The Waterworks

by E. L. Doctorow

  Twenty-one

  "I knew the way to my father was through Eustace Simmons," Martin told us. "Simmons came out of the, maritime life. I went along West Street, around the Battery, to South Street, I went into every sailors' bar, every saloon, every dance hall in the Port of New York, with no luck. Then I thought, my father being, absent, Simmons would represent his interests around town. The situation elevated him, to the higher class�of thieves.

  "One night I had the assignment from the Tatler to go to the Astor House, where Boss Tweed and his friends were giving a testimonial dinner to a Tammany Club ward leader. They all wore the emblematic tiger in their lapels, the gold head of a tiger relieved in blue enamel, the eyes set with rubies. A very young girl danced on a table in a belted diaphanous gown, and at her feet, following her every move with the discrimination of a, connoisseur, was Eustace Simmons. I hadn' t seen him in many years but I knew him immediately. A Cadaverous man, dressed well but with the effect somehow of dishevelment, he was slouched back in his chair. The dimmed light brought out the ruin of his face - he is pitted and pocked, the skin under the eyes is black, the head of wiry hair graying and combed across from ear to ear, and the whole aspect of him, somehow, dirty looking.

  "A few minutes later, I sat down in the chair next to his and could see he recognized me. Someone was making a speech. There was laughter and applause. I said in Simmons' s ear that I wanted to see my father. He gave no indication that he heard me, but after a pause to light his cigar, he rose from the table and sauntered out of the dining room. I followed as he trusted I would. "It was peculiar and it shocked me at first, but I respected him for not attempting to deny my father was alive. He has a quick mind, Simmons, and I think he knew within moments of my appearance what he would do.

  "He got his hat and left the Astor House with me right behind him. His carriage was around the corner. In the light of the streetlamp I caught a glimpse of the driver I can' t adequately, express what I felt at the sight of him, the same driver of the white stage with my father and the other old men. I didn' t want to get into the hansom. Simmons shouted "Wrangel!" and the driver leapt down and locked a powerful arm across my throat so that I couldn' t breathe, though I could smell the onions on his breath, while Simmons caught me behind the ear with what I suppose was a sap. I saw a sudden bright light.

  "I don' t know what happened then or how much time passed. I was aware of motion, then of the motion conferred to a carriage by a team of horses, then of painful daylight, then of two or three small faces staring at me. I was looking at children. It was day, I tried to rouse myself, I was not tied but I could not move. I think on top of everything they must have drugged me. I couldn' t seem to get to my feet. I toppled over and a child screamed. Then I was on my back, looking at the battened ceiling, of what, in the moment before I passed out entirely, I realized was a public omnibus of the Municipal Transport Company.

  "Let me say here that the driver Wrangel is of less consequence in all of this than you think. He is strong, fearsome to look at, with those colorless pupils, and I could barely speak or swallow after he' d put his armlock on me, but his appearance ought not be held against him. He' s like a good horse. That' s all he is, a loyal stolid soul who asks no questions. He' s a Prussian. They' re brought up to be that way, the Germans, with their strict parents and titled officers, who teach them obedience, obedience above all. Wrangel reveres Dr Sartorius. He served under him in the medical corps. His most treasured possession is their field hospital unit citation, signed by President Lincoln. He showed it to me one day. He thinks when Simmons tells him to do something, it is what Sartorius wants.

  "The doctor himself I find difficult to represent to you. He doesn' t expend his energies on the formation of a, social self. He is quiet, almost ascetic in his habits, courteous, unprepossessing. He has no vanity that can be appealed to or flattered or insulted. You will wonder, as I did, how someone so careless, someone so uninterested in putting himself forward, or seeking advantage, could, marshall, the immense resources needed for his work. But he doesn' t-he simply allows things to happen around him. He takes what is to hand, he accepts what his, devotees press on him. It' s as if, there' s an alignment of historical energies magnetized on him which, for all I know, is probably all, that makes him visible.

  "I wasn' t brought to him for another day or so after I recovered consciousness. I had no idea, and have no idea today, where this was, There was always, only indoor light. I never saw a window. Up dose, and third in a sequence after Simmons and Wrangel, Sartorius appeared to me in his modest demeanor as a mere medical attendant to Augustus Pemberton, a retainer, one of those doctors whose practice is limited to one or two wealthy patients.

