Mount Terminus (2 page)

*   *   *

The three infants had grown so accustomed to sleeping with one another over the course of their long journey, the two girls and the boy wouldn't be separated at night without a great disturbance upsetting the nursery. Their new guardians allowed them to sleep together in the same crib until they were two, then moved them to the same bed until they were five, at which time they required them to reside in separate wings, but the children met every day between lessons to play in the courtyard, and without fail, they sat side by side when they dined. So Jacob wouldn't be lonely at night, the girls cut pieces from the ribbons holding back the thick curls of their hair, and they pinned the shiny material to the lapel of his jacket, and each night before curfew they placed into his pockets notes inscribed with wishes he was meant to read before the dormitory lights were extinguished. The girls longed for things all children long for: sweets and toys and pets. They desired, too, things only orphans desire: a mother and a father, a room in which to sit alone, for silence lasting days and nights with no end. Jacob never made such wishes, as he had only one, of such great importance that he never dared write it down or articulate it.

His only wish was to remain with Rachel and Leah.

To never be apart from them.

To be reunited with them in his bed.

*   *   *

Anyone who had eyes could see in what ways the twins would blossom into great beauties. At the age of nine, they already comported themselves with the poise of young women, and on their own initiative they endeavored to refine their characters so they might better resemble the figures living in the novels they read at night under the glow of streetlamps hanging outside their dormitory windows. Leah taught herself to sing and play the spinet; Rachel taught herself how to draw and paint; their eyes, in turn, retained a hopeful glimmer, and projected an intellect neither sharp nor oppressive.

On Saturday afternoons, they walked with their sister orphans to the long meadow in the park, where, instead of running wild with the others, they presented themselves for public view at the edge of the promenade. There they watched the men and women of privilege stroll by, evaluated their faces as they passed, read into them what goodness they believed they were capable of. On one such Saturday, the identical sisters, dressed in their identical dresses, attracted the attention of an unaccompanied woman who, on her approach, saw them point her out of the crowd, then watched them lift a dandelion to their lips, and blow away the downy tuft in her direction.

What, the woman asked, had they wished for?

The girls said they had wished she would stop and talk with them.

Why? asked the woman.

And they told her why.

And what more would you wish for if I handed you all the dandelions in the world?

And they listed all the wishes they had written in the notes they had slipped into Jacob's pockets. The following day, they were invited to visit the woman's home. And off they went, and never returned. Without so much as a final note to wish Jacob well, they were gone, and would remain estranged from him for almost a dozen years.

*   *   *

To dull the loneliness Jacob felt in Rachel and Leah's absence, he immersed himself in his studies, and he discovered one day in the Asylum's library the writings of the Cambridge scryer, John Dee. He grew increasingly fascinated by Dee's pursuit to devise a numeric code in which one could see the pure verities that underlay the visible world. He dreamed of a universe in which it was possible to prove there was a mystical unity in all creation, and marveled over the thought of an obsidian mirror that the old scholar acquired from a soldier who claimed Aztec priests had found within it the angels of God.

For two years, Jacob spent his free time absorbed by the principals of optics he'd discovered in Dee's writings, in the drawings of Goethe, the treatises of Newton, and when his enthusiasm for this field was brought to the attention of one of the orphanage's trustees, he was introduced to a man named Jonah Liebeskind, an inventor and craftsman, who made his living shaping lenses for cameras and naval telescopes. Mr. Liebeskind was a fastidious bachelor who saw the smallest imperfections in all things. In objects. In architecture. In the manners of men. In the appearance of women. His intention, he would one day explain to Jacob, was not to be unkind by pointing out the deficits in people and the objects they created, he simply could not tolerate mediocrity.

He said to Jacob the afternoon they met that if he was willing to work hard and do everything in his power to live up to his standards, if he was willing to pledge to him his diligence, and promise he would attempt to rise above his circumstances, he would make Jacob his apprentice.

To this, Jacob agreed.

