In the Field

by Rachel Pastan

  “Punishment is expelling someone from school,” she said. “Or firing someone from their job. Or declining to give a deserving person tenure. Not one of these things has ever happened to Paul Novak! He sails on through his charmed life from accolade to accolade. While women like J. Lezniak struggle to get promising work so much as funded. How will you ever know what she might do if you don’t let her try?”

  Hal Volkner, so cheery all day, was seething now. “Sit down!” he snapped. “If you need any evidence why scientists are loath to put women on panels like this, just look in the mirror!”

  She turned toward Mikkleson, captain of this listing ship. “A whole room of people who can’t tell a good proposal from a bad one! Isn’t it your job to make sure they do their jobs?”

  “Miss Croft,” he said.

  “Dr. Croft,” she corrected.

  “Dr. Croft.” He sounded very weary and sober. “I am asking you one last time to sit down.”

  Before he did what? Called the science police?

  “I’ll do better than that,” she said. She left her stack of proposals on the table and walked out of the room.

  CHAPTER 34

  It was a warm spring afternoon, the sky pearly with clouds. A fine light rain, hardly more than a mist, dampened Kate’s hair, which had grown so coarse and gray these last years. Furious thoughts and half-thoughts hissed and swirled through her head as she strode down the sidewalk. It wasn’t easy to walk fast in these shoes, yet she found herself breathing hard. She who often hiked five miles through wet sand, then turned around and headed back for a set of tennis.

  Twenty years of self-control, sacrificed in an instant.

  Twenty years of not only not saying what she felt, but hardly even feeling it. Of telling herself that science was all that mattered; that as long as she kept her focus, she would have her reward. That the focus was the reward.

  Well, that was still true, wasn’t it?

  Or maybe she really was delusional: a crazy bag.

  Because what would happen to her now?

  Why do you want to punish Paul? Jax had said. But it was she who would be punished, one way or another. She knew that.

  Yet what could they take from her? Her job was modest, but it came with something like tenure. She had not herself applied for a grant in years and had no real need to. She had even, lately, stopped submitting her work for publication. She was waiting until she understood the movable gene system more clearly and completely. She didn’t miss the wearisome submission process, or the wrangling with impatient editors about methods and charts. She had the work, and she had her freedom. Which was more than many people had.

  The worry that Thea would not recognize her—that she would not recognize Thea—pursued her all the way back to the hotel. But in fact Kate knew her immediately.

  Thea sat in a low chair in the lobby with its marble inlay floor and deep sofas. She wore a lightweight raincoat, and her head, in a green scarf, was bent over a magazine. She was so absorbed that she didn’t notice Kate until she was quite close. Then she looked up. A polite smile spread across her thin pale face as she stood. “I could hardly believe it when I saw your name on Bill’s list,” she said.

  “It must have been quite a surprise,” Kate agreed. A moment before, frowning over her magazine, Thea had looked utterly familiar, but now, standing before Kate with her neat coat and scarf and composed expression, she seemed like a stranger.

  “I guess it was bound to happen sometime,” the stranger said. “Your paths crossing.”

  “Yet there are so many geneticists nowadays,” Kate said.

  “The field has exploded since Bill started in it,” Thea agreed. From one moment to the next she seemed to shift from recognizable to unfamiliar and back again, like a firefly blinking its light on and off. Kate tried to think of something to say to shift the conversation from its unbearable banality.

  “Do you want to have a cup of tea?” Thea asked brightly. “Or perhaps a walk?”

  “Yes, let’s walk. This lobby is so …”

  As they moved toward the door, Thea tucked her magazine into a pocket, and Kate saw that it was a recent issue of Genetics.

  They walked down the broad sidewalk without speaking. The mist had thickened, drops of water clinging to lamp posts and parked cars, to the gray branches of trees and the first small leaves. Men strode by in raincoats, carrying briefcases, and a few women—most, like Thea, with scarves over their heads—hurried past or huddled under bus shelters. A few dark umbrellas bobbed along the sidewalk, black fabric pulled tight over shiny metal spokes. Kate’s head felt empty and her body felt stiff, as though she were one of the mannequins in the department store window they were passing, blank faces crowned with Easter hats.

