The Waterworks (2 page)

He came behind my desk to stare out the window. My office looked over Printing House Square. The rain streamed down the pane so that everything out there, the schools of black umbrellas, the horsecars, the plodding stages, seemed to be moving underwater. “If you want a favorable notice, why don’t you give me something decent to read,” Martin said. “Give me something for the lead essay. I’ll show my appreciation.”

“I can’t believe that. The grandeur of your opinions stands in inverse ratio to the state of your wardrobe. Tell me what happened, Pemberton. Did you run into a train? Or shouldn’t I ask?”

This was met with silence. Then Martin Pemberton in his reedy voice said: “He’s alive.”

“Who is alive?”

“My father, Augustus Pemberton. He is alive. He lives.”

I pluck this scene from the stream of critical moments that made up the newspaper day. A second later, a cashier’s voucher in his hand, Martin Pemberton was gone, his copy was on the dumbwaiter to the compositors’ room, and I was looking to lock up the issue. I don’t fault myself. It was an oblique answer to my question … as if whatever had happened was meaningful only as it evoked a moral judgment from him. I interpreted what he had said as metaphor, a poetic way of characterizing the wretched city that neither of us loved, but neither of us could leave.

Two

T
HIS
would have been sometime in April of 1871. I saw Martin Pemberton only once after that, and then he was gone. Before he disappeared he informed at least two other people—Emily Tisdale, and Charles Grimshaw, the rector of St. James, who had eulogized the old man—that Augustus Pemberton was still alive. I did not know this at the time, of course. Miss Tisdale was Martin’s fiancée, though I found it hard to believe he’d give up his wild storms of soul for the haven of marriage. In this I was not far wrong: apparently he and Miss Tisdale were having a difficult time and their engagement, if that’s what it was, was very much in question.

To a certain extent both she and Dr. Grimshaw assumed, as I did, that Martin could not have meant the statement to be taken literally. Miss Tisdale was so used to his dramatics that she merely added this startling example to her accumulated fears for their relationship. Grimshaw, taking it a step further, thought Martin’s mind was at risk. I reasoned, by contrast, that Augustus Pemberton had been nothing if not a representative man. If you can imagine what life was like in our city … The Augustus Pembertons among us were sustained by a culture.

We are in the realm of public life now—the cheapest commonest realm, the realm of newsprint. My realm.

I remind you William Marcy Tweed ran the city as no one had before him. He was the messiah of the ward politicians, the fulfillment of everything about democracy they believed in. He had his own judges in the state courts, his own mayor, Oakey Hall, in City Hall, and even his own governor, John Hoffman, in Albany. He had a lawyer named Sweeny as city chamberlain to watch over the judges, and he had Slippery Dick Connolly to handle the books as comptroller. This was his Ring. Beyond that maybe ten thousand people depended on Tweed’s largesse. He gave jobs to the immigrants and they stuffed the ballot boxes for him.

Tweed held directorships in banks, he owned pieces of gasworks and of omnibus and street-rail companies, he owned the presses that did the city’s printing, he owned the quarry that supplied marble for her public buildings.

Everyone doing business with the city—every contractor, carpenter, and chimney sweep, every supplier, every manufacturer—paid from fifteen to fifty percent of the cost of his service back to the Ring. Everyone who wanted a job, from the school janitor to the police commissioner, had to pay a fee up front and then forever kick back a percentage of his salary to Boss Tweed.

I know what people of this generation think. You have your motorcars, your telephones, your electric lights … and you look back on Boss Tweed with affection, as a wonderful fraud, a legendary scoundrel of old New York. But what he accomplished was murderous in the very modern sense of the term. Manifestly murderous. Can you understand his enormous power, the fear he inspired? Can you imagine what it is like to live in a city of thieves, raucous in its dissembling, a city falling
into ruin, a society in name only? What could Martin Pemberton have thought, as a boy, learning bit by bit the origins of his father’s wealth, except that he had been sired from the urban grid? When he went around saying his father, Augustus, was still alive, he meant it. He meant he had seen him riding in a city stage up Broadway. In misunderstanding him, I found the greater truth, though I would not realize it until everything was over and done. It was one of those intuitive moments of revelation that suspend themselves in our minds until we come around to them by the ordinary means of knowing.

All this is by way of digression, I suppose. But it is important for you to know who is telling the story. I spent my life in the newspaper business, which makes the collective story of all of us. I knew Boss Tweed personally, I’d watched him for years. I fired more than one reporter whom he’d bribed. Those he couldn’t bribe, he bullied. Everyone knew what he was up to and nobody could touch him. He would come into a restaurant with his entourage and you could literally feel his force … like a compression of air. He was a big ruddy son of a bitch, he ran about three hundred pounds. Bald and red-bearded, with a charming twinkle in his blue eyes. He bought the drinks and paid for the dinners. But in the odd moment when there was no hand to shake or toast to give, the eye went dead and you saw the soul of a savage.

You may think you are living in modern times, here and now, but that is the necessary illusion of every age. We did not conduct ourselves as if we were preparatory to your time. There was nothing quaint or colorful about us. I assure you, New York after the war was more creative, more deadly, more of a genius society than it is now. Our rotary presses put fifteen, twenty thousand newspapers on the street for a penny or two. Enormous steam engines powered the mills and factories. Gas
lamps lit the streets at night. We were three quarters of a century into the Industrial Revolution.

