In the Field

by Rachel Pastan

  “The University of Missouri,” Kate replied, though she knew Sarah hadn’t really forgotten. “His X-ray institute is doing amazing things. I wouldn’t be surprised if he won a Nobel Prize!” The rain began to come down harder. It tumbled along the gutters and rang in the downspouts.

  Sarah nodded slowly. “It’s about time. After all those dumbos not giving you your due for so many years.”

  “It is,” Kate said.

  “Maybe you can use it as leverage with Whitaker.”

  Kate had thought of that. Whitaker had been increasingly cranky about the one-year extensions to her instructorship he kept giving her. But ultimately people did not stay at the institution where they did their graduate work. She needed to get out into the world. Get her work better known—herself better known. “Maybe,” she said.

  Heavy raindrops immolated themselves on the window. Sarah looked up at the kitchen clock and Kate’s eyes followed. Mrs. Sonnenfeld would be home in half an hour. She was always prompt returning from concerts or her bridge club or her library volunteer meetings; yet she was never early. “Missouri is very far away,” Sarah observed.

  “Yes,” Kate agreed. “But I’m sure they have sick people there.”

  Sarah’s laugh was bright as a bell. “Of course, I could never leave Mutti,” she said. “And she could hardly be expected to pick up and move at her age.”

  Thunder jangled Kate’s skull. The windows blazed white and went out. The dogs galloped in from the living room, tossing their beautiful silken heads like ponies.

  It rained all night, and Kate lay awake listening to the rain. Sometimes it fell so softly that she almost couldn’t hear it: hissing out of the sky with a sound like a phonograph needle after the record is finished. It was still raining at dawn when she heard Mrs. Sonnenfeld get up and go downstairs. When Kate got to the kitchen, the percolator was on the stove, and Mrs. Sonnenfeld was scolding the dogs, who were standing, shivering and whining, by the open door, refusing to go out. The rain wasn’t so much falling now as floating, descending slowly as though lowered on silken threads. A cool mist blew into the house. Clouds billowed and shifted in the sky, shark gray and charcoal gray and pearl. Kate smoothed Holly’s long ears. Could there be a gene for the fear of rain? Could such a gene be linked, perhaps (as long as she was speculating), to the genes for fine long bones and glossy coats? She pictured the genes for different traits all riding the same chromosome like strangers sharing a train compartment. “Poor things. They were bred for beauty, not courage.”

  “Nonsense,” Mrs. Sonnenfeld huffed, pouring cream into a pitcher. “They’re just spoiled.”

  The Plant Breeding building was full of people talking, opening and shutting doors, rattling file cabinets, typing letters, fixing slides. It was disconcerting how few people she knew well here anymore. They moved around the labs and halls taking up the space where Thatch and Paul and even Jax ought to have been: the new young crop of students with their rumpled lab coats and their hooting laughs and their confidence. The promising young men. All of them relied on her characterization of maize chromosomes. All of them used her staining technique, whether they knew she had invented it or not. When she passed them on her way to the bathroom or the conference room, she felt they looked through her without seeing her. In her lab, though, she could forget about them. She could close the door and forget about everything but the work.

  The season before, Kate had bred her twin-sector plant, like a champion stallion, to a range of other maize plants. Under the microscope, she had seen that the chromosomes of many of the offspring showed a breakage, specifically on chromosome nine. Over and over again she saw it, on the same chromosome, and in the same spot: two-thirds of the way down the short arm.

  It wasn’t random, then. It was a pattern.

  On the table, Zimmer’s letter lay in its buff-colored envelope with the Mizzou seal on the back. On the front, her name and address were neatly typed: Dr. Kate Croft, Instructor, Department of Plant Breeding.

  Breakage in the same spot, two-thirds of the way down the short arm of chromosome nine. A pattern.

  Instructor.

  So pleased to be able to offer a home for the study of the exciting phenomena you are seeing in your plants … Finally shaken funding loose from the Dean for a two-year position … Confident that with good results more funding will be forthcoming …

  Instructor. Whereas Paul and Thatch were assistant professors.

