The Inventors

by Peter Selgin

  And though your father claimed he was an only child, he did in fact have a sister. Her name was Berta Conti. She was born in 1902, ten years before your father’s birth – out of wedlock, presumably, which would explain his knowing nothing about her.12

  I found no information concerning her death.

  Theories conflict as to the origin of your grandmother’s surname. One theory traces it to the medieval town of Troyes, France, where Shlomo Yitzchaki (or Rashi, as he was better known), a rabbi famed for his lucid commentaries on the Talmud, lived. A second theory derives the name from Treviso, near Venice. A third connects it with the town of Trier, Germany (“Trèves” in French).

  Wherever its origins, throughout the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries the Treves line spread through Europe. Among the Treves who settled in Italy were Johanan B. Joseph Treves, whose son Raphael Joseph became a publisher of books. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Treves Brothers of Milan (“Fratelli Treves”) was the largest publishing firm in Italy, publishers of Pirandello and Gabriele D’Annunzio – the poet, bon vivant, seducer, war-monger, and inspirer of Mussolini and other fascists. Nonnie, your grandmother, Giulietta Treves, was the daughter of Michele Treves, brother to the famous publishers.

  Your father’s maternal great-aunt, Anette Treves, married Enrico Levi. Their son was the writer and painter Carlo Levi, who wrote Christ Stopped at Eboli.

  Not once while he lived did your father ever breathe a word to you about these or any other members of his – your – family. They were kept hidden from you, their existences not just uncelebrated, but unknown. It was something like those dreams to which occupants of undersized dwellings are susceptible, where an unnoticed door gives way to a series of sumptuous rooms – rooms that had been there all along, only you never knew it. To those sumptuous rooms your father held – or withheld – the keys.

  Why had he sealed off all those rooms? Shame? Anger? Neglect? Your half-sister Clare’s theories failed to satisfy you. And so, armed with a faded black-and-white photograph of a sailboat, you arrived at some theories of your own.

  * * *

  THE TORN, FADED BLACK-AND-WHITE PHOTO SHOWS AN elegant sailboat plying the waters of an estuary under cloudy skies with a bank of marsh weeds in the background. Manning the helm in what looks like a suit is your future-father. Another man stands next to him. At the bottom of the photo the inscription in faded fountain pen ink reads:

  Just to remind you

  Summer 1934

  John H. Goddard

  “SUPREME”

  You first saw the photo in the Building during one of your childhood visits there, tucked between the pages of a German novel in the bookcase in the back room where your father kept the trundle bed in case of a bad fight with your mother. Years later, per your request, he mailed you the photograph along with an accompanying letter.

  The sailboat, he explained in the letter, was a sloop he and six others chartered during the summer of 1934 – the year his father died. Her name was the Supreme. They sailed her through the Norfolk Broads, a system of rivers, lakes, and canals that form a network through Norfolk, a low-lying county northeast of London.

  Your father had been to England before, several times starting in 1927, when at fifteen he spent part of a summer alone there, in London. Of that first summer alone your father recalled only random details. On the Channel crossing after dinner he got seasick and threw up over the rail. As he wiped his mouth, a Scot who had been standing nearby said to him, “You should ne’er part wi’ wha’ you’ve paid for.”

  On that first visit he had been struck by London’s immensity, by its seas of small houses, not palazzo apartments like those familiar to him in Milan, but semi-detached brick homes in neat curved rows, with small gardens in the front and potted chimneys stretching up and downhill far as his eyes could see, crisscrossed by scores of railway tracks, all converging – or seeming to – at a place called Clapham Junction, “the very symbol of banality – but not to a 15-year-old boy from Italy.” So your father wrote to you in his letter featuring a rare glimpse into his past. From Clapham Junction:

  a municipal rail, a bridge, Victoria. Then a taxi ride, the red buses and the calm of it all: no yelling, no hooting like Paris taxicabs, not even that much traffic.

