A Doubter's Almanac (60 page)

I’d like to believe it. Though I also believe she’s saying it to reassure me.

If Emmy has something to tell either of us, she’ll behave like one of her deer, sidling up alongside her mother or father the way a yearling sidles up alongside a cedar. Warily, but for the duration. Standing next to me at the sink while I rinse dishes for the washer, she’ll tell me about the bad dream she had the night before or ask what to do about the boy who called her a name at school. I, in turn, must behave like the man watching the deer. No sharp movements. No quick answers.

About Emmy’s night habits, Audra is at her wit’s end. After dinner, Emmy will dispatch her homework in fifteen minutes, then bake cookies with Audra or sit out on the porch with me until it’s time to go upstairs for her bath. Then she’ll get into bed. On her night table is a stack of books, and she’ll think very deliberately about which one she wants to read. One of us will go upstairs to kiss her good night, and later, at 2:00 a.m., that same one will generally have to rise from bed, go into her room again, and take the book from her hands. For good measure, we’ll unplug the bedside light and move the rest of the stack, too, all the way to the far side of the room. The book in her hand, by the way, is as likely to be
White Fang
by Jack London, as
Rational Points on Elliptic Curves
by Silverman and Tate. Sometimes I think Emmy has to read simply because she doesn’t know how to extinguish her thoughts. Exceed. Discover. Outdo. That’s our daughter.

As for Niels—well, he too could probably do the homework for the math major at Cornell. But it would take him longer than Emmy, and he’d emerge with a red face and a pencil broken two or three times at the tip, then in half. Niels has always been our emoter, and now the emotion he’s becoming acquainted with is frustration. He’s learned to handle it by running forward into everything—into birthday parties, into the student-council meetings, into his scout hikes, into the spelling bees and science fairs that he’s won a couple of times now.

A significant part of his success is due to the single capacity that he’s developed into something far beyond his sister’s. That is, his capacity to
work
. My son is a powerhouse that way—as was my father, for a time. (I also think that Niels runs so eagerly forward because he must hear the soft, quick footsteps behind him.) Niels might be able to multiply two of those six-digit numbers in his head, but I doubt he could do the third, like Emmy. But he’s learning not to let this bother him. Connect. Advance. Contribute. That’s Niels. He’s always been our social one, and now he’s turning out to be our striver, too. When I ask him what he wants to be when he grows up, he smiles winningly and says “A named professor of mechanical or electrical engineering.” When pressed further, he’ll expand: “At a Research One University.” And further still, “At Caltech, maybe, like Aunt Paulie.”

Audra, God bless her, doesn’t miss Manhattan at all. Or at least, not that she tells me. She prefers the life up here, where the biggest event of the fall is the Wildcats’ homecoming parade, and the biggest moment of the homecoming parade is the rambling, overwide turn that our local corn farmer takes onto Main Street (yes) in his half-million-dollar John Deere combine, an S-Series that he banners in Wildcats purple, pulling behind it a flatbed on which stand all the junior and senior members of the football team. They shake their purple helmets and cheer. Audra reaches up her purple sleeves and cheers them back. I know that the players appreciate her. Everybody does at school. She still has that frank South Texas charm. At Westinghouse, she teaches part-time—remedial English three afternoons a week—a schedule that allows her to spend the rest of the days at home, raising two kids who can solve Korteweg–de Vries equations in their heads but still have a hard time making their beds in the morning.

As for me, I teach my two sections of geometry, my two of trigonometry, and my one of senior calculus. I sit on the Curriculum Committee and codirect the annual PTA garage-sale fundraiser (I’m also its largest buyer). My other jobs: cross-country assistant coach; freshman counselor; Math Club adviser. The Math Club, by the way, meets five mornings a week, by request of the membership.

Do I like it? Well, yes.

Mostly.

If you’re looking for the Wall Street profiteer turned Good Samaritan in the small-town classroom—well, it hasn’t worked out that way, exactly. The truth is, I still miss Physico. Sometimes badly. It’s not so much the money (which I still have) as—I don’t know what else to call it: The Game maybe? The Juice? There was a sameness to that life, just as there’s a sameness to this one, but the sameness at Physico came with a lot more fist thumping.

