A Doubter's Almanac (44 page)

My mother set down her glass. “Do you really feel that way?”

“I feel
exactly
that way.”

“Why, Milo?”

“Because it’s the truth. It’s all a waste.”

“What is, Milo? What exactly is a waste?”

He dropped the burger onto his plate. Like a stage direction, an arrow of ketchup appeared on the tablecloth, pointing at me. He looked down at it. “My son, for one. He’s wasted his entire life.”

Bernie barked. At the sound, my roll breathed in. “Ah,” I said. “Interesting.”

“You,” he said, thrusting his chin at me. “You’re going to throw everything away.”

There was a silence. I watched his words drift down like snow in a paperweight.

“Well,” I said mildly. “I’m not sure what any of that means.”

My father’s face reddened. “I know all about you, you lazy little fuck. Do you hear me?”

“What?” said my mother.

“What exactly do you know, Dad?”

“I know that you’re never going to make anything out of yourself, for one. That, I know for goddamn
sure
.”

“What?” said my mother. “How can you say that to your son, Milo?”

“Because it’s the truth, Helena. Because someone around here has to tell him the goddamn truth for once in his life. He’s a fucking waste of talent. Do you all hear me? Waste of brains. Waste of life. Waste of everything I’ve ever given him, right down a hole.”

“What on earth, Milo?”

“Every fucking thing I ever gave him. Which is all he goddamn has.”

Mom rose. “What in God’s name have
you
ever given him besides your—oh, you’re some kind of creature.”

“It’s okay, Mom,” I said.

“No, it’s not,” said Paulie.

My mother said, “My Lord, why I ever—what on earth have you been doing out there in that shed, Milo?”

“Why you ever
what,
Helena?”

Paulie said, “Married you.”

“Oh, is that it?” Dad rose now. “Is that what you were going to say, Helena?”

My mother didn’t answer.

Inside me, a crack opened.

“Well, you’re right,” he said. “You should never have married me. You should have stuck with someone at your own level.”

“Please,” I said. “Both of you—why don’t we all stop? Let’s just sit back down and eat these burgers.”

“You two stay out of it,” said Mom. She was pulling on the cord of the floor lamp now so that the light was going on and off. “You mean, I should have stuck to someone on a
civilized
level? Instead of some egomaniac—”

“Hold on, everybody,” I said.

“No. Go on, Helena. Please, absolutely—go on. Some egomaniac, who
what
? Whose work has never amounted
to one fucking thing.
Is that what you were going to say?”

“Children,” said my mother. “Outside now, please—both of you.” She turned to him. “How dare you?”

Paulie said, “We’re staying right here, Mom.”

“You little cunt,” said my father.

“Oh, my God,” said my sister.

“Oh, that’s great,” said Mom. “
Another
brilliant one, Milo. Milo Andret,
Ph.D.
After fifteen years,
that’s
what you come up with?”

“You were never smart enough, were you? You wanted everyone at Princeton University to think you were halfway uncommon. Then everybody at Fabricus College
for
Women
. Now everybody in the stinking fucking woods of central fucking Michigan. Sweet little good-hearted Helena Pierce. But you’re not. You’re—”

Paulie said, “She married you because she felt sorry for you.”

Right,
I thought:
of course.

“Sorry for me? Well, you can shove that one, Helena. With a goddamn sharp stick.”

Paulie blanched.

“Yes, Milo,” said my mother. “Sorry for you. Didn’t you know? Don’t you know that we all
still
feel sorry for you? That’s why we’re all still here. Why don’t you go find another one of those five-dollar little friends of yours and just get the hell out of our house.”

“You’re the little five-dollar whore around—”

Paulie’s boot hit the wall near his head.

When I stood, my father wheeled. “And
you,
” he said. “You should never have been born.”

“I feel sorry for
you,
Mom,” said my sister.

“Well, I feel sorry for her, too! Mother to a deadbeat like him.” He jabbed his finger at me. “Pissed away every goddamn talent I ever gave him.”

“Milo, get out of this house.”

“
You
get out. All three of you, get out! All three of you fucking ingrates!”

