Us Conductors (14 page)

IF I PLOTTED A GRAPH
with all the good news from my first two years in America, it would be a long, silver, upward-curving line.

But beginning in early 1930, it became a different picture. A graph of winter temperatures, perhaps. A downward slope. Decline.

“Things are not so good,” said RCA’s Mr Thorogood. Even the ink in his pens had faded.

The RCA Theremin had debuted at the Radio World’s Fair in September 1929. Over the next eight months, salesmen took the theremin on the road, demonstrating it to audiences in Illinois, Texas and California. They paid former pupils to perform as guest soloists, visiting virtuosos, ambassadors for the instrument’s ease of use. RCA paid the Marx Brothers to have a go, paid Ripley’s Believe It or Not to introduce a new act, launched a weekly theremin radio program, at 7:15 on Saturday nights, sending ether song across the country. There were ads in
newspapers, ads in magazines, ads on the radio and in the polished windows of music stores.

But as the device cooed at Harpo, as families listened bewilderedly to the radio, RCA’s plan was failing. America was enamoured with my invention: it festooned small-town newspapers, drew crowds in places where priests and sluggers were the customary idols. Yet the people did not themselves wish to own theremins. They were too busy worrying about their wages, saving food stamps, clamouring for the repeal of Prohibition. This was too elaborate a contraption.

MEANWHILE, PASH HAD GONE MISSING
.

I could not find him. Our customary relationship relied on his finding me. He had eagle’s eyes, bat’s ears, a bloodhound’s nose; I’d be sitting at the movies, at the zoo, trying a Flatbush Sacher torte—all at once his hand would clap my shoulder. “Comrade,” he’d say in his bootblack voice. He might have papers for me to sign, news from the motherland, instructions from his employers. He might simply be lonely and wish to talk—long monologues on Kuril scallops or Russia’s bandy league. I do not know if Pash had any friends. I do not know if I was his friend.

But he had been missing since Black Tuesday. That night he had had a look in his eyes: not the look of a man recalling something but the look of a man recalling he would recall something. The something was grim. He left without saying goodbye.

You, too, seemed to step away from my life in the weeks and months after we counted down to one. The next time I saw you, you were crossing the street near the opera. I called to you, waved with both hands. Beside me, men were using pitchforks to heft sacks onto a flatbed truck. I shouted again. You stopped and saw
me. You smiled. You hesitated. I saw you see the men who were lifting those stinking sacks, and me in shirtsleeves, and you mouthed something. Then the truck started to reverse and I had to move out of the way and when I looked up you were gone.

You went away on tour for huge swathes of 1930. Was it an intentional absence? I don’t know. Had I ruined something somehow? The country was falling apart and you were playing your violin in Illinois. When we did see each other we were careful with our faces. We had come very near to each other and now every look reminded us of this. Sometimes too much seems promised.

In November I knew you were back. I rang your house.

“She’s out with that lawyer,” your sister said. Nadia spoke to me as if we were accomplices. “I don’t trust alliterative names,” she said.

“What?”

“Robert Rockmore.”

I said just: “Oh.”

“They’re at Texas Guinan’s.”

I said again, “Oh.”

So you had gone to Texas Guinan’s.

While you were flying by taxi from paradise to paradise, with another man, I was counting my change. I was riding the subway to the kwoon in Chinatown. The USA’s economy had gone limp, like a flag that is brought indoors. First the RCA devices were rebranded as “budget” Victor Theremins. We released plans for an updated model—a little cheaper, a little simpler, with a loudspeaker built into the cabinet. These were not beautiful or subtle instruments. They were clumsy. But they looked a little like radios—familiar, easy, bestselling radios. At the Providence Home Progress Expo they called this new design “the most amazing invention of modern times.”

Unfortunately, the most amazing invention of modern times never went on sale. On a Monday morning I received a letter from the De Forest Radio Company of Passaic, New Jersey. The letter was on rich, thick paper, paper the colour of a stork. Its letterhead showed the elegant names of three Baltimore lawyers. The signatures were equally elegant. The rest of the words were typed. Everything was spelled correctly. They informed me that the De Forest Radio Company of New Jersey was in possession of several patents concerning vacuum tubes and synthetic sound.

RCA also received a copy of this letter. Their legal team called me to a conference room uptown, where the light cut through the curtains. The sun was in my eyes. My muscles ached from the morning’s workout regimen. They asked me questions. They showed me schematics. The inventor Lee De Forest had taken out patents, decades before, governing the musical use of vacuum tubes. “I was in Russia,” I said. “This is unrelated.” They said it didn’t matter. They said it was related. They said that De Forest had been sitting on these patents, waiting for us, like a bandit. “This is an ambush, plain and simple,” they said, and I wished that Pash was there. RCA sent me home. They sent me a letter, on thin, flimsy paper.
Decisions such as these
, Mr Thorogood wrote,
do not reflect anything except the jurisprudential realities
. RCA settled with De Forest. Every RCA and Victor Theremin was removed from the market.

In all of America, just 485 of my devices had been sold.

