Vee had tentatively broached the alternative with him. “You know,” she said, lying in his arms after sex, “they say my aunt Rose, when she was pretty much my exact age, decided enough was enough and . . .” But Eddie, who knew all our stories by then, said, “Veezie, do not even say it,” which, in truth, had relieved her. Really, she was only trying the idea on, seeing whether it fit, and it didn’t, not then. She endured the surgery and the radiation, never looking back, never shedding a tear, in fact making jokes and laughing more than she imagined possible under the circumstances, and the only time she balked about what was being done to her was when she was told about the need for the tattoo. “Just four little blue dots,” the radiologist said, “so we know where to aim. Not even noticeable to someone who’s not looking for them.”
“Why not something temporary?” she asked. “Maybe you could use some sort of laundry pen.”
He smiled, reached for his needle, took her breast, and pulled it taut. It was still tender from the lumpectomy. She tried not to grimace.
“I’m Jewish,” she said as he worked. His name and visage indicated he was too. She said, “Jews aren’t supposed to get tattoos.”
“Tattoos not for fun God gives a pass to,” he said. He was already done.
She slipped the shoulder of her johnny back on. She didn’t bother to tie it shut. You lost all sense of modesty in a hospital.
“And you know this how?” she asked. “You’re a part-time rabbi?”
“Even better,” he said. “I’m a full-time doctor.”
An old joke, but a good one. And it wasn’t really a Jewish thing anyway, her squeamishness about the dots. It was an impurity thing. She’d started out perfect, flawless—ten fingers, ten toes, a full head of hair—and ever since, it had been all downhill. The chicken-pox scar over her eyebrow. The year of no front teeth followed by the years of silver fillings. The Stridex era. Trivial and universal though they might be, these were all signs of deterioration, of decay. Even back then she was consumed with it. Even before the more devastating operations, she was sharply aware of it. She was every day dying. Cavities. Cancer. Blue dots. It was all of a piece.
But she came back to this: hers were impurities she hadn’t sought out. This could not be said of Lady’s necklace or Delph’s tattoo.
Lady, meanwhile, had located her glasses behind the box of off-brand facial tissues on her bedside table. She peered over, read the message on Delph’s leg.
“Oh, Delph,” she groaned. “Tell me that’s not really permanent.”
“Well, yeah, it’s permanent,” Delph said.
“It’s not maybe a joke?”
“It’s a joke in the sense of the joke’s on us. But it’s not a practical joke, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s not a joke like fake dog shit on the carpet.”
Lady ran her hand through her own wild hair. No more Olive Oyl; she’d lost her barrette at some point during her stay. It seemed symbolic, but in a discouraging way: in this healing place she felt dizzy and dazed and out of control. She couldn’t wait to get home, and by home she didn’t mean her apartment on Amsterdam, she meant the apartment on Riverside, she meant her old bedroom. She was tired. It was impossible to get any sleep in a hospital. The third floor had been noisy enough, but now she was on a floor for people who were not really sick, that is, she was near the maternity ward, where the patients’ shrieks and obscenities were even worse than the lunatics’.
Still, she wasn’t upset about Delph’s tattoo the way Vee was. Yes, it was a stupid thing for Delph to have done, and Lady saw years of jeans and opaque tights in Delph’s future, just as she saw a lifetime of turtlenecks in her own. But how, really, was it her business what Delph did with her own skin? It wasn’t Lady’s leg, after all. Lady’s leg had its own problems. Right now, atop the hospital’s pilly, inadequate blanket, it lay armored in a pristine white cast.
“Delph,” Lady said, more fondly than aggrievedly, “you are my baby sister and I love you more than anything, but God, you can be such an idiot.”
Vee bent down to retrieve her briefcase. She began toward the door. Delph took her seat. She smiled at Lady, also fondly. She gestured toward Lady’s throat. She gestured toward the cast.
“Right,” she said. “Right. I’m the idiot.”
CHAPTER 7
1905
On a stage in Paris Mata Hari, self-conscious about her small breasts, removes all her clothes save for a jeweled bra. In a desert in America, the city of Las Vegas is founded. In a clerk’s office in Switzerland, a young physicist friend of Lenz Alter comes up with this: E=mc2.
