Crazy for Cornelia

by Chris Gilson

  Beep.

  “Hey, Kevin Doyle. This is Philip Grace, gimme a call, man…”

  Beep.

  “Fran Lerner, Action News, I saw…”

  Beep.

  “This is Eddie…”

  Maybe he’d been fired for not showing up at work. He played it back.

  “This is Eddie. Call me at my building…”

  Eddie greeted him with a gruff curiosity. “Kevin, where you calling from? You alone?”

  “I’m about to call the building,” Kevin said, “and tell Gus I can’t come in.”

  Gus Anholdt was the building manager at 840 Fifth. He reminded Kevin of a school principal who really wanted to be a hermit. Gus’s motto was, “My door is always closed.”

  “Forget about it. Gus already called me,” Eddie said.

  Kevin felt unease flopping over in his stomach. “Oh, yeah?”

  “Some lawyer for Chester Lord called Gus, told him to take you off duty. They’re giving you two weeks sick leave. He said to tell you, thanks from Mr. Lord. Maybe you got an extra Christmas bonus. You want me to pick it up for you?”

  “Thanks,” Kevin said. “I’ll get it.”

  “Where are you, Kevin? You with anybody?”

  That was the second time he’d asked.

  “Some welfare hotel. I wanted to get away. My phone was ringing.”

  “Telephones these days, you’re allowed to take ’em off the hook,” Eddie offered. “Get well, Kevin. There’s other residents in the building still have to give you Christmas tips. ‘Tis the season to have money, you hear what I’m saying? You owe me for this job, kid.”

  Kevin climbed back onto the sofa carefully. When he saw her, he felt giddy, and brushed her hair with his hand, seeing little flecks of gold.

  She definitely wasn’t crazy. Not the way Philip Grace wrote about her, and Marne wrote her off, and the workers at 840 Fifth gossiped about her. But there seemed to be two Cornelia Lords. There was the Girl Who’ll Always Have Everything, and the one who could look into his soul and know things. He wondered which one would wake up and greet him this morning.

  He dozed lightly, jumped when he felt himself going to sleep. He didn’t want her to wake up first and run away. For all her good points, she was still a flight risk. But he seriously doubted she would run away from him, since she promised to show him something that meant a lot to her that concerned the inventor Nikola Tesla. Hard to believe a girl like that would care about a dead inventor.

  But it was even harder to believe that she cared about Kevin Doyle.

  He wouldn’t be a total idiot, getting twisted up in some romantic fantasy. Maybe he was a fling for her. If he tried to make anything more out of it, the social class curtain would come crashing down on his head. This was New York City, not one of Vlad’s fairy tales. But right now he felt safe and warm with her, scrunched up together.

  His ear and shoulder hurt, but curling up with Cornelia Lord gave him a better false sense of well-being than the Percocets. His eyes closed again and he slept.

  Cornelia saw 10:06 in red numerals. Her eyes darted around the studio, as she collected her thoughts.

  She felt Kevin’s arm around her, deliciously warm. She felt tingly, as she had from the moment she had first seen his corona. Kevin Doyle had plenty of hurt under the splendid corona. She could understand his sorrow over his mother, and his need to make Saint Sebastian perfect for her.

  She admired that.

  For the first time, she also realized that Kevin Doyle was handsome. His face spoke of both wildness and decency. The tender mouth and chin that sprouted morning whiskers looked noble, like Sebastian.

  He thrilled and disturbed her. She could connect with Kevin Doyle. She could feel his grief; terribly new and raw, and quite familiar. But caution should forbid, shouldn’t it? He had swept her off her feet—off the street if she wanted to be literal about it—in such a display of bravado, it would be easy to make a misstep here. His corona, his decency, excited her. But she could be taking a risk, confiding in him about Tesla.

  She had just trusted Tucker and look where that had gotten her.

  She sat up suddenly. Oh, God. She had to warn her father that Tucker had become entangled with old Han Koi. That ugly double corona that snaked from the Kois to encircle Tucker, that was the sign. Coronas couldn’t lie. Or could they?

  She bit her lip, trying to recall exactly what she had seen. She had, after all, chugged most of a bottle of New York State champagne on an empty stomach. That could have been enough to cloud her perception of things.

