The Waterworks (17 page)

“Now you know through all of this … change of our circumstances,” Noah said, “my child’s innocence had acted as something of a governor on all my fears and hurts. What I understood without being able to express it in so many words was that we had dropped down in class. We were living on the charity of my aunt, an elderly woman with a wig, who had no taste for children. At school, though I was better dressed than most of my classmates, I stood in the same lines and was pushed and shoved about with a … breezy evenhandedness. I realized soon enough that in a class of forty children I would not be recognized by my teacher for the charm of my mind…. I’d been
instructed at Ravenwood by tutors whose constant praise and sheer pedagogical delight in my achievements were tributes to my father’s wealth. But to tell the truth I was not cowed by public school and in fact was … livened by it…. I developed a keenness for the boisterous ways of public school children … though I didn’t confide this to my mother. She took me there each morning, to Primary School Number Sixteen … and met me at the entrance every afternoon to see me home. She worried about the harm that might come to me from being with the other children. She distrusted the city and everything about it.

“At any rate, as I watched my marvelous ship of the ocean, my mother and Captain Donne sat talking on the bench behind me. I had half heard bits and pieces of their conversation as they strolled after me and I ran back and forth to meet them and report what my ship was doing. Now, in my happy drowse, I heard more of it. I received it without thinking…. I believe it was the strangest, most frightening conversation I had ever heard. Only gradually did its meaning come through. I thought the sky was growing dark, though it was still quite blue. It was as if my child’s joy was … draining out of the universe. I imagined the voices were from my ship, that it was my ship talking as it sailed toward me with a cargo of adult secrets and sickening mysteries…. I was learning that my father had impoverished us in a willful act. It had been deliberate. We were poor and without a home because he wanted it that way. And all his money he had put somewhere else—nobody knew where. The police captain had found this out. He had chosen to bring us this most awful news out in the sun, by the reservoir. Someone, a colonel, or a coroner, I was not sure who, had written a report. And that had the worst news of all. What was it? Was my brother, Martin, dead? I could hardly breathe. Were
we all going to die? Had somebody killed my father and my brother—who was now coming after me?

“I sat up and looked back at my mother. She was holding a sheet of paper on her lap and reading from it, all bent over as if she had trouble seeing. Her hand went up to comb her hair back away from her eyes. I heard her gasp. She raised her head and gazed at me. … My calm and beautiful mother had turned ashen. The captain took her hand. ‘Both men are missing now, Sarah … and time has moved backward to turn you into the impoverished girl you were … and the tall fellow with his head in the stars is again blessed to be sitting by your side.’ I looked for my ship in the dazzle of watered light. I hoped it had gone down. I was angry at the captain for bringing me a boat to play with as if I were a stupid child….”

My recollection is that when they returned, Noah went immediately upstairs with his boat. In Mrs. Thornhill’s absence, Sarah felt free to draw open the sitting-room curtains and raise the windows and let some of the balm of the evening in. The tea was served and we sat there like mourners … contriving to speak the comforting words of continuing daily life to each other … though the bereaved had just heard that her husband was among the living.

Donne had previously informed Emily Tisdale and Dr. Grimshaw of the essentials: That Augustus Pemberton’s death had apparently been feigned … for what purpose was not known. That he had been ill, seriously ill, but had made preparations that indicated the self-concern of someone … continuing. That Martin had in fact seen him and was believed to have sought a confrontation with him … and had disappeared—where or how nobody yet knew.

Donne’s idea was that in the face of such revelations Sarah
Pemberton would need the support and comfort of friends of the family … such despair, such despair, the family itself, its idea, its name, blasted from her. Yet she sat with her back straight and chin lifted, its implications of an … indolence erased by the pose, and with her hands folded upon her lap … her handsome face drained of all color, but otherwise undistorted by the contemplation of this … news. Of course, she had been toppling into it by degrees. She’d had an inkling when she’d agreed to the exhumation. She kept losing her husband … as he died, as he lived. Her impoverishment had been confirmed as a deliberate act. Her pale blue eyes glimmered but her beautiful full mouth did not tremble. She was a woman in the profound humiliation of an entirely fooled life. But she had the composure of a queen who’s been informed that one of her armies has been defeated.

