Archangel

by Andrea Barrett

  “I should have seen that,” Axel said when he returned. “If you’d kept in touch with me over the summer, if we’d been talking about your experimental design … I should have seen that before Duncan did.” Sam couldn’t tell whether Axel was more angry at himself for missing it or proud of having taught Duncan so well.

  In the wake of that paper, Sam knew he wouldn’t be welcome at Columbia, where everyone had assumed he’d follow Axel and Duncan to graduate school. But with Axel’s help he found a place in a small program in Wisconsin, run by a sound but middling geneticist. Not one of Morgan’s golden boys, like Bridges or Sturtevant; not even someone at the top of the second tier (which was how Axel disparagingly characterized himself), but a man who knew he was lucky to have a lab and the funding for a few graduate students.

  Sam spent that last summer in Axel’s lab, maintaining the cultures and leaving everything in order for Axel’s next helper, wishing, all the time, that he could be discussing new projects with Axel. But Axel, collaborating with a friend in Texas, was seldom there, and Ellen, who might have helped him settle into his new life, instead did the reverse. If she’d gotten pregnant during his last year of college, nothing, Sam knew, could have wedged them apart—but she didn’t, and didn’t, and when summer came and she still wasn’t pregnant, they didn’t see each other for several months. In August, she backed out of her offer to drive to Wisconsin with him and went to Woods Hole instead. Before Thanksgiving, she was gone.

  For a long time, Sam was able to avoid her. His luck ran out after seven years, at a big meeting in Washington where Duncan received a prestigious award. Sam was moving toward the back of the auditorium, having just heard a talk by a maize geneticist and hoping to escape before Duncan spoke. He ran into Ellen in the middle of the aisle, herding two boys and a girl, all resembling Duncan in some way, toward the special seats at the front set aside for the prizewinner’s family. She introduced the children awkwardly and asked how Sam was doing.

  “Fine,” Sam said. “Just finishing my thesis.” She and Duncan had married before he’d even started that work. After which Axel, as if inspired by them, had married a mathematician he’d met in Texas, moved to a leafy street twenty minutes from the college, and promptly produced a son.

  “We miss you at Woods Hole,” she said.

  “Handsome boys,” he said, avoiding their eyes.

  Tugging at her younger son’s collar, bending to adjust the skirt on her dark-haired little girl, Ellen said that she and Duncan went back every year, always with the children, who loved it. But nothing had ever been as wonderful as her second summer there. When, Sam knew by then, she’d already left him but he didn’t know it. When she and Duncan had both returned and Sam, in the shadow of his big failure, had been unable to join them.

  ON THE LIFEBOAT, before the sun rose, when the night was at its coldest and the waves were tossing them about and when, having long since thrown up everything he’d eaten the previous day, Sam was retching painfully and Bessie’s hand was lightly patting the back of his neck, he had thought about his calm hand bringing the needle’s point so lightly, so deftly, to each Drosophila eye. How the flies’ wounds had sometimes stuck to the food, and to each other; how those that lived were weak for several days, some unable to eat. Here on the ship, shaken about like a fly in a test tube, he too was having trouble eating. One evening he learned that while most of the geneticists who’d been on the Athenia with him had been picked up by the British destroyers, two were apparently lost. And on the eighth day of the crossing, while he scored patterns in the oatmeal that was one of the few things left to eat, Sam learned that the little girl who’d been in a coma had finally died.

  Gloom spread through the ship as each seating heard the news, and later Sam saw Bessie, near the bow, comforting her son, Aaron, who was crying. He and the girl had been friends, Sam thought, or at least known each other the way children even of different ages do when confined together. He couldn’t stop himself from walking over to Aaron and squatting down beside him. He rested his hand on Aaron’s back, his fingertips moving gently.

  “Shh,” he said. “It’s all right.” Which was what he’d said in the boat, when Aaron was so cold and sick that he was crying. Also this was what Bessie had said to Sam. Now she said, “He’s taking this very hard.”

  “Were they close?” Sam asked. The two geneticists who’d drowned, husband and wife, had worked at a small Minnesota college and traveled only rarely to international gatherings. Sam hadn’t met them at the congress, but he had on the ship, and he’d envied them when they came down hand in hand to what would be their last dinner. Axel had said, at that same meal, how much he’d been missing his wife and son.