  What did the blackish brown corona really tell her? She tried to imagine convincing her father of what she believed to be true, without the supporting evidence of the Koi corona. Tucker had definitely lied to her about the South America business. The old man on the screen was fake. Tucker’s people had returned the supplies. There would be no grand adventure in Brazil with Tucker.

  But why had he duped her? Perhaps just to enlist her help with the voting stock. Maybe he would be the one who couldn’t wait to dump her.

  Who could tell?

  Tucker still revealed no corona of his own. Maybe he just sort of used other people’s coronas, like other people rented cars. Maybe the Kois had only tried to ensnare Tucker. She needed a second opinion desperately. But nobody advertised a “Corona Hotline” in the Manhattan Yellow Pages.

  Now quite sober and blissfully snug on this cramped couch where Kevin Doyle wrapped his warmth around her—like the little wicker love seat on the Lords’ sunporch that she shared with her mother—she couldn’t be so sure about Tucker and the Kois.

  What she knew for certain was the joyous charge of being with Kevin Doyle.

  She regretted his hurt at her discovery of the fiber optics. It seemed so obvious to her, but of course he didn’t have Dr. Powers showing him new developments in electricity. He wasn’t of her world, Chester would say.

  And snobbery could work both ways, couldn’t it? She felt his resentment of her for being rich. On the other hand…

  No. Too many hands. A clumsy octopus of doubt. She would tell Kevin Doyle about Tesla and be very careful not to compromise him for helping her so many times now. No matter what, she wouldn’t make him lose his job. And she wouldn’t waffle, flipping back and forth like her father. She would call Chester and tell him her suspicions about Tucker, and that would be that.

  She gently stroked Kevin’s face with her fingertips until he opened his eyes.

  “Good morning,” she greeted him. “How do you feel about museums?”

  “She’s not with her friends. Not at any of her haunts,” Chester told Edgar Chase on the telephone. “I think we might have to get the police involved, discreetly.”

  “You don’t get the police involved discreetly,” Edgar explained. “Even if we speak to the commissioner, there’s no assurance.”

  Chester listened but didn’t hear, worn and preoccupied. Tucker had slept in a guest room, after sitting in Chester’s study all night making telephone calls. Tucker had already dispatched his people, that busy, well-scrubbed youth gang, and even some private investigators to check Cornelia’s friends, her acquaintances, anywhere she could possibly have run to hide.

  His daughter had vanished.

  Rubbing his nose, he thought of her trudging through the snow somewhere alone. He desperately hoped she would stay in a reasonably good neighborhood. Thank God New York City had a mayor who cracked down on street crime.

  “Mr. Lord.” O’Connell appeared at the door to Chester’s study. “There’s a gentleman to see you who claims to have information.”

  “Goodbye, Edgar.” Chester hung up with a clatter and took the business card O’Connell handed him. He recognized the card with its double-door logo of the International Brotherhood of Portal Operators. It read, “Edward J. Feeney, Delegate,” a man he had met representing the doormen of 840 Fifth in their labor negotiations with his co-op board.

  Feeney entered the study. His too-small suit wa
s rumpled, and there were small stains on his hand-painted tie. He had random gray whiskers that had eluded the razor jutting out from his rough, reddened jowls. They gave him a seedy look, like a small-time gangster ready to be gunned down in a barber’s chair. Chester watched him as he tried to balance his bulk on the smallest chair, then finally gave up and moved to a larger one. Feeney’s lumpy face seemed oddly pleased. His eyes actually twinkled. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, clutching a rolled-up newspaper in his fists.

  “Can I call you Chester?”

  Chester clenched his hands in his lap. “If you promise to get to the point, Mr. Feeney.”

  “You seen this morning’s Globe?”

  Chester saw Feeney smirk, just enough to make his blood rush to his head. He steeled himself.

  “No. Only the Times,” Chester told him. “There was an article about… the accident in the Metro section.”

  Eddie Feeney pursed his lips and nonchalantly unrolled the newspaper.

  “Doorman Saves Deb from Dad,” the front page screamed.

