“We could hit a few,” Nathan said to Tom. “Not a game, you know. Just hitting.”
“But I’d like a game, Nathan. It would be good for me if you don’t mind,” Tom said.
Tom lost to Nathan every time. And every time, he laughed and thanked Nathan for putting up with him. Nathan said it was no trouble at all. He was grateful for the use of Tom’s court. They played each weekend until the leaves dropped from the vines on the cyclone fence.
“It’s just not normal,” Nathan told Carla. “He loses every time and still keeps coming back. Doesn’t seem to care.”
“He enjoys your friendship,” Carla said. “He enjoys the activity. Tom just enjoys himself.”
“Next spring,” Nathan told her, “we ought to build our own tennis court. The Szabos are just dabblers, and there they are with a private court. Messy court. They don’t even keep it up.”
I like that scruffy court, Carla thought. It’s like Tom.
“Next spring,” Nathan continued, “we’ll build a real court down near the lake.”
Ten
“It’s Nathan!” Sophie exclaimed, holding up one hand to silence her husband while the other pressed an oversized receiver to her ear. The brown silk insulation on the telephone cord in Prague’s Alcron Hotel was frayed. The sound was intermittent. “A girl. Fair, with long legs. Bigger than Alexandra was. Everyone is fine. Oh, Katte! I want to go back and see my new granddaughter!”
“I am soon finished with the conference here,” he reassured her. “What is the name, this new one?”
“It was hard to hear him. So far away. Lee, I think he said. Lee.”
“Lisle!” Felix clapped his hands in delight. “They named her for my mother. He must have said Lisle.”
In fact, Nathan had said “Emily,” but he was very far away. When he met the Weisenthals at the pier, Sophie insisted on being driven directly to Gramercy Park.
“Emily,” Carla corrected her father. “It’s Emily.”
“Lisle-le!” Felix persisted, tickling the sole of the little foot. “So spirited! Beautiful little Lisle!”
Lisle loved everyone and demanded nothing less than absolute adoration from all. Every visitor was hugged and kissed with convincing ardor and confounded by her unabashed seductiveness.
“You’re handsome,” she told Armand, tugging at her pinafore and thrusting a face into his as incandescent as a ripe peach.
“Oh you say that to all the boys,” Armand chided. “I bet you tell your daddy he’s handsome too.”
“My daddy’s very smart,” she assured him.
“And you, Miss Goldilocks, could melt a stone,” Armand replied.
Alexandra had always been a sort of miniature adult. With Lisle’s arrival, the world was suddenly filled with children. She clapped her hands over Nathan’s eyes when he tried to read to her from The Odyssey. He was forced to yield to her preference for Madeleine.
In this buzzing, blooming garden of verses, Carla is a rosebush. They see Mary Poppins and the Hunter College Children’s Concerts. They visit Santa at Macy’s and skate at Rockefeller Center. The girls wear matching dresses and chesterfield coats from Lord and Taylor. Carla tells them about their father’s research, so much as she can understand. And about the need to love all God’s creatures. She tells them God is the name for the sweetness in all living things. She teaches them the importance of good manners and good grammar and shows them how to put on gloves, pressing the spaces between the fingers of one hand against the spaces of the other hand until each finger is smoothly encased.
On Friday afternoons, she picks them up at the Friends Seminary and drives across town to Fairway Market. She wears oxford shirts and tweed blazers. Her brown curls shine. She is blithe. She reaches out as if through liquid. Lustrous peppers, red and green and orange and yellow, some plump and jolly, some lean and curled as a waxed mustache. Dewy, crisp lettuces: citrine and mulberry. Impudent radish knobs. Crunchy beans wriggling beneath her hand like newly-netted sardines. Escarole, chicory, arugula, watercress, and masche. Fresh-baked loaves, dusty with ochre flour, crackling with sesame, caraway, and bran. Lemon curd. Marmalades. Lekvar and honeyed mustards, all in bevelled glass jars.
Citarella’s for fish laid out on beds of cracked ice, gossamer fillets of pink and white and bluish grey. She crushes a sprig of fresh dill in her hand and holds her palm out for her daughters to inhale.
The Henry Hudson Parkway is banked by cherry and apple trees in bloom and new grass the color of May wine. She will cook with wine and herbs and warm the bread. They will moisten their fingers to lift bits of its crust from the table top all through the meal.
