The Waterworks (16 page)

My heart skipped a beat. I glanced at Donne, who showed no emotion, but said, mildly, “Are you saying, Doctor, this Sartorius is a quack?”

“Oh no, not at all. He’s an excellent physician.”

I said: “His name isn’t in the registry of the New York Medical Association.”

“There is no rule that a doctor must be a member. The majority find it … meaningful … collegial … to join. It’s a worthy organization. Another credential, without question, but also good for medicine as a whole. We have conferences, symposia, we share our knowledge. But Sartorius had no regard for any of that.”

“Where is his practice?”

“I’ve no idea. I haven’t seen or heard from him in many years … though if he were still in Manhattan I think I would know.”

Dr. Mott was a distinguished member of his profession. He was a handsome man, still trim despite his age—I would say he was close to seventy at this time—with dark gray hair and mustaches, and a Phi Beta Kappa key drooping across his vest. He wore a pince-nez, through which he regarded each of us in turn with the same thoughtful gaze he must have turned on his patients. We had called on him in his home on Washington Place.

Donne asked him when he had known Sartorius.

“He served on the Sanitary Commission of the Metropolitan Board of Health, of which I was chairman. This would have been in 1866…. The commission anticipated a major cholera epidemic that summer. We cleaned up the slums, we changed the manner of garbage collection and put through measures to discourage contaminations of the public water supply. We prevented a major outbreak … like the one of 1849. I’m not sure I understand why this is a police matter,” he said.

Donne cleared his throat. “Mrs. Pemberton is burdened with some estate problems … in which the municipal government
figures. We’re documenting what we can, by way of a legal resolution.”

“I see.” He turned to me. “And does the press usually sit in on such matters, Mr. McIlvaine?”

“I’m here as Mrs. Pemberton’s friend and adviser,” I said. “It’s entirely personal.”

For a moment I felt measured in the doctor’s scales. I modeled my impassivity on Donne’s and held my breath. Then Dr. Mott leaned back in his chair. “We still don’t know the cause of cholera, although clearly the poison spreads through the diarrheal and vomitous discharges of infected persons. But the question of contagion … Well, there are two theories—a theory of zymotic infection, that is, that the disease spreads through an atmospheric miasma of poisonous matter … or a theory that a microscopic animal organism, called a germ, lives inside the body fluids. Dr. Sartorius was an exponent of the germ theory, on the grounds that only something animate can reproduce itself without end, which it would be required to do to generate an epidemic illness. The choleric poison seems certainly to have this capacity…. Since those days, his point of view would seem to be gaining authority, especially from the fermentation experiments of Mr. Pasteur, in France, and new rumors of the isolation by Dr. Koch in Germany of a cholera vibrio. But in all his ideas, Dr. Sartorius exhibited … well, a terrible intolerance for opposing points of view. He was rude in our meetings. He was generally scornful of the medical community, often mocking us as a cupping-and-leeching fraternity, even though the heroic procedures are no longer seriously maintained by most of us…. I don’t customarily talk about a colleague in this way…. But I am not questioning his competence. He was arrogant, cold, and, needless to say, quite unpopular with his brother physicians. Yet we would never put
social quarantine on a man so brilliant, no matter how unfeeling as a person, in hopes of making a decent Christian of him. He withdrew from us, not we from him. I have to think with pity of his patients … assuming he still practices. He was the kind of doctor who didn’t care what he treated, a man or a cow, and hadn’t a trace of the gift for the soothing word, the comforting assurance, that patients need from us as much as our medications. I say all this in confidence, of course. If you do find him, he’ll probably refuse to see you.”

I remember, after that, walking down Broadway with Donne in the late afternoon heat. The air seemed suspended, unmoving, with a specific attar projected by each shop, store, restaurant, or saloon. Thus we walked through invisible realms of coffee, baked goods, leather, cosmetics, roasting beef, and beer … at which point, on no scientific authority whatsoever, I was willing to endorse the miasma theory of zymotic infection. We were both peculiarly elated. I found myself amused by the stick-legged glide of Donne’s walk. His shadow was longer than anyone else’s. It was the late afternoon, visible columns of sun crossing Broadway at the intersections. The cross streets, lacking traffic, were corridors of sun…. I could see the air, in cinders, sifting through the filigree of fire escapes and telegraph wires. Ladies, laden with their packages, were pouring out of the stores, the doormen of the hotels were blowing their whistles for the hackney cabs, the city was beginning its turn toward evening. We walked among all manner of men … striding, shuffling, limping, begging, ogling the ladies, telling stories, listening to stories, clasping their hands in moments of overwhelming piety. A legless Negro on his wheeled board pushed rudely through legs…. A man dressed as Uncle Sam gave candy to children…. A long-haired millenarian moved slowly among the shoppers, the gospel of the day printed in chalk on his
sandwich board…. The horsecars humming, the stages clopping along … In my elation over this new knowledge of this arrogant doctor, this cold scientist impatient with the ordinary men of his profession, I looked at the world around me with affection, I was filled with an uncharacteristic love for my city, I thought of it as my city, and lamented my missing freelance, that his Broadway was not this one, but a concourse for a white omnibus of ghosts.

I suppose this was the thrill of pursuit, though I couldn’t have known it. It is a kind of cold, selfish feeling…. You hold in abeyance all thoughts of suffering. The name Sartorius is Latin, of course, but it comes out of Germany. I learned that upstairs, on the compositors’ floor at the
Telegram
. The compositors knew everything. They were older than the reporters, and remembered the early days, when they collected the news as well as set it in type, and so had nothing but scorn for the new profession of journalism. They drove me mad by freely editing what we sent up, but when I wanted to know something, it was to the compositors I went. And so I was instructed that as the bourgeois class arose in the German Middle Ages, tradespeople who wanted to elevate themselves socially took the Latin forms of their names. The miller became Molitor, the pastor became Pastorius, and the tailor became Sartorius.

