The Inventors

by Peter Selgin

  Apparently, to some extent at least, the experiment worked. According to tests performed before and after the subjects showed marked improvements in all of the indicators of age – dexterity, strength, flexibility, hearing, vision, memory and cognition. By essentially tricking them into forgetting how old they were, the experiment made them younger.

  Just as children find it impossible to not look forward, as we age it gets harder and harder to not look back. In our youth we were vessels brimming with potential; in middle age that potential has mostly been realized or squandered, its promises kept or broken. To realize that we are no longer becoming is to discover what we’ve become.

  Electrical schematic diagram of clamping circuit that operates upon the output of photodetector, so that detection of only threshold signals is accomplished.” From Patent No. 3,841,761. “METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR DETECTING FAULTS IN FABRIC.”

  XXIII.

  Values & Proportions

  Bethel, Connecticut, 1996

  YOU SEE … THE PROPORTION …

  Your father blinks his light-gray eyes, massages a perturbed brow. Propped in his rocking chair, an unspecified mass, his brain a set of crossed wires, a shorted circuit.

  You ask him if he knows who you are.

  Oh yes. There’s a value. A little bit higher, maybe. Yes I would say that there is a positive value. Higher than most.

  Do you know my name, Papa? Can you say it?

  Well, yes, in a sense. Yes. That is, I know the value, the proportion.…

  It all comes down to proportions and values, plus and minus; high or low. If he can just assign the proper values, things will sort themselves out, the hidden properties will reveal themselves. If he could decide, for instance, what value to assign to the particular essence that is you, his son (though he recognizes neither you nor his son)… if he could assume, for instance, that your assigned value is plus or minus eight, then things would be all right; everything would be fine.

  Let’s try it, he says, holding your hand, straining as he grips it – no longer simply or just “your hand” but an integral part of the all-encompassing universe. All right, he says. Let’s do it, then; let’s assign it a value. A coefficient.

  All right, you say.

  Right. Go ahead, then. Do it.

  The fingers of your other hand polish the rocking chair’s wooden arm.

  So, he says, tensing, turning red. Fine. Come on. Let’s do it …

  * * *

  HE WAS SHOPPING FOR A PAIR OF SNEAKERS WHEN THE stroke occurred. The parking lot of the Thom McAn store. A cloudy day. They had left the store and were walking through the parking lot when, a few yards from your mother’s Rambler, he froze. She called to him – Paolo? Your father stared off into space.

  You were vacationing with your wife in New Jersey when you got the news. You’d been married for four years. Paulette. Petite former dancer. High cheekbones, curly hair. Like you she had Italian roots. Sicilian. True to your father, you held no trace of nationalism. Still, you took comfort in her fondness for anchovies and espresso.

  So far your marriage had been good. For thirteen more years it would stay that way. You were both successful, earning livings in ways that, if not direct expressions of your art, related to it. She produced and wrote children’s television shows, you did corporate caricatures and editorial illustration. You owned your first apartment, a two-bedroom deco job on the Upper West Side. Having no children or plans for any, you could afford trips to Europe – Italy, usually – every few years. Otherwise you vacationed closer to home. That summer, you rented the cottage on Lake Kinnelawn, forty minutes from the city in New Jersey. You swam and sailed a twelve-foot dingy. Paulette read mystery novels and cooked.

  The last time you and your father had seen each other you argued. He said his back was bothering him. You suggested that his sneakers might be to blame, that he get himself a decent pair of new ones to replace the Goodwill tennis shoes he favored.

  What do sneakers have to do with my bloody back? your father argued.

  The discussion took place in the rebuilt Building, the original having burned down five years earlier when a carpet installer your father rented storage space to (and who’d been sleeping there at night after separating from his wife) left a kerosene heater burning. Building #2 had bright white linoleum-tiled floors. No more rotting holes. No mice or spiders or snakes. Most of the machinery and tools had to be replaced. Gone were most of your father’s paintings and notebooks, destroyed by the fire or by the water an inept volunteer fire department pumped lavishly on it. Gone too was the original Building’s smell, that special blend of scorched metal shavings, orange rind, solder smoke, and your father’s frequent farts. The two lathes and his typewriter survived.

