Daddy buys a Kelsey hand press and sets up a small printing business in the downstairs front room where he keeps his watchmaker’s bench. He assembles the press, fastens it atop a two-drawer oak cabinet he’s built, and fills the drawers below the printer with essential items he’s ordered from the Kelsey catalog—extra printer parts, large tubes of ink, and special cuts (engraved images mounted on small wooden blocks for printing pictures).
He builds a separate cabinet to hold reams of blank stationery and boxes of business card stock of varying weights and finishes. He fills two tall wooden cabinets with fonts of type and puts an ad in the local paper, promising Expert Printing. Business Cards. Wedding Announcements and Invitations. Greeting Cards. No Job Too Small. We Aim to Please. To his wooden business sign beside our roadside mailbox, he adds the words Quality Printing below what’s been on the sign since we moved here: Expert Watchmaking and Repairs. Woodworking. His hammer rings with hope as he nails the metal letters onto the wood.
And then we wait for business to roll up our driveway and knock at the white side door with peeling paint that bears the sign Office in stenciled lettering. In the meantime, Daddy lets me help him design our first greeting card. From the printer’s catalog, under Daddy’s close supervision, I select a printer’s cut—a bouquet of spring flowers—and a dainty, archaic type font called Edwardian Script. Then, all on my own, I write a short verse to display inside the card.
When winter like an old man dies
And pinkened April dawns arise
With birds released from frozen wing—
Then I my dappled freedom ride.
I read the verse aloud to myself and, before I show it to Daddy, change the first line from “When winter like an old man dies” to “When winter winds desist their sighs.” I also revise the last line from “Then I my dappled freedom ride” to “Then Spring returns from Hades’ side.” I don’t want to hurt Daddy’s feelings.
In March, our first printing job arrives. The lady who runs the local chapter of the My Lady’s Manor Equestrian Society, just north of us, wants us to print announcements for some of their upcoming events.
In the colder months, the radiator in the front room doesn’t keep the room warm enough for printing. Daddy hangs a bare lightbulb just above the printer’s ink table to keep the ink from hardening.
Daddy trains me to be his “printer’s devil.” I help him set the type in a heavy steel frame called a chase. He fills the empty spaces around the type with blocks of wood he calls “furniture.” He uses quoins—pairs of wedges facing in opposite directions—to lock everything in place within the chase, and a quoin key to force them together. Then he sets the locked-up chase—the “forme”—into the chase bed.
Daddy teaches me to operate the printing press. It’s done entirely by hand, slowly, mechanically, one sheet of paper at a time, one color at a time.
To print, I align—very precisely—a single sheet of paper within the paper guides on the open press. Then I grasp the smooth wooden handgrip at the end of the long cast-iron handle, which is attached at the side of the printer. As I pull the handle steadily down toward me, it brings the soft roller down and over the ink plate at the top of the press, allowing the inked roller to pass over the type and causing the platen—a sturdy metal plate—to press the paper against the type and transfer the image as the press closes.
As I operate the press over a stretch of time, I fall into a soothing rhythm, my arm moving in sync with—and powering—the mechanical parts. I begin to feel the satisfying symbiosis of human and machine that Daddy must have thrived on for years.
Daddy relies on me to search the floor for any dropped pieces of type. “You are my eyes, Lissa,” Daddy says. “I used to have eyes like a hawk, but now I rely on your young eyesight.”
For every job, when the first good print is ready, Daddy calls me in to proof it for him. I learn to detect the smallest of errors in spelling, punctuation, grammar. If I find a mistake, that page is reset and I proof it once again, assuring him that everything is exactly as it should be.
I also learn to distribute each piece of type, after it is cleaned of ink, back into the correct compartment of the correct wooden type case, then insert the case back into the correct drawer in the type cabinet.
“Try not to make a pie,” Daddy teases me.
“Make a pie?”
