XXII
ALLA BREVE
I can’t take it in. Where has he been, and when? After the fact, the holes in my old version are obvious. But this new timetable, for all its superiority, is still shot full of anomalies. June? Half a year from door to door! Unthinkable, even for international mail. I cross off those weeks when, lost to this project, I’d stopped checking for mail: months still unaccounted for.
Assume that Todd, in character, obliviously attached so little postage that the packet went by surface freight. Adding all possible holdups— trouble reading his nineteenth-century hand, customs opening it— accounts for a couple of months at most. Todd’s refusal to descend to anything so courante as zip code tacks on another punitive week here in New York. I conjure up a postal strike in the Low Countries—they happen in social welfare states. Stretched to breaking, the thread still doesn’t span.
Perhaps he began the letter in mid-June, but sent it later. But that’s impossible. Two weeks after he started it, he was back in Illinois, dispatching news of Dr. Ressler’s death. The letter makes no mention of stateside hiatus. And the imitation Flemish card wedged between? I compare postage, look up the exchange rates from the middle of last year. No doubt the card came by surface. Slow boat. Posted before the death notice.
Todd couldn’t have poured out a long chapter, had his life upended, returned to the continent with everything he wrote turned inside out, and then blithely sent the thing unemended, as if nothing had happened in the forgetting world in the interim. Granted he never made sense to me. But even he could not have sent these bottle-messages in any order except card, lengthy letter, and obituary. Still, the gap: as if he set me up to misread chronology, invert it, hate his indifference for half a year. Now I must postdate everything, the way they adeptly postdated the console log when it most mattered. I can’t set it right, can’t remake myself to it.
How many times he left me kitchen-table notes, agonized trails of crotchety, contradicting explications replete with a course-of-battle map, arrows tracing out day’s insomnia: “Don’t worry; stepped out for a minute. Nope, upstairs; first line obsolete. Make that was obsolete; this rescinding is final. Two of the previous three updates are false.” He lived in unaccounted gaps. Gone for weeks. Then waiting in the front room, smiling: You were saying …? In the dark, before falling asleep, he would suddenly ask after leftovers we had eaten a dozen days before. He confused the order of his discoveries about Herri with that man’s chronology. I’d post the anniversary of the world’s first news broadcast, February 1920, and he’d go about beaming as if it had just been sent all over again.
Once, over one of my modest casserole attempts, he asked, “How do you suppose that lobster could walk away like that with his rear half hacked off?” A day later, I remembered: that seafood dive, our business lunch that turned out to be a date after all. It unsettled me: if the first date was still so immediate in him, could the gap between now and the last be any larger?
I’ve seen him do the same to Dr. Ressler. We and an attendant Annie sat in the control room one night on the threshold of spring. The machines on the other side of the two-way mirror blindly carried out their procedures: if balance equals debit minus credit, then goto smoothsailing, else goto errorhandle. We were deep in listening. The theme for the evening was children’s songs: Schumann, Bartók, Debussy. Without even a feint toward preparation, Todd asked his mentor, “So what about that magazine?” Annie and I exchanged glances: had we missed something? But Dr. Ressler broke into a reticent grin. He shook his head and squeezed the bridge of his nose. “Come on,” Todd teased. “What did you tell those gentlemen?” I finally got it. He was jumping not just the weeks between that evening and the New Hampshire woods, when Ressler told us about his one run-in with notoriety. He was leaping over the entire twenty-five years since Ressler did the interview.
“I didn’t tell them anything, as you and your woman collaborator determined.” Ressler winked at me, homage for the bit of detective work I’d done three quarters of a year before. His wink rushed over me, a chemical injection. I was in love with the man. The worst, most unspeakable schoolgirl’s crush.
Todd was relentless, for private reasons. “You must have told them something. Who supplied them with that Miescher quote? Should one ask anybody who is undertaking a major project in science, in the heat of the fight, what drives and pushes him so relentlessly, he will never think of an external goal; it is the passion of the hunter …” Todd had the quote intact.