  Since the fire your father had changed, too. He’d grown older, sadder, slower. His gray eyes had lost their intent gleam. He no longer smiled when working. His face was a flaccid mask of preoccupied abstraction. For this and other reasons you checked your fury at his contempt for your suggestions.

  Those tennis shoes you’re wearing don’t have enough arch support, Papa. They’re okay for playing tennis, but not for standing and working all day like you do.

  Ach, don’t be ridiculous! (said with that familiar dismissive wave).

  It’s true. You need decent arch support. No wonder your back is bugging you. Ask a doctor if you won’t believe me.

  Ach!

  That in general your father refused to take your suggestions seriously frustrated and at times infuriated you. It wasn’t just his refusal to be persuaded that frustrated you, but his way of refusing, the scorn that accompanied his dismissive gestures, his achs and his aughhs. That, not his lack of paternal pride, is what made you so angry with your father at times. That he’d directed the same scorn toward his mother, your mother, your brother, creamers that didn’t pour properly, televangelists, and the country of his birth, didn’t in the least mitigate your frustration or lessen your anger.

  Fine, you said at last. Do whatever the hell you want. It’s your bloody back.

  A week later your mother phoned you to tell you about the stroke. You left Paulette at Lake Kinnelawn and rode a series of trains to Connecticut. On the journey’s final leg, from the worn baize seat of the dilapidated Budd car you watched a litter-strewn summer landscape slide by. You’d taken this journey so frequently every last patch of sooty ballast and grimy weed was ingrained in your senses. It felt as if that train were taking you back through time, as though the rundown Budd car were bound not for Bethel, Connecticut, but for your childhood, that largely imaginary realm of joyful anticipation.

  * * *

  YOUR MOTHER MET YOU AT THE DEPOT. NORMALLY YOUR father would have been there to pick you up, standing by his latest rusting late-model European car, smiling, waving his lint-flecked beret over his thin gray head. In decades of greeting you at train stations he always looked the same. Ah, Peter, Peter my boy! he’d say, clasping and patting you on the back. Even through layers of winter clothes, you’d smell the dander and musk that clung to him always, the smell of the terrycloth robe in his plum-colored bathroom.

  Now your mother hugs you. In place of your father’s smell there’s the waxy odor of lipstick. She’s had her hair colored and teased. Your mother is always having things done to her hair. She is fiercely devoted, in descending order, to her children, her good looks, and her anxieties. She lives in a fortress of anxiety, its closets jammed with solvents, unguents, pastes, and powders meant to eradicate her distress. At times she is as remote and exotic to you as Tripoli, her birthplace, with its date palms and slender minarets. Still she’s your mother and you are damned if you don’t love her.

  How is he doing? you ask.

  Your mother shakes her head. She’s frightened, you can tell. So are you.

  Dey did more tess dis morning, she says. Dey tink maybe is someting to do wid hees blood. After lunch we go see him.

  YOUR MOTHER DRIVES you home. It’s been a while since you’ve s
een the house. Not only has it fallen into disrepair, it seems diminished. Growing up there you had the impression of enormous wealth: the endlessly long driveway framed by elephantine weeping willows, the Cape Cod with its fancy brick facade and gaily striped awnings over its dormer windows, the Building with its array of mysterious outlying structures, the picket fence running up the hill to meet the mulberry tree growing in the corner of the yard, the perfectly round hedges, the stone terraces climbing into the woods, the woods themselves, with their own treasures of moss, lichen, ferns, rocks, crevices, and caves, yours all the way to the summit, from which you could see most of the town.

  Now most of the willows have fallen. With its missing tines the picket fence looks like a bum’s rotten teeth, its once gleaming whitewash turned to dust. Where not overgrown, the lawn is scorched brown. Flowerbeds have gone to seed. Errant shoots sprout from the hedges. Bent scraps of siding cling to the house, one gutter dangles, the others are packed with mulch. The white birch in the turnaround has devolved into a toadstool-festooned stump. From the terraced garden walls, chunks of concrete have gone missing. Dead leaves everywhere. Your father’s car not in its usual spot.

