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LARRY’S FATHER was everything a boy might hope for, a real paterfamilias, who considered himself in control, who entertained few doubts about himself, who assumed that he was the true head of the Peters ménage. But beyond that, his work made him unusual as fathers go: he was an artist of sorts. His artistic impulses had two manifestations. One was the knickknack business, of course, and that could be considered one of the practical or applied arts; the other, the purer manifestation, was his making life interesting for himself and for his family.
Mr. Peters was able to do many things, and he got many things done. He was well known and admired for many of the things he did, but others of the things that he attempted did not have the results that he or anyone else involved in the endeavor might have hoped for, except that they always resulted in a richer, more various, more interesting life for the Peterses. Within the Peters family, not an eyebrow would be raised if Mr. Peters announced, over dinner one evening, that in the morning everyone would begin building a raft so that the family could chart the course of the Gulf Stream during their vacation, or that he had a plan for a sling that could be hung inside a suburban garage, onto which the suburban motorist could drive his car, and which, thanks to an ingenious system of gears driven by the car’s rear wheels, would rock the motorist’s colicky infant offspring gently to sleep, or that he intended to import minks to the island, where, since there were no predators, they could be allowed to run free and would breed quickly, making the Peterses wealthy beyond imagining.
And yet, as unpredictable and impracticable as Mr. Peters’s schemes may sometimes have been, he had a steady, responsible side too. The business savvy he displayed as the head of a world-renowned knickknack design firm was a world apart from the world of late nights, cheap wine, and strong cigarettes that is so firmly established in the popular notion of bric-a-brac designers. The knickknack business, as portrayed in the Larry Peters books, was a tense, competitive, cutthroat business, much more exciting than most businesses that my father or the fathers of my friends were in or were ever likely to get themselves into. Mr. Peters had moved his family to Kittiwake Island because he needed secrecy, he needed a place where he could develop his designs without his competitors’ learning about them before they were released. However, his competitors were a ruthless, unprincipled bunch who would stop at nothing to steal his designs or sabotage his plans: that’s how the adventures arose.
In Topical Guide 190, Mark Dorset considers Grammar and Usage: The Gerund from this episode.
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🎧 190: Larry’s father was . . .