The Inventors

by Peter Selgin

  You watched the video interview again, this time with a notebook and pen in hand. Nowhere in it did the teacher say he was a member of the Seneca Nation. What he says is that his family were descended from the Six Nations of Seneca.

  Also known as the Six Nations of the Grand River or the “Iroquois” Nation or Confederacy, the Six Nations of Seneca was a gathering of six culturally and linguistically similar native tribes that united to promote peace and harmony among themselves.20

  In no special order the six tribes are:

  Mohawk (Kanienkahagen): “The People of the Flint”

  Oneida (Onayotekaono): “The People of the Upright Stone”

  Onondaga (Onundagaono): “The People of the Hills”

  Cayuga (Guyohkohnyoh): “The People of the Great Swamp”

  Seneca (Onondowahgah): “The People of the Great Hill"

  Tuscarora (Ska-Ruh-Reh): “The Shirt-Wearing People”

  The nation’s existence dates back to the fifteenth century, when it occupied vast stretches of what is now New York State west of the Hudson, from the St. Lawrence River all the way down into northwest Pennsylvania. The term Iroquois having derived from a French mispronunciation of a derogatory expression used to describe them by their enemies, the nation’s members prefer to call themselves Haudenosaunee, meaning “The People of the Longhouse,” referring to the very large, very long, single-roomed dwellings erected for meetings and other communal functions.

  Framed with sharp, fire-hardened poles driven close together into the ground, sided with strips of horizontally woven bark, and roofed with leaves and grasses, with flaps of animal hide covering their entryways to preserve warmth, the huts were typically fifteen to thirty feet wide and up to three hundred feet long, and roomy enough to house twenty or more families. They featured centrally located hearths for heating, cooking, and light, with holes above them that let out the smoke (and let in the snow and the rain).

  Apart from the practical purposes they served, the longhouses served an important symbolic function as well. They symbolized the traditions of their society, the nations that had bonded together to form their confederacy, with the Senecas the “Keepers of the Western Door,” and the Mohawks the “Keepers of the Eastern Door,” and the Onondagas the “Keepers of the Central Council Fire and Wampum.” The longhouse was and remains to this day a powerful symbol of these ancient unions, of the members of different tribes coming together in peace and faith for the common good. A place for people who still know how to think and dream.

  That the teacher was not a recognized member of the Seneca Nation of Indians did not preclude his having blood ties to any of the other five Haudenosaunee tribes, though proving this one way or another was impossible, since to your knowledge anyway none of the other tribes kept official records or membership roles.

  Hence to the question: Was the teacher a Native American? you would never get a satisfactory, let alone a conclusive, answer. All you could be sure of was that the teacher had wanted an identity and heritage other than that imposed on him by his immediate background, by the environment of his birth. How strange, you thought, that this man so passionately devoted to helping other people hold onto or regain their cultural identities had been so unwilling to admit to himself or others where he’d really come from and who he really was.

  It was strange, too, that the two men who had meant so much to you – your father and the teacher – both felt the need to break with their pasts and reinvent themselves.

  Hadn’t you done as much? Hadn’t you likewise felt that same need to be someone else, namely someone other than your brother’s twin? Hadn’t you struggled to redefine yourself in the image of some ideal paradigm, the knight-errant in quest of the Holy Grail of an ideal father? Hadn’t all your muddled struggles and wastrel wanderings boiled down to that otiose imperative? Were you not still, as a middle-aged man, conflicted regarding the sources of your own identity, wondering who your father – or fathers – were?

  You lived, you loved, you had good friends and a good wife, a home and a career – all the trappings, in short, of a self-actualized existence, of a successful life. Yet under it all was the feeling that something wasn’t quite right, that you’d never really grown, that the house of your self had been erected on a foundation of quicksand, or none at all. Not that you didn’t know who you were, exactly, but that you doubted it.

  Were you not still searching for that Holy Grail? Were you not, in other words, still searching for your god?

  Aren’t we all, always, by some means or other, searching for our inventors?

  * * *

  THERE WAS ONE OTHER PERSON YOU WANTED TO INTERVIEW. You phoned your mother.

