by Condition
The tests done, Paulette stayed angry. What was the point of all this knowledge if the condition couldn't be treated? Frank had been adamant about starting growth hormone, but it was Paulette who'd taken Gwen for the injections, soothed her fears for days beforehand; Paulette who'd comforted her later when the shots had no effect.
At such moments Frank, as always, was in the lab.
Paulette was no scientist, only a mother. And as a mother she wondered what exactly they'd accomplished by assigning a label to their daughter. They'd made a small but healthy and happy child feel like a curiosity, a medical freak.
It was Frank who'd insisted on classifying Gwen. This struck Paulette as cruel, unforgivably so. And she would not be a party to it. Even to her own family she had dissembled: Oh, she's fine, Daddy. Just small for her age. To her parents, to Anne and Martine, she had lied without compunction. Knowing the cruelty of children, she'd made sure Billy and Scott kept quiet too. Don't say anything to your cousins. It's nobody's business but ours.
She wondered, later, if this had been the right impulse. Yes, she'd wanted to protect Gwen from any stigma; yes, she had the child's welfare at heart. But there was more to it, just as there was more to Turner's syndrome than simply being short. The other aspects of the condition—the sexual aspects—had mortified her. Was she to tell her father, her brother, that Gwen would never go through puberty?
Nothing in her entire life had prepared her for such a conversation.
In the Drew family, nobody went through puberty. Such matters were not discussed.
Mortally embarrassed, she had avoided the whole subject. The family could see for themselves what was happening to Gwen, or not happening. Cowardly, perhaps; but it had seemed to Paulette the best course. And even now, more than twenty years later, she couldn't say with certainty that she'd been wrong.
That evening she telephoned Billy, something she hadn't done in years; mindful of her long-distance bills, he insisted on phoning her himself. Annoyingly, Billy's recorded voice answered the phone. Paulette did not speak to recordings, on principle, but this time she made an exception."Billy, this is your mother," she said, a bit self-consciously.
"It is critical"—Frank's word; why had she used that word?—"that I speak with you. I need your help." She was surprised when, a moment later, her telephone rang.
"Darling," she told him, "I'm worried to death about your sister."
"Mom, take it easy."
"Take it easy? I'm surprised at you, Billy. You and Gwen have always been so close. Aren't you at all concerned?"
Billy hesitated."Yeah, sure. But it's her life, Mom. There's nothing we can do about it."
"Of course there is! You could go down there and have a talk with her."
"I already talked to her on the phone, and she sounded fine. Anyway, I don't think she'd appreciate me rushing down there."
It took Paulette a moment to comprehend this. "You mean you won't go?"
"It's a terrible idea, Mom. Trust me on this."
"Billy, I don't know why you're being so stubborn! Your sister could be in danger."
"There's no reason to think that," Billy said calmly. "If this guy were a total creep, I'm sure Gwen wouldn't get involved with him."
"But how would she know, Billy? Your sister is very inexperienced."
"Is she?"
"Well, of course!" Did he know something she didn't? "Why?
You don't think so?"
Billy sighed."I really have no idea, Mom. Gwen never talks about that stuff."
Paulette tried a different tack. "Well, we don't know the first thing about this young man. Doesn't that bother you?"
"A little," he admitted. "Maybe you should talk to her yourself.
The next time I hear from her, I'll tell her to give you a call."
"Darling, don't be silly. You know she never listens to a word I say."
Billy did not disagree with this.
"Mom, I'd leave it alone if I were you. She's thirty-four years old.
She's entitled to make her own mistakes. And maybe—" He broke off.
"Maybe what?" she said, utterly perplexed. She'd always been able to count on Billy. It was inconceivable that he'd refuse to help.
"It's a weird situation, I know. But maybe he makes her happy."
Happy.
Long after she'd hung up the phone, Paulette tasted this word.
