Riddance. Shelley Jackson
any sustained effort, however, so very few of these enterprises lasted beyond his initial infatuation. In some cases simply writing out an order satisfied the appetite aroused in him by the article or advertisement in one of his periodicals, and by the time a thousand packets of dung-colored, spiky seeds or a lump of waxy material arrived in a bumped, scuffed, stained, and belabeled carton, he had forgotten why he wanted them and sometimes even what exactly they were.
More often he lost momentum only after he met the first serious obstacle, by which time half the house was given over to dyestuffs, say, or the grinding of lenses, and then my mother would enter the field to try to recoup at least some of his expenses. Far more practical than he, she became pretty knowledgeable about the various ways available to a lady entrepreneur to unload a very odd range of goods, and sometimes even turned a profit, though to my disgust she did not ever hold back any of the money she made to supplement the small allowance from which she supplied all her own needs and mine, as she might easily have done, but turned it in to my father, submitting meekly to his grumbling, for of course although he thought “peddling” beneath him, he nonetheless believed that if he turned his hand to it, he would do it better than anyone, always asked what he believed to be very canny questions about the deals she had struck, and invariably concluded by lamenting her sad want of acumen, when the truth was that without her acumen he would have been emphatically out of pocket and perhaps ruined us with his many nonsensical investments.
His extravagances were never more flagrant than when he could style them research. For my father planned a great work, whose particulars were yet to be determined. Above all else he admired inventors, knew their names and stories, often spoke, though always in vague terms, of the inventions that he himself would unveil when he was ready, and pored over the official reports of new Patents and Claims with occasional exclamations of annoyance at those who, to hear him tell it, had anticipated ideas for which he had just been on the verge of filing a patent himself. His conversation at dinner was really a monologue on the latest discoveries, many of them of no utility in his line of work, such as a new method for ventilating railroad carriages, or for making artificial ivory out of caoutchouc, ammonia, chloroform, and phosphate of lime; and some quite unwelcome at the dinner table (or so I perceived—for I had a strong stomach myself—from the suddenly rather taxidermic appearance my mother assumed as her jaw froze in mid-bite), such as a new sort of verminous tumor in the stomach of the horse, an improved remedy for fecal stench, or a way to induce sluggish leeches to suck (soak them in beer). He treated us to expositions on the dyeing of ornamental feathers; female labor in Germany; improvements in chandeliers; the preservation of blood from slaughterhouses in the form of a jelly obtained by adding quick or slaked lime; the Inter-Continental Tunnel planned between Tarifa and Tangiers; a new factory proposing to make paper from the cactus plant; a new method for identifying falsification in documents via photographic copies; and an experiment in weighing the rays of light, which showed that the weight of sunlight on the earth was three thousand million tons, “a force that but for gravitation would drive it into space” (Practical Magazine).
He gave his opinion freely and somewhat wildly on these topics, of which he had no firsthand knowledge whatsoever. Sometimes he became so exercised that he leapt up from his chair and strode around, employing gestures that recalled the elocutionary training of which he was so proud. (He often mentioned that he had won a prize in school for his recitation of Bryant’s “Thanatopsis,” a conversational turn that I dreaded, for it invariably progressed from pleasurable reminiscence to lamentation that such as he should have spawned such as I—i.e., a tongue-tied nincompoop.)
When he heard of a new gadget, however dubious or impractical, nothing would stop him from placing an order, and when it came in the mail he would drop everything to read any manuals included with it, to assemble it if necessary, to try it out, and then to show it off. Alas, he did not have any friends to show it to, so he would summon his secretary, the foreman of his factory, and the more trusted and responsible of his skilled craftsmen, and they would all troop into the parlor and sit very silently and awkwardly on our most uncomfortable chairs while my mother poured tea and my father stalked around the device, waiting irritably for her to finish. It was plain to me that these visitors felt uncomfortable in our house and considered the occasion an extension of their work duties rather than a social event, but my father grew flushed and merry and loud and exaggeratedly colloquial in his speech as if to make his low company feel at home (though they themselves were invariably restrained and punctilious in their diction) and reminisced about the event afterward as though it had been a great success. Then he would spend several days in composing a long letter to the manufacturers giving his opinion of the device and suggestions for its improvement and often spoke as if the manufacturers waited eagerly for his letters and were very grateful for his insights and as if he had some sort of official role in the creative process and was indeed practically a co-creator. When I was very young I assumed that this was true and it made me think my father a very important fellow, but later I understood that it was all moonshine and pictured the manufacturers laughing over the letters with which he took such pains or simply dropping them into the trash unread.
I do not remember all the items he purchased. But here are some that I still possess:
An Automatic Signal Buoy;
An Arithmometer, or calculating machine;
A Magneto-Electric Bell Apparatus;
A Pocket Telegraph, or portable Morse instrument;
A Scott’s Electric Hair Brush;
A Galvano-Faradio Magneto-Electric Shock Therapy Machine.
My father often spoke of our world as rendered limitless by the ever-extending reach of practical science, and this had its effect on me, for I will not allow death to be an end. But while my father’s scientific cast of mind and the ideas and devices that he brought into the house were a great influence on my later work, I hold them to blame for many tribulations. Although my father was a serial enthusiast who could usually be trusted to move on from any given hobby within a few months, my stutter was a continual vexation and a reminder to him of the unfinished project that was my speech, and so from the pages of his science magazines came an endless succession of ways to torture my mouth: the syllabic exercises of M. Colobat, regulated by his muthonome or orthophonic lyre (a sort of metronome); exercises for the lips, the tongue, the breath; tongue-depressing plates, jaw-spreading pads, obstructions of various kinds—cruel descendants of Demosthenes’ pebbles—like the little gold fork of M. Itard, worn “in the concavity of the alveolary arcade of the inferior jawbone,” i.e., under the tongue; leather collars that buckled around my neck and pressed firmly against my larynx; metal plates that strapped to my teeth and projected between my lips; and a sort of whistle that was held against my palate by a sharp point digging into my tongue. It goes without saying that none of these devices fulfilled their promises to “restore the patient’s usefulness to Society by opening the Floodgates to cogent and mellifluous Speech.”
I was supposed to be grateful for the trouble my father took over me and to let any setbacks inspire me to greater exertions, so my mother was not permitted to comfort me when I wept. “You have done enough harm, Madam!” he would cry, for my father considered my stutter a sign of the weakness in the maternal line, and never ceased blaming himself for the “temporary venereal intoxication” that had resulted in the “unscientific” and “counter-evolutionary” union of a man of his elevated forebears with a “moral imbecile” from a “line of shopkeepers and petty criminals.” He felt it his duty to correct for the evil effects of his ill-advised marriage on his social class, so when the pages of his monthlies offered no new quackery to inflict on me, he exercised his own ingenuity, pouring all his balked ambition as an inventor into designing novel devices for me to try. No doubt he also calculated that if he could cure stuttering where others had (so obviously) failed, he would make his name.
Never had a mouth been so stretched, cut, prodded, plungered, braced, cantilevered, wedged, winched, pinched—so Scientific Americaned—so Popular Scienced. These periodicals were possessed of wonderfully detailed etchings of docks, and decks, and dykes, where somber, beautiful, flawlessly geometrical machines enjoyed the anonymous attentions of stiff, tidy men with tapering symmetrical limbs. In my father’s fancy and mine, such was or would be my mouth: a site of modern industry, well-regulated