by Lisa Alther
She stared hard at this great-grandmother whom she’d never met. Dixie Lee Hull. She had been a legendary cook, right up until the day she had cut her finger on the recipe card for spoon bread and had died of blood poisoning. Nine children she left behind her. One of her daughters, Ginny’s grandmother, had loathed housework and cooking and had spent her adulthood going to club meetings. One child had been more than enough for Ginny’s grandmother, Ginny’s mother, who had devoted herself completely to her family and her home. And so it went, alternating generations, each new scion implicitly criticizing its parents by rejecting their way of life. Ginny knew that even before she was born, she had been fated to neglect her child and her housework, to be driven from her home at gunpoint. Just as poor Wendy was now fated to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by her grandmother, Ginny’s mother, and to keep a spotless house packed to the rafters with babies. It was exhausting, this process, and in contradiction to Hegel, no progress appeared to be resulting from this recurring juxtaposition of thesis and antithesis.
But the most remarkable thing, Ginny reflected, was that she contained within each of her cells the tiniest fraction of a germ of nucleic acid from the very body of the woman in this cracked yellow photo, delivered to her via the intercession of her mother and grandmother. Traced back twenty generations, or six hundred years, Ginny calculated that she would find herself directly related to some 1,048,576 people — probably the entire population of northern Europe at that time, which was where her forebears had come from. It gave her a creepy sense of continuity, as though she were onstage now, muffing her lines, with ghostly ranks of ancestors backstage hissing and booing.
If you cared to carry it back through the centuries, every person in existence had identical submicroscopic specks of genetic material from the original man and woman. Forget Adam and Eve — each person had the tiniest imaginable flecks from the original cell, fertilized into existence by a lightning bolt.
It was stifling really. No wonder humankind was insane, with so much inbreeding through the eons. This speck of genetic material from her great-grandmother exercised such a pervasive influence as to make Ginny look almost identical to her — or so everyone said, although Ginny herself still couldn’t see it This speck accounted for the fact that, although they had never met, Ginny could see that their smiles were exact duplicates: They both smiled mostly with their eyes rather than with their mouths.
Ginny wondered what one picture her descendants would seize on to remember her by. This was probably one of the only pictures ever taken of Dixie Lee Hull. To have it done, she would have had to take a day out from her spoon bread baking, put on what was probably her only fancy outfit, and travel to Big Stone Forge by wagon. It must have been a big deal. Whereas Ginny had appeared in hundreds of photos by now, in various poses and moods and modes of dress, to say nothing of the thousands of feet of Kinflicks that featured her. How would her descendants be able to settle on one shot as representative? Which one would Ginny herself select?
Then she remembered that this question was strictly academic. At the rate she was going, her descendants would hasten to prune her from the family tree. Ira was doing his best to make Wendy forget her, and Ginny couldn’t imagine that she’d ever marry again or have another child. The line of Hull women had perhaps gasped its last.
Inordinately distressed by this thought, Ginny rushed downstairs and rifled her mother’s desk. She removed some pictures from an album — a shot of Ginny as a baby in a white dress being held by her own mother, and another of Wendy as a baby being held by Ginny. She stuffed these in an envelope and addressed it to Wendy in Vermont. Surely Ira wouldn’t dare to confiscate Wendy’s mail?
Drained, she picked up the cherished Hull family clock with its steepled roof and etched glass door. She dusted it carefully with the tail of her shirt. Then she wound it — eight turns and no more. She and Karl and Jim had waged horrible battles over whose turn it was to wind the clock each week. Even as a supposed adult, Ginny enjoyed the crunching sound as she wound. As she was wrapping the clock in a sheet, she heard a scratching sound at the door. In burst a middle-aged woman in a blond wig. Close behind her came a middle-aged couple, both dressed in fashionable summer suits. The woman was shrieking in a thick New Jersey accent, ‘Oh Harry! Don’t you just love it? The children would be so thrilled to live in a real southern mansion!’
Harry grumbled, ‘Well, it needs a lot of work, dear…’
The woman in the wig drawled encouragingly, ‘Well, honey, you can’t get much more authentic than this in Hullsport. It was built by Mr Zed Hull hissef. Lord, if you knew the people that would love to live in this house! Why, it’s a gem, purely a gem!’ She looked up, startled to find Ginny suspended midway through wrapping a clock in a sheet.
