The next day, in the new laboratory near Chinatown, Stanford White saw many machines he could not name. Among the flashes and pulsations, it was hard to tell what was animate and what was not. Pure spirits waited to be born from the magic coils. The coils licked each other with their white, snake-like tongues. Greek fire wrote demonic letters in the air. Touched by God’s finger, things went up in flames. White inhaled the fresh electric air. He thought of the place as Tesla’s blue cabaret where natural forces and bodiless spirits put on a show. It was as if the inventor were cracking his whip and taming them. The famous architect came out stunned.
“What about you—visiting me?” he stammered, barely standing on his wobbly legs.
Two weeks later, our summoner of the spirits, our Byronian mystical character, our Manfred visited the estate and its beautiful elms on Long Island. He threw his head back and looked at the sunlight filtering through the intertwining treetops. Red maple trees, full of chirping birds, livened up the park. Nikola and Stanford reclined in canvas chairs under an undulating elm. The breeze leafed through the treetop above them and—as it forgot the exact number of leaves—started to count again.
“They say that the maenads who tore Orpheus apart turned into trees,” Stanford White began in a sweet voice. “As they started to grow roots, they went mad with fear.”
The swirl of the treetops was fascinating.
An empty-eyed angel spewed a jet of water into a green pond. The garden, which simulated Eden, freed the two observers from all the worries of the world.
White was drinking. His burning hair was pulsating. He opened up to Tesla.
He said he hated puritans and moral reformers and insisted that they would be the end of him. With suppressed revulsion, he talked about his mother’s favorite soprano, Jenny Lind, who refused to sing in France and Italy for “moral reasons.”
“I’m a good father,” he confided to Tesla. “But since I have no virtues, I accredit that solely to my instincts.”
He introduced his good-looking son and his two ruthlessly ambitious daughters to Tesla. Their mother supervised their piano practices and Latin declensions. Betsy White was a straight-backed woman who was tired of her own impeccability. Her English face was a cross between a frog and a fairy. She possessed both intelligence and wit, but her real food was etiquette. Daily doses of humor and truth were spices too strong for her. She wore a constant smile on her handsome face, so it was impossible to tell when she was sick or tired or angry. Was the cruel wrinkle at the corner of her mouth a sign of defiance or of self-scorn? She never let on that she knew what everyone else in the city knew.
When she was alone, reality dissolved in her rosy prayers. “May he love me!” she prayed with passion. “May he love only me!”
Katharine Johnson touched Betsy White’s back once and recoiled: how tense you are! The back that bore so many worries at times became stiff, and Betsy had to turn to a masseuse for healing.
Her husband dragged a flaming sixteenth-century shadow behind him.
“Benvenuto Cellini.”
“The devil,” they said.
Stanford White transported Venetian palaces to America. He acquired furniture, carpets, and tapestries for the American kings of steel and coal for whom Tesla’s friend Stevan Prostran worked like a dog. In addition to the Long Island estate, he had one apartment on Gramercy Park, another on Garden Tower Suite, and yet another one on West Fifty-Fifth Street. White piled up books, bronze statues, paintings, and nude sculptures. Despite the envious talk, those were all originals. Behind the electric door that opened with a push of a button, mute greyhounds barked from Florentine tapestries.
White’s red hair burned. He had a somewhat wooden way of speaking, his mustache twirling up like two little flames. He often finished his sentences with “and so…”
“Yes, the Brooklyn Bridge marked the beginning of the heroic age of New York,” White said. “Yes, the tenements have been regulated, at least on paper. A minimum of oxygen should be provided to the windowless sections of the buildings. The air shafts in the middle are mandatory, although in a few months they turn into dumps and pigeon graveyards. Yes, there are fire prevention procedures, but people in tenements bind books, tan hides, and make hats. Yes, architecture inspired by Turkish, Russian, and Japanese influences is in vogue these days. It’s true that I started with neo-Romantic Richardson and then admired Sullivan’s ornamentation, but I still stick to Renaissance ideals. And so…”
White designed the Niagara dam draped in its gigantic curtains of foam. That was when he said to Tesla, “I’d love to do something else with you after Niagara.”
