“I have conceived of a palatial public bathhouse that will employ the latest in hydropathic techniques to promote robust health and invigoration in all its patrons. Combining methodologies I learned at first hand from Vincenz Priessnitz himself at Grafenburg with subtle refinements of my own devising, I can guarantee to reform drunkards, cure the halt and lame, invigorate the intellect of scholars and schoolboys alike, and induce passion in sterile marriages—all for mere pennies a visit!”
This last boast raised further hoots and japes from the crowd, who nonetheless, I sensed, evinced real interest on some deep level at the professor’s pitch. Richardson, meanwhile, seemed to be cogitating seriously on the proposal as well, unconsciously rubbing his sizeable vest-swathed tummy as an aid to cogitation.
Grinning, Professor Fluvius awaited the architect’s response—which finally came in the form of a question.
“How is this ambitious project to be funded, Professor? I do not work in anticipation of a portion of future profits.”
“All is assured, Mister Richardson. I assume pure alluvial gold would be deemed legal tender… ?”
The professor removed a cowhide poke from a suit pocket. Uncinching the poke’s neck, he grabbed Richardson’s hand and poured a mound of glittering golden grit into his cupped palm. Richardson’s eyes expanded to their full diameter. Professor Fluvius dropped the poke atop the mound and said, “Consider this your retainer, I pray, good sir.”
Very carefully, Richardson poured the gold back into the poke and deposited the pouch in his own suit. “Professor Fluvius, you have your architect.”
A roar of acclaim went up from the crowd. I realized that their massed attention had been part of the professor’s sly plan to add public pressure to compel Richardson’s assent. Surely by tomorrow this commission would be spread across all the newspapers of Boston.
The two men shook hands. Professor Fluvius said, “I am staying at the Tremont House, Mister Richardson. I anticipate your dining there tonight with me, so that we may refine our plans. And oh, yes, one last matter. I shall need the establishment finished and ready to open its doors in three months’ time.”
“Three months’ time! For an edifice of any sizeable scale? Impossible!”
Professor Fluvius removed two more plump pokes from his pocket and handed them over to Richardson, saying, “That, Mister Architect, is a word we shall not allow to trouble us again.”
I approached the Palace of Many Waters across the modest plaza of varicoloured granite from Barre, Vermont, that fronted its façade. A warm November day, its sunshine still only half exhausted, had left the stones comfortable to my bare feet. But I imagined that neither I nor my sisters would be discommoded even by the arrival of winter.
At my elbow strode the visitor I had met at the train station: Dr. Simon Baruch. Of medium height and trim physique, dressed in a respectable checked suit, he boasted a full head of dark hair and neatly trimmed thin moustache and chin spinach. He walked with a dignified bearing that reflected his past military service, as a surgeon during the War Between the States.
I had met the doctor at the terminus of the Boston and Providence railroad line, adjacent to the Public Gardens. From thence we walked a few blocks riverward, until we came to Beacon, that avenue which bordered the Charles River. We turned left and proceeded a few more blocks to the intersection of Beacon and Dartmouth, where the Palace reared its mighty battlements.
Perched on the banks of the River Charles (one single-storey wing housing the professor’s offices and private quarters in fact extended out on stilts above the flood), the Palace was a fantasy of minarets and oriel windows, gables and slate slopes, copper flashing and painted gingerbread. Like some Yankee version of the famous Turkish Baths of Manchester, England, the Palace seemed a hamam fit for ifrits—to adopt a Muslim perspective.
After demolition of a few inconvenient pre-existing structures, construction of the Palace had been accomplished in a mere ten weeks, without stinting materials or design, thanks to an army of labourers working round the clock; the ceaseless management and encouragement of Mr. Richardson; and a steady decanting of alluvial gold from the seemingly inexhaustible coffers of our dear professor. (And how marvellously I had matured myself in those weeks, almost as if a new personality had been established upon my own nascent foundations in synchrony with the Palace’s construction.)
Our doors had opened in mid-October, just three weeks ago, and in that time the Palace had been perpetually busy. We were open for business seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, and there were very few stretches when the influx into the Palace was not a copious stream.
