The Daughter of the Wizard

For years my favorite story was that of my father first using a telegraph.
“Papa,” I said one day when I was five, “tell me about the message-thing.”
He placed me on his knee and said, “What part?” though it was the same every time.
“When you learned.” I was fascinated with how things start.
“Well, Dot,” he began, “I was fifteen years old, and I was walking along home by the railroad tracks, when I saw this little boy, about as old as you are, his face to the ground like he was looking for something he’d dropped. And he was so engrossed, he didn’t notice when a train came along. Well, I figured he’d get out of the way, so I kept walking. But the train kept moving, and he just stood there, and the train kept coming, and he just didn’t notice—I think maybe he couldn’t hear. So I run back to where he’s standing there, and I pick him up and carry him out of the way, and I see the driver poke his head out the side of the train. First he looks shocked, then he sees the kid in my arms, and he winks.
“So when the father finds out how I probably saved his kid, he says, ‘How can I thank you?” and I see his telegraph just sitting there—he’s the station master, see—and I say, ‘How’s this work?’ At first he doesn’t think that’s enough, but he sees how much it means to me, so he says, ‘Sure, son, how ‘bout I show you how to use this thingamajig?”
“Papa,” I asked. “What’s a thingamajig?”
He thought for a moment, then said, “Well, a thingamajig’s a thing that works. Anything. Like that telegraph that could reach folks all over the country, or a light that doesn’t need fire, that works by electricity—I’m gonna build one of them one day.”
“I know you are, Papa.”
“Now get some sleep, Dot.”
But usually it was my mother who told me stories. She could tell me all about her childhood, with much more detail and without the skips in storyline my father was so prone to. But she was a woman. Even at this age, I was bothered by this.
It seemed that my father could do anything. When he said he would build a light, he meant it. I never doubted that it would happen. That year I heard “Mary Had a Little Lamb” echoing from another room in a tinny, new, way. He called the machine his baby. When I was seen he built the first electric light. People were calling him “the Wizard of Menlo Park.”
The year I was nine he was working on an electric power station for electric lights. It consumed him. Often he went into the office and did not come home until late at night. One time I stayed up in my bed, humming “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and thinking up a message for him in Morse Code so when he came home he’d be proud of me. Deliberately, I tapped out the dots and dashes in my head: “Papa. Today I am ten years old. You are not here.”
My mother handled my lessons while my father shut himself away. His electric light and the power station he soon finished were his pride and joy. Less than two years later my mother died. The months after her death were a confusing time for me and for him. He shut himself up even more.
I was twelve years old. “Dot” had been slowly replaced by “Marion,” a change I was not sure I liked. I tried to continue my lessons, but I found the material boring without someone to inspire me. Much of it made no sense. The time came that I discovered I was not my father.
I had known it for a long time, really, but it was now that Marion first understood its implications. One day I would finish school, put my hair up, marry a man, and move away from Menlo Park, the place I had known since I was four years old, leave the man I still loved and admired and wanted to love and admire me.
One day my father came out of the office. He came home at noon and said, “Marion, could you run down to the store and buy me some cigars?” He always smoked the same kind of cigar, and he would trust no one else to buy them for him. He put the money in my hand patted my back a bit as he pushed me out the door. It was his attempt to be affectionate.
I walked the short way to the store thinking things over. Who was I to be now, now that I was almost an adult?
I took my time to find his special cigars, hoping to please him. When I brought them to the front, the man said, “You’re a little young to be smoking, aren’t you?” But when he noticed the brand, he said, “Ah…. So you’re the daughter?” I nodded. “Tell, me what’s the Wizard up to now?”
Suddenly I was meek. “I don’t know, sir.”
“Don’t know? Now, that’s mighty fine. Well, you go home and figure out.” He smiled, taking my money and handing the cigars back to me. “And tell him, from me, that he’d better figure out what you’re up to, you hear?”
“Yes, sir.” I didn’t know what to make of him.
“Best of luck to the both of you.”
I took the walk home slower, still trying to figure out what he meant, yet feeling better somehow, stronger.
I came inside to see his materials spread out all over the table, him with his head in his hands. “Thank you,” he said, when I laid out the cigars. “Perfect.”
“Now I’m hoping you can help me figure something out, Dot. Let me show you how this thingamajig works.”

1000 words
Author’s note: This was written in 24 hours, so I have done my best to be historically accurate as to names and years, but there were many things I could not find without access to a library (e.g. Marion’s education). Yet part of what fascinates me is how little is known about Thomas Edison’s family. This is an attempt to create a story from very little information.