The Waterworks (23 page)

“What was my purpose? Everything and nothing. I didn’t know if I’d get down on my knees and beg him to provide for his wife and son … or fall on him and tear his throat out for having given me this life of endless contemplation of his hideous … being.

“I said to the doctor by way of a rational answer: ‘I thought my father was merely a scoundrel and a thief and a murderer.’ He seemed to understand. He rose and told me to follow him.

“I stumbled along in a daze. I became aware of the atmosphere of his laboratories, without seeing anything in particular going on there—two or three rooms with doors open between them, and a faintly chemical smell in the air. All the light came
from gas jets…. There were glass cabinets for instruments … stone-top cabinets inset with iron sinks … boxy machines on wheels with cables and gears and tubing. I remember a square wooden chair with leather straps at the armrests and an iron head brace…. The walls were draped in some brownish napped material, velour or velvet. To me all this was the menacing furniture of science.

“He has a wonderful library, Sartorius. After we came to our understanding, he allowed me to use it. I spent many consoling hours occupying myself with learning more of what he knew … by reading what he was reading. It was a foolish idea, no more than a kind of homage, really.

“He is fluent in several languages…. The scientific journals and papers lay in piles on the floor where he threw them. I made it a task of my own to keep them in order. Books, monographs from France, from London, from Germany, arrived in packing boxes. He knows everything going on in the sciences, in medicine, but he reads impatiently, looking always for something he doesn’t know, something to surprise him … a line of inquiry, a critique. His library is not a collector’s. He doesn’t read for pleasure. He has no particular respect for books in themselves, their bindings, and so on, and he didn’t handle them carefully. He read the philosophers, the historians, the natural scientists, and even the novelists, without differentiating their disciplines in his mind. Looking, always looking, for what he would recognize as true and useful to him. Something to get him past whatever it was that confounded him, past the point in his work where his own mind had been … stopped.

“I think sometimes he was looking really for a companionable soul. He certainly didn’t surround himself with intellectual equals. He lived in solitude. When he entertained, as far as I
could tell, it was at the strong urging of Eustace Simmons. The guests were usually politicians.

“He led me to an elevator, which rode us upward in a brass cage. He drove the thing but made no fuss about it. The floor above consisted of rooms and suites where the clientele resided—the electors, the fellowship, the funeral society of old men. There were living quarters for them and treatment rooms with leather-top tables, and there were rooms for the women who attended them. Later, after we worked out the terms of my captivity, I had the freedom of the place and came to understand and distinguish all of this. My first impression was only of a corridor of deeply shadowed rooms, all of which happened to be empty. The decor was simple, like that of a monastery or a mission.

“It was when I was elevated to the rooftop and saw, in all its humid green glory, Dr. Sartorius’s—what?—facility for biologized wealth?—that I knew this is where I would find my father. I was so stunned I wonder if since then I have been under the sort of spell laid upon those who look on the forbidden.

“Here was the site of the experiment, the heart of the researches, the conservatory Sartorius had designed himself. It was in the nature of an indoor park, with gravel paths and plantings and cast-iron benches. It was all set inside a vaulted roof of glass and steel which cast a greenish light over everything. The conservatory was laid out to effect a forbearing harmony and peacefulness. At the center was a kind of courtyard paved in brownstone, and terraced up from that in single steps were smaller squares with filigreed chairs and tables. Enormous clay urns sprouted profusions of fronds and leaves that I knew on sight were not native. A kind of tepid steam or diffusion of watered air hissed out of ports or valves inset in the
floor, so that the atmosphere was cloyingly humid. I could feel through the floor vibrations of the dynamo that was responsible. The centerpiece of the brownstone square was a sunken stone bath, a bathing pool with water, ocher in color and overhung with a sulfurous mist. An old man, terribly withered, was bathing, with a pair of women attending him. I have not mentioned the statuary, here and there, pedestaled or large enough to stand alone, but consistent in erotic subject, with heroic copulations, nudes of both genders in states of passion, and so on, yet all notably graceless and unidealized, as we are—the sorts of pieces an artist would not show in public but only to his friends.

“The effect of all of this … was of a Roman bath, had Rome been industrialized. The greenish light from the conservatory roof seemed to descend, it sifted down, it had motion, it seemed to pulse. Gradually I became aware that I was hearing music. First I felt it as the pulse of the air … but when I realized it was music, it broke over me, swelling and filling this vaulted place…. It was as if I had stepped into another universe, a Creation, like … an obverse Eden. Its source was an orchestrion standing like a church organ against a far wall—an enormous music box behind glass that sprung from tines of its slowly turning disc the sounds of a concert band.

