Electric City: A Novel (19 page)

“So you really are connected with the war!”

“I didn’t say that.” He folded the newspaper and sighed.

“You implied it,” she said.

“You’d make such a good lawyer,” her mother interrupted. “Don’t you think so? I can just see her in a court of law.”

“
Mom
,” Sophie said.

“She can become whatever she wants,” her father said. “As long as she works hard. That’s the point.”

“Please don’t change the subject,” Sophie said. The milk at the bottom of her cereal bowl looked gray.

“The Company has done a lot of good in the world,” her father said. “And you have nothing to be afraid about.”

“If you’re getting involved with war research, we could all get blown up and not even know why!”

“Nobody’s going to get blown up,” her mother said.

Her father swallowed the last of his juice and shook his head. “My work has nothing to do with bombs.”

“Do you really know that’s true?” Sophie asked him.

He presented what seemed to her a wistful look. “I guarantee you,” he said. “Scientific curiosity is our best hope for the future.”

“But what about all those secrets at the Atomic Power Lab practically next door?” she said.

“Atoms are everywhere,” her father said. “You could say we all consist of atomic power. Does that make us dangerous?”

“If the research weren’t dangerous, they wouldn’t have anything to hide.”

“See?” her mother said. “A lawyer. I’m telling you.”

Her father smiled. “This is America. You could even be president.”

M
ARTIN COUNTED THE
hours before he could end his workday and head over to Midge’s house. Getting acquainted with the Steinmetz canoe would surely help dispel the agitation left over from his return from the lake—the sound of the now-empty truck bed and the echoing space on his front seat where Sophie had been.

The night before, he’d returned to find Annie already asleep in her room. She had left a porch light to welcome him and a pot of soup on the stove, but he wasn’t hungry. Instead, he sat cross-legged on one of Annie’s braided rugs and stayed up past midnight rummaging through several of his most recent notebooks, pausing to touch slender strips of birch bark that had been inserted to mark particular pages. There were photographs of snow-covered trees and an abandoned pair of his father’s gloves; a charcoal drawing of a broken ladder leaning against a gnarled apple tree; an ink drawing of an upside-down bicycle half-buried in mud.

As a last effort before going to bed, he made a note to remind himself that the annotated list of recordings was overdue for an update, especially now that the collection of tapes had overwhelmed his bookshelf and spilled onto the floor. Layers of sound piling up like shale. Mohawk voices and city cacophony. The noon whistle and the dripping of winter icicles. A pair of mourning doves at dawn. The sound of a canoe pushing off from shore.

Midge was still nursing a strained shoulder, grumpy about being unable to play golf for two weeks straight. While Bear and Zeus chased squirrels and dug random holes on the property, Midge gave Martin instructions about which of her several worm beds could benefit from some attention. Plunging a shovel into a compost pile and turning the layers of decay into something useful was highly recommended as a way to shake off the workday’s residue.

“Isn’t that soil looking good enough to make you want a big bite?” Midge said. She was standing nearby, resting one hand on the cracking dusty seat of an old bicycle; it looked like it was growing down into the dirt instead of emerging upward from it.

Martin laughed. “Annie always says, ‘We eat the earth before the earth eats us.’ I never thought it was quite so literal.”

Midge muttered “Ouch” when reaching for a weed sent a streak of pain through her arm.

“My friend Sophie,” he said, testing her name out loud. “She told me her father walks to synagogue by shortcutting through the parking lot of the country club. Have you ever seen him? Saturday mornings?”

Midge paused, looking for clues in Martin’s face. “She’s the girl you brought to the lake?”

He nodded, working the shovel with renewed vigor. “Her father’s religious.”

Midge thought of the occasions she’d steered her golf cart to avoid colliding with a man walking straight across the Mohawk Club’s parking lot and dressed as if for church.
Saturdays. Of course.

“I’ve seen him once or twice,” she said. “We’ve nodded.”

The earthworms gleamed among the cornhusks and shriveled cabbage leaves. Martin remembered the flicker of hope he’d felt when Sophie was riding in the truck with him, followed by the stab of letdown when they arrived at Henry’s place.

“I’m sure the management hasn’t recruited any actual Mohawks either,” Martin said. He didn’t blame Midge out loud for belonging to a place where people named Longboat or Levine weren’t welcome. But the discomfort hovered between them.

Midge shoved hands into the pockets of her moth-eaten cardigan, wishing she understood more about the ways of the world, why people separated into groups identifiable only by last names and religions. Steinmetz used to talk about all human beings as unified fields of energy, like water. What kept that from being true, especially in a place called Electric City?

“Lost tribes,” Midge said, though she honestly wasn’t sure what the words meant. The phrase was something she had overhead in childhood, perhaps from Joseph Longboat or even Daddy Steinmetz, who people sometimes mistakenly thought was Jewish himself.

“We’ve waited for each other long enough,” Martin said. “It’s time for the canoe.”

