The Other Nineteenth Century Read online

  As for one or two, or three or four, other inventions and discoveries of his, he summed them up in the fell phrase (which I am sure spoke more of his natural disappointment than of the actual facts): “Stolen from me in the Patent Office!”

  And, having said this, he would say one thing more, and he always said it, pointing to himself and crooking his head on one side. “Condemned by the neck until dead …”

  The last time I heard and watched him say it was the last time I ever saw him, the one and only time I was ever in his own room. It was after my Grandmother’s death. The room was small enough, but he had made space by taking out the bed and sleeping on the floor. Aunts and Uncles protested, but what could they do? Nothing. The quilt was neatly folded in a corner, books and magazines abounded, Grandfather sat in a straight-back chair at a roll-top desk, staring into an old notebook. A lodge fez, dusty, with missing spangles, drooped out of a pigeon-hole. “They never forgave me,” he said, gazing down.

  (“Mmm, Pa—”)

  But I was first: “Who didn’t? Why didn’t they?”

  “Because of what I knew. Because of what I found out …” His head sank, his chin crept up towards his nose and his mustache flared out. His voice very low, he muttered, “But I would not do it. No, sir, never would I do it. That, I would, by God, never do …”

  “Now, uh, Pa—”

  Poor old head snapped back up, crooked itself to one side. “Condemned by the neck until dead.” Such as he was, he was his old self once again. To the end.

  A few years ago I spent a couple of days with my Aunt Nettie. Halfway through the second day, and having realized that I was not really any more a little boy unable to cipher to the Rule of Three, Aunt Nettie began opening a few closed doors, metaphorically speaking. Now that my hair has begun to grey, I was told what Great-aunt Maude said to Uncle in 1915, and Why (———for instance———). Also, how Cousin chartered an airplane, or airplanes, and flew to Peru in 1930, and Why. The Real Reason why a certain Distant Relation obtained promotion in a certain Imperial Civil Service. And so then, for some reason, clued by something I cannot remember, I said, “Grandfather—”

  And, as if reading what I myself could not read, namely my mind, Aunt Nettie said, “Yes, I was just about to,” and got up and left the room. Returned with something I did not recognize until it was set on the table before me, and I opened it.

  What it was, it was an antique loose-leaf notebook, bound in peeling but quite genuine leather. I opened it. Sure enough. The very same one which. “Wouldn’t you like to have it?” she asked. “I’m sure that Pa would like you to have it.” Aunt Nettie did sincerely mean to be kind, but I have seldom if ever heard any statement which I doubt as much as I do that one. Of course I did not say so, and I thanked her without falsehood, because, anyway, I myself liked to have it.

  “Now,” said Aunt Nettie, pleased. “Wasn’t there something else? I think there is something else.” She considered a moment. “There is a watch,” she said. And added: “But I can’t remember where it is.”

  Later, I called my brother.

  “Hey, guess what I’ve got,” I began the conversation—an admittedly childish locution. He answered:

  “A certain muscle, formerly part of the Emperor Napoleon, for which £750 was asked at auction at Sotheby’s, but failed of sale.”

  I laughed lightly, knowing his sense of humor. “No,” I said. “I’ve got one of our Grandfather’s old scientific experimental notebooks.”

  He said, “Goody”—rhyming it with “broody,” as in, “A broody hen.”

  “At the top of the first page,” I continued, “it says, PROPERTY OF MR. IRA DAVIDSON. CONFIDENTIAL AND SECRET. DO NOT STEAL.—”

  “Death Shall Come On Swift Wings,” my brother murmured. Or perhaps “mutter” would be the correct word. Undaunted, I went on.

  “Did you know that he was working on something called ‘Crystal set photography,’” I asked.

  “Jesus,” he said. Adding, “No.”

  “I wonder whatever became of that?”

  “Stolen in the Patent Office and then suppressed by Them. The family luck. How well do I know. Having inherited it. If nothing else. You must take after another side of the family.” He paused a moment. “I forget which one,” he said.

