Behave

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  It took more discipline than I had to stop replaying the image and the sounds, to stop not only revisiting the image, but feeling my own blood warm in response to it, with equal parts indignation and that other, inadmissable, thing—a quiver of excitement, which I tried to relabel as confusion and simple adrenaline fueled by my hurried flight away from what I had glimpsed. Essie and her red face, her exposed legs, and the edge of her girdle. Watson, turning away, fumbling with his trousers. The cabinet—could I ever file something in that cabinet again without thinking about it?—going rattle and bang.

  For at least one moment, I considered racing out of the building, and never coming back, but then what would I say to my parents, what would I do with my life, and how would anything ever make sense again, given the steps I’d taken to come this far? In the time it took me to discard that preposterous idea, to castigate myself for even thinking it, I noticed I’d folded the conference proceedings, had crumpled them, the front cover dog-eared, and now it was even a little damp, from my perspiring, confused, inky hands.

  Back at my desk, I pressed the booklet down and ironed it with the back of a dry hand, knowing that later this afternoon, he’d be touching these same creased pages, studying every word in the rebuttal inside, aware somehow of my confused feelings, when feelings were supposed to be irrelevant, or else exceedingly simple: rage, fear, love. What else was there, really?

  Chapter 6

  That weekend, I insisted on taking my Stutz Bearcat out for a late-afternoon drive, alone despite Mother’s protestations. I drove with the top down, my father’s raccoon coat draped over me, an old pack of cigarettes hidden in my purse, to be enjoyed only once I found some hidden spot in the countryside, taking in those sights and smells that had always reassured me: red and gold trees, country air, cheerful smoky leaf fires burning along the edges of the roads and fields. Another fall, and I was not at Vassar. I would never again be at Vassar. Welcome not only to Johns Hopkins, but to the school of life, and I was determined to be a better and quicker student: of men in general, of John Watson in particular. (An academic interest, purely. I was too smart to have a crush.) I was determined, more than ever, to be unflappable.

  I started work the next Monday morning determined to be cool and collected, to betray nothing about what I’d seen and thought on Friday afternoon. But as soon as John Watson came into the main room with his hands full of mail intercepted from the mailboy, I started rambling.

  “I just love this time of year,” I said, standing up from my chair so that I’d be nearly as tall, and there’d be no chance of him hovering over me, should the conversation get tricky. “Burning leaves and haystacks, and apples and pumpkins. It’s just wonderful outside the city. My head’s all cleared . . .”

  But he was distracted, sorting through the mail, brow furrowed, looking for something.

  Had I remembered to put that conference publication into his hands? No. It was still sitting on my desk. Face warming, I reached for it and handed it to him, but he took one look and shuffled it back into the pile while his eyes stayed fixed on something smaller, a worn envelope with a handwritten address in the upper left corner.

  “That didn’t take long,” he said, frowning.

  My thoughts were still back with the burning leaves, desperate to launch a harmless conversation. The harder I tried to rein in my thoughts, the more they scattered.

  “Do you go for country drives, Dr. Watson?”

  As soon as I’d said it, I realized its implication—as if I wanted to go for a drive with him, as if I were suggesting something, as if what I’d seen had perversely inspired me to be suggestive. I added quickly, “I meant only with your wife and daughters.”

  For a moment I felt relief, but then a moment later, my face pulsed even hotter. I hadn’t meant to mention his wife.

  “Daughter, singular,” he said. “I’ve got a daughter and a son.”

  He mentioned Polly often, but he hadn’t mentioned the other one—whose name, I would find out later, was John. Little John.

  He continued to stare at the envelope, frowning. “Pickens,” he said.

  “What’s a pickens?”

  “Not a what, a who. He can smell success from a thousand miles off, not that he can find it for himself, even if it were setting up a nest under his own front step.” Watson’s chin was still tucked into his chest as he stared down at the mail. “Some folks you just can’t get rid of.”

  Watson pursed his lips and tucked the small envelope into his front jacket pocket. He glanced at me. “You were asking about drives? I ride, but I don’t drive. Motor cars and I don’t get along.”

  “Oh, I see.” Another brilliant response.

  “I need to take care of this,” he gestured to his pocket “Would you ask Georgie to bring up two subjects?”

  We’d agreed, the week before, that if we had the nurses fetch two babies at a time, we could process them even faster.

  “Of course. Twenty minutes?”

  “That would be fine.”

  Near the stairwell, I saw the young mailboy, Gerry, coming down the hall with his delivery bag over his shoulder. He always did the three floors of our building, Phipps Clinic, last, and then headed back down to the main mailroom before going to the neighboring buildings. “You’re going to the baby ward next?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “Would you save me the trip and tell Georgie we’re ready for the day’s subjects, starting with the little girl? They’ll know the one.”

  “Happy to.” He touched the short bill of his cap.

  “Gerry—”

  “Yes?”

  “Oh, never mind. It was only that Dr. Watson seemed preoccupied because of a letter he opened. I shouldn’t stop you from your rounds.”

  But Gerry enjoyed breaks from going up and down those stairs, too. He’d gab about anything if you prompted him. “I know exactly what it was, if that’s what you’re asking. Another letter from his father.”

