A Perfect Life

by Eileen Pollack

  “That’s our child,” he said. “That’s its heart, Jane. You’ve got to snap out of this.”

  I promised him I would.

  “When? When the kid’s twenty? When you’ve missed the whole thing?”

  My father seemed to suffer the same loss of zeal that I did. He surprised me by relinquishing the presidency of the foundation. He wanted, he said, to spend more time with Honey. But I suspected that, like me, he was giving in to grief and self-reproach. “My job’s over now,” he said, a victory that entailed pretending that his son-in-law and Ted and his own unborn grandchild weren’t still at risk.

  Only Vic didn’t stop work. One afternoon—I was in my fifth month—he called to tell me that he would be spending the next several weeks in Washington, setting up a committee to formulate guidelines for genetic testing, not only for Valentine’s, but for all the diseases for which tests might be developed. This much I had predicted. But he shocked me by accepting Honey’s request that he take over the Valentine’s foundation until my father found the heart to resume his old post. Instead of switching to a line of research whose morality was unassailable, Vic was doubling down on his efforts to find the gene for Valentine’s. There was no going back now, he said. The only solution lay in getting past this hopeless limbo we were in.

  Vic’s energy, his unwillingness to be crippled by the same doubt that had crippled me, made me all the more tired. I couldn’t bear his solicitude. He seemed to think I had gotten pregnant on purpose, in response to finding out that I didn’t have the gene. Every time he saw me, he described another reward of giving birth. “It’s a miracle,” he said portentously. “A child is the very definition of grace.”

  I went in to the lab as infrequently as I could. Not that anyone I knew was there. Yosef had accepted a position as a salesman for a biological supply house. Susan was staying home, cramming for her LSATs. Lew was at McLean, recovering from another bout of manic depression. And Maureen was flying around the country giving seminars in the hope of landing a job. When I did go in, I spent my time complying with requests from other biologists that I send them copies of the probe. Everyone was racing to clone the gene. While the test for the marker required DNA from the patient’s entire family, a test for the gene itself could be accomplished with blood from the patient alone. Even if I hadn’t felt so sluggish, I would have needed years to achieve this.

  My due date came and went. I began to think of my pregnancy as an experiment that had failed. I napped on the couch while Willie sat in the kitchen studying the annual reports of companies he might invest in. But my languor unnerved him. “We could drive to New Hampshire,” he said, an offer I declined, not wanting to give birth in a cabin in the woods with no running water.

  “Babies have their own clocks,” Honey assured me. I could guess what it was costing her not to point out that she had begged me not to have a child with her son. “Willie came two months ahead of schedule. He was the teensiest thing. The doctors told me he might not pull through. And now, well, just look at him—six feet four inches, and so healthy I can’t think of the last time he had a sniffle.”

  Healthy, I thought. In the heartbeat of silence that followed, Honey, I was sure, was thinking the same thing.

  My father was less optimistic. “Something’s wrong,” he kept mumbling. “The kid’s getting too big,” although I had put on less than twenty pounds. “Tell that doctor of yours to make the kid come out now.”

  As it happened, my contractions started the day my regular obstetrician left town for Nantucket. The OB on call was a stern older woman with a face like a pie plate and a watch hanging around her neck upside down, so only she could read it. She was semiretired, and my regular obstetrician had warned us that Dr. Krook had “antiquated ideas.”

  “You going to do the right thing by this gal?” she asked Willie, and even though we were planning on getting married, I was glad he didn’t volunteer this information. A wave of cramps wrung my womb. I reached for his hand, panting, not to any rhythm—I hadn’t had the heart to take the class—but in response to the ebb and flow of pain. The contraction subsided. Through blurry eyes I saw the obstetrician studying my chart. “Both of you have a history of Valentine’s chorea in your families?”

  I struggled to sit up, but Willie was already answering. “What do you propose we do about it now?”

  The next contraction clenched my uterus. I gasped and leaned back. The obstetrician clocked the time. The fact that her watch was hanging upside down upset me terribly.

  “All I meant was that two educated people such as yourselves ought to know better.”

