Prospero's Son: Life, Books, Love, and Theater

by Seth Lerer

  One weekend afternoon shortly before Dad died, he got it in his head to start extracting all the elements. Some we would find; some we would pull out of machinery and products; some we would isolate from chemicals. “Lithium batteries!” he announced after lunch, and so, like knights on an adventure, we drove off to True Value Hardware to buy a handful of batteries, intent on opening them up. Outside, we set up carefully: rubber gloves, respirators, newspaper on the ground. Because of lithium’s reactivity, I suggested we cover everything in Vaseline—a process that left us, begloved and masked, looking like two proctologists on holiday. We used a hacksaw to cut into the batteries, a move that released toxic smells and smoke. We spread apart the metal casing, resecting the elemental heart of the anode, and there it was: a coil of silvery-bluish lithium foil. We quickly covered it in Vaseline, put the whole mess into a jelly jar, and kept it, displayed like a captured creature, on the windowsill.

  As we cut into the battery, I saw us both as surgeons of our adolescence, getting at the heart of something volatile. For as a child, I knew I had a lithium imagination. My oldest memories are not of events but of dreams: tongues of fire licking up around my bed, each one with a laughing face; my best friend’s mother morphed into a monster; hallways, staircases, and elevators going dark and nowhere. One day—it must have been when I was four—I came home after playing cowboys and Indians and, still wearing the headdress I had fashioned out of newspaper, I ran into the apartment, breaking something along the way. “My God,” my mother screamed, “you are an Indian”—the first words I remember her saying to me.

  I looked down at the boy, benignly playing with his grandmother at Dad’s ceremony, fingering the bit of ripped cloth I had held up with my prayers. I remembered, how, soon after my brother was born, I went into my mother’s dresser, pulled out one of her white sweaters, and cut holes in it with a scissors—as if to show her how the fabric of my own life had been torn. If I could tell you of my childhood, I thought, would it make yours better? ’Tis time, I recalled Prospero,

  I should inform thee farther. Lend thy hand,

  And pluck my magic garment from me.

  Like, you, I was intractable. I spent the bulk of kindergarten in the corner, crying “I’ll be good” to a teacher so old and so ugly I was sure she had a tail. When we did homonyms in second grade, I proudly stood up for my own, and offered, in my Brooklyn English, “orphan” and “often.” I was sent to the vice principal. The Brooklyn of the early 1960s was a place where children played outside, where you could ride your bike all day as long as you were home for dinner, and where you could stand on a street corner waiting for adults to come by. “Would you cross me, sir?” I was taught to ask, and unsuspecting children of my generation gratefully took strangers’ hands and walked across the street. On such streets, I was menacing. Stickballs would carom over windshields; mothers would come out of doors to curse us out in Yiddish. When I was six, I found a fiver in my pocket (perhaps it had been given to me by my grandmother), and I waltzed into Phil’s corner store with my friends and ordered up a whole mess of pretzels and red licorice, each piece, a penny. “What are you doing with that five-dollar bill?” Phil chastised me. “Now, you go home and give that right back to your mother.”

  As if to pay me back for my six years of Indian exuberance, Mom put me into therapy. Each Wednesday afternoon, she would take me in a taxi to 39 Park Street to see Dr. Lisbeth Sachs. She had a vaguely European accent, which in those days was a mark of medical authority, and we’d sit there for an hour, talking about dreams, or having tea, or making things with popsicle sticks. One day, after my mother gave the cabbie the address, he turned around and said, “Lot of doctors on that street, eh?” “Just mind your own business,” my mother snapped back (with, of course, the implied “goddamned” hovering between “own” and “business”). I never really got much out of these appearances, save when my mother would herself come in, and Dr. Sachs would ask some piercing question and Mom would break down in tears.

