The Inventors

by Peter Selgin

  An old trick, build the critique into the opus, a preemptive strike.

  READERS WILL DEMAND some form of closure, they’ll have every right to ask, “What ultimate effect did learning about your father’s past have on you? Has it changed you in some significant way? How?”

  Honest answer: I’m not sure. I think in order to love others you must trust them, and in order to trust them you need to trust yourself, and in order to trust yourself you have to know yourself, and to know yourself you need not only to know and accept but to embrace the forces, events, traditions, and other circumstances that made you who you are.

  IN HIS 1897 monograph on suicide, sociologist Emile Durkheim singled out abandonment of tribalism as the root cause of most of society’s ills. He coined the term anomie, meaning “a condition in which society provides little moral guidance to individuals,” a breakdown of the social bonds in a community arising from a disjunction between purely personal and wider social values.

  Through scientific study, Durkheim demonstrated that in turn-of-the-century France the majority of suicides were Protestants, agnostics, and atheists – those without tribal affiliations. Since they didn’t suffer from anomie, Catholics and Jews were far less likely to kill themselves.

  It is through our relationship to the larger social order – our tribe – that we know and accept ourselves, that we feel the ground solid beneath our feet and know tomorrow will be another day much like today. The Jewish people never abandoned their tribe. Torah readings, Shabbat, staying kosher, candles before sundown, dipping in the mikvah – these are but a few of the “irrational” acts by which people of Jewish faith cling to their tribalism.

  It was that tribalism that my father’s parents relinquished in converting to Catholicism, and that my father obliterated every remaining trace of, preferring instead to be his own point of reference, the center of his world, a slave of anomie. In reinventing himself he broke a chain of ritual stretching across four thousand years. Once that chain has been broken it’s impossible to mend. You have to build a new chain.

  “OPTICAL GAUGE FOR MEASURING THE THICKNESS OF A CONTINUOUS WEB.” From Patent No. 3,518,441

  XXVI.

  The Invention of Memory

  United States, 1935 – 1957

  ACCORDING TO THE REX’S PASSENGER MANIFEST, YOUR future-father’s age was twenty-three; his occupation: engineer; his last permanent residence: Milan; his nearest relative: Giulia Treves (his mother); his destination: New York City; his expected duration of stay: permanent; his height: 5′ 5″; complexion: natural; hair: brown; distinguishing marks: none. The manifest further attests that your future father was born on January 29, 1912; that he was able to read and write; that his passage was being paid for by himself; that he was in possession of over $50; that he had never been in the United States before; that he would not be joining any relative or friend; that he’d never been in prison or an almshouse; that he was not a Polygamist or an Anarchist; that he was not crippled or deformed; and that had not come to labor in the United States by reason of any offer, solicitation, promise, or agreement, express or implied.13

  Our father was 5′ 7″.

  From the Rex’s deck rail, like so many before him, your future-father was awestruck by the Manhattan cityscape, a forest of art-deco skyscrapers stretching infinitely upward toward some unspecified glorious ideal. How beautiful the city of New York looked to him then, and how disappointed he would be to discover, after passing through Ellis Island, that contrary to his fantasies the streets of America, or anyhow of New York City, were paved “not with gold, but with uneven, potholed layers of garbage-strewn cobblestones and asphalt, with dirty newspapers and coffee cups blowing everywhere.”

  His first U.S. address was a few blocks east of Columbia University, in a residence called Warren Hall, whose occupants spent their free time sitting in chairs on the roof, filling the air with intellectual talk and aromatic smoke from their pipes. This is the scene that with minor variations would recreate itself for you in a dream that you had about your father not long after his death (though in the dream he’s smoking a cigarette, not a pipe, and he’s alone. But he’s on a rooftop in a city, and young).

  From New York your future-father moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he bought his first American car, a ’29 Ford convertible with a droll rumble seat. From 1935 to 1936 he attended the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard Graduate School. When not engaged in his research he’d borrow a wherry (wider than a racing skull, with a sliding seat for fast rowing) from the boating club. When the Charles River froze over in winter, he skated on it.