And what Edmund Donne hadn’t considered … or relied on, in his diffidence … was his own importance to her as another kind of news in her mind. He could not stop looking at her. And while she spoke to all of us in her calm alto, it was clear from her glances … or in some of the hesitations of their conversation with each other … Well, what shall we call this common thing?—that aliveness to another person that comes unbidden, unsought, and is composed of the idea of a future? For if you think about it, we live mostly by habit … waiting … sustained by temporary pleasures … or curiosity … or diffuse hopeless energies … including malice … but not by that sustaining idea of a future that only comes humming in the secret aliveness that everyone can see except the two … idiotic … starers. So there was news of Sarah’s future alongside the columns of her devastation.

I’m not suggesting this was a practical measure for her, relying on Donne … and on what he could do for her. If what
Noah told me years later … if he was right, and they were reanimating their feelings for each other, hers would be bathed in mortification … atonement… a perception of her life with Augustus Pemberton as sweet justice for the wrong choice … for the love not heeded. If this was so, I think I would have seen it. On the other hand, there should have been an unbreachable difference in class between the wife of Augustus Pemberton—a van Luyden—and a policeman from the street. And there certainly was not. If the situation was as Noah described it, could Donne have been destined for something other than a career as a municipal worker? Was she the cause of his devotion to an unsuitable life? I don’t know … I don’t know.

But it was, of course, the others who needed comforting. In the midst of the small talk Emily Tisdale said to Donne, “You still don’t know where Martin is—why aren’t you looking for him?” Before he could reply she was on her feet, pacing back and forth the way Martin paced when he thought aloud … balling her hands into tiny fists and roving the sitting room. “They fought. He was disowned. It was sad, it was unfortunate, but it happened. Why wasn’t that the end of it! Still, they go on! Who can live—who is allowed to live—when these … unnatural things go on? Martin has such honor in him,” she cried out in that appealing cracked voice. “There’s no telling what he could have done if not for this awful pit … he’s been trying to climb out of all his life. Yes, it’s like a pit he’s fallen into. Where is he, what has happened to him?”

Donne said: “It’s reasonable to assume he would have sought out Eustace Simmons, Mr. Pemberton’s … business associate.”

“Yes, well then, let us seek him out, this business associate.”

“Having been found once, Simmons cannot easily be found again.”

“What is to be done! They are all… somewhere … aren’t they? Living or dead? Find him! I don’t care—God, please, let it be one or the other…. I can understand one or the other. I am ready to marry Martin or grieve for him. I am ready to go into mourning. Why can’t they let me do … even that… this monstrous, monstrous family?”

By way of agreement, Sarah Pemberton said to the girl, “And yet, it’s so peculiar … I can’t think even now that I’m not one of them,” at which point Emily threw herself down beside her on the sofa and wept. Sarah held the girl to her bosom and looked over to Donne. “We’ll find Martin, won’t we, Captain? I will not think I’ve offended my God so that he’s designed in me some … declivity of soul … some pocket flaw in which calamities collect and collect.”

All this time the Reverend Grimshaw had said nothing. With a frown on his face and his arms folded, he’d sat staring at the floor. I didn’t know what he’d been doing since I’d first seen him—counseling Sarah?… consoling Miss Tisdale?—but I felt at this moment the superiority of my own role insofar as I had brought Donne in and got the issues clarified … at least as far as this. I suppose it was an uncommon experience for a newspaperman, to feel for a moment more righteous than a minister.

But he spoke up now … fretfully, clearly disconcerted. “This is beyond any Christian understanding. I admit I’m unable to understand it from my faith … which is a test of faith itself. As you know, Mrs. Pemberton, I had the greatest respect for your husband. He was my friend. A vestryman of St. James. I’m not claiming he lived a blameless life … but he loved you
and he loved the son you gave him. I heard this from his own lips.”

