The Waterworks

by E. L. Doctorow

  "I had of course heard rumors of a scientific orphanage." Hamilton' s voice was a very deep, resonant bass. "Somewhere up on the East River, or north of the Central Park, or in the Heights, I didn' t know exactly what scientific was supposed to mean. On the other hand, an orphanage presumably set up to test modem theories of behavior or health or education seemed likely, even inevitable, given everything going on in New York, everything changing, modernity driving all before it."

  "Had you ever met Sartorius?"

  "No."

  "Had you heard of him?"

  "Never. But I' ll tell you, I knew he was a good doctor the minute I laid eyes on him. I mean, you would trust him to do what had to be done. Not the personality. No bedside manner there. But the quality of mind. Very strong, powerful. He answered only the questions he felt deserved an answer. We ended up trying to formulate questions he respected! Can you imagine? I thought, if I poke around his disinterest, the pure science he seems to, exemplify, I might get a rise out of him. Crack him a bit, see what' s underneath. I suggested that he was one of those doctors who attached themselves to the wealthy. There are not a few like that, who take their practice to the money, I can tell you. I was deliberately rude. I asked if, after all, he was no more than a kind of medical valet.

  "He said - and I can' t give you that accent, it was so slight, vaguely European, but he might have been a Hungarian or a Slav as easily as a German - he said:' Do you imagine, Dr Hamilton, I would have as a purpose merely to keep certain wealthy men alive? That that end would interest me, of itself? I maintained them in the context of my larger interests, not as a physician but as a natural scientist. Whatever their own desires, or grandiose intentions, I told each of them exactly what I would endeavor to do, that might, incidentally, be to his advantage, and that is just what I have done, Whether this one hoped for a normal recovery, or that one for extended life, or another cherished a vision of eternal life, that was their business. I offered them something they understood quite well, an investment. They were qualified for my attention not by their wit or the importance to mankind of their continued life, the gifts they had to give for the benefit of society, or the fact that they were good and kind, but precisely by their wealth. This work cannot be done unless it is endowed. It requires money. They were qualified subjects by reason of their wealth and self qualified by their rapacity - these seemed to be the essential things, and not at all in short supply in the city of New York. But in addition, each one of my gentlemen was given by nature to secrecy, to conspiracy, they were ultimate conspirators, this amiable circle, they not only wanted what I offered, they wanted it only for themselves.'

  "Put me in my place, I can tell you. He was, impressive.

  He' d spent a couple of weeks up there in Bloomingdale. It showed in his suit, which was somewhat the worse for wear. He' d not been permitted to shave, and so on. But it didn' t matter. He had this upright horseman' s posture. He didn' t plead, needless to say, or attempt to sway us one way or another. He didn' t choose to demonstrate to us, however subtly - and I know how subtle some of these maniacs can be - that he was sane, or for that matter insane. We were there to commit him, or to hang him. Since neither alternative was desirable, he didn' t seem to care which it was.

  "But I kept pressing the point, in vain, of course. He couldn' t be shaken. He said the proof of a scientific proposition was that it was universally applicable. If an experiment of his was valid, it could be repeated by others to yield the same results. He said that in the war he had devised surgical procedures for the wounds of high -ranking officers, that were now standard medical corps procedures for all ranks. When I asked him, pointedly, if he was saying someday his researches would be to the benefit of, street children, he smiled and he said:' You' re not suggesting, Doctor, that I am to be distinguished from you or your colleagues, or indeed anyone else in the city, in observing the laws of selective adaptation, that ensure survival for the fittest of the species.' "

  I said to Dr Hamilton: "How can a procedure be repeated if no one knows it exists? Martin Pemberton told me Sartorius kept no records of his work."

  "It' s not true that he kept no records. We found his notebooks, stacks of them, locked in a cabinet in his dispensary."

  "What happened to them? Where are they?"

  "I won' t tell you that."

  "Did you read them?"

  "Every word. He wrote in Latin. It was breathtaking. We were able to understand some of his, equipment only by referring to the notebooks. I will say this to you: He was a man ahead of his time."

