The Waterworks (27 page)

S
HORTLY
after reaching Manhattan, Captain Donne found a judge through the local precinct house and procured a court order remanding Dr. Sartorius, for observation, to the Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane on 117th Street and Eleventh Avenue. The rest of the procession continued south into the city but Donne and I were driven by carriage to the New York Central station at Inwood, near the Spuyten Duyvil, and caught a train that would take us to Tarrytown, thirty or so miles up the Hudson. We had risen before dawn but Donne showed no sign of weariness. In fact he could barely sit still. He walked the length of the train several times and finally came to rest standing on an open platform between cars and inhaling the wet wind.

I didn’t know what a capture felt like to a policeman. My own sense of things was that we had drummed the prey into the net…. The undeniably brilliant intellect of Dr. Sartorius rendered him, paradoxically, a wild animal in my mind, a pure unreasoning product of nature. But Donne seemed not even to be thinking of Sartorius. He would not talk about the morning’s work. He’d decided that he knew where Simmons had taken the
dying
Augustus Pemberton. He was supremely confident, as why should he not be? He said: “Even they have sentiments. Their sentiments parody the normal person’s … but I suppose, after all, it makes them human.”

I felt worn down with gloom. After seeing the inside of the waterworks I grieved for Martin Pemberton…. He had been awed by Sartorius and then repelled by him … and then subjected to slow starvation in solitary darkness … which he saw as a kind of penance. I wondered if it was a mistake to expect of him anything more than a continuing and deep state of shock.

By now, midafternoon, the rain had stopped, but the heavy black clouds were still with us, moving low and seeming to keep pace with the locomotive on its journey up the Hudson. In Tarrytown we boarded the river ferry to Sneeden’s Landing, where we hired an open carriage and asked directions of the livery boy … and in a short while were making our way uphill through the forested road, and then along the western bluffs of the river to Ravenwood.

The Hudson is a magnificent wide silver river at this point … and riding along the sheer bluffs with a view of the river southward, and the enormous black agitated sky rushing up from Manhattan, I found myself thinking not that this was the home territory of Augustus Pemberton. I thought instead of Tweed—I felt these excursions out of the city limits were tracing Tweed’s beginning campaigns against the larger nation.

At Ravenwood you came in off the road onto a wide gravel path that went along a quarter mile or so through the woods … very dark that afternoon, like the cavernous inside of something … past some shadowy outbuildings … to a curving drive that circled around enormous hedges … to the entrance steps at the foot of the portico. Here, when the horse was reined
and stood still with a soft shudder, and we no longer had in our ears the sound of its footfalls or the crackle of the carriage wheels on the gravel path, the silent presence of the Italianate mansion made itself felt. It was unlit. Every window was boarded. The great greensward leading down to the river was overgrown with grass that had fallen over on itself. The light was bad—it gave us none of the detail of the house, but only its extent, its length of porch, and … as we sat in the carriage, not realizing that neither of us was in a hurry to get down … a sense of commanding wealth.

I imagined Sarah Pemberton and Noah in residence here. I saw them in the lighted rooms, appearing in one window … and after a moment in another.

Perhaps Donne was thinking along similar lines…. I could not ignore the energy of his pursuit … that it had to do with Sarah. It was really a romance they had made for themselves out of this unholy matter … and I saw an intrepid spirit in it, I suppose, a human means of resistance to the darkest devilishness, the way people have of combining for strength, through their feelings, though I doubt that their understanding of their feelings had been expressed in many words or included, as yet, any declared intentions.

Donne had bestirred himself and was now on the deep porch, walking from one end to the other. I heard him try the front door. I heard his footsteps. It was getting dark rapidly. I got down from the carriage on the river side, and looked down the long, dark slope to the peculiar implication of a river in the lighter sky between the bank and the far bluffs. But then I thought I saw something in the grass about two thirds of the way down the slope.