  Things aren’t much better inside. A smell of mildew hangs everywhere. The walls need paint. The furnishings you once considered fit for a king now look bedraggled and small, the sad detritus of a petite-bourgeois existence. As for your father’s paintings of which you were once so proud, and which for you were of a piece with the greatest van Goghs and Matisses, you now see them for what they really are: the slapdash dabblings of gifted amateur, their brushstrokes haphazard, their colors muddy, their materials and frames equally shoddy. How the Selgins had come down in the world!

  LUNCH: DEVILED EGGS, insalata russa, peperonata. All your favorites. As your mother and you sit eating across from each other at the glass-topped kitchen table, your mother suddenly weeps.

  I sorry, she says, reaching for and taking your hand. Forgive me.

  What’s the matter? Why are you crying?

  I never mean to hurt you papa.

  What are you talking about? you ask, though you have a pretty good idea. Mr. Peck, the “friend of the family” who lives among birch trees on an isolated hill, whose protruding lower lip glistens with spittle, who voted for Goldwater, who owns rental properties including a small motel and a factory that makes wooden boxes, but never spends his money, who (unlike your father) fought in World War II. On landing at Normandy as bullets zinged past him, he who never learned to swim said Hallelujah. Having resisted them for years, your mother had finally given in to his advances and let herself have an affair with him – her first and only. By then your father had already had many.

  I should never have go with him, says your mother tearfully.

  Why did you?

  I fell sorry for him. Ee was lonely.

  When your father suffered the first of his strokes, Mr. Peck advised your mother to divorce him. When she refused, he launched a tirade, telling her what a lazy, cowardly, selfish, arrogant, unpleasant, egocentric man she had married. When she defended your father, Mr. Peck became abusive, mocking her, calling her a damned fool, a martyr, his spittle flying from his lower lip until she ran from his shingled house.

  I say to myself I never going back!

  But a few days later your mother found herself and her Rambler parked once again in the driveway of Mr. Peck’s cedar shingled house.

  It took a car accident to end the affair. They were coming home from an overnight trip to see the fall colors in Vermont when the brakes on Mr. Peck’s Plymouth (which, being too parsimonious for service stations, he repaired himself) failed and they collided with a highway department sand truck. They returned from the hospital in matching neck braces. Mr. Peck insisted that the accident hadn’t been his fault, that the driver of the sand truck had run his stop sign, when in fact he had done so. Rather than have her file a claim with his insurance company, he tried to get your mother to let him pay her hospital bill. She filed a claim. She also sued him, and won.

  Since then, she and Mr. Peck had not spoken to each other.

  * * *

  AS YOU STEP INTO THE HOSPITAL ROOM, YOUR FATHER sits up, smiling, aware of your combined essences, yours and your mother’s, as if a strong perfume has permeated the sterile hospital room. Despite the summer heat you’ve worn your new hat, a floppy newsboy cap, the sort worn by James Cagney and other movie gangsters in forties melodramas. Unable to identify you by name or relation, having no words for hat or cap, your father remarks as you stand there wearing it at a rakish tilt:

  You – look – vaguely – disreputable.

  His lunch tray sits untouched. Roast chicken and peas gone cold because he either cannot see or doesn’t recognize them. In a too-loud voice my mother asks:

  PAOLO, HOW DO YOU FEEL?

  Your father thinks. That’s all that’s left of him: his thinking, a generalized deliberation or rumination that spreads itself across space and time like a valorous coat across a mud puddle, a weightless brooding suspended in a void, free of object or agency. Your father sees you there, but only as one sees a concept, an idea off to the side of the central topic, a vitreous floater, a shadow on the wall.

  He sings:

  In olden days a glimpse of stocking

  Was looked on as something shocking

  Now heaven knows – anything goes …

  – waving one hand like conductor’s baton while tapping out the rhythm with a stiff finger on his skull.

