Read Online The Waterworks by E. L. Doctorow - Free Book Online Page A

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, I’m 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 thecity 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 modern 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