Electric City: A Novel (21 page)

And yet, without his own willingness to change, he would certainly never have met Joseph, or paddled a canoe, might never have learned to read a river’s movements or an eagle’s wingspan. Instead of Europe, he had a son and grandchildren related not by blood but something more complex and poignant: his heart’s choice.

Sighing, he held one wrist to let the fingertips count his own faint pulse. Ever since the return from California, the current state of his biology was causing alarm in the physician’s office. The same doctor who had consistently joined him at the poker table—the one sharing his love of cigars and brandy—in sterile daylight apologetically explained that Steinmetz was showing all the signs of imminent organ failure.

“A common cold might be uncommonly deadly,” he warned.

Exposing the frail chest of his patient, Dr. Rollings had attached electrodes in an equilateral triangle, measuring the pulsing energy beneath Steinmetz’s gray-tinged skin. A slender ribbon of paper recording the map of heartbeats was suddenly as clear as the story of his entire life with electricity: jagged lines like fragments of Camp Mohawk’s broken mirror, the lightning path, its musical notation, its symphony.

Someday
, Steinmetz thought, waiting for Midge’s visit with his cup of tea,
someday electricity will save the world’s heart
. He will be a long-gone ghost by then, a Wizard no more. Only the name of someone who believed.

Now the knock at the door was like a drumbeat from far away, a rhythmic voice from the little heart he loved best.

“Come in, Midgie,” he said. “I’m right here.”

W
ITHOUT A FAMILY
of her own to corral into place, Midge celebrated Thanksgiving at the Mohawk Club, inviting as her guests a handful of college students too far from home. In truth, she would have preferred serving meals in a soup kitchen or an orphanage, wherever the need was greatest, but every year the Holiday Committee claimed they couldn’t manage without her. Donning a starched white apron and a pair of Corinne’s simple pearl earrings, Midge played multiple roles as local farmer, head cook, and substitute mother.

The students (almost always nineteen- and twenty-year-old boys) showed up with their jackets and ties, scrubbed faces and shined shoes; accustomed to insatiable appetites, they offered effusive gratitude for the heaped servings of turkey and stuffing, squash and cranberries. Between courses, watching the plates wiped clean, she told stories about Daddy Steinmetz—especially his love of practical jokes and the way he shocked first-time visitors to his home with a mild electrical jolt upon shaking hands, using a delicately wired contraption concealed inside his coat sleeve.

It saddened her to notice that as the years passed, fewer students knew who he was, vaguely acknowledging the identity of a mathematician whose numerous patented designs for electric motors appeared in small print alongside the much grander claims of Edison’s. It was the
Company logo they all recognized, glowing above the factory and displayed on countless shiny appliances. The curling insignia of nobody’s name.

Worst of all, plans for preserving the house on Wendell Avenue had fallen through during Midge’s brief absence from Electric City, especially her two-year experiment living in San Francisco. By the time she returned, the Steinmetz/Hayden house had been torn down without her knowledge, leaving a mournful empty space at the center of a tree-framed lot. Her brothers Joe Junior and Bill seemed entirely unconcerned about this disappearance, as though memories of a childhood with lizards and canoes could now be easily relegated to scrapbooks on a dusty shelf.

This Thanksgiving, 1966, she was fifty-seven years old, and she marveled that Steinmetz hadn’t lived past fifty-eight. She tried to imagine this being the last year of her own life: the last round of golf, the last time walking her dog or driving her car, harvesting tomatoes for one final season. It seemed impossible that such an abbreviated life as his could have left behind so many groundbreaking transformations—not least of which was the very concept of a Company-sponsored research laboratory. And yet here was a group of college students in Electric City who barely acknowledged the originality of his lightning generator, his work on alternating current theory, his law of hysteresis.

Even the most extraordinary people end up with as little residue as anyone else,
Midge thought.
A gravestone in a cemetery, a name on a plaque among the pines. A home dismantled and then erased.

