by M. J. Cates
The rain reminded her of a time she had arranged to meet him at the library. A Chicago cloudburst had threatened to shred her umbrella, but he had somehow managed to lose his, so that he arrived at the library looking as if he’d just had a good long soak in the tub fully clothed. Rain had plastered his hair flat, and when he removed his glasses to wipe them there were drops clinging to his eyelashes. Imogen had urged him to go home and change but he wouldn’t hear of it and sat across from her making pencil marks in his poetry text and leaving patches of damp wherever his sleeves touched the table.
She felt the urge to talk about him, to share her affection for him with others in a way she had not before he died. Donna was deeply involved in her analysis with Walcott and, while she still wouldn’t admit as much, Imogen was pretty sure they were lovers and was a little hurt that she wouldn’t confide in her about it. Sometimes she waited up, hoping to hear Donna’s key in the lock, only to fall asleep over whatever she was reading.
In addition to her work with patients, Imogen was now putting in longer and longer hours in the histology lab, comparing slides of brain tissue from schizophrenics with samples from normal people. It even seemed she might be on to something when she discovered irregularities in the part of the cortex associated with hearing—could that be where the voices came from?—but the differences vanished when she was given samples blind. When she didn’t know a sample was from a schizophrenic the microscope refused to reveal any differences at all.
Engaged as she was by this work and by her patients, she still spent untold hours staring out her fourth-floor window. She was languishing there one Saturday afternoon when she saw a group of four people—two men and two women—approaching the front gate, all of them dressed in tennis whites, despite the gloomy skies. She recognized Robert Taunton and Sara Sands but not the other two. The gate was open, and Taunton and the two women went through. The other man took a short run and simply vaulted over the wrought iron fence, which was about four feet high, touching it lightly with one hand as he sailed over. The leap was graceful, effortless, and above all gratuitous—the gate was wide open. Imogen could not be sure why it captured her imagination so, but she couldn’t stop thinking about it.
That night she rapped on Donna’s door. It was past midnight, and Donna had just got in from an evening with Walcott. “You waited up for me? What’s gotten into little Miss Early-to-Bed?”
“Will you help me tomorrow? I need to brush up my tennis game.”
* * *
—
His name was Carl Kromer. Taunton was taking him on a tour of the premises and stopped into the histology lab.
“Dr. Lang, this is Carl Kromer. He’s just finished his M.A. at Harvard and he’s going to be doing his Ph.D. with me. Dr. Lang is a staff psychiatrist and also engaged in some interesting research here in the lab.”
“You do both?” Kromer said. “Isn’t that a little unusual?”
“Not really—not at the Phipps.”
“True,” Taunton said, “but the others are not so good at it.”
“Maybe not so enthusiastic,” Imogen said. “I put in the time, that’s all. What is your dissertation on?”
“Cyclical behaviour—but it’s a recent interest so I’m not sure I can pull it off.”
Imogen was usually allergic to small talk but was aware of an intense desire to keep Carl Kromer there as long as possible. He had a sweet, open face and curly hair that resolutely ignored the part he had tried to inflict on it. She asked him what course work he would be doing.
“I’ve told him he doesn’t have to attend a single lecture,” Taunton said. “Just give me a first-class piece of research.”
Carl talked a little about his excitement in coming to Johns Hopkins and working with Taunton, about the possibilities of turning psychology into a hard science. He grew increasingly animated as he spoke—looking back and forth from Taunton to Imogen, eyes alternately wide, and eager, and amused. When he talked of making a map of repeated human behaviour across intervals of a day, a month, a year, he inscribed a graph in the air complete with axes, dips, and spikes.
“It sounds as if you’re already well on your way,” Imogen said.
“That’s what I thought,” Taunton said. “I’ll have to watch out, or he’ll have my job.”
He and Carl were just about out the door when Imogen, appalled at her own forwardness, called after them, “Oh, Mr. Taunton? Donna Artemis and I were looking for tennis partners—I don’t suppose your new recruit…”
“He does. Quite well, actually—although he’s intelligent enough to let me beat him.”
