Intuition

by Allegra Goodman

  “Oh, there you are,” the driver said.

  “This is our stop,” Charlotte snapped.

  “Relax,” Louisa murmured, and Charlotte shot her a look, because her sister sounded so much like Ann.

  They tumbled out the doors, narrowly avoiding a slush puddle, and carried their bags across the two-lane highway that cut through the campus. They had both attended Hill themselves, and they felt almost old and wise as they trudged across the vast and muddy fields toward the main quad. Parrish Hill had an ethereal, storybook quality, as if it had been fixed in time one hundred years before. To the south, the ground sloped quietly down to the great pond. In the west, a bunch of students trundled off, like farm girls in a John Everett Millais painting, cheeks glowing in the rosy afternoon light, lacrosse sticks pitched over their shoulders.

  Louisa took a deep breath. How sweet the air was after the stale city. She had forgotten.

  A small figure was running toward them. They could see her from far off. Eventually Kate dashed up, breathing hard.

  “Have you heard anything?” she asked.

  Charlotte shook her head. “We were probably on the bus already if Mom tried to call.”

  “Oh.” Kate took one of Louisa's bags.

  “It's light,” Louisa said. “I can carry it myself.”

  “No, I will. You're the guest,” said Kate.

  Louisa looked at Charlotte, amused and touched by how happy Kate was to see them. Hill was such a beautiful, desolate place.

  “Are you hungry?” Kate asked. “There's an opening reception in the old gym, but it's not till eight. We can have an early dinner.” She was wearing a brown corduroy skirt and there was a run in her tights. Her parka was ancient, faded, and green.

  “You should really hit up Mom for some new clothes,” said Charlotte.

  “Well, it's not like she has time to go shopping this week,” Kate replied in the reproachful tones that had earned her the family nickname Kate the Saint.

  The three of them walked directly into the Commons, picked up cafeteria trays, and stood in line. Out of habit, Charlotte reached for her Harvard ID card, and then remembered that no cards were required. Guests came and went freely for dinner. There were no security guards or keys. The school was simply too remote to make such precautions necessary.

  Dinner in hand, the three cast about for a few moments. “Where do you want to sit?” Louisa asked.

  “I don't know,” said Kate.

  “Well, where are your friends?” asked Charlotte.

  Stricken, Kate scanned the dining hall. She wasn't sure she could scare up enough people at any given table to qualify.

  “Your pseudofriends? Your imaginary friends?” Charlotte pressed.

  “All right, fine.” Kate led her sisters to the far edge of a rather literary-looking group, where she introduced them to a French girl named Sylvie, who wore a Hermès scarf; a spectacled young fogy named Stephen; a jolly, pudgy type named Monty; a sophisticate named Nick; and a small kid named Matthew, who was clearly the Jewish one. Each of them said hello graciously. Then they continued talking among themselves about the spring production of Equus.

  As usual, Kate was left to contemplate her dinner. She began to pick at her ravioli swimming in tomato sauce, her dish of chocolate pudding, her two slices of garlic bread. She was almost accepted by the others, certainly tolerated, but she was not one of them. She worked with them on the literary magazine, but her poetry was never picked. She was secretary of the drama club, but no one considered her an actor; she'd never had a part on stage. Sad to say, she was rather common at Hill. She was not African, or even African-American. She had no uncles in the Senate. Her father was not a Wall Street wizard. Her mother was not a famous activist, nor did her family attend the season in New York. Hill prided itself on its diversity. Students came from every sort of privileged background. They overcame stunning deprivations, as well. Here again, Kate fell short. She had not escaped the killing fields of Cambodia or been plucked like a rose from inner-city Baltimore by the scholarship committee. The Hill literati were fond of her, but she could not claim them as close friends.

  Stephen was a little different. He was charming, even chummy when he chose to be. People said his grandfather was rich, but his parents had raised him on a commune in Oregon. He loved arcane bits of information, rare books, antiques. He'd bought a Victorian-era walking stick at a shop in Boston and been suspended for it, under the stricture that no weapons were permitted on school grounds. He claimed his middle name was Daedalus. This seemed fanciful and pretentious—but you never knew with him. It might have been true.

