The Waterworks (22 page)

I don’t know if I can portray the effect of an overriding mentality…. This man I had never seen seemed to characterize the room where Martin lay. He took the shape of everything—the painted iron bed, the wooden chairs, the white plaster walls, and the chair rail. That we were here was willed by him. The calm, meditative face staring up from the pillow had been given its expression by him.

It was sheer misery not to have my paper … to read it every day and see that it was no longer mine. It did what I would not have done, it said what I would not have said. This too was Sartorius. He was my disempowerment.

I had not seen him, at this point, you understand, but I hold his image in my mind and I will assign it to him here, out of the chronology of things … to suggest the force of him … as if we were able to derive him from the disaster he had brought about.

A commanding figure, not tall, but military in his bearing … slender stature and with the stillness of consummate self-confidence … wearing the customary frock coat, slightly puffed at the shoulder seams, and the vest with fabric-covered buttons, and the wide loosely tied cravat with stickpin. The overall impression is of neatness, self-containment. Thick black hair cut short. His cheeks and upper lip and chin are clean-shaven, but burnsides frame his jaw and continue under the chin and curl around the throat like a woolen scarf tucked in under the collar. Black, implacable eyes, surprisingly opaque, with a kind of desolation in them … a harsh impersonality, reminding me of Sherman, William Tecumseh Sherman. Good rounded forehead, slightly domed, thin, straight nose, thin-lipped, abstemious mouth. I’ll animate him with an action: He holds a watch on a fob, glances at it, and slips it back into his vest pocket.

When Martin was finally well enough to leave the hospital, all our spirits rose. He was weak, and needed support as he walked, but he’d begun to recognize his surroundings … and he responded with a nod or a soft, barely uttered word to our questions. It was very gradual, and natural, his return to consciousness, by degrees, with the first responsive light in his eyes as they turned to Emily as she sat by him. But he still didn’t
speak. Donne attempted, gently, to ask some crucial questions, but Martin could not or would not answer.

It was decided that he would convalesce at the Tisdales’. This was Emily’s proposal, to which her father, a good if wary Christian, consented, and Sarah Pemberton agreed. Sarah could not really offer a home that wasn’t hers. Martin’s own place was long since let to someone else, and the dark rooms where I lived then, three stories up on Bleecker Street, were clearly as unconducive to recuperation as Harry Wheelwright’s studio would be.

Those first warm, honeyed afternoons of October, Martin Pemberton sat outside on a chaise with a plaid blanket over his legs. From the terrace at Lafayette Place, he could look out over the private park of his childhood. I had never seen Emily so happy. She went back and forth and fussed and brought tea and whatever else she could find to heal his spirit, or to signify her prayerful desire for her love to heal him. The leaves were beginning to fall, one by one, boating down on the breeze, and mooring themselves against the stone balustrade. I came to see Martin almost every day, as did Edmund Donne. One day we were discussing Sartorius. Just for the sake of argument, I considered the possibility that he might have fled, like Eustace Simmons. That perhaps they had bought themselves a ship and taken themselves and their charges to—where was it Donne had suggested? Portugal?

“No,” Donne said. “He’s here. He wouldn’t run. He doesn’t have Simmons’s criminal soul.”

“He doesn’t? What does he have then?”

I had been aware of Martin’s alertness to the conversation. In the moment before he spoke it occurred to me that he was in agreement with Donne … from the glance he gave him, or
perhaps the set of the facial muscles in the instant before the mouth utters agreement.

“The doctor is not an immoralist,” Martin said. We looked at him. He was gazing at a small bird who had hopped up on the tea caddy. “He never attempted to justify himself to me. Or to lie. Or indicated in any way that he felt… culpable.”