Carl stood there adorably blushing and shaking his head.
Over the next couple of weeks Imogen played several matches with Donna, whose game was darting, aggressive, and occasionally slapstick. Afterwards, Imogen took care to always walk back past the windows of the west wing in hopes of catching a glimpse of Carl on the third floor.
“So he might see you, is what you really mean, missy.” This from Donna, who kept pretending to be startled that Imogen was capable of what was clearly a crush, “dry old stick that you are.”
“I’m not a dry old stick, I just don’t chase after retired sailors.”
“Oh, meow-meow.” Donna tapped her friend’s behind with her racket. “Still, if he does catch sight of you in that get-up the man’s a goner. You look almost virginal.”
“Almost, is it?” Imogen squinted up toward the lab windows, but it was impossible to see anyone unless they chose to park themselves right in the bay window.
* * *
—
Imogen could not be sure, and she certainly was not about to ask, whether Donna had prodded Taunton to finally make the invitation, but make it he did, and the four of them played several times over the next month. It soon became clear that Carl was the best player. It didn’t matter how you mixed up the sides, whoever was partnered with him was going to win, a fact that eventually cooled Taunton’s interest in playing, although he pleaded a pulled hamstring.
As with so many experiments, tennis did not yield the results Imogen wanted. It provided ample opportunity to admire Carl’s physical grace and sportsmanship, but no chance to actually talk to him. She had hoped they could go for tea or something afterwards, but Carl lived on Park Street, two streetcar rides distant, and since he preferred to walk he always had to leave right after the match. Or so he said. The truth, Imogen told herself, was that he was probably just not interested, and why should he be? She was not the most scintillating creature on earth, and even if she had been, she was coming to believe what her mother had told her long ago: men simply didn’t like working women. She was doomed to remain a spinster.
She was in this frame of mind one Saturday afternoon, when she was returning from a melancholy walk. As she was passing the Harriet Lane Children’s Home she saw an odd sight. Carl Kromer was jumping and dodging through the ornamental shrubbery with a large object in each hand as if he were performing—not very well—a balancing trick. Imogen had not believed this man could ever look clumsy, but he did at this minute. Had she not known better, she might have mistaken him for a Phipps patient gone AWOL.
“Mr. Kromer,” she said. “What on earth are you doing?”
“I am attempting to capture a rat. Several rats, in fact. Was attempting.” He raised both his hands, displaying two empty cages. “I know. I look ridiculous.”
Imogen shook her head solemnly. “Not at all.”
Carl pointed an accusatory finger. “You’re teasing me, you wicked person.”
“Never.”
He came out of the bushes, his face shiny with sweat.
“My researches have made two things abundantly clear. First, that my next mission must be to design a rat trap that actually works.”
“And second?”
“Second?” He put his hands on his hips. Unlike slouchy, angular Quentin, Carl had a very four-square, almost soldierly stance. “Come to my lab and I’ll show you. I mean,
if you have a minute.”
“Of course,” Imogen said. Then, trying to sound casual: “I was heading that way, anyway.”
Despite his high-energy aura, Carl was a slow walker—an ambler, as only the very calm or the very heavy can be—and Imogen, who had been accused by Donna of being a bit of a marcher, and by her mother of being a stomper, had to adjust her pace. Of course, Imogen thought, when you’re a paragon of strength and confidence, what need to rush anywhere?
As they headed toward the Phipps he told her how he had come to his current experiments. “Taunton presented me with twelve rats and basically said: Do something. So for the next few days I just fed them bread and milk and stared at them. What struck me—and I know it sounds obvious—what struck me was how they just jumped around the cage and climbed around for a while and then were quiet again. I began to wonder what makes them active and what makes them quiet?”
“It’s not a matter of just needing to exercise and then getting tired?”
