After the discussion of his paper, Prof. Schleicher gathered his papers, collected his transparency slides from the projectionist, and headed for the door at the rear of the auditorium. He clearly didn’t intend to remain to hear Emma or the other speakers. Fueled by a sudden flash of anger, Emma followed him out into the corridor. She had promised herself not to do this. She knew that it couldn’t possibly end well.
“Professor Schleicher,” she called out. “I have just one question.”
He turned, scowled. “Yes? Um . . . do I know you, Miss?”
“I’m Emma Hansen, professor at Harrington, you know, of Hansen and Bellafiori.”
“Oh.”
“Just tell me truthfully, did you review our paper for the American Journal of Genetics in 1938?”
A glassy, cold look veiled his dark eyes. “I have no idea of what you’re talking about, Miss, and I seriously doubt that you do either.” He turned his back and strode down the hall.
Shaking, Emma returned to the lecture room. She barely heard the next short research talk, but gradually forced herself to regain her composure. When her turn to speak finally came, Emma mounted the steps to the stage and stood briefly at the lectern quietly, seeking to calm her nerves. Her throat was constricted and her hands trembled. She had taught classes for years with confidence and ease, but addressing an audience of fellow scientists for the first time was unnerving. A portion of the audience had departed after Schleicher’s presentation, but there were still perhaps a hundred faces looking up at her, not one of them a woman’s face.
She had to tell her story quickly and efficiently. As she began speaking about her science, the tension flowed out of her body and her voice became clear and steady. She emphasized that she and Joe had worked alone and without any knowledge of what she called “parallel research going on in another laboratory.” She explained how her mutants had allowed Joe to isolate the pigments using novel methods and to determine their chemical structures. She showed her genetic maps without taking the time to present the supporting data and presented their conclusions about the enzymatic steps of the pathway and the corresponding genes that determined them. Finally, she described their new evidence that two of their three postulated steps were definitely catalyzed by enzymes in cell-free extracts. At the end, she spoke the detested name. “On the basis of our findings we concur with the one gene: one enzyme hypothesis for gene action put forth by Professor Schleicher and would generalize it further to propose that genes also specify other proteins that are not enzymes.”
Polite applause followed, but no questions.
Emma gathered her papers, her nerves still vibrating, and stepped down.
An older man approached her: Bernard Dodge, who had been so helpful back when she was a Ph.D. student. “Emma, that was absolutely beautiful work,” he said as he grasped her hand. “Amazing that you and Bellafiori could accomplish so much working alone at a small college. Congratulations.”
“Thank you. It’s so good to see you again. I’ll always be grateful for all the help you gave me when I first starting working with Neurospora.”
“Oh, that was nothing. Pity, though, that you will have to share the credit with the Princeton group. Remarkable coincidence, that.”
“Yes, wasn’t it?”
JOE AND ENRICO came into the house, flushed and laughing from their romp in the fresh December snow.
Emma, her face wet with tears, looked up at them from the kitchen table.
“Sweetheart! What’s wrong? Is it your father?”
“No, no. It’s . . . it’s . . . the Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor. It just came over the radio.”
“Pearl Harbor? Where’s that?”
“It’s a navy base in the Hawaiian Territory. They said a lot of ships have been sunk or are on fire. Listen, they’re just repeating it over and over.”
They stared at the arched-shaped wooden box with its dials and grill. Even through the static the excited urgency of the announcer’s voice vibrated as he related the terrible news.
Joe paced back and forth. “The sneaky bastards. I thought it would be the Germans that dragged us into it, not the Japs.”
“Oh, now we’ll go to war for sure. And you’ll have to go, won’t you?”
“Mommy, please don’t cry!” Enrico piped and ran to wrap his still cold arms around her
“I suppose so, yes. I am an officer in the reserve, and, damn it, our country’s been attacked. But, but, we’ve talked about this. I’m in the army, not the navy. I’m thirty-five years old and a chemist. They won’t send me into combat. I’ll probably end up at some weapons depot or proving ground.”
