Reluctant Genius (17 page)

“Poor fellow, how can you for a moment doubt our sympathy?” replied Eliza, who went on to explain that their silence was due to his request for discretion, particularly as he had never said whether the Hubbards were prepared to accept him. “You being now a full man, your own master, and the best judge of what is fitted for your happiness, we should never have thought of biasing you.… We had no wish in the matter adverse to your own, for your happiness would make ours.” They certainly had no objection to Mabel’s deafness: “[I]t would be ridiculous for us to object to your following your Father’s example.… There is no reason why you and a wife who is deaf should not be as happy as Papa and I have always been.”

Eliza’s letter was loving and gentle, but she was hurt. She knew her son all too well. “We are the victims,” she suggested, “of your own excited imagination.” She urged Alec to remember that “there are not so many of us left that we can afford to take up unreasonable offense against each other, or imagine affronts where none were thought of or intended. We should … cling the more closely together for mutual strength and support.”

In the privacy of Tutelo Heights, Eliza had had a hard time persuading her husband not to take “unreasonable offense.” Melville Bell had been outraged by his son’s letter: as impulsive as his son (and equally sensitive to unintended slights), he had immediately sat down and written a furious and aggrieved letter to Alec. After all he had done for his son, how could Alec treat him like this? Given the sacrifices he had made for his son’s health, how could Alec accuse him of neglect? Melville boiled with wrath, but once his rage was vented, he reluctantly allowed Eliza to tear up the note and to end her own letter in a gentler tone: “We both feel thoroughly bewildered, and fear something must have upset your mind.”

His mother’s explanation soothed Alec. His equanimity restored, he gave his parents the news they most wanted to hear: he would arrive at Tutelo Heights in early September for a prolonged visit. And when he stepped through the parlor’s double windows on a warm, late summer day, he found an eager audience for both his consuming interests: the multiple telegraph and Mabel Hubbard. Melville was particularly anxious to heal the rupture. “If he has not killed his fatted calf for me,”

Alec confided to “Miss Mabel” in a letter, “he has done everything else to make me happy—and to show his affection for me.”

It had been a nerve-racking few months for a naive twenty-eight-year-old who had, up until now, buried his emotions deep. Those close to him already knew that too much work and too little sleep could tip him into an overwrought state. The severe headaches to which he was increasingly prone were almost certainly migraines, as he suffered an abnormal sensitivity to light. He put tremendous demands on himself, not least because, with the deaths of his brothers, he felt the weight of family expectations resting on his shoulders. His tendency to work round the clock, and to alternate between states of fierce focus on one goal and an inability to concentrate on anything, suggest a lack of balance in his temperament.

Yet for all Alexander Graham Bell’s neurotic intensity, there was nothing wrong with his brain. He was erratic in his habits and intellectually obsessive, but it was his unconventional mind that made him a genius. He refused to be hemmed in by rules; he allowed his intuition to flourish; he relied on leaps of imagination, backed up by a fascination with the physical sciences, to solve the challenges he set himself. It was perhaps inevitable that when such a brilliant young man fell in love, his emotions would spiral out of control.

It was Alec Bell’s good fortune that he had fallen in love with a woman who would prove able to handle this obsessive personality. In 1875, Mabel was still barely more than an adolescent, tucked under the protective wing of her family and ten years younger than her suitor. But the way she had met the challenge of her hearing loss proved both her intelligence and her strength of character. She knew her deafness set her apart from others, and she had learned to handle herself with grace and confidence. In the years ahead, she would learn to use the same qualities to shield Alexander Graham Bell from stress, emotion, and self-doubt. Thanks to Mabel, the genius of his mind was allowed to flower and the potential for instability in his temperament was never allowed to explode. Their union would provide him with arich, well-rounded family life, a safe haven in which he could reach for his dreams. In the years ahead, Mabel would have to make many compromises and sacrifices. But in return, his disregard for her deafness meant she would live, as her parents had always intended, completely in the hearing world.

Perhaps Mary Blatchford and Mabel’s other relatives found the partnership of their quiet, rather awkward cousin and the gawky Scotsman slightly ridiculous. But Alec was too consumed by his fascination with sound to notice, and Mabel was used to being regarded (and sometimes dismissed) as “different.” Each emerged from the summer of 1875 with a simple trust in the other’s good faith.

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Chapter 8

P
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NO. 174,465 1875-1876

F
rom now on, Mabel Hubbard was a steadying influence in Alec’s life—a source of good sense, insight, and reassurance. “You know my dear,” she teased him at one point, “you are one of those men who can’t live without a little wholesome tyranny from their womenkind!” She admired his protean imagination, but she deplored his volatility. “You are a man of brilliant talents ? but your mind is so fertile it is always drawn off by every new idea that comes up; you like to fly around like a butterfly sipping honey, more or less from a flower here or another flower there.” When Alec was hell-bent on a project, Mabel was the only person who could divert him. When he was distraught, she was the only person who could calm him down.

The first test of their relationship came when Alec returned to Boston from Canada in October 1875. Mabel’s father expected him to buckle down with Tom Watson and produce the multiple-telegraph apparatus immediately. Gardiner Hubbard wanted a commercial application of Alec’s theories as fast as possible. But Alec was still preoccupied with his discovery of the “magneto-electric current” generated by avibrating spring. He wanted to write the specifications for the apparatus that would transmit “vocal utterance telegraphically.” And he still had to earn his living, so he committed himself to a heavy teaching load, including a teacher-training course for Visible Speech teachers and lectures at several local schools.

