Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

“You can be through with me,” he said.

“I don’t want to be. Don’t say that.”

“If you are, I’d understand. I’m washed up.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Yes, I am. I’m good as dead — as a mathematician, anyway. Haven’t done a thing in a decade. Not one fucking thing in my entire life, probably.” He pointed at the box, shaking his head. “Never give up.”

“You didn’t.”

“Yes, I did. A long time ago.” Something appeared in his eyes. But then he waved his hand, and it seemed to go away. He pulled open the drawer again and glanced in at the pills. “What are they, Hans?”

“They’re MDA, Dad.”

“Jesus.”

“The Mellow Drug of America.”

He dropped back into the chair then, swept a hand through the drawer, and held his fist out over the trash can. Then he seemed to think better of it. When he turned and opened his palm to me, I saw a clot of yellows and greens and light blues: 80s, 120s, and 160s. His sweat was already sticking them together.

I reached to take them.

“Goddamn it,” he said. “I guess it’s over for both of us.”

—

I BELIEVE NOW that he never did tell my mother.

At first I wondered if my own silence was expected in return — quid pro quo. But later in my life, when I had my other troubles, I realized that it was probably more elemental: he really had given up. Not only on his work and on me, but on all the relationships he’d ever had — on every one of the distressing amalgams of mystery and pain that had puzzled him since childhood. In the mathematical world — indeed in the entire world — he had not a single friend; at home, my sister already treated him like a stranger; and by that point, no doubt, my mother was halfway gone.

Later that summer, I realized why he’d brought the Fields Medal with him up to the lake. In September, two days before school started, my mother and sister and I drove back to Ohio in the Country Squire, with Bernie sitting like a king on the empty side of the front seat. My father stayed behind to close the cabin. He was going to take the Greyhound home to Tapington in time for his own classes, which began the following week.

But by the time the semester opened, he still hadn’t appeared. One evening not long after that — and not long before I went off to college myself — my mother answered a phone call from the dean of faculty. After a few moments, she went upstairs to the bedroom extension.

As it turned out, she never did finish her nursing degree. By the time I moved to Columbus, she was working again, full-time, as a secretary in the offices of the Fabricus College administration.

That was how their marriage ended — quietly. My father just never came back.

I DIDN’T THINK he would be the type to write letters — especially under the circumstances — but he did: they appeared every week or so in my new PO box at OSU.

I knew he was writing to Paulie, too, back home in Tapington, but Paulie wouldn’t even open the envelopes.

Or so she told me. She said she threw them out as soon as they arrived.

As for me, I read them over and over.

He was a surprisingly elegant writer. The sentences were scrupulous — short, lucid descriptions of the changing seasons and the animals he saw as the woods progressed through the cooler days of autumn into the true cold. He came across porcupines and weasels. He befriended the same family of beavers that I’d befriended myself, and in the winter, after I’d mailed back the first of my responses, he began reporting on their doings. They obviously understood the predictability of fulcrums and levers, he told me, and had evidently mastered the majority of man’s own mathematical innovations up through the Renaissance. As soon as it’s warm enough, I plan to teach them the remainder, at least the geometry and trigonometry. Although I worry that like my students they have an eye only for the necessary.

In his seclusion, I suppose, it was natural that he began to pay attention to the theater of nature, the way he had as a boy. Am I wrong to think that all of us — if left alone — would return to the same comforts?

Sometimes he was philosophical. In one letter, he wrote, Certain categories of thinkers cross canyons. Before the same canyons, a mathematician — a scientist — takes only the smallest, most measured steps.

There were drawings, too, on the backs of the letters or folded inside them. Truly remarkable renderings of the tiny lake as the fall came over it. Then the winter. Then the spring.

On the back of one envelope, in a loop of tiny cursive that twined around the postage, he’d written, I come into the presence of still water.

—

IN COLUMBUS, WHEN I first read about the effects of MDA, I realized how lucky I’d been. Around the country, kids were dying — regularly enough to notice, if you were paying attention. In every college town and big city by then, an army of basement chemists had added the methyl group and turned MDA into MD M A, which first was called window but before long became known as ecstasy. Kids began passing out at raves. They began dancing and hooking up and jabbering in the glow of their own body heat, forgetting to drink at all, communing with the theological verities and releasing into the ether their instinctive commonality until the rising potassium in their blood stopped their hearts.

Somehow, I’d avoided such a fate. And by the time I arrived at Ohio State, at the age of most eighth graders, I’d somehow made up my mind to quit. I’d had an earlier start than my father, and I suppose this allowed me an earlier exit.

But still, I couldn’t help thinking about what he’d said: I guess it’s over for both of us.

Well, was it?

My first week in Columbus, I joined NA. Going cold turkey was easier than I would have imagined, although later, when I mentioned this to my sponsor, he stayed to talk to me after the meeting. He was a man my father’s age, a night watchman who, like my father, reminded me of one of the Ford-plant occupants back home. “Folks like us,” he said, pointing at himself first, then dropping his voice. “Easy stand. Easy fall.”

In fairness, the jury remains out.

With my father removed from the picture, my soup of anger, sorrow, and bewilderment had finally found a place to cool. That first semester, I dabbled in art history and political science. The art history, at least, was interesting — and of course I’d had a head start. Sometimes I imagined my mother standing behind me in the classroom, smiling her insistent smile, and my father standing behind her, turning his head to snicker.

By the end of the fall, though, I’d declared mathematics.

Applied mathematics, anyway — which to my father might as well have been Himalayan transcendentalist studies. Because of my high-school curriculum, I went straight to the upper-level courses. My first day in Mathematics 5702, Curves and Surfaces in Euclidean Three Space, the professor took attendance and stepped to the blackboard, then turned to me and said, “Well, Hans, how is the great man?”

IT WAS FIVE years later — by which time, at barely nineteen years old, I was already the owner of a four-story brownstone in the West Village and a hundred-acre estate near Litchfield — that the envelope arrived in my office. The word PERSONAL, in heavy pencil, slanting down both sides. No return address.

Inside was a mathematics journal: The Northern European Review of Enumerative Combinatorics, volume 13, number 2. September 1999.

The fall I’d left for college.