Now Dr. Baruch and I stopped hard by the large, impressive main entrance so that he could marvel for a moment at the parade of patrons: mothers with children, horny-handed labourers, clerks and costermongers, urchins and pedlars, soldiers and savants from Harvard and the Society of Natural History. I noted every type of man, woman and child, from the most humble and ragged to the most refined and eminent members of the bon ton, all desirous of becoming clean in a democratic fashion. True, their entrance fees differed, and they would be diverted into different grades of facilities once inside. But all had to enter by the same gate—a gate above which was graven the Palace’s motto:
KEEP CLEAN, BE AS FRUIT, EARN LIFE, AND WATCH,/TILL THE WHITE-WING’D REAPERS COME.
—HENRY VAUGHAN, THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY
I noted Dr. Baruch’s gaze alighting upon the motto, and, after taking a moment to apprehend it, he turned to me and said, “An apt phrase from the Silurist, and not without a metaphysical complement to its ostensible carnal focus. Were you aware that the poet’s twin brother, Thomas, was an alchemist?”
“I fear I am uneducated in such literary matters, Dr. Baruch. Our Professor, however, is a man of much learning, and is highly desirous of your conversation.”
Dr. Baruch laughed. “I can tell when I am being politely hustled along. Let us go visit your employer.”
We circumvented the Bailey’s Baffle Gates through which the paying customers had to pass and found ourselves in the Palace’s lofty atrium.
Like most of the interior spaces of the Palace, the lofty, vaulted atrium was tiled with gorgeously glazed ceramic creations, representing both abstract and pictorial designs, the latter of a predominantly marine bent. The hard surfaces granted an echoic resonance to the gabble of voices and footfalls. High stained glass windows rained down tinted light upon the hustling masses as they filed in orderly lines towards the towel-dispensing stations and thence to the disrobing rooms. Naturally, the sexes were separated at this point—save for mothers shepherding children under a certain age—as they would be in the baths.
I guided Dr. Baruch behind the scenes, until we reached the door to Professor Fluvius’s private offices. I knocked and received acknowledgement to enter.
Professor Fluvius’s unique maple desk, a product of the Herter Brothers firm of New York, was shaped like a titanic conch shell. Behind this cyclopean design sat the man whose face was the first visage I had seen upon attaining consciousness. His ivory tresses, longer even than before, fell past the shoulders of his cerulean suit.
Behind him, a window looked out upon the sail-dotted Charles, toward the Cambridge shore. It was cracked a few inches to allow the heady scents of the river inside.
Professor Fluvius ceased fussing with a ledger when we entered, slapping its boards shut decisively, then rose to his feet with a broad smile and came out from behind the desk, hand outstretched.
“Dr. Baruch! A genuine pleasure, sir! Thanks you so much for responding to my humble invitation. I hope to present you with a professional challenge worthy of your talents….”
I hung back near the door, hoping to hear the professor’s proposal, as I was intrigued by Dr. Baruch’s character, insofar as it had been vouchsafed to me in our short acquaintance, and his potential role in our enterprise.
But Professor Fluvius would have none of my impertinent curiosity.
Pulling a turnip watch from his pocket, he examined it and then addressed me.
“Charlene, don’t you have an appointment soon with one of your special clients?”
I knew full well who awaited me upon the hour, but dissembled. “Oh, Professor, I had forgotten. Pardon me.”
“No offence needing pardon, my dear. But you’d best be streaming onward now.”
I had perforce to leave their presence then.
But I was not to be stymied from my eavesdropping.
What a change in my nature from the humble, timid deference shown to the professor upon my first foray into consciousness! It was not that I honoured him any the less, nor did my desires deviate significantly from his—insofar as I plumbed either his motives or my own. But I had developed a stubborn sense of my own desires, and a reluctance to be thwarted.
Outside in the hall, I did not head immediately back toward the main bulk of the thronging Palace, but instead approached a nearby window, lowered of course against the November chill. I opened it and peered out.
