E L Doctorow - The Waterworks

by One

  The wedding party was augmented by a number of policemen in uniform, as well as Grimshaw parishioners who had elected to stay after the service to see who was getting married. In their sight of the bride they were well rewarded, Sarah being a creature of uncompromised grace, regal in a pale blue gown, that matched her eyes. She did not seem ever, that I remember, to hurry, and now coming down the aisle on Martin' s arm, to the soft measures of the organ, she seemed to flow, this great beauty, surely one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen, the wide full mouth in a smile, the unveiled head slightly tilted.

  Donne stood in terror at the altar. Before him, uncharacteristically elevated, was the Reverend Grimshaw in his best laundered white robes fringed in purple and black velvet, his chin raised, his determinedly cheerful gaze on the empty balcony at the rear of the nave. An acolyte beside him held forth a standing brass cross like a spear. Perhaps the Reverend was thinking of the first time this woman had married, a far grander occasion, when it was a far different church, filled with the names of the city, and the only policemen were on guard outside.

  So there, with the organ playing, and the roof beams of St James in a kind of perpetual dusk, though the winter light came planing through the clerestory windows, and the stained glass Deposition behind the altar glowed with the colors of the sun, was God as he is presently composed.

  And Donne and Sarah were married. I did not stay long afterward, The reception was in the parsonage, with a red punch from a cut glass bowl, and cocoa and the small round cakes with pink icing that were then very fashionable, not really my native kind of revel. Sarah Pemberton Donne told me they had found a house on West Eleventh Street, a red brick with french windows with wrought iron balconies and a front yard with a tree in it and a wide granite stoop, a quiet street with all the houses set back and little traffic, though Noah would have to change schools. Donne curved himself downward to shake my hand and admitted to what I had heard around town, that he had been approached by reformist elements in the Republican party who had it in mind, if all went well in the elections, to offer him the post of Police Commissioner with a mandate to clean up the Municipals.

  I remember how still the city was that afternoon as I walked uptown from the church. It was brilliantly sunny and terribly cold and the streets were empty. The footing was treacherous. Everything was thickly glazed horsecars were frozen to their rails, as were the locomotives on their elevated railway of ice, the masts and sheets of the ships in the docks were ensheathed in ice floes lay in the viscous river, the iron fronts on Broadway seemed in the sun to be burning in ice, the trees on the side streets were of crystal.

  Of course it was Sunday, the day of rest. But my illusion was that the city had frozen in time. All our mills and foundries and presses were still, our lathes and our boilers, our steam engines and pulleys and pumps and forges. Our stores were shut, our carriage works and iron works and sewing machine and type writer manufacturers, our telegraph stations our exchanges, our carpentries, our electroplaters, our stone yards and lumber yards, our abattoirs and fish markets, our hosiery mills and garment shops, our smithies and stables, our manufacturers of tool dies and turbines and steam dredges and railroad cars and horse collars, our gunsmiths and silversmiths, our stove works and tin ware stampers, our coopers and clockmakers and ships' chandlers, our brickworks our makers of inks and paper mills, our book publishers our mowers and harvesters and sowers and reapers, all still, unmoving; stricken, as if the entire city of New York would be forever encased and frozen, aglitter and godstunned.

  And let me leave you with that illusion though in reality we would soon be driving ourselves up Broadway in the new year of Our Lord, 1872.