The Inventors

by Peter Selgin

  But you knew perfectly well. The city was no longer his city, the innocent one he took you to on his “business trips” when you were a child, the one he had invented for you. It had become an alien place, a hostile place. By then you knew those early “business trips” to the city with your papa hadn’t been so innocent, either, that he’d kept his mistress there, or more than one mistress. You knew at least one name, Berenice (Beh – reh – nee – chay), a name that would occupy roughly the same plane in your pubescent mind as the devil until that day when its owner appeared at your father’s funeral wearing a reindeer-and-snowflake sweater.

  As you led him away from the telephone booth, you read in your father’s murky gray pupils a look of accusation and betrayal, as if you, his son – not New York City or his literary agent – had let him down. It had struck you then that at seventy-six your father was a deeply disappointed man, a man whose genius had failed him. The Color Coder, the Thickness Gauge, the Shoe Sole and Blue Jean Machines … all the patents and unpublished manuscripts, the hundreds of slapdash paintings, a lifetime’s worth of inventions (most of them no longer in use): none would survive him. Along with that look of betrayal in your father’s eyes that day you saw a man haunted by failure, whose supply of latent talents, however impressive, couldn’t meet the demands of his ambitions, who understood that life would give him no more chances. A man who, in a word – your father’s word, a word he had once applied to you – was overdrawn.

  * * *

  THAT YOUR OWN SENSE OF FAILURE WAS INEXTRICABLY bound up with your father’s made his waning all the more bittersweet to you. If only you could make him see that he hadn’t failed you, that of his dozens of inventions, you alone would survive him; that by your failing alone could he truly fail. How urgently you wanted him to know this – and how much more urgently you yourself needed to believe that you hadn’t and would not fail, that the invention known as Peter Selgin would not only survive, but thrive.

  Your last visit with your father before he had the first stroke did nothing to assuage your feelings of failure or your resentment. During an autumn visit – the same autumn when your mother and Mr. Peck returned from the hospital in neck braces – two months prior to your argument over sneakers, you shared with your father a short story you had written. You did so reluctantly, having by then endured his harsh criticism many times. This time, though, you had cause to be optimistic. After all, you’d worked hard. You’d published a few stories. You had reason to believe that your work was good, or at least that it wasn’t terrible. From a few feet behind his rocking chair you watched your father turn a page, then another. He sighed, rubbed his forehead, shook his head, groaned, and made his disapproval known in other graphic and audible ways.

  Six pages into the story, with an extra loud arghh, he handed it back to you.

  I’m sorry, he said. But I simply can’t go on.

  Why? What’s wrong with it?

  Oh, Peter, I don’t know where to begin.

  Come off it, Papa. It can’t be that bad!

  Oh but it is – it is!

  Tell me why, at least.

  You write too much for effect. You show off. You must learn to humble yourself. Whenever you think you’ve done something terribly clever, think again. (You recalled your father’s criticism of Proust’s metaphors.) Apart from which your punctuation and grammar leave a lot to be desired.

  Though you were tempted to argue, you thought better of it and let the matter drop until later that day when you and your father went for a walk together in the woods behind the house. You’d been walking for some time, neither of you saying a word, when out of the silence you blurted:

  You never did put much stock in me, Papa, did you?

  What does that mean?

  You have no faith in me, that’s what it means.

  Ach – faith!

  Yes, Papa, faith.

  Are you talking about your story? Is that what this is about? Really, Peter, you take things too personally!

  Maybe so. Still, it’s a fact that you never really encouraged us. Me or George. Ask George. He’ll tell you as much.

  Ach! Just because I don’t care for this latest story of yours. Of course I’ve encouraged you.

  Really? When, Papa?

  What?

  When was the last time you encouraged me?

  Oh, for the love … I can’t recall a particular time. But I have. I have!

  Your father’s face had turned red. You changed the subject then, asking about the horsetail ferns that once grew along the trail where you were hiking but had vanished.

  I wonder what happened to them?

  Your father shook his head. It’s not true, he said. I’ve always done my best to encourage you. Always! As for your writing, well, either it’s good or it isn’t. You don’t want me to lie to you, do you?