Hassah helps unload the car. She, too, inhales the fresh dill. The magnolia has shed her petals and the buds on the weeping cherry have finally burst. Car la is overjoyed to see them. Soon the wisteria will appear at the rear porch rafter and the slope to the lake will become a brothel’s parlor of garish gowns and musky perfume.
The children run to the rabbit warren to greet the red-eyed survivors of Nathan’s laboratory. Hassah and Sophie try to keep them alive through the week and dispose of their failures before the family comes up from the City. Nathan arrives on Saturdays with a new supply. Lisle nuzzles her face in their straw and their soft white fur. “Mmmmmm,” she says.
There are two cats now, the walloping Maine Cooner and a sleek Siamese who arrived mysteriously when Lisle was barely two. “Gustav,” she had said, pointing to the shy new cat.
“Silly Lisle thinks ‘Gustav’ is the word for ‘cat,’” Alexandra said.
“She’s right in a way,” Felix said. “In this house, all cats are named Gustav. Except for me. I am Felix the Cat, eh, Sophie?”
“They can’t both be Gustav,” Alexandra said gravely. “They’ll get confused.”
“But no, they won’t,” Felix explained. “You see, they have different last names, these two Gustavs.”
“Oh, Grandpa!” Alexandra was disbelieving.
“Well, just look at them. This huge, round Gustav must be Gustav Mahler, and this delicate, leggy Gustav must be Gustav Klimt.”
“Mahler, the real Mahler, was neither huge nor round,” Nathan put in.
“No, no that’s not the point,” Felix insisted. “It’s the sound of it. The way the words form in the mouth. ‘Mahler’ is a huge, round sound. ‘Klimt’ on the other hand … well, you can see what I mean.”
“Actually, Felix, I don’t see it at all,” Nathan said. “Where do you get all this stuff, anyway?”
“You must listen, Nathan. Rudolf Arnheim says, ‘All seagulls are named Emma.’ And when you attend to it, you can see that they are. Don’t you agree?”
Nathan could not imagine what his father-in-law had in mind. Once again, he thought wistfully, there was some vast chasm that separated him from Felix. It recalled the time the old man had spoken of miracles.
Lisle happily called both cats Gustav. Eventually she was old enough to understand Felix’s explanation, and then she did understand it absolutely. She was the only one who understood and Felix knew that and adored her for it.
In this delirium of wisteria and dill, of her daughters’ shrieks of delight, of her mother’s kisses and Hassah’s embraces, of her abundant father and the two Gustavs, Carla was more than compensated for Nathan’s late nights and for his absences on Fridays. She relinquished him, she decided, to be forgiven for being an inadequate wife, for disappointing him in bed. She had failed to learn to love him. That he must withdraw was, for her, as universal and immutable a principle as any law of Nature. Her sacrifice was necessary to the balance and order of her world.
Her life was, in every other respect, so overflowing, her joy so complete, that she took no notice of it, never paused to mark it, nor to give thanks for it. Such limpid happiness does wash over us without our noticing. It is the soundless transparency of perfection, of senses and energies thoroughly engaged. The absence of trouble leaves no tracks. Each day stimulates and produces until it exhausts itse
lf. Action and the world are so in tune that there is no consciousness of a self apart from them. We take notice of our lives only when something is amiss, when the engine falters and something is found wanting. When this idyll crumbled, as it had to, Carla would remember her happiness. And that is the only consciousness she could possibly have of such bliss: the memory of it.
Every warped old window of the inside porch had been coaxed open and still the heavy August air lingered, having no better place to go. The white wicker and crisp blue-and-white checkered cloths did their best against the torpid heat. Carla wore a white sundress with straps criss crossing her bronzed shoulder blades and carried a basket to the stretch by the fence where scores of zinnias, crimson, gold, magenta, and pink, thrust their bold, hearty heads toward the sun. Her basket full, she returned to the kitchen to snip their stems and arrange them in sportive bunches throughout the house.
At four, the Perrins and the Szabos arrived for doubles. Carla and Nathan against Tom and Marian. The new clay court was nestled in a pear orchard, sheltered from the winds off the lake. Lew Perrin and Tilly Szabo sat low in the Adirondack chairs at courtside, sipping iced tea. All about them, dark-leafed branches bent with hard green fruit. Lew smiled. The sight of his sweet-natured wife, poised in concentration to receive a serve, clearly pleased him immensely.
