The Mathematician’s Shiva by Stuart Rojstaczer Read Free Book Online Page B

on his “eagle eye.” He then moved to my mother, and struggled to find an entryway into conversation. “You know, Doctor K.,” he said, giving an aw-shucks grin, “I hear you’re just great with numbers.” Clinton began to tell my mother of a recurring dream. He is in an elevator of an impossibly tall building. He keeps rising higher and higher alone in this elevator, the numbers signifying what floor he is on getting bigger and bigger. “What do you think it means, Doctor K.?”
    “Well, I’m a mathematician, not a psychoanalyst,” my mother said. “But it would seem that your subconscious is telling you that you are in over your head in your present job.”
    Clinton looked at my mother quizzically, and then grimaced, his jawbone clearly visible. The silence was palpable until Mrs. Clinton, standing behind him, broke into her signature, wineglass-breaking laughter. “Oh, it’s a joke!” President Clinton smiled, hearing his wife’s appreciation of my mother’s dry humor. “You had me there, Doctor K.!” President Clinton placed his hand on my mother’s shoulder briefly and then walked on. Mrs. Clinton gave a nod and a conspiratorial grin that my mother returned. My mother interpreted this brief wordless exchange as an indication that Hillary well understood that her husband, like most men lost in their egos and need for constant praise, was incapable of anything but obvious thought.
    The
New York Times
, of course, had an obituary of my mother with a photograph taken by a White House photographer from that 1993 event. My mother never, ever smiled in a photograph. I have hundreds of pictures of her, and in almost every one there is that same look of scrutiny on her face. It’s as if she is challenging the photographer to go ahead and try to take a decent picture of her. The
Times
called her, “The greatest female mathematician of her generation, and perhaps the greatest of any generation.” My father, upon reading these words, looked hurt and turned indignant. “What is this qualification ‘female’? What do these idiots know of mathematics? There will not be another like her for two hundred years, maybe longer.”
    But he had a right to be pissy. We were at my mother’s home—a place from which he had been banished for many years, until my mother became sick—and the onslaught of phone calls, e-mails, and knocks on the door was already overwhelming. My cell phone mailbox had become completely filled in a matter of hours, mostly with condolences and requests for funeral information from Slavic-accented mathematicians.
    “I want a private service,” I said to my father. “Just us. The family.”
    “Good luck with that,” my father said. “You know better than to ask for such a thing.”
    “You want to go with us to the funeral home and to find a plot?”
    “No. I don’t care for cemeteries. That is something Shlomo is best at doing, anyway.”
    “I’m going to buy two plots, you know. Together. You and Mother.”
    “Yes, I understand. Rachela already told me. You can put me in a Jewish cemetery, I suppose. I won’t be able to object when the time comes, anyway.”
    “I’ll need your signature attesting to your Jewish faith.”
    “You aren’t telling me anything I didn’t already figure out. It’s a good thing I’m an atheist. You, however, have to play whack-a-mole with your sins.” He gave me an ironic grin. Did I view the prospect of burying my father, who wasn’t even circumcised, in a Jewish cemetery a sin? The answer is definitely not. He belonged next to my mother despite their many years apart. I would pay some extra money to the director of the funeral home so he would allow for this travesty. Yes, I knew I would be doing this not just for my mother. Mostly I was being selfish. I wanted to visit one place and one place only when, in the future, I would come back. Although I had no doubt that death was, aside from the recycling of carbon, a final act, I still needed to