“I came to New York with nothing,” he told her. “Nothing but a proper education,” he said.
“And the smarts of a villager.” She laughed.
Vladimir looked at her sideways.
But even at nineteen Frances knew that the combination of these two elements nearly always produced a positive reaction. She knew from watching one after the other come over to the neighborhood from the old world that book smarts and a complete disregard of life’s practical difficulties nearly guaranteed immigrant success, the young Russian she now walked beside included. Frances smiled at Vladimir and looked up the river toward where the Terrier and her sister were schtupping in furs and making a life together inside a faux tomb. Behind her, the bridges strung parallel, hooking laces of a corset.
Vladimir, who had just begun working at Westinghouse as a researcher, told Frances how he’d become a scientist. “I intended to be a rabbi, like my father, and yet it was science, not God, that kept me up at night, questioning. Questions I could answer, finite answers soothed me in a way that God could not,” he said. “The questions of faith can never be truly answered. Does that make sense to you?”
Frances, whose thoughts of God had once given her the comfort that nothing else could, did not say so to Vladimir. He was talking about something different from comfort, she knew, an age-old understanding that Frances realized she herself did not possess. She looked over at Vladimir and smiled, the way she did at the people in the candy store. To each person she nodded her head and encouraged him to tell her all his secrets and lies. They all looked from side to side before they leaned in to tell their stories to Frances.
The warm look seemed to have the same effect on Vladimir. “Normally I don’t talk so much,” he said. “But with you, Frances, I feel very comfortable. Like I am finally living in my skin.” He reached for her hand, and Frances allowed him to take it. She smiled brightly at all the people walking back from Hester Street with their bags of black bread and smoked fish. No one noticed them, so fixated were these pedestrians on getting across the water. No one seemed to be enjoying the journey.
“Tell me more, Vladimir,” she said, stroking his forearm with her other hand.
“Well, I must say, and I have never said so out loud, that I felt burdened by my Hebrew studies. When I looked at the world on a, well, a molecular level, I suppose, it elevated me.”
Frances nodded encouragingly. Go on, her eyes told him.
“It was for me the way I imagine my father felt when he prayed to God. Kind of how I feel looking at you.” Vladimir laughed. “It is amazing. I have never met anyone comfortable in two worlds—the old one and the new. It is a gift, you know,” he said.
Frances’s heart soared. It was the first time since her father had died that it did not feel caught on something sharp, about to rip open.
“Thank you,” she said.
By the time they stepped off the bridge, South Fifth Street behind them, a memory of dusty stoops and smoke and disappointed women looking over to their bowed husbands, Frances had fallen madly in love with Vladimir Zworykin.
And, despite her youth, her hairy chin, and her burgeoning bottom—or perhaps in part because of these things—Vladimir also fell in love with Frances. Every Tuesday and Thursday after work, he came all the way from New Jersey, where he worked, for Frances. He would walk into the candy store and, for a moment, watch her making people feel at ease. “Sid,” she’d say in Yiddish, both hands over the man’s bony one, “just think for a minute what you’d like to say. We’re in no hurry here,” she’d tell him, leaning back in her wobbly chair. Vladimir would rest against the counter sipping seltzer, browsing the Red Gazette from Moscow, and watch Etta torment her customers as he waited for Frances to walk with him through the neighborhood and back to her stoop. There they talked well into the evening together.
Rose knew exactly what was coming. “You’re going to leave me too?” she asked Frances each night after Vladimir left for his flat on Hester Street.
“No, Mama,” Frances said, watching her mother scrub the linens until her hands were raw. But Frances knew that one day, if not this day with this man, it would be true.
Four years after Pauline fled her family with the no-good gangster, much to her mother’s consternation and terrible bouts of late-night cleaning, young Frances Gold married Vladimir Zworykin on a snowy February day at City Hall. As she said, “I do,” clutching the daisies Vladimir had bought from a cart on Hester Street, Frances watched the huge flakes of snow clinging to the leafless tree boughs that scraped against the windows.
