“We can do that,” Jacob told her.
“But I was planning to stay home tonight,” she said.
“Why?” Aaron asked. “Don't you want to go back?” There was not the slightest resentment in the question. He knew he would have raced back to the lab if he'd been in his mother's position. She was the family traveler, and while Jacob and Aaron missed her, they hoped for gifts on her return. New articles, new observations, the deciphering of hidden codes. They were used to her, and expected these times. Her mind was filling up with experiments; her imagination was rising, and it washed over the rest of her life like a tidal sea.
Sandy's house was not such a sanctuary. The girls were home for the long weekend. Kate was practicing piano in the living room, while Louisa tried to read on the couch. Charlotte was in the library watching the relentless news station, CNN. Smoke filled the kitchen, where Kate had forgotten to take the dessert out of the oven. She'd wandered off and let the meringues burn. Ann came running, straight from the shower in her bathrobe.
Friday was the day Ann didn't teach. She was usually holed up in her little home office, working on her book. For many years, her study on invalidism in Victorian life, Indisposed, had been languishing, appropriately enough, in notes and outlines, and three unfinished chapters. Lately, however, the project had a new lease on life. Two daughters grown and nearly independent, and the third away at school, combined with a research leave the year before, had revived Ann's hopes. She turned to her book every moment that she could, and often imagined herself finishing, composing her final acknowledgments to numerous colleagues and librarians, and particularly to Sandy and the girls, who have diverted me so . . . delightfully? so thoroughly? Which word to choose?
She snatched an oven mitt and lifted out the tray of black meringues just as Sandy came home.
“Hello, sweetness!” He crushed Kate in his embrace. “Hi, cutie.” He hugged Charlotte and turned off the television with his free hand. “There you are, Weasel. Where's your mother?” He bounded into the kitchen, where Ann was scraping chocolate cinder cones into the sink, and came up from behind. “We're going to have our paper.”
“Oh, good,” she said. “Could you wash this for me?”
“What was this?” He chipped at the black cinder cones with a knife.
“Ask your youngest daughter,” Ann said. “Those used to be dessert.”
“Kate!” he called into the living room. “Come here. You've incinerated our dessert.”
“I'm sorry,” she began as she stepped into the kitchen. “I—”
But he was already distracted, telling Ann, “Even Marion says we've got results. It nearly killed her to admit it, but she did.”
Gaily, still brimming with the events of the day, he took his place at the head of the dining room table and glanced at his daughters—each so bright, and so accomplished. As he looked at them, his pleasure was only slightly tempered by the frivolous choices each had made in pursuit of that folly, that strange-feathered bird, the so-called liberal education. Louisa, with her engravings of gnats' wings. And Charlotte, majoring in art history and women's studies, for God's sake. No one even dreamed of majoring in women's studies when Sandy was in college. No one had heard of such a field. When he was a young man—all right, a nice Jewish boy—there had been business, and there had been law. And then, shining brighter than either of those, so difficult, and so glorious, there was medicine, the trifecta: the promise of economic security, the possibility of greatness, and at the same time, a social good.
Was it the times in which his daughters lived? Their relative affluence, growing up? The famous boarding school that each in turn attended? Their mother's literary influence? Not one of the girls was turning out like him.
“How's school?” he asked Kate as he served himself from the platter of capon.
“My Donne paper won the Parrish Hill prize,” she said.
“Attagirl,” said Sandy. “What was it about?”
“Macrocosm and microcosm in Donne's Devotions.”
“Okay, and what was the point?”
She bristled at the question. “It was just about his conceit that man is a little world, and the world is like man.”
“Okay, a conceit,” Sandy said. “So what's it good for?”
“His meditations are about his illness taking over his body the way floods cover the earth—”
“What did he have?” Sandy asked immediately. “What was the diagnosis?”
“Well, nobody knows for sure,” said Kate.
“Why not?”
“Dad.” Louisa defended Kate. “Obviously John Donne's medical records did not survive.”
“That's a shame,” said Sandy. Then, to Kate: “So, what was the upshot?”
“The upshot?”
“Yeah, what did you find out? What was the point?”
