The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013

by Laura Furman

  Where was Axel, where was Axel? Maybe he’d been on that yacht, or maybe … he tried not to think about the huge propeller. Around Sam, coats, blankets, overshoes, shawls flew toward wet bodies, something dry for everyone. So many people, everywhere: bodies racked like billiard balls in every corner and companionway, babies calling like kittens or crows as women tried to comfort them. Among them, Axel might be hidden—or he might be in the water still, or safely headed toward Galway or Glasgow on one of the destroyers. Sam pushed through the mass, some faces familiar from the Athenia‘s decks and dining room but many not and none the one he most wanted to see, until, when he came out near the galley, he heard his name and looked behind him. Duncan, who’d always had this way of proving himself astonishingly useful just when he was at his most annoying, waved his hand above the crowd. Beside him, his front hair pushed forward into a kingfisher’s tuft by a gigantic square bandage, was Axel.

  Of course Duncan had one of the actual berths; of course he turned it over to Axel, who, after touching Sam’s face and saying, “You’re here. You’re all right,” disappeared into the deckhouse and fell, said Duncan later (himself now modestly moved to the floor of his cabin, where he’d already had two roommates), into an exhausted sleep. Sam, who stayed awake for a while after Axel left, slept that first night on a coil of rope, surrounded by women in men’s shoes and torn evening gowns, men wearing dress shirts over sarongs made from curtains, children in white ducks shaped for bulky sailors. A little girl whose parents had ended up in a different boat—Sam hoped they were now on some other ship—lay on a pile of canvas nearby. Earlier, he’d seen the two women looking after her piece together a romper from two long woolen socks, a pair of women’s panties, and a boy’s sweater. Now the women curled parenthetically around their warm charge.

  Sam’s trousers were still intact, and between those, his donated slippers, and a wool jacket generously given to him by one of Duncan’s cabinmates, an old acquaintance named Harold, he was warm enough to sleep. The next morning, after a chaotic attempt at breakfast, he and Harold, along with everyone else who wasn’t injured, helped the ship’s crew spread mattresses in the hold, suspend spare tarpaulins from beams to make rows of hammocks, and hammer planks into bunks until everyone had a place to sleep. Harold had helped the captain organize seatings for meals—eight shifts of thirty people, they’d decided—and as he and Sam cut planks to length, they talked about supplies. Harold’s friend George, also sharing Duncan’s cabin, joined them an hour later and described the list he was making of those who’d been separated from family members and friends; first on it were the seven congress participants still unaccounted for. The captain would radio the list to the other rescue ships, which were returning to Scotland and Ireland—only theirs was heading across the sea, on its original course. But what about allocating medical care and pooling medications? What about basic sanitation? If we had rags, Harold said, we could tear them into squares. If we had a system, George fussed, gathering scraps of paper for the latrines.

  If, if, if. Sam tried to think of them as amiable strangers helping to make the best of a hard situation—as if they’d not just been together at a conference where the two of them had looked on blandly as Sam’s work was attacked. As if Duncan, elsewhere on the ship that morning, hadn’t been the one attacking.

  He worked all day, as the ship steamed steadily west and the passengers pulled from the water continued to shift and sort themselves, the sickest and most badly wounded settling in the tiny hospital bay with those slightly better off nearby, the youngest and oldest tucked in more protected corners, and the strongest where water dripped or splashed, layering themselves as neatly, Sam thought, as if they’d been spun in a gigantic centrifuge. He claimed one of the hammocks he’d hung himself, glad that at least Axel had a berth and a bit of privacy. Glad too to find, when evening came, that Harold and George had fit him and Axel into their dinner shift, which also included Duncan and the group of college girls.

  The big square bandage bound to the top of his head made Axel, seated when Sam reached the table, look unusually defenseless. He smiled at Sam and tapped the seat next to him, but before Sam could get there, Harold, George, and Duncan swarmed in, leaving Sam seated at the corner. The college girls, already friendly with Duncan’s group, filled in the empty seats and introduced themselves to Sam and Axel. One, who had smooth red hair a few shades lighter than Sam’s, pointed to Axel’s gauze-covered crown. “Is that bad?”

