A Doubter's Almanac (53 page)

“I don’t think my father has anything to do with it anymore.”

At these words, Audra actually laughed. “Sometimes, you’re so thick,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“Audra, why don’t you tell us what’s on your mind then?”

“What’s on my mind is obvious. Hans was
hoping
to be caught. Weren’t you? Obviously, you
wanted
me to stop you.”

“Why would I want that?”

“Because you couldn’t just let it go on. You
needed
it to stop.”

“Well, I don’t—”

“Shhh,” she said. “Just be quiet. Just think about it for a minute. You must have known it for a long time—that unless something changed—” Here she closed her eyes.

Matthew handed her the box of Kleenex. After a time, he said, “Well, Hans?”

“I guess she means that unless something changed, I’d eventually be in the same shape as my dad.”

“And?” said Audra.

“And I guess I don’t want to think about what that would have meant for our kids.”

—

“T
HAT’S ONE OF
the reasons we’ve never let them meet him,” Audra said. It was her last session with me before she went back to New York in the morning.

“Your children have never met their grandfather?”

“It’s not that we forbid it,” I said. “It’s just that it doesn’t ever seem to happen.
He
certainly never expresses any interest.”

“I don’t know if Hans told you this,” said Audra, “but he didn’t come to our wedding.”

“Was he invited?”

“Of course he was,” she said. “But he must have been afraid to come.”

“Afraid?” said Matthew.

“Of seeing my mother, she means.”

“Do you agree with that, Hans? Do you think he was afraid of seeing her?”

“Well—yes, I think he was. And he was probably afraid to see Paulie and me, too.”

“I can understand that.” This was Audra again. “I can see why he wouldn’t want to show up if all of you were going to be there. It was probably too painful. He was probably so ashamed of what he’d done.”

“My wife is being generous.”

“You see it differently?”

“I just see it as the way he is. He’s a frightened person.”

“Frightened of what?”

“Hard to say. Of people, maybe. Of human beings as unpredictable functions. I don’t know how else to put it. I don’t think he was actually ashamed. I don’t think he operates that way. It’s much more elemental, in my opinion. I think he was bewildered, and being bewildered scares him. He wouldn’t know what to say to the woman who was about to marry his son. He wouldn’t know what to say to her family. And he probably wouldn’t know what to say now to our kids. That’s why he drinks. That’s why he stays away.”

“And you prefer it that way?”

“I didn’t say I do.”

“But you
do,
” said Audra. “You’re afraid of his influence.”

“Well, aren’t
you
?”

Matthew let Audra think about that one.

“I don’t know,” she finally said. “Of course I am. But it’s already there, don’t you think? I mean, honey—
look
at our two children.” She laughed. “They certainly don’t get it from
me
.”

—

“T
HERE’S ANOTHER THING,”
I said. Audra had gone home now, and Matthew and I were in our afternoon session alone. It was my last week at Stillwater, and I’d realized that I was probably going to make it. “When I was at my dad’s cabin,” I said, “I found something interesting—the same mathematics journal that someone had once sent to me at my office in New York.”

“I don’t understand.”

“A few years back, someone sent me a copy of a mathematics journal. And I guess they sent one to Dad, too. The same article had been circled in both of them. But it didn’t have anything to do with either of our fields. It was combinatorics. I was surprised to find it on his shelf.”

“Combinatorics?”

“Pascal’s triangle. The Rubik’s Cube. How objects are ordered. I don’t know much combinatorics, and I don’t think Dad does, either. It was by a man named Benedek Fodor. There was one sentence in it. It wasn’t even in the article, actually, it was just a footnote.”

“Which said?”

“It said ‘It has not escaped my attention that such a finding is at odds with one of the foundational proofs of twentieth-century topology.’ ”

Matthew sat back in his chair. “You know it from memory, I see.”

“A sentence like that—well, for a mathematician, anyway—it’s the strike of the sword. Fodor was referring to my father’s proof.”

“Of the Malosz theorem?”

“Yes.”