  In the summer of 1936, offered a well-paying job with RCA, Paolo Senigaglia quit Harvard and moved from Cambridge to East Orange, New Jersey, near Edison’s laboratory. He rented a corner room in a gabled Victorian house on Prospect Street. He loved the New Jersey suburbs, with their big trees and green, sloping lawns.14

  For the rest of his life, people called my father “Doctor Selgin.” And though he scoffed at the honorific, he never contradicted them or denied having a Harvard PhD. He never completed his dissertation and graduated with a Master’s of Science degree in applied engineering.

  The RCA job was his first salaried position. So alien was the concept of a paycheck to your future-father, it would have slipped his mind completely had a fellow employee not instructed him to report to the payroll window.

  He worked – not very hard – in a quality-control laboratory. His supervisor was a woman with a good sense of humor and the atmosphere was relaxed. Most of the other employees were women, too. When at the end of the workday he watched them stream out of the factory gate, it was, as he put it in a letter to Margaret, his second wife, “quite a show, like a musical, almost, a Hollywood spectacular, unlike anything at an Italian factory gate.” On weekends, in Manasquan near Asbury Park, with some of his coworkers, he swam in the surf, picnicked, and sang Gilbert and Sullivan songs.

  He returned to Italy just long enough to bring his mother back to the States, departing again on the Rex from Naples in February of 1939. Though as it did back in ’35, the Rex’s manifest lists his name as Paolo “Senigaglia” (with the silent second g accidentally omitted but corrected by hand), by then your future father was already using his Anglicized name: Paul Selgin, the new surname his invention of which he was inordinately proud. Not only was “Selgin” unique, unlike the original with its clandestine mute consonant it was – or should have been – easier to pronounce.15

  Or so its inventor assumed, until people kept pronouncing the g hard rather than soft. To remedy this, he took to saying, “Like Elgin, as in Elgin Marbles, but with an s,” thinking – wrongly – that the g in Elgin was soft when it was hard. Then again, no one seemed to know how to pronounce Elgin, as in Elgin Marbles, either. Throughout their lives, along with him, his children would endure hearing their name constantly mispronounced.

  Your future-father’s second time in the United States differed markedly from the first. America was bracing itself for war. An atmosphere of restlessness, restraint, and regulation prevailed. The freedoms he had enjoyed during his first visit were not to be reclaimed. Jobs were scarcer, too. Unable to find work at an electronics firm, he took a job as an instructor at what was then the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn – or Brooklyn Poly, as it was known. While teaching there and living in a dingy basement apartment in Brooklyn Heights, Paul Selgin wrote the series of lectures that would become his first and only published book.16

  Electrical Transmission in Steady State. The lectures were sponsored by the so-called “War Training Program.” Officially known as the “Engineering, Science, and Management War Training” program, or the ESMWT, it was one of the largest, most successful government-sponsored educational programs in U.S. history, second only to the G.I. Bill. From 1942 – 1945 it provided, free of charge, college-level courses to thousands of Americans to help fill civilian technical and scientific positions vacated by the draft.

&nbs
p; In New York City he encountered all kinds of people, not just other engineers, but architects, painters, photographers, and filmmakers. It tickled you to imagine your father in those days, hobnobbing with Greenwich Village bohemians as you would consort with them decades later. You pictured him in an open-necked plaid shirt and beret, a cross between Maynard Krebs and Jon Gnagy.

  All this was before America entered the war. Not long after it did, on a skiing trip to Interlaken in neutral Switzerland, while riding on a ski lift alongside her (so you imagined), your future-father met the Englishwoman named Betty who would become his first wife and with whom he would father your half-sisters, Ann and Clare. Their marriage lasted seven years, its end occasioned by your future-father’s sexual dalliances, his wish to relocate from Fort Wayne, Indiana, to Washington, D.C., and most of all by his insistence that his mother come live with them there.

