Saving St. Germ

by Carol Muske-Dukes

  Saving St. Germ

  A Novel

  Carol Muske-Dukes

  This book is dedicated to Dr. Leona Ling of Biogen Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts, and to Dean Gerald Segal, Professor of Chemistry, University of Southern California: sine qua non.

  And to my daughter, Annie Cameron, ditto.

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part Two

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part Three

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Unlike the rest of the body’s cells, a germ cell has one-half of each of the twenty-three pairs of human chromosomes, since at fertilization, the sperm and the egg each contribute their one-half of a complete set of chromosomes to the newly conceived being. Thus, when the germ cell is being formed, it “picks” pieces from the bearer’s paired chromosomes. Somewhat like a diner at a Chinese restaurant picking some dishes from Column A and other dishes from Column B.

  —Genome, Jerry Bishop and Michael Waldholz

  OPHELIA: ... They say the owl was a baker’s daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be.

  —Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 5

  Part One

  I do not believe that the human brain is to be blamed for the fact that man cannot grasp infinity. He certainly could do that, if in his young days, when he was learning to perceive, the little fellow had not been so cruelly confined to the earth, or even to a nest, among four walls, but instead was allowed to walk out a little into the universe.

  —Mileva Maric

  The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein

  Chapter 1

  AFTER THE CHILDREN were taken away, we were seated outside on white folding chairs under a large blue tarpaulin. “To keep the pigeon poop off our heads,” I heard another parent murmur as the crowd streamed past. Above, at a remove from human discourse, the devious birds perched and plotted, chortling, their heads clustered like feathered bowling pins, nesting aggressively in the downspouts and eaves of the Lower School roof. I watched the principal, followed by her assistants, stride to her place behind a makeshift podium festooned with rich maroon bunting; the bunting’s Gothic gilt letters spelled out “Sillitoe School.” The principal gazed (falling silent, we followed that pointed gaze) out over the rolling grounds: four acres of Marathon grass growing lush about the stucco-and-redwood classroom buildings. As silence fell, the last of the parents hurried to their seats before the podium.

  I found myself hanging back a bit, staring at the doorway through which the children had disappeared. Above, a breeze worried a rainbow windsock in the shadow of a spiteful Chinese elm, which for the last hour had been showering sap balls on the heads of the parents.

  That was it: things just seemed to drop from the heavens at Sillitoe. Its templelike calm bespoke gifts from above, or from a more lateral direction: hands unobtrusively signing tuition checks, eight thousand per annum. The Lower School grounds were landscaped with self-conscious abandon: a number of muscled climbing trees shouldered each other over a montage of dirt paths, conversation pits, fortlike hedges. Two Dr. Seuss-ish palms, skinny and straight as telephone poles, towered over the other trees. Everywhere I looked sprang up the programmed implements of joy: redwood seesaws and sandboxes, balance beams and rocking horses. By contrast, we parents, squeezed tight in rows on our metal folding chairs before the podium, looked deprived and curiously passive—testimony to the drab and discredited teaching traditions that had produced us and preceded this more flamboyant, self-aware pedagogical era. I slipped into the third seat of a row near the rear.

  Sillitoe, you see, was known as a wonderful school. And I had come, like all these other parents, to hear about it.

  “We are a wonderful school,” the principal whispered into the mike. Her name was Allegra Shatner, she said in a strengthened voice, and she was gratified to see us all here today.

  I felt a sharp pain in my chest, put my hand over my heart, and inhaled carefully. I found, in trying to concentrate on Allegra Shatner, that I was afraid of her; in particular, I feared her clothing. Allegra Shatner was a large, imposing woman in a black-and-white leather zebra-striped jacket with fringed sleeves. She wore black-and-white cowboy boots and ribbed white leggings, and her jewelry was of a kind one associated with bodyguards: heavy gold chains, jaguar heads with garnet eyes, a great brass quetzal over her chest. Her hair was also large, the dull orange of a turkey wattle, wrestled into a pugnacious chignon, a huge trapped bundle, ballistic in its restraint.

  I tried to calm myself by running through some bonding hoops in my head. To soothe a headache when I have no aspirin handy, for example, I build the Kekule structure of the painkiller acetaminophen, CH3CONHC6H4OH. It relaxes my mind to assemble the skeletal structure of Tylenol or Excedrin, I pop the bonds together mentally like sparkling Tinkertoys, building only the electrons in covalent bonds, as is traditional—then build again, unabbreviated, the complete formula, including the carbon atoms in the original ring and the hydrogen atoms attached to them, a kind of chemical mantra. Though, usually, mantras aurally soothed, my mantra was visual and alarming: images of chemical dissolution, the world coming apart.

  Breathing carefully, I refocused on Allegra Shatner, already deep into her explanation of how today’s screening process determined eligibility for Sillitoe’s famous kindergarten.

  “I feel for you all,” Allegra intoned into the mike. “There are two hundred of you here today, and a week ago we had another parent group of two hundred—and there are only four spaces available in the kindergarten at Sillitoe this fall. And we take only the cream of the cream, by which I mean, the cream of the cream for us—the children most suited to our program. Our teachers are in there right now with your kids, isolating that cream.”

