In the Field

by Rachel Pastan

  The Great Man’s mouth and eyebrows were straight lines, his nose triangular, so that he looked like one of the geometric figures on his rug. “No one gets a fourth year.”

  “I was leaving anyway,” Kate said. “Fred Zimmer has made me an offer.”

  Kate waited until after dinner, when Mrs. Sonnenfeld had gone out, to tell Sarah. They were in the living room at either end of the sofa. On the carpet, the dogs dozed, Holly and Lily curled up flank to flank and Rose sprawled across the threshold to the front hall. Kate recounted what had happened in Whitaker’s office and explained that she would be accepting Zimmer’s offer. She would be leaving in January.

  “If you’ve decided, then you’ve decided,” Sarah said. Her eyes were fixed on the fireplace, which was cold and bare, neatly swept.

  “Did you hear what I just told you? It’s not a choice.”

  “But why did you have to make Whitaker so angry?”

  Kate tucked her feet up and lay down across the sofa so that the top of her head touched Sarah’s skirt. “I didn’t mean to,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course it matters. He’s your boss.”

  The room was quiet except for the breathing of the dogs and the ticking of the mantel clock. The scent of grass from the open windows mixed with the scent of furniture polish and of Sarah’s hair. “No one gets a fourth year,” Kate said. “I was lucky to stay this long.”

  “Not lucky. You earned the right to stay.”

  “I earned the right to go. He just wouldn’t let me.” She slid her head onto Sarah’s lap and looked up at her. Sarah’s skin was so tight and attenuated, it seemed like the barest scrim of silk pulled over her skull. “Come with me,” Kate said.

  Sarah shook her head. Tears caught in her eyelashes, then fell onto Kate’s face.

  “Come with me,” Kate repeated, her voice lower. “Bring your mother. We can buy a house in Missouri. Out of town, maybe. Maybe a farm.”

  “Kate,” Sarah said.

  “Think about it,” Kate said.

  “Why do you need a university job? Can’t you just keep growing your corn? They hardly pay you anything anyway.”

  Kate stared up into Sarah’s face, disbelieving.

  “You have a home here!” Sarah cried.

  She thought of Paul saying, If you don’t get a real job soon, that will be the end for you. Of Whitaker saying, I have given you a great deal of latitude. She wanted to roll off the sofa and hide behind the velvet drapes. Instead she said, “I can come back for Christmases. Maybe in the summer, you could come to me.”

  But she knew Sarah wouldn’t, knew the hospital wouldn’t permit it. And even if it would, the summers were such a mad rush of work …

  She thought about how much labor it was going to take to get a new field ready—to level it and plow it and plant it—and her heart surged with joy. She couldn’t help it. Even with Sarah’s tears damp on her face.

  “Don’t go,” Sarah said. Her voice was thin and chilly, but Kate knew that was only so didn’t she break apart.

  “Sarah,” Kate said.

  Sarah waited. She took a handkerchief from her sleeve and dried her face, then folded it up and tucked it away, while they both waited for Kate to discover whatever it was she might say.

  They were still waiting when the telephone rang with its blaring jangle.

  “Leave it,” Kate said, but Sarah was already rising to answer it, striding over Rose, who awoke with a yelp.

  “Yes?” Sarah said in the hall. “How many? All right. Twenty minutes.”

  The coat closet door opened and shut, then the front door. A car engine started. Rose yawned and stretched and got to her feet. She walked over to Kate and stood in front of her, swishing her tail. Kate touched her head. Rose laid her silken muzzle on Kate’s knee.

  Up in her room, at her desk under the eaves, she took out the manuscript of the paper she was writing, about the twin sectors. She read the introduction over. Something swelled inside her chest, pressed the air out to the edges of her ribcage, made her skin feel hot and blotchy. It was all wrong. Wrong. She crossed the sentences out with a big black X. She rolled a fresh piece of paper into the typewriter and started again.