“Tell me, Dad,” said Paulie. “Did
I
piss away my talent?”

“What?” he said, without even turning. “No, you didn’t, Paulie. You never had it to begin with.”

When my mother swung the floor lamp, the cord yanked it from her hand, so that instead of smashing the wall, it leaped backward and wobbled against the baseboard. My father leaned over, picked it up, and threw it through the window. The pane thought for a moment; then was gone. Shatters covered the carpet. He stepped over and began stomping them. Paulie screamed.

My father reached through the empty window frame and lifted something in from the porch. When he turned, I saw my mother’s crowbar in his hands. Paulie launched herself against him, shouting, “I hate you! I hate you!” Dad lurched toward the wall, smacking the floor with it as he tried to shake her from his back. “I hate you! I hate you!”

“Milo,” said my mother evenly. “Put that thing down.”

“Fuck all of you.”

“Put it down.”

“Get her goddamn off me, then!”

“Hans,” said my mother.

“Paulie,” I said. “Perhaps—”

My mother grabbed for him.

When he swung it, I don’t believe he intended it to come anywhere near her, but by the time it cleared his shoulder, she was standing right next to him. I saw the dark flash and thought,
This is how—

But she ducked, and it passed over her head. He shouted “Jesus, Helena!” and a spray of dust shot out from the wall.

“Oh my God,” said my mother. She straightened, trembling, and Paulie dropped from his back. “I hate you,” Paulie said. “I truly, truly hate you.”

The hook of the bar was still wedged into the plaster, and with a grunting lurch he twisted it free. But then he brought it to his shoulder and rammed it in again. The boards splintered, and a bright triangle of lake appeared. The next blow shook the house and opened a gap to the corner. He smashed again. The planks tore away like cardboard. I could see most of the dock now and our two boats tied together in the sun. Then the whole run of land to the water. Bernie was barking wildly. My father kept smashing. A quivering tangle of vines popped into the room. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he shouted. Paulie screamed, “Idiot!” He shouted, “Fuck you all!” Paulie screamed, “You crazy idiot!” He tore at the vines, then hooked the blade over the slats and pulled. When they ripped clean, he crashed backward onto the carpet, glass scattering all around him and the crowbar skittering away.

As I bent to pick it up, I heard my mother say, calmly, “Enough.”

When I turned around again, she’d dropped to the floor and was wrapping him in her arms.

“No!” Paulie shouted. “You can’t do that!”

“Quiet, Smallette.”

“You make me sick! You make me sick! He’s crazy, Mom!”

“Quiet now, Paulie,” I said. “Just, let’s be quiet.”

Then suddenly my sister calmed. She cocked her head and brought her hand to her mouth. On the floor, my mother had blanketed him with her body, the way she might have blanketed a child, leaning down over his chest and cupping his face in her hands. Under his harsh breathing, I realized that she was whispering to him. Paulie stood above them, ashen, and even Bernie had flattened himself against the rug, so that after a moment I was able to make out her words. Her lips were pressed close to his ear. “I love you,” she was saying. “I love you, Milo. It’s all right. Everything’s going to be all right.”

Disciplina in Civitatem

T
HAT WEEK,
I
waited for the apocalypse, for the universe to finally acknowledge the rent that had been torn in the fabric of Andret family life. But first one day, a partly cloudy one and mild, then the next, sunny and humid, floated peaceably by. My mother cleaned up the mess. We ate breakfast. We ate lunch. We ate dinner. We spoke, though somewhat cautiously, when we passed one another on the paths. In the daytime, Mom went back to working on the clearing. Dad went off to his shed.

Today was Saturday, finally, and my father was washing the hallway rug in the lake. It seemed to me that this was his first acknowledgment, in any form, of what had happened. Mom and I were sitting together on the porch, watching him. From the end of the dock, he dipped it into the water, then lifted it, spread it onto the boards, and squeezed a bottle of soap over it.

I couldn’t imagine him ever apologizing: but this was close.

“Those things,” my mother said suddenly. “Those things I said. I want you to know that you had nothing to do with any of them. What I said about why I’m still here with your dad, for example. You must know how upset I was.”

“I do know, Mom.”