  Your future-father stayed at a manor house called Hepworth Hall. Weather permitting, meals were served in the garden where the chutney bowl squirmed with wasps. He spent his days riding a rented bicycle, taking outings to Cambridge and Clacton-on-Sea, where, “for two-and-six,” through a telescope on an amusement pier, instead of peering out across Martello Bay, he spied on the girls walking along the boardwalk. Finding one he liked, he caught up with her and confessed having watched her through the telescope. This novel line apparently worked: they spent the rest of that afternoon together, swimming and sunbathing, strolling the shore and eating ice cream cones.

  After a week your future-tense-father traded Hepworth Hall for a boarding house in Kilburn, then still a working-class London neighborhood. The landlady had a pretty but disturbed daughter. She spent all of her days alone in her room wearing a frazzled scarlet nightgown, singing the same mournful ditty over and over:

  I’m unhappy, so unhappy, everything is wrong Bluebird, sing me a song …

  At the boarding house he met a French traveler his age named Maurice who’d mastered the trick of putting French five-cent coins (the size of British pennies but worth a lot less) into subway turnstiles. Together they roamed London. You could imagine how excited your future-father must have been, as excited as you were the first time on your own in New York City. Romance, sex, the intrigues offered by not just a city, but a foreign city. By the time you knew him, your father had a paunch; his hair was already thin and gray. But the father who roamed the foggy streets of London in your mind with his French sidekick was slim and fit. His hair was dark, rich, and curly like yours, brushed back from a sloped forehead, his large, gray, deep-set eyes darting from one unfamiliar object to the next, aglow with curiosity, with the possibilities held by new things.

  The man at the helm of the Supreme is just a few years older and even more handsome. The sailing trip, which your father’s mother funded, had been his graduation gift. He’d just earned his undergraduate degree in engineering from the Polytechnic University of Milan (Politecnico di Milano), the oldest in Milan and the most highly respected technical university in the world.

  “The man with me in the photograph,” your father’s letter to you continues,

  is David Fitt, my good friend for many years, a lawyer and a real gentleman. The photo was taken by John Goddard, who signed and dated it. … We were a group of 7, I think, when we started out [on the voyage], but only 3 stuck it out to the end. When we were 7 my job was folding blankets, but with only 3 of us each did a little bit of everything. I cooked risotto once but it was no great success. In spite of the risotto and the blankets I really had a great time … We sailed all the way to Great Yarmouth at the mouth of the Yare on the North Sea, a place well-known for “bloaters,” a fish people eat for breakfast.

  The letter goes on to describe how the washing water they pumped from the estuary into a tank had been phosphorescent. “It was weird to wash your hands and face in it.” Sailing had been difficult. The canals were narrow, making tacking and sailing against the wind impossible. In the shallows the Supreme ran aground frequently. “There was a pole you used to push the boat off the shoals,” your father wrote,

  I did this once, but when I got the boat moving whoever was at the tiller managed to catch the wind and left me stranded, hanging on the pole which was stuck in the mud. This was enormously funny and after feeling let down for a moment I joined in the general laughter.

  At a place called Beccles, while swimming in a river, your father met a girl he liked. But the Supreme had a schedule to follow, and the rest of the crew grew impatient with his flirting. With great sadness he’d been forced to leave her.

  Contrary to your image o
f your father, the photo of the Supreme and the story that went with it demonstrated to you that he hadn’t always been such a loner, someone incapable of intimate friendships. The father you grew up knowing had few real friends. Apart from his secret mistresses, his most intimate relations were with fellow members of the AMC – the Appalachian Mountain Club – with whom he’d go hiking on weekends, or fellow Unitarians at the so-called Barn, where, at the secular Sunday services, he might hope to encounter an atheist or two. Then there was the Arion Society, a club devoted to German culture. He would volunteer at their Faschingballs – costumed carnival dances – serving bratwurst and tearing tickets from a roll, enjoying the costumes, beer, oom-pah music, and German conversation. But sooner or later all these organizations and their activities bored him, and your father would retreat to his beloved Building, to his snakes and spiders and inventions-in-progress.

