In the Field

by Rachel Pastan

  Janice was a brisk young woman with a quick, nimble mind. If one of them had an interesting slide, she often went down the hall to invite the other to come and look at it. Kate had learned more about bacteria than she’d ever thought she would, and had begun to admit they could be useful models for certain kinds of problems. Occasionally the two women took walks together. Kate was teaching Janice the names of the local trees and wildflowers, about which she was shockingly ignorant. On the weekends, Janice drove back to New York City, where her husband, an ophthalmologist, worked.

  “Coffee?” Kate held up two mugs.

  “Thank goodness!” Janice yawned, stretching her arms over her head. She looked like a plump white hen in her lab coat with her sharp black eyes and quick, precise movements. “Come sit down and distract me from all the ridiculous changes this idiot editor wants.”

  Kate listened while Janice described in detail the changes she’d said she wanted to be distracted from. They discussed the rumor that one of their older colleagues was going to retire; a surprising paper suggesting Avery was right about DNA, rather than protein, being the carrier of genetic information; and the proposed expansion of Route 25A. Then Janice glanced at her watch. Kate stood up, embarrassed at having needed the hint. Still, she paused on her way out to say casually, “Come for dinner tonight, why don’t you? I’ve been dreaming of lamb chops.”

  “I can’t,” Janice said. “I’m going back to the city tonight for Howard’s birthday.”

  The dim room seemed suddenly to brighten, but only around where Janice stood.

  That weekend the weather was fine. Kate went for a long walk in the woods where the spring beauties and the trout lilies were blooming. She played tennis with one of the yeast guys who worked in the next building. She paid her bills and caught up on the stack of journals by her bed. She drove to town for groceries and bought lamb chops to cook for herself, but she left them under the broiler too long and they came out tough. She scrubbed the pan, dried it, put it away, then poured herself a couple of fingers of scotch and sat by the window, peering out into the darkness in the direction of the harbor. She could hear the sound of halyards clanking against masts, proving that boats were there even if she couldn’t see them.

  The spring wore slowly on. The sun rose earlier day by day, the trout lilies were succeeded by trillium and Solomon’s seal. Kate’s corn flourished in the greenhouse, and the field by the library was ploughed and leveled for planting, which she would do by hand once the weather warmed up a little more. She tried a new recipe for lemon bars and gave them away to all the usual people. Her apartment smelled pleasantly of lemons and butter for a day, then the smell faded.

  Jerry Waxman came downstairs to return the tin she’d given him the lemon bars in. It turned out he was in charge of organizing the summer genetics symposium, and he asked her to give a talk. “It’s about time you gave a thorough explanation of this movable-gene business,” he said. “Not just these veiled hints.”

  Kate brought the tin to the sink and ran water into it. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll be more comfortable after I see this season’s data.”

  “You could be saying that till you die!” Jerry Waxman said. “How much data do you need? You’ve been working on this as long as I’ve known you, and how many papers have you published on it?”

  “None,” Kate said.

  He threw up his hands. “At some point,” he said, “you’re going to have to stop waiting for the world to come to you.”

  But he had come, hadn’t he?

  And really, it wasn’t a bad time to begin to organize the work into a coherent form.

  That night she wrote to Thatch and told him about Jerry’s invitation. She had taken to writing to him once a week, sitting down at her typewriter and tapping out a page or two. He wrote back, little scrawled notes or short letters, sometimes longer ones. He told her he was moving to a new apartment farther uptown, and she wrote back that that seemed like a good idea. He told her he had learned to roast a chicken, and she sent him her recipe for lemon bars. He told her he was going to teach a course on the history of genetics, and she told him he should be sure to show slides of the ratsicles from Castle’s old textbook.

  Tonight she began to sketch out her thoughts about what she might say in her talk, beginning with the crosses she had made back in the early 1930s, and what they had revealed, and how she had found the twin-sector plant, and what she had understood it to mean, and the many crosses and backcrosses it had prompted—all the way up through the landmark red-spot plant and its own cascading generations of descendants. Luckily she kept a stack of paper beside the typewriter, because when she looked up, it was after midnight and her letter had sprawled to fifteen pages. Yet she wasn’t tired. In fact she felt wide awake.

  “The thing I want to convey,” she wrote, rolling yet another sheet of paper onto the platen:

  is that it’s not just a question of the mechanics of what happens at cell division (though of course the mechanics are crucial), but that these processes and mechanisms have a significance beyond the field and the laboratory. It’s about how things become what they are. A leaf with speckles, or a kernel with a red spot, yes. But also, potentially, the kind of person one is, which might not be the kind of person that might have been expected, given one’s forebears.

  We start as a zygote with inherited factors from our parents—of course. But reorganizations are possible. Modifications are possible. They happen. They happen on the level of the cell itself!

  We are not predetermined. That is what I’m trying to say.

  CHAPTER 38

  The podium was a little too tall for Kate, but that was all right. She didn’t need notes, and she didn’t need the artificial dignity of a hunk of polished wood. She stood by the hot overhead projector on the low stage in the overflowing room on the last afternoon of the summer genetics symposium, holding her folder of transparencies, and began taking the audience through it.

