City of Light (v5)

by Lauren Belfer

  That was a close call. I’d never hear the end of it from these girls if he made an actual reference to the birth canal. As it was, judging from their faces they hadn’t realized where his thoughts were headed (except for Maddie, who caught my eye, but she would never tell).

  “’Course it was cold as hell”—he glanced at me again—“I mean, cold as all get out, and I had the echoes of my buddies’ prayers following me all the way: ‘You’re a good fellow, Billy-boy. We won’t forget ya’—that kind of thing. It wasn’t exactly a comfort. And I didn’t much enjoy getting discharged through the air and onto that icy reward. Still, it made me famous.

  “Afterward I said to Mr. Sinclair, I’m not putting myself at risk again. I’m better off showing visitors the wonders of this power station and telling the tale. Being a boss wise beyond his years, he saw the truth of this and put me in a place where my talents could excel, impressing young ladies like you.” The girls (with the exception of Maddie) continued to stare at him with wide-eyed wonder.

  “Excuse me, Mr. O’Flarity,” I said, in my best schoolmarm style. “Perhaps we should move on?”

  “Yes, of course. Yes.” He cleared his throat and a change came over him, from a seducer to a teller of ghost stories. As he leaned toward the girls, his tone was now filled with faux terror. “From here, we take the elevator down—down—down into the darkness of the wheel pit.” He shivered. “I warn you—and only once do you get the warning: the depths, the blackness, the spin of the turbines, the never-ending churning of water through the penstocks—they could terrify persons much stronger than you, my darling girls!”

  He was right. The elevator cab, with its ornate, wrought-iron filigree, clanged against brick-lined rock as it swayed down ten flights, through a trench lit only by bare, hanging electric bulbs. The penstocks—huge metal tubes filled with rushing water—loomed before us. The noise was deafening. The air smelled dank. Abigail Rushman reached for my hand, and I squeezed hers in reassurance. O’Flarity and Addison Barker, the Negro elevator operator, exchanged a knowing smile. As we neared the bottom of the wheel pit, the flywheels and the turbines came into view, delicate, shadowed, eerily beautiful with a mist of water glistening around them.

  At the lowest level, we stopped. “One hundred and thirty-two feet down, we are!” O’Flarity announced. He got out, positioning himself on a steel platform. He opened a trapdoor in the floor and pointed downward with satisfaction. “There it is, my dearies,” he shouted above the roar. “The tailrace, surging beneath us. You feel the power of the earth down here, don’t you? Pressing against us. But we’re holding it back, eh, ladies? For now, we’re holding it back.”

  In spite of his showmanship, I shuddered, and I felt grateful to return to the surface.

  In the presentation room, a young workman awaited us.

  “Peter!” Maddie ran to embrace him. He was tall and blue-eyed, with dark blond hair turning to brown; a thick curl fell across his forehead. He was neatly dressed, wearing a tie, and looked to be in his early twenties. The girls gathered around him, a bit aghast. They would probably remember this young man more clearly than the wheel pit.

  “Miss Barrett,” Maddie said, her arm around his waist, “I would like you to meet my brother, Peter Fronczyk.” As he stepped forward to shake my hand, he seemed embarrassed by the attention.

  “Ach, ach,” O’Flarity interjected. “So, Petey-boy, this is the famous sister who went to the city to get herself schooled, eh? I’d keep a better eye on her if I was you, my lad. Strange ideas and manners she be getting there—socialist tendencies, if you ask me.”

  “It’s nothing but what I’ve picked up from Peter,” Maddie said, teasing them both, “if you can get that into your thick head, Billy O’Flarity.”

  As she said this, I saw the glimmer of another culture, one she kept hidden from us at school. Although Maddie boarded at a house across from Macaulay, her family lived at Echota (meaning “city of refuge” in Cherokee), the model village designed by Stanford White for the power station workers. I felt as if the community of Echota were now revealed to us, with its own rules, standards, and jokes. I understood why Maddie never seemed bothered by the teasing of other girls: She wasn’t at Macaulay to find a group of friends, but solely to get an education.

