The day Jenny was born, Paul resolved to take proper care of her. Duty, not love, motivated him. He expected Maggie to provide the soft nurturing—she’d be Harlow’s terry-cloth monkey. Maggie had worked all through the pregnancy; she’d set up an office in the corner of the second bedroom so she could do her bookkeeping from home while the future baby slept. Paul had suggested that she take a break from work, but they needed the money, so he went along with her plans. She was as efficient at pregnancy as she was at everything else: collecting hand-me-downs from friends, reading Lamaze books, massaging her nipples months in advance so she could nurse. Three weeks after Jennifer was born, he was taken aback when Maggie burst into tears and declared herself incapable of bearing one more sleepless night. He thought she was joking and made light of it. She flew into a panicky rage. The OB nurse they called advised Paul to give the baby a bottle at eleven so that Maggie could rest. He did, and it helped. Maggie began to smile a bit more, to accept half a glass of beer in the evening after the eight o’clock feed. She grew calmer as the baby slept more regularly. But the baby’s routine kept changing, and Maggie continued to look frazzled. He didn’t recognize the self-sufficient woman he knew to be his wife. Her distress unnerved him.
Then, at three months, the baby contracted the flu. Her temperature spiked to 104 degrees. The pediatrician said there was no danger and to comfort her while the fever burned. All night long, Paul and Maggie took turns trying to console the red-faced, whimpering infant. At four in the morning, Paul found himself pacing back and forth in the living room with the baby against his shoulder while Maggie dozed. He bounced her gently, cooing her name, feeling heat radiate from her little body to his cheek and down his chest. The back of his head and neck ached, but he was wide awake; the baby needed him.
Maggie appeared in the doorway, tying back hair in a ponytail, then stretching out arms to receive the still whimpering child.
“How is she?”
“Exhausted. Maybe a little cooler. She’s dry though.” He handed Jennifer to her mother. “If you’re okay, I’ll nap a bit.”
“Hope you can sleep. I didn’t.”
She wouldn’t have slept well on a normal night, he thought, or what had become normal since Jennifer’s birth. He took off jeans and T-shirt and lay down. In the quiet he heard the kitchen clock tick and Maggie singing softly in the living room. He closed his eyes.
A voice blared next to his head; “6:30” glowed on the clock. He moved quietly to the bathroom to shave and dress. At 6:45, he stepped into the living room. Maggie lay on the couch on her back, eyes closed, holding the sleeping baby on her breast. He whispered her name. To his great relief, neither mother nor baby stirred. He tiptoed to the apartment door, then stopped to glance back. Maggie’s chest rose and lowered softly; the baby’s cheeks were rosy but not feverish, and her lips formed a pink, little O of content. How beautiful and vulnerable his wife and daughter looked. In that instant, he succumbed. He would gladly give up a night’s sleep to keep them safe.
On the bus to campus, Paul visualized the scene at home when mother and child would awake. Maggie would be tender and businesslike, smiling through her fatigue while changing the diaper and offering her breast. Much as her weepiness had irked him, her devotion comforted him. He felt bound with her in a net of passion to protect the little life they had created. The urge to nurture his daughter deepened within him, unexpected and undeniable. Like mother love.
His own mother may have been attentive to Paul and his brother, but Paul couldn’t remember. He could vaguely remember playing games and laughing with her around the time he first went to school. As time passed, her light-heartedness faded. She did the household chores—cleaning, cooking, washing, scolding—but she never smiled. And then she stopped doing chores. Lenny sometimes filled the gap. Paul made himself a peanut butter sandwich to take to school for lunch every day—which later killed his taste for peanuts. At the time, he attributed his mother’s negligence to the fact that she didn’t care about him and Lenny. Then she died, and the boys had to contend with the old man on their own. Paul channeled his anger at his father, never Lenny, silently opposing his every word. Only much later, while he was in the army, did he learn that his mother had suffered from stomach cancer for years, without complaint but lacking energy to nurture or to subdue their father. Lenny, it turned out, had known all along. Lenny, nearly three years older, had gone along with their parents, believing Paul, at ten, too young to understand. He was still angry at having been left out. He was still angry at having been left behind.