“I wish I’d never uttered a word of any of it. I wish none of us had.”

“I know
that,
too.”

“Of course you do. We were all crazy up there for a few minutes.” She set down her mug. “Except for you, I suppose. You kept your head better than the rest of us. Thank you for that.”

“You’re welcome. I guess.”

We turned to watch him again. He was leaning over the fabric, kneading the soap into foam, his fingers picking out what must have been the last bits of plaster in the weave.

“I think he’s a little better now,” she said. “I think he might be back to normal.”

I lifted my head and looked over the cove.

“What’s the matter?”

“
Normal
people don’t swing crowbars at their wives,” I said.

“He wasn’t swinging at me.”

“Then who was he swinging at?”

She looked down at him, then up at the woods. “He was swinging at
that,
” she said. She pointed. “At whatever’s going on in that shed up there.”

“Well, normal men don’t rip holes in their houses either, just because a proof isn’t going perfectly.” I pointed the other way, behind us at the cabin, where a man from the hardware store had nailed up a sheet of plywood the day before. “Or because they decide a job offer is some kind of insult.”

“Ordinary men don’t do what he does.”

“Please.”

“He goes in there every morning with no idea of what he’s going to find, Hans. He never knows if any of it will pay off. For him or for us.” She shook her head. “For you and Paulie, I’m talking about.”

Out on the dock, he pulled the rug back up onto the boards, rolled it, and began pressing out the water.

“That’s why he swung a crowbar at you?”

“He was mortified about that.”

“
Mortified?
And how about the stuff he said to Paulie?”

“You’re right—that was inexcusable.” She turned her head and looked with a pained face out at the water. “But he wasn’t in a normal state. He really wasn’t.” Then she added, “One day, you’ll understand.”

“What, when I’m a mathematician?”

“When you have a family.”

He rose then and lugged the sopping mass up the dock. When he reached the stairs, he unrolled it and hefted it over the railing. He looked up at the porch then, miming the weight. Then he actually waved.

Mom waved back.

“He’s acting like nothing happened,” I said.

“No, he’s not. He’s acting like something dreadfully wrong happened.
I’m
the one who’s acting like
nothing
happened.”

Dad smiled a little, came down the steps, and started making his way through the woods toward the shed. We watched him. After a time, she said, “You know, Hans, human beings will always be tested.”

“Is that why you’re pretending it didn’t happen?”

She looked out at the water again, then back at me. From far in the trees, we heard the shed door slap shut. “No,” she said.

“Then why are you doing it?”

“Because I don’t see that I have any choice,” she said.

—

I
N HIS SHED,
the box that held his Fields Medal was sitting at the corner of his desk. He’d called me out there to speak with him.

“You know,” he said suddenly, “you can’t make time run backwards.”

“Does it look like I’m trying to?”

He actually laughed.

Then he reached into the drawer. “Now we’re going to stop bullshitting each other,” he said. “Things are about to change around here.”

He pulled out his hand. In it were a half dozen of my pills.

“Oh,” I said. “Well.”

He balled his fist and shook it. “They’re a drug, aren’t they?”

“I have no idea.”

He looked at me with disgust.

“You’ve never seen them before, right?”

“As a matter of fact, I haven’t.”

He opened the drawer and threw them back in. Then he stood and stepped toward me, leaning close. He gazed into my pupils. I could see the tiny scabs at the corners of his lips and the web of capillaries on his nose. But there was no recognition at all in the sorrowful irises that stood just a few inches from mine. Not any that I could see, anyway, even with my dose at its peak.

“You’re high on them right now,” he said. “Aren’t you?”

“I don’t even know what they are.”

His laugh was a bark. He shifted back on his heels and for a few moments just stood there. Then he sat again and began rocking in the chair, its wheels squeaking. “Well, that’s funny,” he said. “Because I found them in your closet.”

“That
is
funny.”

“Let’s see”—he glanced at the calendar—“about three weeks ago now.”

“Well, I don’t know what to say.”

“How about nothing?”

“That sounds good.”

He stared at me for a long time. Finally, he pointed up at the rafters. “Take a look,” he said.