His Father's Voice

Illustration by Broeck Steadman

Scott caught himself staring at the bare wood and web-cluttered beams of his late aunt’s attic instead of packing, but he found it hard to concentrate. Ten days ago, Scott hadn’t even known who his biological parents were. Now, his search for his heritage had led to a dusty cardboard box in this dusty attic, filled with faded and broken moments of the long dead hopes of a father and mother he’d never known. Carlo Valdez had been a poor man with a little talent who had tried so hard to be more than a cog in the universal machine, and Theresa Rodriguez a plain girl who had once upon a time seen the light of his father’s soul and been momentarily blinded.

Theresa, it turned out, had died years ago, but her sister Maria had lived in this house they shared, increasingly frail, saving everything for “someone, someday, to make amends.” Scott’s arrival seemed to have completed something for her; he’d known her only a week, but in hours of talk, they’d begun to be friends.

Now Aunt Maria was gone too, her house filled with strangers going through things trying to decide who would get what. Some were so closely related to him that he had the uncanny feeling of looking in a mirror when he talked to them.

Thank goodness it was a loving family; the arguments were all of the “here, you take this, she would have wanted you to have it,”—“No, you take it, it meant so much to you…” variety. Then everyone had been too kind to even speculate that Scott’s surprise appearance might have hastened Aunt Maria’s heart attack.

The pictures in the album weren’t faded, though some of them were black and white. They’d been treated well and, except for the quaint clothes and old cars, looked like they’d just come back from the photo lab. Some pictures were of the people downstairs in their younger days, some of strangers.

But a couple of them included a thin girl with long straight brown hair, thick glasses and buck teeth in an artfully sophisticated pose: his biological mother, Theresa Rodriguez. The house was full of her, too, but as an older, more accomplished woman, in whose eyes and face the world weariness was not affected. There was little of her counterculture years here, a decade-long flight from reality that, Aunt Maria said, really ended only when they heard of Carlo’s death. Scott had two boxes full of Theresa Rodriguez: full of photos, clippings, school papers, and other things that kind people, trying to make up for what they’d done forty years ago, insisted he take.

Also, there was one precious picture, not one of the best, but good enough, of his father in an apron in front of a barber shop. He could see himself in his father; short but wideshouldered and deep-chested. The same pattern of baldness, offset by a neat, well-trimmed moustache. If Carlo Valdez had been nearsighted like his son, he hadn’t worn glasses; or hadn’t been able to afford them. If so, Scott thought, that might explain some of his father’s people problems.

Scott understood all about people problems. The person who had come up with the concept of the “alpha male” would probably have given Scott an “upsilon” or “phi.” He’d been fourteen by the time the school had discovered he was mildly nearsighted; too late for all the unrecognized acquaintances, miscopied assignments, and athletic failures.

With his build, Scott should have been a football player, but he was, as it worked out, an untalented but adequate and diligently informed keyboard musician who supplemented his “maintenance engineer’s” income by fixing electronic and acoustic instruments, playing at weddings, and teaching. His one stroke of luck, a few years back now, had been to help compose and play the keyboard on the pop hit, “Rather be Blue,” that had paid the mortgage and still produced a few hundred a year in royalties. But people in the business had got to know him, shunned him, and he’d had to fall back on janitorial jobs to support himself.

Carlo Valdez had been a barber to make ends meet. But the man had been a singer in his heart and in his spare time; a basso in the Tri-city Lyric Theater and chorus for years, who had even changed the spelling of his first name to sound more Italian.

Then, at the age of fifty-four, with no savings to speak of, after years of romantic failures painfully documented in the bundle of letters, Carlo had made love with the stage-struck Theresa. It happened, the letters revealed, the night after his one and only performance as Don Giovanni as a last minute substitute for the Lyric Theater. A homely, artsy-craftsy girl throwing caution to the wind and an over-the-hill want-to-be had tried, for one night, to be real people. In 1964, the pregnancy had been a major scandal.

