Greer was content to work primarily in Marblehead; she had her books, her pollen, her radio, and when Thomas returned from Cambridge, she had him all to herself.
Just before they left Wisconsin she’d completed her dissertation, and now had her Ph.D. The department, as promised, made no mention of the incident, and she was able, without any trouble, to change her topic to the broader field: the floral biogeography of isolated landmasses. If she wanted her degree, she had no choice. The only trouble was with Jo, who had read Thomas’s paper within hours of Greer’s committee meeting. When they had met for dinner that night outside on State Street, Jo stared at her across the red-checkered tablecloth, tapping her fork, waiting for Greer to speak.
“Look, it’s only appropriate that I let you be the first to tell me what you think,” Jo said. “But if you don’t say something soon, I’ll be forced to give you my opinion.”
Greer took a deep breath. “I don’t know what to think.”
“All right, then.” Jo set the fork down. “Do you want to know what I think? Do I have your permission to speak freely?”
“Jo, you can always speak freely.”
“Well, then, get ready, ’cause I’ve got shit to say. You understand, don’t you, that your sweet old husband, your dearest Jackass in the Pulpit, has used your work and passed it off as his own in a national journal. He’s ruined your dissertation, humiliated you in front of your colleagues, and has gotten you to do his grunt work, impeccably, for five years while he flew all over the country playing big-shot scientist.”
Greer steadied her hands on the table. “No one in his position does the grunt work. They all get lab assistants.” She knew she sounded defensive.
“They don’t all get you for a lab assistant. They don’t all get your work. Jesus, Greer. Please, tell me you’re angry, tell me you’re fucking furious, or I’m going . . . well, I’m going to have to smack you.”
But there was something good in Jo’s anger. With each step Jo climbed toward rage, Greer felt herself descend toward composure. “I’m upset,” she said.
“Upset?” Jo’s eyes traveled the neighboring tables in desperation. “Somebody get me some smelling salts. You,” she said, eyebrows arched, “are unconscious.”
“It’s not as simple as you think. I’ve been over this for hours in my head. It’s complicated.”
“I’m ignorant, then. I don’t see any complications.”
“Jo, Thomas and I have been working together for five years. I’ve been gathering data for him, inhis lab, for five years. I used that data for my dissertation, the same data I knew he was using. I should have realized.”
“The data doesn’t matter. It’s the analysis. The equation. That’s not shared property.”
“I know. But we talked about this stuff. Cross-water dispersal. Magnolia population thresholds, beetle populations, the time lapse. All of it.”
“So you talked with him about your dissertation.”
“It’s just that it’s hard to know what was mine and what was his. He had ideas, I had ideas, we talked about them. For God’s sake, he asked me to read his paper. How do I know who borrowed from whom?”
“Are you really asking yourself that?”
Greer suddenly felt tired. She had used up her small store of arguments and clearly could not subdue Jo’s anger. She wished now that Jo had been there for all those talks. Then she would understand why it wasn’t easy. Greer thought of asking Jo simply to leave her be, but knew she would take that as an admission. Finally, she said: “Yes, I really am asking myself that.”
“I’m sorry, but you seem to be stuck in a goddamned swamp of denial here.”
“I’m sure it looks that way to you.”
“You’re forgetting that I work in that lab, that I know Thomas’s research, and that I read your dissertation. I’ll tell you this much, you can deny what happened all you want, but I know, and I’m not going to keep quiet.”
“Jo, this is for me to deal with.”
“You’re not dealing with it.”
“You weren’t there. You weren’t there for our conversations. I know you’re trying to protect me, but you . . .” Greer looked at Jo, who was leaning toward her across the table, her eyes red. What was it in her face? Greer didn’t want to move toward something she could never retreat from, but hadn’t Jo always been waiting for Thomas to mess up? She had never liked him, she refused to. “Jo, you have your own bias here.”
“So let a committee decide. Let an objective group of outsiders evaluate the situation.”
Greer’s hands flew up at this and knocked over her water glass. “What objective group of outsiders? Professor Jenks? Is it not already completely clear to you that nobody would believe in a million years Thomas borrowed even a punctuation mark from me?” She let the glass remain on its side, water spilling across the table and dripping onto her lap. “It wasn’t for a moment a question in anyone’s mind thatI usedhis ideas.”
“That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be a question in your mind. Or a certainty. Jesus, Greer.”
The waiter appeared at that moment, slow and cautious, clearly aware his customers were engaged in a heated debate. He quietly righted Greer’s glass and swept a thick towel across the table. He asked if they had decided on their dinner.
“Lasagna,” said Greer without looking up.
“Same,” said Jo. “And a bottle of red wine.”
“We have a Chianti . . .”
“Anything,” said Greer. She unfolded her napkin and attempted to dry herself. She rubbed at her skirt, her hands happy to be occupied, and tried to avoid Jo’s stare.
“You know, we should have been celebrating tonight.” Jo’s voice sounded far away, like a voice struggling over a tangle of telephone lines. “We should have been ordering champagne. You deserve champagne, Greer. The best champagne in the world. You really do.” Greer dropped the napkin and looked up. Jo’s eyes had filled with tears and now fixed themselves on the tablecloth. “Fuck.”
