Tesla (52 page)

Tesla laughed. He quoted Napoléon: “The rarest form of courage is three o’clock in the morning courage.”

Tesla talked two hundred miles an hour. Tesla reached a conclusion. Tesla hung up.

“That’s very interesting,” Gernsback whispered into the dead receiver.

During the stock market rage, everyone grew rich except Tesla. Once in a blue moon, Boston Waltham Watch required his speedometer patent, or Wisconsin Electric bought his film projector.

There was no reason for him to go back to New York, the site of his bankruptcy.

Yet he returned regularly.

With the agility of a young man, he leapt and dashed in between the onrushing cars. He claimed that he could still wrestle a twenty-five-year-old, that his hand was steadier than ever, that everyone grew older except him, and that he would not know how old he was unless he had a mirror.

He frequented movie theaters.

The lights went off, and a child’s voice rang out in awe: “It’s starting!”

In that mysterious twilight, madness was contagious. A sentimental piano envoked the passage of time. A young man and an old man opened their eyes widely while sitting on a bench.

Dr. Caligari, with his tortoiseshell eyeglasses, resembled an evil bug. He rang his bell in front of a circus tent: “Come! Cesare, who has been sleeping for twenty-five years, is about to wake up!” The black dot swallowed up the screen, coalescing over the images of the characters. The county-fair Mephistopheles and the head of the asylum were the same person. A madwoman played a nonexistent piano. The staircases and towers on the screen were askew, not because of the artistic stylization, but because of the recent war. A somnambulist walked through the distorted city, holding a sleeping girl in his arms.

While Tesla was inside the movie theater, an icy rain fell on top of the snow.

The streets became glassy.

Skewed buildings were falling over icy Broadway.

The city became secretive.

Many, many years before, Tesla had slipped on the glittering streets of Karlovac.

“One should walk next to the buildings,” he reminded himself. “One should walk on one’s toes.”

At that moment, his heels flew up toward the stars.

“Cesare, who has been sleeping for twenty-five years, is about to wake up!” flashed through his mind.

The branching tree of his nerves fired, and Tesla surprised himself by sharply jerking his body, somersaulting, and then landing on his feet. He felt someone’s fingers clutch his shoulder. A stranger’s honest eyes examined him from up close. A frightened smile pulsed in the corner of the Good Samaritan’s mouth. “Are you okay?”

“I think I am,” Tesla answered softly, straightening his overcoat.

Then he recognized the man who steadied him:

“Giovanni! Out of prison? But of course…”

Twenty-five centuries of melancholy colored Giovanni Romanello’s smile. “I paid my debt a long time ago,” he said.

“I still haven’t paid mine…”

Tesla looked like he was about to sneeze. This man, who used to tell him about Sicilian blood oranges and sweet lemons, did not recognize him! Tesla was not sure if he had heard him at all. Giovanni was preoccupied with something else.

“Excuse my asking, how old are you?” Giovanni asked in a suddenly muffled voice.

“A few short of seventy.”

“Unbelievable,” the visitor from the past whispered. “I’ve seen cats do that but people—never.”

CHAPTER 109

Only Pains Hear, Only Needs See

Upon their return, the Johnsons found it difficult to make the mental somersault that the new times required. Speakeasies had replaced the blind tigers. The world rushed forward with the jerky, accelerated pace of silent movies.

The crowds seemed to whisper, “Our thoughts are blown by the winds! We are hypnotized by advertisements.”

Yet another dog’s life had passed. A puppy named Richard Higginson III now barked inside Johnson’s apartment. The puppy was so little that it rolled to the side as it walked, and they had to pick it up and hold it whenever a larger dog was around.

The whole world became an invitation to a dance that Katharine did not know how to accept.

“I don’t know why I feel so blue,” she wrote. “I feel as if everything in my life has slipped away.”

Once upon a time, enormous hats hovered above Katharine’s aunts. The aunts believed that it was better to be adequate at what you were not interested in, than excellent in what thrills you. To them, everything interesting in life was a personal threat. Logic was a Cinderella in their house of rules learned by rote. Even in her dreams, it was impossible for Katharine to pick up a wrong fork. She lived like Alice in a “how dare you?” version of Wonderland, surrounded by cousins who bore false witness to their own lives. The aunts claimed that discretion was the mother of all virtues. It appeared to her that discretion and thinking did not go hand in hand.

“Discretion?” Katharine mused. “That’s not our natural state. We’ll become discreet when we die.”

So what was the truth?
Katharine Johnson, née McMahon, wondered like Pontius Pilate.

