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

the name of liberty, only to end up witnessing from the sidelines instead. Just as applied science had seduced him, he wanted to transmit the thrill of invention into the world of the real, to leap the space between invisible power and the palpable modernization of quotidian life.
    When Electric City elected a Socialist mayor, Steinmetz felt reverberations of hope for a role of another kind—in the laboratory of the classroom. Not with the graduate students at Union College, or even the undergraduates, but on behalf of the youngest students, the ones at the beginning of life. He was elected president of the school board, recognizing a chance to interweave his love of youngsters and his love of discovery.
    “Here is where the New World can truly begin,” he proclaimed. “These children, raised in a climate of possibility and expansiveness, are the ones who will bring the highest evolution for us all. Orphanshave the same rich potential as those born into privilege; humanity is God-given and equal at the start. Progress for all of us depends on this truth.”
    Joseph Longboat thought his friend was a wonder, not unlike the formations on the bark of injured pines, hardened resin lasting for millennia. Persevering in the face of so many obstacles, Steinmetz floated on the river the way amber floats on saltwater. The canoe was the finest Joseph had ever made.
    “You have the disguise of a geode,” he told Proteus one afternoon. “Misshapen on the outside, dazzling facets inside.”

M ARTIN ’ S FATHER HAD followed the patterns of his ancestors, and of the natural world too. Always said he was coming home in the spring, after the thaw, when the ice on the river broke apart and slowly, inevitably, thinned and disappeared.
    “It’s a rhythm you can count on,” Robert said, “measured by opening your eyes and listening. Not the calendar pages, not the clock on the wall. The earth will tell you.”
    Robert must have learned about paying attention from his mother. Annie spoke of these signs to her grandson Martin, teaching him about the texture of the softening world during their walks at the edge of the river. Annie would reach down to touch the ice, then place her fingertips lightly on both sides of his face, imitating the gentle pressure, the letting go.
    That gesture always made him want to ask about his mother, who had died shortly after his birth. Her name was like his, Martine, but that was practically all he knew.

    At home, when Annie knelt beside Martin, their paired hands worked the soil in the half acre of land behind their barn-shaped house. Annie’s fingers were arthritic but strong; she separated roots as though untangling her own long hair, made room for the growing things to breathe.
    “Under the surface the crystals are dissolving,” she explained. “The seeds waking up from their patient sleep. You feel it in your bones.”
    Martin told her about sensations that kept him awake at night, a deep burning at the center of his thighbones, as if he were being pulled from both ends of his body.
    Annie smiled sympathetically. “When the earth stretches, it makes space for the sun to come all the way in.”
    The sun came closer just like Martin’s father came closer, his heartbeat steady and palpable. Martin came to believe Robert was like a migratory bird remembering home and knowing exactly when to turn around. Except once his father had stayed away through three years, a cycle that broke the rules Martin wanted to be able to rely upon. Annie said that could be his own chance to grow, to keep standing on his own steady feet without leaning on anyone else. Martin hated the enforced self-reliance at first, but once he learned it he was glad. Now his father saw how they both stood solid and separate, the way men were meant to be.
    “It’s a good thing,” Robert said, returning after all that time, gray threads in his hair. And Martin said in his new deep voice, “Yes.”

    Martin had no one his own age he