  I glanced around at the rows of silent worried parents. The tarpaulin above us riffled a little in the breeze and occasionally a pigeon crash-landed on one of the tarp posts, remaining to tremble above, convulsively cooing.

  I looked back at Allegra Shatner, who sighed and shook her head at the upturned faces before her. “It’s tough. I wish I could be more encouraging, but numbers are numbers.”

  Anxiously, I checked to see if my name tag was still stuck just above my left breast: ESME CHARBONNEAU TALLICH.

  A tan woman in a rose-colored suit on my right placed a white styrofoam coffee cup in the grass near our feet, and as I glanced down, I saw that one of the gummed-back name tags had stuck to the heel of my shoe. I strained to read it: BRANDON.

  There was an audible intake of breath in the mike and the audience straightened up expectantly. “We are looking for the independent child, the motivated, creative child who can function completely on his own. Who can listen and follow directions.”

  Allegra stared dramatically into the faces before her: two hundred cowed, well-heeled parents. “Let me give you all an example.”

  I began hooking up a few mental atoms. This time, desiring a cigarette, I constructed the chemical architecture of nicotine. The pain in my chest grew, pushing outward in concentric circles.

  “My own l
ittle girl attends Sillitoe— What am I saying, ‘little girl,’ she is in the Upper School and her class is near graduation! For her senior project Brittany decided to do something on the homeless. She plans to go right down there to Fourth and Wall and interview some of these less fortunate people, ask them how they got into this situation. She believes that there are a lot of fascinating stories, I mean exciting, TV-drama-caliber stories, hiding down there and, as a journalist, she can bring them out. Of course I’m concerned for her safety—perhaps she’ll have to stay in the car and shout out her questions—but she’ll do a terrific job of it. She’s a Sillitoe girl. That says it all.”

  I heard the sound first, since I’m most familiar with the source. It was an eerie quavering note, somewhere between a groan and a pigeon’s wobbling cry, and as it grew louder, the birds flew up, flapping their hideous wings and raining poo on the tarp. Allegra Shatner paused and looked up, smiling nervously. “What is that noise?”

  It rose and fell like an air-raid siren. As I stumbled out of my row, I noticed the woman in the rose suit staring at my foot. I walked quickly in the direction of the school, BRANDON flashing at my heel.

  “What is the problem here?” Allegra Shatner asked as I hurried by, but I did not look up at the podium. My eyes were on the schoolroom door, through which Ollie had disappeared nearly forty minutes earlier—and from which Ollie now burst, lowing, a teacher at her heels.

  “Sweetheart,” I whispered, and Ollie pulled away from the teacher, her eyes wide, her face chalk-white, her mouth wrenched open, vibrating with sound.

  “Come here,” I said, “it’s OK.” But Ollie stopped suddenly, hung her head, then glanced guiltily up at the teacher, who stared severely down at her. The teacher, a slim, heavily made-up young woman, turned to me.

  “We were taking Polaroids,” the teacher said—and when I looked quizzical, “we have to remember what these kids look like somehow!” “She”—she glanced down at Ollie’s nametag—“Olivia got frightened for some reason.”

  “It’s all right, Ollie.” I held out my hand and Ollie stared at it, then slowly put her palm inside.

  “She hates to have her picture taken,” I said. “She’s like a Bedouin.”

  “She was extremely agitated.” The teacher looked accusingly at me. “She didn’t talk at all during the interview.”

  “She doesn’t like to talk,” I said. “She hardly ever says a word.” The teacher and I stared at each other. “Unless of course she’s really stimulated by her environment.” There was a pause. I slung my bag over my shoulder and turned away, my hand in Ollie’s.

  “Well,” I said, “I guess Ollie’s made the decision for us here. You’d better get back in there. Really, you don’t want to miss any dairy products.”

  She blinked, then turned her back on us.

  We walked together across the thick grass. Allegra Shatner stared in our direction. I waved as we headed for the parking lot. The chemical formula for Quaaludes slowly began to form in my mind.

  Ollie stopped several times to pick up acorns or pine needles, a bottlebrush blossom. She was humming under her breath. She knelt down and investigated a tiny castle of nearly fossilized pigeon shit, but then looked up at me and left it behind.

  Chapter 2

  I TAKE MY daughter to the doctor. We park in a large, spiral-shaped parking structure, then board an elevator, which stops at a huge lobby, then rises again and lets us out on the eighth floor—a long hall leads to the Pediatric General Specialists Group (after a colon, the logo reads: A CORPORATION). The corridor is soundlessly carpeted, track-lit, with a series of recessed niches. Inside each niche (they appear at equal intervals) is a time-lapse photograph of an ongoing lunar eclipse—time and space overlap as we move down the hall.

  Ollie glances sideways at the photographs. They are an attempt to teach, among other things, perspective—but the moon is viewed through the usual haze of clichés. Though the satellite camera is trained directly on its surface and the camera is suspended in space (the laser lens on its retractable stem, focusing, zooming in, deftly probing like a hummingbird’s beak), the moon still appears to be above us, curiously flattened, despite the fact that its craters and volcanic peaks come into sharp contrast prior to obliteration by the earth’s shadow. The eye learns to see what it expects to see.

