“Where’s a mug like me supposed to go to church, Miss O’K?” Sliv says. “I never seen a Cathedral like this before. Where’s the priests and nuns and candles?” I tell Sliv they’re all dead in the water.
June 6, 1975
Don’t forget the man-made ditch, I say to The Tommies. Don’t forget our first job here as Tommies is to clean up the hole in the ground made by men, for men.
June 10, 1975
“You can’t drink it,” Linda Connolly says to me. “You can’t swim in it. You can’t fish in it. You can’t wash your clothes in it. We’re too scared to even pee in it.” Why? I wonder. Where’s the pollution coming from? “Nobody knows,” she says.
July 3, 1975
Linda Connolly is becoming quite a soldier. She reports back after her first reconnaissance mission. “It’s because of a nuclear power plant down canal,” she says. “Right on the canal.” Saddle up, I say. This is going to be quite a ride.
July 13, 1975
We find ourselves in the Hat City, where O’Kells have gone before. It was here that Father started to invent, here where Tom was born at the Home For Hatters, and here where we find the Consolidated Nuclear Energy Station where the Chapeau Hat Plant used to be. The building is a massive metal sprawl behind cement walls, topped off with a foot of barbed wire dusted brown with rust. The only thing missing is a moat. We go to the gate but we get nowhere. “You’ll have to talk to our communications department,” the guard says with a wheeze. “And they’re not back until Tuesday.”
July 15, 1975
The Hat City is no place to wait for anything. I suppose the people here should be grateful for nuclear power after everyone stopped wearing hats, but they are scarce and stooped, bareheaded, as if to be anywhere near the canal is to be counted among the walking dead.
July 20, 1975
The communications department, so-called, is a woman with bifocals who
tells us nothing. “We know you’re to blame,” Linda Connolly says to her. “There’s no doubt about it. We’ve got the data from all kinds of tests.” Bifocals says: “That’s your opinion.” Linda Connolly says: “It’s fact, not opinion.” She hands her a short stack of research. Bifocals says: “You have your facts, and we have ours.”
August 19, 1975
We’re camped out now with our tents, circling the cement wall of the Hat Plant like a tent city. We take turns carrying the signs and picketing Consolidated Nuclear for the benefit of the television cameras. The Tommies shout: “Nuke Consolidated! No more nukes!” Not very original, but it’s what the TV reporters expect. We have all the time and money in the world. We can wait for Big Brother to break down.
September 1, 1975
Bifocals finally asks for a meeting with me, alone. “There’s something you need to know,” she says, and then she tells me. Impossible, I say.
September 13, 1975
He grows more obese, more grotesque every time I see him, as if each awful moment in his life invaded his flesh to poison his soul. His skin is still smooth as a baby’s, but splotched a nasty red like a baby’s rash. The hair is all white now but his brush cut is chopped even shorter than before, like his hair lost all desire to grow years ago. He wears a pinstriped suit immaculately tailored to contain what he has become, a corrupt old bastard ready to rape anyone who gets in his way, the way he raped me when I was just a girl. “It was the perfect place for a nuclear power plant, if you must know the truth,” Tom tells me. “The hat industry was dead. There were no jobs. There was no hope in that godawful town. It was a walk in the park to put the plant right on the canal, right where the old Chapeau plant used to be. The Hat City just rolled over and played dead. The Aldermen told us we were doing them a favor.” Tom’s desk is every bit as dark and massive as he is, a barricade made of mahogany, and he swings in his high-backed black swivel chair to turn his face toward me and away from the light. My hate for him is so pure it feels like a drug.
September 19, 1975
Sell it, shut it, or clean it up! I slam the phone down in Tom’s ear. I’m not about to let him keep raping me.
September 23, 1975
He asks for another meeting and I make another trip down to the city. “I understand you’re buying up everything else along the canal,” he starts in. “Why don’t you buy the plant from me—from us. I mean you are the owner as much as I am, Eleanor. You’ve got the money. But do you really want to buy it from yourself, from O’Kell Consolidated?” How much? I say. He names his price, our price. Out of the question, I say. “Well, then,” Tom says. “I suppose you can take it up with the board. You are still on the board, aren’t you?” Fuck you, I say.
October 3, 1975
Bifocals again. “I have a message for you from Mr. O’Kell,” she says. “He says if you don’t end your protest within ten days he will tell the press that you are an owner of the plant.” Ask me if I care, I tell her.
October 11, 1975
“I’m afraid I can’t sell you the plant, Eleanor,” Tom tells me over the phone. What are you talking about? I say. “The nuclear energy business?” he says. “It’s past peak, past prime. The risks now far outweigh the advantages. The protests are depressing our net worth, and all the doomsday talk is going to be a drag on our earnings forever. It all became so tiresome, just like Father’s tiresome electrical patents. The time has come to cash out, to play some other game. You and that splinter group of yours actually helped us see the light. You have my thanks. You have, as always, served a very useful purpose.” What are you saying? “O’Kell Consolidated is no longer the owner of any nuclear power plants, Eleanor. We are no longer in the nuclear energy business. Instead we are flush with cash.” Then where are you going to put our money? “If I knew that,” Tom says, “you and I would be even richer than we are today.”
