Sarah put her hands on Kate’s shoulders. “I thought I might take that holiday I missed. My aunt has a house she lets me use. On Cape Cod. We could go there for a couple of weeks. You could eat. Lie in the sun. The dogs love it! You could get your strength back.” Her fingers were making light circles on Kate’s collarbones, and Kate felt the touch all the way down her spine. Light streamed into the room from the window. Her breath churned through her body. Twenty-eight years old, and every part of her felt unfinished, translucent. Mutable. She had always wanted to see the mystery creature inside the chrysalis. Now, she was it.
“Sarah!” Mrs. Sonnenfeld’s voice sailed up the stairwell. “Are you up? I’m making oatmeal! If you are not eating it, I will be very annoyed.”
Kate froze, but Sarah walked casually to the door. “I was just checking on our patient,” she called down.
CHAPTER 22
Kate agreed to the trip to Cape Cod. Afterward, assuming she’d regained her strength, she would return to her own apartment and go back to work.
But before they left, she had to go see the Great Man. On her way down the hall to Whitaker’s office, she peeked into Thatch’s cubbyhole. Someone had already colonized it. She was shocked to see how different the space looked: the bookcase half full of unfamiliar books, the desk jammed into a different corner in a futile attempt to make the room seem bigger, the burnt toast and chemical fixative smell drifting out into the hallway instead of the smell of coffee.
Opening the door to her own lab was almost as strange. Here were her packets of seeds, her dusty lab notebooks dense with penciled tables, her trays of slides, her orderly cabinets. Her microscope in its black sheath as though in mourning. When she took the cover off, its contours were cold under her hands. She touched the ridged knobs, leaned her face toward the eyepiece. Drew back.
In Whitaker’s outer office, Miss Floris was typing furiously, a cigarette burning in the ashtray on her desk. That Miss Floris had been Whitaker’s secretary forever, and that she had never married, provoked the usual stupid jokes among successive waves of graduate students, but to Kate it suggested that she was better than most people at keeping her private life private. Now she got up and came around the desk to embrace Kate. “We were so worried,” she said. “Even he was. When I saw you in that hospital bed, you looked like a husk that might blow away. But you look fine now! You look like yourself.”
“I’m much better,” Kate said.
“I hate to think, if he hadn’t gone to your apartment.”
Kate waited for Miss Floris to mention Cynthia, but she said nothing. Maybe she didn’t know. Or maybe she was just practicing her discretion. “Is he in?”
“Dr. Zimmer is with him. He’s here to give a seminar. They were supposed to be finished an hour ago.”
Kate knew of Fred Zimmer, a maize geneticist who was doing pioneering work with X-rays: using them to create dozens of mutations to study rather than waiting for nature to toss one up. They’d corresponded, and he’d irradiated some of the stocks she was using, but she’d never met him. “Should I come back?”
“Certainly not. Go right in.”
Kate knocked and opened the door. Behind his vast, lion-clawed desk, Whitaker reclined in his chair with his legs stretched out, the heels of his work boots on the blotter near the miniature tree that looked unchanged since the first time Kate had seen it. The other man—Zimmer—was leaning forward as though he had been talking intently. Both men were smoking pipes, the blue-gray trails rising in converging streams toward the window.
“Good to finally meet you,” Zimmer said, shaking her hand. He had an alert mild face and looked not that much older than she was.
Whitaker was beaming. “I saved this girl’s life,” he said. “She was dying of pneumonia, blue and limp as a beached fish, and I found her and carried her to her salvation.”
“He broke into my apartment,” Kate said, sitting down. “I’m a beneficiary of the willingness of the modern scientist to prevail by any means necessary.”
“The Chinese would say that means you’re responsible for her life forever,” Zimmer told Whitaker.
“I’m looking out for her all right,” Whitaker said. “I’m making her into a first-class corn man.” He smiled. “It’s good to have you back, Kate.”
