It dawned on Elizabeth that she had misunderstood the meaning of the word “domestic.” She didn’t want to offend the eyelashes by admitting she wasn’t looking to clean houses—not yet, anyway, though if it came to that, if she found nothing else, she would do whatever she had to. And she was too ashamed to admit she didn’t know this other meaning of “domestic.” She would have filled out an application just to be courteous, but she couldn’t spare the money. She told the woman this, as quietly as she could because she was aware that everyone was still eyeing her from behind.
“Don’t bullshit me,” the woman snapped. She motioned with her chin toward Elizabeth, as if to use her as evidence against herself. “You look like you have a lot more than a hundred bucks.”
* * *
Back at the apartment, she found Angela sitting crossed-legged at the base of the couch with a book in her lap. John Vain was washing dishes. Hal sat at the two-person dining table where Elizabeth had organized the masses of files and papers related to his invention into neat piles. She hadn’t had a chance to study them yet, as she had offered, but she could tell the moment she opened the door and saw the expression on Hal’s face that he was holding a wake of some kind, watching the years of hard work and mountains of dreams slowly wither before his eyes, forcing himself to learn to let go.
Angela jumped to her feet when she saw Elizabeth. “Did you get it?” she cried, too hopefully. She was holding the book open against her right thigh, pressing down on it as if to keep her legs from running to the door. “Did they give you a job?”
__________________
Elizabeth wouldn’t take a handout from John Vain, and she was too smart not to realize the “position” he was offering—financial advisor and business affairs coordinator—was created for her alone. Her first reaction, therefore, was to thank him sincerely but decline.
“I can’t let you do any more for us than you already have,” she told him on Monday morning, when he called at seven to make sure he caught her before she and Angela had left for school.
Never mind she was no accountant: “Hal says you’re good at math.”
Never mind she couldn’t work evenings because she had to be home with Angela: “You can come and go as you like.”
She turned John Vain down again that night when he stopped by to ask if they would accompany him to Lucky 99 for dinner, and she intended to stick by it, to remain proud but poor for the rest of her life if she had to because those things matter, you see—things like honor and dignity and knowing when to stop taking advantage of another’s kindness, the small footprints that remain when we’re gone, the traces of ourselves we leave upon the world.
She tried to explain this to Angela, who had been watching Elizabeth that morning as she talked to John Vain on the phone.
“Why did you say no?”
Angela had light skin and long legs and an explosion of shiny brown curls that had a way of escaping any restraint, so that at any given time part of her hair was pulled back and the rest hovered around her face. The growth spurt that would leave her taller and bigger than most other Iranian women in adulthood wouldn’t occur for another year or two, and the know-it-all attitude wouldn’t set in for another decade, but she was already brave and obstinate and, yes, a little angry.
“I thought you said you can’t even get hired as a maid.”
* * *
On Tuesday morning, when the phone rang again at a few minutes past seven, Angela threw herself on the receiver before her mother could reach for it.
“You have to say yes,” she warned, her little hands wrapped around the phone as it kept ringing, her voice breaking midsentence. Her eyes, dark and alert and forever vigilant, were clouded with fear. “You can’t decide everything the way you want to.”
Later, Elizabeth would claim this was the moment she realized her daughter had become American.
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The first thing Elizabeth discovered in John Vain’s books was that he shouldn’t have hired her or half the workforce at the restaurant because he didn’t have the funds, hadn’t had them for a long time, maybe ever—he was paying for things with borrowed money that he couldn’t pay back anytime soon. She was alarmed by this, but not nearly as much as by his reaction to her report.
“Don’t worry about that,” he said when she gave him the bad news. He had this expansive, nothing’s-ever-gonna-go-wrong manner that was reassuring and endearing to a great many people, but didn’t convince Elizabeth. “I’ve always been poor.”
He would have followed that with a confession he was dying to make: that he didn’t care what she found in his accounts as long as he could sit there and watch her go through them.
He would have told her this, gotten down on one knee and proposed marriage, if he didn’t think it indecent to make a move on a woman when she was in such vulnerable circumstances. He was, of course, aware of his own limitations: here he was, a street kid with barely an education, before the genius widow of an upper-class gentleman whose name people still uttered with deference. Then again, he had half a century of good luck to draw from, and at least as much patience. And he had the restaurant.
* * *
The Lucky 99 Grill, at the intersection of Sunset and Crescent Heights, was built on a one-acre lot situated on a hilltop. A rambling structure with high-beamed ceilings and large windows and open verandas overlooking Los Angeles, it had a parking lot in the back and a row of limousines and Rolls-Royces in the front. The cars were rented, along with their spiffy drivers in black Armani suits, at the (discounted) rate of three hundred dollars a day, to transport wealthy patrons and out-of-town friends to the restaurant and back. The rides were complimentary, as was the bottle of Veuve Clicquot that arrived at every VIP’s table as soon as guests were seated, along with the daily amuse-bouche from the chef and a bowl of Caspian beluga caviar from John Vain.
