The Waterworks (7 page)

I called on a Sunday afternoon. The room where we sat had a high ceiling and was furnished with comfortable sofas and chairs, polished wide-board floors, lovely worn rugs. It was not an ostentatious room. Breezes lifted the curtains from the sills and ushered through the large open window the sounds of the occasional passing carriage and the cries of children at their games. The homes on Lafayette Place were harmoniously composed to accompany one another, all Federal in style and with a small plot in front of each with a low wrought-iron fence. The pillared entrances were not up a stoop but at street level. This
was a piece of the old city that had still not given way to progress, though it would in a few short years.

Miss Tisdale was petite but resolute, with a forthright, unaffected manner. Though she was not a beauty, she commanded one’s attention with her high cheekbones and fair skin and the eyes slightly slanted at the corners, and a melodious voice that tended to break charmingly at the peaks of her sentences. She seemed to have no interest in the usual strategies of feminine presentation. She wore a plain dark gray dress, simply cut, with a white collar at the neck. From the collar hung a cameo brooch that rode minute distances, like a small ship at sea, as her bosom rose and fell. Her brown hair was parted in the middle and held behind the head with a clasp. She sat in a straight-backed chair with her hands folded in her lap. I found her quite fetching. Oddly enough, as a result, I felt I was intruding in Martin Pemberton’s personal life to an extent that he would deem intolerable. Emily Tisdale was his, after all. Or was she? I had enlarged the circle of concern for Martin, which until that moment had included only herself… and so, quite readily, she made me her confidant. “Things have not been going well between us. When I saw him last Martin said: ‘I live with this burden of your waiting for me. It is always Emily waiting. Don’t you understand what hell you face? Either I am mad and should be committed, or the generations of Pembertons are doomed.’ All that inflamed, Wagnerian sort of thing … that the Pembertons were a doomed family up from some hideous underworld they were destined to return to…. How does a person respond?”

“He had seen his father,” I said.

“Yes, he had seen the late Mr. Pemberton, riding in a crosstown omnibus.”

“You mean on Broadway,” I corrected her.

“No, not Broadway. While he was walking past the holding reservoir on Forty-second Street. The snow was falling.”

“The snow? When was this?”

“In March. In that last big storm.”

At the time he confided in her, the snow had melted and the season in New York was spring, which one knew because crocuses and gladioli and foxglove appeared for sale in the flower carts at Washington Market, and the swells had begun to race their trotting horses on the track up in Harlem. The climate having moderated, people resumed the practice of paying calls, as did Martin on Emily, in her home, where he assured her she could despair of ever having his proposal of marriage because—at least insofar as she could understand his logic—Augustus Pemberton was abroad on the earth.

I’ll tell you now I found this earlier incident more ominous, more truly unsettling, than the other. I don’t know why, precisely. It had not the awful specificity of the wen on the old man’s neck…. In the shadow of the retaining wall of the holding reservoir, Martin walks east on Forty-second Street, leaning headfirst into the wind, clutching his collar about him. From the gusts of snow blowing across the thoroughfare a carriage emerges, a public stage. He turns to look. The horses are at a gallop and though the driver, swathed in a fur robe, whips them to even greater speed, their passage is stately and silent. The stage sails past in a cloud of whirled-up snow…. And he sees in the rimed window, as if etched there, the face of his father, Augustus, who at the same moment turns an incurious gaze upon him. A moment later the entire equipage is swallowed by the storm.

Now the chill set in. Martin’s boots were frozen. His Union greatcoat seemed to absorb the wet air. The falling snow smelled metallic, as if machined, and he looked into the
opaquely white, flaking sky, imagining it as an … industrial process. That is what he told Miss Tisdale.

She sighed and sat straighter in her chair.

You know I am an old lifelong bachelor, and the truth of my breed is that we fall in love quite easily. And, of course, silently, and patiently, until it passes. I think I fell in love with Emily on this day. She put a theory into my mind … the idea of the unremarked development in America of an exotic Protestantism. I mean if there was voluptuousness in virtue, if there was a promise of physical paradise in a chaste and steadfast loyalty, it was here in this heartbroken girl.

I found myself resenting her treatment at the hands of my freelance. She looked at me brightly. She had enrolled, she said, in the Female Normal College up on Sixty-eighth Street with the purpose of becoming a teacher of public school children. “My father is quite shocked. He thinks the teaching profession is only for women of the working class—quite unsuitable to the daughter of the founder of the Tisdale Iron Works! But I am so happy there. I am reading ancient history, physical geography, and Latin. I could have chosen French, I know a bit of French, but I’m inclined to Latin. Next year I take the lectures in moral philosophy given by Professor Hunter. The only bad thing—they have a weekly review in English grammar and—horrors!—arithmetic. Oh, the children will have fun with me in arithmetic.”

At that point her father came in and I was introduced. Mr. Tisdale was quite old, with a fringe of white hair, and he kept a hand cupped behind his ear in order to hear better. He was a dry, stringy old Yankee, of the sort who live forever. In the manner of the aged he promptly informed me of everything I should know about his life. He confided in a loud voice that
after Emily’s mother had died giving birth he had never remarried but had devoted himself to raising the child. Emily sent me a silent glance of apology. “She is the light of my life, my lifelong consolation and pride,” said her father, speaking as if she were not in the room. “But since she is mortal I cannot claim perfection for her. She is already twenty-four and, if I may say so, stubborn as a mule.”

This was an allusion to a marriage proposal that Emily had turned down. “You’d agree with me, sir,” he said, “if I told you the name of the family.”

