A Doubter's Almanac (66 page)

At one point, from the porch, a snore drifted through the wall. As it did, a look of pain crossed my mother’s face.

Hay set down his tea. “There’s no use denying it,” he said. “He was a difficult man. We both know that.” He smiled musingly at her, then looked over at me. “And you, Hans—you know it, too, I’m sure.”

I nodded.

“But there was something in him that a few of us responded to, as well. Powerfully. You and I did, anyway, Helena. It was more than just his genius.”

“In a strange way,” said my mother, “it might have been his honesty.”

Hay rubbed his hands slowly together. “I guess I agree with that,” he said. “I don’t know if many other people would call it that, but I believe that’s what it was. Clarity, at least. Incorruptible vision. He had an unwillingness to ease anyone’s pain, including his own. No—maybe not an unwillingness. A complete
inability
to ease it. His or anyone else’s.”

My mother looked down.

Hay broke off a cookie and chewed it, and my mother poured more tea. “I’d always wished—” she said, setting aside her cup. “I’d always wished that when you came all the way out here to help him like that, that he would have had something left of his ambition. Enough to accept the job, anyway.” She touched her napkin to her cheek. “Or enough humility. Maybe humility was what he needed at that moment, more than anything else.” She smiled faintly, perhaps at the thought of my father being humble. “I know it’s long past,” she said, “but I’ve always wished it could have happened differently. I’ve always meant to thank you for your graciousness, too, Knudson. I imagine there must have been opposition. I should have thanked you years ago.” She touched at her lips. “It meant a lot, to all of us.”

“It did,” I said.

Hay looked up.

“Anyway,” she went on. “I suppose things probably wouldn’t have been—”

He rose, brought a box of tissue from the counter, and reseated himself next to her.

“Darn it,” she said. “I didn’t—”

“It’s fine, Helena.”

Another fitful snore came through the wall.

It was Hay’s small chuckle at the sound that allowed my mother, I think, to finally reclaim her poise. I must say, she was of striking beauty as she did. She blinked her eyes, wiped her cheeks, and then produced her familiar, forthright features again, as though they were items she’d merely stowed for a moment in her purse. When she sat straight, she resembled the woman she must have been when she first walked into the mathematics department offices, forty years before. And Hay, too, as he held himself squarely in the chair beside her and touched his pressed cuffs, one then the other, looked like a man of some distant and formal period. It was a visible transformation for both of them.

“I can’t help thinking,” she went on, “that another chance would have rekindled him. Would have spurred him to accomplish one more thing that would have been worthy of his talent.” She raised her chin. “That we all would have been—that we all would have been—even the children—”

She turned to the window.

“I’m sorry, Helena.”

“If only he’d been humble enough when he needed to be.” She was still looking away.

Hay cleared his throat.

She turned toward him, dabbing again at her eyes. “Thank you for your courage, Knudson. The Andrets will always be grateful.”

He reached out then and touched her shoulder, lightly, before withdrawing his hand. Then he leaned back and took a protracted sip of tea—I could see him deliberating. As he set the cup back onto the saucer, he looked up at her with an expression of kindness. “I still don’t believe—” he began. “I still don’t believe in holding an important conversation on the telephone. And I didn’t in those days, either, Helena. That’s why I came out here to see him.”

Mom was honestly surprised, I think, by the words that followed. He laid them out precisely, as was his unremitting nature, all the while holding out the box of tissues. When he’d finished, his hand went forward briefly again and touched her on the shoulder, then descended to the table, where it closed for a moment, rather tenderly, over her wrist. Then it retreated. Either the gesture or the news seemed to still her—to still her deeply—as if he’d plucked from her shoulders a lifelong cloak of worry.

There were tears in her eyes. Presently she turned to me, a smile emerging almost involuntarily. “Did you know this, too, Hans?”

“No, Mom.” I took her hand. “I didn’t. But I suppose it doesn’t surprise me.”

What Hay had told us was that when he’d made the trip up to the cabin all those years ago, he’d done so only to alert my father to a paper he’d heard about, a paper that Benedek Fodor was about to publish. This had been the sole reason for his visit. There had never been any offer to return to Princeton.