  Heaven knows: anything goes…

  Your mother spoon-feeds him. Mashed peas. Chocolate pudding. Later, the duty nurse helps him into a wheelchair. You roll him down the corridor to a lounge with a large plate glass window. Scudding clouds, blue sky, hills of blazing autumn trees. You describe the view, a Hudson River landscape by Thomas Cole or Frederick Church. He sees something more like Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie. I feel the value in this instant to be quite high, I’d say at least plus or minus … oh … I don’t know, eighteen or thereabouts. He goes on about proportions and relative values and how it may be best to increase the coefficient by a percentage of the total variation.

  You think you understand him.

  True, you say. But the important thing is it’s a beautiful day.

  Ah yes, that is true, I suppose. Yes, that’s important …

  * * *

  FROM THAT FIRST STROKE YOUR FATHER MOSTLY RECOVERED, but other episodes followed: sudden blank looks while watching television, delayed answers to simple questions. One morning, home for another weekend visit, you heard a strained voice calling from the garage. You went out to find him there, in the backseat of the Opel he was no longer supposed to drive, saying, Ah, there you are, Peter, old boy. Perhaps you’ll enlighten me. I can’t seem to find the bloody steering wheel!

  Over the next year, by invisible increments, the loss of proper names and nouns became permanent. The objects of this world were suitcases without handles; your father couldn’t grasp them. His memories were next to go. One by one like unfaithful friends they deserted him.

  You tried to help him remember. You’d sit with him in the living room where he’d been relegated to his rocking chair, reminding him of things, saying this is your house and I’m your son, Peter and You have sons, twins, Peter and George. …

  You reminded him of his inventions, of the Color Coder and the Thickness Gauge and the Blue Jean Machine. Remember? Your lab is at the bottom of the driveway. The Building, we call it. It burned down, but you had it rebuilt. Remember? The floors used to be rotten. Mice and snakes lived there. I used to visit you down there. I’d watch you working at the lathe, the typewriter, the band saw. At the ends of our visits, on our way up the driveway to the house, we’d stop for a pee. Remember? (If you could just make him remember a few things, it would help; it would save a bit of your father for you.)

  … You’re my father, my papa.

  … I’m your son, Peter.

  … You invented the first dollar-bill
changing machine. The Nomoscope.

  … Remember the Nomoscope?

  For your sake and your father’s you tried to remember the good things. Exploring the beds of abandoned railways, those early trips to New York, the Hotel Paris …

  … Remember the Hotel Paris, Papa?

  Five years had passed since you and your father were last in New York together. He visited you not long after you and Paulette bought your apartment. It was his first trip there in years and would be his last. The apartment was on West Ninety-fourth. He found a parking space three blocks away on Columbus Avenue and rang the lobby buzzer. You showed him your sunken living room that you had decorated with paintings of the sinking Titanic. Then you went to a nearby diner for lunch. Your father ordered vegetable barley soup. When you asked him how it was, he looked at the soup spoon trembling in his fist and said, in a voice leaden with sorrow, Not so hot. He had come to the city to see you, true, but also to gain an audience with the literary agent to whom he had sent his latest magnum opus, a manuscript titled Beyond Pragmatism, by which he hoped to advance the theories of William James into the twenty-first century, a futile hope for this obdurate eccentric who rarely read anything published after the Hague Peace Conference and whose manifestoes were riddled with hyphenated to-days and plastered with Ko-Rec-Type. The literary agent had not returned his calls.

  Having paid for your disappointing lunch, he repaired to a telephone booth across the street, where, for the eighth time so far that day, he tried to reach the agent, only to lose a quarter to the out-of-service payphone. You stood there and watched as with uncharacteristic fury he slammed the receiver down, nearly breaking it.

  Three blocks away, you found another phone booth, this one occupied by a young African-American man, prompting your father, until that moment the least bigoted person you’d ever known, to combine a garden-variety epithet with a racial slur.

  Papa, take it easy, you’d said – or something to that effect. What’s wrong?