“He was talking about how complex and how vast man is,” Kate said, floundering. “And how small and susceptible at the same time.”
“Susceptible to what?” he asked with sudden interest.
“To sin,” she said.
He laughed at that. The very word was archaic, to his mind. Sin was like some dread medieval contagion long ago contained, some previously invisible microbe carried by rats or fleas. Sandy's ideas about right and wrong were intricate and situational. He injured his subordinates' feelings, overworked his residents, exaggerated on certain occasions, kept silent on others. Professionally, he fought hard and dirty. But he certainly did not sin. “So, that's what it comes down to?” he asked Kate. “People sin?”
Abashed and angry, Kate glared at her plate.
“Sandy,” Ann chided him. He provoked the girls with a kind of pride, but Kate was too young to understand him. And already he'd turned his attention to Charlotte.
“Why aren't you eating?”
“I don't eat chicken,” Charlotte reminded him.
“It's a capon,” Ann pointed out, as if that made a difference.
“I'm applying for a summer research grant,” Charlotte said, changing the subject.
“Oh, really? To do what?”
“Go to South America.”
“Just go to South America?”
“To do research for my senior thesis.”
“Oh, of course—so you'll be wandering all alone through . . .”
“Not alone,” she assured him.
“Not with Jeff,” Sandy said.
“If you'd just—”
Sandy lifted his hand. “Stop. I don't want to hear it.”
“Can I just say one thing?” Charlotte asked.
“No,” said Sandy. He was simply in too good a mood. He would not listen to a single word about Charlotte's athletic, ambitious college swain. Jeff from Dunster House. Jeff from the Crimson. Jeff the squash player. Jeff Yudelstein. That ridiculous name! Not just an ordinary Jewish name, but an overstuffed knish of an appellation. Yudelstein was halfway between a yodel and a strudel.
“Dad! Could you just listen?”
“No!” He mimicked her outraged tone exactly. His blue eyes were starry with ferocity and fun.
When the children were small, Ann had done the disciplining at the table. She had taught the girls their manners, their letters, how to count—“Do two twos next to each other make twotee-two?” Louisa had once asked her—and shown the girls how to read people, as well as books. During those years Sandy was rarely home, and she had put in the hours with the girls during the afternoons and evenings, and on the weekends, and in the mornings before school; and perhaps this was why she was the calmer parent now that they were growing up. Lately she couldn't help feeling that she and Sandy were trading places—that he was taking up the enforcer's cudgel. Grateful for his efforts; sometimes dismayed but often amused, she hung back a little from the fray. She placed more confidence in her daughters than Sandy did, because she had raised them herself.
“You think you're so cute,” Charlotte rebuked Sandy, “sitting there, controlling the conversation . . .”
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“You're like Major Barbara's father,” Kate said. Her voice was rebellious, even as she got a little lost in her literary allusion. “You're like what's-his-name . . .”
“Andrew Undershaft,” Ann murmured.
“You have this . . . smart-alecky way,” Charlotte said. “You sit there and start lecturing everyone with this . . .”
“You're like Undershaft when he tells his family whatever they think and do is no good for anything, but manufacturing gunpowder is actually useful,” Kate told Sandy.
“And you don't even know what I—” Charlotte said.
“I catch on quickly,” Sandy told her.
“You catch on. You can't even let me finish a sentence.”
Sandy waved her off. “I know how they're going to end.”
The girls were huffy by the end of dinner, but they did appreciate it when he pitched in with the dishes. As soon as they'd finished, Sandy was up, stacking plates. “Bring them in here,” he called out to Louisa from the kitchen. He had just thought of a perfect abstract for the paper. He would have to call Marion as soon as he finished washing the plates. He imagined he'd catch her back at the lab.
But the lab was empty. Robin and Natalya had gone home. Cliff and Prithwish, Aidan and Feng, were all heading to the Wursthaus in the Square to celebrate. The young men pushed and shoved as they opened the heavy institute doors. They stepped out into the cold spring evening, teasing Feng about his stocking hat, striped green and white. “Where'd you find that one?” Cliff asked.
Grinning, Feng shrugged. They all knew his odd, frugal taste in clothes.
