Mother Nature: The Journals of Eleanor O'Kell
Page 17
June 3, 1983
Sliv makes sure the traitor takes nothing with her. “I escorted the bitch myself, Miss O’K, pardon my French. I wouldn’t let her take nothing, not even her Kleenex box after I made her cry. She was clean as a baby’s bottom when I hustled her out the door. Only things she took was the clothes on her back and whatever she had inside her head.” I don’t tell him that’s what I’m afraid of.
June 8, 1983
“‘Cease and desist?’” Tom says over the phone. “Genetics is a burgeoning field, Eleanor, a booming business, not just a backwater in that godforsaken town of yours. A certain amount of, shall we say, cross-breeding with O’Kell Consolidated can only benefit your little test-tube operation.” Fuck you too, I say.
July 13, 1983
I tell Nancy to give all of Abigail Rickover’s geneticists a fat bonus. I don’t ever want to lose anyone to Tom ever again.
August 9, 1983
Sales of our frozen embryos are going through the roof in Europe. Abigail Rickover thinks the same thing will work in Japan, in Asia, all over the world, even behind the Iron Curtain one day. “We’ve struck gold,” she says. I say it must be the O’Kell in me.
September 1, 1983
We will actively recruit carriers for The Tommies from the streams of mothers who keep showing up in the last town at the Lying-In. Business is booming, but we have to spread our wings.
September 23, 1983
Every bed is taken. Our numbers are so good that I keep raising prices. But it doesn’t seem to matter. The Good Egg is just a great business.
October 9, 1983
I look at the pictures Diana took for Imagine of Kelly and Heather, Scarlett and Allyson. They all look so much thicker, heavier, older to me now, just two years later. I wonder what I ever saw in them. Their daughters are the future of The Tommies, and they are the past.
November 3, 1983
I tell Nancy an egg is an egg is an egg in this business, as long as it’s a Cushing egg.
November 21, 1983
“No more needles,” Allyson says. “It’s my body and I won’t do it.” You don’t have to, I tell her. As a carrier, Allyson is now on a cash-and-carry basis.
December 9, 1983
We have to indoctrinate the mothers, I tell Nancy. It’s no longer enough to load them up and let them walk out with their Cushing babies. We have to teach every one of them what it means to be a Tommie. “The donors,” Nancy says. “We don’t need many. There’s no reason why they can’t be bigger, smarter, faster even. We can raise our standards.” Do we need to pay them more? “No,” Nancy says. “The Harvard boys still think it’s a great deal. They think it’s a steal. Forced labor, I call it.”
December 31, 1983
“Are you making money?” Charles Evans wants to know over the phone. Hand over fist, I tell him.
January 1, 1984
“I need to experiment with dogs,” Abigail Rickover says. “I want to put genes into their bodies. Then I want to put genes into people. It’s going to take some time.” And I thought I was the one who wanted to play God.
January 17, 1984
“The Tomgirls are talking about boys,” Heather tells me. “But there are no boys in this town.” Let’s keep it that way, I say.
February 1, 1984
There’s a boxload of border collies yelping in the corner of Abigail Rickover’s lab. They look scrawny enough to be half-breeds. Why collies? I wonder. “We are breeding them to be vigilant,” Abigail Rickover says.
March 9, 1984
“The price of eggs keeps going up,” Nancy says, “and the price of Good Eggs is going through the roof.” I tell her Europe is the tail that wags the dog.
April 1, 1984
The new mothers, our new Tommies, are true believers. They know the stories about Constance Briody inside out. I am going to put them to work with the Tomgirls. True faith is a miraculous thing.
April 10, 1984
“Why did you want to make babies in the first place?” Nancy wonders. To make a new world, I say, you have to start from scratch.
May 7, 1984
Let me tell you all about men, I tell the Tomgirls in the basement of the Cathedral. There used to be a time when we couldn’t live without them. They helped us make babies. They made most of the money. And they made our lives miserable. It was slavery, if you want to know the truth. We were stuck with them, and they could do anything they wanted with us. They could use us, they could abuse us, and we still had to make a home and raise the children, usually by ourselves. Sometimes they left us for another woman, usually a younger woman. It was pure hell to live your life through a man, but we never had a choice. Now we do. We don’t have to live that way any more. Look around you in the town. Do you see any men, other than Sliv and Chief Dan and the guys who take the trash out? There’s a reason for that, and the reason is we don’t need them. Now look at the Lying-In. Look at the smiles on the faces of the mothers when they come out with their own baby girls, without men. Do they look like they’re missing something? Or do they look like they found what they were looking for? That’s why so many of them are staying on or coming back to the last town to be Tommies. To be without men is a new kind of bliss, I tell the Tomgirls, and we want it to last forever.
