City of Light

by Lauren Belfer

  “Yes, young ladies, feast your eyes on the largest hydroelectric alternators on earth! Five thousand horsepower each,” announced Billy O’Flarity, our guide. Upon our arrival this morning, O’Flarity had received us with extravagant deference. We hadn’t yet seen Tom. Indeed, I hadn’t seen Tom since the night Karl Speyer died. Of course I’d written him to express my thanks for his endowment. He had responded with this invitation to visit the power station.

  Despite my better instincts, I had continued to read the often extravagant speculations in the yellow press about Speyer’s death. If the coroner’s report turned out to contain only what Mr. Rumsey thought it should, I rationalized, I needed to have my own information. Unionists, nature lovers, professional rivals, thieves: The newspapers considered these the most likely culprits in Speyer’s death. Mercifully, no reports, thus far at least, had implicated the leaders of the power project. Therefore I still felt secure withholding from the police my knowledge of Tom’s argument at home with Speyer and his lie about it later. I could still cling to the hope that my suppositions were wrong; I prayed so. Yet the matter gnawed at me, my fears made worse by a creeping suspicion that Tom was in fact using the endowment to bribe me into silence … otherwise, why would he have presented it that way, suddenly and without warning?

  “Yes, you’re lookin’ at ten percent of the electric power generated in the United States of America—and it can go anywhere we decide to send it,” O’Flarity was saying in his Irish brogue. He smiled benignly upon us. His wavy hair was white around his face but progressed through various shades into a pure carrot color that curled over his collar. His white eyebrows were thick and brushed upward, waxed into position, I wagered, because I’d never seen such gravity-defying eyebrows. The blue of his eyes faded into white. Although his clothes were not flamboyant, he wore them flamboyantly—two vests of contrasting plaids, both frayed, a silken ascot, and a white shirt with billowing sleeves. He was like an impoverished showman, a carnival barker like so many in the town of Niagara Falls, with its fire eaters, stuntmen, and museums of horror. The only difference was that Billy O’Flarity wasn’t showing off America’s Fattest Lady or the World’s Tallest Man, but a symbol of the future come to life.

  “Right here, right before your very eyes, you are witnessing the transformation of the world, from the age of steam to the age of electricity!” Extravagant phrases, but true nonetheless.

  “Over there’s the switchboard platform—made from nothing less than the finest Italian marble. See how smooth it’s been polished? Notice too the polished faces of our handsome switchboard operators!” A few of the girls giggled, but more blushed, and O’Flarity beamed with pleasure. “Yes, indeed, you’ve got every single thing you need to operate the generators right on that platform: your bus bars, your rheostats, your handsome young men. Any questions?” He raised his eyebrows in appeal. “No? Well, young ladies, I’m not surprised. Overwhelming, it is, to see for the first time these miracles of human ingenuity. Let us leave this temple of power to the edification of the next group of visitors, and I’ll show you how it all works.”

  With a well-rehearsed dramatic flourish—throwing an imaginary scarf around his neck—he turned on his heel and led us back the way we’d come, down a narrow flight of stairs and through a vaulted passageway. He walked with a swaggering limp that might have been fabricated solely to add to his style. I herded the girls before me, taking my place at the end of the line to make sure no one wandered off. Thus I saw the girls as a group, dressed virtually alike in long dark silk skirts and high-necked Holland shirtwaists, hair twisted up at the back of their heads. Alas, a timeworn image came into my mind, making me sentimental just when I wanted to be stern: the memory of these girls only a few years ago, their skirts at their calves instead of the floor, their hair bouncing freely behind them, big bows propped on the tops of their heads. Now they were grown, almost ready for college or coming-out parties or both. In most ways, they were out of my control. Either I had made them into what I wanted them to be, or the cause was lost.

  As we entered the high-ceilinged presentation room, O’Flarity took a pointer from the bin near the door. Diagrams and maps covered the walls, and there were working models of machinery, some with water gushing through them. Groups of tourists, including a party of Japanese gentlemen, vied for space. The power station had become as much a tourist destination as the Falls. Considering the expense that must have gone into this presentation room, Tom and his partners were obviously eager to show off what they had created.

