The Perfect Host (23 page)

I
N
1924,
WHEN
I was just a pup, my father was a thing currently known as a “radio bug.” These creatures were wonderful. They were one part fanatic, one part genius, a dash of childlike wonderment, and two buckets full of trial-and-error. Those were the days when you could get your picture in the paper for building a crystal set in something smaller and more foolish than the character who had his picture in the paper the day before. My father had his picture in there for building a “set” on a pencil eraser with a hunk of galena in the top and about four thousand turns of No. 35 enameled wire wrapped around it. When they came around to take his picture, he dragged out another one built into a peanut. Yes, a real peanut which brought in WGBS, New York. (You see, I really do remember.) They wanted to photograph that too, but Dad thought it would be a little immodest for him to be in the paper twice. So they took Mother’s picture with it. The following week they ran both pictures, and Dad got two letters from other radio bugs saying his eraser radio wouldn’t work and Mother got two hundred and twenty letters, forwarded from the paper, twenty-six of which contained proposals of marriage. (Of course Mother was a YL and not an OW then.)

Oddly enough, Dad never did become a radio ham. He seemed satisfied to be the first in the neighborhood to own a set, then to build a set—(after the spiderweb coil phase he built and operated a one-tube regenerative set which featured a UX-11 detector and a thing called a vario-coupler which looked like a greasy fist within a lacquered hand, and reached his triumph when he hooked it into a forty-’leven-pound “B-eliminator” and ran it right out of the socket like a four-hundred-dollar “electric” radio) and first in the state to be on the receiving end of a court order restraining him from using his equipment (every time he touched the tuning dials—three—the
neighboring radios with which Joneses were keeping up with each other, began howling unmercifully). So for a time he left his clutter of forms and wire and solder-splattered “bathtub” condensers shoved to the back of his cellar workbench, and went back to stuffing field mice and bats, which had been his original hobby. I think Mother was glad, though she hated the smells he made down there. That was after the night she went to bed early with the cramps, and he DX’d WLS in Chicago at 4:30 one morning with a crystal set and wanted to dance. (He learned later that he had crossed aerials with Mr. Bohackus next door, and had swiped Mr. Bohackus’ fourteen-tube Atwater-Kent signal right out of Mr. Bohackus’ gooseneck-megaphone speaker. Mr. Bohackus was just as unhappy as Mother to hear about this on the following morning. They had both been up all night.)

Dad never was one to have his leg pulled. He got very sensitive about the whole thing, and learned his lesson so well that when the last great radio fever took him, he went to another extreme. Instead of talking his progress all over the house and lot, he walled himself up. During the late war I ran up against security regulations—and who didn’t—but they never bothered me. I had my training early.

He got that glint in his eyes after grunting loudly over the evening paper one night. I remember Mother’s asking him about it twice, and I remember her sigh—her famous “here we go again” sigh—when he didn’t answer. He leapt up, folded the paper, got out his keys, opened the safe, put the paper in it, locked the safe, put his keys away, looked knowingly at us, strode out of the room, went down into the cellar, came up from the cellar, took out his keys, opened the safe, took out the paper, closed the safe, looked knowingly at us again, said, “Henry, your father’s going to be famous,” and went down into the cellar.

Mother said, “I knew it. I
knew
it! I should have thrown the paper away. Or torn out that page.”

“What’s he going to make, Mother?” I asked.

“Heavens knows,” she sighed. “Some men are going to try to get Mars on the radio.”

“Mars? You mean the star?”

“It isn’t a star, dear, it’s a planet. They’ve arranged to turn off all the big radio stations all over the world for five minutes every hour so the men can listen to Mars. I suppose your father thinks he can listen too.”

“Gee,” I said, “I’m going down and—”

“You’re going to do no such thing,” said Mother firmly. “Get yourself all covered with that nasty grease he uses in his soldering, and stay up until all hours! It’s almost bedtime. And—Henry—”

“Yes, Mother?”

She put her hands on my shoulders. “Listen to me, darling. People have been—ah—teasing your father.” She meant Mr. Bohackus. “Don’t ask him any questions about this if he doesn’t want to talk, will you, darling? Promise?”

“All right, Mother.” She was a wise woman.

