(It is not a very happy day in Margot Sharpe’s life. It has not been a very happy week in Margot Sharpe’s life, nor has it been a happy month in Margot Sharpe’s life. But Margot Sharpe is not one to acknowledge personal problems when she is performing professionally.)
More frequently in recent years, Milton Ferris has designated Margot Sharpe his surrogate in Project E.H. Ferris trusts Margot Sharpe “without qualification”—(he has told her, and this is greatly flattering to her)—and behaves as if she were now his favored protégée at the university; he has been responsible for Margot being hired in a tenure-track position in the Psychology Department, and at a good salary. Of his numerous younger colleagues, Margot Sharpe seems to be the one Milton Ferris trusts most in the wake of the departure of Alvin Kaplan.
There has been some good news for the university memory lab—a renewal and an expansion of their federal grant, the elaborate proposal for which Margot did much of the work. And now Milton Ferris has become a consultant for a popular PBS science program and is often in Washington, D.C., at the National Institutes of Health; and he is often traveling abroad, with a need for someone like Margot in the lab whom he can trust as his protégée, his emissary, his representative. At the present time, Milton Ferris has embarked upon an ambitious lecture tour in China under the auspices of the USIA.
Alvin Kaplan, Ferris’s male protégé, has recently left the university. He has been promoted to professor of experimental psychology at Rockefeller University—a remarkable position for one so young. Like Margot Sharpe, now assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at the university, Kaplan has co-published numerous papers with Milton Ferris.
Both Alvin Kaplan and Margot Sharpe delivered papers on their groundbreaking research in amnesia at the most recent American Association of Experimental Psychology conference in San Francisco.
Saw your name in the newspaper!—occasionally someone will call Margot Sharpe. Family member, relative, old friend from the University of Michigan. Sounds just fascinating, the work you are doing.
Sometimes, Margot will receive a call or a letter—Why don’t we ever hear from you any longer, Margot? Do I have the wrong address?
Once, Margot couldn’t resist showing E.H. a copy of the prestigious Journal of American Experimental Psychology in which the major article appeared under her name—“Distraction, Working Memory, and Memory Retention in the Amnesiac ‘E.H.’” Her heart beat rapidly as E.H. perused it with a small wondering smile.
(Was she behaving unprofessionally? She would have been devastated if a colleague found out.)
Gentlemanly E.H. reacted with bemusement, not resentment—
“Is ‘E.H.’ meant to be me? Never knew I was so important.” He asked if he might take the journal home with him so that he could read it carefully—to try to “understand what the hell is going on inside my ‘scrambled brains’”—and Margot said of course. And so Margot placed the journal on a table in the testing-room for E.H. to take home with him.
(Confident that the amnesiac would forget the journal within seventy seconds and she could easily slip it back into her bag without him noticing.)
Since then Margot has several times showed E.H. journals with articles about “E.H.”—some of them co-authored by Milton Ferris and his team of a half-dozen associates including Margot Sharpe, others by just Milton Ferris and Margot Sharpe.
By degrees, they have become associated with each other as scientists. Collaborators.
It has been years. Has it been years?
In the memory lab, time passes strangely.
It was only the other day (it seems) when Margot was first introduced to “Elihu Hoopes”—who’d stared at her with a kind of recognition, hungry, yearning, and squeezed her small pliant hand in his.
I know you. We know each other. Don’t we?
We were in grade school together . . .
E.H. squeezes Margot’s hand in his strong dry fingers. She has been anticipating this—she doesn’t pull her hand away from his grasp so quickly as she does when others are in the room with them.
“Mr. Hoopes—‘Eli.’ I’m so happy to see you.”
“I’m so happy to see you.”
There is something different about this morning, Margot thinks.
Margot thinks—But I can’t. It would be wrong.
Still they are clasping hands. With no one else in the testing-room to observe they are free of social restraint. Between them, there is but the residue of instinct.
“Do you remember me, Eli? ‘Margot.’”
“Oh yes—‘Margot.’”
