“I realize,” Owen wrote, “that this alteration in procedures may complicate matters ever so slightly. I also comprehend that for a gentleman such as yourself who must deal daily with sums and situations vastly greater and more ostensibly dire than the one at hand this might present an impediment which makes our whole business together less worthwhile for you. But, I do not mean to be (as my mother used to say) persnickety. It just seems to me that to undertake the responsibilities and debt this purchase represents to me personally, without a direct examination of the property under discussion, would be foolhardy of me, and deplete what admittedly small resources I have at hand to work with. As I take it there may be a missing piece in a puzzle I have worked out for a very long time without solving—and I think my chances at relative success are greater than those which ancient scientists bent on devising, say, a perpetual motion machine, might have had. And so it strikes me as well worthwhile to proceed apace here, showing every sign of optimism that what it is we propose to accomplish will be done to the satisfaction of all involved, not the least of whom might be the subject/object, himself…”
It was just this waiving of caution that Krieger’d been looking for in order to lock into place one of the final bits of his jigsaw program. Madeleine Berkeley Work was there, in invisible effigy, in his back pocket. Maddie loved her secret privacy at the crazy ranch as much as Hannah, and loved it doubly for the peace it afforded Henry. If the good Dr. Berkeley was willing to order the import of product and documentation posthaste, the esteemed Corless might easily divine the urgencies involved and take it upon himself to skip the meeting-in-Manhattan step, and suggest (impel by threat) that it would be so kind of Madeleine to take Lupi and Olid on up to Owen herself. Wouldn’t that be simpler for everyone, all round? Wouldn’t it, truth to tell, be one more binding reason for those at the ranch to keep their mouths forever shut? Neat idea, might be worth a little surcharge.
5.
THERE WAS A quixotic quality, touched by pathos and qualified by absurdity, that obtained in this man who had chosen to spend the better part of his life drifting toward deeper and deeper reclusiveness—from society, from friends, from his wife and children—so that he might devote himself to the contemplation of such obtuse and dated works of scholarship as Metchnikoff’s The Prolongation of Life and Flourens’s De la longévité humaine et de la quantité de vie sur le globe.
But the books were there, part of the family library—two double-shelved walls of quarter morocco with embryo-shaped marbling on their boards, old speckled cloth gold-stamped on the spines, tree calf dried into dust. They had been there for as long as Owen Berkeley could remember. Biology, entomology, geology, zoology, physics, all the natural sciences were represented; but it was longevity and its sister study, eugenics, that captured the child Owen’s interest. Buffon’s Histoire naturelle générale et particulière … Sir E. Ray Lankester’s Comparative Longevity in Man and the Lower Animals … Weismann’s Essays upon Heredity. An uncle Owen had never known, whose name dangled free and leafless in the genealogy of the family tree, one of the grander eccentrics in the Berkeley pantheon, had assembled the specialized library decades before this attentive disciple was born; none of Owen’s ancestors had touched the library, but Owen had been familiar with it from youth. What could be gotten out of these books he took. Voraciously. By adolescence what he lived for were his theories and his mice.
The first of his mice was Rochester. He had named it after Jack Benny’s butler, to whom he listened religiously on the big Zenith Sunday evenings. Benny made him double up in laughter when he drawled out the name, “Raaaw-chestr.” Owen would go to his room after the program and mimic, “Now, Raaaw-chestr?” Then, conjuring the mouse’s repartee, “Yahsah mihstah Benny?”
Those were the good days. Rochester was a fine specimen, adept at memorizing routes that would lead him down corridors (made up of bricks on the parquet floor) to a cube of cheddar cheese at the other end of the labyrinth, and a glorious acrobat on the treadmill and the little Ferris wheel. He seemed to respond positively to the attention his young owner lavished on him.
