Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

It was, as I somehow already knew, his Fields Medal.

I knew this even though I’d never before seen it in my life. I knew it even though, until that moment, I’d never even realized it was an actual object . But from the velvet lining now I tilted out a golden disk the size of a dollar coin. I lifted it to the window and saw the writing that was engraved in tiny, precise letters around the rim. His name glowed in the morning light.

By the time he came back from the restroom, I was leaning over the rear seat again, pretending to be looking through his books. The box was back inside the blanket, but as the car steered onto the highway he glanced over at me, then held my gaze. I considered what I’d say if he asked me about it. In my hands I still felt the cool ghost of its shape and in my ears I could still hear the waves of applause, stretching off into a dark auditorium.

But he turned back without a word.

It was only later that evening, as we were lugging the bags into the cabin and my dose was finally letting go of me, that I wondered why he’d bothered to bring something like that up there at all.

—

THAT WEEK, MY mother set to work clearing the land. She started close to the house, using the clippers and pruning saw that Dad and I had brought up from Tapington and a crowbar that she’d found under the porch. She used the crowbar for the roots, wedging it underneath them and levering until a great snake of a shape began to reveal itself in the mulch.

“ ‘Out, damn’d spot,’ ” she said to me one morning, holding out her palms. On her gloves, rust from the crowbar had mixed with juice from the vines until the leather looked like it had been soaked in blood. “ ‘Out, I say!’ ”

“ ‘Hark,’ ” I answered gravely, “ ‘she speaks.’ ”

We’d read Macbeth that year in English class. Though it wasn’t anything I cared about, I still had a memory for it. This pleased her. She rose and kissed my cheek. Then she wriggled the tool from the soil and plunged it in a few inches up the line. She’d been working since dawn on a patch of undergrowth no bigger than a Ping-Pong table. Though the sun was hardly over the trees, she was already covered in sweat. She wiped her brow and said, “How’s your father doing?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because I thought you might be the one to know.” She leaned forward on the bar and bounced.

“He’s working on something,” I said. “He wants to do something big again.”

“Yes, I know.” Then, “He’s been saying that since we moved to Ohio.”

“Oh.” I dug listlessly at a root, then sat back to rest. “That was a big deal for you, wasn’t it?”

“Wasn’t what?”

“Moving from Princeton.”

“Why yes, Hans — yes, it was.” From the corner of my eye, I saw her watching me. “I don’t mind saying so.”

I turned and regarded her in full now. Her face was wet, of course. Dripping. The sign above her head this time read:

ASK ME

I set down the spade. “Are you upset that this is where you are, Mom? I mean, that you moved to Ohio? And that you’re up here now?”

“Not at all.” She laughed, but at the same time the sweat seemed to thicken on her cheeks. Finally, she said, “Anyway, there’s no point.”

I turned away. I was incapable, especially in those days, of understanding her. Though she talked with us openly, and though she sometimes appeared to tell us her private thoughts, these private thoughts always seemed to be in the service of other even-more-private thoughts; as though beneath all the laid-together pieces she’d forgotten what she’d first set out to conceal. The kindnesses, the confidences, even the tears — they were all just layers. My father, on the other hand — who rarely spoke to us with anything that might be termed kindness— had never in my experience been anything short of forthcoming. He wore his own pain, and the malice it yielded, as nothing more than a fact.

She said, “Your dad’s wrong, you know.”

“About what?”

“About math being a curse.”

“He told you that?”

“No, Paulie did.” She nodded toward the cabin. “Neither of you has any curse, Hans. Do you hear me? That’s just your father being — I don’t know — dramatic. You have to ignore half of what he says.”

“I already do.”

She turned and looked at me — proudly, I think. For a time then we just sat there.

“I’m just not sure it’s the right half,” I said.

This brought out a laugh. Then she rose and wedged the crowbar under another root. “Now,” she said, lowering her weight onto the end, “tell me what he’s working on.”

—

BUT OF COURSE I didn’t know. I never did. Dad’s work — though it was our family’s livelihood and though it would later become the work of both his children — was still performed in a far universe. That universe now included his desk at home and his tiny, moss-rimmed shed in the woods, but it was still a universe none of the rest of us was allowed to enter.

In the mornings, he vanished.

In the evenings, he reappeared.

One such evening, not long after our drive back from Tapington, I was sitting on the porch with my sister when we heard the slap of the shed door. A moment later, Dad was at the clearing. Instead of coming across to the cabin, though, he turned and headed down to the water, where, at the shore, he dropped to the ground and did a dozen push-ups. I’d never even seen him do a single one. I wouldn’t have thought he was even capable of it. But he was. He did them easily. He was skinny again, and when he stood, his arms glistened.

When he stripped to his swimming trunks and stepped into the water, I felt what I might have felt watching a polar bear emerge from a cave at the zoo, tread thickly across the patio, and slip into the pool.

“God,” I said to Paulie. “Is that really who I think it is?”

She looked at me, rather closely. “Who else did you have in mind?”

Dad waded in. The wind had died, as it usually did in the evenings, and the inlet was perfectly calm. When the water reached his chest, he stopped walking and stood with his arms crossed, breathing heavily.

“What’s he doing?” I said.

“He’s hyperventilating. He has this idea that he can make it all the way across.” She looked at me closely again.

“Underwater?”

“Yes, Hans. Underwater. He’s been doing it since we got here. Where have you been? It’s sixty-five yards. I measured.”

At that moment, he slid under. A foot kicked at the surface and then he disappeared. For a few seconds, I could see his pale legs beneath the brown.

“That’s a long way to go without breathing, Paulie.”

“Not for him it isn’t.”

Judging from the timing, he might have been halfway to the other side of the cove when the sound of a boat engine came into range. A moment later, the craft itself swept into the mouth of the inlet and pulled up short. It was followed by a skier — a girl about Paulie’s age — who came racing around the edge of the trees. They were still a hundred feet from where Dad was swimming. The girl lifted her ski rope and tossed it, then slid magically across the surface until she was alongside the boat, where she made a tiny S with the ski and sank to her knees. There was laughter, which carried brilliantly, as though the entire family were sitting on the porch with us. The man at the wheel reached from the side of the boat and took hold of her hand. When she was over the transom, he wrapped her in a towel and hugged her across the shoulders.

At this point my father surfaced. He stood, rubbed his eyes, and looked out at them.

From out deep came another round of laughter. A boy stepped up onto the side of the boat this time and cannonballed into the water. The woman in the front seat leaned out and skipped the ski to him. Then the boat nosed around, gurgling. A moment later it roared off, the boy popping up behind, shaking out his hair as he rose from the water. Just before they disappeared, he cut the ski in a long arc that threw a fan of diamonds all the way onto the beach.