The Tesla Legacy

Chapter 8

A flurry of movement by the door told Joe his mother had arrived at the Oyster Bar. Even in New York City, home to a fashion industry and full of beautiful women a third her age, something about Tatiana drew all eyes to her. She was always a star.

She still wore the black dress from the funeral, but she had taken off the hat, veil, and gloves. Her black hair, hair that would never go gray, was cut in a severe bob that angled forward, longer at the chin than at the nape of her neck. A new cut for her, and it looked good. She crossed the floor with easy grace.

He hadn’t inherited any of her coordination.

A wheeled suitcase trailed along behind her. He jumped to his feet to take it from her.

She kissed him on each cheek and held his face in her hands for a second. “You look pale.”

He kissed her on the cheek. “You look great!”

She waved her hand. “Always you say this.”

“Always it’s true.” He brought her suitcase to their table and parked it before pulling out her chair. His mother was a stickler for manners. “What do you have in here, rocks?”

“You are closer than you think.” She held her fingers down for Edison to sniff.

Edison refused, because he was wearing his vest. When he wore his vest, he considered himself on duty and didn’t respond to anyone’s overtures but Joe’s.

“Such a serious dog.”

“It’s his training.” Joe didn’t bother to explain. She wouldn’t have listened if he had. “What’s in the suitcase?”

“We must speak of your father.”

The waiter saved him from answering. His mother ordered a Brooklyn Summer Ale without opening the menu, and he ordered the same.

“So.” She tapped the top of the suitcase. “You didn’t come today.”

“I can’t. I explained before.”

“Can’t? Won’t try? Who can say which this is?”

“I can say. I don’t like it, but I have a real condition.”

“But he was your father. You owed him such.” She pushed back her hair on one side, and Joe saw the long scar it usually concealed.

His father gave her that scar. One night, she’d come back to the trailer late. His father, standing by the door with a whiskey bottle, had clipped her across the side of the head. If the bottle had been full, it might have killed her. As it was, it took Farnsworth nine (scarlet) stitches to close the wound. Joe was five years old, and when he sat holding her hand while Farnsworth sewed up her head, he had thought she would die.

He leaned over and touched the scar. “I didn’t owe him a damn thing.”

She took her hand in his. As always, her hands were warmer than his. “Your time together was more than those moments. Good moments, too. You owe him your life, the man you have become.”

“I don’t.” Joe’s voice rose. He brought it down. “Anyway, I couldn’t go to the funeral. You know that.”

She dismissed his agoraphobia with a squeeze of his hand. “Anything is possible. Always.”

The waiter arrived with the beer. Joe ordered bluepoint oysters with steak fries, and his mother followed the waiter to pick out a lobster. Joe couldn’t eat a lobster after he’d been formally introduced. His mother never worried about things like that.

He sat in his chair and wished that she was right, that anything was possible, and he’d be able to go outside again the minute he wanted to.

His mother returned and sat. “They fly the lobsters straight in from Maine. Imagine! I can see them sitting in little seats with their seat belts fastened, wishing they were allowed to smoke.”

He laughed. “Maybe they let them smoke on those flights. The lobsters won’t live long enough to get gill cancer.”

Dinner was better after that. She caught him up on the happenings of the people in the circus. She kept in touch with them, although she hadn’t performed in years.

When he got rich, he had bought her any house she wanted, and she chose a Victorian in San Francisco with a view of the sea. It looked much like the one where he lived, except that hers was full of old circus people and relatives from overseas.

“I suppose you are curious about my suitcase,” she said after they had eaten.

“What’s it for? You going on a trip?”

“It’s for you, from your father.”

“I don’t want it.”

“Not from him directly,” she said. “From the Teslas, passed down.”

“But Dad wasn’t a Tesla, was he?”

“You knew?” She raised her sculpted eyebrows. “All this time?”

“I found out today at the funeral. Someone told Miss Torres, and I looked it up from there. Dad’s real name was George Smith.”

“Your Miss Torres is a pretty woman. Smart, too, and not one to be led about. Good for you, I think.”

“She works for me. That’s it.” This was his chance to tell his mother about Celeste Gallo, but the thought of explaining their complicated relationship to his mother was too daunting. “Why did Dad lie about being a Tesla?”

“His name was officially changed with the government. He was as Tesla as you.”

