Universe of Two

by Stephen P. Kiernan

  “Is that right?” Charlie asked. “Does he ever get burns?”

  “Not that I recall,” my mother said. “All I really know is that Frank Senior has spent many happy hours down there.”

  Then she turned and gave me the high beams, so I would understand exactly what she was doing next. Interpreting silence for approval, she took a deep breath and sallied forth. “You know, Charlie, if you ever thought a little extra practice would help . . .”

  “That’s exactly the problem,” he said. “I’m only allowed to solder when my supervisor is there. If I could work another few hours, I think I’d improve much faster.”

  “Well then, it’s settled,” my mother said.

  “Excuse me?” Charlie replied, focusing. “Did I miss something?”

  “You come for dinner this week, and we’ll eat early so you can get down to that workshop and sharpen your skills. You’ll be an ace in no time.”

  Charlie made his surprised expression, the wide-eyed one that always softened my heart. He put his sandwich down, and stared off into the middle distance. He was humble, that Charlie Fish, but he had dignity too. “That is generous of you, Mrs. Dubie. But I would not want to intrude on your household if I was not entirely welcome.”

  “So it’s really up to Brenda,” she said, all brass and tacks. With that she took a big bite of her sandwich, and both of them became quite busy not looking at me.

  One time as a kid at the community swimming pool, there was a dare among us girls to see who would go all the way down and touch the drain. It was not that hard, if you started with a good big breath. But what I remembered afterward was the pressure of it, the squeeze that water exerted on my lungs—or maybe the pressure was outward, the air inside me wanting to come out. In that moment at the folding table, I had the same feeling: there was a pressure on me, and something inside was trying to escape.

  “It’s my mother’s house,” I said. “Anyone she invites is welcome by me too.”

  Charlie turned and faced me, and I suspected he wanted more. He deserved more too. I just didn’t know how to give it yet.

  “Then it’s settled,” my mother announced despite her mouth being full, but not without fixing me with a glare like her eyes were flamethrowers. If Charlie noticed, he was too polite to let it show. “You come Thursday, I’ll roast us all a chicken. And after lunch I’ll see if I can find some ointment for those burns.”

  The bell hanging on the front door tinkled just then, a rube-looking fellow in a too-small hat wandered in. He peered around as if he did not know where he was. I knew how he felt.

  Casual as you please, I picked up my sandwich. “Mother,” I said, “would you mind taking this one please?”

  14.

  Arriving at work the next day, Charlie spied Santangelo near the entryway. He jogged over, calling out, “Hey, Steel Wool.”

  “Charlie, hey.” Santangelo swung the door wide. “How’s life in the basement?”

  Charlie fell into step beside him. “I never thought I would be nostalgic for arcs. What are you third-floor guys up to these days?”

  “Oh, there’s no one up there anymore.”

  “They canned all of you? Who’s doing the nation’s math?”

  “Nobody got canned. We’re all reassigned. What about you?”

  “Soldering.” He stopped, lowering his head. “What for, I have no idea—and I’m not very good at it.” With effort, he raised his face again. “Where’d they reassign you?”

  “The Manhattan Engineering District. With the group working beneath Stagg Field.”

  “The football stadium?”

  “Sports are on hiatus for the duration.” Santangelo leaned closer. “You have no idea, Fish. We lined a squash court with graphite, and inside it they are breaking the laws of nature.”

  “Are they?” Charlie snickered. “And what’s your job?”

  He laughed. “I man the crank.”

  Charlie laughed, too, though not knowing why. Perhaps Santangelo’s excitement was contagious. “What’s the crank do?”

  “Raises and lowers the control rod, the one that makes the reaction go critical.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “It’s downright comical.” Steel Wool raised his arms, conjuring an imaginary squash court. “Bigwigs stand up in the balcony, you know? They wave like emperors, I loosen the rope, the rod drops, and the Geiger counters go insane. Chain reaction, bingo. Then they lift a finger, I tighten the rope. The rod rises and the reaction stops.” He glanced up and down the empty hallway. “It’s incredible. They actually control the pile.”