“Carla, you’re supposed to be covering that side.” Nathan was unforgiving. “You let it get right past you. Pay attention, will you? Fifteen all.”
But she could not pay attention. Not with that bear so near. The bear was huge that afternoon, and his warm bear-breath engulfed her everywhere. When they were backcourt and he was laughing his gurgling bear laugh, when they were both at net and it was impossible to breathe.
She caught his eye as they each moved to their deuce courts. His shrug was an apology. It meant he knew what he had done. What his presence had done. The heat, the dampness were insufferable. Rivulets of sweat ran down to the cuffs of her anklets.
He stayed behind to help her with the glasses and pitcher as the others made their way back to the house. She could smell his damp tennis clothes, sweet and heavy.
“I saw you cutting zinnias when I drove by earlier,” he said. “You were just standing there with your basket and that white dress and you know, I thought there were zinnias sprouting from your neck and your shoulders and the bend in your arms. The heat must have gotten to me.”
Eleven
Cancer research is like its subject. One project engenders another. Nathan’s research ultimately focused upon the transport of lipozomes, a project with far broader applications than ophthalmic cancer. It was, Hilda said, a natural. And so a second proposal was drawn, a second project launched, and a second suite of laboratories inaugurated. Nathan was peerless. His research brought the hospital more from the NIH than that of any of his predecessors. And there were matching gifts from Harknesses and Sloans. Heaney glowed as he introduced Nathan at hospital dinners.
He had a new and larger army of residents under his command. Most evenings he could leave by eight. Mondays, he took Hilda back to her place for a nightcap. Thursdays were for music. Nadia, a Russian emigré he’d met at a conference in White Sulphur Springs, loved opera and chamber music and believed she loved Nathan. Her aristocracy delighted him as much as her devotion. On Fridays, they dined at her apartment on Central Park West and listened to music late into the night. He loved the smooth, hard ivory of her hipbones. The Beethoven E-flat Trumpet Concerto.
“It is said,” Nathan told her, “that Beethoven wrote his music for all mankind, but that Bach addressed his music directly to God.”
When the music concluded, Nadia rolled over and extended an arm toward the cassette player. The Hafner. “Yes,” she said, “and Mozart wrote for the angels.”
On Saturdays, he was on the tennis court in Peekskill by nine. His serve was never so strong, so accurate. His ground strokes had a mean topspin. When Nadia grew impatient with the demands of his schedule, she was easily replaced.
A step forward to wait for the moving chair to catch them behind their knees and lift them away. A low whirr punctuated by clicks as the pulley ratchets meshed and then silence white as an empty page. Far below them, brightly colored skiers wiggled past and vanished. A tiny lurch as the mechanism stopped and their chair swayed with the languid rhythm of a drunk discoursing from a lamppost.
“I haven’t regretted losing that appointment,” Robin Colby was saying. “At the time, though, it felt like the loss of life itself. I loved the feeling of climbing upward. I thought my heartbeat would slow and I’d stop breathing if I ever had to spend my days on a plateau.”
“Yes, I know exactly what you mean,” Nathan said.
“Being chief would have been a high for awhile but then it would have become another plateau. You think perhaps we need to keep climbing because we can’t bear children?” Nathan knew he must have appeared puzzled because Colby began gesturing as if to illustrate his point. “Ascent giving assurance of life ongoing. Do you think we press forward to keep from thinking of death?”
“That’s a bit overworked, Robin,” Nathan said. The pulley ground to a halt, and then lurched forward again.
“But, you know, creative endeavor lets us sort of give birth over and over. That’s why this research grant has meant the world to me,” Robin continued.
“You really think of it as giving birth?” Nathan asked.
“It is giving birth. Just look at women. Do you think they really care about climbing? Do you think they worry about immortality as we do? That they take all this as seriously as we? Well, they don’t. They have children and that does it for them. Happiness is so much easier for them.”
They were well above the snow-encrusted hemlocks now.
“Better not let Carla catch you talking like that. She’s taking lessons from Alexandra. ‘Biological destiny’ can get you into deep trouble at our house.” They slipped off the lift chair and traversed to the ridge. “You know, it’s interesting that you enjoy your research so much,” Nathan continued. “I love mine, but I hadn’t really considered why.”
