Forever (2003) by Pete Hamill

Author:Pete Hamill [Hamill, Pete]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780316735698
Amazon: 0316735698
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Published: 2003-11-14T11:00:00+00:00

73.

For months now, starting in the unseasonably hot days of late April and through the scalding summer, Cormac was like the abandoned Africans on the streets: He longed for water. He did not mind the heat; some secret part of him, chilled by the arctic winter of his Irish youth, would always be cold. He did mind the filth. The aroma that came from his own filthy body. The itching dirtiness of his hair. He wanted to be hot and clean, and wanted the same for all the others in the town: the ancient Africans, the children, the women. In dreams he turned and rolled among dolphins in the ocean sea. He was scoured by salt. He was perfumed by the sun. Upon waking, he washed from the tepid water that waited for him in a bowl. The ritual did not help. There were more and more people in the city and the same small amount of water.

“It’s like money, Mist’ Co’mac,” Beatriz said one morning. “They jus’ ain’t enough to go around.”

At the Evening Post, Cormac could not convince the editors to make New York water as important a cause as independence for Greece or the compromise in Missouri over slavery. Still, Cormac made notes about the scandal of water. He wrote articles that were not published. “Everybody knows that,” said one white-haired editor. “It’s not news.” But no water yet ran from the taps of New York. There were, in fact, very few taps, and they were in the homes of the rich, fed by water tanks erected on the roofs of their private fortresses. For all others, water was still drawn from parched wells and did not run into bathtubs or sinks or toilets; it was dipped, splashed, heated on hearths. It did not run as the rivers ran. And in the articles he wrote, and held in a desk drawer when they were not published, he made clear that the reason was corruption.

The major agent of the corruption was called the Manhattan Company. For decades after the redcoats sailed away, it had controlled all water supply in New York through a corrupt charter. Even Burr and Hamilton had been allies in the swindle, and its outline was simple. The spring of 1800, the turn of the new American century, the newspapers full of Napoleon in Europe… that year, the Manhattan Company was awarded two million American dollars by Albany for this water project. A generous arrangement, said the Federalist newspapers. An intelligent act of faith in the future of the fine little town at the mouth of the Hudson. Blah, they said, blah, they repeated, blah blah blah. But the deal had a nasty clause: It allowed the directors to use all unspent moneys for whatever purpose they desired. Before supplying a drop of water to citizens, they founded a bank. The aim was to make money. Or more money. For themselves, of course, not for the citizens. So they spent one hundred thousand dollars on water and used the rest of the two million to start their bank.

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