Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

Audra looked up. “Hans,” she said.

My wife doesn’t like me quizzing the kids like this, particularly if we follow my father’s rule that the younger one gets to go first. I suspect she worries that Niels might never get his chance.

“Either of you may answer,” I added.

Contrary to what many people think, by the way, Niels is not named after Niels Bohr, the great Danish physicist, but after Niels Abel, the great Norwegian mathematician. I named him after Abel because Abel had improved on Euler’s work and had been educated, not coincidentally, by his own father. Emmy’s name, on the other hand — Emmy Lovelace Andret — was chosen by Audra, in honor of two great women of mathematics: Emmy Noether, whose brilliance has long been the province of the cognoscenti, and Ada Lovelace, who most likely wrote the world’s first computer algorithm, and who also — again, not coincidentally — was the daughter of a poet.

That particular evening, however, Niels was quicker than his sister. Without even having to think, he said, “One.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because they have the same circumference. The gear teeth mesh. George Washington just makes a single turn around himself.” He glanced at Emmy. “Isn’t it obvious?”

Most mathematically inclined adults, after some thought, will arrive at this very answer — the one that Niels, at ten years old, came up with in an instant. But Emmy was silent.

Her brother laughed — a bit meanly, I thought. “See?” he said, reaching for the coins.

But I held back his hand. “You can’t actually do it for her,” I said. “You have to let her think about it herself.”

His hands came back to his sides. “Come on, Em, don’t you see?”

I waited for my daughter. Audra had cooked her spicy stew, a holdover from her Texas days, and had seasoned it like the Hill Country girl that she still is — the first bite tastes like a rattlesnake has gotten loose in your mouth. I poured water around. As we waited for Audra to sit down, I watched Emmy think.

She does it the way my father used to — as though it’s physical exercise.

It was only after Niels and Audra had taken their first bites, wiped their mouths, and sipped their ice water, that Emmy said, “Wow.”

“What is it, honey?”

“It’s kind of amazing.” She smiled, just slightly, in my direction.

I smiled back, just slightly, in hers.

“He doesn’t go around once,” she said. “He goes around twice.”

—

LASSERVILLE IS A lot like Tapington, actually. Tapington had the rusted Ford plant; Lasserville has the rusted Maytag plant. A washing machine isn’t a pickup truck, but the assembly-line workers who used to bolt the tub rotor to the spin shaft aren’t that different from the assembly-line workers who used to bolt the transmission to the drivetrain. The distinction is that in Tapington I lived among the aftereffects of ingenuity. Those midwestern kids who’d grown up rebuilding hot rods in their garages had moved to the Ford plant, and when the Ford plant closed they moved back to their garages — customizing engines and fabricating body parts for the aftermarket. And Fabricus College was there, too, of course.

All this kept something alive in that town. When I was a kid, Tapington had a swimming pool and a public library that were both open seven days a week. Up here in Lasserville, the men and women who no longer make washing machines no longer make much of anything. We have tanning parlors and nail salons and pet-grooming establishments now, the signs planted in the front lawns of people’s houses. The pride up here has been fraying for a while. The pool’s open all summer, but the library only opens on Saturdays.

Mostly for this reason, our family is talked about around town. The Wall Street kingpin on the run from the feds. The hedge-fund magnate who ditched it all for his wife. The adviser to the Rockefellers. The adviser to the advisers. The savant who gave up a fortune to solve one of the great problems in mathematics.

That’s the one I get asked about the most.

Like the others, of course, there’s not a shred of truth to it.

—

I NEVER DID let them fire me. And, in fact, I’m not even sure they would have. I walked outside that morning, ate a cart breakfast on the piers, and for several minutes enjoyed the underbridge light show that you see from that part of Manhattan at that hour of the day. By the time I took the elevator back upstairs, HR had arrived. I brought two cups of coffee down to the sixty-fifth floor and explained to the rep what I’d decided to do.

Our life up here:

Emmy is the earliest out of bed in the morning. She rises at dawn and performs a check of the house, glancing into all our rooms, then heading downstairs to look out through the kitchen window into the barley field beyond our backyard fence, where deer in impressive numbers congregate at first light. On some mornings there are twenty-five of them. Emmy watches them while she does what she calls her meditating .

“What’s your meditating about ?” I asked her one day.

“Oh,” she said, smiling patiently at me. “I don’t know. About life.”

Sometimes the deer will come close to the fence to nibble the branches of the cedars. In the yard they stare back at the spot where Emmy stands behind the glass. She’s told me about one of them in particular, a gangly white-spotted yearling who wanders into the mowed area next to the kitchen and lowers her head to eat, despite my daughter’s presence in the window. Emmy believes that this particular fawn has learned to trust her.

My wife likes the fact that Emmy believes this. She thinks it shows that she’s decided to move outward into the world.

Both kids have changed, I have to say.

Emmy’s in sixth grade now, with all the eleven-year-olds, though she’s just turned nine. When I drop her off at school in the morning, she lets go of my hand and glances up at the building, then walks halfway up the path before she turns around to look at me. I nod, like a coach sending in a new player. Not that she needs it, of course — not for her schoolwork, anyway. I imagine, actually, that she’s already capable of doing the problem sets for most of the math majors at Cornell, a campus not that far from here. But she wears this fact low, like a rabbit’s foot in her pocket. In class, she hardly speaks and on the playground she favors the boys’ games. She’s not the only girl who favors them, though, and she spends her time on the weekends with a couple of like-minded allies — shy, oily-haired, front-of-the-class girls who nonetheless like to reach barehanded into the muddy stream behind the house and pull out frogs and tadpoles and even turtles. Emmy’s what my sister used to be.

She can also multiply three six-digit numbers in her head and, from twenty-five miles away, point without hesitation straight at our house. If I ask her what she wants to be when she grows up, she’ll look at me, smile, and say, “Older.” If someone else asks, she’ll answer, “A veterinarian.” And if they press, “Small animal.”

I’d like to believe it. Though I also believe she’s saying it to reassure me.

If Emmy has something to tell either of us, she’ll behave like one of her deer, sidling up alongside her mother or father the way a yearling sidles up alongside a cedar. Warily, but for the duration. Standing next to me at the sink while I rinse dishes for the washer, she’ll tell me about the bad dream she had the night before or ask what to do about the boy who called her a name at school. I, in turn, must behave like the man watching the deer. No sharp movements. No quick answers.

About Emmy’s night habits, Audra is at her wit’s end. After dinner, Emmy will dispatch her homework in fifteen minutes, then bake cookies with Audra or sit out on the porch with me until it’s time to go upstairs for her bath. Then she’ll get into bed. On her night table is a stack of books, and she’ll think very deliberately about which one she wants to read. One of us will go upstairs to kiss her good night, and later, at 2:00 a.m., that same one will generally have to rise from bed, go into her room again, and take the book from her hands. For good measure, we’ll unplug the bedside light and move the rest of the stack, too, all the way to the far side of the room. The book in her hand, by the way, is as likely to be White Fang by Jack London, as Rational Points on Elliptic Curves by Silverman and Tate. Sometimes I think Emmy has to read simply because she doesn’t know how to extinguish her thoughts. Exceed. Discover. Outdo. That’s our daughter.