The Waterworks by E. L. Doctorow Read Free Book Online Page A

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 hadeulogized 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 formbut 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