Page 277 - A Little Life: A Novel

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THE NIGHT BEFORE he leaves for Boston for their friend Lionel’s wedding, he
gets a message from Dr. Li telling him that Dr. Kashen has died. “It was a
heart attack; very fast,” Dr. Li writes. The funeral is Friday afternoon.
The next morning he drives directly to the cemetery, and from the
cemetery to Dr. Kashen’s house, a two-story wooden structure in Newton
where the professor used to host a year-end dinner for all of his current
graduate students. It was understood that you weren’t to discuss math at

these parties. “You can talk about anything else,” he’d tell them. “But we’re
not talking about math.” Only at Dr. Kashen’s parties would he be the least
socially inept person in the room (he was also, not coincidentally, the least
brilliant), and the professor would always make him start the conversation.
“So, Jude,” he’d say. “What are you interested in these days?” At least two

of his fellow graduate students—both of them PhD candidates—had mild
forms of autism, and he could see how hard they worked at making
conversation, how hard they worked at their table manners, and prior to
these dinners, he did some research into what was new in the worlds of
online gaming (which one of them loved) and tennis (which the other
loved), so he’d be able to ask them questions they could answer. Dr. Kashen
wanted his students to someday be able to find jobs, and along with

teaching them math, he also thought it his responsibility to socialize them,
to teach them how to behave among others.
Sometimes Dr. Kashen’s son, Leo, who was five or six years older than
he, would be at dinner at well. He too had autism, but unlike Donald’s and
Mikhail’s, his was instantly noticeable, and severe enough so that although
he’d completed high school, he hadn’t been able to attend more than a

semester of college, and had only been able to get a job as a programmer
for the phone company, where he sat in a small room day after day fixing
screen after screen of code. He was Dr. Kashen’s only child, and he still
lived at home, along with Dr. Kashen’s sister, who had moved in after his
wife had died, years ago.
At the house, he speaks to Leo, who seems glazed, and mumbles, looking
away from him as he does, and then to Dr. Kashen’s sister, who was a math