Rochester was never allowed to eat the cube of cheddar cheese that lay at the maze’s end. Instead, he got a teaspoon of sour cream and honey which, for want of other choices, he gratefully lapped up. What Rochester (in fact) lived on was a strict diet Owen concocted out of Metchnikoff. Products of soured milk were its few staples (”milk become acidulous,” the boy explained to his mother, “under the influence of lactic ferments”). He noted that Rochester developed a taste for such things as plain yoghurt and boiled bananas. His cage was kept spotless under Czerny’s edict, which Owen had read in the Master’s The New Hygiene: “means of preservation against cancer … rigorous cleanliness … and perhaps the giving up of raw food.” He followed Metchnikoff’s notion that the principal agents in the process of degeneration were the products of putrefaction that had their tenure in an animal’s large intestine before being passed out of the body. These toxins, he understood, are absorbed into the blood and thereby carried through all the tissues of the poor creature’s body, slowly but surely contaminating it. Thus, duration of an animal’s life—or, by extension, that of a man—could be prolonged if measures were taken to counteract this process of autotoxification. Metchnikoff’s solution was simple, by Owen’s analysis. To combat or suppress the malevolent (the evil) bacteria—”our redoubtable enemies”—that thrived in the large intestine, butyric and putrefactive, one needed only introduce by gradient exposure the presence of lactic (the good) bacilli which produced bacterial flora that might happily live in the alimentary canal. Hence little Rochester’s diet. His food was boiled into unrecognizability. He subsisted on whitish, gruelish mush. This spartan diet was all for his own good and Rochester’s contentment and health were a consuming preoccupation of his young keeper, who could not imagine, with the exception perhaps of his own mother, a finer friend, one who would play the straight man to Jack Benny jokes, who would on the coldest wintry nights be taken into the linen sheets, bedclothes blue under the moon that peeked out from the snowy sky, the linen itself clean and warm and evocative of grandmothers and great-grandmothers who had slept in them through similar winter nights, and who would curl there against him, like his own little progeny, his great funny pal. No! he thought, he—Owen—was going to help Rochester live longer than any of the Himalayan goatherds he had read about. It was not beyond his imagination that if the mouse could live enough beyond his normal term, and be kept not only fit but through a series of exercises which might release vast amounts of blood through the cortical region to enrich and stimulate the brain, Owen might in time be able to teach Rochester rudimentary words. The squeaks, squeals and squawks he already made during the day fascinated Owen, who early on had begun jotting down their variations and the date and hour when each sound occurred. He looked for pattern and coherence in the cries that came from his sleek rodent, something that might indicate desire or pain or joy. Several Big Chief tablets full of notes had been amassed, but the boy could make no sense of his data. Still, he held out for several years the hope that someday he and Rochester could do a Benny routine, roles reversed.
His mother followed this precocity with supportive enthusiasm. Rochester would prove to be his earliest success. The normal life expectancy of a mouse, he well knew, was five or six years at the outside. So when Owen volunteered to join the army as a medic, in 1940, at the age of twenty (his colitis having kept him out for three autumns running), Rochester had already acceded to the age of six years, four months, one day. His coat was as lustrous as a healthy mouse half his age (and Owen had by that time acquired half a dozen new colonists with which he could make comparison). His eyes were sharp, hearing fine, his scent keen, his physiognomy resilient; yet when Owen came home never would he have expected Rochester to be waiting for him.
What was his grandest success might also be deemed his greatest calamity, and his doting mother’s worst mistake. On seeing her son back from F
rance, and his astonishment at finding the mouse still alive, how could she bring herself to admit that Rochester had in fact died a week after Owen left? how bring herself to recount the lengths to which she had gone to locate, at a pet shop in Albany, another mouse whose coloring, shape, and character so resembled the beloved Rochester that the loss of him might not seem so awful?
Owen had been sent home and discharged from duty after he had stepped on a short but razor-sharp sickle in a field in Burgundy: blade, hidden in tall ryegrass, plunged up into the sole of his boot and pierced cleanly through his foot, emerging between its laces. He was an ambulance driver, had just been transferred from Germany, had labored under the three-week delusion that fighting in France would be lighter than what he had seen near Karlsruhe and Stuttgart and Heilbronn. Yet here he was, heavy emergency kits in either hand, following two medics at a dead run, to reach a patrol with wounded, cut off by sniper fire. The sniper, heedless of their red crosses, fired shots as they endeavored to traverse a clearing to reach the farmhouse where the men were sequestered. Running half-crouched the three continued up a slight hill as the crack of the rifle reported from somewhere within a dense stand of pines to their left. Owen had pressed ahead half a dozen steps through the thickening rye before he noticed the presence of the sickle, its blade like a crescent sticking up through the boot’s tongue, its wooden handle twisted underfoot. The sight of it made him feel faint, and he sat back singing with pain as one of his buddies withdrew it. He came to under the spirit of ammonia, foot and calf throbbing, in the back of his own ambulance, in the company of two other injured men. His arm and chest hurt; each was wrapped in bandages; he’d been hit.