  “Hey, Kate,” he called from across the table. Louisa stared at him; he looked so familiar. “Can I borrow your Tristram Shandy?”

  “Where's yours?”

  “Lost.”

  “Well, where did you lose it?”

  “My dear,” he said professorially, “if I knew where I'd lost it, obviously it wouldn't be lost.”

  “Don't lend him anything,” said Monty.

  “Yeah, I wouldn't,” Matthew told her.

  “Please. I beg of you,” Stephen said, and came around and knelt before Kate on bended knee.

  “I'm sure it's on reserve in the library,” she told him.

  “Malignant thing,” he said.

  Then Louisa remembered where she had seen Stephen.

  “He was Prospero,” she whispered to Charlotte.

  He'd played Prospero in the school's Tempest the year before. Louisa recognized the whimsical expression on his face, the round glasses, the way he spoke: formal, and at the same time flip. He had been such an odd image with those glasses and his wooden staff. Such a mix of innocence and sophistication, part Phileas Fogg at the Reform Club, part Saint-Exupéry's Little Prince. And now he must have been at least six inches taller, so lanky, and carelessly bemused. And trying to borrow books from Kate!

  Charlotte viewed Stephen with a gimlet eye. After all, she knew something about callow youths.

  That night Charlotte and Louisa curled up in sleeping bags in Kate's attic room. Years before, some girl had stuck glow-in-the-dark stickers on the overhanging eaves. Galaxies of tiny stars and planets filled the room as soon as Kate turned out the light.

  “It's like a planetarium.” Louisa lay on her back, admiring the view.

  But Charlotte got straight to the point. “You should watch out for Stephen,” she told Kate.

  “Why?” asked Kate.

  “Because he's trouble,” Charlotte said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “She thinks he likes you,” Louisa said, amused.

  Kate sat up in bed, genuinely surprised. “He does not.”

  “Definitely stay away from him,” Charlotte warned.

  “Really?” Kate was piqued by the suggestion. She'd always assumed Stephen liked boys better than girls, but then she wasn't sure. Maybe he wasn't sure either.

  “He's bad news.”

  “Why?”

  “Don't listen to her,” Louisa counseled. “She's grumpy, and she's off men.”

  “You are? Even Jeff?”

  “Who?”

  “You broke up with Jeff?”

  “Dumped him,” said Charlotte.

  “Dumped cranberry juice on top of him,” amended Louisa.

  “Well, Dad will be—”

  “I'm not discussing it with Dad,” snapped Charlotte.

  “She's afraid of making him too happy,” Louisa told Kate.

  “Very funny,” Charlotte said.

  “He'll find out, anyway,” said Louisa, who hadn't been nearly so philosophical when she broke up with her own boyfriend the year before.

  “I just wish—” Kate began.

  Charlotte interrupted, “Oh, don't say you like Stephen.”

  “No, I just wish Mom would call from DC. It isn't like her not to call.”

  “They'll be here tomorrow,” said Louisa, “and then she'll give you the bl
ow-by-blow.”

  “I hope Dad didn't lose his temper,” Kate said in a small voice.

  “Of course he didn't lose his temper,” Charlotte said. “That's what lawyers are for.”

  “To stop you from losing it?”

  “To lose your temper for you.”

  “I'd kind of thought they'd make it up here after all and surprise me,” said Kate.

  “Come on,” Louisa told her gently. “You knew it would be us.”

  “In loco parentis,” Kate murmured.

  “By the time they flew to Boston, and got the car, and drove out here . . .”

  “I know, but I sort of thought your coming was just one of Mom's contingency plans,” Kate said. “Do you think if the hearings are running late, that's a bad sign?”

  “No! Why are you always so alarmist?” Charlotte asked, although that was exactly what she'd been thinking.

