The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013

by Laura Furman

  Axel, Duncan, and two other students, both juniors, worked at desks pushed into an island at the center of the room; Sam’s place was at the sink, shaking used food from soiled bottles, or at the counter, filling wooden racks with wide-mouthed homeopathic vials. From there he’d watched Duncan mating virgin females in bottles for which Sam had prepared the food, later shaking the etherized offspring onto counting plates, bending over dissecting scopes, shouting happily when he found something unexpected. In November, he’d discovered a new mutant, which Axel had sent to Columbia, and that had made Sam feel—not that he wanted to be Duncan, not even that he wanted to be Duncan’s friend (he was shallow, Sam thought even then, and prone to leap to easy conclusions), but that he wanted a chance to work on his own.

  He plunged into the clutter, planning to take over Duncan’s chair the minute he finished cleaning up. Axel asked if he thought maintaining the stock cultures for the Genetics and Heredity course, even as he was enrolled in it, might be too much.

  “I’ll be fine,” Sam said, bending to his glassware. Everything stank of overripe bananas. “It’s no problem at all. I could do more, if Duncan gets too busy …”

  Axel squashed a fly on the counter and laughed. “You have to sleep sometime,” he said. “Although, personally, I think sleep is overrated. Do you want to hear what went on at the meeting?”

  “Please,” Sam said. “I’ve been dying for news.”

  Later—at Woods Hole, in Moscow, every place where, after long days in the lab, he’d end up drinking with fellow geneticists—Sam would try to describe what he felt like hearing Axel summarize the extraordinary paper he’d heard at the international meeting in Toronto. As if he’d sprouted extra eyes, which let him see a new dimension. Or as if his brain had added a new lobe, capable of thinking new thoughts. It is commonly said that evolution rests upon two foundations—inheritance and variation; but there is a subtle and important error here. Inheritance by itself leads to no change, and variation leads to no permanent change, unless the variations themselves are heritable. Thus it is not inheritance and variation which bring about evolution, but the inheritance of variation. Surely the name of the man who’d written that—Hermann Muller—deserved a whole separate shelf in Sam’s brain. Whenever he recited those crucial lines, others would chime in with more of Muller’s essential insights: that in the cell, beyond the obvious structures, there must also be thousands of ultramicroscopic particles influencing the entire cell, determining its structure and function. That these particles, call them genes, were in the chromosomes, and in certain definite positions, and that they could propagate themselves. Magic, they all agreed. Magic!

  For ten dazzlingly cold days that winter, before Duncan and the other students returned from their holiday, Axel and Sam talked about Muller’s ideas while they worked alone together. Then Duncan returned for the spring semester, Axel showed Muller’s paper to him—and suddenly they were planning experiments while Sam was sterilizing forceps. The whole semester went that way, until Duncan graduated and, for just a little while, got out of Sam’s way.

  During the day, when trying to move through the mass of people on deck was like being transported through an amoeba, Sam thought often about those early, blissful months in Axel’s lab. Here, if Axel wasn’t surrounded, he was absent. Reading in his berth, Duncan would say. Or napping, he’s exhausted, talk to him at dinner. Each day would end with nothing Sam had meant to say said—and then it was night, when he kept thinking about the night.

  The night in the lifeboat, the night on the water, which Axel had shared and which Duncan could never know. The night floating under the clouds and the moon, Sam’s boat so flooded that it was in the sea as much as on it, everyone packed together as tightly as bodies in a collective grave. Shoulders pressed to others’ shoulders, backs to chests, knees to hips; fifty-seven people who, once they were safely aboard the City of Flint, avoided those with whom they’d been so strangely intimate. The woman, for instance, who’d worn Sam’s life belt: how was it that they didn’t stick together? She had given her chance at life to her son, Sam had given his to her; the gesture might have bound them. Yet she was in one of the bunks near the rear of the ship, nowhere near his cocoon of a hammock, and when he passed her on deck, they nodded politely and kept moving. Each time, he remembered what they’d seen of each other. What that woman—her name was Bessie—had seen of him. Instead of seeking her out, he’d move toward Laurel and Pansy and Maud, who’d turned out to be pleasant company, filled with impressions from their brief time in France and Italy and eager to talk about the news the radio officer relayed.