“Your friend.”
“Yes, my friend—‘Mar-got.’”
Conscientiously, E.H. pronounces her name Mar-go. So quick at mimicry is E.H., one would think his skill a kind of memory.
“I think I knew you in—was it school? Grade school?”
“Yes. Gladwyne.”
We were close friends through school. Then you went to Amherst, and I went to Ann Arbor.
We were in love, but—something happened to part us . . .
(Wouldn’t Eli realize, Margot Sharpe is much younger than he is? At least seventeen years?)
(Yet: E.H. is a perpetual thirty-seven and Margot Sharpe is now thirty-four. If E.H. were capable of thinking in such terms he would be thinking that, magically, the young woman psychologist has caught up with him in age.)
“I’ve been looking forward to today since—last Wednesday. We’re doing such important work, Eli . . .”
“Yes. Yes we are, Mar-go.”
It is very exciting, their proximity. Their privacy. Margot can feel the man’s breath on her face as he leans over her.
E.H. seems to be inhaling Margot. She wants to think that her scent has become familiar to him. (She has conducted olfactory memory tests with him of her own invention indicating that yes, E.H. is more likely to remember smells than other sensory cues; his memory for smells of decades ago is more or less undiminished.)
E.H. is taller than Margot by at least five inches, so that she is forced to look up at him and this is pleasurable to her, as to him.
Is E.H. nearly forty-seven now? How quickly the years have passed! (For E.H. no time at all has passed.)
His hairline is receding from his high forehead, and his russet-brown hair is fading to a beautiful shade of pewter-gray, yet E.H. remains youthful, straight-backed. His forehead is lightly creased with bewilderment or worry that quickly eases away when he smiles at a visitor.
“Eli, how have you been?”
“Very good, thank you. And you?”
The question is genuine. E.H. is anxious to know.
All of the world is clues to the amnesiac. Like a box of jigsaw puzzle pieces that has been overturned, scattered. Through some effort—(a superhuman effort beyond the capacity of any normal individual)—these countless pieces might be fitted together again into a coherent and illuminating whole.
Is E.H. “very good”? Margot knows that the poor man had bronchitis for several weeks that winter. Terrible fits of coughing, that made testing impossible at times. Not only were short-term memories slipping out of the amnesiac’s brain as through a large-holed colander but the severe coughing seemed to exacerbate loss of memory.
(Margot has been concerned about E.H.’s health in recent years. She is assured that the amnesiac receives physical examinations at the Institute, that his blood, blood pressure, and other vital signs are routinely tested. In her own case, Margot often forgets to schedule dental appointments, gynecological appointments, eye examinations—and how much more likely to neglect himself is a man with memory deficits.)
E.H. has forgotten the bronchitis and its discomforts. E.H. has forgotten his original, devastating illness. E.H. quickly forgets all physical distress, maladies. He may be susceptible to moods—but E.H. quickly forgets all moods.
He has lost weight, Margot estimates about five to eight pounds. His face is the face of a handsome ascetic. He retains the alert and agile air
of an ex-athlete but he has become an ex-athlete who anticipates pain.
Today he is wearing neatly pressed khakis, an English-looking striped shirt, and a dark green cashmere sweater. His socks are a very dark purple patterned in small yellow checks. All of his clothing is purchased at expensive men’s stores like J. Press, Ralph Lauren, Armani. Margot has seen these clothes before, she thinks, but not for some time. (Who assists E.H. with his wardrobe? Sees that his things are laundered, dry-cleaned? Margot supposes it must be the watchful and loving guardian-aunt with whom he lives.) Even in the throes of amnesia E.H. exhibits a touching masculine vanity. Margot always compliments him on his clothing, and E.H. always says, “Thank you!”—and pauses as if he has more to say, but can’t remember what it is.
