A Doubter's Almanac (30 page)

“Hans Euler Andret,” he said, reading from his roll book.

“The middle name rhymes with
toiler,
actually
.”

He laughed.

“It really does, Mr. Dowater. Most people think it rhymes with
ruler
. But it rhymes with
oiler
. As in Leonhard
Oy
-ler.”

“You’re named after a mathematician, then.”

“After three of them, in fact.”

“I see.” He didn’t waste any time thinking about it. “Tell me, Hans, how do you expect to take a night course at the university while you’re enrolled during the day at North?”

His question wasn’t logical. I answered anyway. “My mother drives me.”

“Well, that’s awfully nice of her.”

“She’s taking classes, too.”

This seemed to catch his interest. “In what, may I ask?”

“Nursing.”

“She wants to go into the healing professions, then?”

I couldn’t decide on a response. It seemed to me that in reality she didn’t want anything of the sort, that in fact she’d enrolled in nursing school only so that she could drive me to my course in Fourier analysis. But this didn’t fully make sense to me, either, since her goal had always seemed to be to extend her children’s education beyond mathematics. In fact, what I secretly suspected was that she was driving me to Columbus every Tuesday and Thursday evening because she hoped that while I was there I would sign up for a course in art history.

“I suppose she does,” I said.

He nodded. “And tell me, Hans, how’s it here for you?”

“It’s good, Mr. Dowater.”

“Excellent, then.” He looked up wryly. “And the other inmates,” he continued, “they treating you okay?”

“I don’t really notice.”

He picked up the Panthers calendar from his desk and flipped the page. “There’s a math competition that our seniors go to every year,” he said. “Has Mr. Kirpes told you about it?”

“I don’t like competitions.”

“I agree. I agree—but now, this is a statewide event. Even at your age, you’d probably have a good chance at taking the prize. For North, I mean. I think it would bring a few hours of glory to this old place. Glory to you, glory to our untiring Mr. Kirpes, and glory to the Panthers. It’s only in Dayton, you know.”

I didn’t answer. Mr. Dowater had a reputation for deadpan humor, a humor that was strangely similar to the low-level, sarcastic sniper fire offered by the school’s underbleacher population of stoners and class-cutters. It didn’t really pay to engage it. After a moment, he set down the calendar and dropped the cheer from his voice.

“At the rate you’re going, anyway,” he said, “you’ll be out of here in two more years.”

“I know.”

“And then what? We haven’t sent a student to the Ivy League in quite a while. I imagine you’d be a strong candidate for either Harvard or Yale.”

“I don’t want to go to Harvard or Yale.”

“I agree. Just don’t tell me you want to be a Buckeye.”

“Not in a million years, Mr. Dowater.”

He eyed me approvingly.

“I want to be a Beaver,” I said.

“A what?”

“Caltech. The Beavers. Beavers are the engineers of the animal world. Caltech is the best school in the country.”

“I see.”

“Or MIT,” I said.

“Yes, another fine university. And what are
they
?”

“They’re the Beavers.”

Now he eyed me suspiciously. “I thought you just said that Caltech was the Beavers.”

“I did, sir.” I kept an inscrutable face. “But so’s MIT. They’re both the Beavers.”

He blinked a few times, then absently lifted the handle of the paper cutter on his side desk. “Well, that’s a little strange,” he said.

“Indeed it is,” I answered. “Indeed it is.”

—

I
T WAS THAT
spring, just as I was making the turn into the middle leg of my high-school career, that my eyes were finally opened.

One Saturday morning, the family set out in the car for the Macon Dalles, which was perhaps the only locale in Spartan County that could in any way be noted for its geologic grandeur. The Pitcote River, which for the vast part of its course meanders oleaginously through the rolling farmland plains of south-central Ohio, at one point strays into the quartzite underpinnings of the Allegheny foothills, which mark the geologic end point of the eastern United States; there, in the first rock bed it has ever encountered, it speeds itself into a panic. For a few hundred yards, it crashes through the landscape, churning past boulders and casting rainbows into the air. These are the dalles. At the end of them, the river makes another turn and widens again, slowing abruptly back into its old self—a fat, sandy-brown stripe that curls off into the unremarkable plains of the western part of the state. At this point in the landscape, there is a geologically striking run of steep and—for our part of the country, at least—dramatic cliffs that look out in both directions, west over the calm river and east over the raging one. The state park here was where my mother liked to walk.