“People were so stupid and cruel, back then,” one of his new cousins had said. “Theresa really loved him. He only lived three blocks away, and they’d talk when she came home from school. He would have married her, but your grandfather wouldn’t have any part of that. So he left town, she left town, and you went up for adoption. She found Carlo years later, when she was on her own. She was a secretary, you know, worked for Peabody and Cramer for thirty years.” And a street and commune hippie for ten years before that, but only Maria had told him that. Scott had just nodded. “Yes, she found him. They wrote after that; the letters were in the box.”

“Theresa,” the cousin added, “got that box in the attic after he died; it arrived UPS from his boarding house saying it was all there was left and that Carlo had wanted her to have it. Then she moved in with Maria, and the box came with her. They looked for you, did you know? If you’d only been a few years earlier—”

“I didn’t know,” he’d told them. “I didn’t know.”

He’d lost his concentration again. He looked down from the rafters to the cardboard box. Dust. A photo album. Old letters. Programs from various productions Carlo had been in. Discharge papers—Carlo had been in World War II. Some vinyl phonograph disks, heat warped, cracked, in cardboard dust jackets. Unplayable. Pinza, Callas, Tucker, Tebaldi and what was this? Tri-city Lyric Theater! Excerpts from The Student Prince. The Mikado, The Merry Widow, and Don Giovanni. Don Giovanni? It had been that live performance; Carlo was listed in the title role. Why had they recorded that one? Was it the only night they’d had first-rate recording equipment? Or was it the best?

Impatient with excitement, Scott tried to pull the record from the dust jacket. But it was too warped to slide out easily, and before he thought to simply cut the dust jacket, it broke completely in two under the stress of his pull. He extracted the pieces and looked at the simple inexpensive label.

Scott groaned aloud. Damn! Was there some kind of curse running through his blood that decreed that his kind would get to touch the goal of their dreams once, then have it snatched away? Scott wanted to hit something, slam his hand into it and feel pain. But that would make too much noise, and then he’d have to explain and deal with the sympathy.

He took a deep breath instead and focused his attention on the fine grooves of the broken record; the music, his father’s voice, were still there if he could think of some way to repair a record as broken and warped as the artist’s life. He wrapped the pieces in an old newspaper so they wouldn’t get further scratched, and fitted them gently, reverently, back into the jacket.

There must be something someone could do about that, he thought. Scott’s inheritance, the one good thing in his father’s life. Aunt Maria said Theresa had listened to that record over and over in her last month, dreaming of what might have been as her cancer consumed her drug-numbed body. Theresa had hung on until the turn of the century, but had not woken up on January first, 2002.

Scott carefully packed everything in the fresh book-pack moving box he’d brought, taped it up, addressed it to himself, and carried it downstairs.

There were polite good-byes all around and then, stuffed with fajitas and tacos, mellow with a Corona, he let his rental car drive him to the airport.

He was still distracted and disconnected when Betty picked him up in their ancient Reliant and brought him home from San Jose Airport to their two-bedroom ranch house in a cheap part of Mountain View. It had been built well over half a century ago, more for tight-budgeted junior officers from the old Navy field than for software executives. But even with the mortgage paid, the taxes were almost more than they could afford. The neighborhood was poor, but relaxed; people who had bought recently were poor from making payments, long-term residents had always been poor. The streets were lined with old, dented, gas-engined pick-ups, and the air was multicultural with outdoor cooking from everywhere around the planet.

Scott took his precious box into the garage through the rear door to his shop. There was, he realized, the same sense of neatness and order to his workbench as in his father’s photo album and the other things in that old carboard box. Carlo Valdez had not had much, but as Scott’s new relatives assured him, what he had was always in good order. So with his son.

Scott had taken two years of junior college physics, but didn’t go on. He’d really been more interested in music. His adoptive father died drunk in a car wreck and he’d gone to work after school to help make ends meet. That had been the end of good grades. He got his AA and did band gigs.

In ’95, the China War caught his reserve unit, and when he got back, Mom—she would always be Mom to him—had lost her job. He’d gone to work full time for the school then and played for money at night. When Mom passed, Betty, a simple woman from a good family whom he had thought of only as a friend on the job, had offered to help with the inheritance taxes in exchange for the spare room.

That had lasted two weeks, Scott remembered with a smile. A simple, determined woman, who’d seen something in him no one else had seen.