The minister turned to Donne. “Augustus was … rough-hewn … not always aware of the impact of his words … on gentler sensibilities. There’s no question of that. I’m even willing to grant you a lack of clear moral criteria in the conduct of business … a tendency to keep his Christian soul here”—Grimshaw indicated a place in the air above his head—“and his business methods there,” he said, indicating the floor. “Let us grant that… he was like most men of his interests—investors, founders of business, captains of industry—complicated … contradictory … and capable of the full range of human feeling, from the noblest to the most reprehensible. But this … conspiracy you suggest! That he has pretended to die merely to abandon his family and leave them destitute?… destitute … though for some reason or cause you cannot account for … I simply cannot reconcile this … paganism—I don’t know what else to call it—with what I knew of Augustus Pemberton, for all his … Christian … imperfections.”

I wanted to leap in at this, but Donne raised his hand. He was seated, ridiculously, in one of Mrs. Thornhill’s needlepoint side chairs, his body folded up behind his vaulting knees. “We’re not ascribing the motive to Mr. Pemberton … that he contrived his death to abandon his family.”

“Then what is it you’re doing, sir! What is the purpose of your … speculation?”

“It is hardly speculation, Reverend. In the Hall of Records a contract is registered showing that a year or so before Mr. Pemberton’s final illness he mortgaged Ravenwood to a partnership of dealers in properties in the amount of a hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars…. We find also that he sold his seat
on the Exchange and his interest in a Brazilian maritime firm, among his other interests. We have to conclude that after he knew he was seriously ill, Mr. Pemberton sought to liquidate his assets.”

“Who are you to conclude anything, sir!” And to Sarah he said, “Why do I hear of such things from … policemen? Why has Mrs. Augustus Pemberton tainted herself with such associations…. The police and”—glancing at me—“the press, God help us all. My dear woman, is the loss of your home so bitter that you would not consider any recourse but the desecration of your husband’s grave?”

“His grave,” Donne said, “was not desecrated, since he was not in it. We desecrated someone else’s grave.”

Donne had said this matter-of-factly—he would do nothing else in the situation—but Grimshaw heard otherwise. “So in your view as a functionary of the esteemed and brilliant church of the Municipals, Martin Pemberton is our prophet … and the shade of Augustus rides a city omnibus on Broadway!”

“Perhaps, Reverend, you would like to consider the circumstances all together, as I have,” said Donne. “Neither father nor son where they should be … one dead but not in his grave or certified dead in the public records … the other, a presumed lunatic, off chasing his phantom … the surviving family, heirs to a fortune that no longer exists … And tell me your interpretation.”

Emily had sat up at this and the two women, side by side, were reasonably composed as they waited—as we all waited—for Dr. Grimshaw’s reply. In this moment I understood, as they must have, that Donne’s researchers had provided an answer of a kind … that where, before, all had been chaos and bewilderment and hurt, now it was clear that something understandable
… an act… had been committed … a deliberate act or series of acts … by which we could recompose the world, comfortingly, in categories of good and evil. And I felt the first stirrings of some communal perception … that the missing son and fiancé might be embarked on something heroic.

Grimshaw’s small neat face was entirely, uniformly flushed under his thatch of silver hair. I imagined I could see the little vessels of blood rushing up to the skin like parishioners filling the pews. He looked at each of us in turn. He was in this instant of his anguish unnecessarily physical in my awareness. I didn’t like to see that occupational cross hiking itself up his vest with each sharp shallow breath. His mouth was slightly open. He removed his spectacles and massaged them with a handkerchief, and it was as if he had taken all his clothes off. I would have liked to suppose his bright blue eyes were an unalterable theological composition. He had believed himself the ceremonial authority on life and death. How must it have felt … to be as much a victim as Sarah and her son? To understand the depth of humiliation … as if you had never understood Christ before?

He reset his glasses and returned his handkerchief to his pocket. In his light voice he said, “I am ordained to seek out suffering … and to embrace it … to take on the burden and sink to my knees under it. I will console and pray and absolve and celebrate as a priest of Christ’s church, where suffering comes round as regularly as day and night. But this … this tolls inside me as something cataclysmic. I am not prepared…. I am not prepared. I feel the need to pray to begin to understand, and to call upon God … to let me hear the soft summons of Jesus Christ somewhere from this … from this … this family of Godless Pembertons”—here he raised his eyes to Sarah—“that is so magnetically awry as to threaten to destroy all of us who have circled about them … including the ministry.”