Lady Professor

by Switzer, Robert L. ;

  They were so keen to make the holiday a joyful one that Emma sensed that they were trying too hard. There were hints of artificiality, of desperation to their merriment. Joe seemed distracted. This was not the easy, natural way of their intimate lives together. What was this long separation, this war doing to them? Finally after a week together, two days before Joe would have to return to his unit, Emma massaged Joe’s neck as they lay in bed together.

  “Joe, something’s wrong. What is it? Has something happened? I can feel it. Have you . . . met someone?”

  “Oh, God, no, Emma. There will never be anyone but you. Don’t ever think that. But . . . yes, there is something I’ve been dreading telling you. Because I know how you will worry. I didn’t want to spoil Christmas with it.”

  “What, Joe, what?”

  “Sweetheart, please try not to worry about this, but I have been reassigned to go overseas.”

  “Overseas? Where? What for?”

  “It’s all hush-hush. I’m not supposed to tell anyone. Not even you. But the Army’s getting set to invade Italy from north Africa as soon as Rommel’s been run out.”

  “Italy? Oh, no. They’re not sending you into combat?”

  “No, no. Not that. They found out that I speak Italian and some German. They want me to interrogate captured Italian soldiers, you know, for intelligence. Get ’em to tell us where troops and defenses are, orders they got, that sort of thing.”

  “That sounds dangerous to me. Won’t you have to be where the fighting is?”

  “No. I’ll be behind the lines. They will bring the prisoners back to HQ. Word is, the Italians are pretty demoralized. They expect that a lot of them will be pretty cooperative. They’re sick of fighting the Germans’ war.”

  “Well, I dread it. I wish you didn’t have to go over there. It was a lot safer at Aberdeen. I don’t care if you were bored and your talents wasted.” Emma buried her face on Joe’s chest, kissed the beloved smooth skin. “When do you have to go?”

  “I don’t know exactly. When I get back, they’re sending me to some special training to learn Italian military terms and learn about the kinds of information I’m supposed to get, all that. Then, I’ll have to take a troop ship across the Atlantic—that should be some ride in the early spring—and join up with a unit there. The timing and attack routes are all big secrets.”

  “I don’t want you to go,” Emma cried. “I was so single-minded throughout my life until I met you. All I wanted was to study science, to teach science, to do research. I shut everything else out. Even my family, except for Henrik. And the goddamn war took him from me. You changed all that. And now it’s trying to get you. You—you and Enrico—are the most precious things in my life now. More precious than all the science. I don’t want you to go! I don’t.”

  “Oh, sweetheart, my love, I don’t have a choice. When you’re in the Army, you have to go where they send you. You know that. But, believe me, I’ll be careful. I’ll be the biggest coward in the Army. I’ll stay way back and make chit-chat with the paisanos. No heroics, I promise. Please, don’t worry.”

  ON A HOT AUGUST afternoon in 1943 the doorbell rang. A boy on a bicycle handed Emma a Western Union telegram. He avoided looking at her and sped away without waiting for a tip. Dear God, no. Heart pounding in her throat, she ripped a yellow sheet from the envelop and read:

  THE SECRETARY OF WAR DESIRES ME TO EXPRESS HIS DEEP REGRET THAT YOUR HUSBAND FIRST LEUTENANT JOSEPH F BELLAFIORI WAS KILLED IN ACTION IN SICILY ON FIFTEEN AUGUST CONFIRMING LETTER FOLLOWS—

  Is it worse knowing or not knowing? Joe’s body lay hastily buried in the unforgiving soil of Sicily. Emma would never see it again. Did the bullet pass cleanly through his chest and did he fall to the ground, his chestnut eyes wide with disbelief? Or was there an explosion that ripped his beautiful body into a bloody tangle of flesh, bones, metal, and khaki shreds, the former human recognizable only from his dog tags? Were there flames, burning gasoline torturing his scorched, suffocating body? Did he die quickly, his last sound a surprised grunt? Oh, God grant him—and her—that. Or had he lain writhing on the ground, crying out for all that he was about to lose, crying out for Emma and Enrico, for the joy of living, for help, for the pain to end? It was too horrible to bear, yet the images stalked Emma, attacked her at night, threatened her sanity.