WHAT DO YOU DO
when you are going broke? You search for your patron. Winter was blowing in and Pash was out there somewhere. But I could not reach him at his telephone number. He did not answer my mail. Three times I visited the apartment
that was not really his apartment, where I knew he occasionally stayed. There was no answer, just scuffs and creaking behind the walnut door. As a co-director of the Theremin Corporation, his signature was often needed; I faked it.

One day I went to the covert Soviet consulate in midtown. I waited thirty minutes for a someone to emerge, spidery, from a grey door. I asked him: “What am I to be doing?”

He replied: “Please go back to your laboratory, Dr Termen.”

When I came outside I felt all of the city’s steely ambivalence. Office windows reflected clouds. Down the street, construction clanged. I stepped between cars, scanning for a friend, for a bus, for something to smile at. On the corner, a black car purred. I looked away and then looked back, squinting. Behind the wheel sat a tall, lean man with a sweep of blond hair. His binoculars were raised, and trained on me.

I ran.

At home I balanced in a green leather chair, a recliner that collapsed if the occupant leaned too far forward or too far back. I had set up a snapping, whirring television device in the corner of my bedroom; it projected the rehearsal rooms in jerky light, glowing squares, triangles, rectangles. I watched students arrive and disappear. I did not go to see Schillinger or Frances. I did not visit with my most loyal students, like Lucie Rosen or Henry Solomonoff, who were now teaching the others. I sat on the cusp of collapse and imagined the receding silhouettes of you and of Pash. My life had paused on each of you, for a moment. Where was it headed now? I sparred with partners at the kwoon, knocked them to the floor. I imagined Pash in an alleyway, swinging at Danny Finch. I walked home through flurries. A courier arrived with a new U.S. visa: what spirit had renewed it?

Late at night, when the students had left, I ate small, simple meals, enjoying the movement of a knife through an onion, the
division into two pearly parts. My bank account was like an emptying vault: income depended on loans, patents, future sales. There were no loans, no new patents, no future sales. No one was buying a thing and I owed the Plaza Hotel two months’ rent. Their envelopes collected like fallen leaves on the end table by the door. I did not know where I would get the money. I thought of Sasha in Leningrad, reviewing new data. I thought of Katia growing older in New Jersey, but did not call her, just sat in my recliner and watched the students’ arms, like semaphore, signalling that I had more yet to do.

At night I dreamed of sums, but mostly of subtractions.

It was an acquaintance who saved me. One evening Walter Rosen came up to the studio with Lucie, and when she went into the practice room to run her scales, Walter stood meditative in the vestibule. I could see him on my rickety television, like a bit player in a movie. He wore a jacket and waistcoat. He had pouches under his eyes. He crossed to my bedroom door and knocked.

“Who is it?” I said.

“Walter Tower Rosen,” he said.

I tugged the television’s plug from the wall socket. The projector died away. “Come in,” I told him. We had spoken only twice, three times before.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello.”

He seemed to be waiting for me to stand up.

I rose and shook his hand.

“Lucie is my wife,” he said.

“Of course I remember.”

Walter was a lawyer. The first time he and Lucie came to visit, he said the instruments sounded like “Spanish birds.”

I wondered if Walter thought I was sleeping with his wife.

“How can I help you?” I said, hands balled in my pockets.

“Dr Theremin, I understand you are having some financial difficulty.”

I did not react. He did not seem to need me to.

“Lucie has been talking to me about this for some time, although to be honest I didn’t realize how serious it was until I ran into Douglas Hollingworth at the bank and he told me about your line of credit.”

“This is somewhat embarrassing,” I said after a long pause.

“Nonsense. Happens to the best of us.” He seemed to be looking over the room: piles and stacks and jars. He gave a gentle smile. I realized suddenly that this smile was genuine; it was gentle because it was genuine. “Lucie had her second recital last week. It was superb. Everyone says so. There is no question that you are doing important work.”

Did he want her to receive more private lessons? To have a theremin built?

“Lucie is a fine pupil,” I said.

“When capital runs out, one requires investors, simple as that. It’s obvious you have the ideas. All you need is the space in which to develop them. Yes?”

“Yes,” I said carefully.

“We live on West 54th Street. Do you know it?”

“It’s around the corner,” I said.

“We wanted to invite you to move into number 37.”

“To move into?” I said.

“We live next door, but 37 is vacant. You could move your studio.”

“
This
studio?”

“That’s the notion,” said Walter. He shrugged, as if he were apologizing. “Just until you get back on your feet. Don’t worry about rent; the current tenants are just a few dusty insects. Moths don’t pay rent either. For us it’s the best of both worlds: I can ask
you to explain the scientific principles I read about in the papers; Lucie can practise or have repairs done. Then when your troubles are behind you, you’ll be able to find your own space.”

“Of course,” I said.

“Perhaps we can even have dinner together!”

I looked at this man, guileless, accommodating.

I said, “I do not know how I can repay you for this.”

He waved his hand. “Dr Theremin, it is good for the spirit to be able to help a mensch.”

“A
mensch
?” I didn’t recognize the expression.

“A
mensch
,” Rosen said, “is what we all aspire to be.”