Intuition

by Allegra Goodman

  They applauded until Jim Marvin silenced them. The hall was stacked to its carved rafters with students, friends, and parents. In the hush, as Sandy glanced behind him, he saw with satisfaction that the lab family's pews were full. He loved this sort of ceremonial event. He adored the prospect of sitting with a captive Hawking for three hours. Here was a man difficult to pin down for a ten-minute meeting. Now Glass had Hawking at his side for the entire concert—and the break. He had only begun to tell Hawking of his plans for R-7, and as the music rose, Sandy could not help but smile, imagining the seeds he was about to sow in Hawking's mind.

  Jacob Mendelssohn followed the score on his lap, and for the most part, when Aidan sang, he approved. He thought Aidan was quite good, but the Evangelist was better; his enunciation was superb. Fortunately, the others could not read Jacob's mind, because he actually pitied Aidan a little for having to sing beside the Evangelist's pure, clean tenor.

  Prithwish and Natalya and Cliff did not realize that the Evangelist had stolen the show from their own Aidan. He held the stage, feet planted, schoolboy solemn, blue eyes round, mouth stretching to shape the notes, all effort and sincerity. He was known in the lab for dumb practical jokes, for his terrible taste in boyfriends, for inventing obnoxious nicknames. Swish for Prithwish, Auntie Em for Marion, and If for Cliff. Onstage, however, Aidan was grand and stoic. They watched his every move, and waited impatiently for him to stand.

  But Robin waited for the choruses. They were so simple and so chaste, like hymns, and then somehow, in their repetition, they began to fold themselves around her. The choir rose and fell in waves behind the soloists and the voices enveloped her with warmth. The soloists were bright, the Evangelist's recitative a tour de force, but the choristers stood for the community, and in their society of voices she began to feel the deepest consolation. She forgot the neglect she had been suffering, the lack of interest shown to her, the orders to devote her time to Cliff's project. She forgot how the lab's research was moving away from her. For a moment, she almost forgot her wrenching break with Cliff. Her resentment was so small in scale before the chorus; a shard of glass in an ocean of sound. And what did it matter that she'd practically been coerced to come? That she sat like a child behind her elders? She had entered a landscape where work and competition, and even heartbreak, seemed as small as a bridge or boat in a soaring ink-brushed Chinese painting.

  Robin was not an enthusiast, but that night she jumped to her feet before the rest. She stood up in front, applauding, and hardly noticed what the others did or when they jumped up too, clapping, stamping, cheering, all around her.

  Out in Memorial Hall, the undergraduate choristers raced through the audience with their black music folders, and laughed and flocked together, high on their success. Parents were taking pictures, boyfriends and girlfriends were embracing while the hired musicians made their way sedately through the crush, carrying their instruments in sensible brown cases. In one corner of the marble hall a young tenor stood sobbing, overcome by Bach. Tears streamed down his cheeks while his friends from the Collegium Musicum came to comfort him. Courage, Jacob told the young man silently. No need to cry; it wasn't that good. And he watched, amused, as girls rushed over to the boy, solicitously waving the flowers they'd been given, their single roses wrapped in cellophane.

  Robin stood with the others, waiting for Aidan to reemerge. She watched Glass talk up Hawking, even while Hawking's wife held forth to Ann. Robin's feet tingled, as though they'd fallen asleep. Everyone was talking at once; Glass was still bubbling away, Cliff right at his side. For the moment none of it bothered her. In the din, with all her mind filled by the choir, she could hardly hear. And so she spoke to Jacob while the music still protected her. “I hear you might be interested in some help grading.”

  “Pardon me?” he asked, turning to her politely.

  But as soon as she tried to speak again, Jim Marvin stepped into the hall to his choir's whoops and cheers.

  “Oh, there he is,” said Ann, pointing to Aidan trailing the conductor with the other soloists.

  “Hey, Aidan! Over here!”

