At lunchtime, she tidied up and headed home. Sarah was at the hospital, and Mrs. Sonnenfeld was out somewhere. Kate was glad, she didn’t want to talk to anyone. Up in her room, she lay down on the bed, looking out the window at the sky and the crown of the tulip poplar. She loved the tree’s long fluted early summer flowers, but those were long gone now, and the bright green leaves were fading to yellow. A long strand of cirrus cloud drifted by. Thinking about weather always made her think of Mendel, who had recorded it twice a day, every day, at his monastery in Brno. Mendel, who had gone to his grave with his work not only uncelebrated, but disbelieved.
She never lay down in the middle of the day, not even on weekends. Except of course when she’d first come to this house as an invalid. Then she’d lain all day long watching the clouds, watching the sky change from one shade of blue to another. Waiting for Sarah. If she shut her eyes now, she could still inhabit that first moment, when she had first put her arms around her. The brush of Sarah’s mouth on the side of her face, the moment of hope and terror. The first, impossible, electric touching of their lips.
The night Cynthia had tried to kill herself.
Cynthia, whom Thatch loved.
I always like to help out a protégé when I can.
Let it go, let it go. She turned over in the cool smooth sheets, turned again. Eventually she fell asleep.
When she woke, the sun was low, and Sarah was sitting on the edge of the bed. Kate reached up and pulled her down. They lay quietly together. Kate tried out sentences in her head.
I saw something in the drying shed.
I found the most extraordinary kernel.
The control mechanism in one of my plants is doing something very interesting.
She could feel herself—feel everything—poised on the cusp, the way you could feel the season changing, new weather blowing in. She longed for whatever it would bring, and at the same time she wanted to hold on to this moment, her face against Sarah’s shoulder, the clean white walls, the solidity of the maple headboard with its carvings of lilies and pomegranates. She wanted to hold her discovery close a little while longer.
“How was seeing your friend?” Sarah asked.
In the fading light, Kate began to tell Sarah about the dinner at Whitaker’s: the meal, what Whitaker had said, what she’d learned about what Paul had done. She sat up, her voice rising as anger overcame her all over again.
“I don’t understand,” Sarah said. “What does it mean, he didn’t credit you? He broke a rule?” She propped herself up on her elbow, tossing her hair back over her shoulder, frowning as she tried to understand.
“Not a rule—custom. Etiquette. He knew how important this was, and he shut me out.”
“That man is a snake in the grass,” Sarah said. “I never understood why you had anything to do with him.”
Kate looked at her sharply. “Are you saying it’s my fault?”
“Of course not!” Sarah reached for her hand. “I’m agreeing with you.”
Kate’s palm felt hot and claustrophobic in Sarah’s, but she made herself leave it there. “He’s the best scientist I know,” she said. “Other than me.” Which was a joke and not a joke.
“You only have to spend ten minutes with him to see that success is all he cares about,” Sarah said.
“He cares about doing good science. His mind is very …” But how to explain Paul’s mind?
“He cares about winning a Nobel Prize,” Sarah retorted.
They regarded each other. Kate could feel herself flush, while Sarah turned to alabaster.
“How is that poor woman?” Sarah asked, changing the subject. “Your friend’s wife.” She slid her hand from Kate’s to refasten a hairpin.
Kate sat back against the headboard. “I don’t think she’s too well.”
“Poor thing,” Sarah said. “Sylvia.”
“Cynthia.” The name felt wrong in Kate’s mouth, as though she had no business saying it. She thought of Cynthia coming into the hospital room with the jam jar of joe-pye weed, Cynthia saying, Of course you must come to us. “Hard for him, too,” Kate said.
“Did you talk about Missouri?”
“No.”
Kate watched Sarah try to make out what that meant. That she wasn’t serious about going? That she’d already decided to go so she didn’t need his advice? Kate tried to make it out herself. Was it because she knew he would have told her to go? Even as he also said there were more important things than science.