  “I’ve followed your career,” Thea said as they waited for a light to change. “You’ve done well.”

  “I’ve been lucky.” The light turned green and they continued walking.

  “No.” Thea’s voice changed. “It’s not luck. I mean, you stuck with it, didn’t you? You didn’t give up.” Kate could hear something underneath the words now, as though a dark stone had lodged beneath her tongue. On either side of the street, elegant houses crouched behind gleaming black iron gates. A group of iridescent pigeons rose from a damp green lawn into the air.

  “I just kept working one day after the next,” Kate said.

  “That’s what I mean.” Thea halted in the middle of the wet sidewalk and turned to look at Kate full on. “You didn’t stop.”

  Kate felt Thea’s gaze jolt through her. “Nelson—Bill. Your husband. He says you work in his lab, though,” she said in confusion.

  Thea turned away and began walking again. “Oh, yes. He finds me very helpful.”

  They passed a drugstore, a hairdresser, the Colombian Embassy. How limited her world was, Kate thought! A field, a laboratory, what could be seen through the optic tube of a microscope. She half wished herself back there, in her own world. Tonight there would be a dinner for the panel. But she couldn’t possibly go, could she? After what had happened?

  The thought of Paul’s face when he got his acceptance—the self-satisfaction, the complacency, the utter lack of surprise—made her blood boil.

  When obstacles stand in your way, you get rid of them, he had said to her once.

  Could it be true, as Jax had reported, that Paul was going to be nominated for the Prize?

  Clap clap clap went Thea’s shoes on the wet pavement. The familiar proud way she held her head, the set of her shoulders: a shiver of happiness surprised Kate with its spreading feathers. “Thea,” Kate said. “I want to thank you. For urging me—for more or less demanding that I take that introductory biology class. It changed the course of my life.”

  “I’m sure you would have found your way to biology with or without me,” Thea said. “It seems to have been your destiny.”

  “Nonsense!” Kate said. “I don’t believe in destiny.”

  Thea’s feet sped up. Clap-clap, clap-clap.

  “Did you ever think about going on and getting your PhD?” Kate asked, hurrying to keep abreast of the pale beige raincoat and green scarf.

  Thea laughed. “I had three children in three years. First Diana, then the twins.”

  “Identical twins?” Kate was interested despite herself.

  “I could always tell them apart! Michael and Gabriel. They’re eighteen now. Diana is two years older, and doesn’t she make sure they know it.”

  “You named them for angels.” Kate felt she could see them, Thea and her children, sitting around a kitchen table, eating toast and jam and drinking milk, the way she and her brother and sister had once done. She thought of the issue of Genetics Thea had buried in her raincoat pocket. Did she read scientific journals over the orange juice? Had she sat on park benches with her babies in perambulators, poring over charts and graphs?<
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  “Now they have flown away on their golden wings,” Thea said softly.

  They crossed a wide avenue to a grassy circle with a statue of a man on horseback. They walked across trolley tracks, glistening with rain. They passed a small tree with a few pink shivering blossoms. They didn’t speak. The silence felt easy to Kate, like the silence in her cornfield.

  At last Thea pulled back her sleeve and peered at her watch. Her coat was dark with rain, and rain clung to the tendrils of hair that sprang free from under the scarf. “I should get back.”

  “What about now?” Kate said. “Couldn’t you get your PhD now? The work you’ve done in your husband’s lab—couldn’t that count toward a thesis? After all, we’re not old crones yet!”

  “Oh, Kate,” Thea said. “You know it doesn’t work that way.”

  It was the first time that afternoon Thea had said her name.

  Kate’s mind brimmed with ideas. “At Cold Spring Harbor, in the summer, they have courses. Symposia. You could learn a lot, and it would give you the opportunity to consider—”

  “I couldn’t possibly be away so long,” Thea said. “Bill wouldn’t like it. Besides, the twins will be coming home.”

