Behave

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  “Miss Rayner. I trust you had a restful summer?”

  “Yes, and you?”

  “A month at our lakeside place, in Canada.”

  “With your family?”

  “My daughter was working on her lake swimming.”

  A perfect family man, with just the faintest echoes of the South in his voice—a lengthening of certain words, that “dawwww-ter” strung out long and soft. All summer, I’d thought about his New School lecture, reenacting it in my mind, and I’d remembered him as loud, almost brusque—but that was only the impression he made, with his outspoken opinions and his strong, masculine features. In fact, he spoke quietly, the loudest part of him the frequent laugh he used to punctuate conversations. His drawl and his laugh were both so pleasing to listen to, so worthy of trying to fix in my memory for recall at a later, more leisurely occasion, that I must have missed the final question he asked. He had to turn and say it a second time.

  “I said, ‘Are you ready for the rest of the tour?’”

  “Oh yes. Please. It’s all terribly impressive.”

  Dr. Watson was the ruler of a new empire here at Phipps Clinic, so recently remodeled it still smelled of paint and varnish and something else fresh—maybe it was only baby talc I was noticing—as Dr. Watson barely touched my elbow and gestured that we should turn a corner to peer into one of the labs. There it was again, stronger: a more complex scent than my father wore, more musky and liberally applied. With the sharp crease in his well-tailored trousers and the silver cuff links studding his immaculate pale-blue shirtsleeves, Dr. John Watson looked and smelled like a man heading out for cocktails rather than preparing for a long day doing science. Now there were two reasons to lean in closer when he talked: to catch each soft, drawn-out vowel and to note with appreciation his sophisticated fragrance, as effective to a woman as Pavlov’s bell was for his trained dogs.

  On our tour, Dr. Watson introduced me to Dr. Adolf Meyer, who had hired him before the war, and to everyone we passed, including several students, all male, who were also new to the program. One of them, Curt Richter, originally from somewhere out west—Colorado—was carrying a sort of leather-bound portfolio, looking officious.

  “Here since last week,” he said when we were introduced.

  “Did you come early for a reason?”

  “Just eager to start,” he said, and offered me a loose and easy grin, but my own smile in response was nowhere near as relaxed. Should I have come earlier? What had he been doing all this time that I had already missed?

  Curt tagged behind us for the next few minutes, hands in his pockets, looking so comfortable already, while I hadn’t even found a place to stow my purse and gloves. Would we have white lab coats? Watson didn’t have one. Curt didn’t have one. I couldn’t wait to stop looking and feeling like a special visitor instead of someone who truly belonged.

  Everything in the clinic was clean and starchy or shiny: porcelain bowls and long rows of railed beds in the psychiatric side of the clinic, and at our end of the building, a half octagon of slanted windows with a stunning view out over a green lawn with more medical buildings beyond. Well, did I think we’d be working in Frankenstein’s basement? The facilities had to be spectacular. I’d already heard that John Watson had gotten offers from every other major university, eager to steal him away.

  In the newly remodeled lab side of the third floor, everything had been carefully selected and designed, down to each desk and chair.

  “Special ordered,” Watson said, tapping an armrest. “And the third floor’s wiring, too—to my specifications. You can’t let someone else design a lab who isn’t fully aware of all the lab’s potential functions. We plan to get a lot done here in the next few years.”

  In my college days, I’d heard endless praise for Vassar’s architecture: its stained-glass library windows, which could make you believe you were in a medieval cathedral when you were simply studying for a chemistry exam. This was something else: everything modern, the vision of men still alive, still young. No ghosts here, and no hanging portraits of old men with square-cut beards.

  This is where new things would begin—and also, of course, where some things would end. But we couldn’t know that yet. There seemed nothing to stop us from rescuing a young field from irrelevance, from developing a new and better science, from creating a more rational and promising future.

