2

Eigen Vector’s mother was a famous botanist, as fame goes in the world of botany. Names like Carolus Linnaeus and Charles Bessey don’t roll off the tongue. Perhaps Mendel and his peas. Perhaps the name George Washington Carver might have rung a bell, a great botanist relegated to second-order recognition, being called an agricultural scientist. Daisy Vector, née Meyerowitz, was an expert on Asteraceae. She was the author of Flora of the Southwest and four plant genera of the aster family were named for her. She was at best an absent mother, not without love for her daughter, but also not the least bit unwilling to leave her in the care of a young Hungarian nanny named Zsóphia Szabó. Richard Vector was a well-known sculptor, known best and perhaps solely for a giant public work of art that was taken down due to outrage. The metal work depicted a not much abstracted form of an enormous penis in mid-circumcision. The city of Omaha, Nebraska, was, to a person, unhappy with the dick that Dick built. It turned out that nothing could have been better for his career, as he became instantly famous and never worked again. He was at home with his daughter as little as his wife and it turned out that enormous metal penises were not the only kind he was willing to share. He shared his more modest fleshy one with Zsóphia Szabó on more than a few occasions. Daisy and Dick staged a rather loud and public divorce, neither offering much comfort to their quiet, genius, tucked-away child. She was thirteen and it all crashed down on her and so she attempted suicide. Eigen Vector leaped from a highway bridge over a river in Ithaca, New York, leading to the memorable headline: Depressed Daughter of Dick and Daisy Dives into Drink. Her parents were scared or shamed into remaining together for the sake of the child, creating a sour home with intense and crippling attention focused on the daughter. Eigen spiraled inward, finding mathematics along the way, a world that her parents could not penetrate and so became hers and hers alone. The daughter of Daisy and Dick was in graduate school at Caltech at the age of sixteen and a tenured professor at Brown at nineteen.

“You can’t send me back alone,” Eigen said, holding an egg roll expertly between chopsticks.

“Your reasoning?”

“Because you need my help.”

“And why do you say that?”

“If you’re so unsure of the situation that you need to send me away, then you obviously need my help figuring out this situation. If your main concern is my safety, then you need to know that I am safe and the only way to know that is if I am with you.” She smiled.

“I see you’re dining with Morton’s fork. Okay, but we still need to go to the train station. I want Sill to at least think that you or both of us are headed back to Providence.”