“Can’t you read?” Susan screamed. She pointed to the stapler: THIS BELONGS TO S. BATE. In every lab I had worked in, there were two kinds of people: those who labeled every item with their name, and those who walked off with anything that wasn’t nailed down. But Susan’s reaction to the disappearance of her pens and inoculating loops exceeded all bounds. The first thing you did if you found a pen in your pocket labeled S. BATE was quickly to get rid of it. Maybe Lew was being blamed for someone else’s theft, or he was afraid to confess. Susan crouched beside him, small, with fine hair, narrow eyes, and pointy ears, like a lynx. “Don’t lie to me!” she shrieked. “I can’t stand men who lie!”
She was one of those women who blame any man’s fault on the gender as a whole. Because of this, her tantrums seemed to reflect as badly on me as they did on Susan. Apparently, she had been abused by her father, and she acted as if my own father were to blame for the gene that threatened me. She wasn’t a bad scientist, but everyone knew why Vic kept her on, why he endured her rants and accusations. What upset me about Susan’s tantrums was the possibility that I was also treated kindly, kept on year after year despite my lack of results, for the same reason—pity.
Most scientists of Vic’s caliber chose only the brightest, most single-minded graduate students and postdocs to work in their labs, then goaded them with threats of getting kicked out if they didn’t publish papers. Vic hired those applicants for whom he felt most sorry—Maureen, in her wheelchair; Yosef, who had arrived in America with the stubble on his cheeks and fifty dollars in his pocket; Lew Schiff, who had been hospitalized twice for manic depression and seemed so tightly wound he might spiral apart at the slightest wrong word; and Susan, whose only problem was a personality so disagreeable that she had been asked to leave two labs before this one. Other professors pushed their students to work weekends and nights, especially when their experiments had failed. Vic insisted a failure meant you take the afternoon off (everyone obeyed him except Achiro and me). He paid to install a lower workbench for Maureen. He gave Achiro permission to charge his long-distance calls to the lab. He let Susan pace furiously back and forth across his office—“the confession booth,” we called it—and somehow convinced her that he wouldn’t let her labmates steal her ideas. We worked hard to repay his kindness. But secretly we resented him for making our lab infamous as a warehouse for freaks. Not that other labs weren’t filled with eccentrics. People who study sea-urchin sperm and fruit-fly wings aren’t likely to be conventional. Getting in to MIT was a license to indulge the eccentricities that had gotten you teased in high school. But those of us who worked in Vic’s lab weren’t eccentric so much as flawed, and flaws weren’t indulged at MIT.
“If you don’t keep your grubby hands off my things . . .” Susan never completed her threats, whether because she couldn’t think of a punishment severe enough, or because real violence scared her.
Lew had learned that the slightest word of defense would unleash a new tirade. He rubbed his fists against his wiry hair, then turned back to pouring his gel. Susan hurled the stapler. It hit the wall beside Lew’s head, sprang open, and dropped heavily, like some broken-jawed bird. She stormed past me. “Watch out!”
I wondered if she had said this to excuse her behavior, or to warn me of the dangers awaiting me in the lab. No one was there except Achiro and Lew. The others were probably in the conference room, taking advantage of the free pizza and beer Vic bought every Monday afternoon for group meeting. I was surprised to see Achiro. But there he was, in a white polo shirt and striped slacks, bending over a notepad and writing something with a mechanical pencil. Beside him rose a stack of orange loose-leaf binders and the metal box containing his slide collection. I reminded myself not to ask what had happened. But he told me on his own, as smoothly as if he had been practicing.
“I am going back to Japan,” he said. “My wife, she leave home. Our children are with my parents. They are, ahh, very old people.”
I tried to make sense of this. Maybe Achiro’s wife had grown tired of living with her in-laws and run away. Or she had had an affair.
“You take these.” He waved his hand above the notebooks.
“Oh, no,” I said. I couldn’t. Not after all the work he had put in. And he would need the data in those journals when he found a new lab.
He shook his head violently. “Broken.” He thumped his chest. “How you say, I no care?”