‘Well, howdy, honey,’ said the woman in the wig. ‘I bet you’re the cleaning girl?’
‘No, I’m a burglar,’ Ginny said, staring insolently at the three housebreakers. ‘Actually, I’m Virginia Babcock. Who are you?’
‘Why, I declare!’ the woman cried. ‘Ginny, honey, it’s been so long since I’ve seen you that I like to not knowed you! Why, you must have grown two feet!’
‘No, I’ve always had two feet,’ Ginny replied, glaring at her. Who was this babbling idiot?
‘Thelma Buford, honey, from up at Southland Realty,’ the wigged woman reminded her, sounding hurt.
‘Oh. Yes, of course. Mrs. Buford. How are you?’ Ginny had been at Hullsport High with her daughter. The daughter had talked too much, too.
‘Fine, thank you. And yoursef?’
‘Fine, thank you.’
‘These here people are the Hotchkisses. They’re moving down from up at New Jersey. Mr. Hotchkiss is with your daddy’s plant. They’re just real interested in your house here.’
‘We think it’s just elegant,’ Mrs. Hotchkiss assured Ginny.
Thinking fast, Ginny said, ‘Oh, you mean my father cleared up that mess about the title before he died?’
‘What mess?’ Mrs. Buford snapped. ‘The title is clear as a bell.’ She smiled reassuringly at the Hotchkisses.
‘Oh, that’s right!’ Ginny gasped. She threw her hand to her mouth. ‘I wasn’t supposed to mention it, was I?’
Mr and Mrs. Hotchkiss were glancing at each other uneasily.
‘What are you talking about, Ginny?’ Mrs. Buford demanded.
‘Oh nothing!’ Ginny said brightly, with a knowing glance at Mrs. Buford to indicate her infinite cooperation in deception. ‘Nothing at all.’
The Hotchkisses fidgeted nervously. ‘Well! What else do you have to show us, Mrs. Buford?’ Mr Hotchkiss finally asked.
Her mother was at breakfast when Ginny arrived in her room. Hurriedly she unwrapped the clock and placed it on the bedside table. Then she took out some gummed picture hangers and positioned them on the wall beside the bed. When they had dried, she hung the photos — Dixie Lee Hull, Great-uncle Lester, Cousin Louella, Grandpa Zed with his wild white hair. Nothing got things accomplished quite so efficiently as guilt, Ginny reflected.
Then she sat down and listened with pleasure to the steady tick-tock. Soon her pulse was throbbing in cadence with the ancestral clock.
As Ginny sat concentrating on this unlikely biological feat, her mother shuffled in on the arm of Mrs. Childress. Mrs. Babcock glanced around the room, startled. As she saw the clock and the photos, her tired yellow face burst into a smile, and she said with surprise, ‘Why, thank you, dear.’
Ginny smiled back, her guilt temporarily allayed. It was really so easy to please her mother. She didn’t require much. Why then had she, Ginny, spent most of her life trying to make her miserable? ‘How are you feeling today?’
‘Fine, thank you. Better.’ Mrs. Babcock settled herself in bed and gazed with affection at the faces in the photographs while the clock ticked away.
Soon Dr. Vogel appeared. He sat in an armchair and crossed his legs, prepared to stay a while for once. ‘All right, Mrs. Babcock, I’ll give
it to you straight, since you’ve asked me to.’ They settled back, bracing themselves for their respective tasks in this interchange.
‘Now. How does blood clot? All right. In grossly oversimplified terms, there are some twelve compounds referred to as clotting factors. These factors interact in various ways to produce an enzyme called prothrombinase. Prothrombin in the presence of prothrombinase and calcium yields thrombin. And fibrinogen in the presence of thrombin yields fibrin. Platelets under the influence of thrombin break down so as to liberate ADP, which causes other platelets to clump at the site of tissue injury. The clumping platelets, interspersed along fibrin, form the clot.’
Ginny looked at him with disgust. Was this the best he could do for the unfortunate layman? Mrs. Babcock looked dazed.
