"Or, according to those scholars who look for corroborations of the Word of God in foreign tales, or who analyze his style that Moses is not the author of the Pentateuch, but several writers after, who added on, added on, each with his own version of the Word, until hundreds of years later, all was amended and revised by the ultimate author, R, the Redactor! No, my friends, not the Revelator, not the Revealer of all truth and being, not the Resurrected God of every breath that has ever been breathed, not the Reigning Creator of the Infinite Realm, but a mere redactor, a wretched bookworm who, with his dictionaries and etymologies, took upon himself the establishment of our religion.
"My dear friends, it is so astonishing-we should all laugh heartily if these self-important, pagans did not get respectable hearings in our academies and divinity schools.
"But take heart, for even within their impious professions ,are scientists and scholars who, undaunted, claim the faith, and find in the latest scientific evidence only more of the glory of God. So this is our good news, this morning: In the first instance, that the story of God' s creation of the universe in seven days, as is written in Genesis, is not disproven by the geologist' s tabulation of rocks thousands of years in formation, or the zoologist' s dating of the ancient fossils in those rocks, because the Hebrew word for day does not define any particular length of time, and the creative days of God could have been separated by aeons of his thought, infinite thought from verse to verse. Thus, not in human chronology, but God' s, came the burgeoning of his designs, for can anyone imagine that everything we study, from the depths of the oceans to the constellated stars in its chemical composition, in its taxonomy, and in its, evolution is the happenstance of chaotic event? That it is not God playing his pen who draws us, in our dominion over all living creatures, out of the slime of the earth? So this is what our true natural science says, and to that we may say, Amen. "And in the second instance, of our scholars of the Bible in the divinity schools, who are become literary stylists, and place their own false idol, their infamous Redactor, their anti-Christ, in his place, We may watch them, as their claims split into further claims, finding tales, discarding other tales, and burrowing their way back through the Greek, Aramaic, Sumerian, and Hebrew dialects, in their endless search for, authentication, and there will be a hundred of them tomorrow, and a thousand the day after, all babbling away in their learned tongues, that we will thunderously silence in our hymns of praise to the only Author of the only Book, and will pray for, unto our Lord, whom we entreat to have mercy upon us all, in the name of His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, who died for our sins. And to that we say, Amen."
Seventeen
THOUGH SERMONS were respectfully published in the newspapers, though churches were numerous and spires were everywhere on the skyline, not Christ' s but Tweed' s image inhered in the shifting formation of clouds, or in the light of each season, as the presiding image of our sense of ourselves, the face of our time. It was the struggle, or ordeal, of some of us - not enough of us, apparently-to cast off that terrible collective self-regard of which he was the apotheosis. I could imagine him in private moments of physical gratification of all his appetites sitting up on Forty third Street in his millionaire' s mansion a total triumphant success in, all his thieving enterprises and still affirm his essentially disembodied nature. I felt him as an awful presence riding lightly about our head and shoulders, or lodged in the roots of the jaw, behind the throat, as something vague but tenacious installed in us, the deity of our rampant extortions.
Not to try your patience, let me assure you that finally all the columns will be joined to be read across the page like cuneiform carved across the stele. I had summoned a freelance off the bench outside my office and assigned him to go through the basement morgue and look for any stories about men of wealth who had died penniless. Donne was doing his own research. We hoped in our pursuit of the truth to identify Augustus Pemberton' s companion riders, the lineaments of the, lodge, or brotherhood, the mortuary fellowship, of the white stage. But as to their motives we had no more idea than Martin had when they rode by him in the snow. God knew where they were. I knew only that they would not be found in their graves.
But even as our search for Martin Pemberton continued, Well, I should remind you we were not mathematicians working with pure numerical thought, We had jobs, duties We met our responsibilities, which always appeared to us as diverse. And at least one of us was trying to live with his affections.
