“They’ll come,” Paul Minot assured me. The post-office clock chimed the half hour. “See, there they are.”
At the door stood the Manns. The mother seemed alert, and the daughter, who was thirty, had the sweet but apprehensive face of a child. The three eldest boys wore vacant expressions, but the youngest son seemed brutish. His sweatpants hung low to expose his hairy belly and the tops of his buttocks. In this he resembled his father, whose trousers wouldn’t close; he held them up with knotted rope, as if this relieved him of the need to zip his fly.
“It’s her fault,” the father said, jabbing his chin toward his wife. “And her father’s fault. And that bastid first husband of hers. They’re the ones soured the blood in this family.” He laid his arm protectively across his youngest son. “I said to her, you want to let them stick you and yours, fine. I don’t see no reason to let them stick me and Little Jim.”
His wife looked as if she hoped we would stick him with something more lethal than a needle. “No reason except I cook for you and clean for you. And my Debbie does the same. And even my boys go out now and then and earn a few dollars. If I ask a little something in return, that’s reason enough. You do it or you can go live at the VA and let the nurses clean up your mess.”
“And who’s gonna clean your mess when you start shittin’ on the floor, like your old dad did, eh?”
“That’ll be the day, you cleaning any mess of mine.”
Miriam Burns placed one hand on each of Mr. Mann’s beefy shoulders and pushed him in a chair. “We’ll need blood from all seven of you,” she said, and jammed the needle in.
By the time Sumner finished examining all seven Manns it was a quarter past nine and the second family was waiting, as was the third. Everything took longer than expected. The complications of kinship were so intricate that, even with his chart, the mayor could barely untangle who was who. The simplest questions—How many siblings do you have? Are they living or dead?—might take a donor an hour to answer. To test the concentration of a fleshless old man, Sumner asked him to read a paragraph from the New Jerusalem Post. “You setting me up for a laugh?” the old man said. “Everyone knows I can’t read.” Sumner fared no better when he asked the old man to name the current president. “Don’t know and don’t care. Just a rotten gang of cocksuckers back to FDR, and him the biggest one.”
This struck a blow to Sumner’s pride. Many of the patients Vic referred to Sumner wrote back to say how compassionate they had found Dr. Butterworth. They had no way of knowing that even as they chatted, Sumner was observing them for symptoms—the twitch of a hand, the tendency to stop in midsentence—and he asked these same questions of every patient he saw, feigned the same interest, could pass that person on the street the next day and not know him.
“Can’t stump you, can I.” Sumner laid his pen across his clipboard and asked the old man how he felt.
“That’s more like it. I’m ninety-three years old. I ain’t got time for your bullshit questions. I feel lousy, is how I feel. Takes me till noon to unbend. Can’t hardly take a piss. But when I think of my dad and granddad, dying of that chorea thing in their early forties, I thank my lucky stars. Now, you get that pretty young girl over there to take my blood, and I’ll go on and get home.”
It took me a while to realize pretty young girl meant me. Still, I couldn’t be flattered. Either he had the sex-wrought brain of a Valentine’s victim, or he was starved for love, as old men often are. I wrapped a length of tubing around his arm, which was as rubbery and thin as the tourniquet. I swabbed his tattoo, so blurred by age I could barely make out the picture. “Hula dancer,” he muttered slyly. “Sorry she ain’t wearing no shirt.”
Watching Sumner examine patients, I couldn’t help but admire his insincerity and the power this gave him to alleviate people’s fears. He praised children for their brilliance in counting by twos. When a woman couldn’t touch her fingers to her nose, he assured her, “That’s all right, dear, it doesn’t matter,” while I was too sad to do anything except murmur how sorry I was.