I
T WAS
H
ENRY
’
S
idea to spend their last Sunday together playing tourists in their own town. He and Sophie met Martin at the boat rental shack on the edge of Iroquois Lake, the centerpiece of Electric City’s Central Park. Sophie wore one of Simon’s old baseball caps, fraying at its brim; the cumulative effect of summer sun had turned Henry’s blond hair almost white. Martin wore sunglasses even though the day was overcast.

Deliberately silly in rented paddleboats, Sophie said it was better than bumper cars, though just barely. She and Henry sat side by side in a boxy yellow boat that kept their legs pressed close. Martin in a boat of his own bobbed higher in the murky water. Having chosen to keep the Steinmetz canoe at Midge’s place after taking it on its first voyage, he smiled at the absurd gap between Joseph’s craft and this plastic contraption. Maybe next summer he would bring the canoe to Henry’s house on Lake George. Maybe everything would be different by then.

Aimlessly drifting, Henry and Sophie took turns resting while the other one did all the pedaling. Martin pointed out the way the swans were so graceful on the surface and yet with gangly black feet working hard underneath. Every once in a while the sun pushed through the heavy clouds, but mostly the sky threatened rain. This was nothing like the sparkling day they had all shared on the mica-saturated water of an Adirondack lake.

Sophie lost her baseball cap in the reeds while they were returning the boats to the muddy shoreline, but Henry managed a dramatic rescue, sinking in as far as his knees.

“Don’t tell me about the percentage of swan droppings in this muck,” he said. “Because I wouldn’t do this for anyone but you.”

Martin watched from drier land.
Swans mate for life
, he thought but didn’t say. The idea was a little too romantic to believe.

Instead of a picnic they all went to the Castle Diner. Martin was disappointed to see no sign of Charlie the waitress, but realized she must have been taking night shifts. He had twice now, past midnight, brought a microphone hidden inside the sleeve of his jacket to sit at the counter, watching her. She didn’t seem to mind smiling with apparent sincerity for each new table, switching herself on like generous neon. It wasn’t that he objected to her role, or that he didn’t sometimes wish she had some charm saved for him in particular. What surprised and intrigued him was her apparent way of choosing yes so much more often than no.

Sunday afternoon at the diner should have been packed, but the place was strangely quiet. In driving the few blocks from Central Park toward downtown, Sophie was struck by the number of nearly empty intersections they crossed through. Even the church parking lots looked deserted. She had a memory of the blackout music fading from the radio, “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon.”

When the check came, Henry insisted on paying for all three of their meals. “Our swan song,” he called it. “Last Supper? Last Lunch?”

Sophie shrugged. “Great gesture. Wrong religion.”

Martin laughed. “What she said.”

The next stop should have been obvious, except that Henry was the only one of the three who knew it existed. Steinmetz Park, forty-five
acres overlooking the Mohawk River and with its very own swimming pond and bathhouse. By the time they arrived, a thunderstorm had just begun, which meant that the few families enjoying the place were packed up and leaving. Two boys streamed past them on bicycles, wearing towels like capes, heads bent low against the hard rain. Martin parked his truck next to Henry’s car where they had a wide view of the hillsides drenched in green.

“Perfect place to watch for lightning,” Sophie said to Henry, then made jagged lines in the air with her hands so that Martin could get the idea through their closed windows.

He nodded, flashing his headlights in reply, just in time for a clap of thunder to reverberate overhead. Henry held up his fingers to count the seconds before the streak appeared, but it wasn’t as close as he would have preferred.

“Better safe than sorry, I guess,” he said to Sophie. “Are we having fun yet?”

After a few minutes it was clear that the storm was heading west and away from them, heaviest in the distance. Martin rolled down his window just long enough to suggest they move on.

“Pilgrimage to the Steinmetz house?” Henry said, leaning across Sophie, who had opened her window too. “The space where it used to be, I mean.”

“I’m surprised they didn’t build a shopping center on top of it,” Martin muttered, unable to help himself. He was glad they weren’t aiming toward the Stockade, where his own history and Henry’s collided in too many complicated ways. Not least because of the tribal burial grounds covered with parking lots and warehouses, while the homes of the Dutch settlers had been preserved with careful respect.
No bitterness for today
, he told himself.
Even the land keeps changing its story—solid
ground scooped into ditches and canals, seasoned with water, then ice. Filled in again to make a boulevard.

Sophie tipped her head out to look up at the clearing sky. “It’s rainbow weather now,” she said.

By the time they reached Wendell Avenue, the storm had fully passed and steam was rising from the pavement, though dripping trees made it sound as though the rain hadn’t yet stopped. On the cracked concrete footpath down the center of the Steinmetz property, puddles glistened.

Martin grabbed something from inside his glove box and handed it to Henry. “I thought you might take this back to school with you,” he said.

A thick envelope held photos of Clinton’s Ditch before it was full of canal water and then during and then afterward, a hundred years passing in a photographer’s flash. Water, mud, mules and barges, canal paths, the straining of muscles and the sweat of man and beast, the churning of muddy wheels and muddy water, stench and slap of feet and hide and all in the name of moving things and people from here to there, upriver and down.