A Doubter's Almanac (48 page)

“Hmm,” she said, peering over her reading glasses. “You know, you get things cleaner by hand.”

“Well, now you don’t have to.”

“I
want
to.”

“Ah.”

“And I want the kids to, also. That’s how you raise them. Not with dishwashers that pull out of the wall, and not with”—she hesitated—“a string of nannies.” She used her hip to nudge the dishwasher closed, and it beeped a down-cadenced version of the same spry melody. With her glasses off she looked at me queerly, as though a strange but no-longer-threatening animal stood before her. “Of course you already know all this,” she said.

—

A
FTER TWO DAYS
in the apartment, she invited us for dinner. Niels and Emmy had gone over ahead of time for their first Grandma outing, which we were surprised to discover had included the preparation of the meal. When I entered with Audra, Niels lost no time in informing us that they’d gone out to buy yesterday’s bread at Pret A Manger, reviving its crust in the oven, along with last week’s tomatoes from D’Agostino, which Mom had let Niels sauté in a pan and then Emmy cook into a frittata. At the center of the table it sat on a metal stand like a wedding cake. Mom pointed around the corner at Emmy, who, like someone else’s child, was already scrubbing the pan in the sink. Audra’s jaw actually dropped.

Mom moved behind Niels again, but again I wouldn’t let her catch my eye.

—

A
ND THAT WAS
how we lived, for a good long while anyway. Audra, who’s always worked particularly hard, left for the publisher’s every morning at seven. Forty-five minutes later, I walked the kids to school, then made my way back to the apartment, where Lorenzo would be waiting out front with the day’s customaries: a triple espresso, a chocolate croissant from Flakey’s, and the usual grooming kit unzipped to a set of German nail clippers and a Japanese razor. (On the far side of the pivoting desk there was also a pack of flossers, a tin of breath mints, a bottle of mouthwash, a shaving mirror, and four newspapers, all of them arranged on the tray like the tools of a particularly well-informed but hedonistic dentist.) In the afternoon, Anna-Maria delivered the kids to my mother’s. At 8:30 or 9:00 in the evening, Lorenzo dropped me back at the house.

Mom changed everything. It wasn’t that luxury didn’t agree with her; it was just that she hated wasting anything at all—envelopes, tea, money of any denomination, time, or intellect. Squandering what the world had allowed us was to her the great sin of our epoch (a point with which I’ve come to agree). Within weeks, she knew most of the used-goods stores in Lower Manhattan. And the kids went along on her shopping trips as though exploring a newly charted land. Niels readied himself with a map. Emmy (who needs no map) brought along a reporter’s notebook. One afternoon I opened it to a page that contained a matrix of milk, ice cream, and butter prices at all the markets in the neighborhood. She’d figured everything by the ounce.

Naturally, Mom also availed them of the art museums. I knew the more prominent ones myself—the Met, MoMA, the Guggenheim—from the money-related events I’d attended in their inner rooms. But Mom went further. She succeeded in doing for the kids what she’d once hoped to do for Paulie and me, on all those drives to Chicago. And the kids didn’t even seem to mind.

Over the first months, they became familiar with just about every landmark, major or minor, on the New York art scene, from the Whitney to the Neue to the Folk Art. They went to the Chelsea and the Rubin and a whole slew of private galleries whose buzzered doors she scoffed at but still entered. The Frick didn’t allow children, but she talked them in anyway. On weekends they went by subway to the Museum of African Art in Harlem and the Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, where they picnicked from a wicker basket she’d bought from a street cart. I could well imagine all these expeditions: the kids, watching the paintings, being watched by Mom; Mom waiting saintlike for any sign of interest.

Emmy no doubt heartened her. Emmy will absorb whatever is presented—music, art, mathematics—and store it in the permanent collection. Niels will flit around like a bee. But when the bee settles on a flower, it settles.

I could imagine Mom charting their futures.

“They’re interesting,” she said to me one day. “They’re not like you were at that age. Or Paulie, for that matter.”

“Well, they’ve got plenty of Audra in them, too.”

