In the Field

by Rachel Pastan

  In the Field

  A Novel

  Rachel Pastan

  For my brothers, sisters-in-law, and brother-in-law:

  Stephen, Peter, Elizabeth, Amy, Lisa, and Hershel

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Anyone who knows about genetics will immediately recognize that the protagonist of this novel, Kate Croft, is based on Barbara McClintock, who won the Nobel Prize in 1983.

  But this is essentially a work of a fiction. I use some of the facts of McClintock’s life and science, but I have no way of knowing what she thought or felt, and the details of her personal life are murky. I have been moved and fascinated by the story of her life and science ever since I read her obituary in the New York Times in 1992. But in writing this book, I intentionally talked to very few people who actually knew McClintock. I wanted to have the freedom to make Kate Croft the person I needed her to be.

  I have taken even more liberties with some of the great scientists McClintock was close to. Some readers may recognize some of their science here, but I have no reason to think any of McClintock’s scientific friends and colleagues were anything but entirely upright.

  As for the science itself, I have done my best to convey it as accurately as possible. Doubtless there are errors, for which I take complete responsibility.

  PROLOGUE

  1982

  In summer at that hour she would have been out in the cornfield already. Hot green smell of rising stalks, sharp blades of dew-damp leaves, wasps buzzing. But it was October now, and dark. Kate had always been a light sleeper, an early riser, eager for what the day might bring. Often, wakeful and restless, she wandered down to the lab in the heavy stillness of three a.m. She kept a cot there, among the shelves of microscope slides and back issues of Genetics, in case she got sleepy and didn’t want to bother coming back upstairs. After an hour’s doze she’d wake with her mind clear as through scrubbed, the work waiting.

  This morning though—5:20 by the stove clock—she was upstairs in the apartment kitchen when the phone rang. Drinking coffee in her old seersucker robe, her round steel glasses polished with a carefully pressed handkerchief, she was absorbed in an article about yeast. Some days lately her mind felt sticky, a swollen door she had to tug open, but today it was working fine. When the phone rang—a loud bright trill intruding on the humming silence—she glanced at it darkly. What kind of person called at the crack of dawn?

  Two parallel answers, like two parallel streams of bubbles in an aquarium, bloomed in her gut and rose.

  But if someone had died, who could it be? Nearly everyone she’d ever loved was dead already.

  As for the other … Well, it was October.

  She lifted the heavy cold receiver to her ear. “Hello?” she barked.

  “Is this Dr. Kathleen Croft?” a male voice said. Melodic, affable, vaguely foreign. “I have some very good news.”

  The words clogged and confused her brain, they were like lights stuttering in the darkness and then going out.

  Then he told her what he’d called to tell her: her work, an award, recognition long overdue … Afterwards she couldn’t remember what he’d said exactly. The old ghostly voices swirled around her as if trying to drown him out. Her mother’s: It’s a waste of money to send a girl to college. Dr. Krause’s: Young women don’t take this work seriously. Hiram Cole’s: Science is not something to pass the time with until you get married!

  The committee had recognized her discovery, nearly half a century earlier, that genes could move from place to place on the chromosome, something that had come as quite a surprise.

  Well, that was true enough.

  But nowhere in the citation was the significance of her discovery mentioned, the true significance that she, leaping from sight to insight, had understood long ago, that genes did not absolutely determine what an organism would be.

  It was as though you celebrated Thomas Edison for making a filament of carbon incandescent without explaining what the thing did: light up a dark room.

  PART ONE

  1923

  CHAPTER 1

  Outside it had grown colder, but at least the wind had dropped. The white November moon lit up the empty street as, clutching her suitcase, Kate plunged into the night. The moon swam in and out of the trees, and the curtained windows of the houses seemed to watch her as she passed, like the blank black eyes of whales. As long as she was walking she could almost manage not to think. Instead, in the darkness of her mind, she recited the phyla and classes of plants—Thallophyta, Bryophyta, Pteridophyta—moving steadily in the direction of the campus as though pulled by a current. It was the way her feet knew to go.