  She had gone over her notes so often—and, anyway, she knew the material so intimately—that she barely needed to think as she delivered her talk. She could hear her voice tumbling out, but it seemed to be coming from far away. Meanwhile her mind drifted up freely to a corner of the ceiling where a large spider was weaving a web. Kate seemed to see the spinneret on the creature’s abdomen very clearly, the fine silk spooling out of the orifice which pulsed open and shut, controlling the tension. Spiders were very interesting. They could produce different types of silk for different purposes, and she’d read that spider silk was stronger than steel. She watched this one move with sure steps along the web’s radial lines, laying down the sticky spiral thread. Somehow, the instructions for building a web were embedded in the pattern of its chromosomes! The idea, though not new to her, was thrilling, sending electric bubbles streaming from the depths of her stomach to prickle the top of her scalp. Maybe someday someone would understand how a spider did that. She hoped she lived long enough to find out.

  The question period was a bit of a tussle. Not that she was surprised. She knew the data could be hard to follow. Though it was true that she had permitted herself to imagine—to hope—that a murmur of excitement might ripple through the lecture hall. Still, what could she do? She couldn’t force people to see the way she saw.

  Afterwards there was a reception out on the lawn. A big striped tent had been set up as if for a wedding: long tables spread with cheese and bread, angel cake and strawberries and sweet whipped cream. Kate stood on the grass with a glass of punch while people crowded around, wanting to follow up on what she’d said. There were some congratulations (perfunctory? sincere?), especially from her Cold Spring Harbor colleagues. (“I told you you had plenty of data,” Jerry Waxman said.) Also a lot of people who wanted more details, or to argue, or to talk about their own work.

  “Yes,” she told a young man with skeptical, intelligent eyes. “First I crossed that plant with �
�� The complementary dicentric component … As I explained, I used a sequence of six marked loci. And of course the linkage studies …” A number of other people, mostly also young men but a few older ones, stood nearby listening, and also one youngish woman. She hung back, waiting for the others to finish, but her bright greenish gaze was fixed on Kate as she explained again to Reg Silverthorn from Stanford why it was clear that she had uncovered a significant system and not just an incidental effect.

  “Did you have a question?” Kate asked the young woman at last, turning away from Reg.

  “I’m just still trying to absorb the idea,” the woman said. “A flexible genome! A genome responsive to things outside itself!”

  Reg Silverthorn raised a finger and said loudly, “Everything we’re learning from E. coli suggests just the opposite: that genes are a fixed message written on the chromosomes.”

  “That’s bacteria,” Kate said. “If you use a simple organism, of course you are going to miss some of the complexity. I’ve been saying that for years.”

  Reg Silverthorn was growing annoyed. “At the most basic level, life is the same,” he said. “Same rules, same processes. What’s true for E. coli is true for an elephant.”

  “I don’t see why,” Kate said. “Take reproduction.” But Reg had caught sight of someone else he wanted to talk to.

  “I work with bacteria, too,” the young woman said. “But I’m starting to see that corn has some interesting properties.”

  “Unique properties,” Kate said, waving her glass of punch in the air.

  “It’s slow, though,” the woman said.

  Kate had heard this a thousand times. “Slow has advantages. It gives you time to be sure of what you’re doing. To make sure that you’re really seeing what you think you’re seeing.”

  But was that true? Were you ever—could you be ever—sure?

  The woman’s name was Viv Adair, and she was doing a postdoc at Columbia. “I do have a question, actually,” she said, and asked about a slide Kate had shown illustrating the behavior of a ruptured chromosome in mitosis.

  Kate began to answer at some length. It was hard to explain without a picture to refer to. Sketching the movement of the ruptured chromosome in the air with her hand, she spilled her punch. “Come by my lab tomorrow,” she suggested. “I’ll show you the slides.” She was always glad for a chance to encourage bright young women.

  “I wish I could, but I have to catch a train at eleven.”

  “We’ll do it early,” Kate said, waving the objection away.

  By the time Viv poked her head around the door the next morning, the mist had burned off and the harbor glittered azure and silver outside the window. “I wasn’t sure how early you meant.”

  “I like to get a jump on the day,” Kate said.

  Viv wandered into the room, surveying Kate’s shelves with their bright equipment, reagents in brown bottles with neat typed labels, yearly lab notebooks fat with data. Trays of corn kernels were laid out on the lab bench, slides stacked by the microscope. “I think best at night,” she said. “The air feels clearer when everyone else is sleeping. Their thoughts don’t interrupt me. Let alone actual people knocking on the door.”

  “Sometimes interruptions make space for a new idea to come in,” Kate said. “Something that connects up, in surprising ways, with the idea you were following.”

  Viv laughed. “I have enough trouble managing one idea at a time.”

  Kate smiled. “You’re still young.”

  “Not that young,” Viv said. “I’m thirty-five.” She looked down at one of the trays of corn kernels, picked up a yellow one with brown speckles, and rolled it gently between her fingers.

  “Well, I’m forty-three, and I plan to live to be a hundred,” Kate said gaily. “That’s the best way. Outlive them.”