Margot Sharpe has done what few of her science colleagues would do, or would consider it proper for a scientist to be doing: daringly, like an investigative reporter, or indeed a detective, she has looked into the background of the amnesiac subject E.H. In all she has spent several days in Philadelphia meeting with former associates of Elihu Hoopes including black community organizers who knew him in the late 1950s and 1960s as one of a very small number of white citizens who gave money to their causes, as well as to the NAACP and Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference; she has learned that, in some quarters, Eli Hoopes is considered a “hero”—that is, he’d behaved “heroically” in joining civil rights activists who’d picketed City Hall, protested Philadelphia police brutality and harassment, campaigned for better schools in South Philly, better health-care facilities, an end to discriminatory hiring in municipal government. He’d established a fund for university scholarships at Penn, earmarked for “disadvantaged youths.” He’d given money to Philadelphia Inquiry, a local version of Mother Jones that appeared sporadically during the 1960s. (In one of the issues, which the former editor passed on to Margot Sharpe, there appeared a personal account by Elihu Hoopes titled “Hiding in the Seminary & the Afterlife”—a provocative memoirist piece in which Elihu Hoopes speaks of his experience at Union Theological Seminary and why he’d dropped out after two years: “I felt that I was living in a cocoon of privilege. My eyes were opened by a black Christian who told me of lynchings in the South—following World War II.”)
As a way of being friendly and winning the amnesiac subject’s trust, Margot has several times asked E.H. about his “activist” life and his “seminary” life; E.H. is likely to become overexcited talking of these past lives which he seems to know are “past”—yet has no idea how he knows this, and what has happened in the interim. He has a vague understanding that he has not seen, for instance, the black community organizer with whom Margot had spoken, for some time; yet, since he believes himself to be thirty-seven years old, and living still in Philadelphia, he is confused about why he hasn’t seen the man—and whether the Philadelphia Civil Rights Coalition has disbanded. (Margot is hesitant to tell E.H. that the Coalition has not disbanded; she fears he would not understand why it isn’t possible for him to reconnect with it.) E.H.’s memories of the seminary are both vivid and vague as in a film that goes in and out of focus. And his memory of his recent past is becoming strangely riddled with blank spaces. He is beginning to forget proper names—a symptom, Margot doesn’t like to note, of the more general, inevitable amnesia of an aging brain.
So, Margot has learned that it is wisest to steer the amnesiac subject into activities and routines that don’t arouse his emotions, or provoke his memory. This morning she leads him through the first of a battery of tests designed to measure “working memory.” Initially E.H. performs well, like a bright twelve-year-old; these are complicated tests, tests of some ingenuity—(Margot designed them herself); yet as Margot works with E.H. she is less buoyant than usual.
She forgets to praise the amnesiac, who so yearns to be praised but will not recall what is missing if you don’t praise him; tears gather in her eyes and threaten to spill down her cheeks. She is so unhappy!
At last E.H. asks what is wrong?
Nothing! Of course, nothing is wrong.
Margot proceeds with the testing like one with eyes riveted straight ahead. To glance to either side is the danger.
“I’M SORRY. I shouldn’t be telling you this.”
This should have been the strategy. In Margot’s memory, something like this will have been the strategy.
But it happens, Elihu Hoopes is so gentlemanly, yet so tender and solicitous, Margot begins to weaken and confide in him, far more than she’d intended.
Margot thinks—This man was training to be a minister. His soul is so much vaster than mine.
Margot hears herself tell E.H., who is her amnesiac subject, that—that she is very unhappy . . . She trails off into silence wiping at her eyes.
At once E.H. tells her yes, he understands. He is sorry for her and wonders if he can help her.
No, Margot says. No one can help her.
But is she sure?—E.H. asks.
In the sequestered privacy and quiet of the testing-room they are speaking together quietly. The tests have been set aside—for the moment.
It would be a matter of great astonishment if anyone (outside the testing-room) could hear what they are saying.
Margot had no intention of telling anyone—certainly not E.H.—of the singular unhappiness of her life, which she believes to be entirely her own fault, a misery inflicted upon herself. Yet, Margot hears herself confessing, unforgivably—she is in love with someone who does not love her in return.