Somehow his daughter excused us, gracefully but firmly, suggesting that I would want to see the garden. I followed her down a hall to the rear of the house, and into a large drawing room with broad leaded-pane doors that led to a granite terrace. We stood at the balustrade.

What she had called the garden was actually a private park that extended behind the entire block of Lafayette Place homes. A serpentine gravel path went among formal flower beds, and offered wrought-iron benches where there was tree shade. It was a lovely, peaceful place, with pedestaled sundials and birdbaths and a crumbling brick wall the ivy had long since conquered. Here and there in the wall was an arched niche with the bust of a weathered, eyeless Roman.

“Right next door, in Number Ten, is where the Pembertons used to live. When Martin’s mother was alive. We ran in and out of both houses all day, we did not distinguish between them. This garden was our playground,” Emily said.

So that was the paradisial beginning. I could look out and imagine Emily and her Martin, their young souls urged into wing, their voices from dawn to dusk in this garden as constant as the birds’ … and think of the superior state of childhood,
when love is lived without knowing it is called that. Can the love that comes later be more powerful? Is there any in maturity that will not long for it?

“I fear for my friend,” she told me. “What does it matter where he places the omnibus with his father … inside his mind or in the world … if his torment is the same? I would like to ask you the favor of letting me know if he writes to you or comes back for an assignment. Will you?”

“Immediately.”

“Martin has always been terribly careless of his own welfare. I don’t mean that he is someone who is likely to walk in front of a train. He is not absentminded. But ideas take hold of him. His convictions take over and almost seem to perform themselves in him … whereas other people merely have … opinions. He is heedless, arrogantly so. He’s always been like that. He was not humbled by being a child. He noticed things and pointed them out. Often they were funny. He was a wonderful mimic when we were young, he imitated adults, he did Cook with her brogue and the way she dried her hands on her apron, which she picked up first from the hem … and he did the policeman who walked here in our street with his feet pointed outward and his hand on his nightstick as if it were a sword in his belt, and his head tilted up to keep his topi from falling over his eyes.”

She was now happy to be talking about her Martin and for a few moments was able to chat about him as if nothing were the matter—as people do in their grief.

“Martin was wicked boy! He satirized Mr. Pemberton, usually making him into an animal of one sort or another…. It was very funny. Of course all that stopped as he grew older and more somber … except when—he was by then at college—he came to me with the letter that disowned him … and
he hadn’t forgotten his impersonation after all! I thought it was a catastrophic thing that had happened, but there he was reading the letter in his father’s grumbling voice and having his father’s difficulty with the words that had obviously been written by a lawyer … having great fun repeating the hard words, his brow swollen in rage and his lower lip curled out like a bulldog’s….”

Well, I am giving you a conversation of that young woman of many years ago—in all of this, you must be aware, I represent matters which only I seem to have survived. But I’m fairly sure it was on this occasion I understood that my moody imperial freelance was not for any reason of his own absent from his boardinghouse and his job … and from his Emily … who was, for all the letters he’d tossed in the fireplace, the inevitable lovely associate of his sorrows, the one he would leave but return to, the one who knew him, the twinned soul. And I considered that a municipal authority, learning of these circumstances, might justifiably find Martin Pemberton to be legally missing.

Nine

I
HEARD
a slightly different account of Martin’s experience in the shadow of the wall of the holding reservoir … as he reported it to Harry Wheelwright, and as Harry told me, much later, after everything was over. At first Martin was not terribly surprised by the sight of the stage. He thought of it as a hallucination brought on by the night just passed. He had reason to believe he’d conjured it up, it was early in the morning and perhaps he was not quite sober … having spent the night in a shanty on the West Side, with a young housemaid, whose soul knew nothing but service … so that … this is a delicate matter … so that as she kneeled before him and he held her head and felt the working muscles of her jaw and the rhythmic Pullings of her cheeks, he realized in himself his father’s imperial presence, his father’s cruelty rising to a smile in the darkness like the inherited beast of himself breaking into being … and he felt not pleasure but the brute disposition of a man he loathed as no other.

It was only later that the doubts set in. He became convinced the coach and its passenger were as real as they appeared
to be. In such ways as we all deal with our symptoms of illness, taking them lightly and seriously by turn, he was cycled in his torment, swinging from mind to world and back again—though more driven, I can imagine … more in the way of an electromagnetic motor in his frantic changes of mind.

I’ll tell you here that I was ready to believe in every dark vision if it appeared at the Croton Holding Reservoir. Which is gone, of course. Our public library stands there now. But in those years its massive ivy-covered walls rose over a neighborhood monumental in its silence…. The few brownstone and marble mansions across the street along Fifth Avenue stood aloof from the noisy commerce to the south. Our Mr. Tweed lived just a block north, practicing the same silence. It was an unnatural thing, the reservoir. The bouldered retaining walls were twenty-five feet thick and rose forty-four feet in an inward-leaning slant. The design was Egyptian. The corners were relieved by trapezoidal turrets, and bisecting each long wall face were temple doors. You went in, climbed up a stair to the parapet, and came out in the sky. From this elevation the rising city seemed to fall back before something that wasn’t a city, a squared expanse of black water that was in fact the geometrical absence of a city.

I grant you that it is a very personal feeling I had. New Yorkers loved their reservoir. They strolled along the parapet arm in arm and were soothed in their spirits. If they wanted a breeze in summer, here is where it would blow. Puffs rippled the water. Children launched their toy sloops. The Central Park, well to the north, was not yet finished, all mud holes and ditches and berms of shoveled earth, a park only in the eyes of its imaginers. So this was the closest we could come to pastoral.