The Roots of the Olive Tree

by Courtney Miller Santo

  The morning visit with her father had exhausted her. The day had started sunny, but just after lunch, clouds had swept down from Shasta and the temperature dropped ten degrees. Calliope pulled into the driveway of Hill House and thought about how her life was going to change. She wanted to talk to her mother first and alone. There were emotions she wanted to share about her father and Guy. She just wanted to say good-bye to Anna, because although she could live another couple of years, the end was nearing for her. Being with Amrit and watching Erin with her new baby had made Calliope fearful of regrets. She had regrets about her husband’s death, how it had come so swiftly and so silently and there had been no time for good-byes.

  Her mother opened the door before she could reach it. “Where’s Dr. Hashmi?”

  “He’ll be here soon. I took him to meet Daddy earlier this morning,” Calliope said. “You wanna go for a walk?”

  She looked up at the sky and then back at Calliope. “It looks like a good time to get out of the house.” As she came down the stairs, she buttoned up the old house sweater she wore and took her plastic rain cap out of the pocket.

  “It’s not going to rain,” Calliope said.

  “It might,” Bets said.

  They walked along the path that led from the front steps to the orchard and then took the overgrown road that would bring them to her daddy’s trees. It wasn’t any darker in the orchard, the trees barely topped out at five feet. The light, however, was different. It was absorbed and then diffracted by the leaves. The gray of the leaves was much more pronounced in the cloudy weather. The magpies warbled as they walked down the path and then their calls softened as the birds settled into their presence in the orchard.

  “I sold out of the oil pressed from Daddy’s olives,” Calliope said as they reached the bench that their father had built from limbs he’d pruned. He liked to use green wood that he could wet and twist into shapes. The seat was made of an old tree that had been hit by lightning. Her daddy had sawed it himself and then oiled and sanded it.

  “People are the same,” her mother said. “Always looking for the easy answer, ready to believe in snake oil but they’ll tell you why it’s not snake oil.”

  “It can’t hurt them,” Calliope said. “It isn’t like we know why Anna’s lived so long, or you, or Daddy.”

  “False hope is a dangerous weapon,” her mother said.

  “Hope is hope.” Calliope wanted to change the subject. “The vain deserve a little false hope; besides, I think I’m through with all that.” She’d had an offer on the store, and it was enough to leave the oil behind, to leave Kidron behind and move east with Amrit.

  Bets grabbed her hand. “I’m glad. I didn’t want to tell you it was wrong, but it was. I was afraid someone who was truly sick would buy it. You have no idea the lengths I would have gone to if I’d thought there was a way to make you heal after your accident. And now there’s your father. I’d give the whole of this to bring his mind back.”

  She told her mother about her most recent visit to Golden Sunsets, about how her father had mistaken her for his sister. She told her about Amrit and the way her father had responded to him. Her mother laughed and she looked younger. Calliope wanted to ask Bets about Frank’s relationship with Guy, how long she’d suspected that he preferred men, but she didn’t know how to start.

  “They hold hands,” she said.

  “Guy’s a good friend,” her mother said.

  Calliope wanted to push her, to ask her about their marriage, about her brothers, but she knew that one of the talents her mother had was keeping secrets. If she pushed her today, as she had a dozen other times in her life, her mother would just get up and leave. Busy her hands with work. There was a certain catch in her mother’s voice when she brought up Guy that told Calliope what she wanted to know. Her mother wasn’t oblivious to the change in her father, and it made her wonder if it was actually a change at all. What could a man have done in the 1940s if he preferred men? It wasn’t as if there were parades, anthems, coming-out guides. It still bothered her to consider this, that there was a less than genuine feeling between her parents, that their love wasn’t real, that it was wrapped up more in practicality and convenience than in fate or romance.

  “Amrit and I are in love,” Calliope said this quickly, and then without pause, she asked her mother to tell her the story of how she and her father had met.

  “We always knew each other,” she said. “You know this.”

  “But there must have been a moment when you looked at him and realized that he was more than someone who worked in the orchards.”

  “No. That’s what there was to love about him, he’d always been there.”

  “Then tell me about the day he proposed? Did he know that you loved him?”

  Her mother turned and looked back at the house. “Anna’s going to be wondering where we are. We should head back.”

  Calliope wanted to hear the story again from her mother, the one she’d told them growing up—how Frank had swept her up out of the orchard and carried her away on his horse like she was Guinevere and he Lancelot. How they rode to the river and he’d told her that he couldn’t live without her. Her mother always ended the story, which was unusually sentimental, by saying that the war made them all stupid. Calliope had cherished that story growing up. She’d nursed it in her head until her parents were fated to be together. She magnified moments between them, how her father always brought her mother small wildflowers he’d found in the orchards and knit them into flower crowns.

  It was the sort of love she’d been looking for her whole life, desperate for during her marriage. And now she suspected that it had all been the product of her imagination, that her mother and father had been nothing more than friends who had a family together. She heard the words her mother said earlier echo in her mind. He was always there.

  Bets stood and started to make her way back to the house. Calliope still hadn’t told her she was leaving. “Mom,” she managed and then she started to cry.

