Prizes

  “Karl, let me be perfectly honest with you about Dad.…” She hesitated, then said almost under her breath, “I’m scared out of my wits.”

  The fax arrived late one autumn evening at the beginning of her second year at MIT. It had first been sent to the Department of Physics at Berkeley, the affiliation Isabel had listed in her controversial article.

  The chairman then called the da Costa home in Cambridge. At first Isabel was surprised and delighted to hear her old adviser’s voice. After they had exchanged warm greetings, he said something which made her squeal with delight.

  “Yes, that’d be great. Fax it to the department. I’m sprinting there so fast it’ll still be coming out of the machine. Thanks, thanks a million.”

  She hung up and turned to Ray.

  “You’ll never believe this, but the Italian Academy of Science has chosen me for this year’s Enrico Fermi Award.”

  “The Fermi?” Raymond gasped. “That’s just about as close to the Nobel as you can get in physics. When’s the ceremony?”

  “To be honest,” she said, still shaking her head in disbelief, “I was so knocked out by the news I can barely remember anything else he said. Anyway, it’ll be in the fax. Oh Daddy …” She dissolved into tears of joy and threw her arms around him.

  As they embraced, she thought, I can’t wait till Jerry calls tonight.

  “Isabel,” Ray murmured. “I’m so proud of you.”

  “I couldn’t have done it alone, Dad,” she responded.

  And as they hugged each other they realized something else that neither acknowledged: Isabel was now taller than her father.

  The Enrico Fermi Prize was established by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in honor of the man who had been Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Rome. He was one of those rare scientists at home in the practical as well as the theoretical field.

  After receiving a Nobel Prize in 1938, Fermi immediately escaped Mussolini’s fascism and emigrated to America, where he became a leading member of the team in Chicago that created the first sustained nuclear reaction—an experiment that culminated in the construction of the atomic bomb.

  Like so many other scientific prizes, even the smaller ones, the award was not merely a plaque or statuette, but included a monetary gift as well. In Isabel’s case, her bold work in the area of high-energy physics had now earned her seventy-five thousand dollars.

  Their 747 landed in Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci Airport at dawn. Three distinguished-looking gentlemen in charcoal-black suits met the da Costas as they disembarked: the president of the academy, Raffaele De Rosa, and two members of the executive committee.

  As one of them presented the radiant, dark-eyed, sixteen-year-old with a large bouquet of flowers, what seemed like hundreds of cameras clicked and whirred from the roped-off areas beyond.

  While the welcoming dignitaries were bowing and scraping and referring to her as Signorina da Costa, the paparazzi had no such reverence. Dozens of photographers shouted “Isabella, give us a smile!” “Run this way!” “Wave your hands to all of Italy.”

  While their baggage was being fetched for them, Isabel and Raymond were ushered past customs. Then the trio led them out to where a stretch Mercedes limousine waited.

  Raymond, who was unaccustomed to imbibing anything but Miller Lite, had found himself unable to resist the charms of the Alitalia stewardesses who had foisted upon him several glasses of Asti Spumante. He swayed slightly as he trudged along in the company of two professors of physics, following a few steps behind his prize-winning daughter.

  On the long journey into the still-sleeping city, one of the scientists read off, in heavily accented textbook English, the timetable of events that had been meticulously planned by the organizers. It included press conferences, luncheons, more press conferences, television interviews, two dinners in her honor—one of them the night before the big event, when her stomach would already be full of butterflies. All this would be built into the ultimate apotheosis, the official presentation of the awards in the Aula Magna of the university.

  Isabel was expected to make an acceptance speech, after which all would retire to the Hotel Excelsior for the grand banquet that would conclude the program.

  While her father had spent most of the flight relishing the amenities of first class, she had used the time to pore over her speech, which would be carried live on RAI, the Italian national television network.

  The committee had spared no expense to demonstrate their appreciation of the young physicist’s achievements. The da Costas’ luxurious quarters in the Excelsior, which they had reserved for them, were graced by at least a dozen different arrangements of flowers.

  Instinct drew Isabel to the most lavish of the bouquets. As she suspected, it was from Jerry: “Break a leg. Love, J.”

  She quickly hid the card in her purse.

  Ray was so sozzled that he excused himself and went to his bedroom to sleep it off.

  In contrast, Isabel ordered a continental breakfast and strong coffee so that she could best avail herself of the twelve hours’ respite granted them before the ceremonial tornado began.