“But why do it at certain times and not others? And why climb around a cage you already know every inch of? And why do they all behave in almost identical fashion? No one taught them to run around for an hour, sit still for twenty minutes, run a bit, and so on. And obviously they didn’t evolve in these cages.”
“No, but climbing must keep them alive, right? Get them food and so on?”
“The big question for me,” he said, unlocking the lab door, “is why do they do certain things for certain durations after certain periods of time? So my first question was, how can I even measure such stuff?”
The psychology lab had been divided in two since the last time Imogen had seen it. Taunton’s grasp-reflex apparatus had been moved to one side, and Carl’s rat equipment took up the other. Books and files were stacked everywhere among the cages, and scattered among them were various parts of what had once been a bicycle. Taunton’s side looked spartan by comparison.
Carl pointed to a table with a glass top and sides.
“I designed this thing. It sits on tambours so it isn’t affected by our footsteps. It’s not pretty, but you see the floor? It’s covered with a rubber membrane, and if you take a look underneath…”
He squatted down and Imogen went carefully down on one knee beside him.
“You see that rubber tube? It connects the cage floor to that recording drum.” He pointed to a metal cylinder. “That’s smoked paper on it.”
“It’s a kymograph.”
“Exactly. So as the rats run about, the tube makes a mark for each and every movement. And—the truly fiendish part—it’s connected to a chronometer that simultaneously records the time on a chart.”
They stood up, and Imogen remembered the graph Carl had drawn in the air the first time they met. “You’ll be able to describe their activity levels throughout the day.”
Carl nodded. “I can observe the effects of diet, fatigue, hydration…But it’s time of day that interests me at the moment. So much of their behaviour seems spontaneous, I can’t believe it’s learned. It has to be driven from inside.”
“What did Mr. Taunton say?”
“He looked at it for exactly two minutes, nodded once, and said, ‘Not bad.’ ”
“Quite an encomium, coming from him.”
“Really? Do you think?” It was the first time she had seen him exhibit anything like anxiety about his career.
“If Taunton isn’t happy, he won’t waste any time letting you know. Why do you need more rats? You have twelve.”
“Oh, it’s not the quantity. I want to see if wild rats exhibit the same cycles of behaviour—these creatures are domesticated.”
“Well, it’s fascinating work you’re doing, but I’m due on Three West in about two minutes, so I’d better leave you to it.”
“Thank you so much for taking an interest. Makes me feel almost…consequential.”
Imogen smiled. “What was the second thing?”
“Pardon me?”
“You said your researches had taught you two things. You need to build a better rat trap, and…?”
He put his hands on his hips again—a posture Imogen was beginning to realize was habitual with him—and consulted the ceiling for a moment, before looking at her once more.
“The other thing I need to do is ask Dr. Imogen Lang if she would accompany me to a concert.”
* * *
—
The next afternoon they attended a concert in the park and afterwards went for tea and cakes in the boat pavilion. In the following weeks they went to movies, the occasional play, and even dancing, but it was their talks afterwards that Imogen loved the most, sitting across a table and unfolding for each other their life stories, their hopes and plans, their favourite books. They talked about the war, which was finally going well for the Allies. Carl had been in Germany the year it broke out.
“I was studying at the Technische Hochschule in Dresden—I thought I wanted to be an engineer.”
“Well, that makes perfect sense. You like to make things, design things.”
“All it taught me was that I’m a lot more American than I am German, despite my background. I mean, I loved the Germans in many ways—they were very friendly and happy people, the ones I knew—but there was this militaristic streak, and this ridiculous patriotism. They still hadn’t got over the wars of the last century. Which isn’t to say I think we should be shooting them now. A couple of my German cousins were killed last year.”
“Oh, that’s sad. I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Have you lost anyone?”
“Yes, I—” Imogen faltered.
“Someone close?”
“Yes, a—a very good friend.”
“Was she a nurse?”
“It was a man, actually.”
Carl gave her a quizzical look.