“I had a premonition of the pitiful truth as I looked for Augustus Pemberton among the quiet and coddled old men of this place … these idlers and their companions, silently listening like people in the park, in their black frock coats and with their hats upon the tables.

“I found my father in a kind of grassy alcove, sitting on a bench … slumped in this misted pleasure-grove in a kind of vacuous despondency or infinitely trusting patience, which I would soon learn was steadfast … as it was with the other
gentlemen in residence around him … despite the vitalistic therapies applied to them, inside and out.

“My primitive father … bluntly, powerfully selfish … stupid, intransigent, with his crude appetites and gross taste and stylish cunning … whom I tried to speak with and wept in front of and prayed to have restored in all his force … rather than as this shrunken soul lifting his eyes to look at me, without recognition, at the urging of Dr. Sartorius: ‘Augustus? Do you know who this is? Will you say hello to your son?’”

Twenty-two

M
ARTIN
lapsed into silence. None of us said anything. I felt the breeze … looked out over the Tisdales’ autumn garden … listened to the ordinary sounds of the street … with, I suppose, gratitude. Martin closed his eyes and after a few moments it became apparent that he had fallen asleep. Emily adjusted his lap robe, and we left him there and went inside.

It was unfortunate that the ladies had heard his account. Sarah Pemberton, quite pale, asked Emily if she could rest a moment somewhere. She was accommodated, and later, when Emily went to see to her, Sarah confessed she had developed an intense headache, in her silent forbearing way containing the effect of her knowledge as a private matter … but the pain was so severe, Emily had to send for a doctor. He prescribed something for the pain that didn’t entirely work, and that night, at Emily’s insistence, Sarah Pemberton stayed over, and Noah as well … and Emily Tisdale found herself running a small sanitarium.

Donne and I decided to leave. He gave an anxious look up the stairs, but there was nothing we could do but get in the way. Seeing us to the door, Emily said: “I am terrified. Who are these
… malignities of human life in our city? I want to pray but my throat closes up. Can our lives ever be the same? What is to be done, do you know, Captain? Is there something for us to do that will … restore the proportions of things? I cannot think of one. Will you think of one? Will you do that, please?”

Donne and I walked over to Pfaff’s saloon on Broadway. The raucous good humor there seemed to me callow. We sat in a corner and had several whiskeys. I was thinking of the … desperate impertinence of this league of old gentlemen … so unsatisfied with the ways of their God as to take their immortal souls into their own hands…. How pathetic, not to trust their Christian theology, but to ensure things for themselves. How brazen and how pathetic.

Donne thought of things in a more practical manner. “It is a kind of new science, I suppose … part of the knowledge of modern times. But it seems to require enormous sums … to go forward. It is a complex enterprise. Expensive to run. They bought that mansion and fitted it out as an orphanage. They had the protection of the Municipals … the endorsement of the city fathers. There is another establishment … where this conservatory is … another entire establishment with a staff. All of this has been funded by the—what would you call them?—patients?”

“Yes, at best … to the tune of thirty millions.”

“Is that a reasonable estimate?”

“Twenty-five, then … at least that.”

“Well, it must be banked somewhere … under someone’s name. It can’t be all gone.”

“No.”

“It would be one of Mr. Tweed’s banks. I have been talking to the federal district attorney. I’m trying to get him to issue subpoenas. But he needs something specific.”

“Why would the Ring not steal it for themselves?”

“They will if they have to,” he said. “I imagine they hope for something more.”

“What more?” I said, and the moment I did I realized what he meant. The Ring, with their vaulting ambition, would carry ambition to its ultimate form. They were nothing if not absurd—ridiculous, simpleminded, stupid, self-aggrandizing. And murderous. All the qualities of men who prevail in our Republic.

“While Sartorius is free, the money is sacrosanct,” Donne said. “That’s why if we hope to recover anything for Sarah—for Mrs. Pemberton and her son—we must find the accounts and impound them more or less at the same time we … impound him. It will take months for the Ring to be put on trial. Until then they are not without hope of preserving their last … best secret.”

I was comforted by Donne’s analysis of this strange cabal … as if it were a legal, practical concern, a problem to be solved, a matter of fact … whereas my mind was beset by this thing…. The images from the conservatory … loomed in me. I could not sleep, I was haunted … not by ghosts, but by Science. I felt afflicted with intolerable reality. All my fears were compounded into a fear of the night. I was without my profession, my reason for being … my cockiness. Somehow, deprived of the means to report it, our life and times, I imagined myself at its mercy. Life seemed to be an inevitable disease of knowledge … a plague that infected all who came in contact with it.

