The Waterworks by E. L. Doctorow Page B

gracefully but firmly, suggesting that I would want to see the garden. I followed her down a hall to the rear of the house, and into a large drawing room with broad leaded-pane doors that led to a granite terrace. We stood at the balustrade.
    What she had called the garden was actually a private park that extended behind the entire block of Lafayette Place homes. A serpentine gravel path went among formal flower beds, and offered wrought-iron benches where there was tree shade. It was a lovely, peaceful place, with pedestaled sundials and birdbaths and a crumbling brick wall the ivy had long since conquered. Here and there in the wall was an arched niche with the bust of a weathered, eyeless Roman.
    “Right next door, in Number Ten, is where the Pembertons used to live. When Martin’s mother was alive. We ran in and out of both houses all day, we did not distinguish between them. This garden was our playground,” Emily said.
    So that was the paradisial beginning. I could look out and imagine Emily and her Martin, their young souls urged into wing, their voices from dawn to dusk in this garden as constant as the birds’ … and think of the superior state of childhood,when love is lived without knowing it is called that. Can the love that comes later be more powerful? Is there any in maturity that will not long for it?
    “I fear for my friend,” she told me. “What does it matter where he places the omnibus with his father … inside his mind or in the world … if his torment is the same? I would like to ask you the favor of letting me know if he writes to you or comes back for an assignment. Will you?”
    “Immediately.”
    “Martin has always been terribly careless of his own welfare. I don’t mean that he is someone who is likely to walk in front of a train. He is not absentminded. But ideas take hold of him. His convictions take over and almost seem to perform themselves in him … whereas other people merely have … opinions. He is heedless, arrogantly so. He’s always been like that. He was not humbled by being a child. He noticed things and pointed them out. Often they were funny. He was a wonderful mimic when we were young, he imitated adults, he did Cook with her brogue and the way she dried her hands on her apron, which she picked up first from the hem … and he did the policeman who walked here in our street with his feet pointed outward and his hand on his nightstick as if it were a sword in his belt, and his head tilted up to keep his topi from falling over his eyes.”
    She was now happy to be talking about her Martin and for a few moments was able to chat about him as if nothing were the matter—as people do in their grief.
    “Martin was wicked boy! He satirized Mr. Pemberton, usually making him into an animal of one sort or another…. It was very funny. Of course all that stopped as he grew older and more somber … except when—he was by then at college—he came to me with the letter that disowned him … andhe hadn’t forgotten his impersonation after all! I thought it was a catastrophic thing that had happened, but there he was reading the letter in his father’s grumbling voice and having his father’s difficulty with the words that had obviously been written by a lawyer … having great fun repeating the hard words, his brow swollen in rage and his lower lip curled out like a bulldog’s….”
    Well, I am giving you a conversation of that young woman of many years ago—in all of this, you must be aware, I represent matters which only I seem to have survived. But I’m fairly sure it was on this occasion I understood that my moody imperial freelance was not for any reason of his own absent from his boardinghouse and his job … and from his Emily … who was, for all the letters he’d tossed in the fireplace, the inevitable lovely associate of his sorrows, the one he would leave but return to, the one who knew him, the twinned soul. And I considered that a municipal authority,