“Well, I know it’s selfish and unpatriotic, but I don’t want you to go at all. I couldn’t bear to lose you. Not after what happened to Henrik.”
But Joe did go to war and soon. He was called up for active duty in March of 1942 and after a short training period was assigned to the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, as he had predicted. He wrote cheerful letters to Emma and enclosed printed letters with simple text and hand-drawn pictures for Enrico.
“The Army sure knows how to waste people, time, and money,” he grumbled to Emma. “They don’t need a Ph.D. chemist for what I’m doing (which I am not allowed to tell you), but please be assured, sweetheart, that I am safe. The only explosions around here are in deep bunkers.”
In June of 1942 Emma received a phone call from her brother Bjorn informing her that their father had died, so she and Enrico took the train to Stanton Falls. The cars were filled with young men—boys really—in military uniform, smoking cigarettes and joking as though they were going to a picnic instead of to slaughter. Some of them smiled at Enrico and patted him on the head, as Henrik and Joe must have done on their way to war when they saw children.
Their train arrived just in time for them to go directly to the undertaker’s establishment in Stanton Mills for the customary viewing the evening before the funeral. A gathering of the Hansen’s friends and neighbors stood in a large formally decorated room where they spoke quietly and soberly. Emma no longer recognized most of them nor they her.
At one end of the room under soft light lay her father’s body in an open coffin, its interior lined with frilly cloth, the sort of material he would never have tolerated in life. Despite the undertaker’s cosmetic art, the wastage of age and disease lay exposed on her father’s face, his cheeks sunken, his nose carved to a thin beak, his eyes closed in unsuccessful imitation of sleep.
Emma stared at him, waited for emotions to come and was shamed when they did not. This flinty man’s loins had given her life; his labor had fed, clothed, and sheltered her. When she was a schoolgirl, he had quietly protected her peculiar pursuits, even if he didn’t understand them. Had he loved her? He never said. Had she loved him? She never said. It was too late for words now.
Enrico stood nervously beside her, tugged at her hand. He was the only young child in the room.
“Can you see Grandpa? Do you want me to lift you up?”
He shook his head no. “I saw,” he whispered. “Grandpa isn’t going to wake up, is he?”
“No, sweetheart. He has died. Remember, like the dead robin we found in the yard? Everything that lives, stops living sometime. It’s how nature works.”
“Me too?”
Emma’s eyes stung and she knelt to embrace Enrico. “Don’t worry. It won’t happen for a long, long time.”
Tears ran down Enrico’s face. “Willie at school said the soldiers that went off to war are going to get killed. Is Daddy going to get killed?”
Now Emma, in spite of her best effort to protect Enrico, was crying too. “No, no, honey. Daddy is safe. Grandpa was just very old and sick.”
Emma turned from the coffin and, holding Enrico firmly with her left hand, shook hands with Bjorn, Susan, and their nearly grown sons, who seemed embarrassed by her obvious grief, whose causes they mistook. Beside them stood her sister Kirsten, whom she had not seen in many years.
; Oddly, Kirsten’s husband Kurt and her daughters were not with her. She was now in her late forties, and the years had not been kind: her hair was graying, her face lined and hardened. Was she still angry with Emma for not having attended their mother’s funeral fifteen years earlier?
Kirsten’s eyes widened at Emma’s tears. She offered a limp hand. “Well, better late than never.”
“Please, Kirsten, can’t we put that behind us?”
Kirsten shrugged, inclined her head to indicate a desire to speak privately. At the side of the room she whispered, “I suppose you know, he left the farm, everything, to Bjorn, nothing to us.”
“No, I didn’t know, but . . . well, I guess . . . since Bjorn has been running the farm all this time . . . Bjorn and Susan and the boys . . . I suppose it makes sense. The oldest son usually inherits the farm. It hurts not to get anything; I can see that, but I guess I didn’t expect much. I’ve been gone so long. It’s all right with me.”