“Please don’t, Jo.”
“I’m sorry.” Jo wiped roughly at her eyes with the back of her hand. “You just don’t know how much I care about you. How much this kills me.”
“I know,” said Greer. And then, tentatively, “I think I know how you feel.”
“Do you?” Jo said. “Do you really know?”
“I know, Jo. I guess I’ve always known. But . . .”
“You love a man who steals your dissertation. And here I am, ready to do anything for you, and . . . well, what a fucking world.”
“He didn’t plagiarize, Jo. You’ve got to understand.” Saying it felt good. It calmed her. “He didn’t plagiarize.”
Jo shook her head. “I just want to know what you’re going to say to him when he gets back. ‘Congratulations on your paper, honey?’ Yeah. Congratulations,” she spit out, “let me give you a big wet kiss.”
“Jo.”
“Let me see if I can’t give you five more years of my life and work so that you can have your name inNature. ” Jo was looking into the distance, talking to herself now.
“Stop it, Jo, I don’t—”
“Because I’ll do anything my husband asks? Because I’m just a stupid little woman?”
“Jo!” Greer nearly screamed this. People at nearby tables turned to stare at the two of them, dressed for celebration, disheveled by anger.
Jo stood. “I’m sorry, Greer. I can’t help you right now. I’m going to go.”
“You’ve got to trust me.”
“I know.”
“I’ll talk to him.”
“Good,” said Jo, folding her napkin into smaller and smaller squares and setting it neatly on the table. She straightened her fork, slid her water glass to its original position, and pushed in her chair. She then looked at the spot where she’d been sitting and nodded slowly, as though satisfied, or saddened, by how easily she’d managed to erase all traces of herself. In the blue light of the streetlamp Jo seemed paler than usual, almost
ill. “You’d have been better off with Castro,” she said.
Greer couldn’t look at her. “I’d have gone to Cuba with you.” She wanted her words to be sweet, but she knew they sounded like an ending. “Jo,” she said, as if she were calling to a ship on the horizon, so far-off she only thought to whisper.
Then Jo turned and walked slowly up State Street, and Greer watched her best friend disappear into a sea of strangers.
The truth was Greer didn’t exactly believe everything she had told Jo. It wasn’t that she had tried to lie, but she had needed to play devil’s advocate and to see how well the devil fared. The committee meeting still seemed a nightmare from which she was waiting to awaken. She reread her paper, she reread Thomas’s, she wandered through the lab replaying their conversations—too many to keep straight—and in the end came up with only this: Thomas couldn’t havestolen her equation. He wouldn’t have offered to let her read his paper if he’d beenhiding anything. The whole thing was simply an awful coincidence.
“Good God, Lily. I can’t believe Jenks said that, implied that. I’m going to phone him right now.”
“Thomas, talking to him won’t matter. I don’t want him to take it back. It’s perfectly clear what Jenks and the committee as a whole think, whether or not you muscle them into recanting.”
He had returned from his conference at Harvard, put his suitcase in the bedroom, and immediately pulled champagne from the refrigerator. “Only the best twice-fermented carbon dioxide bubbly for my wife.”
Greer took the bottle from his hand, settled into the couch, and told the story of the meeting.
Now Thomas was pacing the living room. “They obviously don’t understand what happens when two people are working with the same data. There are a limited number of paths the mind can follow.”
“Is that what happened?”
“For God’s sake, I trust you, Lily.”
“Isthat the question?”
“I know you’d never intentionally borrow my work, or anyone’s. That’s what I want to tell Jenks.”
“That’s not what I’m asking.”
He stopped pacing. “Whatare you asking?”
“What do you think I’m asking, Thomas?” She had practiced this a thousand times. Be calm, she told herself, unaccusing. Of course he hadn’t stolen her work; but she needed some sort of explanation. The words came slowly. “You know, you did read my dissertation.”
“Jesus, Lily! You’re not even for a moment thinking . . . Talk to Bruce, look at my notebooks! We’ve been toying around with equations for over a year, well before I even looked at your paper.”
“Excellent,” said Greer. “I’ll talk to Bruce. Problem”—she raised her hands dramatically in the air—“solved!”
“Lily, let’s stay focused.”
“All right, then, focus.” She turned to him. “Were you working on dispersal equations before I told you what I was working on?”
“Lily, don’t you remember? I was the one who toldyou what to look at. I was and still am your teacher, for God’s sake. Your advisor. That was your choice. You came to me, you needed direction, and I gave it to you.”
“I didn’tneed direction, Thomas. I turned to you, and not as my teacher or as my colleague, but as my husband, to share my work with you.”
“Your work?”The words were pitched too high, and each one rang like a bell of disdain. “Lily, I love you dearly, you know that, but please. The Magnolia Project was and is mine. And I couldn’t be more pleased to have you in the lab, but it’s not exactly your work.”
Then why was she working longer and harder than he was, than Bruce was, to get results? “I can’t believe you.”