  In the hallway, on her way out to the drying shed, she ran into Whitaker.

  “There you are,” he said, though she had been in her lab all morning.

  “Here I am,” she agreed.

  “I want to talk to you. Come along to my office, please.”

  Kate had to move quickly to keep up with the old man’s long strides. He was still vigorous at seventy, though his face, brown from working in the sun, was beginning to be stained with liver spots, and his temper had become more erratic. She reminded herself that there was no reason to think she was in trouble. He probably just wanted to talk over a result. But the timing worried her.

  Yet even if he had found out she was considering leaving, why would that anger him? He wanted her to leave. That was clear every time she had to ask him for another year. Maybe he was irked that she had been offered a job he had had no role in arranging. Even though he kept on not arranging one.

  “How does your harvest look?” he asked as they strode through the outer office, where Miss Floris, half hidden behind a vase of dahlias, sat typing.

  “Good, I think. I was just going out to see what’s what.”

  “Didn’t lose many plants?” The question, asked jocosely, was a way of ribbing her for the way she managed—or micromanaged—her field. Everybody else planted many plants, as many as a thousand, knowing they’d lose a lot to pests and to chance. With so many plants, you needed help at fertilization time, which meant you gave up some level of control, and mistakes were often made. In order that there would be no mistakes—in order that she would know, absolutely, the genetic makeup of each plant—Kate fertilized every ear herself; checked them all for damage daily; watered carefully. She was able to grow only about two hundred plants a season, but each one was an intimate.

  “Not too many,” she said. In fact, she had lost two.

  Seated at his claw-footed desk, Whitaker took his time lighting his pipe. Kate sat in the chair by the window wondering if she should beat him to the punch, come out and tell him about Zimmer’s letter. Ask his advice, maybe.

  Well, she knew what his advice would be. Go. Go.

  “Have you heard from Thatch, lately?” Whitaker asked when he had got his pipe going.

  “Thatch? Not very lately, no.”

  Whitaker was looking out the window, where the clouds were finally breaking up. “I’ve invited him to come give a seminar,” he said. “Next week.”

  Kate wasn’t aware of any particularly seminar-worthy work Thatch was doing, but then, as she’d said, they hadn’t been in close touch lately. “I’ll be glad to see him,” she said.

  “Weren’t you writing a paper together?” Whitaker asked. “On the bronze locus?”

  “He dropped off. Busy with other things, I guess.”

  “But his name will still be on it?”

  She shook her head. “We talked about the idea at the beginning. And I used some of his stocks. But in the end, he didn’t do any work.”

  Whitaker frowned and pulled on his pipe. After a minute he turned his hawkish stare on her. “I’d like you to put him back on.”

  Kate laughed. “I’d be happy to have his help. But you’d better talk to him about it.”

  Whitaker’s face was stern. “I want his name on the author list.”

  Kate stared at the Great Man, waiting for the thing he was asking to make sense.

  “Talking about the idea isn’t nothing,” Whitaker
said. “Using some of his stocks isn’t nothing.”

  “Not doing nothing is hardly a standard for publication,” Kate said.

  But Whitaker, who was usually exacting about who got credit for what work, wasn’t listening. Something on the crowded desk had caught his eye. He leaned forward, squinting at the perfect bluish bonsai spruce that had sat in its shallow dish, looking exactly the same, as long as Kate had been coming into this office. “Did you hear Cynthia lost another pregnancy?” he asked, picking up his large, bird-shaped scissors and pruning off a twig almost too small to see.

  Kate flinched as though the blade had grazed her. She hadn’t heard that. She hadn’t heard a word from Thatch in months. Maybe he was too occupied with his private grief. She hadn’t written to him, either, of course, and what was her excuse? “Poor Thatch,” she said. “Cynthia, too, of course.”

  Whitaker’s finger moved along the branch, testing the tiny needles, searching for a flaw. “Most of the time, marriage is good for a scientist. It makes him more organized.”

