The Waterworks by E. L. Doctorow

“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.
    I called on a Sunday afternoon. The room where we sat had a high ceiling and was furnished with comfortable sofas and chairs, polished wide-board floors, lovely worn rugs. It was not an ostentatious room. Breezes lifted the curtains from the sills and ushered through the large open window the sounds of the occasional passing carriage and the cries of children at their games. The homes on Lafayette Place were harmoniously composed to accompany one another, all Federal in style and with a small plot in front of each with a low wrought-iron fence. The pillared entrances were not up a stoop but at street level. Thiswas a piece of the old city that had still not given way to progress, though it would in a few short years.
    Miss Tisdale was petite but resolute, with a forthright, unaffected manner. Though she was not a beauty, she commanded one’s attention with her high cheekbones and fair skin and the eyes slightly slanted at the corners, and a melodious voice that tended to break charmingly at the peaks of her sentences. She seemed to have no interest in the usual strategies of feminine presentation. She wore a plain dark gray dress, simply cut, with a white collar at the neck. From the collar hung a cameo brooch that rode minute distances, like a small ship at sea, as her bosom rose and fell. Her brown hair was parted in the middle and held behind the head with a clasp. She sat in a straight-backed chair with her hands folded in her lap. I found her quite fetching. Oddly enough, as a result, I felt I was intruding in Martin Pemberton’s personal life to an extent that he would deem intolerable. Emily Tisdale was his, after all. Or was she? I had enlarged the circle of concern for Martin, which until that moment had included only herself… and so, quite readily, she made me her confidant. “Things have not been going well between us. When I saw him last Martin said: ‘I live with this burden of your waiting for me. It is always Emily waiting. Don’t you understand what hell you face? Either I am mad and should be committed, or the generations of Pembertons are doomed.’ All that inflamed, Wagnerian sort of thing … that the Pembertons were a doomed family up from some hideous underworld they were destined to return to…. How does a person respond?”
    “He had seen his father,” I said.
    “Yes, he had seen the late Mr. Pemberton, riding in a crosstown omnibus.”
    “You mean on Broadway,” I corrected her.
    “No, not Broadway. While he was walking past the holding reservoir on Forty-second Street. The snow was falling.”
    “The snow? When was this?”
    “In March. In that last big storm.”
    At the time he confided in her, the snow had melted and the season in New York was spring, which one