  No, Papa, I don’t want you to lie.

  Well, then …

  Still, it would be nice if you could be a little more encouraging.

  But how can I encourage work that isn’t good? (The question had a pleading, desperate tone to it.)

  I rest my case.

  I didn’t mean it that way! You know I didn’t mean it that way!

  Your father’s face had turned red again. It was the face of a man in agony. You felt bad then. It wasn’t your father’s fault, after all, if your stories weren’t any good, was it? Nor is there a law that says a father needs to approve of – let alone admire – the performances of his children, however dismal.

  Please, you said. Don’t get upset. Let’s just drop it, okay? It’s not important.

  Which only upset your father further. Which was what you had wanted, or thought you had wanted, wasn’t it: to make your poor old papa feel like shit. Now that you had achieved your goal you felt like shit yourself.

  You waited for the blood to drain from your father’s face, then walked silently together back to the house.

  * * *

  DURING YOUR FINAL VISITS WITH HIM, HIS STROKES having rendered him no longer able to care for himself, much less to work or read or write or paint or do any of the things he loved, you sometimes slept with your father. Someone had to sleep with him to make sure that he didn’t fall out of the bed and bleed to death from the medicine doctors prescribed to thin his blood. You did it for your mother, to give her a break. Otherwise, she slept with him.

  Now and then, your father would “soil himself.” The expression amused you. You pictured a Sunday gardener in canvas shoes and straw hat stooped over a mound of soil shaped like your father, mulched, seeded, fertilized, sprouting tea roses and gardenias.

  Your father smelled: the rank, cheesy odor of human decrepitude. Before climbing into bed with him you’d rub a dab of Vicks VapoRub underneath your nostrils. Then you’d tuck your father in and kiss his stubbled cheek.

  Before he had his strokes, your father suffered from insomnia. Now he slept like a child. Lying with him on a convertible couch in the den that had been your grandmother’s room, you slept well, too.

  YOU WAKE TO your father’s growling basso profundo as he inveighs against your mother, who, with her thick accent, reasons with him, or tries to. You get up, put on your robe, and follow the sounds to their source downstairs.

  Ma Paolo, your mother says. Is only twenty dollar more a month.

  Another twenty dollars, your father grumbles in English. And another twenty, and another! What do you think, that I’m made of money? (He doesn’t want to spend the twenty dollars a month to insure the Building against fire.)

  Ma Paolo, sii ragionevole! If someting ’appen –

  Nothing’s going to happen, damn it. You won’t be stuck with any bills, if that’s what you’re worried about. I have savings. I’ll pay for the bloody fire, if there is one. I’ll pay for my funeral, too, if you’re worried about that as well.

  Paolo –

  Vile, cretinous –

  From the dream of your parents arguing you drift into another dream, one of you naked a
nd smeared with shit, running through the lobby of a movie theater packed with giggling girls. The dream carries you to the summit of mortification.

  Then you wake up.

  THE VICKS VAPORUB has worn off. You smell a dark, deep, pungent odor. Your father whimpers. You switch on the lamp. Smeared across your father’s thigh is damning evidence that he has “soiled” himself. The brown smudge mocks you. You close your eyes to ferns swaying in a breeze. With your eyes still closed, your mind drifts over Huntington Lake, to the island with the lighthouse. You feel the sun on your eyelids. The smell of excrement reasserts itself. You open your eyes to your beshitted father.

  You consider appealing to your mother but don’t want to wake her.

  You wonder: should I clean up the bed first and then my father, or vice versa? To clean the bed I’ll have to get my father out of it, which will mean sitting him in a chair. But then the chair will get “soiled.” I’ll have to put a towel down on it, you think. But which towel? Does my mother keep a special towel for that purpose? Would it be morally defensible to use a towel and then, without telling anyone, throw it into the hamper and let it be used again for normal purposes? Has my mother done just that? you wonder. Have I dried myself with a towel or towels that have touched my father’s “soiled” flesh? Does it matter?