“I’m almost back,” she said quickly. “My doctor says I just need a couple of more weeks and then I’ll be right as rain.”
The stem of Whitaker’s pipe made a little clicking noise against his teeth. “She’s lucky I’m fond of her,” he said to Zimmer. “I know half a dozen men who would start tomorrow.”
“It’s the same at Missouri. I get letters from qualified people every week. But unless they bring their own funding, there’s not much we can do.”
“How are the fields?” Kate asked. “Thatch said nearly everything was lost.”
“The worst flood in a generation,” Whitaker said. “But somehow you still have a few plants standing.” He said this mock-accusingly, or maybe actually accusingly, his lips either smiling or pretending to smile. “The gods must have a soft spot for you.”
She sat up straighter. “Not that it matters,” she said. “Since I wasn’t able to bag them.”
Whitaker took his boots off the desk and fiddled with his pipe. “Thatch did it.”
She blinked at him as he tapped the ashes out. “What did Thatch do?”
“He bagged the plants for you before he left.”
Kate could not believe it. “He would have told me if he’d done that.”
“He meant to go see you, but at the last minute— Well. He asked me to let you know. The point is, you can fertilize them if you do it soon. If the plants that survived give you any crosses worth making.”
Kate stared at Whitaker, who was refilling his pipe rather clumsily. “He bagged them?” she repeated.
“There weren’t many,” Whitaker said. “It couldn’t have taken him long.” He turned to Zimmer and began to explain his plan for the university administration to build a protective berm with a channel to funnel water away from the fields to mitigate future flood damage. “We’re the most productive department in the division,” Whitaker said. “Pick any measure you like. Publications, citations, fellowships. Then something like this happens, and everything is set back a year.”
“The drosophila people don’t have these problems,” Zimmer said.
“It’s in the university’s interest to protect our work,” Whitaker said. “But they behave as though it has nothing to do with them.”
“You have to show them something exciting. You have to make them believe you’re on the verge of something big.” Zimmer turned to Kate. “I’m trying to start up a whole X-ray institute at Missouri.”
“That’s a wonderful idea,” Kate said.
“We’re getting some very interesting variegation. Interesting patterns on the kernels.”
Kate felt a pang of envy. If there hadn’t been a flood … If she hadn’t gotten sick …
But Whitaker said Thatch had shoot-bagged her plants, so maybe the whole year wouldn’t be lost.
“What kind of variegation?” Kate asked.
“All kinds. On the leaves. On the stalks. Intriguing patterns on the kernels.”
“He’s getting ten times more than we’ve been seeing,” Whitaker said. “It’s incredible.”
Kate, too, was studying variegated plants. The kernels would be colorless when they should be red, or the leaf ribs would be yellow when they should be green. That was simple to explain: a dominant gene was knocked out and a recessive one expressed. But Zimmer’s corn sounded as though it was in a different category entirely. “I’d love to hear more about it.”
He smiled. “It’s the subject of my talk.”
She hadn’t planned to go to the talk. She’d promised Sarah not to tire herself.
Whitaker looked at
his watch. “Speaking of which.”
Kate followed the men out of the office and down the hall. She felt unreal, semitransparent, a ghost haunting the place it had once belonged.
In the seminar room, Zimmer strode up and down, waving a piece of chalk, his ideas unfolding like a series of immaculate handkerchiefs. X-rays, mutations, markings, ingenious crosses. Every detail was carefully established, every leap of logic both cunning and plainly laid out. Warmth rippled through her chest as he showed slides of the markings on the kernels he had grown: white kernels with purple streaks, yellow kernels speckled purple and red. “I’d like to say there’s a pattern here,” he said, “but so far we haven’t found one.”
There had to be a pattern, Kate thought: a cause to explain the effect. That was how nature worked. It might be—must be—subtle. Complex. But it was there.
After the talk, she drove out to look at her field.