“I know it sounds funny, but we really were just friends. At least I thought we were.” And then it all came tumbling out—their parting, Quentin’s declaration of love, his plan for suicide. It was the last thing she wanted to talk about, and yet she couldn’t stop herself.
“Well,” Carl said when she was done, “I can’t fault a man for being in love with you.”
Imogen didn’t know where to look. It was certainly too soon for him to say something like this, but she could not call herself exactly displeased by it.
“And you shouldn’t fault yourself for not being in love. You did the right thing.”
“Difficult to say that, under the circumstances.”
There was a silence, and Imogen was glad Carl made no attempt to break it.
“I just don’t understand the point of all this slaughter,” she said, after a time. “The Lusitania was a terrible crime, but this is all over ancient European grudges and it just seems like the male psyche run amok. I’m not much of a political person, but I truly don’t think it would have happened if women were running things.”
“You might well be right,” Carl said stoutly. “They could hardly make a worse mess.”
This was pleasant to hear, but it was not Carl’s opinions so much as his expressiveness, his passion, and his eloquent hands that Imogen fell in love with.
* * *
—
Carl’s arrival at the Phipps coincided with some spiky developments in clinic politics. While Dr. Ganz had initially been thrilled with lassoing Robert Taunton to run his psychology lab, he was disturbed when it turned out that Taunton not only believed in behaviourism, he believed in it to the exclusion of all other views. As his fame grew, so did his arrogance, and he ceased to be diplomatic about his opinion of Ganz’s “psychobiology.”
Taunton was writing books; Ganz was not. Indeed it was a running question among the staff—Why has the chief never written a book? Ganz was so full of ideas, so eager to back vastly different areas of research, so convinced that his chosen discipline was on the brink of a golden age, that it seemed perverse of him to keep his ideas to a small circle of associates.
Taunton invite
d Carl and Imogen—soon seen as a couple, if not exactly engaged—to supper one night at his beautiful house on Calvert Street. (His wife came from money, according to Carl. Big money.) They dined under a glittering chandelier—maid, footman, and butler close at hand. Mrs. Taunton’s necklace rivalled the chandelier for sparkle, shooting tiny slivers of light in all directions.
The conversation revolved, as it usually did, around the Phipps. Imogen spoke admiringly of Ganz’s lectures on psychotic reactions and said, “I don’t know why he hasn’t put his ideas in a book.”
“Very simple,” Taunton replied. “Because he doesn’t have any.”
“I would have thought you would agree with him. Isn’t he, after all, saying that patients learn to be schizophrenic?”
“No, he seems to think they decide to be schizophrenic. They can’t face whatever reality is offering them at the moment, and so they retreat into insanity. You could call it a learned reaction, if you could demonstrate it. Has he been able to induce schizophrenic reactions in the lab? Can you induce a mania? If you could, you might be able to find a way to extinguish such behaviour by inverting the stimuli, but no. If you press him on it, he becomes huffy, and gets lost in his so-called psychobiology jargon.”
“Robert, please,” his wife said. “Our guests are not here for a debate.”
After dinner, Mrs. Taunton at her husband’s urging entertained them with a few songs at the piano. She had a high, clear voice, free of the hyper vibrato that bedevils so many amateurs, and Imogen was moved by her version of “Barbara Allen.” Taunton stood behind her, hands on her shoulders, looking every bit the proud husband. Imogen thought of Sara Sands sneaking out of his lab at two in the morning and could not understand why a man married to so lovely a person as Evelyn would ever stray.
Over the next few months, relations between Taunton and his employer worsened as Ganz tried to get the psychology lab to develop experiments that might support his ideas. Taunton categorically refused.
“They’re not even speaking to each other these days,” Carl told her. It was winter now, and he had talked her into taking the streetcar all the way out to Roland Park where they could go ice-skating on the pond. Baltimore was suffering record-breaking low temperatures and ice-skating was suddenly the thing to do on a Saturday afternoon.