The Other Nineteenth Century (21 page)

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Authors: Avram Davidson

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With some apologies to the readers, I must explain that this account, or Account, is actually more the work of my younger brother, C. R. Davidson, who has insisted that my own name be attached hereto——“Because,” he writes, with his usual modesty, “Because you have arranged it.” This will be, then, the second time that experiences of the late Ira Davidson will have appeared in print, as some adventures of his when a boy formed the basis for another story, published in another magazine.
1
——A.D.
Actual recollections of my Grandfather are, in my own mind, at least, few. My brother used to go to visit the grandparental home a few times a month, by trolley car; but I was deemed too young; and the visits were never returned: once my Grandfather had moved away from a neighborhood, he seldom cared to return. A typical memory might be of the time we met at the home of my Great-aunt Fannie (Mrs. Benjamin Webber). My Grandfather’s greeting to me was, “Can you cipher to the Rule of Three?”
Grandmother: Now, Davidson, don’t bother him with questions like that, he is only a little boy.
Grandfather: What! I am not even supposed to speak to me own grandchild? (Strikes table with fist, stomps away, furious.)
Grandmother: Sshh, Davidson! Sshh!
Aunts: Now, Pa—
Uncles: Now, Pa—
Myself: (Exit, pursued by a bear.)
It was on another occasion that his temper, “uncertain at best,” was displayed at its almost worst. Uncle Jacob—who was not really an uncle of ours at all, except as a courtesy title, being the brother of Great-uncle Benjamin—Uncle Jacob actually made a statement very sweeping in its inclusiveness, and one which (I now suspect) he had probably read in the New York Sun, to wit, that America was very fortunate because most of its great wealth was in the hands of men both moral and religious. My Grandfather at this seemed to go somewhat insane. His head snapped up, his mustache flew out, he pointed his finger at Uncle Jacob and in tones high and almost hysterical he cried out, each syllable separate, “
Ha
! Ha!
Ha!”
He was not laughing at all.
“Sshh, Davidson,
sshh!
”
“Now, Pa—”
“Now,
Pa
—”
My Grandfather was not a successful man; neither was he in the best sense of the word a philosophical one. His discovery of a means to keep scouring bars from crumbling came along just as America, almost overnight, converted to canned scouring powder. Many years he worked on developing auxiliary propellers for motor balloons; no sooner were they ready for testing than the motor balloon vanished from the heavens, and from history as well. I cannot tell you in details his system for bringing Grand Opera on a subscription basis into every American home via earphones hooked into the telephone; I
can
tell you that it was ready almost to the day that the radio vacuum tube came onto the market; and that after that, The Big Men, who until then had shown every interest, no longer answered
my Grandfather’s communications nor admitted him to their offices.
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 picturesque 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
some
thing, 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!”

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