  “Congratulations, man. We've been waiting for an hour!”

  “Well done. Well done!”

  “Aidan,” said Sandy. “How we gonna keep you down on the farm?”

  They surrounded him, while Ann took pictures. Long after that night, a photo from the concert stayed, taped up on a lab refrigerator. Everyone agreed it was the best group picture they'd ever had. Even Robin was smiling, practically laughing with pleasure. But it was late, and Barbara Hawking told the assembled she was getting tired. Sandy said he'd walk with Peter to get the cars. Ann suggested they should all start getting back, and so logistics cut the jubilation short. The group headed out the door into the chilly spring night. They ambled to the parking lot at the Philpott, just half a block away: first Sandy and Barbara and Peter, and then Jacob and Aidan, talking music, and finally Cliff, who found himself in step with Kate.

  This was not an accident; Kate had meant for him to find her this way. All through the concert she'd sensed Cliff sitting in the row behind, and wondered if he remembered her. In the vast loneliness of the Hill School, she'd certainly remembered him: a biologist drawn to poetic tropes and puzzling conceits. She remembered how he'd listened. He'd found his way into Donne, even in the middle of her father's Christmas party, followed her inside through the metaphoric door. And then! He was like someone who'd never seen the ocean. He'd grown so quiet and thoughtful. She'd wished she could recite to him forever in the library. He'd sat with her and ignored everything and everybody else. When at last the party ended, and he'd stood up to go, she'd longed to run upstairs and get all her books and give them to him. She'd wanted more than anything to raid her mother's library and pull out every sixteenth- and seventeenth-century author on the shelves and give them to him like keys to great walled gardens. She'd seen he was a scientist who wanted to escape; she'd felt his need to travel somewhere new.

  Now he noticed her walking next to him. “Hey, Kate,” he said in mild surprise. “How's John Donne treating you?”

  “He's okay,” she murmured, studying the sidewalk. Then she looked up at Cliff and spoke directly. “Congratulations.”

  For a second Cliff was confused; they'd all been so busy congratulating Aidan.

  “On your results,” Kate amended. “My dad's excited.”

  Cliff flushed with pleasure; this was an ovation in itself. He wanted to take Kate's hand, she'd made him so happy; she looked so pretty with her delicate and earnest face, her light brown hair spilling over her sweater. My dad's excited. He could have kissed her. He loved her for those words—although instantly, greedily, he wanted to hear more.

  She smiled back at him and wished he would take her hand. She wished he would kiss her. She wished, above all, that she were not fifteen.

  They walked in silence for a moment, and he considered asking about the speech contest or school. Instead he said, “Could I ask you a favor?”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “We're writing up the paper on my results, and I was thinking. . . . Do you think you could find me an epigraph?”

  “An epigraph about what?”

  “I don't know, something about mice, or viruses. I had a professor at Stanford who put epigraphs on all the chapters of his textbook—just these perfect literary quotes.”

  “I don't think I'll find anything about viruses,” she said.

  “No, you wouldn't.” He brushed the idea away with his hand. “Never mind. I'm getting a little obsessive,” he confided. “It's my first big paper.”

  “I know,” she said.

  They'd reached the Philpott. The Hawkingses had finally reached their car. Sandy and Ann hurried Kate away; Robin hitched a ride home with Natalya and Ivan while Prithwish and Cliff plotted to meet Aidan for drinks in Harvard Square. Only Aidan and Jacob, oblivious to everyone around them, were still deep in conversation, discussing instruments and tempi while Marion stoo
d and listened. She was humble when it came to concerts, quite aware from living with her gifted husband that she herself was not musical at all.

