Free The Waterworks by E. L. Doctorow Page A

nurses or ministrants of charity with abject fear.
    These urchins—or street rats, as we called them—were as common and unremarkable as paving stones. When I described Martin Pemberton in his greatcoat striding down Broadway under a dark, threatening sky, I would have given a more accurate picture by including the storekeepers in their white aprons letting down their awnings, the luggage merchant bringing his stand of umbrellas to the front door, a millenarian moving slowly through the shoppers, his five-cent God-written pamphlets woven between his fingers, the unsettleable pigeons in a perpetual flutter off the sidewalk … and the children, the ubiquitous children, weaving through the pedestrian crowds of Broadway under no authority but their own, flashing a mop of hair or a furtive glance back, and a moment later becoming invisible, as if not air was their medium but dark river water.
    Of course we had mission homes, children’s aid societies, orphanages, and industrial schools, but this surplus of a bustling democracy overwhelmed them. For every lost or runaway child reported by a parent or guardian there were a hundred whose disappearance from their homes had been noted with no more than a shrug or a curse. It was the boring editorial writer who called for yet another commission to study the matter, the naïve politician who proposed to his colleagues a social policy for the young. The public had no taste for the topic, any more than the ruminant herd would meet to consider what to do when one of their number was cut out by the wolves and run down for a meal.
    This was the world traveled by your ghostly white stage. It was a hard world, but are we less hard now? The awful indulgences of society change from era to era, but if they’re not entirely invisible to their generations they are borne patiently enough…. For certain religious sensibilities such children fulfilled the ineffable aims of God. For the modern folk, Mr.Darwin was cited, and the design was Nature’s. So the flower girl Mary, and the newsies and the rest of these child beggars who lived among us, were losses society could tolerate. Like Nature, our city was spendthrift and produced enough wealth for itself to take heavy losses without noticeable damage. It was all a cost of doing business while the selection of the species went relentlessly forward, and New York, like some unprecedented life form, blindly sought its perfection.
    None of this was not in tune with the disappearance of my freelance Martin Pemberton. Every day I bought my bedraggled zinnia and went to work … and while I composed my paper, picking from the clips and cables and filed copy the world picture I would invent for my readers, and while I made my assignments and shouted out my orders, so as to have the news that I must have because everybody else had it, but also to have the news that I must have because nobody else had it … the shadows of my secret story took form and dissolved and reformed and dissolved again as I considered its possible shapes.
    I was still wary of seeking out Harry Wheelwright. I remembered the allusive fragment of his conversation with Martin that I’d overheard at the St. Nicholas Hotel. As a friend and confidant of Martin’s he was a putative conspirator. If he knew where Martin was he wouldn’t tell me. If he did not know he could not tell me. In either case he could mischievously dissemble knowing or not knowing. Or his predilection for irony might persuade him to confide in me only what he believed I already knew. I didn’t want to put myself at the mercy of such a fellow—he was no one to confront unarmed, as it were.
    But I did find myself thinking of Sarah Pemberton … that she had never answered Dr. Grimshaw’s letter. I knew nothing of her relations with her stepson, but even if they were the most indifferent or cursory, how could she completely ignore analarmed description of his mental state? Was she made in the mold of her husband,