The bus stopped in front of the science building. When he entered the office that he shared with the other junior researchers, his buddy handed him a magazine. While his computer booted, he looked at Science, picking up a pen to check off his initials on the routing slip. He put a check next to P.A., thinking the initials suited him all right, and flipped to the table of contents. He saw two titles that might have implications for his own work. He turned to the first article, ignoring the squeeze of tension in his chest. Every time he picked up Science, he dreaded discovering that someone else had scooped him on his big idea or that someone had already taken a step that made his current experiment redundant. No problem in the first article, no need to change any of his procedures. He turned to the second.
Goddamn.
In all his years at Michigan, he had been investigating a bird virus that he suspected caused tumors to grow in mice. Other biologists had also been looking at viruses’ effects on mouse DNA. If anyone could show a mechanism at work in the mouse model, the next step would be seeing if it caused human cancer. Now, before his eyes, some guys on the West Coast were speculating that bird viruses do not “infect” mice in the sense that they do not introduce any foreign DNA that makes a mouse cell cancerous. Viral DNA, the authors theorized, does not enable a genetic reaction that directly subverts the normal mouse cell; instead, the virus prompts the mouse DNA itself to turn rogue. Something that the virus does turns on the mouse cell’s natural ability to grow and multiply unchecked.
Paul’s mind spun.
He had been searching for bits of DNA that promoted tumor growth and trying to fit them to the bird virus’s fingerprint. But if the engine of tumor growth lay within the host DNA, his search was wrongheaded. Agitation spread from his chest through his torso. He could sense the structure of his experiment imploding, like a building collapsing from within when you knocked out the beams. He willed himself to clear the rubble and start fresh. His ability to keep clear, to put reason ahead of dogma, was a point of pride. It would take years for the cancer biology community to test the West Coast team’s theory, but he had no doubts. His gut told him they were right. He would have to reimagine his hypotheses and rewrite his procedures. Something inside him shifted gears; in a rush, he understood the next steps to take.
He pulled out a yellow pad. He couldn’t write fast enough to capture the cascade of ideas flowing through him.
The office meeting that afternoon went late, until almost four. The lab director maintained a formal agenda, calling on staff in order of seniority. When it was Paul’s turn to speak, he mentioned the startling article. He didn’t want to share his thinking—point out the article, for sure, but not lay out the implications—until he could claim the turf. The boss passed to the next person without comment. Paul sat with head down, fiddling with his pen, hoping no one would question him. He paid scant attention to the rest of the meeting. He couldn’t wait to get back to his desk. When the others invited him to join them for the customary postmeeting beer, he begged off, saying his baby was sick. He charged back to his cubicle.
The phone rang. Annoyed, he picked up the receiver.
“She’s down below a hundred.” Maggie’s voice trembled.
“She’s on the mend, Mag. That’s great.”
“She’s still sick.”
“You can’t expect an instant cure. Don’t believe what you see in the movies.”
Maggie’s voice grew lower
. “When will you be home?”
Her tone set his teeth on edge. He didn’t need to go home; the baby was healing.
“In a couple of hours. You have everything under control.”
A year earlier, when Maggie had told him about the pregnancy, he had been angry about the timing. She had promised to be the primary caregiver, to manage the household without a ripple. He had known that he wouldn’t be off the hook; nor had he wanted to be. But now he detected an accusatory note in her voice. It was unfair—he did his share. From the minute he walked in the door in the evening, he cared for the baby, except on the rare nights when an experiment kept him late.
Maggie continued, “She doesn’t want to nurse. I’m worried about dehydration.”
“Try a little water in a bottle. And don’t fuss. She needs rest. I’ll be home as soon as I can.”
He hung up.