After a few feet my pants legs were soaked. The rains had left the grounds swampy. It was some consolation that after
sloshing my way down there, I found the corpse of Augustus Pemberton propped on a rattan chaise that was faced toward the river. He, or it, was soaked too, with his bony legs ridged in his trousers, his large bluish feet bare, the toes pointing to heaven, his hands folded, his fingers intertwined … a man at peace … who had lived in the limbo of science and money. The head was turned to the side, as if from its own weight, and I could see the wen on his neck, which had apparently maintained its health amidst the general wasting away. I was not repelled, only curious, and in the fading light was able to see that the bonework of his large head had stretched the skin so taut … and it was so empurpled … that this was no longer a human face possessed of character … and I could not believe it to have been the source of any kind of affection in the heart of a woman of the quality of Sarah Pemberton … or obsessive fascination in the heart of the young Martin Pemberton. I tried to perceive the tyrannic will in these remains, but it was gone, just part of the estate.

With the encroaching darkness the wind began to pick up. I called to Donne. He came down and knelt beside the body, and then stood and peered in every direction, as if something of Augustus Pemberton that should have been there was missing. The wind seemed to be blowing the darkness in upon us. “We need light,” Donne said, and strode back up the slope.

I stood for some minutes beside the body on its chaise, as if it were my orientation in this … wilderness. My camp, my base. I had always made a distinction between what was Nature and what was … City. But that was no longer tenable, was it? The distinction was between all of God’s endless provision … and the newsroom. I longed to be back now in my newsroom, sending the story up to the compositors. Not in this wild—I was not one for the wild.

I felt a perverse admiration for Mr. Pemberton … and for his colleagues of the mortuary fellowship, Mr. Vanderweigh, Mr. Carleton, Mr. Wells, Mr. Brown, Mr. Prine. I saw Sartorius, for all his imperial achievement, as … their servant. They, not he, had ridden up Broadway with the news … that there was no life, no death, but something that was a concurrence of both.

Actually, when the hearing was held to decide if Sartorius should be permanently committed to the insane asylum or put on trial, this same idea, his servitude to wealth, was brought up by Dr. Sumner Hamilton, one of the three alienists on the Commissio de Lunatico Inquirendo. But I will get to that. Donne came running back with a kerosene lamp he had found by breaking into a gardener’s shed. In the light of the lamp I saw Augustus’s gray hair receding at the front of the skull but rising in a billow at the crown. “Someone had to close the eyes,” Donne said, and holding the lamp over his head, he made his way to the land’s edge.

Now, as I have said, there was a narrow cut downward to a scaffolded wood stairs that had been built down the sheer bluff to the beach several stories below. In this bad light, from the top platform, we did not at first see the broken railing halfway down. What we saw below was a skiff blowing about at anchor a few feet off the shore, its unfurled sail dragging in the water.

While I waited there, Donne went down the stairs. I watched as the light descended, growing brighter in itself but casting less and less illumination for my benefit with each of his steps. Then he called, and telling me to tread cautiously and stay to the wall side, he bid me come down … which I did. We stood on a platform perhaps two thirds of the way down: the railing here was entirely gone, and resumed, jaggedly, halfway down the next flight of steps.

We got down the rest of the way and found a man on his back with his head almost entirely pounded into the sandbank by a seaman’s footlocker, which, nevertheless, he continued to hold in his arms as the object of his love. Donne said quietly it was ’Tace Simmons. There was a great mess of blood and matter around the head, which had struck some sort of rock under the sand. One of the eyes had been dislodged from its socket. When we pulled the footlocker out of the stiffened arms, the latches, which had no padlocks, fell open with a clink. Donne opened the top of the chest back on its hinges … and there, filling it from top to bottom, were stacks of greenbacks, federal gold certificates of every denomination … and even shinplasters, notes for amounts less than a dollar. Donne remarked that apparently not all of Mr. Pemberton’s fortune had been turned over to the enterprise of endless life. “Cunning to the end” was what he said by way of eulogy, but with respect to the factotum Simmons or to the old man up on the bluff, I could not tell.

