well, then. If you think you understand the rules, how about playing a little game?”
“Yes, sir,” Frank responded quickly.
Despite the fact that this was supposed to be a harmless pastime, Charles focused all his energies on the game; the square chessboard became a battlefield of honor and dignity upon which he delivered martial orders against his little six-year-old son. From the minute they began, Charles weighed every move with painstaking caution, as if he really should have been consulting territorial maps or discussing strategy with the imaginary chiefs of staff who greeted him each day in his equally imaginary military headquarters. It troubled Frank to see his father like that, and he had difficulty concentrating on the baby steps of his chess game. His father’s hands, covered with liver spots and bulging veins, grabbed the chess pieces with thunderous force, as if uncorking giant wine bottles. Every time he made a move Frank feared that the little plaster geishas and mandarins would go exploding into thousands of little pieces. That afternoon, Frank’s father mercilessly beat his son seven times in a row, availing himself of a rather outrageous move known as the “fool’s mate.” Charles’s chess etiquette, of course, forbade him from winning games on the basis of cheap tricks, but if his son wanted to become a real man, he would have to be able to accept legitimate defeat with humility. He needed to learn how to survive in the battlefield of life, to emerge from the trenches and face his enemies. That’s what Charles Bacon thought.
“My mistake,” Charles mumbled upon losing to his son for the first time. He even lit a cigar to display his sporting attitude, and added, “Although you didn’t play too badly yourself.” The next day, however, he didn’t wait for his son to suggest a game. When Frank returned from school—he was about eight years old by now—he found his father setting up the chessboard and carefully wiping down each chess piece as if inspecting a squadron of subordinate officers.
“Shall we begin?” he asked his son. Frank nodded. He tossed his book bag onto the floor and prepared to enter into far more than a mere battle: This was a fight to the death. After several hours of play, it was safe to say that young Frank had outfoxed his father, winning the first, third, fourth, and fifth games. The befuddled Charles managed to take the second and the sixth, and he did have the consolation of winning the final round, at which point he decided that it was rather late and that he had other, more important things to do.
That day, Frank learned the meaning of the words Pyrrhic victory firsthand, thanks to his father’s rather typical display of self-indulgence. Not long after, Charles suffered a series of misfortunes, which would fuel his bitterness and aggravate the chronic depression that set in months later. After Frank won the game, he saw the impotent look on his father’s face and couldn’t help savoring this vindication. But his father’s temperament would not permit this kind of humiliation. After only one more year of chess games, in which his percentage of losses grew higher than that of his son, Charles simply decided not to play against Frank anymore. A few months after that, he died of a heart attack.
Before he was six years old, Frank’s name never bothered him. His mother always called him Frank or Frankie; it was her way of trying to inject a bit of the New Jersey spirit into the boy. Since the death of Frank’s father, nary a mention was made of that awful “Percy” which had found its way onto his baptismal certificate. No, it only appeared on the most official of documents, and then only as P, like some kind of scarlet letter that he prayed no one would ask him about. But in school everything changed. His first-grade teacher was the first to notice:
“Francis Bacon?” she exclaimed loudly, almost laughing.
“Yes,” he replied, not understanding quite what she meant. Little did he know that from that moment on, his hopes of remaining anonymous would be dashed forever. Suddenly he found himself transformed into an object of curiosity and ridicule for students and teachers alike, sacrificed to a ritual that would repeat itself over and over again at the beginning of each school year.
At first, it wasn’t such a terrible thing to discover that his name was not so original. He was consoled, in fact, by all the Johns and Marys and Roberts he saw. His mother’s second husband was called Tobias Smith, and he didn’t seem at all troubled by the fact that he had to share his name with thousands of his compatriots. But the taunts were what bothered Frank the most: “Bet you think you’re some kind of genius, don’t you, Mr. Bacon?” they asked. He did; that was the worst thing of all. Who would ever believe that there could be another brilliant scientist named Francis Bacon? The first coincidence seemed to make the second one virtually impossible. He tried defending himself by proving to everyone how talented he was, but the arrogance with which he presented his results only elicited bouts of laughter from his teachers. It was as if they thought his intellectual abilities were nothing more than an anomaly or an eccentricity rather than true genius. In any event, they never failed to compare him with the “real” Bacon, as if he were nothing more than the unfortunate, apocryphal copy of a long-dead original.
Bacon’s childhood and adolescence were lonely. Hypersensitive about the qualities that set him apart from the other children, he recoiled from all human contact apart from the unavoidable. He was hardly the easiest person to live with, either, due to the persistent migraines that plagued him, sending him into nearly catatonic states in which the slightest bit of light or noise was all but unbearable. He would spend hours on end locked away in his room, dreaming up formulas and theorems until his stepfather would knock on his door, practically dragging him downstairs to supper. By this point, his mother almost regretted ever having taught him how to count: Not only had he become intransigent and rude, but he also was increasingly intolerant of anyone less intelligent than he.
The hateful games people played at his expense gradually receded from his thoughts and he found himself more and more captivated by the English scientist who had caused all the trouble to begin with. He needed to know who that fateful ancestor was, the person whose mere name had made his life a living hell. With the same dedication of a teenager who inspects himself in the mirror day after day for the most infinitesimal signs of his metamorphosis into adulthood, Francis doggedly pursued his namesake. To avoid the displeasure of reading his name in print over and over again (since it always referred to someone else), Frank chose to immerse himself in the obsessions of his “ancestor.” And in the process of learning about the original Bacon’s great discoveries, Francis made one of his own, the kind of vague realization that emboldens a person to take a leap of faith across the great unknown. This discovery, rather than fulfilling the predictions of his detractors, was the thing that led Frank to discover his vocation. In spite of the apparent happenstance of their shared name, Frank was inspired by the discoveries of the first Francis Bacon, and began to believe that his destiny was somehow linked to that of the old, dead scientist. Maybe it wasn’t exactly a reincarnation—he couldn’t think about things like that—but he felt sure it was some sort of calling, a circumstance that was too obvious to have been an act of pure coincidence.
The life history of Baron Verulam, the first Francis Bacon, transformed the life of our Francis. The more Frank learned about the baron, the more he felt that he had to continue, in some way, the work of the original Francis Bacon. As unpleasant as he had been toward those around him, Francis Bacon had managed to achieve immortality. Young Francis felt a bond with him, for he, too, felt misunderstood by his contemporaries, and he comforted himself by thinking that one day his mother, stepfather, and schoolmates would be sorry for the shoddy treatment they subjected him to. He felt especially proud of sharing his last name with a man to whom Shakespearean plays had been attributed. Just like Sir Francis, Frank had become a learned person for a variety of reasons, including curiosity, the search for truth, plus a certain amount of natural talent for his studies. But in the end Frank easily admitted that the greatest source of inspiration had been the same one Sir Francis cited: rage. For him, a happy coexistence with the precise, concrete elements of mathematics was the only solution to confronting the chaos of the universe, whose destiny was utterly independent of his. Adapting a little saying made famous by his Elizabethan