“A pie,” Daddy explains, “is what printers call the mess you make when you spill a case of type on the floor. All the spilled type pieces are a squabble and need to be sorted out all over again, inspected for any broken edges, and redistributed in the case.”
“I will only make apple and pumpkin pies, I promise. No printer’s pies.”
“Better not, or I may be out of sorts. In the printer’s world, that means I won’t have enough of the pieces I need to fill the type case.”
Even though we both laugh at Daddy’s play on words, I take my job, as I do all jobs, very seriously. I try very hard to do everything perfectly—to please Daddy, and, I’m realizing, to feel okay about myself.
It is 1966. Spence is a senior in high school. I am in the tenth grade. I am good in English and French; Spence excels in science and math. He’s so good, the math teachers get him to tutor other kids in the Advanced Calculus class. When he’s offered the math award for the Class of ’66, Spence refuses to attend the graduation ceremony, so he doesn’t receive the award. He also refuses to have his picture taken for the school yearbook. When asked why, Spence’s only response is, “I prefer not to.”
Spence’s classmates have begun to call him Bartleby after Herman Melville’s curious character in “Bartleby the Scrivener.” Initially, Melville’s Bartleby, hired to copy legal documents by hand for a Manhattan law office, works efficiently and produces a large quantity of excellent work. But when asked to proofread a document, Bartleby responds, “I would prefer not to.” Soon, this becomes his response to every request: “I would prefer not to.”
I begin to worry about Spence’s reclusive behavior. I wonder if he is going through something like my “maybe, maybe not” phase. Whenever I try to ask Spence, “What’s wrong?” or “Are you okay?” he rebuffs me.
Finally, I get so frustrated with him, I say, “You’re driving me crazy, Spence!”
He just says, “It’s a short trip,” and clams up.
One day, I decide to talk with Daddy about Spence. Daddy is in his front office, cleaning the press’s roller and ink table after a round of printing. I pull up his watchmaker’s stool and observe him for a bit. As usual, he performs every task with intensity, precision, and fierce concentration. I wait until he sets aside his tools and looks up at me from his work. Then, quietly, I broach the topic.
“Daddy, do you think Spence is acting a little weird these days?” Daddy is sitting in the cane-back swivel chair at his desk. He wipes his hands on an ink rag, and for a few moments, seems to be considering my question. Finally, he speaks.
“I have to admit, Lissa, that I’ve never understood that boy. The more I try to get him interested in my work, the more he resists. I used to think Spence would follow in my footsteps, get married one day, and have some sons to carry on the Power name.”
“I can carry on the Power name for you, Daddy.”
“No, Lissa. You can’t. Only boys can carry on family names. All my brothers died without sons, so Spence is the only one left to do it after I’m gone.”
“Well, that doesn’t seem fair. What’s wrong with girls?”
“Nothing. But that’s just the way it is, Lissa.”
“Hmmm.” I decide to let that subject drop—for now.
“So, Daddy, do you think Spence is depressed? Giving up the math award is a pretty big deal.”
“Well, Spence was always closer to his mother than to me. He was always Jimmie’s boy. I don’t think Spence has been the same since your mother died.”
“I’ll try to be extra nice to him, Daddy. I’ll make him pork chops for supper. That’s his favorite.
”
Daddy just shrugs and gives a little tilt of his head, as if approving my intentions.
Spence spends the summer caddying at a couple of local golf courses. He has to bum a ride with a friend, walk, or hitchhike to get there. He saves his money, and at end of summer, he buys himself a 1940 Plymouth coupe for just eighty dollars.
One of his high school math teachers has kept in touch by phone, and insists that Spence enroll in college. Spence’s first choice is the University of New Mexico. He’s accepted there, and seems intrigued by its department of physics and astronomy, but daunted by the distance he will need to travel in his antiquated, slow-moving Plymouth.
