by Devin Murphy
DEDICATION
For Becca, my light maker.
EPIGRAPH
“Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”
—VLADIMIR NABOKOV
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
A Brief Crack of Light Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
The Lighthouse Lady Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Throwing Away the Oar Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .* About the author
About the book
Read on
Acknowledgments
Copyright
About the Publisher
A BRIEF CRACK OF LIGHT
1
I was fourteen when my father thought he finally developed the perfect inner coil for the lightbulb. He’d gone to Hamburg where he tried, again, to solicit a new account from Volkswagen. My mother was playing Chopin’s Étude in Thirds on her piano downstairs when he came home. My brother, Edwin, older by a year, slumped next to me on the floor of our bedroom drawing with pastels on a large sheet of butcher paper. Fergus, our big leg-chewing mutt, slept upside down beneath the window with his feet against the wall. In his dreams he twitched and kicked himself across the floor, digging his claws into the plaster until a rut formed one foot off the ground ringed the room. My parents’ voices were muffled until they walked into the den, where sound carried up through the heating register.
“I still think it’s a bad idea.” I knew she wanted him to stop crossing the border.
“This will set us up for the future.”
“There is no future with them.”
“They’ll give me a chance to supply all their headlights. What else could we want, Drika? We need secure accounts.” I could tell by the groan of a loose spring that my father sat on the Biedermeier sofa next to the metal clock, his feet probably resting on the wooden steamer trunk.
“It’s a bad idea. Sell more here and in France.”
“To whom?”
There was a cold beat of tension between them. This was an old fight and hearing them start up again felt like a nervous folding of wings deep in my chest.
“I got you something,” my father said to her after a moment.
He always brought books home to us as presents. For my mother, he brought her books on music that she’d devour. She would come into the room, thrusting the opened pages into our laps for us to read, like she needed us to hold them to be real. I knew from reading all those books that the oldest song was the Shaduf Chant, sung by workers on the Nile River in Egypt. And that there was a concert in Breslau on August 2, 1937, that ended with sixty thousand people singing together.
“The world’s largest choir. Can you imagine?” my mother asked.
I knew that in 540 BC Pythagoras introduced the concept of the musical octave. In 250 BC the first organ was invented in Greece.
“That long ago,” she whispered. “Astonishing.”
When my father brought back music sheets, my mother would race to the piano to begin practicing. Monteverdi’s Vespers; Puccini’s Madama Butterfly; and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring all took shape in our home. With no warm-up she could play all of Handel’s Messiah. She didn’t tire, or the music gave her new energy. She never said. She rarely talked about her playing or responded when I praised her.
“The music plays itself,” she said. “The musician is there to make the transitions between loud and soft. Fast and slow. Slide along those scales and you can make it work.”
I knew she made it sound easy to tempt me to try, but I had no talent or patience for stringing one butchered note after another.
Books were sacred to my parents, who both longed to use them to break from what they perceived as their vulgar lineages. So my father gave books freely and we gathered as many as we could. Years before, when my father was struggling to launch the factory, he’d given me a set of illustrated Bibles. I remembered a picture from one of the books of a cypress-tree-filled valley between Nazareth and Cana. An ancient path my father said Roman generals marched over. I remembered nothing else from those books, because soon after I received the gift, when his manic efforts and drive were tipped by self-doubt and fatigue into some fatalistic downswing, he got roaring drunk, gathered up those volumes, and crammed them into the fireplace, where they curled into orange ash. As the fire bucked and flared, it cemented the written word for me as a higher power that could lift a person from basic human rage and lunacy, or drive them right back down into it.
“This is a nice book,” my mother now replied to my father. But there was a flatness to her voice. Disappointment. A small beat of quiet that held the larger story of their lives I had yet to piece together. Back then, I didn’t yet know how neglected she felt by my father, who gave her wealth and gifts instead of his time.
“Well, I don’t know who you should sell to,” my mother started in again, “but if things get bad we should shut down and leave.”
“Now? When I’m so close? If I get this right it will change everything. This is it.”
“This is it, this is it. You’ve been close for ten years. Things get better, but you’re never happy. Never done.”
“If I get this coil right they’ll be our largest account. We’ll supply almost all the vehicles in Germany. We can leverage that to sell all around the world!”
The teakettle clanked against the kitchen sink.
Fergus stood up, scratched at the carpet, walked a tight circle, and fell into a ball, knees and elbows clunking the ground.
