They visited the Bellafiori family in Chicago first, arriving by train in the mid-afternoon, and took the el and a streetcar to Joe’s old neighborhood. Emma was glad he knew his way around the city. She was intimidated by the noise and traffic, the tall buildings and clattering elevated trains. Enrico, who had only known the quiet, shady streets of Harrington, Ohio, stared and clung to his parents.
Mama Bellafiori enthusiastically greeted them. “I professori! “E Enrico, che bello. She embraced Enrico before kissing Joe and Emma on both cheeks.
Emma would recall the following three days as a haze of cheerful noise and confusion, great meals of rich Italian food, some of which she recognized from Joe’s cooking, and red wine. The house was so filled with Joe’s brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews that she struggled to learn their names and connect them with faces. Joe coached her when they were finally alone at night.
Much of the conversation was conducted in Italian. Emma had heard Joe use occasional Italian phrases and curses, but now she saw that he was completely fluent. Though lost to its meaning, Emma loved the sounds of a language so rich in vowels and rhythms. She recognized some words from her years of studying Latin and resolved to persuade Joe to teach her to speak Italian—whenever they might find time for that.
Eventually, though, she began to feel excluded by the flood of florid, unintelligible language. Couldn’t the family try harder to include her? Enrico was so often inspected and admired, hugged and kissed that he was exhausted and fretful by night. Most of Joe’s family had never met Emma before, and they treated her warmly, but with an air of respect that seemed to place a distance between them, addressing her as Signora la professoressa. She repeated, “Please call me Emma,” and wanted to add, “Joe is a professor too,” but did not. Surely they knew that already.
On Saturday they took their leave and headed for the train station for the two-hour trip to Stanton Mills.
“If we stay until Sunday, they’ll make us go to Mass,” Joe warned Emma. “And I know you don’t want to do that. Nor do I.”
“My ears are stilling ringing.” Emma laughed. “I always thought you were lively and emotional, but now I see you are one of the quiet ones. Wait until you meet my family. They’re practically frozen mutes compared to your lot.”
IN STANTON MILLS they had arranged to meet the Oosterfelds before going to the Hansen farm. Piet and Hannah had sold the grocery business, but still owned the building and lived in the familiar upstairs apartment. They had grown old and fragile. They moved slowly and carefully; a quaver had crept into their voices.
“So this is the lucky man who married our dear Emma,” Hannah said as she grasped Joe’s hand. “And look at this beautiful little boy.”
Enrico hung shyly by Emma’s leg.
“I’m the lucky one,” Emma told them. “Joe’s a professor of chemistry at Harrington College, and he’s my partner in everything we do.”
“Emma has told me how much you have helped her over the years. She’s living her dream now, thanks to you,” Joe said as he offered his hand.
“Oh, we didn’t do much,” Piet said. “Emma did it. She’s a very determined young lady.”
“I’ve noticed.” Joe laughed.
Their conversation was slow, polite. Twenty-seven years had passed since Emma first sat in this room with its fussy furniture and lace doilies. Her life had been completely transformed since then, while the life of this dear old couple, whom she had regarded as substitute parents, changed only with the passage of the seasons, the weakening of old age. The Oosterfelds understood that she and Joe were teachers, but when Emma tried to explain that they had discovered something important about how genes work, they simply smiled, and Hannah said, “That’s wonderful, dear.”
As they prepared to leave, Emma said, “Please don’t bother to come down the stairs,” and they did not argue. She wondered if she would see them again before they died, then suppressed the thought.
Bjorn picked them up in town in a nine-year-old Ford Model A sedan instead of the truck Emma recalled from years before. There were other changes too. Most of the twelve miles of rural road leading to the farm had been graded and covered with gravel, so the trip was dusty, but less rough than Emma remembered. Thanks to the Rural Electrification Act, the Hansen farmhouse now had electric lights and simple appliances, but there was still no indoor plumbing. Water was still carried from the well and heated on the kitchen range. Joe was amused by the wooden outhouse, but Enrico was frightened by the big holes in the seat and had to be coaxed to perch his little bum nervously on it.