  We all went on drugs. Mom lived on Milltown and Librium for the better part of the Kennedy administration, and while Jackie’s pillbox hats absorbed a nation, Mom’s pillboxes spilled over the kitchen table. I was given Thorazine, much stronger than the sedatives Mom took. Thorazine is now one of those relic drugs out of the age of thalidomide and lobotomies, something that, I am told, they no longer prescribe even for homicidal schizophrenics. Whole stretches of my childhood have evaporated from me; I have no memory of third grade. When people of my generation sit down and recall where they were when John Kennedy was shot, I say nothing—if only I could shoot back that I was so medicated that I could barely dress myself, as if my 1963 had been assassinated by a pill. When I recounted this experience to a psychoanalyst in Palo Alto and asked him if they still used Thorazine anywhere, he said, “Oh, probably in some prison in Mississippi.”

  In the Mississippi of my childhood, I took refuge in the things of nature. There was a book in the Time-Life Nature series that had pictures of all of the elements, with evocative descriptions and arresting chapter titles—I remember one, “A Deceptive Façade of Solidity,” a phrase that, in retrospect, could well have stood as an epigraph for my entire family. Weekends, we trooped off to the American Museum of Natural History, with its minerals and meteors. I memorized all that I could, and began to collect whatever elemental objects I could find. From there, I moved on to rocks and gems, once forcing my father to accompany me to some ancient jeweler’s hovel on Canal Street to beg for samples. Crystals and cut stones arrested me. Light seemed to disappear inside them, only to emerge more brilliant and more colorful than when it entered. I would spend hours staring at the Star of India in the museum’s Morgan Hall, watching how the asterism moved as I moved, wondering whether the faint star was really there or was just a trick of light. There was, at the museum too, an emerald crystal the size of a fist and a topaz larger than a suitcase. At home, I built my own collection out of jewelers’ chips and castoffs. We went to the New York World’s Fair in 1964, where I spent an entire day at the Brazil pavilion, gawking at amethysts and geodes. I bought a few broken pieces of citrine, of smoky quartz, and of amethyst there (probably for no more than fifty cents), and thirty-five years later, when I learned to facet gemstones, these were the first pieces I cut.

  But the most beautiful of all were tourmalines; rich reds, dark greens, fluorescent purples. My favorites were the watermelon tourmalines, crystals that moved from green to white to pink, as if they were plugs cut from some stony, seedless fruit. They were like candy, and I soon learned that their many colors came from lithium. Lost in the silicate, trace metals made them beautiful. What trace metals could enter me? Was there some strange impurity that would enable me to trap the light, to make it shimmer as it left, to help me move from rind to sugary inside?

  The word “lithium” comes from the Greek lithos, meaning stone, and for the early nineteenth-century chemists who found it—and its elemental peers—it must have seemed almost magical to conjure little blobs of metal from these rocks. Men such as Sir Humphry Davy, or Johan Arfvedson, Jöns Berzelius, or Robert Bunsen would place the rocks in acid, leach out the metallic salts, and then recover them as crystals. They heated these compounds to what must then have been unheard-of temperatures (common table salt, for example, melts at a temperature greater than copper, silver, or gold) and ran electric currents through the melt. God knows how they got their electricity. I imagine great banks of wet batteries, slabs of copper and zinc in jars of acids, bubbling away and putting out raw voltage that would split these compounds into elements. And at the anode, there would be a little gleam: lithium, sodium, potassium, calcium. Chemistry was more than a science; it was theater, and seeing the results of such electrical and coal-fueled power must have been like watching Vulcan walk out of the forge with gleaming steels.

  Remember (I would turn to him) how much you loved Uncle Tungsten, the memoir by Oliver Sacks? That’s where we read how Humphry Davy isolated alkalis and
how, as a young boy, Sacks took great pleasure in repeating Davy’s old experiments. He would take bits and pieces of the metals and throw them in water, watching them sputter and burn. Once, he writes, he secured a three-pound chunk of sodium solely for the purpose of tossing it into a nearby river and creating an explosion. “This,” he writes, “was chemistry with a vengeance.”