And in Lenz Alter’s lab there’s his own scientific breakthrough. We’d like to describe it in detail, but we aren’t chemists. We can’t really explain what it is Lenz Alter did in his laboratory that auspicious year. All we know is he figured out a way to run nitrogen and hydrogen through a steel contraption to produce liquid ammonia. Then he performed some additional hocus-pocus with that ammonia, and wound up with—ta-da!—a big pile of shit.
Not natural shit, obviously. Faux shit. Designer shit. Scientists call this synthesis of his the manna process. Bread from the sky. Food from thin air.
We’re more than willing to concede that the production of man-made nitrogen fertilizer is not as thrilling, not nearly as sexy, as the theory of relativity. Nor is it as exciting as the scientific miracles of our own times. Decoding the human genome. Untangling string theory. Making a teeny-tiny telephone.
Nor does the age of fertilizer, which is what science-historians call this period of narrowly averted famine, have quite the same ring to it as the age of reason or the age of technology.
But for those folks who were alive in 1905, when the human race found itself on the brink of starvation because seagulls—poor exhausted creatures—could no longer provide guano at the ever-increasing rates mankind demanded, Lenz Alter’s figuring out how to revive the earth’s depleted arable soil was pretty damned exciting.
And yet we’re products of our age, not his, and we sometimes struggle to regard our great-grandfather’s Nobel Prize–winning work with the appropriate awe.
We have a joke. Well, not a joke. A skit. You have to picture the stage in an old vaudeville theater done up like a mad scientist’s lab. There are two scientists on that stage, both in white coats, both with thick German accents, one bald as an egg, the other with wild, wiry hair. The bald one is our great-grandfather. The other is his friend.
ALTER
Albert, Albert, mach schnell! I’ve just solved humanity’s biggest problem.
EINSTEIN
No shit!
ALTER
Exactly!
Also in 1905: Iris Emanuel Alter fixes dinner. She’s proud of her husband’s achievements. She’s certainly proud that her name appears on the dedication page of his first book. Still, the dedication page is not exactly where she dreamed of her name appearing.
She’s neither Lenz’s lab assistant nor his colleague, his coauthor, or his drinking companion, nor the person he talks to about nitrogen and hydrogen and liquid ammonia and fertilizer, much less about her continuing interest in soluble salts. When he wishes to talk about his work, Lenz talks with Einstein, with Planck, with Bosch, with Willstätter. He talks with Lehrer when Lehrer and Marthe visit Karlsruhe. He talks with his students late into the night. He talks with his three-year-old son over breakfast while the boy bangs on the table with a spoon. Once she heard him talking about fertilizer with the dog. “How many times must I tell you, we are no longer in need of your assistance in this matter,” he said as Prinz, the timid black Labrador, cocked his head to one side and smacked the lawn with his meaty tail.
Iris is only what Lenz asked her to be: his wife. And being his wife is all-consuming, leaves no time for independent research, which, since she has no lab privileges or team, would be impossible anyway. The housework is more demanding than she imagined, although she admits this is partially her fault. Politically, she’s nonhierarchical, which means
she doesn’t believe in servants. She does her own cleaning, shopping, cooking, sewing, laundry. She prepares the elaborate dinners Lenz requests in the mornings and fails to come home for at nights. She’s responsible for every aspect of their entertaining. Her husband enjoys parties, especially those held in his honor. He’s been known to converse exclusively in those extemporaneous heroic couplets of his, perfect iambic pentameter from the arrival of the guests to their departure, from pancake soup to black walnut cake. The guests ooh and ahh and chuckle and guffaw and sometimes they even applaud, but she’s fairly sure that they, like she, have come to find the relentless performing more annoying than clever.
Needless to say she also cares for her own son, her poor sickly son with the iffy heart and the propensity to pick up colds and fevers and the inability to put on weight. For Richard, there are no housekeepers, no day nurses, no malcontent governesses, no paddles, or switches. There are no trips, despite doctors’ suggestions, to sanatoria in the Alps. There is only his mother doing every last thing herself.
