Tesla (35 page)

“It’s useless to whisper to the deaf or wink at the blind,” Robert concluded.

At that moment, Tesla looked at him with warmth. A softening smile started to form in a corner of his mouth. “Listen to me, Luka. This planet is packed with free energy. I’ll transmit both energy and messages. All or nothing.”

“But why not something?” Robert asked. “At this very moment,” he continued in a tense voice, “the battle regarding the wireless transmission of messages is about to begin. That’s as big as your war of currents against Edison. By the way, back then you had Westinghouse and his company behind you.”

“What’s the good of acting wisely if you feel bored all the time?” Tesla answered. “The wireless transmission of messages is miraculous to everyone. But I suspect that the images on one’s retina—that is to say our dreams—could be recorded and transmitted by telephone. In my article for the
Electrical Review
, I hypothesized that energy possesses the qualities of both particles and matter. I’ll transmit messages, images, and power that will merrily turn the flywheel on any engine anywhere in the world. I’ll transmit melodies.”

Still, between his delicate inner ear and his aching temples, Nikola sensed a wave of hostility. A hint of anxiety. It quivered in the air.

The journal
Public Opinion
wrote, “The facts regarding Tesla’s discoveries are simple and few, while the fairy tales spun around them are extravagant and numerous.”

Professor Pupin from Columbia University insisted that Tesla’s inflated reputation was like an empty, echoing bucket: “
Dong! Dong! Dong!
That’s precisely how it echoes,” Pupin joked.

Professional journals became jittery. Tesla’s colleagues—and especially his opponents—were annoyed by his propensity to live beyond his means and to take visions as if they were already completed projects.

He felt Robert’s hand on his shoulder. “Remember what they told the crazy and brilliant Ludwig of Bavaria,” Johnson said.

“What?” the inventor asked, removing the hand from his shoulder.

“There’s no happiness outside the community of humans.”

Tesla gave Robert a visionary look: “Keep this in mind, my friend—free energy!”

Tesla accompanied his words with an irresistible smile that simultaneously revealed an inspired weakness and a higher truth. The glare of that smile grew like the frequency of his oscillator. Tesla’s face assumed a half-inspired, half-anguished expression that so annoyed Father. Did not Vivekananda say that the soul was a drunken monkey stung by a scorpion? In fear, Robert gazed at the luminous distances, gossamers, and fairy tales in Tesla’s eyes. In addition to Tesla’s irresistible charm, Robert also sensed a halo of eccentricity and solitude enveloping his friend and felt sorry for him.

There is no doubt that the reader has been worried about Tesla as well.

The smile continued to pour out. Every woman with an alcoholic husband knows that smile. It was the beatific smile of a hopeless gambler, the smile that made Tesla’s mother give in.

CHAPTER 71

The Maelstrom

“Why don’t you come visit me at my new laboratory?” Tesla asked.

For a moment, the red devil was confused. For no apparent reason, he was trying to straighten the brim of his white bowler hat. Then he made a quick decision and compressed his face with a frown: “It’s a deal!”

The next day, in the new laboratory near Chinatown, Stanford White saw many machines he could not name. Among the flashes and pulsations, it was hard to tell what was animate and what was not. Pure spirits waited to be born from the magic coils. The coils licked each other with their white, snake-like tongues. Greek fire wrote demonic letters in the air. Touched by God’s finger, things went up in flames. White inhaled the fresh electric air. He thought of the place as Tesla’s blue cabaret where natural forces and bodiless spirits put on a show. It was as if the inventor were cracking his whip and taming them. The famous architect came out stunned.

“What about you—visiting me?” he stammered, barely standing on his wobbly legs.

Two weeks later, our summoner of the spirits, our Byronian mystical character, our Manfred visited the estate and its beautiful elms on Long Island. He threw his head back and looked at the sunlight filtering through the intertwining treetops. Red maple trees, full of chirping birds, livened up the park. Nikola and Stanford reclined in canvas chairs under an undulating elm. The breeze leafed through the treetop above them and—as it forgot the exact number of leaves—started to count again.

