“Something else,” said Mr. Barry. “As you know, I was an engineer, and as an engineer, I tried to nurture in my son an interest in the sciences. Well, we subscribed to a few magazines that I felt were useful to this effect, such as Popular Mechanics, which is very well known, and Science & Mechanics, which is less well known but in many ways superior, and it was from one of these that we got the idea to build our own telescope, which you could do from a kit—and then, when we had done one of these, which was just a rudimentary matter of assembling parts, we got more ambitious and embarked on a mission to build a fairly sophisticated and powerful telescope on our own, or, should I say, John William got ambitious. He used to take the bus downtown to the Seattle Public Library on Saturday mornings to do his research, and he brought home from there copies he’d made of pages from articles in, I don’t suppose you’ve heard of it, Popular Astronomy magazine, to which, by the way, I got him a subscription for his thirteenth birthday; it’s now defunct. ‘The Poor Man’s Telescope’—that was the article that intrigued him so and got him started, because it detailed how an amateur telescope buff had made a concave mirror, at home, in his workshop—good, hard information on how to make a very sophisticated mirror, one that could see into space. John William brought back from the library a book called, I think, The Amateur’s Telescope, a title of that nature, by a Reverend Ellison, that I do remember—sometimes it’s the title and sometimes it’s the author—who we subsequently discovered was the director of the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland, and also an expert in the making of telescope mirrors. It evolved that John William, age thirteen, had convinced the Seattle Public Library to order this book from a library in London—at age thirteen.
“But I would have to say that his primary source of information was simply Scientific American magazine. Scientific American had undertaken to popularize the hobby of amateur telescope-making. They had an ongoing series, so there was plenty of information there, a lot of technical data and food for thought, which John William imbibed. What amazed me most was that my son was not daunted. Telescope-making is a scientific hobby—it isn’t just building soapbox cars or putting together a go-cart. You don’t have to be an Einstein, but you do need better-than-average intelligence, an innate grasp of the principles of physics, considerable patience, a lot of determination—what I would call ‘grit’—and, finally, some handiness, which, by the way, I did not have—I wasn’t good with tools—but John William did. That boy liked to tinker. He liked to look at things closely. He wasn’t turned aside when success required a diligent effort and very fine tolerances. In glass work, flaws are magnified. With the lens of a telescope, you need to work within a millionth of an inch of perfect. So you had better be motivated, and John William was. He spent a lot of late nights on his telescope project. Why was that? is an excellent question. You know, I think astronomy and astrophysics are among the more romantic of the sciences. Deep space and the mysteries of the universe—they’re pretty intoxicating. It was just the same thing with me and flight. I used to marvel as a young man at the sight of an airplane. How did an object of that size and weight get off the ground? It seemed impossible, and the impossibility of it, going higher, bigger, faster, the more impossible the better, the more they said it couldn’t be done—all that intrigued me. So this is something I know a little about—how the scientific inquiry can dominate a young person and start him on an exhilarating journey.”
Mr. Barry paused. He seemed aware, suddenly, that his glowing report on his son’s youth was at odds with the fact that John William had grown up to live—and die—in the woods. But his hiatus was only a hiatus, not a transition. His tone remained celebratory. “John William cut his teeth on a six-inch ’scope,” he said, “made his errors, learned from them, and then went on to a twelve-inch project. He did both without dimensioned drawings or hard specs, although I did help out with a lot of preliminary calculations, and I walked him through some models. This was hard stuff—a lot of advanced algebra and work with parabolas and conic sections. The theory of the mirror, its mathematical basis—this isn’t a business for just any thirteen-year-old. But he had a high IQ and that intensity I mentioned. He understood what it took. He was willing to do all the grinding and polishing. He was patient in working with carborundum—something I found laborious. You know, it was impressive, but again, I see now, over the top. Because he was too much the boy wonder, too much the young genius—and I didn’t see, and neither did Ginnie, how this might have what you would call a dark side.” Mr. Barry stopped again, poised over the phrase “dark side,” which momentarily stilled the hand at his tie. “I remember once, around two a.m.,” he said, “I got up to do something or other and I could see that there was a light on in the basement. Two a.m. The house was cold. I went down the stairs, and there was John William kneeling on the floor, and he was busy with something called the Foucault knife-edge test, which is a way of determining if a mirror is spherical. A lot of people know about Foucault’s pendulum but not about Foucault’s knife-edge test. This is the French physicist who is justly famous for