Electric City: A Novel (26 page)

T
HE SETTLERS IN
Shenahtahde were wrestling through a terrible winter, using every available fur and burning all the chopped wood and knowing the winter would still keep coming.

“How do the Indians do it?” the women asked each other.

Yet even in the midst of all that bitter cold, they shared nostalgia not for the abbreviated nights of Holland’s summer but for the long nights of skating, the entire village out together in the deep dark but not minding, lanterns and a fire at the edge of the canal for warming afterward, and the ruddy faces and the laughter.

Man-made land reclaimed from the sea, metamorphosis from water into something solid enough to hold you up, becoming a place to plant potatoes, tulips.
Oh, Flatland
, where cities could be built below sea level and protected by walls, dikes, systems of control holding back the ocean. Well, holding it back most of the time, not always.

How mystifying to see that everything in the New World could be the same and not the same, children dying young here too, and women in childbirth, inescapable mortal cycles of the influenza, and yet they all struggled on. Pregnancies one after another, like the relentless revolving of seasons, life bringing itself back to life.

If it’s a boy she’ll give him the name of Henry. A good way to take the old name of Hendrik and make it a new name in a new country
.

His lineage will become part of this other landscape, full of eccentric mountain ranges and virgin forests and wild water. She had seen the Indians come into town for trading, the faces unsmiling but not without curiosity. They were serious but not in the stern way her family was, and the women carried their babies in such a comfortable-seeming way, those obsidian eyes and wide cheekbones, the intricacy of beadwork reminding her of the lace her grandmother used to make with such patient care all through the long nights of winter, lit by kerosene lamps and candlelight until her eyes failed and she worked by feel.

And she knew this, even with a husband on yet another mission far from home: eventually, inevitably, spring would arrive all over again. There would be sweeping. A kind of pragmatic meditation, to pray at the same time as cleaning, to erase and make the surfaces an open horizon of possibility, like a sky free of clouds, thoughts flying like dust particles too small to matter, until they settled and got swept away again.

The world turning on its tilted, eternal axis.

One of the faces hanging on the wall of a long dark hallway in a forgotten corner of Henry’s house looked so much like him it could almost be a fake, a ruse. Except this was real: the way features can insistently repeat themselves across generations. Missing only a beard, Henry knew he could have been mistaken for any of them, even now as he bent over his knees to touch the steel that felt colder than ice.

The face in the portrait belonged to Arendt Van Curler, after whom Henry’s brother Aaron had been named. And whenever Henry thought about that, the storm clouds inside gathered until everything was gray and fierce and rattling his ribcage.

Here was the man who purchased the vast acreage that would, in a few hundred years, become Electric City. The man who brought his Dutch sensibility and passion across the Atlantic; the man who traded with the Iroquois and shared a common consideration for crops and animals and children and trees. His youngsters and his wife were living in an almost-finished house at the edge of the Stockade, and their dog had had its first litter; the fall harvest was so promising and the firewood had been well stacked to prepare for the coming winter.

Aged thirty-five, Arendt was on a trading journey in Canada, one of the last trips of the season. He missed his wife. He had a terrible cough that kept him from sleeping through the night; his boots needed repair and so did his gloves. He loved the wild beauty of this northern countryside, its jaggedly uneven horizon so much more provocative than the Flatland he memorized as a child. But the canoe in Lake Champlain was no match for this thunderstorm. Torrential freezing rain caught him completely by surprise, and it was impossible to change course, no one close enough to help.

Arendt capsized and drowned.

Henry felt like a figure in a painting by Brueghel, the one whose scarf ends fly behind him as he bends forward to pick up speed, hands clasped at the small of his back.
Imaginary Dutchman on Ice
, he thought, and his breathing found a syncopated rhythm.

In another minute or two he would circle back to gather Sophie into his arms, press their bodies together, and say the words he’d been practicing in his sleep.

I love you
, he would whisper into her ear.
You, I love
.

A
LL THOSE YEARS
ago, Annie had showed Martin her favorite serpentine walking paths along the edge of the still-frozen river; at certain points, after slipping out of their shoes, Annie reached down to press her hands beside her own bare feet and Martin’s too.

“Notice when that hardness gives way to something else, gets softer and wetter and more forgiving,” she said.

But it wasn’t anywhere near spring. It was the coldest part of December; it was the day before the start of a new year; it was Sophie’s birthday. So Martin didn’t take time to study the ice, to make use of what Annie had taught him about the texture of seasons. He skated away from Sophie, away from Henry.

