I’m still trying to understand him, really. To come to some reckoning — the great effort of my life, I suppose. As the Book says: a searching and fearless moral inventory. Of both of us. I’m the same age now that he was on the day he first arrived at Princeton.
D’où Venons Nous? Que Sommes Nous? Où Allons Nous?
Not long ago, when I was in my late twenties and already pretty much gutted by the outlandish blossom of my adopted trade, I came back home to take care of him. By then he’d been living by himself for most of a decade on the shore of a muddy lake in the middle of an underpopulated forest in a long-forgotten county of rural central Michigan. In his cottage the duck-print wallpaper was peeling from the plaster in long, twisted strips, like the birch trees of his childhood. Now his health was failing.
What was remarkable, actually, was that it hadn’t failed earlier. When I was a boy, his breakfast had consisted of two boiled eggs, two slices of bacon, and a glass of bourbon. I thought this was normal. I thought it was normal that he didn’t touch the eggs. In fact, I used to pour the bourbon for him while my mother cooked the bacon, and when he finished the bourbon and the bacon, I ate the eggs. My sister and I were raised in Tapington, Ohio, near the campus of Fabricus College for Women, the small Baptist institution that had taken him in — sub rosa — after his two dismissals, first from Princeton and then from the College of Lake Ontario.
By the time I came back to help my father, my mother had already divorced him. Of course, theirs must long have been an abysmal marriage, or at least one predicated on a particularly despairing seesaw, at one end of which Dad had stacked every ounce of his logical brilliance, his highly purified arrogance, his Olympian drinking, his caustic derision, his near-autistic introversion, and his world-class self-involvement, and at the other end of which my mother had placed her two modest parcels of optimism and care.
And perhaps a third: her humor. Even amid the decline of their marriage, she maintained her mild, tardy habit of one-upping his banter in a softly offered voice, after a long pause, that was like a tennis player reaching a ball just before the second bounce.
I can still picture him in those days. Tall. Gaunt. Distracted from us but not yet distracted in general. Still focused on something outside the room. He walked around with his hands behind his back, his feet swinging wide, his head tilted back, like an Old World European skating on a pond. Long before things had gone bad, he’d also become as direful a smoker as he’d been a drinker. My most prominent memory from childhood, in fact, is the smell of his cigarettes, a smell that was rooted in every corner of our house and in every piece of clothing that any of us ever wore. I didn’t mind it, but my mother certainly did. She washed and washed. She tidied and tidied. And that was just the beginning. She encouraged and encouraged. Apologized and apologized. Tried and tried. How can I describe her? She was a creature who lived to serve others. If that is the criterion one uses for loveliness, then my mother was the paragon of loveliness.
And she was devoted to him. That in itself is another mystery.
As it turns out, she never did get her degree — but not long after my father mentioned art history to her, she indeed took it up, just as he’d suggested. She did it on her own, without even telling him, but she did it with unwavering dedication. That’s the way she was.
—
YES, HELENA PIERCE is my mother.
She married Milo Andret in a courthouse, the day before the two of them left Princeton together for Buffalo, New York, to the locum tenens position that Knudson Hay, ever loyal, had found for my father. The College of Lake Ontario was a small-enough, experimental-enough, ambitious-enough liberal arts venture to have taken a gamble on a man whose office had been packed up by campus security. There was no honeymoon, of course, but Mom and Dad took the train north and rented an apartment not far from Niagara Falls. Unfortunately, the fresh start lasted only a few weeks itself before my father had insulted the director of his new department as well and been shipped out all over again. This time to Tapington, Ohio, where—miraculum miraculorum—an offer had come through from Fabricus College. In March of 1984, my parents bought an old Country Squire station wagon and headed south on Route 77. My mother has lived in Tapington most of the time since.
My father, I’m sure, would have preferred a two-seater — or at least a coupe — over a family car. But his new bride was practical. Either by nature or because she knew what was coming.
I was born at the end of that year, and a year later came my sister, Paulette.
—
BY THE TIME Paulie and I were old enough to go to school, my mother was already dragging us to art museums. I mean, dragging. There were plenty of perfectly fine ones around us in Ohio — in Columbus and Cincinnati and Dayton, to name just a few — but the one she insisted on going to at least twice a summer was the Art Institute of Chicago, which, like a well-contemplated punishment, lay at the end of a sweltering, five-hour drive. My sister and I endured the trip in the rattling old Country Squire, whose black vinyl interior by then smelled like a dog kennel set down in a decaying forest. My father, of course, didn’t come along. In the rear seat, Paulie and I read our puzzle books and stared out the dusty windows; in the cargo bay, Bernoulli, our Bernese mountain dog (partly), whom everyone but Dad called Bernie, lounged on his side with a shredded nylon bone propped near his mouth; and in the front seat, stiff backed and smelling mildly of Dial soap, my mother drove with both hands on the wheel, now and then wiping the sweat from her neck with a folded handkerchief. The air conditioner had long ago stopped working.
By that point, in fact, the Andret family station wagon was well known around Tapington. A Fabricus colleague once asked Dad if he’d been wounded in the shoot-out — a reference to the strikingly linear formation of rust holes that perforated the left front quarter panel. Our next-door neighbor, who washed his car every Sunday, used to spray off our Country Squire out of helpfulness, or perhaps concern, and then lean down to inspect the interior through its sap-streaked windshield. Dregs of yellow foam bulged from the upholstery, and above the cargo bay the cloth lining of the roof had been taped back to the frame. One of the backseat doors could only be opened from the inside, and on humid days the electric windows worked only if we tapped the rocker buttons in rapid succession, like a ship’s telegraph operator broadcasting an SOS. In the glove box, Dad kept a can of starter fluid.
My father, of course, would have bought a new car in a heartbeat.
My mother, of course, would never allow it.
The car’s darkly carpeted floor resembled the mulch of a long-untended garden, composted from used-up drawing pads, dried-out felt markers, and waterlogged reproductions of the Old World masterpieces that my mother handed out before our trips. (For at least a year of my childhood, a mud-obscured figure of Jesus — from an April calendar page depicting Giotto’s Christ Reasoning with Peter—looked up at me sideways from between my sneakers.) The musty odor of the seats was catalyzed by a yeasty damp that seemed to be entering through the footwells.
Yet before every trip to Chicago — or indeed before any trip of more than about an hour — my mother gave us another mini-lecture on another long-dead artist, then handed out another mini-sheaf of masterpieces, generally cut from the museum calendars of a bygone year. (Paulette had been named after Paul Erdős, by the way — one of the few contemporary mathematicians who was not despised by my father — but her middle name was Artemisia, after Artemisia Gentileschi, the virtuosa oilist of the Italian Baroque.) My mother herself had always enjoyed painting, but I also think she devoted herself to art history as ardently as she did — and tried to devote us to it as well — because it was as different from mathematics as a field could be.