  They kept him company at meals as well, where the questions he longed to ask Axel—who was beside you, what were you thinking, what was the part that most frightened you?—dissolved in the perpetual chatter. Duncan and Harold and George invariably settled close to Axel, who then would look at Sam, ruefully, Sam thought, as Sam found a separate place, and pretend to listen politely to the other three.

  They were more interesting? They were safer. Harold and George taught at the same little college in Massachusetts, had roomed together at the congress, and, indeed, had come over together with Duncan, yet they gossiped about common acquaintances and speculated on jobs and funding as if they hadn’t just had weeks of each other’s company. Duncan chimed in with news about colleagues in California, not just from the institute that his former advisor had established and where he still worked, but from Berkeley and Stanford as well. Even Axel, a fixture now at the college where Sam had first met him, offered modest nuggets gleaned from meetings in New York. Whose lab was expanding, who had lost support. Whose marriage had broken up.

  What did any of this have to do with science? Or with the real feeling of what had just happened to them? The meals seemed doubly hard when Sam thought of how much better he’d done recently with Avery. On the inexpensive precongress tour, which he’d taken largely so he could see where Avery worked, they’d been scheduled for a day and a half in Cambridge. Sam had skipped all the other sites to visit Avery’s lab at the Cavendish, where he’d admired Avery’s new X-ray facility and studied his lab notebooks. Together, they’d happily discussed their most recent projects.

  By the time the motor coach left on Sunday, Sam had felt like he knew his old friend again—and it was this, he thought, staring glumly into his pea soup during one particularly trying lunch, that had made him optimistic about what might happen with Axel in Edinburgh. So they had not, before the meeting, seen each other in seven years; so their correspondence had shrunk to an occasional exchange of reprints. His warm meeting with Avery had convinced him that he and Axel would also slip back into their old, easy ways.

  Through Grasmere and Keswick the following day, on to Edinburgh that afternoon: six hundred geneticists, from more than fifty countries! New work, new ideas; a chance to renew old friendships. He’d been horribly disappointed to find that the Russian geneticists, some of whom he knew from his time in Moscow and Leningrad, had been denied permission to travel. After that, nothing else went the way he’d hoped; the session began to unravel almost as soon as it started. Germany and the Soviet Union signed their pact and the German scientists left. Then the delegates from the Netherlands followed the Germans, and the Italians followed them. In ones and twos the British scientists trickled off to join their military units, while the French left all at once.

  By Saturday, when Sam gave his talk, the Poles and others from the Continent were also gone, leaving only a spotty crowd of Americans, Canadians, South Africans, Australians, and New Zealanders to listen. Where was it written that they all had to turn against him? That what he said would actually enrage them? Duncan, who spoke later that day, set his own prepared talk aside and instead spent his time refuting every aspect of Sam’s presentation. He was so familiar with the last decade of Sam’s work—he had read all of Sam’s papers, Sam understood then—that he did an excellent job.

  Here on the ship, the sound of Duncan’s voice sometimes ca
used Sam such pain that even if Duncan weren’t always blocking his way to Axel, he would have wanted to strike him. He’d come around a corner, find Axel and Duncan, catch Axel’s eye, see Axel wave—and then Duncan would turn and smile falsely, and he’d keep moving until he ran into Bessie, which would spin him in yet another direction. Then at night, lying like one of a long row of larvae among his canvas-shrouded fellow passengers, he’d return to his night in the boat, when Bessie’s knees and shins had pressed uncomfortably into his lower back. With every stroke of the oar he freed himself briefly from that pressure, only to thump back into her bones. He came to hate her legs, then to hate her. But later, when they stopped rowing and waited for the sun to come up, he grew so cold that he sought her legs on purpose. Her shivering shook Sam’s body too, and also that of Aaron, her little boy, who was pressed into the hollow between her chest and her bent knees. Aaron’s whole right side—shoulder, arm, torso, leg—over the course of those hours also pressed itself against Sam’s back. All the adults faced the same way, unable to see each other’s faces, sensing their levels of misery through the contact of their wet flesh. Bessie’s crying passed from her chest through Aaron’s side and into Sam’s back, and his groans passed the other way, a wave moving through the boat. Her back had to be pressed into someone else’s legs, and that person’s back to the next and the next and the next. Each time he went over this, he imagined that Axel was listening and that he in turn would describe his own night.