M
ARTIN REALIZED THE
irony of carrying an extra-sensitive mechanism for listening when he wore earplugs at the plant to shield himself from the deluge of machine-made noise. The visible world didn’t always match up with its audible counterparts; sometimes the frame couldn’t hold the view.

During lunch breaks and with increasing frequency, Martin heard coworkers at the plant swapping stories about GIs who had begun to question the war out loud. He noticed in particular that black men were calling it a racist war led by a racist army. Someone had printed up a poster crudely calling for black mercenaries to help in killing off other oppressed peoples.
SUPPORT WHITE POWER
! it sneered.
TRAVEL TO VIETNAM, YOU MIGHT GET A MEDAL
!

“Body count” was being used to measure success against the Vietcong. Then came the words “enemy combatants,” offered up in headlines, and the familiar sound hit Martin like a well-aimed blow to his solar plexus. That terrible term from the centuries-ago massacre of his own people, labeling innocent women and children so that history could repeat itself on the other side of the world.

Meaning: the wrong color of skin or shape of eyes, the wrong language, the wrong god. Phrases used as dirty weapons with the same twisted purpose as before, the same genocidal effect. All at once, he couldn’t escape images of young men burning their draft cards, shouting
in unison, “Hell no, we won’t go.” On the news, there were crowds marching with signs outside the Dow factory where napalm was being produced, bombs to be dropped on yellow people just like in 1945, Nagasaki and Hiroshima, always in the name of someone else’s idea about freedom and justice. Martin endured standing while everyone around him at school recited the pledge, but soon even this would be the last form of participation.
No more
.

Each fall weekend, on his way to and from the plant, Martin walked beside a defeated-looking fence high enough to make a complete mystery of whatever lay on the other side. One November day the faded wood, there as long as he could remember, suddenly displayed a splash of white paint, followed a day later by more paint in the shape of a large rectangle, half the size of a refrigerator. The next day, a word was stenciled in black at the center of the box:
BROTHER
. And the day after:
BEWARE
.

A week passed with no change, simply
Brother Beware
, a pair of words creating a drumbeat in his head, his footsteps, disturbingly mimicked by the machines in the factory.
Brother Beware. Brother Beware
. And then a second white box appeared with a typewritten note stapled so that it was white on white, small words he could read only by standing close: T
HE
M
AN IS COMING FOR
Y
OU NEXT TIME
, B
ROTHER
. I
N THIS
W
AR OF
A
GGRESSION, THE
S
TRANGER AT THE
D
OOR IS
Y
OU
.

When Martin lifted the bottom of the page away from the wall as though finally understanding that it was meant exactly for him, sure enough there was a symbol he recognized from readings on Steinmetz: the Greek letter omega.
Ohms
, he thought,
unit of electrical resistance
. Next to that simple insignia was a local phone number written upside down in blue ink. He committed the number to memory, knowing the message would now disappear from the wall, and knowing that someday soon, with a draft card in his pocket, he would need to make a call.

H
ENRY
’
S ANNUAL
T
HANKSGIVING
weekend in New York City with his mother’s side of the family was usually a treat; since his three cousins were older, all married and with young children, he managed to spend most of the time out of the limelight. Someone, after all, needed to take the Dodge family corgis for walks several times each day, and someone was always needed to run down to the corner store for more ice (there was never enough) or olives (never enough of those either). Although his grandparents had plenty of staff to prepare elaborate meals and maintain the huge and fastidious apartment, Henry actually enjoyed being the designated supplier of missing ingredients. He welcomed the chance to see how long he could delay returning to the eighteenth floor, knowing that cocktail hour started especially early on holidays, and lasted late into the night.

On the other hand, staying away from Electric City was a newly discovered frustration. Sophie explained in one of her letters that her family had never quite figured out how to celebrate such an American event, and that it seemed to her an excellent time to take an offshore vacation. Although Martin had sent him the requested photos of the Van Curler Hotel, the envelope contained a note saying, “Wish you were here.” Henry hadn’t felt comfortable enough to ask Martin what he did for Thanksgiving, assuming that the very idea of the holiday was annoying at best and possibly reprehensible at worst.

