The Engineer's Wife

by Tracey Enerson Wood

  They carried picket signs that read Dangerous Work, Workers Dying, and We’ve Got the Bends, They’re Giving Us the Shaft. When two workers attempted to cross the picket line, the strikers became an angry mob. The scabs tried to escape back to the streets, but the mob chased them. They were caught, thrown to the ground, and savagely beaten.

  The newspaper headlines screamed of the horror. Neighbors banged on our door, shaking the papers and demanding settlement. Our financial backing shriveled.

  Shortly before the strike, workers had unearthed several human skeletal remains. Although they had probably rested under the river for decades, if not centuries, they were a grim and frightening reminder to the already skittish workers.

  A critical decision needed to be made, and I had to convince Wash to visit the site. The uneven bedrock was a very different situation than what we had encountered in Brooklyn. No one wanted to take the responsibility for proceeding in conditions that had never before been faced. We would have to keep his time in the caisson very brief. Even so, I felt nauseated at the thought of exposing him to the danger once again.

  The ride over on the ferry was pleasant enough, the brown river smooth and faintly smelling of fish. Waves foamed about the boat with a comforting swish. Wash asked about the welfare of the workers, especially O’Brien.

  “He’s not on strike. He’s working in the office.” I shielded my eyes from the sun with my hand in order to measure his expression. “Sad about his wife. He told me how she died.”

  “Did he now?” Wash said matter-of-factly.

  “I must have heard that marble bust story a hundred times, but you never told me you knew O’Brien in the war.”

  “Did he not deliver a message from me, shortly before I returned?”

  I thought back to that winter morning before we were married. “That was O’Brien?”

  “The very same. He got me through times no one should have to live through. Did he tell you he replaced an orderly who had been shot through the heart by a bullet intended for me?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “I thought not. Believe me, there are plenty of war stories you don’t want to hear and I don’t want to tell.”

  “Not only war stories. You never talk about the things that bother you most.”

  He tap, tap, tapped his cane, watched it land on the deck. “I rode home to get maps. Father had precisely what we needed, having surveyed most of Pennsylvania. I gave half to O’Brien. Your brother got them, and we won the battle.” He faced me, his mouth drawn, his eyes wet and distant. “Is that what you wanted to know?”

  The ancient Chinese practiced the “death by a thousand cuts.” The phrase occurred to me as I looked at Wash and sadly wondered what had happened to our marriage. Although he was sharing, he did it under duress, creating more of a distance rather than bringing us closer. We had lost—or possibly never fully developed—a trust with our deepest thoughts and emotions. And now there was too much for us to bear, and we could no longer lay our sorrows on each other. I didn’t have a clue how to change things. There was no undoing the path we had travelled, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep treading the same way. I vowed to seek guidance from a kind and wise person. Just as soon as I had a moment to call my own.

  * * *

  Wash, C. C. Martin, and I descended the air lock into the Manhattan caisson, the first time Wash had visited since winter. My throat tightened as my mind flashed with images of him leaving on a stretcher. But we had to make a decision regarding when to halt the descent of the caisson, and this decision was too momentous to make without him.

  Having witnessed Wash’s and others’ attacks of the bends, each differing from the other in symptoms and severity, I tried to discern a pattern. Why were some men affected severely, some mildly, and others not at all? Wash, O’Brien, and Young, for example, had suffered greatly. They were all approximately the same age, which is to say a bit older than the average worker. But Martin was older and rarely had so much as a headache. All the men were quite fit, at least at the start, so I didn’t think physical constitution played a role.

  What the afflicted did have in common was a proclivity for driving themselves long and hard, making multiple trips into the caisson each day. They were hurried; perhaps they climbed out more quickly than the unaffected.

  “The brighter lights and whitewashed walls are an improvement,” Wash said upon entering the caisson.

  “What’s the strike costing us?” Martin asked.

  “My sole remaining nerve,” Wash responded. “The caisson needs to drop, what, another thirty, forty feet?”

  “Depends on this.” I picked up an iron bar and whacked at three-foot intervals across the floor. The bar thudded on ordinary ground and clanged upon hitting solid rock. “There’s a ridge of bedrock here, as if on top of a mountain. To set the entire caisson on bedrock, we need to blast through this ridge.”

  “And there’s this.” Martin knelt near a two-foot-tall boulder.

  Wash examined the boulder with a magnifying glass. “Sand…silt…minerals…mostly quartz and feldspar, compacted by a glacier.”

  Wash offered his magnifying glass, and I examined the sample. Bumpy and gray with some shiny bits. It looked like—well, a rock.

  “Two strong men dug for an hour to produce this chunk,” Martin said.

  “Use powder to blast through both this and the bedrock ridge.” Wash checked his timepiece, giving me a moment of peace, as he was keeping careful track.

  “That’s more money, time, and risk, and it may not be necessary,” I said.

  “Can we shorten the work shifts?” Martin asked. “The caisson is so deep, they’re nearly all getting the bends now.”

  “We’ll have to. Just to get them back to work,” I replied.

  “If there’s nothing else?” Martin excused himself.

  I tapped a toe against the boulder. “What’s the difference between this and bedrock?”