demonstrating the rotation of the earth on its axis, but what people forget is that Foucault was avidly interested in light—light, more than gyroscopes and pendulums, intrigued him. And his knife-edge test is truly ingenious. You can use it to measure the smallest mirror imperfections, but all you need is a light and a razor blade. Of course, Foucault would have used a kerosene lantern, but John William was using an electric lamp. So the basement was dark except for this one light source. John William had devised a sort of chimney from a loose piece of tin, and since the lamp was shrouded in this sleeve, I guess is the word, not chimney, the light in the room was dampered, muted. With the exception being a tiny pinhole my son had made with a sewing needle. The light emerging from this hole was considerable, and it was aimed at John William’s mirror-in-progress, a mirror he’d been grinding and polishing for a week. John William was kneeling, as I’ve told you, and he was using the razor blade, which he’d mounted on a popsicle stick, to act as a line cutting through…it’s hard to follow, this business. Hard to describe. And I suppose the science doesn’t really matter right now—but believe me, Mr. Foucault knew what he was doing. And so did John William. ‘It’s two o’clock in the morning,’ I said. ‘You have school tomorrow.’ And so forth. And what he said to me in response was strange. For a thirteen-year-old. Who you think would worry about getting in trouble or being disciplined by his father. He said, ‘I’m going to stay up and do this. This is what I want to be doing. School is a waste of time. Most of what other people think is a good way to spend your time is a waste of time from my perspective. Other people can do whatever they want. I’m going to do this. It doesn’t matter to me if it’s two o’clock in the morning.’ Words to that effect. Mildly rebellious. I don’t quote verbatim. Except for this one statement, which made an impression on me and stuck with me word for word. Which was, quote, ‘The stuff they teach you at school is just so they can own you.’ What did that mean? You’ve been in education, Neil. But it was two in the morning, and I was too tired to ask him questions. I had to get up and go to work in a few hours. Probably I told him to go to bed or something, but I didn’t enforce whatever it was I said. I walked away. I left him there with his shadowgraphs. He was making curvature notes. It was a lot of geometry—the kind of geometrics with mouth-filling names.”
“‘The stuff they teach you at school is just so they can own you,’” I said.
“That’s right,” Mr. Barry said. “Strange.”
FOUR-FIFTY-FIVE in the afternoon—five minutes until Hospitality Hour began in the Rainier Club’s Kirtland Cutter Room. In June in Seattle near five o’clock, it’s possible to tell, from a south-facing window, that the sun has dropped in the northwestern sky, because its light at that hour flares in the glass of skyscrapers, but only in the upper reaches of northward façades—and this was visible from one of our den windows on the third story of the Rainier Club. Our white-jacketed server was now gatheri
ng up our nut bowl, my coffee cup and saucer, and Mr. Barry’s Sprite glass. Try as he might, he couldn’t be inconspicuous, because in juxtaposition to the decrepit Mr. Barry—and to me—he moved with ease. So there we were. But we were not going to talk about the hermit of the Hoh in front of this boy-god. Then Mr. Barry looked at his watch and mentioned the men’s room. So my cue had arrived; our meeting was over. He began collecting himself for the effort required to rise into a standing position. He was figuring out the physics of the moment—what to lean on and what to push from, which limbs to involve and how—when our server intervened. He extended a hand, as if Mr. Barry was a fallen football comrade, while behind him, on his outstretched other—dramatically high and slightly tilted—he poised his loaded busboy’s tray, and all of this with a white-toothed smile, a bow tie, a dimpled Anglo-Saxon chin, blue eyes, and no trace of facial hair.
Mr. Barry just persisted in his mechanical difficulties. He was a bit like a wind-up toy running down as he clawed at the armrest of the sofa, at the sofa seatback, and at the coffee table, his futility increasing with every manipulation. He made a first ill-ventured stab at rising, which ended with him back on his cushion. “I don’t need any help,” he said, but he did, and before long, humiliated, he took the boy’s hand. Upright, he felt for his tie and, at long last, straightened it. Our server backed out of the room.
Mr. Barry maneuvered toward the fireplace, the better to survey the financial leaders whose images hung on the wall. The dozens of painted portraits and formal photographs there commanded his attention; he wanted to gaze into them before he left—some he leaned away from with his glasses in his hand, others he examined with his glasses briefly perched, others demanded a glasses-on, then glasses-off approach. I joined him. A gathering of the Seattle Bond Club, its members in tuxes, its officers seated, the whole lot looking tipsy. A. O. Foster of Foster & Marshall, a file folder in hand, standing in the complicated-looking doorway of a bank vault and leading with his chin. Hal Sampson, Ron Adolphson, Bill Rex, and Fred Paulsell planning something or other at a boardroom table. Mr. Barry leaned in particularly close and then, with one wing of his glasses, tapped the glass of a photo and said, “That’s my father there, second from left.”
