The Waterworks (8 page)

But I am sensitive to architecture. It can inadvertently
express the monstrousness of culture. As the complicit expression of the ideals of organized human life it can call forth horror. And then something happens appropriate to it, and maybe from its malign influence….

Several years before Martin walked in the shadow of its wall, a boy was drowned off the cobbled bank at the west end of the reservoir. I was there on the Fifth Avenue side—I was there with the one woman I have ever seriously considered marrying. Fanny Tolliver was her name, a generous, dear woman with a glorious head of auburn hair who was much amused by me … but within months was to succumb to heart failure…. It was not clear what had happened, I heard shouts, people were running. The sun had spread over the water’s surface. And then the scene clarified as we went toward it along the parapet…. The child was pulled feetfirst from the water by a man who … I have since decided … was bearded, and this bearded man wrapped him in his frock coat and rushed him directly past us, down the steps to the street, where, as I looked down over the ivied wall, the … blackbeard, in his shirtsleeves, summoned a waiting hackney and rode off with his burden, the carriage rattling over the cobblestones down the avenue—I thought to a hospital. But then the boy’s mother appeared, coming along the walk, tearing her hair and screeching, falling, sobbing. It was her child, and as for the man, who had said he was a doctor, she didn’t know who he was…. And Fanny sank to her knees to hold the distraught mother, and in the brilliant water of this sunlit afternoon I saw the lad’s toy boat sailing like a clipper at sea, its prow falling and rising in the laplets, still on the tack he had set for it, its sail puffed in the soft June breeze as it dipped and reared among the fracted diamonds of water and light.

Who these people of the parapet were, their names, addresses, the circumstance that brought them together, or if the boy lived or died, or if the blackbeard killed as well as kidnapped, are questions I can’t answer. I report, that is my profession, I report, as a loud noise testifies to a gun. I have given voice to the events of my life and times, and from my first timid type-inch of apprentice writing until the present moment I have taken the vow to do it well and truly. But that Sunday at the reservoir, the faculty was suspended, there was to be no account for the
Telegram
from me.

Remembrances take on a luminosity from their repetition in your mind year after year, and in their combinations … and as you work them out and understand them to a greater and greater degree … so that what you remember as having happened and what truly did happen are no less and no more than … visions. I have to warn you, in all fairness, I’m reporting what are now the visions of an old man. All together they compose a city, a great port and industrial city of the nineteenth century. I descend to this city and find the people I have come to know and for whose lives I fear. I tell you what I see and hear. The people of this city think of it as New York, but you may think otherwise. You may think it stands to your New York City today as some panoramic negative print, inverted in its lights and shadows … its seasons turned around … a companion city of the other side.

The scene of that day is indelible in my mind but sealed up in the information I’ve given, and memory cannot recover the moments after—what we did, what we offered that woman, or where she went. It makes it no easier for me now to confess that at the time I was assistant managing editor of my paper.

But is there any street, any neighborhood, any place in the
city that won’t eventually be the scene of disaster, given enough time? The city compounds disasters. It has to. History accumulates them—I grant you that. The reservoir was in fact an engineering marvel: From an upstate dam across the Croton River, the water flowed through Westchester in conduits, crossed the Harlem River on a viaduct of fifteen Roman arches, and came to its containment at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street. When it began to operate the danger of fires was considerably reduced—pumping stations were built and firemen now had water under pressure, and were municipal employees. So it was badly needed, our reservoir. Crucial to a modern industrial city.

But I happened to be present the day it was dedicated, a July Fourth. It had taken years for our incorruptible government to bring it to us—you need the money to flow freely before the water can—years of men in top hats poring over blueprints and raising their arms and pointing and giving instructions to the stolid engineers awaiting their pleasure … blastings, the ring of pickaxes on the Manhattan schist… dray teams groaning with loads of rubble…. Years of this … inverted temple building…. And now here is young McIlvaine in his first months on the job as a reporter of monumental news. His lean face is unlined and shining … he does not at this time in his life require spectacles…. It is Independence Day, 1842. The War Between the States is two decades ahead…. He stands on the elevated bank of a huge cubic crater. In his nostrils is the odor of wet sand, the dank air of new stone construction. Arranged along the south embankment in solemn black ranks are the shades of municipal life—the mayor, former mayors, would-be mayors, aldermen, commissioners of this and that, philosophes of the chamber of commerce, ward heelers, and
fellow newspaper wretches. And after speeches spoken grandly and at inconsiderate length, oratorios of self-congratulation, the ribbon is cut, the wheels are turned, the sluice gates are opened, and the water thunders in … as if it were not a reservoir at all, but a baptismal font for the gigantic absolution we require as a people.

Ten

I
’M
not sure what obligation I’m under to give you a sense of the life around this matter, the degrees of my consciousness taken up with all my regular duties, or indeed my sense of the expanding, pulsating city pumping its energies outward furiously in every direction … except that, of course, all of it was indicative, all meaningful of the story I sought out, just as any chosen point on the compass can lead you to the earth’s core…. I suppose I would be justified in reciting to you all twelve pages of our paper every day for several years of the post-war, from the shipping news to the commercial reports on the corn and cotton crops, the fortunes made or lost on the Exchange, the latest technical marvels from our inventors, the murder trials, the social scandals, the politics from Washington, and the glories of the western tribal expurgations. But this is a municipal matter, a municipal matter … and I should keep to the streets, whether they are paved with stones or, as they were farther north, merely laid out with string over mud lots. In any event you will see that invariably what it is we need to discover is exactly what we already know.