  “Now, ladies, gather round, gather round,” O’Flarity said, his words echoing with other words in other languages against the marble floor and tiled walls. He drew us together around a scale model of the Niagara River region from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario.

  “Now for a bit of background. The men who built this power station—the greatest men in our great nation—paid for it out of their own pockets. Without any public offerings. Without any help from the federal government—that’s right, zero was the amount of money that came from Washington. Their names are Morgan, Vanderbilt, Belmont, Biddle, Rothschild, and Astor—not to mention many from right here on the Niagara Frontier. They put up millions of dollars with no guarantee of return. And why did they do it, I ask you?”

  “To turn a profit?” Maddie Fronczyk asked.

  I stifled a laugh. Maddie was softly round, her blonde hair braided around her head. Her family was Catholic, from Silesia, a region on the Polish, German, and Czech borders. I feared some of the girls teased her about looking as if she were in Silesia still, but Maddie took everything in stride. She attended Macaulay on a scholarship that Margaret had established years ago for the daughters of industrial laborers. Her father had worked here at the power station before his death. Perhaps because of her background, she seemed older than her years, certainly older than the other seniors around her.

  “It’s an excellent example of the function of the profit motive in a capitalist society,” she continued.

  What had she been reading in her free time? The element of ironic humor in her words was lost on her peers, but I enjoyed it immensely.

  O’Flarity, however, was indignant. “You are wrong, young lady! The men who paid for this power station did it for the good of mankind—to run our industries, to light the darkness. They saw a need and they filled it. They are heroes! They took the risk, they had the courage—they transformed the world!” He tapped his pointer against the floor.

  Maddie smiled as if forgiving a child for misbehaving, but the other girls looked impressed. I didn’t interfere. I made it a policy to stay in the background when I took the girls on field trips. People didn’t expect enough from these girls, and it was my job to expect more. To make them expect more from themselves. My primary duty here was to protect their virtue.

  O’Flarity glared at each of us, as if awaiting further challenges, before continuing. “Now I’m sure you’re all wondering why Niagara is the most perfect site in the world for a hydroelectric power station,” he said, like an accusation. “I’ll tell you. First, the Niagara River is not a river. It’s a strait, linking two bodies of fresh water, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. Because it’s a strait, we have a continuous, steady, even flow. This is extremely unusual, and I hope you’ll never forget it. The Great Lakes are a huge reservoir behind us”—he thrust out his arm expansively—“where water exists for nothing but to go over the Falls. And we’ve got a second advantage here at Niagara, which is that we aren’t off somewhere in the woods. We’re at the absolute center of the best commercial routes in the country, adjacent to the major metropolis of Buffalo.”

  Now he cleared his throat and spoke with a certain reverence, gaining from the girls an even closer degree of attention. “The farsighted heroes who built this project”—he glowered at Maddie—“realized they would need to send the electricity away from the Falls to make it truly beneficial. Therefore they opted to utilize alternating current. Over the objections even of the great T
homas Edison, they chose alternating current: That’s how brave they were. These details are important, dearies, so you must bear with me, you must stretch your minds.”

  Only Maddie flinched at his deprecation; the others may not have recognized it.

  “Nowadays we accept alternating current as the most natural thing in the world, but even a decade ago it was radical! Thomas Edison—now, he’s done a lot of good in the world, don’t get me wrong—but he devoted himself to direct current, clung to it, no matter what evidence anybody gave him to the contrary. That was his profit motive talking. Direct current was his baby. But the problem was, direct current has to be used within a couple of miles of where it’s generated; it’s got a low voltage, it can’t just be sent anywhere. Luckily the farsighted George Westinghouse believed in alternating current, which can go places. This is what brought on the so-called Battle of the Currents, which some of you may have heard of.”

