No One You Know (22 page)

Thirty-two

I
’M A BIT OF A NIGHT OWL,”
D
ON
C
ARROLL
had said when I called to ask if we could meet. “Can you come by late?”

Arriving at the math building at Stanford just after ten p.m., I felt a sense of déjà vu. I remembered tracking McConnell down in this very building when I was twenty, sitting outside his office, listening to the students talk about him as if he were a celebrity. Now the building was empty, my footsteps echoing in the hallway. I shivered in my thin sweater, wishing I’d worn a jacket. The place had a bland institutional smell—floor cleaner and cardboard, a slight chemical odor that might have been dry erase markers. The smell of the world was changing, I noticed it every day. When I was in college, the buildings of USF smelled like chalk, old books, and mimeograph ink.

I turned down a couple of wrong hallways before finding the office number. The door was open, Carroll’s back to me. He sat at his computer facing the window, a coffee cup perched precariously on the edge of the desk. He was so still he might have been sleeping. I tapped on the door, but he didn’t seem to hear, so I cleared my throat and knocked more loudly. He turned to face me. He had gray hair and glasses, a kind face with light brown eyes.

“Ellie Enderlin?”

“Yes. Thank you for taking the time to talk.”

“Sorry about the strange hour. I find the older I get, the less I sleep. Did you know that Thomas Edison claimed to sleep only three hours per night? He invented the lightbulb so that humankind wouldn’t waste its time in bed. He believed sleep was the enemy of progress.”

Carroll looked down at his hand as though he’d just noticed the large envelope he was holding. “Pardon me, I have to go slide this under the secretary’s door.”

While waiting, I glanced around the office. The walls were covered with plaques, cheaply framed announcements of various awards, and photographs—there he was with Jimmy Carter, hammer in hand, standing in front of a house-in-progress; there with Stephen Hawking; there with Paul Allen; there with Baron Davis. On Carroll’s desk were more personal photos—an attractive woman in her sixties, probably his wife; a black cocker spaniel; a little girl on a blue bicycle. One in particular caught my eye—a photograph of Carroll standing in the rain beside a young Peter McConnell, in matching white parkas. From the angle of the Golden Gate Bridge in the background, I could tell the photograph had been taken at Crissy Field.

On top of a stack of papers was a hardback book. When I saw the cover, I did a double take. The book was in German, so I couldn’t read the title. I was holding the book, staring at the cover, when Carroll came back in the room.

“Ah, you have an interest in topology?”

“Not exactly. It’s just—this symbol on the cover. I recognize it.”

“Ah, the double torus.” Carroll took the book from me and placed it on top of a stack of file folders. “This is a review copy, just came in the mail today. Apparently I coauthored a paper with this gentleman twenty years ago, but I’ve been racking my brain all day, trying to remember him. Complete blank. That’s what happens when you turn seventy. Did you know that the lower mantle of a volcano flows in a double torus pattern?”

I shook my head.

“Makes perfect sense, but somehow I’d forgotten it. I’m liable to forget my own name pretty soon. My daughter Genna recently put me on a strict ginseng regimen, but so far it hasn’t made a difference.” He smiled and sat down, crossing his legs and folding his hands in his lap. His hands were smooth and unmarked, as if they belonged to a much younger man. “Please, have a seat. On the phone, you said you wanted to talk about Peter McConnell. Like I said, I doubt I can be of any help. I haven’t seen him in over a decade.”

“I was more interested in what he was like back then.”

“What he was like?”

“This is an awkward question, but I’d heard that McConnell had—” I glanced at the picture on his wall of him and McConnell together. I couldn’t think of a delicate way to phrase it.

“Yes?” Carroll leaned forward.

“I heard he had girlfriends.”

He settled back in his chair, frowning. “Who told you this?”

“A former student in the math department, Steve Strachman.”

“Strachman,” he said, with obvious distaste.

I waited.

“Ah, yes. Well, Peter was very handsome. Very charming. Women certainly liked him, no question. But I don’t remember girlfriends, per se, other than your sister. To be honest, I was glad when he met Lila. His wife always struck me as a climber, more interested in what he might become than in who he was.”

“What he might become?”

“Yes. I don’t think it mattered at all to her what his field was—it could have just as easily been science or literature. Peter rarely said an unkind word about Margaret, but he confided to me once that she’d always been insecure about her own lack of education—she’d given college a try briefly but apparently it didn’t work out for her—and she felt that she could redeem herself in the eyes of her parents by marrying an academic. It bothered him, I think, the idea that he might not live up to her expectations.

“Naturally, when she found out about Lila, she was furious. She made all sorts of threats, but Peter didn’t take her seriously. When I told him he should be concerned he assured me that it was just hot air.”

Now I was the one leaning forward. “What kind of threats?”

“That she would make a stink around the department. That she would confront Lila personally. That she would leave him and take their son Thomas. But Peter knew that Margaret was all about appearances. She couldn’t stand to go home to her parents in defeat. Despite her very justifiable unhappiness about the affair, there were certain things she wanted out of life—prestige, mainly. She believed that Peter could give her that.”

“That confirms what McConnell told me about her.”

“You’ve talked to him?”

“Yes.”

He uncrossed his legs. On his right foot he wore a blue sock, on his left foot a yellow one. “When?”

“A month ago. In Nicaragua.”

“He didn’t mention it,” he said, more to himself than to me.

“You talk to him?”

“Not by phone, of course,” Carroll said. “Letters.”

“But I thought you said—”

“Ah, that. It’s true, I haven’t
seen
him in a decade. I didn’t say we have no contact. You’ll understand if I’m protective of him. I feel responsible, in a way, for what happened.”

“Responsible? How?”