She had always wished for Gwen to meet someone—an anthropologist perhaps, or an archaeologist. (They weren't the same thing, though Paulette couldn't recall what the difference was.) He and Gwen would fall in love. It would be clear at a glance what had drawn them together (their common love of anthropology, or archaeology). The young man's motives could be trusted because they would make sense. Gwen would marry and adopt children or, like many women these days, live contentedly without. With each passing year, this scenario seemed increasingly unlikely; but Paulette continued to hope.
Yet now a young man had appeared, and she was filled with dread. Her daughter was in love, possibly for the first time. Paulette had learned long ago—and had been reminded again recently—that there was no more vulnerable state. A woman in love would part with anything. Comfort, security, dignity; her own plans for the future. And when love raced off to Providence in the new truck she'd bought him, she would stand at the curb waving good-bye.
Frank climbed the stairs to an outdoor platform in the far end of Brookline, along a sleepy spur of the Green Line. He had left his Saab at the dealership; he would catch the inbound train to Park Street, where he would change trains to Kendall Square. The whole business would eat up most of his morning. He glanced at his watch.
The Green Line trains were notoriously slow, and today he had no time to waste.
Back at the lab his docket was full. A presentation this afternoon, the Genetics in Medicine lecture series at Harvard. Afterward he'd drive straight to the airport. He was scheduled to speak early the next morning at Stanford. With publication looming, his life had grown hectic. Cristina had submitted just after New Year's, and the enthusiasm at Science was palpable: almost immediately, the paper went out for review. The reviewers, whoever they were (Frank had his theories), made a few minor suggestions, and Cristina had done the revisions in record time. In a mere three weeks, the paper would be in print—the fastest publication of Frank's career. Waiting was a kind of sweet torture, not unlike the first weeks of courtship, the runway leading up to sex. Daily, hourly, he thought of the apoptosis labs at Baylor and Chicago, the lingering danger of being scooped. With the paper in print, his lab would have a clear title to Cristina's findings. There would be more speaking engagements, interviews with the press. For the first time in ten years—since the heady days of XNR—Frank McKotch would have the world's ear.
And then.
In just a month the Academy would announce this year's nominees. Frank had been hopeful in the past, but this year he was dead certain. His moment had arrived.
Until then, he was cagey. The trick was to talk about the research, to generate excitement, without giving away too much. I'm like a tired old stripper, he grumbled happily to Margit. Take off the gloves, the stockings.
Keep the pasties on. He'd prepared two versions of the same spiel: a quick forty minutes for Harvard, a longer, more detailed (but still oblique) talk for the meeting at Stanford. Frank was a natural public speaker, relaxed and confident; but he knew better than to show up underprepared. He'd planned to spend this crucial morning reviewing his notes. Instead he'd squandered it on errands. The Saab's inspection sticker would expire while he was in California, leading to even more headaches when he returned. His colleagues had wives to look after such details: the unending, time-consuming maintenance, the hidden costs of owning a car, a house, a body. That fall he'd caught a cold that developed into bronchitis; hacking and aching, he'd driven himself to the emergency room. At such moments he felt deeply his aloneness. In these ways and others, life was more complicated for a man on his own.
A cold rain beat its Plexiglass roof. In the distance was a well-funded public high school, new and gleaming, overlooking athletic fields. It was the kind of school Frank's children might have attended if Paulette had not insisted on Pearse, where all the Drew men were bound to go. That Billy and Scott were not Drew men but McKotch men was a point he never bothered to articulate. His surname was a joke, an alias, a sore reminder of his father's disgrace. If anything, it was the brand of failure. Certainly it had never done a thing for Frank.
He stared out at the football field, unchalked, useless, a soggy, undifferentiated expanse of dying brown. The snow had melted; rainwater pooled in the end zones, reflecting the dull gray sky. Melancholy came upon him in a wave. For most of his life he'd evaded it with sprints and deft pivots, like the gifted quarterback he'd once been.
Now, with old age looming, his fancy moves had abandoned him.