  I, at least, recalled the bitter Battle of the Currents: Thomas Edison electrocuting stray dogs in front of reporters to try to prove that high-voltage alternating current was dangerous to bring into homes. But Edison did not mention that high-voltage alternating current was never brought into homes; the voltage was always stepped down by transformers before it was used. In addition, scientists like Edison always talked in terms of home use when virtually no homes used electricity; factories, industries, streetcars, yes. But homes weren’t wired (except for those of men like Thomas Sinclair), and I’d never heard anybody even discuss the mass wiring of homes.

  “So what exactly is alternating current?” O’Flarity pondered aloud. “I’ll tell you. It was invented by the greatest genius of all time, Mr. Nikola Tesla. I myself have seen Mr. Tesla, right here at the power station, during one of his visits. I’ll never forget it. He’s a gigantic man—in mind and body; I’ll wager he’s over six and a half feet tall, and thin as can be; he’s all brain! Now, as to this alternating current: Mr. Tesla saw it one day in a flash of genius while he was walking in a park in Budapest—that’s the general part of the world he’s from, in case you’re wondering what he was doing in such a place. Alternating current is what we call a polyphase system. It keeps reversing its direction. Forward and back, forward and back. It’s created with a rotating magnetic field. The way it works is …” As he spoke on, in increasing complexity—and I was impressed by his knowledge—the girls’ eyes glazed over. After a few moments O’Flarity realized he’d lost his audience and tapped his pointer hard on the floor, startling them.

  “Ladies! Rouse yourselves for this bit of insight: Our electricity can go anywhere in the state, anywhere in the nation! It can be put onto what we call a grid: flick a lever right here at Niagara, and someday you’ll be lighting up Albany or Cleveland or Chicago or Ma and Pa’s farm out in the boonies somewhere. And it’s cheap. Cheap and plentiful!” He eyed the girls with mock lasciviousness. “Which no one would ever say about you, my dear young ladies!”

  Well, that remark certainly caught their attention. More than a few of them covered their mouths to hide their giggles.

  Sternly I cautioned, “Mr. O’Flarity.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he acknowledged, bowing his head with a grin. “You have a harsh mistress, girls—as you should, as you should. All right, follow along, every one of you,” he said as if addressing a troop of obedient house pets.

  He moved to the next model, a side view of the powerhouse itself. “Now, here is how a powerhouse operates.” He used the pointer to show us the relevant spots. “The water from the Niagara River enters the canal outside the building here, flows into the sluices of the fore-bay, then down the penstocks to the turbines.” His voice rose in excitement with each item. “The water makes the turbines spin, the spinning moves the alternators, and voilà, electricity!”

  The girls applauded him.

  “After it does its work, the water flows through the tailrace—that’s a fancy word for a tunnel—and discharges into the gorge down below the Falls. Okay?” He glanced around to gauge the girls’ comprehension. In spite of their enthusiasm, they looked a bit confused. “Here it is again: We take the water from the river above the Falls, use it to generate electricity, then discharge it into the gorge below the Falls. The water we use never goes over the Falls at all. Don’t worry if you can’t understand, it’s a lot to take in all at once. Questions?”

  “What happens after you’ve taken all the water from the river?”

  Well, that was an insightful question. Abigail Rushman had asked it, peering at O’Flarity over the glasses perched at the end of her nose. Abigail was the daughter of a dry goods store owner, a man who had become very rich very recently. Never thin, Abigail had gained a bit of weight this year and taken on a plodding studiousness. From little things she’d said to me during the past months, I sensed that her mother was pressuring her about coming-out parties and young men. Also, I sensed that her mother chose her clothes: bright colors (though still within school regulations for seniors) that didn’t suit her. Several times I’d spotted telltale threads from bows or ribbons that had been ripped off. I was pleased to see Abigail paying attention and participating.

  “Take all the water?” O’Flarity protested, almost jumping on her. “Impossible, my dear. We’ll never have a shortage. Our supply is as limitless as the Great Lakes themselves.”

  “What I meant was, after you take all the water to make electricity, there won’t be any left to go over the Falls.”

  “Ach,” he said dismissively “You’ve been listening to the madmen outside.”