“Just be glad it’s not winter.” Emma laughed.
Bjorn and Susan’s sons, now fifteen and thirteen, had grown from shy little boys into tall, lean adolescents. The older boy’s voice was now a deep rumble, and he looked so much like Henrik that Emma nearly broke into tears when she first saw him. Dear, beloved, lost Henrik. Nothing had been heard about him since his disappearance years ago, and the family rarely mentioned his name, as though he had been a disgrace.
But Emma’s greatest shock was seeing her father. Why had they not told her? Papa was gaunt, his hair completely white and thin. His head jerked from time to time with small involuntary twitches, and his hands trembled constantly. His speech—what little there was of it—was slurred.
“I had no idea Papa was in such a bad way,” Emma said to Susan when they were out of his hearing. “You didn’t say anything in your letters.”
“Would it have mattered? Nothing you could do anyway,” she retorted. Then, seeing the hurt in Emma’s face, she softened. “The doc says it’s Parkinson’s disease. It’s gotten a lot worse in the past year, so I didn’t tell you. I guess we’re trying to pretend it isn’t so bad. He tries to work as hard as he ever did. Won’t listen to Bjorn, never did.”
Most hurtful, the old man seemed indifferent to Emma, Joe, and his grandson Enrico, whom he had never seen before. Preoccupied with his failing body, he had turned cold.
And what of Kirsten, her older sister? “Did you tell Kirsten that we were visiting?” Emma asked Susan. “I’d like to see her and her family. Surely it’s time to get over her resentment over my not returning for Mama’s funeral. That was years ago.”
“Sure. I called her and told her you and Joe and the little one were coming. She said, well, never mind what she said. I guess she’s not over it. I’m sorry.”
A painful knot twisted in Emma’s stomach. What a stubborn, spiteful family this could be. Why couldn’t they talk about their feelings? What could she do? Beg her sister for forgiveness? Well, damn it, she could be stubborn too.
Bjorn and Susan were now clearly in charge of the farm and were responsible for its modernization. Susan showed Emma her electric refrigerator and washing machine.
“Just like in town,” she said. “I’m working on Bjorn to put in running water and a bathroom, soon’s we get enough money. Maybe a furnace after that.”
Bjorn, quiet as ever, led them on a tour of the barn and outbuildings, proudly pointing out the new tractor and machinery and the electric milking machine, which had allowed a doubling of the farm’s dairy herd. It was all new to Joe, and he was fascinated. He bombarded Bjorn with questions and comments, earning the respect of his brother-in-law.
“That Joe sure is interested in farming for a city boy. Smart too, catches on real quick,” Bjorn told Emma.
Perhaps to avoid the emotional complexities of her return to her family, Emma spent much of her time with Enrico, showing him the farm’s animals. He squealed when a calf ran a long, wet sandpapery tongue over his hands and giggled when a cow arched her back, raised her tail, and released a great stream of yellow urine from her backside. Such everyday sights from Emma’s girlhood were exotic adventures to her son.
She led him on walks into the fields and pastures, naming plants and birds they saw and searching out a redwing blackbird’s nest in a grassy ravine. They even found a dung beetle patiently rolling a ball in
the dusty cowpath. Emma could not resist explaining to Enrico why the beetle was doing that and how she had discovered a dung beetle thief.
Three days on the farm were enough. Joe and Enrico had a good time, but for Emma a mixture of estrangement and sadness dimmed the pleasure of the visit. They slept poorly because they and Enrico were forced to share a narrow bed with a lumpy straw mattress. Emma was keenly conscious that their presence added to Susan’s burdens, and she no longer knew how to be very helpful. So, pleading the need to return and prepare for the coming fall classes at Harrington, they asked Bjorn to drive them to the train station in Stanton Mills.
On the train ride back, Emma was unusually quiet. The gentle rocking of the train car soon put Enrico to sleep.
“Joe, will you think less of me if I admit that I no longer feel as though I belong there? I’m so much happier at Harrington with you. I’m a little ashamed of feeling that way.”