  And I thought as I lay there that it isn’t always possible to know what “better” might mean. Maybe I had had a child because I had grown so tired of weighing the pros and cons of each option. Maybe I had had a child because, by the time my head was clear enough to reach a decision, the pregnancy seemed too complex an experiment to destroy. Or maybe I had had a child because I was sick to death of death and wanted to give my father something to live for. Or maybe I had had a child because tossing a coin had revealed what I wanted to do all along.

  “Now push,” the doctor ordered. I didn’t need to be told. I had no other desire but to push. Still, I held back. I would never have a child in my body again, never share this sensation so many women before me had known. “They wanted to put me under,” my mother said. “That’s what they did back then. They put the mother to sleep so she wouldn’t make any trouble. But I raised a fuss and told them, ‘Don’t you dare. This is one moment I am not about to sleep through.’” My mother, Glori Weiss, had felt this same pain, this same suspense and exaltation, and perhaps this same worry that the child she already loved, the child she would undergo any torture to spare, might someday fall ill.

  Then I couldn’t keep from pushing and out my baby rushed on a wave of warmth.

  “A girl,” the obstetrician announced. “Small. But she seems to be fine.”

  One of the residents held her up. Her face was round and red, with a tuft of wet hair peaking from the crown. She looked like a beet from my mother’s garden.

  “And what’s the baby’s name?” the resident asked.

  “Lila,” I said. “Lila Weiss Land.” I had intended to name her for my mother, but I was afraid of cursing her with my mother’s bad luck. Besides, “Glori Land” sounded like some dopey doublespeak for heaven. No other member of our family had been blessed with both good health and a euphonious name. My father’s father had run off when he was a boy, and his mother had been a shrew. That left only my mother’s mother, Lillian, but “Lillie Land” sounded ridiculous. Then Willie took me for a walk through the Arnold Arboretum. The lilacs were in bloom. Lilac? I thought. No. Lila. Lila Weiss Land. Then I realized that “Lila” sounded like Laurel.

  “But that’s what she wanted,” Willie said. “Remember the day we all had brunch? Remember how Laurel whispered something? Well, what she said was, ‘Make my sister happy. And if you ever have a kid, name the baby for me.’”

  That was just like my sister, to strike the tragic aunt’s pose. I was nearly as afraid that Lila would take on my sister’s personality as that she might inherit her grandfather’s faulty gene. But it was a nice name. Lila Land.

  “She’s too, too precious,” Maureen cooed. “What a peanut! Look at those tiny hands! And that mouth! Have you ever seen anything so kissable?” She produced a heart-shaped box wrapped in shiny paper. “Why are baby clothes all so boring? It took me hours to find these.” In the box lay a pair of red-and-white-striped booties to which she had applied silver sequins and scarlet bows.

  Yosef came next, clean-shaven and newly coiffed. “I make more in my first week as a salesman than in two month as a postdoc. If my family gets visas, I will meet them at the airport driving a long black Lincoln Town Car,” although I could tell he was saying this to keep up his spirits; he hated his job, selling water baths, autoclaves, and spectrophotometers. “Best part is I finally got money to buy nice things
for my friends.” He produced a giant stuffed mouse whose fur was so soft I couldn’t help but stroke it, and six smaller stuffed babies, imitations of the litter that had been born to the runt I was more than certain than ever must be a homozygote: all six of its pups seemed to be afflicted with the heterozygous form of Valentine’s.

  On the morning I was discharged, Willie packed the stuffed mice in a box, then went to bring the Jeep. An orderly came in to get me.

  “I don’t need a wheelchair,” I said.

  “Rules, rules, rules,” the young man sang. “You trip and fall with that baby, we’re all in deep shit.”

  I had just settled in the chair and accepted Lila in my arms when Rita Nichols appeared in running shoes and her nurse’s uniform. I hadn’t seen Rita since our trip to New Jerusalem. She had resigned from the project to devote more attention to her sons, especially Dennis, who had emerged from his coma but still seemed to be suffering some mental impairment; the boy who had scored nearly 700 on his math SATs now had trouble adding. “At least with Valentine’s, you got fifty-fifty odds,” Rita told me when I visited. “A black boy in Boston, he’s lucky he sees twenty without getting killed or messed up in his head.”