“It would be fair to say I encouraged the relationship. A perfect match is as rare as a perfect number. I’ve always considered myself fortunate that I found mine early in life and had the good sense to marry her. Anyone could tell that Margaret and Peter had nothing in common, and there was no tenderness between them. Lila, on the other hand—it was clear when I got to know her that they were right for one another.”

“You knew my sister?” I asked, startled.

“Yes, Peter introduced us soon after they met. He wanted her by his side when he broke the news that they were going to tackle Goldbach. I think he knew I would be alarmed. I’m not sure how much you know about the conjecture…”

“Only what Lila told me—that it was proposed in 1742, and many great minds had been stumped by it. Every even integer greater than two can be expressed as the sum of two primes?”

“Exactly. A mathematician can easily derail himself by focusing on a single, unattainable goal. Look at Louis de Branges and the Riemann Hypothesis. Along with Goldbach and, until fairly recently, Fermat, the Riemann Hypothesis is one of the most difficult open problems in the world. De Branges spent twenty-five years working on it, and in 2004 he published his proof on the Internet. But no one paid much attention, and it has yet to receive a peer review. What’s strange about this is that De Branges is no upstart; in the eighties he proved the Bieberbach Conjecture, by any accounts an important achievement. When he published that proof, there was a lot of skepticism—very similar to what has happened with his Riemann proof—it was as if everyone
wanted
him to be wrong. But in the end, the work won out. At issue in the Riemann case is the fact that he used mathematical tools in which he is one of the few experts—spectral theory, for example—so assembling a team who would be qualified to review the proof would be an enormous undertaking. It doesn’t help that he’s a bit of a wanker. Added to that is the fact that, in 1964, he claimed to have a proof for the existence of invariant subspaces for continuous transformations in Hilbert spaces. But his claim was false, and he has paid dearly for his mistake in terms of his credibility. Mathematicians, for better or worse, have a long memory. Now De Branges is in his seventies. I have to admit I’m rooting for him, if only because I’d love for him to show the world that an old guy can still have the mettle to make a huge contribution.”

Carroll smiled. “You must forgive me. One doesn’t easily abdicate the role of math professor. It’s in the blood. As Poincaré said, ‘Mathematicians are born, not made.’”

“McConnell and my sister,” I pressed. “You encouraged them?”

“Yes, early on, Peter came to me for advice. I could find no logical support for continuing in an unhappy and unproductive marriage. When the opportunity for happiness presents itself so clearly, I said, one should take hold of it. I don’t believe in this business of the tragic genius. I think a man does his best work when his domestic life is happy. Look at Ramanujan, all his brilliant results and astonishing insights—the infinite series for pi, the Ramanujan Conjecture—but dead at thirty-two of tuberculosis in some slum in India. An arranged marriage at twenty-one to a nine-year-old girl. He’d have contributed far more to the world of mathematics if he had carved out for himself a tranquil home life with a compatible partner.

“So you see, my advice to Peter was not entirely without self-interest. I had the conviction that if he and Lila worked together, they could accomplish something extraordinary. Of course, I didn’t expect them to prove Goldbach, but I knew that if they worked toward that nearly impossible goal, they would no doubt come upon other important discoveries in the process. Look at the history of Fermat’s Last Theorem. Along the path to its proof, a number of significant advances were made: the proof of the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture is inextricably linked to the search for the Fermat proof.”

Carroll unfolded his hands and placed them on the armrests of his chair. He wore a wide gold wedding ring and had a perfect manicure.

“I digress. Beyond the advice, I facilitated the relationship in a very practical way. Peter once confided that he and Lila felt uncomfortable working in the math building; your sister was afraid that people would begin talking. So I offered them my house to work. My wife was a muralist and was often away doing commissioned work, and by then Genna was off at Columbia.”

He paused, watching my face. “Don’t look so surprised. Just because I’m a mathematician doesn’t mean I have no concept of romance. Do you know what Voltaire said?”

“Hmmm?”

“‘There is far more imagination in the head of Archimedes than in that of Homer.’ We mathematicians get a bad rap for being the cold-hearted purveyors of reason and common sense, but the truth is that one can make important mathematical discoveries only by employing the imagination. Lila’s imagination was fierce. I used to come home late from my office and find them bent over the kitchen table, hard at work. We’d order out and sit in the kitchen over our take-out containers from the Good Earth, talking number theory. I’d just turned fifty, and I can’t tell you what a delight it was for me to be allowed into the intimate circle of their mental gamesmanship. We worked well together, the three of us. I had the knowledge, see, the decades of experience, but they—especially Lila—had the ability to come at something from an entirely new angle, to conjure a surprising connection or intriguing question from thin air. Sometimes, when we’d talked so much our heads were about to explode, we’d retire to the living room and play a video game that Peter had turned Lila on to—some Atari-age game involving rapidly rotating triangles.” He smiled at the memory. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the game is tucked away in a box somewhere in the basement.”

“That explains where Lila was on those nights when she stayed out so late. We never did piece together where it was that she and McConnell met.” I hesitated. “I’m not sure how to put this, but did they use your house for—”

Carroll looked alarmed. “Goodness, no. There was a small hotel in Half Moon Bay. I would have preferred not to know, but Peter offered the information one day, out of the blue. I think he just needed to tell someone. He desperately loved your sister. I know from experience that’s the sort of thing one doesn’t want to keep secret. You want to tell the world. Wisely, he only told me.” Carroll frowned. “Naturally, I’ve always wondered what might have happened had I told Peter to go back to his marriage, to forget about Lila. I suppose there’s no harm in confessing to you now that the investigation was the one time during my life when I made a clear choice to deceive. I didn’t tell the detectives about Lila and McConnell because I believed it was my duty to protect him. Perhaps it wasn’t the right thing to do, technically speaking, but I’ve never regretted it. Of course, in the end—when that tawdry book came out—I was unable to help him.