Staring at walls again, he reproached himself. Somehow, he would do something to make her right, something for Theresa and Carlo, something to close a wound half a century old. Back to work.

He spread paper towels on the workbench, opened the box, placed the broken halves of Don Giovanni gently on them, and stared. Somewhere, in the neat rows of boxes that lined the garage, was an old Girard turntable. He searched, found it, found connecting wires, found their old amp, used alligator clips to attach the speakers from the old boom box he had for companionship in the shop, and ran the ridges of his thumb under the stylus. Nothing.

Three hours later, he’d found the broken wire, soldered it, tested again and was rewarded by a hollow grating sound. Very good. Betty called him to go to bed.

After work the next day, he had disassembled, cleaned and lubed the turntable. Then he got it to play one of the unbroken records, after a fashion; it wowed as the needle went up and down the warped hills of the old disk. Nevertheless, progress.

Back to the recording of Don Giovanni. He blew the dust off and studied the broken edges again. With a dozen small clamps—you never have too many clamps, he thought—he managed to hold the edges back together. They fit. He got the Super Glue, carefully wet each edge and pressed them together, using large rubber bands around the clamp mounts to hold everything tight.

Two days later, he tried to play the record. But it broke again the first time the stylus hit the imperfect joint.

“What’s the matter, hon?” Betty asked as he crawled into bed. She levered herself up on an arm and looked at him with that motherly concern that falls full on the husband in a childless family. She’d never made any pretense at beauty; too strong-featured, too pear-shaped. But she ate sensibly, did physical work all day, and exercised those muscles that didn’t get what they needed that way. Her spare, big-boned figure wasn’t stylish; but it was pretty good for a woman in her forties.

“It broke again.”

“There’s got to be someone who can fix it.”

He stroked her gently with the back of his hand and she smiled. “Yeah. But they’re expensive.”

“It means a lot to you. I’d rather put money into recovering your Dad’s voice than another dinner out.” Scott laughed. “I’ll ask around.” Then he slid over to her and they began to make love. She was the only one he’d ever been with, and he was too grateful to be curious about others. She was heaven.

Afterward, they had the house turn the bedroom wall set on, and took a virtual trip over Pluto, courtesy of C-Span and NASA’s latest probe. It had vast areas of rolling, washboard-like hills, blown up dramatically to ten times their real scale by hype-desperate NASA publicists. Various geologists tried, without too much success, to explain the hills, and Scott wondered what they really looked like. Betty giggled as his fingers mimicked their eye’s virtual journey.

Scott’s thoughts drifted from Pluto’s valleys, to Clyde Tombaugh, and a meditation on persistence. When a chance to sing Don Giovanni had come along, his father, against all odds, had been ready for it. Never quit, Scott told himself. Never quit.

“Hmmm,” the Audion engineer muttered for the third time as he examined the broken record. Then finally, “Yes, I think we can do that. We’ll make rubber casts of each half, splice those together, and make a hard cast on that negative. That’s going to lose a little fidelity, but not too much. Then we’ll play it into the remastering system; you ought to get a pretty good CD out of it.”

Scott nodded, then asked the hard question.

“How much?”

“Not that much, really. Less than ten thousand, I’d guess. Our business people do the estimating though, so you’ll have to talk to them.”

Scott nodded again. “Well, thanks for your help,” he told the man with a confident sound in his voice, shook hands, and found his way out.

He didn’t stop by the business office and he didn’t let them see him cry.

Scott saw the garage sale on Calderon on his way home, and stopped because he was in the mood to buy something at a reasonable price. He noted some technical books on the card table next to a dirty laser-toaster. He shook his head; facing arrays of high-powered diode lasers, impossibly expensive twenty years ago, a top-of-the-line consumer product a decade ago, a piece of five-dollar junk now.

“Doesn’t work,” the heavyset dark haired woman in the lawn chair told him. He nodded.

There was more stuff in the back of the garage. Whoever had died had owned a microscope; a real one, not an educational toy. He took it out into the sunlight, pulled a hair from his beard and put it where a slide would go.

“Doesn’t work,” the woman rasped again. “The old jerk was always fooling around with scientific stuff that doesn’t work. He should have read his horoscope more; now I tell you that works! Predicted he was going to have a bad day the day he died, it did.”