“Yes, yes, you’re right.” She nodded, as though the thought were new to her. “I can see that.”

“Niels is like you,” I offered. “More well rounded.”

She eyed me.

“I mean that as a compliment.”

“Thank you.” She smiled, but after a moment, the smile thinned. “Emmy is the one—the one I worry about.” She touched her head. “She could—”

“Yes, yes, I know.”

“But she won’t,” said my mother. “We just won’t let her.”

—

O
UR COUNTRY PLACE
in Litchfield is an eighteenth-century colonial with a hundred acres of oak and maple out back. Out front is a brook whose course has been nudged with a backhoe so that it makes two gurgling passes beneath a pair of Japanese footbridges beside the driveway. At the loop of the bank, the old carriage house has been converted into an office—yes, the pads, the pencils, and the caramels, though not the boxes.

That’s where I was when the phone rang one Saturday a couple of years ago. “Who’s this?” I said, hearing a woman say my name on the line. Her voice prodded something in my memory.

“Cleopatra Biettermann,” came the reply.

“Do I know you?”

“My husband and I are old friends of your father’s. Cle Wells was my name then.” She paused, taking a dramatic breath. “Your dad’s not doing well, you know.”

“How do you mean?”

“He told me that the two of you had some kind of falling-out. That’s why I called.”

“How’s he not doing well?”

“When I spoke to him recently, he didn’t sound very good.”

I was still trying to place her voice. “Well,” I said. “He can sound that way.”

“I know he can.” She paused. “Hans, your father is an extraordinary man. He’s unlike anyone either of us has ever known.”

“Well, on that point, we agree.”

“Oh—” she said, inhaling sharply.

“What?”

“Nothing.” Then she added, “For just a second there, you reminded me of him.”

We were both silent. Then I said, “So, how exactly is he not doing well?”

“I think you need to go see him,” she said.

Drunkard’s Walk

O
N THE
P
HYSICO
jet, the waiter served a dry-aged New York strip with raspberry reduction and a plate of miniature asparagus spears under dill. In Detroit, I settled into a stick-shift Audi. I could have landed at an airport closer to the house, but I was looking forward to the drive. The GPS said 112 minutes.

I made it in ninety.

The thing is, I nearly missed the turnoff. That’s how different it all was. The gravel road that in my childhood had curved down into a cedar-strewn swampland and over a shaky wooden bridge had been paved and straightened. Asphalt so black it looked as though it had been laid that morning. White lines down the sides like the stripes on a Ping-Pong table. At the intersection sat a new hotel—a Lakeland Suites with its bright green shamrock, slowly turning. Next door, a slickly rounded Speedway station, its line of pumps turned gold by the evening light. I had the thought that if I continued down that shining slice of pavement, I’d find a business park at the end.

And I almost did.

It was a housing development. Gray and beige saltboxes with steep green roofs, the dark living-room windows reflecting a dozen shimmering balls of flame as the sun moved down below the trees. Closer to the bridge stood a longer, lower construction with the same steep roof. A parking lot wrapped around three landscaped sides. I thought it might be a gym; then maybe a bowling alley; then a school. Then I read the sign:
A SINNING MAN NEVER PRAYS—AND A PRAYING MAN NEVER SINS
.

My father was passing a mega-church now every time he went into town.

Just before the creek, I made the sharp turn onto the rutted two-track. This part was paved now as well—the same darkly glinting asphalt and shining white borders. All of it burnished to amber by the evening. The old trestle bridge had been replaced by a steel one, with a fenced-in foot lane. On the far side, peeking from the trees every hundred feet or so, were driveways that ended in carved mailboxes—smallmouth bass and startled owls and friendly bears with their jaws open for the postman. People had taken to naming their cabins:
TEES FOR TWO, A LONG DRIVE, ANGER’S AWAY
!
I could see the screened-in porches through the boughs and the lamps burning in the living rooms. Suddenly a row of streetlights blinked on.

Streetlights!