It was one of those days when the worst you’ve imagined truly does come to pass, along with disasters you hadn’t been creative enough to predict. The room was so stuffy that three donors fainted. Children vomited and threw tantrums. The coolers that the mayor had bought to chill the ice cream couldn’t contend with the heat. “You promised us refreshments,” sneered a mother whose child was crying bitterly. “But there ain’t anything here but crumbs and slop.” This struck the mayor dumb. It was, he said, the first promise to a constituent he had ever been accused of breaking. I figured he must have seen a Valentine’s seizure before, but not two in one morning—a man losing control of his bowels, a woman flailing so violently she knocked the flag to the floor. One moment I was elated that fate had chosen me to find the cause of all this suffering; the next moment, I was stricken by despair that I was torturing all these invalids for no purpose except my own misplaced hope.
Rita pumped up a blood-pressure cuff. “Who said helping your people ever comes easy?”
My people. What did I have in common with such a mean-spirited crowd? They shrank from Rita’s touch and stared shamelessly at her braids. In return for this rudeness, Rita tied their tourniquets tighter and jabbed their needles deeper than I had ever seen her do. One disheveled woman brought a grandchild who had an earache. The girl wasn’t prone to Valentine’s but her grandmother thought it only fair that Miriam examine her. Miriam said she would be happy to see the girl at her office but didn’t have the proper equipment here. The grandmother pointed to Miriam’s bag. “Bet you got one of them ear things. I took the time off from work. Least you can do is take a look in her ear.”
Miriam examined the child, who seemed listless and withdrawn. The ear was infected. Miriam wrote out a prescription.
“Hey, Doc,” someone else called. “Got a lump in my neck I’m kinda worried about. Could you come and take a look?”
“Long as you’re looking at his lump, you might give me your opinion on this welt on my shin. Damn thing won’t heal.”
By two that afternoon, the tension in the room was as stifling as the heat. A foul-smelling fisherman in a rush to get back to his boat flustered me so badly I stuck him with the same needle I had used on someone else. He jerked away, the syringe bobbing in his arm. “What are you trying to do, give me his cooties? I seen on the TV how there’s this thing now in people’s blood can make another person sick. That new thing, whatyoucallit.”
“Who you saying has cooties?” asked the first man I had stuck.
“Ah, keep your fucking shirt on. All I’m saying is, you can’t be too careful. These government doctors, they need some guinea pigs for some experiment, you think they’re going to tell the likes of you what they’re really up to?”
“Come now,” the mayor said. “You don’t actually believe—”
“Don’t I? You heard that one over there open his mouth?” The fisherman waved a four-fingered hand at Yosef. “Tell me I don’t know a fucking Commie when I hear one.” He demanded Yosef’s name. Yosef raised his arms, a vial of blood in each hand.
“That’s Dr. Horowitz,” I said, stepping between Yosef and the fisherman with a bravery I didn’t really feel. “He’s worked with me for years.”
“Yeah? And why should we trust you? What kind of name is Weiss? Hundred to one Dr. Weiss here is making a little something off our blood.” The crowd moved up behind him. “I was down to Boston once, sold a bag of my blood for twenty dollars. How come I ain’t getting nothing for this blood?”
“If he’s getting twenty dollars, we want twenty dollars,” said a woman in a hairnet.
The mayor assured them that no one would profit from their blood.
“Easy enough for you to talk. You got a steady job. Don’t got the sickness in your family.”
The mayor looked so flustered that Rita rose to speak. Her braids were the highest thing in the room. “Do any of you fine ladies and gentlemen happen to know how mu
ch I’m getting paid for being up here with you today? Sixty-five dollars. Minus the two hundred dollars it’s costing me to send my boys to camp.” She tugged at her uniform. “How about you, Dr. Burns? You making anything here today?” Miriam said she wasn’t. “And you, Dr. Lewis? Or you, Mr. Mayor? You earning any blood money here today?”
“The mayor’s position is an honorary one,” Paul said primly.
Rita asked if that meant he was doing this for free.
Yes, he said. It did.
Rita turned to Sumner. “And what about you, Dr. Butterworth? Could you give these fine folks an idea how much you would be making at that neurology clinic of yours at the Massachusetts General Hospital if you weren’t here with us right now?”
