The Waterworks (30 page)

The footlocker that had killed Simmons held a fortune—something in the neighborhood of one and a half million dollars. This was presented to Sarah Pemberton as her due—please don’t be shocked—with no overexacting concern for the laws of probate.

That winter I was a guest at two weddings held within a week of each other. Martin Pemberton and Emily Tisdale were married, by their preference, in the open air, on the garden terrace of the Tisdale home on Lafayette Place. Dr. Grimshaw, who, in the course of these events, seemed to have simplified his spiritual life into a steady and perpetual disapproval of everyone and everything on earth, conducted the ceremony with his little neat nose red from the cold and with a bead of clear liquid hanging from its tip. The bride, typical of her practical nature, wore a white satin gown with a lace shawl about the shoulders … very simple in its lines, with no undue embellishments, and the simplest of veils, which lay like a celestial white leaf over her hair. Real remnant leaves from the earth, in orange and yellow and brown, blew about our feet, and the only music was the wind coming off the dormant garden. As Grimshaw read the service in his high thin voice, I saw from behind how the bride held the arm of her groom, from elbow to clasped hand, and tight to her side, to prop him up, or herself, or perhaps both of them. They were matched in height and in youth and in the history of their childhood lives … a perfect match, and consecrated in the appropriate place, overlooking their small walled park, hidden from the city … which is the way nature hopes to survive in New York.

I was circumspect in my examination of the bride’s figure, though angered by what I imagined were the similar longings of the large wheezing fellow who stood beside me … even though, in what I supposed was a capitulation of sorts, he had brought as a wedding present the portrait of Emily he had painted for himself. When the bride said her “I do,” her voice cracking in her joy, my heart, I like to think, was broken forever.

Sarah Pemberton was in attendance, of course, radiant to be resolved in her widowhood, Donne by her side … and the elderly Lavinia Pemberton Thornhill, back from her annual general inspection of Europe. Mrs. Thornhill was exactly as she had been described to me, a fussy old woman of wealth who wore an old-fashioned hoop gown and a wig that didn’t sit quite straight on her head. She had a peremptory way about her … a family trait … and seemed to be satisfied only by the conversation of Emily’s father, Amos Tisdale, who was roughly her own distinguished age and thereby deserving of her attention. Of course she had not been told anything at all … and since her connection to Martin all his life had been tenuous, at best, in the great tradition of this in-name-only family, she kept looking at him as if trying to assure herself that he was indeed her late brother’s son.

Noah, dressed in a short-pants suit with his hair combed back and his shoes shined, served as best man, a role he performed with a solemnity no greater or less than his everyday solemnity. He handed the ring up in its little velvet box on the palms of both his hands to his stepbrother, and it was this moment… seeing in his hazel eyes as he glanced up at Martin the manly compact that he made with him … that secured for me the revelation of our rituals … this old lapsed Scotch Presbyterian, his suppressed tears swallowed in his throat … that they are made holy truth by the children.

The ceremony done, we all got ourselves inside to the parlor quickly enough, where there were mulled wine and cocoa and plates of wedding cake. Amos Tisdale had graciously refused to express his misgivings … and sealed his determination by bestowing upon the young couple a six-month Grand Tour of Europe in the following spring. When this was announced, to congratulatory applause, Harry Wheelwright was inspired to recall to me his own trip abroad. He spoke with that reflective self-assessment people are given to at weddings. “I went to Europe,” he said, “to stand before the work of the Masters, and so I did … in Holland, in Spain, and in Italy. I would have done better … just to drop to my knees and touch my forehead to the cold floors in front of them.”

“You didn’t learn anything? You were not inspired?”

“Yes, I was inspired. I was inspired to run through my capital until I had left only the price of a decent second-class passage home…. My inspiration was to forget art … and simply paint the faces and figures of my fellow citizens—at least those who would pay me. To find the character in the eyes, the mouth, the chosen posture—wasn’t that, after all, what this Rembrandt had done, this Velazquez? I would be a fellow tradesman, however obscure. I would share the intent, at least, to paint human faces unlocated, with nothing behind them … alone in the universe.”

He drank off his wine. “But, you know, they loved every ruffle of the collar, every line of the chin, every brown shadow in the corner. Nothing was scanted, it was all light of one kind or another, and they loved light … whatever it fell on. They were helpless to do anything but render it. I knew I had that … love of light. But if it was to be called art, what I did, others could think about it, I would not … ever again. And that is what I’ve done.”

I could not decide if Harry deserved my congratulations for conceding … in the history of western art there might have been a better painter or two. But I would have preferred to go on listening to Harry if I had known Martin Pemberton would collar me to express his gratitude. Martin was overheard, unfortunately, and in another moment the others had gathered around … all of them apparently dedicated to embarrassing me to the utmost.

My freelance said with an awful earnestness: “You saved my life, Mr. McIlvaine.” I found this remark almost frightening, like a confirmation of his permanent mental decline. It was the same pale fellow with thinning blond hair and penetrating gray eyes and intensity of expression … but the thought was banal.

Then Emily, my dear Emily, stood on her toes and kissed my cheek…. This was intolerable to me, although none of them understood why … and then they all laughed because I had turned red.

“Captain Donne found your fellow,” I said to her.