  “Well, my dears,” O’Flarity said, “this young man is a specimen of our switchboard trainees.” He said the words with a touch of irony, giving Peter a shrewd glance. “Yes, ladies, we’ve got over four thousand workers here and every one of them a prince. But our management plucks these especially intelligent and charming boys out of the line and teaches them to monitor the thing itself—invisible, all-powerful electricity!” He paused, relishing his own verbal flourishes. “Management does this in particular with boys who show signs of being good union organizers. Girls, you couldn’t find a better organizer than Pete here—up until about, what, six months ago now?” O’Flarity laughed heartily.

  Peter looked sheepish, but still managed a smile.

  “Now then, Petey, and not meaning to be rude, what takes you away from your classes to come slouching with us?”

  “Mr. Sinclair’s assistant found me and told me to join you.” The earnestness of his manner reminded me of my father’s students, those young men, grown-up boys, really, who were constantly eager to discover the right thing to do and then do it rightly. “Miss Barrett, I’m instructed to tell you that Mr. Sinclair is occupied with telephone calls to New York City this morning. He will join you if he can.”

  “Excuse me, please, Miss Barrett.” Abigail Rushman pulled on my sleeve. “Can we see the outside part now? The intake canal?” I was pleased that she’d broken away from the generalized swoon over Peter Fronczyk. “I heard it’s famous.”

  “You don’t have to tell us how famous it is!” O’Flarity exclaimed. “But I’m trapped, Pete—I got some Swiss engineers coming in. Thinking about building a power station in the Alps, they said in their letter. You want to take these young ladies out, since you’re freeloading with your sister for the morning?”

  “Yes, I’ll take them,” Peter said shyly.

  I thanked Mr. O’Flarity and tipped him, and then we retrieved our coats from the reception area and followed Peter outside.

  When I’d visited Chartres Cathedral years before, my first glimpse of it had been from far away. The cathedral had seemed to rise from misty wheat fields, alone, pure, and noble. Of course, as I got closer I discovered that the cathedral was surrounded by a bustling town, its buildings blocking the view. Therefore the image I always cherished was the first one, the towers and buttresses emerging on the horizon from a field of wheat.

  When we walked out of Powerhouse 1, Peter taking us through a door on the river side rather than the formal entryway we’d used when we arrived, I felt as if I’d come to a Chartres that had no village to conceal it. The four cathedrals of electricity existed in proud isolation along the windy riverbank. The damp, weighty snow of early spring encased the expansive landscape. Like white fire, morning sunlight glinted off the windows of the two powerhouses now complete on the Canadian side of the river. Just beyond the powerhouses, the transmission lines began their journey upriver to Buffalo, cutting the sky like taut ribbons of black.

  Peter led us down the carefully shoveled path to the intake canal—“three hundred feet wide and two thousand feet long and we can expand it whenever we need to,” he explained—and I imagined what the scene would be like if the powerhouses did take all the water. Most likely the machinery could never take every drop; a little would always escape, and we could ice-skate on what remained. What a joy that would be, to glide on skates to Canada and back. And although I shivered now in the unremitting wind, I could visualize the summer, when we would picnic on the precipice amid gentle rivulets and streams.

  Suddenly a huge blast rocked the pathway beneath our feet. Gulls shrieked. The girls stopped and turned to me, immobilized, waiting for my reaction. Quickly I made myself impassive—that was always my
trick to gain a moment to figure out what was going on, before giving them guidance. For my own guidance I turned to Peter. He was smiling, so I smiled too, and the girls relaxed. “Look,” he said, leaning against the canal railing and pointing to the river. “They’re using dynamite to break up the ice.”

  Indeed, there were men walking on the ice at the mouth of the canal. They wielded poles and pickaxes, prodding and pushing at the ice to break it up before it entered the canal. As they worked, they jumped from ice floe to ice floe, hats pulled low over their faces.

  “With Powerhouses One and Two, there was a mistake in the design,” Peter explained. “The sluices aren’t low enough to pull in water from below the ice, so the men have to keep the ice out of the canal, to stop the sluices from getting clogged. When Three and Four are on-line, you won’t see men doing a job like this. The new sluices are lower, with better gratings too.”

  “What happens if someone out there slips and falls into the water?” Evelyn Byers asked with a thrilled shiver at the horror of it. “He could get caught in the current and be carried over the Falls. Or if the ice he was working on was already in the canal, he could get pulled into those sluices and sucked into the turbines!”

