“Thank goodness,” my mother said when the car door closed again. “I was getting a little bored in here.”
In those days, this was her version of malice. My father had been on the attack since he’d discovered the second picnic basket had been left at home, and for most of the drive my mother had been parrying him, meeting his disjointed and rambling accusations with her own incremental admissions, coyly humorous questions, and occasional nods of agreement, like a boxer using the ropes. This was not an admission of defeat but a tactic. Time was on her side — we all knew this — and once my father had downed a few bona fide cocktails and gotten a bit of lunch into him, he would reliably retreat. My sister and I were witnessing nothing but the feel-out punches of the day’s early rounds. We knew not to say anything ourselves, or he’d turn his spite against one of us.
But this morning, somehow, the beer wasn’t calming him, nor the pretzels that my mother kept proffering across the seat. The twelve cans were already as light as a bag with a sandwich in it.
We were most of the way to the dalles when he turned and said, “I just would’ve thought that someone would have taken it up by now. And built something significant on it.” He slowly pulled open the tab of the penultimate beer, allowing it to hiss. “That’s all.”
“That’s because it’s authoritative” was my mother’s immediate answer.
Paulie was reading The Hound of the Baskervilles and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (to this day she maintains the habit of reading two books at once), and I was working my way through the Fabricus College library’s pristine copy of Martin Gardner’s puzzles from Scientific American. Bernie, leaning over my shoulder from the rear, was poking his head out the window into the passing air and cambering his snout up and down, a ritual that my father always referred to as testing his principle. (This was a reference, of course, to the Bernoulli principle of inviscid flow — although, actually, Bernie had not been named after Daniel Bernoulli, the physicist and mathematician who’d elucidated the principle, but Jakob Bernoulli, the pure mathematician, who’d sided with Leibniz against Newton in the Great War of the Calculus. (Naming a dog after an ally of Leibniz in the calculus wars, by the way, no doubt reflected my father’s sense of irony as well as his quite durable sense of grievance.)) In any case, I can’t say how I knew, but I understood immediately that my parents were discussing the Malosz theorem. My father’s single crowning achievement had been the hidden stage work for most of the serious clashes I’d ever witnessed between the two of them. It was a historical fact as old and mysterious and yet as ever alive to our family as slavery might be to other families, or the bomb in Hiroshima, or the Holocaust. It put him into a mood. He’d published the paper twenty years before, but the proof had only a handful of times been used as the basis for another mathematician’s work.
I set down my book of puzzles.
Glancing back at us, my mother opened her side window so that the sound of the wheels would cover her words.
I sat forward.
“Don’t be nosy, Clever Hans.” This was Paulie. She called me Clever Hans not because she thought I was quick-witted but because a German farm horse by that name had once become famous for being able to do arithmetic with its hooves.
“I’m not nosy, Smallette. I’m interested.” (Smallette was the best I could do for Paulette, to my long-standing disappointment.) I leaned my temple against the back of my father’s headrest, hoping he’d think I was sleepy.
“Nobody’s come near it in years,” I heard him say.
“That’s because they’re intimidated,” Mom replied. “They’re intimidated by its brilliance.”
I remember marveling at my mother then, noting that despite the unrelenting weight of what must have already been a thoroughly one-sided marriage, she was immediately drawn to the encouraging word. For a few moments, I thought the impasse had ended.
But after driving silently for a time, my father turned to her and muttered, “Bullshit.”
When there was no response, he said it louder. “Bullshit!”
Of course, I also knew exactly what he was talking about. My mother’s imperturbable kindness was infuriating even to me — although, being young, I was confused by such a feeling.
“Okay,” she said gently.
“You know,” he said, “you are such a fucking Pollyanna.”
“What I said was the truth, Milo. No mathematician can come near what you achieved in the field. Not for a long, long time, anyway. Some work just puts an end to debate.”
He slowed the car. “Why, might I ask, are you such a goddamn fucking apologist?”
My mother turned to look at me in the backseat, then at the traffic behind us. “Sweetheart.”
He slowed further. A van roared past. Bernie barked.
“Milo. This is a highway.”
“I wrote a fucking brilliant proof, Helena. And no one’s taken it up. Not one fucking single other mathematician. Not one in twenty fucking years.”
“That’s an exaggeration.”
“Not that much of one. It’s a goddamn insult.”
“It’s just another mark of its power, sweetheart. That’s all. Nobody followed Newton, either. Now please speed up a little.”
My father continued at the same rate, working the eleventh empty back into its plastic ring as first one car, then another, pulled out to pass us. I glanced out the rear window, where a line of traffic was building.
When the Leinie cans were back in their place, he withdrew his hand and drummed his fingers lazily against the wheel, like a farmer plodding along in a tractor. “By the way,” he said, glancing up into the mirror. “That’s completely absurd. Barrow preceded Newton, and Leibniz followed Newton. You don’t know a goddamn thing about it. You don’t know the first thing about a goddamn thing about what you’re goddamn talking about.”
All of this was said slowly.
“We can discuss it,” said my mother, “anytime you’d like.” Then: “Will you kindly respect the speed limit?”
“Okay,” he said, shifting his foot to the accelerator. “Kids, your mother says we should respect the speed limit.” The engine growled. We roared forward, pulling close behind one of the cars that had just passed us. A moment later, our engine shaking, we passed it. Then the two ahead. He pulled in finally for a semitrailer coming in the other direction, then pulled back out to pass.
I looked over the headrest: the speedometer was on eighty.
“Okay,” my mother said calmly. “What’s next, Milo? What exactly are you planning to do next? Children, are your belts on?”
“What’s next is nothing!” But rather than jerking the wheel or stomping even harder on the accelerator, as I somehow hoped he would do, he simply slid back into line and laid off the gas until we had slowed again to fifty-five; and then, just like that, we were driving peaceably. My mother offered him another pretzel, and he took it straight from her fingers into his mouth. When the salty tidbit appeared to soothe him further, she handed him a few more.