Читать книгу The Inventors - Peter Selgin - Страница 21

IV.

The Building

Bethel, Connecticut, 1970

ON THE WAY HOME FROM THE TEACHER’S COTTAGE THAT day you stopped at the Building, the converted barn structure that was your father’s laboratory. During WWII it had been a black market farm and bookie joint. Nesting boxes for chickens, industrial incubators, and piles of dusty old-fashioned telephones had filled its abandoned rooms. The man your father hired to renovate it, an Italo-Frenchman named Serge, did a shitty job. Within months the new floors rotted. Gaping holes appeared where chair legs and people’s shoes broke through it. The roof leaked. Snakes, rodents, birds, and other forms of wildlife built nests between the wall joists. You could see daylight through the cracks in the stucco. Your father had trouble insuring the place, it was in such bad shape.

This was where your father conceived, designed, and built his inventions, his Color Coders, his Thickness Gauges, his Rotary Motors and Mercury Switches, his Shoe Sole and Blue Jean Machine. He didn’t mind the leaky roof, the rotten floors, the spider webs. He liked sharing his workspace with all kinds of creatures, the lowlier the better.

One day, the president of a big manufacturing firm drove up from New York in his Cadillac to talk with your father about an idea for an invention. At the time a five-foot black snake was living in the vestibule, so your father made the executive and his three-piece suit climb through a side window. Later that day, the businessman watched in horror as your doting Saint Francis of a father fed the snake a whole loaf of Wonder Bread.

Your father worked from dawn till dusk. He’d rise in the morning gloom, shave in the downstairs bathroom (the one with plum-colored fixtures), make and eat his breakfast of two soft-boiled eggs with toast and tea, then walk down the hill to the Building, where he’d work until eight-thirty, when the post office opened. If the weather was good he’d pedal his rusty Raleigh there and back, then work on until noon, when he’d walk back up to the house for a lunch of leftovers or canned soup.

Occasionally, feeling the urge for humanity, he’d walk into town and sit on a stool at the Doughboy diner, joining truck drivers and factory workers there. But despite his protests (Don’t spend your life among machines, Peter, my boy. Annoying though they can be, you’re better off with people. At least with people you can kick them and get a response.), he preferred his solitude and his inventions.

If he had other errands to run your father would typically run them in the afternoon, setting off by car to Danbury or Newtown to see the tool and die man, the sheet metal worker, the welding expert, the anodization man. Sometimes you’d go with him and watch, with uneasy fascination, him interacting with these grimy artisans in their loud, cavernous, dingy lairs. The other men were taller than your papa, who stood five foot seven, their faces tough and leathery, eyes bloodshot, skin dark with grunge. Compared to them your father looked timid and slight, as out of place amid the clamor and grime of their work places as a rose in a coalscuttle.

Your father always smiled when he worked, his face a mask of blissful concentration. Walking up the driveway to the house, you’d see him through the window as you passed by, at his workbench or typing away at his typewriter, grinning from ear to ear. Other times, when a solder joint wouldn’t take or when he stripped the thread of an obstinate screw, his oaths would resound off the Building’s crumbling walls. His flamboyant curses and Promethean farts were legendary among the neighborhood kids, whom he would hire occasionally to sort screws and other salvageable parts from obsolete inventions, and who did so as much to hear them as to earn twenty-five cents per hour.

YOUR PAPA WAS a genius. He spoke six languages fluently and had a PhD from Harvard, so you’d been given to believe. He belonged to a society of geniuses called Mensa. Occasionally the society held gatherings. Once he took you and George to one, a picnic in Westchester. During it an argument broke out between two geniuses. They were debating whether or not a can of baked beans placed unopened on the barbeque grill would explode. As your brother, your father, and you looked on, the two geniuses advanced their competing theories, supported by principles of molecular structure, gas and fluid dynamics, and particle physics. Their colorful debate might have continued forever had it not been interrupted by a considerable explosion. The two geniuses along with a dozen bystanders spent the next half-hour picking hot beans out of their hair and clothes.