  “Deb’s fine,” Bets said, stepping back to the bench and rubbing her back. “She’s just fine. Before she left I gave her money and directions to one of Uncle Wealthy’s old cabins in the Cascades. I’m sure that’s where she is, and when she’s ready, we’ll go find her.”

  This revelation caused Calliope’s confidence to collapse. She’d truly believed that her mother didn’t know where her daughter was, that Deb had left on her own. The tears ran down her face and dripped down her collar. Her leg began to ache and after a while, she was forced to blow her nose on the edge of her blouse. She was finally angry enough to say what she’d come to say.

  “I’m leaving.” She reached for her mother’s hand.

  “But you just got here,” her mother said. “And you haven’t said hello to Anna yet.”

  “No. I’m leaving Kidron. I’ve had a reasonable offer on the store, and Amrit wants me to move east with him. Back to Pittsburgh.”

  “Oh.”

  The silence was not a good indication. Calliope knew this, remembered from her childhood that a quiet mother meant anger with consequences that could never be seen ahead of time. When her brother Jimmy had eloped it had fallen to Calliope to tell their mother. She’d nodded at Frank and then stayed in her room for two weeks.

  “I’ll come back, of course,” Calliope said, her voice an octave higher than she wished it to be.

  Her mother looked at the sun sinking toward the horizon. She spoke without blinking. “You’ll come back. It’ll just be for a funeral.”

  CONFIDENTIAL

  2007 MACARTHUR FELLOWS NOMINATION DOSSIER

  Prepared By: Redacted

  Proposed Nominee: Amrit Hashmi

  Area of Research: Genetics with specific focus on the longevity gene and a stated research goal of helping humans achieve biological immortality.

  Location: University of Pittsburgh

  Geographically, this is a strong location for us because it offers us an opportunity to diversif
y our award locations.

  Publications and Awards: Appended

  RESEARCH SUMMARY

  For the last two decades, Dr. Hashmi has worked to understand the genetic mechanisms of aging and longevity. Initially, his research interests centered on the Turritopsis nutricula, commonly called the immortal jellyfish. As a response to adverse conditions, the Turritopsis undergoes a reverse aging process and changes from a mature jellyfish to a polyp, which is the species state of infancy. In this way, the jellyfish can avoid death and just continue to repeat the cycle of growing young and then old again in indefinite cycles. This ability, which is a form of biological immortality, has not been found in any other species.

  While many others in his field have continued to focus their efforts on researching and understanding the conditions of aging in lesser organisms, Dr. Hashmi is among the few who has advanced to studying the genetic makeup of specific humans. When the near completion of the human genome project was announced in 2000, Dr. Hashmi shifted his attentions entirely to finding the longevity gene(s). He claims the fastest route to stopping the aging process in humans is to understand what sets apart the small percentage who are able to live well into their tenth decade with better physical and mental health than those who are thirty or forty years younger. He launched a worldwide effort to document every living human being over the age of 110. He’s been criticized by his peers for not including anyone a century or older, but the correlation of his data suggests that superior medical care in the last twenty years has artificially inflated those numbers. His focus on supercentenarians means that fewer than 1,000 people worldwide meet his qualifications for inclusion in his studies.

  Because of this low number, in the last year at the urging of the National Institution on Aging, which partially funds his research, he has focused his efforts also on the offspring of these supercentenarians. This helped Dr. Hashmi move toward identifying general biological markers that control aging in the body. Rumors in the research community purport that Dr. Hashmi is close to finding the specific sequence of genes. Last year he started working with a 112-year-old Northern California woman and her direct female descendants. One of his research assistants told us that there is some indication that each of these women has a mutation that prevents degradation during cell division. In most humans, the telomeres, which are part of the DNA that occur around the edge of chromosomes, shorten with each division. Their contention is that there is almost no shortening in these women.

  RESEARCH APPLICATION

  What sets Dr. Hashmi’s study apart from others is his contention that the longevity gene does more than keep us from aging. He contends that there are many other elements at work in supercentenarians that not only extend their life, but also fight off deadly conditions like cancer, diabetes, obesity, and heart disease. In addition, these genes working in concert with other inherited traits in these genetic superagers help them to maintain physical integrity in areas where the elderly often see degradation, such as hearing, eyesight, dental care, flexibility, and other mobility issues. Dr. Hashmi thinks big and he thinks beyond his discipline. He believes his research could change the way we treat not only general wear and tear on the human body, but illness in general. He claims that the only age-related difficulties that won’t be treatable in fifty years are those caused by environmental damage. In the immediate future, identifying the specific genes will enable researchers to extend human life by an average of thirty years.

  CONTROVERSY

  To date no specific drugs or even targeted gene therapies for use in humans have resulted from any of the research on longevity. While Dr. Hashmi’s research, which focuses on the production of a specific class of proteins, shows the most promise for targeted therapy, there are still many who claim that the increased levels of these proteins in Dr. Hashmi’s superagers is nothing more than a symptom of longevity. Despite this, no other researcher in this field has even posited a cause of the slowed aging in Dr. Hashmi’s superagers. To his detractors, Dr. Hashmi points out that the children of superagers also live to be older—indicating a genetic connection to aging.