One morning she even apprehends her own mugger, chasing him down and repeatedly banging him on the head with a burlap sack containing hard cheeses and a large turnip. “I think she’d have killed him if we hadn’t pulled her off,” the admiring grocer tells the local press. The article includes a photograph of Iris looking shy and sheepish and holding a wedge of Emmentaler. It’s her third and final time in the papers.
“Oh, dear!” Iris says that evening to Richard. He’s in his high chair, a pillow behind his back, a sash tying him to the chair just in case he figures out a way to slide down to the floor. He’s thumping on his little tray with his wooden spoon. She’s grated the Emmentaler, the weapon reduced to fluffy slivers that soon will be sprinkled on the sliced, sautéed turnip, which in turn will be baked and consumed at dinner. “You know that normally I wouldn’t hurt a fly. I’m a pacifist through and through. It was just . . . well, it was my handbag.”
To the other Richard, Richard Lehrer, she writes, “Anger overtook me and I became an unrecognizable monster capable of doing murder with a cheese. Sometimes these days I find myself wondering if I’ve taken leave of my senses. But that’s the wonderful thing about the monograph I’m planning to write, isn’t it? Everything is data. All is grist for my mill.”
The reference in that letter—that was the last anyone heard of this monograph, this book.
Iris cuts the photograph from the paper and sends it to her sister Lily. “What clever caption do you have for this?” she writes.
Lily writes back: “The cheese stands alone.”
1911
From the speech of Kaiser Wilhelm II, delivered at the inaugural ceremony of the Dahlem Institute for Physical Chemistry:
Our Institute director, Lorenz Otto Alter, is ideally suited to his new position. His scientific achievements have already given great momentum to the German chemical industry, in which we are world leaders. His current work is also critical to maintaining Germany’s stature in the world, though I have been told that I can say no more about this work at this time. It seems the only persons more enamored of secrets than statesmen are chemists.
Iris hates everything about Dahlem.
“Really?” Lily writes. “Hate? That’s a childish word, don’t you think?”
“Fine,” Iris writes back. “I’m a child.” Because she does, she foot-stomping, breath-holding, hair-tearing, fist-pounding hates the place. She hates its bourgeois tidiness, the prissy lawns, the fussily clipped border shrubs. She hates the long commute when she wishes to go into Berlin—and when doesn’t she long to go into Berlin, with its theater, concerts, museums, all the things that don’t exist in this suburb? She hates the hours she spends with the faculty wives. She hates the monstrous animal in the mansion next door, a wolf the owners insist is not a wolf, but a new breed. “How can you dislike a dog called a German shepherd?” Lenz asks her, and she bites her tongue as she so often does these days. All she says is, “He lunges at Prinz every chance he gets, and he never stops barking.” Let Lenz figure out what she means, but isn’t quite saying.
Nor did it take her long to pass this judgment on Dahlem. She began hating it the very first week they arrived. She hated the inaugural ceremonies, the parade down the rainy main thoroughfare. She has an aversion to all parades, but this one was especially off-putting, first the peacocking Kaiser, next the famous Christian theologian, and then, the scientists, which is to say, the Jews, bringing up the rear. Germany, God, and her son’s father marching up the street. And she, Frau Doktor, relegated to the sidelines. The pecking order codified once and for all.
By then they’d already moved into the handsome white residence the Institute restored for them. Naturally it’s the largest of the faculty homes, a three-storied honor, unless you happen to be nonhierarchical. Then, not only are you embarrassed by its size, but you have that much more housework and cooking to do. So much more hostessing.
Although lately she’s realized she doesn’t mind the housekeeping as much as one would think after hearing her complain. She notices that she’s begun seeking out additional projects and chores. She’s taken to sewing all her own clothing, although that’s not really a choice on her part. She wears only Reformkleider now, those voluminous dresses of rough material designed to conceal a woman’s body so she may be judged not on her figure but on the quality of her mind and her character. You can’t find these dresses in stores.