Twenty-six

T
HE
laws of New York State held—for all I know they still do—that a person committed to an insane asylum by anyone other than a legal relation has to be examined by a board of qualified alienists … to determine if the commitment is appropriate. Sartorius had no living relations. The doctors at the Bloomingdale facility having recommended his confinement in the New York State Institution for the Criminally Insane on Blackwell’s Island, a state-appointed Commissio de Lunatico Inquirendo, as the alienists themselves so delicately put it, was called into session. All this in a matter of weeks. It was unseemly haste on the part of the medical community! The Commissio was not a court and had no obligation to make its hearings public. I was beside myself. Try as I might, I couldn’t sit in. At one point, I know, they adjourned to the waterworks to examine Sartorius’s facilities. They called on Martin Pemberton for his testimony … and somehow Dr. Grimshaw, terribly exercised by the thought that Sartorius might not stand before a court for his crimes, arranged to be heard before them. Donne was not called, nor was I.

No written record was made of their deliberations. The
report of the Commissio was sealed by court order and to this day has never been released. But let me tell you about institutional thought. Whatever the institution … and however worthy or substantive … its mind is not an entirely human mind … though it is made up of human minds. If it were really human it would be capable of surprises…. If it were wholly human it would be motivated by all sorts of noble or ignoble ideas. But the institutional mind has only one mental operation: It abhors truth.

The head of the Commissio was Dr. Sumner Hamilton, a leading psychiatrist of the city. He was a stout, heavily jowled man who waxed his mustaches and combed his thin black hair crosswise, ear to ear. He loved good food and wine, as I was to learn, after footing the bill for our dinner at Delmonico’s years later … when he was quite willing to talk.

“I had of course heard rumors of a scientific orphanage.” Hamilton’s voice was a very deep, resonant bass. “Somewhere up on the East River, or north of the Central Park, or in the Heights…. I didn’t know exactly what
scientific
was supposed to mean. On the other hand, an orphanage presumably set up to test modern theories of behavior or health or education seemed likely, even inevitable, given everything going on in New York … everything changing, modernity driving all before it.”

“Had you ever met Sartorius?”

“No.”

“Had you heard of him?”

“Never. But I’ll tell you, I knew he was a good doctor the minute I laid eyes on him. I mean, you would trust him to do what had to be done. Not the personality. No bedside manner there. But the quality of mind. Very strong, powerful. He answered
only the questions he felt deserved an answer. We ended up trying to formulate questions he respected! Can you imagine? I thought … if I poke around his disinterest, the pure science he seems to … exemplify, I might get a rise out of him. Crack him a bit, see what’s underneath. I suggested that he was one of those doctors who attach themselves to the wealthy. There are not a few like that, who take their practice to the money, I can tell you. I was deliberately rude. I asked if, after all, he was no more than a kind of … medical valet.

“He said—and I can’t give you that accent … it was so slight, vaguely European, but he might have been a Hungarian or a Slav as easily as a German—he said: ‘Do you imagine, Dr. Hamilton, I would have as a purpose merely to keep certain wealthy men alive? That that end would interest me, of itself? I maintained them in the context of my larger interests, not as a physician but as a natural scientist. Whatever their own desires, or grandiose intentions, I told each of them exactly what I would endeavor to do … that might, incidentally, be to his advantage … and that is just what I have done…. Whether this one hoped for a normal recovery, or that one for extended life, or another cherished a vision of eternal life, that was their business. I offered them something they understood quite well … an investment. They were qualified for my attention not by their wit or the importance to mankind of their continued life, the gifts they had to give for the benefit of society, or the fact that they were good and kind … but precisely by their wealth. This work cannot be done unless it is endowed. It requires money. They were qualified subjects by reason of their wealth and self-qualified by their rapacity—these seemed to be the essential things, and not at all in short supply in the city of New York. But in addition, each one of my gentlemen was given by
nature to secrecy, to conspiracy, they were ultimate conspirators, this amiable circle, they not only wanted what I offered, they wanted it only for themselves.’