Viv, who had been dead now fifteen years.
Mostly they’d been happy together: Kate and Viv. Mostly happy, most of the time, for most of two decades. Even the last six months, when Viv was dying, they’d been happier than Kate might have thought possible.
If only Viv could be here now!
If only her father could.
When she’d called Laura to tell her the news, Laura had said—all business—I guess we’ll have to find you a gown.
Her sister had surprised Kate more than once over the years. She had visited Viv in the hospital, bringing fancy chocolates and arranging great vases of irises and fringed tulips, demanding to speak to doctors. At Viv’s funeral, she’d kept a fierce hold of Kate’s hand, as though they were still children crossing Flatbush Avenue, her rings biting into Kate’s flesh, while Thatch sat on her other side, his hair grizzled, his wife Melanie and their teenaged daughter sitting stiffly, one row back, in their dark dresses.
Now Kate stood alone at the top of the steps of the laboratory building. High white clouds blocked out the sun. The photographers worried aloud about rain. “How does it feel to have your work, which I understand was ignored for many years, finally vindicated at your age?” someone asked.
“It feels quite nice,” Kate said.
Laughter, as though she had made a joke.
“Did you ever think you would win something like this?”
“Oh, no! I never thought about it. I always just enjoyed the work every day.”
Knowing chuckles. But it didn’t bother her, she was too old to be bothered.
“What will you do with the money?”
The money! “Remind me how much is it?” she said, looking around, wondering what Paul had done with his. Paul, who had won the Prize decades ago for the one gene–one enzyme work.
More laughter—genial, festive, tinged with condescension, lapping at her gently like shallow waves.
“Nearly $200,000.”
“Oh yes. My goodness!” she said.
“Perhaps a vacation,” the questioner suggested. “You’ve earned one, wouldn’t you say?”
“Gracious, no,” Kate replied. “At my age, I’d better keep right on working. I might not have all that much time left, you know.”
More laughter.
Partly she was playing the role they had cast her in—the eccentric old lady scientist, possibly gone slightly daft—but only partly. She was thinking that, with so much money, she could have taken Viv around the world. Viv had always wanted to see the canals of Venice. She had wanted to see the rain forests of Brazil. Not this year, Kate always said. How could she leave her plants for so long?
Of course, Viv had had her own work. She had made a couple of interesting discoveries about antibiotic resistance. But she was not—had never been—single-minded the way Kate was. She’d had her garden, had volunteered at the town library. She had played the viola in a good amateur string quartet. Sometimes, looking at Viv, Kate had wondered about the value of a life carved from a single piece of stone: a life you were always polishing, protecting. Had the variety of her days made Viv happier than Kate? Less happy? Who could say? One gained what the other lost. But what was gained, and by whom? What was it, exactly, that had been lost?
That morning, when the dignitary from Sweden had given her the news, her mind had briefly stuttered to a halt. She had disappeared into the past, becoming again the child standing over the jade-green chrysalis, determined to know what was happening inside. All her life, she had been asking the same questions. All her life! How lucky she was to have lived long enough to glimpse a few of the answers. Lucky, too, to have known the people she had known: Dr. Krause, Thatch, Whitaker, even Paul.
To have answered the ad Thea had put in the newspaper. To have fallen ill and been taken (by Whitaker!) to Sarah’s hospital. To have agreed to give the talk Viv had happened to attend.
Luck, contingency, persistence. Endurance. Or call it stubbornness! Call it anything you liked.
“Dr. Croft?” the emissary had repeated in his wavery, musical voice, over the phone. “Dr. Croft, are you still here? Have we dropped our connection?”
“Yes,” she’d said into the receiver that connected to a wire that stretched across the bottom of an ocean—imagine that! Her voice rushing through the clear cold depths where nameless fish lived out their lives in the dark. “I’m still here.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
So many people helped me learn about genetics, particularly the genetics of corn, and how corn research is done. Thanks especially to Randy Wisser, who spent an afternoon showing me his field at the University of Delaware.
Deep thanks, also, to everyone at Cold Spring Harbor—David Jackson, Rob Martienssen, Tim Mulligan, Clare Clark, Kylie Parker, and Dagnia Ziedlickis—who invited me to visit the place Barbara McClintock had lived and worked, and patiently and generously answered my questions.
To Sankar Adhya, who shared his memories of Barbara McClintock.
To Meg Spencer, who helped me find books about early twentieth-century genetics, and to Scott Gilbert, who laid out the terrain.
To the American Philosophical Society, where Barbara McClintock’s papers are housed.
To Manuel Lerdau and Edward Buckler, who answered lots of questions about floods and plants, and helped me dream up scenarios that never made it into the final version of this book.
To Robert and Ted Chaney, who advised about 1920s cars and breakdown scenarios that also didn’t make it into the book.
Barbara McClintock was fortunate to be the subject of two extraordinary biographies. The first, Evelyn Fox Keller’s groundbreaking A Feeling for the Organism, was written with McClintock’s cooperation before she won the Nobel Prize. The second, Nathaniel Comfort’s The Tangled Field, was written a generation later, after McClintock’s death, and added layers of complexity to Keller’s essential vision. I could not have written this fictionalized version without their knowledge and insights.
Thanks to all the people who read drafts of this novel, some of them many, many times: Betsy Bolton, Dinah Lenney, Alice Mattison, Susan Scarf Merrell, Linda Pastan, and Lisa Zeidner.
To Gail Hochman, who rescued this project when it needed rescuing.
To Joe Olshan, who saw what was good in the book and also what it needed.
Most of all, thanks to my father, Ira Pastan, Chief of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the National Institutes of Health, who told me I’d be able to learn enough genetics to write this story. My father helped me every time I ran up against something in the science I didn’t understand with the same patience and clarity with which, when I was a girl, he helped me memorize the valence electrons of the elements and taught me the names of the common wildflowers in our woods. In writing this book, I was able to see the world through his eyes a bit more clearly.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rachel Pastan is the author of three previous novels, most recently Alena, which was named an Editors’ Choice in The New York Times Book Review. The daughter of a molecular geneticist and a poet, she has worked as editor at large at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, and taught fiction writing at the Bennington Writing Seminars, Swarthmore College, and elsewhere. She is currently the editor of the weekly newspaper The Swarthmorean.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2021 by Rachel Pastan
ISBN: 978-1-5040-6792-
8
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