Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

In front of Terminal B now at LaGuardia, Lorenzo pulled the baggage cart behind us, loaded down with her strapped valises. With exaggerated Neapolitan grace he set them into the trunk of the Lincoln. As he did, she stepped off to the side to raise her eyebrows. “Very elegant,” she whispered, once we were inside and moving. “You’re living like a Medici, I see.”

“Which one would that be?”

“Lorenzo, of course.”

I laughed. “That’s my driver’s name, too, you know.” I tapped on the glass. “Lorenzo, this is Mom.”

From the front seat, the big Italian head tipped modestly to one side.

“Well, Lorenzo was the great one in that family,” said my mother, leaning forward to tap the glass herself. “Most of the rest of the Medici were just—” She stopped.

“What, Mom? Bankers?”

“You know that’s not what I mean. Several of them were popes, too, and one of them was the queen of France.”

“That would be Caterina, madam,” came Lorenzo’s voice from the front. As we merged onto the Grand Central Parkway, he slid the partition the rest of the way shut.

Mom smiled. For a while she watched the traffic.

“Well, you’ve always wanted to come back east, anyway,” I said.

“I have?”

“Yes, Mom. You have.”

She sat back. Then, in an unhurried voice, she told me a few details about the move. What she’d kept, what she’d sold, what she’d given away. Then about the house, which she’d eventually managed to unload for a profit. I asked whether she had any second thoughts about coming to live in New York.

She didn’t answer, just held up her purse. It wasn’t a purse, actually, but an old Fabricus bookbag stretched until the zipper wouldn’t close. Inside, I could see a stack of presents. “I’m looking forward to spending more time with my grandchildren,” she said.

When the car idled at the tolls, she gazed out the window. It was a startlingly clear afternoon under a range of billowing cumulus; in the distance, Lower Manhattan shone in a precipice of light. She couldn’t have picked a more inviting day to begin her new existence.

“By the way,” she said. “When did I ever tell you I wanted to come back to the East?”

“You told me in Michigan.”

“Well, frankly, I don’t remember.” She laughed. “Or maybe I just don’t think about it anymore.”

From the side window, I could see the Chase Manhattan tower shielding the Physico building from the north. It was a Saturday, and I needed to go back into work to run a few simulations.

She set her hand on my shoulder. “What are you thinking about?”

“You once told me how beautiful New Jersey was. You told me you hoped I’d get to eat fried clams on the beach.”

She looked at me.

“Right before Dad turned down the job,” I said.

“Oh, that.” Her face darkened. Then she composed herself. She laughed again, turning back to the window. “Well,” she said. “I don’t think about that anymore, either.”

—

WHEN WE’D FINALLY made it down to the Village, I pointed to the bulging bag of presents in her hand. “Have you been reading up on shock and awe, Mom?”

She blushed. “I just want to make sure they’re happy that their grandmother is here.” After a moment, she added, “Or I can parcel them out, if you think that’s better.”

“Of course they’re happy you’re here, Mom. Even without presents.”

“Oh, sweetheart. You must not understand children yet.”

At the house, Emmy and Niels were back from school. The two of them hadn’t seen their grandmother in a while, and of course they were a bit bashful when I opened the door to the kitchen. Mom burst in the way she always does when she’s nervous, letting out an overenthusiastic squeal. She clutched the misshapen bag to her side so that she bumped against the trim of the narrow door and caromed into the room like a pinball clanging off the bell. The kids looked up tentatively. But in a moment she was around the back of the counter and hugging them both, kissing them on their clean little heads while Niels reached up to hug her and Emmy tried to get in one last bite of Cheerios. Meanwhile, Anna-Maria, the Ecuadorian nanny who’d started with us the month before, made her way out from behind the range island, smiling ecstatically, as though it were her own mother arriving without warning from a thousand miles away, and kissing her own two children on the head.

Mom was right. Within a minute, they were tearing through the things she’d brought. She slipped behind Niels the way she’d slipped behind Lorenzo at the airport. I turned away.

They were books, of course. Mostly art books.

That night, on the sofa, the three of them sat together reading them. Lorenzo had already driven Anna-Maria home. In those days, our kids liked to squabble with each other over just about anything, from whose milk had been filled closer to the top to which one of them had seen the quadruple peanut in the bag; but now they sat adoringly, one on each side of their grandmother. Like two disciples on the Giotto calendar page that used to look up at me from the floor of the Country Squire. Niels was on the right, where, just like in the painting, Mom was rubbing his foot; Emmy was on the left. Both of them had on their obligatory halos. Niels was Peter, of course (not that I know the first thing about such matters); but Emmy, it occurred to me, was Judas. Not because she would ever have betrayed anybody but because I could see that she was afflicted with certain thoughts that neither her brother nor any of the rest of us would ever have.

Mom calmed her. It was obvious. Emmy’s brow was unwrinkled. Emmy’s an Andret, through and through, but at that moment the Pierce quarter of her seemed to be exerting the same effect on her that in my own calmer moments it still exerts on me — the buffer against the storm of Andret genome that has tormented me for as long as I can remember.

One of the things I’d learned by that point, in fact, and for which I was already deeply grateful, was that Audra calmed me in the same way that my mother used to calm my father. On the day Mom arrived in New York, Audra and I already owned a house in the country but hadn’t yet bought the one we live in now, all the way upstate and out of the way. Lorenzo’s Town Car still sped me wherever I wanted to go. The stewards of legendary fortunes still called me every day. And yet the moment I took the seat next to Mom on the ride back from LaGuardia and closed the window to the horn-blaring cacophony of Terminal B, I felt myself enveloped in a nearly forgotten embrace. Really, it was a weighty thing. As we merged onto the Grand Central Parkway, the thick auto glass hushed everything, like a blizzard. There in front of me was the comforting bald shine of Lorenzo’s Mediterranean occiput, rising cheerily from the headrest, and there around me was the childhood scent of my mother’s soap. A peace fell over me like one I’d not known in years. I’d actually felt the urge to weep. But I’d turned to the window instead, where the landscape, looking strangely war torn, slid soundlessly past. My mother must have realized what I was feeling. Her familiar voice, in a cadence of reply — though I hadn’t asked a question — had said simply, “It’s good to be here, honey.”

—

ON MONDAY, WE gave her a tour of her new apartment. It was two blocks from our house. Mom had stayed the weekend in our guest room, where Niels and Emmy had made an encampment on her floor. Her first night in New York, I’d tucked the two of them in on a pair of sofa cushions arranged around my mother’s bedposts. On Monday morning when I checked in before work, I found three lumps in the bed. They were tight up against her like piglets. I could hear them all breathing: Niels as though climbing a hill, Emmy as though working the middle section of a test, and Mom as though reading the end of a Jane Austen novel. On the pillow, she opened one eye, smiled, and closed it again.