“Actually,” Sumner said, “doctors don’t get paid an hourly wage.”
“Just give us a general idea,” Rita told him. “A ballpark figure. That’s all the good people want.”
Sumner estimated that his salary for a day would translate to eight hundred dollars.
“You’re giving up eight hundred dollars a day to be doing this?” Rita said.
“Yes,” he said, “I am.” The crowd murmured its amazement that anyone would forgo eight hundred dollars to spend a day with them. Sumner looked modestly at his loafers, as if he hadn’t understood until then how generous he really was.
“How about you, Dr. Weiss?” Rita went on. “Why don’t you tell these people what you’re hoping to gain from all of this.”
I couldn’t answer such a question. Nothing I was doing would help a single soul in that room. “I’m not earning anything,” I said.
“You’re not earning money. But if you find this gene you’re after, you’re going to write up a paper and publish it in some fancy journal. Isn’t that why you’re doing this? To get yourself famous?”
I had fantasized too often about seeing my name on such a paper to deny Rita’s charge.
“Go on,” she said. “Tell these people why you really need to find this gene.”
Everyone stood there watching me, but I couldn’t say a word.
“You want me to tell these people how it runs in your family? How your own mother died of this disease?” Rita grasped my wrist and pushed my sleeve above the elbow. I stared at the patch of skin she started swabbing. That patch of skin on which the alcohol dried was the only part of my body that wasn’t hot. Rita jabbed in the needle. My muscles were so tense and the pain so startling, I gasped. I saw blood swirling in the syringe, and even though I had seen thousands of vials of blood, my head began to swim. Rita transferred the blood to a stoppered vial and held the tube aloft. I wanted to snatch it back. This must have been how Willie felt, angry that a stranger should steal a part of who he was.
Rita handed the vial to Yosef, who scribbled a code on the label to indicate the donor. “There now,” Rita said. “You see anybody here getting paid for this blood?”
“How old was your mother when she passed on?” a woman asked me.
“Got the shakes yet?”
“I didn’t think people on the outside came down with this thing.”
“Hope you’ll excuse us, Doc.” The man who said this was excruciatingly thin, with a dirty gray ponytail straggling down his back. “We’re used to doing for ourselves. Sometimes we have a hard time showing how we’re grateful.”
An enormous older woman took me around and squeezed me. She smelled like a large sea mammal—a walrus, or a manatee—and I grew faint in her embrace. Yosef pushed through the crowd and began to pass around Dixie cups full of warm Coke.
“Let’s drink a toast,” he suggested. “Like that sign in the library says, all of us here are brothers, get under same skin.”
The fisherman who had demanded to be paid for his blood knocked his cup against Yosef’s. “To the whole fucking lot of us,” he said, then he knocked his cup to mine.
For the next several days, we visited the homes of donors who were too disabled to come see us. I kept thinking about Maureen and her trips to Peru to gather samples for her experiments. The mud had been so thick she couldn’t use her wheelchair, so a crowd had raised it to their shoulders and carried her wherever she needed to go. They trusted her because she was forced to trust them. I showed up at the homes of the people I was studying with a large entourage. On my own, I couldn’t have brought myself to knock on any door, not knowing if I would find a scene from my past—a child caring for a parent—or a scene from my future—a man my father’s age spooning food in his daughter’s mouth. I let the mayor introduce us. Outnumbered by experts, most donors were docile. They answered Rita’s questions, revealing intimate facts about themselves they wouldn’t have disclosed to their closest friends. I began to understand why Merriwether Valentine had assumed poverty to be the cause of the afflictions he observed rather than the other way around. On a solitary farm miles from New Jerusalem, Miriam and I found a woman whose husband had run off. The woman had never heard of Valentine’s. Her son wore a helmet to keep him from injuring his head when he threw his fits. I spent an hour convincing the woman that his seizures weren’t caused by the time she had dropped him from his crib twenty-seven years earlier.
