A Doubter's Almanac (59 page)

There she was. Slender. Her profile turned against the banks of a river. This was a different kind of drawing. Each strand of hair had been individually drawn. Each shadow on the face brought out with a web of fine lines. Dad had reproduced the folds of her skirt exactly, and the rush of water beyond it so perfectly, with nothing but the hatching of his pen.

Still, it took me several moments before I understood what I was looking at: it was Cle Wells, as a young woman.

—

“M
AY
I
ASK
you something?”

“Depends what it is,” said Cle. We were in her Citroën, heading back with groceries. She was driving fast, and the bags were rattling in the trunk.

“Did Dad use to visit you in Manhattan?”

For a moment, she didn’t answer. Then she said, “A couple of times, yes.”

“So when he broke the mirrors in that restaurant, it had something to do with you.”

“Well, it had more to do with the fact that he was drunk.”

“And what about here, then? Did you ever come up
here
to see him?”

“Once, yes—stupidly. A few years ago.”

“May I ask you something else?”

She looked over. “I think so.”

“What does Earl think of all this?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Do you love him?”

“You’re talking about your dad, I presume?”

“Yes.”

“Well, at my age, it doesn’t mean much.”

“So you do.”

“I mean the
word
doesn’t mean much. Not that it did when we were young, either—not for me, anyway. Do I love your father? I suppose I do. Love at this stage is all kinds of things, not the least of which is pity.”

“So you pity him.”

“Of course I do. But I love him, also. And I feel a duty to him. I feel pity and duty for both of them.” She turned the mirror to look at herself, at her narrow features that were still, to me, strikingly lovely. “That probably sounds cruel,” she said.

“Do you pity
yourself
?”

“For what?”

“For marrying the wrong man?”

She laughed. “Earl and I do fine.”

“Earl told me he doesn’t believe in pity.”

“He did? Well, that’s because he wouldn’t know where to start.”

On the curves of the cove now she pressed the accelerator, and a man in a driveway shook his head as we passed. “You’re always in a hurry,” I said.

“Life is short.”

“Then why are you staying up here like this?”

“To help out. To be of use.”

“But isn’t that a little weird with my mother around? Isn’t it painful for
both
of you?”

She glanced at me again, slowing the car finally as we turned in at the drive. “You know, it probably makes it easier, actually. For both of us. A young man might not understand that. But your mother’s very helpful.”

“And you?”

“I’m very helpful, too. You learn it, obviously. I
had
to.”

When we stopped in front, she popped the trunk but didn’t make a move to get out. Instead, she turned and looked out at the lake. “Your father once did something for me, Hans.”

“Oh? What was that?”

“Well, it’s a long story. But at this age, I finally understand what I can do for him in return.”

“Which is what?”

She put her hand on the door latch. “Let him long for me again,” she said.

—

“I
T USED TO
be like rock,” Dad said, “right up here, in front. Now it’s soft.” He poked at his ribs. “There’s room now—look, Hans. And I hardly itch anymore.” He brought my hand to his flank.

“What am I touching?”

“My liver. Feel how small it’s gotten.”

He pulled my fingers under the ribs and pressed them against what felt like a purse full of gravel.

“I’ve always known,” he said. “Haven’t I? I’ve always, always known.”

“What have you always known?”

“When I’m on the edge of something.” He let go of my hand. “Diet and exercise, Hans. And the body itself. The blood tests are going to show it now, too.”

“What are they going to show, Dad?”

“That I’m getting better.” He pointed up at the cabin, where Cle and my mother were cooking in the kitchen. “I can feel it, Hans. Those two—they’re what’s going to cure me.”

The Lord’s Daughter

M
Y FIRST MORNING
back at work, I went in early; but by the time I walked into my office, one of the senior partners in risk was already standing at my desk. This must have been standard practice. I’d told them I’d be out for a week; I’d been gone for a little more than six.

When I shut the door, he moved to the row of windows that looked over the river. The first light of day was just showing behind the bridges.