  Chapter 4

  Right away, they started bringing us the babies from the pediatrics ward of the Harriet Lane Home next door, connected by a convenient corridor to the Johns Hopkins medical buildings. Watson—for that is what other graduate students called him and I would simply have to get used to it—had just shown me into one of the small testing rooms when two nurses entered, wheeling a nursery cart. Nestled inside was a red-faced newborn, small thatch of black hair plastered to its wrinkled, red scalp.

  Watson’s eyes lit up. He’d only started to explain to me about his theories of basic emotions: fear, rage, love—which wasn’t love at all, he said, but only a response to erotic stimulation, a tickling of lips or genitals. But at the sight of the incoming nursery cart, Watson ceased his impromptu lecture.

  “An angel from next door,” he said to the first nurse, a fresh-faced blonde whose curls were pinned into a complex arrangement around the borders of her white cap. By angel, I thought he’d meant the baby. Later, I would realize he meant Essie, and any other pretty nurse who helped out at the lab.

  Watson held out a stopwatch in my direction, then had second thoughts and handed the watch to the second nurse, a shorter, dark-haired woman. I was just looking around, taking it all in: a scale, a cabinet, a waist-high examination table in the middle of the room, and two open shelves with various items, including the flat white pillow that Watson handed me now.

  “I want you as close to me as possible for this, Rosie.”

  “Rosalie.”

  “Rosalie. I recall that you were the only one in that lecture audience last winter who knew how to catch a ball.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  And still, I didn’t understand why I was holding a pillow.

  At that moment, the door opened a crack, and Curt poked his face into the room, eyebrows lifted, grinning. Another free and willing hand, conjured as if on cue, though I noticed he wasn’t pressed into immediate duty. Watson nodded and Curt entered, slipping into the room, back against the wall, observing—the boy waiting for his turn to bat, squirming on the bench, which only made me focus more intently, privileged by this special duty with the pillow, whatever it was.

  “Georgie, you’re ready with the stopwatch?”

  The dark-haired nurse stepped closer to the table, stopwatch held out in front of her face, thumb at the ready. Watson gestured for me to lay the pillow on the examining table, and on it he set the newborn, naked except for a diaper. The baby’s eyes were still closed—he or she, it (for now), was just beginning to root around. Watson touched the baby’s left cheek with a finger and the baby turned toward the touch, mouth opening, lips seeking. Watson chuckled with appreciation, never tired of seeing those basic reflexes at work. Then, from below the table he produced a short iron rod, about the diameter of a pencil, and worked it into the baby’s left hand, the tiny fingers with their perfect little translucent fingernails clasping around it.

  “Left side first, Georgie.”

  Watson began to lift the rod and the skinny arm went up, still fastened to the rod. A few inches higher, and the rosy bump of a shoulder lifted off the pillow, arm straightening, ribcage flexing as the body pulled upward. When I gasped, Watson smiled, but he kept his eyes fixed on the baby, whose splayed arms and bowed legs seemed even skinnier and smaller and redder, held apart from its solid little trunk of a body.

  “You’re not one of those people who thinks a newborn is weak, are you?” Watson asked me, with pleasure in his voice. “Hard to survive the jungle and the savannah all
those millions of years without a few tricks up your sleeve.”

  Up the baby went, up and up, into the air. “Ready, Rosalie?” And now the baby was supported by nothing at all, I was holding an empty pillow, and the newborn, eyes still closed, red face screwed up with sheer effort or imminent protest, lungs filling with an angry cry, was hanging by one tiny, surprisingly determined fist and nothing else. I spread my hands across the space between the pillow and the hanging baby, all my attention focused on that vulnerable, exposed body.

  Watson started to say, “But they lose this fierce grip . . .”

  Just then, the baby plummeted, dropping into my cradling hands. Its skinny legs folded slightly upward as I stretched my fingers to catch the diapered rear end. At the same time, I angled my right hand, trying to make a suitable landing place for the soft, narrow shoulders. Breath held, arms trembling, I lowered the whole tender package down into the soft resistance of the pillow.

