The Boat Runner by Devin Murphy
A BRIEF CRACK OF LIGHT
1
I was fourteen when my father thought he finally developed the perfect inner coil for the lightbulb. He’d gone to Hamburg where he tried, again, to solicit a new account from Volkswagen. My mother was playing Chopin’s étude in Thirds on her piano downstairs when he came home. My brother, Edwin, older by a year, slumped next to me on the floor of our bedroom drawing with pastels on a large sheet of butcher paper. Fergus, our big leg-chewing mutt, slept upside down beneath the window with his feet against the wall. In his dreams he twitched and kicked himself across the floor, digging his claws into the plaster until a rut formed one foot off the ground ringed the room. My parents’ voices were muffled until they walked into the den, where sound carried up through the heating register.
“I still think it’s a bad idea.” I knew she wanted him to stop crossing the border.
“This will set us up for the future.”
“There is no future with them.”
“They’ll give me a chance to supply all their headlights. What else could we want, Drika? We need secure accounts.” I could tell by the groan of a loose spring that my father sat on the Biedermeier sofa next to the metal clock, his feet probably resting on the wooden steamer trunk.
“It’s a bad idea. Sell more here and in France.”
“To whom?”
There was a cold beat of tension between them. This was an old fight and hearing them start up again felt like a nervous folding of wings deep in my chest.
“I got you something,” my father said to her after a moment.
He always brought books home to us as presents. For my mother, he brought her books on music that she’d devour. She would come into the room, thrusting the opened pages into our laps for us to read, like she needed us to hold them to be real. I knew from reading all those books that the oldest song was the Shaduf Chant, sung by workers on the Nile River in Egypt. And that there was a concert in Breslau on August 2, 1937, that ended with sixty thousand people singing together.
“The world’s largest choir. Can you imagine?” my mother asked.
I knew that in 540 BC Pythagoras introduced the concept of the musical octave. In 250 BC the first organ was invented in Greece.
“That long ago,” she whispered. “Astonishing.”
When my father brought back music sheets, my mother would race to the piano to begin practicing. Monteverdi’s Vespers; Puccini’s Madama Butterfly; and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring all took shape in our home. With no warm-up she could play all of Handel’s Messiah. She didn’t tire, or the music gave her new energy. She never said. She rarely talked about her playing or responded when I praised her.
“The music plays itself,” she said. “The musician is there to make the transitions between loud and soft. Fast and slow. Slide along those scales and you can make it work.”
I knew she made it sound easy to tempt me to try, but I had no talent or patience for stringing one butchered note after another.
Books were sacred to my parents, who both longed to use them to break from what they perceived as their vulgar lineages. So my father gave books freely and we gathered as many as we could. Years before, when my father was struggling to launch the factory, he’d given me a set of illustrated Bibles. I remembered a picture from one of the books of a cypress-tree-filled valley between Nazareth and Cana. An ancient path my father said Roman generals marched over. I remembered nothing else from those books, because soon after I received the gift, when his manic efforts and drive were tipped by self-doubt and fatigue into some fatalistic downswing, he got roaring drunk, gathered up those volumes, and crammed them into the fireplace, where they curled into orange ash. As the fire bucked and flared, it cemented the written word for me as a higher power that could lift a person from basic human rage and lunacy, or drive them right back down into it.
“This is a nice book,” my mother now replied to my father. But there was a flatness to her voice. Disappointment. A small beat of quiet that held the larger story of their lives I had yet to piece together. Back then, I didn’t yet know how neglected she felt by my father, who gave her wealth and gifts instead of his time.
“Well, I don’t know who you should sell to,” my mother started in again, “but if things get bad we should shut down and leave.”
“Now? When I’m so close? If I get this right it will change everything. This is it.”
“This is it, this is it. You’ve been close for ten years. Things get better, but you’re never happy. Never done.”
“If I get this coil right they’ll be our largest account. We’ll supply almost all the vehicles in Germany. We can leverage that to sell all around the world!”
The teakettle clanked against the kitchen sink.
Fergus stood up, scratched at the carpet, walked a tight circle, and fell into a ball, knees and elbows clunking the ground.
“I also came up with a solution for keeping the boys busy. It will help with the Volkswagen account too,” my father said loud enough so she could hear him from the other room. I leapt from bed and kneeled over the heating vent. Then my father walked into the kitchen, where it was harder for me to hear. Several minutes later the teakettle whistled, and I heard my mother yelling.
“Are you kidding?”
“Edwin, come listen,” I said to my brother.
“Not now.”
“Edwin. Listen.”
“Not now.”
I knew not to engage him when he was like that.
“It’s a good idea. It will make them good citizens,” my father said.
“Good German citizens,” she screamed.
I looked at Edwin. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” he said.
I went back to bed and patted the mattress. Fergus shot up and jumped up with me. He stood panting in my face until I scratched behind his ear enough that he sat down and eased his head onto my legs. He stayed like that as I went to sleep wondering what my mother meant.
In the morning I bounded down the stairs, where I found my father already awake and working in his lab. My mother’s busy movements made it clear that they had avoided another fight and gone right to icy silence. For breakfast she served wild blueberry crêpes from a cast-iron skillet and covered them in syrup and churned butter. She wore her hair-strand gold necklace that held a pendant my father brought back from Norway and silver earrings from Poland. Edwin and I ate with our arms shielding our plates from each other. There were oil and vinegar bottles and a brandy decanter in the center of the table that we’d often douse the other’s food with if he let down his guard.