  How different the man at the tiller of that sailboat: handsome, carefree, flirtatious – a twenty-two-year-old like many twenty-two-year-olds. Like you, but more certain of his direction, less confused.

  And though he had seen fit to give you this rare intimate glimpse into that English summer, the rest of your father’s life before you were born – his Italian childhood, his years in the U.S. before meeting your mother, his first two marriages, remained, for all intents and purposes, a dark secret, one that – for all its brightness – the photograph of the Supreme rendered darker still. Like the concentrated beam of a flashlight, in illuminating one portion of your father’s past it shed ever more obscurity over the others.

  This obscurity took the form of questions. Chief among these: why did your father, an Italian Jew, choose to reinvent himself as an English atheist?

  THEORY #1: ANGLOPHILIA

  The sail outing aboard the Supreme took place in the summer of 1934. The Third Reich had yet to adopt the Nuremburg Laws; they would not be passed until September 1935. Five more years would pass before Mussolini signed his so-called “Pact of Steel” with Hitler. Still, by the summer of 1934 the precarious position of all Jews throughout Eastern and Central Europe was – or should have been – obvious.

  Seeking relative safety, waves of Jews flooded Great Britain, arriving there only to confront a different set of Blackshirts, those of the British Union of Fascists, the B.U.F. When not attacking Jews with fists and boots, the B.U.F. denounced them through loudspeakers and murderous slogans scrawled on walls.

  This was the England where Paolo Senigaglia felt at home.

  Still, there were practical reasons for choosing England. Thanks to a succession of British nannies hired for him by his mother, from a very young age the man who was to become your father spoke English fluently. And England was easy to get to: a series of trains from Milan to Paris, then one from Paris to the channel boat.

  But something beyond safety and proximity attracted your father to England. From when he was a young boy he had been drawn to English ways and people in part thanks to the books he read – Kipling, The Forsyte Saga, and The Road to Wigan Pier – novels in English that he got from the library. One quality of those books may have appealed to him above all others, an essence that seeped out of the prose in which they were written, the quality conveyed by Charles Chaplin’s cane-spinning walk and credulous facial expressions: that blend of reasonable restraint and total lack of presumption best captured by the word decent as in “a decent chap.”

  It was this quality of reasonable restraint above all others that drew your father to the English and England, a quality whose antithesis was exemplified by the bombastic rhetoric of fascism under Mussolini – the prime minister who once kissed your volleyball champion future-mother on the cheek.

  Paolo Giusseppe Senigaglia’s embrace of English values was, or may well have been, to a large extent, his means of revolt against the two sources of tyranny that bore down on him throughout his childhood and youth: Italian fascism and an overprotective mother. Throw in a long-legged English nanny on whom he’d had an unrequited pubescent crush and you have a surefire recipe for Anglophilia.

  THEORY #2: ANTI-SEMITISM

  You’d heard him rail against televangelists, coffee creamers that didn’t pour properly, and peanut butter (vile, loathsome substance!), but apart from that one occasion when prompted by a black man’s presence in a sought-after telephone booth he uttered a racial slur, you never suspected your father of prejudice. Prejudices were irrational, after all, and your father was a rational man – an engineer, a man of logical, scientific bent.

  Yet when given expression, your father’s disavowal of reli gious values of any sort was hardly measured or scientific. Why did such fury attach itself to it? Why this need to not merely disavow but deplore religions, as if they posed a threat to his survival?

  Perhaps they did. Having jettisoned – first through his renouncement of the Catholic Church and then through his denial of any Jewish origins – any and all religious traditions, values, and beliefs, having thus forfeited membership in any religious tribe, he came to resent all religions. Instead of mourning his loss, he scorned those who hadn’t endured it, who still belonged to something bigger than themselves.

  Hence your future-father became a “self-loathing Jew,” i.e., an anti-Semite. Was not his embrace of England and English values itself anti-Semitic? And what of his love of Germans, of their ludicrously long words, their books and beer and bratwurst and oom-pah music, not to mention at least one woman named Bernice?