But the microscope worked just fine. It was just a little old-fashioned; no built-in digital array, but the optics, the motion, the weight and steadiness spoke of a one-time top-of-the-line instrument.

“The little light doesn’t go on,” she added. That, he thought, would be the little light you used to backlight a sample slide. It probably needed a new bulb.

“How much?”

“Ten bucks.”

He bit his lip. It might be worth a thousand. He ought to say something. Then he thought; she didn’t give a damn about what the microscope meant, or she’d know what it was worth. The woman despised what it stood for. She had earned the fruits of her own carefully-nurtured ignorance, and he wouldn’t do the world any favor by subsidizing that worldview. So he rationalized.

He looked at the hair again, and accidentally got his finger in the image and saw the loops and ridges as if they were the hills and valleys of another world, like those strange, periodically folded mountain ranges on Pluto.

He could sell the microscope for a tenth of what it would cost to recover his father’s performance of Don Giovanni.

He gave the woman the ten bucks, his hands slippery with fear that she would change her mind and ask more. He only had eleven in his wallet.

“You can fix junk?” she asked as he handed it to her. “Take the toaster too. For you, one buck.”

He shrugged. Spending habits: eleven bucks a day was three hundred thirty a month. Three years of that would recover the record. He smiled, gave her the buck, and took the toaster. He might indeed be able to fix it cheaply—but there were already many things that needed to be fixed in that garage.

Betty was waiting for him when he got home.

“Bad news. I can tell; you went shopping.” She smiled.

“Bad news,” he admitted. “Ten grand. They want ten grand.”

‘Tour dad’s important to you. We gotta know where we come from.” She put her arm around him and squeezed. “Hon, we’ve got plenty of money in the house.”

“We promised ourselves we wouldn’t do that.” The royalties and the dividends of what was left after they paid off the house were enough to eat on if they lost their jobs in another cutback cycle, if they ate ra-men. Society had almost taken the house from him once for taxes—and the idea of giving the title to someone else, of giving the crooks, graspers, and cheats out there a chance at him, even though it made good financial sense, made him shiver. The house was what he had left of Mom’s life, all her long hours at low pay, all her scrimping and discipline. He would not risk it. Mom, Carlo, Theresa, he vowed, someday I’m going to do something to make you all proud of me, something that makes it all meaningful. Something to make dad sing.

“Hon,” Betty interrupted his thoughts, “we can’t take it with us. You’re obsessed with this; every night, every day we’re not at work, you’re in that workshop and we’re not getting any younger.” She pressed her body against him, and murmured, throatily. “Let’s make some hay while the Sun shines. Go for it.”

It lifted him out of his gloom a bit. “Hey, we gotta lot of years left, darling. We’ll start saving more. Besides, maybe I can make some money off this junk I bought.”

“OK, hon. Whatever you think best. I love you.”

He answered with the distracted kiss of a man running after a dream and running out of breath as it got further and further away. Perhaps some things were not meant to be.

The day before the school’s annual swap meet, Scott took the microscope and the now-working laser toaster out of their boxes for a last-minute polishing. The microscope tempted him again, reminding him of the days when he thought he might have a professional career ahead of him. A job in industry, or maybe even a professorship at some idyllic liberal arts college in a small midwestern town, far from want and tension; complete with fresh air, trees, and seasons.

The drawers of the plastic organizer that held his nuts and bolts had thin plastic dividers that he thought might make good sample slides. He pulled one out, frowning and shrugging his shoulders as some number eights mixed with some number sixes.

The now-working light could illuminate samples from above and below. The instrument worked perfectly, and he went on a microscopic odyssey, exploring nails, paint brush bristles, sawdust, bare wire ends and numerous other small objects.

Thinking back to the Pluto video, he took another look at the planet of his fingertip, and journeyed over its ridges. Then he remembered the phonograph needle over that same fingertip. He reached for half of his father’s record, stored on one of the neatly labeled “open projects” shelves over the workbench, blew the dust off of it, and placed it in the focal plane.