  “She used to take him for walks around the deck, when she was bored,” Bessie said, gesturing toward their own crowded railings, so packed with passengers eager for air—they were expecting rain—that strolling was out of the question. “They played make-believe. You know, the way children will: I’ll be the mommy and you be the little boy, and I’ll get you ready for school …”

  “She sounds sweet,” Sam said. The figures crowding the railings separated, moved together again, bunched, and dispersed, long lines forming only to condense into shorter segments.

  “Not always—once she pinched him hard enough to leave a mark.”

  Aaron shrugged off Sam’s hand and pushed himself more firmly into Bessie’s legs. “Do you have children?” she asked, smoothing her son’s hair.

  “I don’t,” Sam said, and if Duncan and Harold hadn’t joined them just then, he might have told Bessie how pained he’d been when he understood that he likely never would have any. Ellen, who couldn’t get pregnant with him, had gotten pregnant instantly with Duncan; no woman he’d been with since had had so much as a scare. Sometimes, when he’d had too much to drink (throughout Prohibition, he and his friends had always had access to lab ethanol), he used to joke around with a toothpick-and-gumdrop figure he called Mr. Heredity. Look at me! he’d have the figure say. Interested since childhood in how we inherit traits, but I can’t reproduce! But although he laughed as hard as anyone when Mr. Heredity drooped his gumdrop head, later, when he began to grasp the fact that no one would ever have his hair or his blocky nose, his height or his big hands, he felt quite otherwise. The day his heart stopped, the day he got hit by a bus (the day a torpedo sank the ship that was taking him home), everything that had led to his father and mother and converged in him would be extinguished.

  But here were his colleagues, bearing down. He managed a smile as they greeted him and, looking at Bessie and Aaron, asked if they could do anything to help. Sam introduced them only by name, without explaining how he knew them.

  “We’re fine,” Bessie said.

  Impossible to focus on her and Duncan at the same time. Instead, Sam kept his eyes on the unusually turbulent sky. Great soft gray clouds piled one atop the other, pushing each other aside like wrestling dogs.

  Bessie said, looking only at him, “Margaret’s death made Aaron miss his father more than usual. He keeps thinking something’s happened to him, that he won’t be there when we get home. Those men we saw in the water …” She picked Aaron up and left.

  Duncan watched them walk away and then turned back to Sam, eyes bright with curiosity. “You were in the same lifeboat?”

  Sam nodded. He’d told Duncan nothing about the night in the boat; what Duncan knew of the torpedo, the flames, the boats in the water, he knew from other survivors, not from him.

  “If you ever want to talk,” Duncan said, pushing aside his floppy hair, “I’m happy to listen.”

  AFTER SAM GRADUATED from college, he mostly kept his work to himself. Axel, busy with his new wife and son, also had new students to train and increasingly relied on his connection to Duncan, who was doing very well as part of his advisor’s group. Duncan and his colleagues shared fly strains with Axel’s lab; Axel and his students collaborated on papers with them, which helped them all. Sam worked alone, steadi
ly and quietly, throughout his years in graduate school, doing nothing without his advisor’s explicit approval, choosing a thesis project closer to his advisor’s heart than to his own and committing to it entirely. He kept in close touch with Avery, who’d gone to England by then, and Avery helped him modify an X-ray source so he could radiate his Drosophila and look for mutations. The experiments he completed were nowhere near as flashy as Muller’s work in this area, nor did he and his advisor gather anywhere near as much data—they were working along parallel tracks at first and then, after Muller had yet another big breakthrough, in support of what he’d already shown—but Sam knew it was solid work, a bandage for his dented reputation. By 1930, when he got his degree, he was able, despite the growing effects of the crash, to find a position in Missouri. In between teaching sections of general biology, he worked every spare minute in his own lab, grateful for what he’d been able to salvage and trying not to envy Duncan, who had followed his advisor out to California and had a much better job.