  Chester flinched at the sad, grainy image of Cornelia twisted in the horse blanket in the snow, being plucked by the young doorman named Doyle from the jaws of Chester’s own car. Naturally, the photographer had captured the exact moment when his car struck Doyle, recording the full measure of the young doorman’s agony. He imagined it would prove useful for some personal injury lawyer.

  Chester focused on Feeney. He had a bulldog’s jowls. Yet Chester recalled that Edward J. Feeney, delegate, had never, in his negotiations on behalf of his Portal Operators union revealed even a trace of that breed’s loyalty. Feeney looked out for himself, first, then his men. “Your point, Mr. Feeney?”

  “This guy is my nephew.” Eddie tapped a stubby finger twice on Kevin Doyle’s likeness. “I got a feeling your daughter’s with him.”

  Chester tried to visualize Cornelia with the doorman. Anything seemed possible now.

  “Why would you think that?” he asked.

  “I’m just saying, I got a hunch. If I helped you out—”

  Chester cut off this unsavory whiff of a money demand before it could leave Feeney’s mean little mouth.

  “Thank you for your time,” he told him. “We’ll discuss compensation if this proves true. Please keep it to yourself.”

  “Keep what to myself?”

  Chester frowned before he realized the man was joking. While O’Connell swept Eddie Feeney out to the foyer, Chester walked upstairs to check several guest rooms, and finally found Tucker. He shook the boy awake. While Cornelia slept like a little girl, Tucker sprawled across the small guest bed in his boxer shorts like a monstrous Gulliver, snoring loudly.

  “Chester,” Tucker squinted at him. “What?”

  “Do you think it’s possible that Cornelia is with the doorman?”

  Tucker didn’t take long to collect himself. “You mean that guy Doyle?” He yawned. “I checked him out. Lives in a slum. I sent somebody to look at his apartment and there was nobody home.”

  “He behaved well at the hospital,” Chester remembered, “refused to talk to the media. But if he’s taken Cornelia…”

  “Chester,” Tucker said with a sigh. “That guy’s a loser. He couldn’t get her to go with him unless she wanted to, and trust me, she wouldn’t want to.”

  This was definitely Corny’s place.

  He saw the look of almost religious rapture that made her skin flush and her eyes seem to glitter.

  Kevin looked around the New York Tesla Museum and its few visitors.

  “We aren’t open to the public yet,” she explained. “Just the students and Tesla Society members who drop by. And people who need to get inside.”

  Some he figured were students, busy peering at signs and taking notes. And some homeless people wrapped like mummies in their layers of ragtag clothes and faces streaked with permanent dirt. During the winter months, chased out of Midtown where they might annoy the tourists, they went anywhere they could warm up. He had to admit that even the homeless drop-ins looked curious about the exhibits. Some other people, whose eyes burned with the fire of true believers, drifted in and out. Did Tesla have groupies? They were mostly young, dressed neatly enough, but some had their shirt collars buttoned up all the way to the top and buzzcut hair that could have been styled by Black and Decker.

  Kevin looked up. The museum was a knocked-open space four stories high and half a block square, full of exhibits. There were old-time inventions and photographs of the wacky inventor.

  In the middle a steel-girded tower shaped like a stainless steel mushroom with a bulbous head shot up almost to the roof. Directly over the tower, a massive skylight had been installed in the ceiling. It was made up of two huge glass panels set on tracks.

  “Does the skylight open up?” he asked her.

  “Sure. When we want to raise the tower.”

  She stared at the tower and spoke in the same hushed voice she had used for his Sebastian. Here he felt a sinking feeling that Cornelia Lord was a little too devoted. A self-made nun in the Church of the Wrong Assumption.

  “You paid for this museum?”

  “Some of it. I spent nine months helping to convert this space. I found the curator, came up with some of the exhibits. But the owner of the building leases it to us for a dollar a year. He belongs to the New York Tesla Society, too.”

  She gripped his good arm in excitement. Around the tower objects dangled on wires. Kevin saw that they were models of odd airships, tent-shaped with aluminum wings that looked like they couldn’t get off the ground in a tornado. Scattered among the models, he saw silvery disks with lumps in the middle. Uh, oh. Flying saucers.

