In the Field

by Rachel Pastan

  “It was crucial,” Kate said. “You couldn’t have done the work without it.”

  He laughed. “Of course I could have.”

  That utter ease, that easy affability, that affable mendacity. She didn’t know which enraged her most.

  “I appreciate your efforts,” he said. “Sometimes people say or do things that help you along the way. But it’s still your work.”

  Kate stared at him, remembering the last time he’d said those words. The terrible summer heat. The high booth with its dark red leather upholstery. The butter whorls sinking into the melting ice. “You knew perfectly well what you were doing.”

  He stubbed out his cigarette and looked at her hard. “You keep making the mistake of thinking things are personal,” he said.

  “It’s personal,” she said, her voice rising, “when persons are involved.”

  He tilted his head as though to get a different view of her. “You’re a great scientist, Kate. No one thinks that more than me. You’re skillful, and your ideas are absolutely original. But if you mind so much when those ideas help someone out, you should keep them to yourself.”

  All around the room the hard surfaces of the lab benches and the glassware and the stainless-steel taps stood out brightly in the morning light. “That’s not the point,” she said. “The point is, you should have given me credit.”

  “I really didn’t think it mattered.”

  Whether he was lying to her, or just to himself, she couldn’t tell. “It was the same when you used someone else’s plants to make the crosses you wanted, back in Kansas,” she said. “It was the same when you took my unfinished work—my diagram—and showed it to Whitaker behind my back.”

  Paul tilted the stool an inch farther back, and then another inch, till she was certain he would topple over. “I helped you,” he said. “Me showing that work to Whitaker was the best thing that ever happened to you.”

  Kate slapped her hands on the desk. “It wasn’t your decision to make!”

  “If not for me, you would have been stuck with Hiram Cole for another two years,” he said, his voice finally rising. “You never would have gotten a thing done! It would have been ages before you or anyone else would have characterized the chromosomes, and the whole field would have been held back.”

  It startled her, hearing how much importance he put on her breakthrough.

  “When obstacles stand in your way, you get rid of them,” Paul said. “Cole was an obstacle.”

  “He was my obstacle,” Kate said. “I would have found a way.”

  Paul laughed. “Like you’ve found a way to get yourself out of Cornell? Out from under Whitaker’s shadow? If you don’t get a real job soon, people will wonder. And that will be the end for you, Kate. The absolute end. Do you hear me?”

  “Whereas you,” she retorted, “would never have gotten a second chance after Kansas if Whitaker weren’t your sixth cousin thrice removed.”

  Paul shook his head. “I would have,” he said.

  Kate leaned across the desk with its leather blotter and its jar of pencils and the neat, corrected proof of his PNAS article. “Would you?”

  Paul let the two front legs of the stool fall forward with a clatter, and she could see she had finally rattled him. “It’s about what you get done,” he said. “I’ve always gotten things done.”

  “But they threw away your results in Kansas, didn’t they?” Kate said. “They destroyed your seeds. So: not that time.”

  “That was another life,” Paul said.

  She found that she was on her feet, though she didn’t remember standing. She looked at him, steadying her trembling hands against the hard surface of his desk. With her standing and him sitting on the stool, they were just about the same height. “It’s true, isn’t it?” Whether she meant what had happened in Kansas, or his relationship to Whitaker, or that he had taken all the Neurospora credit to himself, she didn’t know.

  “That’s enough!” Paul said. He stood up, and once again she was forced to look up at him. “You wanted to talk to me? You’ve talked. Now go on back to your instructorship, and your slow-growing Zea mays, and your handsome lady doctor.” His eyes burned into her. Saw her. It was such an unaccustomed feeling, as though her skin had been slit open and he was probing around inside her, touching all her organs with his big square hands. Whether he was threatening her, or merely mocking her, she couldn’t tell. She looked down at the proofs, the neat rows of type and the title in bold letters across the top, the single author name and the affiliation underneath: Paul S. Novak, Harvard University. Then she picked the papers up and ripped them in half. She put the two halves together and ripped again. She tossed the torn quarters back onto the blotter, where they fanned raggedly out.

  Paul’s face went hard. “You witch,” he said.

  “Better a witch than a thief,” Kate said.

  The door swung open. A white-haired man in a suit and tie stood in the doorway looking from one of them to the other. “What the hell is going on in here?”

  Everything went still and glittering, as though instantly encased in ice.

  Then Paul spoke, his smoothness almost entirely back in place. “This is Dr. Croft,” Paul said, nodding to her. “Kate, this Professor Allen Metcalfe, department chair.”

  Kate knew who he was. He had been on his August vacation when she had been here before, so she hadn’t met him, but she had studied his elegant papers, interesting despite being about flies. Now he looked from one of them to the other, trying to make sense of the situation.

  “I came to talk to Professor Novak about why he didn’t put my name on his one gene–one enzyme paper,” Kate said. “Despite my fundamental contributions.”

  The older man looked at Paul, who shrugged.

  “It’s true.” Kate tried to summon the radiant fury that had made her rip the pages. “I spent two weeks here working out the cytology, and he didn’t so much as footnote me.”