  Peter simply looked at her without replying.

  “Yes, and it happens all the time,” Maddie said angrily, stepping in front of her brother. “If you read the local paper you’d find out it happens at least once a week.”

  “Now, now, Maddie,” Peter said, patting her shoulder. “Where would your friend see the local paper? Besides”—Peter turned to Evelyn, who looked more emboldened than hurt by Maddie’s outburst—“the men know the risks. They know exactly what could happen, at every moment. They try to be careful.” Peter stared at the men on the river. “Well, come on,” he said, rousing himself and chucking Maddie under the chin. “Let me show you one of the wonders of the world: the new tailrace for Powerhouses Three and Four.”

  The sound of the wind filled the tunnel, its roar carrying away the echoes of our footsteps. Water seeped from the walls, puddling on the floor. Peter carried a lantern, which threw our shadows high against the curving brick walls. The tunnel was shaped like a horseshoe, the floor curving downward, the walls curving out and up, meeting in an arch high above our heads. Although Peter held up the lantern, we still could not see the ceiling.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” he whispered, exultant. “It’s made from masonry and concrete, lined with four layers of bricks. It’s made to be filled with water.” His voice was edged with wonder. “Once it’s filled, no one will ever see it again. Unless it has to be closed because of a problem. But I’m sure there’ll never be a problem. The design is too perfect. Every time I come down here I feel like I’ve got to get the memory of it inside me, to last forever.” Slowly he turned in a circle, holding the lantern high, transfixed, a look of longing and wistfulness on his face—in stark contrast to my girls, whose primary concern was their wet feet.

  “Ugh,” said Evelyn, walking on tiptoe, trying to find a dry spot. “Why didn’t we get rain boots before coming down here?”

  Peter laughed, the spell that had taken hold of him broken. “There are underground springs all through the surrounding rock. That’s why we get this seepage, until the tunnel is completely sealed.”

  “That wasn’t my question,” Evelyn said morosely.

  “Now, now, enough of that.” He shook her shoulder as if she were one of his sisters and she positively flushed, forgetting her wet feet altogether.

  “This is the tailrace for Powerhouse Three,” Peter said. “Up ahead, it merges with the tailrace from Powerhouse Four to make a single tunnel. Come on, I want you to see the interlink.”

  Evelyn hurried to his side. I smiled to myself as I gathered the others.

  We had been alone in the tunnel, but as we approached the interlink we heard voices, growing louder, and saw the crossed shadows thrown by dozens of lanterns. Men were moving through the interlink and down the main tunnel. There was an animal stench in the air, explained when we saw a mule pulling a cart of bricks.

  And then the interlink opened before us, vaults and archways wide and soaring, architecture and engineering melding into an extraordinary creation. I was filled with amazement. So this was what artists meant when they spoke of the sublime. Meanwhile men put on rain gear, gathered tools, ate lunch, rested. The interlink seemed nearly as wide as a town square. There were more than a few Negroes among the laborers; Tom was known for paying high wages and hiring without regard to race, but as we walked further into the interlink, I saw that, among other jobs, the Negroes alone were responsible for the dozen or so mules that were stabled to one side, baled hay piled high.

  The workmen gazed at my girls frankly and made certain gestures which caused their eyes to widen. Joking in languages I couldn’t understand, the men began blowing kisses at the girls. We shouldn’t be here, I realized, but Peter was oblivious to the situation.

  “The men are going a mile down,” he said excitedly, pointing toward the main tunnel. “To the outlet, where we’re doing the final work. We’re hoping everything will be done by the time President McKinley visits in September, when he comes for the exposition, and then he can personally throw the lever that will put Powerhouse Three on-line, and—”

  “Ladies, good morning, forgive me for not joining you sooner.”

  We turned, and there was Thomas Sinclair striding into the interlink with no regard for wet feet. He held a lantern, and in the crisscrossing shadows he seemed taller than the rest of us. His suit was impeccably cut, his hair perfectly combed. All conversation stopped, replaced by a murmured “’Morning, Mr. Sinclair, ’morning, sir.”