How was it possible to care as much as Achiro once had cared, then suddenly stop caring?
“Excuse me,” he said. “Someone is waiting in this lounge.” I thought he meant someone was waiting for him, to drive him to the airport. “But first, ahh, take these.” He lifted the metal box. I had no choice but to take it. Achiro bowed. So did I. When he left I felt edgy, as if a comrade who had failed at some dangerous task had passed the mission on to me. I forced myself to walk down the hall to the meeting. As I passed the lounge, I saw a large, broad-cheeked woman leafing through a catalog of mice one could order from a breeding facility in Bar Harbor. The woman was middle-aged, with blunt-cut gray hair. It was a warm spring day, but she wore a long-sleeved flannel shirt, a wool skirt, and black woolen knee-highs.
“I’m Dr. Burns,” she said. “Miriam Burns. I’ve got a family for you.” Her voice was grating as a buzz saw. “I have a practice,” she said. “In Maine. I see a lot of folks with Valentine’s syndrome. I found Dr. O’Connell’s name in a journal. I tried to get in touch with him.” She lowered her voice, which made it sound like a buzz saw in a distant part of the woods. “Whenever I called I got this Asian man. Let’s just say he didn’t have a real good grip on the language. I could have written a letter. But I was coming to Boston anyway—I’m taking a refresher course in trauma—so I figured I would stop by in the flesh.”
“You’re treating a family with Valentine’s?” I asked.
“Treating them?” she said. “There’s no treatment for Valentine’s. I tell them what they’ve got, then I stop around every now and then to make sure they’re not rotting in their own filth. I make sure nobody puts a pillow to their face until there’s no point not to.” She removed a nail clipper from one of her many pockets, unfolded the file, and used the point to scrape the dirt from beneath her nails. She was exactly the sort of person you would want to show up if you had suffered from some trauma; she would stop the bleeding, then keep you from feeling too sorry for yourself.
“You live in Maine?” I asked. “Why do you have so many patients there with Valentine’s?”
She refolded the clipper. “Let’s just say somebody had it way back when, and that somebody married somebody else who had it, and they had lots of kids, and those kids had lots of kids, and everybody sort of married each other and had more kids.”
“The family is big?” I said. “How big?” I prayed she would answer ten. Maybe, if I were incredibly lucky, twelve.
“The whole pedigree?” She counted on her fingers. “You have the Smiths. The Martingales. The Evergreens. The Fews. It’s damn confusing—the head of the Smith clan way back when was a Few. The mayor made a chart. When he unrolls the damn thing, it stretches the length of town hall. With the distant relations, the count could run as high as three or three-fifty.”
I allowed myself to think: She means three hundred and fifty. I waited for a sense of relief to set in. Instead, what I felt was a crushing compression, like a clock whose spring has been too tightly wound. I’m not ready yet, I thought. Please, give me time.
9
Strangely enough, I put off my trip to Maine as long as I could. It was one thing to theorize about the miracles we might accomplish if only we discovered a large enough family with Valentine’s. It was another thing to find such a family, enlist the help of busy colleagues like Miriam Burns and Sumner Butterworth, then fail to find the gene.
Of course, there were also practical reasons to wait. Miriam Burns needed to prepare her patients. She couldn’t get their hopes up. Donating blood wouldn’t guarantee they woul
d gain anything in return. Many of her patients had no telephones or cars. They lived miles from New Jerusalem and were tended by relatives nearly as infirm as they were. Some were squeamish. Some believed that giving blood would sap their manhood or strength. Many distrusted doctors. Those who lived in the village would be invited to a special bloodletting party, complete with cake and ice cream. Anyone too sick to attend would be visited at home. Later, I would go back and make a foray to the island offshore where the most inbred descendants of the original settlers with Valentine’s lived. All in all, we would need to take blood from nearly three hundred people. What if none of them consented? What if they all did?