“Then, you mean—there’s a
problem
with it?”

“Well, that hasn’t been shown. But there might be. There
might
be a problem with it. It can take a long time for a question like that to actually be sorted out. It can take decades. That’s how it goes with these things. The Kepler conjecture was solved years ago, but still nobody’s completely sure if it’s right. Some people are still trying to verify it, and other people are still trying to find a flaw. And the Malosz conjecture might be even more difficult than that one. But yes,” I said, “when a mathematician like Benedek Fodor says something like that, it casts doubt on what Dad did.”

“Did your father ever tell you about this problem—this
potential
problem?”

“No. Of course he didn’t.”

“But wouldn’t he have known about it?”

“Possibly. Not certainly. A proof like his takes years of work. Not many people in the world can even
read
a paper like the Malosz theorem, let alone track it. Fodor’s article was in an obscure journal. It was published in Europe. It was a single sentence. It was another mathematician’s thinking, in another field, in a footnote. All it did was raise a doubt. Dad might not have even heard about it.”

“But the journal was on his shelf.”

“Along with a hundred others.”

“Still,” he said, “it’s a doubt that concerns you.”

“I don’t know whether it concerns me or not. It would take me as long to figure that out as it would any other mathematician. Longer, probably.”

Matthew closed his eyes—he appeared to be thinking. “So your theory is that the same person might have sent the journal to both of you? Why do you think someone would do something like that?”

“I would have to assume as an attack.”

“Against you or your father?”

“Against both of us, I guess.”

“Well, that’s upsetting.”

“Of course it is. I don’t like to think that I have enemies out there the way
he
does.”

“Your dad has enemies?”

I laughed. “Dad has nothing
but
enemies. He makes them pretty much everywhere he goes. Pretty much everyone he ever works with. Pretty much every place he ever works. It’s easier to count the people who
aren’t
his enemies.”

“May I ask you something?”

“Yes.”

“Is that why you try so hard not to make them yourself?”

“Possibly.”

He nodded, then sat back in his chair. For a time, we sat there together silently. Then he said, “Do you feel any better now?”

“Why would I feel better?”

“Because you told me about this. I would have thought there’d be other things much more difficult for you to talk about, but you talked about all of them without too much effort—at least effort that I noticed. This one—a doubt about a proof your father wrote before you were even born—this one took all your will. I can see it. Your wife’s already left, and it’s the very end of your time here.”

“More difficult than a doubt about the validity of his work? For a man like my father? Nothing could be more difficult.”

“I meant for a man like
you
.”

I laughed. “I don’t know why it’s so hard. It shouldn’t be.”

He smiled. “You do feel a little better now, though, don’t you?”

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

“Confession is most of what we do,” he said. “Isn’t that funny? We have this state-of-the-art clinic. We have this highly trained staff. But in the end, confession might be just about the only cure we offer.”

—

O
NE SPRING MORNING,
after I’d been back in New York for a few months, my phone rang at work: Dr. Gandapur had found Dad asleep on a bench down by the water with a bottle next to him. This was March, and the lake was still capped by an uncracked plate of ice. Dad was dressed in black wing tips, dark socks, and a pair of boxers. Nothing else. The wing tips were his old teaching shoes from Princeton. He’d shined them up.

“Well, the good news is that he’s an extremely hardy creature,” said Dr. Gandapur. “In fact, such an insult would have killed anything less. I think he was out there for at least a couple of hours.”

“But he’s all right now?”

“He seems to be, actually.” Over the crackling line, he chuckled. “He’s drinking a very cold bourbon right now.”

“Well, good. That’s a relief.”

There was a pause.

“But I am indeed afraid,” he said. “Well, to put it this way, is what you are doing out there—I mean, your current work in New York City—how difficult might it be to put it aside for a bit?”