The most terrible thing was that the only hope in dealing with it was in acquiring more of it, more of this dead spirit of knowledge. I imagined, to give myself courage, that it all might be initiatory, a kind of spiritual test in a world ruled by God after all … and that at its worst, at the moment of its greatest,
most unendurable terror, it would end … in a kind of light and peace … that we could stagger about in, like happy drunks, until we died. But as a lapsed Scotch Presbyterian, I couldn’t really believe that. What I did was pretend to have the same practical, matter-of-fact attitude as Donne. We convened each day at the Tisdales’ and put our minds to hearing as much from Martin as we could. We had first of all, of course, to know where that conservatory was. And there were other questions. Martin seemed to have been seduced by the doctor’s intellect … to the point of working for him. But we had found him dying in the cellar of the orphanage. What had happened? Donne was reluctant to put him under hard questioning—he didn’t seem strong enough for it. The best course, if the most exacting, was patience.

We sat with him over several days … alone, the two of us. We did not think it advisable for the women to hear any more of it. Martin told us that in a very short time he had come to think of Dr. Sartorius in Sartorian terms—that is, with the disinterest of a scientist. “I forgot what was personal,” he said. “My father? An abstraction, an unsouled creature, beyond my caring. It was only his body as a field for scientific experiment that was of interest…. The doctor never tried to persuade me of anything, he wanted nothing of me, really…. Once we had made our gentlemanly agreement, I felt it was to my advantage to know him and hear him speak his thoughts.”

“What was the agreement?” Donne asked.

“Only that I would make no attempt to leave, or interfere with the work. In return I could have the freedom of the place…. I’d be treated as a guest. Simmons was not entirely happy with the arrangement. Apart from understanding the … sensitivity of his work, Sartorius, as far as I could see, depended on others to analyze what was in his interest. He
lacked cunning … he was not wily. I think there was just enough ordinary humanity in the man that he liked someone to understand what he was doing.

“Seven gentlemen were in that … league of immortals. One day one of them died, truly died, and Sartorius invited me to observe the autopsy. This was performed in his surgery … on an iron table with turned-up edges and a drainpipe at one end. A flexible shower fixture hung from the ceiling to keep the corpse cold with running water. He asked me to take the faucet from its cradle and direct the stream at effluvia … created in the course of his observations. I don’t know if his procedures were those of a coroner, I doubt that they were. He opened the chest and examined the lungs and bronchia, and held the heart, and declared all of it normal, unremarkable. The corpse seemed serenely undisturbed by its dissection. The face was beardless, unlined, the expression composed and incorrupt. He was a man of middle age, younger than the others, which surprised me. Sartorius talked as he worked. ‘When Mr. Prine came to me he’d been diagnosed as an epileptic. He was given to convulsions, and episodes of paralysis. I knew from certain signs on the scalp that he was, in fact, syphilitic’ Sartorius examined the scalp and then raised it away from the skull with his lancet. Then he applied the trephine and removed a portion of the skull. I was not made ill by any of this. In his presence you relinquished yourself to his state of mind—in this instance his keen interest in the postmortem. The opened body released such fetid, foul stinks…. But I was somehow inured, I felt this was some sort of clockwork to be disassembled, the face after all remained at rest and indifferent, a mask, a machine’s costume. I was avid only to know what the doctor would discover…. The whole inner table of the skull had a rough, eroded appearance. He pointed out three separate depressions where the bone
had thinned, so that when he held it up to the lamp, light could be seen through it. These depressions corresponded to three hard and irregular coral-like growths on the surface of the brain—as if the brain itself had absorbed the bony material. He almost chanted his comments about what he found, talking either to himself or to me, it was not clear…. Though he used the terms of physical medicine, each reference was quite specific. I watched his long, delicate hands and was so concentrated in my attention … that I imagined at moments it was the hands that were speaking. ‘These adhesions about the fissure of Silvius, see how they bind the anterior and middle lobes into one mass.’ His accent was very slight, nothing more than an intonation, yet it was there. ‘And the dura mater in this area adheres to the brain tissue.’ I saw what he made me see…. The most awful thing was a suppurating, yellowish cheesy deposit, shaped like a pyramid, which he deftly cut out and laid with his bare hands on a small scale, to determine its weight. He put his instruments down and held his hands under the shower faucet. ‘Yet you have noticed how much of the brain and the skull are healthy. Unfortunately I can’t determine the extent to which we may credit the treatments he received here. All we can say by way of consolation is that Mr. Evander Prine, who was a terminal syphilitic, remained alive longer than he had a right to. But I confirm Ricord’s
Treatise on the Venereal
. Under tertiary symptoms we must place nodes, deep-seated tubercles, tubercles of cellular tissue … caries necrosis….’ His diction was so unemotional that when he made a personal remark, it came almost as a shock. ‘Too late,’ he said, ‘too late, even for Sartorius.’