A man named James O' Brien walked into my office one day. His title was sheriff of New York County. This was a lucrative office because the sheriff kept all the fees he collected. He' d been appointed, of course, by Boss Tweed. O' Brien was one of the Ring, typically unlettered, crude, cunning, with that kind of brute intelligence of the politician, but with the additional righteousness conveyed by his office, which allowed him a generally punitive impulse in all his dealings. I knew that O' Brien had done a couple of things to challenge Tweed' s power in the Democratic party, and had failed, so when he arrived unannounced and sat down in front of me and wiped his bald head and lit his cigar, I closed my door to all the noise and distraction in the city room and sat behind my desk and asked what I could do for him.
Just at this time Tweed was beginning to chafe from the attacks on him by Harper' s Weekly and its political cartoonist, Nast. Most of his constituents couldn' t read and so he didn' t care what was written about him. But a caricature of him as a fat moneybagger with his foot on the neck of Liberty had a kind of, illumination to it. Harper' s also owned a book publishing company. Their textbooks had suddenly been banned from the city schools. Tweed may have been irritated but he was more or less . invulnerable because all the criticism was deduction or surmise. Nobody had any hard evidence. He controlled the whole of government, including the legal system, and he had the loyal~ if not love of the hoi polloi. He sent foreigners just off the boat into his courtrooms and his judges instantly naturalized them into voting citizens. He had seventy-five percent of the opposition county Republicans on his payroll. His bribes were legion and nothing like evidence had ever been produced against him. He said one day to some reformers, "Well, what are you going to do about it?"
And now here was the moody, truculent Sheriff O' Brien, sitting in front of me. I was put in mind of the great Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, written to instruct young sachems. One of the most important of its primeval lessons is that, if you would hold power, you must share the booty. Tweed' s was an ancient, savage politics, so who would know that lesson better? Yet here was this O' Brien, inexplicably scanted in Tweed' s patronage, and he held in his lap a bundle wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine, which he claimed held the records, a copied-out set of ledgers, that showed the true extortionate dealings of the Ring-all of it duly recorded in neat columns, the incredible amounts stolen, and under what pretexts, and how they were divided. Migod. "Why are you doing this?" I said to O' Brien. ' "The son of a bitch welched on me. Three hundred thousand simoleons. He won' t pay it."
"For what?"
"My fair share. I warned him."
He was a righteous blackmailer, O' Brien. I had to wonder:
Tweed had many ambitious, overreaching men to deal with-why had this one become a problem? The colossal success of his fraud, the completeness of it, the systematization of it, as big and smooth working in its machinery as the Corliss steam engine, had impressed him into believing, not in his invulnerability - more than that. He must have begun to receive from his most private self reflections, intimations of immortality. I can think of no other explanation for what he' d done - waving O' Brien off, giving him no satisfaction at all. That is just what you cannot do to a co - conspirator. Sheriff O' Brien regaled me with unassuageable bitterness. He said he was looking for a newspaper that would publish the story the numbers told. I told him to leave his bundle with me. I told him I would study what he had, and if it was the truth, the Telegram would run it. You would not think from my matter of fact demeanor that I knew what I had j
ust been given.
That night I sat at my desk reading the ledgers of the most brazen and colossal cabal in the history of the Republic. I will never forget that night. Can you imagine what it meant to a newspaper wretch to have it in black and white under his reading lamp? After all, what do we live for? Not wealth, certainly, not philosophical enlightenment, not for art, or love, and not in any hope of salvation, certainly We live for proof, sir, we live for the document in our hand The glory we seek is the glory of the Revelator. And here it was, all recorded in neat columns. I think I wept for joy - I felt as privileged as a scholar holding in his hands fragments of Mosaic scrolls, or a parchment of Homeric verse, or a Shakespeare folio.