  Slowly, steadily, she worked her way through a new draft of the introduction. Then she tackled the methods section and began the discussion: one gained what the other had lost. Her thoughts unspooled, threading themselves cleanly through the needle of her mind, so that her quick fingers could stitch them up. Time passed, measured only by the clack of keys and the piling up of pages. She had lost track of the night altogether when the abrupt soft click of the front door shutting two floors below brought her back to herself. She glanced at the clock. It was after one. Mrs. Sonnenfeld must have come home hours ago without Kate even noticing. She listened to Sarah moving around in the hall, the closet door opening and shutting, her footsteps slowly climbing the stairs. Kate’s back and shoulders ached, but she was almost finished. She just had the tricky discussion section left. Still, with the whole thing clear in her mind, she knew, if she just kept going, she could get it right.

  PART FIVE

  1948

  CHAPTER 32

  “Kate Croft!” said a familiar voice. “I would have recognized you anywhere.”

  Kate turned. The man who had spoken was about her age: pale skin, snub nose, salt-and-pepper fringe of hair. He came toward her across the plush carpet of the boardroom with its tall windows and polished, paneled walls. A name materialized in her brain: Jax. Jax Harrison, whom she had blessedly neither thought about nor seen in many years. She held out her hand, forestalling the embrace she saw was coming. “Isn’t that nice,” she said.

  Six geneticists were assembled in Washington, D.C., to review grant proposals and distribute funds. Before the war, grant-giving had been left to the discretion of institute and agency directors, but times were changing. Science was opening up, hurtling forward. Kate had even heard that Harvard Medical School was accepting girls.

  Jax pumped her hand. “Good to see you. Kate Croft! How are you? I admire the way you’ve stuck with corn. Whitaker would have been proud.”

  Evelyn Whitaker had died several years earlier, of a massive heart attack, in his sleep. Kate had gone to his funeral, where she’d found to her surprise that she was glad to have a handkerchief. He had helped her in so many ways after all. He had, after all, saved her life. “I don’t know about that,” she said.

  “Of course I’ve heard a little about your work.” Jax smiled his old vulpine smile. “This movable genes business. People say either you’re a genius, or else you’re off your rocker.”

  Kate’s face twitched—a little flutter in her cheek that had developed in recent years. “I just get up in the morning and go to the lab like everybody else,” she said.

  “Don’t be modest.” Jax leaned in so she could smell his breath: stale coffee and burnt cloves. Did he still smoke those terrible cigarettes? “You were never like everyone else.”

  Again the flutter, like a tiny moth under the skin trying to get out. “Remind me where you are. Berkeley, is it?”

  “Caltech,” Jax said. “Pasadena. Sunshine three hundred days out of the year! You step out your back door and there are oranges.”

  Kate had been cultivating a new smile, vague and harmless, and she tried it on him now, then began to turn toward the refreshment table. Of course someone like Jax would end up someplace like Caltech. Jax was saying something. She almost managed to get away without hearing what it was, but a word—a name—jumped out at her. Thatch.

  “What?” she said, more sharply than she’d meant to, turning back.

  “I said, do you ever see Thatch?”

  “Not for years.” The moth fluttered more insistently.

  “That’s a shame. You two were so close.”

  “Do you see him?” Kate d
emanded.

  “Maybe five years ago was the last time, when I was in New York for a meeting. He doesn’t travel much.”

  “No,” Kate said.

  “Doesn’t publish much, either. Not like us. Such a shame. He was so promising back then.”

  “He published enough to get tenure,” Kate said.

  “And Paul,” Jax went on. “Who would have thought someone from our little cohort would have reached those heights!” He leaned confidentially in. “You’ve heard they’re putting together nomination papers for him, for the Prize?”

  Kate kept her face as bland as possible. “No. I hadn’t heard that.”

  “Of course, almost no one gets it on the first nomination. But in his case … You’ve seen we have a proposal from him?”

  Kate nodded. She certainly had seen that.

  “That one will be an easy call, anyway,” Jax said.

  “Will it?” Kate said. “There’s not much data there.”

  “Well,” Jax said, “but we all know what kind of scientist he is.”