Whatever the truth about the prewar life was, it could not be compared with Katharine’s present need for psychological security. She now missed the bygone world that used to be so boring to her. She missed all the irritating lady recitations that she had detested all her life.

“Mom! Get out of those dark, draped rooms,” her handsome son, Owen, yelled. “Jazz will cure your tuberculosis!”

“Okay,” Katharine agreed, without enthusiasm.

With a bright smile and suffering eyes, Owen dragged his mother and father to a party at East Egg on Long Island.

The Studebaker glided along the dusty tree-lined road.

The golden lions of summer roared during the day and purred at night.

Owen and his parents raced the moon on their way to East Egg.

Yes?

In the garden, men and girls came and went like moths, among the whispering, champagne, and stars.

Yes?

A Rolls-Royce kept bringing in guests until after midnight, when the second dinner was served. Bare calves flashed as ladies stepped out of the car in their sparkling dresses the color of the moon or in their outfits of peacock feathers. Many of the incoming guests did not even know Mr. Gatsby. In Katharine’s time, a young gentleman was allowed to touch a lady’s waist only with a glove or a handkerchief. It was only yesterday that no one could monkey around and dance alone. Now, after the Great War, they danced the shimmy and the Charleston, flailing their legs to the side in the swirling smoke.

Johnson, who looked more and more like a grieving lion, made a reconciliatory remark: “Now it’s their turn to be young.”

The pool’s color was the essence of azure.

Drunken girls tried to walk on the water. They splashed the water with their arms, and people pulled them out sopping wet, amid a lot of squealing. The music was fast and then three times faster. Saxophone players leaned backward like yachtsmen. Our Katharine felt sick among these he-and-she loonies who danced alone.

“We’re too old for all of that,” Robert said when they returned home.

“The world had changed less from Plato to my elementary school days than since my elementary school days till now,” Kate sighed.

The former beauty threw her jacket on the floor and went to her room. Owen’s wife, Jenny, really got on her nerves. She could not stand that urban face and that body exuding erotic laziness. Out of “refinement,” Jenny ate only oysters and fruit. The silly woman could not understand why people thought so hard to come up with something original instead of simply repeating what the rest of the world was saying. Her fancy girlfriends used to be equally devoted to sailing and interior design. Their beloved fashion was a thoughtless force. (As if previous fashions had been thoughtful!) This unimaginative younger generation was the same as the older one—it only snuck up behind Katharine’s back.

Katharine did not understand the limitations of life. The grandmotherly role did not suit her. They say that women—when no one desires them anymore—gladly become grandmothers in order to receive a little tenderness from beings who have no other choice.

Yet she still felt hunger. She still felt shivers. Desire.

Tesla’s cold-fire baths were not available to her. She drank opium tinctures.

And so…

So…

So… charmingly… she smiled at the floor.

“O world!” she murmured. “In you, only obsessions choose. Only weaknesses understand, only pains hear, only needs see.”

O world!

CHAPTER 110

Did We Live the Same Life?

The pains that accompany old age were nothing compared to the pains of the soul. The old woman with wrinkled cheeks, propped up against three pillows, with a heavy heart, she thought about her life and could not remember anything good.

Robert did.

When they were young, Kate protected a perfect spiderweb on which drops of dew looked like jewels. “Don’t brush it away. Look how it gleams in the sun.”

Over and over again, he told the story of how a reporter caught their wedding bouquet.

When they undressed together for the first time, he kissed her left breast. “And now her little sister, so she doesn’t feel neglected.”

“Mmmmmmm,” she murmured.

Like Szigety a long time ago, Robert loved that she walked around the room naked so he could see in her hips the same force that spun stars and planets.

She caressed the tree of life between his legs. Her moans sang in harmony with his in the bed.

With his lips on his wife’s ear, Robert watched the streetlights on Lexington Avenue come on.

When she got pregnant, he kissed her stomach. When Agnes was born, Robert got up at night and tiptoed to the cradle to see if the baby was breathing.

“Do you remember?” he asked her.

She did not remember anything anymore.

Robert compared his memories to hers and spread his arms. “I wonder—did we live the same life?”

CHAPTER 111

I Didn’t Know How…

“What’s Katharine doing?” Tesla asked.

“Cultivating her moods.” Robert grew darker. “But she’s also ill.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Something in her chest.”

After they came back from Rome, there was no more hiding.

Before, the wrinkles gathered around her eyes. But old age truly arrived when her cheeks wrinkled. Her once-clear blue eyes became clouds of milk in tea. Yes, they became cloudy and so did everything else. It was truly painful to look in the mirror. But even the suffering that accompanies old age was nothing compared to…