Kate was so thrilled that she didn’t even consider explaining to him about Cole’s trisomics, what a waste of time that project was. Anyway, when he read Cole’s draft, he would see for himself.
“All right then,” Whitaker said, and she understood that she was dismissed.
She stood up. “Professor Whitaker?”
He had already picked up a manuscript and begun to read. “Yes?”
“I want you to assign me to work with someone else.”
He thrust the manuscript down impatiently. “People have disagreements,” he said. “It’s part of science. What’s more, it’s part of life. My advice to you is to talk to Dr. Cole and work it out.”
Kate nodded. “I don’t think that’s possible in this case,” she said. “He thinks I’m not serious about science. He told me so.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Whitaker said. “Anyone who talks to you for five minutes can see how serious you are.”
Kate couldn’t think of anything else to say, so she remained silent, standing there on the mustard-yellow rug with its mysterious geometric shapes, her eyes drawn back to the strange tree, which she supposed Whitaker found beautiful.
“All right,” Whitaker said. “You can work with Johannsen.”
Thatch was waiting in the hall when she came out. “What did he say?” he asked, though he must have seen from the way she glowed that things had gone well.
“Let’s go outside,” Kate said. “It’s such a lovely day.”
They went out to the lawn and sat under a bur oak with its elegant, multilobed leaves. The heat had broken, and the soft grass smelled strong and sweet. A blue jay swooped past them, flaunting its gaudy wings. Everything was conspicuously, ridiculously beautiful. Still, Thatch sat with his long legs sticking glumly out, chewing on a stalk of clover. “What did Whitaker say?” he asked again.
“He said I can work with Johannsen,” Kate said. “Look at the gall on that branch.” She pointed up to a knob half hidden in the leaves. It reminded her of the deep-staining knobs on the chromosomes. “How does the tree know to make it?”
“It’s to contain some parasite,” Thatch said absently.
“I know! But there are lots of kinds of parasites, and the trees makes different galls for each one. A specialized response. Isn’t that amazing?”
“Listen,” Thatch said. “I’m sorry I talked to Whitaker behind your back. I shouldn’t have assumed I knew what was best.”
“That’s all right,” Kate said. “It’s worked out. He wants me to draft a paper! He had some good questions I have to think about.” As she enumerated them for Thatch, some of the answers began to take shape in her mind. “The work on the linkage groups is a big project,” she said. “Much more than one person can do. You should take part of it.”
Thatch’s stalk of clover was all chewed up. He tossed it aside and picked another one. “Maybe we can work together,” he said.
“And Paul will want part, I’m sure. When I talk to Whitaker, I’ll see how he thinks we should go about it.” Already she took for granted that she would be meeting regularly with the Great Man.
“I feel I owe you something by way of apology,” Thatch said. “Why don’t I make you dinner this weekend?”
“For goodness’ sake, Thatch,” Kate said. “I’ve said it’s all right.”
“A congratulations dinner, then. I’d like to.”
“All right. If you really want to. We can invite Paul, too.”
There was a silence. Thatch spat the clover stem out. “The more the merrier,” he said.
Back inside, Kate found Paul in his lab and told him what had happened. He smiled his slow crooked smile. “Didn’t I say good work rises to the top?” He grasped her hand briefly, then let it go. For the rest of the day she could feel the ghost of his touch on her skin.
On Saturday evening, Kate, Thatch, and Paul sat on kitchen chairs in Thatch’s backyard, which was raddled through with pink patches of lady’s thumb and long tangled networks of creeping Charlie. He had built a fire pit to grill frankfurters over, had set a bucket of water close at hand just in case. “I used to be a Boy Scout,” he said, which came as no surprise. Kate had baked a chocolate cake with raspberry jam between the layers. She felt excited in an unfocused, confusing way, as though an old slow horse she’d been riding had suddenly broken into a gallop. The world seemed to be rushing toward her, all green and gold. Paul had brought beer and a bottle of whiskey, obtained God knew where. Also a phonograph and one record, “The Santiago Waltz.” He wound the phonograph up and the strains of the music drifted into the trees. He held out his hand to Kate, and they revolved around the yard as Thatch tended the fire, laid out the potato salad, and sliced some tomatoes from his garden. Kate broke away from Paul to examine the tomatoes, which were a surprising dark purple color.