Spence gets a part-time job at Sweeney’s delivering groceries, and decides instead to attend the University of Maryland, where he has also been accepted. He drives off to the campus in the 1940 coupe. The car has two doors, two seats, a pull starter, two small windshields divided in the middle by a metal strip, and no defroster. Its small oval rear window doesn’t give much of a view out over the car’s stubby rear end, which rounds downward to its trunk in an awkward hump, like a squatting dinosaur’s droopy hindquarters.
Spence returns late in the day, pale and shaken by the chaos of trying to enroll at the large campus—long lines, crowds of noisy, surging freshmen—and frustrated by his inability to coordinate the required courses with his work schedule.
“Don’t think I could make that drive every day in the Plymouth. And if I stay on campus, they said I’d have to sleep, at least for the first semester, in one of their temporary prefab dorms. Eight guys in one dinky unit. Can’t do it.”
The next week, Spence tries to sign up for the navy, but he’s found to have a heart condition, and doesn’t qualify for service. He comes home looking defeated. Over the next few weeks, he drifts around the house, or shuts himself in his room for long periods. A sense of purposelessness steals the youthfulness from his step. His trademark excited pacing—around the kitchen table or in a circle behind the barn—has ceased. A suppressed anxiety daubs shadows under his eyes, and settles a look of permanent dejection around his mouth.
“How’s your brother doing?” Mr. J. Winfred Walker asks me one Sunday after church. J. Winfred is a mover and shaker at my Methodist church, a successful businessman and landowner, and, in some ways, the lord of the manor in our rural (and latently feudal) farm community. “Haven’t seen him in church in a long while.”
J. Winfred is an influential man who believes it is his Christian duty to look out for church members who are less fortunate, and apparently, at the moment, our family fits that description.
I’m somewhat tongue-tied around this important man, who projects a colossal presence in his impeccable three-piece suit. Before I come up with a response, this pillar of the church presses both my hands in his, gazes at me with deep, soulful brown eyes, and says, “I’m sure they could use someone like Spence at the bank. I’m on the board of trustees at Maryland National. Have Spence give this gentleman a call, and use me as a reference.” Releasing my hands from his grasp, he slides a pen and business card from the silk lining of a clandestine inner coat pocket, and scribbles a name and phone number on the back of the card.
Spence is interviewed in the personnel office in the bank’s downtown Baltimore headquarters at the corner of East Baltimore and Light Streets, an art deco giant that soars up beneath its copper-clad dome to dominate the city’s skyline; but he is hired to work blocks and blocks away, at an entry-level job on the first floor of a much smaller building facing Calvert Street. His first “real” job is handling coins for Maryland National Bank.
I always have supper ready for Daddy and Spence when Spence gets home from work. And sometimes, when he’s not too tired, I get Spence to tell me a little about his new job before he goes off to bed.
Each morning, he comes in the back of the building through the loading dock, punches in, and enters the first floor, which houses two work areas: the coin room and the dollar room. Though both rooms share a manager, they have discrete staff and functions. The coin room deals only with coins; the dollar room is reserved for paper money. Employees share a small kitchen and bathroom.
Spence has been assigned to the coin room, where machines that process metal money dominate the space. Bags, heavy with loose change of all denominations—collected from vending machines, pay phones, church collection plates—are dumped into the coin machines for sorting, counting, and weighing to verify the count. Day after day, Spence handles coins—sticky, grimy coins—as machines deposit them into rolls and seal the tops. The coins get hot in the machines, sometimes so hot they burn and blister my brother’s hands. He foregoes wearing gloves, and builds up calluses.
Within the year, the bank administers a logic test. Spence aces the test, and is promoted to data processing. At first, he runs the check sorter; then he becomes a computer operator. The bank’s senior programmers soon recognize my brother’s prodigious skills. They lend him their programming manuals and groom him to become a computer programmer.
At home, Spence resumes his characteristic pacing around the kitchen table after supper. He spends hours in his room studying thick manuals, teaching himself computer languages—ALGOL, COBOL. He begins writing programs for the bank. On weekends, he sits for hours at a large wooden table, in the room we use as a combination dining/living room, poring over tall stacks of computer printouts.
