A Tangled Web

by Judith Michael

  “Everyone helped. He loves you, you know.”

  “Lu? Why do you think that?”

  “I saw it in his face.”

  “I haven’t seen it. Or much of anything else; he hides most of his feelings. I’ve known him for two years and he’s never talked to me before tonight about proving himself worthy of his government’s expectations.”

  “Still, I think he thinks of you as a father.”

  “Well, I can live with that if Cliff can.”

  “We’ll talk to Cliff. But, Garth, you really do go on about Lu; does he need all that stroking all the time?”

  “I don’t know. You’re right; I realized I did it again tonight, but he’s so tense most of the time I find myself trying to make him feel better about himself. There’s a kind of desperation to him, almost a recklessness. He can’t really relax; he can’t really enjoy himself. One time when he was in my office I wanted to hold him on my lap and tell him everything would be all right.”

  Sabrina smiled. “He would have been very surprised.”

  “He would have thought the eminent professor had lost his mind. Well, I’ll be careful at home from now on, and I’ll talk to Cliff.” At the door to the dining room, he stopped and took her in his arms. “I love you.”

  “I’m so glad of that.” They glanced into the room and saw an empty table, and heard Penny and Cliff talking to Mrs. Thirkell in the kitchen, and they held each other close and kissed.

  “Stolen kisses,” Garth murmured as the kitchen door swung open and Penny and Cliff came back.

  Sabrina stayed in his arms. “It’s when parents stop kissing that children get upset.”

  “Not a problem, then, since kissing you is the first item on my agenda for the next fifty or sixty years.”

  “What’s the joke?” Cliff asked as Sabrina and Garth smiled together.

  “Sixty years of kissing,” Sabrina said, and as Cliff came close she put her hand on his hair, chestnut-colored, the same as her own, and pulled him closer. “We plan to kiss you and Penny for at least the next sixty years.”

  “You’ll be ninety-three,” Penny said. “That’s really old.”

  “Not too old to kiss.”

  “We’re hot on the trail of a gene that makes kissing as potent at ninety-three as it is at thirty-three,” Garth said, and he stood in his dining room with his wife in his arms and his children close by, and felt the abundance of his world and of his own powers: he was just forty years old, healthy, respected in his field, loved in his home. He had everything he wanted; there was nothing he could not do.

  * * *

  A week later he reached back to retrieve that feeling as he sat in his office facing a staff attorney for Congressman Oliver Leglind.

  “Roy Stroud,” the attorney had said as he walked in. “Glad to meet you, Professor; I’ve been wanting to for a long time. Ah, this must be the grand new building we’ve heard so much about.” He walked to a square table beneath the window and looked down at a model of the Institute for Genetic Engineering. He was short and stout, with a small brush mustache, wire-rimmed glasses that slid down his small round nose, and a watch chain across his paunch, and he rocked back and forth from toes to heels to toes as he contemplated the Styrofoam model set in Styrofoam-landscaped grounds. “Very handsome. Handsome indeed. That’s a handsome monument to you, Professor.”

  “To science,” Garth said.

  Stroud was moving a model car along the road circling the institute. “Takes me back, oh, it does take me back. I had a collection once: every model car they made. I don’t think I missed one. Not one model car did I miss. Well.” He turned back to Garth. “Let’s sit down, Professor, I don’t want to take too much of your time.”

  Garth pulled out a chair for Stroud, debated briefly taking the one next to it, then sat in his leather swivel chair instead, putting his desk between them. “It would be helpful if I knew what this is about.”

  “Well, it’s about universities; I guess you could guess that. Congressman Leglind, as I’m sure you know, is chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, and he’s been bombarded lately with a flood of mail from constituents who are worried about balancing the budget and wondering if maybe Congress is giving too much money to universities. Nobody watches over universities, you know; there’s nobody out there signing off on how you spend the funding you get from your government, so nobody really knows where the money goes. So the congressman thought, in response to this avalanche of mail—an outcry from the people if we ever saw one—that he’d hold hearings on the way universities use the money Congress gives them.”

  “A bombardment, a flood, and an avalanche,” Garth said reflectively. “How much mail is that, exactly?”

  Stroud guffawed. “I do use a lot of words; I confess it. I don’t have an exact count, Professor, but I assure you it was definitely a torrent.”

  Garth did not smile. “And what is it you want from me?”

  “Information. The hearings start next month and you’re on the list of those we’ll probably call to testify, but right now we’re just gathering information. The congressman likes information up front; he doesn’t like a lot of surprises, so we’re into fieldwork in a heavy way before the hearings begin. We’re curious people, Professor, and we’re mainly curious about the way other people spend the government’s money. So what I want first is to ask—”

  “It is not the government’s money. It’s our money; it comes from our taxes. The government wasn’t transplanted here from Mars: the government is us, all of us who vote and pay taxes. And the government doesn’t give our money away; it invests it. In this university, the government invests in genetic research that can change people’s lives: how long they live, how comfortably they live, how productive they are, how secure an environment they can provide for their children—the next generation. Most people would call that a wise investment.”

