Intuition

by Allegra Goodman

  2

  “YOU CAN'T just crawl under a rock,” Aidan told Cliff on the eve of Sandy Glass's Christmas party. Aidan and Natalya and Robin had come to pick him and Prithwish up, and they stood in the doorway of the apartment, like a bunch of carolers.

  “I'm not crawling under a rock. I just don't feel like going,” Cliff said.

  “Ta ta ta tum.” Aidan sang out the theme from Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet while playing air violin. Aidan was an impossible ham, and improbably handsome as well, an aging young swain with his curly blond locks and pale blue eyes. The lab tech position was just Aidan's day job. He was really a baritone and soloed all around Boston. He worked with Emmanuel Music, among other groups, and sang cantatas at every opportunity, even to the mice in the animal facility. “Ta ta ta tummmm, ta ta ta tum,” he serenaded Cliff.

  “Very funny,” Cliff said.

  “You'll need letters of recommendation,” Robin reminded Cliff. She took his hand, and he smiled a little. Only she could be so earnest in such a low-cut black dress.

  “You need to work,” said Prithwish as he knotted his red tie.

  “You need to eat,” said Natalya.

  “You can't turn away from all that free food,” added Prithwish.

  “I'll drink to that,” said Aidan, and he produced a bottle of champagne from inside his dress coat, and plastic champagne flutes as well.

  “Let's stay here,” Cliff said to Robin.

  “No, no, you aren't going to burn your bridges like that. You're going to work this out,” she told him. “Here, see, we brought you a drink to get you started.”

  Cliff wasn't the only one who needed fortification before the Christmas party. Even in the best of times the researchers approached this event with trepidation. Sandy's house was so grand, his polished floors so perfect, his Persian carpets so rich and delicate, they never knew quite where to put their feet. Glass lived in Chestnut Hill in a brick Tudor with a turret and a wrought iron balcony and a slate roof like the armored plates of a prehistoric beast. Inside, the rooms were draped with damask curtains. The rosewood piano gleamed, and though the leather library chairs were cracked with age, though the radiators hissed, and the first floor was rather drafty, everything in Glass's home seemed precious, and historic.

  Shy on arrival, the postdocs stood in the entryway, until Ann Glass took their coats and ushered them into the living room crowded with people from Sandy's other life, the medical practice where he made his money.

  “Who is that? Robin?” Sandy embraced her and kissed her on the cheek. “I didn't recognize you all dressed up. I never recognize any of you,” he said to the assembled: Aidan, Prithwish, Cliff, Feng, and his wife, Mei. “Go get yourselves some drinks.” He shooed them to the bar. “Watch out for the mistletoe!”

  Glass didn't mind overwhelming his researchers with hospitality and intimidating them with his prosperity. He liked to show his postdocs what could be done with money and talent and imagination. His house was an object lesson in that respect. After all, he'd been poor at their age too.

  Glass loved the satin touch of fine woods, the patina of cracked leather, the ring of certain words. Appearances were not superficial, but of substantive importance to him. Thus, years ago, Glass had discarded Sam, his given name, and nicknamed himself Sandy. His last name was invented too. Toward the end of medical school, he'd changed it from Glazeroff. This he'd done not just to forget that his grandparents were Eastern European Jews, but for aesthetic reasons. He could not countenance living and working in such a Russian bear-coat of a last name, and so he'd distilled Glazeroff to its purer form.

  Christmas appealed to him. Each year he adorned a tree with blown-glass ornaments. He appreciated lovely things, and over the years he collected more and more of them. He well recalled the cheap suits he'd worn when he was younger, the slip-covered furniture in his parents' house and the greasy potato latkes his mother fried for Hanukkah. In fact, he remembered these things with a certain nostalgia. Nevertheless, as soon as he could afford fine clothes and food and more elegant traditions, he availed himself of them. It was, of course, his wife, Ann, raised Episcopalian, who read books about Jewish history. It was she who lit a little silver menorah that Saturday night for the Christmas party. Nine slender candles were melting fast among the greens and pinecones on the dessert table. She lit the menorah every year because she felt it was important for the children.

