Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

A broken umbrella on the floor by the door. Wobbly chairs in the kitchen. More clues. An orderly existence had begun to fail. As we stepped through the echoing halls, bits became clearer. The buoyant mother’s efforts had in the end proved insufficient. Onward we went, through the cramped rooms. The smell of dust on drapes. The sourness of mold from the cellar door. Side by side above the mantel in the living room hung two old oil paintings, one of a barn and one of a stormy sea. The other walls were covered with faded prints of famous art — Fra Angelico, Caravaggio, Monet, Mondrian, Escher, Picasso — the history of Western civilization in counterclockwise order, pausing for the chimney.

These poor people.

My father had disappeared upstairs. When I arrived in the bedroom he was tearing through the closet, heaping clothes into a pile. Then he gave up and strode all the way down to the basement. Furniture shifted. Boxes thudded against the concrete. When he returned, he was dragging behind him the unattached sections of a wooden ladder. He joined them together, leaned the frame up against the trapdoor in the ceiling, and ascended into the attic.

More scraping. He appeared at the opening with a box in his hands. “Where does time go?” he asked.

“Depends on velocity.”

“Ah,” he said, climbing down. “I’ve raised a theoretician.”

“What’s in the box?”

“Something I made.” He set it on the rug, broke the tape, and began lifting out parts. “When I was in school.”

“What is it?”

“It’s called a quatrant.”

As he joined it together, it became obvious that not all the pieces would fit. He joined several at the rim and a few along the struts, but the dovetails and the sliding joints had all shrunk or cracked, and he couldn’t close the radius.

“When I made this,” he said, “I was in the midst of the most hopeful period of my life, but I was tormented by a problem. I thought that if I devoted myself to it, no matter how difficult it turned out to be, then my devotion would reveal the truth.”

“And now?”

“I think that the problem was the only thing that allowed me to exist.”

—

WE LEFT THE next morning before dawn, the Country Squire piled high with our take. Tied-off garbage bags and rolled-up sheets, all of them filled with the things from Mom’s list. Her summer coat hung from a hook over the back door, and three pairs of her shoes were wrapped in dish towels inside the spaghetti pot, which sat atop its own lid next to a taped-up box of cooking utensils. Beside it all lay the quatrant, its parts rolled into a blanket. I could barely see out the rear window.

Dad was in an expansive mood. As he drove, he talked. He told me about how he’d first gotten the idea for a quatrant from a book he’d found as a graduate student. For years, a man named Tycho Brahe had used a quatrant to record every single incremental change in the position of the heavens above his attic in Denmark. He sipped at his soda. “And do you know what came of it?”

“No,” I said.

He looked over. “Nothing, Hans. Nothing at all.”

The sun was just beginning to rise. His thin smile became a parenthesis of thought. After a moment, he said, “Actually, that’s not true. What came of it were the Rudolphine tables.”

I turned and watched a pickup truck drag a cloud of dust through a field.

“The Rudolphine tables were his life’s work. They were his signature accomplishment. A record of every celestial body in the sky.” He glanced over again. “Listen to me, please.”

“I am.”

“They surpassed the Alphonsine tables in every way. They were a thousand times more accurate.” He reached his hand back and touched the rolled blanket. “The Rudolphine tables were a masterpiece. They ended the Ptolemaic system and brought about the heliocentric one. They were the beginning of modern astronomy.”

For a few moments I considered his words. “Then why have I never heard of him?”

“Because he only collected the data, Hans. He never actually published it. Do you know who finally did?”

“Tell me.”

He turned and looked at me significantly. “Kepler. Kepler published Brahe’s data.”

We were in the rolling farmland now at the northern edge of the till plain. I’d not yet taken my dose. The hour was still early and the road stretched before us toward the brightening horizon. My father was driving twenty miles an hour over the speed limit.

“Kepler started as Brahe’s student, but then he became his rival. And in the end, he killed his old master.” He shook his head. “By disproving the Tychonic theory.”

“Okay.”

“Just like that, one man was dead and another was ascendant. Brahe knew that the planets circled the sun, but he was stuck on the idea that the sun circled the earth.”

“He was close, I guess. It was a reasonable idea for the time.”

He looked over. “He got it wrong, Hans.”

“Obviously. But he was on the right track.”

I could feel his gaze.

“Nobody cares if you’re close, Hans. Brahe was blinded. That’s why he missed it.”

I looked out the window.

“Listen to me.”

“I am.”

“It wasn’t even that he hadn’t thought of the possibility. He had thought of it. But he insisted that the earth couldn’t be in orbit around the sun, because”—here he paused to smile—“because if it had been, the stars would have exhibited a parallax.”

“And they didn’t?”

Now his look was disdainful. “Yes, of course they did. How else could it be?” He opened his window and spat.

“Well—”

“Brahe just flat out ignored it. If the earth was the thing that was moving, he knew that a parallax had to be there. He knew it would be maximized at six months’ orbit. His own student was humiliating him. They were both looking straight at a parallax, and they both took the observations, and yet one of them failed to see it. It was obviously there.”

“Maybe it was too small for his instruments.”

“Well, it wasn’t. It was just ignored. Brahe somehow convinced himself that it wasn’t there.” He cleared his throat. “Hope overcoming reason.”

“It’s not so bad to be hopeful.”

“You’ve been talking to your mother.” He leaned across the seat. “Tycho Brahe clung to a lousy idea, Hans. That’s all it was. People like us — you must know this by now — we can’t do that. We know damn well when we’re right. We know a long time before anyone else even suspects it.” He cleared his throat. “Or when we’re wrong. That’s how we live. That’s how we die.”

After that, we drove in silence. Just north of the state border, we stopped for gas, and when he walked inside to use the restroom, I took out one of the film canisters that I’d pulled from my ficus pot earlier that morning. I swallowed my dose. I had enough now to last me through the summer.

We were in a country filling station — one pump, a service bay, and a buzzing Coke machine. The sky was already white with humidity. As I waited, I turned and fingered his row of books on the floor behind me. On one end was Jordan’s Cours d’Analyse, which I’d read that winter, and behind it a copy of Hardy’s “A Mathematician’s Apology,” whose title still drew me, despite the fact that as a boy I’d given up on it after a few pages. Next to the books was the quatrant, and when I lifted the blanket around it I saw again how old and dried out it was.

But then I saw something else that he’d wrapped inside with it: a box. It was newer and made of varnished wood. I pulled it out and set it on my lap, and for a few moments, as I waited for the day’s roll to introduce itself, I looked down at it. Then I opened it.