  “What’s a pile?”

  A sudden look of panic crossed Santangelo’s face. “I shouldn’t be talking to you, Charlie. I thought you knew more.”

  “What are they controlling, Steel Wool?”

  “Can’t say,” he answered, moving away down the corridor. “God. Forget all that crap, okay? It’s nothing. Just . . . just fancy math.”

  “What is it, though?”

  “Forget it, all right? Forget I said anything.” And he bolted up the stairs.

  Charlie stood alone, listening as Santangelo’s shoes ran flight after flight. What was he supposed to forget? What did any of this talk mean? At last he turned, making his way down to the dungeon. It smelled of stale air.

  As Charlie hung up his coat, Beasley went to his station and switched on the iron. “Next lesson: how to sweat.” He tapped the desk with a forefinger. “Pay attention.”

  Before Charlie had settled in, Beasley arranged two plates. In one smooth motion, he melted soldering material into the gap between the plates. The hot metal seeped into the seam, cooling like a metallic glue.

  “Conductive, solid, waterproof.” Beasley stood. “Try sweating your failures together first, so you don’t ruin something of value.” He ambled away. “Not that anything you make possesses any value.”

  Charlie spent the day sweating. There were gaps, spills, mistakes that did ruin components. By day’s end, though, he had run one bond successfully for the length of two plates. It was the fastest he had learned any new technique. He brought the completed assembly across the lab for inspection. “How’s this?”

  Beasley barely gave Charlie’s work more than one eye, before tossing it aside.

  “What?” Charlie asked. “How is it?”

  “Sloppy, incomplete, and ugly.” Beasley continued soldering. “I am going to talk to Simmons about you tomorrow. As far as I am concerned, you are officially CTD.”

  “CTD? What’s that stand for?”

  He pointed his index finger at the floor and made a swirling motion. “Circling the drain.”

  15.

  He ate nearly the whole chicken. I’d been too little to remember when Frank went through his growth spurt. But I could not recall ever seeing a human being tuck into a meal like Charlie did that night. My mother gave all three of us decent portions: chicken, rice in gravy, warmed carrots. Charlie was finished before I’d taken three bites.

  He put his fork down, then noticed how much was left on our plates. “That is mortifying,” he said. “I’m sorry, today I had to skip lunch—”

  “Are you kidding?” My mother laughed. “Nobody around here ever says anything nice about my cooking. You just paid me the perfect compliment.”

  It wasn’t true. Roast chicken was her signature dish, with salt and onions and pale crescent moons of celery, winning cheers from our family every time. But I was smart enough not to contradict her.

  “Here,” she said, taking his plate. “Let’s load you up right this time.”

  She shuffled off to the kitchen, Charlie calling after her, “I haven’t had home-cooked food in a solid year.”

  My mother returned with a plate piled high. “I can’t imagine the cafeteria meals. The taste. The dirt.” She feigned a melodramatic voice. “You got here just in the nick of time.”

  We all chuckled. I couldn’t remember the last time my mother said something tha
t made someone laugh. Charlie’s second helping went down slower, but she persuaded him to have thirds. After dinner, she made sweeping motions with her hands.

  “Shoo,” she said. “I’ll take care of the dishes. Brenda, please show this starving wolf to the basement. And, Charlie, make yourself at home down there.”

  “I really appreciate dinner, ma’am, and the chance to practice some more.”

  “Don’t you go all ma’aming on me,” my mother said. “Just get busy.”

  I swung the narrow door open, switched on the light, and started down—calling back to him, “Watch your step.”

  In fact, the stairs were crooked as a cowboy’s teeth, but they’d always been that way, I’d just never paid attention to it before. I felt a flinch of embarrassment, until I heard Charlie exclaim from above me.

  “Look at this place. It’s immaculate.” He’d spied the worktable.