  Meanwhile, the City of Flint kept steaming sturdily through the waves, miles passing but far too slowly: how to get through the days? A grim-faced doctor, still waiting for word of his wife and daughter, busied himself by organizing the ship’s hospital, stitching up the survivors’ wounds, tending to burns and scrapes. He’d been in a boat that overturned and had spent hours floating alone, draped on a bit of rudder. What, Sam wondered, did he think of when he stopped working? A Canadian girl, ten years old, had been struck on the head by a falling beam when the torpedo first hit the Athenia and, although she’d been conscious during the night in the lifeboats and her first day on the City of Flint, had fallen into a coma; the doctor watched over her closely, and Sam would sometimes sit beside her, reading out loud from a novel Laurel had loaned him.

  Eavesdropping at dinner, pretending to listen to Lucinda and Maud but actually straining to hear Axel responding to Duncan’s questions, Sam learned that Axel, when he wasn’t resting, passed the hours reading books he’d borrowed from Harold and George. Harold, meanwhile, kept busy with the little daily newspaper he now posted each morning on a bulletin board, around which people gathered to read his notes of the ship’s progress and bits of friendly gossip. The college girls put on a fashion show, herding good-humored volunteers along an improvised runway as others voted for the most outlandish costume. On a day when the sea was very smooth, pierced now and then by leaping fish, Sam wrote letters to his mother and to the woman he was seeing back home, neither of whom knew that his changed plans had put him aboard the Athenia. The letters, which couldn’t be sent until they reached Halifax, were as useless as curled wings on a fly, but time passed as he tried to describe—not the explosions, not the bodies, not his night in the boat. Not what had happened in Edinburgh, nor what Duncan had done, nor his estrangement from Axel. The shapes the clouds made in the sky, then. The porpoises leaping in sets of three and five. The brave little girl in her improvised romper and the kind women, strangers before boarding this ship, who cared for her.

  He found a corner where he could wash his face in the morning, and an exercise route—from the open middle deck in front of the smokestack, around the port side of the deckhouse, to the bow, and back down the starboard side—on which, if he rose early enough to beat the crowds, he could pace like a horse in a mine. No matter what he did, or how he arranged his days, he ran into Duncan. When Duncan stopped near the air scoops to light a cigarette, the solid sheet of hair lying over his forehead flapped up and down in the breeze like a lid. Why was he there when Axel, whom Sam so much wanted to see, was always where Sam was not? And when Sam went down below one night to the talent show that Maud and Lucinda had organized, Axel was there, but there with Duncan.

  Men sang “Danny Boy” and “Begin the Beguine,” children tap-danced, a woman pleated an accordion. Two sailors whacked at fiddles as two more whirled about. Axel came over to suggest that Sam do some little tricks involving toothpicks and gumdrops, which he was good at and used to offer up at parties: two minutes to make a model of a locomotive, a minute—Avery had first taught him this—for a sugar molecule. For a moment, Sam was tempted, remembering how at Woods Hole he’d entertained his companions with models of sea squirts and the polymer backbone of cellulose, but then he looked at Duncan, right by Axel’s side and waiting for him to make a fool of himself, and he declined.