“That’s OK, sweetheart. I feel the same way sometimes when I go back to Chicago. We’re the family now: you and me and ’Rico.”
IN THE FALL, Emma and Joe wrestled with the problem of demonstrating the conversion of Pigment D into Pigment B and of Pigment B into Pigment C by cell-free extracts, as predicted by their scheme. They had little success.
“The problem is that Pigment B is an unstable aldehyde,” Joe complained. “We can’t keep it around long enough to use it as starting material for the B to C reaction, and it doesn’t accumulate cleanly in the D to B assays.”
“But D is a stable alcohol, right, and B is a stable carboxylic acid. Why don’t we try to run both reactions together?” Emma asked.
“You mean test for conversion of D all the way to B? Two successive oxidation steps?”
“Right. Both enzymes acting one after the other. If that works, then we can use extracts from the mutants. Extracts from pigB or from pigD mutants ought not to work because they’re missing one of the required enzymes, but if you mix them . . .”
“The missing enzymes will be provided, and it will work just like the extracts from the parent strain,” Joe interjected. “Emma, that’s brilliant. Let’s try it.”
By the end of November they had shown experimentally that cell-free extracts from normal and mutant strains behaved exactly as they had predicted. The activities were destroyed by heating and by digestion with a preparation of protein-destroying enzymes from beef pancreas. Joe and Emma felt they had adequate evidence for the role of enzymes in the first two steps of their proposed three-step pathway, and they now turned to the vexing problem of finding evidence that an enzyme catalyzed the last step, the conversion to Pigment C into Pigment A. So far, they had not been able to demonstrate that reaction in the lab.
Their excitement was greatly tempered by their alarm at events occurring that fall in Europe. Germany invaded Poland; Britain, France, and their allies declared war on Germany; Russia took possession of eastern Poland, forced the Baltic countries into submission and went to war against Finland. The war between Japan and China advanced in intensity. The world was once again at war, only twenty-one years after the end of the Great War. Emma was distraught.
“We’ve got to stay out of it. The only result of war is death and destruction.”
“Roosevelt says that America will stay neutral. Don’t you think the French and the English will be able to beat the Germans?”
“Oh, God, Joe, I can see all that horrible trench warfare like the last war over again. I’ve told you what it did to Henrik. If we go to war, won’t you have to go? You’re an officer in the Army.”
“I suppose so, but I’m thirty-three already and with a Ph.D. in chemistry, they’d probably send me to a proving ground for ordnance. Testing weapons or something like that. Not combat.”
“Still, isn’t that dangerous?”
“I’d imagine they’re pretty careful. Certainly it’d be a lot safer than being shot at.”
“Oh, don’t even joke about it. I could not bear to lose you.”
CHAPTER 20
1940
IT WAS AN exceptionally lovely spring on the Harrington College campus. A sustained period of warm weather in late April following earlier rains stimulated a glorious display of flowering trees, blooming bushes, and lush green lawns. Emma could not recall the campus so beautiful. Students strolled the quads, holding hands and hugging books, laughing and frolicking like innocent children in an Arcadian glade. The warmth made Emma happy to be a respected professor among them, happy to be married to Joe and mother of Enrico, happy simply to be alive.
In what little free time they could squeeze out, Joe and Emma continued their attempts to demonstrate the enzymatic character of the reactions of pigment formation in cell-free extracts made from Emma’s fungal cultures. They discovered that the conversion of Pigment D to Pigment C could be much accelerated by the addition of a boiled extract of yeast; the active ingredient in these extracts had properties that indicated that it was the so-called “nicotinamide coenzyme” that had been described previously by a German biochemist, Otto Warburg, who had shown it to be involved in oxidation reactions. That fit perfectly with the fact that conversion of Pigment D to Pigment C required two oxidation steps. However, they were stuck with the last step of their pathway, the conversion of Pigment C to Pigment A. Nothing they tried permitted them to observe that reaction with cell juice in the test tube. They were missing something.