I miss the fist thumping.

But we’re here in Lasserville now. And my gut tells me we’re staying. When I watch Emmy and her friends saunter into the house in their creek-soaked overalls, I feel something that I never felt in my days on the seventieth floor of the Trump Building. When I watch Niels hoisted up onto the hay cart by the middle-school principal during the Fourth of July parade—well, what can I say? I like to believe I’m giving them a little shot of something. A vaccination against the future. Or perhaps against the past, about which they still know almost nothing. Sometimes I think that my own father, who probably had no intention about such things but no doubt remembered his own childhood, might actually have been hoping to do the same for Paulie and me, with his place up in the woods.

Anyway, I do miss the fist thumping.

In Manhattan, I should add, I used to thump my fist no more than 60 percent of the time (the Shores-Durbans, of course, were only probabilities). But 60 percent was enough to put me at the top of my profession by a substantial and probably unassailable margin—unassailable because legions have since joined the game. Out here in Lasserville, on the other hand, I don’t get to thump my fist very much at all. Once a semester, maybe. Last winter I landed a kid in the New England mathematics Olympiad.
Thump
. And this fall I discovered that the pouty emo in a faded frowny shirt at the back of my honors trig class wasn’t listening to Fall Out Boy through the bright blue earbuds in his bright blue hair but to Yakov Eliashberg’s Roever Lecture on affine complex manifolds.

Yes, this happened.

Thump. Thump.

I don’t mind that my own children, when they reach high school, will probably not even sign up for Math Club. It’s something of an unsaid warrant among us—the overcourteous step of the battle hardened—that we steer shy of one another when it comes to
the field
. Truthfully, both Emmy and Niels are already miles ahead of anyone else around here—and probably miles ahead, even, of where I was at their age—and I do wonder what will happen when they arrive at Westinghouse. The two of them in Math Club would pretty much ruin it for the others, even for the kid who made it to the Olympiad.

I know that Audra, too, is wary. Not of their talents, perhaps, the way I am, but of their other legacies. She probably wouldn’t say so, but that night in the living room of our Perry Street brownstone can’t be that far back in her mind. When I get home from work these days, she and I will drink a cup of tea together on the kitchen stools, looking out at the fields. She’ll tell me about her day. I’ll tell her about mine. Sometimes, though, as I talk about a new kid in Math Club or a nice moment in my classroom, she’ll look at me so intently that I wonder if what she’s actually doing is remembering.

When we’re finished with our tea, she’ll go outside to the garden for an hour before it’s time to make dinner, and I’ll go upstairs to the sleeping porch, where I’ve set up my desk. I take out the homework I need to correct. But for a few minutes, I don’t even pick it up. I just sit there behind the screens, doing nothing, moving ahead with nothing, just watching my wife dig in the soil or, beyond her, the hills of barley sway in the wine-colored light, which at that hour looks enough like the sea. I think about the kids. I think about all of us. On my desk, I keep a single finely polished fragment of wood, a charm of well-rubbed beech whose curve slides smoothly against my thumb. Before I start my work each day, I rub it for luck.

Ignorance is the thing we seek to remedy.

—

I
SHOULD ADD:
I have fun with the kids.

The reason I mention this is that I remember only one time in my life when my own father actually seemed to have fun with us. Dad wasn’t interested in fun. And generally speaking, neither am I. But every Saturday now, Audra and the kids and I do something together as a family, usually in the abundance of woods and streams and meadows that provide our solace up here in Lasserville.

Most of the time we have fun.

One thing we like to do is picnic on the shore of the Aldrich Gap River, in our spot above the Wides. Along a half mile of bank there, the water moves from narrow and swift to broad and still, and the bank changes from steep granite to gentle meadow. That meadow is graced with every sort of sedge, fern, and wildflower, and the bank is alive with beetles, dragonflies, and a dodging air show of brightly winged moths. We use the distant shore to practice our elliptical geometry. I admit that I was the one who started it; but Emmy’s taken to it, too, now, and of course Niels has made it into a competition.