  “Who?” Viv fixed Kate with her sharp greenish gaze.

  “The people who don’t see as clearly as you do. Because time is going to prove you right in the end.”

  Viv put the kernel back in the tray. “You mean it’s going to prove you right.”

  Kate felt suddenly cheerful. “Could be,” she said.

  They began looking at the slides. Viv kept her head bent over the microscope for a long time, standing very still, like a night heron waiting for a fish. She asked questions, and Kate took out a pen and paper to draw the breakages and the key loci. She liked doing this—retracing the intricate logic for a good listener.

  She knew, of course, that she hardly knew anything yet. The cell was an uncharted country, and she was an explorer newly landed on shore. But that was part of the joy of it: the promise of richness that lay ahead. The sense she had of undreamed-of discoveries—unimagined systems and structures—waiting there in the dark to be found.

  In the middle of a long digression about ring chromosomes, Viv suddenly looked up. “I’ve missed my train!” she said.

  “Oh, there are lots of trains,” Kate said. “I can take you to the station anytime. But look at this.” She clipped a new slide to the stage. “This one surprised me. At that point I hadn’t expected a break here. I had been thinking I’d see it on the short arm because …”

  When they got hungry, they wandered across the lawn to Kate’s apartment, and Kate made toasted cheese sandwiches. They ate sitting on the sofa because the table was covered with science journals. Kate asked Viv about her research, and her current supervisor, and the graduate work she had done at the University of Wisconsin on the response of streptococci to the new drug, penicillin.

  “The best thing about Madison,” Viv said, licking butter from her fingers, “was that in the winter I could ice skate to work. The place I lived was around the bend of the lake from the genetics building. I would tromp down with my rucksack and put on my skates. Fifteen minutes later, I’d jump off the ice and go up to the lab.”

  “I used to love skating,” Kate said. In her mind’s eye, the long-forgotten pond of her childhood floated up, glittering under a robin’s-egg sky.

  “Sometimes I skate on the pond at Rockefeller Center. If you ever find yourself in New York, we might go together.” Viv spoke so casually, so apparently carelessly, that the invitation might have meant nothing.

  “I don’t travel much,” Kate said.

  “Going to New York is hardly traveling. You should come down and give a talk at Columbia. More people should know about the work you’re doing.”

  New York, the crowds on the streets and even in the parks. A roomful of men with doubtful faces listening more for a misstep than an insight.

  “Hmm,” Kate said.

  “What’s the point of doing science if you’re going to keep your results to yourself?” Viv said, suddenly impatient.

  “I’m not going to keep them to myself forever. But you heard the skepticism yesterday. I have a lot of work to do before I’m going to convince people.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought you were the sort of person who did things based on what other people thought.” Viv shook herself like a bird shaking out its feathers, and her pale, feathery hair began to slide out of its bun.

  “I should hope not!” Kate replied.

  But she thought of the young girl, drenched in shame, plunging into the November night. Of the veiled, careful years at the Sonnenfelds’. Of her solitude since then—her freedom, she called it. But was that what it was, really? She thought of Thatch standing by the glittering river: Ithaca was a long time ago.

  “I can’t stop thinking about your movable genes,” Viv said almost dreamily. She leaned back against the sofa cushions and tucked her feet under her. “With bacteria, when penicillin is introduced into the environment, pretty soon we have bugs that—instead of being killed by the drug—are totally unaffected by it! So strange. So, of course, one of our basic questions is how does such a big change come about so quickly? Now that I’m learning about th
ese sudden alterations in your corn, it makes me wonder: maybe the bacterial chromosome breaks apart, too, and reassembles in new patterns! Maybe they have movable genes, too.”

  Kate set down her plate with its crumbs and crusts of bread. Her heart had begun to thud, and at the same time something was rising up through her like sap. An idea was taking shape there in the air between herself and Viv. If movable genes could be found in bacteria … If they could be the cause of antibiotic resistance … “You’re talking about evolution,” she said.

  Viv’s pale eyebrows furrowed. “Am I?”

  “Don’t you see?” Kate said. She laid an urgent hand on Viv’s knee. It was solid and warm under her palm.

  “Tell me,” Viv said.

  Kate opened her mouth, but no words came. Viv’s face—straight nose with a faint pink line of sunburn, freckles like the dappling on a corn kernel, pale lashes golden where they caught the sunlight from the window—seemed to grow slowly larger as Kate met and held the greenish gaze. Her cheeks were burning but her hands were cold. A passionate shiver climbed up her spine.

  And all the time her brain was ticking away—skating away along its own course. Her corn; the wriggling chromosomes breaking apart and coming together; unknown stimuli begetting changes no one could predict. The future was breaking open like a chrysalis; like an egg. The whole world seemed to be speaking to her: whispering its secrets in a language she could almost understand.

  EPILOGUE

  1982

  For the hastily organized press conference about the Prize, Kate put on lipstick and a gold brooch Viv had given her once, back before she’d stopped trying to change what Kate wore. Would it kill you to wear a dress once in a while? she used to say—mostly teasingly. Maybe on the full moon?