Idiots, said your father under his breath.

He held over fifty patents, mostly for machines that measured and analyzed things. Among them was one for a machine that could distinguish a real dollar bill from a counterfeit one, making it possible to get change for coin-operated vending machines. Called the Nomoscope, it should have made your papa a very wealthy man, but for reasons obscure to you having something to do with a shady patent attorney, your father (as he was wont to joke at dinner parties) never got a nickel from it.

The patents were illustrated with drawings like this one:

^{4. 4.}

Should this drawing not speak for itself, the following explication attends the patent application: “Referring now to FIG. 3, the control circuit includes transducers 31 and 41 connected in opposition by resistors 43 and 44 and supplied with current from a source of direct current power 35 which may be a battery. The transducer ends of resistors 43 and 44 are connected respectively to the control electrode, in series with resistor 43A, and cathode of a vacuum tube triode 46. It is obvious that one or more transistors may be used in place of the triode. The control electrode of triode 46 is coupled to a saw-tooth generator 49 by means of series capacitor 39. The saw-tooth wave modulates whatever signal is received from the transducers 31, 41, and even when no signal is received from the transducers, the anode-cathode current is modulated in accordance with a saw-tooth wave. The anode of triode 46 is connected in series with a relay winding 47 and a direct current source of potential 48. The relay winding operates two armatures 50 and 51, each of which in turn operates two pairs of contacts. Armature 50 is connected to one terminal 52 of motor 15 while the other terminal 53 is connected through another pair of contacts 54 to a ground or common conductor 55. Conductor 55 is also connected to the terminals of two sources of potential 57 and 57. The contacts on armature 50 are arranged so that, when the relay winding 47 does not pass current, the motor 15 is connected through one pair of contacts 50 to battery 57. If the relay is actuated, contacts 58 are broken and a second pair of contacts 60 is closed, thereby sending current from the second source of electric power 50 to motor 15 to cause it to turn in the opposite direction. In this manner the direction of the motor is controlled to turn so that portion 22 may be lowered, or when the contacts are operated to turn in the reverse direction, to raise portion 22 and move it away from the object being measured.”

YOU LOVED TO visit your father in the Building. You couldn’t wait to jump off the bus after school and run down the long dirt driveway, under the drooping branches of the weeping willow trees lining it. You would enter through the main door and – provided no snakes were living there – cross the vestibule and knock softly on the inner door. To your father’s Is that you, Peter, my boy? Come in, come in! you would enter, forgetting to shut the inner door behind you.

Close the door, your father would say, and you’d close it.

The Building had five rooms, including the empty vestibule that was home to occasional serpents, the bathroom (with a toilet that didn’t work), the study where your papa kept his shelves of books and a trundle bed that he’d sleep in sometimes after especially bad fights with your mother.

Then there was the main room, where he did his inventing. It held the drill press, a table-mounted sander, a grinding wheel, the bending machine, and two lathes, both big as mules. Here was the long bench where your papa soldered and tested his circuits, and the table where he sketched out his designs and typed on his typewriter. Thumbtacked to the wall above the tool bins was a crude sketch by your papa of a man laid out on an operating table, with surgeons cleaning up in the background, a cut-away view of his belly revealing a wrench left inside it. The caption in your father’s handwriting said:

NO OPERATION IS COMPLETE

UNTIL ALL THE TOOLS AND PARTS

HAVE BEEN PUT AWAY

Then there was the back room, where your father kept the band saw and a blue machine on splayed legs for cutting tubes and shafts that galumphed like a lame camel. Sheets and chunks of every sort of metal were kept there in wooden bins, with other bins holding spare and used parts.