“Well, it’s not all right with me. He should have left it in equal shares. Kurt was so mad, he wouldn’t come to the viewing. Bjorn could have bought us out. Prices for milk, corn, and meat are way up now with the war and all. And it’s going to be a long war, it looks like. He’ll make a lot of money.”
“Oh, God, how can you say that? My husband is in the Army now. If the war goes on long, it’ll take Bjorn’s and Susan’s boys. Just because you have only girls. I don’t give a damn what it does for farm prices!”
Kirsten turned without speaking and walked away. Does death always bring out the worst in families?
After the funeral the next day, Emma asked Bjorn to drop her and Enrico off in Stanton Falls two hours in advance of her train’s departure for Chicago, so she could visit the Oosterfelds. Bjorn delegated the task to his older son Peter, who was happy for the chance to drive the family car. The youth’s striking resemblance to Henrik unsettled Emma, and he in turn was shy because he hardly knew his aunt and little cousin.
Emma broke the silence with what she hoped was a gentle question. “How do you like high school, Peter? You’re a junior now?”
He shrugged. “Yeah. It’s OK. I wanted to get on the basketball team, but practice is after school, and Dad said I had to be home for chores. I’m sixteen now, so I can drop out.”
“Oh, don’t do that. You’ll be so much better prepared for the future with more education. I guess you’d expect me to say that, but it’s true.”
“I don’t see how school helps me much, ’cause I don’t know what I want to do. I don’t like farmin’ much. Maybe if I could have my own place. Couple years, if the war’s still goin’ on, guess I’ll join the army.”
“Well, I hope it’s over and you don’t have to go. And we get Joe home again. Peter, war is terrible. It just about killed your Uncle Henrik. It did destroy him mentally.”
“What ever happened to him? They never talk about it.”
Emma bit her lip. “He just disappeared. We don’t know what happened. I think he jumped a railroad car and became a hobo, but no one really knows. Did anyone tell you that you look just like him? I was so fond of him. It makes me want to hug you.” She lost the battle against tears. Peter fell into an embarrassed silence.
EMMA MOUNTED THE familiar stairs at the side of the grocery store, slowly to accommodate Enrico’s short legs. Piet greeted her and Enrico at the upstairs door. He was even more thin and aged than the last time she had seen him.
“Come in, come in. We’re so glad you came to see us. Sorry about your father. We couldn’t come to the viewing or the funeral, because Hannah has been poorly. Heart trouble. She can hardly get around anymore, but, here, come say hello. She’s lying down.”
Hannah was lying on a sofa under a blanket, clearly very feeble and breathing with difficulty. She waved a bony hand toward Emma. “Come here, dear girl. And little Enrico. Forgive me for not getting up.”
Enrico hung back shyly.
“You remember Hannah, sweetheart?” Emma said.
He nodded.
Hannah patted his hand. “Such a beautiful child. Your mommy is like a daughter to us, Enrico.”
Emma gently kissed her cheek, thin and dry as crepe paper. They made small talk, avoiding the painful questions that hung in the air: with no family in the community how were they coping? How would Piet manage after Hannah died? Emma longed to tell them how grateful she was for their support when she had struggled financially, but even more, for their affectionate kindness, for their having been, in a way, parents to her, but she knew they would be embarrassed by such overt emotion. She wanted to say goodbye to Hannah, who would surely die before Emma would return to Stanton Mills, but the best she could manage before they left was to kiss the old lady again and say, “I hope you will be much better soon. Thank you for all you and Piet have done for me.”
Emma was unusually quiet on the train as they returned to Harrington.
Enrico leaned close to her, then looked up, brown eyes imploring. “Mama, you be happy, OK?”
CHAPTER 22
1942 -1943
BY THE FALL of 1942 the war—it was now being called World War Two—had reached its tentacles into Harrington, Ohio. The number of students on campus dropped sharply. Rumors circulated that Harrington College was threatened with closure because of low enrollments and that only generous gifts and loans from Miss Harrington kept the College open.