  “Not really,” Axel said. “A long jagged tear in my scalp, but the doctor said it should heal.”

  Not nearly enough information. Sam imagined Axel under water, trying to surface through the debris. An oar cracking down on his skull, a fragment from the explosion flying toward him. When did it happen, who was he with, who took care of him? He leaned forward to speak, but another of the girls, annoyingly chatty—Lucinda was her name—said, “How do you all know each other, then?”

  “We work in the same field,” Harold said. His doughy cheeks were perfectly smooth; of course he had a razor.

  “Genetics,” George added. Also clean-shaven. Briefly, Sam mourned his lost luggage. “The study of heredity.”

  “These two,” Axel said, gesturing first toward Sam and then toward Duncan, “used to be my students.”

  “Really?” said the one named Pansy. “That wolf-in-a-bonnet disguise makes you look the same age as them.”

  It was true, Sam thought as the others laughed; the bandage covered Axel’s bald spot, his sprouting beard concealed the creases around his mouth, and he was trim for a man who’d just turned fifty. Duncan, ten years Axel’s junior, boasted a big, low-slung belly that, along with his thinning hair, made him look like an old schoolmaster. Straightening up, sucking in, Duncan turned to Lucinda and said, “We were all at the genetics conference I told you about.”

  “Where everyone was arguing!” Lucinda said brightly. “See, I do listen. Which side”—she turned to Sam—“were you on?”

  “Lucinda,” said a girl named Maud.

  “Actually,” Harold said, rubbing his cheek with his thumb, “it was Duncan and Sam here, who were having a disagreement. But that’s all behind us now.”

  Sam tried but failed to catch Axel’s expression, while Duncan changed the subject. But as they were clearing out for the next shift of diners, one of the quieter girls approached Sam and said, “Were you really all quarreling about some experiment while the soldiers were gathering? I would have thought …”

  “… that scientists aren’t petty? That we’re not as childish as everyone else?”

  “Something like that,” she said, with a surprising smile. “Although I don’t know why I should expect that. I’m Laurel,” she reminded Sam.

  Straight brown hair, solid hips, pleasant, but, in Sam’s opinion, unremarkable-looking except for her eyes. Up on deck, amid a crowd of people he didn’t know and safely away from the ones he did, he watched the water move past the hull and listened to Laurel talk about what they’d heard on the radio. The Germans were smashing through Poland and had occupied Krakow. An RAF attack on German naval bases had gone awry. Each wave took them farther from what was going on in Europe. On the Athenia, along with the Americans and Canadians bolting for home, had been refugees from Poland and Romania and Germany who’d managed to get to Liverpool and then fought for berths, only to end up floating in the water before, if they were among the lucky, being rescued by a ship that would bring them back to Britain to begin the process of trying to flee again.

  The sky was streaked with mare’s tails to the south, dotted with little round clouds to the north; the last edge of the sun had vanished but some color remained. The open deck was so crowded by now that each of them touched at least one other person. Duncan pushed through like a fox through a field of wheat, nodded when he saw Sam, and kept moving. Duncan wasn’t stupid, Sam thought; he knew some things, including what it meant to be part of a field of science still in its infancy. But he didn’t know the new and e
normous thing that Sam and Axel now shared. Sam in one boat and Axel in another, but the same sky, the same rain, the same flares and fears and darkness and dawn. Laurel said something about the windows of a church in London and Sam pretended to pay attention. Why was it, he thought, that even here Duncan seemed able to keep him and Axel apart?

  In 1921, when Sam went off to college in upstate New York, he was sixteen years old and six feet tall, trying to conceal his age behind his size and so lonely that he might have attached himself to anyone. His father, an astronomer at the Smithsonian, had died when he was four; Sam remembered his smell, his desk at the observatory, his laugh. Afterward, his mother had moved them to Philadelphia to live with her parents, who seemed to be nothing like her. He slept in a bed his great-uncle had once used, near a shelf on which, between two photographs of his dead father, a mirror reflected back a face framed by his father’s thick red hair but otherwise very different. His mother’s mouth, her father’s heavy lower lids, two moles on a jaw that must have come from someone on his father’s side. When he touched that face with hands his father’s size but his grandmother’s shape, he felt a huge, hazy, painful curiosity that he couldn’t put into words. Like his mother, he was good with numbers, but otherwise his mind seemed to leap and dart where hers moved in orderly lines. Perhaps, he thought, like his father’s? He could only guess.