Also, she’s taken up gardening.
The garden (and Prinz’s doghouse, so close to his enemy’s territory) is situated in the yard directly behind the house. Directly behind the garden wall is the physical chemistry laboratory where Lenz and his assistants and his students work. The benefits of having one’s husband’s lab so close that you can look inside it from your kitchen window are frequently enumerated by the wives in the adjacent houses: it’s a very short walk when it’s time to bring him his lunch or the papers you’ve been editing and typing for him or anything else he’s forgotten. He comes home energized from the day’s work rather than weary from a long train or tram ride. Even if he works late into the evening and misses supper, he’s usually home early enough to see the children before they’re put to bed.
Iris has enumerated the drawbacks to no one but herself: every day you get to see the place you want to be but aren’t. Also, if he doesn’t come home at night you can easily tell by the darkened lab windows it’s not because he’s working late.
“I’ve been out with the donors,” Lenz will say when he arrives home, midnight or later. Or “I’ve been at the club with Einstein.” Or with Planck or with Moritz or with Meyer. Theo Meyer, Iris’s old friend from university who wouldn’t be here if not for her. “But if I were seeing other women,” Lenz says, “whose fault would that be?”
Iris looks at him, her eyes devoid almost nearly of color, almost entirely of suspicion. “Did I say a word?” she asks.
She has not said a word because his point is not without merit. She left their marital bed when Richard was born, and she has never returned. The doctors urged her to move a cot into the nursery. She didn’t hesitate. Is there a mother who would? The same doctors now assure her that Richard is sufficiently robust to forgo this careful attention. She disagrees. Yes, Richard is healthier now, though still skinny as a broomstick and prone to sore throats and sniffles, but would he be as healthy if she weren’t always by his side, monitoring his breathing, listening to his heart, ministering to the slightest rasp or rale before it can turn into something serious, something deadly?
And doesn’t that make Lenz’s philandering, which is of course what he’s doing on those nights he claims to be with donors or Albert or Max or Emil or Theo—doesn’t that make his infidelity and lies and efforts to transfer the blame to her astonishingly selfish, given that the reason she no longer shares his bed is that she’s making certain their child doesn’t die in his sleep?
It’s more than that, though, and she knows it. It confounds her that she,
such a lustful virgin, has lost all interest in marital relations. In fact, she’s more than uninterested. If Lenz touches her in passing, just a hand on her shoulder, she becomes as enraged as if he’s a stranger assaulting her. She tries to hide her rage from him, to take deep breaths or think of something soothing—her roses, the hummingbirds at the bee balm, the torte in the oven, anything really—but it’s all she can do not to strike him. This is her reality, this inexplicable fury that overtakes her when her husband indicates that he would like her to provide him with marriage’s physical comforts. And so if Lenz takes lovers, she supposes it’s his right. She bristles and deflects, but in her heart she knows the blame does rest on her. She makes and abides by a decision: as long as he comes home before Richard wakes up in the morning, she’ll say nothing. She sticks to this decision. Nothing is all Iris says.
And, as she lectures herself repeatedly, it’s not all bad in Dahlem. Dahlem has its good points. Dahlem is clean. Dahlem is safe. The schools are up-to-date in their curricula and pedagogical methodology. The place is full of Jews like themselves, so there’s none of the hostility, none of the sneers, no sense that there are places one isn’t welcome. At the same time, the Jews here have all converted, so there’s none of the shtetl, none of the beards and fur hats and fringes, none of the superiority that thinly disguises self-hatred or the self-deprecation that so loudly conveys superiority.
And Theo Meyer joining them here: that’s a pleasure. And he and all of her husband’s students addressing her as Frau Doktor: that’s a pleasure too, a bittersweet kindness. She likes the boys in the lab. She waves to them from the garden. She feeds them when they, with her husband, burst into her house at night, filled with ideas and excitement. They are nice young men who include Richard in their conversations and milder horseplay as if he’s an equal. Sometimes she offers her own thoughts, an insight here or there, and they listen to her, thank her.
A Reunion Of Ghosts: A Novel Page 13