The Waterworks (6 page)

A moment later he is on his knees in the street, the horses having suddenly been reined and just as abruptly whipped forward again, as if the driver up on the box had deliberately intended to shake him loose. He hears someone shouting and manages to struggle to his feet just in time to avoid a trampling. He staggers to the sidewalk, his nose bleeding, his hands lacerated, his clothes soaked and torn, and is aware of none of this as he looks northward through the rain to the vanishing white stage and whispers “Father! Father!” with all the destroyed love he has ever felt reanimated in an instant of total credulity.

“‘Father! Father!’” Dr. Grimshaw cried out in his weak tenor. He had been made quite breathless by his account.

Seven

A
T
least I knew now why my freelance had shown up at the
Telegram
with his copy soiled with blood. In the interest of my own newsmaking, I would not allow myself to think of his anguish. I simply held it in my mind as something that would magnify whatever information I collected, or distort it, or bend it into its spectral bands…. In fact this had not been the first—what shall we call it?—sighting. The first had occurred a month before, in March, during a heavy snow, and was afterward reported by Martin to his fiancée, Emily Tisdale, but in a context of the difficulties between them that would not let her believe anything was being represented as it really was.

But I’ll get to that.

When Grimshaw finished his account we sat for some moments in silence while he regained his composure. Then I asked him what his reaction had been to Martin’s story. “Did you say what he said you would have to say?”

“I suppose I did, yes. I felt an immense compassion, of course…. I tell you frankly, I have never liked Martin. I thought his attitude toward his father quite unconscionable. He’d always been contrary, contentious—always. With everyone.
For him to come knocking at the door of St. James … had to be an act of desperation. Obviously the apparition of his father was a torment of his mind. A phantom event summoned up by his guilt. Well, so could it be his first blind groping for forgiveness. I am not an alienist but neither am I a stranger to the healing of pastoralia. There was something to be accomplished here, there was an opportunity for Christ, or else why did the young man come to me, after all?

“I began by asking if he remembered the omnibus in any detail.

“‘Only that it was one of the white stages of the Municipal Transport.’

“It was unusual that a city stage would have only one sort of passenger, I told him. Public transport is used by everyone—humanity in all its array stuffs itself aboard these coaches.

“‘You are right, of course,’ he said. He laughed. ‘Was it a dream, then?’ He touched his skinned forehead. ‘Yes, I have heard of dreams that draw blood.’

“‘You didn’t dream,’ I said. ‘Probably the stage was chartered by a lodge or learned society. That would account for the brotherhood of old men. And the fall you took was quite real, I can see that.’

“‘I’m grateful to you!’ Color was now in his cheeks, he listened as a man well entertained.

“‘And as for the old men, they are like old men everywhere,’ I said. ‘They fall asleep on any and all occasions, even, as I can tell you, during the most eloquent sermon.’

“‘Another point well taken!’ He frowned and rubbed his temples. ‘Which leaves only my father.’

“‘Your father or the image of him in the darkness through the streaks of rain … I can say only that as Christian doctrine has it, Resurrection is so truly exceptional that it has so far
occurred only once in history.’ You see, I thought a bit of levity might not be out of place. I thought he would appreciate the joke, but perverse as always, Martin rose from his chair and looked solemnly down at me. ‘I do beg your pardon, Reverend, you are not the fool that most of your calling are. I had worried you might be one of those pastors who secretly attend séances. You don’t, do you?’

“‘No, I can assure you.’

“He nodded. ‘I am so glad. We should have a chat sometime. You don’t think I saw a ghost, do you?’

“‘Not a ghost,’ I said keeping my own gaze level. ‘I think, for the explanation of what it was you saw, we must look into your history.’ At that he became enraged. ‘Into my mind, you mean? Into my poor plagued mind? Is that where we look?’ He leaned over with his hands flat on my desk and put his face up close and stared directly at me—the crudest, most pugnacious gesture, like a bully, like a common street thug. ‘You look, if you wish, Reverend. Let me know what you find there.’ And with that he threw open the door and was gone.”

Tea was brought in. Reverend Grimshaw poured and the cup rattled in the saucer when he reached across his desk to set it in front of me. I didn’t question his account. It had the accuracy of reflection of a victim. There was always the clash of cultures from a contact with Martin, as if he carried his own thunderstorms wherever he went. More cruelly, he had subjected the old priest to a kind of roughhouse. He wanted assurance that the whole thing was a delusion—“You will say what you will have to say and then I’ll be able to get some sleep”—and when the assurance was duly given, he turned on him.

But I also wondered if perhaps Martin had not believed it—that the purpose of his visit was really to look in the old man’s eyes and see how much of a liar he was. Grimshaw had
eulogized his father. Every wall of St. James had been buttressed by Pemberton money. The old families had fled, but the once-indentured servant had remained steadfast. Martin’s vision was precise—and the ground for it was the noisy, heedless everydayness of the commonest scene in New York. Augustus Pemberton was among the living. He was the old man seen twice riding a public stage through the streets of Manhattan. I did not know it at the time, I was still to hear of the other, but it was possible to understand that even if madness was the more desirable of the explanations available to my freelance … for, after all, what was worse than thinking he was insane was knowing that he was not … nothing Grimshaw said could alter the reality of the experience, and when he suggested the answer was in the imagery Martin himself had projected, the opportunity for Christ and the healing of pastoralia was lost.

