of course. Only that he was brilliant at brokerage and was soon applying its principles to abstract materials—commercial debentures, stocks, bonds, and federal notes. He came
into possession of a seat on the New York Exchange by default. We made out the old scoundrel as a kind of frugal, down-to-earth Yankee. He didn’t advertise his place in the city’s commercial life with elaborate or ostentatious business quarters and did not carry on his ledgers a large complement of employees. I’ll bet he didn’t. “It’s all up here anyhow” was his famous line, delivered as he pointed his index finger at his head. “My own mind is my office, my warehouse, and my account book.”

He would never have read Tom Paine, of course, who said, “My own mind is my church.” But where deism, even in the 1870s, was a scandal, self-idolatry, if it left an estate of several millions, was an example to us all.

According to his eulogist, Dr. Charles Grimshaw, glory was bestowed on Augustus Pemberton in the War of Secession, when he put his skills to the service of his country, supplying the Union quartermaster with goods which he commissioned and delivered from mills as far away as Peking, China. Apparently, from their role as beggars, churchmen develop the same sympathies for the moneyed class as politicians do. Someone in Mr. Lincoln’s administration was no less forbearing: I sat in our morgue with the forlorn feeling of an orphan as I read that Augustus Pemberton was among the select group of merchants given thanks by a grateful nation in a dinner at the White House with the president in 1864.

Six