The grooves wavered from side to side; he thought of flying along those grooves; he’d be jerked from side to side and get airsick. That vibration, of course, was how these old records made sound. Now if he were flying along that groove, his radar altimeter would experience a doppler shift as the surface came in and out at him.

Could he build a little something to fly along those grooves? If it weren’t in actual contact with the record, it wouldn’t break when it hit the broken edge. And it wouldn’t wear out the record—those old disks would last just as long as the CD’s. “Scott?”

“Oh, hi, darling.”

“I brought you some soup. What are you thinking about?”

“I was thinking about building a sort of laser needle for these old records, that wouldn’t touch the records so it wouldn’t matter if they were cracked or warped.”

“Sounds expensive. I mean, it would have to be very precise, wouldn’t it? And precise things cost a lot.”

She had a point. He started thinking about the servos, tracking, doppler transducers… damn!

“You’re right, I think. The way the Audion guys were going to do it would cost a lot less, I guess.”

The realistic professional in him could conceive of ten thousand dollars as being less. The boy reached out to the father he’d never known, and his hand closed on air. He couldn’t give up, not now, not so close.

“Betty, I’m going to keep the microscope. If it’s worth a grand now, it will be worth a grand next year. And by next year, maybe I’ll think of something else.”

“Sure, hon. Drink your soup.”

But the next year was little different. He tried to make a tracking system, but it wouldn’t stay on the groove. The stuff he needed to fix that was too expensive.

His latest idea was to guide the laser with a stiff Teflon fiber to track the groove, using a resistive diaphragm and servo loop instead of physical force to guide it. But there was an interaction mode between the fiber and the servo control that caused it to hunt its way out of the groove.

He’d been trying a software damper when Betty came to the shop.

“Hon, they’re releasing the Persephone encounter tapes tonight. Want to quit and watch?”

NASA had found a four-hundred-kilometer iceball far out of the ecliptic for the Pluto probe to pass by. Some newspeople were calling it the tenth planet, causing a lot of astronomers to smile through clenched teeth. But it was probably the biggest event left in the saga of robot space exploration.

“Sure, why not? I give up. This isn’t going to work either.”

There. He’d admitted it. A broken idea depressed him even more than his broken record, and, uncharacteristically, he just left everything where it was. He turned as he left the shop, slapped the light switch off, said “Sorry, Dad,” into the gloom, then followed Betty back to the house.

But instead of using the wall screen in the livingroom, she led him back to the bedroom.

“I know this sounds a little kinky, hon. But last time, well, it was kind of good.”

Scott laughed. “Anything to please. We’ll can it and play it back.”

They did. They were making their fourth pass over Tombaugh ridge in deep afterglow when Betty suddenly gasped and her eyes snapped wide open. Then she laughed gently.

“Oh, Scott,” she murmured, “did the probe actually fly down that valley, like this?” She took one of his fingers and used it to simulate the hypothesized probe trajectory in the folds of the bedding.

“No,” he laughed, “they made a three-dimensional model of Persephone in their computer and just transformed the coordinates of the pixels so that it looks that way, as if we were in a spaceship traveling right down that groove…”

She giggled as he was rendered speechless. Of course! He had lasers. He had a microscope. He had a turntable. A drill press to hold the microscope. He could track by hand, to prove the concept. He had his home computer and its optical floppy. As long as he had the picture of the groove, he didn’t have to fly anything physical through it. His “needle” could be a purely software construct.

He threw his arms around his wife and kissed her a dozen times, then looked at her grinning, giggling face with the first hint of a suspicion. Exactly what had she been thinking while…?

It was a rich, full organ of a basso voice, perhaps a little off key, perhaps with not enough breath left at the end. But it had an impressive volume, and with training, Carlo Valdez could have been good, very good.

It echoed through Scott’s new house hidden on the wooded hill, a modest mansion as such things went, only thirteen rooms around a great, square Castillian courtyard, but it was unmortgaged. One wall was filled with old LP’s; a collection purchased for peanuts before they became worth millions.

The programmers assured him that yes, Carlo sounded just like Carlo had sounded, but that disappointed them because they could have made it sound better than Carlo had sounded.

But Audion’s new Research Consultant had politely told them where to go with that idea. If you could see me now, Dad, he thought.

“I should never have believed it…” his father sang.