At a certain turn in the trail, which looked down on a stretch of whitewater that foamed and leaped over refrigerator-sized boulders, she would set down our picnic blanket. The spot was only a short distance from the parking lot, but its topography was as wild and wooded as anything you might find in a state a thousand miles to the west. The roiling water, fifteen feet below the path, was thrilling. To me as a boy—although of course I understood the volumetric dynamics of why it had sped up—it was frightening as well: a frothing, cauldronic reminder of what our familiar river could become. My mother sometimes hushed us as we ate so that we could listen to its roar. You could discern the whole orchestra in it, from upright bass to triangle.

I suppose I could look now at her choice of lunch spot as emblematic of her desire to pretend that she was any place else other than southern Ohio, that she was sightseeing any place else other than along the last western afterthought of the Allegheny Mountains, that she was making her life any place else other than among the flat, soy- and corn-bearing farmland that is the eastern precursor to Indiana, and that she was married to a man who was anyone else besides a brooding assistant (yes) professor of mathematics, in a department composed of him and a pair of semi-retired colleagues, at what was essentially a secretarial college almost two hours’ drive from the nearest art museum. Sometimes she sat quietly for the entire afternoon.

On this particular day, though, she and my father had been arguing. My mother had forgotten one of the picnic baskets, and on the drive to the dalles my father had been reduced to drinking from two six-packs of Leinenkugel that he’d picked up at a gas station outside the town limits (Tapington in those days was dry). In the front seat of the Country Squire, the two of them were exchanging words, biting them off under their breath while staring straight ahead, like a pair of spies on a park bench. The six-packs stood between them, taking up a good part of the upholstery, and my mother had moved all the way over against the door. My father always replaced his empties into the plastic rings—this was long before Tapingtonians recycled anything—as though he were assembling a new set of especially light beer cans that might be sold back at the next grocery. By now he was about two-thirds of the way through his day’s supply. He’d stopped once already along the road to pee, and now he stopped again.

When he got out of the car to do his business, my mother stared straight ahead. But I turned to watch. There was always something wild and charismatically uncaring about my father’s demeanor in these moments, some mysterious abandonment of his frowning and cogitative state that already meant a lot to me, even though at that age I understood almost nothing about him. Paulie had long ago stopped whispering
“Perv”
to me for observing him as he relieved himself. She, of course, kept her head in her novels.

I remember that it was cold that day, and windy, but that the sky had been cut from the crackling blue gem field of a late midwestern April. Outside the car, as other families sped past, my father stepped to the leeward side of the open door, then leaned back from the waist and at the same time forward from the ankles. His penis poked out from his zipper. For this part, Bernie always stood up at the rear window. My father paused for a moment, rocking slightly while a few indistinct words played on his lips. Then, just before his stream started, he tilted back his head, as though there were a code written in the sky that allowed the event to begin. This was the moment I waited for. The movement seemed to be a marker of his own private devotion; as though despite his unshakable atheism, as though despite his sour, entirely analytic approach to every affair of life, he nonetheless felt the need to acknowledge the heavens in regard to this particular function of the body. I don’t know—perhaps I sensed that he simply enjoyed it in a deeper way than I did. It was possible, I already recognized, that the eye-narrowing depth of his physical delight in that moment was relative to the paucity of other delights in his life. But in any case, the prayerful uptilting of his cranium always seemed to democratize him for me, to make him, for a few moments at least, a regular man. Bernie let out a bark.

“Is he done?” asked my mother.

I opened my window. “Almost.”