“You’re back,” he said, not unkindly. “You were on family leave, right? I’m assuming everything’s okay.”

“Yes, it is. Thanks for asking.” I slid into the chair and powered on my row of monitors. “I’m back now.”

“Well, they’ll want to have a word with you when they get in.”

“Who will?”

“HR.”

“I was going to take a look at London.”

He kept his eyes on me. “I believe you’ll need a password for that,” he said.

—

W
HAT
I
HADN’T
realized was that by then there were dozens of mathematicians who could do what I was doing—all of them, in one way or another, having learned it from me. You’d have thought, at least, that this would have given the partners pause.

It hadn’t.

And so here we are now, Audra and I and the kids, with money in the bank to outlast
their
kids (and their kids’ kids), living in a town—Lasserville, New York, population 5,813—where a good part of the citizenry doesn’t have enough money to last out the month. We’re two hours closer to Kingston, Ontario, than to Lower Manhattan. We’re also fifteen minutes from the Aldrich Gap River, which is fast enough along the Narrows south of the house to hold rainbow trout and slow enough along the Wides north of it for the lily pads to grow shore to shore, like a well-tacked carpet.

That carpet is the exact color of pool-table felt, which Emmy likes, because the rug in her room is of precisely the same shade. Like many devotees of group theory, she’s excited by all demonstrations of symmetry. She can stand on the shore of that river for an hour while Audra and Niels and I eat lunch under the maples.

We do that quite a bit these days.

I think Emmy likes the mystery of the spot, too, the way she knows from the undulation of the green that the water is there but never actually sees it. The feeling is much like the joy of mathematics itself, the original secret of the guild: that the miracle of the universe can be worshipped without actually witnessing the divine.

I also think she might be counting the lily pads.

—

T
HE OTHER NIGHT
at dinner, I gave the kids a puzzle. This was on our screened porch. I set a pair of quarters on the table and pushed them against each other so that their ridges meshed like gears. “If you hold one still,” I said, “and roll the other one around it, how many revolutions will George Washington make?”

Audra looked up. “Hans,” she said.

My wife doesn’t like me quizzing the kids like this, particularly if we follow my father’s rule that the younger one gets to go first. I suspect she worries that Niels might never get his chance.

“Either of you may answer,” I added.

Contrary to what many people think, by the way, Niels is not named after Niels Bohr, the great Danish physicist, but after Niels Abel, the great Norwegian mathematician. I named him after Abel because Abel had improved on Euler’s work and had been educated, not coincidentally, by his own father. Emmy’s name, on the other hand—Emmy Lovelace Andret—was chosen by Audra, in honor of two great women of mathematics: Emmy Noether, whose brilliance has long been the province of the cognoscenti, and Ada Lovelace, who most likely wrote the world’s first computer algorithm, and who also—again, not coincidentally—was the daughter of a poet.

That particular evening, however, Niels was quicker than his sister. Without even having to think, he said, “One.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because they have the same circumference. The gear teeth mesh. George Washington just makes a single turn around himself.” He glanced at Emmy. “Isn’t it obvious?”

Most mathematically inclined adults, after some thought, will arrive at this very answer—the one that Niels, at ten years old, came up with in an instant. But Emmy was silent.

Her brother laughed—a bit meanly, I thought. “See?” he said, reaching for the coins.

But I held back his hand. “You can’t actually
do
it for her,” I said. “You have to let her think about it herself.”

His hands came back to his sides. “Come on, Em, don’t you see?”

I waited for my daughter. Audra had cooked her spicy stew, a holdover from her Texas days, and had seasoned it like the Hill Country girl that she still is—the first bite tastes like a rattlesnake has gotten loose in your mouth. I poured water around. As we waited for Audra to sit down, I watched Emmy think.

She does it the way my father used to—as though it’s physical exercise.

It was only after Niels and Audra had taken their first bites, wiped their mouths, and sipped their ice water, that Emmy said, “Wow.”

“What is it, honey?”

“It’s kind of amazing.” She smiled, just slightly, in my direction.