  After working for about an hour, she rose from the graceful antique desk and tiptoed to her father’s bedroom door. Hearing him snoring loudly, she hurried to the phone, extracted her little address book from her leather passport case, and dialed a number.

  “Hello,” she said in a cautious whisper, still frightened that Raymond might somehow overhear. “This is Isabel da Costa. You should be expecting my call.…”

  She paused for a moment, listened, and then stated, “No. I won’t have the money till the actual ceremony. But I’ve made sure your fee will be covered by a banker’s check. It’s as good as cash. Anyway, your merchandise had better be as terrific as you say, or the deal’s off. Okay, see you then. Grazie.”

  44

  SANDY

  The greatest day in Gregory Morgenstern’s life was the blackest in Sandy’s.

  Scarcely three years after the publication of his discovery of the antibodies for liver cancer, Morgenstern was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine. As though the honoree had been an unsung hero for so long that the scientific community had rushed to redress their oversight as soon as possible.

  The pain of the announcement was bad enough for Sandy. But the ceremony itself produced a veritable dagger in his heart. For Greg—the quintessential family man—had taken not only his wife to Stockholm, but his daughter and his granddaughter as well.

  By some cruel trick of fate, photo editors all over America were drawn to the picture of the winner and his three ladies.

  And ironically, Sandy’s generosity had been the cause of this further distress. For, according to the terms of his divorce, Judy needed his permission to take Olivia out of the country.

  He had wanted very badly to say no, for suddenly here was something he could deny Morgenstern, who had otherwise despoiled him of everything.

  And yet Sandy could not be so hardhearted as to make his daughter a hostage to his own bitterness and rage.

  He also calculated that if he insisted on his right of veto, Judy would use it as ammunition against him for the rest of Olivia’s minority.

  “I really feel bad about this,” Sandy admitted when Judy asked his permission.

  “I think I can understand,” she offered. “But I know you’ll do the decent thing—whatever your feelings in the matter, you don’t want to hurt Olivia.”

  Sandy sighed. “I’ll give my consent on one condition.”

  “Sure, Sandy.”

  “That you never use the word decent to me again.”

  When his daughter returned from the ceremony, she innocently reported to Sandy on the phone, “It was really neat, Dad. You should’ve been there.”

  When Greg had first committed his intellectual robbery, Sandy had consulted Milton Klebanow, the greatest expert in patent law on the Harvard faculty, to find out if he could receive some modicum of justice.

>   At their initial meeting Klebanow was not wholly pessimistic. After all, Dr. Raven could produce the evidence of his own lab books, and they could find expert witnesses who would evaluate and testify to the importance of his contribution to the project.

  As they spoke, Sandy was gripped with a sudden fear that—at the very moment they were chatting—Morgenstern or one of his minions might be confiscating his proof. The instant the consultation ended, he rushed in a panic to the lab to gather all the documents—including his contract. Obsessed with the notion of spies and espionage, he avoided using the university machines and photocopied them in a store on Massachusetts Avenue.

  The next day, Klebanow phoned him at the faculty club, where he had found temporary refuge.

  “I’m not a scientist,” he began, “and the formulae are beyond my ken. But two things strike me. First, even I can tell you’ve done a significant amount of work, and second, it’s too late to do anything about it.”

  Sandy’s heart sank. “But yesterday you—”

  “Yesterday I hadn’t read your contract,” the lawyer answered. “I don’t suppose you ever have either. Otherwise you would have understood the clause that automatically assigns the rights to anything you create to the director of the lab—in this case, Professor Morgenstern.”

  Sandy’s spirits nosedived. He knew that even if he had been aware of this clause, he would have trusted Greg enough to sign the contract anyway.

  At the height of the emotional conflagration, he had resigned his post at MIT, confident that he could easily find another. He was correct, for universities like Columbia and Johns Hopkins, which were better informed on the nature of his role in the Morgenstern research, took the initiative and sought him out. After he wrote letters to several other major institutions, he was swamped with offers.

  Yet the terrible injustice so embittered Sandy that he made a conscious effort to become a cynic. From now on, he determined, all his research would be motivated by advancement and rewarded with material gain.

  It soon became clear to him that the big money was in combating the aging process. Everybody was afraid of dying. This, after all, was the universal enemy. A scientist who might slow the process—and especially one who could stop the clock—would have the world at his feet and millions in the bank.

  Midnight oil was burning in laboratories all over the world as they studied the mechanisms that imposed limits on the life span. Legions of other scientists were also hunting for the genes that debilitated various organs of the body and contained the invisible clock of aging.

