A Doubter's Almanac (65 page)

I let out a small laugh.

He smiled. “Your kids are fine,” he said.

“Thanks, Dad.”

“They’re not the usual.”

“I appreciate it.”

I realized he was trying to catch his breath, so I sat there quietly. After a time, he said, “Women are the suns, you know. Men are just the moons.”

Then his eyes closed. I pulled the blanket over him, and he snored. “All that fucking work,” he said suddenly.

The small muscles at the rim of his mouth were quivering. I had that feeling again that I was seeing him in another piece of time. But he was going backward now. Somewhere in the universe, maybe, he was a young man again.

“What did you want to know?” he said, waking. He turned toward me and winced.

“I have your shot.”

He thought about it. Then he mumbled, “Okay.”

I rolled him over the rest of the way.

“Do you want my advice, Hans?”

“Of course I do.” I slid in the needle.

“That burns.”

“I know it does. I’m sorry. It’s going to feel better in a minute.”

His hand reached back and tried to find the syringe.

Another silence. A long one this time, while his fingers moved slowly over the bone. He was feeling for the needle that I’d already pulled out. Finally, he said, “What kind of advice?”

“Whatever you feel like telling me.”

He thought about it. Then he said, “You were a lonely boy. So was I.”

His eyes closed again.

When they opened, he said, “Life is brutal.”

He looked out toward the lake. “I should have just kept walking,” he said. His eyes came back to me, then drifted out the window again. “I was deep enough. I should have just kept on going.”

—

I
T WAS THE
middle of the night, but Audra picked up on the first ring. “How is he now?” she said.

“Not good.”

“Oh, sweetheart, I’ll come back out.”

“I don’t know if it’s time yet.”

“I’ll be there tomorrow.”

“Thank you, Aud.”

I was on the porch, watching him sleep. Through the screens, the sun was beginning to light the horizon.

“You know,” I said, “I think I finally figured something out. Something Matthew said to me once about confession. He might have been right.”

I listened to her breathing.

“Tell me what you mean,” she said.

“It’s a hunch. For a long time, I’d been thinking it was Earl who sent us that journal. But now I realize Earl doesn’t know a thing about it. If he did, he would have said something.” I looked out the window at the close hills, which were just beginning to be marked out against the day. “I think it was Dad.”

“Sweetheart, I’m sorry—I don’t understand.”

“I think it was Dad who sent me the combinatorics journal, Aud. The one with Benedek Fodor’s paper in it. Dad sent it to me himself.”

Mysterium Cosmographicum

W
HEN IT HAPPENED,
the floor hardly shook.

I ran out to the porch, but Paulie was already at his side. Dad was on the rug, the cast pushed up against the wall. His huge belly was splayed beside him like a duffel bag he’d tripped over. I could see the labored heaving of his chest.

“Oh, God,” Paulie said, backing away. “He hurt himself.”

The cast lifted a fraction of an inch, then fell.

“Oh, God,” he murmured.

“Let’s get you up, Dad. Come on, Paulie. We’re going to lift him. Dad?”

“No, Hans.” Paulie had backed all the way to the door.

“Dad,” I said, “are you hurt?”

“Up,” he said weakly.

“Let’s lift him. Paulie, come over here and help!”

She crossed the floor and knelt next to us. I lifted Dad’s belly until it flattened over his ribs.

“Jesus,” she whispered.

“I know.” With the cast I pushed the weight of it over his hips. “Okay, lift.”

“Oh, my God,” said Paulie. “What was that?”

“It might have been his ribs. Dad, did we hurt you?”

He rasped.

“Set him down, Paulie. Set him down. Take his shoulders. I’ll get his legs. Dad, we’re going to move you.”

She knelt by his head. He was trying to twist onto his side. I used the cast to pin his belly, but when I grabbed his hip my thumb pushed through the bone as though it were a piece of Styrofoam. “Oh, God, Paulie.”

“Oh, no. Oh, no.” She rose.

“Paulie! Look at me! We have to get him up.” I straightened his leg but he pulled it away. “Get the blanket, Paulie! Get the blanket from the bed!”

“Oh, no, Hans. Oh, no. We’re going to
hurt
him!”

“He’s already hurt! Jesus, Paulie! Get the blanket!”

