The Waterworks

by E. L. Doctorow

  At the time he confided in her, the snow had melted and the season in New York was spring, which one knew because crocuses and gladioli and foxglove appeared for sale in the flower carts at Washington Market, and the swells had begun to race their trotting horses on the track up in Harlem. The climate having moderated, people resumed the practice of paying calls, as did Martin on Emily, in her home, where he assured her she could despair of ever having his proposal of marriage because - at least insofar as she could understand his logic - Augustus Pemberton was abroad on the earth.

  I' ll tell you now I found this earlier incident more ominous, more truly unsettling, than the other. I don' t know why, precisely. It had not the awful specificity of the wen on the old man' s neck. In the shadow of the retaining wall of the holding reservoir, Martin walks east on Forty second Street, leaning headfirst into the wind, clutching his collar about him. From the gusts of snow blowing across the thoroughfare a carriage emerges a public stage. He turns to look. The horses are at a gallop and though the driver, swathed in a fur robe, whips them to even greater speed, their passage is stately and silent. The stage sails past in a cloud of whirled up snow. And he sees in the rimed window, as if etched there, the face of his father, Augustus, who at the same moment turns an incurious gaze upon him. A moment later the entire equipage is swallowed by the storm.

  Now the chill set in. Martin' s boots were frozen. His Union greatcoat seemed to absorb the wet air. The falling snow smelled metallic, as if machined, and he looked into the opaquely white, fIaking sky, imagining it as an industrial process. That is what he told Miss Tisdale. She sighed and sat straighter in her chair. You know I am an old lifelong bachelor, and the truth of my breed is that we fall in love quite easily. And, of course, silently, impatiently, until it passes. I think I fell in love with Emily on this day. She put a theory into my mind the idea of the unremarked development in America of an exotic Protestantism. I mean if there was voluptuousness in virtue, if there was a promise of physical paradise in a chaste and steadfast loyalty, it was here in this heartbroken girl.

  I found myself resenting her treatment at the hands of my freelance. She looked at me brightly. She had enrolled, she said, in the Female Normal College up on Sixty eighth Street with the purpose of becoming a teacher of public school children. "My father is quite shocked. He thinks the teaching profession is only for women of the working class-quite unsuitable to the daughter of the founder of the Tisdale Iron Works! But I am so happy there. I am reading ancient history, physical geography, and Latin. I could have chosen French, I know a bit of French, but I' m inclined to Latin. Next year I take the lectures in moral philosophy given by Professor Hunter. The only bad thing-they have a weekly review in English grammar and - horrors! - arithmetic. Oh, the children will have fun with me in arithmetic."

  At that point her father came in and I was introduced. Mr Tisdale was quite old, with a fringe of white hair, and he kept a hand cupped behind his ear in order to hear better. He was a dry, stringy old Yankee, the sort who live forever. In the manner of the aged he promptly informed me of everything I should know about his life. He confided in a loud voice that after Emily' s mother had died giving birth he had never remarried but had devoted himself to raising the child. Emily sent me a silent glance of apology. "She is the light of my life, my lifelong consolation and pride," said her father, speaking as if she was not in the room, "but since she is mortal I cannot claim perfection for her. She is already twenty four and, if I may say so, stubborn as a mule." This was an allusion to a marriage proposal that Emily had turned down. "You' d agree with me, sir," he said, "if I told you the name of the family."

  Somehow his daughter excused us, gracefully but firmly, suggesting that I would want to see the garden. I followed her down a hall to the rear of the house, and into a large drawing room with broad leaded pane doors that led to a granite terrace. We stood at the balustrade.

  What she had called the garden was actually a private park that extended behind the entire block of Lafayette Place homes. A serpentine gravel path went among formal flower beds, and offered wrought iron benches where there was tree shade. It was a lovely, peaceful place, with pedestaled sundials and birdbaths and a crumbling brick wall the ivy had long since conquered. Here and there in the wall was an arched niche with the bust of a weathered, eyeless Roman. "Right next door, in Number Ten, is where the Pemberton' s used to live. When Martin' s mother was alive. We ran in and out of both houses all day, we did not distinguish between them. This garden was our playground," Emily said.

