Dr. Ellis has prescribed a restricted diet for Mary Frances, low in sodium and high in protein and calcium; daily exercise is “a must” and no bad habits—smoking, alcohol. Nurse Betty provides pamphlets for Mary Frances to take home and consult. If Mary Frances has any questions about the pregnancy, any questions at all, she is to call Nurse Betty at once on a private number—“Let’s make that a promise, Mary Frances!”
All this attention is deeply moving and flattering to Mary Frances. Already her experience as an unwed expectant mother is totally unlike the dire predictions her mother and female relatives would have made for her; indeed, Mary Frances cannot believe how nice everyone is being, including dear, darling “Nath’iel” who has surprised her by being not disapproving and resentful since she’s become pregnant, but supportive of her decision to have the baby.
Both Dr. Ellis and Nurse Betty caution Mary Frances, however, not to discuss her prenatal care with anyone. Not a roommate or a friend, not a family member or a relative. For the Life Sciences Obstetrics Care Clinic is a privately endowed health-care facility that can accept very few patients, and these are usually limited to the wives of tenured faculty. Other young female students at the University are eligible only for minimal prenatal care at the University infirmary but Mary Frances is “different”—“special”—because of N____’s appointment in Life Sciences.
Before Mary Frances leaves the Clinic she is asked to sign a “confidentiality contract,” agreeing not to discuss any aspect of her prenatal health care. This includes the identity of her obstetrician and the location of the Clinic. Crucially, it includes the identity of N____ whose work-visa would be revoked by the State Department.
Seeing that Mary Frances is looking flushed and confused by so much happening to her within a small space of time N____ takes the contract from her to examine. He has seen a draft of the document previously, yet its contents are obscure even to him, who’d helped compose it: seven numbered paragraphs of tight-packed small print which grants to the Clinic certain prerogatives regarding the pregnancy and birth, including the surrendering of the infant at the time of birth or shortly thereafter, as well as the surrender of the fetus in the event of a miscarriage, at the “discretion” of the Clinic. Such an unorthodox document could have no legal binding of course but it is supposed that the naive experimental subject could be intimidated into accepting its terms if necessary.
N____ hesitates just a moment before telling Mary Frances to sign—“Go ahead, darling. It’s just legalese. It’s just routine.”
With a giddy smile and a flourish of a pen Mary Frances signs the document.
Has N____ called her—darling? The word slipped out, unbidden.
“Ideally, as soon as the hybrid is born, the mother should die. For in this case she can’t be trusted to nurse it, and she can’t be trusted not to reveal our secret.”
The Professor speaks so thoughtfully, tugging at his stiff white goatee, others around the table are tugged in his wake, as a large speeding vehicle tugs smaller vehicles in its wake.
“Yes. That is—true. But to be realistic …”
“—we can’t just kill her. Of course.”
“Of course not. But in the event of her ‘dying in childbirth’—being killed by an embolism, for instance—”
“—that would be very practical. An embolism is plausible. But—”
“—a hemorrhage, after a difficult birth. We’ll schedule a caesarean, in any case. And the medical report would be that both mother and infant failed to survive a difficult birth. There’d be no problem about death certificates so that the Humanzee could be raised in seclusion, right on this floor, for its natural life.”
“Yes, but—isn’t it more likely that the embryo will self-destruct? A miscarriage …”
“… she would never know. What was in her womb …”
“… or a stillbirth. In which case she might see the body, and realize that …”
“No. She would not, necessarily. A premature infant Humanzee would probably resemble a human infant just enough that a drugged and distraught female wouldn’t know the difference even if she did ‘see’ it.”
“If it lives, the female can still be told that it has died. Just make sure that she’s sufficiently groggy from the anesthetic …”
“But consider the possibility that she can nurse it—would want to nurse it. The strong maternal instinct to ‘nurture’ might overcome revulsion—”
“… if she ‘sees’ the infant Humanzee but doesn’t recognize it as something other than human …”
“The maternal instinct is so powerful, the female would wish to believe that her infant is normal, so she might actually see it as normal …”
“… or a human infant with birth defects, a Down syndrome infant for instance, which she could certainly nurse and with which she might bond.”