“They say that the maenads who tore Orpheus apart turned into trees,” Stanford White began in a sweet voice. “As they started to grow roots, they went mad with fear.”

The swirl of the treetops was fascinating.

An empty-eyed angel spewed a jet of water into a green pond. The garden, which simulated Eden, freed the two observers from all the worries of the world.

White was drinking. His burning hair was pulsating. He opened up to Tesla.

He said he hated puritans and moral reformers and insisted that they would be the end of him. With suppressed revulsion, he talked about his mother’s favorite soprano, Jenny Lind, who refused to sing in France and Italy for “moral reasons.”

“I’m a good father,” he confided to Tesla. “But since I have no virtues, I accredit that solely to my instincts.”

He introduced his good-looking son and his two ruthlessly ambitious daughters to Tesla. Their mother supervised their piano practices and Latin declensions. Betsy White was a straight-backed woman who was tired of her own impeccability. Her English face was a cross between a frog and a fairy. She possessed both intelligence and wit, but her real food was etiquette. Daily doses of humor and truth were spices too strong for her. She wore a constant smile on her handsome face, so it was impossible to tell when she was sick or tired or angry. Was the cruel wrinkle at the corner of her mouth a sign of defiance or of self-scorn? She never let on that she knew what everyone else in the city knew.

When she was alone, reality dissolved in her rosy prayers. “May he love me!” she prayed with passion. “May he love only me!”

Katharine Johnson touched Betsy White’s back once and recoiled: how tense you are! The back that bore so many worries at times became stiff, and Betsy had to turn to a masseuse for healing.

Her husband dragged a flaming sixteenth-century shadow behind him.

“Benvenuto Cellini.”

“The devil,” they said.

Stanford White transported Venetian palaces to America. He acquired furniture, carpets, and tapestries for the American kings of steel and coal for whom Tesla’s friend Stevan Prostran worked like a dog. In addition to the Long Island estate, he had one apartment on Gramercy Park, another on Garden Tower Suite, and yet another one on West Fifty-Fifth Street. White piled up books, bronze statues, paintings, and nude sculptures. Despite the envious talk, those were all originals. Behind the electric door that opened with a push of a button, mute greyhounds barked from Florentine tapestries.

White’s red hair burned. He had a somewhat wooden way of speaking, his mustache twirling up like two little flames. He often finished his sentences with “and so…”

“Yes, the Brooklyn Bridge marked the beginning of the heroic age of New York,” White said. “Yes, the tenements have been regulated, at least on paper. A minimum of oxygen should be provided to the windowless sections of the buildings. The air shafts in the middle are mandatory, although in a few months they turn into dumps and pigeon graveyards. Yes, there are fire prevention procedures, but people in tenements bind books, tan hides, and make hats. Yes, architecture inspired by Turkish, Russian, and Japanese influences is in vogue these days. It’s true that I started with neo-Romantic Richardson and then admired Sullivan’s ornamentation, but I still stick to Renaissance ideals. And so…”

White designed the Niagara dam draped in its gigantic curtains of foam. That was when he said to Tesla, “I’d love to do something else with you after Niagara.”

For months, they only crossed paths briefly since both of them were busy. “Next week!” they kept saying.

When Sarah Bernhardt came to New York with her play
Izéïl
, Johnson invited her for dinner. On that occasion, Tesla introduced White to Swami Vivekananda. “So you are introducing the devil to the angel?” White grinned.

“Next week, for sure!”

A few months went by.

Finally in August, they spent a weekend in Newport, Rhode Island. The coastline with sails looked like an impressionist painting. Castles competed for grandeur with one another. Marble shone in the middle of the lawn. Peacocks cautiously treaded across the grass. Swallows in tailcoats alighted under the eaves of the millionaire’s mansion. Waves broke against black rocks in front of the Breakers.

