To go by contraries: that is what C. and I had been doing from the beginning, without the phrase for it, and it is what we promised each other that night we would always do—move through the world together yet each in our own way. I have never found it a difficult promise to keep, chiefly because, like the brook, no matter where I wander in any given moment, I am ultimately compelled in one direction. “?‘Where is north?’ ‘North is there,’?” the poem begins, but listening to C.’s voice flowing on through the rest of it that night, lovely and shady and sunlit, I thought, as I have thought ever since then: north is you.
* * *
—
We did, of course, eventually make it to Ohio. I don’t remember much about the remainder of the drive, but I do remember our arrival. My parents—no fools, and no strangers to me—knew what it meant that I was bringing someone home to meet them, and by the time we pulled into the driveway, they were almost as excited about C. as I was. (“We have trimmed the bushes, fixed the leaks in the roof, painted the inside of the garage, brushed our teeth, and made ourselves very huggable,” my father had responded when I’d emailed that morning to say we were on our way.) I recall a flurry of introductions in the hallway, my father inquiring with characteristic expansiveness what we needed by way of food and drink, my mother radiantly happy just to have us in her home. Then I walked C. into the living room, settled next to her on the couch, and listened as she fielded a classic Isaac Schulz interrogation.
It wasn’t until I was well into adulthood that I realized how many people, when they first met my father, found him terrifically intimidating. Anyone who came into his orbit immediately became the focus of his omnidirectional curiosity and his unbounded instinct for hospitality, which together went flying toward their object in a gust of jokes, questions, rapid-fire information, and heavily accented English. None of this ever fazed me, because I knew from age zero that he was all bluff, benevolence, and adoration, but it scared the living daylights out of some of my shyer friends. In country songs, fathers greet their daughters’ suitors by sitting on the front porch saying nothing and polishing a gun. My father would invite you inside, offer you a sandwich, a scotch, three different flavors of ice cream, tell you anything, ask you everything—and, for a certain kind of person, be twice as frightening.
C., as it turned out, was not that kind of person. I have seldom been more filled with joy—and also already something like pride, so thrilled was I to have her in my life—than that first day when I sat there listening to her talk with my parents. (It filled them with similar joy, my mother told me later, to sit there watching us.) Amid all the questions and answers, one exchange in particular stands out, occasioned by the fact that C. was raised, as no one in my childhood was, to say “sir” and “ma’am” to her elders. My mother—who had worked hard to instill good manners in her own children—found this charming; my father wanted to know if her parents had served in the military. No, sir, she explained; she was just from the kind of family, and the kind of place, where that’s how things were done. Well, be that as it may, my father said, you’re to call me Isaac from now on. I have never known C. to miss a beat, and she didn’t miss that one. “Okay, Sir Isaac,” she said.
My father laughed, not only out of appreciation but, I think now, out of a kind of recognition. From the beginning, he adored C., and, although the two of them were born two continents and forty years apart, I suspect that he saw in her something of himself. That made him, as usual, swifter than I was: before that day, I hadn’t noticed any similarities between the two of them, doubtless because of their far more pronounced differences. In addition to the obvious ones of age, gender, and background, my father was almost always gregarious, while C., when not at home, can sometimes be reserved. But they were both people who came from one context and steered themselves into a very different one by sheer force of intellect, and sitting there listening to them talk, I was struck by how much her mind reminded me of his.
Like my father, C. has the kind of relationship to knowledge that comes from early scarcity—or, maybe more aptly, from late and sudden abundance, from first picking up a newspaper or venturing off to the library and realizing that you could simply choose to sit down and learn. I imagine that some childhood autodidacts feel chronically anxious about the legitimacy of their erudition. But both C. and my father, having learned to think by themselves, somehow managed to carry on thinking for themselves: they had deep, serious, original minds, ones far less susceptible than most to the parroted or the glib. They also had, between them, the two most remarkable memories I have ever encountered—memories so rapid, well-supplied, and reliable that they functioned as a kind of accessory intelligence, readily furnishing needed information and supplying, among disparate subjects, subtle and surprising connections.
The flip side of this particular gift is that they were both driven crazy by any brief glitch in their normally near-perfect recall. In the face of one of these, my father would push his glasses onto his forehead, squinch one eye closed, look upward, look pained, produce a long, rolling aaaaa-aaaaa-aaaccchhhhhhhhh—a kind of Semitic “argh,” made up of sounds my palate can’t even produce—and say, in a tone of dire irritation, “Come on, Isaac.” C.’s version of this, I have since learned, involves saying, “Gimme a minute” (by which she means “Do not under any circumstances make any noise or say anything at all right now, including ‘Never mind’?”), then burying her head in her hands and, if she is sitting, curling inward, as if the missing fact is stored somewhere near her knees. Thus have I seen the two of them berate themselves into finally remembering, say, the name of a minor character in a lesser Balzac novel they last read a decade ago—circumstances under which, I should add, I myself would struggle to recollect even the title.