“Vay? What are you doin’ out there?”
“Pop told me and Ro we should be learning from everybody.”
Stone and Zach exchanged smiles.
“Guess break time’s over,” Zach pushed to his feet.
Stone waved to his little brother to enter.
Vale did as he was directed. A phony smile curved his mouth while speculation filled his dark eyes.
~5~
Aaron left the silver 1967 GTX idling when he drove into a spot outside The New York Public Library. “You wanna take Grek with you?”
“Not today,” Humphrey told his brother and then looked to Gabriel in the back seat. “You gonna hang with Ari today, alright Grek? A lot more exciting than what I have in mind.”
“Yeah, personnel is a real adventure,” Aaron sighed.
With Gabriel’s interests laying in the managerial admin side of the company, it made sense for him to shadow Humphrey and Aaron.
Humphrey grinned. “Alright, alright we’ll let Grek make the choice. What’ll it be, Grekka? A day with the books or all our lovely employees?”
It didn’t take long for Gabriel to make up his mind ‘lovely’ being the deciding factor. Aaron shook his head where it rested on the vinyl seatback. Meanwhile, Humphrey chuckled.
“You want a lift back, Hump?” Aaron asked.
Humphrey threw out a wave. “Forget about it. I don’t know how long I’ll be in here. I’ll hop a cab when I’m done.”
Aaron smirked, his warm brown eyes narrowing devilishly. “What is it with you and not driving?”
“Distracts from the view,” Humphrey slanted Aaron a wink and grabbed his bag from the foothold. He left the Plymouth, keeping the door open so Gabriel could take the front seat. He overheard Gabe asking Aaron how many women worked for the company and smiled.
The brief ride from the factory to the library did a lot to improve his mood following the dramatics inside his father’s office. Crossing into the library’s hallowed space took the mood improvement to a whole other level. He had been there many times and yet the library’s lofty ceilings, handcrafted floors and staggering artwork always stunned him.
Humphrey tugged the strap of the satchel higher on his shoulder and headed to his preferred work space. For years, he’d been coming to the library on his own. Athena had only needed to accompany him once long ago to secure him a check out card and then Humphrey had been left to his own devices. His parents didn’t seem to mind. If anything, they encouraged the visits. Humphrey believed they thought, hoped he might have had aspirations of becoming a doctor.
His aspirations weren’t nearly so noble, but the appeal was remarkable.
He found one of his favorite tables in a far corner of the 3rd floor research area and began to unpack his belongings. He had accumulated a great deal of notes since he’d begun his studies. Tesano kept him very busy and sometimes he went weeks without a visit. Still, he put in a tremendous amount of time when he was able to devote attention to his investigations.
He could still recall the first time he’d heard the word eugenics. Perhaps he had heard the term before in school or in passing and just never paid much attention. Perhaps it hadn’t held any real significance for him during those times.
That all changed the night his father told his mother he was bringing his bastard home for her to raise. The bastard was a Tesano as it stood, but nothing like Stone who could still claim Athena as his mother. No...this bastard was something altogether different. Something abominably different.
The night of the argument, Humphrey left the apartment soon after his mother ran crying to the bedroom and his father shut himself up in his study. Humphrey had stormed out of the building with no real sense of where he was heading. He only wanted to be as far away from his family as possible.
Before the library became such a popular destination for him, he had most enjoyed riding the subway trains. Any time of day was good, but the night rides were especially enjoyable. He didn’t care where that night’s trip took him, but was decidedly uneasy when he wound up in Times Square. He wasn’t interested in a return trip home just then and had walked the crowded streets for a time. He was simultaneously intrigued and overwhelmed by the sense of life that practically pulsed through the environment.
He found his way to an all night cafe and managed to snag a corner booth in hopes of keeping a low profile. He was already tall for his age, but no one was going to buy that he was old enough to be there on his own. The last thing he needed was to be carted home by some truancy officer.
Luckily, the place was busy enough so that no one hassled him about his age. A waitress zipped by with a menu. It was while he tried to decide between the chicken fried steak or corned beef and cabbage, that he overheard it. The conversation between the two men in the booth behind him went unnoticed at first. It was the ‘aren’t you sick of this filth taking over?’ line that caught his ear. This, followed by the ‘stealing our jobs and ruining our neighborhoods?’ The back and forth went on for several moments.
Humphrey lost track of the conversation when the waitress returned to take his order. When he re-tuned to the conversation, the ‘about eugenics tomorrow at seven’ trickled past his ear. He listened for more, but the men left soon after. The words ‘about eugenics’ remained fixed in his mind. The next day, he was making his first visit to the library.
Now, over a decade later and with several interest meetings under his belt, Humphrey considered himself somewhat of an aficionado on the subject. How to put what he’d learned to use had become the question.
Eugenics was regarded as a set of beliefs focused on improving the human population on a genetic level. Its practices rejected the idea that all were born equal. Individuals or groups deemed genetic failures, should be ‘encouraged’ not to reproduce. Propagation of the human species should be left to those pegged as more desirable on physical, mental and moral levels. Its doctrines included racists’ logic such as the strengthening of a pure Nordic race and the elimination of those ethnic groups deemed unfit.
Eugenics was nothing new. Plato had suggested selective breeding with regard to humans as early as 400B.C.
The movement reached a kind of ‘beginning of the end’ when it became entangled in the rhetoric of Nazi Germany. Countries that had adopted many eugenics policies, began to shy away from the movement.
The United States however, upheld a great deal of its allegiance to eugenics principles. The country’s use of forced sterilization had been widely documented and Humphrey immersed himself in the texts and teachings of eugenics supporters.
The definition of the term, created by Francis Galton in 1883, spoke to Humphrey in a way he at first didn’t fully comprehend. He devoured articles on the subject. The Eugenics Quarterly became a popular source in the early days of his research.
Frederick Osborn’s 1937 piece became a particular favorite as well. In his article, “Development of a Eugenic Philosophy”, Osborn made the argument for greater numbers of sexual reproduction among people with desired or ‘positive eugenics’. Likewise, he called for lower reproduction numbers from those with less desired traits or ‘negative eugenics’. Still, by the end of World War II, many of eugenics’ blatantly discriminatory laws were abolished.
Despite his interest in the subject, Humphrey couldn’t say he felt much disappointment over its abandonment. Among the many titles he’d inhaled on the subject, Hitler’s Mein Kampf was among them. In the 1925 piece, the dictator had praised eugenics ideals and called for the sterilization of defectives and degenerates throughout the world including entire racial groups-among them those of Italian descent.
There were, however, aspects of eugenics that became something of a foundation for his interest. Specifically, he was curious as to what more rested beyond the movement which, to him, seemed increasingly antiquated with the passing of every year.
Humphrey didn’t see the need for extermination or sterilization for that matter. Eventually, everyone died out. The question was what came afterward. That was where the true potency of such principles resided. The future...and the power to dictate its outcome. But how?
Somehow, Humphrey knew the answer lay in the research that had already consumed almost half his life.
~~~