  It was quiet. No leaves scudded along the pavement, no cars rumbled, no chattering voices relieved the vacant silence that closed over her like water. In an hour or two, the first buses would start running and the sparrows with their feathers puffed for winter would twitter in the bushes, but right now it seemed not a soul in Ithaca was awake besides herself.

  And Thea, of course, shut up somewhere inside the house behind her, her face pink with shock. Kate thrust that face away, deep in the darkness of her mind.

  By the time she reached the library, her arm ached and her feet throbbed in their heavy shoes. The great stone building was dark. In a daze, Kate went up to the door and tugged on it anyway. It gave a quarter of an inch, jolting hope up through her, before the bolt caught and held. She turned away and resumed walking (Gymnospermae, Angiospermae), and the next time she looked up she was in front of Roberts Hall, the biology building. She set the suitcase down and looked up at the steps with their litter of brown oak leaves. She looked at the heavy double doors above which the great windows, each one as tall as a person, faintly reflected the moonlight. Perhaps because they were bare, they seemed less unfriendly than the ones she had passed in the town with their linen or flowered damask curtains closed against her. She walked up to the wall and laid her hand against the cold grit of the stone. The deep slate sill of the first-floor window pressed into her waist. When the weather was fine, students lounged there, dangling their legs. Kate hoisted herself up, leaning back against the cold glass. Images from the night—pale hard faces and pairs of girls waltzing in sherbet-colored dresses—crowded into her mind. She pulled her legs under her and got carefully to her feet. Grabbing onto the upper ledge with her hands, she peered up. Just above was the window of the biology lab, which Dr. Krause kept open half an inch to combat the gas and formaldehyde smells, and because, he said, he liked fresh air. “When I was a boy in München, we always slept with the windows open. Even in winter!” he had told his Introduction to Biology students. “It was thought to be good for our health.”

  Was the window open now? Clinging to the stone, Kate squinted. The ribbon of darkness along the bottom seemed differently black than the darkness above it. Her fingers scrabbled, searching for holds. Next to her, the decorative brickwork formed a kind of frieze, a band protruding slightly from the rows above and below. Perhaps if she could get her foot onto it, she could hoist herself up. Then again she might slip, tumbling down the façade to land in a heap on the forecourt.

  Well. There was only one way to find out.

  She felt better now that she had a plan. Besides, she had always liked climbing: the backyard elm tree, beeches in the woods on summer afternoons. As she reached her foot over to the frieze, her body felt light. Her scuffed shoe did not slide. She reached up with one hand, then with the other, pushing with her leg. Yes, it was open! Barely, but it was. She slid her hands under the sash, forcing the glass up until she could duck into the room.

  Inside, everything was quiet and dark. The room smelled of fixatives and stains, of dead sna
kes coiled in jars and living mice in the walls, of ammonia and bleach. It radiated order and rationality. In this room, if you used your mind and the right equipment, you could answer all the questions at the end of the lesson.

  How many carpels are involved in the formation of the peach?

  Where are the resin canals located in a pine leaf, and what is their function?

  How many seeds can you see in a longitudinal section of a grain of corn?

  Still, she couldn’t stay here. She needed to find somewhere she could hunker down out of sight.

  In the hallway, it was darker still. There were no windows, no gleam of moonlight to guide her. She felt her way along the wall, trying all the doors she came to.

  The first door: locked.

  The second door: locked.

  As in a fairy tale, the third door opened. In the dimness, Kate made out the shadowy shapes of a desk, a chair, stacks of books and papers.

  Someone’s office. No good. No good.

