The Waterworks (18 page)

Of course he was wrong, the Reverend, in thinking this was only a Pemberton family matter. We were all wrong insofar as we thought these misfortunes were circumscribed in one … Godless family. I would not have extended myself now, at my advanced age, if this were just the odd newspaper tale I had for you … of aberrant family behavior. I ask you to believe—I will prove—that my freelance, finally, was only a reporter bringing the news, like the messenger in Elizabethan dramas … the carrier of essential information, all eyes upon him, delivering the dire news … but for all his gallant duty, only the messenger.

Our little gathering had turned out not quite as Donne intended. As a result he decided to make practical use of the occasion, and to hear once again Martin’s descriptions of the white omnibus going by in the snowstorm on Forty-second Street… and north on Broadway in the rain. He had heard it all thirdhand … my version, which reported what Martin had told Emily and Charles Grimshaw. Now he questioned the Reverend and the girl directly. And so once more the stage rode by in snow, in rain, in all our minds, and by the time we’d adjourned, I was thinking not of Augustus Pemberton but of the other old men in that dark cabin with him.

This was something that Donne had been thinking and wondering about for some time. But to me it came as a revelation.

I will say here by way of addendum that from this day of his despair, Charles Grimshaw’s rectorship of St. James took a turn for the better. I’m not sure it was the shock to his faith of his vestryman’s empty grave … or if all those millenarian prophets parading past his empty church—Shakers and Adventists, Mormons and Millerites—had anything to do with it … but the pastor who cherished historical confirmations of
biblical events stepped up to the pulpit the next Sunday and delivered a blazing sermon that was reported in several newspapers. I myself reported it for the
Telegram
, not that I intended to, having gone to St. James that morning in the luxurious state of mind we call suspicion. I had been wondering if Grimshaw knew more than he had let on of our haunting concern and I had wanted to have a leisurely look at him.

Quaint as it may seem, sermons in those days were considered newsworthy. The Monday papers were filled with them … substantial excerpts or even whole texts of representative sermons delivered from pulpits around town. The clergy were considered dignitaries of the city, and religious diction was assumed to be applicable to the public issues of the day. We had reformer churchmen like Reverend Parkhurst who were out to unseat the Tweed government, and well-known theatricians like the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
. My own Charles Grimshaw was not so eminent, but what he said was picked up that day by a few of us … and brought some new faces to the following week’s services … and thus began a run, as it were, of increasingly well-attended Sundays, the major attraction of which was the novelty of a pastor’s conversion to his own Episcopal certitudes.

“From all sides are we assailed, my friends, from all sides … by natural scientists whose science is unnatural, by religious scholars whose scholarship is blasphemous—so that these learned, oh-so-learned, men close around us like a circle of pagan dancers around a missionary being prepared for the pot.”

His voice still lacked resonance, but fire flashed from his pince-nez. I thought he rose a bit higher over his lectern, that perhaps he had made himself a platform of hymnals to stand on.

“For what do they tell us: that mankind, whom God gave
dominion over the birds and beasts and the fish of the sea, is really only descended from them, so that the first ape stood up on the hind legs of a mammoth, and when he shed his hair, there stood Abraham and Isaac and, God forgive them, Jesus himself.

“Or, according to those scholars who look for corroborations of the Word of God in foreign tales … or who analyze his style … that Moses is not the author of the Pentateuch … but several writers after, who added on, added on, each with his own version of the Word … until hundreds of years later, all was amended and revised by the ultimate author, R, the Redactor! No, my friends, not the Revelator, not the Revealer of all truth and being, not the Resurrected God of every breath that has ever been breathed … not the Reigning Creator of the Infinite Realm … but a mere redactor, a wretched bookworm who, with his dictionaries and etymologies, took upon himself the establishment of our religion….

“My dear friends, it is so astonishing—we should all laugh heartily if these self-important … pagans did not get respectable hearings in our academies and divinity schools.

“But take heart … for even within their impious professions are scientists and scholars who, undaunted, claim the faith … and find in the latest scientific evidence only more of the glory of God. So this is our good news, this morning: In the first instance … that the story of God’s creation of the universe in seven days, as is written in Genesis, is not disproven by the geologist’s tabulation of rocks thousands of years in formation or the zoologist’s dating of the ancient fossils in those rocks … because the Hebrew word for
day
does not define any particular length of time, and the creative days of God could have been separated by aeons of his thought… infinite thought from verse to verse. Thus, not in human chronology, but God’s, came the burgeoning of his designs…. For can anyone imagine
that everything we study, from the depths of the oceans to the constellated stars, in its chemical composition, in its taxonomy, and in its … evolution … is the happenstance of chaotic event? That it is not God plying his pen who draws us, in our dominion over all living creatures, out of the slime of the earth? So this is what our true natural science says, and to that we may say … Amen.

“And in the second instance, of our scholars of the Bible in the divinity schools, who are become literary stylists, and place their own false idol, their infamous Redactor, their anti-Christ, in his place … We may watch them, as their claims split into further claims, finding tales, discarding other tales, and burrowing their way back through the Greek, Aramaic, Sumerian, and Hebrew dialects … in their endless search for … authentication … and there will be a hundred of them tomorrow, and a thousand the day after, all babbling away in their learned tongues … that we will thunderously silence in our hymns of praise to the only Author of the only Book … and will pray for, unto our Lord, whom we entreat to have mercy upon us all … in the name of His only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ, who died for our sins. And to that we say … Amen.”