Why did he feel like a heel? Maggie was perfectly capable of handling Jennifer, fever and all. He needed to stay there, to capture the thoughts barreling through his head. Lately, Maggie had seemed so mercurial. He contemplated confronting her about her mood and its effect on his. Once again, he backed down, expecting this crabby chapter in their marriage to pass when Maggie’s hormones stabilized. Theoretically. He sympathized with her—he remembered the six months or so before he had finished his thesis, when dragging himself to the library at all hours had caused a constant headache that aspirin couldn’t relieve—but he was tired of her begging off sex, of her locking herself in an emotional cocoon with the baby. He had his own needs. He loved Maggie, but he was no longer in love with her.
He picked up the yellow pad he had left on his desk. Ideas lay scrawled on pages in no particular order; some were in the margins, linked to others by loopy arrows. This was his style—generating a mess of loosely associated ideas and then going back to reorder, prune, fill in gaps. He usually liked to talk the logic through with someone, because good stuff came out of his head when he was able to speak his thoughts aloud. Maggie often served as a sounding board—she asked good questions that spurred him on—but he didn’t want to open the Pandora’s box of her worry about fever and feeding or anything else.
His own father had been the lousiest of husbands: pushy, selfish, never earning or saving enough. Paul was convinced that his mother might have survived had her disease gotten the attention it deserved. But the old man hadn’t stopped drinking and spending his own damn way. And, after the money dried up, the old man turned mean.
Back then, Paul had sworn he’d be a better husband, if he were ever a husband. He meant to keep his word. But being a superior husband did not require going home this instant when his research needed to take a new direction. If he could get ahead of the pack now, there’d be plenty of opportunity in the future. More prestige, more money. Anything Maggie and Jennifer might need. He could out-think the rest of the staff on a normal day; with luck and a little more work, he might parlay the new approach he was about to take into securing a lab of his own. Maggie would understand. He’d tell her she had to understand. She wanted his success as much as he. She knew cancer would not yield its secrets without a fight.
He focused on the loopy diagrams on his pad. It would take hours to parse them, and the excess adrenalin rippling through him spoiled his concentration. He tried to re-create the sequence of his thoughts before the phone call, without success. He ripped the top two sheets from the pad and folded them so they fit into his jacket pocket. Maybe the others hadn’t left yet. He could use a beer. A quick one. Lovely Jennifer awaited.
TEN
Jennifer’s first birthday dawned damp and chill, threatening Maggie’s plans for a picnic party. She had borrowed the manicured garden of one of Paul’s thesis advisors and prepared lunch herself to save money. She needed the party as a marker, a potentially happy ending to a torturous postpartum year. All those dreary months, she’d hidden the worst moments from Paul, moments when for a split second she’d wanted to smash the bawling baby against a wall and then hated herself for the thought. So much love, so much pain bundled together. Paul couldn’t have known how hard it had been.
She’d invited Paul’s colleagues, the neighbors, her parents, and her boss. Sarah, who had abandoned politics after college and moved to New York to become a banker, was unable to attend. Maggie missed her desperately. It was she who had counseled Maggie—after Paul had said no to a baby year after year, even after his thesis was finished—to reach for her heart’s desire. Maggie worked those seven years as a bookkeeper and managed their minimal household. But she wanted joy, so when Sarah advised poking a hole in her diaphragm, she went for it. She was thrilled when Paul warmed to the baby, as she’d known he would. But she flushed hot with shame at the knowledge that she’d tricked him. He’d been so pissed off at the timing that she’d vowed never to confess. The secret bored a hole in her heart.
Maggie stepped into the middle of the garden to survey the arrangements. The picnic was spread on a table covered with paper imprinted with flowers the size of pizzas; a cooler with wine, water, and soda stood beneath. Toys and games for the older kids lay spread on a blanket on the floor of the gazebo at the far end of the lawn. The drizzle had stopped, but the gray sky threatened. She prayed rain would hold off for Jenny’s big day, her redemptive day. With nothing left to do, she entered the house to wait for her guests. She found Jennifer squirming in the arms of her grandmother, who sat talking with the wife of Paul’s advisor. Maggie sat next to her mother, reaching for her child, who smiled brightly and stretched toward her.
