The Waterworks (19 page)

Well, not to prolong the pain … You know, one reason I kept so many freelances out on the bench and had so few
reporters on staff is that Tweed almost always got to the staffers. I had a man in Albany, covering the state legislature, who wrote favorably one day about a bill designed to make the monopoly of gas companies report their true earnings and reduce their prices … and the next day wrote about this bill as if it had been devised by European communists. Regulation of the gas companies had wide support in both houses, but in the same twenty-four-hour period in which my man changed his views, the Tweed people, who had paid him off, and most every other reporter up there, paid off the legislators. So I am not saying our press stood clean and shining apart from the ordinary life of the city. Tweed committed advertising to our pages—unnecessary, and very profitable, city advertising. I knew that, I knew all of it…. But I thought … I thought … this story was so monumental… the truth so overwhelming in its demands … and the condition of the city so precarious … that journalistic honor would prevail. But on instructions of our publisher, the editor in chief would not let me run the biggest story since the War of Secession. Let me compose myself a moment…. To this day the memory buffets my poor soul.

Not just the
Telegram
—paper after paper looked at the evidence and refused to print it. The eminent
Sun
under the eminent Richard Henry Dana carried the mayor’s messages to the people … as advertising…. They had a contract for city legal notices in eight-point type at a dollar a line. Either the publishers needed Tweed, or they counted themselves his friends. Others were afraid of what he would do to them—there were all sorts of reasons.

What would save American journalism from infamy would be the death of a member of the
Times
board who was a partner in Tweed’s printing firm. This left the surviving director,
George Jones, and Louis Jennings, the editor, free to run the material.

As for me, I am a lifelong bachelor. I had no wife and children to worry about. I thought about it a day or so…. I had not been able to move my publisher, Mr. Landry…. I had gone rushing up to his sanctum to protest … to appeal. He listened quietly enough to my ranting and raving. Tweed’s effect on the city had been like a vampire’s arterial suck. I saw him in every seeping mound of garbage … in the sewers emptying into the streets … in the moving shadows at night of the rats in their furtive numbers … in the plodding city wagons of people dead of the diseases of filth…. I emptied my desk and left the best job I’d ever had … took my hat and coat off the rack and walked out of my city room.

But that is not to speak of here. After the accounts were published in the
Times
… that fall there was a public rally at the Cooper Union on Astor Place and a citizens’ committee was formed that brought a taxpayers’ suit, and the Ring began to crack. Connolly, the ring’s comptroller, said he would cooperate, and a grand jury was formed to bring indictments.

All hell seemed to be breaking loose. The collapse of a system, even a system that subjugates them, unsettles folks, and there was an agitation all through the city, like a storm blowing this way and that, tearing up the store awnings, turning people around in the street, spooking the horses. Three banks that had Tweed on their boards went under. Dozens of small newspapers that had lived on his largesse ceased to publish. Businesses of all kinds closed their doors. Strangers were getting into fistfights, something like a deep bass hum was coming up through our feet, like the roaring down from the mountains of a flash flood, as if despite ourselves, we were
going to have to face up to the truth, all of us who made up this town of calamitous life.

I would not say Donne was not diverted by the imminent doom of the Ring. But neither was he distracted. This was all anybody in the city could talk of, and he had to have been personally gratified—he had lived in a kind of professional slavery to this culture, and now it was crumbling. Yet he was not given to triumphing—that was not his nature, he did not make of all this an occasion to think of himself. What I did see in his face was an intensity, almost like feverishness, as he went through these same revealing account books, which I entrusted to him before I reluctantly turned them back. I remember thinking how odd it was of him when he said afterward, at dinner, that what he found meaningful was not the usually inflated sums warranted to this or that transaction, but the occasional entries that seemed legitimate in their accounting. The Ring’s books recorded not only the transactions in which the city was the ostensible buyer of goods or services, but also those in which it was the seller, and in these cases very often of legal entitlements or charters it had no legal right to sell. How out of character, he said, to find an entry where a piece of legal paper was signed without apparent compensation.