For months, they only crossed paths briefly since both of them were busy. “Next week!” they kept saying.
When Sarah Bernhardt came to New York with her play Izéïl, Johnson invited her for dinner. On that occasion, Tesla introduced White to Swami Vivekananda. “So you are introducing the devil to the angel?” White grinned.
“Next week, for sure!”
A few months went by.
Finally in August, they spent a weekend in Newport, Rhode Island. The coastline with sails looked like an impressionist painting. Castles competed for grandeur with one another. Marble shone in the middle of the lawn. Peacocks cautiously treaded across the grass. Swallows in tailcoats alighted under the eaves of the millionaire’s mansion. Waves broke against black rocks in front of the Breakers.
“Seven million,” Stanford White whispered out of the corner of his mouth, pretending to look at the ocean. “This pleasure cost Vanderbilt seven million dollars.”
They observed the sunset from a wicker shelter in front of the house. At seven o’clock, a butler—as stiff as a Venetian doge—entreated them to come in. Two griffons bellowed at an urn adorned with some kind of wild cabbage in the hallway. White and Tesla changed at leisure. With their glowing plastrons, they descended under the painted sky in the atrium. Giant bronze candelabras with sixteen milky lamps hung there. The stairway was modeled on the one in the Paris Opera.
Rosy Numidian and green Italian marble decorated the walls. The fireplace in the library, which resembled Juliet’s balcony, was brought over from a sixteenth-century French castle. The giant hearth oozed a chill. Boring old bronze statuettes despaired on the tables. Obsessive symmetry characterized the rooms, which were saturated with a delicate scent from an enormous quantity of flowers.
“I always used to eat before I got hungry,” White confessed to Tesla. “I’m skinny because of tuberculosis.”
The villa was built according to how the French from the Age of Empire imagined Renaissance style. Vanderbilt also had a famous French cook. The cook triumphantly closed his eyes and personally brought in the tray of veal.
Mmmmmm…
The Frenchman boasted that his country had a cheese for every day of the year, so he offered a certain number of them for the host and his guests to judge. Nikola remembered Madame Bauzain’s words from Strasbourg: “When you feel like closing your eyes during a meal—that’s great cuisine. The rest is nothing.”
After dinner, they had a drink in the music room, in front of a blue fireplace made of Campagna marble. A labyrinth of mirrors that faced one another multiplied the ceiling lamps. At one time, three orchestras played in this summerhouse.
That evening, the famous villa was quiet.
Cornelius Vanderbilt II had recovered slowly from a stroke and spoke little. With his sideburns like dandelion fluff and his stony beard, he looked quietly deranged to Tesla. His brother William Kissam came on horseback from a nearby “summer hut” called Marblehouse, on which he had spent eleven million. They had brought electricity to the hut, he said, although that was a passing fad, ha, ha, ha. His hardheaded Alva stayed at the Chinese pavilion so that she could see the ocean. William Kissam’s smile looked like a yawn, and he constantly turned the conversation to the Defender’s success at the American Cup.
“No, no, try one of these!” he insisted. The tips of the Cuban cigars began t
o glow. A sharp but delightful odor spread throughout the room. Smoke swirled around and lifted them like a magic carpet. There was the sound of bongos. Monkeys and birds started to chatter. A wistful guitar was heard. The pungent smell was a lure that drew them deeper into the labyrinth. Waves broke along sea baths for slaves in Havana. William Kissam pointed out that he enjoyed Havana more than Paris.
At the Breakers, Tesla slept on a short but beautiful Empire bed on which Napoléon’s Josephine once spent a night. He felt anxious. To his surprise, he did not dream of Dane. He dreamed of the Maharaja of Kapurthala’s mustache. In his dream, women looked at the mustache, lifted their hands to their brows, and fainted. Crickets went wild around midnight. Like the silver treetops, their songs spiraled higher and higher until they finally touched the starry constellations.
Tesla and Stanford met again the following Saturday, and the one after, and yet another one after that.