  So that was the paradisal beginning. I could look out and imagine Emily and her Martin, their young souls urged into wing, their voices from dawn to dusk in this garden as constant as the birds and think of the superior state of childhood, when love is lived without knowing it is called that. Can the love that comes later be more powerful? Is there any in maturity that will not long for it?

  "I fear for my friend," she told me. "What does it matter where he places the omnibus with his father, inside his mind or in the world, if his torment is the same? I would like to ask you the favor of letting me know if he writes to you or comes back for an assignment. Will you?"

  "Immediately."

  "Martin has always been terribly careless of his own welfare. I don' t mean that he is someone who is likely to walk in front of a train. He is not absentminded. But ideas take hold of him. His convictions take over and almost seem to perform themselves in him, whereas other people merely have, opinions. He is heedless, arrogantly so. He' s always been like that. He was not humbled by being a child. He noticed things and pointed them out. Often they were funny. He was a wonderful mimic when we were young, he imitated adults, he did Cook with her brogue and the way she dried her hands on her apron, which she picked up first from the hem and he did the policeman who walked here in our street with his feet pointed outward and his hand on his nightstick as if it were a sword in his belt, and his head tilted up to keep his topi from falling over his eyes."

  She was now happy to be talking about her Martin and for a few moments was able to chat about him as if nothing was the matter-as people do in their grief. "Martin was a wicked boy! He satirized Mr Pemberton, usually making him into an animal of one sort or another, It was very funny. Of course all that stopped as he grew older and more somber, except when - he was by then at college - he came to me with the letter that disowned him and he hadn' t forgotten his impersonation after all! I thought it was a catastrophic thing that had happened, but there he was reading the letter in his father' s grumbling voice and having his father' s difficulty with the words that had obviously been written by a lawyer, having great fun repeating the hard words, his brow swollen in rage and his lower lip curled out like a bulldog' s.

  Well, I am giving you a conversation of that young woman of many years ago - in all of this you must be aware, represent matters which only I seem to have survived. But I' m fairly sure it was on this occasion I understood that my moody imperial freelance was not for an reason of his own absent from his boardinghouse and his job, and from his Emily, who was, for all the letters he' d tossed into the fireplace, the inevitable lovely associate of his sorrows, the one he would leave but return to, the one who knew him, the twinned soul. And I considered that ea. municipal authority, learning of these circumstances might justifiably find Martin Pemberton to be legally missing.

  Nine

  I HEARD a slightly different account of Martin' s experience in the shadows of the wall of the holding reservoir as he reported it to Harry Wheelwright and as Harry told me, much later after everything was over. Martin was not terribly surprised by the sight of the stage. He thought of it as a hallucination brought on by the night just passed. He had reason to believe he' d conjured it up, it was early in the morning and perhaps he was not quite sober, having spent the night in a shanty on the West Side, with a young housemaid, whose soul knew nothing but service so that this is a delicate matter, so that as she kneeled before him and he held her head and felt th
e working muscles of her jaw and the rhythmic pullings of her cheeks, he realized in himself his father' s imperial presence, his father' s cruelty rising to a smile in the darkness like the inherited beast of himself breaking into being and he felt not pleasure but the brute disposition of a man he loathed as no other.

  It was only later that the doubts set in. He became convinced the coach and its passenger were as real as they appeared to be. In such ways as we all deal with our symptoms of illness, taking them lightly and seriously by turn, he was cycled in his torment, swinging from mind to world and back again - though more driven, I can imagine, more in the way of an electromagnetic motor in his frantic changes of mind.