As a people we practiced excess. Excess in everything—pleasure, gaudy display, endless toil, and death. Vagrant children slept in the alleys. Ragpicking was a profession. A conspicuously self-satisfied class of new wealth and weak intellect was all aglitter in a setting of mass misery. Out on the edges of town, along the North River or in Washington Heights or on the East River islands, behind stone walls and high hedges, were our institutions of charity, our orphanages, insane asylums, poorhouses, schools for the deaf and dumb, and mission homes for magdalens. They made a sort of Ringstrasse for our venerable civilization.

Walt Whitman was the city’s bard, among other things, and not all that unknown. He went around dressed like a sailor in a peacoat and watch cap. A celebrant, a praise singer, and, in my opinion, something of a fool in what he chose to sing about. But he has these confessional lines about his city, less poetic than usual, like a breath he is taking before singing the next encomium:

Somehow I have been stunned. Stand back!

Give me a little time beyond my cuffed head and slumbers and dreams and gaping …

The War of Secession made us rich. When it was over there was nothing to stop progress—no classical ruins of ideas, no superstitions to retard civil republican ardor. Not so much had to be destroyed or overturned as in the European cultures of Roman towns and medieval guilds. A few Dutch farms were razed, villages melded into towns, towns burned into precincts, and all at once block and tackle were raising the marble and
granite mansions of Fifth Avenue, and burly cops were wading through the stopped traffic on Broadway, slapping horses on the rumps, disengaging carriage wheels, and cursing the heedless entanglement of horsecars, stages, drays, and two-in-hands, by which we transported ourselves through the business day.

For years our tallest buildings were the fire towers. We had fires all the time, we burned as a matter of habit. The fire wardens telegraphed their sightings and the volunteers came at a gallop. When the sun was out, everything was blue, the light of our days was a blue suspension. At night the flaming stacks of the foundries along the river cast torchlight like seed over the old wharves and packing sheds. Cinderous locomotives rode right down the streets. Coal stoked the steamships and the ferries. The cookstoves in our homes burned coal, and on a winter morning without wind, black plumes rose from the chimneys in orderly rows, like the shimmering citizens of a necropolis.

Naturally it was the old city that tended to go up, the old saloons, the hovels, the stables, beer gardens, and halls of oratory. The old life, the past. So it was a pungent air we breathed—we rose in the morning and threw open the shutters, inhaled our draft of the sulfurous stuff, and our blood was roused to churning ambition. Almost a million people called New York home, everyone securing his needs in a state of cheerful degeneracy. Nowhere else in the world was there such an acceleration of energies. A mansion would appear in a field. The next day it stood on a city street with horse and carriage riding by.

Three

I
N
one sense it’s regrettable that I became personally involved in what I’ll call, for the moment, this Pemberton matter. Professionally you try to get as close to things as possible, but never to the point of involvement. If journalism were a philosophy rather than a trade, it would say there is no order in the universe, no discernible meaning, without … the daily paper. So it’s a monumental duty we wretches have who slug the chaos into sentences arranged in columns on a page of newsprint. If we’re to see things as they are and make our deadlines, we had better not get involved.

The
Telegram
was an evening paper. By two or two-thirty in the afternoon the issue was set. The press run was over by four. At five I would go to Callaghan’s around the corner and stand at the big oak bar with my stein and buy a copy from the lad who came in to hawk them. My greatest pleasure … reading my own paper as if I had not constructed it myself. Summoning the feelings of an ordinary reader getting the news, my construed news, as an
a priori
creation of a higher power—the objective thing-in-itself from heaven-poured type.

What else did I have to assure myself of a stable universe?
Callaghan’s oak bar? Above me was the dark patterned-tin ceiling, behind me the honest unpainted tables and chairs, and a floor of octagonal tiles with clean sawdust under my feet. But Callaghan himself, a florid man with a harsh wheezing breath, was an unfortunate patron of his own wares, and there had been more than one or two foreclosure notices in the window over the years. So much for solid oak. The newsboy, then? Piping his call at the door? But I lie if I say it was always the same one. Newsboys lived warring lives. They battled for their corners with fists and teeth and saps, they were cunning and brazen and brutal with one another. They made payoffs to get their papers early. They climbed stoops and rang doorbells, they muscled each other at the stage stops, they raced through the horsecars, and if they caught your eye, a folded edition was in your hand and the little palm under your chin before you could utter a word. In the trade it was said that newsboys were the statesmen and financiers and railroad magnates of the future. But no publisher wanted to admit that his weighty estate was carried on the small, rounded shoulders of an eight-year-old boy. If any financiers and statesmen were sprung from these urchins, they never made themselves known to me. A lot of them died of venereal and lung diseases. The ones who lived, lived to express the moral infirmities of their class.

I could have thought of Martin Pemberton, the self-impoverished son of a father he had disowned, or who had disowned him: I had come to appreciate his reliably tactless opinion—there was something assured! I wondered one afternoon, standing in Callaghan’s and finding my culture page flat and uninteresting, where in hell he had been lately, Pemberton, because I hadn’t seen him in several weeks. Almost at the same moment, at least I think so now, a messenger came through the door with a packet from my publisher. My publisher was always
sending things around that he thought I ought
to
know. Today there were two items. The first was the latest issue of that organ of Brahmin culture, the
Atlantic Monthly
, in which he’d flagged an article by no less a personage than Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holmes was railing at certain ignorant New York critics who were not sufficiently in awe of his fellow trinomials of New England literary genius, James Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Though he didn’t identify the offending critics, it was clear from his references that Martin Pemberton was one of them—I had run his piece on the subject early in the year, in which he had said of those men, and Mr. Holmes with them, that their names were too long for the work they produced.