The Inventors

by Peter Selgin

  When the teacher was sixteen and had just gotten his learner’s permit, he was driving a VW Beetle with Frank, his paralyzed brother, in the passenger seat, when they had an accident. It was a winter afternoon. The roads were icy and your future teacher was arguing with his brother, screaming and crying, when suddenly he lost control of the car. It may have been the ice, the teacher said, or maybe he swerved in anger, or he wanted to have an accident, to kill them both. The car rammed through a guardrail and rolled down an embankment. It rolled ten times before coming to rest on its passenger side a few feet from a frozen pond. The teacher explained how he’d climbed out of the car and stood there, unable to see through the blood, how it had seeped through his fingers as he cupped his shredded face in his hands. Frank survived the accident without a scratch. That was how the teacher got the scar on his face.

  That was all you knew about the teacher’s past. That and that he’d gone to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship before earning his undergraduate degree at Berkeley.

  * * *

  ABOUT YOUR FATHER’S PAST YOU KNEW ALMOST AS LITTLE. Whenever you’d ask him questions about his past your father gave brief, grudging answers, or he’d dismiss your questions with a wave of his hand and an augh! or some other sound indicative of disinterest, disgust, or displeasure. What does it matter, Peter? Why should you care?

  Still, every so often a story about your father’s past would leak out of him, like the one about the time when his father came home from work one day and, for no obvious reason, slapped him across the face. Your father had been five or six years old. Still, sixty-five years later he’d remember it. Nor had he ever forgiven his father for it.

  This was the only thing your father ever told you about his father or about anyone or anything to do with his family, for that matter. Otherwise it was as if his family had never existed.

  There was one other story, though, one your father didn’t tell but that you somehow knew anyway, the one about his father, your grandfather, being run over by a streetcar. It came to you spontaneously, like a vision, or you concocted it, but you saw it as clearly in your mind as though it were projected on a screen in a movie theater.

  Guido Senigaglia, a severe-looking man with pince-nez and a pointy gray beard, dressed in a three-piece banker’s suit adorned with a golden watch fob and a narrow-brimmed black Borsalino, crossing a busy thoroughfare on the way to the bank where he works. He stops to look at his pocket watch, not realizing that he’s done so in the middle of the streetcar tracks. By the time he sees the orange streetcar coming it’s too late. The vision ends with a scream reverberating through the bustling, cable-crossed streets of Milan.

  Like methane gas from a murky, weedy swamp, now and then other bits of your father’s past bubbled to the surface. As they broke some of the bubbles whispered names. Farnsworth. Diamond Ordnance. Arthur Silz. Kit Davidson. Aiken. Fitts. Fivre. Mark I. Treves… There were tantalizing clues and bits of evidence. A pair of worn skis, a faded photograph of your father at the helm of a sailboat, a painting on one of the walls of his laboratory of a series of clay busts in varied tones arranged on a piece of furniture, their faces as vacantly enigmatic as Easter Island statues.

  You knew he’d been married three times, twice before meeting your mother, yet he spoke as seldom of his other two wives as of the rest of his family – as if they, too, never existed.

  You understood, too, that there had been other women in your father’s past, women with whom he’d had affairs, though the word affair hadn’t yet entered your vocabulary. One name in particular was invoked more than any other during your parents’ frequent violent arguments, Be-reh-nee-chay, the syllables roaring in flames from your mother’s mouth like a movie monster’s breath.

  Yet you never got the feeling that your father was keeping secrets from you. It was more like he didn’t care, like he couldn’t be bothered, as though his past didn’t exist for him, like he’d forgotten about it the same way he would always forget about little things that didn’t matter enough to him, like zipping his fly.

  YOUR FATHER DIDN’T believe in God. He was an atheist – a word you learned long before you would learn the words nuance or empathy, and longer still before you’d come into contact with words like metaphysics or transcendence.

