One More Thing (19 page)

When we were in the fourth grade, an old man burst into our classroom one day waving his rumpled little plaid arms and screaming. It might have been adorable if we had been old enough to find older people adorable, and also if it hadn’t been a little bit scary.

“Stop! Is he saying anything about trains?! About train times?! Stop!”

Our teacher, Mr. Hunt, had a mustache and an inner calmness about him, and we never noticed that then he must have only been in his twenties. He put his arm lightly across the old man’s back and led him to a big wooden chair in the corner of our class, a chair that none of us ever actually sat in but that might look to a visitor like a seat of honor.

“How can we help you?” asked Mr. Hunt.

“Are you asking them questions about trains?” asked the old man.

“No,” said Mr. Hunt. “We’re talking about geometry today. Can I help you with something? Would you like a glass of water?”

Mr. Hunt had an accent that my parents identified as a working-class one from Dorchester, Massachusetts. Some of us thought it made him sound cool, and some of us thought
it made him sound like an old lady. Either one may have been why the old man seemed to calm down a little bit whenever Mr. Hunt spoke.

“Did he ever,” exhaled the old man, who now rotated toward the class from the chair as if he were an amateur actor with stage fright in a community musical who was nonetheless following through on the play’s plan to break the fourth wall, “ask you about trains? About trains leaving stations at different times?”

“Yes, I have,” said Mr. Hunt.

“What textbook did you use?
Problems and Solutions Four
?”

“I got it from the internet.”

A few of us gasped and then realized that Mr. Hunt didn’t seem embarrassed about this, and then realized that we, too, got a lot of good stuff from the internet. Why shouldn’t Mr. Hunt?

“The internet!” wailed the old man, his head sinking into his little hand. “No no no no no.”

We all just watched him breathe for a second, like we had with the turtle our class had adopted earlier that year.

“Can I talk to you privately?” the man asked Mr. Hunt.

“Anything you have to say to me, you can say in front of my students,” said Mr. Hunt. “Within the parameters of acceptable language.”

“That’s my problem,” said the man.

He stared at us all at once, somehow, with a look that said that we knew what he was talking about, but we didn’t.

“A man leaves Chicago at twelve p.m. on a train heading for Cleveland at sixty miles per hour,” he said quickly. “Another man leaves Cleveland at one p.m. heading for Chicago on a train going eighty-five miles per hour. At what time will the two trains cross paths?”

One kid, Arush, raised his hand. “Approximately—”

“I know the goddamn answer!”

“Language,”
said Mr. Hunt.

“And there’s no ‘approximately’ in math,” said the old man. “It’s math. The answers are exact.”

“The answers are exact,” echoed Mr. Hunt, somewhat faintly. “Put your hand down, Arush.”

“That’s my problem,” said the old man, sitting back down in the chair. “I wrote it. That was the one thing I did. The one thing. When you’re young, you think everything you do is just the beginning. But when you’re old, no matter who you are, you realize you only did one or two things.”

We were silent. We had never heard anything like this before.

Some of us wondered what the one or two things we would do would be.

The old man smiled like it was over, but it wasn’t.

“What I
did
not,
could
not, expect and
should never have
expected was that it would become the most famous math problem in the goddamn United States!”

“Language.”

“Pardon … Fine. What I did not expect was that every textbook in America would rip it off from the one I worked for and that I would end up taking home thirty-five dollars, yes, that’s right, kids, a whopping
thirty-five dollars
for what would become the most famous math problem in America. Does that sound fair to you? What does that work out to per year?”

Arush raised his hand and Mr. Hunt signaled him to put it down.

“Mister?”

I spoke with what I believed was the right balance of politeness
and confidence to get the old man’s attention. “Sir? We actually learned the problem a little differently. Does that possibly make it different, in your opinion?”

The old man listened.

“We weren’t asked where the trains would meet. We were just asked which would get to its destination faster.”

“And,” Mr. Hunt chimed in, “I taught it to them with Boston and New York.”

“Everybody changes it,” said the old man. “But when I came in here yelling about how they stole my problem, you all knew which problem I was yelling about, didn’t you?”

We did.

“So that says a lot, doesn’t it? If after all these years, you can recognize the basic spirit of something?”

It did.

“Would you care to tell us how you came up with it?” asked Mr. Hunt.

The man settled back into the big chair, and we could see how small he really was.

“Spring 1952,” he said. “I was deployed in Europe, this is postwar—I was in the war, too, but I was sent back as part of a rebuilding effort in Belgium. I was homesick, more than during the war. I’m not afraid to admit that. I wasn’t homesick during the war. I got married in between, to my wife.”

He said the next part differently, and he looked out the window as he did: “
June
.

“I went again to earn extra money so we could build a family. I had my textbook job, and I could do that from anywhere, so this was like having two jobs. I was there ten months and one week before I was able to go home. I flew from Antwerp to London to New York—Idlewild, it was called then, the airport,
before JFK died, before there was a JFK, well before JFK was JFK, anyway—and then to Chicago.

“Our home was in Columbus, Ohio. When I landed I phoned her from the airport and told her that I was taking the train right away from Chicago to Columbus, and it was only five hours away, she … 
June
.

“She said she couldn’t wait that long, now that I was so close. Can you believe that? Five more hours, after ten months, and she said she couldn’t wait! She said she was going to hop on a train going toward me, too, and we would just have to meet in the middle. I said, June, that’s crazy! But she insisted. And the real crazy thing is, secretly, I had been thinking the same thing.

