When did I begin to see through his act? It must have been the evening he asked me to talk to Karl Prince about eggs. I had entered junior high and was very caught up in my first science-fair project. It was nothing original, really, just the standard “Egg to Chick: How an Embryo Grows.” The project entailed little more than asking Mr. Prince, who ran a nearby chicken farm, to donate fertilized eggs. I set these in the incubator my father helped me build, and every day after school I tweezed a window in one shell and took notes on what I saw. My mother cleared a shelf in her Frigidaire and let me keep the eggs in a set of glass dessert-bowls she had been given for her wedding. At first, the exercise seemed pointless. I saw exactly what the textbook predicted I would see. Then I began to wonder why and how all this happened. At three days, the tiny heart lay beating in its dish. In twenty-one days, an entire living chick had grown from a single cell in a gooey yolk. How did each cell know which part of what organ it was destined to become? I was stunned to find out real scientists knew as little as I did. I decided to become whatever sort of biologist studied how an animal grew from an embryo or an egg.
I bought three sheets of oak tag and a box of Magic Markers. Carefully, I stenciled the title of my project. I retrieved the windowed eggs and sketched what I saw. The markers’ inky smell, their squeak against the oak tag, made me dizzy with joy. My father brought home a dozen wire hangers, which I used to frame the posters so they would stand.
The night before the science fair, our family went to King’s. On our way to our table, my father stopped to talk to Karl Prince about eggs. “Hey, Karl.” He drew a drag of his Lucky Strike, which he held daintily between a circle of finger and thumb. “Those eggs you gave Jane? Seems she figured out a way to make chicks without the roosters. If you ask her nice enough, she might let you in on the secret. Won’t you, doll?”
My father, I saw then, didn’t consider an egg a mystery, a source of new life, but a product to be sold. An egg was a piece of merchandise. And my knowledge, my ability to make a good impression, to say the right thing, these were merchandise, too. So even though I knew the right thing to say to make Mr. Prince laugh, even though I knew it involved the words “I might, if he paid me,” I couldn’t bring myself to say it.
“Turning shy on me, doll? Happens to the best of them. Girls hit twelve and, pfft, they’re useless for life.”
Useless? Because I was a girl? Because I wouldn’t let my father turn what I felt about those eggs into a joke, a product? I refused to say another word that night. I would never again take pleasure in saying just the right thing to make my father’s friends laugh. I got over this, eventually. I started speaking again. But only when I had something important to say. I loved my father. I knew that he was putting on this benefit to raise money for the cause that might save my life. But I hated giving speeches. I hated dressing up. Performing.
And so, with some misgiving, I took the train to Manhattan. It dove beneath the city, and I grew more apprehensive. I caught a taxi to the hotel and checked in. As I lay soaking in the bath, and later, as I struggled to zip my dress, I tried to figure out how to act when I saw Willie.
I took the elevator to the ballroom, then stood beside the door and studied all the tall, slender, self-possessed women who, I was sure, wore fancy evening gowns and attended banquets every night. Across the room, my father looked up at me and smiled. I had begun to smile back when I realized that he didn’t have the foggiest notion of who I was—he was smiling at some stranger in a slinky, revealing dress.
When he realized his mistake, he put one hand on the shoulder of the man he had been speaking to and propelled him across the room. “This is my daughter,” he told the man, who looked me up and down approvingly. “Jane, I want you to meet someone who is going to make Valentine’s chorea a household word.”
The man was president of the second-largest advertising agency in New York. His wife’s family was at risk for Valentine’s, and he had volunteered his services to publicize the disease. “What your organization needs is better PR. You scientists get on TV and what do you do but sling around a lot of big words. A bunch of talking heads. Like I was telling Herb here, we’re going to put together a series of public-service spots. With you and your sister, we can’t miss.”
I saw Willie come in. His mother introduced him to a gaunt blonde in a scarlet sheath, who kissed him. I turned back to the PR man, who was talking about the “spots” my sister and I would appear in. Willie came up to me then. “Hey,” he said, “Jane. You look great.”