So caught up was Frances in marrying Vladimir, she did not realize what a civil ceremony would mean. What, no breaking of the glass? She silently panicked when the brief ceremony was over. How will we know the fragility of all things? How will we know to preserve our marriage and that, like all beautiful breakable things, marriage is an irrevocable act?
And then Frances panicked out loud. “No Ketubah!” she said.
“Frances, we have a wedding license. Who needs a Ketubah? My goodness, do you think I’m going to collect a dowry? This is the twentieth century. All we need to be is legal,” her new husband said.
Frances was silent but not in agreement. She remembered her parents’ Ketubah, hidden away in the back of a closet, the one place her mother never seemed to clean. It was written in Aramaic, and it had these beautiful, detailed paper cuttings in blue and green. “Well, how could we not stand beneath a chuppa!” She grabbed Vladimir’s arm. Frances was not a girl who’d had the luxury to spend her childhood dreaming of her wedding, and so she had not known until it had come and gone—so quickly!—what she might have liked it to have been. “Our life together will be without a solid foundation!” Her nails dug into Vladimir’s wool peacoat.
Vladimir kissed his new wife, and she kept her eyes open, watching as the snowflakes clung to his black eyelashes. “To that, I believe I have a solution,” he told her. He took Frances’s hand and guided her away from City Hall.
“Where are we going?” she asked him, the two of them trudging through snow, Frances still grasping her bouquet, the red ribbon that held the daisies together a slash of vibrant color in the white day.
Vladimir was silent, and Frances let him take her, looking back at the hushed city as they stepped onto the walkway of the Brooklyn Bridge. They walked without speaking, snow falling lightly around them, gathering in slow, quiet heaps. When they got to the center of the bridge, Vladimir stopped.
“Look, my dear!” He gazed up, blinking away snowflakes.
Frances bent her head back. The way her neck stretched her chin toward the sky, and the view of the overwhelming awnings of the bridge, the massive structure climbing into the heavens, the falling snow, made her giggle.
Vladimir kissed her eyelashes, laced with snow. “A beautiful structure,” he said. “See? The perfect foundation!”
She threw her arms around her new husband. “Not exactly a chuppa climbing with roses,” she said. “But it will do.” Frances walked to the edge of the bridge and threw her bouquet into the East River.
“To science!” she screamed, laughing.
The flowers arced against the gray sky, the red ribbon trailing behind. “For the fishes,” Frances said, returning to her husband’s side, the two walking hand in hand down the incline and back toward Brooklyn to tell her mother their news.
Frances never went back to the candy store, not even to kiss Mr. Berkowitz once on each cheek and tell him, Thank you. Here is where I decided I would be a star. You will hear of me one day.
Frances left her mother’s house for Vladimir’s four-story walk-up on Hester Street. In Manhattan! she told herself, when she tried to kiss her mother good-bye before she turned away. Rose stopped the scrubbing she had begun as soon as Frances told her of the marriage long enough to admonish her in Yiddish: “You are heading backward, my daughter, to the old world.”
The Lower East Side was once the sole neighborhood in the city Frances had
ever been to, and though most people from her neighborhood despised it—the noise and the stink, the only place to get some space to oneself on the rooftops between the sheets pinned to the wash lines—Frances always felt closer to something there. Until she’d gone to Grand Central Terminal on her way to visit Pauline, this was what the city was to her. Carts lining Hester Street at the Khazar market—barrel pickles, herring, fruits, and also men’s work pants and shoes. Women pointing to chickens, squawking in cages, and the butcher slaughtering them right there, blood running into the street.
But there was also the Forward Building on East Broadway, a testament to thought. And the Garden Cafeteria, where all the intellectuals met to exchange ideas. These were the cultural places that had made her father proud. And somehow Frances felt being in Manhattan brought her far closer to glamour and fame and fortune than the brownstone in the shtetl of South Fifth.