He had opened the restaurant with the help of a loan officer at a small regional bank—Bank United of California—where a friendly clerk with a growing family helped small entrepreneurs “establish” credit. Brady McPherson was a Pentecostal Christian from Echo Park, a grandnephew by marriage of the Canadian revivalist preacher Aimee Semple McPherson, founder of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. Though Sister Aimee and her children had profited handsomely from the Lord’s bounty over the years, members of their extended family had been left to struggle like ordinary folk.
Early in his career, Brady had used his aunt’s connections to sustain his loan brokerage firm called the Foursquare Loan Corporation where, for over a decade, he had obtained special “Lord’s Loans” for church members: in exchange for a 10 percent commission, handed to him in cash, he doctored loan applications for good, God-fearing folk who would never have qualified without the benefit of Brady’s powers of amplification. By the time the banks caught on and the federal government stepped in, he had made millions of dollars and was married with three children. He went to jail for twenty-seven months and emerged penniless, divorced, and owing child support. So he made up a new résumé, leaving out the little matter of his sojourn in the state’s equivalent of a bed-and-breakfast—because that’s all it was, really, a minimum-security prison with wide-open grounds and fresh country air—and soon enough, he was back to making magic with loan applications. He got John Vain an $800,000 loan and a $200,000 line of credit at 11.25 percent interest. That was in April 1972. By 1980, he had added another $700,000 to the original amount.
John Vain never knew what McPherson wrote on the loan applications that he filled out and only put in front of John Vain to sign, but he was sure it was the kind of information the bank liked to see. Still, it wasn’t until Elizabeth began to examine his books that he learned just how rich and successful the bank thought he was. The loan documents showed him flush with assets and enjoying a more than considerable income—which was fine with John Vain, and fine also with McPherson and his bosses at the bank.
The only spoiler in the bunc
h, once she accepted the position he had created for her and actually took it seriously, was Elizabeth. Although new to the country, she had a sense that exaggerating the value of one’s assets, or inventing them outright on what seemed like official papers, was wrong. To make her happy, John Vain checked with McPherson and came back to report that the bank was free to verify every statement that had been made. If it didn’t attempt to verify, it was because the responsible parties were satisfied with the terms and conditions. He explained this was the way business was done in America, the reason money grew so fast here and everyone prospered. You have to have faith that the loan officers know what to write on the forms and the banks know how much money they should lend and that the holes between what is and what should be will somehow be filled over time. That’s how everyone gets rich in this country, he said: with a lot of loans and a great deal of optimism.
Elizabeth, though, didn’t see the wisdom of going so deeply into debt. She understood that John Vain wasn’t as interested in making money as he was in spending it, but she couldn’t accept his kind of recklessness. She didn’t believe numbers lied or could be wished away. She suggested he trim his overhead by keeping a smaller staff. He said he couldn’t imagine ever laying off the Latino busboys he had hired illegally, because they didn’t have papers and were underage, and whom he paid three times the minimum wage and sent home every night at ten so they could get a good night’s sleep before heading to school in the morning, whose “guardian” he served as so that the school called him instead of the parents when they had been tardy or cut class, and whose report cards he checked—because he had been there, done that, he would tell them, he’d hired them because they needed money but only as long as they stayed in school.
So what if he was spending much more at Lucky 99 than he earned? He told Elizabeth that the champagne and caviar were an investment in the restaurant’s long-term success—a way to attract celebrities who wanted everything free but whose presence, in turn, drew regular paying customers. In LA, he said, you had to look rich to become rich, and anyway, being rich had never been a priority to John Vain. Neither in his youth in New York, when he slept on the floor of the church attic amidst the stench and muck of wet army blankets and open footsores in wintertime and unwashed bodies and rotting garbage in summer, nor later, in the air-conditioned lobbies of five-star hotels or near the crystalline waters of private swimming pools, did he enjoy holding on to his earnings. In the beginning, when he had just arrived, he sent nearly all his money home to his mother. Then she died of pneumonia and no one told him, so he kept sending money that her relatives picked up and spent, until one day he called her house and a neighbor told him she couldn’t be reached because she was long dead and buried.
Instead of making him more careful with his spending, the relatives’ betrayal caused John Vain to try harder to make new friends and help people. As for the loans, by late 1982 Brady McPherson had been promoted to vice president, and Bank United of California was just about to grow from one branch to three.
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One of the two fundamental laws of electrical engineering: The algebraic sum of all currents entering and leaving a node must equal zero. So basic, you can’t move on or build from this unless you got it right. Unless you were a mathematical genius with a rapacious imagination and an inexhaustible drive, a poor son of working-class parents from South Tehran who knew no home or country, no language or religion, followed no pathway other than the one illuminated with numbers.
