“What?”
“A strand of hair. Can I?”
Hilda took off her helmet, let down the little bun she kept her hair folded up in and started to preen through the hair flowing between her shoulder blades. She singled one out, yanked it, and held it out to Edwin.
“Make a sliding knot in that,” Edwin told me.
“It’s too delicate,” I said.
“The way you taught me,” he said. “Loop it and cinch it until the loop is half the size of a guilder.”
I’d never taught my brother anything in my life and when I looked at him he winked at me, a put-on mannerism I now see he took from Uncle Martin. I twisted Hilda’s hair, and imagined my hands running through the rest of it, what the full heft of it would feel like. When the loop was knotted, Edwin took the strand. Still holding the fly, he let his pinky and ring finger pinch the fly to his palm and held one end of her hair strand with his thumb and pointer finger and the other with his other hand. He slid the knot of hair under his pinched fingers to where the fly was, and started wiggling the strand back and forth, working the fine hair and little bug. When he opened his hand the fly jumped out and flew, then stopped in midair, and started moving like an inverse pendulum in perfect circles around the tips of his thumb and pointer finger where he pinched the little hair tether.
“Here you go, Hilda,” Edwin said, “flies make good pets.”
“Gross,” she said, but held her hand out to pinch at her own hair.
The fly circled around in front of her as we walked. It lifted and flitted, the constant buzz of it moving with us.
“Jacob, you showed him this?” Hilda asked. Some voltage of light cut loose in her cool green eyes. I was paralyzed by her red mouth, a momentary softening of her features, this glimpse of youthful beauty.
“He sure did,” my brother said, patting me on the back. “This one’s full of great tricks.”
I blushed under her stare, and looked at her and the fly on a string that mystified me as much as Hilda did. Hilda was distracted by the fly in front of her, and I studied the part in her hair, the deep green flecks in her eyes, and wished the road would go on forever.
After camp, half the summer was left, so Edwin and I started working full-time at our father’s factory. Our first day, he gave us a tour of everything we’d seen hundreds of times. His office had a picture-frame window that looked down onto the factory floor. The glass furnace, rollers, and cooling tanks were against the far wall. The ribbon machines and assembly lines stood parallel to each other. Production flowed from end to end, then serpentined back in the other direction on the next line until the finished bulbs were ready to be packaged and stacked by the case for shipments. The window filtered out the noise of wheezing machinery and workers calling loudly to one another over the molding press tamping out copper bases for the lights. Once he formally showed us the entire factory, he started describing how Gerard and Annie Van Den Bosch ran the books, the ledgers; what each person in the office did. Then we moved to the factory with Ludo’s mother, Edward Fass, and dozens of others.
“Boys, if you’re going to understand this business, you’re going to learn it from the bottom up, not the other way around,” he told us.
I tried to picture myself making this my life, standing behind the glass up in the office and watching the output of our own industry. We started by loading the cases of bulbs onto outgoing trucks. “This is when you protect all of the hard work that went into making them,” he said, showing us how to stack the boxes close and tight and to cover each pallet with padded cargo blankets.
“These are the first for our trial run for Volkswagen,” he pointed to a growing stack of light pallets. “A long way to go, but it’s a start.”
Then Edwin and I unloaded supply trucks, and filled and organized the warehouse supplies. When that was done, he had us follow Samuel around. Samuel stopped every ten paces and let his right arm flail up over his head and scribble some frantic thought in the air. He’d force out some inarticulate grunts that were drowned by the factory noises. On breaks that week, I followed Samuel up the cobblestone road from the harbor to a bench where he sat and fed the birds. Pigeons gathered around his feet, jumped into his lap, and settled on the back part of the bench as he crumbled old crusts in his palms. He looked calmer when he was with the birds. His spastic arm didn’t shoot up as often, but when it did the pigeons leapt away from him, and lingered for a moment in a wild flap of wings before falling back toward him. He had them tamed. Big shorebirds often swooped in and made off with large chunks of bread but he kicked his foot at those, preferring the oil sheen–ringed crowns of the pigeons.
After I followed Samuel around, Edwin and I were put on the assembly line to shadow the workers there. Most of the men on the line had hands too thick to do such delicate work. Edward Fass, who manned the first station, had a deep fishhook-shaped scar on his forearm that formed a meaty ridge. I stared at the scar as we screwed in copper bases.
“You’re going to learn it all,” my father told us, and he meant it. He had us getting more involved at his home laboratory too. He kept trying to create new lightbulbs, new chemicals, and new methods; his ambition seemed boundless.
Taking time away from drawing and painting drove Edwin wild, and he spent all his free time with his artwork. He had a book called Fish of the World, and he would pencil-sketch different fish, detailing each fish down to the scales, copying the models from the pages. Sometimes he’d add an extra fin, a change that was not noticeable, but just as often he’d add a set of arms or legs so the fish could easily crawl off the page and run across our room.
“Did you know fish never shut their eyes?” Edwin said while flipping through his book. “I’d like that. Not missing anything. To always be able to take everything in.”
At night, during a storm, Edwin was on his hands and knees leaning over the paper and drawing a giant picture of a fish swimming in a huge lightbulb. “That could be our family crest,” I said, admiring the details of his drawing as Fergus came in trailing the scent of damp fur, and began running around the room, howling in fear of the thunder.
“Oh god, Fergus. You stink,” Edwin said and pushed our dog away from him.