  As your father whimpers, using an old towel from under the kitchen sink, you wipe the floppy globes of his rump, the web-like undersides of his knees, the flat white base of his spine, the sacks of exhausted muscle clinging to his upper arms. Your father’s a baby and you’re his mother, Nonnie. Stronzo! As you wipe him you look out the window at the crescent moon shining there like a fingernail paring.

  Having cleaned him, you guide your father to his rocking chair and sit him down.

  Don’t move, you say. Stay right there, I’ll be right back. Okay?

  * * *

  YOU BUNDLE UP THE SHITTY SHEETS AND CARRY THEM downstairs to the laundry room. To get there you have to pass the furnace area, where your mother makes bridal headpieces she sells on consignment at a boutique in town where she works. She keeps her sewing machine, her boxes of beads and sequins and lace, her ribbons and silk netting and crinoline, there. Like galaxies strung out across the night sky, six of her latest headpieces, a pristine row of them, hang from a length of clothesline suspended between the fuel oil tank and the furnace. The headpieces are worth seventy-five to a hundred dollars each.

  As you’re passing by it with the bundled sheets the furnace clicks and roars to life, startling you so you instinctively whip around with the bundle. The centrifugal force of the sudden movement splatters your father’s loose bowel movement across the headpieces, strafing them with brown bullets of liquid shit.

  Back upstairs, you find your father on the floor in front of his rocking chair. Your mother stands there looking awful in a rose-colored nightgown you bought her many Christmases ago.

  Where were you? she asks.

  Taking care of something.

  What happen to de bed?

  I’m taking care of it.

  Together you and your mother put fresh sheets on the bed and tuck your father in. Afterward you get back into bed yourself.

  BUT YOU CAN’T sleep. To the sound of the washing machine rumbling downstairs you picture your mother’s headpieces being agitated along with your father’s shit.

  Your thoughts drift to the night the Building burned. You’d been sleeping soundly, not with your stroke-addled papa in the den that had been your grandmother’s room, but alone in your basement bedroom, when the pounding on the front door woke you.

  You put on your pajama bottoms, rushed upstairs, and opened the door to a volunteer fireman, his spiky metal helmet haloed in orange flames.

  Your folks own that building down there?

  Yes.

  Well – it’s on fire.

  Moments later, the three of you stood there – you, your mother, your father – in the driveway in your pajamas, watching flames leap up the utility lines, where they set off sparks. As the roof collapsed your atheist father put a hand to his sloped forehead.

  My god, he said under his breath.

  Later that same morning, you sifted through muck and ashes, pulling out boxes of waterlogged capacitors, a charred notebook, a drowned oscilloscope … In a pile of soggy ashes and vermiculite something glittered like gold, a brass turning from one of the lathes. You put it in your pocket …

  AT DAWN, WITH your father snoring, you go down to the basement and empty the washing machine. The formerly white bed sheets are now beige. So are your mother’s headpieces. You carry the latter up to the kitchen, where, seated in the breakfast nook, you try to clean them with a can of K2r Spot Lifter spray. When that doesn’t do the trick you try a mixture of baking soda and vinegar. Using an old toothbrush you grind the paste in and around sequins, rhinestones, crinoline, and artificial pearls, the bristles working it into a froth. Finished, you carry the headpieces back downstairs and re-hang them back on the clothesline next to the furnace.

  Back upstairs, hoping that it will help them dry faster, you set the house thermostat to broiling,

  By then the sun is up. Birds sing.

  You lie back down next to your still sleeping father.

  Hours later, when you check the headpieces they’re still wet.

  They’re also still beige. Worse, they smell like shit.

  You spray them with Glade.

  * * *

  I DON’T SEE WHY IT SHOULD BE SO BLOODY DIFFICULT.

  I know, Papa.

  Fine – in that case do it, then. Increase the proportion.

  I’m trying, Papa.

  Don’t try, do it, damn you!

  It’s not so simple, Papa.

  What’s not simple? All you have to do is increase the bloody proportion. That’s all I’m asking of you, nothing more. Give me that satisfaction, why don’t you? Is it asking so much? I don’t see any good reason why you should deny me this one little thing!

  No one’s denying you anything.

  Bloody …

  It’s just not so easy, that’s all.

