Next Door Neighbors

My sister and I spent much as children with the couple who lived next door. They were an intensely private couple---I will call them merely the C's in deference to that. They must have been in their sixties when I knew them. Mrs. C always said she was the same age as the year was anno domini. 

Mr. C. made a workshop for me downstairs in the concrete basement that still had a coal bin. . It was a wooden box, with a seat, and a cardboard sign on the front that said “Damon's Workshop.” Mr C had drawn it. He has his adult workshop nearby. Arranged on the wall were his various tools, neatly aligned, all propped on metal pegs that stuck out from a board perforated with holes.  He had worked at Bell labs and had many phone patents.

 There was a sort of fenced in area of the basement that  held a modern oil burner. the basement smelled of oil. Mr. C H went in that area now and then now. I wasn't allowed in but could peak through the wooden slats of the crude wall.

We made various things. Simple toys—for example, a wooden stick like a fuselage with little carved corrugations on the bottom and a propeller on the front-- when stroked underneath by another stick the vibrations caused the propeller to turn. The propeller turned one way if you stroked the fusilage front to back, vice versa if you stroked back to front. 

He was a spare man, always dressed in a white shirt, gray pants, and a kind of
plain unadorned black shoe. He had thin arms and gray hair and a kind of mild but intelligent face which in retrospect I see as an aged, thin Nordic face. The couple was German and occasionally alluded to the trials suffered during the second world war when anti German sentiment could be found in our village. The seemed to frequently allude to a butcher in town, a German, who had to close his doors. Occasionally they would give lessons in German to a not very rapt pupil.

Mr. C. would tell me, in the workshop, that when I made a measurement I should check it, then recheck it, then check it again. He had a slide rule which he tried to instruct me on, rather overestimating my interest and ability, or his ability to explain such an instrument on the fly. The middle slide seemed to shoot in and out, and he would arrive at an answer that seemed to me not an answer at all, since then you had to figure out how many zeroes to add.

There was a picture on the wall of his younger version—taken some years back when he essentially looked, minus a few wrinkles, very much alike. I asked for the photograph after his death—his wife at that time disappointed that I had kept up with her during my college days—said I could have it, though I never did receive it.

He was at the beck and call of his wife. They were childless. I suppose that I was their surrogate—myself and my sister. No other children were allowed into the home, although lots stopped by because they gave out candy at the door. We had to take off our shoes and wear some cloth booties so not to dirty the floor. She was herself a formidable woman—a German herself from upstate New York who had an MA in mathematics at a time that was very rare. Mr. C himself had a PhD and worked at Bell labs and kept his telephone patents in the piano stool. The drawings depicted very old style phones—their relegation to this spot, under which she sat to play piano, does in retrospect speak a bit about the subordinate position he seemed to occupy in the home. There were quite a few of those patents.

They had a folie a deux, a rather rare psychiatric condition. I figured this out later. They shared a delusion that my father, who had a new style machine for relieving muscle aches, was sending radio waves to their home. An example, I suppose, of how an obsessive style of thinking, theirs certainly, also has similarities with paranoia, and other craziness. So, despite my parents feuding with them—they even called the FBI—I continued to spend time there, with my sister who perhaps was even more of a favorite than me. Otherwise, they never went out. She had her groceries delivered, hadn't been a block from her home in years.

Mr. C talked about his friends at Bell Labs. One drew his patents in tiny form—an entire diagram on a small square at the bottom of the page. Another fellow insisted on being called “Doctor”, though everyone had a PhD from a good engineering school. When he demanded this, they all complied and called him doctor while continuing to address each other by their Christian names. I always remember that when I see some person with a mail order degree insisting on being called doctor.

We played checkers. Probably thousands of games. He tended to allow me to win. The pieces were Popeye heads. Occasionally he would win, and the look on his face as he made a gleeful last move,, a sort of impulsive rapacious smile was truly alarming. I did not really mind losing, but the sudden glimpse of human rapacity, breaking unexpectedly through the usually bland exterior was alarming. We seldom had a conversation of any sort—the only thing I could ever remember him saying was, “Yes, Dear” to his wife. I suppose, oddly enough in retrospect, that I was the closest person he had in his life.

I lost touch with them when I was in college and I think Ms. C. was very disappointed when I did not acknowledge some Bachman pretzels she had sent. I still have the letter where she expresses, with mock consternation how Bachman could have been negligent about sending me that package. All her letters were with a special typewriter she had ordered with script font and brown ink—everything possible in the house was brown.

I was a minor hero when the couple locked themselves out of the home, and I got up on a ladder and cut the screen to open a window. What they seemed to amaze and impress them was that the incision in I made in the screen was a perfect tiny square which then I stitched up with thread—their idea of heroism.

In graduate school, Mr. C. already deceased, I went to her home and knocked many times. I anticipated with some dread a meeting with her—I had changed somewhat, probably adopted values she disapproved of, and further, disliked the idea of the polite, formal conversation that would ensue, recalling distant events with a sense of feigned nostalgia. I knocked many times. No answer. I went to the window and saw her sitting, staring ahead, deafened and oblivious. I knocked on the window once or twice, then left. I did not disturb her, or, rather, I chose to walk away, partly out of laziness—I was full of youth and in college, but also because I knew she had a revolver, a frightening object I had once discovered in her side table before she nearly leaped to close it. I didn’t want to get shot as a burglar.

I lost touch after that completely until learning she died. She had various medical crisis and with great ambivalence accepted help from my father. They were adherents of Marry Baker Eddy, another reason for the ongoing strain with my father—yet nonetheless he treated them—the animosity years in the past. The people who acquired much of her stuff—family of an attorney who had helped her in her later days, asked if I wanted anything. I took a pair of calipers that had hung on the wall of the workshop, and an old fashioned oil tin like the Tin Man's in Wizard of Oz,. Ms. Coyne had given enormous amount of Bell Telephone stock, that had split dozens of times and appreciated over 60 years to various people, but my legacy was much greater.