Dad bought a big shiny brass padlock for his workshop in the cellar, and every time Mother mentioned the cellar, or the stars, or radio to him in any connection, he would just smile knowingly at her. It drove her wild. She didn’t like the key, either. It was a big brass key, and he wore it on a length of rawhide shoelace tied around his neck. He wore it day and night. Mother said it was lumpy. She also said it was dangerous, which he denied, even after the time down at Roton Point when we were running Mr. Bohackus’ new gasoline-driven ice cream freezer out on the beach. Dad leaned over to watch it working. He said, “This is the way to get things done, all right. I can’t wait to get into that ice cream,” and next thing we knew he was face down in the brine and flopping like a banked trout. We got him out before he drowned or froze. He was bleeding freely about the nose and lips, and Mr. Bohackus was displeased because Dad’s key had, in passing through the spur-gears in which it had caught, broken off nine teeth. That was six more than Dad lost, but it cost much more to fix Dad’s and showed, Mother said, just how narrow-minded Mr. Bohackus was.

Anyway, Dad never would tell us what he was doing down in the cellar. He would arrive home from work with mysterious packages and go below and lock them up before dinner. He would eat abstractedly and disappear for the whole evening. Mother, bless her, bore it
with fortitude. As a matter of fact, I think she encouraged it. It was better than the previous fevers, when she had to sit for hours listening to crackling noises and organ music through big, heavy, magnetic earphones—or else. At least she was left to her own devices while all this was going on. As for me, I knew when I wasn’t needed, and, as I remember, managed to fill my life quite successfully with clock movements, school, and baseball, and ceased to wonder very much.

About the middle of August Dad began to look frantic. Twice he worked right through the night, and though he went to the office on the days that followed, I doubt that he did much. On August 21—I remember the date because it was the day before my birthday, and I remember that it was a Thursday because Dad took the next day off for a “long weekend,” so it must have been Friday—the crisis came. My bedtime was nine o’clock. At nine-twenty Dad came storming up from the cellar and demanded that I get my clothes on instantly and go out and get him two hundred feet of No. 27 silk-covered wire. Mother laid down the law and was instantly overridden. “The coil! The one coil I haven’t finished!” he shouted hysterically. “Six thousand meters, and I have to run out of it.
Get
your clothes on this instant, Henry, number twenty-seven wire. Just control yourself this once Mother and you can have Henry stop standing there with your silly eyes bulging and get dressed you can have any hat on Fifth Avenue
hurry!
”

I hurried. Dad gave me some money and a list of places to go, told me not to come back until I’d tried every one of them, and left the house with me. I went east, he went west. Mother stood on the porch and wrung her hands.

I got home about twenty after ten, weary and excited, bearing a large metal spool of wire. I put it down triumphantly while Mother caught me up and felt me all over as if she had picked me up at the foot of a cliff. She looked drawn. Dad wasn’t home yet.

After she quieted down a little she took me into the kitchen and fed me some chocolate-covered doughnuts. I forget what we talked about, if we talked, and at the bottom of the steps I could see a ray of yellow light. “Mother,” I said, “you know what? Dad ran out and left his workshop open.”

She went to the door and looked down the stairs.

“Darling!” she said after a bit, “Uh—wouldn’t you like to—I mean, if he—”

I caught on quick. “I’ll look. Will you stay up here and bump on the floor if he comes?”

She looked relieved, and nodded. I ran down the steps and cautiously entered the little shop.

Lined up across the bench were no less than six of the one-tube receivers which were the pinnacle of Dad’s electronic achievement. The one at the end was turned back-to-front and had its rear shielding off; a naked coil-form dangled unashamedly out.

And I saw what had happened to the two alarm clocks which had disappeared from the bedrooms in the past six weeks. It happened that then, as now, clocks were my passion, and I can remember clearly the way he had set up pieces of the movements.

He had built a frame about four feet long on a shelf at right angles to the bench on which the radios rested. At one end of the frame was a clock mechanism designed to turn a reel on which was an endless band of paper tape about eight inches wide. The tape passed under a hooded camera—Mother’s old Brownie—which was on a wall-bracket and aimed downward, on the tape. Next in line, under the tape, were six earphones, so placed that their diaphragms (the retainers had been removed) just touched the under side of the tape. And at the other end of the frame was the movement from the second alarm clock. The bell-clapper hung downwards, and attached to it was a small container of black powder.

