The Waterworks (9 page)

Of course we had mission homes, children’s aid societies, orphanages, and industrial schools, but this surplus of a bustling democracy overwhelmed them. For every lost or runaway child reported by a parent or guardian there were a hundred whose disappearance from their homes had been noted with no more than a shrug or a curse. It was the boring editorial writer who called for yet another commission to study the matter, the naïve politician who proposed to his colleagues a social policy for the young. The public had no taste for the topic, any more than the ruminant herd would meet to consider what to do when one of their number was cut out by the wolves and run down for a meal.

This was the world traveled by your ghostly white stage. It was a hard world, but are we less hard now? The awful indulgences of society change from era to era, but if they’re not entirely invisible to their generations they are borne patiently enough…. For certain religious sensibilities such children fulfilled the ineffable aims of God. For the modern folk, Mr.
Darwin was cited, and the design was Nature’s. So the flower girl Mary, and the newsies and the rest of these child beggars who lived among us, were losses society could tolerate. Like Nature, our city was spendthrift and produced enough wealth for itself to take heavy losses without noticeable damage. It was all a cost of doing business while the selection of the species went relentlessly forward, and New York, like some unprecedented life form, blindly sought its perfection.

None of this was not in tune with the disappearance of my freelance Martin Pemberton. Every day I bought my bedraggled zinnia and went to work … and while I composed my paper, picking from the clips and cables and filed copy the world picture I would invent for my readers, and while I made my assignments and shouted out my orders, so as to have the news that I must have because everybody else had it, but also to have the news that I must have because nobody else had it … the shadows of my secret story took form and dissolved and reformed and dissolved again as I considered its possible shapes.

I was still wary of seeking out Harry Wheelwright. I remembered the allusive fragment of his conversation with Martin that I’d overheard at the St. Nicholas Hotel. As a friend and confidant of Martin’s he was a putative conspirator. If he knew where Martin was he wouldn’t tell me. If he did not know he could not tell me. In either case he could mischievously dissemble knowing or not knowing. Or his predilection for irony might persuade him to confide in me only what he believed I already knew. I didn’t want to put myself at the mercy of such a fellow—he was no one to confront unarmed, as it were.

But I did find myself thinking of Sarah Pemberton … that she had never answered Dr. Grimshaw’s letter. I knew nothing of her relations with her stepson, but even if they were the most indifferent or cursory, how could she completely ignore an
alarmed description of his mental state? Was she made in the mold of her husband, was this an entirely and forever combative family? But then the rudeness to a concerned pastor—a proven friend of her husband’s—had to be accounted for. If Sarah Pemberton and Martin were completely severed from each other she would still respond, if only to affirm that.

The answer was provided by the Reverend himself, who informed me in a note that he now had met with Mrs. Pemberton, who was staying at the home of her late husband’s sister, Mrs. Thornhill, on East Thirty-eighth Street. So this was the comforting humdrum answer. Sarah Pemberton and her son, Noah, were not in residence at Ravenwood, and his letter had simply been delayed in forwarding. In any event she had taken quite seriously his observations concerning Martin’s mental state … and had spoken with Emily Tisdale and now hoped, in his words, “that I would call on her to discuss the matter.”

So there I was, in the midst of things, who only felt honest outside of them … but flattered, to tell you the truth, by my inclusion in the private discourse of family, fiancée, and pastor. I arranged to call in the early evening, after the final edition of the
Telegram
was under the arms of the homeward bound.

The Thornhill home at 60 East Thirty-eighth Street was a brownstone in a row of them, with trees lining the sidewalk. This was a preferred northern neighborhood of the wealthy … just a few quiet blocks from the reservoir, in fact. I don’t know what I had expected of a stepmother, but Sarah Pemberton was the loveliest, most pacific of human beings, a mature beauty in her late thirties, I would say, more womanly than the piquant and honest Miss Tisdale, with a fuller, larger frame and a paradoxically placid manner, on which her trials had made no apparent inroads. She had light blue untroubled eyes. She wore her dark hair parted in the middle and tight over the temples.
A wonderful curved, clear forehead, white as alabaster … like the housing for a soul. She was a calm, handsome woman, one of those who with the least attention to themselves maintain their good looks … with an effortless grace, everything about her harmonious, unforced, and her voice a low melodious alto—but all of this making, finally, an odd impression on me, given the circumstances I was about to be informed of.

