One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories(42)

“The internet!” wailed the old man, his head sinking into his little hand. “No no no no no.”

We all just watched him breathe for a second, like we had with the turtle our class had adopted earlier that year.

“Can I talk to you privately?” the man asked Mr. Hunt.

“Anything you have to say to me, you can say in front of my students,” said Mr. Hunt. “Within the parameters of acceptable language.”

“That’s my problem,” said the man.

He stared at us all at once, somehow, with a look that said that we knew what he was talking about, but we didn’t.

“A man leaves Chicago at twelve p.m. on a train heading for Cleveland at sixty miles per hour,” he said quickly. “Another man leaves Cleveland at one p.m. heading for Chicago on a train going eighty-five miles per hour. At what time will the two trains cross paths?”

One kid, Arush, raised his hand. “Approximately—”

“I know the goddamn answer!”

“Language,” said Mr. Hunt.

“And there’s no ‘approximately’ in math,” said the old man. “It’s math. The answers are exact.”

“The answers are exact,” echoed Mr. Hunt, somewhat faintly. “Put your hand down, Arush.”

“That’s my problem,” said the old man, sitting back down in the chair. “I wrote it. That was the one thing I did. The one thing. When you’re young, you think everything you do is just the beginning. But when you’re old, no matter who you are, you realize you only did one or two things.”

We were silent. We had never heard anything like this before.

Some of us wondered what the one or two things we would do would be.


The old man smiled like it was over, but it wasn’t.

“What I did not, could not, expect and should never have expected was that it would become the most famous math problem in the goddamn United States!”

“Language.”

“Pardon … Fine. What I did not expect was that every textbook in America would rip it off from the one I worked for and that I would end up taking home thirty-five dollars, yes, that’s right, kids, a whopping thirty-five dollars for what would become the most famous math problem in America. Does that sound fair to you? What does that work out to per year?”

Arush raised his hand and Mr. Hunt signaled him to put it down.

“Mister?”

I spoke with what I believed was the right balance of politeness and confidence to get the old man’s attention. “Sir? We actually learned the problem a little differently. Does that possibly make it different, in your opinion?”

The old man listened.

“We weren’t asked where the trains would meet. We were just asked which would get to its destination faster.”

“And,” Mr. Hunt chimed in, “I taught it to them with Boston and New York.”

“Everybody changes it,” said the old man. “But when I came in here yelling about how they stole my problem, you all knew which problem I was yelling about, didn’t you?”

We did.

“So that says a lot, doesn’t it? If after all these years, you can recognize the basic spirit of something?”

It did.

“Would you care to tell us how you came up with it?” asked Mr. Hunt.

The man settled back into the big chair, and we could see how small he really was.

“Spring 1952,” he said. “I was deployed in Europe, this is postwar—I was in the war, too, but I was sent back as part of a rebuilding effort in Belgium. I was homesick, more than during the war. I’m not afraid to admit that. I wasn’t homesick during the war. I got married in between, to my wife.”

He said the next part differently, and he looked out the window as he did: “June.

“I went again to earn extra money so we could build a family. I had my textbook job, and I could do that from anywhere, so this was like having two jobs. I was there ten months and one week before I was able to go home. I flew from Antwerp to London to New York—Idlewild, it was called then, the airport, before JFK died, before there was a JFK, well before JFK was JFK, anyway—and then to Chicago.

“Our home was in Columbus, Ohio. When I landed I phoned her from the airport and told her that I was taking the train right away from Chicago to Columbus, and it was only five hours away, she … June.

“She said she couldn’t wait that long, now that I was so close. Can you believe that? Five more hours, after ten months, and she said she couldn’t wait! She said she was going to hop on a train going toward me, too, and we would just have to meet in the middle. I said, June, that’s crazy! But she insisted. And the real crazy thing is, secretly, I had been thinking the same thing.

“You have to understand what it was to be separated from someone back then. You’re across an ocean; the world was just at war; now the Russians say they’re going to bury us with a shoe. There are no rules anymore. And there’s no telephone in your pants. You don’t get news very often, and when you do, your heart pounds because it might be bad news. After all that, we couldn’t take not being in sight of one another for a second more than we needed to.

“I did the math, and I kept doing it again and again on the train, how many minutes it would take to meet each other, estimating her train and my train at all these different speeds … Just looking at it every which way on the back of the train stationery envelope. They had stationery on trains back then—can you believe that? Everything was better then. Not everything,” he said, looking at Arush, “but so much. So many things. Anyway. I don’t know how I ever thought of it because I was only thinking about June, but I think your brain gets bigger at times like that because there was another part of my brain that thought, Boy, this would make one hell of a textbook problem.