  At the corner of Wooster Street and Almar Drive, where you and George waited for the school bus in the morning, Bobby Mullin, who went to Saint Mary’s, used to punch you in the face for not believing in God. He’d walk up to you, shove his face into yours, and say, Do you believe in God? When you said no he’d punch you. Bobby had pimples and red hair and wore the Catholic school’s official green plaid tie over a starched white Oxford cloth shirt. How he knew you didn’t believe in God you had no idea. You wondered if maybe there was a Master List of Atheists somewhere and, if so, who was in charge of it. For sure your father’s name was close to the top.

  Though your father was an electronics engineer and inventor, his wasn’t the calm, rational, detached atheism of a scientist. The engine of his disbelief ran hot and would boil over from time to time. He reserved a special loathing for televangelists. However fleeting, the appearance of a flashy-toothed, pompadoured preacher on television sufficed to deliver him through a profusion of profanities to apoplexy’s door.

  Papa didn’t believe in belief, such was the magnitude of his skepticism. The words belief and faith made him cringe. What does it mean – to “have faith”? What imbecility! When people say they “believe” in something or other, what do they mean, other than that they’ve stopped thinking? What’s so bloody wonderful about that?

  No, your father wasn’t built for belief. Or faith or patriotism or pride. Logical creature that he was, he could no more bring himself to feel such things than he could salute the flag, throw a football, or drop to his knees and pray to an Almighty Creator.

  Your father’s lack of pride, faith, and devotion extended to his children. Blood may have been thicker than water, but so what? What did that have to do with anything?

  From your father you’d inherit your own atheism, though you’d resist calling yourself an atheist, the word sounded so hostile, so harsh, as if you were God’s sworn enemy rather than someone who didn’t – couldn’t – believe in him.

  THERE WAS ONE more clue to your father’s past – not a clue, really, but a question, namely why did he treat his mother, your grandmother, Nonnie, so badly, calling her stronzo and other names whenever she dared to venture forth from the little corner room where she lived like an in-house prisoner, reading Reader’s Digest, watching Arthur Godfrey, listening to her radio – a brown Bakelite job with a round dial?

  On her way to the bathroom – the downstairs bathroom with the plum-colored fixtures – he’d intercept her, cutting her off, offering admittance begrudgingly or refusing it outright. The bathroom was ever an item of contention between them. It belonged to the house, but it was Papa’s bathroom, where he flossed his teeth and kept his unguents and implements and medications, his safety razor, his Sominex, his Senokot, his Desinex. He kept his bathrobe there, too, the battered terrycloth one, with its odor of musk and dander, that special smell that whispered Papa to you when you’d take a whiff or when you’d wear the robe, enshrouding yourself in your father’s essence.

  STRONZO! Papa would bellow at his mother on her way to the bathroom with her cane.5 She’d stop and stand there, frozen, clutching her cane, bewildered, pupils dilating, her eyes searching those of her only child for forgiveness, for a reprieve, for mercy, asking What have I done? getting no answer, for by then her son would already be red-faced with laughter, his titters conveying him the rest of the way to his purple fortress, to resound – together with the sound of the door slamming – off its plum-colored tiles.

  The word literally means “large turd,” but is used more generally to characterize a reprehensible human being.

  What terrible thing had his mother – your grandmother – done to him?

  One anecdote provided a partial ex
planation. Like the one about his father slapping him it was the only story your father ever told you about his mother.

  He was nine or ten years old. His father had just recently died. In preparation for a move to a much smaller apartment, his mother was sorting through their belongings, deciding what items to keep and which to throw away. She kept her collection of Japanese fans and threw out your father’s favorite toy: a locomotive that ran on live steam, with a real boiler and pistons of shiny brass. She threw it into the rubbish bin. By the time your future father found out, the basurero – the garbage man – had come and gone.

  For that, apparently, your father never forgave his mother.

  Still there had to be more to this otherwise gentle man of sixty abusing his mother, the same mother he’d kept close to him for so many years, across an ocean and through three marriages, to explain why he did so so constantly, so viciously, with such relish.

  You might have asked him but you didn’t, knowing he’d have shrugged and waved his hand and said aughh in that way of his, as if the question were beneath contempt, as if only an imbecile would ask such a stupid question.