  Sacks had as much of a “chemical boyhood” as we did: the fascinations with the elements; the love of organizing life into clear categories; the power of chemical reactions. And yet, he had a childhood ripped from home. Sent off to boarding school in 1939, he found a break from all the bullying and terror of the classroom in observing nature. The winter was “exceptionally cold,” with “long glittering icicles hanging from the eaves of the church. These snowy scenes, and sometimes fantastic snow and ice forms, conveyed me in imagination to Lapland or Fairyland.” He goes on:

  It was during the same winter that I remember finding the windowpanes of the rectory doors covered with hoarfrost, and being fascinated by the needles and crystalline forms in this, and how I could melt some of the frost with my breath and make a little peephole. One of my teachers—her name was Barbara Lines—saw my absorption and showed me the snow crystals under a pocket lens. No two were ever quite the same, she told me, and the sense of how much variation was possible within a basic hexagonal format was a revelation to me.

  We read this passage one night, and when you are older I will tell you how it called to mind so many other versions of the story. One day, I’ll read to you from Adalbert Stifter’s Indian Summer, a lovely nineteenth-century story of a young boy’s fascination with the plants and animals, the rocks and minerals of nature. Like us, he built collections (“Since childhood I had tried to get many a sample for my collection”) and saw landscapes in the frames and fissures of crystals. When he climbs the Alps and looks out on their frosty peaks, he recalls what it was like to look out of frozen windows:

  When moisture in the form of tiny droplets that can be scarcely seen even with a magnifying glass comes onto our window panes from the vapor in the air, and the necessary cold temperature also sets in, then the whole sheet of lines, stars, fans, palms, and blossoms that we call frosted windows is created. All these things come together as a whole, and the rays, valleys, ridges, and knots of ice are wondrous to behold when examined through a magnifying glass.

  Like looking at snowflakes under a magnifying glass, Stifter subjects bits and pieces of the child’s life to close scrutiny. The brilliance of Sacks’s similar reminiscence lies in its filtering through this device: as if the magnifiers of his memory were not the facts of life but the tropes of fiction.

  My Dr. Sachs had no such insight, but when she would say things like “Your dreams are windows to your psyche,” with her rich rolled r’s like Viennese whipped cream, we believed her. I think I always trusted people with an accent: something authentic about it, something that took us back to the deep past of our European roots. Maybe that’s why so many Americans love Oliver Sacks, with his perfect English colored only by those slightly “wabbit” r’s. Maybe, too, that is why you find the books of W. B. Sebald on my nightstand. His characters are displaced and disturbed; but so, it seems, was he. “Memory’s Einstein,” Susan Sontag christened him, as if to evoke not just the obvious association with the genius of relativity but, more subtly, to make Sebald—with his wiry gray hair, rich mustache, and émigré’s affect—the accented authority of our time.

  In Sebald’s Austerlitz, the hero of the novel recalls how, as a young boy in the 1930s, he was sent off from Europe to England on the Kindertransport; how he lived with a Welsh couple; how he attended a boarding school; and how he forgot his name and language. One day, “during the coldest winter in human memory,” he returns from that school to his adoptive family in Wales, where the mother is dying:

  There was a coal fire smoldering on the hearth of her sickroom. The yellowish smoke that rose from the glowing coals and never entirely dispersed up the chimney mingled with the smell of carbolic pervading the whole house. I stood for hours at the window, studying the wonderful formations of icy mountain ranges two or three inches high formed above the crossbars by water running down the panes.

  This scene recalls precisely Stifter’s prose. It also recalls a moment earlier in Sebald’s novel, when his narrator visits the eye doctor. Something has impaired his vision, and one gray winter day he takes the train to London to visit a Harley Street specialist. Sitting in the overheated waiting room, the narrator anticipates the angst of Austerlitz in the death chamber of his Welsh adoptive mother:

  From the gray sky that lowered over the city outside a few isolated snowflakes were floating down, and disappeared into the dark chasms of the yards behind the building. I thought of the onset of winter in the mountains, the complete absence of sound, and my childhood wish for everything to be snowed over, the whole village and the valley all the way to the mountain peaks, and how I used to imagine what it would be like when we thawed out again and emerged from the ice in the spring.