“Immortality, Nathan. Immortality. Women don’t give a damn about it. They have babies and they’re as eternal as the earth they stand on. We have to press onward and upward. But if we put something in the world that wasn’t there before, something enduring like research, it’s like having babies. It’s better, in fact.” He gave a little snort to retrieve the mucus that was beginning to drip from his nostrils. “When I’m in the lab, I give birth every day!”
Nathan was mute. He wondered if the metaphor fit him as well. He was uneasy with Robin’s view of women, a view that put them oddly in the ascendancy. An admiration that could almost be envy. It struck Nathan as perverse.
At the base of the mountain, Colby came to a hockey stop, sharp and neat. “You were racing me all the way down,” he said, calling to Nathan over his shoulder.
“I don’t race,” Nathan said. “I attend to form.”
“Your form is splendid,” Robin said. “But you were carving very narrowly to catch up with me. It’s just as I was saying. Even in our descent, we strive, we compete. It’s our biological program. Women are lucky.”
“Just don’t get Carla and Alexandra started or I can promise you’ll never be invited to dinner again,” Nathan said. Colby does envy women, he thought, and shuddered.
Now the lift bore them higher up the mountain.
“Are you sure you don’t miss being chief?” Nathan asked.
“Never even think about it,” Colby said.
Nathan thought about it all the time. Two research projects and he still thought about it all the time.
“Research is enough, then? Really enough?” he asked his colleague.
“Research, the kids, the country house, skiing, women. Yes, it’s plenty.” They were poised at the ridge now. Colby planted his poles and surveyed the steep, narrow slope below.
“And Reena? You know your wife is something of a p
aragon at our house. A career woman in the same profession as you, raising three kids and all. Carla and the girls think Reena is ‘Woman of the Year.’”
“She’s an excellent ophthalmologist and a very good mother but she’s not much woman. Not much woman at all.” Robin adjusted his goggles.
“C’mon, Robin, that’s not fair.”
“C’mon, yourself, Nathan. You screw around a lot. Would it ever even cross your mind to screw Reena?”
“Robin, you can go too far, you know.” Nathan bent to begin his descent.
“What’s the big secret, Nathan? We’re both screwing around. Reena knows it. Carla knows it. They’re not enough for us. They know that, too, and they don’t mind, believe me. They’ve borne their children and they’re happy. We’re the ones left craving something more.”
“For godsake, Robin!” Nathan planted his poles and pushed off down the mountain.
At dinner at the lodge, Carla proposed a toast to Lisle who had won the junior slalom that afternoon.
“I thought you had to be eight to enter,” Colby’s young son, Marco, said.
“Yeah,” Lisle grinned. “I lied. Anyway, I’m going to be seven very soon.”
“Nobody who’s eight still has both front teeth out,” Marco scowled.
“Well,” Lisle retorted, “maybe with my teeth missing they thought I was a very, very old lady.”
Amid the laughter that followed, Nathan turned to his little daughter and pressed her glowing cheeks tight between his palms. His nose just grazed the tip of hers.
“Oh Lisle! Lisle! Promise you’ll never be a very old lady! Promise you’ll never be older than seven!”
“My God, Nathan!” Carla looked away quickly to keep from making too much of it.
But Nathan held his little daughter close to his side. “Seven is a wonderful age,” he said. “I will be seven with you. We can both be seven forever!”
Hilda had left hours ago. It was probably four in the morning. He strode through his laboratories, letting his fingers graze the cold black stone benchtops. They were extensions of him, they were of him. He extended as far as the walls. Beyond, perhaps. From his office, Bach’s B-minor Mass poured forth, coating the benches, the incubators, even the rabbits in their covered cages, with its haunting, seraphic sound. Mount Sinai Hospital wanted him to bring his projects there. They could make him chief in three years, when Don Drazen retired. “Gloria! Gloria!” He would have a chat with Heaney. Heaney would make a counterbid. He was in play. “Glo-o-o-oh-r-i-a!” Director of research, full professor, chief! He stood in the doorway to his office and turned to behold his laboratories once again. A glass stirring rod stood in a beaker nearby. He took it between his thumb and his forefinger. It was his baton. Yes, he thought. Yes, it’s happening. Yes! He would soon have his pilot’s license. And his shiny new Cessna Skyhawk. He could already feel the engine whirring within him. He would fly, actually fly!
The Speed of Light Page 6