Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

When he got out of the car to do his business, my mother stared straight ahead. But I turned to watch. There was always something wild and charismatically uncaring about my father’s demeanor in these moments, some mysterious abandonment of his frowning and cogitative state that already meant a lot to me, even though at that age I understood almost nothing about him. Paulie had long ago stopped whispering “Perv” to me for observing him as he relieved himself. She, of course, kept her head in her novels.

I remember that it was cold that day, and windy, but that the sky had been cut from the crackling blue gem field of a late midwestern April. Outside the car, as other families sped past, my father stepped to the leeward side of the open door, then leaned back from the waist and at the same time forward from the ankles. His penis poked out from his zipper. For this part, Bernie always stood up at the rear window. My father paused for a moment, rocking slightly while a few indistinct words played on his lips. Then, just before his stream started, he tilted back his head, as though there were a code written in the sky that allowed the event to begin. This was the moment I waited for. The movement seemed to be a marker of his own private devotion; as though despite his unshakable atheism, as though despite his sour, entirely analytic approach to every affair of life, he nonetheless felt the need to acknowledge the heavens in regard to this particular function of the body. I don’t know — perhaps I sensed that he simply enjoyed it in a deeper way than I did. It was possible, I already recognized, that the eye-narrowing depth of his physical delight in that moment was relative to the paucity of other delights in his life. But in any case, the prayerful uptilting of his cranium always seemed to democratize him for me, to make him, for a few moments at least, a regular man. Bernie let out a bark.

“Is he done?” asked my mother.

I opened my window. “Almost.”

In fact, he was still in the midst. My father peed like a horse. His urine flowed in one great sweeping stream that started suddenly and stopped just as suddenly, a single, winking arc of shimmering clarity that endured for a prodigious interval and then disappeared in an instant, as though the outflow were a solid object — an arch of glittering ice or a thick band of silver — and not (as it actually approximated) a parabolic, dynamically averaged graph of the intersecting functions of gravity, air resistance, and initial velocity on a nonviscous fluid, produced and exhibited by a man who’d just consumed more than a gallon of midwestern beer. The flow was as clear as water. When it struck the edge of the gravel shoulder, the sound was like a bedsheet being ripped. Beneath this high reverberation, he let out a protracted, appreciative whistle that culminated in a tuneless gasp, his lips flapping at the close like a trumpeter’s. In the viny topsoil, a gap appeared, a wisp of vapor rising from its center. Then a meandering river pushed its way forward, excavating a skier’s course downhill. After the liquid had been absorbed, the foamy sluice continued to steam at the edges, as though it were not dilute human waste he had emitted but some caustic effluent. He shook himself. From my vantage he appeared entirely unashamed. Bernie bumped about in the cargo bay. My father moved up close to peer through the windshield, zipping his trousers and smiling through the glass at my mother. I realized that the yellow that should have been in his urine was unmistakable now in his eyes.

“Thank goodness,” my mother said when the car door closed again. “I was getting a little bored in here.”

In those days, this was her version of malice. My father had been on the attack since he’d discovered the second picnic basket had been left at home, and for most of the drive my mother had been parrying him, meeting his disjointed and rambling accusations with her own incremental admissions, coyly humorous questions, and occasional nods of agreement, like a boxer using the ropes. This was not an admission of defeat but a tactic. Time was on her side — we all knew this — and once my father had downed a few bona fide cocktails and gotten a bit of lunch into him, he would reliably retreat. My sister and I were witnessing nothing but the feel-out punches of the day’s early rounds. We knew not to say anything ourselves, or he’d turn his spite against one of us .

But this morning, somehow, the beer wasn’t calming him, nor the pretzels that my mother kept proffering across the seat. The twelve cans were already as light as a bag with a sandwich in it.

We were most of the way to the dalles when he turned and said, “I just would’ve thought that someone would have taken it up by now. And built something significant on it.” He slowly pulled open the tab of the penultimate beer, allowing it to hiss. “That’s all.”

“That’s because it’s authoritative” was my mother’s immediate answer.

Paulie was reading The Hound of the Baskervilles and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (to this day she maintains the habit of reading two books at once), and I was working my way through the Fabricus College library’s pristine copy of Martin Gardner’s puzzles from Scientific American . Bernie, leaning over my shoulder from the rear, was poking his head out the window into the passing air and cambering his snout up and down, a ritual that my father always referred to as testing his principle. (This was a reference, of course, to the Bernoulli principle of inviscid flow — although, actually, Bernie had not been named after Daniel Bernoulli, the physicist and mathematician who’d elucidated the principle, but Jakob Bernoulli, the pure mathematician, who’d sided with Leibniz against Newton in the Great War of the Calculus. (Naming a dog after an ally of Leibniz in the calculus wars, by the way, no doubt reflected my father’s sense of irony as well as his quite durable sense of grievance.)) In any case, I can’t say how I knew, but I understood immediately that my parents were discussing the Malosz theorem. My father’s single crowning achievement had been the hidden stage work for most of the serious clashes I’d ever witnessed between the two of them. It was a historical fact as old and mysterious and yet as ever alive to our family as slavery might be to other families, or the bomb in Hiroshima, or the Holocaust. It put him into a mood. He’d published the paper twenty years before, but the proof had only a handful of times been used as the basis for another mathematician’s work.

I set down my book of puzzles.

Glancing back at us, my mother opened her side window so that the sound of the wheels would cover her words.

I sat forward.

“Don’t be nosy, Clever Hans.” This was Paulie. She called me Clever Hans not because she thought I was quick-witted but because a German farm horse by that name had once become famous for being able to do arithmetic with its hooves.

“I’m not nosy, Smallette. I’m interested .” ( Smallette was the best I could do for Paulette, to my long-standing disappointment.) I leaned my temple against the back of my father’s headrest, hoping he’d think I was sleepy.

“Nobody’s come near it in years,” I heard him say.

“That’s because they’re intimidated,” Mom replied. “They’re intimidated by its brilliance.”

I remember marveling at my mother then, noting that despite the unrelenting weight of what must have already been a thoroughly one-sided marriage, she was immediately drawn to the encouraging word. For a few moments, I thought the impasse had ended.

But after driving silently for a time, my father turned to her and muttered, “Bullshit.”