Under banks of long fluorescent bulbs buzzing and wavering in their death throes you would walk to where your father stood working, wearing his pilled moth-eaten cardigan and stained khaki trousers (winter) or shorts (summer). Past rows of tiny drawers brimming with screws, bolts, nuts, washers, tubes, lenses, photocells, toggle switches, relays (“tick-tick things,” you called them), solenoids, potentiometers, rheostats, transformers, resistors, capacitors (“capacitators”), and rectifiers, you would make your way, carefully avoiding the holes in the floor. On the table next to your father’s typewriter a portable radio played a mixture of classical music and static.

The Building had its own special smell, a blend of solder smoke, scorched metal, mildew, electrical shorts, farts, and orange peels. Your father liked to eat oranges when he worked. He kept a straw basket of them by his typewriter. He’d toss the peels into a gray metal wastepaper basket, along with gobs of pulp that he would spit into his palm. A perfume of oranges rose from the wastebasket.

You’d watch him typing with two fingers on his Royal typewriter, or soldering a circuit, or turning a part on the lathe. The lathe was your favorite. You loved watching him manipulate its plethora of bright chrome dials with one hand, like an engineer manning the controls of a locomotive, while smoothing the fingers of his other hand around the spinning chuck, its knuckles black with grime. From the spinning chuck bright turnings of aluminum, copper, and brass spiraled to the rotted floor. Afterward you’d sweep the turnings up with the dustpan, pocketing the longest and brightest specimens for a collection you kept in a wooden box.

Among boxy instruments on his workbench was one with a round screen called an oscilloscope. As it shed its green light over his thin gray hair, his sloping forehead, his wrinkled brow, his aquiline nose, your father would gaze at the glowing screen and you would gaze at him, wondering what he made of it, amazed that your father (or anyone) could extract meaning from a dancing thread of light.

The Building was your father’s sanctuary, the place where he sought refuge among his ideas and instruments. It was your refuge, too, a shrine, the place where you went to worship your papa and experience the awe and mystery of his works. Under its buzzing and flickering fluorescent lights, between the holes in its rotting floor, in a pall of solder smoke and radio static, the universe was conceived, engineered, tested, and approved.

IN THE BUILDING’S back room you had your own workbench, with your own (broken) oscilloscope, your own soldering gun, your own plastic drawers of assorted parts. There you gave birth to your own invention, an electric motor you built from scratch, almost. You fit brushes and stators to an old rotor that you found, turned the aluminum casing for it on the lathe, fixed a bearing to the shaft, mounted the result on a bracket, and attached a toggle switch to it. You soldered the two wires, one red and one blue, from the coil to the toggle switch, then added (for the heck of it) two diodes, a small transformer, and a yellow capacitor chosen for its looks alone. You attached an electrical cord to the transformer and plugged the result into a wall outlet.

Before it caught on fire the capacitor blushed and gave off a bluish gray puff of pungent smoke, garnishing failure with splendor. Still you were damned if your motor didn’t look as if it should have worked, if it didn’t display all the superficial properties of a perfectly good motor. In fact what you had invented was a sculpture of a motor, a postmodern motor. An artist’s motor.

YOUR VISITS TO the Building ended usually at dusk, when your mother would telephone from the house to say dinner was ready. Before leaving, you’d empty all the wastebaskets and turn off the lights and the furnace.

With the six o’clock siren howling in the distance, you and your father walked up the hill to the modest Cape Cod with a brick-accented front and dormer windows from which the striped awnings had long been removed. Summer heat, crickets and peepers. Or December dusk, the air crackling cold, the sun about to sink behind a hill.

Halfway up you and your father stop for a “pissing contest,” both of you standing side by side, unzipping at the driveway’s edge, aiming father-and-son streams into the Queen Anne’s Lace, poke-berries, goldenrod, and milkweed. Your papa’s thick, ruddy, uncircumcised dick resembled the Polish sausages that your mother boiled with potatoes and cabbage. Your own dick scarcely rated notice.