  The letter from Col. Brinkmeyer, Joe’s commanding officer, didn’t answer those questions. It simply stated that he had been killed by “a surprise attack on his convoy by German aircraft.” He said that Joe had been “an excellent intelligence officer, effective in his work and popular with his fellow soldiers” and concluded with “profoundest sympathy” and asked her to remember that Joe had “sacrificed his life for his country.”

  How she hated that cliché. How many times would it be repeated to widows and mothers and fatherless children before this war was over? His country had wasted Joe’s life. She had lost the love of her life and Enrico had lost his adored father. The world had lost a brilliant scientist and teacher. The bullets or shrapnel or whatever the hell they were had torn bleeding holes in her life. How in God’s name could she go on living?

  CHAPTER 23

  1950

  EMMA CLOSED THE folder, leaned back in her office chair, pushed her glasses up to her forehead, and rubbed her eyes. She was still getting used to her bifocals, she supposed, or was it simply fatigue from reading four senior honors theses this afternoon?

  So many students asked her to direct their honors research that she could only accept four each year. This year two had chosen topics in traditional biology: one had conducted a study of the parasitic wasps that paralyze cicadas with their stings, lay their eggs in the bodies and store them away in underground burrows, and the other had followed the succession of microbiological species that developed in a rural pond over the course of last summer and this spring. Two others worked in Emma’s lab on isolation and characterization of mutant strains of Neurospora that required amino acids for growth.

  Her office door opened quietly. ’Rico. Only he came into Emma’s office without knocking. He plopped his books onto her desk and bent to kiss her cheek.

  ”Hi, Mama. Sorry I’m late. Baseball practice went on longer than usual.”

  “Oh, I was so busy with these theses that I didn’t notice.”

  Emma rose from her chair and embraced him. How she loved him. His smiling entrance was like the warmth of summer sun. He looked so much like Joe that her heart ached. At fifteen he was already taller than Joe had been and more slender, almost willowy, but he had the same dark curly hair and amber-brown eyes, the same easy grin. His voice had changed last year—it still startled her to hear a deep man’s voice in the house—and his face was losing its boyishness. Dark shadows covered his upper lip and jaws.

  He needed Joe to teach him how to shave, but Joe was gone, wasn’t he? Joe would have been so proud of him. What would he have thought, though, when Enrico announced when he started high school that from now on he wished to be known as Hank—short for Henry—not Enrico or ’Rico? Too foreign sounding, he said. His friends complied, but Emma persisted in calling him ’Rico in private.

  In the bleak days after Joe’s death Emma wrote a list of reasons to go on living. The first item was Enrico. Then followed: Science, Teaching, and “Because Joe would want me to: Honor Joe.” Now, nearly seven years later that list, tattered and tear-stained, was still in the corner of the blotter on her desk. The list did its job; it reminded Emma again and again of what she had loved and why she loved it. Gradually she not only went on living, she found purpose and muted happiness in life again.

  As is common for an only child raised by a widowed parent, Enrico/Hank developed into a serious, responsible, adult-like child, not wounded, but very aware of the possibility of being wounded, protective of the mother who had protected him. He was saved from excessive seriousness by having inherited Joe’s playful, emotionally expressive character. He was quick to cry, quick to anger, quick to forgive.
He expressed affection without inhibition and had many friends. He wasn’t a natural athlete, but pursued sports with determination. Emma saw that the coaches of his sports teams often became father figures for him. If Joe were still alive, he’d surely have lured Enrico into his lab to work on his projects by now.

  Emma squeezed Enrico’s shoulder. “’Rico, how would you like to work in the lab with me this summer?”

  Why had she not invited him to do this before? Perhaps she was wary of overwhelming her son. He was so much like Joe as it was; she resisted the urge to mold him into a scientist-collaborator like his father had been. The boy needed freedom to develop on his own path. Yet, it would be a joy to share her love of research with him.