“They’re Black Prince,” Thatch said. “I got the seeds from my grandmother.”
Kate picked up a slice with her fingers and bit into it. “So sweet,” she said, licking juice from her chin.
Over dinner they discussed whether the pigment that made maize kernels purple was the same pigment the tomatoes had. They discussed varieties of tomatoes and varieties of sweet corn (different from the Indian corn they studied) and whether it was possible ever to find out what the tomato had been like before selective breeding. “Vegetable history,” Kate said dreamily. “That would be very interesting.” Everything seemed interesting, suddenly.
It was a clear, warm, moonless night, the great span of the Milky Way glittering. Paul cranked up the phonograph again, and again he and Kate danced, an inch of charged buzzing air between them. Then he put the needle back to the beginning and she danced with Thatch, and then with Paul again. This time he held her very close in the darkness. Her ear was against his chest, and his heart thumped so loudly she couldn’t feel her own heartbeat at all. When the record ended, she said she was tired and went to sit down. But Thatch said, “You danced with Paul three times.”
“It’s not a contest,” she said. But she stood up again.
“Life is a contest,” Paul said, stretching out his long legs and throwing back his head to gaze up at the stars.
“Don’t be glib,” Kate told him.
“What do you think it is, then?”
“A web,” she answered. “An infinitely large fabric in which everything is intertwined. And lucky people like us get to spend our lives poking and prodding at the seams, trying to understand how it all fits together.”
Paul laughed, a single loud hoot like a baboon. “That’s a very romantic notion.”
“It’s not romantic in the least!”
Thatch restarted the record and came over and took her hand, and they moved together in the dark. His hand was firm on her waist, and hers rested lightly on the damp back of his shirt. Paul sat smoking, the tip of his cigarette an orange glow.
“What about you, John Thatcher?” Paul said. “What do you think life is?”
“Shut up, Novak,” Thatch said. “I’m busy.”
When the record ended, Kate said, “That really is it for me. It’s been quite a week. Give me a cigarette, will you, Paul?”
“A triumphant week,” Thatch said, as Paul passed her a cigarette and leaned over to light it for her. Thatch found his teacup of whiskey in the grass and raised it. “Here’s to you, Kate Croft! And your diagram. And to many more exciting discoveries.”
“And not having to work for that idiot Cole anymore,” Paul added, lifting his teacup. “He’ll have to struggle through his trisomics all by himself, God help him.”
“Poor Cole,” Kate said. “Showing my diagram to Whitaker didn’t work out the way he thought it would at all.”
“I never thought I’d hear you say Poor Cole,” Thatch said.
“Cole didn’t show it to him,” Paul said.
There was a pause.
“What do you mean?” Kate said at the same time Thatch said, “Who did then?”
“I did,” Paul said.
Kate tried to speak, but she was so shocked that no words came out.
“Why?” Thatch said.
“Because I thought he should know about it.”
Kate found her voice. “Did you wreck the lab, too?” She knew she should be angry, but she just felt blank and baffled. Life was a contest, he’d said. He was making up the rules as he went along.
“No,” Paul said. “That was Jax. He told me he was going to.” The glow of his cigarette dimmed and brightened.
“He told you?” Kate was trying to keep up.
“People talk,” Paul said. “Even when they know they shouldn’t.”
“And you didn’t stop him?”
“I didn’t think he was serious,” Paul said. “Besides, I don’t think I could have stopped him.”
Thatch got out of his chair and strode over to stare into the fire. “Do you know what I think life is?” he said. “It’s the struggle of decency against corruption. That’s what I was taught when I was a child, and it’s what I still believe.” He picked up the bucket and heaved the water onto the flames. The wet coals hissed.