  I' ll tell you here that I was ready to believe in every dark vision if it appeared at the Croton holding reservoir. Which is gone, of course. Our public library stands there now. But in those years its massive ivy-covered walls rose over a neighborhood monumental in its silence. The few brownstone and marble mansions across the street along Fifth Avenue stood aloof from the noisy commerce to the south. Our Mr Tweed lived just a block north, practicing the same silence. It was an unnatural thing, the reservoir. The bouldered retaining walls were twenty five feet thick and rose forty four feet in an inward leaning slant. The design was Egyptian. The corners were relieved by trapezoidal turrets, and bisecting each long wall face were temple doors. You went in, climbed up a stair to the parapet, and came out in the sky. From this elevation the rising city seemed to fall back before something that wasn' t a city, a squared expanse of black water that was in fact the geometrical absence of a city.

  I grant you that it is a very personal feeling I had. New Yorkers loved their reservoir. They strolled along the parapet arm in arm and were soothed in their spirits. If they wanted a breeze in summer, here is where it would blow. Puffs rippled the water. Children launched their toy sloops. The Central Park, well to the north, was not yet finished, all mud holes and ditches and beans of shoveled earth, a park only in the eyes of its imaginers. So this was the closest we could come to pastoral.

  But I am sensitive to architecture. It can inadvertently express the monstrousness of culture. As the complicit expression of the ideals of organized human life it can call forth horror. And then something happens appropriate to it, and maybe from its malign influence.

  Several years before Martin walked in the shadow of its wall, a boy was drowned off the cobbled bank at the west end of the reservoir. I was there on the Fifth Avenue side - I was there with the one woman I have ever seriously considered marrying. Fanny Tolliver was her name, a generous, dear woman with a glorious head of auburn hair who was much amused by me, but within months was to succumb to heart failure. It was not clear what had happened, I heard shouts, people were running. The sun had spread over the water' s surface. And then the scene clarified as we went toward it along the parapet The child was pulled feet first from the water by a man who I have since decided was bearded, and this bearded man wrapped him in his frock coat and rushed him directly past us, down the steps to the street, where, as I looked down over the ivied wall, the blackbeard, in his shirtsleeves, summoned a waiting hackney and rode off with his burden, the carriage rattling over the cobblestones down the avenue - I thought to a hospital. But then the boy' s mother appeared, coming along the walk, tearing her hair and screeching, falling, sobbing. It was her child, and as for the man, who had said he was a doctor, she didn' t know who he was. And Fanny sank to her knees to hold the distraught mother, and in the brilliant water of this sunlit afternoon I saw the lad' s toy boat sailing like a clipper at sea, its prow falling and rising in the laplets still on the tack he had set for it, its sail puffed in the soft June breeze as it dipped and reared among the fracted diamonds of water and light.

  Who these people of the parapet were, their names, addresses, the circumstance that brought them together, or if the boy lived or died, or if the blackbeard killed as well as kidnapped, are questions I can' t answer. I report, that is my profession, I report, as a loud noise testifies to a gun. I have given voice to' the events of my life and times, and from my first timid type-inch of apprentice writing until the present moment I have taken the vow to do it well and truly. But that Sunday at the reservoir, the faculty was suspended, there was to be no account for the Telegram from me.

  Remembrances take on a luminosity from their repetition in your mind year after year, and in their combinations and as you work them out and understand them to a greater and greater degree so that what you remember as having happened and what truly did happen are no less and no more than visions. I have to warn you, in all fairness, in reporting what are now the visions of an old man. All together they compose a City, a great port and industrial city of the nineteenth century. I descend to this city and find the people I have come to know and for whose lives I fear. I tell you what I see and hear. The people .of this city think of it as New York, but you may think otherwise. You may think it stands to your New York City today as some panoramic negative print, inverted in its lights and shadows its seasons turned around, a companion city of the other side.

  The scene of that day is indelible in my mind but sealed up in the information I' ve given, and memory cannot recover the moments after - what we did, what we offered that woman, or where she went. It makes it no easier for me now to confess that at the time I was assistant managing editor of my paper. But is there any street, any neighborhood, any place in the city that won' t eventually be the scene of disaster, given enough time?