  “Would I have to give up baseball?”

  “No, of course not. Your schedule would be completely flexible—whenever you are free and I’m in the lab too.”

  A frown crossed Enrico’s face. “What would I have to do?”

  “Well, you know I do genetics . . .”

  “The science of heredity, yeah, but I don’t know much about it.”

  “Don’t worry about that. I’ll teach you as we go along. I’ve moved away from pure genetics to using it as a tool for figuring out how cells work, how they take the simple chemicals we can feed them and convert them into the complicated molecules that cells are made of. It’s called biosynthesis.”

  “Oh. So how do you do that?”

  “The metaphor I like to use is an assembly line, like in a factory where an automobile is put together out of thousands of small pieces. Each worker puts on one piece and passes it on to the next worker. So, in the cell the worker that puts on a piece is an enzyme, a clever protein molecule that knows how to make a very specific chemical reaction go really fast.”

  “I thought protein was something you were supposed to have in your diet.”

  “It is. Proteins are really important components of all cells. I’ll have to teach you more about proteins later, but for now, just think of them as workers on a biosynthetic assembly line.”

  “OK. But I don’t see what genetics has to do with it.”

  “That’s what we do in the lab. You see, the information needed to make an enzyme is inherited. It’s carried on an inherited element called a gene. Every cell learns how to make its enzymes from its parents. Here’s the important thing: for each enzyme, there’s a single corresponding gene. Your Daddy and I were the first to prove that.”

  Emma’s pride in that statement was clouded with residual anger. Phillip Schleicher. The arrogant swindler. Ah, well, no point in burdening ’Rico with all that.

  “Really? Is that a big deal?”

  “Yes, it is. I’m really proud of what we did. Anyway, here’s how we use that knowledge. Suppose something goes wrong with the gene. It’s defective; it can’t make an enzyme that works. What happens then?”

  “The assembly line stops.”

  “Exactly. The cells with the defective genes are called mutants, and they all inherit the same defect, so you can collect them. And you know that they are mutants because they can’t make whatever the assembly line was making, whereas the cells with normal genes can.”

  “How do you know which is which?”

  “You know how I grow my fungus cells—Neurospora crassa, they’re called—on these Petri dishes?” Emma waved her arm at a bench in her office, where round, flat glass dishes were stacked.

  “Yeah, you mean those dishes with little white spots on them?”

  “Each spot is a pile of cells that all grew from a single cell. So they’re all genetically identical. We call them colonies. Here’s the thing. People have figured out that the fungus can grow on really simple medium, just some sugar and salts. They’ve got assembly lines for all of the hundreds of complicated molecules that they need to make new cells. And genes for every worker—each enzyme—on every one of the many assembly lines. So if we can isolate mutations that knock out each of the workers on a given assembly line, we can learn a lot about the assembly line and how it works.”

  “I don’t get it. How?”

  “Well, we isolate a lot of mutants that can’t grow unless we add the end product of the assembly line—biosynthetic pathway—that we want to study. Let’s say it’s one of the twenty or so amino acids that the cell needs to make proteins. The parents can grow without it, but the mutants won’t grow unless it’s added to the growth medium. Some of the mutants knock out the same worker; some knock out different workers. We can tell which is which by mapping them. Different genes map to different locations. I’ll teach you how that works. From that we can get a good idea of how many workers—enzyme steps—there are on the pathway.”

  “Seems like a lot of work just to figure out how many steps there are.”

  “It is, and what you really want to know is what each worker does: what chemical reaction the enzyme catalyzes.”

  “Yeah. Can you do that?”

  “Yes. Here’s the trick. Go back to the assembly line. Suppose one worker’s job is to add the front wheels to a car, and he’s not working but all the other ones are. Pretty soon a lot of incomplete cars with only their rear wheels pile up on the line, but no finished cars get made. From looking at what piles up, you can deduce that the missing worker normally does.”

  “Sure, that makes sense.”

  “So it often happens that the mutant strains that we isolate in the lab pile up a substance that’s on the pathway to the final product. If we can isolate it and determine its chemical structure, we get valuable clues about how the pathway works. We would probably have to do that for several different mutations.”