  She had just finished her shift on the neurological ward. “Been meaning to come to see you, but you know how it is.” She lifted Lila’s arm and let it drop. “Thin as a chicken bone.” She tsk-tsked. “Not an ounce of extra meat on her. Just like my James at that age.”

  I told her again how sorry I was about what had happened.

  She shook her head, which to me, in the wheelchair, seemed seven feet high. “Dr. Butterworth, he says Dennis probably will get back most of what he’s lost. Thank Jesus for that man, all he’s done for my boy. It’s James I’m keeping my eye on now. Better he ends up a momma’s boy than he ends up like his brother.” She turned to leave. Her sneakers squeaked. “Whatever happened to that woman? What’s her name, Dreary? Drury?”

  My sorrow was made even more pronounced by the hormones. “She died,” I said, tears rising to my eyes. I hadn’t wanted to attend Flora’s funeral; it was too soon after we had buried Laurel. But Willie came with me. There was a brief service in an evangelical church near Pittsfield. Willie and I sat near the back, and no one seemed to notice us. Only when the dozen or so mourners moved outside for the burial did Flora’s husband register that we had come. He strode over to me then, and I drew back, as if I were afraid he might strike me for torturing his wife without doing anything to relieve her suffering. Instead, he embraced me in a grip so strong I could feel my child kick to free itself from being smothered.

  “You tried,” he said. “You’re the only goddamn person who gave a fuck about my wife.” Then he broke down and sobbed. His friends, huge men who seemed ill at ease in suits that barely concealed their tattoos, their thick gray beards and long gray hair showing signs of having been trimmed for this occasion, needed to support Mac through the remainder of the funeral. The ones who hadn’t arrived on motorcycles herded him and his kids to their trucks and cars.

  One of the women who remained behind came over and tried to comfort me. “Don’t feel bad,” she said. “Death was a release for that poor woman. She finally found her peace with Jesus.” Which, I suppose, she had.

  “Social Services ought to check on that family,” Rita told me in the hospital. “I never was too sure what I thought about the father.”

  “He’s all right,” I said. “He loves those kids. Maybe it’ll be easier for him now that Flora’s gone.” Except that I knew it wouldn’t be. Mac might be able to derive some comfort in finding out that three of his four children didn’t have the gene that had killed their mother. But his youngest child, Annette, the one who had stayed home from school to watch Gilligan’s Island with her mother—Annette had tested positive.

  I stroked my baby’s head. “I’ll try to remember to visit them and see how they’re getting on.”

  “You do that,” Rita said. “Maybe, if you want some company, I’ll come along for the ride.”

  The orderly pushed my wheelchair down the corridor.

  “Thanks for sending me that magazine,” Rita called after us. “Didn’t understand most of what you and Dr. O’Connell wrote, except the part with my name in it. But it sure looks nice on the coffee table. Something to pass on to the boys.”

  After we brought Lila home, Honey and my father drove to Boston to help us. I tried to persuade them to rent a condo nearby. My father seemed to derive some small comfort from holding Lila. But Honey wouldn’t hear of it. “You two are on your own now. There’s a company from Toronto that’s interested in buying the stores. We’ve got to make everything shipshape for when we show the big shots around.”

  Sell the stores? It was one thing for my father to take a rest from the foundation, but to give up his stores? He was only sixty-eight. What would he do to keep his mind occupied? Honey, I guessed, was trying to distance them from the possibility that Willie or Ted might come down with Valentine’s, which would mean that Lila would be at risk. But the baby started crying right then, and I never got the chance to ask.

  In fact, Lila cried and screamed for hours.

  “Here,” Willie said. “You hold her. I’ve got one last trick up my sleeve.”

  I tried everything I could think of, but Lila kept wailing the same one-syllable sound over and over, as if she were crying out for something, or issuing a warning—“Food!” perhaps, or “Fire!”—in a language none of us understood. Willie, in the meantime, had gotten his guitar. He had taken lessons as a kid, but after his father got sick, he gave it up. To stop Lila crying, he played the few songs he knew. I knew infants couldn’t focus, but she seemed to be watching her father’s hands. She held her fingers poised exactly like the fetus in my mother’s copy of Reproductive Biology. Her father strummed the strings, and she laughed and drew back her lips, exposing that tiny bridge of flesh that was so like her aunt’s. I couldn’t help but wonder if, as Willie had said, a person’s DNA could be written out and played like a musical score, what our daughter’s genetic code might sound like.

