A Doubter's Almanac (47 page)

“Doesn’t matter,” Dad said gruffly. “They’ve been watering them all night anyway.”

I could see him fighting somebody. His head was circling. His chin had dropped, and he was looking out at the two of us over the tops of his glasses. Audra asked him about the Fields then, which warmed him for a moment. He was bred to charm any woman he met, and I understood that my fiancée was no exception. But when he finished telling the story of his trip to Warsaw, the head dropped again.

I leaned to Audra’s ear and whispered, “I’m sorry about this.”

“Don’t be. It’s not your fault.” She opened her hand on the table, and I took it.

“You’re lovely,” Dad said suddenly, reaching for her other hand.

She let him take it.

“You remind me of someone I used to know,” he said. “Look at her, Hans. Isn’t she a vision?”

“She is, Dad.”

“Whom do I remind you of, Mr. Andret?”

He looked right at her, his eyes fixed on her face. This didn’t rattle her in the least.

“Dad?”

He snapped his glance away. “It doesn’t matter.”

Then he descended into the true dark. He’d been picking at the cookies at the center of the table, but now he pushed them away and let his head fall all the way to his chest. He mumbled something. Then he snored. He woke cursing.

“Dad?”

“What?”

“Audra and I have to go now. I’ll get you a cab.”

“Good riddance, then.”

But he got up with us and pushed back his chair. As we crossed the room, I had to take his arm to steady him. The last thing he said, after we’d made it past the bar but before we reached the door, was “Fuck you, Hans.”

“Fuck you, Dad,” I answered, patting him carefully on the back.

But he hadn’t said it like in the old days. This time I could barely make out the words.

At the door, he stopped and made an attempt to gather himself. He tugged at his jacket, pulled his arm out of mine, and leaned heavily against the door to open it. Just after I went through, he said, “You two go wherever. I’m just going to sit at the bar for a moment and finish up some thinking I’ve been doing.”

—

T
HE WEDDING WAS
at the Winston Club in Sagaponack. Next to the grass tennis courts was a slate patio that turned out to be a landing pad. On the morning of the ceremony, four helicopters set down on it: Physico people, naturally, in their charcoal suits with slightly brighter ties. A couple of them might have been called my friends, but the rest had come mostly because they were beholden to me—to an underaged, corrupted mathematician who couldn’t help observe that the distribution of monochromatic attire around the bar was further evidence of the Shores-Durban nonrandomness of profit-motivated entities. Together, we’d been trimming the world of its shaggy billions.

Almost all the rest were Audra’s people, including the priest. Her people could be described as genteel, astute, and Texan. Country folk who read plenty of books and discussed them as though I’d read them, too, but who also knew how to mend a cattle fence. She and I had known each other not quite a year, a fact that seemed to worry half of them and please the other half.

Mom came by herself, and Paulie with a young man who might or might not have been a boyfriend—I could see my mother trying to arrive at a hopeful conclusion. By then, my sister had grown into a rather formal young woman. She was an associate professor now at Caltech in Pasadena. Homological algebra. She hugged me and kissed Audra on both cheeks, but I could see that she was no longer the girl who would catch a frog in her bare hands.

Well, I guess I wasn’t the boy who would do that anymore, either.

As the ceremony approached, I calmed myself with some Shores-Durban extrapolations, and just before I went into the anteroom I indulged one last therapeutic pull from the gangster-style hip flask that had been offered to me by one of my charcoal-suited pals. Then I walked back out to the tent. A few minutes later, Audra stepped up the well-mowed aisle on the arm of her father and took her place across from me on the platform. The priest leaned forward and caught my eye, as if to say,
Are you all right in there?
The next thing I noticed was Audra lowering her chin, also to catch my eye, edging it lower until I smiled. She winked.

My mind cleared.

There are several possible explanations for why our marriage has lasted. Audra is forgiving, for one. In the end, I’m as impulsive as my own father; but like him, also, I’m obliquely hoping to be led.

Also like my father, I’ve always known when the solution is at hand.

—

D
AD, AS YOU
might have guessed, didn’t make it to the wedding. I called him a week before, but all he said was “Yeah, I thought I answered that already.”

Analysis Situs

A
LITTLE MORE
than half a decade later, on a warm afternoon in September, Lorenzo drove me out to LaGuardia to pick up Mom. I’d offered to come get her myself in Ohio, in one of the Physico jets, but she’d assumed I was joking. I’m not sure why. The winter before, when I’d flown out in one of those same jets to help her prepare the house, she’d watched from the front seat of a sporty new Ford Focus as the pilot taxied me right up to the parking lot fence. (It had been hard enough to get her into that car in the first place, I should add: the salesman from the dealership had to promise her he wouldn’t try to sell the Country Squire to some other, unsuspecting soul—although my own guess is that by that point the old thing could barely have been sold for parts.)

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.”

—

W
HEN 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.”

—

O
N
M
ONDAY, 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.

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!”