Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

But the next evening, when we walked her through the new apartment, she said, “This won’t do.”

“What won’t, Mom?”

We weren’t two minutes into the tour. I was showing her the kitchen, which had been remodeled by an Upper East Side firm, while Audra showed the balcony to the kids. Mom pointed below the marble counter at the two stainless-steel dishwashers. “I wash my dishes by hand, honey,” she said. “Always have.”

“Well, now you have a machine to do it.”

We tried unsuccessfully to unlatch the handle of one of them, until I realized it was a sliding-drawer model. When at last we succeeded in getting it open, the electronics lofted up a pleasing arpeggio with the strangely recognizable cadence of “Well, Hello There, You!”

“Hmm,” she said, peering over her reading glasses. “You know, you get things cleaner by hand.”

“Well, now you don’t have to.”

“I want to.”

“Ah.”

“And I want the kids to, also. That’s how you raise them. Not with dishwashers that pull out of the wall, and not with”—she hesitated—“a string of nannies.” She used her hip to nudge the dishwasher closed, and it beeped a down-cadenced version of the same spry melody. With her glasses off she looked at me queerly, as though a strange but no-longer-threatening animal stood before her. “Of course you already know all this,” she said.

—

AFTER TWO DAYS in the apartment, she invited us for dinner. Niels and Emmy had gone over ahead of time for their first Grandma outing, which we were surprised to discover had included the preparation of the meal. When I entered with Audra, Niels lost no time in informing us that they’d gone out to buy yesterday’s bread at Pret A Manger, reviving its crust in the oven, along with last week’s tomatoes from D’Agostino, which Mom had let Niels sauté in a pan and then Emmy cook into a frittata. At the center of the table it sat on a metal stand like a wedding cake. Mom pointed around the corner at Emmy, who, like someone else’s child, was already scrubbing the pan in the sink. Audra’s jaw actually dropped.

Mom moved behind Niels again, but again I wouldn’t let her catch my eye.

—

AND THAT WAS how we lived, for a good long while anyway. Audra, who’s always worked particularly hard, left for the publisher’s every morning at seven. Forty-five minutes later, I walked the kids to school, then made my way back to the apartment, where Lorenzo would be waiting out front with the day’s customaries: a triple espresso, a chocolate croissant from Flakey’s, and the usual grooming kit unzipped to a set of German nail clippers and a Japanese razor. (On the far side of the pivoting desk there was also a pack of flossers, a tin of breath mints, a bottle of mouthwash, a shaving mirror, and four newspapers, all of them arranged on the tray like the tools of a particularly well-informed but hedonistic dentist.) In the afternoon, Anna-Maria delivered the kids to my mother’s. At 8:30 or 9:00 in the evening, Lorenzo dropped me back at the house.

Mom changed everything. It wasn’t that luxury didn’t agree with her; it was just that she hated wasting anything at all — envelopes, tea, money of any denomination, time, or intellect. Squandering what the world had allowed us was to her the great sin of our epoch (a point with which I’ve come to agree). Within weeks, she knew most of the used-goods stores in Lower Manhattan. And the kids went along on her shopping trips as though exploring a newly charted land. Niels readied himself with a map. Emmy (who needs no map) brought along a reporter’s notebook. One afternoon I opened it to a page that contained a matrix of milk, ice cream, and butter prices at all the markets in the neighborhood. She’d figured everything by the ounce.

Naturally, Mom also availed them of the art museums. I knew the more prominent ones myself — the Met, MoMA, the Guggenheim — from the money-related events I’d attended in their inner rooms. But Mom went further. She succeeded in doing for the kids what she’d once hoped to do for Paulie and me, on all those drives to Chicago. And the kids didn’t even seem to mind.

Over the first months, they became familiar with just about every landmark, major or minor, on the New York art scene, from the Whitney to the Neue to the Folk Art. They went to the Chelsea and the Rubin and a whole slew of private galleries whose buzzered doors she scoffed at but still entered. The Frick didn’t allow children, but she talked them in anyway. On weekends they went by subway to the Museum of African Art in Harlem and the Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, where they picnicked from a wicker basket she’d bought from a street cart. I could well imagine all these expeditions: the kids, watching the paintings, being watched by Mom; Mom waiting saintlike for any sign of interest.

Emmy no doubt heartened her. Emmy will absorb whatever is presented — music, art, mathematics — and store it in the permanent collection. Niels will flit around like a bee. But when the bee settles on a flower, it settles.

I could imagine Mom charting their futures.

“They’re interesting,” she said to me one day. “They’re not like you were at that age. Or Paulie, for that matter.”

“Well, they’ve got plenty of Audra in them, too.”

“Yes, yes, you’re right.” She nodded, as though the thought were new to her. “I can see that.”

“Niels is like you,” I offered. “More well rounded.”

She eyed me.

“I mean that as a compliment.”

“Thank you.” She smiled, but after a moment, the smile thinned. “Emmy is the one — the one I worry about.” She touched her head. “She could—”

“Yes, yes, I know.”

“But she won’t,” said my mother. “We just won’t let her.”

—

OUR COUNTRY PLACE in Litchfield is an eighteenth-century colonial with a hundred acres of oak and maple out back. Out front is a brook whose course has been nudged with a backhoe so that it makes two gurgling passes beneath a pair of Japanese footbridges beside the driveway. At the loop of the bank, the old carriage house has been converted into an office — yes, the pads, the pencils, and the caramels, though not the boxes.

That’s where I was when the phone rang one Saturday a couple of years ago. “Who’s this?” I said, hearing a woman say my name on the line. Her voice prodded something in my memory.

“Cleopatra Biettermann,” came the reply.

“Do I know you?”

“My husband and I are old friends of your father’s. Cle Wells was my name then.” She paused, taking a dramatic breath. “Your dad’s not doing well, you know.”

“How do you mean?”

“He told me that the two of you had some kind of falling-out. That’s why I called.”

“How’s he not doing well?”

“When I spoke to him recently, he didn’t sound very good.”

I was still trying to place her voice. “Well,” I said. “He can sound that way.”

“I know he can.” She paused. “Hans, your father is an extraordinary man. He’s unlike anyone either of us has ever known.”

“Well, on that point, we agree.”

“Oh—” she said, inhaling sharply.

“What?”

“Nothing.” Then she added, “For just a second there, you reminded me of him.”

We were both silent. Then I said, “So, how exactly is he not doing well?”

“I think you need to go see him,” she said.

ON THE PHYSICO jet, the waiter served a dry-aged New York strip with raspberry reduction and a plate of miniature asparagus spears under dill. In Detroit, I settled into a stick-shift Audi. I could have landed at an airport closer to the house, but I was looking forward to the drive. The GPS said 112 minutes.