  I chuckled. “Well, I’m going to see if I can figure it out.”

  “Listen, kid,” my brother said, “let well enough alone. Confine your researches to interesting sidelights into the history of the provincial city of Garfield.”

  “Provincial it may very well be, but there are those of us who love it,” I said, staunchly.

  “Oh God.”

  Recognizing that he was under the spell of one of those moods of bitterness which sometimes mar an otherwise admirable character, I thought it best not to prolong the conversation. “Well, I just thought you’d like to know, and if I really find out any thing, I’ll call you up—” I said.

  “And therein fail not,” were his parting words.

  Probably the whole matter might be attributed to a desire on my Grandfather’s part to entertain the tedium of his research by spinning a good yarn, so to speak. As for the pages and pages of diagrams, I once showed them to my close friend, Mr. Jeremy Knight, a computer expert.

  “I couldn’t make heads or tails of this,” I said to him.

  “Neither could anyone else,” he commented, after scanning several of the pages—those with diagrams on them, I mean.

  Besides these pages, which constitute by far the mass of notes, there were a number of others in my Grandfather’s eager, rough calligraphy. Some of them are of a political nature, and have really no bearing on this account, or Account; but perhaps they may still be of some use in establishing even approximate dates for the Account, which is otherwise undated. For example, the lines,

  “But Ira B.

  Davidson, he

  Says he wun’t.

  Vote fer Governor C.”,

  evidently refer to Calvin Coolidge, who had been the Governor of Massachusetts. A few other references to a “Governor S.” almost certainly mean Alfred E. Smith, once Governor of New York. “Great Eng.” must be Herbert Hoover, “the Great Engineer,” (and a scholar of by no means slight attainments, as witness his translation from the late Latin of Georgius Agricola’s De Re Metallica). And there can’t be any doubt that “Pop. Ch. A.” or “Sen. A.” is Senator Magnus Abercrumbie, sometimes called “The old Champ” or “the People’s Champion” or “The last of the Populists.”

  Purely for purposes of a smoother flow of narrative I am going to do what I never did or even thought of doing before in my life, and that is to call the protagonist of this Account by his first name. And I am not going to interrupt this same flow to distinguish what he saw, or what he said he saw, and put down in writing, from what he thought he saw and or pretended he had seen and illustrated with what are really very small and very rough little sketches—some in margins, some in between lines of text. I suppose that there must have been antecedent notes of the experiment. I do not suppose that Ira began his intense interest in and experiments with the notion of Crystal Set Photography already full-grown, but if there were other notes, they have not survived. I may wonder if even these ones would have done so, had they not been preserved in a binder of such obviously good quality.

  So we don’t know what Ira exactly had in mind when the Account begins. If we could make sense out of the diagrams—but we can’t. What we know is that on a date, or day and time of day, not too helpfully set down as Wed. afternoon, a “wet plate” had cracked, and there were no replacements at hand. It was just then that, perhaps glancing up and around in exasperation, he observed a confluence of moving blurs within his crystal. This struck him enough so that he made almost the first of the sketches mentioned above. (The very first actual sketch was of a cat, perhaps one belonging to the family, and which anyway needn’t concern us here.) Moving blurs and moving lines. The general effect resembles some of the less pict
uresque of the cave paintings.

  Intrigued at this unexpected and unexplained effect, Ira began to reorganize, or, perhaps, organize, his equipment; and in this he was somewhat successful, but whatever it was which he was seeing seemed to be very far away. It occurred to him—and, I confess, it would never have occurred to me—that if he could get hold of a telescope or a set of binoculars—

  He did. But evidently nothing more was to be seen. The notebooks continue with more diagrams, more diagrams, and more and more diagrams. Then comes another dating. Wednesday afternoon. He looked through his binoculars, and, for the first time, saw clearly. A group of men were dressing, in a room somewhere; not, indeed, from a state of complete nudity, but out of street clothes and into more formal wear: frock coats or cutaways or something of the sort, so much more common then than now. And, to his even greater surprise, they began to put on something entirely unfamiliar, something which was attached with a sort of harness arrangement.