I was confused. Was this the real Willie Land, or the Willie Land about whom I had been dreaming for so many weeks? I blinked and tried to make the two Willies line up. “You do, too,” I said. “That’s a beautiful tux.”
He stroked the lapels. “My dad wore it the year he was nominated for an Oscar. It’s been hanging in mothballs for about a century. But it’s kind of classy, don’t you think?” He turned so I could see the tux from all sides. It fit him perfectly, but I couldn’t understand how he could stand to wear it. After my mother died, I couldn’t bring myself to put on anything she had ever owned. “I didn’t hear from you,” he said. “I know you’ve been busy. That’s fantastic, about all those sick people you turned up in Maine. But I thought . . . I sent those cards.”
I tried to remember why I hadn’t written back.
Honey tapped the microphone. “Everyone?” The amplifier buzzed. “Could we each find our places?”
Willie’s place tag was next to mine. A waiter came with wine, and Willie laid his hand across his glass. He rested his arm across my chair, and even though I wasn’t sure what this gesture meant—he might not have had anywhere else he could stretch it—I felt wonderfully at ease. I closed my eyes and inhaled the sharp scent of mothballs, then settled against his arm. We sat that way and listened as Honey expressed her wish that the newly reorganized Institute for Valentine’s Research and Education wouldn’t lose sight of the needs of the average man and woman, “the husband who loves his wife dearly but cannot endure another day of isolation, or the wife who banishes her husband for drinking, only to learn that he was, in reality, a victim of a dreadful disease.” I tried to connect what Honey was saying to the Valentine’s victims I had met in Maine. But she was one of those people who can’t speak of suffering without inflecting her speech like an actor reciting Shakespeare. The microphone’s echo made it even harder to believe the suffering was real.
Vic was seated at the opposite end of the dais. The night before, in the lab, he had motioned me into his office. I assumed he was curious about what I intended to say at the benefit. Instead, he sat there toying with a candy bar and asked if I had ever stopped to think that we didn’t really know what we were doing with this Valentine’s thing. I felt the tears welling in my eyes. If Vic, of all people, didn’t believe my experiments would work, then maybe I was deluded to think they would.
He must have seen my distress. “I don’t mean we won’t find the gene. I mean, what’s going to happen when we do find it?” He unwrapped the Baby Ruth and took a bite. “Dianne is pregnant again.” I couldn’t tell if his tone was rueful or resigned. He finished the candy and wiped his mouth. “I took her for an ultrasound. Don’t worry. It’s nothing serious. Her OB is just a little worried because she hasn’t been gaining weight. But Dianne and I were sitting in the waiting room, and the woman next to us announced that she was there because she wanted to find out her baby’s sex while it was still early enough to do something about it. That’s how she put it, do something about it. I asked if she already had too many girls, and she said no, she and her husband didn’t have any kids at all. Having a boy was very important to her husband, and she wanted to make him happy. Then the nurse called her in, and I sat and looked around the room and tried to figure out which other couples were there to find out the gender of their babies before it was too late to ‘do something’ about it.”
I should have guessed that a man who had attended a seminary might find abortion distas
teful. Still, I felt betrayed. I excused myself by saying that I had to take my samples from the centrifuge. The lab was like a Laundromat; if you didn’t remove your bloods the minute the drum stopped spinning, you would find your test tubes on a shelf with a nasty note informing you of what an inconsiderate douche bag you were. I left Vic without reminding him that he, of all people, shouldn’t be trying to prescribe what a scientist should or shouldn’t do.
Honey stopped speaking. The audience clapped. I heard Honey introduce me but I remained sitting in my seat, stupidly hoping I might gain some advantage by this delay. I was reluctant to make too many claims for my work, for fear I couldn’t keep them.