November 7, 1975
I had forgotten how good it can feel to hate. I had forgotten just how much I hate him.
December 3, 1975
Good news, finally. The new owners of the plant are going to clean up their act in the Hat City. They are not going to close it down entirely, but they are going to immediately stop dumping their waste untreated into the canal. I call a meeting in the basement of the Cathedral to tell The Tommies to enjoy our first great victory together. But inside I feel raped by my bastard brother all over again.
December 13, 1975
There has been enough inbreeding in the last town along the canal to last a century. What we need now is plain old breeding, intentional manipulation to produce the desired result. I want to pick and choose whatever traits I want for my Tomgirls, from brown hair to perfect breasts to a baby’s sex. They say it’s years away but I don’t believe it. Money has a way of making things come to life overnight. But how? It’s too late for arranged marriages, too soon for test-tube babies. Where do we go from here?
December 15, 1975
“We can adopt!” Scarlett says. “Why not?” I say it’s only a matter of time before society accepts that two mothers are better for a family than a father fighting or in flight. But you can’t expect a judge to see it that way. The only place men are really needed, I tell Scarlett, is in a courtroom. And a court case means more exposure than we want. The world beyond the canal is not ready for The Tommies. And we’re a long way from being ready for the world.
December 24, 1975
I promise myself we are going to find a better way, a better life for our baby girls, with or without their mothers. We are going to make damn sure our movement survives no matter what. By the time our girls are grown, by the time they have baby girls of their own, there will be a better way, even if I have to spend my every last dime to find it. I think of it as natural selection, with me, naturally, doing the selecting.
May 8, 1976
There is talk in Life now of test-tube babies, of creating life outside the womb. In a world where life is man-made, where a man’s sperm carries more weight than the man, any kind of life is possible for a price. But right now it all seems too
far-fetched, too much like science fiction, like a town full of bald-headed aliens. I wish I knew what to do next. I wish I knew what to do period.
June 12, 1976
I resign from the board of O’Kell Consolidated. My letter to Tom says he should be crucified.
August 3, 1976
I feel so much anger at Tom, so much anguish about The Tommies.
August 23, 1976
I have to try something radical, something radically different, so that the future has nothing to do with the past. I need to find a madwoman. There’s no other way to put it. But it’s not like I can put an ad in The Times.
September 4, 1976
It’s time I did my homework. There are geneticists all over the country in various forms of research, but I need a woman with no politics and no mind for it and a blind ambition for her work, someone wronged by men, someone angry enough at men to learn how to hate them.
September 28, 1976
Most of the geneticists I hear about are men, and most of them are fat and happy in their tenured ivory towers. I talk to a few, two in Chicago, one at Stanford, two at Berkeley. They’re all willing to take my money as consultants. But men are a dead end, a complete waste of my time.
October 3, 1976
A molecular biologist at Cold Spring Harbor, a woman, tells me that there are big problems at Harvard, because the Mayor of Cambridge wants to stop all biological testing. She tells me that whole departments might have to close up shop. She tells me about a woman named Abigail Rickover.
October 16, 1973
I get on the phone with everyone I know in medicine and her name keeps cropping up. She’s ahead of everyone else in the field, my sources tell me. She thinks it’s possible to do what I want to do, to create the right kind of creatures on demand.
November 3, 1976
All roads lead to Abigail Rickover, an apolitical orphan in the world of genetic politics. All she cares about is her work, bless her. I am going to wine her and dine her.
November 14, 1976
We will build statues for you in this town, I am saying to Abigail Rickover. You will be famous. You will be a hero. I am thinking so what if she looks like something out of a test tube, with features so plain you could use them to set the mean on the human race. I know enough to know that she is a geneticist so brilliant the world will beat her to a bloody pulp. To me, that makes her just like a Tommie, the endpoint of evolution, the equivalent of a new beginning. I say I want her to be the first executive director of The Briody Institute for Advanced Family Research. She looks out the window to the streets that lead down to the canal. “It’s not Cambridge,” Abigail Rickover says. “It’s not Harvard.” No it’s not, I say. But Cambridge and Harvard are never going to let you do what you want to do. The Mayor there wants to shut you down, and the male professors with tenure are not about to give you your due. Here you can build your own empire. You can create your own world, a better world. I will give you the keys to the kingdom. That’s a promise. “Do you understand what I’m trying to do?” Abigail Rickover says. Yes and no, I say. “I am trying to find a way to put genes into the body. It’s our best hope to cure illness, birth defects, cancer, multiple sclerosis, all kinds of disease.” It sounds like a miracle cure, I say. “If it works,” Abigail Rickover says, “it will be no miracle.”