  Unable to find another well-paying job anywhere on the East Coast, your future-father took another instructorship, this one at Purdue University in Fort Wayne, Indiana. With his mother left behind in the Brooklyn Heights apartment, he and Betty rented a drafty efficiency attached to a farmhouse. When not teaching at Purdue, to keep midwestern boredom at bay, your future-father did pastel sketches of red barns and duck ponds, and wrote the first of his several never-to-be-published science fiction novels.17

  I have three of my father’s sci-fi novels. One, The Twin Planet, depicts an agrarian utopian Earth on which dominant Amazonia women suckle infant-sized males. This from a man who detested his overprotective mother.

  Though he enjoyed certain aspects of it – the big skies, the rolling farmlands, the red dairy barns, the operatic lightning and snowstorms – Paul Selgin wasn’t cut out for the Midwest. He found midwesterners narrow-minded and bland. He longed to return to the East Coast, to engineering and inventing. So when the offer came from the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., to be leader of a team in its Ordnance Development Division, to Betty’s dismay, he jumped on it.

  To his decision to have his mother join them in D.C., Betty responded, “Over my dead body.”

  Your future-father was adamant. Much as he may have resented her, he refused to leave his mother alone in New York. He was, after all, still an Italian son, a mammone. He would not capitulate.

  And so, while your future-father moved to Washington, D.C., with his mother, Betty and his daughters boarded a train bound for New York City. Days after arriving there she filed for a divorce.

  The Bureau’s Ordnance Development Division was charged with developing fuses for munitions – bombs, rockets, and mortar shells. As of that winter of 1943, its focus was the “proximity fuze,” a fuze designed to detonate at the instant when the distance to a target fell short of a pre-determined length, resulting in greater accuracy and far more destruction.18

  Today many consider it one of the most significant technological developments of World War II, bested only by radar and the atomic bomb. No less a figure than General Patton called the new fuze “devastating to the enemy” and credited it with winning the Battle of the Bulge.

  Though the proximity fuze helped the Allies win, and hence shortened, the war, your future-father could not have been pleased with his role in its development. Nor could the war’s end have brought much relief, not after he learned of the annihilation of two Japanese cities by a pair of hydrogen bombs using an analogous detonation technology developed by another team of his division.

  Still, your future-father kept his new job. In fact he was promoted to a higher position, one requiring greater security clearance. And so on the fifth day of February 1946, at the District Court in Brooklyn, New York, pursuant to Petition No. 414545, under the name Paul Joseph Selgin, your future-father became a U.S. citizen. Thus the last trace of Paolo Giuseppe Senigaglia was extinguished.

  All Paul Selgin needed now was a family to carry on his new name.

  WHILE WORKING AT the fuze lab (whose employees, incidentally, were forbidden to utter the word bomb), your future-father met Margaret, the American scientist who would become his second wife. At lunch, while she went about collecting dues for her union, he followed her around, until he screwed up the courage to speak to her. Following an eight-month courtship, he and Margaret married and bought a house together in Bethesda, one with extra rooms they would rent out, plus a spare room for his mother.

  “I was extremely naïve,” Margaret confessed in a letter she wrote you in answer to one you’d sent her. Not only was she completely unaware that her husband was Jewish, it had taken her two years into their marriage to learn that he was Italian.

  “I asked him about his name,” she wrote. “I’d never heard the name Selgin before, so I was curious. Anyway that’s how I found out.”

  It was the Selgin name, ultimately, that ended your future-father’s second marriage. He and Margaret had been vacationing together in Martha’s Vineyard, renting bicycles and staying at a hostel there, when she confessed to him that as a result of an operation she’d had thirty years before she could not have children.

  “Your father about fell apart,” Margaret wrote. “He so wanted a son to carry on that clever name of his that he was so proud of. I wanted that as much for him as he did for himself. That’s why I left him, one of the reasons.”

  “I still remember the day we parted,” Margaret’s letter continues. “He was behind the wheel of his yellow Studebaker. I stood next to the car, saying something about how maybe we should try again. ‘It’s a little late for that, isn’t it?’ he said, and then he drove away just like that. But I knew I’d made the right decision. He wanted a son to carry his name. I knew I couldn’t deprive him of that.”