  “And indeed it might be, it might indeed be, if the money is used wisely. The wise use of money, as of course you know, is numero uno when there isn’t enough to go around. So, Professor, I’d ask you first about a party you gave at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago on February twentieth of this year.”

  Garth stared at him. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I am always serious, Professor.”

  “You come in here talking about balancing the federal budget and then you ask me about a fund-raising event that cost five thousand dollars.”

  “Is that what you call it? A fund-raising event? I understood that it was a party.”

  “Who called it that?”

  “Well, it doesn’t really matter. Someone who heard about it. Renting the aquarium, you know, that’s a class act, and class acts tend to get around. Good food, music, limos to take some of you home . . . doesn’t sound very academic, does it? I mean, I went to college and law school and I never heard of my professors dancing around with fish and catered dinners and riding home in limos.”

  “Entertainment is in the budget,” Garth said, and heard himself saying it to Claudia at the aquarium. “People who give substantial sums of money like to be appreciated. We hold these events in the most pleasant atmosphere we can find to thank those who’ve helped fund our programs and to describe to them and to prospective donors the programs that still need funding. Our guests always know we’ll be coming back to them for more at some time in the future; a convivial evening is part of the whole process.”

  “But you’ve got the government giving you—sorry, investing in you. That money is supposed to be used for research, not for renting the aquarium. And not for putting on a dinner at the Ritz-Carlton last December eighth, or for a dinner at Le Français on January the twentieth, or for renting a cruise ship on Lake Michigan for dinner on March tenth. One thing we’ve noticed, Professor, is how well you all eat.”

  Garth gazed at him. “The entertainment budget is one half of one percent of the money we spend on research. It pays for itself many times over.”

 
“So far. You don’t know that, going in; that’s just a hope and hopes sometimes crash; hope is not a way to do business. Especially with the government’s money. But I agree: these aren’t the biggest items. The biggest—no contest—is this handsome institute you’re building for yourself.”

  “For the university. And for science.”

  “But there’s a kitchen in this building, and a lounge that’s sort of like a faculty club, and an auditorium, and some pretty nice offices and reception rooms. So what we’re curious about here, Professor, is what does all that have to do with science?”

  Garth was so still it seemed he barely breathed. Anyone who knew him would have known how his anger was building. “Since we’re asking questions, I have some for you. Why is Congressman Leglind hostile to science? Is he afraid of it? Does he think that attacking science somehow makes this a better country? Or does he believe that the fortunes of his political career rest on finding something to destroy?”

  He was on his feet now, leaning over the desk, his voice rising. “Or is he simply the kind of politician who makes Congress a laughingstock, the kind who creates circuses instead of legislation, the kind who believes in nothing but getting reelected by means of whatever demagoguery it takes?” He paused. “I’m waiting for an answer.”

  Stroud shook his head. “Shame on you, Professor. You’re talking about a congressman who spends his life in the service of his country and doesn’t have anything like the cushy life you professors have, and you still can’t leave him alone. Congressman Leglind cares about science, he cares deeply about it, but he also cares about the government’s money, how it gets spread around college campuses and frittered away on dinner parties and fancy buildings. He’s determined to root out anybody who isn’t doing science. Real scientists spend the government’s money on equipment, not fripperies; they don’t need kitchens and lounges and auditoriums and fancy parties. Real scientists care about science. Period. And that’s what the congressman cares about.”

  Garth circled his desk and went to the door of his office. “If your congressman gave a damn about science, you’d be asking what that institute is for, how many students and faculty will use it, what lab facilities it will have and what kind of a library, what guest speakers will use the auditorium and who will be in the audience from local high schools and other universities, what space it will free up in other buildings that can then be used for other branches of science.”

  Stroud had turned to face him, and Garth opened the door. “That’s what an inquiring mind would ask; that’s what a truly curious person would want to know. A curious person would not spend his time fabricating plots to whip up the anger of voters. A curious person would want to search out the best ways he and his constituents can make this a more informed, more intelligent nation. And there are people like that around: people who understand the value of science and how desperately this country needs to increase its commitment to it, for our own good and for our place in the world. They know that if some universities are guilty of excesses, that’s not a reason to undermine all the work that’s being done by serious scientists across the country, and I can’t believe those people will let you get away with a slash-and-burn rampage across the campuses.”

  He looked at his watch. Be polite, he told himself. At least be polite from now on. “When we made this appointment I thought I’d have another hour, but as it happens, I have to take a class in a few minutes for a colleague who is ill. If you think we need a follow-up, my secretary will find a date.”

  Slowly Stroud stood and retrieved his briefcase, which he had not opened, from beneath his chair. “I’d be more respectful, Professor, when you testify before the committee. Just a friendly warning. If the congressman wants me to come back, I’ll call.”