  And then the scene vanished. That is, the entire scene vanished.

  Fortunately, by this time Ira’s children were all grown and married, although how he was able to support even himself and his wife, whilst spending his days tinkering with such absurd conceptions as “Crystal set photography,” is itself a mystery. I suppose that he must have had some savings and/or investments. That his mind was agitated by something, we may imagine from the brevity of the diagrammatic notes intervening between the above-noted, or second, sighting, and the next reference: Wednesday afternoon.

  This time, and after sundry adjustments and improvements to his equipment, he saw, through what we as children still called “spyglasses,” the group of men full-face-on. And he felt that they all looked like high-school principals! I don’t really know what sort of an image this may conjure up for others, but to me the picture is instant and vivid. The men are all spare; all wear thin-rimmed eyeglasses, have sandy to grey hair and mustaches; all of them have mustaches, the full yet neatly trimmed mustaches of a certain period in American history. Their hands are hard and bony, neither calloused nor soft, limp: hard! Their manner is crisp, curt. “This won’t do!” they seem to say. Or, “We can’t do that!” and, “We can’t allow that!” “You should have known that!” “We cannot make any exceptions!” And, also, “You have already been allowed extra time!”

  (In case it may seem that I am reading too much into a single phrase, I will have to admit, albeit a trifle sheepishly, that there is after all the evidence of the sketches—rough though they are.)

  All this is familiar enough, I am sure. But what follows next certainly is not. The men now have on something vaguely resembling blacksmiths’ leather aprons, reaching from just below the tiepin to just below the knee, and slashed in a very curious manner, and evidently decorated with very curious designs here and there.—This, you will recall, over their formal clothing!—And, what is more, and is more unusual: the men are evidently dancing!

  Here we have eight or ten men, in early middle age and vigorous maturity, dressed (first) as though for an inauguration, let us say, and (secondly) as though for some sort of a fancy-dress ball—they are ranged in two ranks, and they are moving in their places, running in place, flinging their hands up in unison, flinging their legs up in unison—

  Is this some sort of exercise? Something like the sitting-up exercises or the use of the “medicine ball,” then so popular, both of them? If so, then why the curious combination of costume? In fact, why either element of the costume? Perhaps they were just having some fun? But the expression on their faces belies that, belies that entirely. Their faces are absolutely serious, their faces are in dead earnest. Not a ripple of either embarrassment or amusement stirs those stiff countenances by a hair. Slightly they lower their heads in unison, and each one lifts to each side of his head at the temples a hand with all fingers closed-in except the index finger, which points straight up; simultaneously they lift their feet so that the trousers move up and disclose the high-buttoned, highly polished shoes, lift their legs so that the knees are almost up to, are up to the line of the hips: they are prancing—there is no other word for it: they are prancing in place; then they toss their heads, keeping their hands in the same relative position and the same gesture—

  Imagine, if you can, a chorus line. And now imagine that the same principle of movement in absolute unison applies, although of course an absolutely different sort of movement, and that instead of young women the line of dancers consists, as I have said, of mature men, the type which one would unhesitatingly describe as the leaders of their communities. They do not smile. They dance. They dance, they dance, they dance.

  And, always as they dance, they gesture. They move their hands to a horizontal position and they pass their hands ever so swiftly across their throats. And now the pace of the dance becomes somewhat swifter. The gestures become more and more bizarre … the gestures become almost shockingly so … .

