The Waterworks by E. L. Doctorow Page A

knew because crocuses and gladioli and foxglove appeared for sale in the flower carts at Washington Market, and the swells had begun to race their trotting horses on the track up in Harlem. The climate having moderated, people resumed the practice of paying calls, as did Martin on Emily, in her home, where he assured her she could despair of ever having his proposal of marriage because—at least insofar as she could understand his logic—Augustus Pemberton was abroad on the earth.
    I’ll tell you now I found this earlier incident more ominous, more truly unsettling, than the other. I don’t know why, precisely. It had not the awful specificity of the wen on the old man’s neck…. In the shadow of the retaining wall of the holding reservoir, Martin walks east on Forty-second Street, leaning headfirst into the wind, clutching his collar about him. From the gusts of snow blowing across the thoroughfare a carriage emerges, a public stage. He turns to look. The horses are at a gallop and though the driver, swathed in a fur robe, whips them to even greater speed, their passage is stately and silent. The stage sails past in a cloud of whirled-up snow…. And he sees in the rimed window, as if etched there, the face of his father, Augustus, who at the same moment turns an incurious gaze upon him. A moment later the entire equipage is swallowed by the storm.
    Now the chill set in. Martin’s boots were frozen. His Union greatcoat seemed to absorb the wet air. The falling snow smelled metallic, as if machined, and he looked into theopaquely white, flaking sky, imagining it as an … industrial process. That is what he told Miss Tisdale.
    She sighed and sat straighter in her chair.
    You know I am an old lifelong bachelor, and the truth of my breed is that we fall in love quite easily. And, of course, silently, and patiently, until it passes. I think I fell in love with Emily on this day. She put a theory into my mind … the idea of the unremarked development in America of an exotic Protestantism. I mean if there was voluptuousness in virtue, if there was a promise of physical paradise in a chaste and steadfast loyalty, it was here in this heartbroken girl.
    I found myself resenting her treatment at the hands of my freelance. She looked at me brightly. She had enrolled, she said, in the Female Normal College up on Sixty-eighth Street with the purpose of becoming a teacher of public school children. “My father is quite shocked. He thinks the teaching profession is only for women of the working class—quite unsuitable to the daughter of the founder of the Tisdale Iron Works! But I am so happy there. I am reading ancient history, physical geography, and Latin. I could have chosen French, I know a bit of French, but I’m inclined to Latin. Next year I take the lectures in moral philosophy given by Professor Hunter. The only bad thing—they have a weekly review in English grammar and—horrors!—arithmetic. Oh, the children will have fun with me in arithmetic.”
    At that point her father came in and I was introduced. Mr. Tisdale was quite old, with a fringe of white hair, and he kept a hand cupped behind his ear in order to hear better. He was a dry, stringy old Yankee, of the sort who live forever. In the manner of the aged he promptly informed me of everything I should know about his life. He confided in a loud voice thatafter Emily’s mother had died giving birth he had never remarried but had devoted himself to raising the child. Emily sent me a silent glance of apology. “She is the light of my life, my lifelong consolation and pride,” said her father, speaking as if she were not in the room. “But since she is mortal I cannot claim perfection for her. She is already twenty-four and, if I may say so, stubborn as a mule.”
    This was an allusion to a marriage proposal that Emily had turned down. “You’d agree with me, sir,” he said, “if I told you the name of the family.”
    Somehow his daughter excused us,