Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

“I would have to assume as an attack.”

“Against you or your father?”

“Against both of us, I guess.”

“Well, that’s upsetting.”

“Of course it is. I don’t like to think that I have enemies out there the way he does.”

“Your dad has enemies?”

I laughed. “Dad has nothing but enemies. He makes them pretty much everywhere he goes. Pretty much everyone he ever works with. Pretty much every place he ever works. It’s easier to count the people who aren’t his enemies.”

“May I ask you something?”

“Yes.”

“Is that why you try so hard not to make them yourself?”

“Possibly.”

He nodded, then sat back in his chair. For a time, we sat there together silently. Then he said, “Do you feel any better now?”

“Why would I feel better?”

“Because you told me about this. I would have thought there’d be other things much more difficult for you to talk about, but you talked about all of them without too much effort — at least effort that I noticed. This one — a doubt about a proof your father wrote before you were even born — this one took all your will. I can see it. Your wife’s already left, and it’s the very end of your time here.”

“More difficult than a doubt about the validity of his work? For a man like my father? Nothing could be more difficult.”

“I meant for a man like you .”

I laughed. “I don’t know why it’s so hard. It shouldn’t be.”

He smiled. “You do feel a little better now, though, don’t you?”

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

“Confession is most of what we do,” he said. “Isn’t that funny? We have this state-of-the-art clinic. We have this highly trained staff. But in the end, confession might be just about the only cure we offer.”

—

ONE SPRING MORNING, after I’d been back in New York for a few months, my phone rang at work: Dr. Gandapur had found Dad asleep on a bench down by the water with a bottle next to him. This was March, and the lake was still capped by an uncracked plate of ice. Dad was dressed in black wing tips, dark socks, and a pair of boxers. Nothing else. The wing tips were his old teaching shoes from Princeton. He’d shined them up.

“Well, the good news is that he’s an extremely hardy creature,” said Dr. Gandapur. “In fact, such an insult would have killed anything less. I think he was out there for at least a couple of hours.”

“But he’s all right now?”

“He seems to be, actually.” Over the crackling line, he chuckled. “He’s drinking a very cold bourbon right now.”

“Well, good. That’s a relief.”

There was a pause.

“But I am indeed afraid,” he said. “Well, to put it this way, is what you are doing out there — I mean, your current work in New York City — how difficult might it be to put it aside for a bit?”

FOR A WHILE, as Mom got used to Manhattan, she was at the Perry Street house every day. In the morning, she’d eat breakfast with the kids, then walk them to school. While they were gone, she’d bustle about. By 3:30, when they clomped back in through the front door, she’d already have made plans for the afternoon. First they’d put away their things, and after they’d had a snack and cleaned up the kitchen, they’d head out. They liked to walk uptown as a trio. Small galleries and secondhand shops in the old neighborhoods. Tea in the Russian pastry shops. Exercise in the public parks. Really, it was as though the two kids we knew had stepped out the door one day and been replaced by the resourceful offspring of pioneers.

As for me: well, it hadn’t been that long since Stillwater, but I was managing to stay clean.

Every morning, Lorenzo drove me to Physico, where the Shores-Durbans and I still spent the day cutting tiny pieces out of the biggest, juiciest financial steaks in the world. I’d lost some of my drive, I suppose. But I didn’t miss it — not yet, anyway. When the Town Car dropped me back at the house in the evening, I’d walk to the gym with Audra. Mom was with the kids then, too, strolling on the High Line or reading aloud to them on the living-room rug. The Wind in the Willows or Art Through the Ages . She supervised their generally sparse practice sessions on the piano. With Emmy, she was also drawing a little, although Emmy seemed to have inherited none of that particular aspect of my father’s talent. For his part, Niels was turning into an engineer rather than a mathematician. Even at his age I could see it. Mom saw it, too, as clearly as I did, and the relief she took in it was evident. From the public library she brought home books on dams and engines and airplanes. Audra might not have noticed the difference between engineering and mathematics, but to Mom and me it could not have been more obvious. Cricket and baseball.

One afternoon I watched Niels build a rubber-band rifle from a broomstick. I registered the sight with relief, the way my father must have registered the sight of his own son, at almost the same age, sitting under the mulberry tree rescaling Euclid’s proof on the infinitude of primes.

“Look at it,” Mom said to me one night after the kids were asleep. She held up Niels’s weapon, which looked rather capable. He’d filed down the end of the broomstick and cut notches in the tip, then duct-taped a row of clothespins as triggers. Mom and I were on the terrace. It had been a warm day, and she’d poured herself a glass of wine. She set it down and sighted along the barrel of the gun at the lightly dressed walkers who were making the midevening transition from the restaurants to the bars. “Niels is so excited,” she said.

“They live in such a different world now. Everything’s old hat for them. But this —this is new.”

“It’s the kind of thing that boys did during my childhood.” She sighed. “Now they’ve all seen everything.”

A group of young women drifted by beneath us, their phones glowing in the dark. All my life I’ve loved sitting with my mother, watching the world move insignificantly along.

“I know that when you were that age,” she said, “you played in the backyard.”

“It’s what I had.”

“And what a blessing that was, thank you. Your childhood was an open canvas.” She set down the gun and took a sip of wine. “Canvas and paint — and a few math lessons — that’s what we gave you.” Then she added, less firmly, “And not even that much, really. This generation — sometimes I wonder.”

“People have been saying that for a thousand years.”

She frowned. There was a pair of newspapers at her feet, and she worked off their rubber bands and hooked one of them into a trigger. When she fired, the rubber band whizzed up over our heads and shivered through the halo of the streetlamp. It paused at the apex, then wobbled lamely down to the street and brushed the shoulder of a man walking past. He touched his sleeve and looked up.

Mom ducked.

I waved.

“Wow,” I said when she sat up again. “You seem — I don’t know.”

“What? Tipsy?”

“No. Happy.”

“I am happy. I’ve been quite happy.” She looked out at the busy sidewalk. Then she added, “Not just here, though, Hans. For years now.”

For several moments, we were silent. I believe we were thinking the same thing.

“Mom,” I finally said. “He’s sick. Things have gotten worse.”

“I know, sweetheart.”

“How did you know?”

“Paulie told me.”

“It has to be — I don’t know, upsetting.”

“Of course it is. It’s terribly upsetting.”

She pulled out the other rubber band and hooked it into the clothespin. But then she set the whole thing down on the floor. “I’m not going out there,” she said. “I just want you to know that.”