Somewhere in this season, in May, or early June, working
men in various industries began spontaneously to leave their workplaces in support of the idea of an eight-hour workday. In fact the legislature had several years before made this the law, but the employers of our city had simply ignored it… and now, their patience spent, brewery workers, mechanics, carpenters, blacksmiths, bricklayers, were laying down their tools, removing their aprons, and taking to the street. Even the stolid burghers at the Steinway piano factory walked out. All over the city men were meeting in halls, making speeches, marching through the streets, throwing up picket lines, and police units were dispatched to break up these meetings, arrest these marchers, and crack the heads of these speakers, who were disturbing the peace and refusing to do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. Our headline by the third day defined the circumstances as a general strike. I looked over my editorial floor and dared any reporter to join the fun. Instead they spread out over Manhattan and came back to file their war reports. From Elizabeth Street as far uptown as the gasworks, from the Eleventh Avenue abattoirs with their hooked cow carcasses to the Water Street docks, police and workingmen were doing battle. I stood at my open office window and imagined I could hear a kind of ground song, as if I were overlooking a prospect of woods and fields with burbling freshets and the chirrups of small perching birds.

Our publisher dictated an editorial for the front page to the effect that the infamous communistic ideas of the foreign workers’ internationals had finally taken root in American soil. Other papers published similar sentiments. After a few weeks the whole thing blew over with a series of symbolic agreements that left things substantially as they were, and everyone went back to work. I mention this here to impress upon you what a realist I am … and what a hard historical city this was … going
through the same kinds of affairs it goes through today, rising in some quarter to excess and subsiding again, a city of souls whose excitements have always been reportable, who have always been given to that nervous, vocal, exhausted but inexhaustible combat that defines a New Yorker, even if he has just yesterday walked off the boat. This is my caveat, in case you were beginning to think I am proposing to make of the white stage with old Pemberton riding it, conveniently, on those streets just where his son happened to be, some sort of … Spiritualist notion. To me, a ghost is as tired and worn-out a fancy as the Romish conceit of my friend Grimshaw. I abhor all such banalities. I am extending myself in a narrative here—it is my own mind’s experience that I report, a true deposition of the events, and the statements, claims, protestations, and prayers of the souls whom I represent as seen or heard … so that my life is wholly woven into the intentions of the narration, with not a thread remaining for whatever other uses I might have found for it. I would not so hazard myself on behalf of some hoary convention, heaven help us all. This is not a ghost tale. In fact I’m wrong even to use the word
tale
. … If I had another word to connote not a composition of human origin but rather some awful Reading out of Heaven, I would use it here….

But if you’re entrenched in the Parlor Faith, let me remind you that by your own dicta, ghosts don’t come in crowds. They are by nature solitary. Secondly, they inhabit defined places, such as attics, or dungeons, or trees. They are sited to do their haunting—they are not detached and collected and given rides about the city in public stages.

No, the world I am spreading out for you here in the flat light of reality is the newsprint world, with common, ordinary, everyday steamboat sinkings, prizefights, race results, train wrecks, and meetings of the moral reform societies going on
simultaneously with this secret story invisibly in the same lines. Every day on the way to work I would buy a flower from a child named Mary who stood in front of the
Telegram
building holding a basket of bedraggled second-day blooms in the crook of her arm. The Pemberton matter came out of as common an everydayness as that… common as the vagrant children who flowed among us and around us, under our feet and off the edges of our consciousness. Flower Mary, we called her. She was solemn and shy in her business, a tyke with a profusion of unwashed brown curls, a ragged smock, and the drooping socks and the lace-up shoes of a boy. She could be made to smile, but when once I questioned her—as to where she lived and what her last name was—the face went blank and with the flick of a curtsy she was gone.

All of them had lost their family names, these vagrant Flower Marys, these Jacks and Billys and Rosies. They sold papers or day-old flowers, they went around with the organ grinders to play the monkey’s part, or indentured themselves to the peddlers of oysters or sweet potatoes. They begged—swarming on any warm night in the streets and alleys of the bawdy districts. They knew the curtain times of the theatres and when the opera let out…. They did the menial work of shops and at day’s end made their beds on the shop floors. They ran the errands of the underworld, and carried slops, and toted empty beer pails to the saloons, and hauled them back full to the rooms of their keepers, who might pay them with a coin or a kick as whim dictated. More than one brothel specialized in them. They often turned up in hospital wards and church hospices so stunned by the abuses to which they’d been subjected that they couldn’t speak sensibly but could only cower in their rags and gaze upon the kindest nurses or ministrants of charity with abject fear.

These urchins—or street rats, as we called them—were as common and unremarkable as paving stones. When I described Martin Pemberton in his greatcoat striding down Broadway under a dark, threatening sky, I would have given a more accurate picture by including the storekeepers in their white aprons letting down their awnings, the luggage merchant bringing his stand of umbrellas to the front door, a millenarian moving slowly through the shoppers, his five-cent God-written pamphlets woven between his fingers, the unsettleable pigeons in a perpetual flutter off the sidewalk … and the children, the ubiquitous children, weaving through the pedestrian crowds of Broadway under no authority but their own, flashing a mop of hair or a furtive glance back, and a moment later becoming invisible, as if not air was their medium but dark river water.