  Artistic memory replaces lived experience: as if the only way to grasp the glitter of our childhood or face our fears in doctors’ offices is to retreat into allusion. Childhood gets filtered through the snow of books. The white page and its letters look for all the world like snowy streets. Our schools are filled with Mrs. Lineses, showing us all how to lineate our lives. And in our coldest winters, we seek to be transported out of our rooms.

  My parents must have hoped that we could transport ourselves out of our city rooms, but little changed after we followed Dad to Harvard. We lived on quiet streets, with lawns and lots. I visited the Peabody Museum, whose collections lay in dusty cabinets, the minerals and cut stones lying on their sides, the old handwritten labels foxed and curling up around them. I dragged my parents off to quarries, where we’d pick around the tailings looking for crystals in the dross.

  I fell in with a friend whose father was an optical engineer for Itek, one of the many research firms that sprouted around Boston’s Route 128 in the 1960s. He’d bring home electronic gear from work and set up strobes and lasers in his basement. One day we developed a project to photograph a drop of milk. My friend, his father, and I took a thin aluminum pie pan and attached a wire to the rim. We ran this to a battery and then to a strobe light. The connection then ran to a strip of metal that we placed underneath the pan, so close as to be just not quite touching. We filled the pan with milk so that the bottom of the pie pan bowed within a millimeter of the metal strip. We turned off all the lights, and opened the shutter of a camera focused on the pan. Standing on a ladder, I held a medicine dropper full of milk. I let a large drop come down, and as it plopped into the pan, the bottom bent just enough to complete the circuit, fire the strobe light, and catch the splash of milk in the fractional second of its flash. The open camera captured it, and when we had the film developed we could see the crown of flying milk, the big bulge in the middle of the circle, and the smaller droplets flying out like jewels in a tiara.

  We sent away for model rockets, and on winter days in Massachusetts we would trudge out to snow-covered fields and set up launching pads. Each rocket came with a self-contained engine, a firing device, and a parachute designed to deploy at the top of the arc of flight. I had my friend take a picture of me standing next to our creation, and I posed like Robert Goddard posed in the famous photograph, taken in a Massachusetts winter in 1926, just before he launched the first liquid-fueled rocket. Like Goddard’s, our rockets often crashed and burned. Most times, the parachute would fail to open, or would partially deploy, only to flail as a burning plastic streamer behind the cardboard and balsa rocket body as it plunged back to the field. Only once did our parachute open, and then the wind caught it, blowing the rocket a quarter mile away into a stand of trees. We stood there, helpless but happy that the thing had worked, and yet we never would recover it. And I imagined what it would be like in the spring, when the snow thawed and the trees bloomed and someone w
ould stop by and see this strange fruit hanging beside hemlocks.

  One winter later we were gone. The basement in the Pittsburgh house became my lab. There I assembled retorts and reagents to extract radioactive elements from my rock collection. I ground up bits of pitchblende and mixed them with acids, generating brilliant green solutions that fluoresced under my ultraviolet light. I laid specks of my distillates on paper-wrapped sheets of photographic film. After they were developed, the films showed stray black marks, exposures from the radioactivity. I broke up handfuls of thermometers to collect blobs of mercury. And I read deeply in the “Amateur Scientist” column of Scientific American, trying in vain to follow their instructions for such things as a magnetic resonance spectrometer and a Van de Graaff generator.

  About the only bit of equipment I mastered was a cloud chamber: a pickle jar, the cover lined with black velvet, a bit of alcohol dripped in, and the whole thing inverted onto a block of dry ice. With the lights out and a flashlight beam set tangent to the jar, we saw the fronds of vapor trails left by stray particles as they passed through the alcohol-infused air, ionizing as they went.