  Something changed in the man’s face. “Croft?” he said. “Kathleen Croft?”

  “Yes,” Kate said.

  “You characterized the maize chromosomes!”

  “Yes.”

  “That was good work,” Metcalfe told her gravely, as though he might be the first.

  “Thank you,” Kate said.

  “Where are you nowadays?”

  “Cornell.”

  “Part of Evelyn Whitaker’s group?”

  She nodded.

  “Well. Please send Whit my regards.”

  Kate stared at him: the well-cut white hair, the well-cut blue suit. The beetle-black, thin-soled, wing-tipped shoes. A fly man, not a man who had ever worked a field. “I will,” Kate said.

  “And let’s have no more of this nonsense,” he said.

  Kate broke up the trip home at a motel, a low building with a long row of doors and a muddy parking area surrounded by raggedy, half-wild shrubs. An iron-haired woman in an old-fashioned dress sat at the registration desk. “Is your husband bringing in the bags?” she asked as Kate came in empty-handed.

  In the grim room to which her key admitted her, Kate lay on the lumpy bed. Her body was wracked by exhaustion, but she couldn’t sleep. Why had she thought it would do any good, driving across two states to confront someone who would always, regardless of everything, come out on top? Had she thought she could make him regret what he had done? That would have been making him regret who he was. Regret his nature.

  But couldn’t people change their natures? Couldn’t they change, the way her corn had changed in the middle of the growing season, suddenly producing leaves with different frequencies of streaks? Something switched on, something else switched off, deep inside the cells.

  Could she? It seemed to her she was exactly the same as she had been when she was a child. Curious. Subject to sudden passions. Drawn to things boys were supposed to be
drawn to: caterpillars, ballgames, multiplication.

  In her family, stubbornness was passed along through the female line. She, her sister, and her mother were all mulelike, boulderlike. Immovable, once they got an idea into their heads.

  Did they think about her from time to time, her mother and her sister? She went to see them once in a while—her mother still in the big, cold, dark house near Flatbush Avenue, Laura in a bright brownstone in Brooklyn Heights with modern sofas and the latest appliances and life-sized paintings of girls with flowers in their hair—but they never came to visit her. Charlie had moved to Los Angeles. He was not much of a letter writer. He had never gone to college, never married.

  Well, maybe all of them were stubborn, not just the women. Consider her father, dead set on going to war.

  Yet it seemed to her that she had been changed by the last two years, living in the Sonnenfeld house with its music, and flowers cut from the garden, and the mannerly bustle of dogs. Mrs. Sonnenfeld singing to herself in German, Sarah pouring whiskey into glasses her mother had carried across the ocean. The flutes of the tulip poplar flowers scattered in the grass. She seemed able to see more acutely, to think more expansively. But maybe she was wrong. Maybe what had happened was that she had lost her focus, lolling among the lotus eaters while men like Paul plunged through the forests with their gleaming axes.

  She turned over. The rough sheets smelled of bleach. Away across the state of New York, Sarah was sleeping, her dark hair fanned across the pillow. Kate could have been there with her, but instead she was here.

  CHAPTER 31

  “I thought you had died!” Sarah said. “I thought I had saved you from pneumonia only to have you die in a stupid automobile crash!”

  Kate stared at her, incredulous. “How could you think that?”

  “What was I supposed to think?” Sarah’s face was furious, adamantine, but she kept her voice low. “If you’d left me, I assume you would at least have let me know.”

  “But you should have known there was a reason,” Kate said.

  “Yes. That you had driven off a cliff!”

  They were in the backyard in the early evening light. The lowering sun slanted through the branches, scattering bright patches across the grass. Sarah was harvesting lettuce from the garden for dinner, bending over the neat row of black seeded Simpson, cutting the leaves with the kitchen scissors. She wore one of her mother’s flowered aprons over her dress, and her hair was tied back in a yellow kerchief, which made her face look stark and sallow.

  “Let me tell you what happened,” Kate said.

  Sarah moved down the row, gathering the lettuce into a yellow colander. Yellow kerchief, yellow colander, a few yellow tulip poplar leaves littering the grass. Already, though it was only September, dusk was closing in earlier.

  “I told you what I found out. How Paul—” His name in her mouth was like biting down on something bitter, but she plunged on: “How he didn’t credit me for the contributions I made to this paper he’s publishing. This important paper. What it says is—” But she managed to stop herself before beginning to explain what it said. Sarah was still snipping lettuce, though she had already gathered more than they could eat. “Anyway, I went to see him.”

  Sarah stood up slowly and turned. “You drove all the way to Cambridge, Massachusetts,” she said, the blades of the scissors flashing in her hand. Carefully she placed them in her apron pocket.

  “I wanted to hear what he would say,” Kate said.

  “If that was what you wanted, you could have called him on the telephone.”

  It astounded Kate that Sarah didn’t understand. Surely it was perfectly clear. “I needed to see him,” she explained. “I needed to see his face.”

  Sarah held the colander tight against her apron. “It’s what,” she said. “Three hundred miles? Four hundred, maybe?”

  “It was the only way to know—to really know—how he would respond!”