By the time he realized something was wrong,
off
, he was on the far circumference of Iroquois Lake.
The frozen almost frozen lake
. He turned to look for Sophie first, to wave her back toward the safe embankment. But then he heard as much as saw the rupture where Henry’s blades broke through, knew in an instant the deadly jolt of that urgent water, blue black and ravenous. The weight of Henry’s clothes, his skates and all that gravity.

Moving low and fast, Martin got as close as he dared before lying down on the ice just the way he was supposed to; he snaked toward infinity on his belly, and it took much too long for Sophie to get there to
hold on to Martin’s legs with her own not strong enough why not strong enough arms.

Henry disappearing at the edge of the world.

H
ENRY
’
S FAMILY HAS
a mausoleum at the Vale Cemetery, dove gray and solid, already sheltering the ghost of a dead child, though not a single person dares speak of this, especially not now. An elaborate carved angel graces the oversized doorway. Her serene face is looking up, not down; she seems so calm and unconcerned. It’s a good thing, this marble house of the dead, because the ground is too frozen to dig open.

For the funeral, Gloria Van Curler wears a black veil over her face so Sophie can’t see her eyes. But she already knows what they look like.

The ice is everywhere, everywhere.

THREE

T
HE FIRST MONTH
of 1967 became Sophie’s very own blackout. She fell mute, just like the televisions and stereos and every appliance up and down the Eastern Seaboard all the way back in early November of 1965. An eternity ago. Spending entire days curled in the corner of her darkened bedroom, Sophie couldn’t find any language for her grief.

Although her daughter had told her so little about the boy before the accident, almost nothing, Miriam read Henry’s obituary in the
Electric City Gazette
. There was discreet mention of an older brother who had died, years before.

Both of Sophie’s parents remained patient in the silence. Miriam brought tea, toast, and broth. But after a week passed, she gently urged Sophie to consider going back to some of her classes, give her mind a place to focus.

“The guidance counselor authorized an extended absence, but maybe too much time away will do more harm than good,” Miriam whispered, sitting on the edge of Sophie’s bed.

David stood in the doorway of the room. “Shivah lasts seven days for a reason,” he said. “I’m not saying you have to bounce back. But little by little, life goes on.”

It’s too late
, Sophie thought,
too late to explain anything
.

Her mother reached for Sophie’s hand under the heavy winter blankets. “You’ll rediscover love,” Miriam said, her voice gentle. “It doesn’t seem possible right now, and you probably don’t believe me. But your father and I are proof. You can lose your entire world and still, eventually, you can be happy.”

Sophie kept her eyes closed, forcing herself to listen.

Her mother’s hand held on as she spoke. “The heart is the most resilient organ in the body.”

David could believe in a formula for mourning, but even science had its limits.

Sophie remembered Miriam talking about her best friend Greta Meyer who hadn’t made it out of Holland during the war. She admitted this was the one person—aside from relatives—she found it impossible to get over losing. Every October 11, on what would have been Greta’s birthday, Miriam lit a memorial candle and wept.

What about Greta Meyer?
Sophie wanted to ask her mother, who was claiming that happiness was out there ahead of her, somewhere.

The answer seemed obvious, and irrefutable.
Certain deaths stay with you forever
.

Senior year had resumed in early January, but Sophie only managed to return by the middle of February. When she received her letter of admission into Union College’s premed program in March, she read it with so much detachment the welcome might as well have been addressed to someone else, a stranger whose name she didn’t recognize. That person had applied in some earlier lifetime. She was nobody Sophie knew.

Conversely, the public library felt too familiar, too much like a story she simply wanted to erase. She begged Miriam to call and tell Mrs. Richardson that Sophie wouldn’t be coming back to work. The only possible source of comfort for Sophie was exactly the person who felt most remote, off-limits as though he were composed of the machinery inside her father’s laboratory. If she allowed herself even a thought of leaning into Martin’s arms, in the same instant, a pounding in her temples began. No matter her certainty the two friends had never been rivals competing for her, not overtly. The very image of being consoled by Martin over Henry’s death struck her as the ultimate betrayal.

Occasionally, catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror, she tried to see if she could recognize the hollow face staring back. It even seemed that her eyes had turned a browner shade of green, her inner flame extinguished.