  “Got the time on that one, Georgie?” Watson continued, absolutely calm. “They lose it, as I was saying, at about a hundred and twenty days.”

  The baby was fine. Just fine, I told myself, breath catching in my throat. Despite the solid presence of the pillow, the infant kept its arms up and held apart from its trunk, fingers splayed and grasping, bouncing back and forth a little, shuddering, still clutching for the branches or leaves that might have broken its fall, tumbling from that ancestral tree. Dark blue eyes open now, bulging, full of surprise: Who did that? Where am I?

  “But you know,” Watson continued, “we’ve even had an infant entirely missing a cerebellum who could still perform well at this test.”

  “But how did a baby live without a cerebellum?” I was thinking of the poor baby’s parents. I couldn’t help it.

  “He didn’t,” Watson said. “But we made the most of his first few days, all the same. Sentiment is the enemy. Knowledge and progress, Rosalie. That’s what we’re concerned about here. Can you do it?”

  “Catch the baby?”

  “No, conquer unproductive sentiment. Most people can’t.”

  I hoped it was a rhetorical question, but it wasn’t. He really wanted to know, and it seemed to matter. I seemed to matter.

  “I’ll do my best.”

  The baby, breathless and outraged, was on the verge of squalling, and I wasn’t sure if I should pick it up or rub its chest or find something to put in its mouth or offer some other kind of soothing. I was not yet indoctrinated enough to know that soothing any baby was counterproductive to its own healthy development. Before I could get in the way, Watson worked quickly, pushing the iron rod into the baby’s right fist before the test could be interrupted. “Right side now, Georgie. Ready again, Rosalie?”

  And up the baby went into the air a second time. This second trial was shorter than the first. Almost immediately, the infant dropped into my hands, which were more ready to break the fall in a graceful maneuver, guiding the baby back down to the safety of the pillow.

  “A little off the predicted curve,” Watson said, beaming, “All right, let’s get a weight.”

  I glanced around, but the first nurse, Essie, was already taking charge, carrying the baby over to the scale. Georgie, holder of the stopwatch, passed a clipboard to me and I took it, pretending to know what I was doing, and recorded the weight, pressing hard to tame my shaking hand.

  “There, and you didn’t even drop your first subject,” Watson said, enjoying the look of surprise still on my face. “Multiply that by a few hundred, and you’ve got only one of the dozens of experiments we’re running here. We’ll do some vision tests later this afternoon, and those you’ll be able to handle with only one nurse assisting.”

  Georgie asked, “The next one right away, Dr. Watson?”

  “Right away.”

  “We’ve got a little Negro girl, sixteen hours old.”

  He clapped his hands together. “Black, white, green or purple, makes no difference to me.”

  At dinner that night, I talked mainly about the vision tests, underplaying the grip test because as soon as I began to explain it, Mother brought her hands to her cheeks: “A baby can’t possibly support its own weight!” But I was excited, they could see that. And Mother and Father were both excited for me.

  I decided not to mention at all the demonstration in which Watson had handled a baby a little forcefully, to show how by confining the infant’s limbs and placing pressure on either side of its head or pinching closed its airways until it turned blue he could provoke it into an explosive rage. Instead, I mentioned that we were studying babies of various races and backgrounds, all mixed together.

  My father set down his fork and spoke slowly and deliberately. “So, your Dr. John Watson is not a believer in eugenics, then.”

  “He’s more interested in early environment than inheritance,” I said. “In terms of basic reflexes and inborn traits, his point is how few there are. And what he is most interested in tracking—like the development of vision—he tracks across racial boundaries. Across all boundaries. We don’t know much about the backgrounds of the children we’re given to study.”

  Annie came in with a creamer and sugar for the after-dinner coffee, and glanced around the table, looking for items to remove. Through the open door, from the distant kitchen, we could hear Bertha, muttering to herself in German, and then chastising Frank for something.

  “A lot of well-meaning and important people take an interest in eugenics,” Father said, still maintaining that curiously even tone. “Roosevelt does. Alexander Graham Bell does.”

