There was no beach on the far shore of Walden Pond. No one had trucked in sand here. Cliff pulled himself up onto the rocks.
“Hey, don't stop now,” Glass complained, and Cliff remembered Glass liked to turn around and swim back without any rest at all.
“Just let me catch my breath,” said Cliff.
“You'll only get cold,” Glass warned him, but then he climbed up out of the water as well. “Stand over here in the sun. My God, this lab could use some exercise.” He looked at his Rolex Oyster watch and shook his head. “You guys are atrophying.” Then, without missing a beat, “I wanted to talk to you about the Crimson article.”
Tired as he was, Cliff wished he were back in the water. He should have known not to ask Glass for rest.
“This is not how we want to present ourselves.”
“I know,” said Cliff, “I didn't think—”
“Well, you should have thought about it.”
“It's just a student paper,” said Cliff. “And it's the summer weekly issue. Nobody's going to read it.”
“Your interview is in the public record now,” Glass snapped.
“You told me to meet with him!” Cliff burst out. “You asked me to speak with him.”
“I assumed that while speaking to Jeff, you'd use your common sense.”
“Look, he asked me about my role in the work. I just answered his questions.”
“Your answers,” said Glass, “do not match any of the other stories out there.”
“You mean the stories about Feng. Well, Feng didn't want to talk to Jeff. Nobody wanted to talk to him, so I'm sorry, but I had to do it. Jeff asked what I did, and I told the truth.”
“Journalism has nothing to do with the truth,” Glass snapped. “There is a time and place for the truth, but journalism is very simple: one interview, one story. Just that one story, and then the other side of that story. There isn't time for your alternative version, and my commentary, and everyone's two cents. There just isn't time. We are selling exactly one thing here. We are selling R-7. Not you. Not your career.”
“I wasn't trying to sell myself in the Harvard Crimson,” Cliff said softly.
“That's how it reads.” Glass slipped back into the water. “That's how it comes across. And it's bad for the lab. It just makes it that much harder for us to do what we need to do.”
Cliff caught himself as he was about to speak. He choked back angry words, but then he couldn't help himself and blurted them out anyway. “If you were so worried about keeping the lab on message, then you should have done the interview yourself.”
Glass said nothing. He pushed off from the bank and didn't even look at Cliff.
“The article wasn't really about me, anyway,” Cliff called as he scrambled in after Glass. “It wasn't about the lab, or me, it was all about Jeff. It was really just about how he wants to become editor of the paper.”
Otterlike, Glass glided out on his back, head up, looking over at Cliff. Steely-eyed, but with just a hint of humor, he said, “Now, that is certainly true.”
Crouched at her sisters' feet, Kate was playing with Aaron's magnetic chess pieces in the sand.
“I was wondering where those went,” said Aaron. He dusted off the pieces and set them up on the little board. “White or black?”
“I don't want to.”
“Look, I'm just using these.” He pointed to the skeleton crew of men he'd set up on his side. “You can be white.”
“Go, Kate,” Louisa cheered.
“Oh, God,” she muttered.
“You used to play very well,” Ann reminded her.
“In sixth grade.” She studied the board and tried to remember the opening her father once taught her.
“That's not bad,” said Aaron, countering immediately.
She tried to ignore him as he knelt across from her in the sand. She'd always liked the game, but, perfectionist that she was, she hated struggling at it. After some thought, she ventured forward with her knight.
“Are you sure you want to do that?” Aaron asked.
“Oh.”
“Try something else.”
“No, I already moved it.”
“It doesn't matter. That's better,” he said. Then, two moves later: “Have you thought about your bishop? Good.”
He was coaching her, guiding her into position. Gradually, her many white pieces and his few black gridlocked in a draw.
“Good game,” he said.
She looked up at him. “No, it wasn't.”
“Why not?”
“Because you were giving me the answers. You were practically forcing me to win!”
“I wasn't forcing you, I was teaching you,” Aaron said.
“That's how your dad taught you?” Kate asked skeptically.
