the universe was conceived, engineered, tested, and approved.
IN THE BUILDING’S back room you had your own workbench, with your own (broken) oscilloscope, your own soldering gun, your own plastic drawers of assorted parts. There you gave birth to your own invention, an electric motor you built from scratch, almost. You fit brushes and stators to an old rotor that you found, turned the aluminum casing for it on the lathe, fixed a bearing to the shaft, mounted the result on a bracket, and attached a toggle switch to it. You soldered the two wires, one red and one blue, from the coil to the toggle switch, then added (for the heck of it) two diodes, a small transformer, and a yellow capacitor chosen for its looks alone. You attached an electrical cord to the transformer and plugged the result into a wall outlet.
Before it caught on fire the capacitor blushed and gave off a bluish gray puff of pungent smoke, garnishing failure with splendor. Still you were damned if your motor didn’t look as if it should have worked, if it didn’t display all the superficial properties of a perfectly good motor. In fact what you had invented was a sculpture of a motor, a postmodern motor. An artist’s motor.
YOUR VISITS TO the Building ended usually at dusk, when your mother would telephone from the house to say dinner was ready. Before leaving, you’d empty all the wastebaskets and turn off the lights and the furnace.
With the six o’clock siren howling in the distance, you and your father walked up the hill to the modest Cape Cod with a brick-accented front and dormer windows from which the striped awnings had long been removed. Summer heat, crickets and peepers. Or December dusk, the air crackling cold, the sun about to sink behind a hill.
Halfway up you and your father stop for a “pissing contest,” both of you standing side by side, unzipping at the driveway’s edge, aiming father-and-son streams into the Queen Anne’s Lace, poke-berries, goldenrod, and milkweed. Your papa’s thick, ruddy, uncircumcised dick resembled the Polish sausages that your mother boiled with potatoes and cabbage. Your own dick scarcely rated notice.
While pissing, your father would recite a favorite limerick:
There once was a man from Madras
Whose balls were made of brass
In frosty weather they clanged together
And sparks flew out of his ass
Your papa’s urine never failed to outperform yours in every category: thickness, altitude, distance, endurance, its glittering golden arch reminding you, as it rose and fell into the weeds, of the brass turnings that spun from his lathe. Watching it twist and turn in the twilight, you’d say to yourself: When I can pee that far, I’ll be a man.
BY THE TIME you got to the Building that day it was already dusk. The lights still burned inside. You knocked on the inner door. To your father’s Come in, Peter my boy, you let yourself in, remembering to shut the door behind you. Your father sat at his typewriter, typing. Well, well, so good to see you, Peter boy, he said, and went on typing with two fingers, smiling. Maybe he asked you about your first day at school. You may even have said something about visiting the new teacher in his cottage, though it’s unlikely. However affectionate and welcoming, your father never pretended to be that interested in you. He listened to you the way he listened to his radio, appreciating the background noise even though he didn’t give a fig what music was playing.
Anyway, you’d forget what you talked or didn’t talk about.
But you wouldn’t forget how, when you were small, on hot summer days your papa would take you and George to a muddy swimming hole under a railroad trestle near the edge of town, how once there he would enter the water as he always did, ever so slowly, inch by gruesome inch, making wincing sounds as if he were stepping into a vat of boiling oil. Meanwhile the fathers of other kids your age ran and jumped into the water.
How you had longed for your papa to jump like the others. Jump, Papa, Jump! you would plead. But he wouldn’t. I can’t, he’d say. I’m too old.
Those three words – I’m too old – how they tolled in you like a tarnished bell. Too old Too old Too old… At moments like that your disappointment knew no bounds. And it was true. Your papa was old, born in 1912, the same year the Titanic sank.
But it wasn’t old age that kept your father from jumping into bodies of water anymore than it prevented him from throwing footballs or playing catch, things your father would no sooner have done than he would have swum the Bosporus or climbed Mount Everest. It wasn’t age that made your papa old. It was his unwillingness to do anything that failed to engage him, that didn’t pertain to his pursuits and interests. It was egocentricity, not age, that made your father so old.
So you concluded that day after visiting the new teacher for the first time.
As you stood there watching your father type, seeing him smile in concentration, it occurred to you that something else had changed for you that day. You realized, not for the first time but with a novel sense of bitter disappointment, that your papa, the human god who’d invented the world for you, was a remote, absentminded old man.
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.”
I HAVE A THREE-AND-A-HALF YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER, AUDREY. She lives with her mother in New Jersey. I see her a half-dozen times a year, as often as my academic schedule allows.
I never meant to become a father; I sure didn’t plan to become one at fifty-three, let alone a long-distance father. Life has its own agendas.
The first and only other time I came close to fatherhood I was twenty years old. I’d gotten my high school sweetheart pregnant. Though I’d moved to New York to study art, on visits home Laura and I kept seeing each other. She was a shy, quiet girl, and we spent most of our time together in pursuit of means to avoid talking to each other.
During one