“Like what?” I asked him.

“There is a newly founded orphanage, the Home for Little Wanderers, with an address up on Ninety-third Street by the river. Yet the ledger reveals that no money passed hands to expedite a charter.”

I thought this was rather a peculiar observation in the context of a great scandal… and my own misfortune. But you see, Donne was taller than most men and so he had a better view of the lay of the land. In a day or two he’d found the charter document and certificate of incorporation in the Hall of Reeords.
The Home for Little Wanderers was a nondenominational orphanage that was to be scientifically managed according to the latest child-raising principles. Mr. Tweed and the mayor and Comptroller Connolly were members of the board of trustees. Eustace Simmons was listed as director. Wrede Sartorius, M.D., was the attending physician.

Eighteen

A
T
this time, the city north of Seventy-second Street was no longer country, but not yet city either. The houses were few and far between. Whole blocks had been scraped clear and laid out with surveyor string, but nothing was on them. You would see two or three of the usual row houses with their granite stoops, and, after a gap, two more sharing a side wall, but none of them occupied. Here was a street set with paving stones that stopped at the edge of a pasture, there was a scaffolded half-risen apartment house through whose unframed windows you saw the sky … or a Beaux Arts mansion going up alongside a cluster of shanties with a pig and goats rooting about. And everywhere were great piles of brick, or stacks of lumber under tents of flapping canvas. Steam cranes stood in fields of grass and shrub. Somehow there were never any workers to be seen … as if, with a mind of its own, the city was building itself.

From Park Avenue and Ninety-third the unpaved road ran downhill in a gentle slope to the river. In the fields on either side pumpkins were scattered and trees were beginning to turn. The sounds of the city were distant, almost imperceptible. Donne
and his men were encamped beneath a stand of yellowing weeping willow halfway between First and Second avenues. Their tunics were unbuttoned, they had canteens of water and lunch-boxes, and their accumulated refuse was held in a cardboard carton at the foot of the tree. They could not be seen from the riverside. The road went past them downhill, and where it leveled off was the stone mansion Home for Little Wanderers.

A police kiosk stood on the sidewalk by the front gate. Donne said, “We have kiosks at the diplomatic missions. We have them in front of Mr. Vanderbilt’s place … and at Tammany Hall…. These must be very important children.”

All together, out of the whole force of Municipals, Donne had managed to commandeer twelve or thirteen men who were loyal to him. Another contingent stood watch from a shed on Ninety-fourth, a block north of the mansion on First Avenue … and a third a block south.

But I didn’t understand what they were doing—which was … apart from using their binoculars … nothing. I had joined them on the second day of their watch. Here and there in the field around us birds were scooting about in their dustbaths or hopping from brush to tree. High up over the river an undulant arrow of geese pointed south. I wondered if I had come all this distance to join a covey of birdwatchers. I suppose I must have said something to that effect.

“Whom shall we arrest?” Donne said.

“Everyone … whoever you find.”

“So I’m to enter without a warrant?”

“Would any of their judges give you one?”

“What will the charge be?”

“What does it matter… as long as we can see what’s going on in there that needs a police guard to keep people away.”

“That is the way they would do it,” Donne said quietly.

He handed me the binoculars. I saw the mansion shimmering in the magnification. It was a Romanesque structure of red stone trimmed in granite and with the turrets and small windows of an armory. The bottom half was obscured by a brick wall. A cast-iron gate gave on to a courtyard. It looked its part—a very substantial building, lending substance to those who lived there. It was an outpost of our advancing civilization … like all our other institutions out at the edges—poorhouses, asylums for fallen women, homes for the deaf and dumb.