  “Origin, mostly.” Wash chiseled off a chip and pocketed it.

  “You said this stone was deposited by the glaciers.”

  He nodded. “Hardened by pressure. Quite different from the river silt above.”

  I put a chisel blade to the boulder and whacked off another chip. “But it’s almost as hard as bedrock, rather like a natural concrete.”

  “Bedrock isn’t glacial. It’s created from the earth’s mantle.”

  “If we go down another forty feet or so, the danger will become much higher. What if we stopped right here?”

  “Give up?” he asked incredulously.

  “Of course not.” I whacked the boulder with the chisel, the clang ringing off the walls. “If the difference between this compressed stone and bedrock is origin, and if it’s as dense and stable as concrete, does it matter if it’s not bedrock?”

  “We have no precedent. Concrete is stable and will support the load of the bridge. And bedrock will hold unlimited loads. But this?” He stabbed at the ground with his cane.

  “May be just as strong. And the men are suffering terribly at this depth.” My gut lurched; we’d gone past five minutes. I tugged his sleeve. “We need to get you out of here.”

  We climbed into the exit vault. Wash turned the valves to force out air to lower the pressure to normal atmosphere.

  “Wait.” I rotated the valve back halfway. “Let’s release slowly. Give our bodies more time to adapt.”

  “Don’t you think we need to get out of here? This is the highest pressure I’ve experienced by far.” He rubbed his thighs. “And my legs are tiring.”

  I turned the valve a little more. “Let’s sit a bit. Humor me.” I helped him down to the board-covered floor. After about twenty minutes of slowly decreasing the pressure, we climbed up the ladder and through the hatch at the top.

  Wash gasped and bent over. Nausea rose in my stomach. A flash of pain r
ipped through my lungs, and strange sensations prickled up my legs and arms, like an army of ants on attack. But grace was shining down upon us that day, and we both recovered after a few minutes.

  The line of strikers stretched out into the street and around several city blocks, their numbers far exceeding the actual workers. We suspected the press, the union, or both were paying sympathizers to join.

  A scuffle broke out, and line-breakers were bludgeoned with picket signs. Police beat back the protesters with bobby sticks.

  “Forty more feet. How many more men can we subject to this fate?” I asked.

  Wash pointed his cane at the strikers. “At that depth, I’d estimate another eighty men dead or crippled from caisson disease.”

  “We can end the digging now. Blast what we must to get on level footing.” I slipped my arm around his. “Why take the risk of sinking farther? Didn’t your father lay foundation on similar ground in Cincinnati?”

  “Not quite, and that was a much smaller project. We mustn’t make untested comparisons. Can’t risk resting this behemoth on a theory.”

  Two strikers carried a paralyzed victim of the bends to the line.

  Wash shook his head, rested both hands on his cane, and scrutinized the river like a great opponent. “We could do some tests on the glacial bedrock.”

  As soon as he used that phrase, I knew his marvelous brain had worked it out, and my theory had merit. The strikers stepped aside as Wash hobbled through their line, and we safely reached our buggy, protected by my gender and his infirmity.

  “We must test the glacial bedrock as you suggest. That’s a brilliant idea.” I took a deep breath. “It’s time for an ultimatum.”

  “Of what sort?”

  “The workers must go back or be fired. They’ll return once they know we intend to replace them. We’ll have Kingsley make the announcement.”

  Wash stopped midstep into the buggy. “Where is the sweet young woman I married?”

  I squeezed the chip of glacial bedrock, cold and unforgiving, in my hand.

  Twenty-Five

  1873

  I did not think of myself as callous, and Wash’s comment, though said in jest, made me bristle. In fact, I was greatly concerned with the welfare of the workers and, in concert with Dr. Smith, sought ways to prevent the injuries and ailments befalling the men, especially caisson disease.

  We met in his small, cluttered office near the construction site. I had previously shared my experience with slowly releasing pressure while in the vault and that it didn’t seem to be successful.

  Dr. Smith scratched the top of his balding head, a fringe of hair encircling it like the laurel wreaths of the ancient Greeks. “Your symptoms were mild and resolved quickly. At that pressure, they would have been even worse if you had come up quickly.” He spread a set of diagrams of a device similar to a tube-shaped coffin with gauges and air vents. “The air lock pressure can’t be precisely controlled through a slow decompression. My idea is to build a chamber—something akin to a miniature caisson—but above ground. When workers come out of the caisson, they will rest in this chamber where air is pumped in until it matches the pressure of the caisson. Then, the air pressure would be gradually decreased.”

  “It seems worth a try.” I handed back the drawings.

  He proposed the idea to the board. His work was for naught, however, as the Manhattan caisson would be complete before we received the necessary approvals.

  After laboratories performed chemical analysis, compressive strength, and other tests on samples, my theory on glacial bedrock was substantiated: the naturally formed concrete was strong enough to hold the massive tower. Accordingly, Wash agreed we would fill the caisson at seventy-eight feet of depth rather than risk more lives by digging deeper.