I went to the first clock mechanism and started it by pulling out the toothpick Dad had jammed in the gears. The tape began to move. I pulled the plug on the other movement. The little container of black powder began to shake like mad and, through small holes, laid an even film of the powder over the moving tape. It stopped when it had put down about ten inches of it. The black line moved slowly across until it was over the phones. The magnets smeared the powder, which I recognized thereby as iron filings. Bending to peer under the tape, I saw that the whole bank of phones was levered to move downward a half an inch away from the tape. The leads from each of the six phones ran to a separate receiver.

I stood back and looked at this goldberg and scratched my head, then shook same and carefully blew away the black powder on the tape, rewound the movements, refilled the containers from a jar which stood on the bench, and put the toothpick back the way I had found it.

I was halfway up the stairs when the scream of burning rubber on the street outside coincided with Mother’s sharp thumping on the floor. I got to her side as she reached the front window. Dad was outside paying off a taxi-driver. He never touched the porch steps at all, and came into the house at a dead run. He had a package under his arm.

“Fred!” said Mother.

“Can’t stop now,” he said, skidding into the hallway. “Couldn’t get 27 anywhere. Have to use 25. Probably won’t work. Everything happens to me, absolutely everything.” He headed for the kitchen.

“I got you a whole reel of 27, Dad.”

“Don’t bother me now. Tomorrow,” he said, and thumped downstairs. Mother and I looked at each other. Mother sighed. Dad came bounding back up the stairs. “You
what?
”

“Here.” I got the wire off the hall table and gave it to him. He snatched it up, hugged me, swore I’d get a bicycle for my birthday (he made good on that, and on Mother’s Fifth Avenue hat, too, by the way) and dove back downstairs.

We waited around for half an hour and then Mother sent me to bed. “You poor baby,” she said, but I had the idea it wasn’t me she was sorry for.

Now I’d like to be able to come up with a climax to all this, but there wasn’t one. Not for years and years. Dad looked, the next morning, as if he had been up all night again—which he had—and as if he were about to close his fingers on the Holy Grail. All that day he would reappear irregularly, pace up and down, compare his watch with the living-room clock and the hall clock, and sprint downstairs again. That even went on during my birthday dinner. He had Mother call up the office and say he had Twonk’s disease, a falling of the armpits (to whom do I owe this gem? Not my gag) and kept up his peregrinations all that night and all the following day until
midnight. He fell into bed, so Mother told me, at one ayem Sunday morning and slept right through until suppertime. He still maintained a dazzling silence about his activities. For the following four months he walked around looking puzzled. For a year after that he looked resigned. Then he took up stuffing newts and moles. The only thing he ever said about the whole crazy business was that he was born to be disappointed, but at least, this time, no one could rib him about it. Now I’m going to tell you about Cordelia.

This happened the above-mentioned years and years later. The blow-off was only last week, as a matter of fact. I finished school and went into business with Dad and got mixed up in the war and all that. I didn’t get married, though. Not yet. That’s what I want to tell you about.

I met her at a party at Ferris’s. I was stagging it, but I don’t think it would have made any difference if I had brought someone; when I saw Cordelia I was, to understate the matter, impressed.

She came in with some guy I didn’t notice at the time and, for all I know, haven’t seen since. She slipped out of her light wrap with a single graceful movement; the sleeve caught in her bracelet, and she stood there, full profile, in the doorway, both arms straight and her hands together behind her as she worried the coat free, and I remember the small explosion in my throat as my indrawn breath and my gasp collided. Her hair was dark and lustrous, parted widely in a winging curve away from her brow. There were no pins in it; it shadowed the near side of her face as she bent her head and turned it down and toward the room. The cord of her neck showed columnar and clean. Her lips were parted ever so little, and showed an amused chagrin. Her lashes all but lay on her cheek. They stayed there when she was free and turned to face the room, for she threw her head back and up, flinging her hair behind her. She came across to my side of the party and sat down while the Thing who was with her went anonymously away to get her drink and came unnoticeably back.