  “Yes,” Kate said. “We do.”

  The hotel in which the committee members had been put up was the nicest Kate had ever stayed in. Her room was the size of her living room and kitchen combined at home, with a fitted dark-green carpet and light-green-and-cream-striped wallpaper. The large soft bed had so many pillows, it must have taken the denuding of a flock of geese. There was a desk, an armchair, a low table, and a vase of tall pale lilies. She tried to enjoy it, but it made her feel odd. Surely the money would have been better spent on actual science?

  In the spacious bathroom with its veined marble countertop, she ran a bath. Water splashed and tumbled gaily from the gleaming faucet, steam fogging the several mirrors. Kate took off her dress—dark green with a Peter Pan collar, her best, but still she feared too shabby for this place—hung it carefully on the back of the door, and slipped into the water. She shut her eyes and tried to relax, letting the heat envelope her, but the tub was so big that she had to grab on to the slippery side. She was the wrong size for this tub. It had been designed with a different kind of person in mind.

  She reminded herself that it was an honor to have been asked to serve on this panel; an honor she had earned through her work.

  It had been a productive decade for Kate. The meticulously bred descendants of the twin-sector plant, and of the red-spot plant, had continued to throw up interesting results.

  More than interesting. Riveting. Revelatory.

  First she had mapped the great dark river that was maize’s chromosome nine. Identifying its features, deducing what each part did. She was studying corn, but if it could be done for corn, it could be done for any organism—even, someday, for people. Outlandish as that seemed.

  By the time it became clear that she would never get tenure at Missouri, she’d proved that the breakage she kept finding at the same spot on chromosome nine was itself controlled by another part of the chromosome. Genes, then, not only controlled what an organism looked like—whether a corn kernel was speckled or solid. Genes also controlled the behavior of other genes.

  The data—collected in thick black notebooks stuffed with tables, charts, graphs, catalogs, and inventories—were complex, and it was hard to convey them simply. Still, once you absorbed them, they were thrilling.

  Her first few papers on this material had been very well received.

  After Missouri, Kate had moved to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island, thirty miles east of New York City. It was a good place for her, quiet in winter, buzzing with activity in summer. A pretty, wooded campus near a little cove where you could swim from June to September. She’d taken up tennis again. She’d learned to bake, having stumbled upon a recipe in the newspaper for chocolate walnut cookies, which reminded her of the ones Mrs. Sonnenfeld used to make. Doubtless still made. Or, perhaps not. She would be nearing eighty now.

  Kate and Sarah still corresponded once in a while, though Sarah was a terrible letter writer. With their tilted, sprawling script and humdrum observations (Mother is busy with her committees. Things at the hospital are all right. The weather is terribly hot, even by the lake.), Sarah’s letters seemed to have been written not by the sharp, complicated person Kate had loved but by someone else entirely.

  For several years after Kate left Ithaca, she had found reasons to go back. She still collaborated with people in Whitaker’s group, and she never minded driving. Through the late 1930s, her Ford Deluxe regularly hummed through the black and green fields flanking the road out of Missouri. After the fields came the forest, stands of oaks and stands of hickory each in its niche. The native sassafras and the invasive bush honeysuckle, the dewberry and the cottonwood. As she angled north, the season would roll itself back like a filmstrip run the wrong way. The leaves would grow smaller, maybe even furling themselves to swelling buds. It was a kind of time travel.

  It was understood that she could stay at the Sonnenfelds whenever she wished.

  Her old room with its dark slanted beams and white curtains would be waiting, scoured and aired. Mrs. Sonnenfeld would have baked a walnut cake, and Sarah might have placed a jar of flowers on the table by the bed.

  Then one spring, Sarah answered Kate’s letter announcing her arrival date with a longer than usual letter explaining that someone else was living in the room now, a nurse from the hospital who had recently moved to Ithaca and needed a place to stay.

  You didn’t have to be a genius to know what that meant.

  But: A nurse! The triteness of that choice infuriated Kate. Though of course, nurses were the women Sarah mostly met.

