A Doubter's Almanac (39 page)

“Well, he was in some kind of sociable mood. He was going on about how math is a curse.” I laughed. “He told me that I have it, too.”

She looked away. I could see the little shivers in her jaw. “Well,” she finally said. “Good for the two of you.”

A Marrow Lover’s Feast

T
HAT WEEKEND,
D
AD
and I returned to Tapington. Mom had made a list of things she needed. From the dock, she and Paulie lifted their iced-tea glasses and Bernie lifted his matted head as Dad and I edged out the driveway in the Country Squire. On the dashboard, the top page of Mom’s pad fluttered in the air vent, shivering the thickly penned words
THANK YOU
!
and
DON’T FORGET
!
into my vision.

Dad drove fast, the windows down. At a gas station south of Felt City, he left me in the car while he used the restroom. In the hot asphalt fumes of the lot, I ducked down in the seat and took my dose. Then I picked up Mom’s list. It was several pages long. The first page read:

Kleenex (full one, by fridge)

Sun hats (Paulie’s—cellar door?)

SPAGHETTI POT (biggest don’t forget LID)

Drainer (spaghetti)

Lid for pot

Foot cream (white)

Bernie nail clippers

Nice cotton dish towel, yellow one

Leather leash by door maybe on rack

Hans shorts (khaki, second drawer, back)

Paulie sandals (skinny brown)

Pruning knife (garage, and clippers?)

Striped swim suit (haven’t worn in years—call)

When Dad returned, I set the pad back on the dash. He buckled his seatbelt and said, “Me, for example.”

“Me what?”

He pulled out a sweaty can of ginger ale from the cooler and held it up to the light. “I was young when I learned the importance of will,” he said. He snapped it open. “I was young when I learned to appreciate difficulty. What it takes to do something that nobody thinks you can do.” He took a long swallow, then turned and looked at me appraisingly.

I looked back like the hardened criminal I was. “Wow,” I said. “Extremely interesting, Dad.”

Sometime later, on the Ohio side of the border, we left the highway and started down a country lane. At the end of the blacktop, looking out over an astonishingly rectangular pond, stood a restaurant with a hand-painted sign over the door.

s’MAMA’s

Folding chairs leaned against garbage cans. The lot was filled with every manner of vehicle, from rusted tractors to a cream-colored Cadillac with its leather convertible top folded down behind the seat. Black people worked at the counters, and white people sat at the tables. It was a barbecue joint. I’d passed this way on every one of my trips to Chicago with my mother, yet I’d never had any idea such a place existed.

Dad went to the counter. Something about the swaying car ride, the murmuring crowd, and now the salty smell of the meat—I could see it flaming inside the wall ovens—caused my roll to open like a sinkhole.

s’MAMA’s

The so-nearly-achieved symmetry of the name began devouring me.

I sat down at a table. I was a crayfish in a tank, and people were studying me through the glass. I waved my claws.

“What?” said Dad. He was standing at the table with a pile of Styrofoam boxes in his arms, looking queerly at my face. “I didn’t hear you.”

I turned and gazed out at the pond. In biology that semester, we’d seen a film of gazelles at a water hole. At every moment that the herd was drinking, there was always one gazelle who kept an eye on the horizon. At the tables now, the human beings were doing the same thing. At each table at least one person—in our case, me—was watching for lions.

Eating.

People were happy when they were eating.

“Suit yourself,” he said, smacking down the boxes and pushing in beside me. Ribs and corn. When he’d picked clean his first order, he slid a second one over in front of him. For many minutes we didn’t speak. Now and then I rechecked the horizon. I’d managed to wrestle myself to the surface of my mind.

People were happy when they were eating.

That’s why it made them vulnerable.

In the pond, fish were jumping peaceably, just often enough to signal that they were watching me. They were trying to calm me. Thank you, fish. I turned and made an effort to appreciate my father. He tore at his meal. He gnawed the gristle, then nibbled at the joints. He sucked on his fingers. When he was done with the meat, he dispatched two pieces of corn, sliding and turning the cobs like a machine designed to remove the kernels. Then he pulled a plastic fork from the bag and poked it around the hollows of the bones, looking for marrow. Finally, he picked up a thoroughly eaten rib and sucked at it again. “God,” he said.
“Ribs.”

“Yup.”

“Your mother doesn’t ever make ribs
.
”

Something had changed him.

“Sometimes she does,” I offered.

“Nope. Never.” He wiped his fingers on a sharp-smelling towelette and leaned back in the chair with his hands behind his head. “Now that was food,” he said, gazing out over the table.

I realized why he was different:
she wasn’t
here
.

I was the gazelle watching the horizon. I was responsible for bringing us back to safety. After a certain amount of time, I said, “I know that, Dad.”

“You know what?”

“I know what food is.”

He narrowed his eyes, picking up the corn-fork again and poking it around. “You’re a funny one.”

“How is that?”

“I know you know what food is.”

“Okay.”

“That’s not why I said it.”

“Okay.” I looked across at him. “I wish Mom could have tried this.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. She’d like it.”

“No, she wouldn’t. Neither would your sister.” He looked doubtfully at me. “You haven’t touched yours. You mind?”

My roll was a huge black bird inside me now that suddenly cawed and spread its wings. I gulped.

He reached. “You mind?”

“Please.”

When he’d finished what was in my box, we returned to the car, and for the rest of the ride home he stared out the windshield while I stared out the side window, scouring the horizon.

I, too, was different when my mother wasn’t around.

Not far outside of Tapington, he turned to me and said, in what sounded like an amused voice, “Do you know who Knudson Hay is?”

“No.”

“He was my boss at Princeton. There’s a conference at the U of M, and he’s coming out for it.”

“So?”

“Well, he’s going to drive up afterwards and stop by the cabin.”