  She kept going, trying one door after another until finally, at the far end, by the stairwell, another knob turned. Heart pounding, she peered into a small, windowless storage room. Crates were stacked against one wall behind a thicket of chairs, a lopsided table, and a tower of rusty metal cages that might once have held mice or guinea pigs. Kate pushed a few of the chairs out of the way as quietly as she could. The scraping sound set her heart racing, though there couldn’t possibly be anyone to hear. She eased the crates forward until there was a space between them and the wall just wide enough to lie down in. She took off her coat, spread it out, and lowered herself onto it. This was where she belonged—in the dark, on the floor, in a room meant for broken things.

  Kate had signed up for Introduction to Biology back in September because her housemate, Thea, was taking it, and she wanted Kate to take it too. “Otherwise I’ll be the only one,” she said. Thea was taller than Kate, pale and gray-eyed in her plaid, pleated jumpers. A long braid hung down her back, bouncing and swaying when she walked, the strands almost blond where the light caught them.

  “The only what?” Kate asked.

  “Girl,” Thea said.

  “Those classes have a hundred people in them,” Kate scoffed. But she signed up anyway, and it turned out Thea was right: they were the only two. They were freshmen, and it was 1923. Three times a week they sat next to each other in the front of the big musty auditorium. Thea insisted they sit in the first row. She was from Manhattan—her father was a classics professor—and, unlike Kate’s, her family had encouraged her to go to college. “My father said it was a good idea, as long as I didn’t think I could learn Greek,” Thea said.

  Kate’s father, a physician, had died in France, in the war, at the age of forty, when Kate was twelve. Before that, at home in Brooklyn, he’d liked to walk out into the countryside with his field glasses, looking at trees and birds and butterflies, once in a while taking Kate with him. She liked to think he would have been happy to see her go off to Cornell, whereas her mother, when the train to Ithaca was called, had pressed her lips together in a thin line like a bobby pin and said, “Try not to embarrass yourself.”

  Kate loved the house on Myrtle Street, which she shared with Thea and another girl, Lena. She loved its wooden floors, which were mostly bare, and its plain white walls, so different from her mother’s fussy wallpapers. She loved the acorn-shaped finial at the bottom of the bannister, the wood worn to satin by anonymous hands. She even liked the cupboard-sized room Thea showed her when she answered the ad, into which a bed and a chest of drawers had somehow been crammed. From the doorway, a single high window looked out onto the neighbor’s brick wall.

  “It’s not a beautiful view,” Thea conceded as they stood together, looking up.

  But Kate was determined to find everything about her new life lovely. She threw herself down on the coverlet, which exhaled a cloud of golden dust, and tucked her arms behind her head. From here, the window was a rectangle of pure blue. Her mind drifted up, steeping itself in color. “It is from here,” she said.

  Thea came over and sat on the edge of the bed to see what Kate was seeing. “Blue is my favorite color,” she said, looking up at the rectangle of sky. “What’s yours?”

  “Blue.” Kate shut her eyes. Sometimes her body felt too small to contain everything roiling inside it, and she had to shut things out so she wouldn’t burst.

  In the Myrtle Street house, the girls cooked omelets for all meals, or heated up soup. Sometimes, if she had the money, Thea brought home bagels and salty orange fish from Rosenbaum’s delicatessen. Kate had never eaten a bagel before, and she subjected it to a scrutiny that made Thea and Lena laugh. “How do you get a texture like this, chewy yet melting? It doesn’t taste anything like a doughnut, like you’d think it would. Doughnuts are cakey and sweet—you fry them in oil—” But of course the other girls knew what doughnuts were, even though Kate was unfamiliar with their foods, and their confusing rules about what you could and could not eat, and their singsong prayers on Friday evenings, which they claimed they only bothered with because they had promised their mothers. Kate liked to watch the candle flames and listen to the minor melodies as they sang the Hebrew words. She liked the way Thea’s face looked in the candlelight, tranced and medieval, her freshly washed hair shining. It was the one time of the week she left it loose.