Vladimir did not need to be prompted to ask Rose to come live with them. She laughed at him and adamantly refused. “I am not,” Rose had screamed at Frances and Vladimir in Yiddish, “put on this earth to be your maid!”
Frances shook her head at her mother.
Instead of Rose living with them, Frances went back to South Fifth Street to pay the rent each month and help her mother with the household chores. It made Frances sad to pin the wash to the line—clothes for only one, her mother’s undergarments, the discolored crotches, fluttering in the breeze.
No matter how often she came back to sit by the window and listen to her mother’s ceaseless complaining—now I am alone, all I did for you people and everyone has left me, left me alone, soon I will be forced to take in a boarder!—Frances avoided the candy store. All those stories felt burdensome to her, as if, now that she finally had her own story, those of her neighbors had become less important. Walking down the block, toward her mother’s flat, where she had grown up and watched her sister lean in to the mirror and paint her lips, adjust her hat just so before heading out into the night, where she had watched her father, her hero, fall, Frances would run into her old clients. Sometimes they would smile at each other as they passed on the crowded street, though often the people turned away from Frances, in part from the anger of being abandoned, in part from the shame of having told her too much. Once Betty Shapiro grabbed Frances’s arm on the street. “Where have you gone?” she asked. “Who will pass this on?” she said in Yiddish. Frances tried to ignore Betty’s gnarled finger that pointed at her heart.
“Someone will come.” Frances smiled at Betty.
But really, Frances knew the neighborhood was already changing, and those stories would sit inside Betty Shapiro and all the others, unless they found a different way to tell them. The future was silence, a lip of snow blanketing these streets. And also the future: Frances willed herself not to think of the letters of warning left on the kitchen table that Vladimir received almost weekly now from his school friends, those intellectuals scattered all over Europe like seeds dropped from the mouths of birds, that told how it could turn out to be as bleak as the past.
Meanwhile, Vladimir continued working at Westinghouse, coming home from the office often well past midnight.
“But what are you doing there?” Frances would ask, raising her head from the pillow, her eyes rimmed with red from the exhaustion of trying to stay awake for her new husband. The flat smelled of fried eggs and boiled potatoes.
Sometimes he would make his way through the nest of her tangled hair and settle into a kiss.
“Is it some kind of secret?” she’d ask him as he climbed into bed and brought her close to him.
“No,” he said. “Just complicated.”
On one of these nights, Vladimir arrived home to an especially inconsolable Frances.
“I’m all alone here!” she sobbed when he returned after 1:00 A.M. The day before, her mother had put doubt in Frances. I’ve never heard of working so late into the night. You believe such nonsense? You are crazy! Rose said. Meshuge to believe this. When Frances screamed at her husband, she heard her mother’s voice, as if it had been this voice that had spoken, not her own, and she brought her hand to her mouth, as if to put the sentence back.
“I promise it will be worth it,” Vladimir told her, removing his coat and hat.
Frances held her tongue and did not speak the litany of accusations she had been thinking of the entire evening. A mistress! Already! Gambling! Oh, my God, the Mob has gotten to him! Had these also been her mother’s thoughts? “I don’t believe you,” she said tentatively.
“Okay,” Vladimir said. “Here it is. I am re-creating the human eye.” He traced his thumb over her eyelid as she held her head back languidly.
Frances snapped her head up and looked at him sideways. “Is that code for something? And does it involve a woman?”
“No one but you,” he said, stripping to his underwear and climbing into bed next to her. “There is a tube, a picture tube, and it imitates the condition under which the human eye functions.” Vladimir put his large, dry hands on Frances’s hip. “It can visually record anything.”
“Anything?” Frances smiled, her head on her elbow.
“Anything,” he said. “You are my muse.” He pulled her close.
“What, now you’re a poet?” Frances climbed on top of her husband and leaned back.
“You little beast!” He grabbed her hips with both hands, and she rocked on top of him. Vladimir reached up to touch Frances’s face, her neck, and her breasts. “I can see through you, my beast,” he said, moving his hand across her chest and resting it over her heart. Once Vladimir had worked researching the X-ray, and Frances now imagined herself, a set of stark white bones on black paper, two-dimensional. She crinkled when you shook her. Frances imagined herself discovered.
