The Wednesday Sisters(9)

THERE WAS A FAINT LIGHT in one of the mansion windows that night as I settled onto my front-porch steps to wait for Danny. I'd heard the place was haunted, that when the wind was blowing just right you could hear the ghost of the old woman who'd built it playing melancholy organ music, or weeping in the attic, or calling for her dead child. But there were always stories about places being haunted, especially old mansions like this one, with tragic tales behind them. And though I believed in the Holy Spirit and Jesus rising from the dead and visiting the apostles, Doubting Thomas putting his hand through Jesus' wounded side, I dismissed people who believed in ghosts as overly dramatic and absurd. I figured the light was the street lamp behind the house coming through the window, the reflection of car lights off a pane, the night watchman or the cleaning staff. Or maybe I was imagining the light, imagining a ghost to go with the faint strains of melancholy piano music coming from somewhere in that direction.

Someone checking on the place, I decided. A policeman's flashlight, one of Palo Alto's finest making sure everything was okay (which was reassuring, given the way hippies and radicals had begun gathering in downtown Lytton Plaza).

Except that this looked more like . . . well, it looked warmer, more flickering.

The light went out entirely then, just like that, leaving me staring into the glass-window darkness.

A few minutes later, a car came to a stop at the corner. Danny? But it continued straight on Channing and pulled into Ally's drive. A slender, dark-skinned man got out and slipped in through Ally's front door without knocking or ringing the bell that I could tell. I glanced at my watch—eleven o'clock already? But I forgot all about Ally then, because Danny came home talking about quitting Fairchild, leaving his nice, stable job at his nice, stable company with its nice, stable salary to join a new company that wasn't even a company yet, just a handful of scientists and engineers putting their heads together at someone's house, with no certain future at all. “NM Electronics, it's going to be called,” he said.

And not a month later, my steady, one-job-one-wife-for-life Danny up and gave notice at work.

“You quit?” I said. “Danny! But you just started!” And the job he was talking about now didn't even seem to be the NM Enterprises job he'd been talking about—though it turned out it was the same job; the company had just settled on a different name.

“Andy is tired of watching our work languish between development and production at Fairchild,” Danny said, “and I'm jumping ship with him. These guys, Frankie, they have a plan to make larger-scale integrated circuits mass-producible!” Words hard enough for me to understand in isolation, much less strung together like that, though Brett, of course, would understand it all. “They're trying to develop a new way for computers to store and access data, something faster and more powerful than ferrite core,” she said when I told her the next day, and I said, “Oh, sure, to replace ferrite core,” as if that cleared it right up.

Yes, the business was riskier than Fairchild, Danny admitted. They were still meeting in people's houses, though they'd signed a lease for space starting August 1, offices that would turn out to be small and cramped and full of the old tenant's left-behind furniture, with pipes poking out of the ceiling and holes in the floor of the manufacturing space. And the company wasn't even expected to make a profit for a year or more, though there would be money to pay his salary, Danny assured me. A venture capitalist (the first time I'd heard that term) was helping them find investors.

“People are lining up, knocking on the door for the job Andy says I'm the perfect guy for, Frankie,” Danny said. And Danny is not above liking to be flattered; I should know.

“Silicon-gate MOS,” he said. “That's my baby.”

I thought I was your baby, I wanted to say. I thought Fairchild was the opportunity of a lifetime. Wasn't that why we'd moved so far from home? I thought we talked about big decisions like this before we made them, I wanted to say. We had talked about it, though, and after five years of marriage I should have been used to the way Danny made decisions when he had to make them: while I was still eyeing the airplane from the ground, he was up above the clouds with the door open, sure his parachute would work.

So many Bay Area parachutes didn't work, though, or didn't work fast enough. The earth shifted beneath them before they could land. Technology-business failures were so common that a Business-Week cartoon that fall would parody the risk: crowds piling in and out the doors and windows of an “Integrated Circuits” building while a salesman asks, “Want a beam-leaded MSI Flip-Flop Chip in MOS-Compatible DTL?” and another says, “That went out back in July!” But it wouldn't be funny if Danny's MOS chip was one of the technologies that crashed.