  Half his salary he sent to his mother, who, in the wake of both her parents’ deaths, had taken in boarders but even so was still struggling to hang on to the Philadelphia house. When he lost his job in 1933, he knew she felt the blow too. Although he wrote to everyone he’d ever met, there were no positions to be had. Axel, who temporarily had to close his own lab, could find him nothing, and Duncan couldn’t, or wouldn’t, help, despite being the protégé of someone who’d just won a Nobel Prize. When Sam had nothing to lose and was on the verge of going back home, he appealed to the man whose paper had so inspired him that first winter at college, and whose field he now shared.

  He’d written to Muller a few times during graduate school, sending results that confirmed or extended Muller’s own and asking about his latest work. At a conference, Muller had tracked Sam down and inspected his most recent data closely; after that, they’d continued to correspond about interesting questions. If a quantum of light could, as Niels Bohr suggested, trigger photosynthesis, was it also the case that an individual ionization caused a mutation? Did chromosome breaks result from radiation’s direct or indirect effects? After Muller left Austin in the wake of a scandal involving his support of a Communist-leaning student newspaper, he went to Berlin, where, he wrote to Sam, he was collaborating with a brilliant Russian scientist who shared his interest in using the tools of physics to explore the nature of the gene. The work was intriguing, the company stimulating, but just as he was settling in, Hitler was appointed chancellor and soon his colleagues began to lose their jobs. Muller accepted his Russian friend’s invitation to help set up a research program and most recently had written to Sam from the Institute of Genetics in Leningrad.

  Was it possible, Sam wrote him, that given his background and their shared interests, he could be of some use at the institute? Secretly, he thought they also shared a disgust with what was going on in their country, the mad inequities that seemed to be destroying every good thing. In Russia, Sam thought, science might assume its rightful role, and scientists, instead of being separated into little fiefdoms ruled by petty kings, would work under the shelter of the state, free to follow their best ideas. He was thrilled when Muller, so enthusiastic himself about the Soviet experiment, found money for a position in which Sam was, if not quite an independent investigator, more than a student.

  Soon Sam was living in Leningrad, exploring chromosomal rearrangements and learning that many of the apparent point mutations caused by X-ray treatment were actually recombinations of broken fragments. Segments were lost, segments were duplicated; he began to get a sense of what size a gene might be, and how it might function when moved to a new position. What if natural mutations were actually rearrangements of the particles in the chromosomes, rather than changes to the particles themselves? Muller proved to be an excellent guide. Not a teacher, as Axel had been; not really a friend, like Avery; he was clearly Sam’s superior, but he was accessible and kind, and Sam was thrilled to be working with someone he’d admired for so long.

  It hardly mattered that, with housing short everywhere, Sam had to sleep in the corners of other scientists’ rooms, for a while in a bed behind a curtain in the laboratory, later in a basement hall. Everything was crowded, everyone was improvising; he was glad to be part of the common flow, and even the struggle to find supplies was worth it—such work, for such a purpose! Surrounded by Russians day and night, he learned the language quickly. And when the institute was moved to Moscow, Sam went too, leaving behind several friends and a woman with whom he’d had a brief affair.

  Writing to his mother—he tried to write home twice a month—he described the farmers and engineers he met, the German Jews who’d sought refuge in the Soviet Union as the Nazis rose to power, the ardently socialist Englishmen and discontented Americans. He met men who’d soldiered in several wars, including one who’d fought against Germans at the beginning of the Great War and then later, in the province of Archangel, with the Reds against Americans. He showed me the white cotton overcoat he’d worn, Sam wrote, which had made him invisible in the snow. He claimed that once, as he’d been scrounging for food in the streets, he’d seen an American soldier leap from the top of a gigantic wooden toboggan run and onto the ice below. Really, I am living in the most remarkable place.

  That winter, as the snow fell and fell—he was never warm, no one had enough fuel—Sam thought often of that soldier suspended in the air. Leaping from, or leaping toward? For all the hardships of daily life here, he still felt freer than he had since his time in Axel’s lab, and he moved through Moscow with a sense he hadn’t had in years of everything being interesting. At the Medico-Genetics Institute he saw hundreds of pairs of identical twins—how eerie this was, each face doubled!—being studied like laboratory mice. He visited collective farms, and he met a geneticist named Elizaveta who’d discovered a remarkable mutant fly a few years before Sam arrived. Walking toward her bench was like walking into Axel’s lab for the first time, the air dense with the smells of ether and bananas and flies fried on lightbulbs, the atmosphere of delight. Elizaveta, who had long, narrow, blue-green eyes below the palest brows, said she knew that genes controlled development: but were they active all the time, or did each act only at a particular period of development, and lie dormant otherwise?

