Lady Professor

by Switzer, Robert L. ;

  Emma crammed her foot on the brake and stopped abruptly.

  Henrik half-climbed, half-fell out of the truck’s right side door, dropped to his knees at the side of the road, and vomited.

  The sounds of his violent retching twisted Emma’s belly and she began to cry. Leaving the engine running and the headlamps on, she climbed out of the truck and knelt beside him with her arm over his heaving shoulders. He finally calmed, and she pulled him to his feet. They sat side-by-side on the running board while he wiped his mouth and eyes with the back of his hand.

  “Hennie, Hennie, this has got to stop. You’re killing yourself.”

  “Who cares? I’m no good any more. I’m so screwed up.”

  “I care.” Tears poured down Emma’s face. “I care so much. I can’t lose you. You’re the only one in the whole family that . . . that . . . understands me. Mama and Susan think I’ve gone high hat. Everything I care about is useless to them. Papa and Bjorn don’t care either. As long as I help with the milking and cooking and gardening and canning and the laundry. I’m just a hired girl. You’re all I’ve got. You loved me, I know you did. At least until that damned war. And I love you too. I still do. Hennie, I want you back.”

  She wrapped both arms around his neck and sobbed. She had never spoken the words of love before. Never. Not to anyone. Nor had she ever heard them.

  Henrik didn’t reply. They sat together, sniffling and breathing irregularly. Finally, Henrik embraced her awkwardly. Emma helped him back into the passenger seat, and they drove the rest of the way back to the Hansen farm in silence.

  FOUR WEEKS LATER Emma returned to the Oosterfeld’s store, her head down in despair. Her search for a teaching job—any teaching job—in the Stanton Mills area had been futile. No positions were open at the city’s elementary school or at any of the nearby one-room country schools. She was not credentialed to teach in high school. Just this Friday the County Superintendent of Schools had bluntly told her that he foresaw no possibility of a vacant teaching position anywhere in the county.

  Now she had accompanied Henrik into town in the family truck—after extracting a promise that he would permit her to drive home—and needed to share the bad news with Piet and Hannah: she would not be staying with them in the coming year. She would have to search for a position in a distant county and board near the school that hired her, if she could find one. Staying at home on the farm without a job was not a choice she would ever accept.

  The Oosterfelds saw the disappointment in Emma’s face at once, and, as there were no customers at the moment, sat down with her at the back of the store.

  “It’s no good,” Emma said softly. “I just can’t find a job close enough to Stanton Mills to stay with you. In fact, I haven’t found a job anywhere yet.”

  “Oh, we’re so sorry. We were looking forward to having you back with us,” Hannah said.

  “So was I. More than you know. And, if I have to pay room and board, it’s going to take even longer to accumulate enough to go back to college.” Emma bit her lip, determined not to cry.

  Piet rose and put a hand on her shoulder. “Emma, Hannah and I have been talking about this. It’s not right, you having to interrupt your education for so long. Maybe, maybe we can help you.”

  Hannah nodded vigorously.

  “What do you say, we lend you the money for the next two years?” Piet asked.

  “Oh, that would be wonderful, but I can’t ask you to do that. It’s too much. And who knows how long it would take me to pay you back. You’re so kind, but I . . . just . . . I couldn’t take so much from you.”

  “Now, why not? You’ve been like a daughter to us, Emma. We haven’t any children of our own. It would give us pleasure to help you. And don’t worry about paying us back. We’ll work out a schedule so you can do that after you graduate.”

  The Oosterfeld’s offer was a splendid, unexpected gift. Emma yearned to accept it. But her family would be humiliated, furious that she had taken charity from the elderly couple. And, if she pursued her dream of earning a Ph.D., she wouldn’t be able to repay the loan for many years. In fact, she would go deeper into debt in graduate school.

  Still, shouldn’t she solve one problem at a time, rather than becoming overwhelmed by the obstacles further down the path? Perhaps, two years from now she could teach in a high school for a couple of years to earn money to repay the Oosterfelds and for graduate school? Did her parents really have to know about the loan?

