Saving St. Germ

by Carol Muske-Dukes

  Chapter 13

  You must obtain a laboratory coat and wear it in the laboratory. In addition, please be aware that some instruments are hazardous (for example, the ultraviolet light sources and the high-voltage power supplies) and that many of the chemicals and reagents may be harmful if ingested (for example, ethidium bromide) or dropped onto exposed skin (for example, phenol). Therefore, you must take care and wear appropriate apparel when necessary—for example, plastic goggles when using ultraviolet light, and gloves when using ethidium bromide and phenol. As far as is known, the biological materials—phages, bacteria, enzymes—are harmless; nonetheless, we will use weakened strains of E. coli to prevent any possible spread of recombinant DNA molecules out of the laboratory.

  The instructions were taped to the lab door. I stood reading and rereading them, not seeing them. Rocky was in there, I knew: I could hear the strains of Traffic. I couldn’t bring myself to push open the pneumatic door; I couldn’t bring myself to put on a public, cheerful face or even a private, suffering one. Jay had left me. He’d been gone for five days and I was edgy, sleepless.

  I slumped down the hall to my office, let myself in, and turned on the harsh overhead light. My desk was covered with papers and graphs and spilled beakers and bent tubing. I moved to the bookshelves that lined the walls and ran my fingers along the dusty spines. I reached in my pocket for a crumpled pack of cigarettes and lit one, throwing the dead match at the wastebasket, just missing.

  I smoked and stared at the titles: abstracts and biographies. There were occasional lives of women along the shoulder-to-shoulder stories of men in science. And what kind of lives were the lives of women scientists? Could they (should they?) be categorized as a type of life?

  I crushed the cigarette in an old crusted beaker. It hadn’t tasted good. On my way down the hall, I’d been consoling myself with certain self-serving daydreams: even if my husband had left me, I was going to be renowned in my field (and here I might light a smoke and swagger a little). OK, OK, not a Nobel laureate, but a theoretician in whose wake perceptions of reality exploded, re-formed? As if a scientist’s life was in itself a neat vengeance!

  I wrenched open a stuck window, sat down, and pulled my journal toward me. Papers fluttered a little; a photograph of Stonehenge I’d taped to the wall a year ago blew under a cupboard.

  Imaginary Lecture:

  A Brief History of Women in Science

  After your father left me, I went on in the tradition of ... whom? I glanced up at a little wall chart I’ve made for myself—a random litany of the lost names. Aspasia, physician; Annie Jump Cannon, astronomer; Nettie Marie Stevens, cytogeneticist; Amalie Dietrich, naturalist; Jane Sharp, midwife; Hildegard of Bingen, cosmologist; Hypatia of Alexandria, mathematician and philosopher; Augusta Ada Byron, mathematician, inventor; Caroline Lucretia Herschel, astronomer.

  All those lost lives! Of women who (like me) wanted only a little space, a little time to putter or theorize. Craved a little knowledge, dying to pursue an answer or two. I could hear the voices: a cry here, a comment there, bits of lives outside narrative, circling.

  Late one night I made some notes, picking up volumes: personal memoirs, histories, biographies of men—extracting the odd offhand insight into the silent lives of sisters, mothers, wives, teachers, friends. The bits of lives flew to me like iron filings to a magnet.

  Here’s The Compleat Midwives’ Book by Jane Sharp, a seventeenth-century British midwife. Jane stood at the childbeds of women who died, feverish and hemorrhaging—women who couldn’t have read their own tombstones. There is no anger in Jane’s voice, only resignation. Women, she says, are “denied knowledge,” not “bred up” like men.

  Bred up, an interesting phrase. Because represented here are bred up women, women bred within an inch of their lives, like Byron’s daughter, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, a mathematician, a genius who, in the 1840s, helped Charles Babbage invent “the difference engine,” a precursor of the computer. Her breeding got her essentially nowhere, except into a footnote in Babbage’s biography. We do have an exasperated quote from her, a snap at old Babbage, who would fuss with her mechanical descriptions: “I cannot endure another person to meddle with my sentences!” One can almost recognize Father in these tones, except no one ever fussed with George Gordon’s lines.