Dusk was filling the room. The nightly chorus of robins and sparrows surged in through the open window. The inch of air between her leg and Sarah’s was electric.
“I miss you when you don’t come home,” Sarah said.
Kate leaned hard against the headboard, the indentations of the carvings pressing into her back. The rich notes of the robins’ song swirled around them. Why was the song deeper at dusk than during the day? Were the lilting notes somehow encoded on the chromosomes? “You work all night, too, sometimes.”
“Because I have to,” Sarah said. “Because that’s the schedule.”
“I have to, too.”
They’d had this argument before, in a hundred variations. Last week Sarah had said, “What would be so bad about taking a whole Sunday off?”
But did plants take a day off from growing?
“They do in the winter,” Sarah said.
In the winter, the stacks of data unfurled and burgeoned on Kate’s desk. If she didn’t get ahead of them before spring, the thicket would engulf her.
Sarah’s life was different. She had struggled, of course, to get where she was now: the medical school professor who singled her out during cadaver dissections; the fellow interns who acted as though she weren’t in the room when she spoke; the dozen jobs she’d applied for before getting this one, when two local doctors died of influenza in 1918 and the hospital was overwhelmed. “They literally hired me over two dead bodies,” Sarah liked to say.
But all that was long ago now. She liked her work; and at the end of the day, she put work out of her mind, which had compartments: one for the hospital, one for Kate, one for her mother, one for music. Whereas Kate’s life was a large marble egg she held in her arms.
Kate got up from the bed and began to dress. She was restless and overtired, her internal clock turned upside down.
Sarah pushed herself up on her elbow. “What are you doing?”
“Going for a drive.”
“Do you want company?”
“Better not.” Wallet, keys. Well-worn cardigan sweater with leather buttons.
“Where are you going?”
Kate sat down on a chair to lace her shoes. It was almost full dark now.
“Will you be back for dinner?” Sarah asked in a different voice. “Mutti will want to know.”
“No. I don’t know. No.”
Behind the wheel, Kate’s panic receded a little. The Ford seemed to glide over the ribbon of asphalt that unfurled endlessly into the distance, its V8 humming steadily. Even if she went to Missouri, she could come back regularly—couldn’t she? There were roads. How long a drive could it be? Well, long, probably. So, not every week, but possibly once a month. And in the summers, of course. She could keep growing her corn in Ithaca and live with the Sonnenfelds from planting to harvest. Surely Whitaker would let her keep some space here.
I always like to help out a protégé.
I’m sure Paul could select his own organism.
How could Paul publish his Neurospora paper and not even show her a draft? Not mention her in a footnote? Not so much as let her know? She had to ask him.
No. She had to tell him she knew.
Let it go.
But she couldn’t let it go.
The road wound east through forests, then broke out into meadows. She was tired, but she wasn’t read
y to stop driving. Sometimes she could make out the shadows of farmhouses, which she imagined being guarded by great muddy dogs. She passed through Richford, through Whitney Point, through the tiny village of Greene. It was late—long past dinnertime—though she couldn’t read her watch in the dark. The moon was a pale disk far away in the sky. The road spilled ahead, faintly shiny in the yellow glow of her headlamps. When she couldn’t fight her sagging eyelids anymore, she pulled off onto the side of the road and stretched out across the seat.
When she woke, it was full daylight, and she was in a rubbishy field of gorse and dry reeds. She got groggily out of the car, lowered her trousers, and squatted by the fender. Behind her, a tree, scorched by lightning, rose probably forty feet toward the scudding sky. On one of its skeleton-arm branches stood an enormous hawk: tense yellow feet, sharply curving beak, glossy black back with lighter shoulder patches. She recognized it from books, though she had never seen one—a bay-winged hawk. Not that there were any bays around here. It was a western bird, far from home. What storm had blown it such vast distances over mountains and prairies?
The hawk sat motionless on its branch, in the scrubby field, a thousand miles from anywhere it belonged. Standing up slowly, Kate watched it, waiting to see what it would do.