Daddy and I come in here to chat and watch TV while Spence goes over his printouts. Sometimes, we call over to Spence to include him in the conversation, but often, he becomes so absorbed in the strings of computer code that he doesn’t seem to hear us; he doesn’t respond. Spence has entered, on the ground floor, a new world called the Information Age, a world that is alien to Daddy and me.
One Friday night, Daddy has gone up to bed, Spence is still poring over his printouts, and I’m standing in the kitchen doorway ironing, watching an old movie on TV. Then there’s the sermonette and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and the station signs off. I click off the TV. The only sound now is the hollow, persistent ticking of the Regulator clock in the kitchen.
“Spence,” I call over to my brother. Sometimes, very late at night is the best time to have a conversation. “Spence?” He looks up. “Why do you like computer stuff so much?”
Spence stares across the room for a while, at nothing—or at everything—and says, “If you make a mistake with something mechanical, like a watch or a clock, it’s ruined, and you have to throw it away. But if there’s an error in a program, you can always fix it, rewrite the code, make it work. A little time lost, but no material wasted.” I remember what a perfectionist Daddy has been with Spence, and how angry Daddy used to get when Spence did something wrong in the shop. Now I get it. Now Spence has found something of his own, something that carries him beyond Daddy’s criticisms. Before long, Spence is training other programmers, and fortunately for Daddy and me, his salary steadily increases. Our family’s finances take a sharp turn upward. Spence begins to buy nice three-piece suits. I wash and iron his dress shirts every week, and when he goes out of town to do a training, I fold and pack his clothes neatly in his suitcase.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
PICKUP TRUCK PICKUP
NOW that Spence has graduated from high school and started to work, I have to walk by myself to catch the school bus at the intersection. Spence leaves for work too early in the morning for me to get a ride with him, and he doesn’t get home until six P.M., in time for supper.
I really don’t mind the walk itself, but waiting in the cold at the corner for the bus to arrive is not my favorite thing to do. Sometimes, my feet freeze so badly they throb with pain when they start to thaw out on the bus.
By now, I’ve learned to dress more like the other girls—makeup, hose, a conservative but fashionable dress length just above the knee. I’m kind of alone here at school now, with Paloma gone, but once in a while, we talk on the phone. She doesn’t like the private school, and she’s mad at her dad for m
aking her go there.
I feel pretty good about myself, and am starting to think about college. Daddy still doesn’t allow me to participate in after-school activities or go on dates, but I’m okay for now with romance novels like Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and Victoria Holt’s Mistress of Mellyn and old movies on TV like Hold Back the Dawn and The Swan, with heart-melting French actors like Charles Boyer and Louis Jourdan to satisfy my longings. I don’t think I’m ready for the real thing, yet, anyway.
I dig out my old writing notebook from the bottom of my desk and try to write my own version of a passionate romance novel, but revise as I might, the characters keep coming out two-dimensional, like paper dolls cut from flimsy paper. It’s always about two vague young women vying for the love of one ill-defined man. One woman—the one I identify with—is quiet, shy, serious, intelligent, mousy. She dreams that the man will rescue her from her drab life. The other woman is her opposite—the one, in my heart of hearts, I’d like to be—beautiful, lively, daring, self-confident—maybe the way I imagine Jimmie was before she married Daddy. The man, of course, is handsome and troubled in a meaningless way. Because I’ve never had a boyfriend, my story inevitably shuts down, and never progresses beyond a paragraph or two.
It’s a Monday morning in May, and the weather has turned warm enough to leave my jacket at home, hanging on the hallway coatrack. I get even warmer as I walk, so I take off my cardigan and tie it around my neck. I’m just past Cory’s Ridge, moving under a fringe of old trees whose roots cling precariously to the road bank on either side, when a pickup truck, heading in the direction I’m walking, comes to a sudden stop alongside me.
At the Far End of Nowhere Page 16