When his ship docked in New York harbor some weeks after, it was only a matter of months before VE-Day came. For the rest of his life he would walk with a slight rolling limp. The puckered scars at the back of his biceps and at his ribs were the only emblems of his bullet wounds. Sometimes he believed he’d been cheated, in that he was never given a medal for his actions. They were liberally dispensed to others in his unit.
Owen never graduated from medical school. He was home-educated, and it meant he was seen as an eccentric by professors and fellow students. “The liver is a diplomatic organ,” began one of his essays. “The liver—that hardy, black-brown sieve, the largest gland in the body of man—is the centerpiece of evolution. Consider the very word itself. Liver, or, one who lives …” He dreamed of having the skill to perform liver transplants on stray dogs, and was convinced that such operations would lead him to prove that the furry patients that received the foreign liver would both live longer and accept other organs more readily. Puppy liver into an old bitch, aged liver into a young mutt, the results would be constant. The next step was easy to imagine. The genetic makeup of a dog—its maudlin behavior aside (Owen had a physical aversion to dogs)—was complex. There was nothing interpretable, genetically, in this mystery, so long as its principals were terriers and corgies. But mice and rats? right down Owen’s line. The genetic makeup of a rat is simple. An albino rat is going to have a harder time accepting a liver from a black rat than from another white rat. But white into white? You would have to work as fast as a sacrificial priest, those Mayan priests who could remove your heart with their stone blades and show it to you in the open air before you died; one hundred and thirty to two hundred seconds, he estimated, to resew both artery and vein. But there were things one could count on. White rat liver into white rat liver: results, one dead liverless rat, one rat whose lifespan ought to double, tail pink, coat shiny. Take a spotted rat, graft its skin onto a white rat, and the white rat can take a transplant from another spotted rat; if spotted rat number one lives five years, spotted rat two may expect to live ten. The snow-pure genes!
His diaries filled up with designs, but the love affair with the liver was never consummated, nor were those he contemplated for other glands and organs of the body—the pancreas, the kidneys, the heart, the brain. While his grades were high, his willingness to remain in the academy wasn’t strong. Couldn’t all this be accomplished at home? He hated Baltimore, hated the very words Lock Raven, the avenue where he kept a room. At Easter, having come home to announce that he intended not to go back, he met Sophie. Or, met her again. And for a time, livers were the farthest thing from his mind.
A big-boned girl with flaxen hair that lay in coils across her head, Sophie had known Owen since childhood. When they were children they swam with other friends all summer long at a cove in the river known as Roan Oak Point. Sophie was the only girl Owen had ever kissed. They were married in 1947; Red was born a year later. In 1951 Sophie gave birth to Madeleine. The family did not live in poverty but neither was it well off. Sophie had been able to work occasionally before the twins. Alma and Jonathan, were born, and Owen received military benefits. Mostly they lived on family money—an exigency that depressed Owen but which he felt only fractionally compelled to change. He was not lazy, but even on the lowest of days when his studies fell into a lull he found it preferable to stare at the patterns, the bats and blossoms, in the well-worn oriental runner that lay on the floor of the offices, than to waste his time learning some trade.
Twice he had gone down to New York seeking work. This was what he told Sophie. He stayed one week each visit. His telephone calls home were distressing. “I seem to be completely unemployable,” he confessed to her. In the background he could hear one of his daughters crying, and his heart would sink in guilt, since in fact he had passed the day not interviewing for jobs, but lost in the monumental and cool corridors of the Museum of Natural History and calling down books in the reading room of the Public Library. On the bus back home he acquitted himself by the admission he hadn’t stamina enough to make the commute every day in any case. He would devote his life to science. It was all that mattered. There might be some sacrifices, but in the end it would measure out, it would come to be seen as worthwhile.
Sacrifices were made—all issues, active and inactive, of stocks the family possessed he sold the next morning; he put up for sale the last considerable acreage of Berkeley land that remained—all but a hundred acres, incorporating the paddock and stable which he would not have to relinquish until later. The estate was now eaten away, as he saw it, to a hermitage. His mother, whose signature he had forged in order to liquidate certain of the stocks, wasn’t told about the measures he had decided to take. Sophie could only worry, but she did not argue.
“We’ll put it all in savings, draw interest.” Much of the money, after those first careful years, went into equipment. Packages arrived and were spirited away up into the offices, contents never to be seen by the family.