  When he turned eight, his grandfather persuaded a friend to admit Sam to a school so good that his mother, who wrote books and articles about astronomy, was just able to pay the fees. Tearing through his classes, eager for more, he skipped one year and then another. A biology teacher, Mr. Spacek, reeled him in when he reached the upper school, introducing him to the study of heredity. In the empty lab, at the end of the day, he’d enter into Mr. Spacek’s fruit-fly experiments as if he were tumbling down a well, concentrating so intently that the voices rising from a baseball game on the field below, or from the herd pounding around the track, shrank to crickets’ chirps and then disappeared. From the books that Mr. Spacek loaned him, Sam finally gained the language to shape what he’d been feeling since he could remember. Who am I? Who do I resemble, and who not? What makes me me, what makes you you; where did we come from, who are we like? What do we inherit, and what not?

  Mr. Spacek helped Sam translate his curiosity into hypotheses that might be tested, experiments he might perform. He urged Sam to apply to college a year early, and then got him a scholarship and everything else he needed, including two precious books for the journey up the Hudson River. These, along with the sandwiches Sam’s mother had packed him, helped during the bad moment when he confused the motion of the water rushing alongside the train with that of the train itself. Once he arrived at his new refuge, though, he felt fine. The brick and stone buildings were just as handsome as Mr. Spacek had promised, and his room was excellent too, with a big window, two low beds, two desks with lamps and chairs and space for books. Shirts and jackets were already hanging neatly along one half of the closet rod and these, along with a carton of books and a pair of skis, belonged to a wiry boy who introduced himself as Avery Hayes and asked if he might have the bed away from the window. Sam, who’d never had a close friend, right away liked Avery’s smile and his calm, thoughtful movements.

  “Of course you can have that bed,” Sam said. “But are you sure …?”

  “Perfectly,” said Avery. “I’m sensitive to drafts. If you don’t mind, I’ll take this desk then, too.”

  Which left Sam exactly what he wanted, a view out over the quad, past the beeches and benches and flower beds to the long brick building with limestone lintels, which he’d spotted the instant he arrived: the Hall of Science, the reason that he’d come. This was his place, Mr. Spacek had told him, this and no other: because this was the place where Axel Olssen taught.

  Mr. Spacek had also arranged for Sam to join Olssen’s section of general biology his first semester, and Axel transplanted Sam so smoothly from Mr. Spacek’s world into his—soon after the first exam, he hired Sam as a bottle washer, brought him into the lab, and told him to use his first name—that Sam hardly felt the shock. The weeks rocketed by, the work Sam wanted to do crowded by other classes, the regimen of the dining hall, compulsory weekly chapel, and the swimming lessons that were part of the physical fitness requirement. The basement pool was dimly lit, slimy under Sam’s feet at the shallow end, where he stood and tried to follow the instructor’s motions. He was the only one that year who didn’t know how to swim at all, and those first weeks of splashing, coughing, breathing in when he was meant to breathe out, and sinking, perpetually sinking—“You’re remarkably dense,” the instructor said cheerily, trying to support Sam in the water with a hand under his ribs—were humiliating. Thrusting his face back up into the air, Sam lost track of his surroundings and once again was the small, frightened boy who, after his father’s death, was sometimes swept away by tantrums. But then, as soon as he crossed the quad and entered the Hall of Science, everything annoying faded away.

  Axel was young himself, just a few years out of graduate school, energetic and delightfully informal; he loaded Sam down with his own books, trusting that he could make sense of the material despite being only a freshman. When he discovered Sam’s age, he laughed and said genetics was a young man’s game—Alfred Sturtevant had been only nineteen, still an undergraduate, when he’d devised the first chromosome map. Calvin Bridges had been an undergraduate too, and a bottle washer, like Sam, when he spotted the first vermilion mutant. Who knew what Sam, the perfect age at the absolutely perfect time, might do? Theirs was a new field, Axel said. A whole new world.

