The Inventors

by Peter Selgin

  Care to come in? he said.

  A CAST IRON stove. A bed in the corner covered by a rainbow-shaded serape. Improvised shelves packed with all kinds of books. An unvarnished slab of wood mounted on some bricks in the center of the room served as a table, with various-sized cushions scattered around it for sitting. Everything neat, tidy, clean.

  The teacher hung your wet jacket. He had you take off your wet sneakers and put them on the tiled apron in front of the stove. He offered you a cup of Chinese tea. The tea tasted and smelled like smoke from a burning hat factory. You asked for sugar. The teacher gave you honey. Seated on a cushion at the Japanese-style table, you took tentative sips from a pottery cup with a fish design and no handle.

  The teacher wore sweatpants and a gray sweatshirt with the word OXFORD in blue across the chest. He sat across from you, speaking in a soft voice, asking you questions about your family, your mother and father. He was especially interested to learn about your father, having heard that he was an inventor.

  What sort of things does your father invent? he asked.

  You told him about the Color Coder, the Mercury Switch, the Shoe Sole Machine, the Optical Differential Thickness Measuring Instrument, the Induced Quadrature Field Motor, the Null Type Comparison Reflectometer, the Neutralized Cathode-Ray Deflection Tube. The teacher smiled.

  He has his laboratory at the bottom of our driveway, you explained, in a converted barn. We call it the Building. The floors are all rotten. It’s full of mice and spiders and snakes. He doesn’t mind. In fact, my father sort of likes it. (You were careful not to say “my papa.”)

  Sounds like a most interesting man.

  He’s an anglophile. He was born in Italy, but he talks with an English accent.

  Speaks, said the teacher. He speaks with an English accent.

  You did your best to describe your mother, explaining that she was Italian, too, but that unlike your father, who spoke English better than Walter Cronkite, she had a heavy accent and coined her own distorted versions of common idiomatic expressions, turning “when worse comes to worst” into “bad that it goes,” and “don’t stand on ceremony” into “no make compliment,” and “I don’t give a damn” into “I no give a goop.” Some people find it charming, you said.

  The teacher laughed and so did you.

  You told the teacher about your grandmother, Nonnie, who had her own little room in a corner of the house (decorated with Japanese fans, smelling of lilac and mothballs), and the family dog, Pa’al (the apostrophe had been your idea), and how poorly behaved she was, how – to the amusement and horror of dinner guests – she’d climb on the dining room table after, and sometimes even during, the dessert course.

  The teacher asked you about your brother. He wondered how you and George got along. You confessed that you fought a lot, you weren’t sure why, maybe because people were always comparing you or lumping you together – the Selgin Twins; the Selgin Boys – as if you were one and the same.

  Which we aren’t, you said.

  Of course you’re not, said the teacher.

  You went on talking, with the teacher mostly asking questions and you answering them. Meanwhile the rain kept falling, pattering against the carriage house roof, dripping down from its eaves. There was a fancy wooden chessboard at the center of the table, its checkerboard pattern formed by alternating veneers of different woods. Seeing you admire it the teacher asked if you cared to play. You’d never played chess before.

  It’s not hard, the teacher said. I’ll show you.

  He showed you how to move the pieces. At first it seemed impossibly complicated, all those different pieces and so many ways to move them.

  Take your time, the teacher instructed. This is one game that gets played between the moves.

  By the third or fourth game it got easier, though it still took the teacher less than a dozen moves to checkmate your king. You played until it started to get dark outside and the rain fell less hard. It was time to go. The teacher let you borrow his umbrella.

  As you stood ready to leave by the door, he said, I enjoyed our visit.

  Me too, you said.

  I’ll see what I can do about getting you into my class.

  You hadn’t even asked.

  THAT’S ALL YOU’D remember, that and the smell of the stove and candle smoke and smoky tea, and of all the books filling the teacher’s shelves – a musty, vanilla-and-mushroom smell. And the sound of rain falling as you played chess.

  You’d remember too how, as you walked home that day, things were different. The houses, the church steeple, the gasoline pumps at the Sunoco station, the cars splashing through puddles, the streams of smoke rising from people’s chimneys – they all looked the same. The town was the same town you’d spent most of your life in, where you rode your bike and waited for the school bus and watched the hat factories burn down one by one. Nothing had changed, really. Yet nothing would ever be quite the same.