‘Hmmm, yes, hmmm,’ he continued. ‘So you see, a disorder at any point in this chain can inhibit clotting — the absence of any of the twelve factors in appropriate amounts, a malfunction of any of the chemical reactions. Hemophilia, for example, results from a factor deficiency. However, because of your platelet count, one can conclude that factor deficiency doesn’t apply in your case. You see, those with factor deficiencies don’t exhibit low platelet counts as well. Hmmm, yes. So — you are not factor deficient, you are platelet deficient. You have only 16,000/mm’ compared to a normal count of over 150,000/mm3, using the Coulter Counter Model F.
‘Hmmm, yes, hmmm. Now. How do platelets come to be deficient? Hmmm, yes, hmmm. Well, platelets can be deficient if an insufficient number is being produced. Yes? Or if they’ve gone into hiding somewhere. Hmmm, yes. Or if they’re being destroyed. The reason people have been extracting all the blood from you, Mrs. Babcock, is that we’ve been doing tests to try to narrow down the reason in your particular case. Hmmm, yes. Now cells in the bone marrow called megakaryocytes exude the small bodies of protoplasm that we call platelets. If platelet production were low, one would expect the megakaryocyte count in the bone marrow to be depressed. However, we’ve done a bone marrow aspiration and your megakaryocytic count appears to be normal. This is nice because it means that you aren’t in the early stages of leukemia, which sometimes exhibits symptoms similar to yours.’
Mrs. Babcock felt stricken. She might have been dying of leukemia unawares because nobody had bothered to consult the subject of all these amazing tests?
‘Hmmm, yes. So — this would indicate that your platelets are hiding, Mrs. Babcock. Or that they’re being destroyed. Now. How are platelets destroyed?’
Ginny felt as though she were being hypnotized by the ticking of the clock and the simultaneous pulsing of her blood, which blood was apparently healthy only through some fluke of nature. How could anyone’s blood be healthy with all these things to go wrong?
‘The spleen functions as a filter,’ Dr. Vogel was saying. ‘It sequesters and destroys worn out or diseased blood components. It’s possible that your body has formed an antibody to your own platelets and your spleen is destroying them. We’re still trying to narrow this down and should have an answer for you in the next few days. Well! Any questions?’
Ginny and Mrs. Babcock sat as mute as college students during a discussion period. ‘How does the spleen destroy platelets?’ Ginny asked finally.
‘Hmmm, yes, hmmm. Ah, actually we don’t exactly know.’
‘Who is this “we” you keep referring to?’ Mrs. Babcock asked.
‘Hmmm, yes. “We.” Modern medicine, I suppose.’ He blushed and shifted in his chair.
‘So you gave me steroids to spur platelet production even though you already knew from my bone marrow aspiration that I was producing enough?’ Mrs. Babcock asked casually.
‘Hmmm, yes. Well, no, not exactly. Well, you see, we don’t know exactly how steroids work. We just know that often they do work.’
‘But not this time,’ Mrs. Babcock reminded him.
‘Well, no.’
‘So what happens next?’ Ginny asked.
‘Hmmm, yes. Well, next we try a transfusion. We’ll give you two units of whole blood, Mrs. Babcock, with the idea that your bloodstream can use the foreign platelets to stem your bleeding, until they die off. Plus it will alleviate your anemia and low blood pressure for a time. By then we expect to have pinned down your difficulty so that we can treat it directly. It’s also possible, though not medically proven, that these foreign platelets could exercise some sort of “priming’’ effect on your own bloodstream. I’ve seen it happen.’
‘What you’re saying is that you really don’t know what you’re doing?’ Ginny asked.
Dr. Vogel stood up. ‘My dear young lady, I assure you that we in the medical profession know a good bit more about what we’re doing than a layman.’
Ginny didn’t reply. She had learned from observing Eddie Holzer, who had done it all the time, that it was impossible to discuss issues civilly with a person who insisted on referring to himself as ‘we.’
‘Granted it’s trial and error, to an extent, but it’s educated trial, trained error.’
Ginny stared at him evenly.
‘And so we’ll begin the transfusions as soon as we can find a donor. We need fresh blood, not more than an hour old, because the platelets in stored blood are often injured or dead. But you have an uncommon blood type, Mrs. Babcock. Did you know that? You could get forty-five dollars a pint for it on the Bowery in New York City.’ He laughed weakly. ‘But we’re typing the staff for a donor right now.’