  Instead, Duncan stepped forward and, in his surprisingly sweet tenor voice, sang a bland version of the song for which, years ago, he used to invent ribald verses, entertaining the students during the summer they’d both spent at Woods Hole. Sam had just finished his junior year at college then; Duncan had been in his second year of graduate school, studying with Axel’s teacher, Thomas Morgan. Almost everyone important in their new field was at the biological station that summer, investigating some aspect of genetics or embryology or both. Sam, one of the few undergraduates taking the invertebrate course, paid his tuition by waiting tables at the mess hall and collecting specimens for his teachers. On nights when the moon was in the right phase, he’d bus his tables, drop his apron, and head for the Cayadetta‘s dock with a long-handled net and a tray of finger bowls. His desire to earn his teachers’ approval was as ruthless as the lantern he held over the water, dooming the mating clam worms that spiraled upward.

  Afterward, he skipped the gatherings at the ice-cream parlor and the visits to the movie house in Falmouth so that he could work on the project that had seized him. A scientist named Paul Kammerer, who had recently made two American lecture tours and whose sensational work—VIENNA BIOLOGIST HAILED AS GREATEST OF THE CENTURY. Proves a Darwin Belief, one newspaper blared—was so controversial that even Sam’s mother, who wrote articles for popular-science magazines, had interviewed him, had caught Sam’s eye as well. Kammerer claimed to have shown that when a change in the environment of his toads and salamanders caused an adaptive change in them—altered skin color, different reproductive behaviors—these changes could be transmitted to subsequent generations. A kind of heresy, Sam knew—the exact opposite of what he’d seen in the lab for himself. Although he’d breathed in his Quaker grandparents’ conviction that the world can be improved, first Mr. Spacek and then Axel had trained him out of his unconscious assumptions that when individuals strengthened and developed their faculties, through vigorous use, they then passed that strengthening along. That the ones they stopped using were lost, and lost for good.

  At Woods Hole, though, surrounded by interesting strangers pursuing so many different ideas, the truth had begun to seem more complex again, which made him read Kammerer’s claims with real curiosity. Axel had taught him to question everything—didn’t that include the beliefs that were quickly becoming conventions in their field? At night, roasting oysters on the beach, he and his classmates talked about Kammerer and speculated on the reasons why some biologists attacked him so furiously. Even those opposed to his conclusions were disturbed by that. They were all flirting with socialism then, some more than flirting; they sympathized when Kammerer complained that no one gave him a fair hearing. With the war just over, no one wanted to hear that inheritance wasn’t everything, or that race and class characteristics passed on through generations might be altered.

  Tiny, darkly tanned Ellen Eliasberg, a fellow student in Sam’s invertebrate course, was moved by Kammerer’s passionate statements about the necessity of man passing on what he acquired in the course of his lifetime to his children and his children’s children. Sam was caught up by her arguments—and, at the same time, fascinat
ed by the bad temper Duncan’s advisor showed whenever anyone mentioned Kammerer’s work.

  “The leopard can change his spots?” he’d say mockingly. “Fathers can pass what they’ve learned to their sons? Why not just reject every bit of science done in the last century? Why not go right back to Lamarck and his folklore? Cave fishes and deep-sea dwellers lose their eyes because they don’t need them in the dark; moles have poorly developed eyes because they’re in burrows most of the time; if an organ isn’t used, it conveniently disappears and if it’s used often—why not point to the giraffe stretching his neck to reach for higher leaves?—it gets bigger. How long has that been believed? And yet Payne bred fruit flies in the dark for sixty-nine generations, without the slightest change in their eyes or behavior. In my own lab, we’ve seen well over one hundred new types arise spontaneously, with no environmental influence, each breeding true from the start. Overnight—literally, overnight!—eyeless flies have appeared from normal parents, by an obvious change in a single hereditary factor.”

  Then he’d say that the popular press was being fooled, once again, and foolishly misleading the public (here Sam thought of his mother; had she sorted this out?); he’d say Kammerer was a charlatan and a publicity seeker and perhaps even a fraud. He ranted so wildly that even Duncan looked uneasy, and Sam saw, for the first time, what might happen when the passion required to defend a new set of ideas went too far.