Here I am, she wanted to tell him, puffing out her chest as if this would give her a third dimension, and get her husband to look closer, not to her heart even but to her soul.
“If only I could bottle up this light that you are, put it in a box,” he said. With a hand on each breast, Vladimir twisted Frances’s nipples. The sensation shot through her, a straight and exacting line of pleasure from her chest to her crotch, everything now connected.
“In every American home.” He laughed. “A little box of you. We’d be rich!”
In that moment, Frances didn’t care when her husband came home as long as he got there. She couldn’t care less that he was owned by a huge corporation and that all his hard work, all those nights he came back to the flat, his body a tight coil held together by a tiny, wound filament, were really gifts to someone else. Frances remembered coming home to her mother and putting her coins in that glass jar. Clink clink clink. Frances thought she would live her entire life just to hear that miraculous stilling of the straw broom on wooden floorboards.
She thought of the time Vladimir had taken her to the theater, how they had sat in those red velvet seats at the St. James, the curtain about to break open. In that moment when the houselights dimmed, she had turned to him and said, One day that’s gonna be me. When the conductor had tapped his stick and the orchestra wound down its tuning, beginning the overture, she had taken her husband’s hand in hers and said, One day. Then Hollywood, she’d thought. California! Palm trees and the Pacific Ocean. She’d thought of herself wading in the sea, a huge hat on her head that she had to hold on to so as not to lose it in the wind.
That night Frances made love to her husband, watching him move beneath her as he explained himself to her. She knew she could never be apart from Vladimir and his lovely, holy science. She knew he could make her a star. In every American home, she thought. I believe, I believe. She leaned down to kiss his face, his shoulders, his taut neck, her love for him then as strong and fortified and necessary as the towering awnings that supported the Brooklyn Bridge.
Vladimir was not lying—he would re-create the human eye, and in so doing would control what the eye would see. In 1929, the year that Frances and Vladimir stood on the Brooklyn B
ridge, Frances throwing her snow-dusted bouquet into the East River, Vladimir invented the Iconoscope, the television camera.
But the Kinescope, Vladimir’s second invention, is the device that, through a directed beam of electrons, translates the pictures it receives into images on the screen. Some say meeting Frances was Vladimir’s destiny, Frances his complete and total inspiration. Would he ever have discovered the Kinescope without Frances Gold? Never.
The electron beam in the Kinescope strikes the back of a phosphor coating, and, for a split second, that charge glows. As Vladimir worked into the night, what he imagined was translating his wife’s very energy and placing it into a confined space where it could be saved and played whenever he liked. I want to capture you, he’d tell Frances. Her warmth, her way with the old neighborhood and the folks of the new world, inspired Vladimir to find a way to bring her into every American home.
The Kinescope was going to be huge, but either Westinghouse, which soon made Vladimir director of research, could not see this, or perhaps, like so many other major corporations, it was, in the end, not big enough to back it alone. It needed investors. And, despite her husband’s wishes to keep what he was doing under wraps, here was where Frances thought she might be able to help him in return.
As enraged as she was at Pauline, for leaving, yes, for abandoning her for a life of things, for not sitting shiva for their father—their father!—Frances had managed to keep positive feelings for her old friend Solomon. She still remembered him the way he was before he became the Terrier, how he would come back to the neighborhood and bring her chocolate-covered cherries. Solomon had given Frances the first pair of shoes that had not been her sister’s hand-me-downs: Mary Janes. The day he brought them, the patent leather shoes refracting light, hooked to the ends of his plump fingers, Franny had done the two-step on her front stoop and imagined she was a beautiful girl at the Ziegfeld, dancing with Eddie Cantor. And riding home with him in his breezer the day she had visited them in Westchester County. Frances was not ashamed to say that it was the first time she had ever felt the wind in her hair.
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