Electric City: A Novel (4 page)

Whenever he stayed up late at night listening to his homemade recordings of elders speaking Mohawk, and considered the idea that the Electric City Museum ought to collect such things, he always ended up assuring himself that he was better at safekeeping than any
museum could ever be. Even the battered trunk with a broken lock served as a treasure chest when it was draped with one of Annie’s handmade quilts.

He would have had to teach the basics of listening, and he had no idea how to explain the subtleties of telling stories by beginning with “you” instead of “I.” On his high school English papers, that same “you” was repeatedly crossed out with red marks, replaced in the teacher’s handwriting with her strangely detached “one.” It would take more patience than he possessed to explain that in his own tongue, there was a “we” that meant
you and I
, while another word for “we” meant
he/she and I, but not you
. The language of including and excluding could be simple, but not easy.

Why share this legacy with people who owned too much already, and yet seemed oblivious to the value of preserving what they claimed. Not the land, not the river, not even the houses they built or the machines they made. The letters in the sky and the kitchen appliances and the things that came after.

In the faintest background of certain tapes, Martin recognized the cacophony of mayflies. Their singing so brief and urgent.

You know how to quiet everything down toward a center point, a place where even your breath is barely a disturbance, like the mirrored surface of a pond. Present to nothingness, you can be present to all, even as you stay off to the side somewhere, watching. The flight of an owl in the darkness, wings against air, silent.

You keep waiting to hear somebody tell the true story of the massacre at the Stockade. Instead all you ever get is the twisted history being
told all wrong about who fought and who died. To refer to women and children as “combatants”!

You feel rage in your fingers; the muscles in your legs tighten with a confusing mix of defiance and helplessness. Who made up these words? And who claimed the right to use the names of your people for their street signs and subdivisions? The wrongs are everywhere.

Trapped behind your desk, in the angry voice you keep inside, you challenge the teachers to talk about American history in a different way. You dare them to learn the whole of what happened before they claim to know the facts. The inside voice threatens to erupt, especially now that massacres seem to be happening all over again, in jungles on the other side of the world.

Today, a November morning, you get in trouble for refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance, sent to the principal for remaining in your seat with your fists clenched. You don’t even bother to explain to the homeroom teacher why you will not say words that aren’t true, won’t even shape your mouth around them.

In the principal’s office you mumble something about hypocrisy, about the lies of
freedom and justice for all
when you know better, know what it’s been like for your ancestors and even now, for all the so-called nonwhite people, which really means the ones with no money and no power.

“I don’t pledge my allegiance,” you say. “I won’t put my hand over my heart, not for this flag. You can’t make me.” You sit up straighter in the hard wooden chair. You don’t want to get into any argument or negotiation.

Amazingly, the principal listens. Mr. Borden leans forward and keeps his palms flat on his oak desk. You are shocked to realize that this middle-aged freckle-faced man really does seem to want to understand,
and his milky blue eyes are fixed with great seriousness on you. He wears a tightly buttoned collar and a green tie with some kind of white bird printed on it, and you wonder if Borden genuinely cares about birds or nature in general, if he spends time with his children (there are family photos on the desk, turned so that both you and the principal can see them: the smiling blond wife and two girls, carbon copies of their mother but one shorter than the other and one missing a tooth). Does he take his daughters on camping trips, or maybe swimming? Does he teach them the names of birds and trees?

The principal says, “I want to suggest a compromise.”

You remember a spelling lesson: “The principal is your pal.” You hold your tongue, wondering if this is how it used to happen every time, the promise made and the promise broken.

But here is how it lands: you agree to stand wordlessly during the recitation of the pledge, hands by your side and staying loyal to yourself while acknowledging the rights of the others to speak their own truth. The flag will keep hanging in the corner of the room, where you do not have to look at it.

On the way home from school, you find out that on the very same day of your own small resistance, a young man planted himself in front of the United Nations building in New York City and set his own body on fire. He is burned beyond saving. The blackout that follows doesn’t seem anywhere near as shocking as this piece of news, carried on radio waves into the very hollow of your chest. Exploding.

K
ARL
A
UGUST
R
UDOLF
Steinmetz waited in an interminable line with close to a thousand other steerage passengers on the deck of
La Champagne
. It was July 1, 1889, and the temperature so blistering that most of the passengers, wearing multiple layers of clothing, stood nearly paralyzed with heat exhaustion. One might have expected pandemonium, or at least a kind of restless excitement, but this was the last in a lengthy series of degradations to be endured, and there was nothing to do but bear it.

Steinmetz was still trying to stifle the cough that had wracked him for much of the two-weeks-long crossing from Le Havre to New York. He knew that the first order of business upon arrival at Castle Garden meant passing the medical inspection, and he had more than the average challenges to worry about. Standing slightly over four feet tall and with the same hunched back that disfigured both his father and his grandfather, he was all too aware of the innumerable physical ailments guaranteed for a twisted body like his. He had even temporarily forgone his greatest pleasure, cigars, in order to give his cough an opportunity to subside. Today, mentholated throat lozenges filled his pockets, and he slipped yet another one into his mouth as he watched for the line to inch forward.

