Read Online The Waterworks by E. L. Doctorow - Free Book Online
Authors: E. L. Doctorow
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Historical fiction, General, Historical, History, Young men, New York, New York (State), New York (N.Y.), 19th century, City and Town Life, Urban Life, City and Town Life - New York (State) - New York - History - 19th Century - Fiction, Young Men - New York (State) - New York - Fiction, New York (N.Y.) - Fiction
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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 shadow 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. At first 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 the 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 appearedto 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 berms 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 inadvertentlyexpress 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 feetfirst from the water by
Nine
I HEARD a slightly different account of Martin’s experience in the shadow 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. At first 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 the 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 appearedto 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 berms 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 inadvertentlyexpress 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 feetfirst from the water by
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