Seventeen

T
HOUGH
sermons were respectfully published in the newspapers, though churches were numerous and spires were everywhere on the skyline, not Christ’s but Tweed’s image inhered in the shifting formation of clouds, or in the light of each season … as the presiding image of our sense of ourselves … the face of our time. It was the struggle, or ordeal, of some of us—not enough of us, apparently—to cast off that terrible collective self-regard of which he was the apotheosis. I could imagine him in private moments of physical gratification of all his appetites sitting up on Forty-third Street in his millionaire’s mansion … a total triumphant success in all his thieving enterprises … and still affirm his essentially disembodied nature. I felt him as an awful presence riding lightly about our head and shoulders … or lodged in the roots of the jaw, behind the throat, as something vague but tenacious installed in us … the deity of our rampant extortions.

Not to try your patience, let me assure you that finally all the columns will be joined to be read across the page … like cuneiform carved across the stele. I had summoned a freelance off the bench outside my office and assigned him to go through
the basement morgue and look for any stories about men of wealth who had died penniless. Donne was doing his own research. We hoped in our pursuit of the truth to identify Augustus Pemberton’s companion riders … the lineaments of the … lodge, or brotherhood, the mortuary fellowship … of the white stage. But as to their motives we had no more idea than Martin had when they rode by him in the snow. God knew where they were. I knew only that they would not be found in their graves.

But even as our search for Martin Pemberton continued … Well, I should remind you we were not mathematicians working with pure numerical thought…. We had jobs, duties…. We met our responsibilities … which always appeared to us as … diverse. And at least one of us was trying to live with his affections.

A man named James O’Brien walked into my office one day. His title was sheriff of New York County. This was a lucrative office because the sheriff kept all the fees he collected. He’d been appointed, of course, by Boss Tweed. O’Brien was one of the Ring … typically unlettered, crude, cunning, with that kind of brute intelligence of the politician … but with the additional righteousness conveyed by his office, which allowed him a generally punitive impulse in all his dealings. I knew that O’Brien had done a couple of things to challenge Tweed’s power in the Democratic party, and had failed … so when he arrived unannounced and sat down in front of me and wiped his bald head and lit his cigar, I closed my door to all the noise and distraction in the city room and sat behind my desk and asked what I could do for him.

Just at this time Tweed was beginning to chafe from the attacks on him by
Harper’s Weekly
and its political cartoonist, Nast. Most of his constituents couldn’t read and so he didn’t
care what was written about him. But a caricature of him as a fat moneybagger with his foot on the neck of Liberty had a kind of… illumination to it.
Harper’s
also owned a book publishing company…. Their textbooks had suddenly been banned from the city schools. Tweed may have been irritated but he was more or less invulnerable because all the criticism was deduction or surmise. Nobody had any hard evidence. He controlled the whole of government, including the legal system, and he had the loyalty if not love of the
hoi polloi
. He sent foreigners just off the boat into his courtrooms and his judges instantly naturalized them into voting citizens. He had seventy-five percent of the opposition county Republicans on his payroll. His bribes were legion and nothing like evidence had ever been produced against him. He said one day to some reformers, “Well, what are you going to do about it?”

And now here was the moody, truculent Sheriff O’Brien, sitting in front of me. I was put in mind of the great Anglo-Saxon poem
Beowulf
, written to instruct young sachems. One of the most important of its primeval lessons is that, if you would hold power, you must share the booty. Tweed’s was an ancient, savage politics, so who would know that lesson better? Yet here was this O’Brien, inexplicably scanted in Tweed’s patronage … and he held in his lap a bundle wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine, which he claimed held the records, a copied-out set of ledgers, that showed the true extortionate dealings of the Ring—all of it duly recorded in neat columns … the incredible amounts stolen, and under what pretexts, and how they were divided. Migod.

“Why are you doing this?” I said to O’Brien.

“The son of a bitch welshed on me. Three hundred thousand simoleons. He won’t pay it.”

“For what?”

“My fair share. I warned him.”

He was a righteous blackmailer, O’Brien. I had to wonder: Tweed had many ambitious, overreaching men to deal with—why had this one become a problem? The colossal success of his fraud, the completeness of it, the systematization of it, as big and smooth-working in its machinery as the Corliss steam engine, had impressed him into believing … not in his invulnerability—more than that. He must have begun to receive from his most private self-reflections … intimations of immortality. I can think of no other explanation for what he’d done—waving O’Brien off, giving him no satisfaction at all. That is just what you cannot do to a co-conspirator.

Sheriff O’Brien regaled me with unassuageable bitterness. He said he was looking for a newspaper that would publish the story the numbers told. I told him to leave his bundle with me. I told him I would study what he had, and if it was the truth, the
Telegram
would run it. You would not think from my matter-of-fact demeanor that I knew what I had just been given.

That night I sat at my desk reading the ledgers of the most brazen and colossal cabal in the history of the Republic. I will never forget that night. Can you imagine what it meant to a newspaper wretch to have it in black and white under his reading lamp? After all, what do we live for? Not wealth, certainly, not philosophical enlightenment… not for art, or love, and not in any hope of salvation, certainly…. We live for proof, sir, we live for the document in our hand…. The glory we seek is the glory of the Revelator. And here it was, all recorded in neat columns. I think I wept for joy—I felt as privileged as a scholar holding in his hands fragments of Mosaic scrolls, or a parchment of Homeric verse, or a Shakespeare folio.