The four of them tramped over to Francis Avenue and cut through the parking lot there to get to the Harvard bio labs, where they'd pick up Mei.
“Shouldn't we stick to the path?” Prithwish suggested. None of them had boots.
“Nah.” Cliff plunged ahead in his sneakers. “Takes too long.” The moon was bright; the sky lit up, reflecting light from icy puddles. They jumped over parking-lot chains sparkling with melting snow crystals, and beat a path to the corner of the bio labs' courtyard. There, in summer, the Harvard grad students sometimes challenged the Philpott postdocs to volleyball, but now the net was stowed away, the ropes and pins stuffed into boxes in the redbrick bio labs' basement. The courtyard showed patches of grass and slush in the center, while the edges were still piled with stale snow.
“I'll be right back.” Feng headed through grand doors adorned with gold friezes of animal, insect, and plant life: giant wasps, ants, bees, mushrooms, elands. Frisky, joyous from the day, Cliff scooped up an icy snowball. He took careful aim and pelted one of the brass rhinoceroses that guarded the building. Then he shot the other, for good measure. The snow smacked and splattered against the verdigris flanks of the great animals.
“Dare you to climb up there,” Aidan said to Cliff.
“Just give me a boost.”
“That's cheating.”
Cliff looked at the ornamental, but anatomically correct, rhinoceros statues. These were no mere crouching lions; the rhinos stood on brick pedestals, and their height from toe to horn was at least six feet.
Cliff scrambled onto a pedestal and reached upward for a handhold on the brass rhino's ridged back. “Give me a push,” he called down.
“It's too high,” said Aidan.
“Come on, just push me up.”
“Here, I'll help you,” said Prithwish, and he tried to push Cliff from below. “Ouch!” Prithwish yelped as Cliff tumbled down onto the slushy ground.
“Once more.”
“This is your last chance,” said Prithwish with mock severity.
Cliff jumped onto the pedestal, Prithwish pushed, and Cliff flung himself hard onto the rhino's smooth, icy back. “I'm up!” he yelled, triumphant, straddling the beast. He leaned forward, trying to touch the metal horn.
Prithwish and Aidan were laughing at him. Cliff's jeans were soaked through.
“Can you get down?” Prithwish inquired politely as Feng and Mei emerged from the building. Seeing Cliff up there, Mei covered her mouth with her gloved hand.
“Yeah, I'm coming. I'm coming down,” Cliff called.
“Well, come on, then,” said Aidan.
Cliff should have slid off, or, by rights, he should have fallen. But he did not fall; he swung his legs up and knelt on the statue's back. He crouched there for a moment, and then, in one beautiful movement, found his footing and balanced like a surfer on the back of the rhino. He heard his friends cheering and laughing, but he didn't look down. The night shifted around him. The courtyard was no longer square. Long arms outstretched, he fought to stay upright another moment and then another, until, whooping, he jumped far into the air, far into the soft white night, to land and roll in the matted grass and scant, melting snow.
Part III
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1
ONLY ROBIN was unhappy. No one excluded her. No one ignored her. On the contrary, Marion and Cliff asked her daily for progress reports on her experiments. In April, Sandy and Marion submitted the R-7 paper and set Robin to following up Cliff's work. She was supposed to discover whether Cliff's virus was effective on pancreatic cancer cells. Meanwhile, she had no time for her bone tumor work; the new project had fallen by the wayside. She had felt lonely before, toiling in isolation on Sandy's blood collection, but this was worse. This was like being drafted to join a war effort. This was everyone working together in the lab with gung-ho good cheer, and singing Glass's party line. A brutal, jingoistic marshaling of resources for R-7.
There was nothing inappropriate or unexpected here. Cliff had results, and the lab was pursuing them. This was Cliff's time. As a graduate student Robin had waited almost a year to file her dissertation, because the whole lab was concentrating on pushing another student out the door. Stefan had been there longer; his case was more urgent. For a good nine months the lab devoted all its resources to Stefan's project. The techniques were new, the genetic manipulations cutting-edge, but the psychology was utterly traditional. Dutifully, like younger daughters waiting to marry, Robin and the other grad students had worked and waited to finish their own degrees. “Absolutely, after Stefan,” Uppington had promised her, “you'll be next.”
