Proof By David Auburn – Catherine

CATHERINE: I lived with him. I spent my life with him. I fed him. Talked to him. Tried to listen when he talked. Talked to people who weren’t there … Watched him shuffling around like a ghost. A very smelly ghost. He was filthy. I had to make sure he bathed. My own father.
After my mother died it was just me here. I tried to keep him happy no matter what idiotic project he was doing. He used to read all day. He kept demanding more and more books. I took them out of the library by the carload. We had hundreds upstairs. Then I realized he wasn’t reading: he believed aliens were sending him messages through the Dewey decimal numbers on the library books. He was trying to work out the code.
Beautiful mathematics. The most elegant proofs, perfect proofs, proofs like music … Plus fashion tips, knock-knock jokes – I mean it was nuts, OK?
Later the writing phase: scribbling nineteen, twenty hours a day … I ordered him a case of notebooks and he used every one. I dropped out of school … I’m glad he’s dead.