  Ollie stops to stare at one of the photographs and suddenly her small figure looks iconlike, framed by the plaster window. Once, as a college student, hosteling through Brittany, I came across one of those seaside churches (Perros-Guirec?) built on a cliff above the water. It was a village haunted by the Black Madonna. A local artist had sculpted his own faux assemblage, renderings of the famous dark patroness, whose likeness stood ensconced in a side chapel of the local church—where one wan ray of sunlight banded her forehead between four and five every day in the afternoon. The artist placed his imitations on the rock outcroppings that jutted from the natural stone colonnades marching to the sea. Inside each tiny parapet was a black madonna, each slightly different: a progression in the chalky stone. Some had smeared eyes; some had godly fear in their faces, some a sunflower’s idolatrous cheer. I stayed a day or two in the town and I kept coming back to the church, haunted by those small dark figures, and then one portentous day, the Feast of the Assumption, August fifteenth—all the madonnas were gone. Just like that. The eye searched frantically but found just a series of absences suggesting ... what? The artist must have known that until the madonnas returned, it would be impossible not to see them. And not as obvious versions of an “original”—or shadows of a white madonna. No, they were, standing there, mounted on their parapets above the regular shudder and hiss of the sea, intricate representations of the unexpressed—mockeries of the representational. It was simple, the eye had to explode pattern, try to answer the riddle of the unseen without thinking of it as the missing. That absence was part of the way to see them, to see what wasn’t there, unchartable through set visual fields, the compass, the laser, the electronic simulator. I realized that was what I wanted to do: to see that moment of invisibility more and more clearly.

  Ollie tugs my arm. “Mom. Go. Go now. This light is too loud.”

  In the posh waiting room, Ollie spun around silently, like a top, emitting a high wavery sound and I paged through A Mother’s Guide to Child Development:

  Your baby is five! Do you believe it, Mom? Most child-development experts believe that at five your child should be capable of using words in comprehensible sentences. (That means putting key “subject” words in an order that makes sense!) They also believe that at five the child should be capable of an expanded attention span—he should be able to sit and play by himself for extended periods. And he should be able to recognize and identify correctly most primary colors, as well as a number of familiar shapes!

  Read to your five-year-old, then “quiz” him gently about what you just read together. You can actually improve your child’s educational potential!

  Beyond the door is a Kiddie Doctor of some renown. We’ve been to see him just once before this visit. As a famous child specialist, he is confident in his judgments; he leans back in his executive adjustable lounge chair, lacing his long slender fingers, contemplating the ceiling, talking about the behavioral habits of developing human beings. This doctor and I argue: I’ve been outspoken in my reactions to his analysis of Ollie. Ollie’s “problems,” though they sometimes seem like involuntary withdrawal or hyperactivity, are not, in my opinion, these states.

  This doctor has suggested to me that my daughter has been exhibiting signs of emotional dysfunction, with hints of (but not) autism—because her silences are long and peculiarly stimulating to her, because her sudden flights of words and activity are inappropriate, often without context. I differed with his interpretation of these “signs.” I had many reasons for disagreeing, but I had trouble explaining them to this person who mumbled into a bar-of-soap-sized tape recorder in his vest pocket as he interviewed patients. Once, as he began ea
rnestly murmuring to his pocket in front of us, I reached over, pulled the tape recorder out of his vest, and clicked it off. His hands flew to his breast as if I’d stabbed him. His mouth fell open.

  I sat, shaking, in front of him, holding up the tape recorder like a prize.

  “When you whisper to this tape recorder, it makes me feel as if you’re not listening to me.”

  He kept his hand, Napoleon-like, over his heart. He blinked once, twice.

  “I was listening to you, Mrs. Tallich.”

  He slid his hand across his vest, then held it out, tentatively. I placed the tape recorder in his palm.

  “I don’t want to put my child on medication for as you put it, ‘occasional symptoms.’”

  He raised his eyebrows, which were silver, sculpted as his hair, and shook his head. The tape recorder sat, silenced, on the gleaming desktop between us. In the time-honored pose of shrinks, judges, or actors demonstrating a studious remove, he sat slowly back in his chair. He cuffed the side of his nose with his fist and stared at me.

  He said nothing.

  I said nothing.

  Ollie said: “Blue blue blue ... walk walk waves the shark.”

  His eyes, the brows above frozen in a spasm of disbelief, wandered to Ollie, swinging her legs from the tall chair. Eventually, they slid back to rest on me.

  Now, as I drove out of the Valley, her humming beside me, I considered Ollie, the way Ollie fit into the world. When I wore my red glass beads, Ollie would crawl into my lap and finger them one by one. “Hot,” she would say, “the beads are hot.” Other kids might have pointed out more immediately apparent qualities of the beads. They were pretty, red, one could see through them—but I could follow Ollie’s logic. The beads were hot, from resting against the jugular pulse, against the heat at the curve of the neck. Now she smiled at me, chattering about the bumps in the road as if they were alive.