Finally, I took my place at the podium and thanked everyone for coming. I meant what I said, but the PA system gave my thanks the same tinny ring it had given Honey’s. I pulled the rubber band from my notes and began to deliver the explanation of my work I had given Willie. But whenever I said words like “restriction enzymes” or “polymorphisms,” the audience squirmed. I was trying to describe how to label a probe with a radioactive tag when Laurel came in. She wore a strapless dress with turquoise sequins. Her companion was a thin, muscular black man with a clipped beard. He was, I saw, the only black person there. I wasn’t sure why this upset me. The only black Americans who got the disease were those with white blood. Then it came to me that my father had neglected to invite Rita Nichols. She might not have wanted to leave her sons alone. But she ought to have been invited.
Laurel and her date slipped into two chairs along the back wall. I finished my speech and asked if anyone had any questions. No one did, so I sat back down.
Next up was Paul Minot. He walked to the podium in a ruffled blue tux that he must have rented from the shop that rented tuxes to the New Jerusalem boys who were going to their prom. We would need to excuse him, he said. He didn’t get out into society much. Where he came from, if folks heard you were paying five hundred dollars a plate to eat dinner, they would be awfully disappointed if that plate wasn’t gold. Not to mention the food. The audience laughed appreciatively. “And all this talk about enzymes and polywhatsits—I can’t pretend that I understood half of what the speaker before me was saying.”
I winced. Was he extracting revenge for my refusal to go out with him? I had fixed him up with Maureen. Maybe he was only playing to his audience. That’s what politicians did, didn’t they? They played to their audience.
“All I can do is tell you about the people I know,” he went on. “And try to give you some idea of how much you would be changing their lives if you found a cure for this illness.” Miriam dimmed the lights and projected Paul’s slides on a screen. There was the Smith family tree, and the Shaker barn in New Jerusalem, and photos of several families from whom we’d drawn blood. All this made me feel like an ambassador soliciting funds for his poverty-stricken tribe, all those pot-bellied children displayed before their huts, the thin-breasted mothers giving suck to lackadaisical infants with flies on their eyes.
Willie squeezed my shoulder. “Don’t you just love home movies?” he whispered. The audience applauded with that extra show of force meant to convey more than mere politeness. Paul returned to his seat. Maureen touched his hand.
“And now,” Honey said, “I would like you to give your very warmest welcome to the very first recipient of the new Dusty Land Award, honoring, as it does, the individual who has made the greatest contribution to Valentine’s research.”
Vic shuffled to the podium with the bewildered expression of a beauty queen who doesn’t realize how attractive she is. The microphone was low, but rather than lift it he lowered his neck and bent his knees. He thanked Honey and the institute for giving him this award. Then he pulled out a crumpled envelope.
“Let me ask each of you a question,” he started. “If this envelope contained a sheet of paper on which was written the day and manner of your death, how many of you would open it?”
This wasn’t the speech I had expected, an optimistic prediction of the progress that lay ahead and a plea for more funds.
“For the first time in human history,” Vic went on, “we are developing the power to tell a healthy person when and how he will die. But who can predict what anxieties such knowledge might bring? Think of the parent who learns that a child carries a fatal gene but can’t inform him and must live with the secret. Think of the young person who gains access to the information that she will never reach middle age.”
It was a setup, I thought. A trap. Why hadn’t he warned me? Or maybe he had tried to warn me the night before and I hadn’t let him. Now, at the benefit, Vic exhorted his listeners to consider all the tests the medical profession might develop. Would parents test a fetus to see if the child would be too ugly, or too short, or not intelligent enough? Would young men demand that their prospective spouses submit to a battery of tests to make certain they didn’t carry deleterious genes? He lifted the envelope. “I propose, ladies and gentlemen, that we organize a conference to address issues such as these and safeguard against the careless use of whatever tests we might develop down the road.”
My father sprang up. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “But don’t forget that while you’re debating what to do, my daughters over there could get Valentine’s and die.”
I looked to Laurel, who sat with her smile rigidly fixed. No wonder she avoided such functions. The Valentine’s Poster Kids, that’s what we were.
