Archangel

by Andrea Barrett

  Meanwhile the City of Flint kept steaming sturdily through the waves, miles passing but far too slowly: how to get through the days? A grim-faced doctor, still waiting for word of his wife and daughter, busied himself by organizing the ship’s hospital, stitching up the survivors’ wounds, tending to burns and scrapes. He’d been in a boat that overturned and had spent hours floating alone, clinging to a bit of rudder. What, Sam wondered, did he think of when he stopped working? A Canadian girl, ten years old, had been struck on the head by a falling beam when the torpedo first hit the Athenia and, although she’d been conscious during the night in the lifeboats and her first day on the City of Flint, had fallen into a coma; the doctor watched over her closely, and Sam would sometimes sit beside her, reading out loud from a novel Laurel had loaned him.

  Eavesdropping at dinner, pretending to listen to Lucinda and Maud but actually straining to hear Axel’s response to Duncan’s questions, Sam learned that Axel, when he wasn’t resting, passed the hours reading books he’d borrowed from Harold and George. Harold, meanwhile, kept busy with the little daily newspaper he now posted each morning on a bulletin board, around which people gathered to read his notes of the ship’s progress and bits of friendly gossip. The college girls put on a fashion show, herding good-humored volunteers along an improvised runway as others voted for the most outlandish costume. On a day when the sea was very smooth, pierced now and then by leaping fish, Sam wrote letters to his mother and to the woman he was seeing back home, neither of whom knew that his changed plans had put him aboard the Athenia. The letters, which couldn’t be sent until they reached Halifax, were as useless as curled wings on a fly, but time passed as he tried to describe—not the explosions, not the bodies, not his night in the boat. Not what had happened in Edinburgh, nor what Duncan had done, nor his estrangement from Axel. The shapes the clouds made in the sky, then. The porpoises leaping in sets of three and five. The brave little girl in her improvised romper and the kind women, strangers before boarding this ship, who cared for her.

  He found a corner where he could wash his face in the morning, and an exercise route—from the open middle deck in front of the smokestack, around the port side of the deckhouse, to the bow, and back down the starboard side—on which, if he rose early enough to beat the crowds, he could pace like a horse in a mine. No matter what he did, or how he arranged his days, he ran into Duncan. When Duncan stopped near the air scoops to light a cigarette, the solid sheet of hair lying over his forehead flapped up and down in the breeze like a lid. Why was he there when Axel, whom Sam so much wanted to see, was always where Sam was not? And when Sam went down below one night to the talent show that Maud and Lucinda had organized, Axel was there, but there with Duncan.

  Men sang “Danny Boy” and “Begin the Beguine,” children tap-danced, a woman pleated an accordion. Two sailors whacked at fiddles as two more whirled about. Axel came over to suggest that Sam do some little tricks involving toothpicks and gumdrops, which he was good at and used to offer up at parties: two minutes to make a model of a locomotive, a minute—Avery had first taught him this—for a sugar molecule. Sam was almost tempted, remembering how at Woods Hole he’d entertained his companions with models of sea squirts and the polymer backbone of cellulose, but then he looked at Duncan, right by Axel’s side and waiting for him to make a fool of himself, and he declined.

  Instead, Duncan stepped forward and, in his surprisingly sweet tenor voice, sang a bland version of the song for which, years ago, he used to invent ribald verses, entertaining the students during the summer they’d both spent at Woods Hole. Sam had just finished his junior year at college then; Duncan had been in his second year of graduate school, studying with Axel’s teacher, Thomas Morgan. Almost everyone important in their new field was at the biological station that summer, investigating some aspect of genetics or embryology or both. Sam, one of the few undergraduates taking the invertebrate course, paid his tuition by waiting tables at the mess hall and collecting specimens for his teachers. On nights when the moon was in the right phase, he’d bus his tables, drop his apron, and head for the Cayadetta’s dock with a long-handled net and a tray of finger bowls. His desire to earn his teachers’ approval was as ruthless as the lantern he held over the water, dooming the mating clam worms that spiraled upward.

  Afterward, he skipped the gatherings at the ice cream parlor and the visits to the movie house in Falmouth so that he could work on the project that had seized him. A scientist named Paul Kammerer had recently made two American lecture tours; his sensational work—VIENNA BIOLOGIST HAILED AS GREATEST OF THE CENTURY: Proves a Darwin Belief, one newspaper blared—was so interesting, and so controversial, that even Sam’s mother had interviewed him for one of her articles. Kammerer claimed to have shown that when a change in the environment of his toads and salamanders caused an adaptive change in them—altered skin color, different reproductive behaviors—these changes could be transmitted to subsequent generations. A kind of heresy, Sam knew—the exact opposite of what he’d seen in the lab for himself. Although he’d breathed in his Quaker grandparents’ conviction that the world can be improved, first Mr. Spacek and then Axel had trained him out of his unconscious assumptions that when individuals strengthened and developed their faculties, through vigorous use, they then passed that strengthening along. That the ones they stopped using were lost, and lost for good.