  At meetings—so many meetings!—he listened to talks about the practical applications of genetics to agriculture and the Marxist implications of the theory of the gene. Once, in a dark room after a day of lectures, he watched a film called Salamandra, about an idealistic scientist who’d demonstrated Lamarckian inheritance in salamanders but was then betrayed by a sinister German who tampered with his specimens to make it look as though his results had been faked. Denounced, deprived of his job, he lived in exile until rescued by a farsighted Soviet commissar who proved his work had been right all along. Partway through, Sam grasped that this was a transposition of the life and fate of Kammerer, who’d killed himself after a researcher proved that some of his results had been faked. By then, his own big mistake seemed very far away.

  Working all the time, excited by the new experiments in the lab, he ignored what was happening out on the streets until, after a while, even he couldn’t avoid knowing about the party members being persecuted and executed, those who disagreed with Stalin disappearing. Intellectuals and scientists from different fields began to disappear as well, including geneticists, some of them Sam’s own colleagues. The director of the twins study vanished and his institute was dissolved. Elizaveta, more cautious than some, gave her flies to Sam and slipped away to her grandmother’s village. Geneticists had failed, Sam read in the papers, to serve the state by providing the collectives with new crops and livestock that could thrive in difficult climates and relieve the food shortages. They were stuck in bourgeois ways of thought. If a society could be transformed in a single generation, if the economy could be completely remade, why couldn’t the genetic heritage of crops or, for that matter, of man, be transformed as well?


  In this context, Lamarck was a hero; and also Kammerer (Sam could see, now, why he’d been shown that film); and also the horticulturist Ivan Michurin, who’d claimed that through some kind of shock treatment he could transform the heredity of fruit trees, allowing their growth farther north. Trofim Lysenko, pushy and uneducated, rose up from nowhere to extend Michurinism beyond what anyone else could have imagined. Lysenko hated fruit flies, he knew no mathematics, he found Mendelian genetics tedious. Even his grasp of plant physiology was feeble. How could Sam take him seriously? Lysenko claimed that heredity was nothing so boringly fixed as the Mendelians said, but could be trained by the environment, endlessly improved. At a big meeting Sam attended at the end of 1936, Muller tried to rebuff Lysenko by clearly restating Mendelian genetics and outlining the institute’s research programs. Lamarckian inheritance, Muller explained, could not be reconciled with any of the evidence they’d found.

  Sam was amazed when some in the audience actually hissed, and more so when, after Lysenko responded by dismissing all of formal genetics, those same people stood and cheered. Genetics was a harmful science, Lysenko said, not a science at all but a bourgeois distortion, a science of saboteurs. Muller and his like were wrecking socialism, preventing all progress, whereas he would now completely refashion heredity! His Russian was failing him, Sam kept thinking; Lysenko couldn’t be saying this. What should be so, must be so? Yet his friends heard the same thing. Those who doubted him, Lysenko said, were criminal. A theory of heredity, to be correct, must promise not just the power to understand nature but the power to change it.

  Muller, after making careful arrangements to protect his colleagues, left the country early in 1937, and Sam followed a few weeks later, first selecting breeding stock from the best of Elizaveta’s flies, and then destroying all the papers and letters he’d received from his Russian friends. Of course I understand why you need me to return to the United States, he carefully wrote to his mother, who’d requested no such thing but could be counted on to understand that his letters were likely being read. Back in Philadelphia, writing up his last results from the Moscow lab in the small bedroom where he’d slept as a child, the familiar sound of his mother working in the living room complicated by the movements of the two teachers with whom she now shared the house, Sam began another search for employment. This time he had better luck, finding a position at a small college near the western edge of Illinois. For a while, as he was trying to set up yet another lab—how many times could a person order glassware, brushes, ether, drying racks, all the bits and pieces needed to do the smallest experiment?—he thought about changing fields entirely. If science in the United States was controlled by a few powerful people, and science in the Soviet Union was nothing but a branch of politics—then what was the point of doing anything? Perhaps he’d do better at farming, or statistics, or auto mechanics.