To pass the days until the trip—and to keep my mind off Willie—I spent most of my time reading about the Shakers who had settled in New Jerusalem a hundred years earlier and whose descendants still lived there, one tenth of them afflicted with Valentine’s disease. The fact that genetics should be entwined with religion didn’t strike me as strange. A person’s faith is handed down from parent to child. The members of a given sect shun those outside their gene pool. Parents concerned with passing on their religion produce the largest families. They tend to keep track of who marries whom. Generation after generation, they voluntarily perform a series of matings no scientist but God would dare to carry out. The gene for Valentine’s chorea might have existed in the human race since primitive times, but early Homo sapiens died too young to manifest its symptoms. Or the mutation arose later. Maybe it struck only once, so all recent sufferers trace their inheritance to that earliest source. If so, my mother’s family must be related to those Shakers in Maine. More likely, the mutation arose several times independently, in various parts of the world, and our only link to whoever carried the gene came not from the past, but from the future we shared.
I had known before my research that the Shakers viewed intercourse as the root of all sin, but I hadn’t been aware that the Shakers did shake. They clapped their hands, hooted, groaned, howled, and whirled in circles until their bonnets flew off. Such seizures were interpreted as a sign of God’s will. A woman stomping her heels might be crushing snakes underfoot. A boy rushing from church and gobbling swill from a trough might be satisfying his secret hunger for sin. After such convulsions, a Shaker might freeze while his fellows interpreted the heavenly message. Hands up: Mercy, life. Hands down: Judgment, death. Hands thrown backward: Leave the world of the body behind.
In the late 1830s, a group of Shaker girls began to fall into trances. They sang songs in secret tongues and acted in ways that seemed drunken or obscene. Neat Shaker children wallowed in filth. They decried their elders’ sins and sported fine clothes that would have been forbidden if these hadn’t been “gifts” from Mother Ann, the founder of the religion. Most Shakers believed these fits to be inspired. Others doubted and scoffed. Eventually, the doubters and scoffers won out. Divine manifestations among the Shakers grew rare. Their chants came to resemble Methodist hymns. They learned their dances by rote. They turned to selling seeds and making furniture.
Then a widow named Elinor Smith came to live in New Jerusalem. What I could learn of the Smiths I had gleaned from a few references in books and voluminous letters from the mayor of New Jerusalem, a man named Paul Minot, who was also the town librarian, it seemed. His letters were written on onionskin paper, dry and frail as dead skin, and he used archaic locutions like “heretofore” and “mind you,” which led me to picture a wiry old codger in plaid wool pants drawn up beneath his armpits. According to the mayor, Elinor Smith had sought shelter among the Shakers for herself, her two sons, and her three unmarried daughters. Soon after her arrival, she began to tremble at meetings, then she would burst from her bench and twirl about the room like the Shakers of old. Just as suddenly she would freeze, limbs locked in postures that pointed the way to heaven or hell. Even those elders who mocked the hysteria of an earlier age thought these seizures to be authentic. Two of Elinor’s daughters began to throw fits. Then the younger son, Goodenough. Among the many documents the mayor sent that spring was a blurred photostat of a petition from Goodenough Smith to the elders of New Jerusalem dated 1881, when he must have been in his early thirties:
Seeing as Sister Elinor Smith is the Instrument by which the World has received a Great Gift from God, &, seeing as this Gift is clearly transmitted from parent to child by the will of the Lord, I petition you to grant that the Smith family is Elect, & entitled to enter into a Lawful State of Carnal Union, whose sole purpose is to engender more servants for God. I await your reply.
Yours in the Spirit of Jesus Christ and Mother Ann, &tc.
Bro. Goodenough Smith.
No answer is recorded. But several months later, Brother Smith left the village with his sisters, an older brother, and several friends. He sent a letter to his mother’s family in Bath and informed them that they, too, were instruments of God. A cousin moved out to the farm Smith had bought on Spinsters Island. He married the cousin whose name was May Martingale. A dozen other lost souls joined them on the farm, among them a family from New Hampshire named Few. Except for Smith’s claim that he and his relatives were entitled to breed servants for God, he lived as a Shaker, building cabinets and chairs for the fishermen’s wives.