  At Woods Hole, though, surrounded by interesting strangers pursuing so many different ideas, the truth had begun to seem more complex again, which made him read Kammerer’s claims with real curiosity. Axel had taught him to question everything—didn’t that include the beliefs that were quickly becoming conventions in their field? At night, roasting oysters on the beach, he and his classmates talked about Kammerer and speculated on the reasons why some biologists attacked him so furiously. Even those opposed to his conclusions were disturbed by that. They were all flirting with socialism then, some more than flirting; they sympathized when Kammerer complained that no one gave him a fair hearing. With the Great War just over, no one wanted to hear that inheritance wasn’t everything, or that race and class characteristics passed on through generations might be altered.

  Tiny, darkly tanned Ellen Eliasberg, a fellow student in Sam’s invertebrate course, was moved by Kammerer’s passionate statements about the necessity of man passing on what he acquired in the course of his lifetime to his children and his children’s children. Sam was caught up by her arguments—and, at the same time, fascinated by the bad temper Duncan’s advisor showed whenever anyone mentioned Kammerer’s work.

  “The leopard can change his spots?” he’d say mockingly. “Fathers can pass what they’ve learned to their sons? Why not just reject every bit of science done in the last century? Why not go right back to Lamarck and his folklore? Cave fishes and deep-sea dwellers lose their eyes because they don’t need them in the dark; moles have poorly developed eyes because they’re in burrows most of the time; if an organ isn’t used, it conveniently disappears, and if it’s used often—why not point to the giraffe stretching his neck to reach for higher leaves?—it gets bigger. How long has that been believed? And yet Payne bred fruit flies in the dark for sixty-nine generations, without the slightest change in their eyes or behavior. In my own lab, we’ve seen well over one hundred new types arise spontaneously, with no environmental influence, each breeding true from the start. Overnight—literally, overnight!—eyeless flies have appeared from normal parents, by an obvious change in a single hereditary factor.”

  Then he’d say that the popular press was being fooled, once again, and foolishly misleading the public (here Sam thought of his mother; had she sorted this out?); he’d say Kammerer was a charlatan and a publicity seeker and perhaps even a fraud. He ranted so wildly that even Duncan looked uneasy, and Sam saw, for the first time, what might happen when the passion required to defend a new set of ideas went too far.

  But he wanted to work, simply to work, and he tried to stay focused on that. The old wo
oden house where he bunked that summer was less than a block from the lab, surrounded by sand and scrubby pines, but during his first weeks he went there only to sleep. Every minute he could steal from his course and his jobs he spent designing an experiment that might prove or disprove what Kammerer contended. Instead of Kammerer’s slow-growing salamanders and midwife toads, Sam decided to use his swiftly reproducing flies. And he’d work with their eyes, not only because variations in eye color had been the first and best-documented of the mutations observed in fruit flies but also because eyes and their development had always been central to these discussions.

  He used fly cultures he’d kept for Axel, techniques he’d learned in his lab, a procedure he’d seen Duncan do in a different context. With a needle he ground to a very sharp point and then heated, he touched—just touched—the center of the red eye of a lightly etherized female fly; then he touched the other eye and laid the fly on a dry piece of paper, which he put into a little vial. A couple of hours later, he transferred the treated flies to a food bottle. In the few that survived the procedure he watched how the Malpighian tubules turned deep red and stayed that way. So: injury to one organ, the eye, caused what appeared to be a permanent change in another organ: an acquired characteristic.

  Later, he mated the treated females to normal males and proceeded as usual. Amid the next generation he found a few mutants—yellow body, narrow eyes, twisted penis—as expected. And also, unexpectedly, seventeen flies, both male and female, with red Malpighian tubules. This was peculiar, and completely compelling: what did it mean? Immediately, he started breeding these to each other. None of their offspring showed the red tubules, but that might mean nothing; the trait was likely recessive, and he had only a small sample.

  Duncan and most of the other students had a sense of what he was doing; they wandered in and out of the open labs and they all talked not only while they worked but also during their outings. Still, no one knew the details until the director asked him to give a presentation at one of the season’s last Friday night gatherings. He was nervous when he spoke—undergraduates were rarely asked to speak in front of the whole community—and he referred to earlier work that he hoped might support his own. In particular, a recent symposium that many in his audience had attended and that had examined this crucial question: could an injury to one generation cause an effect that was inherited by the next?

  Swiftly, he moved through those other researchers’ results. One had demonstrated the transmission of acquired eye defects in rabbits, which seemed to have the characteristics of a Mendelian recessive. Others had shown what seemed to be inheritable effects of injury from alcohol, lead, radium, and X-rays. Perhaps, though, this was parallel induction: had a physical agent acted simultaneously on both the germ cells and the somatic cells, producing changes independently in each, or had the change induced in the body actually affected the germ cell? Which was the mechanism at work with Sam’s flies, and would either case argue for evolution directly guided by the environment? Sam saw Duncan in the audience, listening intently and taking notes, although he didn’t ask any questions afterward. Other hands did wave, though, and Sam was pleased with the way he guided the passionate, occasionally contentious, but civil discussion that followed.