  “Daddy likes things tidy.”

  He stood beside the plank bench that served as a seat. The tabletop was clear and clean. Soldering tools hung on a particle board against white-painted outlines, so anyone could see where each one belonged. Spools of wire dangled in easy reach.

  “It’s as organized as an operating room,” Charlie said. “Where does he keep his components?”

  Not knowing what a component was, I shrugged. “Maybe in there?”

  Charlie saw where I was pointing, to the chest of narrow metal drawers. He slid the top one open, revealing those odd little electronic things, in racks that arranged them by size. “Your father is a genius.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I certainly had never thought of him that way.

  “I’m realizing that I work in a garbage heap,” he continued. “We waste hours, digging through bins to find components.” He turned to me with his eyes bright. “It makes sense here. The organization of it all makes sense.”

  “I’m glad,” I said.

  Then there was a pause, a strange, awkward moment, which I felt down to my toes, but Charlie did not catch. I went to the place I always sat, three steps from the bottom, while Daddy worked. I’d been sitting on that step since I was a little girl, while he told me stories about men whose radios he was repairing, or the HAM operator who had connected with someone in Norway. I would watch, no idea what he was doing with those wires and tools, thinking it was silly how he poked his tongue out when he was concentrating. I was just his daughter, keeping him company. We were soldering ourselves together. The world went away, and we became a universe of two.

  Charlie slid onto the bench—good posture, like I’d learned on the organ—and began plucking things from the drawers. “This is great,” he whispered.

  A stranger thought occurred to me: One day, I might have a daughter, too, who might sit and watch her father from the stairs, learning about patience and craft, enjoying their quiet bond. And then the most peculiar notion of all, that the person she’d be keeping company might be this boy, right here.

  Charlie switched on a soldering iron. “Your father is teaching me without even being here. That’s how smart his organizing is.”

  “He has his ways,” I croaked. But Charlie was so enthralled, he did not notice that I’d choked up. “Be right back.”

  “Sure, okay,” he said, turning a dial, and I trotted back up those crooked steps.

  My mother was drying the dishes. “Everything swell down there?”

  I just gave her a hug.

  She laughed and made a face. “What’s that all about?”

  I couldn’t say. I scurried up to my room, and closed the door. I sat on the bed for a while, looking out the window at nothing. San Diego, England—the people I loved were far away. I knew, too, that if they made it home, when they made it home, life would not go back to the way it had been. I’d finished school, Frank would be a veteran and all grown up. My father would want to spend every possible minute with the wife he’d missed for so long. I couldn’t imagine him wasting evenings alone in the basement.

  No, the days of sitting on the third-from-bottom step were over. Life is always rushing away from us, I know that now, but that night it was a new idea. I wrapped the bedspread around myself, my grandmother’s old quilt, reds and blues in a flying geese pattern she’d sewn while pregnant with my mother. And I had myself a good pout.

  “Brenda?” my mother hollered from downstairs. “You need anything?”

  “I’m fine,” I yelled back. “Be right down.” But for a long time, I didn’t go anywhere.

  Gradually I recovered, hurried past her reading in the overstuffed chair, and headed straight to the basement. Halfway down the stairs, I realized I’d brought along my quilt. Meanwhile Charlie had finished something, I could see a little teepee of metal plates shielding the soldering iron, but he was not at the table.

  “Charlie?” I called out. “You still here?”

  “What the heck are these for?” He poked his head out from the unlit storage area, back behind the furnace. He was holding an organ pipe nearly his own height. “Is your dad building a cathedral down here?”

  I pointed at the soldering table. “What about your practicing?”

  “I needed a break or I would have burst into flames.” He approached with the pipe. “But honestly. You don’t sell cathedral organs.”

  “There are only a few pipe repairmen in Chicago,” I explained, “and they’re all expensive. My father does the small jobs. He figures churches will refer customers to him down the road.”

  “This wouldn’t be too hard to fix though.” Charlie held the pipe horizontally. “The seam has split, that’s all.”