June 2, 1984
I sit with Abigail Rickover and watch the Tomgirls run with the border collies. They are becoming so beautiful, so ripe, so rife for what awaits them. With boys they would only go to the dogs. “You see how they are?” Abigail Rickover says. A border collie puppy noses my hand, then runs away. “I think there’s a genetic reason for that. I think there’s a gene, and if we find the genes that cause individual behaviors we hit the jackpot.”
June 17, 1984
There are no boys here at our nurseries. There are no mothers with sons in our town, and no fathers to speak of. We have finally reached the end of the road with men. Who needs them?
July 4, 1984
We are watching Sliv shoot fireworks out over the canal. The Tomgirls on blankets all around us are oohing and aahing. “What do we do with the Tomgirls?” Nancy says. “They won’t be girls forever.” No they won’t, I say. They will be Tommies very soon.
July 27, 1984
“We can’t keep up.” Abigail Rickover stops me in the lobby of the Lying-In. “It’s simple arithmetic. Every bed is full, even all the cots we’ve added to the rooms. But we’re coming up short on eggs.” That can’t be, I say. “Yes it can. Even Allyson. We used to be able to count on four, six, eight eggs every month from her. She was like a machine. Now the numbers don’t work any more.” I tell her to find me a better business. Or a better drug.
August 9, 1984
Nancy wants to tonight but I have nothing in me.
August 16, 1984
What have we learned from the border collies? I ask Abigail Rickover. “We’ve learned they love the Tomgirls,” she says. “But the rest will take time. It’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack full of needles.” I tell her I don’t have forever.
September 19, 1984
“We’ve got a problem,” Nancy says. “One of our donors is acting up. He graduated from Harvard Law then went out and grew a conscience. He’s a lawyer now. Specializing in bioethics.” Bioethics? I say. “We may have to buy him off,” Nancy says.
October 9, 1984
“I think I found it,” Abigail Rickover says. “That new business we were talking about.” I say I’m listening. “Sometimes, after fertilization, multiple fetuses start to grow in the womb when there’s only room for one or two at most. So we take out the others.” You abort them? “It’s perfectly legal,” she says. “But until now we’ve just been disposing of the fetuses, throwing them out with the garbage. Now we don’t have to. There’s going to be a big market for that tissue.” There’s a market for dead babies? “It’s the best tissue known to man for gene research, and researchers are willing to pay top dollar. That’s their dirty little secret.”
October 11, 1984
So we have become a chicken factory, savoring and salvaging every last gizzard. I love it.
November 19, 1984
“I heard a rumor there’s been some people poking around town,” Chief Dan tells me in my office at the Lying-In. “Want me to have a look, Miss O’Kell?” Your job is to look the other way, I say. Or did you forget?
December 9, 1984
“His name is Vincent D’Angelo,” Nancy says. “He wants to know where his sperm went. He says that’s his right as a father. He wants $500,000 up front or he’s filing in court.” Tell him we don’t know, I say. “He knows that we know. He knows we’ve got records of everything. He’s not dumb. He’s Harvard Law, and he’s asking for full disclosure.” Son of a bitch, I say.
December 20, 1984
Charles Evans sets us up with a lawyer, Gregory Larkin, a specialist in paternity cases. “Eleanor,” Charles Evans says. “I just need to ask you one question. What in the name of Sam Hill are you doing up there?” Next question, I say.
December 25, 1985
I travel with Nancy to Diana’s for Christmas in the city. We are still talking when Luigi and G go off to bed. I ask Diana what’s wrong with Luigi. “Tom is wrong with Luigi,” she says. “You remember those fights in Southampton about the hedges? That was only the beginning.” And? “Now Tom is badmouthing him everywhere, to everyone all over town. Saying he’s a sicko, a homosexual.” Diana starts to cry. “The Tennis Hall of Fame!” Diana says. “They won’t even invite us to their dinners any more. I used to love their dinners in Newport. All the courses. The appetizers. The dancing.” I take Diana’s hands. “I know my life is a fake,” Diana says. “But it was my choice to make it fake. It was my fake. My own private hell. Tom had no business, no right to tell a soul. Now Luigi has nowhere to go. His old friends laugh at him. Everyone knows and now G knows, too. We had to tell him what he already knew. I hate Tom for that.”
December 28, 1985
Nancy and I meet with Gregory Larkin at his office on State Street. “A nuisance suit, pure and simple,” he says. I say I wouldn’t be so sure.
January 1, 1985
“It’s Odette,” Allyson says. “She’s bleeding. She’s the first Tomgirl to bleed.” That’s wonderful news, I say. “Why is that?” Allyson says. I say there’s no time like the present.
January 7, 1985
Gregory Larkin is latent, isn’t he? I say to Charles Evans. “Very observant,” he says. Very obvious, I say.
February 3, 1985
“We’re in some trouble,” Nancy says. “There’s a hearing date.” I tell her that Charles Evans tells me not to worry. He says Gregory Larkin is the best in Boston. “He better be,” Nancy says.