“Yeah.” Aaron glanced toward his father. “Sort of.”
Jacob snorted with laughter from his chair.
“There they are.” Ann pointed to Cliff and Sandy in the water. The two of them were swimming more slowly now, steadily stroking toward shore. “I was getting worried about you,” she chided Sandy when he finally arrived.
“Why?” he asked, drying himself off with his towel.
Disgruntled, and more than a little out of breath, Cliff paced the sand. He would have liked to walk down the beach, follow the trail under the trees and take a few minutes by himself, but it was time for the toast. Marion was distributing plastic champagne flutes. Prithwish and Aidan were popping corks on the green bottles of Martinelli's sparkling cider.
“Did you swim all that way?” Nella asked Cliff in her South African accent. “We'll have to get you a real drink, then.”
“All right, everybody, gather round. Gather round,” Sandy ordered in his jovial, commanding tones as he and Aidan and Prithwish poured. And everyone did gather, cups overflowing. Even the kids, tall as they were nowadays. Louisa and Charlotte stood at Ann's side, and Kate and Aaron took glasses. The sunbathers roused themselves. Natalya and Tim crowded in. “We have a lot to celebrate this year,” said Sandy. “Some great results, some great follow-up. Our Nature paper.” The researchers whooped and Aidan whistled as Sandy held the fresh black-and-white offprint high in the air, a small stiff banner in the breeze. “And last but not least the new grant from NIH, funding to commence in September.”
“Phew,” said Prithwish amid applause and laughter. They could joke now. Funding after such a long drought was like coming back from the dead.
“We have a lot of work ahead of us,” said Marion.
“Believe it or not, we're just laying the foundations,” Sandy said. “Aidan and Natalya, I've said it before, and I'll say it again. We've got the best lab techs in the institute. Not to mention the best baritone!”
“And with the new funding, we're hoping to hire a third tech to take some of the load off of you,” Marion announced.
Cliff glanced at Nella and smiled, imagining she might be the one invited upstairs. She rolled her eyes and snorted comically. “Yeah, right, you wish,” she whispered.
Aidan and Natalya knew better and exchanged nervous looks. They dreaded the arrival of an entirely different tech from the second floor—a woman highly competent, but kooky as well, whining, droning, mirthless, braless. “Please God, not Billie,” Aidan murmured under his breath while Natalya whispered furiously in Russian to her husband.
“Prithwish,” said Sandy, “your teamwork on R-7 has been outstanding. Time and again, you've done everything we've asked, and more. Feng, what can I say? We're blessed. Who am I leaving out?” He made a show of looking behind him, and then grinned. “Oh, yes, Cliff.”
Cliff looked down at the sand unhappily, even as Marion praised him, in what were, for her, superlatives. “You've done very well.”
“You've shocked the world,” added Sandy, whose superlatives were just that. “And your work is gonna turn the cancer community upside down.” Cliff glanced up. As always, he was amazed at how fast Sandy's mood changed. Then Sandy looked Cliff full in the ey
e and added joshingly, “All you need is a little humility and patience.”
This coda confused and hushed the group. For just a moment no one spoke or even moved. Then the cool breeze off the pond ruffled Marion's stacks of white paper napkins and the toast went on merrily. “To R-7! To the lab!”
Only later, in the parking lot, did Marion take Sandy to task. “That was unnecessary.”
“What do you mean?”
“Criticizing Cliff like that, in public.”
“I didn't criticize him publicly. I talked to him about the interview in private. All the way on the other side of the lake.”
Jacob and Aaron were coming up the path with the loaded red wagon in time to hear Marion tell Sandy, “I didn't ask you to be my enforcer.”
“Oh, come on, Marion,” Glass wheedled.
“I'll speak for myself, thank you very much,” she snapped, and Jacob cheered silently to hear his wife talk like this. He loved to see her stand her ground before Glass, as of old.
