Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

The thing is, I had a good time with him. I’m not sure why, knowing what I now do. Maybe it was my mother’s influence — her highly developed penchant for looking at the shinier side of the coin. Things were normal, actually — at least they felt normal to me —for most of my childhood.

I remember moments. One afternoon that October, we were sitting under the mulberry tree in our front yard, as we’d done nearly every weekday afternoon that fall, working our way through the foundations of my father’s field. At that point, Dad still hadn’t fully accepted his personal and professional failures — not that I knew of, anyway — and although he’d already been drummed out of Princeton, he was still young and in my mind still a formidable expert on the workings of the world. In the yard, the citrus smell of his cologne was mingling pleasantly with the mild vinegar of the crab apples that lay about on the grass. Paulette was with my mother indoors. On that day, I remember, my father had just led me through a derivation of the fundamental theorem of calculus (James Gregory’s version — he found Isaac Barrow’s less impressive, even if historically superior to both Newton’s and Leibniz’s). This might sound like an outrageous exercise for a boy my age, but I can tell you now that in no way is calculus beyond the grasp of any reasonably talented, if isolated, seventh grader (my sister and I had both skipped three years in school). I could offer other examples — the educational systems of various Eastern cultures, the experience of quite a few homeschooled children, or the statistically reliable presence, in any given year, of dozens of preadolescents among the freshman classes of our great universities — but all that I really need to say is that by that age I’d already mastered every precursor — algebra, geometry, and trigonometry — with no difficulty at all, sitting with my father on a rotted wooden bench beneath a gnarled old mulberry.

I should also add that, among a cohort of future mathematicians, my overall development might actually be considered slow . (There were other reasons for this.) By way of example, Paul Erdős, the great Hungarian savant, could multiply three-digit figures in his head not long after he could walk. In my own case, before I’d even stepped through the doors of a junior high school, my father had explored with me every antecedent of Newton’s and Leibniz’s work, along with all the variously powerful methods that existed for mathematical proof, from the deceptively modest induction to the graceful contraposition to the thrillingly brutal reductio ad absurdum (and even to the reviled enumeration of cases, at which computers now excel and about which my father, for his own peculiar reasons, couldn’t speak without his lips puckering, as though around a lemon). I’d learned it all, without particular effort. And I’d thought it all no less normal than his daily breakfast of bacon and bourbon.

“Hans,” he said to me one afternoon, “this idea, this discovery that shapes can be described with incrementally smaller shapes, that anything at all can be approximated in such a simple manner, is what first drew me to mathematics. And it has guided me in much of my thinking since.”

His conversation normally didn’t require response.

“Mathematics is an invented science,” he went on. (This was a peculiarity of his, that he always insisted on the word mathematics, when just about every other mathematician I know says math. (Although it should also be noted that, like every other mathematician I’ve ever met, he insisted on using the full phrase “the Malosz conjecture ” or “the Malosz theorem ” every time he uttered the problem’s name; he would have never, unlike his son, simply called it “the Malosz. ”)) “But strangely,” he continued, “the inventions of mathematics, which are wholly constructions of the mind, are in turn able to yield other inventions. That is why they often seem more like discoveries than creations . In fact the distinction remains a debate.” He looked over at me meaningfully, his still-soulful eyes shining vibrantly against the pallor of his cheeks. “I also believe that this is why so many mathematicians feel that they have been privy to the language of God.”

“I’ve heard that,” I offered.

He thought for a moment. “Although I should also say that I’ve thought of it in other ways, too. As the language of the mind, for example. Or even”—here he turned to me more thoughtfully—“as the language of language . The underlier of grammar. The skeleton of cognition. The rails on which the train of human advance steams up and down, one hill after the next.”

At that moment, a mulberry twig fell onto the lawn before us.

“Squirrels,” I said, looking up.

He retrieved the bit of wood and turned it over in his hand. Once he was going, it was difficult to stop him. “Mathematics is like carving a wooden doll,” he said, “and then, one day, you watch as your wooden doll gives birth to another wooden doll.”

These words have stayed with me all my life.

We sat there for a time. By that age, I was accustomed to his drifting. I saw the squirrel now, trampolining in the branches. Now and then it shook loose a few leaves, which fell around us. I’ve often wondered if they aim at people.

“In fact,” he suddenly resumed, “this is exactly how you will know whether your wooden doll is alive. If it yields another wooden doll.”

Not so many years after that, during the summer when his disease finally became apparent, I remember noticing the altered shape of his belly, which had begun to protrude beyond his belt. He’d taken us to the public pool. By that point, I’d entered a premature adolescence and was already considering Caltech or MIT for my future (or, if for some reason neither saw my potential, perhaps Harvard or Princeton). My father had always been a slender man, practically gaunt. Now his belly resembled a smoothly linear Gaussian curve, slightly downsloped and radially distributed about the nidus of what I would later learn, when I came back from Manhattan to take care of him, was called the umbilical ligament. His gut hung over his swim shorts like a water balloon.

“My God,” I said to him as he sat down near the diving board, “what’s that?”

“Statistical noise,” he answered instantly.

“Fuck you, Dad.”

“Fuck you, Son.”

He smiled. That year, we’d somehow taken to saying this to each other. I was the one who’d started it, but to my surprise he’d kept it up, perhaps because he sensed that the joke of it deflected the serious battle between us that was already on the horizon.

That afternoon, I well remember how he didn’t look like the other middle-aged fathers who were gathered beneath the faded sun umbrellas, their polo shirts amiably protruding. There was nothing roly-poly about Dad’s new belly. Nothing that made him look approachable or paternal. Despite his clever answer, he looked sick. Tall and dashingly thin all the years I knew him, he seemed suddenly to be shedding another, boundaryless person from inside himself — a larger, jiggling, water-inflated homunculus, dusky gray in hue, that had begun pushing itself out of his skin. A wooden doll emerging from another wooden doll.

I was swimming that day with a boy I knew from school, and at one point, as I was crouching to dive, he looked up at me from the water and said, “Your dad’s eyes are yellow.”

“Everybody’s are that color,” I said, “if you look.” Then I dived.

—

I’M A TEACHER myself now — high-school geometry, trigonometry, and calculus — and in my job I come across plenty of kids in trouble. It’s not hard to notice the distracted quiet in the loudmouthed jock, the missed homework from the valedictorian, the escalating tardiness from the sleepy cheerleader who wears the same ash-stained blouse to class all week. I’ve made a point to be on the lookout for these kids, for the ones who are smart enough and adept enough to make it into my classes — and smart enough and adept enough, thus, to be ignored by the school’s counselors — but vulnerable enough, if that’s the way you want to think of it, to veer.