  The children were scarcely that anymore. There were three daughters. Louisa, who was twenty-four, and refused to go to medical school. Charlotte, a sophomore at Harvard, who wouldn't be a doctor either. And then there was the little one, Kate. She had come home from the John Parrish Hill Academy for winter break, only to disappear into her room with her books.

  Even after the party had begun, Kate was upstairs reading John Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. With the kind of feverish, imaginative sympathy that won her the English award each year, she had begun living and breathing less and less like a fifteen-year-old girl and more like a Protestant divine.

  Glassy-eyed, she read Donne's account of the illness that brought him close to death. She lay with her head propped up on pillows and imagined herself John Donne in bed, his illness overtaking her, swamping her like a flood covering her body, drowning her, as she read each section: “‘Medicusque vocatur. The physician is sent for'. . . . ‘Metuit. He is afraid.'” She read the words aloud, like one obsessed—but this was practical as well. She was memorizing Donne's Fourth Meditation for the Southern New England Speech and Debate Festival.

  Her mother appeared in the doorway several times and told her to change and come downstairs. When Kate finally threw on a red plaid wool dress and wandered down, the house was hot and made her strangely itchy. The crimson walls in the library seemed too bright, the caterers' silver platters too shiny. The dining table was covered with an array of pfeffernuesse, gingersnaps, madeleines, miniature napoleons, and bite-size chocolate mousses in sweating chocolate shells.

  Her father's old doctor friends wore black and navy. Wiry, white-haired Dr. Hoffbauer, with his narrow blue eyes, and fat Dr. Krieger from South Africa, and bald Dr. Bier all shook Kate's hand and examined her, and said she'd grown, as if this were an important clinical observation and not a cliché. Her mother's colleagues wore purple and houndstooth, and teal knits and gold buttons, and they smiled at her and complained among themselves about “the administration,” and they smoked. At a slight distance, clutching their drinks, stood the small contingent from her father's lab. They huddled together for mutual protection, the women spindly in high heels, the men trussed up in crimson neckties. Only one postdoc had wandered off.

  He was clearly a lab rat, although she couldn't quite place him. He was tall and jittery, his dirty-blond hair too long, his suit jacket too short in the arms. Still, he had an air of nobility about him as he leaned against the mantel in the library. He had dark, disillusioned eyes, and fine features scuffed with the beginnings of a beard, as if he were a prince in disguise.

  “Are you new?” Kate asked politely.

  “No,” he said, flustered. He hadn't noticed her before. “Are you?”

  “Not really.” She liked him for not figuring out who she was.

  He scanned her face, her ash brown hair and bemused blue eyes. Suddenly he understood she was Glass's youngest daughter. “Oh,” he said miserably.

  “Yeah, I'm Kate,” she said.

  “You've grown,” he said, defending himself.

  She drew herself up, self-conscious, annoyed. “So I hear.”

  “That's why I didn't recognize you.”

  “Well, we're even.” She relented. “I didn't remember you either.”

  “I've been at the lab almost three years.”

  “That's nothing,” Kate told him. “Some of you guys have been coming here half my life.”

  “Hmm.” He smiled fleetingly at his shoes. “I doubt I'll last that long.”

  “Why?” Kate asked. “Are you not producing?�
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  Nervously, but with a glint of humor, Cliff's dark eyes darted over her, and Kate felt flustered, herself, to be looked at. “How old are you?” he asked her.

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirty,” he said.

  “Are you a Mud-Phud?”

  “Just a PhD,” he said. “I was at MIT before this.”

  “So you must really like research.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I really like research. I really, really do.”

  She stared at him. She would have died rather than ask, but “really, really”? Was that irony? Or was he serious? He looked unhappy enough, standing there all alone. “It'll get better,” Kate said earnestly.

  He shrugged.

  “You know,” she told him, “when John Donne was thirty, he was imprisoned.”