  Oh, he was omosessual, she said.

  How do you know?

  Because – he tell me!

  Why would he tell you that?

  I ask him. Dat time when he come for Christmas. After you go to bed, I ask. I say I like you very much, but is someting I need to ask you, an please no get mad at me. Dat when I ask him and when he tell me.

  He said he was gay?

  Your mother made a tsking sound. He no say gay, Peter!

  What did he say?

  I ask him are you omosessual an e say yes, Pinuccia. I say to eem I no give a goop if you omosessual. I know you a good man, I tell him, but I Peter mudder an I swear on god if you put a finger on my son I keel you.

  Before getting off the phone with her you had one more question for your mother.

  Does the name Bernice Mundt mean anything to you?

  Who?

  She came to Papa’s funeral service. A German woman. Bernice. Beh-reh-nee-chay.

  Ma va! Quella stronzo! She had de nerve to come to his funeral!

  She told me Papa was Jewish.

  Silence at your mother’s end of the line.

  Who is – or was – she?

  One of you fadder girl friend. You know you Papa. My first date in America he take me to dinner at de home of one of his girlfriend. She made chicken tetrazzini.

  That was Berenice?

  No, she was a different one. She live in New York. He go to see her when he went der. I knew all about. I no stoopid. She call him all de time at de house. I always knew was her; I could tell by de way he talk. One day she call and I answer. She say, “Who are you?” I say, “If you so interested in my husband, go ahead, you can have him. I’m ready to divorce him.” Den I trow down de phone. Per l’amor di dio. After dat she never call again. I can’t believe she come to his funeral! Cretino!

  Then, after a pause: Was good looking?

  Nothing like you. She was German.

  Figurati. He always like de German one. Probably a furbacchiona. Papa like brain more den body. Why he marry me I never know.

  Did you know Papa was Jewish?

  No when I agree to marry him.

  But you did know – eventually?

  When I marry his cousin.

  You married Papa’s cousin?

  You fadder couldn’t come to Italy. He couldn’t leave his work, so to make thing go faster I marry his cousin by proxy. Later he come to Italy an we get marry by de church. By den I knew was Jewish.

  How did you know?

  Because his cousin look Jewish. But by den was too late.

  You’d have changed your mind because he was Jewish?

  Dey took everything from us. During the war. Dey gave my father forty-eight hour to leave Africa. Because he was antifascist. He had to sell everything. Two Jewish men dey buy everything. In the beginning dey pay every month, but when the English take over dey stop. My family never see another penny. After the war my fadder try to find them, to get our money. Even Interpol could no find them. I still remember der name, Piccolo an Letizia. From den on I no like Jewish people.

  Mom, don’t say that!

  Why no?

  Because – it’s terrible!

  What can I say? Was a disaster.

  For all you know those two men were exterminated! They probably ended up
in a concentration camp. No wonder Interpol couldn’t find them!

  I was tirteen. You no forget ting dat happen when you tirteen.

  So you knew all along about Papa?

  I knew.

  Why didn’t you tell us?

  I try to keep secret. I no want you and George to know.

  Why not?

  I no want you to be Jewish!

  * * *

  IN THE FUTURE OF NOSTALGIA, SVETLANA BOYM DEFINES nostalgia as “a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed.” She distinguishes between two types of nostalgia: restorative and reflective. Reflective nostalgia thrives on the wistful longing for the past itself rather than on its attainment or recreation. Restorative nostalgia goes beyond mere longing to attempt an actual reconstruction of a lost, non-existent past.

  “Reflective nostalgia,” writes Boym, “dwells on the ambivalences of human longing.” It cherishes the details of memory rather than its symbols. In so doing it calls into doubt any absolute truth about the past, leaving room for poetry, irony, and humor.

  Restorative nostalgia, on the other hand, supports and protects an absolute utopian ideal of the past. “It takes itself dead seriously,” Boym writes. According to Boym the restorative nostalgic knows two main plots: “the return to origins and the conspiracy.” He seeks to turn history into a private or collective mythology.