“That might work …”
“That is taking an enormous risk …”
“Except as the Humanzee matures wouldn’t it become clear to even the most deluded female that her baby isn’t—human?”
“But would it make a difference? If the female bonds with the infant, even a deformed or hybrid infant, isn’t that enough for her to remain its chief nurturer? Isn’t that the essence of the female instinct?”
“No, no! Wait—”
“Ridiculous—”
“Dangerous—”
“We can’t have her ‘nurturing’ the hybrid as if it were hers. Bringing it up like a child! It’s ours and belongs in our lab.”
“She would never give it up, once she ‘bonded’ with it. No nursing!”
“Better to take it from her immediately after the birth, tell her it’s dead. Show her—something. An infant corpse, an aborted embryo. I could easily acquire the remains of an embryo from an abortion clinic. She’d be so agitated she couldn’t think straight …”
“… maybe tell her it died, but we can harvest its organs. ‘Give life to another baby.’ Pay her off …”
“Tell her there’s medical insurance at the Clinic. Five thousand dollars. That should do it.”
“She won’t be alone and grieving—N____ can take care of her …”
“What if she has a breakdown, is taken to an ER? They see she’s had a baby, they ask what happened to the baby …”
“I told you: the ideal situation is that the mother dies as soon as the creature is born. We can provide nursing, nurture. What about Maude?”
Maude! A ripple of approval around the table.
During this discussion N____ sits in a state of suspended animation, numbed as if by Novocain. Taking notes on his laptop as usual. It is typical of N____ not to provide much commentary at the weekly meetings unless the Professor or another colleague asks his opinion; now, the Professor pointedly turns to N____ to ask what he thinks.
“’What do I think?”—N____ seems to be considering.
A long pause. A fleeting and indecipherable expression crosses N____’s face. His fingers have ceased typing on the laptop. The Professor and the others wait. Very straight-backed the chief technician sits, staring at the laptop screen as if searching for the answer there.
4.
Methodically N____ parcels out his time with the experimental subject.
Following the Professor’s directive. The female’s disadvantage is the male’s advantage. Keep her on edge.
Keeping Mary Frances both dependent upon him and uncertain of him. Lonely for him and yet fearful of contacting him. “Crazy in love with him”—(she has said, embarrassingly)—yet fearful of annoying him. Just when the experimental subject thinks that she may have offended N_____, and that N____ may have abandoned her, N____ will call her as if nothing is wrong; N____ will bring her flowers, take her to dinner and to the movies, bring her back to the apartment on Edgar Street to stay the night.
N____ will (clenching his teeth) call her darling. Acquiesce when the experimental subject seizes his hand to press against her alarmingly swelling belly.
Listen intently, nod, smile indulgently as Mary Frances chatters excitedly about names for Baby.
“Tiffany” is her first choice, if Baby is a girl. Runners-up: “Brooke”—“Emma”—“Sarah”—“Elizabeth” …
“Nathaniel, Jr.” is her first choice, if Baby is a boy. Runners-up: “Joseph”—“Matthew”—“Jonathan” …
Asked what his favorite names are N____ says that he has no favorite names and will let Mary Frances choose.
“Oh, but—not even one name? Say it’s a baby girl …”
N____ can’t recall the names Mary Frances has suggested and so says, “Well—there’s ‘Mary Frances’—”
“Oh, gosh no. That’s sweet of you, Nath’iel, but—not a good idea. ’Cause there’s no ‘Mary Frances, Jr.’—there’d have to be ‘Big Mary Frances’ and ‘Little Mary Frances.’” Mary Frances shakes her head, laughing. “But ‘Nath’iel, Jr.’—that would be nice. We could call him ‘Nath-ie’ …”
N____ shudders. His name attached to the hybrid Humanzee.
“‘Galahad.’ That’s a distinctive name.”
“‘Gala-had. ’Is that a well-known name? Not the Bible, is it?” Mary Frances frowns, considering.
N____ says, “It might be in the Bible. One of the obscure books. It’s a traditional name.”