  I’VE LIVED HERE FOR THREE YEARS NOW, SINCE I TOOK a tenure-track position at the state university where I teach writing. When I told them I was moving here, my friends predicted that I’d go crazy, that after thirty-five years in New York City life in a small southern town would be the end of me – and not just any small southern town, but Milledgeville, Georgia, the former home of Flannery O’Connor and Central State Hospital, once the biggest psychiatric facility in the country, the place where “they” sent you if they wanted to get rid of you. Watch out, people down here used to joke, or they’ll send you to Milledgeville. Everyone knew what that meant.

  I guess I didn’t watch out.

  * * *

  NOVEMBER.

  A cloudy, breezy day – the breeze strong enough to raise whitecaps on the lake. The sky gray, the water a shabby brown, the trunks of the trees lining the shore blackened by last night’s rain, everything a variation on a theme of grays and browns. The muted colors complement my mood, the season having laid out my emotional palette for me – umbers raw and burnt, a dab of ochre, smoke black and bone white.

  For my canvas I have my notebook, the cardboard kind used by generations of school kids, with faux black-and-white marble covers, $1.99 at K-Mart. My writing desk: a twelve-foot Vermont Packboat: folding caned seats, mahogany gunwales, lightweight Kevlar hull (deep blue), bronze oarlocks, spruce oars. When not in use it hangs from the ceiling of the basement, where I keep my studio, mounted with a pulley system.

  And though my desk rows beautifully, most of the time I’m happy to just drift along, as I’m doing now – not just physically, on the water, but mentally, in my thoughts. The Japanese have a word for it: zuihitsu. Literally it means “follow the brush,” let the mind flow freely, as it sees fit, from thought to thought with no agenda. Though it pertains to a genre of Japanese literature consisting of loosely connected musings, zuihitsu can apply as well to other forms of creation, to poetry, painting, or music. In this case the term is doubly apt, for as my rowboat drifts so do my musings. If she didn’t have a name already, I’d call her Zuihitsu. But she’s got a name: Audrey.

  All of which is by way of explaining that I write these notes with little respect for order, logic, or causal relationships – not out of carelessness or laziness, but because a person adrift in a rowboat on a lake can hardly be expected to do otherwise.

  * * *

  I TRADED NEW YORK CITY FOR A LAKE AND GOT A GOOD DEAL.

  The best things about living here are silence and solitude; the worst things are the same. Sometimes it gets so quiet it’s spooky. Not long ago, while working, I was disturbed by the sound of what I took to be rap music, a low steady bass note throbbing somewhere. Since my neighbors here are mostly older retired people I figured it had to be coming from a boat. But there were no boats passing. My years in New York have made me paranoid about noise. Thirty-five years of car alarms, truck-backing signals, and ghetto blasters waking you up after midnight can do that to you. Hoping to locate the source of the sound, I went outside and heard nothing. But as soon
as I went back to my desk it started again.

  What the hell, I thought.

  Then I realized it was my own pulse throbbing in my ears.

  That’s how quiet it gets here.

  I’m not complaining. The silence is good for writing, a welcomed collaborator, the clear lens through which I look into the past. Looking through it now, I see the Building, the yellow stucco shack that was my father’s laboratory, where he built his inventions.

  United States Patent 2,964,641, DEVICE FOR THE IDENTIFICATION OF ENGRAVED DOCUMENTS. “Apparatus for identification of engravings, said engraving comprising a surface bearing a plurality of spaced, approximately parallel lines of a particular unique configuration and of substantial width, separated by spaces of different reflectance from said lines, said apparatus comprising a complimentary surface bearing lines corresponding in configuration to the spaces of said first surface but of greater width, means for optically superimposing said two surfaces to produce a uniform optical effect over the combined surfaces when the two sets of lines are complimentary and positionally matched, shifter means for shifting said surfaces with respect to each other in a first direction substantially perpendicular to at least some of said lines to produce a variation in the combined optical effect at a particular frequency determined by the distance between said lines and the speed of said shifting, photoelectric means responsive to said variations in optical effect to produce electrical signals at said particular frequency of occurrence corresponding to said variations, circuit means responsive to said signals, and tuned to said frequency to produce a control signal at a predetermined amplitude of said signal frequency.” Also known as “The Dollar Bill Changing Machine.” Filed April 26, 1957.

  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.

  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: