Since it was important that Ledocq have the newest gadget, Carter didn’t mention that even his Oakland apartment had been blessed with a new telephone during their eighteen-month absence. “Quite spiffy,” he said, dialing. And then, when the line connected, he said, “Hello, is this the florist? Charles Carter, checking on my order.”
He spoke on the phone for less than a minute, half words of assent, then hung up.
Folding his arms, he said, “Perhaps he isn’t here. I’ve had my sources check every hotel, every boardinghouse, every storage unit, every scientific instruments dealer. He’s not to be found.” He looked up. “But at least no one else has even been looking for him. Harding told me he’d never given up the name to anyone else, and now I believe him. If there are bad men out there, I’m ahead of them.” Carter put his hands into his pockets. Outside, finally, the sound of a foghorn in the night, sweet and lonely. “I’ll find him.”
“What else, Charles?” James looked slightly worried.
“Harding set up a meeting for young Farnsworth. With the only capitalist whose advice he would trust. They’re to meet tomorrow at noon.”
James clapped his hands. “Splendid—you know where he’ll be, and when, so—”
He stopped when he saw his brother rubbing his chin, which stubble had brought to the consistency of sandpaper. “It’s not going to be so easy . . .” Ledocq and James, who were hard to hold captive, hung now on his every word, though he wasn’t exactly enjoying it. “It’s Borax.”
CHAPTER 12
Pem Farnsworth lay next to her husband under the imported cotton sheets of their suite at the Palace, listening to the sounds of late-night traffic outside the open window. The velvet bedspread was in a crumpled heap at the foot of the bed. The air in the room felt heavy with the August humidity, and, Pem thought, there was something about the fog that made the air smell like roses tonight. She had never been so happy in her life.
“Keep talking,” she said.
“I thought I was boring you, Pem.”
“I adore your voice, husband.”
“Wife.” He kissed her and they called each other “husband” and “wife” several more times. They had been married four days before in Provo, Utah.
“Okay.” His left arm was around her shoulders, and with his right arm he gestured. “What you see when you look around in the dark, those are called retinal flashes.”
“They look like little fireflies.”
“It’s got to do with the rods and cones,” and as she listened, she stopped paying attention to what exactly he was saying, but his passion pleased her. She could just barely make out, in the dark, his Adam’s apple rising and falling, and she conjured up in her mind his skinny arms and legs, how they looked almost hairless, how she could only feel the blond hair there but not see it, and how quickly his brain worked, so quickly she thought steam might funnel out of his ears. On the train to San Francisco from Provo, he’d made sketches of devices called “captive balloons” that he said would soon float a hundred miles over the earth and replace telegraph wires.
“I just know,” she finally murmured, when he had finished, “that when I looked up in the dark, I saw all those little flashes, and I thought they were mine. They were a private show just for me.”
“I like that. I love that.” And a moment later he propped his head up on his fist and turned on the bright bedside lamp.
“And I want to stop time,” she said. He laughed, for they’d had this conversation often. She was so happy she wanted to make time freeze, and the first time she said it, he’d given her the whole relativistic lecture on the possibilities of altering time’s path, only stopping when he realized what she actually meant, and now it was one of their jokes.
“Honey, if that’s what you want to do, I’ll build you something,” was his response now.
“Make it something that goes with my bob,” she said.
He touched her cheek. “I wanted to see your face when I told you this.” He had blond, unruly hair, light grey eyes, a pork chop of a nose. They had met two years ago in sophomore chemistry—she was taking it, and even though Philo was only fifteen then, he was teaching it. Back then, his parents wouldn’t let them meet after school because Philo had chores. So he stayed up all night, three nights in a row, and built a motor for an automatic clothes washer and a vacuum-sealed pump that milked the cows twice as quickly. For a week, he and Pem held hands and talked, but then a load of laundry caught fire, and Philo had to do the wash by hand again. But now he was older: seventeen. His voice still broke when he was excited. They were so young they couldn’t even register for their room at the Palace—they’d had to sign in with a notarized permission from her mother, and even then the hotel had them registered under her folks’ names. “Are you enjoying your honeymoon?”
“Oh, Phil, of course. This is so wonderful.”
“Would you like Paris, France, better? Or London?”
She laughed, touching his face. “This is just swell. We don’t have the money to go those places.”
“Actually, Pem, to tell you the truth, we don’t have the money for this place either.”
“What do you mean?” Her voice dropped. “You didn’t get the money from your parents, did you?”
“Oh, gosh, no! I wouldn’t do anything to upset you. We’re a little leveraged, to tell the truth. I just figured there might be more investors in San Francisco, so I picked San Francisco. But, heck, if you’d wanted to go to Paris, we could have gone there instead.”
Pem sat up in bed, drawing the sheets around her. She and Philo had never argued, and she didn’t want to start now, but something in his tone troubled her. “What investors? For what?”
He did not answer immediately. Philo had a way of being crafty that she was still getting used to. Sightseeing in San Francisco, they had been suckered once for three dollars, but Philo hadn’t let it happen again. They even had a joke about how he learned so quickly: “You can’t fool me twice. I haven’t seen the world, but I have been to Boise.”
Philo left the bed and took a key off of his dressing table. “I’ll show you.” He extended his hand. “You’ll like this.”
Pem put her bare feet to the floor. “Where are we going?”
“You don’t need your robe, honey. It’s just in the other room of the suite.”
“I didn’t know we had the other room, too.”
“Well, that’s the least of the surprises. Come on. Don’t be bashful.”
Pem had wondered if she would be able to simply walk around naked with a man in the room. And days into their marriage, she felt as comfortable with Philo as she did alone. Tonight she still hesitated as Philo put a protective arm around her, unlocked the door, and walked her into the next room, which was dark.
He whispered. “You know, there’s another woman in my life.”
Her jaw tightened. When she was able to breathe again, she would sock him in the mouth.
“And I’d like you to meet her.” He flicked on a small light and she saw the room was overrun with his laboratory equipment.
“Oh.” She put her hands to her sides. “An invention.”
“Yeah, honey. Oh, you didn’t think—” He looked at her wide-eyed. “Honey! Golly!”
Amazed by the equipment, but still feeling a little angry, she settled for saying, “Philo, you have to learn to express yourself better.”
“Oh, honey!” He kissed her. “Don’t be mad. I shipped it all out from Salt Lake.” He threw the sheets off of stacks of condensers and transmitters, and started flicking switches and connecting ground wires. As he talked, his voice rose until it cracked. “I never told anyone exactly what all this stuff could do if I got it right, except poor President Harding, and now you, of course, and I decided I wouldn’t tell you till I had to. It’s kind of embarrassing to be tinkering all the time when you don’t have anything to show for it, and, well, maybe now I can show you a little something. Cover yourself up for a second, honey.” Philo pull
ed back the curtains and connected a couple of wires. “And I figure I should show you now since I’ve got some big plans to show this off,” he added. “Okay. Stand right here.” He put both hands square on her shoulders and faced her toward a cherry wood cabinet that was about four feet tall. Inset toward the top was a perfectly round, milk-colored, four-inch piece of glass that looked like a dinner plate.
“What is it?”
“You’ll see.” Philo stood behind her, arms around her shoulders, and he handed her a long cord that had a switch mounted at the end. “Whenever you’re ready, flick the switch from off to on.”
Pem looked up at him, and when he nodded, she looked back at the box. She flicked the switch. At once, a humming sound came from the equipment around her. A spark flew from one connection to another, and she jumped, but Philo held her tight. “Look straight ahead.”
The glass glowed, changing from a milky white to an electric blue, a dozen parallel strands of electric blue with thin royal blue strips between. She heard the sound of hoofbeats.
“What’s that?”
“Mmm. Sounds like a horse to me, Pem. Look.”
The strips of blue were beginning to refract and pull into—Pem gasped—the image of a man on horseback. Galloping. She could see the horse’s hooves moving, the rider’s arms holding the reins rising and falling. Philo was explaining—this was kind of a cheat, it wasn’t really what he had in mind, but it was okay for now, a six-second loop, the sound wasn’t really hooves, a simulation made with something or other—Pem stood amazed. It looked like having your own piece of the world under glass. For a long moment, Philo and Pem Farnsworth held each other. Their bodies were bathed in the blue light of the screen.
“Pem, I’d like you to meet television.”
CHAPTER 13
Carter awoke just before dawn Wednesday. To his surprise, he was curled up under a blanket on James’s couch; his dreams had all been set in Oakland.
Even when Ledocq said “television” aloud, James looked at him blankly, as well he should, for only a handful of people, engineers mostly, had heard of it. Radio with pictures, Ledocq had explained, like listening to the Leonard fight—only being able to see it, too, he said, eyes almost popping. Like having your own movie palace in your living room, only with sound. He dug through a stack of journals, eventually finding a couple of highly technical articles he’d seen years ago, first theoretical discussions by brilliant men about the possibilities of transmitting moving pictures through the ether, followed by crackpot experiments that never went anywhere. Mechanical television—shining a light through a spinning disk—had been attempted in England, but the image, about as precise as hand shadows, was never sharp enough to be exciting. What Farnsworth was thinking, it wasn’t just innovative, it was a revolution. Electronic television, it was crazy, no one had ever considered it. But the plans just might work.
This was too theoretical for the Carter brothers, so Ledocq brought out his radio and put a fishbowl on top of it, and started swapping in and out photographs, wriggling them. In went Helen Willis, tennis racket aloft. “You see? You might watch Forest Hills, and not only could you see the players, but you could hear them, too, and when you get bored”—out came Helen Willis, in went Leopold Stokowski—“you can watch the symphony, and hear it, too.”
“Yes,” James sighed. “Yes, you can hear them, too, and you can’t hear movies, that’s true, you’ve mentioned that.”
“And it’s not on film—the audience would be experiencing all of this while it was happening. They would feel like spectators, just like being there, without the artificial nature that film has, no editing, no schmaltz, just real life. It’s fantastic, I tell you boys.” He seemed positively giddy.
Carter in the meantime had located a supply of photographs and amused himself with popping them into the fishbowl randomly. “Can they see, too, then?”
Ledocq squinted. “Pardon?”
He reddened, as he wondered if the question were foolish. “If I’m looking at Pola Negri through this, and she’s . . . well, can she see me in return?”
“No,” Ledocq said, but then continued, “no? You’d need . . . well, I think—”
“Ledocq,” James said, “please build my brother a device through which he can watch Pola Negri without her seeing him. You do that, and I guarantee you a fortune.”
This degenerated into teasing, and trying to imagine all the events one might watch (“and hear,” Ledocq kept adding) on the television: political debates, artists at work, theatrical productions, perhaps one could follow Treasury agents on their beat—the concepts were stunning. But as his brother and Ledocq continued to punctuate the discussion with new ideas, Carter was increasingly quiet, wondering how to use this odd little device on his stage. His instincts told him that as he’d suspected all along, television was magic.
So Carter had lain down on James’s couch that night to return to scheming about Mr. Philo Farnsworth. How to approach him, and what sort might he be, and was he the sort to license his invention to a magician? Carter had specific plans that went vague in places, so thinking about them late at night had left him nervous. Around 2 A.M., he began flipping through the latest several numbers of the Sphinx—never a good idea for relaxing, as the gossip columns usually detailed who was ahead of him, and who was fast approaching from below.
He had read cautiously this time, assuring himself no one else had television. Augustus Rapp had contributed more atrocious patter. The Society of American Magicians Golden Gate assembly had met in a waffle house and afterward, “dancing was attempted.” Page ten was a full-page advertisement that had nothing whatever to do with his situation—E. F. Rybolt, a distant acquaintance, was selling off his magical literature library for $10,000. The list of available volumes seemed quite exciting, so Carter thought about writing him, then wondered if he had $10,000 to spare.