  The city compounds disasters. It has to. History accumulates them - I grant you that. The reservoir was in fact an engineering marvel: From an upstate dam across the Croton River, the water flowed through Westchester in conduits, crossed the Harlem River on a viaduct of fifteen Roman arches, and came to its containment at Fifth Avenue and Forty second Street. When it began to operate the danger of fires was considerably reduced - pumping stations were built and firemen now had water under pressure, and were municipal employees. So it was badly needed, our reservoir. Crucial to a modem industrial city.

  But I happened to be present the day it was dedicated, a July Fourth. It had taken years for our incorruptible government to bring it to us- you need the money to flow freely before the water can - years of men in top hats poring over blueprints and raising their arms and pointing and giving instructions to the stolid engineers awaiting their pleasure, blastings, the ring of pickaxes on the Manhattan schist, dray teams groaning with loads of rubble. Years of this inverted temple building. And now here is young McIlvaine in his first months on the job, a reporter of monumental news. His lean face is unlined and shining, he does not at this time in his life require spectacles It is Independence Day, 1842. The War Between the States is two decades ahead. He stands on the elevated bank of a huge cubic crater. In his nostrils is the odor of wet sand, the dank air of new stone construction. Arranged along the south embankment in solemn black ranks are the shades of municipal life - the mayor, former mayors, would be mayors, aldermen, commissioners of this and that, philosophers of the chamber of commerce, ward heelers, and fellow newspaper wretches. And after speeches spoken grandly and at inconsiderate length, oratorios of self congratulation, the ribbon is cut, the wheels are turned, the sluice gates opened and the water thunders in as if it were not a reservoir but a baptismal font for the gigantic absolution we require as a people

  Ten

  I' M NOT sure what obligation I' m under to give you a sense of the life around this matter, the degrees of my consciousness taken up with all my regular duties, or indeed my sense of the expanding, pulsating city pumping its energies outward furiously in every direction except that, of course, all of it was indicative, all meaningful of the story I sought out, just as any chosen point on the compass can lead you to the earth' s core, I suppose I would be justified in reciting to you all twelve pages of our paper everyday for several years of the post-war, from the shipping news to the commercial reports on the corn and cotton crops, the fortunes made or lost on the Exchange, the late
st technical marvels from our inventors, the murder trials, the social scandals, the politics from Washington, and the glories of the western tribal expurgations. But this is a municipal matter, a municipal matter and I should keep to the streets, whether they are paved with stones or, as they were farther north, merely laid out with string over mud lots. In any event you will see that invariably, what it is we need to discover is exactly what we already know.

  Somewhere in this season, in May, or early June, working men in various industries began spontaneously to leave their workplaces in support of the idea of an eight-hour workday. In fact the Legislature had several years before made this the law, but the employers of our city had simply ignored it and now, their patience spent, brewery workers, mechanics, carpenters, blacksmiths, bricklayers, were laying down their tools, removing their aprons, and taking to the street. Even the stolid burghers at the Steinway piano factory walked out. All over the city men were meeting in halls, making speeches, marching through the streets, throwing up picket lines, and police units were dispatched to break up these meetings, arrest these marchers, and crack the heads of these speakers, who were disturbing the peace and refusing to do an honest day' s work for an honest day' s pay. Our headline by the third day defined the circumstances as a general strike. I looked over my editorial floor and dared any reporter to' join the fun. Instead they spread out over Manhattan and came back to file their war reports. From Elizabeth Street as far uptown as the gasworks, from the Eleventh Avenue abattoirs with their hooked cow carcasses to the Water Street docks, police and workingmen were doing battle. I stood at my open office window and imagined I could hear a kind of ground song, as if I were overlooking a prospect of woods and fields with burbling freshets and the chirrups of small perching birds.