Some twelve feet below me, the happy waters of the Charles burbled past on their way to the sea, chuckling among the freshly tarred pilings supporting this wing. It would have been a straight, uninterrupted drop to that wet embrace, had it not been for one feature: a kind of catwalk or boat-bumper about halfway down, installed against accidental collisions.
I slipped over the window sill and lowered myself down till my toes met the rough planks. Then I made my way stealthily to a position just below the window of the professor’s study.
“—but inside,” boomed Fluvius’s voice, “inside, Dr. Baruch, I think you will agree with me that they are as dirty as ever. The waters beneath the skin. You can clean the outer man—and that’s a fine start—but the inner man is another matter entirely. A much-neglected matter.”
“I confess,” responded Baruch, “that I have often considered the possibility of tinkering with the interior flora of the human body, with an eye toward remedying several inherent bodily ills. Many are the moments, mired in the bloody tent of a field hospital or the sputum-flecked ward of a slum asylum, when I fantasized about bolstering the body’s natural defences with a dose of some beneficial live culture.”
“Yes, yes, I knew of your researches, Dr. Baruch! Just why I summoned you out of all your peers. And my dreams tally precisely with yours! I believe I have formulated a potent nostrum that will benefit mankind in just such a fashion as you envision. My potion will not only re-order the patient’s defensive constitution, but also contribute to a more orderly patterning of nerve impulses in the brain, promoting more cogent and disciplined thought forms.”
Baruch was silent for a moment, before responding: “If that’s the case, Professor Fluvius, then what need do you have of me and my skills?”
Fluvius sounded slightly embarrassed, for the first time in my memory. “My trials of this patent medicine of mine have been not wholly successful. Certain of my subjects did not sustain a full recovery. Admittedly, I was working with gravely ill specimens to begin with, but still— I had hoped for better results. But I realized after such setbacks that I lacked the precise anatomical knowledge of a trained physician such as yourself. It is this expertise that I desire you to contribute to the cause. As for salary, I know you are above such plebeian considerations. But let me assure you, your monetary compensation will be far above any salary you could earn elsewhere. Will you join me in this quest to improve the lot of our fellow man, Dr.?”
Crouching below the window as the sun continued to sink and a brisk breeze blew up my gown, I eagerly awaited Dr. Baruch’s response. But my concentration was shattered upon the instant by the sensation of a cold and clammy hand encircling my ankle!
Only with supreme willpower did I stifle all but the most muted involuntary shriek that would have betrayed me to those inside. Luckily, a gull screamed at that very moment to further cover my inadvertent alarm.
Heart pounding, I whipped my head down and around to see who could possibly have grabbed me under such unlikely circumstances.
The shaggy head and leering ugly countenance of Usk greeted my gaze. He stood apelike on the crossbeams of the pilings, evidently pleased as Punch to have caught me in this compromising situation.
Just prior the Palace’s opening three weeks ago, a contingent of the Swamp Angels had visited Professor Fluvius as he was giving us Naiads a lecture on our duties. We watched with some trepidation and unease as these hoodlums swaggered into our sanctuary. They boldly demanded a weekly stipend as “protection money,” in order to ensure that the Palace remained unmolested in its operations. Professor Fluvius seemed to agree, and they went their way.
But then he summoned Usk.
As if out of the woodwork, the gnomish gnarled fellow, dressed in rough working-man’s garb, appeared. None of us had ever seen him before. But he seemed on intimate terms with the professor.
“Usk, would you see to it that those churlish fellows do not disturb us ever again?”
Usk laughed, and shivers went down my spine, and likewise along my sisters’, I sensed sympathetically.
“Righto, Prof! I’ll learn them a lesson they won’t soon forget.”
As mysteriously as he had appeared, Usk vanished.
The Swamp Angels had not troubled the Palace since. And I had heard that, after some enigmatic cataclysm among their ranks, the wounded remnants of their forces had been absorbed by the Gophers and the Ducky Boys.
Since that incident, Usk had surfaced occasionally to carry out the professor’s bidding. But none of us knew where he lived, or how he passed his idle hours.