I looked up at Donne, standing behind everyone and towering over them. Well understanding my discomfiture, he said: “Mr. McIlvaine saw before anyone else that something was … amiss.” Can you imagine? He used that word for everything I’ve been telling you! “Amiss”! “He came to see me—it was he who brought in the Municipals.”

“Mr. McIlvaine has done us all a great great service,” Sarah Pemberton said, placing her hand on Donne’s arm and gazing at me with her Mother of God composure.

I don’t even know why I’m repeating this—so that you’ll forgive them, perhaps. The way people, the best people, must go spiraling off in the resolution of things. As if there would be no memory. No carriage coming up Broadway that will forever be the white stage with the nodding old men in black.

I can’t tell you how deeply I abhor our custom of steadfast carrying on … in the manner of people of our sort. The women are mostly responsible for that. In the obituaries we speak of survivors. “Mr. Pemberton is survived by …” I want you to understand the devastation … I felt was in that parlor … among Augustus Pemberton’s survivors. I could feel it in myself … like a bit of indissoluble ash on the tongue. Nevertheless I made some cheerful remark about the future. The young couple would be abroad for a year. I told Martin that when he returned I expected to have an assignment for him. I had gotten a new job, you see, as assistant city editor on the
Sun
. He said with a wan smile: “I will be willing and able.”

And I think finally that’s why I never wrote up the story—not because it would not be heard but because it was his … his patrimony…. For a writer the story is his patrimony … and he might, someday, come into it … my freelance. My freelance.

I did go to the other wedding, on the Sunday following, in the afternoon, at St. James Episcopal on Laight Street. We were in the December of the year. It had snowed in the interval, leaving the entire city white … and then in brilliant sunlight the air had warmed, and then turned bitter cold, coating everything in an icy glaze.

The wedding party was augmented by a number of policemen in uniform, as well as parishioners who had elected to stay after the service to see who was getting married. In their sight of the bride they were well rewarded, Sarah being a creature of uncompromised grace, regal in a pale blue gown … that matched her eyes. She did not seem ever, that I remember, to hurry… and now, coming down the aisle on Martin’s arm to the soft measures of the organ, she seemed to flow, this great beauty, surely one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen … the wide full mouth in a smile, the unveiled head slightly tilted.

Donne stood in terror at the steps to the altar. Before him was the Reverend Charles Grimshaw in his best-laundered white surplice and a white stole embroidered in gold, his chin raised, his determinedly cheerful gaze on the empty balcony at the rear of the nave. Perhaps the rector was thinking of the first time this woman had married—a far grander occasion, when it was a far different church … filled with the names of the city … and the only policemen were those on guard outside.

So there, with the organ playing, and the roof beams of St. James in a kind of perpetual dusk, though the winter light came planing through the clerestory windows, and the stained-glass
Deposition
behind the altar glowed with the colors of the sun … was God as he is now composed.

And Donne and Sarah were married. I did not stay long afterward. The reception was in the parsonage, with a red punch from a cut-glass bowl, and cocoa, and the small round cakes with pink icing that were then very fashionable—not really my native kind of revel. Sarah Pemberton Donne told me they had found a house on West Eleventh Street, a red brick with french windows with wrought-iron balconies and a front yard with a tree in it and a wide granite stoop … a quiet street with all the houses set back and little traffic … though Noah would have to change schools. Donne curved himself downward to shake my hand and admitted to what I had heard around town, that he had been approached by reformist elements in the Republican party who had it in mind … if all went well in the elections … to offer him the post of police commissioner with a mandate to clean up the Municipals.

I remember how still the city was that afternoon as I walked uptown from the church. It was brilliantly sunny and terribly cold and the streets were empty. The footing was treacherous. Everything was thickly glazed…. Horsecars were
frozen to their rails, as were the locomotives on their elevated railway of ice…. The masts and sheets of the ships in the docks were ensheathed in ice…. Ice floes lay in the viscous river…. The ironfronts on Broadway seemed in the sun to be burning in ice…. The trees on the side streets were of crystal.

Of course it was Sunday, the day of rest. But my illusion was that the city had frozen in time. All our mills and foundries and presses were still … our lathes and our boilers … our steam engines and pulleys and pumps and forges. Our stores were shut … our carriage works and iron works and sewing-machine and typewriter factories … our telegraph stations … our exchanges … our carpentries … our electroplaters … our stoneyards and lumberyards … our abattoirs and fish markets … our hosiery mills and garment shops … our smithies and stables … our manufacturers of tool dies and turbines and steam dredges and railroad cars and horse collars … our gunsmiths and silversmiths … our stoveworks and tinware stampers … our coopers and clockmakers and ship chandlers … our brickworks … our makers of ink and our paper mills … our book publishers … our mowers and harvesters and sowers and reapers—all still, unmoving, stricken, as if the entire city of New York would be forever encased and frozen, aglitter and God-stunned.

And let me leave you with that illusion … though in reality we would soon be driving ourselves up Broadway in the new Year of Our Lord, 1872.

E. L. DOCTOROW’S work has been published in thirty languages. His novels include
City of God, Welcome to Hard Times, The Book of Daniel, Ragtime
,
Loon Lake, Lives of the Poets, World’s Fair, Billy Bathgate
, and
The March
. Among his honors are the National Book Award, two PEN/Faulkner Awards, three National Book Critics Circle awards, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. He lives in New York.