Or maybe, she thought, seized by doubt—maybe it wasn’t a bay-winged. Maybe it was just a rough-legged hawk in its dark phase. Though didn’t it have a very yellow beak for a rough-leg? She squinted, trying to see more clearly.
Sarah would know.
There the bird sat, patient and self-possessed, and Kate stood still and silent, watching it. Was it an omen of some kind? Was she expecting some sign from it? A hint, an augury? Was it charging her with going on, with turning back? Perched in this wasteland, glaring down on her with its clear bright eye.
Nonsense. Nonsense. Pulling herself together, she got back into the car.
A few miles up the road, she stopped for gas and bought a map, then sat in a diner, ate ham and eggs, and traced her route: east across the rest of New York, then south and east some more into Massachusetts. It was a long way, but that was all right.
Still, the drive took even more time than she’d calculated. She took a couple of wrong turns and had to retrace her steps, and it was late by the time she reached the Cambridge city limits. She found herself driving along the river: rich scent of mud and old leaves, the light slapping of water against the bank, lights reflected in the rippling black. Then she turned up onto a narrow street, past darkened buildings: shut-up restaurants and shops, the shuttered newsstand. The trolley tracks glinted faintly. In another minute, she had passed through the Square and found herself near the quiet grassy area where she and Sarah had parked that summer, just over two years ago. She pulled over to the curb and stopped the car.
It was a warm night. A breeze stirred the canopies of the trees, and a couple of bats fluttered and dove over the expanse of grass. She didn’t know how late it was, and she didn’t want to know. She had no idea where Paul lived, but it didn’t matter. She didn’t want to see him at his home. And anyway, he would be in the lab, she was sure of it. She had a sense of everything unfolding as it had been ordained to unfold.
She remembered the way: across the road and along the path through the red brick buildings—great looming shapes in the warm darkness. The wind rattled the leaves as she made her way underneath them. The moon gave her a silvery wink. She wasn’t thinking. She had stopped thinking many hours and hundreds of miles ago. Her feet, her instincts, were her guides now, and they led her unerringly up the shallow steps to the door of Paul’s building. She grasped the big door handle, ready to sail into the lobby and up the stairs.
The full stop of the locked door holding fast shuddered through her body and jangled her bones. Her heart began to thud. She tried the door again, and again it failed to yield. Standing on the top step, tugging at the immovable door, she seemed to wake up suddenly from a strange dream. Her calm was gone. It seemed to her that Paul had engineered this—had lured her here with some false hint or promise—only to shut her out again. I want to ask you something, he’d said to the blind, parched person she’d been before Sarah, as he lay sprawled, naked and sated, across her bed.
She took a breath, looked around at the night. There was nobody anywhere that she could see. She squinted up at the dark windows. It must be very late indeed for not even a graduate student to be showing a light.
She was pretty sure she knew which windows were Paul’s. He had the corner lab on the second floor, at the front, facing the building with the frieze of animals. She could just make out now, across the courtyard and high up, the hump of the turtle and the long contour of the snake. She peered up at Paul’s front window, then walked around the corner of the building.
The window on the side was ajar.
She thought of the desperate girl she’d been on that other autumn night, long ago, clawing her way up into the sanctuary of Krause’s lab. She had known nothing then: nothing! Nothing about love, nothing about work.
It wasn’t hard to raise herself onto the balustrade. From there, balancing on her toes, she could just reach the broad smooth second-floor windowsill. Kate was still slim, still agile. Working in the field every summer had made her strong. She pulled herself up with her muscular arms. She wriggled up onto the sill, her legs flailing and then finding purchase on the brick. She took a breath, heaved herself forward, and slipped under the sash.
Inside the lab, she stood panting, waiting for her heart to slow down, then began to feel her away across the room. The first thing she bumped into was the desk. Good. She groped across the surface till she found a lamp, switched it on. That gave her enough light to see by. She sat down at the desk to consider her next move, and there in front of her on the blotter were the proofs of the Neurospora paper. Doubtless left out so that anyone stopping would notice them!