  "In this view I felt I had every right to my anger. I was Augustus' s son, after all, with the contemptuous attitude of the line. I was loud and righteous. I demanded to know if I had been manhandled under standing orders from my father.' How like him to put others between us!' I said.' Is he still afraid to face me? Is he still afraid to answer to me?' Sartorius was calm. He asked, as if simply to satisfy his own curiosity, how I had learned my father was alive.

  "' I have seen him, sir. Do not patronize me. I have seen everything. I have seen the grave in Woodlawn where a child is interred in his place.'

  "He wasn' t cowed-on the contrary. He leaned forward and peered at me. I told him how I had gone to Woodlawn and dug up the coffin. I then felt it necessary to tell him why I had come to that, desperate measure, beginning with my sight of the white stage, in the snow going past the reservoir. I didn' t quite understand how the conversation had turned so that I was, confiding in this man. Yet I was, and with relief. "He said' The possibility always exists of exciting notice, of course, though, I think you are an exception to most people, in acting upon your illusions.' This was said in a tone of approval.' What is your profession, Mr Pemberton?'

  "You understand at no point, then or afterward, did Sartorius attempt to deny anything, or to equivocate. He never tried to justify himself to me. My appearance had aroused his interest, not his concern. At moments during our interview I felt myself a specimen that had swum into his field of vision. He' s a scientist. He does not think of defending his actions. He is not weakened with a conscience. Once I inquired of his religion. He was raised a Lutheran, but Christianity he regards as no more than a poetic conceit. He doesn' t even bother to criticize it, or mock it or disavow it.

  "' If you want to see your father, of course you may,' Sartorius said to me.' I doubt you will get satisfaction. This is something for which you cannot have prepared yourself. The perceptions of a merely moral intelligence, even of filial love or hatred, won' t suffice. I suppose it is no business of mine. But what will you say to this, papa, you thought was a dead man?' "

  "Of course that was the question I had never permitted myself to ask. He must have read the desperation on my face. What indeed could I do? Embrace my father? Celebrate his resurrection? Cry with joy that he was alive? Or did I just want to tell him, that I knew? That I knew, And salute him for having found a depth of human deceit and betrayal beyond my conceiving.

  "What was my purpose? Everything and nothing. I didn' t know if I' d get down on my knees and beg him to provide for his wife and son, or fall on him and tear his throat out for having given me this life of endless contemplation of his hideous being.

  I said to the doctor by way of a rational answer. "' I thought my father was merely a scoundrel and a thief and a murderer.' He seemed to understand. He rose and told me to follow him. "I stumbled along in a daze. I became aware of the atmosphere of his laboratories, without seeing anything in particular going on there - two or three rooms with doors open between them, and a faintly chemical smell in the air. All the light came from gas jets, there were glass cabinets for instruments, stone-top cabinets inset with iron sinks, boxy machines on wheels with cables and gears and tubing. I remember a square wooden chair with leather straps at the and rests and an iron head brace, The walls were drap
ed in some brownish napped material, velour or velvet. To me all this was the menacing furniture of science.

  "He has a wonderful library, Sartorius. After we came to our understanding, he allowed me to use it. I spent many consoling hours occupying myself with learning more of what he knew, by reading what he was reading. It was a foolish idea, no more than a kind of homage, really.

  "He is fluent in several languages, the scientific journals and papers lay in piles on the floor where he threw them. I made it a task of my own to keep them in order. Books, monographs from France, from London, from Germany, arrived in packing boxes. He knows everything going on in the sciences, in medicine, but he reads impatiently, looking always for something he doesn' t know, something to surprise him, a line of inquiry, a critique. His library is not a collector' s. He doesn' t read for pleasure. He has no particular respect for books in themselves, their bindings, and so on, and he didn' t handle them carefully. He read the philosophers, the historians, the natural scientists, and even the novelists, without differentiating their disciplines in his mind. Looking, always looking, for what he would recognize as true and useful to him. Something to get him past whatever it was that confounded him, past the point in his work where his own mind had been, stopped.