  He played “The Water Is Wide” and “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” then some Spanish bolero thing that involved a trill, at which Lila flapped her arms. Her father trilled again, and I saw the repetition of notes in my head, a stutter in the code, CGC CGC CGC. The Valentine’s mutation was a stutter like this trill. A genetic trill, I thought. A multiplication of DNA triplets where there should have been only one. The triplets might code for too much of some protein, some neurotransmitter that flooded the brain’s synapses and wouldn’t let them relax, or some chemical that ate away those nerves. The more repetitions a person’s gene suffered, the more severe the disease. Or the earlier the onset. I promised I would allow myself three more months of rest, of grieving for my sister, of caring for my daughter, before I began the arduous task of setting up my own lab and finding some way to sequence the gene and prove that this vision I had been granted was true.

  22

  For the past fifteen years, I have managed not to show concern when Lila tripped on the stairs, spilled her orange juice, or appeared not to hear my request that she take out the trash. This past winter, when she spent hours staring into space instead of doing her homework, I managed to smile, knowing this to be the symptom of her crush on Robbie Koch, whose knowledge of the classics astounds even me. Whole weeks have gone by in which I never once thought about the odds that Lila’s father inherited the gene for Valentine’s and passed it to her.

  Willie, after all, turned fifty-five last month without showing the slightest sign of being ill. As he blew out the candles on the German chocolate cake Lila and I had baked, I found myself marveling at how lucky we have been and how I ended up with so much more than I could have hoped. I have a husband. I have a daughter. I have a lab of my own, in the same building in Harvard Yard where I did my dissertation (I turned down an offer from Mass. General because my office would have overlooked the Charles). We own this triple-decker
in Somerville, and Willie’s cabin in New Hampshire—some of my happiest memories are of the weekends the three of us have spent there, the walks we have taken in those woods. Maybe Sumner was right. Collecting things does give your life more dimensions. It makes you feel richer, more real. Then again, the more you own, the more vulnerable you are to loss.

  A few hours ago, Lila’s stepbrother, Ted, called unexpectedly from Texas. I put Willie on the phone, then went up to my office to do some work. Lila was in her room, mooning about Rob, no doubt. But I couldn’t concentrate on the paper I was supposed to write. The instant I heard Willie sob, I jumped up and raced down the stairs and found him in the kitchen, inspecting an arty portrait of Lila in the leotard she wore to her first ballet class. From that moment, I knew I would think of Lila’s chances again and again. And the more I tried to stifle it, the more uncontrollably the thought would spring to mind. Would Lila think about it, too? How often do adolescents think about death? More likely, she would brood on her father’s fate rather than her own. I wished we could keep the news to ourselves. But Lila has always been able to sense when either of us is upset.

  Besides, we have made a point of telling her the truth. If we didn’t, Willie said, she would only imagine worse. If she doesn’t hear about Ted’s diagnosis from us, she might hear the news from him. Having reached his midthirties and become, of all things, a federal marshal, Ted seems to view the truth as something for a posse to pursue and bring back, a philosophy apparently shared by the female Texas Ranger to whom he has proposed. According to this woman, the results of the test she asked Ted to take wouldn’t affect her commitment to marry him. She just wanted to know “what she was getting into,” so there “wouldn’t be any surprises,” as if marriage were an ambush she hoped to pull off with as few casualties as possible.

  The test is now available at centers around the country, as long as the client agrees to submit to the counseling procedures Vic’s committee devised. Since the gene itself is known, the test can be done with nothing but the patient’s DNA. “It’s, like, a formality,” Ted told Willie, the test no more threatening than the FDA’s inspection of a prime cut of beef. But when his result came back positive, Ted’s fiancée said she would need another few months “to think things over.” I wanted to demand that Ted call off the engagement, but I couldn’t interfere. Ted is a grown-up. He needs to make his own decisions.