I reasoned then that our Latinated German doctor could have come over in the great immigrations after the failed democratic revolutions of 1848. His medical education was European, which could explain, at least in part, his wish not to associate with American-trained doctors. And if he was a ’forty-eighter he might have joined the Union army, as so many of them did.

You know Washington…. By the time the U.S. Army
Medical Corps replied to our inquiries their information was of course of no practical use…. But it does allow me to begin here to trace the arc of a vaulting soul. When Dr. Wrede Sartorius took his examination for the medical corps in 1861 he posted first among the candidates. He was commissioned first lieutenant and assistant surgeon and attached to the Eleventh Infantry Regiment in the Second Division of the Army of the Potomac under General Hooker. These were the people who fought at Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spottsylvania, and Cold Harbor.

His army service was spectacular. Commendation after commendation. He operated in field hospitals under enemy fire. His innovations in surgical procedure were incorporated into the manual of the Army Medical Corps. I don’t remember all the details, but he became famous throughout the army. He could amputate a leg in nine seconds, an arm in six, and it sounds ghastly now but his skill and speed—especially when anesthetics weren’t available—earned him the gratitude of hundreds of soldiers. He apparently invented procedures—excisions, exsections, of the wrist, the ankle, the shoulder—that are still followed today. His skill in treating head wounds brought him into demand as a consultant to other surgeons. Some of his ideas that were resisted by his superiors were later adopted as evidence bore him out…. All sorts of things … In those days they used collodion dressings. He said no—the wounds should be exposed to open air, even rain. He used creosote solution and later carbolic acid for asepsis … before anybody else. He designed a new kind of hypodermic syringe. He insisted, for postoperative therapies, on fresh food and daily replacement of hay pallets … which sounds obvious now, but he had to buck the whole medical bureaucracy to get these
things. When he resigned his commission in 1865 he was a full colonel and surgeon. He was brilliant and masterful and brave. It’s important to understand this…. Among other things we are speaking of the noble lineaments of the grotesque. I am not interested in sentimentalizing Dr. Wrede Sartorius’s career as a personal tragedy.

Sixteen

E
ARLY
that September, Edmund Donne, with the report of the official exhumation in his breast pocket, invited Sarah Pemberton for a stroll around the holding reservoir. It happened to have been a lovely warm day … one of those autumn days in New York that are what the summer should have been…. There is a sort of stillness to such days, as there is on water between tides, and the light of the sun angles in to make every edifice—every stone and brick and window—intensely, meaningfully vivid. Donne had prepared carefully for the occasion but the weather was his good luck. It was just past four in the afternoon. Noah Pemberton, a new student in public school, had been brought home by his mother at three…. Donne arrived at Thirty-eighth Street with a beautiful model boat of polished mahogany and presented it to the boy. It was rigged as a sloop with linen sails and a swinging boom, brass capstans, and a spoked helm that really worked the rudder—a considerable boat that must have set him back a fair sum. Noah held it in both his arms as they all walked to the reservoir.

Donne had asked us to arrive at the house by five in order to be there before they returned—Dr. Grimshaw, Emily Tisdale,
and myself—for this inverted … wake. He had a few days before on an earlier visit, in uniform, spoken to the servants. In the absence of Lavinia Thornhill—who’d gone abroad—they might have been emboldened to represent her interests as they saw fit … except that they were made to understand Mrs. Pemberton and her son were now under the protection of the Municipal Police, which in a manner of speaking was true.

The fact is … that in the course of the two or three conferences Donne had had with Sarah Pemberton, as well as a more or less daily correspondence … they had become alerted to each other with that peculiar sort of attention characteristic of matched pairs, whether of birds or grazing animals or people. For my part, I long ago became content to live alone with my feelings and judgments … but I recognize that life shifts as desires are contained and released … and that situations do not remain stable. I am not sure I was entirely aware of what had developed between them before this day I speak of… but when they returned from the reservoir and we three were there waiting … and there was a tea in the English style ready to be served … it was as clear to me as if I had read a headline in the paper.

Many years later, over dinner, Noah Pemberton suggested to me that he thought his mother and Captain Donne had known each other earlier in their lives … that perhaps Donne was even his father’s rival for her hand in marriage—the unequal rival, if that was so, since he had no fortune. This was on the basis of a remark or two Noah had overheard of their conversation that day at the reservoir: “‘Now both of them are missing, Mrs. Pemberton … and time has moved backward to turn you into the impoverished girl you were, and the fellow with his head in the stars is again blessed to be sitting by your side,’” or embarrassing words to that effect. But I am not convinced. By his own description, Noah’s state of mind that
day was … beleaguered. Also, Donne’s impassivity when I first came to him with the news of the Pemberton family’s ordeal would have verged on the inhuman.

In any event, at the reservoir he showed the boy how to watch the puffs on the water to get the sense of the wind, and to set the sail and rudder according to the tack he wanted for her. “Then,” Noah told me, “I got down on my belly and launched her with a gentle push. Oh, what an excitement that was! I’d often watched children sail their boats in the reservoir. Now I had my own and it was better than any of them. I ran along the embankment, following her, running around the great square to meet her where I thought she would make her landing. I saw she sailed swiftly before the wind and discovered that didn’t please me as much as a tack into the wind or crosswise to it. I experimented, back and forth, and finally achieved the perfection of a slow but resolute sail that showed her mettle … how she could take water over her bow and still keep coming. I lay on my side in the sun on the embankment with my head propped in my hand and waited for her on her slow sure passage across this … ocean … of floating light … is how it seemed.