Electric City: A Novel (18 page)

Martin’s story echoed for her alongside the hum of the car, his voice a kind of melody, a vibration. With the remnants of sunset looking like pale fire on the rim of the mountains, Sophie hoped Simon wasn’t going to worry if she was late. She would have loved to take one brief detour into Saratoga to catch a glimpse of some jockeys and horses, even a groom or trainer, but there was no room left for anything else.

“Early mornings are best for that anyway,” Henry explained. There was so much he could show Sophie next time: racetracks and betting windows, bandstands, mineral-stained drinking fountains. What about Martin’s secret fishing holes—the places he wouldn’t share, or couldn’t?
How did you know when the second half of your life was going to begin?

Bear in the passenger seat turned his head so often Martin was convinced he was still tracking the unity of his newly formed pack, making sure the other two were following close behind. The turnoff to Jonas Wheatfield’s place pulled Bear’s attention too, and Martin took a deep breath, remembering his plan to visit the stored canoe at Midge’s. He would bring it back to the water with a prayer, a promise of buoyancy. As always, he would ask the river for permission to claim its fish, listening
with equal respect for the sound of yes or no. That practice was helping him now too, as he watched the faces of Henry and Sophie shining together in his rearview mirror. Annie would say it with certainty, that their particular happiness didn’t take anything away from him.
There was enough of whatever you needed. Always
.

If the sign had said
OPEN
, Henry would have chosen the very thing he’d avoided while headed in the other direction: stop at the Country Store. But all the lights were out and the parking lot was empty.
Too late
. He swallowed the disappointment and kept driving south, allowing himself a belief it would be possible, eventually, to layer new memories on top of the old ones. Sophie would hold out her hands and he would fill them with brightly wrapped sweetness, a taste of the lucky world made new again.

S
ATURDAY EVENINGS
S
TEINMETZ
could be found at his poker game, the one he called the Society for the Adjustment of Differences in Salaries. Forcing himself to clear space on the oval table that would otherwise have remained covered in notebooks and drawing paper, Steinmetz used the weekly gathering with friends and colleagues to joke about his Socialist tendencies. Of course all the players knew that these were serious convictions held since his student days in Breslau. If so-called Providence was typically credited or blamed as the source of this one’s perfectly symmetrical face or that one’s irreparable lameness, why shouldn’t those born desperately poor be given the same rights and opportunities as those born into wealth?

From age five onward, Midge was allowed to sit beside him for the first part of the evening, since indulging her was almost as constant a pleasure as his cigar. Although Midge’s mother Corinne frequently scolded Proteus for keeping the child too close to such adult preoccupations, he delighted in the way Midge seemed both fascinated and bored by the movement of cards and coins, the rambling conversation floating above her blond curls. He especially appreciated the child’s intent concentration on practicing her letters on the same pages he used for graphing magnetite resistance and improving plans for an electric canoe motor.

Once she showed him a drawing she had made of Joseph Longboat in profile, a surprisingly good likeness. From time to time he would
allow his focus to wander away from the poker game just enough to allow Midge to trace the outline of his hands, so that she could compare their shape to her own. He showed her how to draw objects in three dimensions, and she played tic-tac-toe using herself as an opponent. In these moments his ideas about women’s suffrage and participatory equality became much more than abstractions—Steinmetz envisioned the day when Midge could be employed in any field she wished, following the inclinations of her own ambition.

By the time she turned eight, and with the election of a Socialist mayor in Electric City, Steinmetz had begun a more public role in political life. He stood on a small wooden platform elevating him to the proper height for the speaker’s podium, so that he was able to address an audience without straining for visibility. The podium hid most of his twisted frame and thus allowed the attention of the crowd to remain fixed on his face, on the words coming out of his mouth.

“We are capable of greatness, each alone and all together. There is simply a need to recognize the fact of our brilliant capacity for more efficiency and less waste. We are able to see this in machinery; why not in our lives? Mathematics teaches us this. The best of us can be enhanced and the worst of us promoted to our highest ability.”

Invited to broadcast his ideas by way of the recently launched local radio station, Steinmetz waxed eloquent. A four-hour workday could turn America into the true Utopia it was meant to be, a place where men spent more time with their families and among friends than toiling at their jobs, and the Happiness Effect would bring about such benefits for everyone, such an exuberant free-flowing exchange of goodwill and generosity of spirit, a current of alternating give and take, a place where needs were satisfied and talents used in the most collectively productive ways.

Day by day and week by week, his notebooks filled to overflowing with essays and mathematical formulations. Socialism and Invention. Disruptive Strength of Air. Relativity and Space. Educational Developments in Electric City. Not to mention the piles and piles of photographs in need of organizing. Corinne could at least be grateful that it was only a mountain of paperwork adorning her dining room table. Out behind the main house in his laboratory was where the truly messy explorations took place. While Midge was allowed to help tend to the lizards and cacti in the solarium, the laboratory remained generally off-limits. “Too many dangerous concoctions!” Steinmetz told her, even when she begged to visit. “I don’t want to set your hair on fire!”

Meanwhile, out of earshot, Joe and Corinne worried about his painfully bent spine. Doctors warned openly that Steinmetz would have a shortened life. The compression of his organs and the cumulative burden on his damaged lungs would be especially costly. As for his own awareness, no matter that cigars might be accused of exacerbating his condition; Steinmetz didn’t need to be reminded of his mortality.

