The Waterworks Read Online Free PDF Page B

of employees. I’ll bet he didn’t. “It’s all up here anyhow” was his famous line, delivered as he pointed his index finger at his head. “My own mind is my office, my warehouse, and my account book.”
    He would never have read Tom Paine, of course, who said, “My own mind is my church.” But where deism, even in the 1870s, was a scandal, self-idolatry, if it left an estate of several millions, was an example to us all.
    According to his eulogist, Dr. Charles Grimshaw, glory was bestowed on Augustus Pemberton in the War of Secession, when he put his skills to the service of his country, supplying the Union quartermaster with goods which he commissioned and delivered from mills as far away as Peking, China. Apparently, from their role as beggars, churchmen develop the same sympathies for the moneyed class as politicians do. Someone in Mr. Lincoln’s administration was no less forbearing: I sat in our morgue with the forlorn feeling of an orphan as I read that Augustus Pemberton was among the select group of merchants given thanks by a grateful nation in a dinner at the White House with the president in 1864.

Six

    I KNEW Charles Grimshaw, and to be fair to him, he was one of the abolitionist pastors in the 1850s of our copperhead city, and saw a chunk of his congregation fall away because of that. But he was in his prime then, and though never the orator and moral eminence of our more renowned preachers, he had the respect of his peers and the cozy devotion of his well-to-do parishioners. By the time of Augustus Pemberton’s death, the rector and his church had both seen better days. The well-to-do had rushed northward, to the wider streets and sunnier neighborhoods north of Thirty-fourth Street—and then past the Forty-second Street reservoir. Commercial buildings replaced the homes, and where once St. James had towered over the city, it now stood in shadow half the day. Its solemn brownstone dignity had become quaint, its little parish graveyard, with its worn stones leaning just a little farther aslant in their inch-by-inch topple through the ages…. So the Augustan funeral was a remembrance of its glory, and for an hour or two St. James was restored to fashionable High Churchiness. It is not hard to understand why the pastor’s eulogy was excessive.
    I should have thought there were enough poor people youcould find to fill your pews. But as the Reverend explained to me in his halting, high-pitched voice, poor people were not generally disposed to the Anglican communion. The new immigrants, for instance, were largely Irish and German Catholics. But Catholicism was not the problem. “They have been here longer than we have,” he said—here on earth, I supposed he meant. No, what made him clutch his crucifix and pace the floor of his study were the proselytizers abroad in the city—Adventists and Millerites, Shakers and Quakers, Swedenborgians, Perfectionists, and Mormons … “There is no end to them, they come down from the burned-out district and parade along Broadway with their eschatology boards slung from their shoulders. They accost people in the beer gardens, they take over the street in front of the opera. They board the ferries. Do you know, yesterday I had to chase one away who stood on our doorstep to preach—before Christ’s church, mind you! Speaking for God makes these people brazen. Christ forgive me, but do I need to doubt their sincerity to say, for all their invokings of the name of our Lord, they are plainly and simply not Christian?”
    He had the fairest skin, the Reverend Grimshaw, the skin of a beautiful old woman … paper-thin and very white and dry … and very small regular features, with a nose barely sufficient to perch the pince-nez there, and bright birdy eyes still vigorous and alert, and thin waved silver hair through which you could see the pinkness of the pate. He was clean-shaven, and trim and small, everything from the little feet that marched him to and fro to the