  “Any fix is hard when your repairman is in San Diego till who knows when.”

  “Don’t the churches complain?” He ran his sleeve down the pipe and it came away gray with dust. “This must have been down here for years.”

  “I guess the war is teaching patience to all kinds of people,” I said. “Even me.”

  It slipped out, but Charlie didn’t let me get away with it. “What are you impatient for, Brenda?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Knowing more, I guess. Understanding more.” I shrugged. “Maybe being grown up.”

  “I think the war is making that happen pretty fast anyway,” he said. “Being eighteen today is completely different from being eighteen five years ago.”

  Neither of us had more to say about that. “Get back to work, you,” I said finally. “Enough chat. You’ve got to earn that chicken supper, or else next time instead of the bird, my mother will skin you.”

  “Yes, my joyous work. Because I didn’t do it enough already today.”

  I was glad to change the subject. “What’s the trouble?”

  Leaning the organ pipe against the wall, Charlie shuffled back to the soldering table. “I’m trying to build a very tight assembly, but I can’t find a tape measure.” He scooped up a bunch of short pieces of wire in various colors, all with gray blunt tips. “I’m estimating, but the lengths aren’t right.”

  I leaned over the thing he was making, and each connection was a separate piece of wire, like he was using cut-up cannelloni. “Why are you doing it this way?”

  “This is how I was taught. What do you mean?”

  “Don’t get touchy,” I said. “It’s just not how my father does it.”

  “Oh really.” Charlie crossed his arms. “You’re going to teach me now?”

  “Jerk.” I crossed mine too. “If you don’t want to know—”

  “No, please.” He tossed the wire scraps back on the table. “Enlighten me.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Charlie, even I can tell that measuring piece by piece takes forever. Look.”

  I picked up one of the spools, and stood over the work he’d abandoned. “Clip one end to the starting place, and bend the wire”—I unwound the spool over each of the components, like it was yarn, making one continuous line—“Till you reach the end. My father doesn’t measure anything. He touches the iron where the wire has to connect.” I reached the last comp
onent and pressed the wire onto it. “Done.”

  Of all the times I’d seen Charlie’s shocked expression, that one won the contest. His eyes followed my wire its whole length, while his jaw hung slack.

  “Careful there,” I teased, “or some bird will build a nest in your molars.”

  He closed his mouth, but leaned over the table like he was reading scripture. “Do you know how ingenious that is?”

  “Hardly,” I laughed. “It’s just what my father does for his radio friends.”

  “Believe me.” He started to pull the bench over, but stopped himself. “Thank you, Brenda. You have no idea.”

  And he kissed me. It wasn’t slow and smoldering, like our lovey smooches from before. But it wasn’t all brotherly quick-on-the-cheek either. Somewhere in the middle.

  I’m not sure he gave as much thought before kissing me as I gave it after. I still think about that kiss now, all these decades later. How authentic it was. How sincere. Often I wish my young self had seen this unguardedness as a strength, rather than a weakness. But wartime culture does not prize vulnerability. I had a lot to learn.

  He plopped himself down and started a new board. Using Daddy’s technique, and humming some sweet melody, he finished in about ten minutes. “What do you know.”

  “Are you going to get sore if I tell you another thing of Daddy’s?”

  “Sore? Hardly.”

  I leaned past him to switch on the light that hung over the table. It reminded me of the day we met, when he had reached to clean up the spots of blood. Then I climbed the stairs and turned off the overhead.

  “Daddy says a light behind you casts a shadow on your work. That’s why organs have lamps right over the sheet music. If the church is dark, you can still see the notes.”

  “Boy.” He smiled, his face open as a dictionary. “There are going to be some changes at work tomorrow.”

  Well. I could have eaten half a pie. Charlie Fish might be a whiz, but I was helping him. Maybe my sense of superiority wasn’t entirely imagined. Maybe I was good for more than selling organs and accordions.