City of Light (9 page)

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. “Begging 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.”

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.