Behind the Home for Little Wanderers the river surged powerfully southward toward the harbor, the color of silver. Perhaps I was only feeling the despair of the unemployed, but at this moment I … the denizen of alleys, dead ends, and saloons three steps down … the reporter who disdained the great national story of the West to make stories out of paving stones pounded with horse droppings, and the street birds picking out their meals there … a fellow whose music was the cries of ragpickers, the din of the organ grinders … who could watch the cat with curved paw lift the lid of a garbage pail and feel that was as much nature as he needed … I fervently wished there were no buildings of any kind on this island. I envisioned the first Dutch sailors giving up on the place as a mosquito-infested swamp, and returning in their longboats to their ships….

It must have been about four that afternoon when Donne told everyone to look sharp. I lifted my glasses: The yard gate was open. Coming into the street was a two-horse team harnessed to a white omnibus of the Municipal Transport Company. One of Donne’s men had run quickly to unhitch their own team, which was off the road, behind the trees. Then we were racing downhill in the police wagon and Donne was leaning out the window and shouting, “Don’t stop them, don’t stop them!” I did not understand what was happening, but when we reached
the level avenue and caught up to the white stage there was a battle going on. Donne’s men at the corner of First Avenue and Ninety-fourth Street had intercepted the stage and were holding the rearing, snorting horses by their bridles … and the man up on the box was laying out his whip over them … horses and police … whatever he could reach.

How can we recall sudden and violent action? I remember the sound those horses made in their fear and pain—it was such a human sound, brought up from their chests, as they turned to go forward and then were backed into the whip. We had now all joined the fray. One of Donne’s men had fallen to the ground and was rolling desperately to get away from the hooves. A policeman climbing up to unseat the driver received a kick from his boot heel and fell to the street on his back. You have to understand, our police in those days did not routinely carry pistols or rifles, which were issued only for emergencies … riots and so on. They did carry nightsticks, which are considerable weapons, and these were being raised now against the driver’s legs. But he was enormously strong, a man in a black suit and boots and a soft felt hat. The hat flew off to reveal a shaved head. Dust rose from the feet of horses and men. It was a beautiful warm sunny afternoon that seemed quickly to be filling with haze. I can recall the painted scene on the side of the stage, a Hudson River view with the Catskill Mountains beyond. Above the scene, in the windows, faces appeared and disappeared, faces that made no impression on me except that I noted the mouths were open and I seemed, after a delay, to relate them to the screams I heard coming from the inside. The police had stopped the stage and this melee had resulted. How odd. I have seen much street violence in my life…. I am not shocked by it, I’m made distant, reflective, and it always appears to me, finally, to be … inexplicable. So it was now. I can’t
even remember what I was doing in the midst of all of it. I can tell you what I saw but not what I did. Perhaps I did nothing, though I would like to believe that in some way I was being helpful. I knew of course that this was the stage that Martin Pemberton had seen in the snow, and on Broadway in the rain, but it was such a solid piece of coachwork, all nicked and scratched and scraped with the heavy usage of route driving … an ordinary city stage, one of the dreary omnibuses of New York.

Donne was used to confrontation in a different way, and took a very efficient, practical approach to it. With an agility that surprised me, he got that lanky frame up the rear ladder and onto the coach roof, and as the driver realized he was there and turned to look up at him, he brought a stick smartly down on the bald skull. I don’t know if I can convey the particular sound of a nightstick on a skull. I’ve heard it innumerable times. It can resemble a rock falling into a pool of water … a soft sound … not pleasant…. Other times it has a cheerful, hard, woodpecking quality … cheerful because of the tonal simulation of emptiness inside the skull. At such moments you’re relieved of wondering about the effects of the blow on the encased brain … which is always of course quite terrible, no matter what it sounds like. Here the sound was simple, blunt … definitive. The driver fell from his perch and landed at my feet in a great oomph of dust. He was a huge man, very strong. The blow had neither killed him nor rendered him unconscious. He pushed himself to his knees and held his head in his hands, but without making a sound … and before Donne was able to come down and order them to stop, the men had surrounded him and given him additional whacks about the shoulders and arms for the temerity of his reaction to them … though the issue had clearly been decided by that one blow.