Because the Harrington College library only subscribed to a few scientific journals, Joe and Emma had to make occasional trips to Columbus to use the science library at Ohio State University, and Joe decided that another search of the biochemical literature for clues to their problem was needed. He and Emma had bought a used Chevy sedan that spring, so he drove off on a beautiful Saturday morning, leaving Emma to look after Enrico and grade papers.
He returned in the middle of the afternoon, much sooner than Emma expected him, and strode into the house, his face smoky with anger.
“Look at this! He exclaimed. “Just look at this. These bastards have stolen our work.”
He slammed an unbound copy of a journal onto Emma’s desk. It was the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a widely read, prestigious journal. Joe had bent it open so that the back of the binding was broken and it lay open to an article by Philip Schleicher and Martin Fox entitled, “Genetic Specification of Biochemical Reactions of Pigment Biosynthesis in Neurospora crassa.”
“My God,” Emma gasped. Her heart beating in her throat, she quickly scanned the paper while Joe paced wildly around the room.
“I can’t believe this,” Joe shouted. “They must have seen our paper when we sent it in.”
“I need to read this more carefully after I calm down,” Emma replied with a shaking voice, “but it’s our pathway. They cite your JACS papers for that. The genetic mapping isn’t nearly as thorough as mine and they use different names for the genes, but they get the same conclusions. And they make the claim that genes act through enzymes, one gene per enzyme, just like we did.”
“Who are these guys anyway?”
“They’re at Princeton. Schleicher is a well-known professor of genetics. I thought he worked on fruit flies. I don’t recall seeing any genetics with fungi from his lab. I never heard of Fox. Maybe he’s a grad student or a postdoc?”
“Well, they’re crooks, that’s what they are. They must have seen our manuscript, seen how good it was and recommended to the journal to reject it, so they could buy time to throw this, this garbage together.”
“We don’t know that. I suppose it’s possible that they were working on this too, on the genetics, I mean, and when they saw your structures, they just put it all together—like we did.”
“Well, God damn it! They’ll get all the credit for our—for your—beautiful insight into how genes work. This was our best chance—maybe our only chance—of ever gaining recognition as world-class scientists. I hate it, I just hate it.”
Enrico ran into the little bedroom that doubled as an of
fice. “Daddy, what’s wrong?”
Joe doubled his fists, scowled, and was unable to answer.
“We just got some bad news about our research, honey,” Emma said softly. She bit her lip and fought tears. She didn’t want to frighten Enrico, who surely could not understand why his parents were so distraught.
Joe whirled around. “Just promise me this. Promise you’ll write to the editor of the American Journal of Genetics. Ask him if these, these guys—Schleicher, he’s the big deal professor, right?—ask him if he reviewed our paper and came up with all that crap to get it rejected. Ask him that, OK?”
“All right, Joe. I’ll do that. Just calm down. You’re upsetting Enrico. I’m as disappointed as you are.”
FOR THE NEXT several days Emma fought depression and anger. She taught her classes, but felt flat, as though she were automatically repeating phrases from previous years. The beauty of the spring was gone, as though a glowering black storm had blown away the blossoms and obscured the sun. Joe was so angry that they couldn’t talk about the offending paper.
Emma forced herself to read Schleicher and Fox’s paper carefully and took notes on the many similarities between it and their rejected Hansen and Bellafiori manuscript. Then she carefully composed a letter to Professor Cornelius Burke-Jones, a faculty member at Yale and the editor of the journal that had rejected their manuscript.
After detailing the many ways in which the two papers reported the same findings and conclusions, she wrote, “The many remarkable duplications between the two manuscripts are sufficient to raise the question of whether our manuscript had been read by Professor Schleicher prior to the publication of his PNAS paper with Dr. Fox. If so, that information may have been used to influence the content and conduct of the research that they published. Alternatively, if they were pursuing the same line of research independently, a motive would have been provided to reject our manuscript so as to gain time for them to claim priority by publishing their work before we did. If such occurred, it would be a highly improper abuse of the review process. Those suspicions would be removed, of course, if we have your assurance that neither Professor Schleicher nor Dr. Fox were asked to review our manuscript or had access to it.”
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