  “It’s such a generous, kind offer. I can’t say no. Oh, thank you, thank you from the bottom of my heart.” Tears filled her eyes.

  Piet and Hannah looked down in embarrassment.

  “There, there, Emma. It makes us happy too. I’ll have the bank draw up the papers,” Piet said. “Now, come, have some coffee with us. You do drink coffee now that you go to college, don’t you?”

  When Emma left the darkened grocery store, her emotions were fragile, confused. Relief and happiness mingled with worry for the future and the strange vulnerability and sadness that come with an undeserved gift. On the street, she breathed the cooling night air deeply to clear her head. The cries of night birds hunting insects attracted by the town’s streetlights pulsed, along with the occasional muttering of an automobile.

  I’d better go get Henrik before he’s too drunk, she thought, and started up the street.

  “Emma!”

  She swiveled her head to see a young man trotting toward her. “Victor. Victor Midlothian,” she cried.

  He stood before her grinning. His long brown hair was no longer parted down the middle, but fell rakishly across his brow. His face, still smooth, but no longer boyish, had become leaner and more sharply defined, and he sported a thin mustache. His chest had broadened, his arms were thicker than in high school days. He was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt with a blue kerchief at the open neck—much more stylish than the young men of Stanton Mills.

  Emma’s mouth fell open.

  He stepped forward, wrapped his arms around her, and kissed her, first on one cheek, then the other. “There,” he announced, “That’s how the French do it. Emma, you are so pretty. Even prettier than I remembered. I am so glad to see you. I heard you were off at college. So smart—of course you’d be at college.”

  “Yes, Hancock College. But I’m home for the summer. How about you? What are you doing? I heard that you were flying aeroplanes in the War. I’m so happy that you weren’t . . . hurt.”

  “Oh, I love flying. And I was lucky I guess. I didn’t get back from France until 1919. Since then, I’ve been flying mail for the government. I’ve got a month’s leave. Visiting my folks.” He swept both of her hands into his, so much more bold and self-confident than Emma remembered him. “I’ve thought of you so many times. Emma, may I call on you while I’m here? We could use my father’s Buick, go to the picture show. Oh, please, say yes. You don’t have a sweetheart, do you? A special beau?”

  “No, no. No one special.” Emma’s face had grown warm, her breathing quicker.

  “All right. Tomorrow night? Seven o’clock? I’ll drive out to your farm.”

  “Yes, Vic. Yes, I’d like that.”

  “Swell! I’ll see you then. We can talk and talk.”

  In the coming days Victor’s courtship of Emma—could it be called that, she wondered—proved to be lighthearted, but surprisingly ardent. Every second or third evening the Midlothian’s big Buick sedan chugged into the Hansen’s farmyard, and he escorted Emma to the car after exchanging pleasantries with her mother and father. Victor related tales—probably embellished—of his adventures flying in France in the closing months of the war, views of the battlefields from the air, the wonders of Paris after the war, and the sophistication of the French people. How different his experiences were from Henrik’s. Henrik’s soul had been crushed; Victor was invigorated, even cocky.

  Their companionship was a welcome relief from the farm’s domestic chores, her mother’s depression, and Emma’s worries about paying fo
r college. Much as she liked him, Emma did not wish to marry Victor. She didn’t want to marry anyone, not any time soon. But, he soon made clear, Victor wasn’t interested in marriage either. He explained that he had adopted the sophisticated French attitude toward sexual morality, and he gently invited Emma to share his views.

  She was tempted. An attractive man who didn’t demand or offer commitment? It was just as well that she had to return to Hancock College in September.

  CHAPTER 6

  1922

  TINY BALLET SLIPPERS, they dip and glide, twist and turn, gracefully swimming with the ease of silvery fish, pausing, speeding, reversing, brushing affectionately against one another in their miniscule pond under the objective lens of Emma’s microscope. How do they know where they are going, what they are seeking?

