Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

As for Niels — well, he too could probably do the homework for the math major at Cornell. But it would take him longer than Emmy, and he’d emerge with a red face and a pencil broken two or three times at the tip, then in half. Niels has always been our emoter, and now the emotion he’s becoming acquainted with is frustration. He’s learned to handle it by running forward into everything — into birthday parties, into the student-council meetings, into his scout hikes, into the spelling bees and science fairs that he’s won a couple of times now.

A significant part of his success is due to the single capacity that he’s developed into something far beyond his sister’s. That is, his capacity to work . My son is a powerhouse that way — as was my father, for a time. (I also think that Niels runs so eagerly forward because he must hear the soft, quick footsteps behind him.) Niels might be able to multiply two of those six-digit numbers in his head, but I doubt he could do the third, like Emmy. But he’s learning not to let this bother him. Connect. Advance. Contribute. That’s Niels. He’s always been our social one, and now he’s turning out to be our striver, too. When I ask him what he wants to be when he grows up, he smiles winningly and says “A named professor of mechanical or electrical engineering.” When pressed further, he’ll expand: “At a Research One University.” And further still, “At Caltech, maybe, like Aunt Paulie.”

Audra, God bless her, doesn’t miss Manhattan at all. Or at least, not that she tells me. She prefers the life up here, where the biggest event of the fall is the Wildcats’ homecoming parade, and the biggest moment of the homecoming parade is the rambling, overwide turn that our local corn farmer takes onto Main Street (yes) in his half-million-dollar John Deere combine, an S-Series that he banners in Wildcats purple, pulling behind it a flatbed on which stand all the junior and senior members of the football team. They shake their purple helmets and cheer. Audra reaches up her purple sleeves and cheers them back. I know that the players appreciate her. Everybody does at school. She still has that frank South Texas charm. At Westinghouse, she teaches part-time — remedial English three afternoons a week — a schedule that allows her to spend the rest of the days at home, raising two kids who can solve Korteweg — de Vries equations in their heads but still have a hard time making their beds in the morning.

As for me, I teach my two sections of geometry, my two of trigonometry, and my one of senior calculus. I sit on the Curriculum Committee and codirect the annual PTA garage-sale fundraiser (I’m also its largest buyer). My other jobs: cross-country assistant coach; freshman counselor; Math Club adviser. The Math Club, by the way, meets five mornings a week, by request of the membership.

Do I like it? Well, yes.

Mostly.

If you’re looking for the Wall Street profiteer turned Good Samaritan in the small-town classroom — well, it hasn’t worked out that way, exactly. The truth is, I still miss Physico. Sometimes badly. It’s not so much the money (which I still have) as — I don’t know what else to call it: The Game maybe? The Juice? There was a sameness to that life, just as there’s a sameness to this one, but the sameness at Physico came with a lot more fist thumping.

I miss the fist thumping.

But we’re here in Lasserville now. And my gut tells me we’re staying. When I watch Emmy and her friends saunter into the house in their creek-soaked overalls, I feel something that I never felt in my days on the seventieth floor of the Trump Building. When I watch Niels hoisted up onto the hay cart by the middle-school principal during the Fourth of July parade — well, what can I say? I like to believe I’m giving them a little shot of something. A vaccination against the future. Or perhaps against the past, about which they still know almost nothing. Sometimes I think that my own father, who probably had no intention about such things but no doubt remembered his own childhood, might actually have been hoping to do the same for Paulie and me, with his place up in the woods.

Anyway, I do miss the fist thumping.

In Manhattan, I should add, I used to thump my fist no more than 60 percent of the time (the Shores-Durbans, of course, were only probabilities). But 60 percent was enough to put me at the top of my profession by a substantial and probably unassailable margin — unassailable because legions have since joined the game. Out here in Lasserville, on the other hand, I don’t get to thump my fist very much at all. Once a semester, maybe. Last winter I landed a kid in the New England mathematics Olympiad. Thump . And this fall I discovered that the pouty emo in a faded frowny shirt at the back of my honors trig class wasn’t listening to Fall Out Boy through the bright blue earbuds in his bright blue hair but to Yakov Eliashberg’s Roever Lecture on affine complex manifolds.

Yes, this happened.

Thump. Thump.

I don’t mind that my own children, when they reach high school, will probably not even sign up for Math Club. It’s something of an unsaid warrant among us — the overcourteous step of the battle hardened — that we steer shy of one another when it comes to the field . Truthfully, both Emmy and Niels are already miles ahead of anyone else around here — and probably miles ahead, even, of where I was at their age — and I do wonder what will happen when they arrive at Westinghouse. The two of them in Math Club would pretty much ruin it for the others, even for the kid who made it to the Olympiad.

I know that Audra, too, is wary. Not of their talents, perhaps, the way I am, but of their other legacies. She probably wouldn’t say so, but that night in the living room of our Perry Street brownstone can’t be that far back in her mind. When I get home from work these days, she and I will drink a cup of tea together on the kitchen stools, looking out at the fields. She’ll tell me about her day. I’ll tell her about mine. Sometimes, though, as I talk about a new kid in Math Club or a nice moment in my classroom, she’ll look at me so intently that I wonder if what she’s actually doing is remembering.

When we’re finished with our tea, she’ll go outside to the garden for an hour before it’s time to make dinner, and I’ll go upstairs to the sleeping porch, where I’ve set up my desk. I take out the homework I need to correct. But for a few minutes, I don’t even pick it up. I just sit there behind the screens, doing nothing, moving ahead with nothing, just watching my wife dig in the soil or, beyond her, the hills of barley sway in the wine-colored light, which at that hour looks enough like the sea. I think about the kids. I think about all of us. On my desk, I keep a single finely polished fragment of wood, a charm of well-rubbed beech whose curve slides smoothly against my thumb. Before I start my work each day, I rub it for luck.

Ignorance is the thing we seek to remedy.

—

I SHOULD ADD: I have fun with the kids.

The reason I mention this is that I remember only one time in my life when my own father actually seemed to have fun with us. Dad wasn’t interested in fun. And generally speaking, neither am I. But every Saturday now, Audra and the kids and I do something together as a family, usually in the abundance of woods and streams and meadows that provide our solace up here in Lasserville.

Most of the time we have fun.

One thing we like to do is picnic on the shore of the Aldrich Gap River, in our spot above the Wides. Along a half mile of bank there, the water moves from narrow and swift to broad and still, and the bank changes from steep granite to gentle meadow. That meadow is graced with every sort of sedge, fern, and wildflower, and the bank is alive with beetles, dragonflies, and a dodging air show of brightly winged moths. We use the distant shore to practice our elliptical geometry. I admit that I was the one who started it; but Emmy’s taken to it, too, now, and of course Niels has made it into a competition.