“But he always said we were descended from Nikola Tesla. That we got our mathematical minds from him.”

“Perhaps you did.”

“Not if we’re not Teslas.”

“Your father was born a Smith, this is true. But he did know Nikola Tesla. His father worked for the great scientist, and your father saw him often when he was a boy. That contact made George aspire to be a scientist — and so your scientific interest may come from Nikola himself.”

“Dad told you that my grandfather was a scientist in Nikola Tesla’s lab?”

“No scientist. Your grandfather raised racing pigeons, and he took care of Nikola Tesla’s pigeons.”

She’d verified everything he’d found online. “So, Dad pushed me to be like my ancestor Nikola Tesla, but not a drop of Tesla blood runs through my veins. I have pigeon-keeper blood in my veins.”

“There is no shame in that.” His mother gave a decisive shake of her head, as she always did when she considered a subject closed.

“There is shame in pushing a child to adopt a legacy that isn’t his.”

“Here you are. A famous man. A rich man. A computer genius. All because of that pushing. Is it so wrong now?”

“Yes.” He had a hundred things he wanted to say, but none of them would change her mind.

“I am here, with my clever little suitcase, because of these connections. Because the famous Nikola Tesla trusted his pigeon keeper more than all the famous scientists he knew.” She nudged the suitcase with her polished shoe. “Are you not curious?”

As usual, she had deflected the conversation down her own path. He was curious. But he didn’t have to admit it.

“I see you look at it, Joe. I know. In this suitcase is a box that your father gave me to pass on to you when he was gone. So I do.”

“It’s probably a bunch of useless papers.”

“Take it down to your hidey-hole and open it to see.”

“It’s a house, Mom, not a hidey-hole.”

“Does it have windows that look out onto the sky?”

“If it did, I couldn’t live there.”

“Fine,” she said. “Tell me about your house.”

“It’s Victorian, the same as yours.”

She snorted. If it didn’t have windows that looked out on the sky, it couldn’t be the same as hers.

“It was built in the early 1900s, the same time as all this.” He waved his hand around to encompass the Oyster Bar and the terminal beyond.

“Why would someone build such a house?” She sounded grudgingly curious.

“The lead engineer, the one who designed the station and its tracks, wanted a house to be built there so he could live in the tunnel system he designed.”

“So they gave him a cave?”

“It’s not a cave. You should come and see. The house sits in a hole blasted into the wall of a tunnel.”

“This is a cave.”

“But in that cave they built a two-story house — with a parlor and a billiards room and a kitchen and bedrooms, with wood floors and wallpaper and a fireplace with a mantel.”

He pulled out his phone to show her pictures. He wanted her to understand about the house.

“It looks absurd, but…” The house had clearly caught her imagination, too.

“The engineer’s contract specified that the underground house be deeded to his descendants in perpetuity, and I leased it from them.” He didn’t try to explain how grateful he was to the house. It had saved him from living out his days at the Grand Central Hyatt, where he’d been staying when his agoraphobia struck. In this quaint antique, alone underneath one of the most densely populated cities in the world, he’d felt at home for the first time in his life.

“Take my suitcase.” His mother pushed it toward him with her foot.

He stared at the simple black case. On the one hand, it might contain Nikola Tesla’s secrets, something any nerd in the world would like to see, including him. On the other, it came from his father, and he wanted nothing from him. Nothing.

His mother patted his arm, something she hadn’t done since he was a little boy. “You have earned it, not because of who you were born to be, but because of who you became. Nikola Tesla would be proud to give this to my famous son.”

Joe wasn’t so sure. The company he’d created wasn’t about bringing peace and light to the world. It didn’t have the grandeur of Nikola Tesla’s vision. Joe had created Pellucid to catch the bad guys, but he wasn’t sure that’s how it was used anymore. Nikola Tesla would probably slap him across the face with a glove if he were still around.

“If you don’t take, what should I do with it?” His mother’s eyes flashed. “Throw it away? Turn it over to the US government? They took all of Tesla’s other papers. They might want these, too. This would then be on your hands.”

In Pellucid, he had created something powerful, and he had sold it to the highest bidder. His life’s work was out in the world, maybe doing damage. He wouldn’t let these papers suffer the same fate, no matter how angry he was at his father.

He reached out and took the suitcase.