It’s a massive undertaking. Eleven and a half towns have to be relocated to higher ground. In some cases, this means entire buildings, houses, churches, will be moved. Whatever isn’t being moved has to be destroyed, burned if it can be, torn down and carted away if it can’t. Every last piece of greenery, every tree, bush, and shrub, must be uprooted. Even the cemeteries have to be emptied. You’ve read Alf’s book, so you know what I’m talking about. You can appreciate why the old-timers, the ones whose families were living here before the Reservoir, have less than kind feelings for the City, even now.
As you might imagine, the Reservoir’s construction draws a host of workers to the area, which is how Lottie and her family enter the story. She, her mother Clara, and two younger sisters, Gretchen and Christina, come up from the Bronx with her father. Rainer Schmidt’s an interesting fellow. In the old country, he was an educated man, a professor of philology — that’s the study of languages, in case you didn’t know. Apparently, the man could speak something like half a dozen languages, and read another three or four besides. He taught at the University of Heidelberg, and was quite the rising young star. In the university system over in Germany, it takes you a long time to become a full professor. Before that, you’re a kind of glorified gofer. Rainer had made professor at the age of twenty-nine, which I gather was a real accomplishment. The essays he wrote were read and debated all over Europe; the book he was working on was eagerly anticipated.
He was a striking-looking fellow. Not especially tall, but he carried himself as if he were, the residue of a boyhood spent in military schools. His face was long, the majority of it taken up by a nose that joined a pair of deep-set eyes to a full mustache. Together, he and Clara made quite the couple. She was nearly as tall as he was, and she wore her head of brown hair up. Her face was broader than his, her features more evenly proportioned. The three girls favored their mother; though Lottie’s eyes had inherited something of her father’s sharpness. A fine, upstanding young family, you would have said.
Then something happened. Lottie wasn’t too clear on exactly what it was, but it concerned a book Rainer was studying. Whatever he did got him drummed out of his school and made it impossible for him to find work at any others. It must’ve been pretty spectacular, because Lottie told Reverend Mapple that she could remember people crossing to the other side of the street when she and her papa were out walking. Once the family had gone through what savings they had, and no sign of another job for Rainer anywhere on the horizon, they decided a move was in order, to some place with new horizons, where no one had heard of whatever it was Rainer had done. Lottie’s mother, Clara, had a sister who’d immigrated to the Bronx years ago, and now ran her own bakery and restaurant. She wrote to her, and the sister sent them the money for their passage.
Once they arrive in New York, they all go to work in the sister’s establishment. Since she paid their way, I guess that’s only fair. Rainer, who numbers English among the languages he speaks, tutors the rest of the family in it each night. Things trundle along like this for a good two years, and then Rainer, who’s moved up to working the counter in the bakery, hears from one of his customers that there’s going to be a massive new construction project upstate and that they’re looking for workers. A skilled laborer, the customer says, a stonemason or a machinist, can do quite well for himself and his family. Rainer finds out whom he needs to talk to, and goes to see the man the following morning. Somehow, he convinces the fellow who interviews him that he’s a stonemason, highly skilled, one of the finest in Germany, who’s done work on some of the most important buildings in Heidelberg. I guess being a professor helps you fake your way through all kinds of situations. After all, when was the last time you heard one of them say he didn’t know something? The man asks Rainer if he and his family can be at the work camp within the next couple of weeks. Sure, sure, Rainer says, no problem. He leaves that office with a new job he has no idea how to perform and two weeks to learn, in a place whose location he isn’t exactly sure of and which he’s going to have to convince his family they need to leave for in that same two weeks.
Through some combination of skill and luck, Rainer succeeds in both tasks. How he does, I can’t imagine. All I can say is, with powers of persuasion like that, I can’t see how he ever lost his job in the first place. Three weeks to the day after the interview finds the Schmidt family living in one of the four room houses the company provides for its married workers. What they thought they could take with them, they have. Only, they overestimated the size of their lodgings, which means that things are a bit cramped. You have to step carefully to avoid knocking over a pile of books or breaking this or that box of dishes. Lottie’s aunt wasn’t happy to have them all up and moving so quickly, but she agreed to store whatever they couldn’t bring until they send for it. Clara isn’t too happy, nor are Lottie, Gretchen, and Christina, with their new accommodations. When he described the place they’d be moving into, Rainer promised little less than a mansion. What they found was little more than a roughly built shack with no running water and no toilet. Compared to her husband and daughters, Clara’s English isn’t especially good — she spent most of her time in her sister’s bakery in the kitchen, helping with the baking — and here she’s living next to other women whose English isn’t especially good. A few are German, a few Austrian, but most are from places like Italy, Russia, and Sweden. One of their next door neighbors is from Hungary. For the better part of the first month they’re at the camp, Lottie lies awake at night, listening to her parents arguing.
V
It’s about this time — I’m talking the fall of 1907, when the first construction on the Reservoir is starting — that Cornelius Dort finally gives up the ghost. He’s not yet surrendered the idea of halting the Reservoir’s construction, and to that end has summoned a team of lawyers to his house to discuss possible strategies for doing so. As he walks down the front walk to meet them, Cornelius stops where he was, shudders, and looks down at the ground beneath his feet. His face twists into a look — one of the lawyers who sees it describes it as “the look of a man striding across a frozen river who realizes with sudden horror that the ice he has been traversing has become too thin to support his weight.” Cornelius shudders again, drops to the ground, and in the time it takes the lawyers to rush up to him, is gone. Story is that final expression, eyes starting from their sockets, lips curled back, remains on his face all the way to the grave.
Cornelius’s passing puts the axe to any lingering hopes folks in the valley might have been nursing that the Reservoir, not them, will be moved. To tell the truth, from everything I’ve read, once those fellows down in the City set their sights on having their water from the Catskills, it was only a matter of time before the valley was underwater. At the end of his life, though, for pretty much the first and only time in it, Cornelius Dort became something like a hero to folks. His meanness, his cunning, his ruthlessness, all those qualities that earned people’s abiding hate, when they were turned against a common foe, were transformed into virtues, into almost heroic assets. There’s a considerable turnout for his funeral, which, interestingly enough, takes place over in Woodstock. This is a good couple of years before the valley’s cemeteries start being dug up and their inhabitants moved to dryer beds. It seems that, despite the efforts he was making, Cornelius had seen the handwriting on the wall. Turns out he’d already had little Bea’s body exhumed and transferred to the Woodstock cemetery almost a year earlier. No one could recall it having happened, but with all the fuss over the Reservoir, who can keep track of such things? A few people remark that, in death, Cornelius is admitting defeat in a way he never did in life, but what more is there to say?