  Sarah picked out one of the lettuce leaves and rubbed it between her fingers. Did it hurt the leaf, Kate wondered? Could plants feel pain? Did the grass cry out silently when you walked on it?

  “And how did he respond?”

  “He was a snake,” Kate said bitterly. “Just like you said.”

  Your handsome lady doctor.

  I really didn’t think it mattered.

  I helped you.

  “He pretended not to know what I was talking about.”

  “So he was a snake,” Sarah said. “What do you care? Why can’t you forget it?”

  “He stole from me!”

  “You knew what kind of person he was! What did you think was going to happen?”

  “I wanted—” Kate said. She thought hard, trying to get it right. “I wanted to know that he knew what I had given him. What he had taken from me.”

  Between Sarah’s fingers, the green frill had turned to pulp, staining her skin. “Forget Paul,” she hissed. “Do your work. Your work’s going well, isn’t that what you keep telling me?” She tossed the mangled leaf onto the grass.

  It was what Thatch said, too: Do your work. In the face of exclusion, slights, disregard, disrespect. “I deserve the credit,” Kate said. “If I don’t stand up for myself, who will?”

  Sarah took a step forward. “Kate,” she said, reaching out her hand. “Listen.”

  But Kate was beyond listening. She stalked back toward the house, crushing the mute grass underfoot with every step.

  The next morning, Kate found a summons from Whitaker on her door. That was unlikely to be good news. Unless, she thought sardonically, he had finally found her a job.

  Miss Floris stopped typing when Kate came in.

  “What does he want?” Kate asked.

  “I don’t know,” Miss Floris said. “But remember, by tomorrow he’s likely to have forgotten all about it.” Her coiled braids, brittler than they’d once been but still golden, glinted in the light of the ceiling fixture. There was no window in the outer office. No carpet, either, only the plain hard floor. There were no photographs on the desk nor any pictures on the wall. Surely Miss Floris could have hung pictures if she’d wanted to. She didn’t have to make her space a kind of cell, as though she were a nun dedicating herself to—well, not to Whitaker, Kate hoped. To science? To excellence? To perfect impervious discretion?

  In the inner sanctum, the Great Man sat at his desk, sharpening a pencil with his pocketknife, shavings scattered at his feet for the custodian to sweep away. As she came in, he looked up long enough to nod. “Dr. Croft,” he said, then went back to his scraping.

  “Professor Whitaker.” She did not dare to sit down. Here she was again, waiting to be scolded on the familiar, roughly woven, mustard-colored rug with its odd geometric designs. Navajo? Hopi? She really should learn more about Indians. Their cultures were very interesting, and deeply intertwined with corn.

  He brought his pencil close to his face to examine it, blew the tip free of dust. Then he laid it down on the desk and raised his eyes to hers. “I had a call from Allen Metcalfe at Harvard,” he said. “He says you were down there yelling in Paul Novak’s laboratory. Making quite a scene.”

  Kate’s heart beat faster. “Paul did a lot of the yelling,” she said. “As I recall.”

  Whitaker frowned. “Metcalfe says you were hysterical.”

  “I certainly was not!” Kate stood up straighter. Her heart was a drum, rousing her courage.

  “So it’s true that you went down there?”

  “I paid a visit.”

  “What for?”

  “I had something to discuss with Paul.”

  “Not that nonsense from the other night, I hope!” Whitaker spoke sharply.

  “It’s not nonsense,” Kate said.

  Whitaker flung his pencil down on the desk. “Do you have any idea how this looks? A student of mine goes gallivanti
ng down to Harvard—to Harvard!—making claims about deserving credit for work one of their scientists did? Work that’s about to get a lot of attention?”

  In her chest, her heart beat steadily. Her lungs took in oxygen and sent it sailing down her arteries, her veins carrying back CO2 for her to exhale, to nourish the miniature spruce Whitaker kept prisoner in its shallow pot. She felt almost the way she did when she ran on the beach, her knees high: step, step, step. “I’m not your student anymore,” she said. “I’m a scientist in my own right.”

  “I have given you a great deal of latitude,” Whitaker said. “I’ve let you pursue your own ideas. Do the experiments you want to do.”

  “Have you had a problem with my ideas?” Kate said.

  “In exchange for which I expect a modicum of respect! Just as you’d give to your own father.”

  Her father! How Kate missed him. The way he strode across the meadow in his tall boots, stopping to point out a caterpillar or a cowslip. The way his soft whiskers glowed in the sun.

  “I saved your life,” Whitaker reminded her. “When you were lying delirious with pneumonia, I carried you down the stairs in my arms.”

  “That doesn’t give you the right to keep me here forever,” Kate said, “like an unmarried daughter to look after you!”

  Whitaker’s face went white. The steady clatter of typewriter keys from the outer office was the only sound. Nothing could keep Miss Floris from her work, Kate thought, she was like one of the Fates, spinning out the thread of life. “You have stumbled, however inadvertently, upon the point,” Whitaker said coldly. “The fact is, I can’t keep you on any longer. The funding has finally run out.” His face was leathery, hard. His hawklike stare bore into her.

  “Because someone at Harvard complained about me?”