Just ahead of him in the queue, a young yet gaunt-faced woman was surreptitiously breastfeeding, shrouding herself as well as the infant
in a webbing of brown wool shawls.
In the name of modesty,
Steinmetz thought,
she is nearly suffocating the child
. He tried not to stare, resisted every impulse to suggest that she give the poor creature a chance to breathe some fresh air. But of course he had no idea what words she would understand. During the voyage he had counted at least thirteen different tongues, muttered and shouted and cried out in dreams. The sea of humanity astonished him. And here they all were, making way for a new land, carrying what they could on their backs.

“Look out there, you!”

“Move up, and stay in line!”

Directives in his new language flew all around him. He felt the press of those eager to reach solid land, while trunks and crates and baskets and satchels were hoisted onto shoulders and carts. There was altogether too much to absorb: light bouncing off the surface of the seawater; children wailing from hunger and weariness; smells of damp wool and unwashed bodies mingling with the stench of the harbor. And within shouting distance, Steinmetz could see several other steamships with their equivalent load of human cargo, waiting for the brutally slow processing to be completed.

The arrival building rose impressively at the dock’s edge, its rococo style reminding him of Bavaria and yet also suggesting a reinvention, more modern, certainly cleaner and less ravaged by soot and weather. Two eagles sculpted in granite posed above the grand entrance, a symbol of this brave world. Not to mention the graceful countenance of the green lady in the harbor, her arm stretched toward heaven with a gilded torch. “I lift my lamp beside your golden door...” Something like that.

His peripheral vision again took in the masses of people pulsing against him. How many would be turned away for carrying visible signs
of disease, not to mention for reasons of insanity (“caused by conditions on the ship,” Steinmetz muttered to no one). How many like himself would be grilled in a vocabulary they didn’t yet possess, asked to prove their capability for earning a living, told to name someone in the States who was willing to sponsor them, help them settle. Were they expecting to be penniless or did they vow to work hard like good Americans?

Like plenty of others, no doubt, he was significantly weakened from the journey—terrible food, little enough fresh water, overcrowded sleeping compartments, and whimpering youngsters at every turn—but he allowed himself a palpable thrill at being so very close now to the true beginning of the rest of his life. It seemed clearer than ever from this vantage point that neither Vienna nor Zurich could have made suitable refuge for a Socialist such as himself; the political constraints he had fled from in Breslau met him there. His fellow mathematics student and friend Oscar Asmussen, a Danish American, had been the one to persuade Steinmetz to join him on this cross-Atlantic voyage. No matter that all he could afford was steerage class, while Asmussen would take his place on an upper deck.

“Would you prefer to end up in some Bavarian prison? Or dead?” Such were the simple equations declared by his friend, and Steinmetz had been unable to refute their logic.

Europe, for him, was over. He was about to step onto an unfamiliar shore, with its promises of renewal and freedom, and adopt it as home.

Inside the vast entrance hall, Steinmetz gazed upward to the curving ceiling and saw a pair of red, white, and blue American flags hanging
limp in the hot air. Having been exhorted to leave behind all cases and bundles, trudging up a wide staircase along with his fellow passengers, he noted the team of medical evaluators peering down over the balcony, studying all of them for obvious signs of infirmity. Steinmetz imagined how pathetic he must look from their viewpoint, no way to hide his compressed frame, his uneven legs. But at least he wouldn’t be seen straining for oxygen or raggedly wheezing like so many on the stairs above and below him.

On this second floor, with doctors scanning each individual in a matter of seconds, scribbling with chalk on dark coat sleeves and lapels, Steinmetz tried to present himself with as much dignity as possible under the circumstances. To be publicly examined by strangers was to be the finale of the humiliations, he hoped.

Just ahead of him, a powdery
B
and
P
were hastily sketched on an elderly woman’s woolen shoulder; her cataracts and ghastly pallor couldn’t be mistaken by even a layperson. Steinmetz observed adults and children of all ages being directed to one side or another, led toward clusters of those who would be taken to the island’s hospital for treatment. He heard loud-voiced assurances that they would be seeing American doctors, not taken back on board.

“You are not being sent home,” a hoarse young man barked over and over. Protests in multiple dialects were elaborately offered in return.

“You are not being rejected. Just need to get stronger first, that’s all.” The young man flexed his muscles as though to demonstrate or perhaps translate, but the gesture was met with baffled expressions.

Steinmetz felt his heart pounding in empathy, knew his own strength was a matter of doubt. Having traversed one treacherous ocean, this seemed to him yet another sea of distress, with feverish looks on nearly every face, even the ones who were passing inspection. The middle-aged
woman to his right was wearing about seven or eight skirts, so much material it must have been like carrying around an extra fifteen kilos of weight.
What a clever inspiration
, he thought, and managed a smile. Why not wear everything you own instead of packing it into a suitcase.