  “From his father? How do you know?”

  Gerry didn’t blink. “Well, from the return address, with his name, and South Carolina. Interesting stamp, too.”

  He noticed the lift of my eyebrows. “Well,” he said more carefully now, “and the doctor himself cussed the minute I put it in his hand—he’s an expert cusser—so that’s only why I took a look. Normally, I’d be too busy.”

  “Of course you would be. And I shouldn’t be keeping you.”

  He started down the stairs, skipping a few. I called down: “Don’t forget about the message for nurse Georgie!”

  Knowing that Watson was inside, I paused outside the baby-testing room, waiting for Georgie to come walking down the hall so we’d be able to enter together. She had wide hips, a rolling gait, and a slow-developing smile that didn’t entirely light up her eyes. But there was an evenness and reliability to Georgie that excused any lethargy. Even in an emergency, you wouldn’t mind watching her deliberate walk down that hospital hallway because you knew, once she arrived, she’d be level-headed and proficient.

  As soon as Georgie stepped through the doorway—I gestured for her to enter first and slipped in behind—he asked her, “You know about men’s clothes, don’t you?”

  “I have a father and three brothers, if that’s what you mean.”

  “You ever go clothes shopping with them?”

  “Sure, sometimes.”

  “I don’t mean the best places, not New York or anything expensive. I mean locally.”

  “Sure, sometimes.”

  Watson was sitting on a stool in the far corner of the room, heels hooked on the stool’s lower rung, letter in his hands. “All right, we’ll talk about it later.” He nodded at me. “Where’s the cart?”

  I’d been too distracted to notice. No nursery cart. No babies.

  “The little girl you asked for was taken home by her mother yesterday
,” Georgie explained. “They’re moving.”

  That’s exactly what annoyed him about research on human subjects, especially infant ones. Unlike rats in a cage, you couldn’t be sure they wouldn’t wander away, move, be collected by relatives or adopted by strangers. He was tremendously excited about the baby research now, but in the beginning, it hadn’t been a first choice. He’d stumbled into it only because Johns Hopkins didn’t have adequate facilities for a large animal population, and only later came to realize that babies represented the blank slates he’d always needed to prove his theories.

  “And the other one? We asked for two.”

  Georgie paused. It was the first time I’d seen her with empty hands, unoccupied by any clipboard, tray, diaper, bottle, or cart. She seemed to notice the absence herself and clasped her hands just under her stout, uniformed chest. “The two-week-old boy passed away overnight, in his sleep.”

  Outside: the click of passing heels. The hateful sound of a man’s tuneless, oblivious humming.

  Finally, Watson responded. “Well.”

  Georgie took a deep breath and added, “We haven’t told his mother yet. She’s coming by for a visit this afternoon.”

  “I see.” And a squeak of the casters as Watson rolled back several inches. “Well. That’s a wasted morning, then.”

  “Would you want to speak to her, to say anything?”

  “That’s not my line. I wasn’t even his physician.”

  Another sore spot. I’d heard from Curt that Watson had always wanted to get a medical doctor’s degree, but couldn’t afford the extra schooling. Though even if he’d had an MD, I was quite sure he’d leave a death notification to one of the nurses. No one liked delivering that news.

  “But you might tell her,” Georgie tried again, “that he was useful. To science, I mean.”

  Watson crossed him arms, stool squeaking under his weight. “But he wasn’t, Georgie. That’s the thing. You can’t be very useful to anyone if they can’t keep you alive for more than a few weeks.”

  I diverted my gaze to the white wall. Up high: a scattering of charts. The human eyeball: front, side, looking down. A chart of average weights and heights. Whatever I was looking for, it wasn’t there, but at least it provided a distraction. I suppose I thought work might cease for the day, that we might gather and proceed to the hospital or take a lunch break and let the news sink in, the way my own family had once gathered silently in our parlor, when there’d been particularly grave news about troop mortalities or numbers dead of the flu. This was one infant, not a thousand dead, but it was one infant we’d held in our own arms. Just last week, he’d been strong enough to wrap his entire tiny, red fist around my finger. Surely any moment Watson would say something kinder or softer.

  Instead he said, “I need a suit.” He corrected himself, “Not for me. And not a good one. Just a suit. If I gave you the rough measurements and the money, Georgie, and a little extra, would you pick one out and mail it for me?”

  “Sure, I could do that,” Georgie answered slowly. “Who’s it for, Doctor?”

  “For my father.”

  “Is he visiting?”

  “He sure as hell isn’t. I’m sending him this gift and it’s the last thing I’m giving him. And he can like it or he can lump it. With any luck, I’ll never hear from him again.”

  I couldn’t avoid looking at him now. His face wore an effortful smirk and he was cradling the side of his cheek with one hand, elbow on his knee, gaze focused out the doorway, watching Georgie leave. When she was gone, he turned to me.

  “I always said we needed a bigger facility: more subjects, more controls. I’ve been talking with Meyer about a national baby farm.”

  I thought I’d misheard. “A baby farm?”