But Robin was not a graduate student anymore, and she had no assurances at the Philpott that she would be next in anything.
At night Cliff stayed late in the lab, and Robin walked home to Waterhouse Street. She did love her apartment, rent-controlled and right on the Common in an old brick building. Her place managed to be both small and rambling, the bathroom down a long narrow passage, the kitchen right near the bedroom. There was not a single square corner; every wall stood at an angle. She loved to take off her shoes and slide in her socks on the smooth, old hardwood floors.
She had no roommates. There had been a goldfish, but only briefly. A year and a half before, she and Cliff had attended the wedding of a pair of frugal postdocs from one lab down. Instead of flowers, a goldfish in a glass bowl stood as centerpiece for each table. Despite her protests, Cliff had insisted on bringing a fish back to the apartment. He'd named it Linus, for Linus Pauling, and left it right on Robin's bookshelf. For days the fish stared at Robin, bug-eyed, creepily fanning its tail. She was sure it was going to die, and dreaded walking in the door to find it floating belly-up. Finally she made Cliff take Linus back to his place. She often told herself she'd rather live alone.
She sat on the couch and ate pita bread and tabouli salad from the container, showered, changed, and brushed her teeth. In her nightgown she sorted her mail and wrote out a shopping list. Note taker, list maker—inevitably she became secretary for any group to which she belonged. She kept a journal. Nothing fancy, just a blank book of graph paper she had found. She penned her entries in neat black print, sometimes several sentences, sometimes only a few words. She did not try to record all her feelings, as she had when she was younger. She kept a diary for the simplest reason, so the day would not slip away.
She had a
quiet fear of vanishing and leaving the world without a trace. She'd published nothing of importance. She had a fear of disappearing when she'd hardly begun. This was not a weepy, sentimental melancholy of hers. She simply suspected she would die young. Her own mother had died at forty-one, when Robin was sixteen. Robin was now thirty-eight. Those were the facts; no cause for existential crisis. She had managed, even at the time. She had been in tenth grade, and missed school the day of the funeral, a Monday. The next day she'd taken a history test on the rise of the city-state of Venice. She'd received the highest score in the class. Her teachers were amazed at this. She actually overheard two of them talking in hushed voices in the hall: “Do you know who got the highest score?” She'd wondered what they took her for, and why they were so surprised she didn't fall apart. The test was easy. She'd prepared. That was all. Her grades had never slipped when her mother was sick. They'd only improved. Her teachers might have understood if they'd thought about it. Her mother was dying of breast cancer, and Robin sat up at night and studied. There was nothing else that she could do.
So now she had a doctorate in biology from BU, and worked and worked in the Mendelssohn-Glass lab, and, naturally, she was a little afraid—not overwhelmingly fearful, but slightly afraid—of dying too soon and wasting her life. It was nothing, really; it hardly showed; it was like claustrophobia, or fear of dogs. She joked about it. “If I ever live that long,” she'd say. Or, cheerfully, “I'm planning to be dead by then.” The jokes were superstitious, to ward off fate and fear.
Her mother had left her with a feeling of impermanence, and a mission as well. She joked about the one, but never said a word about the other. She had buried the mission deep within her, the rusty desire to combat cancer as a scientist. Valiantly, hopelessly, she felt that even if she could not reclaim her mother, she might make some inroads against the disease. Anyone might have guessed this motive in her, but she tried to hide it, dedicating herself silently to her work.
Time was not on her side. This was true for everyone, but Robin understood it better than most. Because of this, certain people annoyed her. Those whose parents lived to ninety. Middle-aged people with both parents. She tried to be patient with them, but they took such a fey delight in themselves. Disease and disaster happened to other families, while these innocents just burbled along. They just lived and lived, and everyone around them lived forever. World without end. Only very occasionally, disaster struck. A father dropped dead. A boyfriend fell sick. There was an accident. The shock was terrible to these novices; they were so angry at God. They had known in theory, but never really known, that anyone could die. They grieved for this. Then, like the stuffed animals in The Velveteen Rabbit (a book much quoted at the goldfish wedding), these victims were transformed; they became real.