Thick curtains of shadow lay all around them. Kate turned toward the place where she knew Paul was and said, “What did you do in Kansas that they kicked you out for?”
Deep in the muffling darkness, cicadas whirred and frogs chirruped over the sounds of the cooling fire. Kate could feel Thatch’s alertness, his thousand invisible antennae bristling.
“I wouldn’t have thought you were the kind of person to listen to libelous gossip,” Paul said.
But she refused to let him sidetrack her another time. “Is it libelous?” she demanded.
“I’d say so,” Paul drawled.
Gradually her eyes adjusted to the absence of the firelight. She could see Paul’s tall shape on the kitchen chair, his legs stretched out across the dark grass, his white shirt glowing faintly, the red tip of his cigarette. “Then why did you leave?” she asked.
“Isn’t the opportunity to work with Whitaker reason enough?”
“It is,” she said. “But is it the reason?”
Paul laughed unpleasantly. “If I tell you it is, will you believe me?”
“I never pegged you for a liar,” Kate said.
Paul tossed the end of his cigarette toward the dead, damp fire. “Well, thank you,” he said.
The firefly spark that was Kate’s mind seemed to drift like a balloon, up out of her body and away. She was tired. She didn’t want to prosecute Paul.
But Thatch said, “So nothing happened? In Kansas?” And then, when a minute went by, he repeated, “Are you saying nothing happened?”
Paul swatted at the darkness as though dispersing a crowd of gnats. “There was a misunderstanding,” he said. “That’s all. About crosses. You know how things get at fertilization time. Anyone could make a mistake.”
Yes, she knew. You started in the fields early, day after day, rushing to finish while the pollen was viable: reaching up high to take the brown bag off the tassels, shaking the pollen into the bottom of the bag, painting it onto the trimmed silks under the crackling glassine shoot bags, stapling them on again to prevent contamination, noting down the crosses with a slippery grease pencil—all as fast as possible, again and again, while the sun burned down and the mosquitos buzzed and the sharp leaves cut your hands. You could never be careful enough. Skin was slashed, sunburned, stung. Pollen was accidentally scattered from the bag, or the bag was insecurely stapled and fell off and blew away, or numbers were transposed so that the wrong plants were fertilized. Data was contaminated, results were called into question. If you had an intriguing result—an interesting anomaly—people would say you had made a mistake at fertilization. That was why, when she had her own project and her own field, Kate was going to fertilize every plant herself! She would have to grow less corn—she knew that—but the trade-off for certainty was easy to make.
Not that people wouldn’t still accuse her of errors.
“You made a mistake?” she asked Paul. “You crossed the wrong plants?”
“I might have,” Paul said from out of the dark. “It was all just blown up out of proportion.”
“Might have?” Thatch said.
Paul turned toward the other man’s voice and said—slowly, coolly, as though he were doing Thatch a great favor by answering—“It was exactly the kind of mistake anyone might have made.”
Something lodged in Kate’s chest, under the breastbone, making it hard to breathe. Every moment she could see Paul more and more clearly: his square jaw and fine long nose, his narrow shoulders and strong grasping hands. The way he sat, leaning back so casually, his face tilted toward the stars. “You crossed the wrong plants on purpose,” she said.
“No,” he said.
“You didn’t?” Against her will she leaned toward him.
“They were the right plants,” he said. He spoke slowly, distinctly, his words ringing out in the darkness like a bell.
The thing in her chest bulged. It was as though she had swallowed an egg.
“I don’t understand,” Thatch said.
But Kate did. He meant that the plants he’d crossed were the right ones for his purposes. He’d fertilized with pollen of his choosing, making crosses that suited his own aims. He had hijacked someone else’s experiment to learn what he wanted to learn. “Did you get the result you wanted?” she asked.