“You’re not just saying that? You promise?” She buried her face in the washrag she had been using to clean her son.
“It wasn’t anyone’s fault,” I repeated, and she tried to kiss my hand.
In one house, we met a man who tied his sister to the bed because he couldn’t afford a nurse to stay with her while he worked. We met a woman who supported her children by knitting sweaters for a company in Bath. Since her husband hadn’t waited for his Valentine’s to kill him but managed to shoot himself first, she hadn’t been allowed to collect his insurance. Even Sumner seemed moved. He was childless and divorced, but he bought three sweaters from the woman, including a tiny red one with a reindeer on the front.
Among rich and poor, we found neglect. We found people who lied about their relatives (“He didn’t really join them Shakers, they snatched him as a child”). But more than neglect or lies, we found the sort of self-sacrifice that is unimaginable for those who aren’t called upon to make it. We met a woman in her seventies who cared for twin sons. Although each of “the boys” was taller than his mother and weighed fifty pounds more, she diapered and bathed them and rolled them in their beds so their skin wouldn’t get sores. Miriam’s suggestion that she send them to a nursing home was met by a puzzled stare. “Oh,” the woman said, “that won’t need to happen unless I die before them. But I’m hoping it will be the other way around.” She took out a beaded purse. “I want you to have this,” she said and handed me a ten-dollar bill. I tried to refuse but finally gave in and stuffed the money in my coat, making a mental note not to spend it on myself.
“Christ! Ma! Need you! Need you! Ma!”
The woman turned to go.
“I’ll come back to visit you,” I said.
“Of course you will,” she said.
I tried to say, Really, I promise I’ll come back, but the woman was already hobbling toward her sons.
On our last night in town, the mayor invited me to dinner. I tried to beg off. I was exhausted, I said. But I couldn’t hurt the feelings of someone to whom I already owed so much. He sensed my hesitation. The fact was, he needed my opinion.
Couldn’t I give it to him here?
No, he said, it wouldn’t be nearly as convenient.
He wasn’t the sort of man you could accuse of trying to seduce you. So what could I do but climb on the bike he must have borrowed from some child—it had pink-and-white streamers and a daisy-covered basket—and pedal along beside him.
We rode for fifteen minutes into the setting sun, the water lapping the rocks beside us. “There it is.” He pointed to a cottage with lacy blue eaves and a white wicker swing creaking on the porch.
“It’s beautiful,” I said. And really, it was. I had never seen a prettier place to live. He held the door and we went in. The walls were china blue with cornflowers
stenciled near the ceiling. A braided rug lay before the hearth. There were a china hutch, a wood trunk, and shelves and shelves of books. Paul went over to the stove, put on a pair of oven mitts, and took out a covered dish. Staring at his back, which was so much narrower than Willie’s, I grew angry and sad.
He offered me a taste of whatever food was in the dish, but I turned away, repulsed by the sight of that spoon coming toward me. Long ago, I had vowed never to let anyone feed me. I took the spoon and fed myself. It was something chewy and bland.
“I was hoping you could help us think of a name for it,” the mayor said.
“For what?” I asked.
“The product I was telling you about. We can’t exactly market it as ‘shaped and molded fish by-products.’” He offered me another bite, then waited so expectantly I had the crazy notion he would tie me to a chair and keep spooning this tasteless stuff in my mouth until I told him what he wanted.
“Why don’t you just call it ‘seafood’?” I suggested.
“Sea Food,” he repeated. “That’s not bad. A housewife could say, ‘Let’s have Sea Food tonight,’ and everyone would say, ‘Sure! Let’s have Sea Food. Everyone loves Sea Food.’” He was looking at me so adoringly you might have thought I had revealed the secret name of God. I was remarkable, he said. Sure, he admitted, he got lonely. The town wasn’t exactly overflowing with women his age, not to say women who had gone to college. But he also didn’t mind telling me that I was one of the bravest, most intelligent women he had ever met.
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