Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

The bright snow. The cigarettes. The quiet.

Whenever the Valium wore low, his mind raged on to Detmeyer.

—

THE MORNING OF his sixth day at the center, a Sunday, he woke before dawn.

He’d never heard quiet like this. Perhaps, in such a state, an opening to the Abendroth would come.

No. The past came tearing out from his dreams again.

He stepped to the window for a cigarette, his hand on his still-bruised cheek.

He’d been pummeled. That was the truth. Ulrich Abendroth. Seth Kopter. Earl Biettermann. Knudson Hay. Yevgeny Detmeyer. Pummeled before the assembled aristocracy of Princeton University and the whole nasty birthright elite of the entire Eastern Seaboard. Hans Borland and his cashmere suits. Cle Wells and her high-toned annunciations. Yevgeny Detmeyer and his cheap, schoolyard hammer punch. His stomach clenched. Yevgeny Detmeyer — a man as low on the ladder of strivers as Andret himself. Lower even! Ugly Russian peasant with a damnable work ethic as desperate as his own. Andret had launched the first blow, but Detmeyer had staggered him with a kick. Mongrel on mongrel. A storm of punches and finally a boot to the face. Andret’s head snapping back and the floor rushing up to deliver the final wallop. Whipped like a dog.

Annabelle, wrapped in the blanket, had been screaming.

He couldn’t exactly reproduce the event — had she tried to intercede?

His cigarette was down. He lit another.

They’d signed him up for a month. Group meetings. Counseling sessions. Exercise walks. Long smokes on the patio. Public confessions. He had the feeling of a gulag. Ruminations on his exploded career. And always beneath it, the nasty memory of the blows. In his dreams, the careening laughter of every despicable enemy he’d ever made. A churning vortex of noisy accusation. The Valium administered four times a day by the lumbering orderly who leaned in to watch him swallow. Green and white. Jolly and menacing. A clown in a nightmare. Made him open his mouth to show he hadn’t stowed the pills in his cheeks.

On the sixth morning, after breakfast, his group was taken into town for coffee as a reward for their effort. By then most of them had been tapered to lower doses of the drugs. His dorm-mates congratulating themselves. By luck he saw a Greyhound bus boarding in a grocery lot across the street.

It took him as far as Milwaukee.

—

WELL PAST NIGHTFALL, the cab arrived back at his apartment. On the road home from the airport, he’d had the driver stop for flowers and bourbon. In the entry hall, his answering machine was already blinking: messages from Knudson Hay and the dean. Hay was concerned. Walden Commons was concerned. Every one of them was concerned.

“Well, fuck you all,” he said, tapping out a cigarette from the pack and blissfully double measuring a shot.

When the glass was empty, he changed his clothes, downed a trio of pills, rewrapped the flowers in tissue, and went outside for a stroll. In the falling snow, the footing in his oxfords was slippery; he picked up an oak branch as a walking stick. The flowers in one hand, freckling themselves with dustings of white; the thick branch in the other, leveling his step. An endless, muffled silence, extending among the lawns and trees and dimly glowing colonials of the place that was as much his home now as anywhere — Princeton, New Jersey. He’d been here the good part of a decade. His mind, he realized, was his only friend.

At the Detmeyers’, he stood at the door, unsure who would answer. He had a speech in his head. Annabelle, if given the choice, would choose him —of this he was more and more certain. Could it actually be that Yevgeny Detmeyer had already moved out? No cars were in the driveway. The Ativan was a waterfall of hope. In its radiant shower he stood unflinchingly. A single lamp glowing from the bedroom — her side of the bed. He pulled back the knocker. Four loud blows on the ornamented brass. A calm hand and a clear sound. The firm, unhurried tolling of destiny. Annabelle. He stepped behind one of the grandiose porch columns, out of view of the window, shook the flowers of their snow, and rapped the slate pavers with the walking stick. At that moment, a doe stepped from the trees into the glow of the streetlamp and looked up at him peacefully.

There was no such thing as a sign from heaven. But this was a sign from heaven.

Oh, Annabelle.

When it was Yevgeny Detmeyer who answered the door, he was thoroughly surprised. That was the problem with his thinking: it neglected the obvious, glued itself to the trivial and followed it to extinction. Yevgeny Detmeyer. Nobel laureate in economics. Street-trained pugilist. Self-promoting thug. The man leaned out from the doorway, looking around, then stepped out onto the porch. Andret forgot his speech. Words wouldn’t serve anyway. He sprang instead from behind the column and broke the heavy piece of oak over his rival’s thick and hideous back.

I’VE BEEN UNTRUTHFUL.

This man — Milo Andret: he was my father.

How else to tell the story? He told me most of it himself, and I’ve filled in where I’ve had to. I haven’t left much out — only the few particulars that I truly can’t bear to record. I hope I might be forgiven, for example, for omitting the bedroom scenes with Helena Pierce — although he recounted them in as much detail as all the others. Bit by bit, he told me the story of his life. This was all later on, when he was ill.

I’m still trying to understand him, really. To come to some reckoning — the great effort of my life, I suppose. As the Book says: a searching and fearless moral inventory. Of both of us. I’m the same age now that he was on the day he first arrived at Princeton.

D’où Venons Nous? Que Sommes Nous? Où Allons Nous?

Not long ago, when I was in my late twenties and already pretty much gutted by the outlandish blossom of my adopted trade, I came back home to take care of him. By then he’d been living by himself for most of a decade on the shore of a muddy lake in the middle of an underpopulated forest in a long-forgotten county of rural central Michigan. In his cottage the duck-print wallpaper was peeling from the plaster in long, twisted strips, like the birch trees of his childhood. Now his health was failing.

What was remarkable, actually, was that it hadn’t failed earlier. When I was a boy, his breakfast had consisted of two boiled eggs, two slices of bacon, and a glass of bourbon. I thought this was normal. I thought it was normal that he didn’t touch the eggs. In fact, I used to pour the bourbon for him while my mother cooked the bacon, and when he finished the bourbon and the bacon, I ate the eggs. My sister and I were raised in Tapington, Ohio, near the campus of Fabricus College for Women, the small Baptist institution that had taken him in — sub rosa — after his two dismissals, first from Princeton and then from the College of Lake Ontario.

By the time I came back to help my father, my mother had already divorced him. Of course, theirs must long have been an abysmal marriage, or at least one predicated on a particularly despairing seesaw, at one end of which Dad had stacked every ounce of his logical brilliance, his highly purified arrogance, his Olympian drinking, his caustic derision, his near-autistic introversion, and his world-class self-involvement, and at the other end of which my mother had placed her two modest parcels of optimism and care.

And perhaps a third: her humor. Even amid the decline of their marriage, she maintained her mild, tardy habit of one-upping his banter in a softly offered voice, after a long pause, that was like a tennis player reaching a ball just before the second bounce.