Requiem for the Bone Man (6 page)

His reputation was such that even before he earned his doctorate, various tech firms across the country were pitching job offers. The winner: Ma Bell.

“Edison, your dissertation can’t be published.”

“What’s wrong with it, Dr. Baker? Isn’t it good enough?”

Baker didn’t respond.

“I can prove every point and substantiate everything. You assigned me the topic, for heaven’s sake! Do the other members of the doctoral committee agree with you?”

Baker looked at the strangely intense young man, who suddenly made him feel old and tired of the game. The boy had achieved more in his short time at school than most of his colleagues had in a full career. His only drawback was not understanding how things worked in the real world. This kid should have been born in the Middle Ages, where he could have spent his whole life safely tucked away in some monastery scrawling his manuscripts, hoping that someday they would be discovered by future generations.

He was too honest to survive the piranhas out there.

The professor rubbed his bald spot as he thought things through. What he said next probably would determine the boy’s entire future.

“Mr. Edison, there’s nothing wrong with your dissertation. You’ve made a persuasive case for a worldwide information and communications system that would link every person and every bit of data available for research. Your encryption programs and algorithms are the most elegant I have ever seen. The committee and I fully agree with your conclusions.”

He paused and sighed.

“Don’t worry about your degree. Your work has already guaranteed you that. I can, in all honesty, say that you have been the most brilliant student I have ever dealt with.”

“What’s wrong, then? Why can’t it be published?”

Somewhere in Baker’s memory the question triggered another time and another young man standing in front of a professor, incredulous at what he was hearing. Was it that long ago?
He had once been such an altruist, wanting to help humanity with his work.

“Edison, I work here at the university as a full professor of electronics and communications. But I also do consulting work on the side. With what they pay us here it’s been necessary, but it’s also an ego builder to know someone out there considers my opinions worthwhile.

“I consult for the government in certain areas, and because of that I am obligated to bring specific types of research to the attention of those involved in national security. Congress passed a law in 1951 called The Invention Secrecy Act that gives the government the right to suppress any invention or research considered dangerous to the national defense. Your paper falls into that category.”

Edison laughed at the implication.

“All my paper does is describe a network of individualized communications and exchange of knowledge bases. The programs I’ve designed protect it from interference. There’s nothing seditious in that, is there?”

Such a brilliant young man
, Baker thought,
how could he be so naïve?
He looked at the sandy-haired, crew-cut, scarecrow-thin figure standing before him in worn khaki pants and polo shirt and tried one more time to get through.

“Edison, the whole power structure in this country is based on controlling the public’s access to information. Can you imagine what would happen if every comment a national leader made could be double-checked for truth and then disseminated instantly countrywide without being filtered through the news media? How about instantaneous access to the stock market? What would happen if it became worldwide?”

“Maybe that would bring about a better world than we have now, Dr. Baker.” Edison scratched his nose, and adjusted his glasses. He would have done anything to bring this conversation to a close. He had been raised to seek the truth, to test hypotheses and concepts against reality, but now he was being told that was wrong.

Dear God, an idealist!

Baker shook his head.

“Let me put it another way, Edison. Your government, your country, needs your abilities. There is a department called ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency. The Pentagon runs it. The people there are very interested in your work. They want you to consult for them—part-time. I know you’ve already agreed to do research work at Bell Labs, but this won’t interfere. The only catch is you cannot publish your dissertation and you cannot discuss it with anyone. Officially, your paper title and material will be classified and a replacement will be substituted.”

“Dr. Baker, I’ve never heard of ARPA.”

“Well, they’ve heard of you. That’s all you need to know for now—that and the fact that I work for them. Are you interested? Tell me now.”

Edison just stood there, not knowing what to say.

“I’ll be honest, Edison. You really only have one option. If you don’t accept, it will be as though you never attended this university. Everything you’ve done here will stay here. It won’t be my doing, though. Neither one of us has a choice on this.”

Edison still didn’t speak. After a moment or two, he nodded his head yes, then turned and walked out of the office.

Welcome to the real world, boy.

Edison walked aimlessly across the campus, head down, a frown on his face, his mind in turmoil. Until this moment, things had been so black-and-white simple. Something worked or it didn’t. If it worked, you used it; if it didn’t, you fixed it. The only complexities involved dealing with people. On that score, things had never been easy for him, no matter how hard he had tried to apply the laws of physics to human relationships.

Naïve as he was, he knew immediately that Professor Baker’s offer was no offer; it was an ultimatum. As the professor had said, he had no choice—he had to accept. But he didn’t have to like it. Besides, sometimes passivity had its own rewards.

Now if he could only get his personal life in order.

His studies took up so much time and his shyness was sometimes so overpowering that he hadn’t had a steady girlfriend all through college. Yet he fantasized about starting a family. He wanted children he could love and teach. He wanted to see them grow and learn to love the things that fascinated him. He also wanted someone to share his feelings, someone to love and to be loved by. Even he knew that you could talk to a piece of equipment only so long before realizing it couldn’t sympathize when things went wrong.