“Guilty as charged. But I was just a child.” A pointed rib for Todd’s benefit: your age, boy.
“I thought you did. Hacks for the glossies seldom know the literature.”
“It might have been any of the other poor souls they’d cornered for the portfolio. ‘Faces to Watch for in ’58,’ or what-have-you.” Todd supplied the actual title of the piece. This irritated Dr. Ressler. “Did you need to memorize it?” That hushed things, and we were back to songs for children. Todd had it coming. He should have known that missing spaces, for other people, remain real. But with the quick forgiveness of one who once studied inheritance for a living, Dr. Ressler gently berated Franklin. “I thought I’d told you everything that anyone could conceivably find interesting about my case.” An edge in his tone insisted that of all ways there were of learning what it meant to be alive, biography was among the least helpful.
Todd, lip out, said, “I just wanted to know how they heard about you.”
“Oh, they were doing the brave new world piece they’re obliged to run every two years. Somebody at Cold Spring Harbor mentioned to the journalist compiling the piece that if they were looking for bankable horses, there was a bright, young, single, obscure young man out in the Midwest who had initiated an interesting bit of work and who, word had it, was not entirely unphotogenic.” He looked at Annie and me sardonically: you see how cells take it upon themselves to fall apart. He couldn’t have been more wrong.
“What did this fellow ask you?”
“Almost nothing about my work. He wouldn’t have been able to follow even the Music for Millions version. He wanted the usual color: twists, eccentricities. Was I a child prodigy? Did I keep my lunch bag in the dissection freezer? Did knowing the chemical nature of humanity keep me from favoring certain eye color? Did I have any words of wisdom for the generation of molecular geneticists then cutting their teeth in school labs?”
“Did you?”
“I told them to read from the bottom of the meniscus.”
Having bludgeoned my way through college chemistry with limited success despite the opposable thumb, I laughed. Annie, the picture of Sunday-school patience, blurted out, “Life magazine? You were famous once?”
Lovering snags him outside the interview, unable to wait until he gets back to the office. “So. Big Time. The coffee tables of America.”
“Listen, Joey. I had nothing to do with this. I wouldn’t even have talked to them, except they were already here. They just want a photo for the gallery. It could have been anybody. Could have been you.”
“Thanks.”
“That’s not what I meant. I mean that the press hasn’t the slightest notion of what we’re working on.”
“Do you?”
“Touché.” Happy to give Lovering the hit if it will help put the ridiculous issue behind them.
“I heard Ulrich hasn’t renewed your fellowship. Sounds like the prophet-without-honor syndrome.”
The bombshell he’s been expecting these last weeks. “Ah,” he says, false-pitched. “I’m out of the running for next year?”
“So I’ve heard. Formal decision won’t be posted for another few days. Department’s eager to squirrel away cash for the big push.” Meaning Lovering’s hunt-and-peck methods on ILLIAC.
His year has been appraised and found lacking. Preferment denied, not because of the quality of his science but because Stuart has shown himself not to be a team player. The vicissitudes of funding cannot afford the solo worker. The popul
ation geneticists have had the right gauge all along. Ulrich has every right to apply his limited research funds to a post-doc who’ll do better by Cyfer. But the calculation embitters Ressler, and he cannot suppress a smiling accusation. “You people are wrong, wrong, wrong.”
Lovering, twitched by bad conscience, reassures him. “Oh, they want to keep you around. You’re hot stuff. Ask any coffee table.” The joke goes flatly aromatic. “But the freebie is over. You’ll have to teach or something.”
He can’t teach—not yet, perhaps not ever. To stand up in front of students and make definitive statements is unthinkable. Every definitive statement is false. Whenever he addresses a room of eager notebooks, he begins to shuffle at the lectern, cloak himself in qualifications. It’s useless to explain this to Lovering, one of those surehanded lecturers who forget that skepticism is at the bottom of scientific method. Ressler adopts an obsequious tone. “I don’t imagine my classroom presentation is likely to be especially stellar.”
“No, I wouldn’t think so.”