  Does the expression on the faces change? Not exactly. Yet there is a change—The angle of the faces changes slightly: No! It is the angle of their vision which changes. They are looking up, somewhat to the right (to their own left, that is) and above. They are looking up, yet, as it were, covertly. And now for the first time those secure and certain faces begin to show another emotion. Here and there sweat appears on the smooth-shaven line of a jaw. Here and there a mouth opens and does not close. The marks, one would say, of exertion? Of physical fatigue … nothing more? No. One would be wrong. One would be very wrong.

  Now as they dance, their hands out, palms down, their heads bowed as in submission, still those eyes turn up, turn up as though seeking something which they fear to find. And here and there, watching closely, one observes a leg tremble, an arm jerk somewhat from its rigid position.

  And Ira, watching, feels the glasses tremble in his own hands, and, although he cannot say why, he feels faint, he himself, not even present at this scene!—feels sickened.

  He leaves. The glasses drop away, he lets them fall. He gets up and he stumbles away.

  Well, what to make of it all? The likeliest explanation is that a tooclose application to an impossible endeavor (I refer to the scientific experiment on which he had been working) resulted in loss of sleep, probably; in loss of appetite, probably; certainly to neglect of sound principles of health. With the result that he, Ira, probably—well, that is certainly too strong. One cannot say, probably. Let us say that it would not be at all surprising had he suffered from an acute form of eyestrain and that as the result of this he simply saw things which were not there. What is certain is that the experiment and the observations were not continued. They were certainly dropped for good. And yet, so strong was the impression left upon his mind that, as we have seen, almost at the last days of his life, he returned again to the perusal of the notes he had made of them.

  One thing I suppose I should say in conclusion. My brother had made mention of my own personal hobby. (I can call it no more than that.) He refers to it, not very seriously, as my “researches into interesting sidelights on the history of the provincial city of Garfield.” It is after all our native city, our own home town; if it is of no great interest to the professional historian, why need it escape the fond attentions of the amateur?

  Ira had made one or two noted references (I mean only that he had noted them down) to “Sen. A.,” and I have said I am certain that this refers to Senator Magnus Abercrumbie. I am afraid that Senator Abercrumbie has not yet found his true niche in our country’s history. He died a disappointed man, certainly. He had perhaps lived into another era, one which was not suited to his hopes. His programs for what he called “The American People’s Charter” were certainly not nationally popular in that period of firm faith in an expanding economy free of all governmental trammels. It is doubtful that, even had he lived, he would have succeeded in getting more than a fraction of his Charter into actual legislation. He had made many enemies. Still, who can really say? He was incorruptible. He was convinced. He was eloquent. We cann
ot forget the shock of his as-yet-unexplained death—in itself and by its manner so doubly shocking to the agricultural and working classes at the time. Nor should we forget the ripples of unease which spread throughout moral and religious circles later in that same year when it was learned that quite a number of our most prominent citizens, under the guise of acting on behalf of the Securities Registration Committee of the Fiduciary Trust Company, were actually meeting to worship the Devil, in a room hired for that purpose in the Garfield Building, between three and four in the afternoon on alternate Wednesdays (July and August excepted).

  AFTERWORD TO “THE ACCOUNT OF MR. IRA DAVIDSON”

  This tale is a curiosity … curiouser and curiouser. Where does the real-world autobiography end and the fantasy begin, or does it? Certainly the family names are real, at least some of them. The Davidson family temper, the family “luck,” the family fascination with archaic oddities, all real. Computer expert Jeremy Knight is real; the Knights were dear family friends. But what is this mysterious dance, where does it come from?

  —Grania Davis

  TWENTY-THREE

  Breakfast one day at the Sutters. Ellis looked up. “Say, do we have an Uncle Zachary?” he asked. Sound dies away, save for Samuel at an egg in its shell and Lewis clattering a coffee-spoon. Louise Sutter, their mother, slightly clears her throat. “Uncle Zachary had a weakness of the chest and his doctors thought he should go and live in the West where the air is dry. Samuel, don’t fiddle. Lewis.” If Ellis observes the difference between Uncle Zachary has and Uncle Zachary had. Ellis does not say so.