  * * *

  FROM THE THEORY OF HUMAN MOTIVATION, A BOOK THE teacher let you borrow, you learned that humans attain their ultimate potential through a process called “self-actualization,” which, to be achieved, requires that lower and more basic needs be fulfilled. The book’s author, Abraham Maslow, organized his scale of needs into a pyramid, with basic needs at the bottom and self-actualization at the pinnacle.

  The concept of self-actualization engrossed you. You were enchanted by the vision of an army of human beings mounting ladders of needs, from the elementary (food, water) through the prosaic (safety, shelter, stability) through more refined yet still fundamental needs (comfort, love, sensual gratification, a sense of belonging), to the summit where they became “actualized.” They realized their true potentials as men and women capable of the highest forms of expression, kindness, resourcefulness, and generosity.

  What about all the people who spend their whole lives just trying to eat, struggling for survival? you asked the teacher. Does that mean they’ll never self-actualize?

  According to Maslow it does, the teacher said.

  It doesn’t seem fair.

  Who says it is?

  You were in the teacher’s cottage, sitting at the Japanese-style table. Stravinsky’s Firebird played on the record player. You’d drunk tea and played two games of chess and wrestled. You said:

  I wonder where I am on Maslow’s pyramid.

  Let’s find out, said the teacher. I assume your physiological needs have been met?

  I’ve got a bed to sleep in. And I’m not starving.

  Glad to hear it. Do you feel safe?

  Pretty much.

  What about your social needs? Would you say you’re loved?

  I guess so.

  Bullshit. You know damned well you are. What about your sense of belonging? Do you feel accepted by society at large?

  Sure. Most of the time.

  How’s your self-esteem?

  You shrugged. It’s not bad.

  The teacher pursed his lips and nodded.

  Sounds to me like you’re ready to self-actualize, he said.

  ON MY LAST TRIP NORTH TO VISIT HER, I TOOK AUDREY to Mystic Seaport. It was one of those rare perfect days life dishes up every few years. It was supposed to rain, but for once I cast aside my skepticism and decided to go anyway. The weather turned out to be more than fine: a few clouds, otherwise cool and very dry. The seaport wasn’t crowded; at times it felt as if we had the place to ourselves. We began with a short ride on a steamboat – a lovely two-decker with the sweetest little engine, this guileless contraption with pistons that made a gentle pssst-pssst sound as they reciprocated and the young engineer doubled as the stoker. The captain let Audrey take the helm and steer the boat in its circular course around the harbor. Afterward we visited the cooper, who let Audrey roll one of her barrels, and the blacksmith, who fashioned an iron heart for her in her forge. The white-hot heart sizzled when dipped in a basin of cool water. Then Daddy rented a vintage rowboat and rowed his sweetheart around the harbor. A pause for beverages at the Spouter Inn (Daddy: pale bitter ale, Audrey: lemonade) followed by an exhibit on the refurbishing of the whale ship Charles W. Morgan and a ride on an antique electric launch. I’d hoped for us to sail, but when we got to the rental office the last sailboat had departed.

  Only as we were driving home on the Merritt Parkway did it start to rain. On the last leg up Route 7 the skies cleared. The sun broke through the clouds at just the right angle, forming an enormous rainbow, the first live specimen my daughter had seen. Fortuitously, it followed us the rest of the way home. I thought to myself: that rainbow is something she will remember. Its colors will burn themselves into her brain. Egocentrically, I thought from now on whenever she sees a rainbow Audrey will remember this trip and think of her daddy.

  One of the chief purposes of life: to supply the illusion of paradise to children.

  A week after I returned to Georgia, Audrey’s mother sent me a photo of her latest watercolor masterpiece. Title: The Rainbow.

  Graph showing the relationship between the reflectance in the position of the photosensitive surface of the photoelectric cell. From Patent No. 3,463,596: “NULL-TYPE COMPARISON REFLECTOMETER WHEREIN NULLING IS ACCOMPLISHED BY MOVING THE LIGHT DETECTOR.”

  X.