  You’re right, it’s too complicated, your father says, shaking his head.

  I’m sorry, Papa.

  Too complicated.

  I’m sorry.

  Screw it!

  Yes, that’s right, Papa. Screw it!

  Your father laughs and so do you.

  ESPRESSO ON THE DOCK.

  What do we remember? What do we know? Are knowledge and memory the same? Just because we remember something, does that mean that we know it? Is memory something that we possess, like knowledge, or is it something we do – an act?

  According to one theory, the difference between knowledge and memory is like the difference between the molecules in the air and the wind that moves them. The molecules are facts, things known, ideas, images, and other types of information stored in the cells of our brains. When we remember something, in the act of remembering it and only through that action do we excite those bits of knowledge into what we call memories. Through the act of remembering, our memories aren’t merely shaped, they’re created.

  As soon as we stop remembering, just as the wind stops existing when it stops blowing, our memories cease to exist.

  Knowledge, on the other hand, is fixed in our minds until rendered obsolete by new knowledge, which usurps it.

  Given the interrupted character of memory, there seems to be no grounding in the narratives for the assumption that it is the same person who is remembered as who now remembers. And given the plural character of memory, it seems to be a fallacy to suppose that it is the same person who figures in all the different memory narratives one has.

  JOHN CAMPBELL

  The Structure of Time in Autobiographical Memory

  The safest memories are the memories which are in the brains of people who cannot remember.

  YADIN DUDAI, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel

  The visiting nurse reading to him from hi
s beloved German dictionary. “Flugzeugwarnnetz.” “Stadtverordnetenversammlungen.” “Verbarrik adieren.””Leberknödelsuppe.” “Fussballweltmeisterschaft.”… Feeding him tapioca pudding and pea soup in the nursing home, where a picture of Pope John Paul II hangs over his bed.

  * * *

  “PAUL J. SELGIN, AGE 88, OF 75½ WOOSTER ST., BETHEL, died Thursday, February 24, 2000, husband of Pinuccia (dePoli) Selgin.

  “Born in Milan, Italy, in 1912, he was the son of the late Guido and Julia (Treves) Senigaglia. He emigrated to the United States in the 1930s and graduated from Harvard University with a PhD in physics.

  “Mr. Selgin taught engineering at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute in the 1940s, and was later director of the Electronics Division of the U.S. Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C.

  “In 1957 he moved to Bethel, where he headed his own electronics laboratory, inventing, designing, and creating prototypes of quality control instruments, including the Thickness Gauge and the Color Coder, used by dozens of industries.

  “Also a painter and author, Mr. Selgin wrote books that ranged in subject matter from electronic textbooks to science fiction novels to philosophical, linguistic, and etymological studies. In his later years he taught languages at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury.

  “Besides his wife, he is survived by two sons, Peter Selgin of New York, NY, and George Selgin, PhD, of Athens, GA; two daughters, Ann Levy of St. Albans, VT, and Clare Wolfowitz of Chevy Chase, MD, and five grandchildren.

  “A gathering of friends and relatives will be conducted at the Green Funeral Home, 57 Main St., Danbury, Monday afternoon from 2 to 3 p.m. Cremation will take place at the convenience of the family.

  “Contributions may be made to the Bethel Ambulance Association, 38 South St., Bethel, CT 06801, or to the Danbury Animal Welfare Society, P.O. Box 971, Danbury CT 06813.”

  “RESERVE TYPE BATTERY,” Patent No. 4,218,525

  XXIV.

  Green Funeral Home, Danbury, Connecticut, 2000

  GEORGE – BY THEN A FULL PROFESSOR AT THE UNIVERSITY of Georgia – flew up for the service. Your brother had been married for twenty years, divorced less than one. Though still a dedicated bicyclist who did regular trips of fifty to a hundred miles, thanks to his fondness for good wine and restaurant meals, he’d put on some weight. He had a good twenty pounds over you. Still, in his custom tailored (in Hong Kong, where he spent a year as a visiting lecturer) suit and raw silk shirt he looked quite good. Your brother’s good looks often caught you by surprise. It was like looking in a mirror, one with a will and opinions of its own.