  Driving through the power station gates, our carriages had passed a group of demonstrators protesting any diversion of Niagara’s waters. These were the so-called nature lovers who were constantly writing letters to newspapers and magazines to condemn industrial development at the Falls.

  “Fact is—and this is what the madmen outside never tell you—we’re saving Niagara Falls. Saving it from itself. The tiny amount of water we’re taking out for electricity—less than three inches on the depth, and the depth is maybe twenty feet at the Horseshoe—that tiny amount helps to preserve what the madmen say we’re destroying. The Falls are weak, weak. Let me show you.”

  He limped over to a wall diagram of a cross section of the rock strata of the Falls. “Here at the top, you’ve got your hard limestone, but underneath you’ve got soft shale. Every day, the water erodes that shale down, beats that shale back, until the limestone layer is just sticking out alone. Eventually the limestone cracks, breaks off, falls down. Then the shale gets beaten back again, and the limestone on top crashes down again, over and over, every day, until someday the Falls will be nothing but rapids. By taking some of the water, the power station is actually lightening the burden—rescuing the Falls!”

  I nodded in recognition. My father had talked about this. The Falls receded on average several feet per year. Over the millennia, the Niagara River had cut a gorge seven miles long.

  “Understood?” O’Flarity knitted his brow, the tufts of his eyebrows meeting in the center as he stared at Abigail.

  “Yes, but—”

  “Good.” He smiled graciously. “Well, my dears, the time has come for the pièce de résistance, as the Frenchies say. Gather round then, and I’ll share my own little secret.” He urged them closer.

  “I wasn’t always crippled as you see me now. Oh no, once I was strong and handsome as—well, as Mr. Sinclair himself. Allow me to show you.” He was whispering, as he must whisper to every group. He began to fold up the cloth of his pants leg. “I got a wooden leg here, you see.” He pulled down his sock.

  “Mr. O’Flarity,” I warned.

  “Ah, quite right, ma’am.” He folded his pants back down. “Impressionable young ladies. Quite right. Well, well. Visit me sometime without your headmistress, girls, and I’ll give you the full effect, if you know what I mean.” He winked, but the girls, I’m proud to say, just caught each other’s eyes and shook their heads: They weren’t falling for this. “Beggi
ng your pardon, ma’am.” Chastened for the moment, he gave me a nod of deference.

  “All right then, let me tell you how I came to get this wooden leg.” He turned back to the cross-section model of the power system. “You see this tunnel? The tailrace? Yours truly is one of only three men in history to fall from the wheel pit into the tunnel and live to tell the tale. Yes, ladies”—he tapped his pointer on the model—“that’s one and one-quarter miles through the tailrace, and that’s where I went. Twenty-six and a half feet per second, twenty miles an hour—that’s the velocity of the water. The trip takes three and a half minutes. I popped out at the water’s edge—just below our beautiful steel arch bridge. It was winter, and I fell, wham, onto the ice, frozen solid, and went skidding a hundred yards with my leg twisted up. Had to be taken off above the knee, it did.” He lifted the stump (covered by his pants) to show it off. “Mr. Sinclair paid the medical expenses himself, seeing how noteworthy it was to have me alive at all. I’m always grateful to him.”

  The girls stared at him in shock.

  Evelyn Byers finally asked, in her typically coy but rebellious tone, “Why didn’t you drown in the water tunnel, Mr. O’Flarity?” She had the come-hither look of the bust of Modestia in the school office. Her father controlled a Great Lakes shipping empire.

  “My dear miss,” he said seductively, “I didn’t drown because I held my breath!”

  “You did not!” Evelyn blushed.

  O’Flarity appeared pleased with himself. “You’re right. The day this happened, we were still testing things out. Only two generators on-line, so the tunnel wasn’t full up the way it is now. It was only about a quarter of the way full. Pitch-black in there. You can’t understand how black it was, like a black wall you’re smashing into.” He slapped a fist against his palm. “But I says to myself, ‘Relax, Billy, you know where you’re headed—right to heaven’s door. Just enjoy the ride.’ And so I did, like a baby floatin’ down its mother’s”—he caught himself and glanced at me—“well, floatin’ down.”