In fact, he was still in the midst. My father peed like a horse. His urine flowed in one great sweeping stream that started suddenly and stopped just as suddenly, a single, winking arc of shimmering clarity that endured for a prodigious interval and then disappeared in an instant, as though the outflow were a solid object—an arch of glittering ice or a thick band of silver—and not (as it actually approximated) a parabolic, dynamically averaged graph of the intersecting functions of gravity, air resistance, and initial velocity on a nonviscous fluid, produced and exhibited by a man who’d just consumed more than a gallon of midwestern beer. The flow was as clear as water. When it struck the edge of the gravel shoulder, the sound was like a bedsheet being ripped. Beneath this high reverberation, he let out a protracted, appreciative whistle that culminated in a tuneless gasp, his lips flapping at the close like a trumpeter’s. In the viny topsoil, a gap appeared, a wisp of vapor rising from its center. Then a meandering river pushed its way forward, excavating a skier’s course downhill. After the liquid had been absorbed, the foamy sluice continued to steam at the edges, as though it were not dilute human waste he had emitted but some caustic effluent. He shook himself. From my vantage he appeared entirely unashamed. Bernie bumped about in the cargo bay. My father moved up close to peer through the windshield, zipping his trousers and smiling through the glass at my mother. I realized that the yellow that should have been in his urine was unmistakable now in his eyes.

“Thank goodness,” my mother said when the car door closed again. “I was getting a little bored in here.”

In those days, this was her version of malice. My father had been on the attack since he’d discovered the second picnic basket had been left at home, and for most of the drive my mother had been parrying him, meeting his disjointed and rambling accusations with her own incremental admissions, coyly humorous questions, and occasional nods of agreement, like a boxer using the ropes. This was not an admission of defeat but a tactic. Time was on her side—we all knew this—and once my father had downed a few bona fide cocktails and gotten a bit of lunch into him, he would reliably retreat. My sister and I were witnessing nothing but the feel-out punches of the day’s early rounds. We knew not to say anything ourselves, or he’d turn his spite against one of
us
.

But this morning, somehow, the beer wasn’t calming him, nor the pretzels that my mother kept proffering across the seat. The twelve cans were already as light as a bag with a sandwich in it.

We were most of the way to the dalles when he turned and said, “I just would’ve thought that someone would have taken it up by now. And built something significant on it.” He slowly pulled open the tab of the penultimate beer, allowing it to hiss. “That’s all.”

“That’s because it’s authoritative” was my mother’s immediate answer.

Paulie was reading
The Hound of the Baskervilles
and
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
(to this day she maintains the habit of reading two books at once), and I was working my way through the Fabricus College library’s pristine copy of Martin Gardner’s puzzles from
Scientific American
. Bernie, leaning over my shoulder from the rear, was poking his head out the window into the passing air and cambering his snout up and down, a ritual that my father always referred to as
testing his principle.
(This was a reference, of course, to the Bernoulli principle of inviscid flow—although, actually, Bernie had not been named after
Daniel
Bernoulli, the physicist and mathematician who’d elucidated the principle, but
Jakob
Bernoulli, the pure mathematician, who’d sided with Leibniz against Newton in the Great War of the Calculus. (Naming a dog after an ally of Leibniz in the calculus wars, by the way, no doubt reflected my father’s sense of irony as well as his quite durable sense of grievance.)) In any case, I can’t say how I knew, but I understood immediately that my parents were discussing the Malosz theorem. My father’s single crowning achievement had been the hidden stage work for most of the serious clashes I’d ever witnessed between the two of them. It was a historical fact as old and mysterious and yet as ever alive to our family as slavery might be to other families, or the bomb in Hiroshima, or the Holocaust. It put him into a mood. He’d published the paper twenty years before, but the proof had only a handful of times been used as the basis for another mathematician’s work.

I set down my book of puzzles.

Glancing back at us, my mother opened her side window so that the sound of the wheels would cover her words.

I sat forward.

“Don’t be nosy, Clever Hans.” This was Paulie. She called me Clever Hans not because she thought I was quick-witted but because a German farm horse by that name had once become famous for being able to do arithmetic with its hooves.