Honey took the microphone. “Everyone?” she said. “I’m sure we’ve appreciated hearing so many different points of view.” She motioned for the waiters to bring dessert. As the guests savored the chocolate mousse (“Chocolate mouse?” Willie joked, which made me laugh), Honey and my father worked their way from table to table, trying to minimize the damage Vic had done. They kept gesturing for Laurel and me to join them.
“I’ll be back in a second,” Willie said. “I want to tell your boss how much I liked his talk.”
I looked around for Maureen, but she must already have left with Paul. I wasn’t about to stay on the dais by myself, but I was equally reluctant to let Willie and Vic discuss the dangers of my research when I wasn’t there to defend it.
“That was a great speech,” Willie was saying. “I’ve been worrying about that stuff for a long time. But what do I know? You’re the expert. I was hoping that if you ever do put that conference together—the one you were talking about—maybe I could wrangle an invitation?”
Vic looked at me then, anxious to convey that he hadn’t meant to upset me. I wanted to tell him that he had every right to follow his conscience, but it wasn’t fair to expect that the people he hurt wouldn’t be upset. Why was he pushing everyone to work so hard on my experiments, believing as he did they were morally wrong?
Vic folded his leg against the wall. “Your father has a point. I suppose we need to find the gene before we decide how to use it. I get so caught up in these grand theological questions I forget how many people might die in the meantime.”
He glanced at me to see if this slip about people dying had disturbed me; I gave no indication that it had. Across the room, Laurel and her date stood beside a miniature palm. They both looked so colorful—Laurel in turquoise sequins, her date in blue silk—they reminded me of tropical fish.
Vic’s wife came up and tugged his arm. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but we have to get back to our hotel room before the babysitter turns into a pumpkin.” He shook Willie’s hand again before Dianne pulled him away.
“He’s a great guy,” Willie said. “You’re lucky to work for him.”
From the speech Vic had given, I didn’t think I would be working for him much longer.
“I wouldn’t worry,” Willie said. “A person can be of two opinions about something. Not everyone is as single-minded as you are.”
The pianist started to play “Over the Rainbow,” which had been my mother’s favorite song. I remembered her standing beside the sink, singing the words in a soft, off-key voice, her sponge circling a soapy plate, ov
er and over.
“What about it?” Willie was saying. “Will you let me come?”
“Where?” I said.
“To that island.”
He wanted to come to Spinsters Island? The last thing I needed was another person trying to supervise my work, especially if that person thought what I was trying to do was morally wrong. “There’s no hotel there,” I said. “The woman who owns the garage is putting us up. But she doesn’t have much room.”
He could bring a sleeping bag, he said. He could camp out in her yard.
I forced myself to say no a second time.
“Your father already said I could come.”
“My father?”
Willie cracked his knuckles. “I told you, I’m thinking about making a donation. One Land Enterprises. We always check out the businesses we intend to invest in.”
“Check us out? We’re not a business.”
“Right,” he said. “What I meant is, we need to make sure the money’s doing some good. That it’s going to help those people.”
“Do you think I want to hurt them?”
“Not on purpose. But I told you, Vic’s speech . . . I’ve been worrying about that for a long time.”
“So you’re going to come up there with me and decide if what I’m doing is wrong?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way.”
“No,” I said. “But that’s basically what you’ll be doing. I just hope you don’t plan on standing there and lecturing everybody on how they shouldn’t donate blood until some committee has figured out whether I’m bent on destroying the human race.”
“You think I would do that? Like I said, some people aren’t as single-minded as you are. Some of us are just a little bit confused.”
I might have apologized and said I trusted him, but I saw Laurel walking toward us. Willie seemed to hesitate, then he turned and loped off.
Laurel hugged me. “I’m sorry I missed your talk. Cruz’s motorbike broke down and it took us forever to get it fixed.” Cruz, it turned out, was the lead choreographer for the Harlem Modern Dance Troupe. “You look stunning,” Laurel said. “This must be so exciting for you. Do you really think you’ll find the gene? A person would have to give blood, wouldn’t she? To take this test?” Laurel shuddered. “You know how much I hate needles. Why don’t you take the test and let me know the answer.”
A Perfect Life Page 14