  The Man in the Wheelchair

  Bethel, Connecticut, 1970

  CERTAIN MEMORIES REPLAY THEMSELVES WITH THE sounds and colors all drained out of them, like a worn-out old silent movie, covered with spots and scratches that look like a snowstorm. You’ll wonder if the movie was real or if you invented it.

  One afternoon in February, a few days before your fourteenth birthday, you walked to the teacher’s cottage. You carried a paperback copy of Man and His Symbols, a collection of essays on Jungian thought that the teacher had urged upon you and that you’d read most of and were eager to discuss with him. You were especially eager to discuss the idea of the “collective unconscious,” Jung’s belief in the existence of a sort of communal warehouse wherein impersonal human experiences were collected and universally shared – a notion that, if he didn’t find it entirely reprehensible, your hyper-rational father would nevertheless have rejected.

  Which may have been why you embraced it.

  When you got there, you found a white van parked in front of the cottage, not an ordinary van, but one with a ramp coming out of the sliding side door and the words TIP-TOP AMBULETTE painted backward across the back, so what it really said was ETTELUBMA POT-PIT. No sooner did you see it parked there than you felt your gut muscles drop and your heart started racing. The teacher has had a heart attack, you said to yourself. He’s had a heart attack and died and you would never see him again. You’d never play chess or drink smoky tea or collect old bottles or walk along the train tracks in search of glass insulators. Everything would go back to being just the way it was before, as if you and the teacher had never met, like it was all just a dream.

  Those were your thoughts as you gazed at the back doors of the white van through the flakes of what was forecast to be the first major snowstorm of the New Year.

  Please God no, you prayed. Please don’t let the teacher be dead. Don’t even let him be hurt or sick. You reminded yourself then that you didn’t believe in god, so instead you prayed to the collective unconscious.

  You stepped up to the blue door and were about to knock when you heard a voice yelling inside. It didn’t sound like the teacher, but then you had never heard the teacher yelling before, you’d never heard him raise his voice. The screaming continued. There were two voices then: a raspy, deep, throaty growl – a voice so gravelly you could have mixed concrete with it – and a calm, subdued, familiar voice that you recognized as the teacher’s. You could have pressed your ear to the door and heard more, but you decided not to. You’d already heard more than you wan
ted to. You wished you hadn’t gone to the teacher’s cottage at all that day.

  You’d turned and were starting back to the road when suddenly you heard the blue door open (in cold weather it tended to stick to the jamb so when opened it made an obscene sound). You turned to see a man in a wheelchair, a scary-looking man with something wrong with one side of his face, being pushed by the ambulance attendant, a dark-skinned man in a white suit. As they neared the van you got a clearer look at the face of the man in the wheelchair. Though one side looked normal the other was a pink-orange color that looked almost fluorescent, like those street signs warning of detours and lane closures. The skin on that side was stretched tightly like a Halloween mask. The wheelchair bound man’s hair had something wrong with it, too. Black and stiff, it looked like a dead crow squatting on his head.

  The man in the wheelchair was smoking. That seemed wrong, too. Someone in a wheelchair had enough problems, you thought. While waiting for him to finish smoking, the attendant, who was tall and thin, leaned against the van. Finished, the man in the wheelchair tossed the butt onto the rear tire of the van.

  By then the snow was falling faster, the flurries blowing in all directions. Through them you saw the attendant help the man in the wheelchair onto the ramp. Then, at the back of the van, the attendant pressed a button or pulled a lever. The ramp lifted up and drew itself in, like a tongue, into the van’s gaping mouth. The attendant returned to the side of the van, said something to the man in the wheelchair, and closed the van’s side door before climbing into the driver’s seat. He sat there for some time with the engine running and puffs of smoke exhaling from the tailpipe.

  Then he backed the ambulance out into the street and drove away.

  Everything was quiet for a while then in the way things get suddenly quiet after a disaster. You stood there in the silence trying to decide whether or not to knock on the carriage house door. You were about to do so when you heard a sound coming from inside. The teacher was crying. There was no doubt about it. Through the blue door you heard breathless sobs. You stood there listening, wondering what to feel.