It was a hot dry summer day with only a few puddles spread across the verges. Sparrows and phoebes sang in the branches, and smoky clouds of gnats drifted through the damp air. The reflections of the clouds swimming slowly across the puddles’ surfaces made the shallow water look depthless. Water striders crouched on weightless legs, waiting for prey.
In the field itself, twenty-six plants were scattered across the rows. Twenty-six out of the two hundred she had planted. They were chest-high now, green and straight. She walked up to each one, walked around it, touched its long sharp leaves. Glassine envelopes were stapled neatly over the shoots, and the brown paper bags fastened over the tassels rattled faintly in the breeze. Thatch had done a neat job. She couldn’t have done a better one herself.
Kate was so tired by the time she came through the kitchen door that she thought she might lie down right on the linoleum.
“Where on earth have you been?” Sarah said. “I expected you hours ago.” She was sitting at the kitchen table doing the crossword, her dark hair in its chignon, her glasses on, looking severe and regal as she smoked.
Thinking better of the floor, Kate pulled out a chair. The dogs came skittering in to greet her, nuzzling her with their long noses. “It took longer than I thought.”
“You’re as pale as a ghost.” Sarah got up and nudged the dogs away. She stood over Kate and began to take her pulse.
“I’m fine,” Kate said. Sarah’s fingers were warm on her wrist. “I’m just tired.”
“I’ll say whether you’re fine or not.”
Holly wriggled into the space between them, and Rose followed suit. “Out,” Sarah ordered. “They think they can get away with anything when Mutti’s at bridge club.”
Holly looked at Sarah and wagged her tail. Rose let out a happy bark. Lily sat politely, ears pricked, waiting to be praised.
“Aus! Aus!” Sarah cried, letting go of Kate’s wrist and clapping her hands.
The dogs retreated behind the threshold of the hall.
“German-speaking Irish setters,” Kate said.
“They don’t speak German,” Sarah said. “Now I have to start again.” But before she could, Kate seized Sarah’s hand and kissed the fingers, the palm, the wrist. Sarah made a sound in her throat and let Kate draw her closer. The skin of her inner arm was cool and silken. In Kate’s mind’s eye she could see the way the skin would look under the microscope: the whorled cells, the nucleus. The threads of the chromosomes that somehow made Sarah who she was.
CHAPTER 23
Sarah’s aunt’s cottage hugged the top of the dune. Its porch, supported by long stilts buried in sand, seemed to float over the beach. “It has to be rebuilt after storms,” Sarah said as they went out onto the weathered boards to watch the green waves crashing, then unfurling their lace along the sand.
“Are there hurricanes?”
“Nor’easters mostly.”
The wind ruffled their hair. The waves heaved and sighed.
“I love storms,” Kate said. “Maybe we’ll get one.”
“I should hope not!”
“I love them as long as they stay far away from my cornfield,” she amended.
“No talking about work,” Sarah said. “That’s rule one.”
The cottage was just two rooms. The big one was living room and kitchen combined, with a table where you could eat looking out over the bay. The bedroom had two narrow beds, which they pushed together. The wicker furniture creaked when you sat down, and there were faded cushions smelling faintly of mold, baskets of seashells and baskets of pebbles, a big iron bucket of driftwood to burn in the stove. At the windows, white gauzy curtains shifted with every breath of wind. On the floor, yellow rush mats lay instead of rugs on the blue-gray boards. The books were damp, the drawers in the dressers were warped and sticky, the sheets on the bed worn soft by a thousand washings. The nearest neighbors were half a mile away. They had brought only Rose with them—the smallest dog, niece to the other two, who were sisters and inseparable. Rose was also, Kate thought, the most human of the dogs, the way she looked at you with her dark, good-humored, intelligent eyes. “She knows all about us,” Kate said as another wave slid back, exposing the pale slope of the sand.