In return, he was given a room of his own in Mr. Liebeskind's splendid home, a key to the garden, a pair of coveralls to be worn in the machine shop, a new suit to be worn on days they made their deliveries, an additional suit, even more refined, to be worn to shul on the high holidays, to the theater, where they would spend each Sabbath eve, to the museum, where they would spend each Sabbath day studying art, and always to dinner.

Mr. Liebeskind was fond of saying, We will not be unseemly Jews. We will not look or speak like men spawned from the gutter.
We
will rise above. He settled for nothing less. Sartorial perfection. Clean hands. Buffed nails. Hair groomed. Shoes shined. Posture erect. Words pronounced without guttural inflection. Manners. Always manners. Always serving the aesthetics of grace. Jacob adopted Mr. Liebeskind's regimen. A small sacrifice to make for a room of his own and for the opportunity to handle such beautiful tools. In a night and a day, the upright Mr. Liebeskind transformed him from an unkempt boy into a pristine little man, and in ten years' time, all the while playing his role accordingly, Jacob absorbed everything Mr. Liebeskind imparted to him. He learned from him all there was to know about the properties of glass and shaping lenses, the mechanisms of photographic equipment, the physical nature of light, the internal workings of reflecting telescopes. His mentor had an impeccable eye for painting and believed there was no reason why he and Jacob, with a forthright application of ingenuity, couldn't, one day, craft lenses and mechanisms that would make it possible for the photographers to whom they sold their equipment to be as great as Hals and Van Dyck. Tiepolo. Poussin. Guardi. He dreamed of traveling abroad like a proper gentleman, to meet with other opticians, to research their methods of shaping lenses, but they were always too consumed with work to take time for a holiday.

With Mr. Liebeskind's permission, Jacob dissected the early projection and viewing devices his mentor had acquired over his lifetime; the components of his magic lanterns
,
the spinning carousel of his zoetropes, the synchronized disks of his phenakistoscope, the mandalas of his Wheel of Life; and with the little money he earned from Mr. Liebeskind, he bought materials with which he re-created, from designs he'd seen illustrated in the journal
Phantasmagoria
, an electrotachyscope and a phasmatrope. In this same journal, he read one night before bedtime an article about Thomas Edison's search for a method by which he might deliver clear and consistent images on his Kinetoscope. Jacob visited the patent office to study the blueprints of Edison's motion picture viewer, and saw in the drawings that the flaw wasn't, as Edison claimed, with the width and length and tensile strength of the celluloid, or, for that matter, with the placement of perforations along the film's edge, but rather with the rate at which each framed image moved past the device's aperture. The instant Jacob looked at it, he saw the wondrous flaw, and in the instant that followed, its remedy occurred to him as if it were handed down from heaven by the angels of God the Aztec priests witnessed in Dee's obsidian stone.

He spent the next year constituting Edison's Kinetoscope, reengineering its system of feeds and loops, sprockets and pulleys, and when it was completed, he added to it a singular item, deceptively simple: a timing mechanism—not unlike what one might find inside a common pocket watch—that would make it possible to deliver however many frames of film per second one desired to the viewing piece of any motion picture device. In keeping with his character, the evening after he observed the successful operation of Jacob's invention, Jonah Liebeskind—as if he had recognized at that moment that he was on the cusp of declining into the middling state of mediocrity he so abhorred—died peacefully in his sleep, leaving not the slightest indication on his face that he'd struggled to stay alive.

To Jacob, who had proved himself over the years a devoted acolyte, Mr. Liebeskind willed his splendid home, his machine shop, his tools, his collection of optical devices, and the type of small fortune a fastidious bachelor accumulates after so many years of hard work without holidays. And once again, Jacob found himself alone, without friends or companions, better off only in riches.

With a small portion of the money left to him by his mentor, Jacob bought a suit more refined than the suit he wore to shul on the high holidays, and, dressed in this new ensemble, he traveled to West Orange to see Edison, who, after studying the patent for Jacob's timing mechanism, had agreed to sit for a demonstration. When presenting his invention to the great man, Jacob said, See, sir, see how simple and elegant. And he showed how simply and elegantly his invention rotated the device's shutter as it intermittently halted and reengaged the scrolling film, how it left just the right length of slack for the sprockets of Edison's Kinetoscope to move the frames of celluloid past the aperture, to create for the eye fluid imagery. And at this sight, Edison remarked, Now, why hadn't I thought of that?

