Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

About clothing the two of them fought without actually fighting, which — in the beginning at least — was the method of warfare that they generally adopted. My father still wore the Borsalino fedora, for example, which he freshened in the mornings with a brush, along with a rotating arsenal of tailored suits, also from his Princeton days, that he regularly dropped off at the cleaner’s. He accented the suits with pale-colored shirts from a mail-order house in New York City. My mother countered by procuring her own wardrobe from St. Andrew’s Memorial, then altering it on a tag-sale sewing machine that she’d restored herself. She was good that way. She could generally repair — since my father rarely bothered to (although he could be surprisingly adept at it) — whatever item in our house had clogged, broken, burned out, worn through, or generally declined. Drains. Curtains. Hair dryers. Carpets. Windows. And certainly whatever didn’t fit, like clothing.

They also fought, without actually fighting, about our education.

Paulie and I were both talented, of course. In mathematics, that means. And because Dad didn’t trust the public schools to teach his subject, he took it as his duty to lecture us on it himself. Naturally, my mother countered. From the stacks of the Fabricus College library she brought home tomes on every unrelated topic she could find, the farther from mathematics the better. Anthropology. Rhetoric. Law. Philosophy. Zoology. Literature. And, of course, art history. The studying we did at her behest from an early age seemed to be another counterweight to my father’s outsize influence — that is to say, another ancillary sort of saving, not all that different from her husbanding of provisions. She would pack us up to our rooms to read her latest acquisition with the same unvarying forthrightness with which she doctored the Fabricus College envelopes or hung to dry her squeezed-out tea bags — as a counterpoint that illustrated frugality and discipline, if not actually reason.

As soon as we’d disappear to our work, she herself would sit down at the kitchen counter with either a tome on some obscure Florentine painter or a gruesomely illustrated textbook from one of the nursing courses she’d been enrolled in since the year my sister entered elementary school. This was my mother’s own task of betterment. Her plan was to obtain a certificate in practical nursing, via the night program at Ohio State. Though she certainly labored withering hours just taking care of the three of us (not to mention Bernie), she was nonetheless determined to finish a degree. She took one course per year, a pace that put her on track to graduate at about the same time she might become a grandmother. But such a triviality wasn’t going to stop her — not Helena Pierce Andret.

To my mother, I suppose, all of this — the books, the museums, the asymptotically far-off degree, all the carefully observed habits of discipline to which she unyieldingly bound herself — was as close as she could ever come to insurance. For her children, that is. Moral insurance. Emotional insurance. For what other reason, after all — other than what she already knew of her husband’s life — would a frugal woman discourage a subject as economically viable as my father’s and encourage one as economically improbable as her own? There was a multitude of things that Paulie and I could do in the world: that’s what she was telling us with her exertions. Art history just happened to be one of them.

Of my father’s own particularly stilted genius in the visual arts, I should add, I have few examples. Nearly all of his later drawings were highly ambitious renderings of the hyper-complex intersections of imagined shapes — rotating tesseracts overlapping at their vertices, 3D manifolds spun about planes in 6D space — and all but a handful of these pages have been lost. Nor do any of his portraits of famous mathematicians survive — not in my possession, anyway. In a silver frame on my kitchen wall hangs a single, elaborate depiction of the front of my childhood home, stupendously accurate in its detail up to the top-left corner of the paper, which remains untouched. And next to it is displayed a nearly photographic reproduction of the one misaligned sidewalk square that for as long as I can remember bulged between 1729 Karnum and the driveway to the north. This concrete square was portrayed by my father with mammoth foreshortening of the frost heave in the background and colossal magnification of the thick-capped property stake in the foreground — as though the whole scene were viewed by an ant. The stake lies on our side of the raised edge. That was the point of the exercise, which Dad had performed for legal reasons. Our neighbor — the one who liked to spray off our car — had tripped. My father had taken it upon himself to reproduce the facts of the tort, which, while lying on his belly, he did without shame or apology (he was capable of neither). There were no lawsuits in Tapington, of course, but he was very familiar with belligerence and on top of that had once lived in the East. Otherwise, in those days he drew nothing that I remember of the recognizable world, and he never mentioned his depictive talents. It was as if they didn’t exist.

Still, my mother was constantly on the prowl for our abilities.

Anything but math.

The museums were the summertime front in what would eventually become their Fifteen Years’ War. The June that I was eight and Paulie seven, my mother put Bernie in a kennel — my father disliked dogs nearly as much as dogs disliked my father — and drove my sister and me to our aunt’s apartment in Hammond, Indiana. There we stayed for three full weeks without him, my mother delivering us by car every morning to a day camp on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, run by the staff of the Art Institute, then driving back to Hammond to spend the afternoon with her sister, talking about what surely was by then a disintegrating marriage. Along the lakefront in Chicago, two-dozen seven-, eight-, and nine-year-olds sat in front of Georges Seurat’s Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte, carefully executing their pointillist imitations, while one of them, using his brush handle as a surveyor’s transit, concentrated on a minimally extrapolated estimate of the number of painted dots (ca. 1.2 million!) on the billboard-sized canvas.

That would be me: Hans Euler Andret.

Failed mathematician.

I’D BEEN NAMED for mathematicians, of course, and in the fall of my ninth year on earth my father finally grew serious about my education in mathematics. In Dad’s mind, all the other academic disciplines — including the physical sciences, which were his own father’s profession and his own mother’s college major — were irrevocably tainted by their debt to substance. Biology, chemistry, engineering, geology — not to mention all those lesser endeavors that Mom brought home to us in her fraying GO WOOD DUCKS! tote bag — were polluted by their reliance on observation, on the vicissitudes of blood, force, and element. Blunderbusses, all of them. Mathematics, on the other hand, required no concession to the perturbing cant of the world. It was pure logic, streaked with pure imagination. Although I admit that this might be an oversimplification, I maintain that there was something distinctly religious about my father’s devotion to the pure. Mathematics, though invisible, acted and existed everywhere at once, as did the Almighty.

Not even physics could boast such a birthright. My father was nettled all his life, in fact, by the idea that he’d left a university with the greatest mathematics program in the world to teach at a place where the mathematicians had to share a hallway with the physicists. The Fabricus College Department of Mathematics and Physics. Imagine! I heard him say more than once that the two fields were like cricket and baseball: alike only to those who knew the rules of neither. This was the kind of pronouncement he liked to make at cocktail parties and departmental picnics, if he was dragged into any kind of conversation at all. There were not many people in Tapington, Ohio — not even at Fabricus — who could respond to such a statement with anything more than a nod. In a way, this might have been his problem all along: that human beings would never quite conform to his Occam’s parsing.