  Yet you never heard an anti-Semitic remark issue from your father’s lips. You never once heard him say an unkind thing about a Jew or Jews. Still, you could not entirely discredit this theory.

  Did David Fitt and his other crewmates on the Supreme have any idea that your future-father was Jewish? Had they even known that he was Italian? If his accent then was what you grew up knowing, though they may have guessed that he wasn’t English, they would have been hard-pressed to infer his origins.

  Maybe the risotto gave him away.

  THEORY #3: THE DESIRE TO REINVENT HIMSELF

  On the other hand, maybe your future-father’s break with his birth country and family had nothing to do with anti-Semitism or Anglophilia. Maybe it was the result of the simple wish to reinvent himself, to start fresh, to open himself to new possibilities?

  Mysterious illegitimate sister notwithstanding, your father was, after all, an only child, an overprotected one, with an only child’s curiosity, imagination, and inventiveness. Combined with his extraordinary intelligence, that inventiveness would have led naturally to a desire to try new things, to explore fresh horizons, to refute, resist, or renounce things that might hold him back. Belonging to a tribe of any sort was certainly one of those things. Religion was another. So was patriotism in all its forms.

  But of all the things that stood to hold your future-father back, none was more powerful than his mother. Italian mothers are known to be overprotective, especially of their male children. The Italian’s have a special word for it: mammone, a mother’s boy, those who keep their dear mothers forever and always in close proximity, there to advise them in all matters while darning their socks and doing their laundry.

  And while it’s true that your father never entirely escaped the fate of a mammone, he did at least manage to escape Italy, a land where children lived with or close to their parents until they died, where sons took up the occupations of their fathers and of their father’s fathers, where to reinvent oneself was next to impossible.

  Is it any wonder that your father fell in love with England? Is it any more of a wonder that he wound up in the United States of America, where he hoped to encounter all the good qualities of England minus the rabid anti-Semitism and the stifling class system, the one place left in the world where a man could truly hope to reinvent himself?

  Hence on June 12, 1935, less than a year after his “Supreme” summer, on the passenger liner Rex, Paolo Giuseppe Senigaglia embarked from the port of Genoa for the United States of America.

  I’M NOT INC
LINED TO SPEAK OF THE AFFAIR THAT SEPARATED me from my daughter. Who would be? The woman was someone I met at a conference in Boston – or maybe Seattle – while living in upstate New York – or maybe it was Florida. Anyhow, I was living over a thousand miles away from my child and her mother, who was earning a graduate degree in Illinois, a pursuit that was to have kept us apart for three years, starting the year Audrey was born. Thanks to my stupidity – my lust, my loneliness, my greed, my indiscretion, my inability to understand what I really wanted … whatever you’d like to call it … three years turned into forever.

  I said I don’t like to speak about it. That was honest enough. Then again, what’s there to say? The rest is banalities and clichés. The real question is: how am I to forgive the person who condemned me to this lovely exile, myself? A confession seems a good way to start. Not to the affair. That’s nothing; that takes a sentence, maybe two. To this whole existence of mine so far. That takes a book.

  Whether we want it or not, for better or worse, our deeper nature usually gets what it wants, or thinks it wants. Blindness with respect to the forces, events, and influences that have shaped that nature leads to many if not most of our worst decisions. Since the two men for whom I felt the deepest affection were exiled by choice and/or circumstance, I have put myself in exile. By no coincidence am I, essentially, alone.

  The worst form of exile is from the self. From that one problem all kinds of ills arise, including the inability to forgive that which we can’t begin to understand.

  It has taken me forever to write this book, which is to say that it has taken me forever to know myself, which is to say it has taken me forever to forgive myself. I should apologize, I guess, but to whom?

  On bad days I say to myself, “Fuck me in a whole bunch of colors if this is my life.” On good days I can’t believe my luck.

  A thing that concerns me: that what I’ve written is on one hand too polished, on the other too personal. Polished on the surface, hollow inside. How would you like that for an epitaph?