It was an amazing moment…. Pemberton was in total possession of himself, as if, all this time, he had been waiting for a subject of conversation that interested him. I decided immediately that I mustn’t make anything of it … thinking he might be—what?—frightened back into his catatonia. In the next moment Sarah Pemberton had come out on the terrace with Noah, after calling for him at his school, and Martin recognized them both and held out his arms for the boy…. We were all so astounded. Sarah Pemberton gasped. She called out for Emily to come quickly. She was overcome…. She stood where Martin couldn’t see her and wept and turned to Donne and put her hands over her face while he held her to him. Martin meanwhile was asking Noah about his classes….

And so that was the day we began to hear of it … everything, from the first sight of the white stage. What was it like? I think I was put in mind of a war hero. Yes, we listened to Martin as if he were a hero returned from the front. We were not inclined to be critical. These were his war stories, told for our wonderment. But I have to admit my euphoria didn’t last. I began soon enough to suspect that Martin’s recovery was not complete. When he referred to Sartorius he spoke of him without the slightest anger or bitterness. Overall, he spoke from some sort of peaceful resolution, or becalming … of the intensity in all his feeling. I was unable to tell how much of
this to attribute to his physical ordeal. But his nature was changed … the characteristic impatience … the suffered worldview … all of it softened, or chastened. He was tacitly … grateful. To all of us. He was appreciative! God forgive me—I could only think this spelled ruin for him as a writer.

Twenty-one

I
KNEW
the way to my father was through Eustace Simmons,” Martin told us. “Simmons came out of the … maritime life. I went along West Street, around the Battery, to South Street…. I went into every sailors’ bar, every saloon, every dance hall in the Port of New York … with no luck. Then I thought, my father being … absent, Simmons would represent his interests around town. The situation elevated him to the higher class of thieves.

“One night I had the assignment from the
Tatler
to go to the Astor House, where Boss Tweed and his friends were giving a testimonial dinner to a Tammany Club ward leader. They all wore the emblematic tiger in their lapels, the gold head of a tiger relieved in blue enamel … the eyes set with rubies. A very young girl danced on a table in a belted diaphanous gown … and at her feet, following her every move with the discrimination of a … connoisseur, was Eustace Simmons. I hadn’t seen him in many years but I knew him immediately. A cadaverous man, dressed well but with the effect somehow of dishevelment… he was slouched back in his chair. The dimmed light brought out the ruin of his face—he is pitted and pocked, the
skin under the eyes is black, the head of wiry hair graying and combed across from ear to ear, and the whole aspect of him, somehow … dirty-looking.

“A few minutes later, I sat down in the chair next to his and could see he recognized me. Someone was making a speech. There was laughter and applause. I said in Simmons’s ear that I wanted to see my father. He gave no indication that he heard me … but after a pause to light his cigar, he rose from the table and sauntered out of the dining room. I followed, as he trusted I would.

“It was peculiar and it shocked me at first, but I respected him for not attempting to deny my father was alive. He has a quick mind, Simmons, and I think he knew within moments of my appearance what he would do.

“He got his hat and left the Astor House with me right behind him. His carriage was around the corner. In the light of the streetlamp I caught a glimpse of the driver. I can’t adequately … express what I felt at the sight of him … the same driver of the white stage with my father and the other old men. I didn’t want to get into the hansom. Simmons shouted ‘Wrangel!’ and the driver leapt down and locked a powerful arm across my throat so that I couldn’t breathe … though I could smell the onions on his breath … while Simmons caught me behind the ear with what I suppose was a sap. I saw a sudden bright light. I don’t know what happened then or how much time passed. I was aware of motion, then of the motion conferred to a carriage by a team of horses … then of painful daylight … then of two or three small faces staring at me. I was looking at children. It was day…. I tried to rouse myself…. I was not tied but I could not move. I think, on top of everything, they must have drugged me. I couldn’t seem to get to my feet. I toppled over and a child screamed. Then I was on my back,
looking at the battened ceiling … of what, in the moment before I passed out entirely … I realized was a public omnibus of the Municipal Transport Company.