‘What type is it?’ Ginny asked.
‘B negative.’
‘That’s my type. I could maybe be her donor.’
‘Why didn’t I think of you? Let me type you.’ He raced from the room in search of a syringe.
Only then did Ginny and Mrs. Babcock realize simultaneously that they still hadn’t gotten any definitive answer about the ultimate severity of Mrs. Babcock’s condition.
‘What did he say?’ Mrs. Babcock asked, her yellow face haggard.
‘I don’t know,’ Ginny confessed. ‘But I think it sounds pretty good, don’t you? I mean, they’re certainly going all out with these tests and things.’ She knew that her efforts to feign cheerfulness weren’t convincing. ‘Where’s Dr. Tyler these days?’ she asked, intent upon tracking him down so that she could question him.
‘He goes to his cabin at Spruce Pine near Asheville in the summer now.’
Ginny turned on the television. ‘The Price Is Right’ was on. She and her mother stared at it vacantly. Ginny was well-acquainted with the show. It had formed the backdrop for much of her morning housework in Vermont. Most of the things being won — a lifetime supply of Alpo dog food, a ceiling-to-floor bookcase complete with a leather-bound set of the outer covers of the world classics, a year’s subscription to New York’s most prestigious wake-up service, a ship-to-shore short-wave radio — neither of them needed, which was nice because it meant that they didn’t have to squander their vital energies being envious of the shrieking winners.
But eventually a three-week tour of Ireland was up for grabs. Mrs. Babcock had always longed to go to Ireland, Scotland, England in search of the towns her forebears had come from. Wesley had always refused to take her. He had no business to do over there. The trip wouldn’t be tax-deductible. It was out of the question. What about the IRA? she had suggested. Don’t they make bombs? It had never occurred to her to go alone. The household would collapse in her absence.
‘Let’s go on a trip to Ireland when I get out of here,’ Mrs. Babcock suggested.
Ginny glanced at her doubtfully — doubtful about her mother’s getting out in the first place, doubtful about her stamina for a trip if she did, doubtful about the two of them even going to downtown Hullsport in a friendly fashion, and especially doubtful about the strained cheerfulness of her mother’s voice.
‘Sure. That would be fun,’ Ginny said brightly. The thing was, she’d love to go to Ireland, all those places. From her mother’s stories, she felt a definite bond with her ancestors. They had been German Lutherans from the Cath
olic part of Germany, Puritans and Pilgrims from Anglican England, Anglicans in the Catholic south of Ireland, Scotch Irish Presbyterians in the Catholic sector of Scotland after the ‘45. Misfits, all of them, with loyalties every bit as confused and fragmented as Ginny’s had always been. Was this proclivity for propelling oneself into circumstances in which one was bound to feel set apart from the surrounding community hereditary, a result of those minute flecks of nucleic acid in each cell? Or was the proclivity absorbed from one’s parents, in the same way that kittens learned to drink milk by watching their mother?
‘…and I consider it a privilege to be deemed worthy of suffering like this,’ Sister Theresa was saying fervently, when Ginny and Mrs. Babcock arrived at the sun porch for lunch.
‘A privilege!’ Mr. Solomon snorted, his thick lenses magnifying his eyes to the size of platters. ‘A privilege! You think you’ve been singled out for special favors, eh, Sister? I like that vun. God says, “There’s Sister Theresa. I think so highly of her that I’d like to give her cancer.”’
Sister Theresa crossed herself. ‘A privilege,’ she confirmed, fingering the medal around her neck with the praying hands and the slogan ‘Not My Will But Thine.’ ‘The Lord gives no one more than he can endure. The cross and the strength to bear it.’
‘Big of Him. So the number of misfortunes you experience is a token of the cosmic judgment on the well-being of your soul?’
“When I was a little girl at school, Mr. Solomon,’ Sister Theresa explained earnestly, ‘sometimes I would come home crying because the bigger boys had teased me. And my mother would say, “But they wouldn’t tease you if they didn’t like you, child.” That’s how I see my present situation, Mr. Solomon.’