Unlike poor Szigety, White knew New York intimately. A number of chorus girls surrounded him at all times. Rumor had it that Carmensita stripped for him and that Little Egypt bared her indefatigable hips in his presence.
Stanford called himself “a philosopher of love” and “a tamer of women’s hearts.” Tears never entered that equation. He believed that the focus of a seducer’s heart is never within himself, and that women found this attractive. When he spoke about women, he became enthusiastically stupid. His hair flamed brightly. He leaned in too close, and Tesla could smell whiskey on his breath.
“Seduction is mesmerizing,” he confided in Tesla like Szigety had done long ago. “Love is electric. If I could add up all my orgasms, that would be like experiencing a thunderbolt. There would be nothing left of me. And so…”
“Isn’t that a bit too much?” Tesla smiled his distant smile.
“Too much? Those words are meaningless,” the redhead flared. “In the Gospel according to Luke, the Pharisees accused Christ of eating and drinking too much.”
One Saturday in December 1897, when it was already dark by four o’clock, White took Tesla to Jimmy Breese’s studio on West Sixteenth Street. The door handle was so audaciously twisted. Tesla readily grabbed it.
Breese wore a satyr mask made of silver. A servant played the double pipe. On the wall, three personified premonitions raised their hands toward the faint sunset. The columns were surrounded with gold mosaic tiles, like those in Monreale Cathedral in Palermo. The ceiling was built in the shape of a tear. Winded waiters from Delmonico’s brought in a twenty-course dinner. All the guests ate with ivy wreaths around their heads.
“People have done weirder things to feel like something was happening,” White whispered to Tesla.
The gentlemen judged the bare legs of the dancers. Over White’s cigarette, smoke spelled out a signature in Arabic script. His lips moved without his knowing it. The orchestra of blind musicians sounded like a hurricane. They served a enormous “Jack Horner” pie. Like golden smoke, a cloud of canaries burst from the pie. Among the birds, Botticelli’s nymph rose. Fair locks cascaded over her pear-like breasts. Those present at the birth of Venus dropped their jaws. The wreathed guests checked the holy sites on her body—her perfect waist, her mighty hips, her black triangle. The black triangle turned first into a Secession octopus and then transformed into a maelstrom and darkened the room, blinding the observers.
“Aaaaah!” the men groaned.
Tesla did not even blink.
White smiled. He tried to explain to the people around the table:
“He’s not from this planet.”
CHAPTER 72
The Marriage of Dušan
All of New York wanted to see him married. To whom? To all of them? To Anna Morgan, the daughter of the sultan of Wall Street—among others—the tall girl with sharp knees. The slim inventor received countless invitations.
“Come and meet Miss Winslow. She can’t believe I know you.”
“Come and meet Miss Amasha Casner.”
“Come to dinner. Miss Flora Dodge will be there as well as Margaret Merrington…”
He would come in, with his furtive gait, floppy-eared and grinning. He saw the ladies as a tangle of soft smiles, lace parasols, innocent low-cut dresses, provocative glances, swan-like necks, flounces, orchids and magnolias in their laps. They supposed they were, they knew they were as irresistible as Niagara. And yet…
All those games of neighing masculinity and meowing femininity bored him. Whenever someone mentioned that topic, Tesla’s ironic mind heard the tense, resounding voice of a guslar—the singer of Serbian epic songs—chanting the lines from The Marriage of Emperor Dušan:
When will the emperor come to fetch his bride,
What season of the year will it be,
How many wedding guests will he bring…
The inventor gave a melodramatic answer to those questions: “Science is my only fiancée.”
Whatever his sexuality potentially targeted, he did not desire to realize it. Scientific discovery was the highest degree of excitement there was—it was a kiss from God. In his laboratory, Tesla’s personality faded away and a blind force, like fire, took its place. Compared to that, all other forms of excitement were nothing.
People did not believe it.
“That’s my higher love,” he added.
People winked, whispered, and reproached him. “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels but do not have love, I am only a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal,” they said.
The eyebrows of the eternal bridegroom lifted toward the ceiling with the tobacco smoke. People could not let it go—they kept asking those questions over and over.