  With both towers growing at a rapid rate, I hoped Wash would steadily improve as well. However, he rarely left the house. There were days he couldn’t get out of bed, his head too painful to lift from the pillow. Dr. Smith consulted with Dr. Walter Reed, a promising young doctor at Brooklyn Hospital, who had taken an interest in caisson disease.

  Dr. Reed was kind to both of us and diagnosed Wash with “contractures and neurological sequelae of the caisson disease, including headache, nystagmus, and tremor.” Dr. Reed prescribed a tincture for pain and stiffness and morphine as needed. But he had no magic cure and offered few answers with regard to how long it would be before Wash could return to work or walk without a cane. We didn’t ask about the marital bed situation.

  Wash suffered from a range of complaints besides the headaches, limb pains, and visual disturbances, which seemed to wax and wane like phases of the moon. But something less tangible was taking hold as well: a nervous unsteadiness, vexing in its nebulous nature and persistence. He was irritable most of the time, losing interest in his pets, keeping up with the news, or even playing with Johnny. He complained of a burning feeling in his skin and couldn’t tolerate being touched.

  One morning in March, I woke at 4:00 a.m. to the smell of frying pork roll and an absent husband. Wash also suffered from insomnia, so this was not surprising. Inclined to provide whatever support my presence could bring, I slipped on my robe and joined him at the kitchen stove.

  “Taylor ham?” I plucked a piece of the pinkish meat from the draining towel.

  He playfully slapped away my thieving hand and nodded toward the small table and two stools. “Have a seat.” He cut more slices from the large roll, right through the muslin casing. Chaucer, a large yellow retriever he had brought back from Trenton, licked his chops and caught tidbits Wash let drop.

  “Is your headache any better?” I scraped the stool over to the cookstove and continued my uninvited intrusion. I held my hands toward the soothing heat.

  He answered with a small shrug as he cut slits from the edge to near the center of the round, thin slices, using his fingers as guides.

  “Can I help with that?” I was fearful his poor vision would lead to a bloody breakfast.

  No answer.

  “Wash, this will all be over someday. Dr. Reed says you will improve over time.” The ham hissed as it met the frying pan. “Why won’t you let me help you with these simple things?”

  “Three slits per slice are traditional, to help it lie flat. I find that five give a more pleasant pinwheel shape.”

  Smoke curled from the pan, the room filling with a tangy aroma as the meat cooked. Wash placed the heaping plate on the table. I poured tea as he repositioned the stool. We ate in silence, the salty, crispy ham slices a treat, my unanswered question hanging in air.

  Wash cleared his throat. “I’m going back to Trenton tomorrow.”

  “Oh? Getting low on precious commodities?” I held up my fork with a triangle of ham. The pressed meat was a specialty of his hometown, and he could scarcely be without it.

  He cracked a smile, fumbling for his teacup. “True enough. I think being around my family will help with—well, will make me feel better. And it’s time I attended to Roebling’s Sons again. My brothers outvoted me. Yours truly is now president.”

  “I’ll come with you, then. And congratulations.”

  “While I appreciate the offer, no thank you, dear.” He dismissed me with a wave of his hand, then looped a forefinger into the ear of the cup handle. His teacup jittered against its saucer, sounding like seashells rubbing together. “You’re needed here.”

  “I guess we can get along without each other for a few days.” I rose to clear the dishes, pushing aside a pang of hurt.

  “It’ll be a few months at least. Perhaps a year.” When I spun toward him, he held up his palm. “You can visit as you wish.”

  “You mean, I have no say? No discussion? When you’re running back to Trenton without me?”

  “Em, it’s not like that. You and Martin have things well under control here, and it’s better I go where I’m needed.” />
  “What have I done to deserve this?” A mixture of hurt and rage bubbled up inside me, and I struggled to maintain a level voice. “Am I not working as hard as I can to keep your world together? What do you want from me?” I crashed a plate into the sink.

  “You’re taking this all out of proportion. It’s merely business.”

  “What use is a family business if it tears a family apart?”

  Wash winced at my comment. I should have known better than to question the very soul of what it meant to be a Roebling.

  I forced words through clenched teeth. “Fine. Go. The bridge will be built, and we will start over. This is not the rest of our lives.”

  He tapped his spoon calmly, carefully. There had been no hesitation in his words, no glances my way as he shared his plan. Wash had thought this all through and calculated my reaction with the same skill he did trigonometry, which infuriated me all the more. I wanted to grab the spoon and hurl it at his head.

  * * *

  Wash’s absence dragged on, but I made scant effort to visit him. It was convenient to blame the burdens of bridge supervision, running a home, and raising a son. Johnny was now five years old and desperately missed his father. He constantly begged to go to Trenton where he also had oodles of cousins to play with. But the guilty truth was that I rather despised Trenton, with its slow pace and nosy relatives. Furthermore, when I did visit, my time was spent not doing things together as a family but transcribing hundreds of pages Wash dictated, my hand cramping from the effort.

  He had me write each step in the bridge-building process in excruciating detail, and after I returned to New York, he mailed the instructions for each step in the process as needed. The letters gave the appearance of him being in full control, with me by his side, even as we remained apart. While the bridge soared into the sky, our marriage was at its lowest point, glacier bedrock.

  * * *