“No.”

“Paulie!”

“No, Hans. We can’t
do
this.”

I yanked it off the mattress myself, then pushed it under his thighs. When I tried to tug the rest of him up onto it, though, his ribs made a snapping sound, as though I’d yanked open a row of buckles.

Paulie screamed.

I moved to his head and tried his shoulders, but I felt a rip inside the cast. He was shaking now.

“Helena—” he rasped.

Mom was standing in the doorway.

“Oh, God, Milo. Lord help us.” She knelt and clasped his hand. “Where does it hurt?”

“Helena—”

“Be strong, my love. Get his shoulders, Hans.”

“We tried, Mom. I don’t think—”

“Yes, we can.” She squatted. “One, two—oh, Lord, what was that?”

“It’s his ribs.”

“It’s going to be all right, Milo.”

I heard Paulie vomit.

Mom went to her knees. “Milo!” she said sharply.

He opened his eyes.

“We’re going to leave you here. It’s going to be okay. We’ll leave you right here on the floor. You’ll be fine.” She was pushing down on his belly now, and the movement seemed to relieve him. He drew a longer breath. “It’s all right,” she said. He drew another. “It’s all right.” She was pressing the weight of it to keep it over his hips. “We’ll get you comfortable, Milo, just where you are. Just where you are, Milo. Right here.”

Then she rose and began pulling pillows from the bed; then cushions from the chairs, sliding them under his head and shoulders and all along his sides. Paulie came back from the living room with more of them from the couch. Dad let Mom move him as she slid them around him. His color was returning now. All the while she kept pressing down on his belly. He was taking longer breaths. “We’ll make it okay,” she said. “Paulie, sweetheart, it’s all right. Hans, you go get his medicine. Paulie, he’ll need a glass of water. We’ll take care of you right here, my love. Oh, Milo. We’ll take care of you right here. It’s going to be all right.”

—

A
ND IT WAS,
strangely—it was strangely all right. Over his last days, my father made one final recovery, a recovery that seemed as improbable as all the others; but this time he did it on a makeshift bed, on the floor of that rickety screened porch, in the shifting light of the sun. He slept and woke, ate little, drank in fits, relieved himself without warning or embarrassment, rested his belly on its own pillow and propped the rest of his frame among a raft of cushions and blankets that had been spread around him like the drapery in a harem. My mother pulled his old mattress away from the wall and made it her own bed.

Dr. Gandapur drained him once more, which eased his breathing considerably. As he was packing up the bottles, he turned to Dad and said, “I’ve made a telephone call, Milo. They would accommodate you quite comfortably at the general hospital where I work in Lansing. And, of course, I would be there, too.”

Dad blinked at the ceiling. He ran his tongue over his teeth and said, as loudly as he could, “Fuck off, Danny.”

Dr. Gandapur’s lips turned up.

The doctor went out to the living room then to make the same offer to my mother, and though they were whispering, I could tell what her answer was.

After that visit, Dad experienced several days of relative comfort. He smoked. He drank a little. He listened to the radio. He talked, quietly and sporadically, but occasionally at length. He even tried to draw again, asking Paulie to bring him the pad—she practically ran to get it—but then letting it fall from his grip a few moments after he’d started. Moths batted the screens. Squirrels shook the branches of the hemlocks. At one point, a doe walked right up to the porch. The world seemed to want to look in.

For hours at a time now, his pain seemed to leave him entirely, as though it had completed its work ahead of schedule and had simply gone on without him. He propped himself up, just slightly, so that he could see out to the water. I don’t know how many of his bones were cracked, and he could hardly raise his head. His hand swelled until we couldn’t even ease it out of the cast. Inside the hole in the plaster, the fingertips grew dark. But he didn’t ask for any more medicine, and sometimes as I was getting his dose ready, he asked me to go light on it or to skip it altogether. I might only be comforting myself, but I think he might have been making one last effort to be present for all of us.

For Paulie, I think, most of all.

After his first day on the floor, she moved her bed down to the sofa in the living room. She would go out to sit with him in the mornings and evenings while my mother took a break.