  “We wouldn’t call it a farm, of course. Institute. People always like that word better. A place where we raise hundreds of them. No bad habits introduced, no going home, a self-enclosed community. Every behavior tracked. Rotating adult supervision so there aren’t any attachment issues. Better hygiene as well.” The last part came out sharply, as an accusation—the closest he came to sorrow or regret. Babies were born naturally strong, stronger than most people could imagine, and when they failed to thrive, there was inevitably someone or something to blame. As always, it was society that messed things up, not biology. He continued, “A carefully prepared environment with lower infant mortality and complete social-emotional stability. Parents entirely out of the way. That’s the only way we’d get anywhere. There’s government money for it, and a few of the right people are saying they’ll support it. It’s not out of the question.”

  For a moment, I thought he might be joking. He wasn’t. But I also knew his idea was a big messy ball of rational notions and strange hubris and old-fashioned human hurt. I might have stated some objection to the “farm” idea if I’d thought it was the real subject, but I didn’t believe it was. Not really.

  I cleared my throat and said, “You’re sure you want to cut off ties with your father, completely.”

  He seemed to see me for the first time that morning. “Yes, I’m sure.” He breathed hard through his nose, shaking his head from side to side. He allowed himself a small chuckle.

  He’d had no overtly sympathetic reaction whatsoever to the death of a baby, which shouldn’t have surprised me. He always took the long, cold view. The historical view. Sentiment couldn’t fix things. Only science and rational public policy could.

  At my mother’s insistence, two weeks earlier, I’d asked Watson and his family to dinner. He’d been slow in answering, and I’d hoped he wouldn’t come, and then hoped that he would, and then that he wouldn’t (“Get an answer, please, Rosalie,” my mother demanded. “It’s starting to get awkward.”), and then that he would so we could just get it over with. Of course, I was curious to meet the woman who had married him.

  “Your wife, does she get along with your father?”

  He laughed. “My wife? She’d much prefer to pretend I was born of better stock, to use a despicable phrase.”

  “What about your mother—can she help sort things out?”

  “She passed away when I was fifteen. Devout Baptist. Raised me to be a preacher. Named me after one: John Albert Broadus.”

  That was a surprise. I’d never met a less religious person in my life than John Watson. But I’d heard one or two people around the lab crack jokes about Watson’s revivalist fervor for preaching science.

  “He’d run off from her by the time she was shaping me up to preach,” he said, “and clearly, the ‘Good Word’ had no good effect on him. Pickens Butler Watson was a bad-tempered, unrepentant rover. No number of dunkings in the Reedy River could wash it out of him. One full bottle of whiskey a day. Left my mother and all of us children to run the farm, which we didn’t manage very well.”

  I opened my mouth to say I was sorry, but he fixed me with a look that discouraged any interruption. He was having more than enough trouble already.

  “When he went to live in the hills with a couple Cherokee women, I was expected to make up for everything he wasn’t, to be a perfect, morally upright son and a substitute husband, both. The absence of a man, even a lousy one, can encourage a kind of suffocating mother-love that’s unhealthy to any child.”

  He’d gotten it out, but just saying it all had left him looking choked up, with a bad taste in his mouth. It wasn’t just the memory of his father’s intemperance or his mother’s neediness, I didn’t think—it was acknowledging it, letting the past show its mark on the present. I knew he’d betrayed his own beliefs in a way just by telling me all this, just by risking that I would find these childhood facts too important. He probably would have denied that his father’s philandering and his mother’s desperation and his family’s backwoods poverty were essential to his present character. Allergic to Freudian notions about early traumas or sources of identity confusion, he was no
netheless offering up his own checkered past as an ante—a chip to buy his way into some larger game whose nature I didn’t yet fully understand. What I knew for sure was that he had chosen to confide in me, as perhaps he couldn’t confide in anyone else: not Curt or Georgie. Not Essie.

  Neither of us had spoken for a long moment when he said, “I don’t like this time of year, to answer your question. You were talking a while back about the leaves and the pumpkins and all that. It’s all right for a few weeks more, but then there’s the long downhill slide into the holidays: Thanksgiving, and that’s bad enough. And then Christmas. That’s murder.”

  “We’ll get some time off, at least.”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  His tone had been irritable and he seemed to want to take it back, because he said next, with a deliberately casual air: “So, you enjoy getting out of Baltimore? You’ve got some college boy who takes you out for a drive, now and again?”

  “College boy? Not hardly, Dr. Watson.”

  “You really can call me John, especially when there aren’t bureaucrats around. Even the nurses do, behind my back.”

  “I’ve got my own motor car,” I told him. “A beauty. I drive it myself.”

  “Well, well, Rosalie.”

  And with the change of subject, with the mention of my name, he returned to being the man I knew him to be, under the surface. His grin widened and his face relaxed. I could see the small gap between his two front teeth, the one where he occasionally stuck his thumbnail, when he was leaned over his desk, concentrating, worrying about something, unaware of being watched. That was all it took—that warming smile—to reassure me that his intentions were good and his future visions were sound, if occasionally extreme when taken too literally, of course, and that beneath it all was a lovable and sensitive person, someone worth not only helping, but defending. I wanted to be the one to defend him. And something simpler: I wanted to be the one to make him smile.