Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

“That’s not the whole story.”

“And now Mom wants him back.”

“What?”

“She does, Hans. I can see it. She can’t even help herself.”

She dropped her head, and when I looked past her I noticed that the room had been gone through: his papers had been shuffled; books were sideways on the shelves; up in the rafters, the lids had been tipped up on his boxes.

“Paulie?”

“Yes?”

I pointed toward the ceiling. “Didn’t you know about all this?”

“About what he was doing out here? Of course I did.”

Out the window then, a heron swooped low over the cove and landed in the shallows. We both turned to watch. It pulled its wings in and made itself into a statue.

Paulie kept her eyes on it. “Actually, Hans, I didn’t. I had no idea.”

“Well, if it makes you feel any better, he fooled me, too, Paulie.”

“Not the way he fooled me .”

Out on the cove, the heron leaned forward, then suddenly speared. When it came up, its gullet was wriggling. The ancient face turned slowly toward us. Then the wings beat, and it lifted away.

“Wow,” she said.

“I know. There’s not much mercy in the world, is there?”

“I haven’t changed my opinion about him, Hans — if that’s what you’re trying to say. Being sick doesn’t change the facts.”

“What makes you think you know the facts?”

She blinked.

Then she rose, moved the chair against the wall, and stepped up onto its seat. When she climbed back down, she had another box in her hands, its lid not quite closed. She set it on the floor in front of me. “Go ahead,” she said.

When I opened it, the only thing I saw was the top of the burlap sack. Even so, I knew what it was. “My God,” I said.

“What is it, Hans? I found it up there. It’s one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen.”

“I didn’t know he kept it.”

“Kept what?”

I loosened the ties and pulled out a length of it. “It’s a chain he made when he was a kid, Paulie.”

“He made that?”

“Yes — from a single piece of wood. He carved the whole thing out of the stump of a beech tree. I don’t even think he was much older than Niels when he did it.”

She blanched. “Oh, God.”

Then she turned to me again and composed her expression. I watched the grief move over her face, then gather itself, then pass out of view. “I don’t know anything about him, Hans. Do you realize that? Not a single thing.”

—

I WAS UPSTAIRS in the bedroom when the house shook. Then it shook again. I heard running. When I reached the porch, Mom and Paulie and Cle were already out there. He was standing alongside the shelves. With trembling arms, he turned and pushed another row of books onto the floor.

—

TWO DAYS LATER, on a hot, muggy morning near the end of that month, a taxi pulled into the clearing and the driver got out and set a ramp onto the front stairs. A moment later, Earl Biettermann came rolling up to the door. Cle had packed her things by then, and Earl yanked the first of her suitcases onto his lap and coasted it down to her Citroën. He tossed it into the trunk and turned back for the next one.

I don’t think he was really there to pick up his wife, though: she could easily have shipped the car and gone home on a plane.

When the last bag was loaded, he rolled into the house and parked his chair in the living room. My mother and Cle and Paulie were gathered around the table by then, admiring what I’d brought in. “Goodness,” said my mother. “What is this thing?”

Cle said, “ My God, Milo — of course you still have it.”

My father’s eyes lifted. He was making his way out from the kitchen, running his cast against the wall for balance. His hand went to the lamp, then the chairback. At the couch, he lowered himself.

My mother picked up a section in her hands and said, “Oh, my God, Milo.”

Dad sank into the cushions. The links were fifty years old, and when they shifted in my mother’s fingers they emitted the clink of stone. But the pale grain had hardly darkened.

“Ah,” said Dad, “you found it, I guess.” He nodded vaguely. “The magnum opus.”

His words were slurred, and a moment later his face grew dull. Then he was asleep.

That’s when Biettermann rolled closer. “Maniacal,” he said quietly. He reached and brought a length of it onto his lap. Each link was the size of his fist, each turn of it cambered into both a twist and loop. He ran his finger around one of the twists. “Born to the field,” he said, peering through the gap to the couch. “I have to give him that much.”

“Single sided,” said Paulie. “Feel it.”

“I just did.” He dropped it back onto the table and moved toward the couch. “And you know what?” I could see it riling him. “It still comes to nothing — that’s the thing. That’s the whole problem. Just like everything else he ever did — it all came to nothing.”

“Oh, please, ” said Cle.

“Even his Malosz theorem didn’t help him in the end.”

I looked at Earl. He was in his own pain.

“It was you,” I said. “Wasn’t it?”

He didn’t answer.

“Wasn’t it, Earl? You sent it to us.”

“He couldn’t stop himself,” Biettermann said. “He was this close. But he fixed on a bad idea. He fixed on bad ideas all his life.”

“It was you, Earl, wasn’t it? You had to have been ecstatic to find it.”

“The whole Malosz thing was luck, you know.” He turned the chair. “You all realize that, don’t you? It was luck.” He tapped his hands against the rails and laughed noisily. “The Fields Medal went to a piece of blind fucking luck.”

“Oh, my God,” I said.

“Earl,” said Cle, “that’s enough.”

But he rolled closer. “Nobody gets lucky twice, though, do they, Andret?” He shook Dad’s shoulder. “Couldn’t pull it off with Abendroth, could you?”

Dad’s eyes didn’t open.

“That’s enough, Earl.”

In the chair he drew back his shoulders, the way he did before he picked up his weights. “Stuck yourself for a decade on a bad idea. If you hadn’t, who knows what you might have done.”

“Enough.”

“Tossed away your last great chance.”

My mother stepped to the center of the room then and said, “My husband changed mathematics. Nothing you’ve ever done comes close to that.”

Biettermann didn’t even look up. “He had a good mind,” he said, “no doubt about it. But it was crippled. Look at him. You can say what you want. But that’s the truth.” He pushed all the way to the couch then, where Dad’s eyes finally blinked open. “Wasted. Never clear enough to see your way through to the end of anything.”

Cle started toward the wheelchair.

“Were you, Milo?”

Dad said quietly, “I don’t even see you.”

Biettermann bent forward. “Then listen to me. I can smell it. Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark.”

“And I thought you were coming to say goodbye,” said Paulie.

“That’s what I am doing.” He slapped the rails. “Goodbye, Andret.”

Cle grabbed the chair then and pulled Earl backward, so quickly that the heels of his shoes bumped along the floor. If she hadn’t, I think the chain would have struck him in the head. Paulie had swung it from her hip, so wildly that when it missed him it lashed back around and smacked her on her own knee. “Ouch,” she cried and jerked at it.

Like a snake disturbed from its den, the whole slippery thing began sliding off the table then, first slowly, then swiftly, until with a sickening clatter it crashed onto the floor. “Oh, Jesus,” Paulie said. She dropped to her knees. “Oh God.” She bent over and began pulling at it, passing the loops through her fingers and rubbing them on her skirt. She lifted the burlap sack off the table and started setting the links carefully back inside. “I think it’s okay. I think it’s—”