I smiled back, just slightly, in hers.

“He doesn’t go around once,” she said. “He goes around twice.”

—

L
ASSERVILLE IS A
lot like Tapington, actually. Tapington had the rusted Ford plant; Lasserville has the rusted Maytag plant. A washing machine isn’t a pickup truck, but the assembly-line workers who used to bolt the tub rotor to the spin shaft aren’t that different from the assembly-line workers who used to bolt the transmission to the drivetrain. The distinction is that in Tapington I lived among the aftereffects of ingenuity. Those midwestern kids who’d grown up rebuilding hot rods in their garages had moved to the Ford plant, and when the Ford plant closed they moved back to their garages—customizing engines and fabricating body parts for the aftermarket. And Fabricus College was there, too, of course.

All this kept something alive in that town. When I was a kid, Tapington had a swimming pool and a public library that were both open seven days a week. Up here in Lasserville, the men and women who no longer make washing machines no longer make much of anything. We have tanning parlors and nail salons and pet-grooming establishments now, the signs planted in the front lawns of people’s houses. The pride up here has been fraying for a while. The pool’s open all summer, but the library only opens on Saturdays.

Mostly for this reason, our family is talked about around town. The Wall Street kingpin on the run from the feds. The hedge-fund magnate who ditched it all for his wife. The adviser to the Rockefellers. The adviser to the advisers. The savant who gave up a fortune to solve one of the great problems in mathematics.

That’s the one I get asked about the most.

Like the others, of course, there’s not a shred of truth to it.

—

I
NEVER DID
let them fire me. And, in fact, I’m not even sure they would have. I walked outside that morning, ate a cart breakfast on the piers, and for several minutes enjoyed the underbridge light show that you see from that part of Manhattan at that hour of the day. By the time I took the elevator back upstairs, HR had arrived. I brought two cups of coffee down to the sixty-fifth floor and explained to the rep what I’d decided to do.

Our life up here:

Emmy is the earliest out of bed in the morning. She rises at dawn and performs a check of the house, glancing into all our rooms, then heading downstairs to look out through the kitchen window into the barley field beyond our backyard fence, where deer in impressive numbers congregate at first light. On some mornings there are twenty-five of them. Emmy watches them while she does what she calls her
meditating
.

“What’s your meditating
about
?” I asked her one day.

“Oh,” she said, smiling patiently at me. “I don’t know. About life.”

Sometimes the deer will come close to the fence to nibble the branches of the cedars. In the yard they stare back at the spot where Emmy stands behind the glass. She’s told me about one of them in particular, a gangly white-spotted yearling who wanders into the mowed area next to the kitchen and lowers her head to eat, despite my daughter’s presence in the window. Emmy believes that this particular fawn has learned to trust her.

My wife likes the fact that Emmy believes this. She thinks it shows that she’s decided to move outward into the world.

Both kids have changed, I have to say.

Emmy’s in sixth grade now, with all the eleven-year-olds, though she’s just turned nine. When I drop her off at school in the morning, she lets go of my hand and glances up at the building, then walks halfway up the path before she turns around to look at me. I nod, like a coach sending in a new player. Not that she needs it, of course—not for her schoolwork, anyway. I imagine, actually, that she’s already capable of doing the problem sets for most of the math majors at Cornell, a campus not that far from here. But she wears this fact low, like a rabbit’s foot in her pocket. In class, she hardly speaks and on the playground she favors the boys’ games. She’s not the only girl who favors them, though, and she spends her time on the weekends with a couple of like-minded allies—shy, oily-haired, front-of-the-class girls who nonetheless like to reach barehanded into the muddy stream behind the house and pull out frogs and tadpoles and even turtles. Emmy’s what my sister used to be.

She can also multiply three six-digit numbers in her head and, from twenty-five miles away, point without hesitation straight at our house. If I ask her what she wants to be when she grows up, she’ll look at me, smile, and say, “Older.” If someone else asks, she’ll answer, “A veterinarian.” And if they press, “Small animal.”