His patron was furious. “Your whole course since you returned,” Gardiner Hubbard wrote to his protégé, “has been a great disappointment to me and a sore trial…. I have been sorry to see how little interest you seem to take in telegraph matters.” At this rate, he would never be able to afford to marry Mabel. So Hubbard told Alec that he had to choose between Visible Speech and telegraphy—in other words, between his father and his potential father-in-law. “He even went so far as to say,” Mabel confided to Mary True, her former teacher, that “Alec should not have me unless he gave it [Visible Speech] up.” The threat was plain: Hubbard would dissolve their business arrangement and shut the door of 146 Brattle Street in Alec’s face if he didn’t buckle down.

Hubbard had learned nothing from the events of the previous summer. Then, his warning to Alec against a “burst of passion” had exactly the opposite effect: Alec had rushed off to Nantucket. Now, his equally heavy-handed attempt to lock Alec into telegraphy research goaded the younger man into angry resistance. Once again, Alec was suffused with emotions he could not control, and there was an ugly showdown in the Hubbards’ parlor. Hubbard was at his most Boston patrician, stroking the long gray beard that flowed over his starched white collar and speaking with ice-cold authority about “duty.” Alec, his knuckles white and his voice shaking, reacted with all the fervor of a free-thinking Scotsman: he refused to be browbeaten into abandoning either his father’s lifework or Hubbards daughter. The following day, he wrote to Hubbard apologizing for “anything in my conduct that might have seemed disrespectful, or that might have given you offense.” But he stuck to his principles. He would not abandon Visible Speech or his commitment to his deaf pupils. “Should Mabel learn to love me as devotedly and truly as I love her, she will not object to [my] work. If she does not come to love me well enough to accept me
whatever my profession or business may be,
I do not want her at all. I do not want a half-love.” He was not going to let the fact that his major investor was also the father of the woman he loved steer him in any other direction.

At this crucial juncture, Mabel stepped in. She already knew that she cared for Alec and that, as she confided in a letter to Mary True, “I would sooner or later marry him, but I did not know if I loved him sufficiently to tell him so yet.” She also resented being a pawn in her father’s business plans. So she closeted herself with her closest adviser: her mother. Gertrude Hubbard told her, Mabel later recalled, that “I could not go on as I was doing, I must be engaged or give him up.” But Mabel’s mother had a soft spot for the passionate pianist and teacher who had stood up to her husband. She made sure that Alec was invited to 146 Brattle Street on November 25, to join the celebrations for Mabel’s eighteenth birthday, which had fallen on Thanksgiving Day. When he appeared on the doorstep, obviously wretched, Mabel quietly piloted him into a small second-floor room that she used as a study, for another tête-à-tête. As she revealed in her letter to Mary True, “I told him that I loved him better than anybody but Mamma, and if he was satisfied with so much love I would be engaged to him that very day!”

Alec was completely taken by surprise. He felt duty bound to suggest that perhaps she was too young— “He almost refused to let me bind myself to him, he reminded me how young I was and how I had not seen other men.” But Mabel insisted that her love was real. Alec could barely contain himself for the rest of the evening, and by the time he reached home in the early hours of the following day he was almost delirious. He scribbled a note to Mabel: “I am afraid to go to sleep lest I should find it all a dream, so I shall lie awake and think of you It is so cold and selfish living all for one’s self. A man is only half a man who has no-one to love and cherish.” When he returned to Cambridge two days later, he and Mabel affirmed their engagement. Mabel’s parents apparently accepted the fait accompli with grace, although they did not allow the couple to set a date for the wedding yet.

Once the betrothal was official, the relationship settled into a pattern that would last a lifetime. Mabel wrote to her newly minted fiancé, “My darling, I warned you before we were engaged that though I might love you very much, I could not do so in the passionate hot way you did.” Mabel recognized that not only was Alec’s temperament far more impulsive than hers, his emotional needs were also greater than hers, and perhaps beyond her capacity to fulfill. “I love you all I can and my powers of loving seem to increase daily. You must be satisfied with this. I would give you more if I could but I cannot help my nature.”

While Alec provided the passion, Mabel supplied stability and structure. This was as true of the practical details of his life as it was of his sprawling emotional hinterland. She took one look at his desk, which was almost submerged in unanswered letters and half-written articles, and got to work—sorting papers into piles and replying to his correspondents. “We are so much obliged to dear Mabel for acting as your Amanuensis,” wrote Eliza Bell. Insisting that his scientific pursuits should not swallow up his health and other interests, Mabel tried to cure him of all-night working sessions. One day a parcel arrived at Alec s laboratory with a note from Mabel explaining that this was a portrait of him that she had painted. He eagerly tore the brown paper wrapping off and found himself staring at a picture of a night owl. She also told him that she was going to buy him a piano, to lure him away from his experiments. Alec wrote to his parents that she wanted him “to play for her
every evening
when we are married!” Eliza replied, “If the fever in which she lost her hearing did not utterly destroy the nerve, perhaps she might hear the piano by resting a piece of solid stick on the sounding board and holding it there with her teeth. [I found that] by such means the noise would reach me.”

Most important, Mabel gently steered her fiancé toward fulfilling his obligations to her father. Gardiner Hubbard was finally convinced of the value of Alec’s mechanism to transmit the human voice, and wanted to apply for a patent for the idea as well as continuing with the multiple telegraph transmitter. But he was frustrated on both counts. In Washington, Alec’s patent application for the multiple telegraph from the previous February was blocked by similar applications from three other inventors: Elisha Gray, Thomas Edison, and a Danish scientist named Paul La Cour. It would take the patent examiner some time to sort out whether the applications overlapped, and who had first conceived of the idea. And Alec, in a typically muddle-headed, unbusiness-like move, had already taken the initiative to patent his “speaking telegraph” in Britain. While staying in Brantford the previous September, and feeling very short of money, he had sold a share of the rights to his invention to his parents’ neighbor, the Canadian publisher-politician George Brown, for $500. The deal was that Brown would file for a British patent while he was in London the following January.