  There was one thing Marion had appreciated, although it seemed too small to mention. She had noticed the way Aidan closed his eyes after his last solo as Jesus. Once crucified, he'd kept them closed until the Passion's end. Marion had watched him sitting in his chair, his eyes shut, with all the music storming around him, and he had never wavered. She had enjoyed Aidan's singing, of course, his voice like a turned wood spindle, warm, burnished, smooth, but she'd appreciated his silent performance as well. His stillness in the chair, his tranquil face, his eyes closed until the last note sounded and the conductor lowered his baton. Aidan was consistent to the end, and she admired that.

  3

  BACH HAD been good to the lab. No one knew exactly what Hawking said or whom he called, but within weeks of the concert, the journal article had jumped a long queue of more mundane submissions, and a glorious publication in Nature was planned for August.

  The lab was entirely caught up in duplicating and developing Cliff's experiments, with Marion as field commander, spending every moment coordinating the effort. She was laying out the lab's claims, datum on top of datum, like tiny bricks. Still, every once in a while she looked up from this ambitious, intricate enterprise and marveled at Glass's virtuosity, selling their research to the world. After days on the road with his black garment bag, he arrived home fresh and full of energy. Bleachy hotel sheets did not bother him, nor did he care about noisy air-conditioner vents, slow room service, or bad food. He repeated himself a hundred times, but his message about R-7 never got old. Like many a troubadour before him, Sandy sustained himself with the great material he'd come to play.

  He had devised two different talks: one twenty minutes, one forty; one popular, for the press; one technical, for conferences and workshops. Each culminated with a set of slides, his before-and-after mice shots, as he called them. The “before” pictures showed animals crippled with their tumors, their flanks swollen. Click! With a push of the button, Sandy transformed these images, advancing the slides to triumphant “after” pictures. Here were the very same mice, sleek, healthy, and, as Sandy told the press, full of piss and vinegar.

  His talk was bold but never brash, his language unfailingly clear, on all points reassuringly scientific. He suggested wild, glorious conclusions, but he never spelled them out. He spoke of the promise of R-7, but never made promises himself. He allowed that one could imagine many applications of viral vectors in human cancer patients, and then left his audience to extrapolate further. This was Sandy's genius as a public speaker. He never let his own words run away with him, but invited every doctor and researcher in his audience to run away with his message, and discover its significance.

  Glass knew publicity was a mixed blessing. Promising results meant pressure. He and his colleagues had all experienced this—the hunger for good news and new results, however slight. Patients would come to threaten, curse, cajole. They would arrive with copies of their records and films of their tumors. Sometimes they would cry; at other times they'd try calm persuasion, offer payments or private contributions to the Philpott or the hospital. Such encounters were almost unbearable. Still, Glass pursued publicity doggedly for the sake of funding and continuing the lab's work.

  Glass knew that other scientists at the Philpott resented him; he did not pretend to be pure. He did pander to the media, and promote himself, but he treated real patients, and he intended to bring in funding of an entirely new order of magnitude. By the time the NIH reviewed and funded his grant proposal, he'd have his journal article and his profile in the national press, and perhaps some scientists would hate him, but the importance of his work would not be denied. There was a sense of manifest destiny in this, a touch of mythmaking. But Glass embraced mythology. He was an oncologist. He understood the uses of enchantment.

  Sandy soft-shoed before the skeptics who sat sour-faced, preferring complex outcomes requiring subtle interpretation and probabilistic modeling. He understood their mistrust and jealousy, and graciously conceded all their objections. He agreed with their calls for larger samples, and more work. “Of course it is too early,” he declared in hotel ballrooms at every conference. “We must not jump to conclusions.” And if he did not disarm his critics permanently, at least during his talks he took their weapons from them.

  He handled patients and overeager journalists with equal aplomb, deflecting their excited question: “Are you saying your viral injections might cure cancer in humans?”

  Sandy demurred, holding up his hand. “Oh, no, we have absolutely no evidence of that.”

  “But the results suggest—”

  “The results with mice are remarkable, it's true. But extrapolating to human disease—that's a big leap.”