But within a few decades, the Shakers on Spinsters Island, like those celibate Shakers who had remained in New Jerusalem, declined and died out. Most of Smith’s descendants slipped back to the mainland and tried to blend in. They might have refused to take part in our study, but the mayor had grown up in New Jerusalem. He wasn’t related to the Smiths and was connected to the Martingales and Fews in the most roundabout way, but when he made his inquiries as to who had married whom and who had died from what, no one took the trouble to lie. I reread his stack of letters. The more intimately I was informed about the residents of New Jerusalem the easier it would be to convince them to give their blood. Elisha Smith. Deliverance Martingale. Carrie Few. Belinda Hayes. What sort of people would worship an illness? But then, didn’t I worship it as well?
The commuter plane that serviced Bar Harbor carried no passengers that day except Rita Nichols, Yosef, Sumner Butterworth, and me. I was sure that my nervous energy could have powered it all the way to Maine.
“Okay, folks,” the pilot said. “Buckle your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.”
As the plane taxied toward the runway, Sumner pointed out various types of aircraft. He had never piloted a plane, but he enjoyed collecting information. He was one of those people who believe that collecting enough of one thing will reveal a great truth, the way fitting together the pieces of a jigsaw might reveal a covered bridge. He prided himself on knowing the function of every cell in the brain, but I had never heard him use the words “consciousness” or “soul.” He leaned back against his seat and did a crossword. I peered between the clouds and tried to spot Willie’s mountain in New Hampshire. A few days before, I had received a postcard from Montana, where he was visiting his son. On the back, in blockish capitals, he had printed: “I HOPE YOU FIND WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR.”
The plane started bucking, and Sumner put down his magazine. “Jane?” He dropped his voice. “There aren’t any of these Shakers of yours still at it?”
I asked him what he meant, still at what?
“Making furniture,” he said. “Or weaving baskets.”
No, I said, I didn’t think there were. The last Shaker in New Jerusalem had died the year before. The Shaker village lay in ruins; the mayor wanted to restore it, but no one had the money. “You know,” I said, “I don’t think you’re going to have much time to go rooting around in people’s attics.” I tried to be tactful. He was fifteen years my senior and I was glad that he was treating me as something of an equal.
Yosef leaned across the aisle. “Tell the truth. You’re not just a little bit worried what these goyim are going to think about us two Yids taking blood from their children? Maybe they think we’re going to use the blood to make matzos? You’re not worried they might
think it’s a plot by the Commies and the Yids and ride us out of town on a rail?”
Yosef loved to put on his thickest Russian accent and play up his origins as a “Commie” and a “Yid.” Mostly, he enjoyed getting me to laugh. But he also believed some plot against Russians and Jews had denied him the success that should have been his. “Yosef,” I said, “these people probably wouldn’t recognize a matzo if they stepped on one. I swear, if you put on that Shylock act of yours—”
“Wouldn’t you just know it?” Rita clicked shut her handbag. “When my James went off to camp, I was so sure he was going to forget to pack his inhaler that I put it in my purse. Then I forgot to take the damn thing out of my purse and give it to him. Soon as we land, I need to find a post office and mail it to him overnight. I’ve got to call the camp nurse and tell her to keep an eye on James and make sure he doesn’t have an attack in the meantime.” She glanced out the window. “Oh oh,” she said. “I don’t like the looks of that.”
I leaned across Sumner so I could see out the window. The plane appeared not to move, embedded as it was in a thick block of clouds. I imagined my sister falling, her hair trailing like a comet, that filmy white shawl slowing her descent, though not enough to stop her.
“Okay, folks,” the pilot said, “get back to your seats,” though none of us had gotten up.
The plane dropped and pitched and rolled, then dropped again. If I had been annoyed at Sumner for considering this trip an opportunity to search for Shaker artifacts, seeing him now, gripping the armrests and grimacing, I was overcome by gratitude that he was taking so much trouble to try to cure an illness that posed no danger to him. And Rita, I thought. She had come on this trip to help cure a disease black people rarely got.
“All right,” the pilot said. “I’m going to try to find the airport. Just sit back and hold on.”
A Perfect Life Page 10