  But even if I put together a narrative, where would it begin? Fourth century A.D.? Hypatia? She was torn apart by a mob of fellow Alexandrians, led to riot by a certain Bishop Cyril, who was jealous of “her wisdom exceeding all bounds, especially in the things concerning astronomy.”

  Well what the hell business did Hypatia have, anyway, knowing so much? Wasn’t playing dumb the smart thing for a smart woman to do? I’m thinking now of Caroline Herschel, astronomer, sweeping the skies with her telescope, credited with discovering eighteen comets. She gave all the credit to her brother, William, who allowed her to work as his laboratory assistant. She called herself a “well-trained puppy dog.”

  Or Mary Fairfax Somerville, mathematician, experimentalist, talking about herself and all women:

  I was conscious that I had never made a discovery myself, that I had no originality ... no genius; that spark from heaven is not granted to the sex. We are of the earth.

  So what do I have to complain about, Ollie? These voices betray suffering I don’t bear. I’m alone now, but I’m my own woman. I have my own lab; I run it myself proudly. I am the only female in a department of men—but my work is respected, I am compensated. I am free to work.

  But look, here’s a publication on a bookshelf just a hand’s reach up, as recent as 1982, that says I have the wrong kind of brain for scientific achievement! I page through the issue of Science magazine. Published inside is a famous study: results of tests that present seemingly definitive proof that the posterior end (the splenium) of the corpus callosum (the great bundle of nerves, commissural fibers) that connects the right and left hemispheres of the brain is larger in women than in men, thus making communication swifter and easier between the two halves of the female brain. From this fact, the test’s authors drew an interesting conclusion. They said that this indicated the male brain is more specialized, giving rise to further conclusions such as, This is why more men are musical, mathematical, and scientific geniuses. In other words, the more lateralized your brain, the smarter you are. And where does that leave women—leaning over the neural picket fence and talking faster? How is it that what could be interpreted as a biological advantage (communication of short-term memory and learned tasks faster across the divide) becomes evidence of how male genius is made?

  I picked up a framed black-and-white photograph of Jay (next to one of a just-born Ollie) on my desk. He was wearing his Dodgers cap, squinting into the sun at the beach. I’d always loved this picture of him. I opened my desk drawer and put the picture inside.

  I watched myself start to slide to the floor, then sit up, ready to kick ass. (Aspasia, Annie jump Cannon ...) Instead of arguing that women have “less hemispheric specialization,” why wouldn’t it be as valid to say men could use more intercortical communication? I know common wisdom used to be that women couldn’t think; men used to make fun of women for being—what? Scatterbrained, intuitive, emotional, incapable of focusing? Now, some people argue that this kind of multiburner thinking is a power. In fact, you could argue that what the male physicist—at the apex of cosmological theoretical speculation—is in essence trying to do is to think like a woman.

  Trying to align his cognitive rhythms with spatial flux: soaping the baby’s rib cage, counting parallel universes, saying aaah, tracking gluons as they pass through walls, fixing the wheels of the broken toy, soothing the high fever, talking to the high fever, noting infinities that plague calculation. Ollie, listen: To pursue the merely abstract is to overlook the nature of the brain and the universe. Thought is given to us in metaphors, which bridge worlds, crossing over: the corpus callosum itself a metaphor for that intersection.

  Now, on my feet agai
n, I ran my finger along the book backs and stopped on the biography of Madame Curie by her daughter, Eve. God, Madame Curie. Why was it whenever anybody anywhere was asked to name a woman scientist it was always Madame Curie? Well, she was indeed the chosen, the only one of us granted enormous recognition and prestige. In her spousal research team, she had the original ideas, did most of the cutting-edge experiments. After her husband’s death, she finally did it all, but she is often listed second: his appendage.

  Curie did what no man has ever done: She actually won two Nobel Prizes—in two different fields, physics and chemistry. She crossed right over those “specialty” boundaries a lot of scientists squawk about. The year she received her second Nobel was the same year the French Academy of Sciences refused to admit her because she was a woman. She was married, very happily; she didn’t seem to be a witch or a dyke or a madwoman, she was approved by the patriarchal judges of professional character.