“Yes, I like it, kind of—‘Gala-had.’ It’s different. Like, high-class!”
N____ gazes at the experimental subject with something like affection. A weird, unwished-for rush of affection. To be so easily made happy! He who has no family, no siblings, feels their absence in his life now. If he’d had a sister like Mary Frances, relentlessly cheerful, optimistic … He will miss her, he thinks, when Project Galahad has no need for her.
Following her initial visit to the Obstetrics Care Clinic Mary Frances is issued an electronic ID card that allows her to enter the restricted tenth floor of Rockefeller Life Sciences unaccompanied by N_____. (Mary Frances’s card does not admit her to other restricted floors, but only to the Clinic on the tenth floor; she could not, for instance, wander about the eighth floor in search of her handsome Asian fiancé “Nathaniel Li.”) Soon she comes to look forward to the weekly appointments with Dr. Ellis which are comforting and flattering to her, for she is treated “like a princess” by the kindly doctor; indeed, Mary Frances has never heard of any expectant mother who has been treated so well, and only wishes that she could boast a little to her relatives back home—“But no, I won’t. I promised, and I won’t.”
After the clinical examination with Dr. Ellis, Nurse Betty takes time to chat companionably with Mary Frances about how the expectant mother is feeling. Nothing is too trivial for Nurse Betty to inquire after: what are Mary Frances’s moods, how is her appetite, does she have morning sickness, does she sleep through the night or get up to use the bathroom, and how many times; is she maintaining a good diet, getting exercise every day, is the baby starting to “move”—“kick”? Sometimes Nurse Betty invites Mary Frances to have coffee with her downstairs, to continue their conversation which veers onto other subjects: their respective astrological signs (Nurse Betty, Gemini; Mary Frances, Capricorn), their favorite foods, TV shows, celebrities.
It is wonderful, Mary Frances tells N_____, how Nurse Betty has become her closest woman friend at the University. How Nurse Betty is just so nice, and so kind. How Nurse Betty cares about Mary Frances as her own mother definitely wouldn’t—“Mom would just scold and say how ashamed they were that I was having a baby, and nag why I wasn’t married.”
Nag why I wasn’t married. This has become a woeful refrain.
(N____ has not (yet) given Mary Frances an engagement ring. He has declared that they are “secretly engaged”—but it must be kept a secret from all of the world.)
Usually, N____ only half-listens to Mary Frances’s chatter. His brain is elsewhere. If a brain could be encased in a laptop, N____’s brain is there encased, in the labyrinthine pathways of a thousand interests as remote from the expectant experimental subject as Jupiter is remote, and as unfathomable to her as that planet would be.
In fact N____ has no need to listen to Mary Frances’s chatter for he knows far more about her pregnancy than Mary Frances herself knows. At the weekly primate meetings he and the others are briefed on the expectant mother’s medical condition, in detail, by their embryologist colleague; if “Dr. Ellis” has videotaped the pelvic exam, it will be shown in ghastly magnification; the results of the amniocentesis will be of particular interest, indicating indeed that the developing fetus is genetically consistent with a “hybrid” species; ultrasound images of the maturing fetus (not obviously not-Homo sapiens initially, but definitely male) are displayed, and discussed. Every word however banal and irrelevant to Project Galahad that passes between Mary Frances and the kindly physician, and Mary Frances and the friendly nurse, is replayed for the team, and these words N____ must endure in dread of an impulsive outburst by the expectant mother—Oh but gosh! He doesn’t love me! The father of my baby doesn’t love me! Doesn’t even touch me now I am pregnant! Goes all stiff and cold if I touch him!
“You must introduce me, N____! She will never suspect a thing.”
So many pictures and more recently videos and ultrasound scans of the experimental subject has the Professor seen, so familiar has the elder scientist become with every square inch of the pregnant female’s epidermis, still more the shadowy fecund interior of her uterus bearing its precious cargo, as well as her uterine canal and vagina, at last he decides that he must meet her in the “flesh”—in the fifth month of pregnancy when Mary Frances’s belly is already round and heavy as a drum and her face is flushed with a rude sort of female health and vigor.