  “Good morning, everyone, thank you,” he said, turning to the group at large like an actor basking in applause. He looked sincerely happy, and although the men now moved more briskly toward their work, several couldn’t conceal an indulgent smile when they passed him, as if he were a roguish child and they were proud of him. In a way he was their representative: the one among them who had made good. Even so, I could see how, in this environment power surrounded Tom like an almost visible aura. He could afford to be charming and boyish; he could afford to elicit genuine affection from his employees, because there remained something ineffable in his manner that would prevent anyone from ever challenging his authority. Watching the faces of his workmen, I saw that they’d do anything he asked of them; the only question was, how much would he ask of them? Would he ask any one of them to commit murder? Had he?

  “Well, then, Peter,” he said, “let us escort these fine ladies upstairs, shall we?”

  “Yes, sir, I’m—” Peter looked abashed, only now realizing that he’d been imprudent.

  “Come along.” With a pleasant smile Tom spread his arms as if to gather us up like ducklings. He ushered us back the way we’d come, not in any hurry, with Peter looking increasingly concerned and Tom looking absolutely relaxed but gazing away from us, into the middle distance, as though to render us invisible to the stares of passing workmen.

  When we were in the isolation of the tunnel, Tom joined me at the end of the line, slowing his pace until we were separated from the others. “Good morning, Miss Barrett,” he said evenly. Of course he would address me formally when I was with my students. “I hope you’ll forgive Peter’s enthusiasm in bringing you to a place that even your ladies most likely found inappropriate.”

  “Not at all. They were perfectly comfortable, particularly in the admiration of your employees.”

  “Yes, I thought they would enjoy that best.”

  “Peter wanted us to see the tunnel,” I said in his defense. “He thought it was important. He called it one of the wonders of the world.” In the lantern shadows, I couldn’t read Tom’s expression. “And it is. One of the wonders of the world.”

  Tom turned to me, his face entering the light. Slowly, a puzzled surprise came into his eyes, as if he were seeing me for the first time. Seeing me, not Margaret’s friend, not G
race’s godmother. His look disquieted me. He raised his hand and almost touched my cheek but instead took my arm as if to protect me, from what I did not know.

  I have relived what happened next again and again. Not so much during the day, when there is enough around me to fill my attention, but when I lie in bed at night and close my eyes—that’s when the scene comes back, the moment-by-moment unraveling of it. Again and again I feel the urge to run to help, although my arms would have been useless. Sometimes, if I drift into sleep with the scene still in my mind, I see something that never happened: myself, there beneath the steel casing. Trapped. Screaming. Myself, watching myself in a detached, naive agony that asks, how has this come to pass?

  Back on the main level of Powerhouse 3, Tom led us to the closest exit, but the doorway was blocked by a huge piece of machinery being wheeled in on temporary railroad tracks.

  “The other side then, ladies.” Tom led the way down the length of the powerhouse, which seemed as long as a big-city railroad platform and was filled with construction debris: ladders, piles of tiles, discarded equipment, the remnants of wooden scaffolding. The unfinished generators rose beside us, each seeming about two stories high and as broad as a small house. Laborers clambered over and around them. The men wore overalls, or baggy trousers with two shirts and a vest for warmth, and cloth caps. Many smoked long-stemmed pipes while they worked. As we passed, each man paused for a moment to touch his cap and murmur the now familiar greeting, “’Morning, Mr. Sinclair.” Tom called out to many by name, exchanging quick jokes.

  When we neared the end of the powerhouse, we realized that something extraordinary was taking place, and we stopped to watch. I stood next to Tom, Maddie and Peter beside us, the girls arrayed behind. A crane, attached to tracks along the wall, high up near the ceiling, was poised over the tenth generator. The crane chain held a huge, hollow generator casing, its top covered with a tarpaulin. The casing was being lowered on top of the generator, although the process had just begun. If the generators were about two stories tall, then the casing was being held about four stories above our heads. Looking up, watching the casing slightly sway, I felt vulnerable and afraid. Tom and Peter took the situation in stride, however, so I tried to emulate them. The crane operator leaned out of the pulpit (as Tom called it) and watched what was taking place beneath him, making changes to the crane position. About ten men stood below, around the generator base, waiting to guide the casing into place.