Ressler feels an urge to smash his colleague to the wall, watch his head loll against the brick. The forbidden appeal fills him: nothing to prevent it. He is more powerful in the upper chest than Lovering, although the comparison hasn’t occurred to him until this moment. Violence forever in the serum. Jacob’s Ladder does not ascend; it coils forever around the same four rungs. “Joseph, I’ve never said ‘boo’ to you. What’s going on here? What do you have against me?”
“What do you have against Ulrich?”
“Against …? Nothing! I just want to do my work.”
“You are a very unpleasant fellow, you know. I can’t think of anyone in the department who’s especially taken with you.”
The casual hallway conversation, at the flick of a switch, becomes puerile. He doesn’t have a clue to what the switch is, let alone how to flick it off. “Listen, Joe. I don’t know what to say. Is this over the interview? That’s crazy. It’s a puff piece. The magazine pulled my name out of a hat. They hadn’t even seen my article, let alone …”
“Screw the magazine.” Lovering’s voice is steady. “Sandy and I don’t even subscribe.” His joke strews the path with shrapnel. “And screw your article, too. Sandy says you dangle too many participles, by the way.”
“I don’t understand this. I’ve never bad-mouthed you. I’m quiet in the office. I keep the glassware clean …”
Lovering wags his head, shedding these possibilities as beneath consideration. “If you haven’t figured it out by now, I ain’t gonna lay it out for you.”
Ressler walks away, shaken. For days, he cannot put the weird run-in behind him. He cedes the office to Joe, abdicates out of shame and inability to look at the man. He doesn’t go to Ulrich to confirm the loss of fellowship; he’ll hear soon enough. He must assume good faith. Difference of opinion, even divorce, must all be in good faith.
On a late-February evening he passes the closed door of Toveh Botkin’s office, from which issue the dampened strains of the gallows march from that old war-horse the Symphonie Fantastique. He freezes in the hall— dark, drafty, and full of the smothered scent of lacquer, hair oil, methane, generations of forgotten undergraduate odors—freezes at the tentative probes of this progression. He is thrown back to the previous year, to Summer Slumber Party, when he did not know flat from sharp, let alone Neapolitan sixth from French overture. He is nowhere close to breaking into the inner circle of repertoire, the mysteries of tone hidden even from program-note readers and devotees. But with the help of the woman on the other side of this door, he has gone from utter illiteracy to the point where he can name this tune without ever having heard it before. He recognizes the Berlioz exclusively from the physiognomic description given in the literature.
Standing in the hall, taut with eerie last-century intervals counterpointed by clattering steam pipes, he feels the quick slip of deliverance. No matter what happens—should he be barred from the intellectual cloister, never publish fresh research again—academic year ’57–’58 will in any light remain the great watershed adventure of his life: the year he intuited the rough, sole appropriate method for cracking chemical inheritance, the year he fell irreversibly in love, and, most intangible, most intense of all, the year he learned to hear. He knocks, lets himself in, walking euphorically against the harmonic wind. He lies down in his old place on the leather couch. At the movement’s end, he lifts his torso and greets his old friend. “Not two flutes, you scoundrels! Two piccolos!”
Botkin needs no gloss. Her eyes brim viscous at his visit. She shakes her head, tsking. “What a student we’ve turned out to be.”
“Dr. Botkin, do you find me unpleasant?”
“Don’t flirt with an old woman. There isn’t one of us who couldn’t rise to make a fool of ourselves under pressure.”
He thanks her obliquely but gratefully by consulting her on the adaptor notion. “We have set everything up perfectly in our tube—plaintext message, scissors, paste, paper, pen—everything except the code book itself. If we slip that in, we ought to get synthesis such as no one has seen yet.”
“What, in this extended metaphor, does ‘code book’ stand for?”
Ressler explains: a bilingual molecule, with specific amino acid at one locus and corresponding anticodon at another. Where the messenger reads ACG, the strip on the translator reads UGC. They fit; the amino is held in position, glued to the growing polypeptide chain. He glances up from the couch when he finishes. Botkin smiles at him, but queerly. “Is there something wrong?” he asks. “Have I committed the usual bona fide blunder?”
