I was desperate to ask my parents what they had been talking about, but asking questions would let on that we could hear them through the ductwork, so I ate and listened for my father.
My father founded the Koopman Light Company, which manufactured lightbulbs in the village of Delfzijl, in Holland. The village sat on the west bank of the Ems Estuary, across from the mouth of the Ems River in Germany and south of the open waters of the North Sea. The company was our town’s largest employer, and he ran the business side of it from the factory’s office in the center of town.
When my father wasn’t at the factory, he spent his time in the dark laboratory attached to our home, where he worked on modifying his production lines and improving the factory’s output. He was always working. My mother said he never wanted to be saddled with his father’s farm so he worked in a frenzy, intent to get away from that life, and did what he could to surround us with art and industry to become as refined as heirs to the royal family. We would gauge his moods by how he came out of the lab. If he walked quickly, with eager purpose, it was because he was happy with the work he’d done and was ready to be with his family. If he came out slow, hesitant, he would usually be distracted for the rest of the day, his mind fogged by whatever needed to be done, done again, or done better. He’d spend a few half-present hours in our company, fidgeting constantly, looking out the window, hounding us about the daily vocabulary our private French, German, and English tutors assigned, saying, “Study your words, boys. You have to be able to name the world.” Or, “The Dutch are the lords of languages.” Then he’d stand up and head back to his lab.
If we were ever allowed into his lab it was because he missed us after traveling to secure sales contracts. He’d go as far east as Moscow, as far west as Morocco, and over to Britain, but he still did most of his business with Germany and already had their Auto Union account, supplying headlights to most Audi, Wanderer, and DKM models. Still, we all knew the thing that kept my father manically rattling through our house on edge, we all knew Volkswagen was the big prize.
That morning, as we finished our crêpes, he emerged from his lab and looked at us sitting at the table.
“Can we talk for a moment?” my mother asked.
“Of course,” he said.
“In private.”
“In a bit then, love.”
Our mother mouthed some coded message to him as she violently stacked our plates and walked to the sink. I looked at my father, who, at a lean six feet six inches, towered over almost everyone.
“Boys. Come on in,” he said and waved us into his lab.
Mysterious surgeon-like tools, curved like fishhooks, sprawled over his workbenches. Long blowing irons leaned in the corner. Around them on the floor were unsuccessful gobs, each plum-sized, burnt, warped, reflective as uncut diamonds. On the shelf were books about Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and studies in electrical currents. My father went right to work with a pair of long, needle-nose pliers and set a coil and filament into place. Then he placed the bulbous glass casing over the assembly and used a vacuum pump to suck out all the air.
Edwin and I always wanted to be his assistants in the lab and knew to immediately grab our safety goggles off the hook when allowed in. I put mine on and watched our father work. I was in awe of him then. He wore soft wool pants and a spun horsehair jacket fitted by a tailor in Amsterdam. The brown jacket was one of five he rotated through each week. His graying blond hair was brushed back by his tortoiseshell comb and held into an off-center part by an antiseptic-smelling pomade. As a nervous habit, he slid out a Swiss watch with a gold-plated case, gilt hands, and an enamel dial that was pinned to his vest by a chain, which he rubbed with his thumb, then tucked away neatly without checking the time, and kept tinkering at his workbench. We would study his every move. In a lot of ways I was afraid of my father. His size. His drunken meltdowns. The barriers he put up between his vocation and family. But I also loved him so much that it felt like my life and identity were built on the tangled interplay of those two emotions, resulting in a deep pull to be near him when he was working.
“Edwin, get me the small canister of black gas.”
“You told us not to touch that one,” Edwin said.
“Today you will.”
Edwin went to the steel-mesh-covered gas locker, undid the latch, and returned with the cylindrical canister held away from his chest like it was some hot, holy thing.
My father fumbled with a glass bulb that fell to the floor and shattered. This happened often. Without a word, he picked up another, crunched over the glass, and walked to us. I studied the broken glass and imagined picking up several shards, laying them side by side by side to see different reflections of how we all fit together. A mosaic of our family. “Watch what I’m doing, Jacob,” he said. He hooked up a release valve to the canister, filled the bulb with shimmying vapors of gas, sealed the bulb at the copper base setting, and screwed that fixture into one of the dangling sockets he hung for testing his lights. His open palms cradled the bulb.
“Now, Jacob, turn all the lights off.”
When I flipped the switch the room went black.
“Now hit your switch, Edwin.”
When Edwin hit the power, a searing white worm burned around the thin coil in the bulb before the filament ignited in an electric whorl, and it flashed into a pulsing glow that our father held out as if offering us some luminous bird. We stared into his palms like he held the crystal future—a future that would turn out so different from what any of us could have imagined in the lab that morning, huddled together.
It’s only now, a lifetime later, I can find these first words about my family, which I always knew would bring the whole of it howling out like a fever dream.
“Boys,” my father said in the lab, “a man I met in Hamburg gave me a good idea of something you can do this summer.”
“Do we have to go work in your friend’s factory?” Edwin teased.
My father took a mock swat at his head. “No.”
“Do we get to go on the next trip with you?” I asked.
“I’d like to take you along every time I leave,” he said. Then he reached his long arms out so a hand cupped the back of each of our necks. “But I’ll tell you what. I have an idea that might be fun. Your own little trip. It’s a summer camp. It might be good for you. You’ll practice your German.”