“I’ll call you from my grandparents’ place,” Henry wrote back to Sophie. “And we can make a definite plan for seeing each other in December.”

Arthur and Gloria picked him up at school in their cream-colored Mercedes and the three drove to Manhattan late on Wednesday night. Henry stretched out on the backseat, claiming exhaustion from midterm exams, but mainly attempting to avoid conversation as well as to keep whatever distance he could find from his father’s chain-smoking. His mother either didn’t mind the fumes or was choosing as usual to endure her circumstances in silence.

When the morning’s radio news issued dire warnings about air pollution, and the announcers quoted medical professionals urging anyone with asthma and other breathing ailments to remain indoors, both Arthur and his father-in-law, similarly dedicated smokers, glanced out the window and then back across the breakfast table at each other.

“Looks like we’re going to have to quit one of these days,” Arthur said to Cleveland, who laughed and coughed on cue.

“New York City air has hardly ever been good for anybody’s health.”

The panoramic view from the Dodge living room windows indeed showed a cityscape heavily shrouded in smog, skyscrapers wearing dense gray shawls as though someone had draped them there for dramatic effect. Henry’s grandmother, Constance, determined to focus everyone’s attention on the elaborate midafternoon meal, enlisted help in setting the table and teaching the younger children how to fold napkins in the shape of swans. Henry was assigned the job of selecting music for the stereo and making sure his grandfather’s ashtray didn’t overflow onto the silk carpets.
Frank Sinatra. Barbra Streisand. Rachmaninoff. Mozart.
Thanksgiving dinner was served.

Various topics carefully avoided at the table included any reference to the fact that the Dodges’ kitchen boasted a new refrigerator with an in-the-door icemaker manufactured not by the Company but by its major competitor. And also: the past summer’s ten-year anniversary of Aaron’s death. Only if you looked closely at a few of the older photos in the hallway near the guest bathroom, black-and-white shots from weddings and birthdays that included two young Van Curler boys, would you ever know that there was one child absent.

The cousins left in a flurry of activity soon after pumpkin pie had been served and inhaled, climbing into taxis heading uptown and downtown. The children were cranky and tired. Cleveland turned on the television in time to hear that upwards of two hundred people had died from respiratory failure and heart attacks due to the record-shattering smog. Gloria proposed heading back upstate to Electric City before things got any worse.

“More driving will just add to the problem,” Cleveland said. “And anyway, the smoky stuff will clear up overnight. We just need a bit of rain.”

Henry watched his mother’s inscrutable face to see if she might be forming a reply, but instead of arguing her point, she reached into a drawer for a deck of cards and began playing solitaire on the marble coffee table. Constance was in her room down the hall, nursing a migraine, and Arthur was reading
Time
magazine, sipping bourbon.

Henry found himself imagining his brother Aaron the way he might look at nineteen, sitting beside him on the couch and deliberately ignoring the news. Nudging him in the ribs and working up a strategy for convincing the doorman to let them out for a walk after the rest of the family had gone to bed.

“The city that never sleeps,” Aaron’s ghost whispered.

When the remembered sensation of kissing Sophie poured through his body, Henry pictured her beside him, instead of Aaron. The two of them in his grandparents’ apartment in Manhattan, grown-up and independent and happy.

Next year we will all be somewhere else
, Henry thought, surprising himself with certainty.
I don’t know where, but not here
.

F
ROM
S
OPHIE
’
S POINT
of view, her family treated Thanksgiving as though it were a kind of anthropological experiment, designed either to defy understanding or perhaps to be gradually comprehended over a period of decades. This year, since Simon had insisted on staying in California for all of the holidays, starting with Rosh Hashana, she hoped that her parents and their friends would tighten their already-close-knit circle without suffocating her in the process. All of their children were old enough to be away at college or else married, and Sophie was the only one still young enough to live at home.