Andrew's Brain: A Novel (16 page)

—or that her real mother died trying to save people.

Is that what you think now?

Yes.

I don’t imagine they would tell the child that.

Well, then, the hell with them!

Oh, for God’s sake, why can’t you be reasonable for a change? Think of someone besides yourself.

Oh, Doc. I do. I think all the time of my two girls. I want to read to them like MT did to his little girls, making up stories to help them get to sleep. He says, “They think my tales are better than paregoric, and quicker.”

Andrew, please—

He wrote down this one story for other fathers to use? Every name, and where possible every word, will have a cat in it—Catasauqua, Cataline, cattalactic. And the girls keep interrupting. What is a catadrome, Papa? I’ll look, he says, pretending to consult the dictionary. Ah, it is a racecourse. I thought it was a tenpin alley, but
cats do not play tenpins when they are feeling well, but they do run races. Thank you, Papa, the little girl says. Yes, he says, and the story continues.

Andrew—

MT’s invented silliness at his children’s bedtime. How he is their protector, and the world’s a safe snug place at their bedtime. How when they are grown they will remember this tale and laugh with love for their father. How this is his redemption.

E. L. D
OCTOROW
’
S
works of fiction include
Homer & Langley
,
The March
,
Billy Bathgate
,
Ragtime
,
The Book of Daniel
,
City of God
,
Welcome to Hard Times
,
Loon Lake
,
World’s Fair
,
The Waterworks
, and
All the Time in the World
. Among his honors are the National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle awards, two PEN/Faulkner awards, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. In 2009 he was short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize, honoring a writer’s lifetime achievement in fiction, and in 2012 he won the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, given to an author whose “scale of achievement over a sustained career places him in the highest rank of American literature.” In 2013 the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the Gold Medal for Fiction.