Sarah took Kate’s hand and guided it to the buttons of her dress. Inch by inch her white skin revealed itself in the afternoon light. The breeze sucked the curtains in and out across the sills. Rose, understanding that a walk was not imminent, jumped lightly onto a chair and went to sleep. From the beach came the sound of the slow waves gathering and gathering, so languorously it seemed they would never break.
Sarah liked to sleep late. She liked to drink coffee on the porch in her bathrobe, her dark hair loose, her big feet bare on the splintery boards. The sun would be high in the sky before she was ready to get dressed, to put her hair up, to poke in the icebox for something to eat.
Kate had seen a sign on a bulletin board in town about a place to go berry picking.
“Why would you want to leave this?” Sarah asked, gesturing to the water, the sky.
“It will still be here when we get back,” Kate said.
“It’s here now.” Sarah had found a copy of Anna Karenina on the bookshelf, and she was stretched out on a chaise longue on the porch reading, her big sunglasses making her look like Greta Garbo.
Kate walked to the edge of the porch. Down on the beach, sanderlings chased the surf back and forth. A dragonfly flitted above the green tips of the dune grass. “Let’s go for a walk,” she said.
“Take Rose.”
“I want you to come.”
“You’re very demanding.”
“And you’re very lazy.”
Sarah turned a page.
Kate watched her, frowning slightly in concentration under her hat, her eyes moving steadily back and forth across the page the way the sanderlings moved up and down the beach. “What’s happening in that book that’s so interesting?”
Sarah shrugged. “Life.” She yawned, and the top of her robe fell open. Kate came over and nudged in next to her on the chaise longue and opened the rest of the robe.
“I’m reading,” Sarah said.
“You can read anytime,” Kate said.
Sarah smiled her genial, ironic smile and put the book down, splayed out on the boards so as not to lose her place.
Sarah let Kate coax her out to the marsh to look at birds; she turned out to know the names of most. She agreed to go blackberry picking and collected twice as many berries as Kate. “My aunt used to pay by the bucket,” she explained.
Her aunt, it seemed, had also been the one who’d taught her the names of the sandpipers and the oystercatchers and the various terns. “She had a life list the length of your arm,” Sarah said, as they sat on the porch drinking gin-and-tonics and eating blackberries. She had found a pad of drawing paper and some pastels in a drawer and was frowning over something she was sketching. “She used to drag me out of bed before dawn and make me car
ry the binoculars.”
Kate sat with her knees pulled up, her chin resting on them, watching Sarah. “You’re a person of many hidden talents.”
“I’m a dilettante, basically,” Sarah said. “A dabbler.”
“You’re a Renaissance man,” Kate said, smiling.
“Whereas you, Kate Croft, are a visionary.”
“Nonsense,” Kate said, blushing.
“You are, though.” Sarah looked up from her drawing, tilted her head. “You’re always looking at something that’s not there.”
“I’m looking right at you now,” Kate said. It was hard, in fact, to take her eyes off Sarah: her measuring gaze, her long neck, the line of white along the edge of her swimsuit.
Sarah turned the sketchpad around. Kate was startled to see that the drawing was of herself. Here was her ordinary face with its slightly pointy chin and snub nose; here was her mousy, wispy hair, disordered by the wind. But Sarah had done something with the eyes. They were not the plain medium brown Kate knew from the mirror, but nearly amber, wide open, and blazingly clear.
For dinner that night they had broiled fish with local tomatoes and corn.
“We’re eating your work,” Sarah remarked as she nibbled her way neatly along the cob and back again: the typewriter method. Kate ate one section all the way around, then moved down: the rotary method.
“No. This is sweet corn.”
“It’s corn.”
Kate shrugged. “It’s Zea mays. But this is the boring kind. All the kernels are the same. My Indian corn is all different colors.”
“Ah,” Sarah said.
Kate put down the ear she was eating. “What we do is, we look at the characteristics of each kernel, and we try to match each one to the chromosomes we can see under the microscope. We’re making maps. I’m making a map of chromosome nine. Chromosome nine is very interesting because—”
In the Field Page 18