He had tried school mixers, clubs, athletic groups, and even cycling competitions. About the only thing he hadn’t tried yet was the canoe club.

He had always liked water activities.

Maybe, just maybe, there might be someone there who...

He stopped himself.

Face it, Bob Edison, you’re lonely.

“Fat, fat, the booboo rat!” “Chubchins!” “Four-eyed fatty!”

They taunted her almost from the first day of school, but she couldn’t understand why the other kids didn’t like her. She always did her homework, eagerly answered questions from the teacher, and usually got perfect scores on her tests. She liked math and science, dressed plainly, and loved to debate different subjects. What was wrong with all that?

Why don’t the boys like me? Oh, who cares what they think anyway! But why did those girls call me “fire engine?”

Then there were the old women dressed in widows’ weeds watching her going into the candy store. She could hear their not-so-subtle whispers about the “Jew girl and her war bride mother.” The first time she heard it she ran home crying, but her father held her in his arms, hugged her, and then laughed.

“Nancy, the next time you hear that stuff,” he said, “just look right back at those old biddies and tell them your Jew daddy saved their asses from Hitler and Tojo, and then you go up to them and say, ‘and my mama saved my daddy’s ass.’”

She always giggled when Daddy said things like that. Mama sat in her chair and smiled.

School also had its glories. Every year, beginning at age ten, she would enter the science fair. And every year her project would make the finals—at first just the local school’s contest, and then that magic year in seventh grade when she reached the East Coast Science Fair. Her project: the effects of a vitamin A-deficient diet on baby mice.

As usual, the other kids made fun of her at first, calling her the “rat lady,” but after she won the regional competition they shut up.

Daddy and Mama accompanied her and helped set up her display, with photos of normal and vitamin A-deficient mice and her commentary. They watched from a distance as she answered all of the judges’ questions. Each year many kids would enter projects actually made by their parents, and each year their entries would fall under the weight of the judges’ interrogation.

Afterwards she walked around the other exhibits and was impressed by one in particular that involved electrical stimulation of heart muscle in frogs. Then she spied one of the two boys who had done the project.

Beanpole thin. Large Adam’s apple. Funny-looking cross-eyed face. Still ...
he’s kind of cute. I wonder what he sounds like when he talks.

She was considering whether to approach him when the public address system announced that the winners would soon be named.

Too bad! He might have been interesting, but he looks too old.

She was only thirteen.

“And the winner in the junior high school category: Miss Nancy Seligman!”She heard her name as if from a distance. Before she knew it, her parents were hugging her and laughing, and a photographer from
LIFE
magazine wanted to take pictures of her and her project. How could she refuse?

But as in Cinderella, glory lasts only a short time—then the chimney must be swept. Winning science contests and getting all A’s didn’t cut it with her classmates. Her success gained her no new friends, and as for dates with boys, well…

She had watched the other girls going through The Change—losing their baby fat and gaining it in other places. She had seen the boys change, too, and how the boys noticed the girls changing. Through her reading, she had learned the biological reasons for what was happening, but she couldn’t understand why even the sensible girls became simpering fools when good-looking guys passed by.

She had to admit, though, that she did appreciate it when she caught them looking at her tresses of golden-orange hair—except now they were even more afraid of her. The cheerleaders were all scatterbrains as far as she was concerned, but they never wanted for dance dates. They never held up the walls in the decorated gyms on prom night, and boys weren’t afraid to talk to them. Why were boys always afraid of girls with an ounce of intelligence?

“Nancy Seligman.”

“Yes, Miss Bradley?”

“Go to the board and write out the nutritional analysis that you worked on last night.”

In so many ways, college was a blessed relief from the way high school had been, and junior high before that—she could display her intelligence freely now, and as she walked to the front of the classroom and began listing the breakdown percentages of the food problem she had been assigned, she began to feel a sense of pride and accomplishment in her studies she never had felt before. She was majoring in nutrition and dietetics, but she also was taking a business and finance course to help when she took over management of the nursing home her parents owned and operated.

“Nancy?”

“Yes, Mama?”

“Can you come home this weekend? We need you to work the desk. Sally called and said she won’t be in. She said she is sick.”

Her mother’s voice still sounded gutturally German after all these years. There was iron behind her words, Nancy knew. She couldn’t refuse.

“Yes, Mama.”

More likely that little twit Sally has a big date lined up. She knows she’ll be too hung over to work. Why do they always think I’ll be there to fill in? I have a life, too. Weren’t they ever young? What were they like at my age? They never talk about it. I can’t even picture what they must have been like.

...

“Medic! Medic!”

“Hang on, fella, I’m coming!”

