Chapter 16: The Mainspring

The mainspring for a Waltham Grade 620, seventeen jewels, circa 1905, is a specific thing. It is not any mainspring, not a generic coil of steel that can be wound into any barrel — it is a spring of a particular width and thickness and length and alloy, designed to deliver a particular amount of energy over a particular period of time, designed to fit in a particular barrel, designed to work with a particular gear train and a particular escapement and a particular balance wheel, and the specificity is the point, is the requirement, is the thing that makes watchmaking different from clock repair, because a clock is forgiving — a clock will run with a mainspring that is approximately right, that is close enough, that delivers roughly the correct energy — but a watch is not forgiving, a watch demands precision, demands the exact spring, the exact energy, the exact relationship between the power source and the mechanism, and anything less than exact is wrong.

Henry called Ollie Baker. Ollie Baker was a watch parts dealer in Rhode Island, a man who had been dealing in watch parts for forty years, a man who knew every grade and model and serial number range of every American watch company that had ever existed, a man whose warehouse in Providence contained — by Ollie's own estimate — four million parts, sorted by maker, by grade, by caliber, by size, stored in cabinets and drawers and boxes that filled three floors of a converted textile mill, and Alistair had called Ollie Baker when he needed parts the way a doctor calls a pharmacist when he needs a drug, with specificity and urgency and the shared language of the trade.

"Ollie, it's Henry Osgood."

"Henry. How's the shop?"

"I need a mainspring. Waltham Grade 620, size 16, open-face."

"620. That's a good movement. You don't see them often."

"Can you find one?"

"I can find anything. Give me twenty minutes."

Ollie called back in fifteen.

"I've got one. New old stock. Still in the factory envelope. These turn up sometimes in estate lots — a watchmaker dies and his family sells the parts and I buy the lot and inside there's a drawer of Waltham mainsprings from 1940 and they're still good, still springy, still wrapped in the waxed paper, and this is one of those."

"How much?"

"For you, thirty-five. For anyone else, fifty."

"Why for me thirty-five?"

"Because your father bought from me for thirty years and he never once complained about a price, which is more than I can say for most clockmakers, who are the cheapest people on earth, present company excepted."

"Thank you, Ollie."

"I'll ship it today. Should be there Thursday."

Henry hung up. Thursday. Three days. Three days to wait for a mainspring, three days to think about the watch, to plan the repair, to prepare.

He spent the three days attending to the parts. He cleaned them, one by one, in the ultrasonic tank — the watch parts required a smaller tank, a smaller basket, a gentler cycle, because watch parts are tiny and delicate and the ultrasonic vibrations that clean a clock wheel can damage a watch wheel if the frequency is wrong or the duration is too long — and the parts came out bright and clean, the brass gleaming, the steel silver, the jewels red.

He examined each part under the loupe. He measured the pivots with the micrometer — a watchmaker's micrometer, calibrated to ten-thousandths of an inch, the kind of measuring tool that lives in a felt-lined box and is handled with the reverence of a sacred object — and the pivots were within specification, were not worn, were round and smooth and true, which meant the watch had not been run excessively, had not been subjected to the constant use that wears pivots, the daily winding and carrying and jostling that grinds the pivots in their jewels the way a pestle grinds in a mortar, and Henry wondered if Alistair had carried the watch or if it had sat in the safe, unwound, unused, a watch in a gold case in a locked box behind a combination that was his wife's birthday.

He examined the hairspring. The bend was in the outermost coil, a gentle deformation that pushed the coil slightly out of the spiral's plane, and the correction would require — Henry considered — a hairspring tool, a tiny pair of tweezers with curved tips that could grip the spring without damaging it, and the correction would be gentle, would be a matter of fractions, of nudging the coil back into its plane, of undoing whatever force had distorted it, and the correction would take minutes but the preparation — the understanding of the spring's geometry, the visualization of the correction, the mental rehearsal of the movement — the preparation would take longer.

He did not correct the hairspring yet. He waited. He was waiting for the mainspring, was waiting for all the parts to be ready before he began the assembly, because assembly should be continuous, should flow, should proceed from beginning to end without interruption, the way a piece of music should be played from beginning to end without stopping, because the flow is part of the work, the continuity is part of the quality, and an interrupted assembly is a compromised assembly, a mechanism that carries the discontinuity in its tolerances, in its clearances, in the small inconsistencies that accumulate when you pick up and put down and pick up again.

On Wednesday evening he went to Elm Street.

It was not Sunday. It was not dinner. It was an unscheduled visit, a violation of the pattern, and when Frances opened the door she looked at him with the expression that mothers have when their sons appear unexpectedly, the expression that is simultaneously glad and alarmed, because an unexpected visit from a son means either that something is wrong or that the son has been thinking, and in Frances's experience both of these were cause for concern.