  Even now, at forty-three, Kate hadn’t had another lover for more than a few months at a time. The last one had been years ago. For everyday company, she had her corn with its familiar habits. Its indelible scents of sap and hot green leaves and pollen.

  Cold Spring Harbor had many black walnut trees, which scattered their heavy crop across the grass in autumn. Kate collected the nuts in an old pillowcase, hulled them with a hammer and chisel, cleaned the meats carefully, let them cure. It was the kind of fiddly, time-consuming process that let her mind work over whatever it was stuck on. She delivered the cookies in neat packages to her colleagues and their families, many of whom also lived on campus. To the postman and the farm manager. To the janitor who mopped the halls at midnight, and the yeast guy she played tennis with, and Jerry Waxman in the apartment above hers who kept a pair of parakeets named Darwin and Mendel. Sometimes the neighbor children brought her walnuts they had collected, approaching her shyly as she came and went along the cinder paths, or leaving them in the hallway outside her door. Sometimes she could hear them whispering out there.

  Knock.

  No, you knock.

  We’ll just leave them, then.

  Were they afraid of her? She suspected so much solitude was making her odder, even, that she’d been before, but surely she wasn’t frightening. She wasn’t a witch in a gingerbread house—a witch jealously guarding her rampion garden. Was she?

  She did guard her corn jealously, in its field between the library and the harbor. She walked it every morning as she had always walked her fields, taking in the daily changes. Her corn grew well here. Her work was going well, insight following upon insight: the timing of the changes, the influence of dosage effects. Last year she had uncovered the most startling thing so far.

  Conventional wisdom said: genes are strung along the chromosome like pearls on a necklace. Like pearls on a necklace, they are stuck in place.

  But she had seen that—sometimes—those pearls could move.

  And when they moved, the corn changed.

  That old, old question—how did an organism (a corn plant, a human being) become what it was—was beginning to yield to her, like a walnut yielding to a hammer.

  What set the movable-gene system in motion?

  That
question was the hardest yet. She wasn’t sure—not sure enough to publish, anyway. But it looked like it happened in response to something going on in the cell. Some signal from the local environment.

  In other words, genes did not dictate absolutely what an organism would be. Sometimes the environment influenced the genes.

  Or so she thought. So the preliminary evidence suggested.

  She had tried this idea out on a few colleagues. She had given a seminar or two, hinting at what she’d seen—what she suspected. But the response had been quite different from what she had anticipated. Instead of enthusiasm, she’d encountered bafflement. Wariness. Doubt.

  People say either you’re a genius, or else you’re off your rocker.

  The person Kate would have liked to discuss all this with was Thatch. If he’d told her she was going off the rails, she would have taken it seriously. She was sure he would have been able to help her see more clearly what was there, buried in the avalanche of data. But their relationship had frayed since the publication of their last paper together, on the bronze locus, back during her final days at Cornell. When he had come to Ithaca to give a talk and told her she ought to get married, failing to see what she had tried to show him about herself. When she had punished him with those terrible words: Because your marriage has brought you so much joy.

  Remembering that moment made her scramble out of the bath. She wrapped herself in the plush white terrycloth robe provided by the hotel. Like the tub, it had been designed for a bigger person, but she rolled up the sleeves. She took out her stack of grant proposals.

  It was interesting to see what other people were working on. Only a few were studying maize. There were many proposals from fly men, and many more still from scientists working on bacteria. Even some from people working on viruses. Viruses! Unable to reproduce outside of host organisms, viruses were not, in Kate’s estimation, even truly alive. How could you learn any important truths about life from studying a thing like that?

  She fished out Paul’s proposal, which she had ranked twenty-eighth out of forty. He was working with drosophila again now, trying to figure out what determined fly eye color. The proposal was slimmer than most of the others, with less detail about what he planned to do and fewer figures presenting preliminary findings. It was cogent enough. His ideas were reasonable. But lots of ideas were reasonable. The question was, why should the committee believe he was going to get results?