Or maybe it was just coincidence that he had been working on them last night.
Or maybe it was destiny.
It didn’t matter. She began to read the paper. And although she already knew, from what Thatch had said, what it contained, she found herself riveted. Paul had a clear confident style, and his claims carried the weight of his authority even before you read how he had proved them. Then, as you made your way through the rigor of his methods section and plunged into the crystalline logic of his discussion, you couldn’t help feel that every doubt, every alternate possibility had been thought of, considered, disposed of. That the conclusions reached here were the only possible conclusions. One gene–one enzyme. Yes. It was seductively simple, as clean as a law of physics.
But biology wasn’t physics. Living organisms were complicated, messy, knotty. Even if Paul was right (and she saw he must be at least partly right), there was bound to be more to it.
She could picture Paul’s face if anybody tried to tell him that.
CHAPTER 30
By the time Paul came in, Kate had taken a nap with her head on the desk, woken up to reread the Neurospora paper, been thrilled and incensed all over again, then poked around to see what else he had going. There were footsteps in the hall as early as 7:30—voices, doors opening and shutting, the rattle of an equipment cart. But it was another hour before the doorknob rattled and Paul strolled in. White lab coat, abstracted expression, a higher forehead than he’d had two years before, the last time they’d met. Right here in this room.
“Hello, Paul,” Kate said. She was sitting behind his desk in the big black chair with the Harvard seal painted on it. Veritas.
Paul startled, his face going dark and sharp, but he recovered himself. Then he took in who the trespasser was, and he laughed, seeming genuinely pleased to see her. “Hello, Kate. Who let you in?”
“I climbed in through the window,” she said.
He smiled, obviously not believing her, and looked at his watch. “If you’d called, I’d have cleared the day for
you. As it is, I have meetings. But I can be free for dinner.”
She watched him for signs of unease. But Paul never seemed uneasy or discomposed that she recalled. Angry, yes. Outraged, indignant, scornful. But not rattled. Nothing seemed to make him doubt his own judgments or abilities, or what he was owed. The same was true, more or less, of Whitaker. Had been true of Krause. She thought about what Whitaker had said at dinner about what was necessary to succeed in science: talent, luck, and perseverance. He hadn’t mentioned arrogance. Assurance. Ruthlessness. Pride.
She wondered whether he would ask her—tell her?—to get out of his chair.
“I heard about your new paper,” she said. “PNAS—not bad!”
His smile broadened, pleasure and self-mockery complexly mixed. “Even I was surprised at how well it came out.”
“I guess everyone is surprised once in a while. Even you.”
Paul sat on a tall stool and lit a cigarette. He smoked, tilting the stool back on two legs. He picked a fleck of tobacco off his tongue. “You didn’t bring your doctor friend this time.”
“No. I came by myself.”
Paul let a double stream of smoke out through his nostrils. “Too bad. I liked her.”
“You should have put my name on that paper,” Kate said.
Paul’s eyebrows went up. “Which paper?” he said.
She looked at him hard. “You couldn’t have done that work without my contributions.”
“Couldn’t I?”
It was hard to breathe. Her chest had gone rigid, the air turned crystalline in her lungs. “I sorted out the cytology. I suggested Neurospora.” She remembered the peculiar hyperalertness of her mind—the weird illumination that came from toiling in the mud, from the confusion of sex, and from her encroaching illness—as she looked at the heel of the loaf left out on the counter and thought: bread mold.
He replaced the cigarette between his lips, and the smoke drifted up and away carelessly, though everything else in the room—the organized files, the labeled sample trays, the jar of sharpened pencils on the dust-free desk—suggested care. “You were very helpful,” he said. “I appreciate that.” He ran a hand through his hair, still thick in the back even as it receded in the front, and yawned, as if the whole conversation were barely enough to keep him awake.
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