The Waterworks (5 page)

I
KNEW
Charles Grimshaw, and to be fair to him, he was one of the abolitionist pastors in the 1850s of our copperhead city, and saw a chunk of his congregation fall away because of that. But he was in his prime then, and though never the orator and moral eminence of our more renowned preachers, he had the respect of his peers and the cozy devotion of his well-to-do parishioners. By the time of Augustus Pemberton’s death, the rector and his church had both seen better days. The well-to-do had rushed northward, to the wider streets and sunnier neighborhoods north of Thirty-fourth Street—and then past the Forty-second Street reservoir. Commercial buildings replaced the homes, and where once St. James had towered over the city, it now stood in shadow half the day. Its solemn brownstone dignity had become quaint, its little parish graveyard, with its worn stones leaning just a little farther aslant in their inch-by-inch topple through the ages…. So the Augustan funeral was a remembrance of its glory, and for an hour or two St. James was restored to fashionable High Churchiness. It is not hard to understand why the pastor’s eulogy was excessive.

I should have thought there were enough poor people you
could find to fill your pews. But as the Reverend explained to me in his halting, high-pitched voice, poor people were not generally disposed to the Anglican communion. The new immigrants, for instance, were largely Irish and German Catholics. But Catholicism was not the problem. “They have been here longer than we have,” he said—here on earth, I supposed he meant. No, what made him clutch his crucifix and pace the floor of his study were the proselytizers abroad in the city—Adventists and Millerites, Shakers and Quakers, Swedenborgians, Perfectionists, and Mormons … “There is no end to them, they come down from the burned-out district and parade along Broadway with their eschatology boards slung from their shoulders. They accost people in the beer gardens, they take over the street in front of the opera. They board the ferries. Do you know, yesterday I had to chase one away who stood on our doorstep to preach—before Christ’s church, mind you! Speaking for God makes these people brazen. Christ forgive me, but do I need to doubt their sincerity to say, for all their invokings of the name of our Lord, they are plainly and simply not Christian?”

He had the fairest skin, the Reverend Grimshaw, the skin of a beautiful old woman … paper-thin and very white and dry … and very small regular features, with a nose barely sufficient to perch the pince-nez there, and bright birdy eyes still vigorous and alert, and thin waved silver hair through which you could see the pinkness of the pate. He was clean-shaven, and trim and small, everything from the little feet that marched him to and fro to the tiny flat ears was in proper proportion. It is a stature that wears clothes well, even clerical collars and shiny black bibs.

Here I will confess, if that’s the appropriate word, I myself am a lapsed Presbyterian. It’s the diction that did it, finally, the
worn-thin, shabby, church-poor words, so overused they connote to me a poverty of spirit, not the richness of it. My own feeling about the street preachers from the burned-out district was … why not? To claim God, accept dispossession. He might even be truer unhoused, the property of the bearded maniacs with their eschatology boards. Why was he appropriately addressed inside a church, but outside in the gutter to speak of him with the carriages going by and the horses dropping their dung was clearly madness? I will say also that churches themselves, of whatever denomination—I can’t speak as authoritatively for our temples and our mosques, but throw them in too—whether they are built Gothic, Romanesque, tiled oriental, or red brick, all smell the same inside. I think it’s the smell of candlelight, or perhaps rectitude, or that sourness that comes of convened heated bodies condensing their glandular odors of piety against cold stone year after year. I don’t know what it is, but it was here in Grimshaw’s study as well, with its shelves upon shelves of the Book of Common Prayer … that must of sanctification.

As you might suspect, I confided nothing of these feelings. Grimshaw had received me, readily enough, the evening of the same day I’d sent a note to him. I waited patiently through his fulminations. When they were done, and he had got back in his chair and was quiet, I brought up Martin’s name. I said nothing about my fears for him … only that he had one day said to me his father was still alive.

“Yes,” Grimshaw said, “that seems to be a worry of his.”

“You are disapproving.”

“Let me just say this: Martin Pemberton is one of those troubled souls yet to look up and see his Savior awaiting him with open arms.”

“When did you see Martin?”

“He banged on the rectory door one night.”

“This would have been—?”