4
AS THE last cars were loaded and the coolers drained of melted ice, Robin was marching down the aisle in Phillips Congregational Church in Watertown on the arm of a groomsman named Tom. At the altar, as rehearsed, she and Tom separated, and Robin took her place in line with the five other bridesmaids. Like them, she carried a white nosegay, and like them wore a sea-foam green taffeta dress with a tight bodice and full skirt, a sash tied in an oversize bow at the back, and puffed sleeves the size of giant melons. She tried to think happy thoughts.
She thought about how beautiful the church looked in the late afternoon light, with its white walls and dark wood pews. She considered how lovely her auburn-haired cousin looked walking up the white cloth runner. Carolyn's train streamed and rippled over the steps to the altar, and as she stood there with the groom she seemed to glow to her fingertips. Robin thought how glad she was that her father and her uncle had started speaking to each other once again, and that there was peace in the family, at least for a while. And then, inexorably, her mind turned to Cliff. She could not stop questioning his data in her mind. There had been a time she'd searched his face to judge his moods. She'd watched him watch other friends, or even women he hardly knew, and wondered constantly what he felt and thought. Now, however, she was consumed with curiosity about what he'd done.
She had her own offprint of the journal article, and she must have read it twenty times. She knew by heart the shape of every column on the page, and the placement of each figure. His data in the article looked fine. But the data were more than fine; they were spectacular. Too good to be true? She was horrified at herself—that just a granule of skepticism and resentment could swell like this inside of her. Even now, in church, at her cousin's wedding, her imagination raced ahead: no one was at the lab. Everyone was driving back from Walden Pond. Mendelssohn and Glass would head home, and the researchers would meet for burgers at Elsie's, as they always did. The lab was empty, and Cliff's paperwork was there to read.
What a strange fever had taken hold of her. At the reception, with the band playing and the family all around her, even then, in every lull, suspicion washed back over her. She stood apart.
She was the only scientist in the family, famously erudite and famously single. Her interminable postgraduate studies were a source of bemused pride to her dad, who often wondered aloud when she would get a “real job.” Her life in Cambridge was the subject of much talk among her cousins, who had just about given up trying to fix Robin up with friends. Even now, in the white reception tent, the cousins urged her on and pressed her forward in the crush as Carolyn prepared to throw her bouquet. But Robin did not want the flowers, and stayed diffidently on the fringes of the crowd. Carolyn turned her back on the girls and threw her bouquet over her head, and the bridesmaids screamed and the flower girls shrieked and jumped up the way Robin had seen dogs on the Common jump up to catch tennis balls in their mouths. One of the little girls caught the beribboned prize, and the bridesmaids turned away, smiling but slightly disappointed, toward their boyfriends.
“I didn't see you trying very hard over there,” her father teased.
“Sorry, Dad,” she told him. “I guess I'll just have to be an old maid.”
“Don't say that.” He dabbed his perspiring face with his handkerchief. He was flushed and overweight, hot in his suit. She worried about her father, and pestered him often about going on a diet, and quitting smoking, and getting a stress test. She was afraid he would get lung cancer or emphysema, and more immediately that he had hypertension, but he never listened to her when she went on about these matters. Maddeningly, he always said, “You can start giving me medical advice when you have a medical degree.” And then Robin's stepmother, Lynn, would jump to his defense.
“I like your style,” Robin had told Lynn once. “I like the way you stand up for Dad and defend his right to die.”
Robin despaired for her father, but she loved him. She had no patience for her stepmother.
When all the toasts were said and the dancing done, Tom drove Robin back to Cambridge. “Just tell me where,” he said. And she guided him through Harvard Square, up Broadway to Felton Street.
“This is it?” he asked uncertainly, as he gazed at the Philpott Institute.
“Thanks, this is perfect,” she told him, and hurried out. “I just have to check some stuff at the lab.”
“Nice outfit,” the guard told Robin as she sprinted past in her bouffant dress. She flushed, but didn't stop. She pushed open the heavy doors that led to the back passageway, and ran up the stairs to the second floor, with its peculiar smell of ammonia and pencil shavings, its linoleum tiles checked black and green like the mottled covers of composition books. Up again on the black iron stairs, her heels clanged on the metal treads and her nosegay of white roses flopped and drooped. She threw it down on the table in the lounge.