  “But you would admit that your work—”

  “My lab's work—and, of course, the work of many others around the world—”

  “The work might open up a whole new arena when it comes to cancer treatment.”

  “As a doctor, I can only say I pray that might be true. No one knows better than I do that we need some avenue of hope for the patients and their families, but today, as of this moment, all I can say to you with any accuracy is that if you're a mouse with cancer, I can give you a better prognosis than you had before.”

  He called Ann at odd moments from pay phones, and she'd hear his voice above the roar of thousands of physicians at a poster session, or the boom of jets taking off at the airport. “Ann!” he'd burst out, as if surprised. As if at midnight anyone else might possibly be home. “I'm in Cincinnati! . . . Going great! Going beautifully!”

  She would try to keep him up to date, to tell him about the department meeting she'd just attended, and keep him posted on the girls—Louisa's cold, Kate's trouble with her chemistry teacher, Charlotte's disappointment that she hadn't gotten her summer travel grant. Sandy's responses were loud, enthusiastic. He was gloriously far away, and had not a minute to spare. His plane was leaving, the banquet was beginning, and he had to run. He spoke in old-fashioned telegrams. Couldn't wait to come home. Thrilled Charlotte wasn't going. Would be back Thursday. It was all good. Great. Fantastic!

  His conversations with Marion were entirely different. Before dawn from the stillness of his hotel room in Los Angeles he called her at the lab, and the two talked and strategized for hours. He wanted to understand all the details of Cliff and Feng's work. He sat with a yellow legal pad and sharpened pencils and reviewed every detail of the newly accepted journal article. Then he discussed with Marion each interview and interchange he'd had the day before. While it was hard for Sandy to keep track of the details at home, he was attuned to the lab and everyone in it. He did not love the lab more than his family, but he thought about it more.

  “We've got photographers coming,” he told Marion joyously. Just a week after R-7's first mention in The New York Times, Sandy had landed an exclusive interview. Now, before the piece had even run, he was fielding phone calls from glossy magazines.

  There was a long silence.

  “Marion?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “They're coming Wednesday, just before I get back. And they're from People.”

  “People magazine!” She was appalled.

  “Marion.” His voice was stern. “This is important.”

  “Why didn't you ask me first?”

  “Ask you? This is a coup! A major coup.”

  “I don't want them here,” she said.

  “You just go about your business. Ignore them.”

  “No.”

  “They're coming anyway,” he said.

  Neither spoke. He sat, adamant, in a forest green wing chair in his hotel room, while she opposed him silently from her threadbare swivel chair at the institute.

  “Marion,” he tried again.

  “I'm not going to be photographed by People.”

  “Do you know what their circula
tion is?”

  “I don't know, and I don't care.”

  “Yeah, but what do you read at the dentist?”

  “Nature,” she said, without a moment's hesitation—and then, with the twist of lime that was her humor, she asked, “What do you read? Scientific American?”

  He laughed. “You're a snob,” he said. “Look, you don't have to be photographed. They can take pictures of Cliff and Feng.”

  “I don't want photographers in the lab.”

  “Too late. Too late,” he said. “The genie's out. The results are in the journal article, signed, sealed, and delivered. Your name, Marion, is on the lips of every oncologist here. Don't you see?” he asked her tenderly. “We're famous.”

  But Marion was too busy to be famous. She was coordinating too many experiments at once. At night she closed her eyes and saw plate after plate of cancer cells, stacks of dirty cages, page after page of the copyedited journal article. She worked eighteen-hour days and still she was not finished. And there were the postdocs to consider, their tasks to direct, their complicated feelings to assuage. For several weeks now, Marion had struggled to keep Robin and Cliff apart, to allow them different schedules and separate jobs and keep them civil in too small a space. Still, they circled sullenly, only speaking to provoke each other. They were like beautiful fighting fish, exquisite with their jewellike colors. Put two in the same bowl and they lashed out, tearing fins and shredding gauzy tails.