  In the dining room, Kate's mother was helping along the conversation here, urging miniature mince pies there. Ann Glass was an associate professor at Boston College and had published a book on George Eliot. Still, she tended everything in the house. She shepherded the party along, consulting with the caterer, introducing Marion's husband, Jacob, to a linguist she thought he might find interesting. She thought of the guests even when Sandy forgot them and talked shop in the bay window of the living room.

  He was debating some point with Marion, and his blue eyes sparkled as his hands sliced the air. Ann's husband was not a handsome man. His features were coarse, his mouth wide, his forehead the more prominent because he had so little hair left. His nose began well, but drooped at the end. His cheeks were red with rosacea. With Sandy, however, the rules of attraction did not apply. He had a quality that went much farther than youth or beauty—an irresistible liveliness that seemed to override cynicism and doubt, a self-confidence occasionally unbearable, but in many cases deeply reassuring. Had he not enjoyed the benefit of a medical education, it's doubtless Sandy would have been an extraordinary salesman like his father, Irving. Shoes, hardware, large appliances, and Israel bonds would have flown like doves from his hands. As it happened, Sandy's sparkling savoir faire made him a stellar oncologist. He radiated hope to every patient. Instead of death, he dwelt on baseball games and the Boston Marathon. He asked terminally ill investment bankers about the stock market; joked that they should give him tips. He focused on the day-to-day, never on the eternal, and his patients loved him for it. He wasn't going to give up on them and turn spiritual. He was an old-fashioned doctor, fighting tooth and nail against disease. Patients came to him from all over the world. Tycoons and Saudi princes, even other doctors. His overworked residents called him a VIP-ologist, and there was some truth to this. Still, no one could deny his gifts. No one played the end game against cancer as Sandy did. He set himself squarely against every cancerous cell, and so inspired his patients into battle that, magically, even the most sophisticated believed that he could never fail them. Their worry was that in dying they might fail him.

  Naturally, Sandy's colleagues hated him, yet he had come to thrive on the brine of their dislike. At forty-nine, Sandy didn't just endure, he adored his job. His ambition was not corrosive, but creative, a by-product of his buoyant spirit. Egotist, optimist, Sandy was a force of nature, and Ann resented but also loved him for it. She shook her head and smiled at her husband holding forth, wineglass in hand, his scant gray hair bristling with a kind of static energy.

  “We'll have to scrape something together,” he told Marion.

  “We don't have the results,” she replied.

  “Well, we'll just have to find them, won't we?” Sandy said.

  “I've come to think,” Marion said, “it's more a question of which results find us.”

  “Passivity is not the answer,” Sandy snapped.

  Marion looked at him reproachfully. She knew as well as he that their old grant from the National Institutes of Health was ending, that last year's research gambit had failed, and that they desperately needed funding. She knew they had to pull together a resoundingly good grant proposal for NIH by April first or contemplate folding. The Philpott Institute was governed by strict Darwinian principles. Investigators broke even or went bankrupt, losing staff and space and equipment to their rivals. Peter Hawking, the institute's director, was saddened when his researchers failed, but, preferring to dwell on happier laboratories, he averted his eyes from their distress. Lab directors without funding had little recourse; they took desperate measures: they switched fields, or retired, or sometimes left science altogether. Marion knew her position was precarious, but she took it stoically. Unlike her research partner, she was a staunch pessimist. Armed with the constant expectation of setbacks and disasters, she took catastrophe in stride.

  “We're going to have to make a fresh start.” Sandy's voice was low. “And the first thing we should work on is replacing Cliff.”

  “Sandy!” whispered Marion, drawing closer. “First of all, he's fully funded through June . . .”

  “Then in June, he's leaving. If he can't get with the program, I want someone else.”

  “You can't just boot him out.” Marion bristled at Sandy's authoritarian approach, but as a clinician, Sandy came from a world where those who were younger or less experienced did exactly as they were told, or faced the consequences.

  “Watch me,” Sandy said.

  “If he wants to stick it out, then I think we should reassess the situation six months from now . . .”

  “Are you actually defending him?” Sandy asked.