"Henry. Come in."

He came in. He sat at the kitchen table. The clock ticked on the mantel — his mother's Ansonia, even now, keeping time, the pallet stone ground flat, the beat steady — and the sound was comforting, was the sound of a repair that had worked, a correction that had held.

"I found Dad's watch," Henry said.

Frances sat down. She did not go to the stove, did not put on the kettle, did not begin the rituals of hospitality that were her default response to any visitor. She sat down and looked at Henry across the table.

"The Waltham," she said.

"You know about it."

"Of course I know about it. It was his father's watch. Alistair's father. Thomas Osgood."

"Granddad's?"

"Thomas's father gave it to Thomas and Thomas gave it to Alistair and Alistair kept it in the safe. He didn't carry it. He said it was too valuable to carry. He said a gold watch is an invitation to the wrong kind of attention. But he wound it. Every month, he wound it. He took it out of the safe and he wound it and he set it and he put it back. A monthly ritual. Like the Sunday winding for Edith Calloway's grandmother clock, but monthly."

"When did it stop working?"

"In the nineties. I don't remember exactly. The nineties. It started running erratically and then it stopped and Alistair put it in the safe and said he would repair it and he didn't, not for years, not until — not until the end."

"Why did he wait?"

Frances looked at the clock on the mantel. The pendulum swung. The second hand swept.

"Because it was too important," she said. "That's what he told me. He said the watch was too important to repair casually, the way he repaired other watches. He said it required a different kind of attention. He said he was not ready. For years, he said he was not ready. And then, a few weeks before the stroke, he said he was ready. He said he had done enough, had repaired enough, had learned enough to attempt his father's watch. He said it was time."

"He was eighty-one."

"He was eighty-one. And he had been a clockmaker for sixty years. And he said he was finally ready."

Henry sat with this. Sixty years of practice before the craftsman felt ready to repair his father's watch. Sixty years of skill accumulation, of knowledge gathering, of the daily discipline of sitting at the bench and picking up the tools and making broken things work, and at the end of sixty years the man says: now I am ready. Now I have done enough. Now I can attempt the thing that matters most.

And then the stroke. Three days later. The hands that had finally declared themselves ready were taken away, were made to shake, were rendered useless, and the watch lay in pieces on the bench and the man lay on the floor and the readiness was moot.

"He never talked about repairing it with me," Henry said. "In the six years. He directed me on other repairs — hundreds of repairs — but he never mentioned his own watch."

"He couldn't. He couldn't talk about it. The watch was — it was the one repair he wanted to do himself. Not direct. Do. With his own hands. And he couldn't, and asking you to do it would have been — it would have been an admission. That his hands were gone. That he couldn't do the thing he had spent sixty years preparing to do."

"So he left it in the drawer."

"He left it in the drawer."

Henry looked at his hands on the table. His mother's hands. Long fingers. Narrow palms. The mainspring scar on the right index finger. The calluses. The hands that Alistair had said were better than his own, the hands that Alistair had praised to Cal but not to Henry, the hands that were now going to do the thing that Alistair had spent sixty years preparing to do and then could not do.

"I'm going to repair it," Henry said.

"I know."

"The mainspring is broken. The hairspring is bent. The case was in the safe. Behind your birthday."

Frances smiled. The smile was small and quick and private, a smile not for Henry but for the memory of a man who had used his wife's birthday as the combination to his safe, who had locked his most valuable possession behind the most valuable date, and the smile was the kind of smile that a wife smiles fifty-two years into a marriage that someone else might think had worn down, the way a pallet stone wears down, but that was still there, still functioning, still producing a beat, even if the beat was uneven, even if the clock needed adjusting.

"He told me the combination once," Frances said. "He said, 'If anything happens to me, the combination is your birthday, because you are the one thing I will never forget.' And I said, 'You've already forgotten our anniversary three times.' And he said, 'Anniversaries are arbitrary. Birthdays are fundamental.' Which is the most Alistair thing anyone has ever said."

Henry laughed. The laugh surprised him — it came out of him the way a chime comes out of a clock, unbidden, mechanical, the result of an internal process that he had not initiated, and the sound of his own laughter in his mother's kitchen was strange and not strange, familiar and not familiar, the sound of a thing that had not happened in this room for a long time and that the room recognized and absorbed the way it absorbed the ticking of the clock, easily, naturally, as if it had been waiting.

"He would have wanted you to do it," Frances said.

"You think so?"

"He left it in the drawer. He didn't throw it away. He didn't give it to a stranger. He left it in the drawer in the shop where you work. He left it for you."