Paul tipped the chair back, balancing on its two back legs, his face parallel to the cold plane of the sky. “They destroyed the seeds,” he said. “Before I could find out.”
Thatch began gathering up the dishes and empty glasses. They rattled and clinked in his arms as he carried them back toward the lighted house.
PART THREE
1933
CHAPTER 17
The wedding was supposed to be in the garden, but when the rain showed no sign of letting up, it had to be moved indoors. Guests sat in neat rows of white chairs in the hotel ballroom with its handsome black-and-gold-striped wallpaper. Thatch didn’t mind, but Cynthia cried so much that the ceremony had to be pushed back half an hour. When at last she came down the aisle, very tall, like a young giraffe, in her blowsy tulle—leaning hard on her father’s arm, her thin dark face puffy and blotched—Paul, who had come up from Cambridge the night before, leaned over to whisper into Kate’s ear, “I thought she was supposed to be pretty.” With his dove-gray suit and his deep blue tie and his self-satisfied expression, he wouldn’t have looked out of place beside Kate’s banker brother-in-law.
Kate shushed him. Then, as the string trio began its crescendo, she leaned over and whispered back, “She is, usually. She’s very fetching in a lab coat.”
“I bet she majored in botany because she heard it was a good way to catch a husband.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t think so,” Kate said. If there was one thing you could say about Cynthia, it was that she was sincere. Her motives were always decent, and they were always right out in the open.
Cynthia had been a junior last fall when she and Thatch had got to talking at the annual botany department picnic. Four months later, when they announced their engagement, the plan was for her to continue on and get her degree, perhaps even begin work toward a master’s. But somewhere amid the preparations for the wedding, and the hunt for a perfect little house to rent, and all the thank-you notes to write for the engagement presents, not to mention the constant assumption by everyone that she would of course be giving up her studies (after all, what use could she have for a degree now?), that intention had been abandoned. People thought Thatch had encouraged her to quit, but Kate knew he was disappointed. Not that he would say so in a million years.
Cynthia had suspected it, though. In her earnest, ardent
way, she’d come to Kate’s office one afternoon a few weeks before the wedding to ask if Kate thought she was letting Thatch down. “I’d hate to think that John thought less of me,” she said, worrying her little diamond on its thin bright band, then looking down at Kate with her doe’s eyes. “Do you think he’d be happier married to someone with a degree?”
Kate, who had samples to fix and crosses to plot out, tried not to fidget. “Of course not. Thatch couldn’t be happier. He thinks you hung the moon!”
Cynthia’s spindly olive-dark hands were pressed together in her lap. The little diamond cast a spray of light across the ceiling. “Thank you for talking about this with me,” she said. “John respects you and values your friendship so much. I just want him to be happy.” That was how she talked: with complete, straightforward sincerity. Well—if that was what Thatch wanted!
Still, that sentence lingered uncomfortably: I just want him to be happy. As though anybody ever just wanted any one thing. Yet Cynthia was not simple-minded.
“I suppose he got tired of waiting for the perfect woman,” Paul murmured now. His breath was warm on Kate’s neck, from which a cameo dangled on a chain, its weight making her feel constricted and ill at ease. “Twenty-eight is a little old to be a virgin, after all.”
Kate pretended not to hear. She leaned forward as though intent on not missing the moment when Cynthia’s father transferred his daughter’s hand to Thatch’s. Her throat felt swollen, and the weather made her head ache.
Thatch smiled down at his bride. It had to be admitted that he looked radiant, with the pink rosebud in the buttonhole, and his face pink, too, under his freshly barbered hair. Behind the wedding party, vases of fresh-cut but artificial-looking arum lilies and freesia stood in for the flooded garden. On the other side of the tall windows, the rain came down in sheets, beating at the wavy panes like an uninvited guest. Somebody should have shut the drapes, Kate thought, wishing that the rain would stop—not merely for Thatch and Cynthia’s sakes, but because of the havoc it might be wreaking this very minute in her field.
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