“Let me say here that the driver, Wrangel, is of less consequence in all of this than you think. He is strong, fearsome to look at, with those colorless pupils … and I could barely speak or swallow after he’d put his armlock on me … but his appearance ought not be held against him. He’s like a good horse. That’s all he is, a loyal stolid soul who asks no questions. He’s a Prussian. They’re brought up to be that way, the Germans, with their strict parents and titled officers … who teach them obedience, obedience above all. Wrangel reveres Dr. Sartorius. He served under him in the medical corps. His most treasured possession is their field hospital unit citation, signed by President Lincoln. He showed it to me one day. He thinks when Simmons tells him to do something, it is what Sartorius wants.

“The doctor himself I find difficult to represent to you. He doesn’t expend his energies on the formation of a … social self. He is quiet, almost ascetic in his habits, courteous, unprepossessing. He has no vanity that can be appealed to or flattered or insulted. You will wonder, as I did, how someone so careless, someone so uninterested in putting himself forward, or seeking advantage, could … marshal… the immense resources needed for his work. But he doesn’t—he simply allows things to happen around him. He takes what is to hand, he accepts what his … devotees press on him. It’s as if … there’s an alignment of historical energies magnetized on him which … for all I know, is probably all … that makes him visible.

“I wasn’t brought to him for another day or so after I recovered consciousness. I had no idea, and have no idea today, where this was…. There was always … only indoor light. I
never saw a window. Up close, and third in a sequence after Simmons and Wrangel, Sartorius appeared to me in his modest demeanor as a mere medical attendant to Augustus Pemberton, a retainer, one of those doctors whose practices are limited to one or two wealthy patients.

“In this view I felt I had every right to my anger. I was Augustus’s son, after all, with the contemptuous attitude of the line. I was loud and righteous. I demanded to know if I had been manhandled under standing orders from my father. ‘How like him to put others between us!’ I said. ‘Is he still afraid to face me? Is he still afraid to answer to me?’ Sartorius was calm. He asked, as if simply to satisfy his own curiosity, how I had learned my father was alive.

“‘I have seen him, sir. Do not patronize me. I have seen everything. I have seen the grave in Woodlawn where a child is interred in his place.’

“He wasn’t cowed—on the contrary. He leaned forward and peered at me. I told him how I had gone to Woodlawn and dug up the coffin. I then felt it necessary to tell him why I had come to that … desperate measure, beginning with my sight of the white stage, in the snow, going past the reservoir. I didn’t quite understand how the conversation had turned so that I was … confiding in this man. Yet I was … and with relief.

“He said: ‘The possibility always exists of exciting notice, of course, though … I think you are an exception to most people … in acting upon your illusions.’ This was said in a tone of approval. ‘What is your profession, Mr. Pemberton?’

“You understand at no point, then or afterward, did Sartorius attempt to deny anything, or to equivocate. He never tried to justify himself to me. My appearance had aroused his interest, not his concern. At moments during our interview I felt myself a specimen that had swum into his field of vision. He’s
a scientist. He does not think of defending his actions. He is not weakened with a conscience…. Once I inquired of his religion. He was raised a Lutheran, but Christianity he regards as no more than a poetic conceit. He doesn’t even bother to criticize it, or mock it or disavow it.

“‘If you want to see your father, of course you may,’ Sartorius said to me. ‘I doubt you will get satisfaction. This is something for which you cannot have prepared yourself. The perceptions of a merely moral intelligence, even of filial love or hatred, won’t suffice. I suppose it is no business of mine. But what will you say to this … papa … you thought was a dead man?’

“Of course that was the question I had never permitted myself to ask. He must have read the desperation on my face. What indeed could I do? Embrace my father? Celebrate his resurrection? Cry with joy that he was alive? Or did I just want to tell him … that I
knew!
That I knew … And salute him for having found a depth of human deceit and betrayal beyond my conceiving.