He tried to calculate his net worth, so difficult a task he had to close his eyes, which led to various disappointed dreams, and when he awoke, he made coffee and stared out James’s window to watch all the boats on the bay. He had several bank accounts that James had set up, and drafts seemed to go in and out like the tide. During the War, he’d taken over the old Martinka magic shop, but he was hopeless at all the work involved, and he ultimately sold it to Houdini. He still had the Oakland property, the Napa property, and had purchased James’s half of their parents’ old house in Presidio Heights, but what meant the most to him was technically his most worthless holding: his island, Koh Pheung Thawng in the Andaman Sea, a gift from the Siamese King.
There was a photograph, tinted, thirty inches by eight inches, framed on the wall of James’s study. Taken with a military camera that rotated on its axis, the photo depicted a line of tethered animals on the beach: zebras, llamas, horses, even a cat and two dogs (Mooch! Earl! Noodles!) that had performed in a Sells brothers high-wire act. Carter looked up and down the line, mentally adding Tug, who would retire within the year.
At the center of the photograph, waving awkwardly—they had frozen in position for five minutes—were the managers Carter had chosen to rule the roost. Karl and Evelyn Kowaleski. Though they had disappeared after their disastrous vaudeville closure, they’d seen the notice in Billboard, and had sent a short note of condolence when Sarah died. They were cooks at a fraternity in Middletown, Connecticut, but Evelyn wrote that they were rehearsing and, any day now, they would be back in the game.
In the photo, they looked proud and anxious that at any moment someone might take this little paradise away from them. Carter waved “hello” back to them. No matter where he went, there was a small dot in the Andaman Sea where he had made someone happy. It was very hard to rescue people and the older he became, the more impossible it seemed. Today, he was going to find Philo Farnsworth and, if necessary, rescue him.
But now it was time for his morning exercises. He poured milk into a saucepan and set it on the stove on a low flame. Then he took a small wooden chest off a shelf in Ja
mes’s study and returned to the kitchen. With one eye on the milk—it had to warm but not boil—he angled a mirror over the table in the breakfast nook. Removing items from the chest, he arranged and rearranged, until he was satisfied, ten silver dollars, a twenty-dollar gold piece, two decks of cards, three foam balls, three billiard balls, a candle, and a pack of cigarettes.
He took the saucepan off the flame, poured the milk into two bowls, and stirred a few tablespoons of olive oil into each. When he was satisfied with the proportions, he submerged his hands. He flexed them, eyes closed, visualizing his skin becoming more supple and his ulnar, median, and radial nerves more sensitive.
After five minutes soaking, then patting his hands dry on Egyptian cotton, Carter performed the Downs coin roll, right hand first, then left hand, then coins rolling down each hand, fingers tucked in so it looked like the dollars were riding a street carousel. Then fifty French drops with each hand, then pinch drops, then it was an exercise in palming stacks of coins in either hand. He had a small cut on his right forefinger, from Baby’s playful swiping, and it made his finger just stiff enough that the finger palm vanishes from that hand looked mechanical. He tilted the mirror from all angles, to see what an audience stage left, or stage right, would see.
His feelings about close-up magic were especially acute now. If magic were a channel he’d been digging his entire life as a way of linking himself to others, television would infinitely expand it. He could bring images of his hands to the farthest reaches of the house. He imagined the third gallery of a performance, where there was a dirty-collared, cloth-hatted man forever squinting at performers, suddenly able to see every flourish of a coin vanish. The best audience member was one who felt informed and baffled at the same time.
He heard footsteps in the hallway, and looked up. Excellent! Entering the room was Tom Crandall. The moment Tom saw who was sitting at the table, he froze, as if prepared to disbelieve the next ten things out of Charles Carter’s mouth.
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