Mom spent hour after hour with him. She cleaned his face with a washcloth, massaged his feet, held a straw to his lips. She carried out his bedpan and changed his sheets if he soiled them. Even in the middle of the night when I went out to give him his dose, she would wake on the mattress behind him and—not wanting to disturb either of us, I think—watch the commerce in silence.

As for Paulie, I know it must have been a test for her in ways that I can’t truly comprehend. I can’t imagine what she must have felt, trying to take care of him at last, when it was so obviously too late, or even watching my mother take care of him, as she had for all their years together. The man who’d left us so remorselessly. The man who’d left all of us, obviously; but most grievously, somehow, had left my sister—at an age that now seemed strangely like the age she might remain forever.

—

O
NE EVENING, AS
I was cleaning the dishes, Paulie appeared in the kitchen. She was wearing a faded flower-print sundress like the ones she used to put on as a teenager. She seemed more at ease than I’d seen her in days.

“Did you talk to him?” I said.

She turned a quick twirl, and the fabric of the dress flared up. “I did,” she said. She moved quickly into my arms and buried her face in my shoulder. When she stepped back, she said, “He asked me about what I do.”

“And?”

“I told him. I told him about my work. And my teaching. But, you know—he seemed genuinely
interested
.”

“He is, Paulie. I know he is.”

“I asked him about his life, too.”

“And what did he tell you?”

“He told me a story about when I was a girl. One time when Mom had the flu he had to take us to his office. You weren’t even in preschool yet, so I must have been about two or three. He was starting on something new, and I wouldn’t be quiet, even when he held me. So he just lifted me up onto his shoulders. I guess I liked it up there. I sat like that for the whole afternoon, evidently, running my fingers through the hair on the top of his head, while he worked.”

“And?”

“And that’s all.” She was blinking.

“That’s a sweet story, Paulie.”

“Is it crazy to think that you can remember something that happened when you were two?”

“I don’t know, Paulie. Maybe not.”

“Because I can. All my life I’ve had that memory. I’ve always thought I invented it, that it was some recurring dream about my professional anxiety, or something like that. But I guess I didn’t. I guess it’s an actual memory. I’m sitting up there, looking at a blackboard, over the top of my dad’s head, and I feel so happy.”

—

L
ATER THAT EVENING,
the phone rang, and the next morning a car pulled up the drive.

It was Knudson Hay.

I don’t know if Mom had called him or if he’d heard the news some other way. He’d flown in from Florida, then driven up at dawn from Detroit. When he saw Dad propped on the floor among the pillows, he pulled off his suit jacket and sat down on the rug next to him.

“Dad,” I said from the doorway, “it’s—”

“Chairman Hay,” whispered my father. “Punctual as ever.”

“Hello, Milo.”

Dad was able to reach his hand up a few inches. Hay took it.

“I’ll leave you two alone now,” I said.

My father glanced at his old boss, then at me, working his lips. “I was right,” he said slowly.

I waited at the door.

“About what?” came Hay’s temperate voice.

I could hear Dad’s lips smacking. “It didn’t matter,” he said.

“That’s okay, Milo.”

“No,” Dad said. “None of it—I was right. None of it mattered. None of it ever did.”

—

S
OMETIME LATER,
H
AY
shuffled into the kitchen. I looked out to the porch and saw Paulie sitting in the chair beside Dad now, reading. He was asleep, his mouth a gash against the pillows.

My mother heated a pot of tea, and Hay sat down with us at the table. My mother seemed strangely comfortable with him, and I must say, sitting between them in that old cabin in Michigan, it took several minutes of conversation before I suddenly recalled that for a decade she’d worked as a secretary in his department. Paulie was right: how ignorant we are of the lives of our parents. In the kitchen now, she poured him a cup of tea and brought out a plate of cookies, then moved to the counter, where, as they spoke, she made a sandwich for him and set it in a paper bag for his flight.

He was doing most of the talking. While my mother listened, first at the counter, then with her hands folded on the tablecloth next to him, he reported in detail about all the people they’d known. In retirement, he’d remained an elegant man, his hair still carefully combed and his summer suit starched in the shoulders. He went through all the old staff, remembering everything: names and dates; illnesses; children; grandchildren. He told her what the faculty had done and where they’d gone. He went on about a few students who’d made reputations in the field. He told her what he’d been doing himself in the years since his retirement.