  Thea knew about all kinds of things: Freud, Galileo, Yiddish theater. She liked poetry, especially Keats and someone German Kate had never heard of, Heinrich Heine. When Thea was thinking something through, she went so still she almost ceased to breathe, and when she was excited by an idea, her shoulders flared backward and her face flushed and she tugged violently at her braid. For example, when Kate mentioned that she planned never to have children, Thea pulled on her braid and cried, “Don’t be silly! Of course you are.”

  “Why of course?” Kate retorted. “If I don’t want to.”

  “Why wouldn’t you want to? It’s the one thing in the world that’s better about being a girl!”

  Kate, who had been lining up her arguments, began to laugh. It was so much the sort of thing she might have said herself.

  “Women without children always look so mournful, like hungry wolves,” Thea said. “Even the fat ones.”

  “I wouldn’t mind being a wolf.” Kate was afraid of lightning, and of suffocation—being buried alive—but she wasn’t afraid of being hungry. “Babies are sticky, and children are always whining about something.”

  “You’ll change your mind,” Thea said.

  Kate glared. This sudden primness—the open flower of Thea’s face gone chilly, as though made of silk—did not suit her. “I won’t,” she said. “Why should I?”

  “You sound like my sister Hannah,” Thea said. “Eat your carrots. I won’t! Wash your hands before you set the table. Why should I?”

  “That’s a stupid comparison,” Kate said. “There’s a good reason to wash your hands before you set the table.” But she saw that Thea’s eyes were full of tears. Kate touched her friend’s wrist. It was sharp and soft at the same time: the stem of a leaf, a milkweed pod. “What is it?” she said.

  “I miss them,” Thea said, sniffing noisily. “I’ve shared a room with Hannah all my life. Here sometimes I wake up, because Lena breathes so differently.” Lena and Thea shared the big bedroom down the hall from Kate’s.

  Kate didn’t miss her family. Even before her father died, she had felt stifled and out of place in that dark Brooklyn house. “I guess everyone breathes in his own particular way,” she said. “Like fingerprints.”

  Thea smiled, even though she was still crying. “Or snowflakes,” she said.

  “Pinecones,” Kate said. There was a flutter in her chest, as though a moth were caught in there, trying to get out. She’d never had a friend like this before, someone she didn’t get bored with and make excuses to get away from, preferring, in the end, to
be alone.

  CHAPTER 2

  In the weekly lab section for Intro Bio, Kate and Thea were relieved to be assigned as partners, even if it was because no boy would have wanted to be paired with them. On the first day, they lugged their microscope over to their bench. The black metal instrument was cool to the touch, solid, with interesting levers and lenses. There was a little platform called a stage that went up and down when you turned a knob. Another knob adjusted the ocular lens—a portal to another world! “Ocular lens,” Kate said aloud, testing the words. Perhaps the world she saw through it would be more comprehensible than this one with its hidden costs and unspoken rules and unbearable expectations. Only yesterday her mother had written complaining about the expense of her room and board. Kate tried to shut out thoughts of being forced to go home, but she could feel them in the dark corners of her mind, buzzing like flies.

  Dr. Krause came around with a beaker of water and an eyedropper. He squeezed one drop onto each group’s slide. “I collected this yesterday in a pond not so far from my house,” he said in his lilting accent. “I don’t know what’s in it. No one knows! Each of you will be the first person in the world to look at this particular drop of water and see what miracles it holds.”

  A snicker or two rose up toward the stained and flaking ceiling. Dr. Krause frowned, his tangled eyebrows furrowing. “Biology is the study of life,” he said sternly. “Life is a miracle! If you doubt that, there’s no reason for you to be here.”

  “Medical school,” someone whispered. Kate turned to give a dirty stare to a square-jawed boy wearing a diamond-patterned sweater. Thea clipped the slide onto the platform and bent over the eyepiece. Her braid was secured today in a pink-checked ribbon. Her fingers worked the focus knob back and forth the way Kate’s sister Laura fiddled with her engagement ring.