Electric City: A Novel by Elizabeth Rosner Read Free Book Online Page A

grow purple and blue gray and fierce. Leaves turned inside out in the wind.

I N Y ONKERS , S TEINMETZ discovered it was surprisingly easy to drape an imaginary black cloth over his own European backstory, and to focus now on the vivid outlines of an American existence. Asmussen had drifted away after helping situate his friend in the position of lowly draftsman for Rudolf Eickemeyer’s machine shop. This left Steinmetz to fend for himself, to explore the intriguing streets of the Lower East Side, and to improve his command of English. The blending of Old and New Worlds was an endless source of fascination: matzo factories alongside hat shops, pickle sellers, and drugstores; Yiddish shouted from tenement windows, and streetcar wires crisscrossing overhead.
    Who could have predicted that within three years, Eickemeyer’s inventions would evolve from mechanisms for hatmaking to revolutionary modifications of electrical motors? Technical drawings made by Steinmetz proved not only his exactitude but his keen understanding of the intersections between groundbreaking mathematics and engineering marvels.
    It was an introduction to Thomas Edison, the first one fully able to recognize the texture of the small man’s genius, that forever changed the direction of Steinmetz’s future. Determined to hire Steinmetz for his own newly established company, Edison was stunned to find that Steinmetz possessed not only a powerful will of his own but a deep senseof loyalty to his original employer. Not a man who tolerated refusals, regardless of justification, Edison purchased the entire Eickemeyer enterprise; Steinmetz was brought like a human trophy to the recently acquired location upstate. Edison exclaimed that they would join forces just the way the Hudson and Mohawk converged, a symbol for the power they were harnessing to transform everything in the world.
    What Steinmetz wanted most was a laboratory, a space devoted to experimentation and accidental epiphanies. Inspired in part by his own body’s perturbations, he could readily discern the difference between those mechanical considerations one could control or modify, and those that were fixed as givens. Soon he was constructing an oversize house on Wendell Avenue, among the newest mansions of Electric City, with an extension alongside the ground floor designed to meet Steinmetz’s specifications and vision.

    The cabin near the edge of the Mohawk was Steinmetz’s other equally invaluable sanctuary: just far enough from town to bring him back into the embrace of nature, and yet close enough to be accessible each weekend. Joseph offered to build him a canoe. There was something redemptive about the way its adjustments at the water line referred directly and automatically to his weight and balance, not in contrast to any other person but merely in response to himself. He climbed in on one side and out on the other, the way its maker taught him.
    The board that served as his desk was plain and unvarnished except when it began to show signs of water damage, at which point Joseph sealed it under a modified coat of the mixture he had used on the hull. Now the desk and the canoe appeared almost inseparable.
    Steinmetz was only interested in fish when someone else caught them; he had no patience for the line in the water, preferring expeditions of the mind. Thus he was able to forget for hours at a time that his spine curved like a second cage around his lungs and heart, pushing one shoulder forward and reorganizing almost all the nearby bones to accommodate distortions. Thinking about electrical current while riding a river’s echo was consolation enough.

    Ideas about harnessing the Niagara coexisted in alignment with Steinmetz’s fervent commitment to justice. The political arena that had summoned him in his youth, Socialist views that sent him into exile all those years earlier, further contributed to a seemingly endless hunger for change. It would have been ironic to come so far in