  In addition to the questions of scientific accuracy, some have raised ethical and practical questions that surround extending life. Questions about overpopulation arise when considering expanding the current life span by as few as twenty years, which essentially adds an extra generation to the world’s population. However, it is important to point out that just two hundred years ago a human being’s life expectancy at birth was only forty-five years. Today, most residents of first-world countries can reasonably expect to live nearly twice that long. These advances in longevity were a direct result of scientific advances in food production, vaccination, antibiotics, and a better understanding of what keeps humans healthy. Dr. Hashmi’s research is a natural extension of those scientific frontiers. Just as humans have adapted to their new reality over the last two hundred years, the ensuing generations will alter the pattern of their lives to reflect a longer life span. Also, this may be moot, as everyone is hypothetically opposed to extending life spans until faced with the loss of a loved one or their own deteriorating health.

  PERSONAL ASSESSMENT

  Although born in India, Amrit Hashmi has lived in the United States since 1940, when his father was recruited to work at Oak Ridge as part of the nuclear experiments. He became a citizen in 1949 along with his parents, although he does retain his Indian citizenship and returns fairly often for visits with his extended family. His first marriage was arranged and he and his wife didn’t have any children. She died more than ten years ago.

  Dr. Hashmi is a dynamic speaker and passionate about his research. Some other researchers have been put off by his zeal for his subject matter. In his spare time, he volunteers with a youth organization in the Pittsburgh area that teaches underprivileged children to fly kites. One of the members of that organization said that a few years ago Dr. Hashmi designed a curriculum for their afterschool program that taught the basics of geometry and spatial recognition through building kites.

  Personally, I find his research not only compelling but boundary-pushing. His area of expertise is young in relation to many of the more established disciplines, but it may be that because it has been previously overlooked, the study of aging will yield tremendous society-altering results. So far the field, without even knowing the exact and varied mechanisms of aging, has managed to find ways to extend life in the laboratory. It is admirable that Dr. Hashmi seeks to bring that same approach to humans themselves.

  RECOMMENDATION

  Dr. Hashmi should be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in the next three years.

  Bets at the End of the Season

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Trust

  Elizabeth had never enjoyed being called Bets, but nicknames had a way of sticking when you least expected them to. It’d been her Grandpa Percy who called her Bets. Bitty Bets because until she became a teenager, she was a foot shorter than all the other children her age. Elizabeth thought about this as she ducked her head under one of the branches in the orchard on her way back up to Hill House. In all of her ninety years, she’d never lived anywhere else, and unlike the others, she’d never wanted to leave. She watched the dry summer breeze blow across the orchard and stir the glaucous leaves. Her hands were still shaking from her fight with Callie. The girl must know Elizabeth’s secret. She was sure her boyfriend had told her, had betrayed what she’d confessed to him in confidence. She should never have trusted Dr. Hashmi.

  She steadied herself on the porch railing. Inside Anna plunked out a series of commercial jingles on the piano while Erin hummed along. The baby let out a gurgle of excitement each time the music swelled, and his laughter made the dog bark. They were oblivious to all the confidences Elizabeth held, not just her own, but others’. There had been small secrets disclosed by her siblings and her playmates, admirations, petty thefts, but her first big secret had come the summer she turned fourteen, when Grandma Mims told Elizabeth the tru
th about Anna. It was Mims who’d marked her as a secret-keeper, pointed out that Elizabeth looked trustworthy—with eyes set evenly and so roundly that the corners melted into high cheekbones and a voice that was soft and at such a decibel that there were those around her who couldn’t hear her speak.

  She slid her hands along the railing, and a small sliver of wood embedded her palm. She sat in the rocking chair and pinched at it with her fingernails, thinking about her grandmother. It seemed like two lifetimes since the old woman had died, but Elizabeth felt her presence now, had felt it in the grove arguing with Callie. She knew that when Dr. Hashmi arrived, there would be revelations, and then there would be change. Elizabeth wasn’t ready for either. She dug at the splinter until her palm bled.

  When it became clear that Mims was dying, father asked Elizabeth to come in from the olive fields and take care of her grandmother. That had been the summer he’d dropped Bitty from her nickname. Calling her Bets, she saw now, was an attempt to delay the obvious—that she was growing up. That July she’d been taken to the department store in Red Bluff for what Anna called womanly wears.

  Mims had been a large woman, but that summer she lost fifty pounds and her skin hung on her like sheets on the line. She’d seemed so old then to Bets, as wrinkled and gray as Anna was now, although at the time Mims couldn’t have been much more than sixty. When Elizabeth lifted Mims’s arms to bathe her, she had to push aside folds of skin to clean between them. It reminded her of patting dry the chickens after they’d been plucked. They both averted their eyes during these moments. At other times, when Elizabeth read to Mims from the book of Tobit or Esther, a conspiratorial feeling emerged between them. Mims had grown up Catholic but became a Lutheran to please her husband. The first night Elizabeth had sat with her, she’d asked her to go next door to the Lindseys’ and borrow their mother’s Bible. “I need a little of my girlhood faith,” she’d said by way of explanation to Elizabeth.