“My friend,” Botkin laments, “you have been working too hard. You have been picking over too many back issues of periodicals and not enough front.” She lifts, fresh from the place of honor on her desk, a reprint of a recent article, hands it to him. He accepts the piece, a paper Crick delivered last fall to the Society for Experimental Biology, with the amalgam of trepidation and excitement of asking a pretty wallflower for a dance. Crick is coherent, gorgeous. From beginning to end, he throws open the casements and floods the place with conceptual clarity. In a few pages, the man crystallizes everything Cyfer and Ressler have struggled so fitfully to consolidate. And before it is all over, Crick hints at the same construct, even employing the term “adaptor”: an RNA strain shaped to encode both reading stencil and written amino.
It chills Ressler to lie there and read the piece, the chill of recognizing Berlioz without having heard him. He does not sink, beaten. Quite the reverse. The piece breaks his heart with poignancy. It is a beautiful late-twentieth-century pilgrim’s narrative—exegesis pressing outwards, refusing to stay confined to the dark backyard. It makes the work his own era struggles to produce seem unmatched by any Renaissance: a time when anything might come to be anything at all.
The shining confirmation—the correspondence between their own work and this work going on across the ocean—descends on him as relief. All sense of racing to the gate dissolves. There is still the weight of wanting to contribute somewhere along the line. But Crick’s structure, so close to the one he has independently imagined, reassures him that contribution is never an endangered individual. It will be made, whatever might become of him, no matter how soon design’s undertow drags him down.
Botkin mistakes the quiet that comes over him while reading. When he finishes, she consoles him. “He still seems confused between ribosomal and messenger RNA. And he has not yet picked up on Gale and Folkes.”
“You think not?” He glances at the paper, frightened. Then he understands his friend is trying to motivate him to remain in the chase. How can he tell her: I am in, for good, forever, even if I drop out along the way? We have no choice in these things; they must be done for the greater glory of whatever there is. “Maybe not,” he whispers, grinning, conceding the responsibility still wrapped inside relief. “Maybe we can add something to this.” He gazes at the creases in Dr. Botkin’s face, the manifestation, the final working out of a textual puzzle
written nowhere in particular, everywhere in general. He hands back the beautiful draft, Crick’s notes toward a score for the young person’s guide to the orchestra. “Let us go after this adaptor molecule, then.”
“I think we have to.”
“You know what it is, of course.”
“More nucleic acid?”
“Who else?” Is there any other matter so skilled at grammar that it can write one, in its own language? “Thank you for showing me that,” he says. “It’s breathtaking.” He spills over with the wonder of it: the organism guessing inspiredly at its own conveyance, mechanisms themselves the frozen record of inspired guesses about the environment. The practical substitute of words for words seems makeshift, courageous beyond imagining. He can say nothing.
Botkin lifts a hand to her darkwood shelves, takes down a book, and slowly reads to him. The source is in German, of which Ressler has only technical reading knowledge. But Botkin’s native fluency bridges this impediment. Her eyes read in one language, her lips pronounce another, without the halting searches of the simultaneous interpreter.
“‘At the suggestion of Doles, the Cantor at the Leipzig Thomas-Schule, the choir surprised Mozart by performing the double-chorus motet Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied. The choir had produced but a few measures when Mozart bolted upright, shocked. After a few more measures, he shouted out, “What is this?” His whole soul appeared to rise up into his ears. The singing ended; he cried out joyfully, “Here at last is something one might learn from.”’ I hope this holds up in translation.”
Even in the translation of a translation. The image of Europe’s prodigy, exiled in the loneliness of his abilities, unexpectedly discovering that he is not alone only augments the strange understanding welling in Ressler. “The name of that piece: ‘Sing unto the Lord a new song’?”
“On the mark.” He does not even ask the name of that surprise something, the someone one might at last learn from. No need to translate it into speech.
The Gold Bug Variations Page 58