  Emma had been studying paramecium for months now, and, although she still had to be certain that her observations were reproducible, she now believed that she had strong evidence to support her hypothesis. But her data presented new puzzles, raised new questions. Complete understanding seemed to recede before her like the terminus of a rainbow.

  Emma’s view of the world of biology had begun to shift from the macroscopically accessible universe of plants and animals, their anatomy and phylogenetic relationships, to the unseen world of protozoa and bacteria. She had mastered her classes in botany, vertebrate and invertebrate zoology and embryology, but studies in her junior year of microbiology and genetics challenged her previous ideas about living systems.

  The world teems with diminutive single-celled organisms that have all the fundamental properties of larger, multi-celled creatures. They can only be observed under a microscope, and often inadequately at that. Anatomical features of the protozoa can be seen, but the true bacteria are so tiny that little can be discerned other than the overall shape of their cells. Rather, the bacteria were characterized by indirect means, such as the differential staining of their cells with the Gram stain, determination of the sugars that support their growth, whether they could grow without oxygen, or the products—acids and gases—they produce. This knowledge forced Emma to realize that she knew woefully little of chemistry, and in her senior year she enrolled in a general chemistry class.

  The other discipline that unsettled Emma’s previous ideas about biology was genetics, the science of heredity. The elegance of Mendelian patterns of inheritance that could be predicted with mathematical precision appealed to her orderly mind. They implied an underlying regularity to the structure of the apparatus of inheritance—whatever that was—that called out for understanding, that harkened to Emma’s old question: how does it work? What were genes and how did they carry and convey genetic information? There was recent evidence that genes were somehow carried on tiny subcellular bodies, called chromosomes, that could be made microscopically visible with stains, but no one knew how.

  Her studies of genetics required Emma to overcome her dislike of Professor Thomas Gillespie, Hancock College’s only professor of biology other than her admired mentor, Dr. Weatherbee. A small, sour man with a pointed Van Dyke beard, Gillespie was overtly hostile to female students. In his first class meeting, he asked the few women students present to cross their legs. Puzzled, they complied.

  Then he announced, “Now that the Gates of Hell are closed, we can proceed.”

  The male students laughed, but Emma fumed. He only called on the male students in his classes and answered Emma’s many questions disdainfully. When she suspected that he did not know an answer, he would announce, “That’s beyond the scope of this course, Miss Hansen. I suggest that you research it in the library, rather than consume class time with it.”

  Gillespie was not particularly curious about the fundamental mechanisms of inheritance. He was more interested in the practical applications of genetics and provided the class with many fascinating examples of studies of inheritance with plants and animals, stressing dominant and recessive genes, the formation of genetic hybrids and their use in agriculture.

  Emma seized upon the idea that she might combine her newly found enthusiasms. Could not genetics be studied with microbes? They could be grown readily in the laboratory, and they reproduced within hours, not the months or year needed for a new generation of animals and plants. When she broached the idea with Professor Gillespie, he scoffed.

  “Nonsense, Miss Hansen, bacteria reproduce asexually, by binary fission. There’s no genetics to study. Besides, they have no chromosomes. What a silly idea.”

  “But,” she protested, “they must pass on inherited information, because the daughter cells are identical to their parents.”

  “Perhaps so, but if you can’t mate strains with different genotypes, you can’t do genetic analysis.”

  Emma conceded his argument. But she persisted. “How about the protozoa? Some species are thought to reproduce sexually.”

  Gillespie shrugged. “What could possibly be the practical use of studying that?”

  Emma repeated the conversation to Dr. Weatherbee, who smiled and said, “Gillespie can be an unpleasant man, I’m afraid. But you have an interesting idea. This is an area outside of my expertise, but I do recall reading a paper about sexual reproduction of Paramecium. We cultivate them for our biology classes, mostly, I confess, because they are so lovely to observe under the microscope. Perhaps you should read up on that and see if you can identify a project that you have a good chance to complete this year.”