“Lily, I’m telling you the truth. I respect you enough to be honest with you. Do you want me to humor you? Do you want me to condescend and pretend you’ve got your own project? Your very own lab?”
She had heard him take this tone with colleagues, at conferences, but never before with her. She was stunned.
“I’m a fucking Ph.D. candidate, Thomas. I’m not supposed to have my own lab.” She hadn’t realized, until this moment, as her body shook with rage, how very badly she wanted his approval, had wanted it from the beginning. “But yes, I do have my own work. Or I would if I hadn’t spent so much goddamned time trying to make sure no one in the world finds a speck of pollen predating yours.”
“Lily.” He came toward her now, put his hand on her head.
“What?” she snapped.
“Lil, please. You have it in your mind that I don’t know how much work you’ve done, or that I don’t appreciate it, and you’re wrong. I appreciate what you’ve done. But, more important than that, than the lab and the data, I love you. You’re my wife, my family. You are the only life I have or have ever had. You can’t forget that. You know what that means to me.”
There. Finally. The words were like an incantation, an ancient chant that would always, for Greer, end even the longest trance of anger. “You’re my life too, Thomas. Which is why something like this isn’t just a professional nightmare.” She felt her posture relax. They had traveled to rage and were returning, after a long drive, to home, to kindness. “It rattles the ground beneath everything.”
“Look. This will all be all right.” He sat beside her and took her in his arms. “We’ll take care of this.” He began to rock her. “It’ll all be fine.”
“I just don’t understand how you didn’t see this coming. You read my paper.”
“It was a busy time.”
Perhaps she was simply going mad. Greer rubbed her face and tried to stir some memory of herself. Was she, after all, the thief? Could she have fallen so strongly under the spell of his work, his ideas, that they permeated her own?
Greer sank deeper into the sofa, into the yielding cushions; she felt she could stay there forever. “I can’t believe this happened. I can’t believe I have to walk these halls, passing people who think I’m a plagiarist.” She closed her eyes.
“Well, you don’t have to stay in these halls if you don’t want to.”
Greer looked at him wearily.
“Harvard,” he said. “They’ve offered me a chair.”
By winter of 1969, at Harvard, Thomas decided he had amassed enough evidence to formally announce a new discovery. After examining over five hundred shales, coals, and sandstones from around the world, the earliest angiosperm pollen was always a Cretaceous magnolia. The lab team assembled the seven years of data, and Thomas went public: Magnolias, he stated, were the very first flowers.
But around this time, several other scientists joined the early angiosperm search. A botanist at the University of California and a geologist at Oxford both began to research ancient magnolias, taking Thomas’s investigation one step further. They accepted Thomas’s discovery that the magnolia family had come first. But they were asking a new question: Whichspecies of magnolia came first, when, and where? Two names—Gerald Beckett Lewis and Jonathan Cartwright—were mentioned in almost all the press coverage of Thomas’s announcement. If Thomas’s photo was printed, so were theirs. Because the media had generated a question of its own: Which of these men would find the first flower?
Before Thomas could formally present his paper, the hunt for the oldest sample of magnolia pollen was under way. He had always suspected there might be angiosperm pollen in early Cretaceous or perhaps pre-Cretaceous rocks, and now it needed to be found. The entire lab’s efforts were directed at this. For six months, the whole team examined even older rocks from North America, but to no avail.
And then, in November 1970, the situation worsened: Bruce Hodges returned from a trip to London with news that Jonathan Cartwright was rumored to have a pre-Cretaceous species and hoped to go public that spring. Panic seized Thomas; it seized the lab. He brought in three more Ph.D. candidates to analyze data. The last of the project’s grant money was used to send the post-docs, Lars Van Delek and Preston Brooks, to Europe to get pre-Cretaceous rock samples.
Despite th
e new researchers, and the fervor of their quest, the atmosphere in the lab grew oddly dull. The more people, the more samples, the less enthusiasm there was. To Greer it felt like working on an assembly line. Hours of cleaning and analyzing each sample to ask a simple yes/no question—is there angiosperm pollen here? The answer, of course, was always no. Nothing learned, no assumptions redefined. On to the next sample.
Thomas no longer stopped by to glance in her microscope. There were no walks through the greenhouse. She lunched alone, or with Constance McAllister, when she was around, because Thomas was too harried to take more than a ten-minute break.
Greer tried to step away from it all, returning to the Marblehead lab and her own research. Whether her pollen was old or the oldest made little difference. She cared how pollen moved, why it moved, how the urge to live manifested itself in nature. And since Harvard’s department offered her no room for promotion—women couldn’t advance beyond research assistantships—Greer felt it was her right to offer Harvard, and Thomas, a little less of herself.
She used Harvard’s restrictions on women to justify her retreat. After all, she couldn’t tell Thomas the project was boring her, or that the frenzy in the lab was tainting everyone, including him.
“Lil, women still aren’t even allowed to use the telescopes at Mount Wilson and Palomar,” he reminded her. “Botany is years ahead of the other sciences. You have all the equipment you need for your work. You need something, tell me and I’ll get it for you. Anything. Nobody is shutting doors on your ability to do what you love.”
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