  But she was never called by her name, Marie Curie; she was Madame Curie, Pierre’s wife. Imagine the two of them: inseparable, together in the lab all day, every day. So close they barely had to speak. But poor Pierre was an absentminded fellow. One day he was crossing the rue Dauphine in Paris, his eyes turned inward on his radium-cure theories; he slipped on the wet pavement and fell under the wheels of a heavy wagon drawn by two horses. His head was crushed. It was a showery spring day, April 1906. Not long before this gruesome event, his wife had had a weird premonition. She’d come running to Pierre, her face wild, in tears, crying that if one of them disappeared the other could not go on, was that not right?

  He’d looked at her, replied, “You are wrong. Whatever happens, even if one has to go on like a body without a soul, one must work just the same.”

  So now she worked on alone. She was the first woman given a position in higher education in France. Immediately after Pierre’s death, she was named professor at the Sorbonne, given her husband’s chair in physics. At the first meeting of her course, she began her lecture on the theory of ions in gases at the precise point where her husband had ended his final talk on the same subject. The day of this lecture, the auditorium was a circus; reporters and curiosity seekers shoved in beside the students. Curie received a standing ovation when she walked in. But she refused to acknowledge the waves of emotion—she gave her lecture in the coolest possible tones, then exited the lecture hall with dignity. Class, you say. Style, character.

  But the same reporters who’d earlier questioned her ability to take over her husband’s position now complained that she had no feelings, she was “cold.” Was she a woman or not? What kind of woman is a scientist, anyway?

  How could any man have imagined that this was the same Marie Curie who frightened her sister nearly out of her wits shortly before the Sorbonne lecture? Marie called her into the bedroom one evening, begging for help. Before her sister’s eyes, Curie opened a parcel she’d been carrying next to her heart for days and days. The parcel contained Pierre’s bloody clothes and the doctor’s linens used to wrap his crushed head. She pulled out the clothes, stiff with blackened gore, crying that she could not let go these remnants of her husband. Her sister knelt beside her, trying to quell her hysterical weeping, then gently put a scissors in her hands, helped her cut the clothes to pieces, toss the pieces in the fire. From one of the last folds of cloth, fragments of brain matter fell free; Curie held them to her lips, hunching over like an animal, making inarticulate sounds; the sister dragged the clothing and the scissors away from her and cut the final pieces, stuffed them into the fire.

  But Curie gave the lecture. She betrayed no emotion at all, she discussed ions and gases. She went back to the laboratory. She put her hands, her bare hands, on the radium, on its “cool light.” She did the work, the work that killed her. I turned my back on the books, leaning against them, breathing hard. If my mood was melodramatic this morning, I’d indulge it, I’d go further into hell. I spun around again and stabbed with my finger, hitting Einstein, his Collected Papers, containing his early correspondence with his first wife, Mileva Maric.

  Ah, Einstein. Harpo Marx-ish angelic face, Daddy of the Universe, everybody’s favorite genius—licking a big cone of vanilla ice cream, his wise eyes alight beneath that great halo of wild white hair. How he spoke in Great Quotes! God does not shoot dice with the universe! Could anyone not adore this gently mischievous, dreamy old guy who refused to wear socks? I pulled his Collected Papers out of the shelves and turned pages.

  In 1896, Albert met Mileva Maric at the Federal Technical Institute in Zurich. She was Serbian: striking—long dark hair and deep eyes in a wide cameo face—and as smart, it seems, as he. Intellectually compatible with Einstein, and three years older. She’d been a child prodigy in math and science, she was sent to the Institute as its only woman student. He fell in love with her for her beauty and her brains and her maturity, and she reciprocated, she loved him, though she was funny about it—my favorite thing. Mileva had a sense of humor. “I’m from a little country of bandits,” she’d say to people, by way of introduction. And when Einstein complained to her, in a letter, about the world’s blindness, she wrote back: “I do not believe that the human brain is to be blamed for the fact that man cannot grasp infinity.” It was conditioning, she said. Infinity would be in man’s grasp if “when he was learning to perceive, the little fellow had not been so cruelly confined to the earth ... or among four walls, but instead was allowed to walk out a little into the universe.”