“I also came up with a solution for keeping the boys busy. It will help with the Volkswagen account too,” my father said loud enough so she could hear him from the other room. I leapt from bed and kneeled over the heating vent. Then my father walked into the kitchen, where it was harder for me to hear. Several minutes later the teakettle whistled, and I heard my mother yelling.
“Are you kidding?”
“Edwin, come listen,” I said to my brother.
“Not now.”
“Edwin. Listen.”
“Not now.”
I knew not to engage him when he was like that.
“It’s a good idea. It will make them good citizens,” my father said.
“Good German citizens,” she screamed.
I looked at Edwin. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” he said.
I went back to bed and patted the mattress. Fergus shot up and jumped up with me. He stood panting in my face until I scratched behind his ear enough that he sat down and eased his head onto my legs. He stayed like that as I went to sleep wondering what my mother meant.
In the morning I bounded down the stairs, where I found my father already awake and working in his lab. My mother’s busy movements made it clear that they had avoided another fight and gone right to icy silence. For breakfast she served wild blueberry crêpes from a cast-iron skillet and covered them in syrup and churned butter. She wore her hair-strand gold necklace that held a pendant my father brought back from Norway and silver earrings from Poland. Edwin and I ate with our arms shielding our plates from each other. There wer
e oil and vinegar bottles and a brandy decanter in the center of the table that we’d often douse the other’s food with if he let down his guard.
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.”
That night, after eating dried apricots and apples roasted over the fireplace, I tried to get my brother to talk about what the camp might be like. Neither of us had ever been away from our family long. I wanted to talk it over with Edwin, to express my concerns, but he began to draw and soon his attention faded from me. He covered another large sheet of butcher paper with etchings, working in circles so his finished project looked like a constellation wheel.
His side of the room was covered in stacks of smooth and textured papers, sketchbooks, knives and peels of pencil shavings, brushes, tubes of paint, a jar of turpentine, and an easel that looked like a giant praying mantis when I caught it out of the corner of my eye in dim light.
Edwin had a book called The Greatest Drawings of All Time that he slipped his own sketches between the pages of.
“Just to keep them pressed,” he said.
“Our sports almanac is just as big.”
“I’ll use that one next,” he said, but page after page of his own work found their way between the covers in what must have been a small allowance to his own sense of talent.
I understood why he did it. I daydreamed about being a prodigy like my brother. I imagined greatness in sports, art, music, and industrial invention, and if those dreams came with tangible scraps, I would have squirreled them away in lofty bindings too.
Edwin spent hours that night working on his hands and knees. I woke much later to the scent of beeswax candles and saw his shadow hunkered over some new
dream image he couldn’t wait to bring out of the paper. The lump of his body dark and still, his extended arm swaying and twitching, conducted some unfolding vision to life. Behind him the old steel radiator jutted out of the wall, a bleached-white square rib cage that hissed and ticked and warmed his midnight painting sessions. He filled an old cistern with water, wet his fingers, and rubbed dabs over the ink lines so they blurred. The shapes loosened at the corners, and the color bled across the watermarks like he created some new set of rules for form.
Our father bought him the easel, but he still preferred to do all his drawing leaning over the floor. He kneeled on the paper, somehow never tearing it, as if when drawing or painting he became weightless and floated over the work.
“Edwin. What do you think that camp will be like?” I tried to break through. “Why doesn’t Mom want us to go?”
Edwin gave me a look like I’d said something really stupid, and kept drawing.
I got out of bed, snuck down the stairs, and shuffled into my father’s lab. I lay down on the floor in the dark. The smell of burnt chemicals hung in the air, and slivers of glass speckled the floor. It became a sort of dare to myself to lie down without getting cut, and I never succeeded. Some jagged shard would always drive beneath my skin. Those little wounds made me feel closer to my father, like we both understood something about his work that went beyond words.
No light came through when the door was shut. I turned a flashlight on and swept it across the floor and the glass shone back like a crystal rug. The beam of light lingered on the tops of chemical canisters and gas welding tanks. I pictured my father bending into the shower of molten orange as sparks bounced off the dark faceplate of his helmet—the blue-tongued coalescence of metals drawing him closer to something that only he could see among the raw materials. I studied the beaded melding points of the castings and bases he made, and how each joint somehow balanced the metals in intricate and subtle curves.
