Electric City: A Novel (7 page)

The water aimed in staccato bursts against the trunk of a massive elm whose sturdy limbs reached out and up, almost dwarfing the house itself. Henry couldn’t take his gaze off the branches, whose density seemed to pull at his attention with an irresistible force. At the same time, the
weight of the day pressed down so hard he felt as though he might pass out. No matter that shade was spreading in a generous pool below the tree; approaching it was forbidden in a way he couldn’t have admitted to anyone. When he detected the shadow of someone moving around inside the leaded-glass entryway, and felt the warning bass drum of his heartbeat, he rallied himself and turned away, sprinting in the direction of his car.

The next morning, a summer thunderstorm hit, with delirious sheet lightning and enough heavy rain to flood the drains and spill with abandon across the streets. The day was warm, but Henry stayed inside to view it all from the couch beside his living room window; he watched the sky grow purple and blue gray and fierce. Leaves turned inside out in the wind.

I
N
Y
ONKERS
, S
TEINMETZ
discovered it was surprisingly easy to drape an imaginary black cloth over his own European backstory, and to focus now on the vivid outlines of an American existence. Asmussen had drifted away after helping situate his friend in the position of lowly draftsman for Rudolf Eickemeyer’s machine shop. This left Steinmetz to fend for himself, to explore the intriguing streets of the Lower East Side, and to improve his command of English. The blending of Old and New Worlds was an endless source of fascination: matzo factories alongside hat shops, pickle sellers, and drugstores; Yiddish shouted from tenement windows, and streetcar wires crisscrossing overhead.

Who could have predicted that within three years, Eickemeyer’s inventions would evolve from mechanisms for hatmaking to revolutionary modifications of electrical motors? Technical drawings made by Steinmetz proved not only his exactitude but his keen understanding of the intersections between groundbreaking mathematics and engineering marvels.

It was an introduction to Thomas Edison, the first one fully able to recognize the texture of the small man’s genius, that forever changed the direction of Steinmetz’s future. Determined to hire Steinmetz for his own newly established company, Edison was stunned to find that Steinmetz possessed not only a powerful will of his own but a deep sense
of loyalty to his original employer. Not a man who tolerated refusals, regardless of justification, Edison purchased the entire Eickemeyer enterprise; Steinmetz was brought like a human trophy to the recently acquired location upstate. Edison exclaimed that they would join forces just the way the Hudson and Mohawk converged, a symbol for the power they were harnessing to transform everything in the world.

What Steinmetz wanted most was a laboratory, a space devoted to experimentation and accidental epiphanies. Inspired in part by his own body’s perturbations, he could readily discern the difference between those mechanical considerations one could control or modify, and those that were fixed as givens. Soon he was constructing an oversize house on Wendell Avenue, among the newest mansions of Electric City, with an extension alongside the ground floor designed to meet Steinmetz’s specifications and vision.

The cabin near the edge of the Mohawk was Steinmetz’s other equally invaluable sanctuary: just far enough from town to bring him back into the embrace of nature, and yet close enough to be accessible each weekend. Joseph offered to build him a canoe. There was something redemptive about the way its adjustments at the water line referred directly and automatically to his weight and balance, not in contrast to any other person but merely in response to himself. He climbed in on one side and out on the other, the way its maker taught him.

The board that served as his desk was plain and unvarnished except when it began to show signs of water damage, at which point Joseph sealed it under a modified coat of the mixture he had used on the hull. Now the desk and the canoe appeared almost inseparable.

Steinmetz was only interested in fish when someone else caught them; he had no patience for the line in the water, preferring expeditions of the mind. Thus he was able to forget for hours at a time that his spine curved like a second cage around his lungs and heart, pushing one shoulder forward and reorganizing almost all the nearby bones to accommodate distortions. Thinking about electrical current while riding a river’s echo was consolation enough.

Ideas about harnessing the Niagara coexisted in alignment with Steinmetz’s fervent commitment to justice. The political arena that had summoned him in his youth, Socialist views that sent him into exile all those years earlier, further contributed to a seemingly endless hunger for change. It would have been ironic to come so far in the name of liberty, only to end up witnessing from the sidelines instead. Just as applied science had seduced him, he wanted to transmit the thrill of invention into the world of the real, to leap the space between invisible power and the palpable modernization of quotidian life.