“During those heavy rains. In April. He was the last person I would expect to see in the rectory. He didn’t wait to be announced but pushed past my housekeeper. His appearance was … derelict, God help us all. A filthy coat worn over his shoulders, his suit muddied and torn. Half his face covered with an ugly bruise. Yet he sat himself in the chair you are sitting in and offered no explanation, but regarded me from under his brow as if he was a general of the armies and I was … something his soldiers had taken in battle. He said: ‘I have seen something that I will describe to you, Dr. Grimshaw, and then I will ask you what I need to know, and then you will think I’ve lost my wits, I promise you.’ That’s what he said. Well, when he’d barged in, I was reading a monograph on the subject of certain Sumerian cuneiforms, recently deciphered, which give an account of the same Flood described in Genesis…. I needn’t tell you—it was something of a wrench from the Sumerian.”

Here the doctor shot me a glance suggesting that as a newspaperman I would not let something that good go by. I obliged, saying I hadn’t known he was a biblical scholar.

“Oh, heavens,” he said with a self-deprecating smile to himself, “not in any sense of the term. But I do maintain a correspondence with those who are. The scholarship now, particularly from Europe, as to Scripture and the life of our Lord is quite exciting. This Sumerian text is significant. If you think your readers might want to know a little about it, I’d consider it no trouble at all—”

“What had he seen?”

“Seen?”

“Martin. He told you he had seen something.”

It was another wrench from the Sumerian. The Reverend cleared his throat and composed himself. “Yes. You know, I
have learned over the years … about souls in need of pastoring … how they often bristle, or present a superior attitude. This was the case with Martin, of course. He could not bear to ask something of me without excoriating me first. What was it he said? ‘I affiliate you with death, Reverend, not merely because you’re the family eulogist, but because you’re the priest of a death cult.’ Can you imagine? ‘Your Jesus is all death and dying, though you attribute to him everlasting life. Every communion partakes primevally of his death, and the presiding image of him, even right there dangling down your vest, is his painful, agonized, endless death. So I come to the right place…. Tell me, is it true that the Romans themselves later banned crucifixion some years
anno domini
, because it was so cruel as to create legends?’

“Well, this may surprise you, but such a Christology is not unknown to me. Faith hears it all, Mr. McIlvaine, faith is unshocked by such challenges, true faith is surprisingly intimate with the foulest of conceits…. Besides, you don’t come under a roof of God’s to blaspheme unless your state of mind is tenuous. I think I was ready to concede he’d lost his wits without having to hear the question he would put to me.

“‘Well,’ he says after a long pause of staring at the floor, ‘so be it. I am sorry I’ve offended you. My mind races. I suppose I’d rather speak of anything except … the thing that has brought me here.’

“‘What is that, Martin?’

“He leaned forward and peered into my eyes and said in a tone of voice I could not determine to be either serious or joking: ‘Reverend, will you swear my father is dead?’

“‘What?’ I said. I didn’t know what he meant. I was terribly alarmed. I did not like the looks of him or the sound of him.

“‘It is simple enough. We are either alive or dead, one or the other. I ask you to classify my father.’ When I continued to gaze at him, not knowing what to say, he raised his hands in exasperation. ‘Oh God, for some light in this brain—do you understand the English language, Doctor? Answer me! Has my father, Augustus Pemberton, died? Is this something you will swear by your God to have happened?’

“‘My dear young man, this is not seemly. I was your father’s friend and I was his pastor. I gave him extreme unction and beseeched our Lord Jesus Christ in his mercy to receive him.’

“‘Yes, but is he dead? I know I did not see him dead!’

“‘This is an unusual consolation you seem to require. Perhaps you recall the obsequies …’

“‘They have no standing in this court. Your sworn testimony, Dr. Grimshaw!’

“I told him, feeling that I was talking to a madman, that, alas, it was so. His father was deceased. He gave a deep sigh. ‘Fine. That wasn’t too hard, was it? Now that you have said so, I’ll tell you something has happened and you will say what you will have to say and we will think no more of the matter. And I’ll be able to sleep.’