For the first time in the history of the college, the majority of the students were women. Many men had volunteered for military service after Pearl Harbor; others had been drafted. All men under forty-five were registered for the draft and nervously awaited their fate. Arguments and resentments over deferments were common. Emma had never seen such attention to radio broadcasts and newspapers before. Strange names entered everyday speech: El Alamein, Guadalcanal, Stalingrad. Rationing of gasoline and rubber tires, sugar and coffee began. The news of death and destruction was everywhere, yet the little campus town was quiet. An air of nervous unreality prevailed.
Emma taught much smaller classes and fewer of them—not many coeds enrolled in biology that fall. Without Joe to encourage her and help with their domestic chores, her genetic experiments faltered, then halted. Although Enrico, now in second grade, was in school all day, Emma needed to be with him as much as possible when he was at home. He missed his father grievously. He became more serious and fearful than he had been before. He held imaginary conversations with Joe and hoarded his father’s letters in a cigar box. He occasionally wet the bed, which he had not done since he was three.
Only through separation had Emma learned how deeply she had fallen in love, how her life had been transformed. Once so self-sufficient, she felt herself moving through her days automatically, puppet-like, in black and white instead of the vivid colors that were now being used in movies.
Joe’s ready affection, expressiveness, and energy had become a part of her life. His enthusiasm and encouragement drove her research when she became discouraged. And, oh, how she missed him physically, his frequent embraces and kisses, the intense pleasure of their lovemaking and blissful gratitude as they drifted into sleep afterward. He wrote faithfully every week, a letter for Emma and another letter for Enrico. He joked about the stupidity of military life and routines, and constantly reassured them of his safety. On infrequent weekend leaves he visited Washington, Baltimore, and Maryland’s Eastern Shore and wrote vivid accounts of his experiences.
Emma did not hide her longing for him in her letters, but she felt it was her duty to seem as cheerful and independent as she could.
IN EARLY NOVEMBER Emma received a phone call from a weary and depressed Piet Oosterfeld informing her that Hannah had died. Although Piet protested that it was unnecessary, Emma made the train trip through the dreary late fall countryside to Stanton Falls for Hannah’s funeral. She offered Enrico the choice to stay behind with Mrs. Schroeder, but he refused and hung closely to her side during the two-day trip. Of her family, only Bjorn and Susan attended the funeral. Altho
ugh Emma and Enrico stayed with them on the farm for one night, their conversations seemed stiff and hollow. Had they noticed that Emma grieved Hannah’s passing more than she had her mother’s and father’s deaths?
After the funeral guests had drifted away, Emma took her leave from Piet.
“I know you’ll be lonely, Piet, I wish I were closer,” she said as she held his spotted and bony hand.
“Ah, don’t worry, Emma. I’ll be joining her soon.”
“Oh, Piet, don’t say that.” Emma choked.
“It’s all right, dear girl. You know, she didn’t say much, but Hannah loved you like a daughter. As do I.” They embraced, a bit stiffly, but with feeling.
“I’m a biologist,” she said softly, “but some parents are not related to their children by blood. Like you and Hannah.” Then she turned away, because she knew that tears would embarrass Piet and upset Enrico.
Piet Oosterfeld died a month later. There were rumors around Stanton Mills that it was by his own hand, but the coroner and the undertaker refused to confirm them. Emma was named the sole heir to the modest Oosterfeld estate, which provoked yet more gossip.
JOE WAS GRANTED leave for Christmas. It took him four days to get to Harrington because he first went to Chicago to visit his family. He reported that the trains were jammed with soldiers and sailors. He breezed into the house on a gust of cold snowy air in a thick brown Army overcoat, smelling of stale cigarette smoke, his cheeks flushed, and enfolded Emma and Enrico in his arms.
They had decorated the house with a small Christmas tree, candles, and holly. Emma had laid in supplies for favorite dishes that she knew Joe and she would enjoy cooking together. Joe and Enrico had wild romps. Joe and Emma made love with an intensity that attempted, but could not quite achieve, the expression of all that bound them together and they feared losing.
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