“Well, that’s nice, I guess.”

He looked back at the road.

“I’m wondering,” he said, “if I should tell your mother.”

—

A
T DUSK, WHEN
we reached Tapington, my roll was still jackrabbiting around inside me. My father opened the front door of the house and led me in. Here we were, just the two of us, in a hallway as cool and still as a mausoleum.

I suddenly understood that the family who had lived here was dead.

The winter coats in the tiny closet were their mummies. A tall father, gruff and oblivious, dandruff pasted to his shoulders. A short mother, diligent and cheerful, her red rainboots pressed together. Two teenagers, poorly fit to the world. Folded Kleenex in the girl’s pockets. Powdery traces in the boy’s.

A broken umbrella on the floor by the door. Wobbly chairs in the kitchen. More clues. An orderly existence had begun to fail. As we stepped through the echoing halls, bits became clearer. The buoyant mother’s efforts had in the end proved insufficient. Onward we went, through the cramped rooms. The smell of dust on drapes. The sourness of mold from the cellar door. Side by side above the mantel in the living room hung two old oil paintings, one of a barn and one of a stormy sea. The other walls were covered with faded prints of famous art—Fra Angelico, Caravaggio, Monet, Mondrian, Escher, Picasso—the history of Western civilization in counterclockwise order, pausing for the chimney.

These poor people.

My father had disappeared upstairs. When I arrived in the bedroom he was tearing through the closet, heaping clothes into a pile. Then he gave up and strode all the way down to the basement. Furniture shifted. Boxes thudded against the concrete. When he returned, he was dragging behind him the unattached sections of a wooden ladder. He joined them together, leaned the frame up against the trapdoor in the ceiling, and ascended into the attic.

More scraping. He appeared at the opening with a box in his hands. “Where does time go?” he asked.

“Depends on velocity.”

“Ah,” he said, climbing down. “I’ve raised a theoretician.”

“What’s in the box?”

“Something I made.” He set it on the rug, broke the tape, and began lifting out parts. “When I was in school.”

“What
is
it?”

“It’s called a quatrant.”

As he joined it together, it became obvious that not all the pieces would fit. He joined several at the rim and a few along the struts, but the dovetails and the sliding joints had all shrunk or cracked, and he couldn’t close the radius.

“When I made this,” he said, “I was in the midst of the most hopeful period of my life, but I was tormented by a problem. I thought that if I devoted myself to it, no matter how difficult it turned out to be, then my devotion would reveal the truth.”

“And now?”

“I think that the problem was the only thing that allowed me to exist.”

—

W
E LEFT THE
next morning before dawn, the Country Squire piled high with our take. Tied-off garbage bags and rolled-up sheets, all of them filled with the things from Mom’s list. Her summer coat hung from a hook over the back door, and three pairs of her shoes were wrapped in dish towels inside the spaghetti pot, which sat atop its own lid next to a taped-up box of cooking utensils. Beside it all lay the quatrant, its parts rolled into a blanket. I could barely see out the rear window.

Dad was in an expansive mood. As he drove, he talked. He told me about how he’d first gotten the idea for a quatrant from a book he’d found as a graduate student. For years, a man named Tycho Brahe had used a quatrant to record every single incremental change in the position of the heavens above his attic in Denmark. He sipped at his soda. “And do you know what came of it?”

“No,” I said.

He looked over. “Nothing, Hans. Nothing at all.”

The sun was just beginning to rise. His thin smile became a parenthesis of thought. After a moment, he said, “Actually, that’s not true. What came of it were the Rudolphine tables.”

I turned and watched a pickup truck drag a cloud of dust through a field.

“The Rudolphine tables were his life’s work. They were his signature accomplishment. A record of every celestial body in the sky.” He glanced over again. “Listen to me, please.”

“I am.”

“They surpassed the Alphonsine tables in every way. They were a thousand times more accurate.” He reached his hand back and touched the rolled blanket. “The Rudolphine tables were a masterpiece. They ended the Ptolemaic system and brought about the heliocentric one. They were the beginning of modern astronomy.”

For a few moments I considered his words. “Then why have I never heard of him?”

“Because he only collected the data, Hans. He never actually published it. Do you know who finally did?”

“Tell me.”

He turned and looked at me significantly. “Kepler. Kepler published Brahe’s data.”

We were in the rolling farmland now at the northern edge of the till plain. I’d not yet taken my dose. The hour was still early and the road stretched before us toward the brightening horizon. My father was driving twenty miles an hour over the speed limit.

“Kepler started as Brahe’s student, but then he became his rival. And in the end, he killed his old master.” He shook his head. “By disproving the Tychonic theory.”

“Okay.”

“Just like that, one man was dead and another was ascendant. Brahe knew that the planets circled the sun, but he was stuck on the idea that the sun circled the earth.”

“He was close, I guess. It was a reasonable idea for the time.”

He looked over. “He got it wrong, Hans.”

“Obviously. But he was on the right track.”

I could feel his gaze.

“Nobody cares if you’re close, Hans. Brahe was blinded. That’s why he missed it.”

I looked out the window.

“Listen to me.”

“I am.”

“It wasn’t even that he hadn’t thought of the possibility. He
had
thought of it. But he insisted that the earth
couldn’t
be in orbit around the sun, because”—here he paused to smile—“because if it had been, the stars would have exhibited a parallax.”

“And they didn’t?”

Now his look was disdainful. “Yes, of course they did. How else could it be?” He opened his window and spat.

“Well—”

“Brahe just flat out ignored it. If the earth was the thing that was moving, he knew that a parallax had to be there. He knew it would be maximized at six months’ orbit. His own student was humiliating him. They were both looking straight at a parallax, and they both took the observations, and yet one of them failed to see it. It was obviously there.”