Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

He stopped. His hand went idly to the rafters above him and brushed against the WRONG box. “You and I,” he said in a softer voice. “We’re the same.”

I made no answer.

“Your mother, though — she’s not like us. I wish it weren’t so. But I can see that you have what I have.”

“Which is what?”

“The curse.”

“Ah,” I said. An earwig poked out of a crack in the desktop. “That’s neither provable nor disprovable.”

“Have you read about Euclid’s doubt? Have you read about his struggle?”

“No.”

“How about Apollonius of Perga? Have you read of the grief that became The Conics ?”

“Ditto to that one, too.”

“That’s because it was never recorded, Hans. None of it ever was. But I can assure you — I can guarantee you — that it was there, for every one of them. For every one of us .”

“I don’t think either of us has any curse.”

But my words glittered cheaply in the air. My father smiled at them sadly.

“History is merciless, Hans. That’s the truth you and I both know. The struggle doesn’t matter. The struggle vanishes. What remains is the work, and the work either stands or falls.”

—

IT WAS ONLY as she was cheerfully cleaning up from breakfast the next morning that my mother said across the table, “Who did we rent this from anyway, honey?”

Dad looked up. “Nobody.”

She lifted her coffee mug and sipped, puckering her lips at the taste. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Someone didn’t just give it to us.”

“Nope.”

“Milo, did we just stay in somebody’s house without their permission?”

My father leaned forward, drew butter onto his knife, and ran it across his toast.

“Milo,” she said. “Are we in somebody else’s house?”

“No,” he said. “We’re not.”

“Well, that’s good.”

“It happens to be ours, Helena.”

She set down her mug and smoothed the front of her blouse. “What did you say?”

“We bought it.”

“Please, honey.”

“It wasn’t much more than a new car.”

“Milo, please .”

“And we have plenty of time to pay it off.”

THUS BEGAN THE last summer I ever spent with my family.

The next morning, I found my mother sitting in a chair before the screened window on the porch, staring out into the morass of vines that reached from the boggy lake to the sides of the house and in a few places came in through the screens. A glass of cheap wine stood on the floor beside her. Over the morning it slowly lowered. In the air above her head, a sign was visible to my sister and me, and probably to my father also. It read:

DO NOT SPEAK TO ME

Paulie and I fixed our own lunches. I ate Special K from a chipped coffee mug and then a few slices of bologna while my sister cooked a strange-looking vegetable that my mother had brought up from Tapington. Since our arrival, a pair of rooty orbs had been sitting on the counter like diseased organs from a surgery. Paulie cut one up and threw it into the skillet.

“What is that thing?” I said.

“Celery root.”

She searched the cabinets until she found a bottle that still contained a little bit of oil.

“I thought the celery was the root.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“No.”

“It’s the stalk, Hans.” She sprinkled in a palmful of pepper. “Did you really not know that?”

“Knowledge isn’t the same as intelligence.”

“You draw fine distinctions, sir.”

I sat down behind her at the rickety table. At school that spring, she’d been running with the oddball crowd. “Are you a vegetarian now, Paulie?”

“Some of the time, yes.”

When she’d finished, she sat down at the table with me and ate straight from the skillet, staring out the window the way my mother had been staring all morning. I watched her until she was nearly finished. Then I said, “Are you happy here?”

“What?”

“Are you happy here like this, with our whole family together?”

“I don’t think about it.”

“Ah.” This was a revelation: my sister didn’t think about it. My dose was still spreading, and I saw all the complicated lines of entanglement again, radiating out from her in a silken web. The thickest strand went straight to my mother, who had moved her chair outside now into the warming sun. My mother didn’t think about happiness, either. Not her own, and not ours. She thought about our well-being; she thought about our health; she thought about our futures . But her concern did not include anything so poorly cageable as happiness. From me, on the other hand, the thickest strand shot straight through the window, climbed the brush, and arrowed through the narrow door of the shed to where my father sat gloomily over his papers. Happiness was something my father would never in his life have considered; in fact, it was something he regularly scoffed at; but I saw then, with bruising clarity, that it was the single prize he’d always chased. His devotion to the solvable. It was the momentary lee of his torment.

It was the same way for me.

—

THE NEXT DAY, right after breakfast, Mom held up three strips of wallpaper against the mantel. Felt City, the town at the end of the road, had a general store, but the general store didn’t offer much in the way of decorating samples. “Which one do you like?” she said to us.

“The fish,” answered my father.

“Which fish, dear? There are two different kinds.” She smiled like an elementary-school teacher and held up the wallpaper again. “See?”

She was being cheerful. This was the punishment she inflicted when she was especially hurt.

“The trout,” he said.

“Are these the trout?” She flicked one.

“Yes.”

“I like the other ones,” I said. “What are those? Bass?”

“Pike,” answered my father.

“That’s a guess,” said Paulie.

“Or muskie,” he said. “And one of them is a walleye, possibly.”

He was trying to be as cheerful as she was.

“If you two disagree,” said my mother, “that leaves Paulie and me. What do you say, sweetheart?”

“The ducks,” said my sister. “Without a doubt.”

“Well, I’m not having fish on the walls of my house,” said my mother. “Two to one, Paulie wins.”

Mom did the work herself. The old mortar had a rough surface, but she used a lot of paste. When she was finished, clusters of bumps still showed through, but the wood ducks and mergansers and especially the mallards stood out elegantly. Their webbed feet splayed beneath the lightly drawn waterline, and their proud heads pointed hopefully toward the actual lake. When Mom was done, she mopped the whole cabin, then brought in wildflowers and set them in cups.

—

“PAULIE,” I SAID. “I don’t think he’s doing as well as you thought.”

“Why not?” It was a warm morning, and we were standing in the upstairs bedroom together, looking down through the window. Below us, Dad had just crossed the clearing, heading toward the shed.

“He’s preoccupied,” I said. “He isn’t working.”

“How do you know?”

“I was in his office. He isn’t working on mathematics, anyway. He’s drawing trees .”

She was silent. On the windowsill was an old fishbowl that she’d found in one of the closets. She’d filled it with lake water and a few rocks and put in a pair of crayfish. She tapped the glass, and one of them did a little threatening push-up, backing up quickly and waving its claws. She tapped again. Then she said, “You were in the shed with him?”