Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

I should add that I had no friends in the neighborhood and only a few friends at school. Midway through my freshman year, Tapington North’s principal, Mr. Dowater, had called me into his office. By then, I’d already made my way through calculus and differential equations and had recently coregistered for a night course in Fourier analysis at OSU.

“So,” Principal Dowater said. “Tell me your name.”

“Hans Andret.”

Obviously he knew my name. How could he not know the name of a boy like me in a school like North? And anyway, he’d called me Hans when he’d first beckoned me in from the secretary’s office. He was just trying to see whether I could speak. But I could speak. Like my father, I could speak well.

“Hans Euler Andret,” he said, reading from his roll book.

“The middle name rhymes with toiler, actually .”

He laughed.

“It really does, Mr. Dowater. Most people think it rhymes with ruler . But it rhymes with oiler . As in Leonhard Oy -ler.”

“You’re named after a mathematician, then.”

“After three of them, in fact.”

“I see.” He didn’t waste any time thinking about it. “Tell me, Hans, how do you expect to take a night course at the university while you’re enrolled during the day at North?”

His question wasn’t logical. I answered anyway. “My mother drives me.”

“Well, that’s awfully nice of her.”

“She’s taking classes, too.”

This seemed to catch his interest. “In what, may I ask?”

“Nursing.”

“She wants to go into the healing professions, then?”

I couldn’t decide on a response. It seemed to me that in reality she didn’t want anything of the sort, that in fact she’d enrolled in nursing school only so that she could drive me to my course in Fourier analysis. But this didn’t fully make sense to me, either, since her goal had always seemed to be to extend her children’s education beyond mathematics. In fact, what I secretly suspected was that she was driving me to Columbus every Tuesday and Thursday evening because she hoped that while I was there I would sign up for a course in art history.

“I suppose she does,” I said.

He nodded. “And tell me, Hans, how’s it here for you?”

“It’s good, Mr. Dowater.”

“Excellent, then.” He looked up wryly. “And the other inmates,” he continued, “they treating you okay?”

“I don’t really notice.”

He picked up the Panthers calendar from his desk and flipped the page. “There’s a math competition that our seniors go to every year,” he said. “Has Mr. Kirpes told you about it?”

“I don’t like competitions.”

“I agree. I agree — but now, this is a statewide event. Even at your age, you’d probably have a good chance at taking the prize. For North, I mean. I think it would bring a few hours of glory to this old place. Glory to you, glory to our untiring Mr. Kirpes, and glory to the Panthers. It’s only in Dayton, you know.”

I didn’t answer. Mr. Dowater had a reputation for deadpan humor, a humor that was strangely similar to the low-level, sarcastic sniper fire offered by the school’s underbleacher population of stoners and class-cutters. It didn’t really pay to engage it. After a moment, he set down the calendar and dropped the cheer from his voice.

“At the rate you’re going, anyway,” he said, “you’ll be out of here in two more years.”

“I know.”

“And then what? We haven’t sent a student to the Ivy League in quite a while. I imagine you’d be a strong candidate for either Harvard or Yale.”

“I don’t want to go to Harvard or Yale.”

“I agree. Just don’t tell me you want to be a Buckeye.”

“Not in a million years, Mr. Dowater.”

He eyed me approvingly.

“I want to be a Beaver,” I said.

“A what?”

“Caltech. The Beavers. Beavers are the engineers of the animal world. Caltech is the best school in the country.”

“I see.”

“Or MIT,” I said.

“Yes, another fine university. And what are they ?”

“They’re the Beavers.”

Now he eyed me suspiciously. “I thought you just said that Caltech was the Beavers.”

“I did, sir.” I kept an inscrutable face. “But so’s MIT. They’re both the Beavers.”

He blinked a few times, then absently lifted the handle of the paper cutter on his side desk. “Well, that’s a little strange,” he said.

“Indeed it is,” I answered. “Indeed it is.”

—

IT WAS THAT spring, just as I was making the turn into the middle leg of my high-school career, that my eyes were finally opened.

One Saturday morning, the family set out in the car for the Macon Dalles, which was perhaps the only locale in Spartan County that could in any way be noted for its geologic grandeur. The Pitcote River, which for the vast part of its course meanders oleaginously through the rolling farmland plains of south-central Ohio, at one point strays into the quartzite underpinnings of the Allegheny foothills, which mark the geologic end point of the eastern United States; there, in the first rock bed it has ever encountered, it speeds itself into a panic. For a few hundred yards, it crashes through the landscape, churning past boulders and casting rainbows into the air. These are the dalles. At the end of them, the river makes another turn and widens again, slowing abruptly back into its old self — a fat, sandy-brown stripe that curls off into the unremarkable plains of the western part of the state. At this point in the landscape, there is a geologically striking run of steep and — for our part of the country, at least — dramatic cliffs that look out in both directions, west over the calm river and east over the raging one. The state park here was where my mother liked to walk.

At a certain turn in the trail, which looked down on a stretch of whitewater that foamed and leaped over refrigerator-sized boulders, she would set down our picnic blanket. The spot was only a short distance from the parking lot, but its topography was as wild and wooded as anything you might find in a state a thousand miles to the west. The roiling water, fifteen feet below the path, was thrilling. To me as a boy — although of course I understood the volumetric dynamics of why it had sped up — it was frightening as well: a frothing, cauldronic reminder of what our familiar river could become. My mother sometimes hushed us as we ate so that we could listen to its roar. You could discern the whole orchestra in it, from upright bass to triangle.

I suppose I could look now at her choice of lunch spot as emblematic of her desire to pretend that she was any place else other than southern Ohio, that she was sightseeing any place else other than along the last western afterthought of the Allegheny Mountains, that she was making her life any place else other than among the flat, soy- and corn-bearing farmland that is the eastern precursor to Indiana, and that she was married to a man who was anyone else besides a brooding assistant (yes) professor of mathematics, in a department composed of him and a pair of semi-retired colleagues, at what was essentially a secretarial college almost two hours’ drive from the nearest art museum. Sometimes she sat quietly for the entire afternoon.

On this particular day, though, she and my father had been arguing. My mother had forgotten one of the picnic baskets, and on the drive to the dalles my father had been reduced to drinking from two six-packs of Leinenkugel that he’d picked up at a gas station outside the town limits (Tapington in those days was dry). In the front seat of the Country Squire, the two of them were exchanging words, biting them off under their breath while staring straight ahead, like a pair of spies on a park bench. The six-packs stood between them, taking up a good part of the upholstery, and my mother had moved all the way over against the door. My father always replaced his empties into the plastic rings — this was long before Tapingtonians recycled anything — as though he were assembling a new set of especially light beer cans that might be sold back at the next grocery. By now he was about two-thirds of the way through his day’s supply. He’d stopped once already along the road to pee, and now he stopped again.