The Waterworks by E. L. Doctorow Read Free Book Online

old men … the back of one with the familiar hunch of his father’s shoulders … and the wizened Augustan neck with its familiar wen, the smooth white egglike structure that from Martin’s infancy had always alarmed him.
    A moment later he is on his knees in the street, the horses having suddenly been reined and just as abruptly whipped forward again, as if the driver up on the box had deliberately intended to shake him loose. He hears someone shouting and manages to struggle to his feet just in time to avoid a trampling. He staggers to the sidewalk, his nose bleeding, his hands lacerated, his clothes soaked and torn, and is aware of none of this as he looks northward through the rain to the vanishing white stage and whispers “Father! Father!” with all the destroyed love he has ever felt reanimated in an instant of total credulity.
    “‘Father! Father!’” Dr. Grimshaw cried out in his weak tenor. He had been made quite breathless by his account.

Seven

    A T least I knew now why my freelance had shown up at the Telegram with his copy soiled with blood. In the interest of my own newsmaking, I would not allow myself to think of his anguish. I simply held it in my mind as something that would magnify whatever information I collected, or distort it, or bend it into its spectral bands…. In fact this had not been the first—what shall we call it?—sighting. The first had occurred a month before, in March, during a heavy snow, and was afterward reported by Martin to his fiancée, Emily Tisdale, but in a context of the difficulties between them that would not let her believe anything was being represented as it really was.
    But I’ll get to that.
    When Grimshaw finished his account we sat for some moments in silence while he regained his composure. Then I asked him what his reaction had been to Martin’s story. “Did you say what he said you would have to say?”
    “I suppose I did, yes. I felt an immense compassion, of course…. I tell you frankly, I have never liked Martin. I thought his attitude toward his father quite unconscionable. He’d always been contrary, contentious—always. With everyone.For him to come knocking at the door of St. James … had to be an act of desperation. Obviously the apparition of his father was a torment of his mind. A phantom event summoned up by his guilt. Well, so could it be his first blind groping for forgiveness. I am not an alienist but neither am I a stranger to the healing of pastoralia. There was something to be accomplished here, there was an opportunity for Christ, or else why did the young man come to me, after all?
    “I began by asking if he remembered the omnibus in any detail.
    “‘Only that it was one of the white stages of the Municipal Transport.’
    “It was unusual that a city stage would have only one sort of passenger, I told him. Public transport is used by everyone—humanity in all its array stuffs itself aboard these coaches.
    “‘You are right, of course,’ he said. He laughed. ‘Was it a dream, then?’ He touched his skinned forehead. ‘Yes, I have heard of dreams that draw blood.’
    “‘You didn’t dream,’ I said. ‘Probably the stage was chartered by a lodge or learned society. That would account for the brotherhood of old men. And the fall you took was quite real, I can see that.’
    “‘I’m grateful to you!’ Color was now in his cheeks, he listened as a man well entertained.
    “‘And as for the old men, they are like old men everywhere,’ I said. ‘They fall asleep on any and all occasions, even, as I can tell you, during the most eloquent sermon.’
    “‘Another point well taken!’ He frowned and rubbed his temples. ‘Which leaves only my father.’
    “‘Your father or the image of him in the darkness through the streaks of rain … I can say only that as Christian doctrine has it, Resurrection is so truly exceptional that it has so faroccurred only once in history.’ You see, I thought a bit of levity might not