It all had to do, more than Grimshaw knew, with those sandwich-board enthusiasts wandering the streets and appropriating his church stoop for their ministries. A prophet of the Millennium would have understood the vision of the white stage and laid his hands upon Martin Pemberton’s head and pressed him kneeling to the New York City pavement and shouted his praise to the Lord for giving to this youth the power to see Satan and recognize evil in no matter what insidiously loving form it appeared … and would have been not far off the mark. But in his rectory, behind his walls, his steeple lost in the shadows of factories, Charles Grimshaw was thirsting for historical verification of the words of Scripture. He was right in thinking the Sumerian account of the Flood in
Gilgamesh
was good material for the
Telegram
. We ran filler like that all the time—everyone did: Mrs. Elwood, an English traveler, reported that she stood on the shore of the Red Sea at Kosseir at dawn and saw the sun rise over the water not in its usual form
but in the shape of a shimmering column. We put it at the bottom of page one … as confirmation of the pillar of fire that for forty years gave light to the Israelites in the wilderness. But this was for our readership of imperfect believers. Did Grimshaw understand that looking for confirmation of the ancient claims could lead to disastrous, looming … error?

I had nothing against the good doctor except that he had worn away, as we all do, and his religion no longer had any authority … other than as organizer of his daily life and conduct and as filing system for his perceptions. At this time, in the seventies, phrenology was all the rage, and of course it was nonsense, but as a system for organizing perceptions it was about as good. There were three basic Temperaments to be deduced from the configurations of skulls, Martin with his slight figure but high brainy brow being of the Mental Temperament—Grimshaw himself a weaker example of this—the other two being the Motive Temperament, which described the long bones and homely visage and reliably logical thought of the late president—and perhaps my own dour Scotch-Irish self as well—and the Vital, which described the fleshy, life-loving appetitiveness and vulgarity of someone like Harry Wheelwright. Of course these were the pure strains, whereas most people participated in more than one, impurely, and there was some question as to whether the race of women wouldn’t require their own special skull readings…. It was absolute nonsense, of no scientific value whatsoever, but a convenience of thought, like astrology, or the organization of time into the six days of the week and the Sabbath. I’ll give you more filler: In 1871 archaeologists found a sacred ossuary cave at Monte Circeo on the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea and uncovered the skull of a Neanderthal buried in a circle of stones among the bones of deer, horse, hyena, and bear … with the cranium
severed from the jaw and brow and used for a drinking bowl. And so we knew at last how old God was—as old … as the mortuary cult of the people of the Middle Paleolithic before the last glaciation.

After Martin stormed out of the rectory, Grimshaw took up his pen and wrote a letter to the widow Pemberton at her estate on the Hudson in Piermont, New York, informing her of his opinion of the tenuous state of her stepson’s mind, which, perhaps out of guilt, had summoned up a haunting delusion. He suggested that he could call on her at such time as she visited Manhattan, or, in turn, would be only too pleased to journey to Ravenwood … that was the name of the estate … but in any event she should be assured Christ’s ministry was available to the Pemberton family as it always had been. This was a reasonable course of action but apparently it was the only one he took. He had seen Martin the evening of the same rainy day I had seen him, and in more or less the same torn, bloodied condition. And he had made no effort to see him since. So what was the nature of his faith and the degree of his concern? Sarah Pemberton had not replied to his letter, which I might have thought puzzling, but which apparently did not surprise him into renewing his efforts. Was he only worn away … to the level of the laity? So that the rudeness and patronizing ironies of the offensive young man were finally too much to forgive? Or was there an impacting loyalty to the father, of what protectiveness I could not imagine, but which put the image in my mind of a dog baying for his lost master?

It was dark when I left the rectory. Grimshaw saw me outside and stood with me in the churchyard. The old gravestones cast shadows in the light from the street. Around them the grass was high, untended.

“Which is Mr. Pemberton’s grave?”

“Oh, he is not here. And it wouldn’t have been the churchyard, it would have been the mausoleum reserved for the elders. I offered it, but he refused. He said he was not worthy.”

“Augustus Pemberton said that?”

Grimshaw smiled in satisfaction, the same fearful, ingratiating smile that took him through every manner of joy and suffering that rolled day and night through all the years of his pastorate. “People who didn’t know him are surprised to hear of Augustus’s humility. I grant you he was not always—what can I say?—in his conduct as … selfless as he might have been. But there it is. No, by his own request he is buried up in Fordham, in the Woodlawn Cemetery.”

Well, that is a fashionable enough place, I thought to myself. It was at the time the most blue-blooded of our graveyards, the consecrated ground of choice. Apparently, Dr. Grimshaw was not disposed to wonder why the man who had not cut his ties with St. James in his long life did abandon her for the duration of his far longer death.

Eight

E
MILY
Tisdale consented to my call because she knew of me as Martin’s sometime employer and thought I might have word of him, if not from him, and could tell her where he was. Since this, in fact, was what I hoped from her, it took me only a moment to understand that the young woman sitting before me, her intelligent brown eyes widened with a receptiveness to the news I might have, but with the head just a shade averted in anticipation that it might be bad, knew no more than would the author of those unopened blue vellum letters I had seen stuck by their points in the ashes of the hearth on Greene Street.