  Coronas. Tesla Towers. Flying saucers. Cornelia had definitely made good on her promise to show him something he’d never seen before. Anybody else, he would have written this stuff off. But he couldn’t deny that her exuberance was catching.

  “How’d the tower work?”

  “It didn’t. His investors pulled the plug too early. It’s a long story.” Her eyes took a detour through sadness, then came back. “He designed it to broadcast free electricity through the atmosphere so anybody could use it. Like radio waves. If he had his way, the whole world could run on free electricity. Houses. Factories. Cars. Even boats and planes. After he got the little bugs out, of course.”

  “Bugs?” Kevin studied the tower and the hanging plane models. Electricity didn’t work like that. Tesla must have had the balls of a brass monkey. “He was way ahead of his time, I guess.”

  “That’s what they said about Leonardo da Vinci, Kevin. Watch.”

  She moved over to the control panel, flipped a switch underneath, and fiddled with a button and a joystick.

  He heard a rumble from the ceiling like a subway train, and looked up to see the big glass and steel panels in the roof begin moving apart. She flicked another switch and the platform groaned and lifted the giant mushroom of the Tesla Tower. It lumbered up toward the roof in a whine of pneumatics. Then the tower’s head poked through the roof, jutting through the opening as light poured in from the sky.

  Kevin stood awed as licks of blue electric current began to shoot around the top of the tower. Suddenly, the little licks burst into a spider’s web of huge blue bolts that danced and crackled over this dingy old rooftop in the crummiest part of the West Side of Manhattan.

  “Hello,” somebody greeted them from behind.

  A man with thick, silvery hair and a trim beard appeared beside them. He wore a charcoal suit and silver tie. His skin looked ruddy, like images he had seen of nineteenth-century Englishmen. Kevin expected him to speak with a British accent, or whip some snuff out of his pocket.

  “We missed you.” The man flashed his teeth at Cornelia. His accent sure wasn’t British. Pure Brooklyn, maybe Flatbush. The man gave Cornelia a bear hug. Then he shook Kevin’s hand with a kind of reverence. “And you’re Kevin Doyle. I’m Gene Powers, the museum’s curator. I saw your picture in the Globe tod
ay. I know a lot of people who’d thank you, if they only knew what this woman did for this museum. She’s too modest.”

  Cornelia shrugged. Powers looked at her, then at Kevin.

  “Well, I’ll be in my office if you need me.”

  “Nobody knows you helped build this museum?”

  “Nobody but Dr. Powers. And now you.”

  “What got you into this?” Kevin asked.

  She evaded him. “Tesla started out as a penniless immigrant in America, digging ditches. Then he went to work for the Edison Electric Company and invented modern electricity.”

  “Not Edison?” Kevin asked her.

  “Edison invented DC, direct current, but it was limited by wires. New York City in 1906 was a rat’s nest of electrical wire. So Tesla discovered AC electricity.”

  “What we use today.”

  “Yes, but Edison got the credit, didn’t he?”

  He waited. She hadn’t really answered his question.

  “What’s this?” Kevin pointed to a small open airship. It looked like a helicopter some kid would make. It had a boxy frame with a tufted seat for two, a propeller on top and one in back, and a rudder. A row of big batteries was stuffed between the seat.

  “It’s a Tesla airship design.”

  “Where’s the engine?”

  “Under the propeller mast,” she told him proudly. “It’s an electric engine to run the propellers. I had it designed to run on AC current.”

  “That looks like a box made out of Tinker Toys,” he pointed out. “You sure it can fly?”

  “Dr. Powers and I flew it once in Connecticut. It’s called a gyro-copter.”

  She placed an almost maternal hand on the airship, beaming. She didn’t look like a crazy nun anymore. The fact was, she looked like a real person with a spark of the divine.

  “Cornelia, all you’ve done, I mean, I’ve never known anybody who could even dream up something like this”—he waved his arm at the exhibits—“and you made it happen.”

  “I just helped.”

  Like she had just helped with his Sebastian.

  Cornelia Lord could spend her whole life on yachts, eating caviar with little flecks of gold. But she didn’t. She had spent her time and money on a dead inventor, more like a half-nutty artist than an engineer.