  In class, Axel brought new terms and concepts alive with his arms, slicing the air like a conductor, his thick hair sticking up in spikes. They were after more than just the study of vague factors or mysterious unit characters, he said: the gene was not simply an abstract idea; genes were material! Heredity depended on chromosomes, forever splitting and recombining; units of heredity—genes—must be arranged like beads on a string, particles invisible to the eye but visible through their actions, ordered along visible chromosomes. Let the older generation argue about immaterial factors, vitalistic forces, the possibilities of organisms passing on changes caused by will or desire. The truth, Axel emphasized during Sam’s first semester, was that the particles of heredity passed from one generation to the next, and could not be influenced by what happened to the body. Every living individual had two parts, one patent, visible to our eyes—the me you see, the tree you touch; that was the somatoplasm—and the other latent, perceptible only by its effect on subsequent generations but continuing forever, part of the immortal stream that was the germ-plasm. Phenotype, genotype (Sam loved repeating those words). Concepts made visible, Axel said happily, through our own flies.

  So Sam couldn’t swim; so he hated his history class. When he listened to Axel talk about his work, now their work, he was entirely alive. If they helped elucidate the way genes were arranged and transmitted, then they’d begin to understand heredity and variation. If they understood that, they’d begin to glimpse the workings of evolution. And if they could understand evolution, then …

  “You have a pedigree,” Axel said one day when Sam was mashing bananas, sprinkling yeast, and measuring agar: by then he was the food maker as well as the bottle washer. “Just like our flies. You were trained by Charlie, and now you’re working with me. We were trained by Thomas Morgan, who was trained by William Brooks. Brooks was trained by Agassiz himself, at the summer school for the study of natural history he founded on Penikese Island. One short line: Agassiz, Brooks, Morgan, me, and then you. You’re connected to the new biology just as directly as the flies we’re breeding in here are connected to the original stocks from Morgan’s lab.”

  Sam didn’t share that with Avery, who was as interested in physics as Sam was in biology, but who hadn’t yet found the right professor; it would have felt like bragging. But he did love the feel of his own hands linking Mr. Spacek’s Drosophila, w
hose ancestors had also come from the fly room at Columbia, to the new generations hatching in the bottles he prepared. Forget the litter, the browning bananas, the morgue filled with bodies drowned in oil. The flies swooned docilely at a whiff of ether, moved easily with a touch from a camel’s-hair brush, and then—the variations were marvelous. Eye after eye after eye, all red—and then here were white eyes, and there were pink. Wings all shaped like wings, until one fly produced a truncated set and another a pair curled like eyelashes, each mating yielding surprises, a new generation every ten days: how could anyone think of this as work? Work was waiting for frogs to hatch and pass through their stages until they matured enough to mate. Planting corn and waiting for the seeds to germinate, the stalk to grow, the ear to fill and ripen before one could even begin to guess—that was work; he couldn’t believe the researchers a few hours away at Cornell had the patience. For him it was always, only, flies. In a clean bottle, a courting male held out one wing to his virgin bride and danced right and then left before embracing her: who wouldn’t love that? Let others fuss with peas and four-o’clocks, rabbits and guinea pigs: for Sam, the flies were the key to everything.

  That first Christmas vacation, he returned to school early at Axel’s request. As the train rumbled north, he looked up from his stack of journals now and then and noticed the Catskills thick with snow, or a crow flying low above the frozen Hudson, but mostly he kept his eyes on his work. The brindled dog at the train station had to bark twice before Sam stopped to pat him, walking on not to his room—the dorms were still closed—but to a small brick house two blocks from campus, where Axel, unmarried then, lived in happy squalor. Clothes on the floor, sheets on the couch (he always had visitors); Sam was welcome to stay, he said, the ten days until the semester started. A minute after Sam dropped his bag, they headed for the lab, which was warm and stuffy despite the bitter cold outside, electric bulbs glowing inside the old bookcases Axel had turned into incubators. Sam found a path through the tumble of plates and coffee cups and reprints and manuscripts, books lying open everywhere, cockroaches investigating the huge stain—molasses?—on the journal that Duncan, whom Sam then knew only as Axel’s senior student, had left at his place.