multitude of Plexiglas panels, swelled from the slim body of the fuse-
lage like a mushroom cap from its stem but smoothed away under-
neath. A snake’s head, a.
“I hate the pusher engines,” Henry said. “They make the ship look
dumb.”
“They’re necessary to get the damn thing off the ground,” Julius
said, turning back to the specs unrolled before him. “Just that little bit
more lift.”
“I know why they’re necessary,” Henry said. “I just think necessary
should be elegant as well, and if it’s not it means trouble later.”
Julius, without nameable expression, raised his eyes from the rolls
of specs to his brother.
“Might mean trouble later,” Henry said to him. “Possible trouble.
Often does.”
“Oh I don’t know,” Julius said. He sat back in his chair and felt for
the pipe in his vest pocket. “I remember Ader’s Avion back a long time
ago. That day at Satory. How elegant that was.”
“Yes,” Henry said. “The Avion.”
“Piss elegant,” said Julius. His lack of expression had not altered.
To the chief of engineering he said, “The Avion looked like a bat.
Exquisite. Even folded its wings back like one, to rest.” Julius made the
gesture. “Only trouble, it couldn’t fly.”
“Well I hate to tell you what this one looks like,” Henry said.
Julius turned then from the specs and gazed, deadpan, at the absurdly
elongated fuselage, with its swollen head and the two big ovals at its
root.
2
The day that Henry Van Damme and his brother had spoken of was
a day when Henry was twelve and Julius ten, a day in October of
1897, when following their tutor and their mother, young and
beautifully dressed and soon to die, they came out of the Gare
du Nord in Paris and got into a taxicab to be driven to a brand-new
hotel in the Rue St.-Philippe-du-Ruel (their father liked new hotels, as
he did motor cars and telephones). Waiting for them at the desk, as
they had hoped and expected, was a large stiff envelope, and the boys
insisted that their tutor immediately set up the gramophone that went
everywhere with them in its own leather box. Their mother had diffi-
culty even getting them out of their wool coats and hats before they sat
down in front of the machine. Jules was the one who cranked it up
with the slender Z-shaped crank of lacquered steel and ebony; Henry
(whose name was Hendryk in the Old World) was the one who slit the
seals of the envelope and drew out carefully the Berliner disc of cloudy
zinc. He knew he was not to touch the grooves of its surface but it
seemed a deprivation hard to bear: the pads of his fingers could sense
the raised ridges of metal as though longing for them.
Their tutor affixed the disc to the plate of the gramophone and
slipped the catch that allowed it to rotate. It was one of only a handful
in existence, though the boys’ father was confident of changing that:
20 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
he, like Berliner, could see a day not far off when communication by
discs small enough to fit in a breast pocket or slip into an envelope,
playable on machines that would become as common as telephones,
would bring the voices of loved ones (and the instructions of bosses
and officials too) anywhere in the world right to our ears, living let-
ters.
The tutor placed the stylus on the disc’s edge, and it was swept into
the grooves. “My dear boys,” they heard their father’s voice say, speak-
ing in English with his distinctive but unplaceable accent. Hendryk felt
his brother, Jules, who sat close beside him bent to the gramophone’s
horn, shiver involuntarily at the sound. “I have some good news that I
think will interest you. I’ll bet you remember a day five years ago—
Jules, my dear, you were only five—when you saw Monsieur Ader fly
his Avion, the ‘Eolus,’ at Armainvilliers. What a day that was. Well,
next week he is to make a test flight of his latest machine, the Avion III,
called ‘Zephyr.’ The flight—if the thing does fly—will be at the army’s
grounds at Satory, on the fourteenth of this month, which if my calen-
dar is correct will be three days after you hear this. It is a beautiful
machine. Monsieur Ader’s inspiration is the bat, as you know, and not
the bird. Take the earliest morning train to Versailles and a carriage
will meet you. All my love as usual. This is your father, now ceasing to
speak.” The stylus screeched against the disc’s ungrooved center, and
the tutor lifted it off.
“And what,” he asked the boys, “do we see in the name of this new
machine?”
“Avion is a thing that flies, like a bird,” said Hendryk. “Avis, a
bird.”
“Zephyr is wind,” said Jules. “Breeze.” His hands described gentle
airs. “Can we listen again?”
Henry Van Damme and his brother were Americans, born in Ohio of an
American mother, but their father—though he spent, on and off, a
decade or more in the States—was European, a Dutch businessman.
He disliked that term, which seemed to name a person different from
himself, but Dutch alternatives were worse— handelaar, zakenman—
redolent of strong cigars and evil banter and low tastes. If he could he
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 21
would have described himself as a dreamer; he wished that entrepre-
neur meant in French what it had come to mean in English, the glam-
orous suggestion of risk and romance.
His sons grew up on trains and steamships, speaking French or
Dutch or English or all three at once, a compound language they would
use for years to keep their secrets. Their education was conducted in
motion, so to speak, and staged as though by an invisible mentor-magi-
cian as a series of adventures and encounters the point of which seemed
to be to discover why they had occurred, and what each had to do with
the preceding ones. At least that’s how the boys made sense of it—they
worshiped their father, and their young British tutor amiably turned
their attempts at exegesis into standard lessons in mathematics or lan-
guage.
Eudoxe Van Damme (he had been christened Hendryk, like his son
and his father, but found the name unappealing) was a large investor in
mechanical and scientific devices and schemes, about three-quarters of
which failed or evaporated, but one or two of which had been so spec-
tacularly successful that Van Damme now seemed impervious to finan-
cial disaster. He had a quick mind and had trained it in science and
engineering; he could not only discern the value (or futility) of most
schemes presented to him but also could often make suggestions for
improvements that didn’t annoy the inventors. His son Hendryk, large
and optimistic, was like him; Jules was slighter and more melancholy,
like his mother, whom he would miss lifelong.
The Berliner discs weren’t the only sound recording device Van
Damme had taken an interest in. As a young man he had assembled a
consortium of other young men with young heads and hearts to develop
the phonautograph of Scott, the machine that produced those ghostly
scratchings on smoked films representing (or better say resulting from)
sound amplified and projected by a horn. It could even produce pic-
tures of the human voice speaking, which Scott had called logographs.
The great problem with the Scott apparatus was that although it pro-