  In September, when he returned to college and reported all this to Axel, Axel shook his head and said he wished Sam had consulted him before throwing himself at such a controversial issue. He should never, Axel said, have presented this to so many eminent scientists before testing his hypotheses more thoroughly. Then he said that while he didn’t yet trust Sam’s results, they were intriguing and Sam should push the work forward. He’d supply the flies and the other materials; when the time came, he’d help Sam write up the results. “Although it would have been better,” he added, “if you’d done even more while you were still at Woods Hole.”

  “I should have,” Sam admitted.

  And would have, he knew, if he hadn’t gotten involved with Ellen. Four years Sam’s senior, presently working as a biology instructor at Smith, she’d spent the previous year in England, where she’d cut off her hair, befriended several brilliant women, and taken up feminism and eugenics. One opinion she held strongly was that exceptionally intelligent people—“Like you,” she said to Sam, during a collecting trip at Quisset, “and me”—should have children together, which would improve the world. Later, she and Sam decanted their specimens side by side, and a few nights after that, when a crowd of students got drunk on the beer two chemists had brewed, they ended up entwined in the dusty wooden attic over the supply room.

  The next day, when Sam apologized for what had happened, Ellen calmly claimed it as her own idea and said Sam had only done what she wanted. At the beach, she wore a daring wool-jersey bathing suit that clung to her wiry shape and ended mid-thigh, the white trim disturbingly like underwear, and when she swam she looked to Sam, with her close-cropped hair, like one of the elegant spiraling clam worms he collected at night. He had no idea how he felt about her; he was nineteen, and she let him make love to her. Sam couldn’t imagine why.

  “Because I want to have several children, starting soon,” she told him. “And you’re such a good specimen. You’re tall”—here she tapped one of Sam’s fingers—“big-boned, and bright”—tap, tap—“hardworking, sturdy, even-tempered.”

  By then she was working on Sam’s second hand, having thrust the first inside her blouse. His hands on her small, pointed breasts, his mouth in the hollow of her throat, her bony feet on his back. He was completely inexperienced when they met; he was astounded. For the last two weeks of his stay at Woods Hole he was with Ellen every night. “If I’m pregnant,” she said the day they parted, “we’ll get married. If not …”

  Not, as it turned out, although they met as often as they could during Sam’s last year of college, several times near Sam and twice in Massachusetts, the second time just after Duncan proved him wrong.

  What kind of a person would, in utter secrecy, interrupt his own project to replicate a fellow worker’s experiments and double-check his results? Duncan published a paper noting that the preliminary results of a young student investigator—here he named Sam—presented orally and informally, had sufficiently interested him to push those experiments further. When he did, he found that in flies whose eyes had been burned, the Malpighian tubules indeed turned red, and that a small number of the offspring of those flies also had red tubules.

  But he also saw something Sam had failed to see, perhaps because he’d been so absorbed with Ellen. In his early work in Morgan’s lab, Duncan had occasionally noticed—or so he wrote; Sam wondered if it wasn’t Morgan himself who saw this—fly larvae feeding on the eyes of dead adults that had fallen on the food at the bottom of the culture bottle; this had colored the intestines of the larvae red. After seeing the initial data (and this did sound like him; he could test a chain of reasoning like a crow pulling at the weak spots in a carcass), Duncan had suddenly wondered if the pigment might be carried from the larvae through the pupa stage, possibly appearing in the adults.

  He crushed the eyes of some flies, mixed them with yeast and agar from a culture bottle, and added larvae; their intestines soon became filled with the red food, and a bit later the Malpighian tubules, visible through the larval walls, became deep red. The larvae pupated; adults emerged; their tubules too were red. Variations with different foods showed clearly that some component of the red pigment in the crushed eyes passed from the digestive tract of the larvae into the Malpighian tubules and remained there into the adult stage. Sam’s larvae had eaten the damaged eyes of dead flies and that—not a response to the injury itself—had colored their tubules. Sam had found not an acquired characteristic, but simply a transient response to diet. Acquired characteristics were not—could not be, Duncan said—inherited.

  Sam was wrong, he’d been proven wrong, but at first that didn’t seem so serious—why would people hold his curiosity against him? He was young, he was enthusiastic; he’d seen
a big question in Kammerer’s work and explored it open-mindedly, trying to follow the data rather than his own preconceptions; he’d shared his findings honestly. Leaving Woods Hole for his last year of college, he’d sensed that others saw him as a wonderfully promising student, welcome anywhere. Six months later, the recent work he’d done in Axel’s lab rendered pointless by Duncan’s paper, those same people seemed to regard him as a dubious young man who’d overreached himself. Even Axel, after reading the copy Duncan sent specially to him, a little handwritten note—I’m sorry—scrawled at the top, groaned and went for a long walk before sitting down with Sam.