“Seven million,” Stanford White whispered out of the corner of his mouth, pretending to look at the ocean. “This pleasure cost Vanderbilt seven million dollars.”

They observed the sunset from a wicker shelter in front of the house. At seven o’clock, a butler—as stiff as a Venetian doge—entreated them to come in. Two griffons bellowed at an urn adorned with some kind of wild cabbage in the hallway. White and Tesla changed at leisure. With their glowing plastrons, they descended under the painted sky in the atrium. Giant bronze candelabras with sixteen milky lamps hung there. The stairway was modeled on the one in the Paris Opera.

Rosy Numidian and green Italian marble decorated the walls. The fireplace in the library, which resembled Juliet’s balcony, was brought over from a sixteenth-century French castle. The giant hearth oozed a chill. Boring old bronze statuettes despaired on the tables. Obsessive symmetry characterized the rooms, which were saturated with a delicate scent from an enormous quantity of flowers.

“I always used to eat before I got hungry,” White confessed to Tesla. “I’m skinny because of tuberculosis.”

The villa was built according to how the French from the Age of Empire imagined Renaissance style. Vanderbilt also had a famous French cook. The cook triumphantly closed his eyes and personally brought in the tray of veal.

Mmmmmm…

The Frenchman boasted that his country had a cheese for every day of the year, so he offered a certain number of them for the host and his guests to judge. Nikola remembered Madame Bauzain’s words from Strasbourg: “When you feel like closing your eyes during a meal—that’s great cuisine. The rest is nothing.”

After dinner, they had a drink in the music room, in front of a blue fireplace made of Campagna marble. A labyrinth of mirrors that faced one another multiplied the ceiling lamps. At one time, three orchestras played in this summerhouse.

That evening, the famous villa was quiet.

Cornelius Vanderbilt II had recovered slowly from a stroke and spoke little. With his sideburns like dandelion fluff and his stony beard, he looked quietly deranged to Tesla. His brother William Kissam came on horseback from a nearby “summer hut” called Marblehouse, on which he had spent eleven million. They had brought electricity to the hut, he said, although that was a passing fad, ha, ha, ha. His hardheaded Alva stayed at the Chinese pavilion so that she could see the ocean. William Kissam’s smile looked like a yawn, and he constantly turned the conversation to the
Defender
’s success at the American Cup.

“No, no, try one of these!” he insisted. The tips of the Cuban cigars began to glow. A sharp but delightful odor spread throughout the room. Smoke swirled around and lifted them like a magic carpet. There was the sound of bongos. Monkeys and birds started to chatter. A wistful guitar was heard. The pungent smell was a lure that drew them deeper into the labyrinth. Waves broke along sea baths for slaves in Havana. William Kissam pointed out that he enjoyed Havana more than Paris.

At the Breakers, Tesla slept on a short but beautiful Empire bed on which Napoléon’s Josephine once spent a night. He felt anxious. To his surprise, he did not dream of Dane. He dreamed of the Maharaja of Kapurthala’s mustache. In his dream, women looked at the mustache, lifted their hands to their brows, and fainted. Crickets went wild around midnight. Like the silver treetops, their songs spiraled higher and higher until they finally touched the starry constellations.

Tesla and Stanford met again the following Saturday, and the one after, and yet another one after that.

Unlike poor Szigety, White knew New York intimately. A number of chorus girls surrounded him at all times. Rumor had it that Carmensita stripped for him and that Little Egypt bared her indefatigable hips in his presence.

Stanford called himself “a philosopher of love” and “a tamer of women’s hearts.” Tears never entered that equation. He believed that the focus of a seducer’s heart is never within himself, and that women found this attractive. When he spoke about women, he became enthusiastically stupid. His hair flamed brightly. He leaned in too close, and Tesla could smell whiskey on his breath.

“Seduction is mesmerizing,” he confided in Tesla like Szigety had done long ago. “Love is electric. If I could add up all my orgasms, that would be like experiencing a thunderbolt. There would be nothing left of me. And so…”