  “A male scientist, you mean.”

  “That’s right.” He set down the scissors and looked at her. “I always say how wise you were not to marry.”

  She took in the past tense: as though, at barely thirty, that option was behind her.

  “I’m going to have a little dinner for Thatch when he’s here,” Whitaker said. “Mrs. W. will whip up something special.”

  But her mind had circled back to what he had wanted in the first place. “Why do you care if his name is on the paper?” She wasn’t being difficult. She was asking a question. She was trying to understand a mystery, which was her job.

  “I’d consider it a personal favor,” he said.

  Kate took the long way around to the drying shed, past the practice fields and the dairy barns. Beyond the academic buildings, the tended lawns gave way to meadow. Wind made patterns in the grass, and there were interesting weeds: milkweed without which there would be no monarch butterflies, yellow wood sorrel which you could eat as a salad, Queen Anne’s lace with its one dark umbel.

  In the shed, in the glaring light of the bare bulb, she tugged down the green sheaths which squeaked against the milky kernels, then turned the ears slowly to see what was what.

  The rotary method.

  In normal corn, each kernel was a solid color. But in her mutant corn, altered by X-rays, the kernels were speckled: constellations of red stars in a white sky. Whatever controlled the color red was turning the process on and off as the kernel grew—a switch being flicked by a wild hand. Red, no red; red, no red; red, no red.

  A circuit sputtering.

  Nothing new. Nothing new. She had seen these patterns many times before.

  And then, as she shucked one ear after another and placed them in the wide racks, she saw it: one kernel that was nearly all red. No speckles here, but a big round spot—garnet-colored, almost glowing in the dusty shed.

  Whatever had been happening—whatever had been flicking the switch on and off—had stopped.

  Kate’s breath caught in her dry throat. The variation she had been chasing culminated right here. This kernel—this kernel!—was the wedge that would help her pry open the mysteries of the changes she saw. To understand what controlled how an organism became itself.

  Kate held the ear up close to her glasses and looked hard. She put it down and then picked it up again. She shut her eyes, breathing in the sweet, milky smell. Then she opened them again to make sure the spot was still there.

  How did an organism—a corn plant or a human being or an Irish Setter—become what it became? It was more than just the genes: it had to be. After all, an eyeball cell and a liver cell were genetically identical. So what controlled what kind of cell a cell ripened into?

  Likewise, a caterpillar and a moth shared the exact same genome; so what controlled which creature came when? Or, to bring the question closer to home, how did a ball of undifferentiated cells inside a woman’s body grow into a person who liked baseball, or daydreamed over encyclopedias, or thrilled to pretty clothes?

  Who fell in love with one sort of person, or another sort?

  Once, when Kate was nine, she had walked through a field with her father to a nearby pond to look for tadpoles, and he had stopped to point out the flies circling a pile of horse dung. There they stood on a sunny spring morning in front of the steaming pile, the sky transparent as water, clouds of gnats drifting peaceably by, and her father talked about spontaneous generation: how people used to believe life could burst forth out of nothing because they saw maggots arise from dead bodies. In fact, he explained, flies laid their eggs in the rotting flesh. Also in excrement. Indeed, every organism grew from tiny seeds that contained the essence of everything the organism would ever need. “Everything essential in the oak is found in the acorn,” he said, quoting somebody. You could always tell when he was quoting from the way he thrust his chest out as though standing at a podium. But there was no acorn, no oak tree here. No podium. Only the enormous pile of oak-brown dung with its halo of flies, which made Kate think uncomfortably of what she knew she should not, the shameful pleasure of her own movements coiling out as she sat on the cold seat. Or—sometimes—in the woods when she was alone, squatting with her dress hiked up behind a log, the air cool against her bare secret skin.

  Why was it all right to look at horse droppings but people ones were shameful? She would have liked to ask her father, who knew everything, but of course she could not. Instead she stood uneasily beside him while he explained that people used to believe all kinds of things as they struggled to explain the natural world. The four bodily humors. Phrenology. Vitalism. “Brilliant minds,” he said, waving his hand like a conjurer. “Amazing the ingenuity needed to dream up these false theories.”