The only unanswerable question was this: would he live long enough to see the realization of his most fervent beliefs? Escalated rumblings of a European war caused him to react first with disillusion and eventually with dread. To witness the interruption of those same young lives he tried so hard to benefit with unlimited opportunity, free education—
sending soft-cheeked boys to kill one another!
Again and again he devoted himself to explaining how the pure and elegant laws of mathematics could be applied to the turbulence of society.

Steinmetz drafted articles about the Company’s dramatic contribution to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in distant San Francisco. The Tower of Jewels was designed not only to attract people during the day with its cut-glass surfaces shimmering in the sun, but also
to draw people throughout the night by means of artificial illumination. No fewer than fifty spotlights aimed their beams at the structure, with the aptly named Fountain of Energy nearby. Photovoltaic sources of energy promised to light up the planet in a perfectly renewable form. Everywhere evident and potent, a halo of the greatest of spectacular effects.

How daring, enchanting, and in every sense new. Electricity was both a servant and a provider of comforts, marvelous innovations releasing humans from drudgery, men and women both. Not to mention the resultant liberation of the human spirit.

Sitting with Midge on his lap, humming a resurrected melody from his own long-gone childhood, he dreamed of the day that everyone would understand. The pulse inside each body echoed the same current of the universe.

M
EETING
S
OPHIE
’
S BROTHER
Simon at the bridge had been more awkward than Henry imagined. He wasn’t used to being looked at with so much mistrust, as though a Van Curler had to prove his own merit to a perfect stranger. But of course if he’d had a younger sister of his own, he would undoubtedly feel the same way toward someone turning up in the dark after an unsupervised overnight to a house by the lake. He hazarded a guess that Simon was evaluating the emotional distance between Martin’s truck and Henry’s MG, but maybe that was just his own wishful thinking.

“Sorry we’re late,” Henry said, pulling Sophie’s paisley bag out of his trunk.

“Nice wheels,” Simon said. “And if you were speeding I don’t want to hear about it.”

Sophie hugged Henry for a long minute before walking over to say goodbye to Martin. Even Bear looked disconsolate about the three of them going their separate ways.

“Thanks for everything,” Sophie called out, waving in all directions. “That doesn’t feel like nearly enough to say.”

Henry and Martin waited inside their own vehicles while Simon’s taillights disappeared uphill toward town. It wasn’t clear to either one of them what was supposed to happen next. Henry considered inviting Martin to grab a milkshake or something at the Castle Diner, something
to fend off his inevitable loneliness, but when he tapped his horn as a question, Martin started his engine and pulled away. The Company logo competed with the sliver of moon, same as always. Martin recrossed the bridge toward home.

The idea of going straight toward his parents’ house on Wendell Avenue was more unappealing to Henry than ever. They’d be surprised to find him back early from the lake, and the last thing he felt like doing was explaining about having friends for such a brief visit.

All too soon, he’d be packing his suitcases for school, going back to the place where he was surrounded by people with roman numerals after their names, legacy upon legacy. He wished he had a nickname, some kind of identity he could truly call his own. He wished he knew his purpose.

Suddenly his mood couldn’t find its way above the horizon. All he could think about was the looming dark of winter, cars in the black morning, snow in their headlights, snow in his hair, his nose staying frozen all through classes and his fingers and toes too. He felt himself bracing for the worst: cold snaps that happened fast and broke things. The sound of bursting pipes or the crash of icicles or cars sliding into snowbanks, the sound of tree limbs collapsing under the weight of the ice, branches unable to bear it.

He had held Sophie in his arms, touched the inside of her body with his fingertips. But he couldn’t be sure that the memory would stay with him once they were all those miles apart.

S
OPHIE DREAMED ABOUT
riding her bike toward Lock 7, looking up at the innocent blue sky and becoming fixated on nuclear fallout. There was a roaring sound that might have been a siren, which, waking her, turned out to be the sound of a neighbor’s lawn-mower. She couldn’t help feeling nostalgic for the delicate birdsong from just one day earlier.

“Looks like you forgot to protect yourself from the sun,” her mother said, noting Sophie’s reddened shoulders when she sat down at the breakfast table. Simon had already eaten his toast on the way out the door.

“Ultraviolet rays,” her father said, not looking up from the newspaper. “They’re stronger than you think.”

“We had fun,” Sophie said. “And the weather was gorgeous.” She had experimented with braiding her hair, remembering that when she’d worn it that way as a child, the pediatrician had teased her about looking like Pocahontas. Maybe Martin would be offended.

“Your grandmother used to worry about skin cancer before anyone else had heard of it,” Miriam said.

“That’s a weird thing to be proud of, isn’t it?” Sophie asked, pouring herself a bowl of cereal.

“She was ahead of her time,” said David.

“I bet not a single one of your friends has a grandmother who was a doctor,” Miriam said. “Am I right?”

Sophie noticed her father’s suitcase in the hallway beyond the kitchen. “Are you going somewhere?”

“Los Alamos,” he said. “I’m taking a business trip for a couple of days.”

“Los Alamos?” Sophie repeated, stunned. “The place where they make atomic bombs?”

“I work at the research lab,” he said. “With magnets.”

“What do your magnets have to do with bombs?”

“Now you’re going to start protesting the war too, like your brother?” her father said.