  * * *

  THREE YEARS AFTER THE TEACHER’S DEATH YOU FOUND this newspaper item posted online:

  UNIVERSITY OPENS

  AMERICAN INDIAN LONGHOUSE

  ————, Oregon (AP), 2009. Two years after the death of the professor who conceived it, ———— has opened an American Indian longhouse, a community center traditional to many Native American peoples in the Pacific Northwest and around the country.

  The 3,000-square-foot building stands as a symbol of two generations of effort, project leaders said.

  “I can’t help but be overwhelmed just to see the structure, to see all the new faces and all the old faces,” said one recent doctoral graduate who was among those who helped see the longhouse project to completion.

  “It’s a place where people will achieve their academic dreams but also a place where spirit and community reside,” the recent graduate said. “There’s no limit to what can take place here.”

  The project is part of a program initiated under the former professor for whom a community of kindred souls had been a long-time dream.

  The professor died in 2006.

  American Indians remain the smallest ethnic minority and have the lowest college attendance rate of any racial group in the country.

  Opening ceremonies for the Many Nations Longhouse included remarks from tribal elders as well as testimonials in honor of the project’s originator. More events are planned for the building’s inaugural year.

  Castalia, the teacher’s dream of a special community where scholars, teachers, and artists, people who still know how to think and dream, would come together, the dream that had been your dream too, had at long last come true.

  Why do I write? To get out of hell.

  ARTAUD

  * * *

  LET’S SAY THAT AT THE “TENDER AGE” OF THIRTEEN I was seduced into an inappropriate relationship with the compassionate, complicated, lonely and confused man who was my eighth-grade English teacher. If so, that seduction was mutual. After all, I was its instigator.

  Yes, yes: I know: I was a boy and he was a grown man. Though it may have been mutual, the relationship was hardly equal.

  Equal or not, my seductive skills were not something to be sneezed at. Still it was up to the teacher – the adult – to resist them.

  In that case let’s just agree that he had his work cut out for him.

  * * *

  INTERESTING HOW LIKE CERTAIN TWINS THE TEACHER and my father mirror each other, with each having tried to redefine himself while escaping his past, but in opposite (and apposite) ways. For the teacher, the means to escape his immediate and embarrassing past was to embrace another past, one beyond the grasp of memory – a distant tribal heritage to which he made dubious if heartfelt claim. Whereas, regarding his past, my father adopted a scorched-earth policy, destroying anything that might have been useful to the enemy, the enemy being history, or rather the history imposed upon him by blood. Where the teacher chose to reconnect with what he believed to be his ancestral tribe, my father wanted no part of tribes of any kind, his own or anyone else’s.

  The teacher’s Castalia, his longhouse, was a communal structure, a place of sharing and learning, of diverse peoples and nations coming together as one. My father’s Castalia – his paradise – was the rat-infested, rotted-floored Building in which he labored in blissful, fart-and-orange-rind-scented solitude, on his inventions.

  * * *

  I DREAM OF MY FATHER.

  In the dream he sits smoking on the rooftop of a building. He looks about twenty-five and wears a white T-shirt. The building is a brownstone of the kind seen in Brooklyn or Hoboken. That’s it, that’s the whole dream. He just sits there, the man who will one day be my father, looking young and smoking. Out of such delicate dreams is the myth of my father constructed.

  FOURTEEN YEARS HAVE passed since my father died. Now I’m a father myself. Audrey has just turned five.

  On our visits together, Audrey and I have our rituals. When it’s time for us to brush our teeth, we do it together, she with her baby toothbrush, I with my electric Braun. We stand facing each other in front of the bathroom sink, each with a hand on the counter, crossing our legs, she with left crossed over right, mine crossed the opposite way.

  In other ways, too, Audrey and I mirror each other. She has my eyes – large, dark, round – and my mouth and stubby fingers. Her stubbornness, her cheeky humor, her rebellious insistence on having things her way – all these qualities reflect me, as I reflected the same qualities in my father and in the teacher.

  Though written to my past self, really this book and its memories are for her. Until someone takes them from her, she’ll carry these memories with her into the future. She’ll be their custodian, the torchbearer of her father’s myth, the exponent of this inventor and his inventions.

  Dear beloved daughter, may this book be the bridge between my past and your future. May it help you invent your own memories, your own myths, your own dreams and desires.