Drake

T
HAT NIGHT, WHEN
I bent to give him his medicine, he startled. “They beat me,” he said.

He twisted his head, trying to shield it with the cast.

“It’s all right, Milo,” said Mom.

His body was shaking.

“It’s all right, Dad. It’s us—it’s Hans and Mom. We’re not going to hurt you.”

—

I
N THE MORNING,
Danny Gandapur arrived again. He knelt by the pillows with a tiny electric saw and cut away the cast. Beneath it, Dad’s arm was green and yellow, still bent in two places, covered everywhere with a strangely plush layer of hair. The doctor wrapped it in a sling and drew the cinches tight.

That afternoon, the pain returned. He arched his back and moaned. The fist of his good hand, bony and gray, beat the floor.

“Come on, Dad,” I said. “It’s time for your medicine.”

“I don’t want any.”

He went on writhing. I waited a few moments, then slid in the needle. For a time, I had to grip his fist to keep the bones from breaking on the floor.

—

“H
E AND MY
mom used to lie in this same bed,” I said that night. Audra had arrived a few hours before. “They used to lie here worrying about Paulie and me.”

She reached over and took my hand. I’d just come upstairs after checking on Dad. There was a breeze outside, and below us, the waves were laying themselves against the pebbles. I didn’t feel sorrow, really, just a washing sort of fatigue.

“And one day Emmy will be in
her
own bed,” she said, “and Niels will be in his, worrying about
their
kids. It’s strange to think about.”

The wind was blowing through the big pines, brushing their needles along the roof. “You know,” I said, “it’s pretty much impossible to define time. Nobody has ever succeeded.”

“That’s very strange,” she said.

“I suppose so. The physicists have been working on it the longest, and I guess they’ve come the closest.”

“Well?”

“They say it’s the thing you measure with a clock.”

She laughed. “You know who once said that same thing to me?”

“Who?”

“Emmy. That exact thing. She must have read it somewhere.”

“Of course she did.”

“But you know who thought like that, too, don’t you? Your father. Your father and your daughter—they both get absorbed by the same kinds of things.”

She turned over on her side then, which is what she does before sleep. I didn’t want her to. I felt like I was losing her into the sea.

“Aud?”

“I’m right here.”

“I think pain is something like that. I don’t think Dad believes it truly exists. Not the way
we
think of it, anyway. Maybe it exists as a measurement of suffering—like a clock does—but not as an essence. I think he truly believes that there’s something he hasn’t figured out about it yet. If he can think about it long enough, maybe he can define it, and then maybe he’ll be able to alter it. I think that’s what he’s doing down there.”

—

D
AD WOKE, BLINKED
his eyes, and turned onto his side. He took a sip from his glass, then raised his face. When he saw Audra behind me, he started to smile. She stepped close, knelt beside him, and kissed him on the cheek.

Even now I saw the pleasure on his face.

When I withdrew the needle, he rolled back down and lifted his neck to see her again. Finally, he let his head fall. “Where the wood ducks rest,” he said.

He slept for a moment.

“Where they rest,” he said. “I lie down on the water.”

“It’s okay, Dad.”

He pointed at the shelves.

“I’m sorry,” said Paulie.

She was standing in the doorway.

After a moment, Dad said, “What was that, sweetheart?”

“I wanted to say that, Dad—I wanted to tell you I’m sorry.”

Audra rose and left.

Dad gestured to Paulie. She crossed and stood before him.

“Were
you
ever sorry?” she said.

“For what?”

“For everything. For leaving us.”

With her fingers, she was worrying her skirt. He raised his arm, and she knelt to let him take her hand. “I was sorry a long time before that,” he said.

—

“
F
ORETHOUGHT
,”
HE SAID
the next morning. He turned toward me. “That’s the word I was looking for.”

“Wow, Dad. You’re awake. That’s quite a good memory.”

“They do not,” he said slowly, “tax their lives”—he took a breath—“with
forethought
of grief.”