Darting inside the lab, she flicked on the fluorescent undercabinet lights, and found her copy of the journal article on her desk. Then she reached for Cliff's lab book and riffled through its alternating white and yellow pages, devouring the numbers there.
She had looked at most of this before, but now she compared his notes to the printed data in the article. Her heart was galloping; her lungs cramped and strained at the tight bodice of her dress. There is nothing here, she told herself. Still, she checked the numbers in each table. Meticulous as a scientific bookkeeper, she combed through the raw data and final draft. Line by line she audited Cliff's accounts. She took a deep breath and closed the book. There were no discrepancies.
She turned the lights off and stood uncertainly for a moment in the darkened lab. Her trepidation faded; her huge anticipation sank away. She walked deliberately down the hall, and then she walked a little faster. Her shoes clicked on the hard floor, faster and faster. Her heels ticked down the stairs to the first-floor exit as she ran to the animal facility.
As Robin unlocked each door downstairs, her dress billowed about her knees, the synthetic fabric rustling around her like a shower curtain. Frantic though she felt, she paused at the lockers and donned lab coat and hairnet. She peeled disposable booties from the stack and slipped one over each pump. She was not afraid of the eerie light or squirming animals, the faint smell, the kitchen refrigerator that served as morgue—all the more gruesome for its ordinary white and chrome, its butter compartment and crisper drawers, and even the snack drawer meant for cheeses, stuffed with stiff mouse bodies in their body bags. She was not afraid of the scuffling mice, the wounded animals staining each other as they fought. She feared none of this. She was afraid of herself for rushing down so desperately, in search of . . . what? Evidence Cliff was not as lucky or as talented as everybody thought.
In the animal room she turned on the examining light and took down the clipboards that hung from the cage racks. She pored over the registry of births and deaths and procedures in between. The notations were all routine, whether in Cliff's scrawl or Feng's firm block letters. She peered at the nude m
ice in their cages. Generations had come and gone since March, and any surviving animals from then were old and blind. She would go home. She would forget all this. Still, she slipped into one last room.
The dissection room was unusually neat, the table clear except for its polystyrene dissecting pad. The drawers underneath were locked, but Robin knew where the key was kept, and opened them one by one. Trays of rusty pins emerged, boxes of extra gloves and black plastic bags, and there, in the bottom drawer, a messy pile of papers, mostly scratch, along with a couple of thin-line permanent markers. Robin's fingers trembled as she held up the pages to the examining light. There was Cliff's handwriting, sloping, spiky, unmistakable on three pages ripped from a spiral notebook. She could not tell if these were just draft notes for his experiments in the journal article, or for some other set. Then on the second page she saw a notation for injection with R-7, and the date, March 21.
She began to run down the hall, her heels sliding in the slippery booties. She pulled them off, tossed her hairnet. She dumped her lab coat in an open laundry bin. Then she pulled her shoes off altogether and began racing up the stairs in her stocking feet. Carrying keys, journal article, three pages of data, and her dyed satin shoes, she sprinted for the first-floor photocopier.
5
CLIFF AND Feng spent Monday morning mocking up their poster for a conference at MIT. They stood at a table in the third-floor lounge with flowcharts detailing how R-7 entered and subverted cancer cells. The process was both simple and elegant in theory: the virus with covert forces in tow approaching, parachuting in behind enemy lines, and knocking off the cancerous sentinel, then donning the enemy uniform and proceeding to destroy the enemy infrastructure. Illustrating these war games accurately on paper was not easy, however. Cliff had prepared elaborate diagrams showing the genetic structure of R-7 and the genetic structure of the target cancer cell. Feng had typed up several pages of exposition explaining exactly how virus and cancer cell fit together. The two men now stood arranging and rearranging diagrams and notes on their foam core board.
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