  "So you didn' t think, then, he was truly insane?"

  "No. Yes. My profession was implicated. There was something in this, quite crucial to all of us. It happened in our midst. The behavior in question appeared to be criminal, at least. Let us say it was. But it was, consistent with the man' s whole medical achievement. He was a brilliant practitioner. He kept going! That is the point-he kept going, through, beyond, sanity, whatever that is. Or morality, whatever that is. But in a perfect line with everything he' d done before.

  "Good God, as to what is sane or insane, I' ll tell you about the state of knowledge in the profession of psychiatry: Give me an old man making his will and let me ask him a question or two and I' ll tell you if he is competent. I am sufficient to the task. I know in a lunatic asylum to instruct staff to stop punishing the poor souls. To give them good food and clean beds, and fresh air. To get them doing things with their hands, knitting, or weaving, or drawing their mad little pictures. There you have the level of psychiatric knowledge today. And no less culpable for the handsome living I make from it. The degree of the man' s behavior was - what? - excessive? Whatever the system of thought behind it, the behavior was excessive. Insanely excessive. The deeper question was-should we let th~ public know? This city had recently suffered several shocks to its spirit, if I may call it that. There was some question as to whether it could suffer another. The district attorney all but said to us, If he is sane a charge is drawn, the legal machinery begins to move. A preliminary hearing is held in a courtroom. In the courtroom are members of the press, "

  "He was under Tweed' s protection."

  "Tweed was finished anyway.

  "So you knew Sartorius was sane?"

  "No, by God, I' m trying to tell you. We knew no such thing. Can you call the things he did, sane. Sanity is a term about as useful as, virtue. Will you give me a clinical definition of virtue? This wine in my glass is a damn good wine, a virtuous wine, virtuously, winy. It exemplifies the best behavior of wine. It is a good and sane and virtuous wine!"

  "You went up there - to the waterworks."

  "Yes."

  "What was your impression?"

  "My impression? He had machines there we had never seen before, that he' d invented. Apparatus for the transfusion of blood. We are just coming round to knowing how to do that. Apparatus to measure brain activity. Diagnostic uses of fluid drawn from the spine, He operated on those men. He cut away their malignant organs and connected them to machines which performed the work of those organs. He' d devised a method to distinguish different types of human blood, he transplanted bone marrow to arrest malignancies of the blood. Not everything, There was a lot of foolishness, drifts into metaphysical nonsense, cosmetic therapies, He had so many things going on for those old men, he couldn' t always have known which was working and which was not. No, it was not all triumph, The last things in the notebooks, he was doing animal experiments, I think, actually trying to transfer a heart from one animal to another."

  "Did you burn his notebooks? You did, didn' t you?"

  "You asked for my impressions. I sat down on a bench in that indoor park of his and, I couldn' t be sure that I wouldn' t have willingly committed myself to his, genius. To have one of those women minister to me, to my every need, in that pastoral, scientific heaven, to live there in a kind of dumb, mindless happiness in the belief that I was being rejuvenated for, eternal life. I sat there in that conservatory, in that quiet
, civilized, well ordered, industrial paradise - I' ll tell you what it reminded me of, the very quiet, pleasant railroad-station cafe of a small European city - and thought, yes, if I had the courage, I would do just what they did, those old scoundrels. I would do just what they did."

  I said: "Dr Sartorius extracted the blood, the bone marrow, the glandular matter, of children, to continue the lives of these elderly, fatally ill men."

  "Yes."

  "... who gave him their fortunes in hopes of, denying their own mortality."

  "Yes."

  "Children died in their place."

  "Never by his hand."

  "What?"

  "Not from any of his procedures. Either he took them after an accidental death or, if he worked with living, donors, as he did subsequently those who died, died of fear. Of an undetectable, infirmity in their spirits of the, survival instinct. Physically, the children' s health was never impaired. That' s what he said. And it' s a matter of record, how well they cared for them in the Home for Little Wanderers."