“Thank you, Mrs. Penrod,” she said, gathering the baby into her arms. “We really appreciate your opening your home.”
“You’re most welcome. My husband thinks highly of Paul. We want to encourage the next generation of scientists.” Claire Penrod was lithe, well coiffed, and wore slacks and a sweater that would blow Maggie’s clothing budget for a year. “I’m going to join my husband in the sunroom. Do let us know if you need anything.” She disappeared down the hallway.
“I thought you said her husband was one of Paul’s professors,” Maggie’s mother, Claudia, said. “I didn’t know teachers made that much money.”
“Her husband consults for pharmaceutical companies. He discovered something a while back. She’s very generous to students. Where’s Paul?”
“He took your father to the lab. I don’t know why. He said to tell you that he’d be back in time. Hope he makes it.” Claudia folded her hands in her lap.
Maggie looked at her mother, ten years younger than Claire Penrod, dry and coarse in comparison. She wore a turquoise pantsuit; dyed, permed hair stood out from her head in a cloud, each individual strand twisting away from its neighbors in chemical agony. Claudia treated her hair herself, avoiding beauty salons with their “annoying young women in ridiculous clothing who want to tell you what to like.” Years before, Maggie had learned not to comment on her mother’s appearance, although her own was fair game. She took a breath and nuzzled the child playing with her earring. “Paul knows what he’s doing. He’s a wonderful dad.” And, she wanted to say, you are in no position to judge. But she held her tongue.
She’d been surprised and intimidated when her parents had agreed to come to the party. Inviting them had seemed like the right thing to do, although she dreaded the critique that would invariably ensue. Her father rarely traveled. He’d seen his granddaughter only once before, when Maggie had visited at Christmas. Maggie’s mother had made the trip to Michigan twice, once when Jenny was born and again after her fever, ostensibly to help care for the baby. Claudia had spent the week reorganizing the room that tripled as nursery, office, and occasional guest bedroom for the student babysitters they could afford.
Claudia and Roger Gilford made an odd couple, he silent and remote, she verbose and opinionated. Roger had had a munitions job during World War II, being too old and too flat-footed to serve. He met Claudia, twelve years his junior, through a friend just after the war. Claudia latched on to him; Roger ha
d the money to show her a good time. A quiet good time, but more luxurious than she had known. After a few months of dating, Roger thought he might as well propose; Claudia acquiesced, envisioning a maid and a position of respect in her church and family. The maid never materialized, but Claudia acted as if one had. She took on airs, altering her vocabulary and writing elaborate thank-you notes on cheap stationery. She had resented the absence of a maid throughout Maggie’s childhood.
Maggie knew that her mother had miscarried twice before she was born, and then there were no more children. Claudia busied herself with church activities and bridge, which she played well, and later the PTA. She paid just enough attention to Maggie to appear a competent mother. She bought her a back-to-school outfit every September, but she didn’t mend it when it tore; she enrolled Maggie in Sunday school and Brownies, but she didn’t participate in the events. She lectured her daughter on being ladylike, but she smoked and drank like a sailor when she played bridge.
Claudia had rarely indulged her daughter. Maggie could remember only one perfect day: one spring, when mother and daughter sat on the floor together in sunshine playing with her dolls, a cool breeze coming through the open window. Most days, Claudia’s attentions took the form of instruction in proper behavior, how a homemaker should care for her family, how a lady dressed for church on Sunday. Maggie tried to be good enough and nice enough to make her mother proud. When Claudia carped at her, the child Maggie thought she had displeased her mother. The adult Maggie knew she was impossible to please, but still she tried.
The doorbell chimed. Claudia edged closer. “Let me take her. You have enough to do.”
Maggie hesitated. She wanted to run her hand through Jennifer’s silky curls and along the curve of her fat little neck, to lose herself in the softness.
“Maggie, you need to learn to share.” Claudia shifted her bottom deeper into the couch and opened her arms.
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