She is in love with a man who is married—a man who is thirty-two years older than she is.
She is so ashamed. She can’t believe such a thing has happened to her.
Seeing the expression in E.H.’s face—surprise, concern, sympathy—Margot begins to laugh. It is all so—ridiculous!
Well, she will concede—she believes she is in love. Naïvely she has believed that the man is in love with her.
She has made mistakes in her relationship with this man. She has acted stupidly, blindly.
Yes, the man is a professional colleague. Yes, he is her senior in every way—her mentor, her dissertation advisor.
So many mistakes Margot Sharpe has made, in her ill-considered plunge into—would you call it passion? In his office at the university when they’d worked together late or when she’d remained late under the pretext of needing to confer with him. Seeing his eyes moving onto her, and feeling that sensation of faintness, helplessness, that is both exhilarating to her, and distressing. For never has Margot Sharpe been a naïve person, never has Margot Sharpe wished to believe that (male, sporadic) interest in her has been anything to take seriously, and to cultivate. On the contrary: she recalls as a girl with two older brothers overhearing how crudely, how coarsely boys speak of girls when they think no one else is listening, or no one who matters is listening. A female is her body-parts. A female is to be ridiculed, to the degree that she is vulnerable to the male.
And there were incidents from high school and college, not traumatic, not humiliating, only just mildly degrading and embarrassing—the sort of quasi-sexual experiences all girls and young women have—which have reinforced Margot’s air of caution and detachment.
Milton Ferris, however, exerted from the start a powerful gravitational pull. Working in close quarters with the man as she was, it was not sufficient for Margot to avoid looking at him: simply being proximate to him, hearing his voice, his dry, droll, kindly, jocular, teasing, deep-baritone voice was distracting to her, overwhelming. And all that she’d succeeded in ignoring in the man’s presence would rush upon her when she was alone. And all that he represents, as a scientist of great distinction. All that he is.
Of course, there were rumors about Milton Ferris. His relationships with female colleagues, associates. His “exploitations” of the naïve and trusting. Such rumors, Margot steadfastly ignored.
She’d been in love with him from the start. Maybe.
She is not in
love with Milton Ferris! Certainly not.
Yet she’d indicated to the older man that yes, she was attracted to him. Or rather, she had not blocked his interest in her.
Once these signals were sent and received, once certain reflexes were triggered, there seemed to Margot no turning back. An irrevocable decision to accept her advisor’s invitation to accompany him to a neuroscience conference in Atlanta—Your way will be paid of course, Margot. Every expense.
She had said yes. She had not said no but yes.
Yes is not to be undone. Yes would be the devastation of her career, if it were undone.
He’d laid his hand on her shoulder, then. Not a heavy hand, yet Margot understood—He is making his claim.
A sort of delirium had come over her. A young woman unaccustomed to the attentions of men, especially men of distinction—a young woman somewhat ill at ease in her skin—how could she resist? E.H. listens to Margot without judging her, of course. He is unusually quiet. Margot feels again a sensation of great affection for him, which brings tears to her eyes. She is thinking—when was the last time she’d cried? At her father’s funeral?—at the burial in the cemetery?—she feels dread at the possibility of remembering too vividly.
Margot is very indiscreet, to speak Milton Ferris’s name. Yet she hears herself ask E.H. if he remembers “Milton Ferris”—of course, Margot knows that he does not. But E.H. nods sagely, to encourage her. They are facing each other across a table, leaning toward each other so intensely, Margot feels the strain in her back.
E.H.’s hand fumbles for hers, to comfort.
Margot’s hand does not ease away . . .
Margot tells E.H. that Milton Ferris has been her Ph.D. advisor, her mentor, since she’d come to the university ten years before. He has helped her as a scientist—incalculably. He has arranged for her to be invited to give papers at conferences. He has been instrumental in her dissertation being published by the University of Pennsylvania Press and her having been hired at the university—the first woman appointment in cognitive neuropsychology.
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