“My dear, hello! N____ has told me, he has been tutoring you in my undergraduate course …” The Professor seems surprised, the experimental subject is an actual person, not nearly so unattractive as her pictures have suggested; her pink-lipstick smile is childlike, trusting; her small mud-brown eyes shine. She is wearing colorful clothes, red shorts that reveal inches of her pudgy thighs, a sleeveless candy-striped blouse that exposes her fatty upper arms and billows over her belly. Her body, big-breasted, big-hipped, misshapen now with pregnancy, exudes its own attraction, like that of a large animal in the prime of its life.
Reluctantly N____ has brought Mary Frances to meet the Professor, seemingly by chance, in the first-floor lounge in Life Sciences. As if the distinguished Professor would be lingering here just waiting for them. It does not seem to occur to the experimental subject that it is odd, the Professor does not seem to think it is odd that his chief technician, an adult research scientist, seems to be romantically linked with a twenty-year-old female undergraduate in General Studies, low-browed and barely articulate.
“Oh yes, Nath’iel did … ‘tutor’ me. Saved my life, literally …”
“Did he! ‘Literally.’ That was kind of him.”
Mary Frances murmurs, blushing, not very coherently that she “really loved” the Professor’s lectures but had trouble remembering them afterward—“Even when Nath’iel explained what you were saying, and had me memorize, it was just so, so hard … Like ‘Ontology repeats philology’—something like that …”
There is a pause. N____’s face flames, he cannot look at the Professor.
Of course, in his lecture, the Professor had spent some time ironically debunking the famous nineteenth-century formula Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny—the (now discredited) theory that as the human fetus develops in the womb it recapitulates, in miniature, the stages of animal evolution itself, culminating in Homo sapiens. N____ had to instruct his easily confused student in the original meaning of the catchphrase, in order to discredit it; but this turned out to be too complicated for Mary Frances who soon reversed the point of the Professor’s lecture, and seems to have scrambled the formula itself.
The Professor laughs, delighted. “Ontology repeats philology’—that is a novel idea, my dear. Thank you!”
&
nbsp; N____ dreads the Professor telling this anecdote to his colleagues in the primate lab. Teasing a subordinate, sometimes mercilessly, to rouse the others to laughter, is one of the Professor’s less admirable traits; yet few fail to laugh when he does.
(Except N____ refuses to laugh when the Professor is being witty at the expense of another. His impassive face, downturned eyes, stiff posture give no hint that he is even aware of his mentor’s playful cruelty.)
N____ has not been tutoring Mary Frances recently. One semester of Intro to Biology was more than enough for the struggling first-year student who’d managed to pass the course, through N____’s valiant effort, with a C–.
(Did N____ cheat on behalf of the experimental subject, preparing her lab reports for her? Providing her with exam questions before the final?) At N____’s suggestion Mary Frances has concentrated on General Studies courses in elementary school education, public health, “communication arts,” in which she has managed to earn B’s and C’s without making herself anxious and exhausted. Her hope of nursing school has been deferred.
And now the spring semester has ended also, and most undergraduates have departed the campus. Except Mary Frances of course, who will remain over the summer months, ever more pregnant with the hybrid Humanzee, living now in the apartment on Edgar Street and seeing “Dr. Ellis” and “Nurse Betty” each Monday morning without fail. (N____ has moved out of the Edgar Street apartment, or rather has pretended to move out, since he’d never lived there, explaining to Mary Frances his need for greater privacy and quiet in which to do his work. It is Mary Frances’s assumption, if she thinks of it at all, that N____ pays the rent on the apartment.)
Eyeing her closely, greedily, the Professor shakes the warm fleshy hand of the experimental subject, and inveigles her into an awkward sort of banter—an older, white-bearded gentleman asking questions of a stout flush-faced girl clearly in awe of him; squinting at him, smiling nervously, leaning back so that her weight is on her heels, one hand absently resting on the swell of her belly. Oh!—she is provoked to laugh, the gentlemanly Professor is so witty.
Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense Page 15