He put on a show for the newspapermen: “At times, it seems to me that my celibacy is too much of a sacrifice for my work.” Then he suddenly changed his story and patiently answered their questions. “Do I believe in marriage? For an artist—yes! For a writer—yes! But for an inventor—no. His is too intense a nature, with so much in it of a wild, passionate quality.”
De Quincey wrote about the abyss of divine joy that yawned within him. Tesla suffered his deliriums of joy in solitude. For years, he lived in a state of almost uninterrupted bliss. Under his stiff collar, he felt passion strong enough to move mountains.
“Ever since a snowball I threw in my childhood caused an avalanche, I’ve been engaged to a force that, in an instant, changes the meaning of everything,” he whispered in his stiff collar. “In comparison, all human institutions are just trifles.”
He could not stand to look at jewelry. He would vomit if he had to touch a woman’s hair. He refused “to join forces” with Edward Dean Adams, with institutions, with members of the fairer sex. In general, he refused to bow to the human condition and human criteria.
“Don’t Achilles and Prince Marko stand apart from the community of humans?” he asked Stanford White. A Pullman car with encrusted ornaments on the walls was taking them to Niagara Falls. Lightning flickered outside.
“Look!” Tesla exclaimed as he touched the windowpane with his index finger. In a field, some cows frolicked before the storm and began jumping around like dogs. Stanford didn’t hear him. “Send me a different waiter. Remove this clown-face!” he yelled.
White’s red hair flamed. His relentless hand kept pouring. He reminded Tesla that Zeus enjoyed making love to Hercules’s mother so much that he stopped the constellations from revolving a few times. Like ancient Assyrians, White believed that the sun god was the one who impregnated all women while men were just the tool. Like Zeus, he wanted to be a swan, a bull, and the shower of gold.
“Don’t worry,” the drunken architect mumbled. “I’ll make love for you.”
That’s all well and good, Tesla thought. But where does that restless watery look in your eyes come from?
White dozed off and dreamed of embracing necks and waists. It grew dark. A fire burned somewhere in the field, and bright sparks shot into the sky. The train roared like a dragon, curled its tail, and sped into the wide, wide world. And yet agai
n—like a long time ago—the rails did not seem to exist but somehow materialized right in front of the locomotive.
In the morning in Buffalo, the inventor felt stiff while his architect felt hungover.
A solemn crowd stood dwarfed by Tesla’s turbines. From the ceremonial speeches, Tesla realized that everything had changed since Kemmler’s execution. In the American mind, alternating current had transformed from the devil to an angel.
Nikola Tesla delivered a conventional speech. Halfway through, his blood turned cold. All of a sudden, he felt jealous of the dead peasant boy and guilty of the blessings he snatched for himself. Dane never married. He would not marry either. He barely kept himself from saying, “I’m bad enough. It’s cruel to make me worse.”
After the official speeches, the mayor grabbed Tesla and White by their arms and suggested they embark on the tour boat Lady of the Mist and get closer to the monstrous waterfall from below. Screaming at the top of his lungs, the mayor whispered to Tesla that most American newlyweds came here on their honeymoon. Tesla was truly excited. He stared at the rustling curtain until he forgot what he was looking at.
“This is bigger than anything else. This is destiny.”
Rainbows arched everywhere in the enveloping mist. Silky water flashed right on the edge before it fell over. Falling, it turned white. Then it became a cloud. The wind blew the cloud upward and spread coolness. Despite their raincoats, Tesla’s, White’s, and the mayor’s faces were wet. This moved his turbines. It reminded him once more of how that small snowball, thrown with a casual movement of his hand, tore out boulders and swept down pines as if they were matchsticks, became pure force, and grew as huge as destiny. The feeling of greatness and the deafening roar completely permeated him.
Indians sacrificed maidens to these curtains made of foam.
Only this boundless coolness finally rejuvenated him and washed the soot of the burned laboratory from his soul. His eyes were full of tears while his soul merged with the unleashed natural force. Yes, the inventor’s nature was wild and passionate. The waterfall completely outshouted him. Tesla’s lips moved silently. At his secret wedding with the measureless force, he softly repeated:
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