A formal photograph of the nine partners in Diversified Securities, shot in 1927 and hand-tinted in sepia, so that they looked more faded than they had to. For some reason, all nine had chosen an expression of humorless sobriety. There was nothing in the photo save them, no backdrop other than a black curtain. They might have been justices of the Supreme Court without the robes. Mr. Barry’s father, William Danforth Barry, had one hand at the lapel of his coat and—I’d seen this in the Boeing photos of his son—a bright, nervous expression. A lot of men of that era looked like gangsters, with their hair slicked back and parted in the middle, but W. D. Barry had an earnest look instead, and stood out because of it; he was also taller than the others, and gazed over the tops of their heads like the only basketball player present. “He accumulated a lot of wealth,” Mr. Barry said. “He was very, very good at making money.”
“How?”
“He invested in everything. He had a hand in any number of ventures, from logging to aircraft. He invested in aluminum. He made a fortune in iron ore and coal. He was very shrewd about downtown real estate. For a while there, his timber holdings were extensive. He funded the Washington Power Supply Company while it developed hydroelectric. He knew everybody. He was a major shareholder at First Seattle Dexter Horton National, and they were very big on war bonds. They spent a lot on their financial infrastructure, and he never balked at that. As a result, they were one of the first banks to go statewide, and after that, he got interested in agriculture. He made a lot of money on commodity futures while First Seattle was busy assimilating a lot of those little hayseed banks you used to have. And let me tell you, when the state went into hydroelectric in a big way, there was my father. He made a killing while a lot of other venture capitalists were going under.”
“Interesting.”
“And now, as I understand it, you’re richer than even he was.”
In the elevator—Mr. Barry on his way to Hospitality Hour, me to my bike—I asked him what his plans were for the summer. “Scandinavia,” he answered. “The second Mrs. Barry and I are going to view the icebergs near Greenland and the Scandinavian fjords. A very good cruise line that, as far as I know, does a wonderful job.”
In the Rainier Club’s lobby, we shook hands. I held on to his a little longer than he liked—his hand was mostly bones, and cold—and while I had him like that said, “You were very candid in talking about him. I thank you for it.”
“Well,” said Mr. Barry, feebly pulling his hand away, “put ‘Rand Barry’ in your acknowledgments, will you? Right where Virginia will see it.”
9
ALKI, 1851
PEOPLE BEGAN TO COME OUT of the woodwork. Old Lakesiders chimed in with what they thought was important. A former teacher from the Bush School, where John William spent eight years, sent me a sheaf of handwritten pages—“Bush, in those days, was forward-thinking,” she wrote. “It’s still operating today, and it still has nothing to do with the two George Bushes who have been presidents of the United States.” I liked this start to things and checked the envelope for her name: Helen Grant, it said, on a return address label bearing Amnesty International’s logo. “One day, during recess,” wrote Helen Grant,
John William stayed in and sat at his desk reading Silent Spring. Can you imagine a second-grader reading Silent Spring? I went about my business, and he called my name. “Miss Grant,” he said, “it says here that a lot of people my age will probably die when they are older of environment-related health problems.” I urged him not to worry. I assured him that Rachel Carson didn’t mean to frighten anyone. I suggested that Silent Spring might be a good book to read when he was older and in a better position to understand it. I was going about my business once more when again he called for me. “Pollution is causing a lot of kids to be retarded,” he said. “It’s bad for birds, too. I read in another chapter where the insects are dying. And the frogs and stuff. Because of DDT in the surface water. Do you think this is real?” he asked me.
I said I didn’t know. I suppose it was the wrong answer. Looking back, and now having read about John William in the Seattle Times, I feel it was indeed the wrong answer. I want to tell you that two things strike me, knowing what I know today. The first is that Silent Spring makes a kind of sense it didn’t before. I hope that my snippet about Silent Spring gives you a measure of insight into your friend—that it is new information. The second is to mention his very distraught tears when I said I didn’t know if Carson was accurate. Poor little John William was completely inconsolable. He buried his face in his hands and wouldn’t remove them. I had to call the school nurse for a sedative.
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