  There her father stood in the spring field, young and vital, his pale sideburns glowing in the morning light. “In the face of mystery,” he told his daughter, “men have always endeavored to explain why things are the way they are. It’s part of what makes us men.”

  CHAPTER 27

  The dogs clattered to greet her as usual when they heard the door. There was a platter of schnitzel on the table, the browned veal sprinkled with parsley and garnished with translucent lemon slices. Also a big bowl of noodles and a plate of sliced cucumbers sprinkled with feathery garden dill. Sarah and Mrs. Sonnenfeld sat at the table with their plates still half full, though it was well past their usual dinner hour.

  “We thought perhaps you’d fallen into a gorge,” Sarah said.

  “Sorry,” Kate said. “I lost track of the time.”

  “Sit down,” said Mrs. Sonnenfeld, waving away her apology. “You must be starving.”

  Kate began to fill her plate with schnitzel and yellow buttery noodles. “This looks delicious,” she said. If she lived alone, in an apartment or a little house in Columbia, Missouri, would she revert to living on soup?

  “I hope it’s not too cold,” Sarah said.

  “Not cold at all.”

  “We waited. But then we gave up.”

  Kate cut hungrily into the schnitzel. Mrs. Sonnenfeld began to describe how long she’d had to stand in line at the butcher shop, and how she had argued with the butcher about the veal, and how, while there, she had run into Mrs. Himmelstein, whose son had won a scholarship to somewhere or other. Sarah stood up and went to the dresser and took the whiskey bottle down. She poured two glasses and set one in front of Kate, but Kate shook her head.

  “I have to work later.”

  “Poor Kate,” Sarah said. “Always working. I guess I’ll have to drink all the whiskey then.” She picked up one glass and poured it into the other.

  Kate had intended to tell Sarah and Mrs. Sonnenfeld about the red spot on the maize kernel, but this clearly wasn’t the moment to do that.

  Sarah sipped her drink. Threads of silver in her hair caught the light, a
nd the wrinkles around her eyes were as fine as cat’s whiskers. “Mutti,” she said. Her eyes were on the white candles that burned with tall straight flames in the silver candlesticks Mrs. Sonnenfeld had brought from Germany. “Did Kate tell you she’s been offered a job?”

  Mrs. Sonnenfeld looked up at Kate, jowls wobbling. “Is that true?”

  Kate nodded, her mouth full of noodles.

  “Well! Isn’t that wonderful news!”

  “At the University of Missouri,” Sarah said.

  “Ah,” Mrs. Sonnenfeld said. She pushed her chair back and began to clear the table, though Kate was still eating. “I am pleased for you,” she said. “Of course.” She cleared away her own plate, and Sarah’s, and then the platters of food.

  “It’s only for two years,” Kate said. “After that it would depend on how the work goes.”

  Mrs. Sonnenfeld stood at the sink in her navy coatdress and her flowered apron and her heavy shoes, her cloud of hair floating over the enamel basin. Sarah got up and began to help her mother. The older woman rinsed a dish and handed it to Sarah, who dried it and put it away.

  “I haven’t said I’d take it,” Kate said.

  Instead of talking about his own projects, Thatch said, he would give them an overview of the genetics work that was being done at the Rockefeller. In a way, this was classic Thatch—directing attention away from himself to others. But it was an odd use to make of a seminar. Kate could feel the breath of uneasiness sliding around the long table as he began going through his overheads, looking older than she remembered in his tweed jacket and dark brown tie.

  Well, they were all older.

  Thatch spoke as well as ever, clearly and enthusiastically, getting right to the heart of what was interesting. Whitaker appeared to listen intently, not nodding off once, but Kate was having trouble paying attention. Thatch looked pale for a corn man in September. Had he been ill? He looked thin, too. Did Cynthia feed him? The thought of Cynthia lodged in Kate’s throat like a fine, nearly invisible fish bone.