“Shall I ask for coffee or tea? They grumble, but they bring it.”

I assumed she meant Mrs. Thornhill’s servants, whose loyalties did not, presumably, extend to her houseguests.

The atmosphere was oppressive. This was summer, you understand, not long after Independence Day—coming uptown in my hackney I’d noticed people still had the red and blue colored papers in their windowpanes with the candles shining through. The sitting room was furnished with a plush sofa, end tables inlaid with mosaic, and needlepoint chairs that were too small to sit in comfortably, and some quite bad European landscapes. The bay window was covered with a velour drapery of the darkest red. There was no concession to summer in this room.

“Mrs. Thornhill is very advanced in years,” Sarah said by way of explanation. “She is sensitive to drafts and complains often of the cold.” And then with a self-deprecating smile: “We old widows are like that, you know.”

I asked her how long it had been since she had seen her stepson.

“A few weeks … perhaps a month. I’d assumed he was busy. He says he earns his pay by the word. That would keep anyone busy, wouldn’t it? I thought it was you who might be keeping him occupied, Mr. McIlvaine.”

“Unfortunately not.”

“Since speaking with Dr. Grimshaw I can only hope Martin is doing what he’s always done. He goes off by himself. He did that as a boy. He broods, he sulks. I can’t think anything would happen to him that is not under his control.”

“He told Grimshaw and he told me …” I hesitated.

“… his father was alive. I know. My poor Martin. You have to appreciate that with Augustus’s death, everything was left unresolved between them. He died … without the reconciliation that would have made his dying easier for both of them. The effect on Martin has at various times since been … a peculiar kind of grief. It’s hard to explain. This family’s life has been, always, terribly intense.”

She then gave me this account of the family history.

Within a year of his first wife’s death Augustus Pemberton had proposed marriage to Sarah and she had accepted. She didn’t speak, Sarah, of her own background but did give me her maiden name, van Luyden. The van Luydens were one of the old Dutch families who’d made their fortune growing tobacco when Manhattan tobacco was considered the equal of Virginia’s. Over two hundred years, however, the fortune had declined. In certain circles, Sarah’s marriage to Augustus Pemberton would have been widely noted … and deplored … though the union of a lovely young woman and a brash nouveau riche thirty years her senior was not without precedent in the Social Register.

For their new home, Augustus built the place in Piermont—on a promontory overlooking the Hudson some twenty miles north of Manhattan—that he had named so grandiloquently after the ravens who were common to the area. “Martin all his life had suffered from his father’s imperious nature,” she said. “I came to know something of it myself over the years…. His mother was his consolation. He felt our marriage,
coming so soon after her death, was a betrayal of her memory. It is a vulnerable time of life to lose a mother…. I hoped as time passed to become her surrogate.

“When Ravenwood was ready, Augustus sold the house on Lafayette Place where Martin had been born and raised … not thinking he would do anything but come with us. This the boy refused to do. He would lose his schoolmates and so on … the only life he’d ever known. Augustus relented, saying it suited him just as well. Martin was boarded at the Latin Grammar School and from that time—he was then fourteen—they lived apart. I had to get used to this … family of males. I am still not sure I have.

“But Martin had a quick mind and a natural boyish honor … that endeared him to me. I persuaded him to come up to Ravenwood for holidays. I wrote to him regularly and plied him with clothes and books. But while all this softened his judgment of me, it did nothing to improve his relations with Augustus.”

Sarah Pemberton’s cheeks flushed when she told of the great and final schism. Martin was by then an undergraduate at Columbia. In his junior year he wrote a thesis for a course in moral philosophy on the business practices of certain private suppliers to the Union during the war … showing that they engaged in profiteering, and delivered goods of substandard quality, and so on. For documentation he used Augustus’s merchandising house as his prime example. My God, that awed me. It was so brilliantly … brazen, wasn’t it? To do a reporter’s job on your own family? I tried later on to get hold of that thesis…. I thought the school would have it on file somewhere. But they claimed not to.