Well, not to prolong the pain, You know, one reason I kept so many freelances out on the bench and had so few reporters on staff is that Tweed almost always got to the staffers. I had a man in Albany, covering the state legislature, who wrote favorably one day about a bill designed to make the monopoly of gas companies report their true earnings and reduce their prices, and the next day wrote about this bill as if it had been devised by European communists. Regulation of the gas companies had wide support in both houses, but in the same twenty-four-hour period in which my man changed his views, the Tweed people, who had paid him off, and most every other reporter up there, paid off the legislators. So I am not saying our press stood clean and shining apart from the ordinary life of the city. Tweed committed advertising to our pages-unnecessary, and very profitable, city advertising. I knew that, I knew all of it but I thought, I thought, this story was so monumental the truth so overwhelming .in its demands, and the condition of the city so precarious, that journalistic honor would prevail. But on instructions of our publisher, the editor-in-chief would not let me run the biggest story since the War of Secession. Let me compose myself a moment, To this day the memory buffets my poor soul.
Not just the Telegram - paper after paper looked at the evidence and refused to print it. The eminent Sun under the eminent Richard Henry Dana carried the mayor' s messages to the people, as advertising, They had a contract for city legal notices in eight point type at a dollar a line. Either the publishers needed Tweed, or they counted themselves his friends. Others were afraid of what he would do to them - there were all sorts of reasons.
What would save American journalism from infamy would be the death of a member of the Times board who was a partner in Tweed' s printing firm. This left the surviving director, George Jones, and Louis Jennings, the editor, free to run the material.
As for me, I am a lifelong bachelor. I had no wife and children to worry about. I thought about it a day or so, I had not been able to move my publisher, Mr Landry, I had gone rushing up to his sanctum to protest, to appeal. He listened quietly enough to my ranting and raving. Tweed' s effect on the city had been like a vampire' s arterial suck. I saw him in every seeping mound of garbage, in the sewers emptying into the streets, in the moving shadows at night of the rats in their furtive numbers in the plodding city wagons of people dead of the diseases of filth . I emptied my desk and left the best job I' d ever had, took my hat and coat off the rack and walked out of my city room. But that is not to speak of here. After the accounts were published in the Times, that fall there was a public rally at the Cooper Union on Astor Place and a citizens committee was formed that brought a taxpayers suit, and the Ring began to crack. Connolly, the Ring' s comptroller, said he would cooperate, and a grand Jury was formed to bring indictments.
All hell seemed to be breaking loose. The collapse of a system, even a system that subjugates them, unsettles folks, and there was an agitation all through the city, like a storm blowing this way and that, tearing up the store awnings, turning people around in the street, spooking the horses, Three banks that had Tweed on their boards went under. Dozens of small newspapers that had lived on his largesse ceased to publish. Businesses of all kinds closed their doors. Strangers were getting into fistfights, something like a deep hum was coming up through our feet, like the roaring down from the mountains of a flash flood, as if despite ourselves, we were going to have to face up to the truth, all of us who made up this town of calamitous life.
I would not say Donne was not diverted by the imminent doom of the Ring, but neither was he distracted. This was all anybody in the city could talk of, and he had to have been personally gratified - he had lived in a kind of professional slavery to this culture, and now it was crumbling. Yet he was not given to triumphing - that was not his nature, he did not make of all this an occasion to think of himself. What I did see in his face was an intensity, almost like feverishness, as he went through these same revealing account books, which I entrusted to him before I reluctantly turned them back. I remember thinking how odd it was of him when he said afterward, at dinner, that what he found meaningful was not the usually inflated sums warranted to this or that transaction, but the Occasional entries that seemed legitimate in their accounting. The Ring' s books recorded not only the transactions in which the city was the ostensible buyer of goods or services, but also those in which it was the seller, and in these cases very often of legal entitlements or charters it had no legal right to sell. How out of character, he said, to find an entry where a piece of legal paper was signed without apparent compensation.
"Like what?" I asked him.
"There�is a newly founded orphanage, the Home for Little Wanderers, with an address up on Ninety-third Street by the river. Yet the ledger reveals that no money passed hands to expedite a charter."