But all in all they got along well under the circumstances. He had some rats, a gerbil, some mice. The gerbil was put on a diet of chicken-embryo cocktails. He looked through the catalogues of biology supply houses, hoping to find one which offered the cells of unborn lambs. Injected, they’d revitalize aging cells of any mammal. The search was in vain. However, Segal’s 1932 experiment, the protein-restricted diet affecting the brain by altering chemical balance, he was able to reenact. Results were of dubious merit. He did spend spare time developing, patenting, and selling two inventions to companies for manufacture. While they did not give him the same satisfaction or exhilaration of these other experiments, they did earn some money. One was a whimsical device: a multi-tined gadget that would debone a fish by lifting both spine and entire system of ribs free of the meat in a single upward stroke. The other was much more ambitious and more directly connected to what he fancied his true work. Here was a railway car for transporting livestock over vast stretches of land to slaughterhouses. The car, in Owen’s design, would be fitted out with a complex bank of high-intensity sodium lamps so situated that each of the animals—whether hog, cow, or sheep—was fully bathed in visible and infrared light for the duration of its journey. It was Owen’s contention the pineal gland in the animal’s brain would under these conditions be artificially inhibited and that as a conseq
uence its secretion of the hormone melatonin would be suppressed. By decreasing or eliminating melatonin from the animals’ chemistries Owen proposed a higher-quality meat might be produced at slaughter, one from which this depressive and sedative hormone was largely purged. The company—Belle Star Farms, of Dearborn, Michigan—that bought the patent outright from him saw in the theory a prospect for marketing a line of morning sausages that could be promoted as “The Perfect Way to Start Your Day.” It was something the FDA might have moved to nix had it ever been foisted on the public as a life-improvement product. No one would ever know what their reaction to Glad Patties might have been, however, as Belle Star Farms filed for bankruptcy shortly after a check made out to Owen Berkeley for three thousand dollars was sent, and cashed.
6.
YOU CAN’T COME here disrupt everything and simply pack and go back again, and leave me with him. And now Maddie. Maddie-talk. Maddie Maddie Maddie—I had a sister and her name was Maddie, they called her skinny and they called me fatty. Everybody in the world is more important to John than his own flesh and blood. You can’t go yet. Maddie was always the favorite, with pa, too, always he let her come in and read with him or help out, but me never. And that once when at dinner wasn’t it, there was Maddie, and she was already sneaking out with Henry, even in the middle of the night when I could hear them down in the haze that one summer, when what was it came up I don’t remember, but there she was saying to everybody at table Alma’s a much better name than
Madeleine. Can you still believe that? Alma means dawn or at least that’s what she always bragged, but what does Maddie mean? Maddie means nothing, that’s what they had told her at school and of course it was true, deep down I felt, yes, yes, that’s right, Alma is me, and Alma means something beautiful and important and why should you who I know what you’re doing with that Negro stable man, why should you expect better? It was almost then and there I blurted out what I knew was god’s truth. John, can I imagine how his face would have looked then, because for all he thought right along he was the rebellious one and setting off on his own course away from pa, and William was already gone into the service then, John saying over and over as if it was something for him to be so very proud of at the time that he would never go and fight that he’d leave the country first, become expatriate, which is more or less what he has gone ahead and done, I mean, anyway, isn’t it? Why didn’t I say it there and then? Pa, ma, John: Maddie’s getting it from Henry, yes; I know it is, it’s a hard thing to say, but I heard them, yes, and saw them too—though that would have been a lie. Almost once when I was running the brindled mastiff down by where the broken bridge and the forsythia rows are, and big as life he came quick from around behind the shed, the one for the scythes, Dill and John in there yesterday, cider press, spigots, the old maple buckets, and always the yellow jackets around looking for some sugar—he came quickly from behind the shed zipping up, that nervous humble look on his face, and who came after him all glowing with smiles but Maddie? nobody but her. Well, hiya-there Almy, hi brindle-Joe, that little speckle foal got crazy and we’re down here looking for it you two want to help? I mean, Jesus, Madeleine—the speckle foal got loose?—but that smile glowing on her face made it all very clear that she never expected me to believe that excuse, in fact she made it sound frivolous and false because she wanted me to know what had really happened, she wanted to outrage me. I believe that even now, don’t I?—even in face of the fact that she has stayed with him, Henry Work, stuck by him all this time. Who would’ve ever guessed? I don’t know. I don’t know, maybe I don’t believe it so much anymore but there had to be truth to it then—at least, I mean, that once, her hair with twigs and leaves in it and her skirt mussed.
Come Sunday Page 34