Easy Does It

F
OR A WHILE,
as Mom got used to Manhattan, she was at the Perry Street house every day. In the morning, she’d eat breakfast with the kids, then walk them to school. While they were gone, she’d bustle about. By 3:30, when they clomped back in through the front door, she’d already have made plans for the afternoon. First they’d put away their things, and after they’d had a snack and cleaned up the kitchen, they’d head out. They liked to walk uptown as a trio. Small galleries and secondhand shops in the old neighborhoods. Tea in the Russian pastry shops. Exercise in the public parks. Really, it was as though the two kids we knew had stepped out the door one day and been replaced by the resourceful offspring of pioneers.

As for me: well, it hadn’t been that long since Stillwater, but I was managing to stay clean.

Every morning, Lorenzo drove me to Physico, where the Shores-Durbans and I still spent the day cutting tiny pieces out of the biggest, juiciest financial steaks in the world. I’d lost some of my drive, I suppose. But I didn’t miss it—not yet, anyway. When the Town Car dropped me back at the house in the evening, I’d walk to the gym with Audra. Mom was with the kids then, too, strolling on the High Line or reading aloud to them on the living-room rug.
The Wind in the Willows
or
Art Through the Ages
. She supervised their generally sparse practice sessions on the piano. With Emmy, she was also drawing a little, although Emmy seemed to have inherited none of that particular aspect of my father’s talent. For his part, Niels was turning into an engineer rather than a mathematician. Even at his age I could see it. Mom saw it, too, as clearly as I did, and the relief she took in it was evident. From the public library she brought home books on dams and engines and airplanes. Audra might not have noticed the difference between engineering and mathematics, but to Mom and me it could not have been more obvious. Cricket and baseball.

One afternoon I watched Niels build a rubber-band rifle from a broomstick. I registered the sight with relief, the way my father must have registered the sight of his own son, at almost the same age, sitting under the mulberry tree rescaling Euclid’s proof on the infinitude of primes.

“Look at it,” Mom said to me one night after the kids were asleep. She held up Niels’s weapon, which looked rather capable. He’d filed down the end of the broomstick and cut notches in the tip, then duct-taped a row of clothespins as triggers. Mom and I were on the terrace. It had been a warm day, and she’d poured herself a glass of wine. She set it down and sighted along the barrel of the gun at the lightly dressed walkers who were making the midevening transition from the restaurants to the bars. “Niels is so excited,” she said.

“They live in such a different world now. Everything’s old hat for them. But this
—this
is new.”

“It’s the kind of thing that boys did during
my
childhood.” She sighed. “Now they’ve all seen everything.”

A group of young women drifted by beneath us, their phones glowing in the dark. All my life I’ve loved sitting with my mother, watching the world move insignificantly along.

“I know that when
you
were that age,” she said, “you played in the backyard.”

“It’s what I had.”

“And what a blessing that was, thank you. Your childhood was an open canvas.” She set down the gun and took a sip of wine. “Canvas and paint—and a few math lessons—that’s what we gave you.” Then she added, less firmly, “And not even that much, really. This generation—sometimes I wonder.”

“People have been saying that for a thousand years.”

She frowned. There was a pair of newspapers at her feet, and she worked off their rubber bands and hooked one of them into a trigger. When she fired, the rubber band whizzed up over our heads and shivered through the halo of the streetlamp. It paused at the apex, then wobbled lamely down to the street and brushed the shoulder of a man walking past. He touched his sleeve and looked up.

Mom ducked.

I waved.

“Wow,” I said when she sat up again. “You seem—I don’t know.”

“What? Tipsy?”

“No. Happy.”

“I
am
happy. I’ve been quite happy.” She looked out at the busy sidewalk. Then she added, “Not just here, though, Hans. For years now.”

For several moments, we were silent. I believe we were thinking the same thing.

“Mom,” I finally said. “He’s sick. Things have gotten worse.”

“I know, sweetheart.”

“How did you know?”

“Paulie told me.”

“It has to be—I don’t know, upsetting.”

“Of course it is. It’s terribly upsetting.”

She pulled out the other rubber band and hooked it into the clothespin. But then she set the whole thing down on the floor. “I’m not going out there,” she said. “I just want you to know that.”