March 9, 1985
“I think I found what you were looking for,” Abigail Rickover says. “The market for aborted tissue? It’s even better than we thought. Researchers can’t get enough of it. The stuff is pure gold. We can charge them anything we want. Especially in Europe. And we’ve got plenty of tissue to sell them. Everything’s perfectly legal. It’s like a license to print money.”
March 21, 1985
I don’t want a court record, I tell Gregory Larkin. I don’t want anyone in the outside world to know anything about The Tommies. “I’ll do what I can,” he says. “But once someone starts to pull on a piece of thread it’s very difficult to put the garment back together again.”
April 16, 1985
The judge won’t let us delay. Vincent D’Angelo, the Harvard lawyer-donor, is asking for summary judgment.
May 8, 1985
The border collies are giving birth to their first litters. “I think we’re on to something,” Abigail Rickover says. “I’m just not sure what it is yet.”
May 26, 1985
We are in Boston at the hearing and a Judge Benning with a face like an old Irish cop is looking at the monogrammed handkerchief so perfectly folded it could be glazed in Gregory Larkin’s coat pocket. “What in God’s name are your clients doing in that town, counselor?” the Judge says. “I think they’re trying to play God, and that means they’re playing with fire. I have every intention of hosing them down to the fullest extent of the law.” Gregory Larkin tells the Judge that under statute such-and-such blah-blah-blah—“You got these bleeding records,” the Judge is looking at me, “so why in the name of Hades are you withholding them like you’re bank robbers or something? Just give the father the name of his child. I slap down the gavel. End of case. End of story.” Gregory Larkin stands up. “Your honor,” he says, “my clients feel that such a revelation would place undue strain upon the confidentiality of the relationships established by The Good Egg and its client-mothers.” Judge Benning looks at Gregory Larkin for a long time over his glasses, the kind of cheap black bifocals you can buy at any dime store. “‘Client-mothers’ is it now?” the Judge says. “Is that what the bleeding world’s come to? Client-mothers? Not in my Court, counselor! Either reach a settlement or I turn The Good Egg into an omelet.”
June 15, 1985
We end up paying our Harvard donor $1 million and promising to open up our archives upon request. “The Court does not have any other requests for parental disclosure before it,” the Judge says. “But I would warn defendants this Court will look favorably upon all such petitions in the future. I would warn defendants not to encourage such petitions to come before this Court.”
July 1, 1985
The best lawyer in Boston? I say to Charles Evans. “It could have been much worse, Eleanor,” he tells me over the phone. “You had no case. I don’t think you realize how vulnerable you are in any kind of legal proceeding. Be forewarned.”
July 11, 1985
Vincent D’Angelo is on the phone. “I just wanted to thank you for being so —what’s the right word?— reasonable, Miss O’Kell. I never thought you’d cave like that.” What’s your point? I say. “My point is there’s a lot of Harvard sperm swimming around in the canals out there. You know that and I know that. I have a feeling we’ll be talking again.” What you don’t know can’t hurt you, I say.
July 28, 1985
I am waiting for the sound of the other shoe dropping, but there was no coverage of our case, nothing in the newspapers. To the world, the Tommies are still a total mystery. I think we may have dodged a bullet. Or a bazooka.
August 6, 1985
“I actually watched the embryo enter my body on the screen of your machine,” one of our new mothers tells me at the Lying-In. “Everything is so amazing here.” The amazing thing is she can’t tell our Cushing eggs from her own.
August 22, 1985
Tommies were born to have babies, to propagate our own private species. That’s why they’re bleeding now. I do the math to make sure the Tomgirls will be ready to produce in time. Worst case, we won’t miss a beat.
September 2, 1985
“Have you ever heard of stem cells?” Abigail Rickover says. “They’re like cells that never really die, that have a kind of immortality. With one stem cell you can create any other kind of cell. That’s why they’re so powerful. We can sell stem cells from our boy embryos for more money than ever before.” I give her the green light. I like the idea of stem cells, the notion of embryonic immortality for Cushing cells. I also like the idea of carving up every speck, every cell, for profit.
September 22, 1985
Your bodies are being made ready for what is to come, I say to the Tomgirls. That’s why you are bleeding or will be soon enough. And that’s what we have all been waiting for. Any questions?
October 12, 1985
“The mothers are lined up out the door,” Abigail Rickover says. “And there’s nothing I can do about it. We just don’t have the eggs.” Raise the prices, I say. And the doses.
December 1, 1985
“We’ve got to do something about Allyson,” Nancy says. “She won’t take the injections. And she’s starting to badmouth us to the other Tommies.”
December 10, 1985
December 22, 1985
We are in my living room and the lights are low when I show the Tomgirls how to pleasure themselves. I tell them it’s just another way to do men one better before they do you.