“You’re right — that was inexcusable.” She turned her head and looked with a pained face out at the water. “But he wasn’t in a normal state. He really wasn’t.” Then she added, “One day, you’ll understand.”
“What, when I’m a mathematician?”
“When you have a family.”
He rose then and lugged the sopping mass up the dock. When he reached the stairs, he unrolled it and hefted it over the railing. He looked up at the porch then, miming the weight. Then he actually waved.
Mom waved back.
“He’s acting like nothing happened,” I said.
“No, he’s not. He’s acting like something dreadfully wrong happened. I’m the one who’s acting like nothing happened.”
Dad smiled a little, came down the steps, and started making his way through the woods toward the shed. We watched him. After a time, she said, “You know, Hans, human beings will always be tested.”
“Is that why you’re pretending it didn’t happen?”
She looked out at the water again, then back at me. From far in the trees, we heard the shed door slap shut. “No,” she said.
“Then why are you doing it?”
“Because I don’t see that I have any choice,” she said.
—
IN HIS SHED, the box that held his Fields Medal was sitting at the corner of his desk. He’d called me out there to speak with him.
“You know,” he said suddenly, “you can’t make time run backwards.”
“Does it look like I’m trying to?”
He actually laughed.
Then he reached into the drawer. “Now we’re going to stop bullshitting each other,” he said. “Things are about to change around here.”
He pulled out his hand. In it were a half dozen of my pills.
“Oh,” I said. “Well.”
He balled his fist and shook it. “They’re a drug, aren’t they?”
“I have no idea.”
He looked at me with disgust.
“You’ve never seen them before, right?”
“As a matter of fact, I haven’t.”
He opened the drawer and threw them back in. Then he stood and stepped toward me, leaning close. He gazed into my pupils. I could see the tiny scabs at the corners of his lips and the web of capillaries on his nose. But there was no recognition at all in the sorrowful irises that stood just a few inches from mine. Not any that I could see, anyway, even with my dose at its peak.
“You’re high on them right now,” he said. “Aren’t you?”
“I don’t even know what they are.”
His laugh was a bark. He shifted back on his heels and for a few moments just stood there. Then he sat again and began rocking in the chair, its wheels squeaking. “Well, that’s funny,” he said. “Because I found them in your closet.”
“That is funny.”
“Let’s see”—he glanced at the calendar—“about three weeks ago now.”
“Well, I don’t know what to say.”
“How about nothing?”
“That sounds good.”
He stared at me for a long time. Finally, he pointed up at the rafters. “Take a look,” he said.
I followed his finger.
“Take a look, Hans.” He leaned sideways and pushed a crate against the wall. “Go ahead. Take a glance at the work I’ve been doing.”
He tapped on the crate.
When I stepped up onto it, I was staring into his rows of boxes lined up along the rafters. The ones in front of me were all labeled WRONG or ??. Behind them, I could see a corner of one that said RIGHT.
“What do you want me to look at?”
“Just take one of them down.”
I suppose I should have known merely from being his son, not to mention from the way he’d been acting lately, or even from the sound the cardboard made as my arms bumped against it on the ledge; but my thoughts were no longer tying themselves together. I reached and pulled a box to the edge, then guided it down. Only when it was on the rug did I understand that I’d picked the one that said RIGHT.
Despite everything, I was still as hopeful as my mother.
“Go ahead,” he said.
“What?”
“Open it.”
I did.
Inside were bottles. Empty ones.
For a moment, even then, I failed to understand.
He brushed his hand toward the rafters. “Every fucking one of them,” he said.
He’d wadded paper between them, but I could still see the red wax melted on the necks. I pulled one out. Not a drop left inside.
“Birds of a feather,” he said.
“You didn’t quit.”
“What does it look like?”
“Like you didn’t.”
“Well, I did, actually. But I couldn’t make it stick.”
I sat down on the floor.
“You can be through with me,” he said.
“I don’t want to be. Don’t say that.”
“If you are, I’d understand. I’m washed up.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Yes, I am. I’m good as dead — as a mathematician, anyway. Haven’t done a thing in a decade. Not one fucking thing in my entire life, probably.” He pointed at the box, shaking his head. “Never give up.”
“You didn’t.”
“Yes, I did. A long time ago.” Something appeared in his eyes. But then he waved his hand, and it seemed to go away. He pulled open the drawer again and glanced in at the pills. “What are they, Hans?”
“They’re MDA, Dad.”
“Jesus.”
“The Mellow Drug of America.”
He dropped back into the chair then, swept a hand through the drawer, and held his fist out over the trash can. Then he seemed to think better of it. When he turned and opened his palm to me, I saw a clot of yellows and greens and light blues: 80s, 120s, and 160s. His sweat was already sticking them together.
I reached to take them.
“Goddamn it,” he said. “I guess it’s over for both of us.”
—
I BELIEVE NOW that he never did tell my mother.
At first I wondered if my own silence was expected in return — quid pro quo. But later in my life, when I had my other troubles, I realized that it was probably more elementaclass="underline" he really had given up. Not only on his work and on me, but on all the relationships he’d ever had — on every one of the distressing amalgams of mystery and pain that had puzzled him since childhood. In the mathematical world — indeed in the entire world — he had not a single friend; at home, my sister already treated him like a stranger; and by that point, no doubt, my mother was halfway gone.
Later that summer, I realized why he’d brought the Fields Medal with him up to the lake. In September, two days before school started, my mother and sister and I drove back to Ohio in the Country Squire, with Bernie sitting like a king on the empty side of the front seat. My father stayed behind to close the cabin. He was going to take the Greyhound home to Tapington in time for his own classes, which began the following week.
But by the time the semester opened, he still hadn’t appeared. One evening not long after that — and not long before I went off to college myself — my mother answered a phone call from the dean of faculty. After a few moments, she went upstairs to the bedroom extension.
As it turned out, she never did finish her nursing degree. By the time I moved to Columbus, she was working again, full-time, as a secretary in the offices of the Fabricus College administration.
That was how their marriage ended — quietly. My father just never came back.
Molly and Sally