  “I hired him,” she pointed out. She did feel responsible for Cliff. Three years ago he'd been a hot prospect from MIT. His professors had raved about his technical ability, his insight, his gift for seeking out and cracking intractable problems. Max Oppenheimer declared Cliff the brightest student he had ever seen. And Marion had known Oppenheimer for twenty years and never heard him speak that way. She had not just hired Cliff, she'd insisted to Sandy that he would be a key player, a star in the making. Together they had welcomed Cliff with open arms. And then? Perhaps their expectations had been too much for him to bear. Tacitly, she and Sandy had taught Cliff to be unrealistic. “He's talented,” she said.

  “So what?”

  They both knew that in the end, talent hardly mattered if you couldn't get results. Lots of people were talented. Talent and intelligence, not to mention tireless hard work, got lab scientists through the door, but—this was the dirty secret—you needed luck. You might be prepared and bright and diligent, and fail and fail and fail. The gene you sought to isolate, the phenomenon you thought significant, could still elude you; the trend and significant pattern of disease could devolve into an endless hell of ambiguities.

  “I still think he has potential,” Marion pressed.

  “Potential for what?”

  She said nothing. Sandy was probably right. Still, she would not simply cut Cliff loose. She knew what it was like to struggle. At the Philpott she had fought for her scientific life, foraged and competed for every last piece of equipment in her lab. After years of ceaseless competition, she'd grown thin and patient, critical of herself and others. Anyone who worked for Marion tensed at her glance and dreaded her questions—never rhetorical, never dramatic, but quietly devastating in their acuity. With one pointed query she could lift the paint off the best ideas to reveal the rotting suppositions underneath.

  “You know he has to go,” Sandy said.

  Still, she frowned and ever so slightly shook her head.

  Marion had been a lithe young scientist once, a beautiful, impulsive girl who earned a PhD at twenty-five and imagined Harvard would hire her just for her elegant work in crystallography. She had been quick to smile, joyous in her facility as carbon structures opened up to her, each in turn, lovely and elliptical. The scientific world had seemed to her then translucent, sparkling, orderly as the Peabody Museum's collection of glass flowers. But there was no job for her at Harvard. A sly postdoc named Arthur Ginsburg got a position there instead, and Marion almost came to believe what others said of her: that h
er papers were repetitive, descriptive, and nothing more. She scrambled to find a place for herself and the means to carry on her work, and when she ended up at the Philpott Institute, she came as a pauper and had to switch fields. She knew the misery of starting over.

  “‘It is too little to call Man a little World,'” Kate recited in the library. Cliff sat in a brown leather chair and Kate perched on the matching brass-studded ottoman. “‘Except God, Man is a diminutive to nothing. Man consistes of more parts—'”

  “‘More pieces,'” corrected Cliff. Kate had brought down Donne's Devotions so he could check her.

  “‘Man consists of more pieces . . .'”

  “Right.”

  “‘And if those pieces were extended, and stretched out in Man, as they are in the world, Man would be the gyant, and the Worlde the Dwarfe, the World but the Map, and the Man the World.'” She stopped for a moment, and Cliff thought she'd forgotten her lines again, but she shook her head, interjecting, “He makes man a microcosm of the earth, and then he just explodes the metaphor! Because man is more complex than the world, more subtle, and more . . . vast.” Kate beamed for a moment, radiant, pedantic. She was herself a secret poet, essayist, dedicated humanist—her mother's child.

  “Hmm.” Cliff stared at the open page before him. Truth be told, until now, he hadn't heard of John Donne. He hadn't learned much about seventeenth-century poets during his years of chemistry and biology and graduate school. It occurred to him now that he'd spent his whole adult life in a prison workshop. Years and years of manual labor went by. New results filtered through only on the rarest occasions, and always to other people. Miracles didn't happen, but Cliff and his friends kept on working. Like scientific sharecroppers, they slaved all day. They were too highly trained to stop. Overeducated for other work, they kept repeating their experiments. They kept trying to live on their seventeen-thousand-dollar salaries. There was not much poetry in that, or if there was, Cliff had certainly not been privileged to see it.