“What is that?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s a poem,” said Audra from the doorway.

He lifted his eyes.

Then he let them fall. I took his hand. The fingers were chilly, and as he drifted, they squeezed mine in a slow rhythm, the way Niels’s used to do when he was first walking, his tiny fingers gripping my own—tighter, looser, tighter—as he labored to cross a room. “I should have—” he said, waking.

The eyelids fluttered.

Later in the morning, he turned. We stayed on the porch with him, but he no longer lifted his head. Mom propped him on the pillows. His eyes were open, but they wandered, the pupils darting back and forth as though tiny insects were hovering in the air in front of him. Early in the afternoon, his mouth twisted and his hand went to his belly. It pressed down along the flank.

He moaned. “Tell Earl,” he said. “Tell him I’m ready.”

“Earl’s gone, Dad.”

He gritted his teeth, looked up at the ceiling, searched weakly with his hand along the flesh.

Then he rose all the way to his elbows.

“Go get him,” he said. “Tell him I’m ready to travel.”

—

T
HE CIGARETTE CASE
was still in the refrigerator, and inside it were the instructions. From the compartment behind the cigarettes, I pulled out two syringes. They were already filled.

That afternoon, I gave Dad the first one. Then I sat down and watched. I, Hans Euler Andret, fellow mathematician, fellow addict, fellow lonely and yet ever-hopeful soul, gave him Earl Biettermann’s dose and then lowered myself onto the floor beside him. His face grew quiet. The writhing ceased. The black, withered hand came up and rested in a loose fist along his belly, which in a small bit of mercy had finally shrunk tight. He was at last being allowed to immaterialize.

I could see that behind his eyes he had gone somewhere worthy of his interest. The lids fluttered. They were closed, but he wasn’t asleep. He was resting calmly.

I wondered if it was mathematics.

I wondered if that’s what he was doing. I hoped, as I sat on the floor beside him, that what he was witnessing behind those lids was the great unbaring of his clue. The way Kekulé, dreaming, had chanced upon his Ouroboros; or Howe, the spears of his cannibals; or Einstein, moving swiftly down the mountain, his transformation of the stars.

On and on he traveled. For the afternoon and into the evening.

Near dusk, clouds moved in, and the wind grew stronger through the screens. My mother and Paulie and Audra came and went. I laid another blanket across him.

At the poles of the earth, time ceases to exist. Or rather, time becomes meaningless because it exists in every form at once. It is always dawn and always dusk. Always noon and always midnight. The reason for this is that, at the poles, every time zone coincides. At those two points—at those
singularities,
as Forsyth would have called them—our construction of the familiar fails.

All through the evening, he lay beneath the blankets, a faint tremor on his face, his bruised fist opening and closing. My mother took long turns with him. Paulie did, too.

Not long after nightfall, his lids opened, and he drew a harsh breath. His back arched and he cried out. My mother took his hand.

After a time, she rose and left the room. When she returned, she was holding all the other vials from upstairs. “This will be enough,” she said.

I looked up at her.

“It’s okay, sweetheart,” she said. “It really is. We’re just going to help him now.”

—

W
HEN SHE EMERGED
later into the living room, she took hold of Paulie’s hand. We all walked together onto the porch and sat down beside him. We stayed there like that, the three of us arranged around him.

I hope he went back to the woods. Back to the great leafy woods of his childhood, where he’d first known solace.

The Battle of Trafalgar

“I
SHALL NEVER
give up!” I shouted from the bow. “I shall never give up!”

“That’s the stuff!” roared my father. “That’s my boy!” I saw his glance move to Paulie, who’d turned away at his words.

“That’s my girl!”

Now she looked back at him.

We were moored in a muddy cove a quarter mile to the north of the cabin. On their maiden voyage, the
Victory
and the
Royal Sovereign
had proved seaworthy, and now Paulie and I had parked the
Victory
beneath the shade of a weeping willow that arched over the shallows. At the deep end of a rotting dock twenty yards to the east bobbed the
Royal Sovereign
.