  Dr Hamilton' s eyes were bloodshot and baleful.'' You tell me, McIlvaine, since you' re feeling so righteous. What we did worked out, didn' t it? Civilization was avenged, was it not?" He sat hunched over in all his bulk, resting his elbows on the table, his arms bulging in their sleeves, his hands crossed at the wrist. "I believe you' re something of a historian. You remember the doctors riots, when the mob chased those Columbia medical students and wanted to lynch them for dissecting cadavers in their anatomy classes?"

  "That was a hundred years ago."

  "You' re not telling me we' re that much further along, are you?"

  Twenty-seven

  I' M FULLY aware that you may think what I' ve been telling you is no more than an elaborate rendition of my own, insanity. That' s reasonable enough. I' m an old man now and I have to acknowledge that reality slips, like the cogs in a wheel, Names, faces, even of those dose to you, become strange, beautifully strange, and the commonest sight, the street you live on, appears to you one sunny morning as the monumental intention of men who are no longer available to explain it, Even words have a different sound, and things you knew you relearn with wonder before you realize you knew them well enough once to take no notice of them. When we' re young we can' t anticipate that what is so matter-of-factly there for us in life is just what we' ll have to struggle to hold on to as we grow older, And time estranges us from the belief we are all given - the pious and the blasphemous alike-that we are born to live in pleasure or pain, happiness or despair, but always in great moral consequence.

  For all of that, I' ve had this same apartment in Gramercy Park for many years now and I' m known to people in the neighborhood as a sane and responsible citizen, if sometimes difficult or cranky. I' m not unduly modest, certainly insofar as I' ve lived much of my life in the satisfaction of the results I' ve had from the insecure trade of newspapering. If I were crazy, wouldn' t I want something? It seems to me madness is a kind of importuning, a clutching at the sleeve. I seriously question the value of this account to my madness, if it is that, since I require nothing of anyone who will hear it. I need nothing and ask for nothing. My only worry, my only worry, is that I' ve given myself so completely to the narrative that very little of my life is left for whatever else I might intend for it, and that it' s really an uncanny feeling - when the story ends, I will end. Now by way of coming round to the end, I' ll say here that when Sartorius was remanded, for life, to the Asylum for the Criminally Insane, I felt a peculiar sort of injustice had been done, that the man deserved a trial. Of course some of my reasoning was self-serving: If there had been a public record, I would have had corroboration for my exclusive, although I was by this time thinking even more ambitiously of not merely breaking the news but telling the whole story within the pages of a book. Let the daily papers cover the trial and I would be able to amplify it with everything l knew, in all its detail, from the beginning. The papers would provide my preamble. But beyond that, to undertake the ritual by which we could, acknowledge ourselves, for what we were. I' ll grant you, perhaps it is sentimentalism to think a society is capable of being spiritually chastened, in some self educative way, of pulling itself up just one, rung, toward moral enlightenment. That we would, as a kind of municipal congregation, drop to our knees and gather our children to us. What really happens is that we shunt off our evil, embody it in, our defendants and turn away. Still, I had these uncharacteristic sentiments, to the point of wondering if l had been cast, myself, into some mental state of-God help me-sympathy for Sartorius, an echo of Martin Pemberton' s.

  I also found myself in an unlikely alliance with Dr Grimshaw, who went about trying to muster up public support for a court proceeding. He was not interested in ritual edification. He wanted the man to hang. The difficulty was, Sartorius was by now a condemned inmate in a mental asylum. That was his identity, that was who he was, and it seemed to have the effect of erasing everything else about him. Such people are without a past, so, definitive is their present circumstance. The whole thing had been wrapped up very quietly, cooperatively. The doctors and the Municipals and the district attorney' s office had all agreed, though for their own reasons, that the resolution should be this, quite unconstitutional resolution. Even to those others who heard the story, or part of the story, it seemed incidental to the political fireworks: Tweed' s right arm, the comptroller, Connolly, had offered to cooperate with the public inquiry. Other Ring members had fled the country. And a grand jury had been empaneled to hear evidence and draw up indictments.