He half crawled and slid across the mud-covered ground, trying to avoid the blood and rain-filled craters. The damn Krauts had caught them in a crossfire. The only thing the men could do was to stay put or die—and a lot had died already.

O God of Abraham, why do you do this to us? Is this some big game to you?

He reached the fallen man. Jacoby! It was Jacoby! He bent over his dying friend and saw the wound. There was nothing he could do. Gently touching the man’s face he rocked side to side like he used to do on
Shabbat
. He had no phylacteries, but it didn’t matter. He began the Kaddish, the age-old
recitation of praise to God in the presence of the dead, remembering the words
the rabbi had drilled into his head. Then he closed his friend’s eyes.

It was the first death of a friend he had experienced, there in the bloody sand of Omaha Beach—Naples had never been their destination, only a ruse to keep the big mission a secret—but it wouldn’t be the last. He would see more of his buddies die, in the hedgerows of France, among the splintered trees of the Ardennes, at the crossing of the Rhine itself. And not just his own countrymen but their enemies as well, men who appeared to grow both younger and older the closer they got to Berlin. Hitler seemed to be sending both babies and old men out to die in his desperate effort to stop the invaders and cling to power. Death, destruction, and despair surrounded them.

Ira could only have guessed it at the time, but he and Jacoby were part of the greatest battle ever fought. The men had hit the beaches less than an hour before, along the French coast at Normandy on the sixth of June, 1944. After an eternity of hours, and then days, then weeks, the German defenses slowly gave way as the Allies under the leadership of General Eisenhower pressed forward.

Begging for food by the local civilians increased as they entered Germany in their thrust toward Berlin. The people, ragged, worn out by Der
Führer’s
’psychotic quest for power, were desperate.

He heard the scratching and scrabbling outside his tent. He got up as silently as he could, and raised the flap. He saw her picking at the remnants of food on the ground where the men had cooked their evening chow. She was young, maybe in her teens. God help him, he realized, he was only twenty-two himself.

Madchen, was ist ihr name
?

“Little one, what is your name?”

“Ilse.”

...

Nancy heard the other girls in the class snickering. She knew she looked tired and not at her best. She had stayed up a good portion of the night helping her parents with the elderly patients. She had come to hate the cloying decay of old age. Those poor people had outlived their time, their friends, and their families. Strapped into feeding chairs, they sat staring ahead into inevitable oblivion. The worst ones were confined to bed, thrown back into infant-like dependency on diapers and hand feeding and cleaning, unable to make sense or to talk at all.

Feeding tubes? Bladder catheters? Diapers? Restraints? I’d rather kill myself than wind up like that. I never want to grow old.

She hadn’t put her hair up so it hung straight down. Its bright, shimmering color made the others envious, and they took every opportunity they could to insult her. College was turning out no better than high school. She had to escape.

Unbeknownst to her parents, she would be starting as a management trainee at a local bank as soon as graduation was over. She had even scouted out an apartment. She would be out of the house, out of the nursing home for good. She needed to leave the cocoon. She needed a life.

Ilse Seligman wasn’t stupid. She knew her daughter was an intelligent young woman and needed her space. But her Ira was stubborn, pigheaded even. She laughed at the thought.

A Jew, pigheaded?

That’s why she loved him so much. His stubbornness had saved her that night when he stood up against the company commander to get permission to help the starving young girl he had found groveling in the dirt. And he had bucked the rules blocking military personnel from marrying civilians from a combatant country. Somehow, in some miraculous way, he had brought her back to the United States with him.

A war bride, they had called her, and a German war bride to boot!

A Jew marrying a German? Oh, yes, my little one, I know what it is like to be a stranger, an outsider.

He was a good man, her Ira, but he drove his daughter the way he had driven himself. So Ilse prayed that Nancy would find happiness, just as she had that long-ago day. And then Ilse Seligman’s heart leapt with joy. Her daughter stood before her, her face beaming. “Mama, I’ve met someone!”

“What’s he like, girlfriend? C’mon, spill the beans! Is he the strong and silent type, or does he come on hot and heavy? Does he have a big bris stick?”

With that, her best friend Betty giggled, and then they both burst out laughing. But Nancy had little to say about her new boyfriend. Well, maybe “boyfriend” wasn’t the right word just yet. “Canoeing partner” might be more appropriate, or even “attentive listener” when she played her violin.

He was kind of cute, in a pet rabbit sort of way. But could she see herself with him? Golden-orange tresses or not, she knew she wasn’t a looker—and at five feet two and one hundred mmmpph pounds? No, she wasn’t tall and thin. She thought she might even weigh more than he did, and he was almost six feet.

What does he see in me? Am I wasting time with him? One nice thing about him is he’s smart—though he’s clueless about dealing with girls—but smart and kind and … oh, damn, maybe I am falling for him! Could I have a family with him?

More daydreaming would have to wait. Right now, she had a date to go canoeing.