  That your father had been so eager for a male heir, that he’d taken such pride in his newly minted name, was puzzling to you, who never thought of your father as someone capable of pride, who considered him immune to that sentiment.

  But the pride your future-father took in his name wasn’t patriarchal or paternal. It was an artist’s pride in his creation. He wanted his creation to survive him. He longed for a male heir. He got twice what he’d bargained for.

  While vacationing in Italy, in the small hamlet of Bettola in the outskirts of Piacenza, your future-father met his third and final wife. Giuseppantonia DePoli was in every respect the antithesis of his first two wives. A dark beauty of twenty-six – fifteen years his junior – she spoke not a single word of English. Nor did she display much intellect, though she was witty and bright. He wooed her with his Charles Boyer good looks, his Renaissance genius, his worldly sophistication. Following a yearlong courtship via airmail, he returned to Italy to marry her. A few days after the wedding, he flew her back to the United State. There, nine months later, at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, at two o’clock on the morning of February 15, 1957, she gave birth to a pair of boys.

  With his new wife, your father experienced another emotion of which you had never suspected him: jealousy. At the fancy Washington, D.C., parties, as your father looked on eagerly from across the room, packs of eligible bachelors and perfidious husbands alike were drawn like sharks to chum to Pinuccia Selgin’s dark beauty.

  His jealousy, along with his disgust with the bureau’s bureaucracy and disillusionment with his role in what President Eisenhower dubbed the “Military Industrial Complex,” prompted Paul J. Selgin to resign his position as head of the Electronics Division at the Washington Bureau of Standards, a post to which he had recently been promoted and for which he earned the then princely salary of forty-thousand dollars per year.

  He had de bess job, your mother told you. An you papa, he trow it away – just like dat! – all to keep me away from dose udder men. He was very possessive, you papa.

  Paul Selgin moved his new family to Bethel, a down-at-the-heels former hat-factory town in southwestern Connecticut, a place where his beautiful wife (who hadn’t learned to drive and barely spoke English) was unlikely to encounter eligible males. In the converted barn of a black market far
m there, he embarked on his new career as a freelance inventor.19

  His first big project: the dollar-bill-changing machine for which he wouldn’t “earn a nickel.” The story of the ill-fated “Nomoscope” is told through a series of affidavits and letters to and from attorneys, and is much more complicated than my father’s glum one-line party quip suggests. In 1958, two years after moving to Bethel, through a man by the name of Peter Treves (no relation to my father’s family, I’m told), his patent attorney and business partner, an agreement was reached whereby the technology of my father’s new invention was leased to the American Totalisator Company, which would mass produce and sell it. Within a year of that agreement, suddenly dollar bill changing machines began popping up in train stations and airline terminals across the country – manufactured not by American Totalisator, but by two other firms: Universal Controls, Inc. and National Rejectors, Inc. There followed a rapid series of accusatory letters, claiming that Totalisator had, for a kickback, underhanded the technology to the other firms. To prove it, the machines had to be seized by court order, taken apart and examined by patent investigators. The case dragged on for a half-dozen years, ending with no proof and a settlement of $10,000 – barely enough to cover legal costs for my father and his partner – who, it turned out, had himself for a hefty sum underhanded my father’s invention to those two other companies. By the time he learned this, my father was so fed up with the whole megillah he refused to pursue it any further.

  One day while vacationing in Venice during the summer of 2000, at a café where I’d been doing a watercolor, I met Michael Philip Davis, an opera singer and director, who subsequently invited Paulette and me over to his mother’s palazzo for drinks. His mother, it turned out, was the famous diva Regina Resnik. Her palazzo was on the Giudecca. When we arrived we were shown to the balcony, where two women were seated. One of the women was Valerie Heller, Catch-22 author Joseph Heller’s recent widow; the other introduced herself as Vivian Treves.