The Last Days of Night(81)

“Paul,” cautioned Erastus, “that’s not a very friendly way to greet our guest.”

“Where is Mr. Tesla, Father?”

“He’s usually back by dinnertime.”

“Usually?”

Agnes was more sympathetic to Paul’s understandable confusion. “A week ago I received a letter from Wilhelm Roentgen.”

The name meant nothing to him. “All right.”

“He’s a professor at the University of Würzburg.”

“Fascinating.”

“Paul,” said Ruth, “would you like some tea?”

“Mother,” said Paul, growing frustrated. “Please give me a moment with my friend.” At the word “friend,” Ruth raised an eyebrow.

“Mr. Roentgen informed me that he’d been receiving letters from one Nikola Tesla. Weekly.”

“Who let Tesla send letters?” Paul looked accusingly at his father.

“Nikola wanted to send letters to a scientist in Germany,” said Erastus. “I did not think this would endanger him.”

“Damn it,” said Paul. “That is precisely what will endanger him.”

“Your language,” castigated Erastus.

“So that is what brought me here,” said Agnes. “Because Roentgen wrote to me to say that he’d been having the most enlivening correspondence with Tesla, and hoped to meet with him on an upcoming visit to America. But Tesla had said that wouldn’t be possible unless I’d given permission. Which Roentgen asked for.”

“Why you?” asked Paul.

Agnes stared at him. “Because,” she said calmly, “he trusts me.”

For whatever reason, she was the one whom Tesla had gone to after the fire. It was in her house that he’d made a temporary home. Agnes had little family; Tesla had none. Together, they’d made the most unexpected of siblings.

“If he’d been writing to Roentgen, perhaps he was writing to others. The community of scientists is small, as you’ve taken pains to make me aware. I’d taken the season off from performing anyway, given my…other voyages. I came here to make sure he hadn’t been found.”

Across the room Paul’s parents seemed perfectly comfortable with all that was happening.

“So he’s safe,” said Paul.

“You should see it. What he’s done. It’s magical.”

“What’s he done?”

Her face crinkled. “It’s very difficult to explain.”

“Is it a new light bulb?” asked Paul eagerly. “A completely original A/C lamp? That’s what he’d been working on.”

“Perhaps,” interjected Ruth, “the simplest way to clear this up would be a visit to Mr. Tesla’s laboratory. After tea.”

“His laboratory?” sputtered Paul. “Where is Mr. Tesla’s laboratory?”

There passed a moment of silence. The only sound was the clatter of four cups being set, by Ruth, against their saucers.

Agnes turned to Erastus. “You should tell him,” she said to Paul’s father. “It was your idea.”





The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious….He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.

—ALBERT EINSTEIN



“HOW COULD YOU build him a laboratory?” Paul asked his father as their carriage wound down the dirt road toward Fisk University. The horses kicked up clouds of dust, coating the air in a dull beige sheen.

“He built the laboratory himself,” said Erastus. “I just gave him some unused space in the basement.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” supplied Agnes from the carriage’s back seat. “What he’s built there.”

“Once again, I’ll ask without expectation of being answered: What is it that he’s built there?”

“Oh, son,” said Erastus, “I’m not much for the natural sciences. You’ll have to ask him yourself.”

Agnes shrugged. “I never even got a handle on the whole A/C-versus-D/C issue, and the man lived in my maid’s room for months.”

Paul fidgeted in his seat as the Fisk campus came into view. Though only a quarter century old, the school had blossomed from a lecture hall for freedmen on an abandoned army barracks into a thousand-student institution. A half dozen stone buildings, all designed in the Gothic style. Paul had been four years old when his father helped to found Fisk. He had little memory of those days, but the story had lived on at his family’s dinner table. The first class had consisted entirely of former slaves: men as young as seven and as old as seventy, few of whom had much experience with a book, much less any sort of formal education. With the support of the Freedmen’s Bureau and the American Missionary Association, the school had thrived. It had recently educated its first second-generation applicant, the teenage son of a former cotton picker from a West Tennessee plantation.

Paul entered the basement laboratory of Jubilee Hall to find a vibrant Nikola Tesla huddling in a semicircle with five Negro students. The men’s backs were to the door, so none saw the entry of Paul’s group. Tesla and his students were too deeply engaged in something happening on a wide metal table in front of them to notice that anyone had come in.