“He strode back and forth across the room and told his tale…. It was extraordinary. Back and forth he went, talking as much to himself as to me. Describing it all in the most vivid terms, the most vivid terms, so that it was as if I was there, with him…. That very morning, before the rain, he was walking down Broadway, en route to Printing House Square. Of course—to the
Telegram
. To you! He had in his pocket a book notice he had written. Is Martin a good writer, does he write as well as he speaks?”

“He may be the best I have,” I said truthfully.

“Well, that is something. At least I can say of him that he lives by his wits. He has never regretted his act, insofar as it cost him the considerable inheritance that was his. He has taken responsibility.”

You would think that a man who all his life had delivered sermons would have learned a thing or two about sticking to the point. Well then, as he said, and as I will tell you now … that morning, under a sky massing for rain, my freelance was coming to see me with his latest review in his pocket. He was headed down Broadway. Broadway, as the main route for commerce, was, as usual, chaotic. Drivers snapping their reins and teams shying with that rhythmless gait given to horses when there is no open space ahead of them. A discordant ground music of hooves clopping on cobblestone. The cries of reinsmen, the gongs of the horsecars, and the hum of their flanges on the tracks. The rattling wheels and drumming boards of innumerable carriages, stages, wagons, and drays.

At the intersection of Broadway and Prince streets, coming along in the far, or uptown, lane of traffic, was a white city stage with the customary scenic landscape painted on its doors. Stages, omnibuses, were the commonest of vehicles. But in the darkening street this one seemed to glow with a strange radiance. He stood stock-still as it went by. The passengers consisted solely of old men in black coats and top hats. Their heads nodded in unison as the vehicle stopped and started and stopped again in the impacted traffic.

Everywhere else there was the characteristic New York impatience—shouts, curses. A policeman had to come into the street to untangle the vehicles. Yet the old men sat in a state of stoic introspection, uniformly indifferent to their rate of progress, or the noise, or indeed the city through which they traveled.

I am trying here to render this account in Pemberton’s immediate state of sensation. You understand this is filtered through the brain of Dr. Grimshaw and after many years in my own mind…. Martin is almost knocked over in the pedestrian traffic. People pool at the crossing and then spill into the street. He holds on to the lamppost. At this moment a flash of lightning in the sky is reflected in the large windows of a cast-iron storefront directly across the avenue. There follows a clap of thunder. Horses rear, everyone runs for shelter as the first large raindrops fall. He hears the urgent flap of the pigeons rising in circles over the rooftops. A newsboy cries out the headlines. A tin cup is held under his face by a maimed veteran of the Army of the North dressed in the filthy remnants of a uniform.

Walking quickly, Martin crosses the street and begins to follow the stage. He asks himself what it is about the old men in black that draws him away from his business. He catches another glimpse of them sitting in the darkened coach. Rain pours off the brim of his hat. He sees as through a curtain: It is not so much that they are old, he decides, it is more that they’re ill. They have the peaked, shrunken, sickly look of his father in his last illness. Yes, that’s what is so familiar! They are old men, or ill enough to look old, and eerily unmindful of the world. They might be a funeral party, except there are no black plumes on the coach. He has the strange impression that if they are in mourning, it is for themselves.

The light is gone and the rain pours. It becomes more difficult to see in the windows. He is reluctant to run up alongside, which he could easily do, but he hangs back because he’s afraid that they would see him … even though he is convinced that these strange passengers do not see—that they could look out at him and stare right through him, unseeing.

Where Broadway bends at Tenth Street, in front of Grace
Church, the traffic thins out, and the omnibus of old men gathers speed. Martin is now running to keep up. The horses break into a trot. He knows that at Dead Man’s Curve, and Union Square with its widening lanes, the race will be lost. He dashes into the street and grabs the handles at the rear door and swings himself up the foot ladder. His hat flies off. The sky glows green. The rain pours. Union Square goes by in a blur—the equestrian statue, some trees, a cluster of people leaning into the storm. Reluctantly, fearfully, with breath held, he peers into the rear window of the stage … and sees in this ghostly rolling wagon of old men … the back of one with the familiar hunch of his father’s shoulders … and the wizened Augustan neck with its familiar wen, the smooth white egglike structure that from Martin’s infancy had always alarmed him.