  May it help you invent yourself.

  Afterword

  George Selgin

  “I’D LIKE YOU TO WRITE AN AFTERWORD FOR THE INVENTORS.”

  You want me to do what?

  “Write an afterword. You know, like an introduction, but at the end of the book.”

  I know what an afterword is. But why are you asking me? Who cares what I have to say about your book? Why not get someone famous to write it? No one is going to read your book because your brother says something nice about it. You might as well ask Mom to write something. Seriously. Ask your publisher.

  “Actually, she’s the one who suggested having you do it.”

  Then you have a crazy publisher.

  “Actually, she seems very reasonable. And she knows what she’s doing.”

  Let’s hope so. But suppose I do write it. What do you expect me to say? If you think I’m going to tell everyone that it’s all true, you can forget it. Remember how you asked me if I minded your including that crap about the fountain pen in your book of short stories? The one that got the whatchyamacallit prize? What was I supposed to do, tell you not to publish the damn thing so the world wouldn’t think I was a big jerk? So I said go ahead, but how about writing something nice about me to make up for it? And you said you would. Remember? Well instead you’ve gone and repeated that same bullshit story again! So if you’re thinking you can get me to swear it’s all true you’ve got another…

  “You don’t have to say that the book is true. You can say whatever you want.”

  Do you really mean that?

  “I do.”

  Ok
ay, Peter. In that case, I’ll do it. But I hope you know what you’re doing.

  * * *

  LET ME SET the record straight. Back in the summer of ’78, I wasn’t getting a degree from Auburn University. I was only there to take a few summer classes. And I lived in an apartment, not a “dorm.” Finally, although my brother visited me, I did not send him packing for stealing a fountain pen from my “collection.”

  First of all, I don’t like fountain pens. They leak. And the nibs scratch the paper. Anyway, I never used them. And I certainly never collected them. When Peter and I were just twenty-one, I was in no position to collect anything. I had no money. My apartment in Auburn was barely big enough for the palmetto bugs I had to share it with. I lived on peanut butter sandwiches and, when I was feeling health-conscious, on raw broccoli dipped in Gulden’s mustard. (Like Wagner’s music, it’s better than it sounds.) Although I was into bike racing – I spent my weekends that summer training or racing with Alabama’s road-racing champ – I couldn’t afford new tubular tires and had to patch and resew my flats. In short, if I had one of anything, I considered myself lucky. If Peter stole any sort of pen from me, it was almost certainly the only decent pen that I owned.

  Would Peter have been capable of stealing his twin brother’s only pen? You bet! If anything, he was even poorer than me, and he couldn’t go a minute without scribbling something in his big journal. But if he did, I don’t remember. Nor do I remember having an argument with him, or telling him to get lost. I have a lousy memory, so it’s possible these things all happened. But I’m sure there was no fountain pen.

  I’m also pretty certain that I never called Peter a “libertine.” How come? Because even in 1978 I knew that “libertine” wasn’t a word one used to describe a pen thief. So I wouldn’t have called Peter a libertine. If I called him anything, chances are I called him an asshole. I called him that all the time. I still call him that sometimes.

  So much for the fountain-pen story. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg – the George of The Inventors differs from the one I happen to be familiar with in lots of other ways. I’m telling you so not because you should care what I was or wasn’t like but because this is one subject of The Inventors concerning which I can claim to be something of an authority. The George I recall was not especially fond of hot fudge sundaes (at Friendly’s, he preferred the mint chocolate-chip ice cream, two scoops, best enjoyed while Peter and the other suckers were cramming for some test). He never earned a master’s degree, from Duke or from anywhere else. Nor did he ever rig up a Bunsen burner to make it spew water, though he certainly would have done that had it been possible. His father never made him vomit, in a Chinese restaurant or anywhere else (though his mother did, once, by insisting that he finish his broccoli). And his sadistic ex-Navy SEAL scuba-diving instructor forced him to breathe, not from a valve-less tank – which was impossible – but from a regulator-less tank – which was possible, but only by breathing water along with one’s air. Finally, the George I know did not lose his vir –