  Garth watched him disappear where the corridor turned a corner, and after waiting another minute he too went out, turning the other direction to a door that led to a small courtyard behind the science building. Patches of May sunlight dappled a stone bench beneath spreading trees; beside it was a dry stone fountain, its basin filled with last fall’s papery maple leaves and brittle black locust pods. In a warm corner beside a brick wall, a student slept, his head on his outstretched arm, his book face down in the grass. Garth watched two butterflies chase each other in fluttering circles around his motionless body; then he sat on the stone bench, legs outstretched, and put his face up to the sun, letting his anger seep away.

  For all his intelligence and sophistication, his world travels to scientific conferences, his work and friendships with an international array of biologists and chemists, he still had a naive astonishment that he could not lead the simple life he wanted without interruptions from people who had no idea what he did and had not the slightest interest in finding out. He had thought he was insulated on a campus, secure behind walls that enclosed a community dedicated to the life of the mind, but in that, too, he was naive: campus walls were easily breached and universities had become big business, involved with corporations and the government and a host of government agencies like NASA and the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, contracting with them for research and development with huge sums of money involved.

  But still Garth Andersen, professor, came to work each day and returned home each night thinking that his clearly defined life was all he needed to concentrate on: his work and his family, the two passions that drove and exhilarated him and made him whole. He had never cared about the fray of competition. He knew Sabrina missed it and was looking forward to returning to it when she went to London, and he knew that his children were learning to handle it in school, from necessity if not from desire. But he was bored by it and did all he could to avoid it.

  He always had done, in his own way, what he wanted to do and what he was best at. And, because he had always excelled, he had never known failure or even second place; he had not had to consider what they would mean in his life. He knew he was lucky, but he was also confident: he knew himself and he knew what he could do excellently and what he could not do at all, like painting, sculpting, singing on key, or building a fine cabinet, though he admired, extravagantly and sometimes with envy, those who did all those things. He was interested in politics and sports; he loved literature, movies, theater, the opera, but none of them were absolutely essential to his idea of a complete life. His family and his work were.

  And so when a little round man with a watch chain across his paunch walked into his office looking like a bill collector from the London of Charles Dickens, Garth’s immediate reaction was to brush him aside. The hell with it, he thought; it will die away. They’ll probably find something on other campuses to spice up their hearings, but there’s nothing here and they know it. It was a fishing expedition and it’s over.

  He checked his watch. Five minutes before his first class. As he stood up, he glanced at the student on the grass. He was awake, stuffing his book into his backpack, preparing to leave. The sun had moved behind the corner of the building, and the courtyard was in shadow. Garth turned toward the door of his building, then glanced back one more time. The student had left, and the butterflies were gone.

  * * *

  It was raining in London, wet streaks on gray buildings, gusty May winds flinging sheets of water against the windows of Ambassadors. Sabrina opened the front door, snapping her umbrella shut as she backed into the shop. She stood on the Bokhara rug just inside the door shaking the water from her hair, feeling exhilarated, as if she had confronted Poseidon and won. Or at least prevailed, she thought; one never defeats the gods—they always have another trick up their sleeve.

  “Mrs. Andersen!” Brian said, coming from the back room. His voice was surprised and also relieved. So whatever it is, it’s still going on, Sabrina thought, and everything else fell away: she became alert, thinking of possible problems, noticing changes in the shop: a new Empire sofa and Directoire chair, a pair of French clocks . . . with a price tag visible on one of them. She went to it an
d tucked it out of sight, knowing Brian was watching, knowing he would remember and not let it happen again.

  She unbuttoned her raincoat and waited for Brian to help her slip out of it. He held it, dripping, in front of him, and carried it to the back of the shop, partitioned into her office and a smaller one for him, and hung it on an antique coat tree in the corner. Sabrina eyed it. “Where did that come from?”

  “Nicholas found it. Or rather, Amelia did, for Blackford’s, but he doesn’t acknowledge that. Such a strange marriage, you know: I almost never see them together, and the few times I do, they pay absolutely no attention to each other.”

  “We will not discuss Nicholas’s marriage,” Sabrina said calmly, though she was angry. Brian would never have made that statement had he thought she was Lady Longworth; he said it only because he knew her as Stephanie Andersen, American, and therefore eager for gossip and unaware of the fine distinctions of social status. She sat at her cherrywood desk. “I’ll look at the ledgers now.”

  His face flushed, Brian brought them from his office. “Is there anything else you need, Mrs. Andersen?”

  “Yes, sit down.” She flipped the pages back to December, when she had last been there. She ran a finger down the columns of purchases and sales, then looked at Brian, seated across from her. “I’ll go over it more closely later on, but at first glance everything looks fine. All right, Brian, let’s talk about your problem.”

  He shifted in his chair. “Nicholas wants to fire me.”

  “Oh, I doubt it; he’d have to deal with me on that, and he hasn’t said a word. Why would he want to?”

  “He thinks I’m spying on him.”

  Sabrina kept her gaze level. “Are you?”

  “Well, yes, as a matter of fact. But only on behalf of Ambassadors.”