  Enrico passed his hands through his dark curls. “Wow. I’ve got a lot to learn. I don’t know any chemistry yet. Or genetics.”

  “Oh, ’Rico. I so wish your Daddy was here. He’d have loved to teach you. He was a master at the chemistry. I’d isolate and map the genes, and he would isolate the things that piled up in my mutants and determine their chemical structures. We were a great team.”

  Enrico searched Emma’s eyes. He reached across the desk and patted her hand.

  “So, without my biochemist—your Daddy—I work with scientists at other universities who are good at that kind of work,” she continued in a husky voice. “It’s not as much fun as Daddy and I had doing it ourselves, but it’s actually more productive.”

  In fact, Emma had used the methods she had just described to Enrico to establish a nationally respected research program. She benefited from the finding of others that irradiation of the cells with an ultraviolet lamp could be used to increase the frequency of mutations instead of using x-rays, which were dangerous and difficult to control. She isolated and characterized mutant strains that were incapable of growing without the addition of essential compounds, such as amino acids, purines, or pyrimidines that are the fundamental building blocks of the critical large molecules of life: proteins and the nucleic acids DNA and RNA.

  Without Joe to work at her side, she set up a series of research collaborations with biochemists at several universities who had the expertise needed for such work. She provided mutant strains to her collaborators and consulted frequently on their progress on unraveling the chemistry of the pathways and the study of the enzymes catalyzing individual steps in them. Emma was now the co-author on a growing number of research publications in the genetic and biochemical literature. She had become the most nationally prominent researcher on the Harrington College faculty, but Enrico was unaware of this.

  “So what do you want me to do this summer?”

  “Well, one of the assembly lines we don’t know much about yet makes molecules called pyrimidines.” Emma pulled a sheet of paper from her desk and drew a chemical structure. “That’s called uracil. See it’s a ring with four carbons and two nitrogens in it. The cells need it to make DNA, the stuff their genes are made of. Let’s you and I try to find mutants of my bug that can’t grow unless uracil is added to the growth medium. That’ll get us started on figuring
out how it’s made by the cell.”

  “OK. You’ll have to show me everything. I guess I never understood what you were doing in the lab all the time. Kind of like solving puzzles. It doesn’t have anything to do with all the animals and skeletons and stuff like we have in the museum, does it? You know, at school they used to call me the kid who lives in a museum.” Big Joe-like grin.

  Emma laughed. “Did you mind?”

  “Naw, I thought it was cool.”

  “The museum is not for my research. I guess it’s mostly just because I love collecting things. Always have. I used to collect wild birds’ eggs when I was a girl. Your Uncle Henrik and I. Then the collection got so big that I found I could use it for teaching general biology and stimulating interest in biology in school kids.”

  Over the twenty-two years she had been on the faculty in biology at Harrington College, Emma had accumulated a large collection of biological specimens: taxidermically mounted animals and birds—some quite large—carefully labeled boxes of dissected invertebrate and vertebrate species, bottles of creatures preserved in formaldehyde, skeletons, microscope slides and on and on. She had purchased many of these for use in her classes. Others had been given to her by grateful former students who were now biology teachers, researchers, or physicians.

  Emma urged the Dean to establish a natural history museum to display the collection, but the Dean insisted that neither space nor funds were available. So Emma decided to create her own museum—in her home. She was no longer happy living in the home she had shared with Joe, so in 1945 she combined the money she had received from the Oosterfeld estate with the ten thousand dollars in G. I. insurance paid to her after Joe’s death to buy a large Queen Anne style house, the home of a former president of the college, that was located just two blocks from the campus. There was plenty of room for her and ’Rico on the spacious first floor, so she converted the second floor bedrooms into a series of rooms dedicated to the display and study of her natural history collection. Hours were scheduled for students in the college’s biology classes to troop up the grand wooden staircase to the upper level of the house to study the specimens, and once a month, she opened the museum to the general public. Biology teachers in the Harrington public schools were invited to visit the museum with their classes.