He'd believed, always, that success was the cure, that a major find in the lab would melt his despair. And now, after ten years of frustration, he had a major publication in Science. In a month the Academy would announce its new members, an honor that again seemed within reach. So why did he feel exhausted and hopeless? His appetite was off, his sex drive nonexistent. When the alarm rang at five each morning, he could scarcely drag himself out of bed.
A train approached, horn sounding, the airy chuff of brakes.
Frank stepped aboard and grabbed a strap. The train was crowded, the last wave of the morning commute. He studied the passengers with interest. They wore hip, casual clothes, carried laptop computers or backpacks. Most were middle aged, or nearly so, yet dressed like students. Fully half were female. Frank wondered what sort of work they did.
He'd have expected a different crowd this far out in Brookline, which was almost the suburbs: young married men, a few yarmulkes maybe, everyone in business attire. Years ago this would have been the case. But times had changed: people were more reflective, now, about what was called settling down. Frank himself had settled down at twenty-four, willingly, cheerfully, with no thought to how much settling was actually involved. In those days only misfits stayed single past thirty, mamas' boys and sad sacks who couldn't get themselves a girl. He'd been a young husband and father when the world began to change. He had scoffed at the hippies, with their beards and ponytails; but all these years later, he could see the appeal of bumming around California or Europe, taking earth's pleasures like healthy young animals, innocent and vital and strong. If he'd been born just a few years later, Frank McKotch might have joined them. Instead he had married, studied, sweated away his best years in the bright lights of the laboratory. Now he was aging rapidly, shuffling toward sixty. And he was still in the lab.
He was thinking such thoughts when the train slowed at a crossing. He glanced out the window and saw a girl riding a bicycle, wearing a long black skirt. The bike was battered and heavy, an old-fashioned model with a low-slung crossbar, a woman's frame. As a youngster he'd found such bikes confounding. A boy, after all, carried the pendulous genitals, the fragile packet prone to accidental blows, the mildest of which could drop him like timber. It seemed wrong that Frank was expected to straddle the crossbar, while girls—their nether parts so well hidden that studying them would become his life's work—got the special low-slung frame.
He'd begun his life's work on a girl who rode just such a bike, a farm girl named Elizabeth Wilmer. Her father owned three hundred acres on the other side of the forest, where coal country gave way to dairy land. Unlike the miners, who were mostly Catholic, the farmers were German Protestants. Every Wednesday and Sunday, the Wilmers walked to services in the next town, at a small white frame church called Living Waters. The denomination—considered extreme even in Godcrazy Pennsylvania—demanded tithes and summer Bible camp and full-immersion baptisms, plus austere dress for women and girls. Lizzy Wilmer's dresses buttoned to her chin and hung to midcalf; her lank dark hair lay flat as a bedsheet down her back. Yet despite her prim appearance, Lizzy could hit a ball farther than Blaise Klezek. Frank would never forget the sight of her running the bases, hair and long skirts flying, as though she might go airborne. He and Blaise and Lizzy played ball all spring and summer. In the winter they rode sleds and built tunnels in the snow, Lizzy in long skirts always, her bare legs pink with cold.
One winter day Lizzy had crept up behind Frank in the woods, as he stood at a tree to urinate. He was eleven then, Lizzy twelve. Can I watch? she asked, shocking him. No girl had seen that part of him before. Write your name, she whispered, hands at his waist, and he did, or started to. The F and r were nearly legible, the hot piss melting the crusty snow.
I ran out, he said, embarrassed, but Lizzy only laughed.
Watch this, she said.
He gaped in amazement as she tugged beneath her skirt and dropped her white underpants to the ground. She stepped out of them and raised her skirt to her waist, then crouched slightly, her legs parted.
Her face was clenched in concentration, the tip of her tongue caught between her teeth.
She drew the letters large and wide, crab-walking to make the base of the L, stopping the stream expertly to make a fresh start with the I. She paused a moment before beginning the last letter—laughing, her hips swiveling, ending with an exuberant whoop, like the finale of a burlesque act. The Z was soft and rounded, as Lizzy herself was not yet. Not that Frank could see her, really, with all the fabric she held bundled about her hips. That came months later, on the muddy spring ground, not far from the spot where Lizzy had pissed.
