Art history was also impractical. In fact, the impracticality of my mother’s education, which had been entirely self-administered, might have been the true reason she remained married to my father for as long as she did. (Which makes me wonder if this is why my father had suggested the field in the first place: Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate.) As a young woman, Mom had been accepted to the College of New Rochelle but by necessity had gone to work instead, at Princeton, where, as you’ve already read, she met my father. I don’t imagine that she ever desired to be a secretary again. Dad at least could support us, if only in Tapington, if only in a peeling house, if only in a ruined station wagon, on his Fabricus College salary.
I should add that, from my mother’s ministrations, I can probably guess what that salary was. After she paid the bills, which she did on alternate Sundays while sipping tea at our kitchen table with a heavily erased figuring pad before her, she had him carry the checks to his office for mailing. Fabricus College had stamps. It also had envelopes, on which she would neatly black out the college’s engraved insignia (although she liked to leave the outline of the steeple and sometimes the silhouetted pair of wood ducks) and write in our own return address: 1729 Karnum Road. When she finished with the current Sunday’s checks, she would prepare the next Sunday’s set of envelopes, tear up the worked invoices, and then carefully hang her tea bag from the kitchen faucet to dry. My mother used a tea bag twice.
Such unyielding frugality was not just her own instinct but the conscious foundation, I think, of a lifelong effort to launch my sister and me into the world. (Even now, she worries.) Whatever my father brought home, she would multiply. That’s what she did: she multiplied. Sunday was the day we ate meat, for example, and on Monday and then again on Tuesday she served a soup of the bones. Times three. With rice and carrots, of course. Times four. Or potatoes. Times five. The carrots grew wild in the sunny unsectioned flat of land behind our house, and the potatoes were the queerly shaped rejects that were delivered by truck to the parking lot of the Tapington public library every Friday afternoon, in thirty-five-pound bags. Agricultural topology, as my father used to say. My mother made it abundantly clear in those days that money was to be saved, even if my father had no inclination at all to save it. She sewed most of my sister’s clothes, and she procured my own rudimentary attire from the ubiquitous church sales that served as the town’s rotating charity enterprise. (St. Andrew’s Memorial Church was called by my father “the Family Andret’s Sartorial Hutch.”)
About clothing the two of them fought without actually fighting, which — in the beginning at least — was the method of warfare that they generally adopted. My father still wore the Borsalino fedora, for example, which he freshened in the mornings with a brush, along with a rotating arsenal of tailored suits, also from his Princeton days, that he regularly dropped off at the cleaner’s. He accented the suits with pale-colored shirts from a mail-order house in New York City. My mother countered by procuring her own wardrobe from St. Andrew’s Memorial, then altering it on a tag-sale sewing machine that she’d restored herself. She was good that way. She could generally repair — since my father rarely bothered to (although he could be surprisingly adept at it) — whatever item in our house had clogged, broken, burned out, worn through, or generally declined. Drains. Curtains. Hair dryers. Carpets. Windows. And certainly whatever didn’t fit, like clothing.
They also fought, without actually fighting, about our education.
Paulie and I were both talented, of course. In mathematics, that means. And because Dad didn’t trust the public schools to teach his subject, he took it as his duty to lecture us on it himself. Naturally, my mother countered. From the stacks of the Fabricus College library she brought home tomes on every unrelated topic she could find, the farther from mathematics the better. Anthropology. Rhetoric. Law. Philosophy. Zoology. Literature. And, of course, art history. The studying we did at her behest from an early age seemed to be another counterweight to my father’s outsize influence — that is to say, another ancillary sort of saving, not all that different from her husbanding of provisions. She would pack us up to our rooms to read her latest acquisition with the same unvarying forthrightness with which she doctored the Fabricus College envelopes or hung to dry her squeezed-out tea bags — as a counterpoint that illustrated frugality and discipline, if not actually reason.
As soon as we’d disappear to our work, she herself would sit down at the kitchen counter with either a tome on some obscure Florentine painter or a gruesomely illustrated textbook from one of the nursing courses she’d been enrolled in since the year my sister entered elementary school. This was my mother’s own task of betterment. Her plan was to obtain a certificate in practical nursing, via the night program at Ohio State. Though she certainly labored withering hours just taking care of the three of us (not to mention Bernie), she was nonetheless determined to finish a degree. She took one course per year, a pace that put her on track to graduate at about the same time she might become a grandmother. But such a triviality wasn’t going to stop her — not Helena Pierce Andret.
To my mother, I suppose, all of this — the books, the museums, the asymptotically far-off degree, all the carefully observed habits of discipline to which she unyieldingly bound herself — was as close as she could ever come to insurance. For her children, that is. Moral insurance. Emotional insurance. For what other reason, after all — other than what she already knew of her husband’s life — would a frugal woman discourage a subject as economically viable as my father’s and encourage one as economically improbable as her own? There was a multitude of things that Paulie and I could do in the world: that’s what she was telling us with her exertions. Art history just happened to be one of them.
Of my father’s own particularly stilted genius in the visual arts, I should add, I have few examples. Nearly all of his later drawings were highly ambitious renderings of the hyper-complex intersections of imagined shapes — rotating tesseracts overlapping at their vertices, 3D manifolds spun about planes in 6D space — and all but a handful of these pages have been lost. Nor do any of his portraits of famous mathematicians survive — not in my possession, anyway. In a silver frame on my kitchen wall hangs a single, elaborate depiction of the front of my childhood home, stupendously accurate in its detail up to the top-left corner of the paper, which remains untouched. And next to it is displayed a nearly photographic reproduction of the one misaligned sidewalk square that for as long as I can remember bulged between 1729 Karnum and the driveway to the north. This concrete square was portrayed by my father with mammoth foreshortening of the frost heave in the background and colossal magnification of the thick-capped property stake in the foreground — as though the whole scene were viewed by an ant. The stake lies on our side of the raised edge. That was the point of the exercise, which Dad had performed for legal reasons. Our neighbor — the one who liked to spray off our car — had tripped. My father had taken it upon himself to reproduce the facts of the tort, which, while lying on his belly, he did without shame or apology (he was capable of neither). There were no lawsuits in Tapington, of course, but he was very familiar with belligerence and on top of that had once lived in the East. Otherwise, in those days he drew nothing that I remember of the recognizable world, and he never mentioned his depictive talents. It was as if they didn’t exist.