  I think sometimes he was looking really for a companionable soul. He certainly didn' t surround himself with intellectual equals. He lived in solitude. When he entertained, as far as I could tell, it was at the strong urging of Eustace Simmons: the guests were usually politicians.

  "He led me to an elevator, which rode us upward in a brass cage. He drove the thing but made no fuss about it. The floor above consisted of rooms and suites where the clientele resided the electors, the fellowship, the funeral society of old men. There were living quarters for them and treatment rooms with leather top tables, and there were rooms for the women who attended them. Later, after we worked out the terms of my captivity, I had the freedom of the place and came to understand and distinguish all of this. My first impression was only of a corridor of deeply shadowed rooms, all of which happened to be empty. The decor was simple, like a monastery or a mission.

  "It was when I was elevated to the rooftop and saw, in all its humid green glory, Dr Sartorius' s - what? - facility for biologized wealth? - that I knew this is where I would find my father. I was so stunned I wonder if since then I have been under the sort of spell laid upon those who look on the forbidden.

  "Here was the site of the experiment, the heart of the researches, the conservatory Sartorius had designed himself. It was in the nature of an indoor park, with gravel paths and plantings and cast-iron benches. It was all set inside a vaulted roof of glass and steel which cast a greenish light over everything. The conservatory was laid out to effect a forbearing harmony and peacefulness. At the center was a kind of courtyard paved in brownstone, and terraced up from that in single steps were smaller squares with filigreed chairs and tables. Enormous day urns sprouted profusions of fronds and leaves that I knew on sight were not native. A kind of tepid steam or diffusion of watered air hissed out of ports or valves inset in the floor, so that the atmosphere was cloyingly humid. I could feel through the floor vibrations of the dynamo that was responsible. The centerpiece of the brownstone square was a sunken stone bath, a bathing pool with water, ochre in color and overhung with a sulfurous mist. An old man, terribly withered, was bathing, with a pair of women attending him. I have not mentioned the statuary, here and there, pedestaled or large enough to stand alone, but consistent in erotic subject, with heroic copulations, nudes of both genders in states of passion, and so on, yet all notably graceless and unidealized, as we are - the sort of pieces an artist would not show in public but only to his friends.

  The effect of all of this, was of a Roman bath, had Rome been industrialized. The greenish light from the conservatory roof seemed to descend, it sifted down, it had motion, it seemed to pulse. Gradually I became aware that I was hearing music. First I felt it as the pulse of the air, but when I realized it was music, it broke over me, swelling and filling this vaulted place, It was as if I had stepped into another universe, a creation, like an obverse Eden. Its source was an orchestrion standing like a church organ against a far wall-an enormous music box behind glass that sprung from tines of its slowly turning disc the sounds of a concert band.

  "I had a premonition of the pitiful truth as I looked for Augustus Pemberton among the quiet and coddled old men of this place, these idlers and their companions, silently listening like people in the park, in their black frock coats and with their hats upon the tables.

  I found my father in a kind of grassy alcove, sitting on a bench, slumped in this misted pleasure-grove in al kind of vacuous despondency or infinitely trusting patience, which I would soon learn was steadfast, as it was with the other gentlemen in residence around him, despite the vitalistic therapies applied to them, inside and out.

  My primitive father bluntly, powerfully selfish, stupid, intransigent, with his crude appetites and gross taste and stylish cunning, whom I tried to speak with and wept in front of and prayed to have restored in all his force, rather than as this shrunken soul lifting his eyes to look at me, without recognition, at the urging of Dr Sartorius:'' Augustus? Do you know who this is? Will you say hello to your son?"

  Twenty two

  MARTIN LAPSED into silence. None of us said anything. I felt the breeze, looked out over the Tisdales' autumn garden, listened to the ordinary sounds of the street, with, I suppose, gratitude. Martin closed his eyes and after a few moments it became apparent that he had fallen asleep. Emily adjusted his lap robe, and we left him there and went inside.