“You have to understand what it was to be separated from someone back then. You’re across an ocean; the world was just at war; now the Russians say they’re going to bury us with a shoe. There are no rules anymore. And there’s no telephone in your pants. You don’t get news very often, and when you do, your heart pounds because it might be bad news. After all that, we couldn’t take not being in sight of one another for a second more than we needed to.

“I did the math, and I kept doing it again and again on the train, how many minutes it would take to meet each other, estimating her train and my train at all these different speeds … Just looking at it every which way on the back of the train stationery envelope. They had stationery on trains back then—can you believe that? Everything was better then. Not everything,” he said, looking at Arush, “but so much. So many things. Anyway. I don’t know how I ever thought of it because I was only thinking about June, but I think your brain gets bigger at times like that because there was another part of my brain that thought, Boy, this would make one hell of a textbook problem.

“We met on the platform of the train station in Spencer, Ohio, exactly three hours and one minute after I got on the train, and we kissed for eleven minutes. They were the best eleven minutes of my life.”

The girls and even a couple of the boys in the class applauded. The best-looking boy in the class, Tyler, made eye contact with Amanda, the best-looking girl in the class, and they both mouthed
Awwww
together, as though the two of them together had somehow had something to do with this.

Maybe Amanda wasn’t the best-looking girl in the class. Maybe she was just the blondest.

“Wasn’t it two guys in the textbook?” said one of four kids in our class named Matt. “Not, like, a guy and a girl?”

“I changed that part. I thought if it was a man and a woman, kids would get distracted and not focus on the math. Two men was a simpler thing back then. And anyway,” said the man, “haven’t you ever heard of artistic license? The point is, it’s
my
life and
my
story. And it’s my problem.”

“It truly is a beautiful problem,” said Mr. Hunt. “I mean, the math problem—not your problem. Your problem, we all hope you resolve it and get what you deserve.”

“Thank you.”

“But just in case,” said Mr. Hunt, “look around at this classroom. Look. Generations of children have learned math from what you did, generations are a little bit smarter because of what you wrote. Doesn’t that count for something?”

“It’s nice,” said the old man. “But shouldn’t I be paid for it? If people are well paid for reality television and cotton candy and dunking a basketball, why can’t they be well paid for changing young minds? I mean, wouldn’t more people do it? Bright, selfish people? Nothing wrong with being selfish. If more people thought they could make a fortune curing cancer, wouldn’t more
people be trying to do that?” He turned to Mr. Hunt. “You, I don’t need to explain this to you. You’re a teacher.”

Mr. Hunt smiled, a private type of smile that we all could see.

The old man made a lot of sense, except for the cotton candy reference. What was that about? Could you really make a lot of money that way? Maybe he knew someone who made a lot of money in candy. Or maybe he was just old, and you just had to ignore a few of the things he said to get to the wisdom.

I had an idea and raised my hand. I knew my idea was so good I didn’t even wait to be called on.

Bright Ben, they sometimes called me in name games at the beginnings of school years.

Maybe it had affected me.

“Do you still have it?”

“Have what?”

“The train stationery.”

“Maybe somewhere,” said the man. “Why?”

“You could use it to prove you came up with the problem,” I said. “Plus, you could even maybe sell the original to a museum.”

Mr. Hunt murmured something to himself that sure sounded to me like “Bright Ben.”

The old man coughed to clear his throat, even though it didn’t sound like there was anything to clear. “Yes, it’s in a shoebox. Or I think it is. I definitely know which one it would be in, anyway.”

He acted like there wasn’t anything more to say about this, even though there obviously was, so I spoke again, this time without raising my hand.

“Could you check?”

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe I could. That’s the box where I put … Where I put … Letters, you know. That’s where I
put …” There were now longer and longer pauses between each word. “Pictures … that’s …” Then that change in voice again:
“June.”

Then just breathing for a while.

“You know, I did go through the box once. And it wasn’t there. But I didn’t look very carefully, though. I didn’t even really look at all. Just put my hand in there and took it out. That’s not really looking.” He paused again. “But I’m not looking again. But maybe it’s there. You know, maybe I’ll look again. That’s not a bad idea.” But he said all of this like he knew he never would.

“Where do you live?” asked Mr. Hunt, gently. “Are you going to need any help getting back?”

“I live in Columbus. I told you that. I have my whole life. I figured I’d start out on the East Coast and then work my way back across the country. See with my own eyes just how big this problem is. Your class is my first stop, actually.”

“You came here straight from Columbus, Ohio?”

“Yes.”

“All the way to Massachusetts? All by yourself?”

“Yes.”

“That’s pretty far,” said Mr. Hunt with concern. “How long did it take?”

“Nice try, nice try,” said the old man. “You want your class to know how long my train took, you gotta pony up.”

Everybody laughed at once, and the laughter seemed to surprise, and then lift, the old man.

“It is … I guess what you said before, it is nice seeing that you all know it,” said the old man. “It’s a reward. Not the only reward, but … you take what you can get. I’ll try to get more, but you take what you can get. It’s done so much good for the world that I do feel like I deserve more. But, yeah, that’s a good thing.”

“It’s a good problem to have,” said Mr. Hunt.

“Huh? What?” said the old man.

“I guess,” said Mr. Hunt, louder and slower, “that in a way, it’s a good problem to have.”

“Oh. Ha,” said the old man.

He walked to the door and put his hand on the doorknob, and we all waited for him to turn it, but he left it there for a very long time.

It’s very suspenseful for someone to put a hand on a doorknob but not turn it, especially if he’s old.

“
June
 … the shoebox … good problem to have, too.”

He opened the door and left.

“What the hell does that mean?” said one of the other Matts.

“Language,”
said Mr. Hunt.

Johnny Depp, Fate, and the Double-Decker Hollywood Tour Bus