I’d last seen my father on the night at Le Pinceau with Audra—the night we had the falling-out that Cle Biettermann mentioned—and I’d last been up here to the cabin several years before that, when I was still a student at OSU. This entire transformation had taken place without me knowing. The lake was still the same humid brown, but it was dotted now with tiny white lozenges suspended in the darkness—speedboats on their shore hoists, glimmering in the long dusk.

A couple of hours after our dinner together in New York, when Audra and I had left him to his nightcap, Dad had thrown a tumbler against the wall behind the bar at Le Pinceau. Then a bottle. Then he’d stood and made his way down the row of $10,000 mahogany-framed mirrors, smashing them with a stool. When he collapsed, an ambulance had been called.

I know these details because I paid for them.

But in the few times since then that we’d spoken—the week before the wedding for one, and a couple of other, rather strained conversations after that—he’d avoided the topic completely. What I knew was that he’d been sitting at the bar with a woman—a woman who’d been kind enough to call me from Dad’s phone when the paramedics arrived to take him to New York–Presbyterian. As I pulled the Audi along the darkening lane now, looking for the old gap in the trees, I suddenly realized why Cle Biettermann’s voice had sounded familiar: she was the one who’d called me. She was the one he’d been sitting with at the bar.

—

A
FTER THAT,
D
AD
and I stopped speaking almost altogether. In fact, the next time I remember talking to him was one Sunday morning at least a year after the wedding when he called me out of the blue. He’d somehow latched on to the idea again that I was an apologist and that along with Paulie and his soon-to-be-ex-wife, I was trying to ruin him.

The phone had rung while Audra and I were asleep. “Now he wants the whole house” was the first thing he said. No greeting.

“Who does?”

“The assassin.”

That’s what he called Mom’s lawyer.

“Well,
you’ve
got the cabin.
She’s
got to live somewhere, too, Dad. Jesus, what time is it out there?”

“The same as it is out
there
. It’s him, Hans. This is the assassin’s work. Your mother would never do anything like this.”

“She might.”

“What?”

“I said, she
might
.”

“Don’t tell me you’re on
their
side again.”

“I’m on nobody’s side.”

I thought I might have heard him take a swallow. I glanced at the clock. “It’s five-thirty, Dad. You know that, right?”

“Well, that’s what time I get up these days.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that. He didn’t seem to know, either, so I waited.

“Are you keeping busy?” I said finally into the gap. “Are you working?”

“As a matter of fact, I am.”

“Okay, good. On what?”

“On something. When I’m alone like this up here, I can think. I’m back on track.”

“On track for what?”

His breathing changed. I could hear him deliberating. Finally, he said, “Who wants to know?”

“What?”

“Who asked?”

“
I
did. I want to know how you’re doing. You just called me, Dad. You woke me up.”

A silence.

“Things get out,” he said.

“What kinds of things?”

“On the Internet. Things get taken.”

“You think someone’s trying to steal your work?”

“Computers have cameras now.”

“Cameras? You think someone’s taking screen shots of what you’re doing?”

“Your mother. The assassin. All of them. People record everything. I’m talking about the Internet.”

“I don’t understand, Dad. You think people are watching you? You think someone’s trying to steal your work off the Internet?”

“Kopter did.”

Another silence. I was listening for the knock of the glass. Finally, I heard it.

Just before he hung up, he said, “Don’t ever ask me to discuss my work again, Hans. Do you hear me? Don’t ever ask that again.”

—

O
NLY THE LAST
fifty yards resembled anything I remembered. Just before our turn, everything reverted, the pavement broken now by potholes and gashes and all the old spindly shrubs growing right through the blacktop. No streetlamps here, the Audi pushing slowly into the country dark. I opened the windows and smelled mud and iron. At the driveway, a fallen birch had been dragged just far enough to allow a car to pass. Rocks pinged the undercarriage. The parking area, which my mother had once cleared, and where I’d once watched my father bid farewell to Knudson Hay—and, later that summer, to all of us—had been taken over by wild. Curtains of vines around a narrow tunnel. At the end of it: the clearing. On the far side of that stood the cabin. Every light was off.