“Absolutely, you’ll go, if you’re accepted,” Joan said a few days later, not having meant to say absolutely, wanting Eric to understand life did not always come through as one might expect. But she didn’t backtrack, after all she and Martin were agreed, and she was elated.
“I’ll be reading your essay, so make sure you do a really great job on it. And don’t—Eric, are you listening? Don’t wait until the last minute to write it. I want to see a draft in two weeks.” She wanted him to be admitted, to go there, to be gone for all of the summer.
Whoops and catcalls, then promises of how good he would be, the studying he would do. “I’ll go and write the essay right this minute, right now, see I’m going, I’m going, I’m gone,” and his door banged shut. Joan crossed her fingers for luck and believed only some of it. He would, however, begin writing that essay at once.
Two days later, Eric handed Joan a thousand convoluted words about how computing and coding did not level the playing field, but instead lifted everyone up. She read the essay through, and then read it again, not completely understanding her son’s thesis, wishing he had inherited an iota of her literary talent. But he lacked her fluidity with words, the fluidity she had passed down, in large measure, to Daniel. Eric’s essay had no chance of opening the vaunted doors to the camp. She debated for a minute, then sat down at the kitchen table and rewrote it until it made sense and read well enough to warrant his admission to the camp, but not so well that it would raise suspicion.
When the acceptance arrived, she wasn’t sure who felt the greater thrill.
*
In March, Martin was away all of the month. Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, across the Baltic Sea to Denmark, across the North Sea to the United Kingdom, then home. Daniel kept track of his father’s travels, stuck tacks into the map of Europe he hung on a bedroom wall for his AP European history class.
Martin called home at the beginning of his stay in each country and said to the boys:
“Din far her ? si jeg elsker deg,” in Norwegian;
“Du ?r b?de utest?ende pojkar oavsett, vad din mamma s?ger,” in Swedish;
“Et tied? kylm? ennen kuin olet, miss? min? olen,” in Finnish;
“Julge olla, olla ?nnelik, ei lase elu jama sa up,” in Estonian;
“Jūs, iespējams, nav pietiekami daudz jēgas, lai saprastu, cik laimīgs jūs dzīvot, kur mēs,” in Latvian;
“En fiasko, men alle de andre har v?ret mirakler for videnskab,” in Danish;
“Hello, mates,” when he landed in the UK.
Daniel kept a log of Martin’s greetings:
Norwegian: Your father here saying I love you.
Swedish: You are both outstanding boys, regardless of what your mother says.
Finnish: You do not know cold until you are where I am.
General: Tell your mother that I’m just leaving the three countries where all those mysteries I’ve been reading are set. No wonder the detectives are so morose, having to search for the killers in all of this snow.
Estonian: Be brave, be happy, don’t let life mess you up.
Latvian: You probably do not have enough sense to understand how lucky you are to live where we do.
Danish: One failure, but all the others have been miracles of science.
Successful surgeries in all of those places, except Latvia. In Riga, Martin had not been able to save a young mother’s sight. “Advanced diabetic retinopathy. Abnormal new blood vessels growing right in the center of Valija’s eyes. I tried laser photocoagulation to control the leakage, and a vitrectomy to remove blood from the vitreous fluid of the eye, but sometimes there is no magic to be made. Such a shame, her little girl will have to learn to do for her mother.” Daniel had no interest in medicine as a potential profession, but he liked hearing the procedural steps, the gory details.
*
In April, Daniel opened the envelope from the Wharton program at UPenn, and he ran to Joan, hugged her hard, said, “Best day ever of my life,” and though she was excited for him because he wanted this, it was, she knew, the wrong place for him, a whole curriculum for which he was not suited. He did not have that hardened glossy shellac, that abundance of blustering ego the big financial suits wore like armor. He was still her sweet, sensitive boy, meant for a life of words, big problems solved by fiction. The books he had read as a child, was still reading, were largely responsible for the young man he was becoming. Despite the swim team, where he was now on varsity, a top swimmer in the state; despite the dates he had taken Tammy on, the girl he first met in seventh grade, the owner, still, of hamsters; despite the AP classes he had taken and was taking; despite how hard he worked to polish off each semester with a report card of solid A’s; despite how much he had studied for the standardized tests and scored well, that was the truth of him: a boy with big dreams who had to work hard to see them realized.
When she tried to imagine Daniel in a suit with a serious tie, lace-up shoes on his feet, sitting around a large lacquered conference-room table, debating the terms of some corporate deal in financial-speak, she could see nothing at all, not even the room.
Martin did not share her concerns; he was delighted the books Daniel read in such quantity had not made him a dreamer, that Daniel had serious aspirations for his future that involved the making of serious money, facing people head-on across that conference-room table, rather than staring down into their eyes as Martin did, until he gave them back their sight and they all walked out the door, rarely returning to show Martin what they had done with the gift he had given them.
Joan had not known Martin felt this way, and before she could say, “Wait, slow down, when did you stop loving the work you do?” Martin said, “Our son aspires to be a great white shark,” and Joan thought there was no great white shark hidden beneath Daniel’s thin skin. If anything, he might be a dwarf lanternshark, a little-known species of dogfish shark that measured, at most, 8.3 inches long, the shark Daniel once had the squirrel wrestle, Henry thinking the whole time how big and brave he was, how steadfast and true, taking down the impossible, when his nemesis had been less than the length of a school ruler. Daniel was five feet ten inches now, and still growing, and he read the business section of the New York Times every day, a subscription of his own that he asked for as one of his seventeenth-birthday presents. The paper had long been delivered to Joan and Martin, but only from Friday through Sunday.
“I need to know what’s going on in the business world every single day,” he had said. Once, he had cared about what would happen to Countess Ellen Olenska in Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence.
*
On the last day of April, the wind blowing since Fool’s Day—keeping away the bees and the wasps, tossing around the hummingbirds, ripping the pear tree buds from the branches before they could flower, until the greening grass looked ice-dusted—finally ceased. The kitchen windows were open, a slight perfume from the flowers unfurling their colors. All the Mannings were around the kitchen table eating dinner, an occurrence that was happening less and less often.