He had reached the door before Charlie managed to reply. “Why are you so deliberately annoying?”
The stork paused in the doorway, turning slowly, perhaps so that his glasses would not fall off. “Because I am not theoretical, Harvard. I am real.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I am a licensed electrical engineer.” Beasley waved an arm at the room. “Everyone else here is theoretical. Math theory, physics theory, chemistry theory, and nothing gets done. You theoreticians scamper around this place like ants. And about as usefully.”
Charlie shook his head. “Do you always exaggerate like this?”
“Exaggerate?” He strode back, hackles raised, and waved Charlie’s unfinished plate in his face. “You are working on electronics that our military men will depend on with total faith. Do it right and Americans live, do it wrong and they die. So far, Harvard, you have done every single thing wrong.” He tossed the plate on the desk, components scattering. “And you think I exaggerate. Grow a conscience, will you?”
Beasley was gone before Charlie could answer—not that he had any comeback ready. Even with a less abrasive instructor, he was out of his depth and he knew it. A person could not learn soldering in a day and a half, not well enough for soldiers to bet their lives on. He rose from the stool, poked his head out the door to make sure the hallway was deserted, then climbed the stairs two at a time.
The secretary was gone and he knocked on the professor’s outer door. Instead of waiting to hear any welcoming words, though, he barged in. “Uncle John.”
“Charlie.” Simmons sat at his desk, looking up from his papers. “I guess I should have expected to see you.”
“I don’t mean to seem ungrateful.”
“But you wonder what you are doing in the dungeon.”
“With the most difficult human being I have ever encountered.”
The professor nodded, waiting.
“Doing a task I am wholly unqualified for,” Charlie continued. “With a teacher who despises me for no reason I have given him. And soldiers’ lives are at stake. And any burn I get is my fault.”
Simmons maintained a serious expression. “All done?”
“I don’t even know what this soldering is for.”
“That didn’t seem to bother you when the work was arcs.”
“True.” Charlie felt caught. “That’s true.”
“Son, you are going to encounter all sorts of people in life. You have to decide which ones you allow to determine your fate, and which ones are bumps in the road.”
“Beasley feels bigger than a molehill.”
Simmons rose and went to the window. He lifted one leg to put his shoe on the sill, and leaned an elbow on his thigh. Charlie thought of a football coach, giving a halftime pep talk.
“There is always more to know,” Simmons said. “There is always a backstory that makes simple things look complicated.”
“Beasley, for example?”
“His mother’s family name is Kozera. They are Poles. One night last spring, Nazis killed the entire family. Aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins, all of them. So here is this young man, an outstanding engineering student in Rensselaer, who has spent every summer of his life with his family in Warsaw. And they’re all gone. What does he do next? Pick up a gun? Enlist? No, he volunteers to use what he has, skills which prove to be quite valuable. Personality issues aside, he creates a highly productive electronics laboratory, which is helpful to national defense in a way neither he nor I is permitted to tell you. Some people consider Beasley a war hero.”
Charlie ran his hand over the back of a chair. “I am supposed to respect him, then? Or have sympathy for him?”
“Maybe not. Maybe no one is allowed to treat people the way he does, no matter what they have lost or what they accomplish.” Simmons returned to his seat. “But you have a choice to make, about how large his influence will be on your life.”
“He seems determined to have me fail.”
“Well, like it or not, this is your shot, son. Most boys don’t get as much as one, which you had already in the math crew. The dungeon is opportunity number two. There won’t be a third, not because I can’t keep a promise to my baby sister, but because at that point we’re out of options.”
“What if I can’t learn soldering well enough though? What if I’m terrible at it?”
Simmons sighed. “Plenty of young men make better soldiers than you might expect. And many soldiers get through a war and come out the other side just fine.”
“What should I do?”
“You’ll need to write your own story, Charlie. I can’t devote any more time to you, there’s too much work. Sometime down the road, I imagine you sending me a note, maybe three words long. Get me out—and I’ll have it done by supper time. Or, if you treat Beasley as a way of strengthening your determination, knowing that bigger challenges lie ahead, you might send three different words. Ready for inspection—something like that. If the work’s good enough, I’ll make sure you advance quickly.”
As he listened, Charlie dug a fingernail into the wood of the chair back. “There is no way around this guy, is there, Uncle John?”
“Make the most of this opportunity, overcome it, and you will earn yourself a ringside seat at history. It would be a hell of a shame for you to miss it.”
“The history of this war, you mean?”
“Charlie.” Simmons let his shoulders drop. “I can’t tell anymore whether you’re being sincere, or discreet about something you’ve already figured out.”
“I am genuinely in the dark here.” Charlie advanced till his thighs touched the desk. “As your nephew, I’m asking. What do you mean? The history of what?”
The professor looked down. He seemed to discover the piles of work on his desk. He placed both palms on the stacked papers, then raised his head, looking his nephew in the eye. “I mean of all time, Charlie. I mean the history of the human race.”
11.
My mother was waiting up when I came home on Valentine’s Day. Or, to be more accurate, when I let myself in she was plopped down in one of the living room’s overstuffed chairs, smoking a cigarette. There was only the one lamp on, over the piano, so the room was dim. She seemed surprised to see me.
“Dinner’s over already?”
“It is.” I hung my coat in the hall closet.
“Did you have a nice time?”
“So-so.” I headed past her for the kitchen where I switched on the lights.
“The food was less than excellent?”
I peered into the icebox. “The company was less than excellent.”
I heard her exhale, then. It was not just the smoking, there was attitude in it. One quirk about Frank and Daddy being gone, with all of their male noise and activity, was how sensitive my mother and I became to each other’s expressions. That exhale had the weight of what a year before might have required a long parental lecture.
I came to the kitchen door. “What?”
“What happened?”
“Mother. I am allowed to not like a boy, if I want.”