When Electric City elected a Socialist mayor, Steinmetz felt reverberations of hope for a role of another kind—in the laboratory of the classroom. Not with the graduate students at Union College, or even the undergraduates, but on behalf of the youngest students, the ones at the beginning of life. He was elected president of the school board, recognizing a chance to interweave his love of youngsters and his love of discovery.

“Here is where the New World can truly begin,” he proclaimed. “These children, raised in a climate of possibility and expansiveness, are the ones who will bring the highest evolution for us all. Orphans
have the same rich potential as those born into privilege; humanity is God-given and equal at the start. Progress for all of us depends on this truth.”

Joseph Longboat thought his friend was a wonder, not unlike the formations on the bark of injured pines, hardened resin lasting for millennia. Persevering in the face of so many obstacles, Steinmetz floated on the river the way amber floats on saltwater. The canoe was the finest Joseph had ever made.

“You have the disguise of a geode,” he told Proteus one afternoon. “Misshapen on the outside, dazzling facets inside.”

M
ARTIN
’
S FATHER HAD
followed the patterns of his ancestors, and of the natural world too. Always said he was coming home in the spring, after the thaw, when the ice on the river broke apart and slowly, inevitably, thinned and disappeared.

“It’s a rhythm you can count on,” Robert said, “measured by opening your eyes and listening. Not the calendar pages, not the clock on the wall. The earth will tell you.”

Robert must have learned about paying attention from his mother. Annie spoke of these signs to her grandson Martin, teaching him about the texture of the softening world during their walks at the edge of the river. Annie would reach down to touch the ice, then place her fingertips lightly on both sides of his face, imitating the gentle pressure, the letting go.

That gesture always made him want to ask about his mother, who had died shortly after his birth. Her name was like his, Martine, but that was practically all he knew.

At home, when Annie knelt beside Martin, their paired hands worked the soil in the half acre of land behind their barn-shaped house. Annie’s fingers were arthritic but strong; she separated roots as though untangling her own long hair, made room for the growing things to breathe.

“Under the surface the crystals are dissolving,” she explained. “The seeds waking up from their patient sleep. You feel it in your bones.”

Martin told her about sensations that kept him awake at night, a deep burning at the center of his thighbones, as if he were being pulled from both ends of his body.

Annie smiled sympathetically. “When the earth stretches, it makes space for the sun to come all the way in.”

The sun came closer just like Martin’s father came closer, his heartbeat steady and palpable. Martin came to believe Robert was like a migratory bird remembering home and knowing exactly when to turn around. Except once his father had stayed away through three years, a cycle that broke the rules Martin wanted to be able to rely upon. Annie said that could be his own chance to grow, to keep standing on his own steady feet without leaning on anyone else. Martin hated the enforced self-reliance at first, but once he learned it he was glad. Now his father saw how they both stood solid and separate, the way men were meant to be.

“It’s a good thing,” Robert said, returning after all that time, gray threads in his hair. And Martin said in his new deep voice, “Yes.”

Martin had no one his own age he wanted to talk to with any regularity. There was his grandmother, there was Midge, and there was his retriever, Bear. Although his cocked ears were smarter than anything humans could imitate, Bear often fell asleep while listening. Martin’s thoughts often remained within his own mind:
What about the way we are and are not inside our bodies, or limited to our bodies—maybe that’s what I mean. That we are held here by gravity and skin, but we extend so much farther, we vibrate and echo and outlast our bodies too.

When he looked at certain photos of Charles Steinmetz that had belonged to his grandfather Joseph, he saw the scientist looking right back, returning Martin’s inquiring gaze with questions of his own. “Why do I interest you?” the ghost wanted to know. “What does my life have to do with yours?”

And Martin wanted to say:
Because of being strange and almost overlooked. Because you persevered despite the odds stacked against you, physically and otherwise. Even politics, even oceans, even language and money. None of it stopped you; none of it broke you.

It was true, the library books told the story, and Midge repeated the tale to Martin in her own way. Recently when he had walked all the way to her house and ended up helping with repairs to her roof, Midge reminisced out loud. When Martin was younger, she had climbed the ladder while he stood at its base. Now their roles were reversed.