  I will say here that the esteemed Captain Donne was in this matter a disappointment to me. He was by now situated back behind his desk at the Mulberry Street headquarters, and receiving petitioners with his hands folded before him on the desk, and his long face lowered between the flying points of his shoulders. I joined our friend Grimshaw in appealing to him to side with us filing for a writ of habeas corpus, that would be the beginning of a legitimate legal process. He would not do it.

  "I think justice has been done," he said.

  "How, sir," said Grimshaw, "if the man is left alive to do more murdering evil?"

  "Have you ever been to Blackwell' s Island, Reverend?"

  "I have not."

  "What we have done may be unconstitutional, it is not due process, but it is all the justice you could wish for." I said: "Except that the rights of the society are scanted." Donne said: "If you have a trial, he will have to be heard. Any lawyer would see that the only hope of a defense would be in taking his testimony. He could argue in his perversity that our interruption of his work cost the lives of his patients. And our proofs, you know, are largely circumstantial. At the least his ideas will be heard, his, genius will be on view. I can' t think that would be of any benefit to a Christian society," he said, turning his gaze on Grimshaw.

  You will not hear from me that Edmund Donne had his limits. Perhaps he felt, after all, that the rights of society had been honored, that from the blundering ad hoc constituency of our frail selves, somehow, by hook or by crook, we had managed to rid our city of this, horror. We had worked it out. There was a degree of satisfaction to be taken. A young man' s life had been saved. A family had been restored to itself. And in the course of things Donne had found a face to look upon that he had loved once before, or was newly in discovery of, but, in either event, was in hopes of seeing every day and night for the rest of his life. So I will not say Donne did not appreciate the depth of the conspiracy-that it was not only a concordance of wealth, and government, and science but a profound, derangement of the' natural order of fathers and sons. There was a more fathomless threat there than to Christianity, that left my eyes blasted to peer into it. I went across to Blackwell' s Island one day from the pier at Fifty-ninth Street. The ferry was no more than an open boat fitted up with side wheels and powered by a small coal-fired steam engine mounted on the deck. It barely kept its course against the powerful scalloping currents of the East River. The weather was raw-this was Nov
ember, when the chill winds huddle you in your coat and give clear, icy indication of the age of your bones. I should also say, in abhorrence of suspense, that I think now, if I wasn' t the only person to visit Sartorius, I was certainly the last before his murder at the hands of a colleague in criminal insanity a few days later.

  He wore the gray beltless robe they dressed them in. His eyes were sharp and clear black behind the incongruous pince-nez affixed to the bridge of his nose. . . but his head was shaved, he was beardless, and in this freezing catacombs his legs were bare, so that I was put in mind of some, garden creature, something hairless, and all eyes. I saw him through a meshwork screen bolted, floor to ceiling, to iron bars. He sat quite still on a bench in a constantly moving, muttering, moaning, outraged population of maniacs, some in restraining jackets, others in shackles. They kept these people not in rooms but in what seemed to be a succession of hall wards with high clerestory windows and vaulted ceilings finished in ochered brick. The great volumes of space above the inmates mixed their screeches and shouts and cries of despair into a cathedral of prayerful sound. But it was an institution, you see, and so he seemed quite comfortable in it, this doctor who had run field hospitals and operating rooms and institutes of his own design. He sat and watched, Even had I not known who he was, my eyes would have fixed on him because he was the only one not moving, not shuffling about, or pacing an imaginary cell, not lifting his eyes to heave~, not twitching, shrugging, or giggling or dribbling over himself, not lying on the floor and waving his arms like a swimmer, not hideously laughing, not endlessly crying.

  A large fire hose was mounted on the wall in the narrow corridor in which I stood. The asylum smell was pungent-from the ammonia wash that was periodically sent over the floors and walls. The guard, who had led me here, rapped his club on the bars to get Sartorius' s attention. What was unsettling about our subsequent exchange was the doctor' s unfaltering poise. He asked me why I had come. I found myself ridiculously flattered that he had recognized me. I said: "I would like if possible to give you your day in court."