father always smiled when he worked, his face a mask of blissful concentration. Walking up the driveway to the house, you’d see him through the window as you passed by, at his workbench or typing away at his typewriter, grinning from ear to ear. Other times, when a solder joint wouldn’t take or when he stripped the thread of an obstinate screw, his oaths would resound off the Building’s crumbling walls. His flamboyant curses and Promethean farts were legendary among the neighborhood kids, whom he would hire occasionally to sort screws and other salvageable parts from obsolete inventions, and who did so as much to hear them as to earn twenty-five cents per hour.
YOUR PAPA WAS a genius. He spoke six languages fluently and had a PhD from Harvard, so you’d been given to believe. He belonged to a society of geniuses called Mensa. Occasionally the society held gatherings. Once he took you and George to one, a picnic in Westchester. During it an argument broke out between two geniuses. They were debating whether or not a can of baked beans placed unopened on the barbeque grill would explode. As your brother, your father, and you looked on, the two geniuses advanced their competing theories, supported by principles of molecular structure, gas and fluid dynamics, and particle physics. Their colorful debate might have continued forever had it not been interrupted by a considerable explosion. The two geniuses along with a dozen bystanders spent the next half-hour picking hot beans out of their hair and clothes.
Idiots, said your father under his breath.
He held over fifty patents, mostly for machines that measured and analyzed things. Among them was one for a machine that could distinguish a real dollar bill from a counterfeit one, making it possible to get change for coin-operated vending machines. Called the Nomoscope, it should have made your papa a very wealthy man, but for reasons obscure to you having something to do with a shady patent attorney, your father (as he was wont to joke at dinner parties) never got a nickel from it.
The patents were illustrated with drawings like this one:
4. 4.
Should this drawing not speak for itself, the following explication attends the patent application: “Referring now to FIG. 3, the control circuit includes transducers 31 and 41 connected in opposition by resistors 43 and 44 and supplied with current from a source of direct current power 35 which may be a battery. The transducer ends of resistors 43 and 44 are connected respectively to the control electrode, in series with resistor 43A, and cathode of a vacuum tube triode 46. It is obvious that one or more transistors may be used in place of the triode. The control electrode of triode 46 is coupled to a saw-tooth generator 49 by means of series capacitor 39. The saw-tooth wave modulates whatever signal is received from the transducers 31, 41, and even when no signal is received from the transducers, the anode-cathode current is modulated in accordance with a saw-tooth wave. The anode of triode 46 is connected in series with a relay winding 47 and a direct current source of potential 48. The relay winding operates two armatures 50 and 51, each of which in turn operates two pairs of contacts. Armature 50 is connected to one terminal 52 of motor 15 while the other terminal 53 is connected through another pair of contacts 54 to a ground or common conductor 55. Conductor 55 is also connected to the terminals of two sources of potential 57 and 57. The contacts on armature 50 are arranged so that, when the relay winding 47 does not pass current, the motor 15 is connected through one pair of contacts 50 to battery 57. If the relay is actuated, contacts 58 are broken and a second pair of contacts 60 is closed, thereby sending current from the second source of electric power 50 to motor 15 to cause it to turn in the opposite direction. In this manner the direction of the motor is controlled to turn so that portion 22 may be lowered, or when the contacts are operated to turn in the reverse direction, to raise portion 22 and move it away from the object being measured.”
YOU LOVED TO visit your father in the Building. You couldn’t wait to jump off the bus after school and run down the long dirt driveway, under the drooping branches of the weeping willow trees lining it. You would enter through the main door and – provided no snakes were living there – cross the vestibule and knock softly on the inner door. To your father’s Is that you, Peter, my boy? Come in, come in! you would enter, forgetting to shut the inner door behind you.
Close the door, your father would say, and you’d close it.
The Building had five rooms, including the empty vestibule that was home to occasional serpents, the bathroom (with a toilet that didn’t work), the study where your papa kept his shelves of books and a trundle bed that he’d sleep in sometimes after especially bad fights with your mother.
Then there was the main room, where he did his inventing. It held the drill press, a table-mounted sander, a grinding wheel, the bending machine, and two lathes, both big as mules. Here was the long bench where your papa soldered and tested his circuits, and the table where he sketched out his designs and typed on his typewriter. Thumbtacked to the wall above the tool bins was a crude sketch by your papa of a man laid out on an operating table, with surgeons cleaning up in the background, a cut-away view of his belly revealing a wrench left inside it. The caption in your father’s handwriting said:
NO OPERATION IS COMPLETE
UNTIL ALL THE TOOLS AND PARTS
HAVE BEEN PUT AWAY
Then there was the back room, where your father kept the band saw and a blue machine on splayed legs for cutting tubes and shafts that galumphed like a lame camel. Sheets and chunks of every sort of metal were kept there in wooden bins, with other bins holding spare and used parts.
Under banks of long fluorescent bulbs buzzing and wavering in their death throes you would walk to where your father stood working, wearing his pilled moth-eaten cardigan and stained khaki trousers (winter) or shorts (summer). Past rows of tiny drawers brimming with screws, bolts, nuts, washers, tubes, lenses, photocells, toggle switches, relays (“tick-tick things,” you called them), solenoids, potentiometers, rheostats, transformers, resistors, capacitors (“capacitators”), and rectifiers, you would make your way, carefully avoiding the holes in the floor. On the table next to your father’s typewriter a portable radio played a mixture of classical music and static.
The Building had its own special smell, a blend of solder smoke, scorched metal, mildew, electrical shorts, farts, and orange peels. Your father liked to eat oranges when he worked. He kept a straw basket of them by his typewriter. He’d toss the peels into a gray metal wastepaper basket, along with gobs of pulp that he would spit into his palm. A perfume of oranges rose from the wastebasket.
You’d watch him typing with two fingers on his Royal typewriter, or soldering a circuit, or turning a part on the lathe. The lathe was your favorite. You loved watching him manipulate its plethora of bright chrome dials with one hand, like an engineer manning the controls of a locomotive, while smoothing the fingers of his other hand around the spinning chuck, its knuckles black with grime. From the spinning chuck bright turnings of aluminum, copper, and brass spiraled to the rotted floor. Afterward you’d sweep the turnings up with the dustpan, pocketing the longest and brightest specimens for a collection you kept in a wooden box.
Among boxy instruments on his workbench was one with a round screen called an oscilloscope. As it shed its green light over his thin gray hair, his sloping forehead, his wrinkled brow, his aquiline nose, your father would gaze at the glowing screen and you would gaze at him, wondering what he made of it, amazed that your father (or anyone) could extract meaning from a dancing thread of light.
The Building was your father’s sanctuary, the place where he sought refuge among his ideas and instruments. It was your refuge, too, a shrine, the place where you went to worship your papa and experience the awe and mystery of his works. Under its buzzing and flickering fluorescent lights, between the