Out of Cyrus Street and placing first in the national college entrance exams in Iran, selected as one of the three most promising engineering students by the shah’s government and dispatched on a full scholarship to Cal Poly, jettisoned by the old country and enraptured by this notion, this awareness of something essential and transformative that was waiting to be given physical shape, Hal could see his heat-detecting radar more precisely than he could see his own hands. He left Cal Poly in 1979 so he could devote all his time to his invention. He was so beset by the certainty that it could be done, so possessed by the understanding of how it could be done, he all but willed the machine into existence, made the equations work out, the problems solve themselves. Time and again, he calculated and mapped and charted his way from beginning to near the end, rammed into failure, worked backward through every single step, every problem, looking for the flaw, the place where he had taken a wrong turn. His teeth whittled down to tiny stubs because he ground them so fiercely while he worked and his hair turned prematurely gray, his gut began to bleed every time he ate and his body twitched every which way—and still he couldn’t detect a single mistake.
For an engineer, Kirchhoff’s current law is the equivalent of the first stone utilized in the building of the Great Wall of China. Hal Zemorrodi could see the wall, every tiny piece of it, every crack and curve and angle of it. He weighed and measured and removed and replaced every piece hundreds of times. But it never occurred to him to go back to that first stone, crack it open, and see the hollow middle upon which his entire world was balanced.
Elizabeth had spent months grappling with the shock of Hal’s miscalculation, agonizing over how to break the news to him when the implications were inevitable. His idea didn’t materialize because it didn’t exist—it wasn’t even in the realm of the possible. Hal had created it based on a false assumption, like a whole garden out of a single dead seed. She finally decided it would be easier to tell him on neutral ground—not his car, which was his domicile, or her apartment, but at Lucky 99 where, at the very least, they were assured of John Vain’s positive intervention.
It was in the middle of summer, one of those rare evenings in LA when the heat wouldn’t relent. To help control his mounting debt, she had convinced John Vain to shutter the restaurant on Monday nights when the turnout was low even among the nonpaying patrons.
She found Hal in the storage room, aimlessly shuffling cans and boxes in an attempt to “earn” his salary, though nothing he could do would have justified the amount he was paid or the “housing” benefits (a rollaway bed, an elegant bathroom, and a standing offer to use the shower in John Vain’s house in Trousdale instead of the Y). When he heard Elizabeth behind him by the door, he stopped working but didn’t turn around.
“I have some thoughts about your numbers,” she said softly. “I wanted to show you.”
They were a pair of elementary school children, he in patched-up gray pants and hand-me-down boots from the children of the family whose house his mother cleaned, she in her starched and ironed uniform and a white satin bow in her hair; the son of a cab driver and a maid, the daughter of a professor and a physician.
Hussein Zemorrodi stood quietly through Elizabeth’s explanation. When she was done, he kept glancing at the papers as if to extract more punishment, and when that didn’t happen he started to nod ever so gently, up and down like one of those dogs people like to put in their car window, and he nodded for so long that it began to worry Elizabeth, so she then took the unusual step of touching him on the shoulder—Iranian men and women did not touch randomly in those days—and that must have awakened him from his catatonia because he stopped nodding, turned directly to her, and smiled.
He seemed to regress in time, not to the very beginning but to the early years when he, mechanical brain or not, was still the son of servants, knew his place, and acted accordingly, so he suddenly bolted upright before Elizabeth, bowed deeply, and said, without making eye contact, “Khanum, madame, I’m very grateful to you.”
The last time anyone saw Hal Zemorrodi he was driving down Hollywood Boulevard in his yellow jalopy, headed for I-101 with the headlights off.
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It needn’t have been such a calamity.
Just because Hal’s one approach to creating the radar was flawed didn’t mean he couldn’t find another. He was certainly smart enough and he had the imagination to think of another way, or come up with a new invention altogether. It’s true that he was as
hamed—to have spent so many years on an impossibility; to have overlooked such an obvious error—but he could have lived through that. He wasn’t so proud, not nearly so vain, as to believe himself unerring. The thing that really took it out of Hal was the realization of what this experience truly meant: he might know a thing or two about the way machines worked; he might have fooled a few people about his native abilities; but at the end of the day, he wasn’t the real deal.
It’s like that when you’re the son of working-class, illiterate parents from a place where boundaries are drawn in blood. No matter how many of them you cross, part of you will always feel like a fraud.
* * *
A few months after Hal’s disappearance, a woman showed up at Lucky 99 with two young girls and a handwritten note bearing his signature. It was scrawled across the back of a Pan Am plane ticket and bore only John Vain’s name, the restaurant’s address, and Hal’s initials—H.Z.—scribbled in pencil. The woman, Zeeba Raiis, claimed she was given the note by an Iranian cab driver with no teeth and not a single strand of hair—not even an eyelash. He had picked her and the girls up from her granduncle’s apartment in Queens and driven them to JFK.
* * *
Zeeba Raiis told John Vain that she had been traveling for nearly two years. Her husband was hiding from the mullahs in Iran but she and her daughters had managed to escape by land through the Pakistan border. They had spent eleven months at a refugee camp in Peshawar, and only got out through the good graces of the International Red Cross. The first country that had given them a visa was Italy, so she went there with the girls and waited for the next opportunity to get to the United States. She and her husband were both Muslim, but her great-grandfather had been Jewish. At twenty-one, he had fallen in love with a mullah’s daughter, converted to Islam, and married her.
The Luminous Heart of Jonah S. Page 17