Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

I can still picture him in those days. Tall. Gaunt. Distracted from us but not yet distracted in general. Still focused on something outside the room. He walked around with his hands behind his back, his feet swinging wide, his head tilted back, like an Old World European skating on a pond. Long before things had gone bad, he’d also become as direful a smoker as he’d been a drinker. My most prominent memory from childhood, in fact, is the smell of his cigarettes, a smell that was rooted in every corner of our house and in every piece of clothing that any of us ever wore. I didn’t mind it, but my mother certainly did. She washed and washed. She tidied and tidied. And that was just the beginning. She encouraged and encouraged. Apologized and apologized. Tried and tried. How can I describe her? She was a creature who lived to serve others. If that is the criterion one uses for loveliness, then my mother was the paragon of loveliness.

And she was devoted to him. That in itself is another mystery.

As it turns out, she never did get her degree — but not long after my father mentioned art history to her, she indeed took it up, just as he’d suggested. She did it on her own, without even telling him, but she did it with unwavering dedication. That’s the way she was.

—

YES, HELENA PIERCE is my mother.

She married Milo Andret in a courthouse, the day before the two of them left Princeton together for Buffalo, New York, to the locum tenens position that Knudson Hay, ever loyal, had found for my father. The College of Lake Ontario was a small-enough, experimental-enough, ambitious-enough liberal arts venture to have taken a gamble on a man whose office had been packed up by campus security. There was no honeymoon, of course, but Mom and Dad took the train north and rented an apartment not far from Niagara Falls. Unfortunately, the fresh start lasted only a few weeks itself before my father had insulted the director of his new department as well and been shipped out all over again. This time to Tapington, Ohio, where— miraculum miraculorum —an offer had come through from Fabricus College. In March of 1984, my parents bought an old Country Squire station wagon and headed south on Route 77. My mother has lived in Tapington most of the time since.

My father, I’m sure, would have preferred a two-seater — or at least a coupe — over a family car. But his new bride was practical. Either by nature or because she knew what was coming.

I was born at the end of that year, and a year later came my sister, Paulette.

—

BY THE TIME Paulie and I were old enough to go to school, my mother was already dragging us to art museums. I mean, dragging. There were plenty of perfectly fine ones around us in Ohio — in Columbus and Cincinnati and Dayton, to name just a few — but the one she insisted on going to at least twice a summer was the Art Institute of Chicago, which, like a well-contemplated punishment, lay at the end of a sweltering, five-hour drive. My sister and I endured the trip in the rattling old Country Squire, whose black vinyl interior by then smelled like a dog kennel set down in a decaying forest. My father, of course, didn’t come along. In the rear seat, Paulie and I read our puzzle books and stared out the dusty windows; in the cargo bay, Bernoulli, our Bernese mountain dog (partly), whom everyone but Dad called Bernie, lounged on his side with a shredded nylon bone propped near his mouth; and in the front seat, stiff backed and smelling mildly of Dial soap, my mother drove with both hands on the wheel, now and then wiping the sweat from her neck with a folded handkerchief. The air conditioner had long ago stopped working.

By that point, in fact, the Andret family station wagon was well known around Tapington. A Fabricus colleague once asked Dad if he’d been wounded in the shoot-out — a reference to the strikingly linear formation of rust holes that perforated the left front quarter panel. Our next-door neighbor, who washed his car every Sunday, used to spray off our Country Squire out of helpfulness, or perhaps concern, and then lean down to inspect the interior through its sap-streaked windshield. Dregs of yellow foam bulged from the upholstery, and above the cargo bay the cloth lining of the roof had been taped back to the frame. One of the backseat doors could only be opened from the inside, and on humid days the electric windows worked only if we tapped the rocker buttons in rapid succession, like a ship’s telegraph operator broadcasting an SOS. In the glove box, Dad kept a can of starter fluid.

My father, of course, would have bought a new car in a heartbeat.

My mother, of course, would never allow it.

The car’s darkly carpeted floor resembled the mulch of a long-untended garden, composted from used-up drawing pads, dried-out felt markers, and waterlogged reproductions of the Old World masterpieces that my mother handed out before our trips. (For at least a year of my childhood, a mud-obscured figure of Jesus — from an April calendar page depicting Giotto’s Christ Reasoning with Peter —looked up at me sideways from between my sneakers.) The musty odor of the seats was catalyzed by a yeasty damp that seemed to be entering through the footwells.

Yet before every trip to Chicago — or indeed before any trip of more than about an hour — my mother gave us another mini-lecture on another long-dead artist, then handed out another mini-sheaf of masterpieces, generally cut from the museum calendars of a bygone year. (Paulette had been named after Paul Erdős, by the way — one of the few contemporary mathematicians who was not despised by my father — but her middle name was Artemisia, after Artemisia Gentileschi, the virtuosa oilist of the Italian Baroque.) My mother herself had always enjoyed painting, but I also think she devoted herself to art history as ardently as she did — and tried to devote us to it as well — because it was as different from mathematics as a field could be.

Art history was also impractical. In fact, the impracticality of my mother’s education, which had been entirely self-administered, might have been the true reason she remained married to my father for as long as she did. (Which makes me wonder if this is why my father had suggested the field in the first place: Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate .) As a young woman, Mom had been accepted to the College of New Rochelle but by necessity had gone to work instead, at Princeton, where, as you’ve already read, she met my father. I don’t imagine that she ever desired to be a secretary again. Dad at least could support us, if only in Tapington, if only in a peeling house, if only in a ruined station wagon, on his Fabricus College salary.

I should add that, from my mother’s ministrations, I can probably guess what that salary was. After she paid the bills, which she did on alternate Sundays while sipping tea at our kitchen table with a heavily erased figuring pad before her, she had him carry the checks to his office for mailing. Fabricus College had stamps. It also had envelopes, on which she would neatly black out the college’s engraved insignia (although she liked to leave the outline of the steeple and sometimes the silhouetted pair of wood ducks) and write in our own return address: 1729 Karnum Road. When she finished with the current Sunday’s checks, she would prepare the next Sunday’s set of envelopes, tear up the worked invoices, and then carefully hang her tea bag from the kitchen faucet to dry. My mother used a tea bag twice.

Such unyielding frugality was not just her own instinct but the conscious foundation, I think, of a lifelong effort to launch my sister and me into the world. (Even now, she worries.) Whatever my father brought home, she would multiply. That’s what she did: she multiplied. Sunday was the day we ate meat, for example, and on Monday and then again on Tuesday she served a soup of the bones. Times three. With rice and carrots, of course. Times four. Or potatoes. Times five. The carrots grew wild in the sunny unsectioned flat of land behind our house, and the potatoes were the queerly shaped rejects that were delivered by truck to the parking lot of the Tapington public library every Friday afternoon, in thirty-five-pound bags. Agricultural topology, as my father used to say. My mother made it abundantly clear in those days that money was to be saved, even if my father had no inclination at all to save it. She sewed most of my sister’s clothes, and she procured my own rudimentary attire from the ubiquitous church sales that served as the town’s rotating charity enterprise. (St. Andrew’s Memorial Church was called by my father “the Family Andret’s Sartorial Hutch.”)