  It was unfortunate that the ladies had heard his account. Sarah Pemberton, quite pale, asked Emily if she could rest a moment somewhere. She was accommodated, and later, when Emily went to see to her, Sarah confessed she had developed an intense headache, in her silent forbearing way containing the effect of her knowledge as a private matter, but the pain was so severe, Emily had to send for a doctor. He prescribed something for the pain that didn' t entirely work, and that night, at Emily' s insistence, Sarah Pemberton stayed over, and Noah as well, and Emily Tisdale found herself running a small sanitarium.

  Donne and I decided to leave. He gave an anxious look up the stairs, but there was nothing we could do but get in the way. Seeing us to the door, Emily said: "I am terrified. Who are these, malignities of human life in our city? I want to pray but my throat closes up. Can our lives ever be the same? What is to be done, do you know, Captain? Is there something for us to do that will, restore the proportions of things? I cannot think of one. Will you think of one? Will you do that, please?"

  Donne and I walked over to Pfaff' s saloon on Broadway. The raucous good humor there seemed to me callow. We sat in a corner and had several whiskeys. I was thinking of the desperate impertinence of this league of old gentlemen, so unsatisfied with the ways of their God as to take their immortal souls into their own hands, how pathetic, not to trust their Christian theology, but to ensure things for themselves. How brazen and how pathetic. Donne thought of things in a more practical manner. "It is a kind of new science, I suppose, part of the knowledge of modem times. But it seems to require enormous sums, to go forward. It is a complex enterprise. Expensive to run. They bought that mansion and fitted it out as an orphanage. They had the protection of the Municipals, the endorsement of the city fathers. There is another establishment, where this conservatory is, another entire establishment with a staff. All of this has been funded by the - what would you call them? - patients?"

  "Yes, at best, to the tune of thirty millions."

  "Is that a reasonable estimate?"

  "Twenty five, then, at least that."

  "Well, it must be banked somewhere under someone' s name. It can' t be all gone."

  "No."

  "It would be one of Mr Tweed' s banks. I have been talking to the federal district attorney. I' m trying to get him to issue subpoenas. But he needs something specific."

>   "Why would the Ring not steal it for themselves?"

  "They will if they have to," he said. "I imagine they hope for something more."

  "What more?" I said, and the moment I did I realized what he meant. The Ring, with their vaulting ambition, would carry ambition to its ultimate form. They were nothing if not absurd, ridiculous, simpleminded, stupid, self aggrandizing. And murderous. All the qualities of men who prevail in our Republic.

  "While Sartorius is free, the money is sacrosanct," Donne said.

  "That' s why if we hope to recover anything for Sarah - for Mrs Pemberton and her son-we must find the accounts and impound them more or less at the same time we, impound him. It will take months for the Ring to be put on trial. Until then they are not without hope of preserving their last, best secret." I was comforted by Donne' s analysis of this strange cabal, as if it was a legal, practical concern, a problem. to be solved, a matter of fact, whereas my mind was beset by this thing, The images from the conservatory, loomed in me. I could not sleep, I was haunted, not by ghosts, but by Science. I felt afflicted with intolerable reality. All my fears were compounded into a fear of the night. I was without my profession, my reason for being, my cockiness. Somehow, deprived of the means to report it, our life and times, I imagined myself at its mercy. Life seemed to be an inevitable disease of knowledge, a plague that infected all who came in contact with it.

  The most terrible thing was that the only hope in dealing with it was in acquiring more of it, more of this dead spirit of knowledge. I imagined, to give myself courage, that it all might be initiatory, a kind of spiritual test in a world ruled by God after all and that at its worst, at the moment of its greatest most unendurable terror, it would end, in a kind of light and peace, that we could stagger about in, like happy drunks, until we died. But as a lapsed Scotch Presbyterian, I couldn' t really believe that. What I did was pretend to have the same practical, matter of fact attitude as Donne. We convened at the Tisdales' and put our minds to hearing as much from Martin as we could. We had first of all, of course, to know where that conservatory was. And there were other questions. Martin seemed to have been seduced by the doctor' s intellect, to the point of working for him. But we had found him dying in the cellar of the orphanage. What had happened? Donne was reluctant to put him under hard questioning-he didn' t seem strong enough for it. The best course, if the most exacting, was patience.