  The glowing stars faded, and the sisters lay in silence as they thought about their father. Unjustly accused, would he lose his position at the institute? Would he have to resign from Harvard Medical School? These questions did not spring from material concerns—losing their house, or dropping out of school, never occurred to them; they were too tough-minded, and at the same time, too sheltered for such ideas. Their worries were all for their father. Their identities were still tied to his, wrapped up in his cause and his career. His brilliance was the centerpiece of their family. His impossible hours, his weekends on call, his absences had structured their lives. His work as a healer, his research, his arrogant benevolence all comprised the central myth of their childhood, and they half dreaded the demolition of that myth, the smashing of their household god. What would become of the family then? What new religion would guide them?

  What would become of him? Sandy Glass had never felt better in his life. He'd turned the tables on his accusers and he was jubilant. As Zouzoua had predicted, the media stampede had turned from Feng. Redfield, with his choice of words, by turns shocking, racist, and unfortunate, had raised the red flag and drawn public fury on himself.

  The uproar over Redfield's comments swirled in all the newspapers, and privately, Sandy's own lawyer called him brilliant as the articles on Redfield's faux pas poured in: opinion pieces chastising the congressman, official statements from the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, and the presidents of major Jewish organizations. There were requests for Sandy to speak to the medical chapter of Boston's Combined Jewish Philanthropies, and calls for Redfield to resign as chair of the Committee on Energy and Commerce. What a delightful pickle! What a savory stew!

  Few enjoyed the brouhaha more than Sandy's own patients. They embraced him at office visits, and hailed him as a returning champion in their rooms.

  “Redfield really put his foot in it,” said Mary Stoughton. She had a breathing tube in her nose for extra oxygen, and spoke in wheezy bursts, but she was planning to make it to her ninetieth birthday.

  “He did, indeed,” said Sandy.

  “It's the most absurd thing I've heard in my life,” Mary said to the elderly daughter keeping watch by her bed. “He called Dr. Glass a Nazi. I said to the nurse this morning—‘They've called Dr. Glass a Nazi!' Of course, Redfield must resign his post.”

  “We'll see,” said Sandy, grinning.

  “Mother is drafting a letter to Mr. Redfield,” said Helen Stoughton, who had been taking dictation on a yellow legal pad.

  “That's what I like,” said Sandy, pressing Mary's hand in his. Her skin was white and papery, and the blue veins showed through. Old age had overtaken her, and cancer was wasting her, but she clung tenaciously to each day. She still knew the time, and followed the fortunes of her associates. She'd always enjoyed her lively Jewish doctor, but never more than when he was in the news. He was on her team. Indeed, he was her team, battling in the papers mightily, fighting Redfield and the whole House of Representatives. Mary never doubted that he did all this on her behalf.

  “The next thing is, we ramp up our work here on the home front,” Sandy told Marion at lunch.

  “I wish we could,” Marion said.

  “And why can't we? What's the problem now?”

  “Well,” said Marion, “we've got a lot to finish with Feng and Prithwish on the bone cancer paper.”

  “That little thing?” Sandy scoffed. “I thought you'd knocked that one off weeks ago.”

  He snatched up the draft from her desk. “You've still got Robin on there as a coauthor?”

  “It was her project before she left,” Marion said simply.

  He practically laughed with exasperation, she was so scrupulous.

  “She made a contribution,” Marion said, “however small.”

  “And this would be the same Robin who is attempting to destroy our careers?”

  “We've already had this discussion.”

  “It's like including Benedict Arnold on the list of Founding Fathers. You know—for his early contributions to the American Revolution.” He skimmed the first couple of pages, heavily annotated with Marion's red pen. “You are spending an inordinate amount of time on this. It's hardly worth your attention.”

  She didn't answer. He was right; the results were modest, but she couldn't help herself. Relieved as she was to be done with subcommittee hearings, impressed as she had been with Sandy's performance, her anxiety was such that she could not let any ambiguity in Feng's paper pass.

  “And Cliff?” Sandy asked her.

