He met Molly Thompson at Oberlin. She was quiet and redheaded, prone to fits of ticklishness in the Ohio grass. They’d kissed regularly. His classmates were certain that more than kissing had gone on—rumors spread quickly in a school that small—but Paul and Molly knew the truth. They’d taken walks along Plum Creek, danced to the fiddlers in Allencroft Hall, and whispered the whole histories of their brief lives behind the sandstone houses along Lorain Street. She’d asked him to return with her to her family in Cincinnati after they’d graduated. Paul had informed Molly that he was going to New York. And that was that.
He’d received a letter from her once, while he’d been in law school. Her son was six months old and her husband was a senior clerk handling finances in the mayor’s office. She wondered, sometimes, how Paul was doing. He’d responded by sending her a clipping from the Columbia law journal. His article had won the annual third-year prize. He told her he’d soon be graduating first in his class.
She didn’t write a second time.
And that had been the extent of his wet-lipped career. Law school afforded little time for making the acquaintance of women, and his professional life even less. His bachelorhood had for some years been total.
Paul knew that he was old, at twenty-seven, to be still unmarried. Not impossibly old, but older than most women of marrying age would like. He was a young attorney but an old bachelor. Paul had made good choices in his life, and they were paying off. That he sometimes wondered what it would be like if he’d made other ones did not mean that he’d ever dream of taking any of them back.
He could not quite say any of this to his father. Paul’s gift with language did not extend to meaningful communication with the man who’d taught him to read. What would he gain by immodestly telling his father that he was by most accounts the most successful attorney of his generation, the lead litigator on the largest patent suit in the history of the United States? No matter what dragons Paul slayed, they would never be the kind to impress.
Erastus was never going to change. He wasn’t going to suddenly develop an interest in his son’s views of the world. He wasn’t going to start appreciating either Paul’s ambitions or his accomplishments. Nothing would be gained by exposing to his father the fraying nerves of his heart. He was content to maintain cordial relations with the old man. The push for anything more would upset the fragile equilibrium they’d finally reached.
Erastus saw no path to righteousness other than faith. He prayed to a Lord and Savior in whose existence Paul did not even believe. But to confess that to his father would be unthinkable. Whatever secrets he might imagine admitting, his university-bred atheism was not among them.
And so they quadrilled genteelly through their conversation. Paul asked about his sister. She was well. He asked about his mother. She was also well. She’d suffered through the winter with a terrible cough, but the spring seemed to banish it, thank goodness. Erastus opined about the election—he was campaigning aggressively for Harrison, having seen firsthand what economic devastation Cleveland had wreaked. Paul wondered aloud whether Harrison would be able to convince the Mugwumps to rejoin the Republicans in the fall. By eleven Erastus was ready, again, for bed. Paul lay on the floor of his sitting room, half wrapped in a blue cotton sheet. The apartment was hot in the summer, and Paul stayed up for some time, unable to sleep. Only after much tossing and turning was he treated to a series of dreams, one of which indelicately concerned a woman with the face of Agnes Huntington.
—
Paul woke with a start at five-thirty in the morning to find that his father was already boiling coffee on the stove. Looking over the morning papers, Erastus grunted as his son got up and made his way to the sink for a shave.
As soon as Paul sat, Erastus slid a page from the previous night’s Evening Post in his direction.
“Something in the paper there you might want to look at,” said Erastus. “The editorial—it’s on your line of work, isn’t it?”
By the time he’d gotten through the editorial’s first sentence, Paul was apologizing to his father. His presence was required in Pittsburgh immediately. He needed to make haste to the Grand Central Station for the next train.
Erastus said that he understood. He said that he could take care of himself just fine over the coming days; he’d leave the key for Paul at the coffeehouse on Fifty-fourth Street. There were donors to be seen, the future of the college to be secured. Erastus had never seen the spires of Trinity Church, so he would be grateful for the chance to take a stroll.
Paul was out the door, overnight valise in hand, by the time he realized that he’d forgotten to give his father a farewell embrace. He knocked at the closed door of his own apartment, the keys safely inside with Erastus.
Yet Paul’s father did not come to the door. Perhaps he’d gone back to sleep, or was unable to hear the knocking over the clatter of plates as he cleaned up the previous evening’s meal. Paul turned away, down the four flights and off to Pittsburgh.
America is a country of inventors, and the greatest of inventors are the newspaper men.
—ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL
ABOARD A FIRST-CLASS car of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Paul reread the New-York Evening Post editorial yet again.
DEATH IN THE WIRES, blared the headline. THE PERILS OF ALTERNATING CURRENT. The article was attributed to “Harold P. Brown, electrical engineer.” Paul’s first question concerned who in the world Harold P. Brown was. Paul’s second concerned why he had been given such a prominent space to proclaim his absurd opinions.
“Every day brings the news of more lives cut short by the menace of electrical wiring that now dangles above our city. Never in the history of this nation has such a dangerous, poorly understood, and criminally untested technology been thrust so haphazardly into the homes of our families and the playrooms of our children, with no regard for their safety.” The paper went on to mention the tragedy Paul had witnessed on Broadway, as well as other deaths at the hands of faulty electrical wiring. “Several companies who have more regard for the almighty dollar than for the safety of the public have even adopted the new ‘alternating current’ for incandescent light service,” continued the paper. “If arc current is potentially dangerous, then alternating current can be described by no adjective less forcible than ‘damnable.’ That the public must submit to constant danger from sudden death in order that a corporation may pay a slightly larger dividend is simply evil.”
The paper went on to suggest, in language of unvarying vehemence, that alternating current was likely to fry the bones of any child within a hundred feet of its use. Because it ran at twice the voltage of direct current, it was, so Harold P. Brown argued, twice as deadly. There was, moreover, no legitimate scientific reason to prefer alternating current to direct; only the marketplace had caused these devious merchants of death to adopt this crooked technology. And, finally, the paper named the main proponent of this deadly system: George Westinghouse. “A villain who apparently will stoop to new lows to make an extra dollar off the na?ve and gullible.
“To prevent the wholesale loss of human life,” concluded Harold Brown’s editorial, “all alternating current, such as that offered by George Westinghouse, must be banned immediately by the legislature of this state.”
—
That evening Paul watched George Westinghouse pace across his laboratory. Gas lamps hung along the walls and washed the cavernous space with a pale orange light. Westinghouse’s engineers feared that electric lights might interfere with their tests on new light-bulb designs. The newest colors on the market—the softest yellows, the wispiest fading whites, the lightest bursting sun flares—were developed here. The colors of the future had to be examined in the dim past.