December 2, 1976
“I don’t know,” Abigail Rickover says over the phone. I am propped up in bed with my Princess, and I am not about to let her say no. You can bring in anyone you want, I tell her. You can have all the resources you need. Don’t forget that I’m an O’Kell, for God’s sake. As far as I’m concerned, you have an open checkbook. Just name your price. She does and it’s not even half what I’m willing to spend for her. “I don’t want a statue,” she says. “I just want a lab and no distractions.” Piece of cake, I say.
December 15, 1976
I tell The Tommies to come together in the basement of the Cathedral so that I can introduce Abigail Rickover. “I am a scientist,” she says. “That means I study things in pursuit of pure knowledge. What becomes of that knowledge is another matter entirely.” I ask her to tell The Tommies what the new world might look like. “By using what we call gene therapy, by inserting the right genes right into people, we are going to be able to find a cure for cancer and just about everything else under the sun. It’s still years away, but it’s not centuries away. It’s not as far away as everybody thinks.” We all applaud. I listen to her speech but I won’t get up to give my own. I don’t want anyone to know just yet that in our tribe of Tommies, only the Amazonian Tomgirls will be allowed to conceive. We will mix and match the physical beauty of Thomas Cushing’s heirs with the finest genes on the planet. And I will be the legal guardian of every one of them. For me, once a childless nun, a granddaughter of Thomas Cushing, this is the closest I will ever get to immortality.
January 11, 1977
I make sure Abigail Rickover explains everything to me. I don’t understand the half of it, not yet. I don’t know anything about “gene-splicing” or what-have-you. But I am going to learn. I have given her the keys to the kingdom but I am still king and queen.
January 22, 1977
“So what’s it for?” Scarlett wants to know. Sorry? I say. “You know,” she says. “All this ‘Brave New World’ stuff. What’s it all about?” If you want a new world, I tell her, you have to be very brave.
February 2, 1977
“Here is the building I will need,” Abigail Rickover says. “Here are the people I will need. Here is what it will cost.” She stares at me, waiting for me to faint. What are we waiting for? I say. Let’s light this candle.
February 12, 1977
“Everything’s spic-and-span, Mrs. O’K,” Sliv says. “You would hardly know the place.” I know, I tell him. It’s a miracle. Sliv is making the town shine for the first time since barges made the trip up canal. There’s no trash to be found anywhere, and beware The Tommie who leaves a wrapper on the sidewalk. Thanks to Sliv, the last town along the canal is starting to look like the kind of town where I would want my Tommie girls to grow up.
March 7, 1977
I approve the plans for the new Briody Institute for Advanced Family Research, a building that will go up right by the canal, facing west. Who says money can’t buy you love?
April 1, 1977
Whenever I feel black I walk right over to the nursery to watch our Tomgirls grow up. They are all nearly three now. Where has the time gone? They have the ruddiness of the Cushings, every one of them, the long legs and longing eyes and the reddish tinge to their cheeks and hair. They stand ready to run at all times, and if we don’t get them outside, even on bad days, you can hear them chattering in the bunkhouse long into the night. They know all the stories of Kate Briody and Tommie glory by heart. There is no television in their lives, and we are careful of what they listen to on the radio, of what they hear from their Tommie teachers, of everything that goes into their beautiful hearts and minds and heads. If all goes well, they will never hear a discouraging word about women, and they will never know the things the world won’t let them do. They can grow up to be the master race. My plan is to impregnate them as early as possible, before they can learn too much about boys.
April 10, 1977
One day I would like to write something for the Tomgirls that I could call “The Book of O’Kells.” Every religion needs a Bible.
April 30, 1977
In the new Briody Center, The Tommies can show my Tomgirls how to live, and why they are being raised by women to create nothing but women. There is no shortage of stepmothers in the last town along the canal, no shortage of mother love.
May 7, 1977
We start every morning with my Tomgirls. We tell them Tomgirls are strong, that Tomgirls can accomplish anything they want in life, that their first duty is to create a new race. You have been chosen, we tell each one. You have been chosen because you are so remarkable, so beautiful, so smart, so strong. Nothi
ng can stop you.
May 22, 1977
Even as little girls they have the long legs of the finest colleens and skin so fresh it tingles. Thomas Cushing may have been a real bastard, an absolute son of a bitch, but his genes are worth a thousand words.
June 4, 1977
Becca comes to take pictures of my Tomgirls. “What?” she says. I am staring because there is something different about her, like she’s finally come alive. Who’s the lucky guy? I ask. “There is no guy,” Becca says. “There’s just me. That seems to be enough for now.”
July 2, 1977
Abigail Rickover is our secret weapon. But it’s up to me to turn her genius into a business. The O’Kell in me wants to make a profit and a point.
Mother Nature: The Journals of Eleanor O'Kell Page 13
