Free The Waterworks by E. L. Doctorow

agreements that left things substantially as they were, and everyone went back to work. I mention this here to impress upon you what a realist I am … and what a hard historical city this was … goingthrough the same kinds of affairs it goes through today, rising in some quarter to excess and subsiding again, a city of souls whose excitements have always been reportable, who have always been given to that nervous, vocal, exhausted but inexhaustible combat that defines a New Yorker, even if he has just yesterday walked off the boat. This is my caveat, in case you were beginning to think I am proposing to make of the white stage with old Pemberton riding it, conveniently, on those streets just where his son happened to be, some sort of … Spiritualist notion. To me, a ghost is as tired and worn-out a fancy as the Romish conceit of my friend Grimshaw. I abhor all such banalities. I am extending myself in a narrative here—it is my own mind’s experience that I report, a true deposition of the events, and the statements, claims, protestations, and prayers of the souls whom I represent as seen or heard … so that my life is wholly woven into the intentions of the narration, with not a thread remaining for whatever other uses I might have found for it. I would not so hazard myself on behalf of some hoary convention, heaven help us all. This is not a ghost tale. In fact I’m wrong even to use the word tale . … If I had another word to connote not a composition of human origin but rather some awful Reading out of Heaven, I would use it here….
    But if you’re entrenched in the Parlor Faith, let me remind you that by your own dicta, ghosts don’t come in crowds. They are by nature solitary. Secondly, they inhabit defined places, such as attics, or dungeons, or trees. They are sited to do their haunting—they are not detached and collected and given rides about the city in public stages.
    No, the world I am spreading out for you here in the flat light of reality is the newsprint world, with common, ordinary, everyday steamboat sinkings, prizefights, race results, train wrecks, and meetings of the moral reform societies going onsimultaneously with this secret story invisibly in the same lines. Every day on the way to work I would buy a flower from a child named Mary who stood in front of the Telegram building holding a basket of bedraggled second-day blooms in the crook of her arm. The Pemberton matter came out of as common an everydayness as that… common as the vagrant children who flowed among us and around us, under our feet and off the edges of our consciousness. Flower Mary, we called her. She was solemn and shy in her business, a tyke with a profusion of unwashed brown curls, a ragged smock, and the drooping socks and the lace-up shoes of a boy. She could be made to smile, but when once I questioned her—as to where she lived and what her last name was—the face went blank and with the flick of a curtsy she was gone.
    All of them had lost their family names, these vagrant Flower Marys, these Jacks and Billys and Rosies. They sold papers or day-old flowers, they went around with the organ grinders to play the monkey’s part, or indentured themselves to the peddlers of oysters or sweet potatoes. They begged—swarming on any warm night in the streets and alleys of the bawdy districts. They knew the curtain times of the theatres and when the opera let out…. They did the menial work of shops and at day’s end made their beds on the shop floors. They ran the errands of the underworld, and carried slops, and toted empty beer pails to the saloons, and hauled them back full to the rooms of their keepers, who might pay them with a coin or a kick as whim dictated. More than one brothel specialized in them. They often turned up in hospital wards and church hospices so stunned by the abuses to which they’d been subjected that they couldn’t speak sensibly but could only cower in their rags and gaze upon the kindest