Jacob sold Edison the rights to use what he would come to call the Rosenbloom Drive for a modest royalty, and he reserved the privilege of being the sole manufacturer and distributor of the mechanism. Jacob's modest riches wouldn't yet accrue into a fortune, but they would soon thereafter, when, several years later, a former associate of Mr. Edison's, a Mr. W.K.L. Dickson, who had been impressed by the young Rosenbloom's ingenuity, sought Jacob out in his deceased mentor's machine shop, and presented to him a new challenge: to build a mechanical system that would allow a projection device to cast a life-size image of a continuous action of prolonged duration. At present, because of the fussy internal configuration and limited capacity of Edison's Kinetoscope, only the shortest of moving pictures could be observed—of the most minuscule physical gestures, of the most meager displays of human nature—and they could only be seen by stooping over a box and squinting into a hole. Mr. Dickson placed in Jacob's hands a design for an apparatus he called a Phantoscope, and Jacob, again, after a short period of study, saw—as if God had breathed the solution into his mind—what Mr. Dickson and his colleagues could not. He set forth his terms—a greater royalty than the one he asked of Edison and the right to be the sole manufacturer of whatever moving parts he invented—and Mr. Dickson agreed.

In a few months' time, Jacob built for him a mechanism more complex, but equally as elegant as the one he had built for Edison: a labyrinth of rolling roundabouts and reversals, metallic passages, clips and levers, all of which fed and guided a length of film on a wayward journey from one magazine up top to another below, with each frame of film stopping intermittently in front of the projector's condenser lens and light source. This device he named the Rosenbloom Loop, which included in its design the Rosenbloom Drive. When Mr. Dickson saw in what an ingenious manner Jacob had made it possible to roll over as many feet of film that could be scrolled into the two magazines, and that the images they produced were larger than life, Dickson, who was not nearly as arrogant or prideful a man as Edison, said, Now, I would have
never
thought of that.

At which time, Jacob's modest riches began to transform into lasting wealth.

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In Jonah Liebeskind's former machine shop, Jacob manufactured his mechanisms, and continued to attend to Mr. Liebeskind's longstanding clients. And as the old man's regimen had served him well thus far, he continued it on his own. He dressed in coveralls when working in the machine shop; when making deliveries, he dressed in his delivery suit; for dinner he dressed in his finest attire. On Friday nights after Sabbath prayers, he sat for a theater performance, sometimes two; on Saturdays he perused the wings of the museum. For many years he kept to these routines, and in doing so began to inhabit the character of his deceased mentor. More and more he resembled the fastidious bachelor whose work left him no time for holidays. And then, one Sabbath afternoon, a dozen years after he had watched Rachel and Leah slip away through the narrow opening of the Asylum's doors, an event he had long ago stopped hoping for befell him. On a bench in the museum, a sketch pad on her lap, a nub of charcoal in her hand, Rachel sat, drawing, re-creating in her own style Tiepolo's
The Rest on the Flight into Egypt
. There she was, the same little girl, now grown into the woman she had once pretended to be.

Jacob watched for a long while, well aware as he observed her in what ways he had become a man she wouldn't recognize, so precise and regimented, tailored and mannered, manicured, as upright as a soldier. For so long now, the boy she was familiar with had long since vacated his body. Even if he wanted to, he knew he wouldn't be able to summon him back. He rounded the stone bench on which she sat and continued to stare at her. He regarded with wonderment the movement of her hand and the shape of her lines, the curve of her wrist, and as soon as he formed her name on his lips, tears welled in his eyes. He thought for a moment that he should walk on and hide his face, but she sensed his presence and turned to see him crying in the silent manner he sometimes cried as a child, and upon seeing him this way, she recognized him.