  “And Margaret Sanger,” Mother chipped in. “A number of progressives.”

  “It’s a growing field,” Father said, touching his napkin to his lips, pushing his plate away, though he hadn’t finished his dessert. “A lot of government money in it, here and abroad. A lot of legislation in support of it. But popular support is rarely an indication of moral truth or even old-fashioned common sense.”

  From the stiff, careful way he was speaking and from the intensity of my mother’s attention to his every gesture, I knew there was more he had to express, but didn’t care to say without adequate knowledge or thought. I’d walked with my father around real estate developments, guided by surveyors and architects, and he was the type to nod, lean over a blueprint, rap on an unfinished doorframe. But he was the money man, and he knew it. He had always left politics to his brother—my uncle Isidor, the senator—who had passed away just before I left for college. Father was content to let the experts do their job, for the most part.

  “I don’t care for eugenics,” he said finally with a sharp shake of his head. “People have suffered enough the foolishness of those who are obsessed with some notion of so-called purity, racial or otherwise.”

  He wasn’t going to speak about our particular group of people—our family and our neighbors who had fled from Russia, Germany, and other parts of Europe where our family trees could become a legal liability or worse. Only “people.”

  He continued, “I’ve had enough with the conservatives and progressives both, obsessed with trying to make generations of people genetically ‘better.’”

  “Well,” my mother tried to say—she had no objection to expressing opinions, positive or negative—“they’re concerned about the mentally deficient, usually, if you’re talking about marriage laws and sterilization and such.”

  “No, Rebecca,” Father said. It wasn’t often he corrected her. “It’s not just about the mentally deficient, or about illness, which in itself can be a red herring, make no mistake. It’s about everything and everyone. And the deeper we can see into our cells and our chromosomes—you may correct me on my scientific terminology, Rosalie, but not until I’m finished—the more it should be clear that down in our marrow and going back through time we’re all more alike than different. You wouldn’t think that new science would only be used to confirm old prejudices.”
>
  Was he finished? He’d only started.

  “You’d think science would make those problems go away, and instead scientists are misusing what they don’t understand to divide humanity up all over again. I’m not trying to be alarmist. I’m just being plain.” He nodded once—now he was done—and tried to smile. “But not your new mentor, thank goodness. He’s not blinded by the so-called promises of eugenics. Aside from making babies cry, he sounds like a good man. Thank your Dr. Watson for taking a stand, at least.”

  “She didn’t say he takes a stand,” Mother said, gently.

  “Oh, he does,” I said with pride—a pride that had only grown, imagining my mentor at his very best, as seen through the eyes of my parents, whose advice I didn’t always follow but whose opinions I most certainly did respect. “I think he takes a stand on just about everything.”

  “But I still think he shouldn’t be requiring babies to hang from poles,” Mother said, fitting in the last word, and reaching sideways across the table to give my hand a reassuring squeeze. “I can’t imagine a person who would do that.”

  “Well, maybe you should invite him to dinner sometime,” Father replied. “Then you’ll be able to imagine him better.”

  My mother leaned back and shook her head, admonishing herself. “Well of course we will! I can’t believe we haven’t done it already.”

  Chapter 5

  The next morning, I spent several hours busy with Watson in the testing room and an equal number of hours on my own performing infant tests involving grasping, blinking, and swimming (thrashing in shallow water, really). I did remember lunch this time, but ate it late and quickly at my desk, while perusing a scientific article. In the late afternoons, generally, Watson was pulled away from us, and there was nearly always a student, professor, or administrator coming round to ask for his help or opinion, to look at a piece of equipment, or to meet someone influential touring the clinic or adjacent hospital. Watson kept one small lab room furnished as a resting room—couch, drink cabinet, an extra filing cabinet, and small rolltop correspondence desk—so that he could read or write letters in seclusion, followed by a nap just as everyone else was leaving. Then he’d put in a second shift, long into the night and without distraction.