Henry considered this. Had Alistair left the watch for him? Had the leaving been intentional, a passing of the baton, a transfer of the responsibility from the father's hands to the son's hands? Or had the leaving been accidental, a consequence of the stroke, a thing that happened because Alistair had no time to decide, no time to choose, no time to say give this to Henry or put this back in the safe or throw this away, and the watch had simply remained where it was, on the bench, in the pouch, in the drawer, a thing left behind by a man who had left behind everything?

He did not know. He would never know. The intention, like the cause of the bent hairspring, was unknowable, was lost in the space between Alistair's last conscious moment at the bench and the stroke, the few seconds during which the world had changed and the watch had become an orphan, and the intention did not matter, because the watch was here and Henry was here and the repair was the thing, the repair was always the thing, and the intention behind the repair — whether Henry was fulfilling Alistair's wish or his own obligation or something else entirely — was irrelevant to the mechanism, which needed a new mainspring and a straightened hairspring and careful assembly and nothing more.

"I'm going to do it well," Henry said.

"I know you are."

He drove home. The mainspring would arrive tomorrow. The repair would begin.

---

On Thursday the mainspring arrived. It was in a small cardboard box inside a padded envelope, and inside the cardboard box was a waxed paper envelope, and inside the waxed paper envelope was the mainspring, coiled flat, dark with the bluing that protects the steel from corrosion, and Henry held it up to the light and it was beautiful in the particular way that springs are beautiful — the tight spiral, the stored potential, the compressed energy, a thing that wants to uncoil and is held in its coil by the shape of its container, by the barrel, by the constraint, and the beauty is in the tension between the spring's desire to release and the barrel's insistence on containment.

He set the mainspring on the white cloth with the other parts. Forty-four parts now, including the new mainspring. The old mainspring, the spent one, the broken one, lay beside it, and the two springs were the same shape but not the same thing — one was alive and one was dead, one was springy and one was limp, one held energy and one held nothing — and the difference between them was the difference between a clock that runs and a clock that does not, between a mechanism that keeps time and a mechanism that keeps nothing.

Tomorrow he would begin the assembly. Tonight he would prepare.

He laid out his tools. The tweezers — three pairs, in graduated sizes, the finest pair so small that the tips were nearly invisible, the kind of tweezers that could pick up a hairspring without disturbing it, the kind of tweezers that required not just steady hands but the absence of a pulse, the stillness between heartbeats, the window of time when the body is motionless and the hands are true. The screwdrivers — the watchmaker's set, smaller than the clockmaker's set, the blades ground to fit the tiny screws of a watch movement, each one balanced in the hand, each one spinning between thumb and forefinger like a small top. The oiler — the watch oiler, thinner than the clock oiler, the cup at the end smaller, the oil it delivered measured in nanoliters, the smallest amount of oil that could be called an amount. The loupe — the 10x, Alistair's loupe, the brass housing warm, the glass clear.

He arranged them on the bench in the order he would use them. He set out the staking tool and the mainspring winder and the hand puller and the case opener and the crystal press and all the small specialized tools that a watchmaker needs, tools that have no other purpose, tools that exist only for this, for the assembly and repair of watches, and the tools were Alistair's tools and they were Henry's tools and they were the same tools, because tools do not change ownership the way people do, tools simply continue, pass from hand to hand, from generation to generation, the way the watch itself had passed, and the tools carried the shape of every hand that had held them, the collective memory of every grip, every turn, every press.

He turned off the lamp. He stood in the dark shop. The clocks ticked. The ship's bell rang — two bells, nine o'clock — and the sound faded and the silence returned and the ticking continued and Henry stood and breathed and the shop breathed with him.

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow he would assemble his father's watch. Tomorrow his hands would do what his father's hands had prepared to do and could not do. Tomorrow the mainspring would go into the barrel and the barrel would go into the movement and the gear train would mesh and the escapement would engage and the balance wheel would oscillate and the watch would tick, would keep time, would run on new energy through old mechanism, the way Henry ran the shop on new energy through old structure, the way a son runs a life on new days through old inheritance.

He climbed the stairs. He went to bed. He set his alarm for six. Below him the clocks ticked and the parts waited on the white cloth and the gold case waited on the bench and the morning waited in the dark the way mornings do, patient, inevitable, the next tick in the sequence, the next tooth on the escape wheel, the next beat in the measure.

He slept. He dreamed of hands. Not his hands, not Alistair's hands, but hands in general, hands in the abstract, the idea of hands, the concept of the thing that holds and turns and grips and releases, the human instrument, the original tool, the five-fingered mechanism that preceded all other mechanisms and that all other mechanisms imitate, and the hands in the dream were working, were assembling, were building something from parts, and the parts were small and bright and the hands were steady and the thing being built was a watch or a life or both, and the dream did not distinguish between them because in the dream they were the same.