That was the key to the silence: advertising. The new El Dorado for the twenty-three newspapers struggling for profits. In the years after the charter, nobody would have cared too much about the Manhattan Bank if the Manhattan Company had only supplied the water. But they gave the growing city only a trickle. They hammered together some wooden pipes, which rotted and collapsed. They dug deeper into the existing wells. They used slaves to carry water from the slimy depths of the Collect Pond, right up to the day when the pond was filled with the dirt and gravel of the hangman’s hill.
The result was the stinking city through which Cormac still moved each day. Many thousands of human beings were shitting and pissing in privies, emptying slops into the streets. Garbage was piled in the streets to be gathered later, and the mounds served as wormy meals for pigs and dogs and goats and rats. Rain turned the mounds to a vile gray paste; cold froze the mounds; snow buried them. And the animals burrowed noses and snouts and teeth into the mounds, and in summer Cormac saw flies the size of butterflies buzzing above them. While the directors of the Manhattan Bank kept counting money.
Alone in the flat on Cortlandt Street, Cormac was sometimes overwhelmed by rage. Rage against the men who had betrayed the Revolution. Rage against those who had turned all that sacrifice of the brave into empty rhetoric. Rage against the Manhattan Bank. Rage against private deals made in secret clubs. The stinking odor of the town felt moral, a sign of its spreading corruption. And it was personal too, for his own body carried a stench that he could not bring to even a casual coupling with a woman. For months at a time, he was celibate. He made drawings of women from memory, for the drawings did not send out an odor. And he brooded about the impossibility of forging a connection with any woman. They came and went in his life, temporary presences, as fleeting as the seasons. They told him their stories. They revealed their bodies to his pencils and brushes. But how could he truly promise to live with a woman for the rest of his life? That was a ghastly joke. A woman would want children, as he would himself. But how could he bring a child into this world so densely stained by human excretions, solid and moral? And besides: He had learned across the decades that he might never be a father. The way other men were fathers. He entered a woman’s body as any man did; he erupted in ecstasies of the flesh, as any man did; but his seed did not flourish. He did not know if this would always be true. Perhaps it was a curse conferred on him by Bridget Riley or Mary Burton or both. An Irish form of voudon. They still came to him in dreams, smiling in knowing ways, stoking his fears, beckoning, retreating, betraying. The two-headed Irish hydra. Awake, he shrugged them away. But when he met a new woman, when he began to calculate the risks of love and the temptations of hope, they came to him again in the night, whispering of vengeance. Time did not erase them. Sometimes, trying to make himself believe in happiness, Cormac thought that if he did finally trust a woman’s love, he might tell her the story of the gift he was granted in a northern cave. The secret of his life. The guarantee that he would love her for the rest of her life, if not the rest of his own. But he never reached that moment. He could not be certain about the way the woman would react. She could pack up, as so many humans now did in the exploding city, and abruptly vanish. Or she might laugh, mocking him, questioning his sanity, offering to volunteer him as a performer at Mr. Barnum’s museum of freaks on Ann Street.
Sometimes he even stopped drawing and painting. In those times, the longing for beauty seemed trivial in a city drowning in shit. Most of the time, he found refuge in journalism. He took his notebook in hand and moved among other people, merging his odor with theirs, recording their lives and their deaths. He was sure, on this day of smothering heat and rising stench, that Inspector Ford would eventually tell him that Dubious Jones was named by her father, a mechanic in Troy who did not trust his wife’s fidelity, and that her killer was an unemployed Hungarian whose name had more consonants than vowels and who had a wife and four children in Budapest. He killed her, as usual, because he loved her. The details were always different, in the lives of other people. The stories were always the same.
Today, as his body felt sickened in every waking hour, he became obsessed with water. Today, he wanted to be clean. Today, he wanted to taste clean female flesh. Today. The rich had water, of course, bringing hogsheads in by cart from country wells to fill those rooftop tanks. But ordinary folk had no water for washing clothes or sheets or themselves. No water for scrubbing floors or sidewalks or the windows of stores. The little water they could find was used for boiling potatoes. They had that trickle, measured by the bucket, some still drawn from the ancient Tea Water Pump on Chatham Street, and little else. And in winter there was often less than a trickle, as the pond froze and the pumps froze and women melted ice and snow in pails. At all hours in all seasons, the city gave off this rotting stench.
The miasma, they called it.
The hod carrier emerging from a house on Hudson Street: “Sure the miasma’s not bad today, is it, Mick?”
Or Beatriz, presiding over mocha and biscuits: “Damn miasma eat your heart out today, Mist’ Co’mac.”
Women tried to erase the miasma with perfume. Self-proclaimed gentlemen carried perfumed handkerchiefs in their sleeves. When theaters were allowed to flourish after the Revolution, the longer plays were shortened, there were many intervals to allow a breeze to cleanse the rancid air, and there were no plays at all in summer. As the town filled up, and then doubled and tripled in population after the opening of the Erie Canal, the stench grew worse. Crowded Sunday churches used lots of incense to overwhelm the stink of the faithful, and when August broiled the city, sea captains claimed that they could smell New York six miles out to sea.
Some young New Yorkers didn’t care, for they’d been born into the smell of shit. It stained their days and nights, and unless they traveled into the wild country to the north, those patches that had escaped ax and saw during the war, they could not imagine a world that did not smell of shit. The hoariest New York joke (Cormac must have heard it thirty times in two weeks) was about the New Yorker who wandered into the open country, collapsed of some infirmity, and revived only when a handful of shit was held under his nose. New Yorkers told the joke on themselves. It always got a laugh. But Cormac had known the sweet smell of grass in Ireland and the salt air of the sea. And so he never got used to the miasma. It began to feel like the walls of an unseen jail, a trap, a punishment, a purgatory.
Nobody mentioned this in the churches, which Cormac sometimes visited as a reporter on the state of the New York soul. Filth, after all, enforced celibacy. The fanatics on the Common, assembled near the new City Hall, preached that man was in essence filthy and the only hope of true cleanliness depended upon a Christian death and the eventual embrace of pristine angels. They were all offspring of the Rev. Clifford, whose days had ended in the old lunatic asylum on Chambers Street. Their visions brought some small relief. Apparently the angels greeted all new arrivals with tubs, soap, and clean towels. Cormac laughed to himself at the notion that the only way to get a bath was to die. All the while, in spite of the stench, babies kept being conceived and born. They all entered the world of the miasma.
Meanwhile, men and women shit in pots. They shit in boxes. And Cormac was one of them. What they did, he did. There was no choice. He shit in bags and carried them to the privy in the yard behind the house in Cortlandt Street. The landlord finally built a privy, four feet deep, a lined tub. Once a week, teams of filthy men came around to collect the tubs of shit and dump the contents into the rivers. But after the canal opened, the number of shit collectors did not increase. The businessmen who ruled the town through the Common Council didn’t want to spend the money, and the people could do nothing because in this glorious democratic city; they were not allowed to choose the mayor. The overwhelmed shit collectors worked more and more slowly. They dumped their cargoes into the East River too late for the tides to flush them out to sea. The stench then rose from the sluggish river. Indians stopped coming to town. The last of the deer and wolves retreated to the forests of the Catskills and Adirondacks, appalled by the odor of humans. Fish and oysters died. The otters died. Whales remained out past the Narrows now. Ships that had been scoured by the harsh Atlantic came to the New York docks for a few days, unloaded, loaded, and departed coated with shit and slime.