  “Surely eighteen-year-old young men can manage without their mother for a few weeks,” Kate said. “It seems to me—”

  “I meant to ask you,” Thea interrupted. “I think you were friends with that boy in our biology lab. John Thatcher. Did you hear the terrible news about his wife?”

  Kate stopped so suddenly that a man behind her cursed as he swerved around her. “What news?” All at once she could feel how soaked she was, her hair dripping, her dress clinging to her goose-pimpled flesh.

  “She took a whole bottle of sleeping pills.” Thea’s eyes glittered. “Yesterday. There was nothing they could do.”

  Kate’s heart seemed to seize up and then to barrel ahead—galloping as though it had somewhere to go, as though it thought Kate should be hurrying off somewhere. Instead she stood rooted to the sidewalk in the steady, hissing rain, hearing Sarah’s voice in her head for the first time in years: She was deranged by grief.

  They took a taxi back to the hotel. It was only a short ride through the falling dusk. They didn’t speak again until they were in the lobby. Then Thea turned to Kate and said, “I’m sorry to have upset you so much. I didn’t realize you were so close.”

  “No. Don’t be sorry. We’re not … It’s just—” But she couldn’t explain.

  “Go up and change before you catch your death,” Thea said. “I’ll see you at the dinner.”

  In her room, Kate took off her ruined dress and shoes. She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror: her pale slight body with its brown neck and face. Arms brown, too, below the elbows, because of the way she rolled up her sleeves. Pale breasts that sagged slightly; pale pink flattish nipples. Flat stomach, hips always surprising her with their bony wideness.

  She couldn’t go to the dinner even if she wanted to, because she had nothing to wear. She’d only brought the one dress.

  What if Cinderella had asked her mother’s tree to give her a microscope instead of a ballgown?

  But that was nonsense.

  Probably Thatch had been the one to find her. Her body.

  She thought of that last time he’d been in her lab back in Ithaca, when she’d been annoyed at him for refusing her coffee. Cynthia’s had a bit of a tough time, he’d said, and then she’d let him change the subject.

  She left the bathroom and got dressed quickly in her ordinary clothes: trousers, collared shirt, cardigan sweater. She got out her suitcase and folded her few things into it, leaving the sodden dress and shoes on the bathroom floor. Picking up her suitcase, she headed for the door.

  Halfway there, she came back again, found a sheet of hotel stationery, and scribbled a note.

  Dear Thea,

  I am grateful to you for telling me about Cynthia Thatcher’s death. John Thatcher and I were close friends once. If you change your mind about coming to Cold Spring Harbor—or if there’s ever anything I can do for you—I’d be pleased to have the opportunity. I was very glad to have the chance to see you again.

  Yours,

  Kate

  Down in the lobby, she left the note with the concierge.

  CHAPTER 35

  The last time she’d taken a sudden trip by train to New York City had been just after seeing Thea, too. The past kept coming back in great cold waves, breaking over her, leaving her drenched in feeling that stung like salt. She shut her eyes, feeling the coolness of the evening through the train window—spring now, at least. Not snowing and freezing the way it had been then. The train jounced over the tracks, jumbling her thoughts. Should she have telegraphed Thatch? Would he be glad to see her, or the opposite? And what would the men on the panel be saying about her? What would Nelson be saying about her to Thea? And what would Thea be saying back?

  Sometimes, when she couldn’t sleep, she still recited the phyla and classes of plants. Did Thea remember the parts of a flower? Pistil, petal, stigma, style. Kate had missed her chance to ask her.

  It was very early when the train reached Penn Station. The sky was dark, and the chilly streets were mostly deserted. Kate headed uptown. Her suitcase swung from her hand as she strode up Eighth Avenue, the city coming to life around her: lights turning on in coffee shops, old men shuffling along with newspapers and small dogs, taxis materializing out of nowhere and disappearing again into the gloom.