  “He's struggling a little,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Why do you think? He's overwhelmed, and he's distracted by lawyers and reporters, preparation for the hearings—”

  “Oh, please.” Sandy cut her off. “Let's snap out of it, shall we? I am so goddamn tired of these excuses. This is exactly the time when he should be doing his best work. We should be cracking the whip so Cliff gets the job done. Show ORIS what kind of stuff his results are made of.”

  “It's easy for you to say,” Marion said reprovingly. She was feeling overwhelmed herself. On the one hand, she wanted to burrow into editorial work, revising the bone tumor paper until the storm outside blew over. On the other, it was maddening to hone these minor contributions while the great thrust of the lab's efforts remained in abeyance. Cliff's new article, unpublishable until the inquiry was over, remained in escrow.

  She had begun to feel like a woman with a bag of gold hidden in her house. She longed to secure her treasure in an academic journal, but she had to wait at least another month for the results of the ORIS inquiry. She'd had such plans for Cliff's work, such schemes for new experiments. She'd scarcely told Sandy the half of them, and now she despaired lest thieves carry her ideas off or, more likely, forge their own versions independently. She wondered if circumstances were distorting her perspective. The inquiry that kept her from publishing, the scrutiny that hampered all their work, the defense that took up so much of her time, only seemed to magnify the potential of R-7. Paradoxically, in her mind, Cliff's results seemed better and better the longer ORIS questioned them. She, who had always practiced diffidence, now suffered from the suspicion that she'd touched something great.

  “The inquiry takes its toll,” she said quietly.

  “Look, the inquiry is something we can beat. Scientifically it's irrelevant. It's pure politics; it has no merit. Have you seen the paper? We've made the point abundantly clear. Letting ORIS get to us is the big mistake. Cliff should be working harder than ever.”

  “I don't think you realize—”

  “I realize everything,” Sandy cut her off.

  He had just that morning seen Kristen Braverman, a breast cancer patient a lifetime younger than Mary Stoughton. Kristen's children were still in grade school. Sandy was treating her aggressively. Her face was gaunt, her skin had a gray tinge, poisoned as she was from chemo and her even more virulent disease. She wasn't doing as well as he had hoped, but there were other drugs. Sandy had tried to impress this upon her.

  Her eyes were pure
blue, fear blue. But he never looked too long into his patients' eyes. Far safer to take their hands, and laugh, and joke. He had taken Kristen's hand firmly in his and told her, “If you think you feel bad, imagine how your tumors feel.”

  She had smiled wanly at her husband, as if to say “This is what I have to put up with from my doctor.” But Mike Braverman was not yet ready to make jokes with an oncologist. He was still reeling from his wife's diagnosis, still growing accustomed to the idea that his wife could die. He was just a greenhorn searching for the words, the funds, the winter clothes for life in this new country of disease.

  “What other options do we have?” Mike asked Sandy Glass continually. That morning he followed Sandy down the hall and past the nurses' station, and into the pastel lounge, and still, somehow, he pressed for a better forecast of what lay ahead.

  Sandy might have paused to commiserate with Braverman; he might have let the tears fall, but he did not believe in mourning prematurely. Conversely, he might have brushed off the grieving husband and moved on to his next appointment, but he was never so overtly brusque, even when he was out of time. A few words about the spirit? A little prayer? Advice on the healing powers of meditation? Sandy left that to the chaplains. He stood, instead, with his patient's husband by the floor-to-ceiling window in the lounge, and gazed out at the city with its row houses and greening parks, its labyrinthine streets turning and feinting and doubling back upon themselves. He gazed out across the Charles to Cambridge, and he said, “We're working on what can be done.” He spoke with the scientist's version of the royal we, which he knew families found most comforting. “We're working on new treatments even now.”

  “Why don't you stop making excuses for Cliff and send him on rounds with me?” Sandy told Marion. “That would light a fire under his—sorry, imbue him with a sense of urgency.”

  Cliff did have a sense of urgency, and still he struggled. Downstairs, he scanned each cage, looking in on his pink wriggling charges. He gazed at his newly healthy mice, the latest group he'd identified as in remission. Quickly, he inspected the troops row by row. One cage caught his eye. Were some mice missing? There were supposed to be four inside.