  From her reading and hours of observing her graceful little “slippers” under the microscope, Emma formulated the question that she now felt she had answered. When they are well fed, paramecium cells divide frequently by asexual binary fission, giving rise to identical daughter cells, but when they are starved, one cell is occasionally observed to fuse with another cell and both undergo changes in their macro- and micronuclei that suggest mating.

  But, she learned from her reading, no one had directly demonstrated the transmission of an inherited trait after these putative mating events. The possibility of doing this occurred to her when, by chance, she found a peculiar, paralyzed paramecium cell, unable to swim, but merely flopping about in an uncoordinated manner. Had the cell been injured? Would it recover the ability to swim if it was cultivated in nutritious medium?

  She carefully isolated the helpless cell with a tiny pipette and grew it in a separate rich culture. To her delight, it divided regularly and gave rise to hundreds of progeny—all of them similarly paralyzed. The swimming defect was inherited. She had isolated a genetic variant, a mutant strain. Now, she thought with growing excitement, I can mate them with the normal strain and determine whether the progeny can swim or not. And I can mate the progeny and see if they obey Mendel’s law.

  The execution of her simple idea proved more difficult than she anticipated. Finding conditions of starvation that regularly led to mating events required much trial and error. When that was finally accomplished, Emma found that some cultures of paramecium never mated with her variant strain, but that others did.

  She did not understand why, but eventually decided to proceed with the strains with which she could observe mating pairs—although they were infrequent and required much patient and eye-straining screening of cultures under the microscope. Mating pairs had to be tediously isolated and the properties of their offspring recorded. It was the spring of her senior year before Emma had collected sufficient observations to be confident of her conclusions.

  AS EMMA SPENT more and more time in the laboratory, she had to reserve time carefully for the demands of her classes and her meal job at the college dining hall. No free time remained for social activities, and she acquired a reputation among her classmates as a bookish grind and a hermit.

  She declined the few invitations from male students that came her way. Max Swerdt had lost interest in her already two years ago and had noised it about that she was “more interested in beetles than men.” That was untrue, of course. She was just insistent upon finishing her education first. And she wante
d the independence that she would likely lose in marriage.

  There had been a man in her life: Victor Midlothian. She had even been intimate with him on a few occasions. It was a secret she could share with no one. She knew how harshly she would be condemned. But she felt no shame, no guilt. They had been completely honest with one another. A door had been opened for Emma, a door to rooms that she hoped to explore more fully some day. But not with Victor. There were other women in his life. He flew—literally—like a bird across America. He sent her penny postcards from the cities he visited inscribed with cheerful messages. “Flew nonstop from Florida to New York!” one crowed. No, even if she were ready for marriage, she wouldn’t marry a man so restless, so reckless as that.

  THE TABULATED DATA in her notebooks all supported her conclusions, Emma had decided, and she now began to think of writing a research report for publication. Most importantly, she had demonstrated that the physical conjugation of paramecium cells, which had been presumed by previous authors to result in sexual reproduction, did indeed result in the transmission of hereditable characteristics. When her paralyzed mutant cells were mated with motile wild type cells, all of the progeny were able to swim like their motile parent, generation after generation. This indicated that the non-swimmers carried a loss-of-function mutation that was recessive to the dominant swimming genotype. The swimmers had the genetic information needed to correct the defect inherited by the non-swimmers. But the pattern of inheritance did not obey Mendel’s law.

  When Emma mated the first generation of descendants with non-swimmers, the proportion of swimming and non-swimming progeny did not fit the predicted pattern. Only very rarely did a non-swimmer result. Emma could not explain this. She suspected that it had something to do with the fact that Paramecium usually has more than one micronucleus, but she had not been able to test that conjecture.

  Emma needed to discuss her results with Dr. Weatherbee, and—this she dreaded—with Professor Gillespie. Did they agree that her findings were sufficiently well documented to write up in a paper and submit for publication? First, Dr. Weatherbee.