  They were both nonconformists. Einstein was a high school dropout—his Great Youthful Quote was “School is no place for inquiring minds,” he found his teachers repressive and conventional-minded, and so did she. They were bohemians, meeting in the cafés, two young physicists who talked about the cosmos the way most people talk about their front yards. They formed a club, an “Athenaeum,” a sort of esthetics-minded café gang that met to talk about music and art and philosophy.

  When Mileva became pregnant, in May 1901, this idyllic, gently rebellious student world changed, at least for her. She went home to her parents in Serbia, and Albert went home too, to persuade his parents to bless the marriage. Einstein’s mother disapproved of Mileva, the marriage, all of it. When she said no to the union, did Einstein fly to his lover, to be by her side for the birth of his daughter? No, Einstein stayed where he was, trying to persuade Mama to relent—but by then Lieserl had been born (without her father present). Lieserl had been “given up” (it seems she was sent to Serbian relatives, then put up for adoption), and because of the elder Einsteins’ objections, and intervening wars, was lost to her parents forever. Mileva and Albert did finally marry, and had two sons, Hans Albert and Edouard, before they split up—but what happened to Lieserl? Mileva had wanted her baby to be a girl. She went through a long, difficult labor and then she held her daughter safe in her arms. And Einstein wrote that he had no wish “to part with her.” Tell me, does God not play dice? Did their lost daughter ever read that quote? Neither a birth certificate nor a record of her death can be found.

  I try again to imagine Mileva at school—the only woman at the physics institute, trying to keep her sense of herself intact, walking into the laboratory, where the scowling professors waited, smiling at everyone, cultivating a thoughtful anonymity, trying not to be called upon. But she was a scientist, after all—her courage came from her calculations, from her proofs. She could answer questions; she could find solutions. Forgetting herself, her sex, she’d rise to her feet sometimes, filled with a fervor to explain an unorthodox answer (for, like Einstein’s, her mind worked in unconventional, metaphoric ways) and in the narrow aisle, she’d stumble a little, grasp the desk for support. Mileva limped slightly: a condition resulting from a childhood fever. As a toddler, in Serbia, she’d been nicknamed La Petite Boiteuse, The Little Lame Girl. It was supposed to be a fond diminutive, but sounded cruel. She became even more self-conscious, having lost her balance now; her voice lost authority, but she went on speaking. Over in the corner of the classroom
, Albert mugged at her, made a funny face at the professor’s back. She laughed aloud at his antics (“Oh that Einstein fellow!”)—and went on with her explanation.

  So they fell in love. Often they hiked together in the Swiss mountains, and they took a trip to Lake Thun of a weekend. I can see her: At a café she sits next to him, surreptitiously pulls down her cotton lisle stocking and brown kid pump and feels for the yellowed callus on the sole of the foot of her shorter leg, a callus formed by the regular plunge and shock of her limp. She is wearing shoes that do not fit her correctly, worn for style, just once, rather than sensible support. She pulls up her stocking, shrugs, puts her hands behind her head. Her foxish face is sunburned, her grin lopsided. He is bold-eyed, inquisitive, bristling with energy, his tie and collar askew. Even his mustache looks off-center. Occasionally, he shivers a little, an involuntary twitch—stares into space then, laughs nervously. He takes an orange from her and nibbles on it, pretending to eat it all. They both burst into laughter. They are so young. What have they been talking about all afternoon, these two lovers on the beach, familiar as sweethearts painted on the lid of a taffy tin? Molecular motion, differential equations, double integrals, thermal motion. Parasols, prams, a man with a cart selling ices. The possibility of relative motion in the universe.

  But Pauline Einstein threw herself down and sobbed like a child. “She is a book like you!”—Yes, Mileva was a book: an intellectual, and also she was a shiksa, a Serbian, of uncertain class; she was forward (competing with men!), she limped ... And more—Pauline Einstein had guessed (though her son denied it vehemently) that the two were sexually intimate. Her son was sleeping with this shiksa Serbian limping scientist. Mileva represented bohemianism, feminism, the demimonde—and Mother said to Albert, “If you get her with child, then you’ll be in a pickle!”