I tie a length of surgical tubing to an old pair of copper grounding rods, which Niels pounds into the soil about his own height apart. Now we have a slingshot. With a strong-enough pullback, we can send a baseball-sized projectile a hundred yards across the river into the trees. The sound it makes on release is like a sword being pulled swiftly from its sheath. Then a whiz that slices back across the river. On the far bank, there’s a slap, followed by a rustle, and then a puff of leaves floating down. Audra won’t let us use rocks anymore because she’s afraid we’ll hit a bird or a squirrel, so we use water balloons. For a while we experimented with dirt clods, which tended to vaporize, and then with spheres of our own chewed-up sandwiches, which generally burst apart straight out of the slot. Yes, we know that balloons aren’t biodegradable—on the way home we stop and look around for the shreds.

Why mention this? One reason is that the kids love it. They shout and whoop. So do I. Niels can shoot farther than Emmy, but I’ve tried to even it up by declaring the goal to be accuracy. There’s usually a stiff breeze over the river, and it varies with its height above the surface, so it’s no trick to see that there’s a mathematical component to the game, and a spatial one as well. And it’s not hard to imagine just how good both our kids might be at it. They pretty much split the victories.

Really, though, in the end there’s no more purpose to it than having a good time. I guess the other reason I mention this is that I like to think that I’m a different sort of man than my father was.

—

A
S FOR
M
OM—WELL,
of course we thought she’d come along with us to our new life upstate. But she stayed in Manhattan. She’s alone again, going on three years now. She’s still as spry as ever, though, and a spry sixty-seven-year-old divorcee who’s longed for most of her life to live in an East Coast metropolis can hardly give up the chance. Especially now that she’s unencumbered.

She attends concerts and gallery openings and museum luncheons, and in the park she takes long, unmapped walks with her cronies. She has a Twitter account and a Facebook page and a little plastic card that gives her access to a car whenever she needs one, through some online enterprise that aims to democratize, not to mention monetize, the world’s carbon-hungry resources. She’s not afraid to drive, either, even in New York City.

She still lives in the place we bought her and still checks on the renters in the brownstone (yes, we keep it—though I sometimes doubt for long), mostly by pulling up a stool at the Starbucks down the block, at the hour when the children return from aftercare and the harried father picks them up for a meal at one of the upscale spots in the neighborhood. “They don’t even eat at home most nights,” Mom says. “And they never eat together.” A pause. “That family.”

“Things are different now, Mom.”

“We always ate with you kids. And always at home.”

“I know.”

“And
no cellphones
.”

But the surprising thing is that she herself eats in those same upscale places now, and she’s bought herself a phone. A nice one, too. She plays Scrabble on it with Paulie on the other side of the country. If you send her a text you get an answer before your phone’s back in your pocket, and her Facebook page has overwhelmed my capacity to follow it. I don’t think there’s a man in her life, but I’ve never actually asked.

As I mentioned, she surprises us. Last fall, she spent Labor Day up here. The weather was chilly in Lasserville, and when we went out to a movie together, she put on her new sweater, a luxurious-looking cardigan with what appeared to be ermine-fur edging. On the ride out to the theater, I could tell that Audra was eyeing it.

Later in bed, Audra said, “That was a Loro Piana.”

“What was?”

“The sweater your mom had on. It was a Loro Piana. I’m sure of it. Your mother’s wearing Loro Piana cashmere.”

“I’m sure it’s imitation.”

“It’s not.”

“Well, then I’m sure she got it secondhand.”

“There was a Neiman Marcus tag in the pocket. A clean one, with the little plastic thingie still on it.”

“How do you know?”

“She hung it in the front closet.”

We were silent.

“That’s a three-thousand-dollar sweater,” she said. Then she added, “At
least
.”

The next morning, at the breakfast table, I mentioned it to Mom. She set down her coffee and looked across at me. “You want to know if it’s real, don’t you?”

“Well, I guess I do, Mom.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Wow.”

She buttered a slice of toast. “And you want to know if I bought it at a thrift store.”

“Have you been talking to Audra?”