I thought this was rather a peculiar observation in the context of a great scandal, and my own misfortune. But you see, Donne was taller than most men and so he had a better view of the lie of the land. In a day or two he' d found the charter document and certificate of incorporation in the Hall of Records. The Home for Little Wanderers was a nondenominational orphanage that was to be scientifically managed according to the latest child - raising principles. Mr Tweed and the mayor and Comptroller Connolly were members of the board of trustees. Eustace Simmons was listed as director. Wrede Sartorius, MD, was the attending physician.
Eighteen
AT THIS time, the city north of Seventy-second Street was no longer country, but not yet City either. The houses were few and far between. Whole blocks had been scraped clear and laid out with surveyor string, but nothing was on them. You would see two or three of the usual row houses with their granite stoops, and, after a gap, two more sharing a side wall, but none of them occupied. Here was a street set with paving stones that stopped at the edge of a pasture, there was a scaffolded half-risen apartment house through whose unframed windows you saw the sky, or a Beaux Arts mansion going up alongside a cluster of shanties with a pig and goats rooting about. And everywhere were great piles of brick, or stacks of lumber under tents of flapping canvas. Steam cranes stood in fields of grass and shrub. Somehow there were never any workers to be seen, as if, with a mind of its own, the city was building itself.
From Park Avenue and Ninety third the unpaved road ran downhill in a gentle slope to the river. In the fields on either side pumpkins were scattered and trees were beginning to turn. The sounds of the city were distant, almost imperceptible. Donne and his men were encamped beneath a stand of yellowing weeping willow halfway between First and Second avenues. Their tunics were unbuttoned, they had canteens of water and lunchboxes, and their accumulated refuse was held in a cardboard carton at the foot of the tree. They could not be seen from the riverside. The road went past them downhill, and where it leveled off was the stone mansion Home for Little Wanderers.
A police kiosk stood on the sidewalk by the front gate. Donne said, "We have kiosks at the diplomatic missions. We have them in front of Mr Vanderbilt' s place, and at Tammany Hall, these must be very important children."
All together, out of the whole force of Municipals, Donne had managed to commandeer twelve or thirteen men who were loyal to him. Another contingent stood watch from a shed on Ninety fourth, a block north of the mansion on First Avenue, and a thi
rd a block south.
But I didn' t understand what they were doing - which was, apart from using their binoculars, nothing. I had joined them on the second day of their watch. Here and there in the field around us birds were scooting about in their dust baths or hopping from brush to tree. High up over the river an undulant arrow of geese pointed south. I wondered if I had come all this distance to join a covey of birdwatchers. I suppose I must have said something to that effect.
"Whom shall we arrest?" Donne said.
"Everyone, whoever you find."
"So Pm to enter without a warrant?"
"Would any of their judges give you one?"
"What will the charge be?"
"What does it matter, as long as we can see what' s going on in there that needs a police guard to keep people away."
"That is the way they would do it," Donne said quietly.
He handed me the binoculars. I saw the mansion shimmering in the magnification. It was a Romanesque structure of red stone trimmed in granite and with the turrets and small windows of an armory. The bottom half was obscured by a brick wall. A cast iron gate gave on to a courtyard. It looked its part - a very substantial building, lending substance to those who lived there. It was an outpost of our advancing civilization, like all our other institutions out at the edges - poorhouses, asylums for fallen women, homes for the deaf and dumb.
Behind the Home for Little Wanderers the river surged powerfully southward toward the harbor, the color of silver. Perhaps I was only feeling the despair of the unemployed, but at this moment I, the denizen of alleys, dead ends, and saloons three steps down, the reporter who disdained the great national story of the West to make stories out of paving stones pounded with horse droppings, and the street birds picking out their meals there, a fellow whose music was the cries of rag pickers, the din of the organ grinders, who could watch the cat with curved paw lift the lid of a garbage pail and feel that was as much nature as he needed, I fervently wished there were no buildings of any kind on this island. I envisioned the first Dutch sailors giving up on the place as a mosquito - infested swamp, and returning in their long boats to their ships.