The Waterworks Read Online Free PDF

know that you are.
    Simmons had been a deputy chief clerk in the Office of the Port Wardens when the Augustus Pemberton Trading Company hired him away. The port wardens did the onboard surveys of the condition of sailing vessels, inspected the cargoes on the wharves, and in general policed the maritime commerce of both rivers. It was a municipal office, of course, and the source of a reliable income for the Tweed Ring. Simmons would have shared in that and been assured of a long, profitable employment, which meant Augustus Pemberton’s offer had to have been very attractive to lure him away.
    I’ll say here, this Simmons was the unwholesome fellow who was with Augustus Pemberton to the end, although now we tread on treacherous ground. I have occasionally to tell you things not in the order in which I learned them. But it was from the young widow Pemberton, Sarah, Augustus’s second wife and the stepmother of Martin, that I would hear how much closer Eustace Simmons lived to the central affection of the man than either she or Augustus’s first wife … and how Simmons knew it, and made it clear to her. “No woman would feel right in the presence of Mr. Simmons,” Sarah Pemberton told me when I had gained her confidence. She colored slightly speaking of the matter. “It was nothing he actually said, he never spoke out of turn. But he had a tone of voice that I found suggestive. I don’t think that’s too strong a word. He made me feel … incidental. I assume he didn’t have much regard for women in general.”
    She told me this when Martin’s disappearance was no longer an isolated matter but had compounded itself with others just as unsettling. While I had no pictures of the father andhis factotum, I had their moral photographs clearly enough, from their relationship to each other, and the indicative choice we make of a right-hand man. And that the larger evil sustained them, I had in the numbers and quality of the municipal dignitaries who came to Augustus’s funeral and, to be fair, in the obsequious tones of the Telegram ’s account.
    So: In black words on this white paper, Mr. Augustus Pemberton, merchant and patriot, had died at age sixty-nine of a blood ailment, in September of the year 1870, and was seen to his rest from St. James Episcopal. We celebrated the fact of his arrival in America as a penniless, unschooled Englishman who hired himself out as a house servant under a contract that required his labor for seven years. We admired him for never glossing over these humble beginnings. In his later years, as a member of the Surveyors Club, where he lunched frequently at the Long Table, a major conversational theme was the example of his life as a fulfillment of the American ideal. Christ, what a bore he must have been, in addition to everything else.
    An obituary is no place to reflect that in domestic service you come to value things , and you learn all the refinements of taste and style that you can aspire to. But I could imagine Augustus’s sentimental education in money and property. At the end of his indenture he became a coach builder’s apprentice and subsequently bought out the business of the man who had hired him. Then he sold it and reinvested his profit in a ship’s chandlery, thus establishing a pattern of loyalty not to any one business, but to the art of buying and selling them. These practices and other investments brought him in his late thirties into prominence as a merchant of the city. No mention of slave trading, of course. Only that he was brilliant at brokerage and was soon applying its principles to abstract materials—commercial debentures, stocks, bonds, and federal notes. He cameinto possession of a seat on the New York Exchange by default. We made out the old scoundrel as a kind of frugal, down-to-earth Yankee. He didn’t advertise his place in the city’s commercial life with elaborate or ostentatious business quarters and did not carry on his ledgers a large complement