She was an old woman now with a dozen grandchildren. Jesus, how life worked.
Years had passed, and there was no rewinding them. Frank would never be young again. He had never cared about money; he'd always known that time was the only wealth that mattered. He'd spent all his on a single purchase: his career as scientist. It was the only thing he'd ever truly wanted. Foolish, foolish, this creeping regret.
Briskly he jogged up the stairs to his office. Betsy Baird looked up from her desk.
"You're my watchdog," he told her. "I need half an hour to review my notes. Make sure I'm not disturbed."
"Frank, just to let you know—"
"I'm serious, Betsy. Half an hour. And don't worry about lunch.
I'll grab something at Harvard."
He charged down the hallway to his office and stopped short. In the chair opposite his desk sat his ex-wife, Paulette.
"There you are," she said irritably. "I've been sitting here half the morning. Frank, have you been running?"
"No, no." He paused to catch his breath. "What are you doing here?"
She eyed him balefully. "I've been trying to reach you for days.
Truly, I don't see the point of these machines if you never listen to the messages."
He blinked, flustered. She wore a slim skirt. He eyed her shapely legs, crossed at the knee. He closed the door.
"This is a surprise," he said, slipping behind his desk."Is everything okay?" He noticed, then, the high color in her cheeks. Her right foot, in its high-heeled pump, quivered rhythmically, as though itching to kick him."You're upset."
"Upset? Yes, Frank, I am extremely upset. Have you heard from Gwen?"
"Gwen?" He blinked. "Why, no, not since Christmas. I thought she was on vacation."
"She was." Paulette paused."As a matter of fact, she's still on vacation. I'm not sure when, or if, she's coming back."
He listened in amazement as she told him the story.
"Wow," he said finally.
"Wow?" Paulette looked at him as though he'd belched or farted.
"That's all you've got to say? Wow? "
"What were you hoping for?" Family crisis notwithstanding, he was due at Harvard in twenty-five minutes, and hadn't so much as glanced at his notes. Paulette had never been any good at getting to the point.
"What I'd like is for you to get involved, for once. Gwen has always res
pected your judgment. Heavens, it's been fifteen years since she's listened to anything I had to say."
"Well, I suppose I could call her," he said.
"Call her? I'm afraid that's not going to do it. Somebody needs to go down there and meet this young man. Find out what sort of person he is."
"Go down there? Now?" He stared at her in disbelief. "Look, I know you're concerned, but frankly you couldn't have picked a worse time. We have a major paper coming out in a few weeks, and that means—" He glanced surreptitiously at the clock. "Now, for instance. I'm due at Harvard in twenty minutes. I have a talk to give, and then a plane to catch."
"You're saying no."
"I'm saying I can't. There's no way I can leave."
She sighed wearily."I should have expected this."
"Paulette, I'm sorry," he said, reaching under his desk for his briefcase. "I wouldn't do this if it weren't extremely important. But I really do have to go."
chapter 6
What he'd lacked his whole life—Scott understood this now—was a mission.
He'd been slow to grasp this truth, despite the fact that everybody who'd ever known him—parents, girlfriends, teachers at Pilgrims and Pearse and Stirling—had pointed it out. Even Penny, who'd drifted through life waitressing and running cash registers, who'd let him keen for years the miseries of teaching Great Expectations to subliterate sophomores, had recently interrupted him: Fine, Scotty. But what do you want to do?
For his thirtieth birthday she had given him, without irony, a book called What Color Is Your Parachute?
At Concord High, where he'd touched down briefly after being booted out of Pearse, he'd spent a morning filling in hundreds of tiny ovals with a number 2 pencil, affirming that he preferred skiing to basketball, bowling to crosswords, rock and roll to jazz or folk. Based on such answers, a computer in Madison, Wisconsin, concluded that he'd make a fine soldier, fireman, or manufacturing floor supervisor.