At any rate, as Sarah Pemberton told it, Augustus was sent a fair copy and invited by the author to make a statement in his defense, which, he could rest assured, would be included in the
final text. “Of course Martin had been outrageous but I hoped he could be dealt with diplomatically. One look at my husband told me that was not to be. I had never seen Augustus so enraged. The young man was summoned to Ravenwood and was no sooner in the door than he heard his father condemn him as a … callow idiot… who did not know the first thing of the real world about which he was so quick to make his high-and-mighty judgments. Augustus had indeed testified before a congressional committee in Washington, as Martin had written … not under subpoena but, as he said, on a simple invitation which as a gentleman and patriot he’d hastened to accept. A majority of the committee had decided the allegations against his firm were unfounded. Had this not been the case there would have been an indictment issued by the district attorney in New York. There was no indictment. And Martin had managed to leave out of his moral philosophy the fact that his father was among the commercial contractors given a dinner at the White House by President Lincoln in recognition of their service to the Union.

“Martin had shocking answers to these arguments. He claimed … that Augustus would certainly have been indicted had he not paid out substantial sums both to members of the congressional committee and to the district attorney’s office in New York…. And that the White House dinner was held long before the charges came out, and by a president who could see evil at a distance but not where it crept up behind him. At this my husband rose from his chair and approached Martin with such fury in his face—he was a stocky man, with broader shoulders than his son—that I had to step between them.

“I wish I never heard the words that flew past me, Martin shouting that trading in shoddy was the least of Augustus’s sins and that had he more time he could have documented also a
maritime business of outfitting … slave ships … and Augustus assuring him with a raised fist he was a miserable … treacherous, lying …
dog
, was the least of his epithets … and if Columbia College was going to endorse such libels in the name of education, it was no university to which he would contribute tuition, room, and board.

“You know, Mr. McIlvaine, I came from a very … quiet home. I was an only child. I never heard a voice raised in all the years of my late parents’ lives together. I cannot tell you how stunned I was by all this … outright … warring. I knew nothing of Augustus’s business dealings. To this day I don’t know what was true and what was not true. But Augustus renounced his son … renounced and disowned him from that moment, and he assured him he would never see a penny of the legacy he could have enjoyed. And Martin said … ‘Then I’m redeemed!’ And he stormed out of the house and walked all the way to the railroad station because Augustus forbade me to order the carriage for him.”

“And that was the end of it?”

“And that was the end of it. Except that I deceived my husband and sent sums from my own allowance so that Martin could complete his studies … and when he began to write for the papers he sent me his published pieces from time to time, also secretly. I was very proud of him…. I hoped the time would come when I could show some of the writings to my husband…. But Augustus fell ill, and two years ago he died … and the reconciliation never took place. It is such a sad terrible thing, isn’t it? Because its consequences go on. The finality … echoes.”

I suppose I could have wondered at this point if what she had learned from her stepson … the shock of it… might have caused Sarah to act, to take some action of her own—what
action I don’t know. She would never have been a business confidant of her husband’s, at least in part because, it was quite clear, she was not the kind of person to approve of his practices. Yet Martin’s accusations notwithstanding, her life apparently had gone on as before, whatever misgivings she might have had. She had made no effort to come to a conclusive judgment … in the way women do who have no choice but to set their course for life and never veer from it. Or was this more like living in the state of irresolution most of us live in with regard to our moral challenges?

I found her gazing at me from her clear beautiful eyes, and the slightest of smiles lighting up her face … and here was my answer walking into the room, a tow-haired boy of eight or nine who was unmistakably her son and unmistakably a Pemberton. A comely, well-formed boy—I saw a bit of Martin in him, in the solemn, hurt look of the eye, but also saw the mother’s poise. He did not acknowledge me but went right to her in that single-minded way children have. He held a book in his hand. He proposed to do his reading outside, on the front stoop, while it was still light.