  Thatch lived in a brick apartment building on Riverside Drive. From the park across the street, Kate looked up at the façade. Decorative arches topped each window like lifted eyebrows, and the dim hulk of the water tower was just visible on the roof. In the fourth row of windows, one—uncurtained—showed a light. She watched it, alert but without expectation, the way she looked through a microscope. After a while, a shadow passed in front of the window—a shadow in the shape of a man, head bent. She waited. The shadow passed again, and then, a few moments later, again. A lone man was pacing in an apartment on the fourth floor. Thatch’s apartment number was 4-C. Still, she couldn’t say for certain it was him.

  It was peaceful in the empty park. The sky lightened, grew gray and pink, and the misty river came into glittering view. The air smelled of mud and asphalt, coal smoke and, strangely, of horses. Bright yellow forsythia shone out of the gloom, and birds trilled in the bare branches of bushes and trees. Spring was less advanced here than it had been in Washington. She glanced back up at the building. The man was standing at the window now, his big, square, lean-jawed face just visible in the early light.

  Thatch’s face.

  Kate’s arm went up and she waved, the way she would have waved years ago, spotting him across the campus. Thatch pressed his face to the glass. He stared, and she waved again, motioning for him to open the window. After a moment, he pushed up the sash. He looked dazed, his face gray in the gray light, his chin stubbled. Kate thought it was the first time she had ever seen him unshaven.

  “John Thatcher!” she called up.

  “Kate,” he called back. “Kate Croft—is that you?” His voice was raspy.

  “Thatch!” she called.

  He ran a hand over his shadowed jaw. “Give me a minute,” he said. “I’ll come down.”

  By the time he emerged from the building and crossed the street, not watching for traffic, it was full daylight. He stood facing her, his hair damp and his hollow face smooth. She’d forgotten how tall he was. Even with his shoulders slumped, he towered over her.

  “I’m so sorry about Cynthia,” Kate said.

  A muscle contracted in Thatch’s pale, scraped jaw. “Thank you.”

  A silence. A couple of cars rumbled by on Riverside Drive. A squirrel ran toward them and stopped, doubling up its tail. The sun grew brighter.

  Thatch looked at the river, where the gunmetal-gray
chop glinted. “What are you doing in New York?”

  “I came to see you. I took the overnight train.”

  “Are you giving a talk or something?”

  “I came as soon as I heard.”

  He ran a hand through his damp hair. She knew it would dry that way, standing up. The squirrel, seeming to decide there was nothing of interest here, chirruped and scrambled away.

  “I’m sorry I’ve been a poor correspondent,” Kate said.

  “It’s easy to lose touch,” he said vaguely.

  “When is the funeral?”

  He turned back from the river to look at her, his eyes searching her face, which she tried to arrange into some sort of expression. “Friday.” Today was Wednesday.

  “Is her family here? Cynthia’s.”

  He looked away again. “They’re on the train from Yellow Springs now.”

  Kate pictured them sitting up rigidly in the railroad car as the locomotive shrieked across the Ohio Valley. “Let’s go get some breakfast,” she said.

  They walked to a nearby coffee shop, where the bell jingled gaily as Kate pushed open the door. “Nothing,” Thatch told the waitress in her pale-blue uniform, but Kate ordered eggs and toast and coffee for both of them. She wondered about the ulcer he had mentioned years ago, whether he still had it, whether he had ever really had it. The waitress brought the coffee in thick concave mugs. Kate poured cream and watched it swirl into the black. Thatch sat listlessly, his hand around his cup, his long legs crammed under the table. Kate began to talk. She hardly knew what she said, only that the silence between them was like falling down a well, and talking was a way to try to keep from drowning.

  “I was in Washington just now, on a grant review panel. It was very interesting: seeing what people are doing. What other people think is important. Usually not what I think is important! Not that that will come as any surprise to you. I’m always amazed at the way genetics is moving away from corn—away, even, from flies—as though an organism big enough to see is necessarily a useless organism. It’s as though people think, if you can’t see something, ipso facto it must be interesting. If only people could learn to see what’s right in front of them!”