While pissing, your father would recite a favorite limerick:

There once was a man from Madras

Whose balls were made of brass

In frosty weather they clanged together

And sparks flew out of his ass

Your papa’s urine never failed to outperform yours in every category: thickness, altitude, distance, endurance, its glittering golden arch reminding you, as it rose and fell into the weeds, of the brass turnings that spun from his lathe. Watching it twist and turn in the twilight, you’d say to yourself: When I can pee that far, I’ll be a man.

BY THE TIME you got to the Building that day it was already dusk. The lights still burned inside. You knocked on the inner door. To your father’s Come in, Peter my boy, you let yourself in, remembering to shut the door behind you. Your father sat at his typewriter, typing. Well, well, so good to see you, Peter boy, he said, and went on typing with two fingers, smiling. Maybe he asked you about your first day at school. You may even have said something about visiting the new teacher in his cottage, though it’s unlikely. However affectionate and welcoming, your father never pretended to be that interested in you. He listened to you the way he listened to his radio, appreciating the background noise even though he didn’t give a fig what music was playing.

Anyway, you’d forget what you talked or didn’t talk about.

But you wouldn’t forget how, when you were small, on hot summer days your papa would take you and George to a muddy swimming hole under a railroad trestle near the edge of town, how once there he would enter the water as he always did, ever so slowly, inch by gruesome inch, making wincing sounds as if he were stepping into a vat of boiling oil. Meanwhile the fathers of other kids your age ran and jumped into the water.

How you had longed for your papa to jump like the others. Jump, Papa, Jump! you would plead. But he wouldn’t. I can’t, he’d say. I’m too old.

Those three words – I’m too old – how they tolled in you like a tarnished bell. Too old Too old Too old… At moments like that your disappointment knew no bounds. And it was true. Your papa was old, born in 1912, the same year the Titanic sank.

But it wasn’t old age that kept your father from jumping into bodies of water anymore than it prevented him from throwing footballs or playing catch, things your father would no sooner have done than he would have swum the Bosporus or climbed Mount Everest. It wasn’t age that made your papa old. It was his unwillingness to do anything that failed to engage him, that didn’t pertain to his pursuits and interests. It was egocentricity, not age, that made your father so old.

So you concluded that day after visiting the new teacher for the first time.

As you stood there watching your father type, seeing him smile in concentration, it occurred to you that something else had changed for you that day. You realized, not for the first time but with a novel sense of bitter disappointment, that your papa, the human god who’d invented the world for you, was a remote, absentminded old man.

4 Should this drawing not speak for itself, the following explication attends the patent application: “Referring now to FIG. 3, the control circuit includes transducers 31 and 41 connected in opposition by resistors 43 and 44 and supplied with current from a source of direct current power 35 which may be a battery. The transducer ends of resistors 43 and 44 are connected respectively to the control electrode, in series with resistor 43A, and cathode of a vacuum tube triode 46. It is obvious that one or more transistors may be used in place of the triode. The control electrode of triode 46 is coupled to a saw-tooth generator 49 by means of series capacitor 39. The saw-tooth wave modulates whatever signal is received from the transducers 31, 41, and even when no signal is received from the transducers, the anode-cathode current is modulated in accordance with a saw-tooth wave. The anode of triode 46 is connected in series with a relay winding 47 and a direct current source of potential 48. The relay winding operates two armatures 50 and 51, each of which in turn operates two pairs of contacts. Armature 50 is connected to one terminal 52 of motor 15 while the other terminal 53 is connected through another pair of contacts 54 to a ground or common conductor 55. Conductor 55 is also connected to the terminals of two sources of potential 57 and 57. The contacts on armature 50 are arranged so that, when the relay winding 47 does not pass current, the motor 15 is connected through one pair of contacts 50 to battery 57. If the relay is actuated, contacts 58 are broken and a second pair of contacts 60 is closed, thereby sending current from the second source of electric power 50 to motor 15 to cause it to turn in the opposite direction. In this manner the direction of the motor is controlled to turn so that portion 22 may be lowered, or when the contacts are operated to turn in the reverse direction, to raise portion 22 and move it away from the object being measured.”