Now I was face to face with him—in a manner of speaking, since actually he had a more prominent view of my bare nether parts than of my countenance. I resolved not to let him know how much he had affrighted me.
In a whisper, I demanded, “What do you want of me?”
Usk husked out his own words. “Prof’d be a tad peeved, if’n he found out you was keyholing him.”
I adopted my most winsome ways. “Must you tell him?”
“Not if’n I don’t choose to.”
“And what could possibly induce you to choose such a merciful course?”
“Let’s say if’n I were to receive certain favours from a certain lady—favours which I’d be more than happy to make explicit to you. Tonight, for instance, after your work’s all done.”
Usk’s grip tightened on my ankle—the rough skin of his palm feeling like scales—and I quailed interiorly. But he had me in a bind. I certainly did not wish to appear a sneak and gossip in the eyes of Professor Fluvius. No, I had to submit.
“Where should we meet?”
“I dwell in the lowest cellar, by the boilers. Southwest corner. That’s where you’ll find my doss.”
“I—I’ll be there.”
Leering once more, Usk released my ankle, prior to slipping away under the floorboards and among the pilings, sinuous as a fish.
Refocusing my attentions on the study window, I heard only the clink of glasses and an exchange of pleasantries. I had to assume the deal had been sealed, and that Dr. Baruch would be staying with us.
And now I needed to keep my appointment.
I pattered barefoot swiftly past the gaudy marble entrances to the enormous, rococo common rooms, big as ropewalks, where the masses of men and women bathed in segregated manner. The sounds of gay and enthusiastic splashy ablutions echoed outward from these natatoria. I could picture the water jetting from the bronze heads of dolphins, the flickering gas lights reflected off the pools, the cakes of fragrant soaps embossed with the Palace’s trademark conch shell, the long-handled brushes and plump sponges, the naked human bodies in all their equally agreeable shades of flesh and states of leanness and corpulence. The imagined scene delighted me. The conception of so many happy people sporting like otters or seals in a pristine liquid environment seemed utterly Edenic to me. I was more convinced than ever that Professor Fluvius’s Palace of Many Waters was
a force for beauty and goodness in this often shabby and cruel world.
Once beyond this area open to the general public—the hubbub abating and I having circumvented with a smile and a nod one of the Palace’s liveried guardians stationed so as to limit deeper ingress solely to the elite—I had access to an Otis Safety Elevator. I stepped aboard along with a man I recognized as the Mayor of Boston, a Mr. Prince: grey hair low across his brow, walrus moustache. He nodded politely to me, and sized me up with the same look a chef might bestow on a prize tomato.
“You’re the one they call Charlie, aren’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, I’m slated to see your sister Praxie today. But perhaps next time you’ll attend me.”
“I’d be delighted, sir.”
The rattling mechanism brought us to the second floor of our establishment. I parted from Mayor Prince, and watched him enter the room labelled “Praxithea.”
On this level of the Palace were the private rooms for our more privileged clientele, where bathing occurred in elegant tubs accommodating from two to several bathers. Included on this level were the seven special suites assigned to us Naiads. In these chambers, the waters themselves were perfumed and salted, and certain luxurious individual attentions could be paid to the selected patrons.
I did not enter directly the suite whose brass plate proclaimed it “Charlene,” but instead stepped through an innocuous unmarked door and into a connecting changing room. There I doffed my gown and donned a bandeau top across my full bosom and a loin cloth around my broad hips, leaving most of my honey-coloured skin bare. I let down my long chestnut hair, and stepped through to where my client awaited.
Frederick Law Olmstead had accumulated fifty-five years of life at this date. The famed architect, known to the nation primarily for his magnificent design of New York’s Central Park, boasted a large head bald across the crown, a wild crop of facial hair, and a penetrating expression betokening a certain wisdom and insight into the ways of the world, as well as hinting at burning creative instincts. His supervisory work in the field had kept him moderately fit, although he had not entirely escaped a certain paunchiness of middle-age.
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