  Hence, taking a page from his father’s operating manual, Sandy “pitched” to all the establishments who interviewed him the idea of an institute to study cell degeneration.

  In the end he accepted a professorship in microbiology, with a lab of his own, at Cal Tech.

  He had a variety of reasons. There was, of course, the prestige, the high salary, the state-of-the-art facilities. Not least, though, was the promise of funding for an Institute of Gerontology. There was also the fact that his father was living in Beverly Hills.

  And, by moving to the West Coast, he would be as far away as possible from Gregory Morgenstern.

  Groundbreaking work had already been done in the field. At the University of Texas a team of doctors came upon a deadly pair of genetic activities: Mortality One, which, when switched on, sets a slow deterioration in motion.

  After this there was Mortality Two, which finishes the job shortly and swiftly. Yet by deactivating these processes, they were able to stop senescence.

  Sandy’s own efforts concentrated on trying to halt the progress and reeducate these genes, and ultimately reverse their destructive activity.

  Unlike diseases such as cystic fibrosis, which have been pinpointed to one particular chromosome, aging is controlled from perhaps as many as a hundred different sites in the genome.

  Some aspects of aging are visible. Sandy himself was experiencing a trivial but painful example as he combed his hair each morning. He sometimes could not keep from counting the strands that came off in his hand.

  This is but a benign indication that other systems are gradually failing. The telomeres—end bits of genes—lose a few base pairs whenever they copy themselves.

  Little by little the losses add up, until they begin to cause damage. And yet Sandy and his colleagues discovered that an enzyme called telomerace can be used to prevent time’s once inevitable erosion of DNA. In other words, as he joked, they could now “grow hair on a gene.”

  In spite of all his misanthropic protestations, Sandy had an unconscious human motive for his research.

  For all subjects that attract scientists relate, however distantly, to something in their psyche. And perhaps Sandy’s many projects were, at least in part, inspired by a preoccupation with his own father’s growing old.

  As a result of many years of exposure to the California sun, Sidney Raven had developed three black spots on his face. An expert dermatologist diagnosed them as malignant and surgically removed them. In his view, there was little immediate danger of the carcinoma spreading to more vital organs.

  But the mere fact that his dad was coming ever closer to the limit of life spurred him into spending more and more time on his quest. Deep in his soul, he cherished the irrational thought that he could make his beloved father immortal.

  There had been an additional element in Sandy’s choice of university—one he had not mentioned to Sidney—for his move to Cal Tech would place him in the same time zone and the same city as the former Rochelle Taubman.

  Yet, what little he now knew of her was almost exclusively from the media.

  Although the split from Elliot Victor did not make banner headlines in a town where marriage is only a seasonal sport, the events that followed propelled Kim Tower once again, permanently it would seem, into the Hollywood firmament.

  “Have you heard the news, sonny boy?” Sidney trumpeted down the phone.

  “I’ve been in the lab all day, Dad.”

  “Well, it’s stunned the town, but she’s coming home in triumph.”

  “Who? What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten Rochelle,” Sidney teased. “I can’t tell you how proud it makes me feel. They’ve just announced that Miss Kim Tower—aka Rochelle Taubman—is succeeding Sherry Lansing as head of Fox. It’s the highest executive position ever held by a woman in Hollywood. As a matter of fact, my sources tell me she’s already on the lot.”

  “My God,” Sandy exclaimed, “that’s sensational. Perhaps I should send her a telegram or flowers or … something.”

  “Why not call her up, sonny boy? She’d probably be glad to hear from you. Remember, you knew her when she was a minnow. Anyway, suit yourself,” Sidney philosophized. “I’m just going down to watch the dailies. Why don’t you drive in and meet me at Chasen’s so I can buy you the best bowl of chili this side of heaven? We can raise a glass to Rochelle.”

  “Great idea. Want me to pick you up?”

  “Don’t bother, kiddo. I think I’ll go home and change. See you at eight.”

  Though not in the movie business, Sandy nonetheless felt a pang of inferiority as he drew up in a mere Chevrolet a few yards from Chasen’s green-and-white-striped awning and had to wait for the valets to park not one, but two Silver Clouds.

  When Sandy gave his name, the maître d’ reacted with a slight bow of the head and led him through the lavish twilight of the restaurant to a rich red-leather booth.

  Declining the suggestion of a cocktail, he ordered a glass of mineral water. When his eyes had grown accustomed to the semidarkness, he scanned the restaurant in hopes of glimpsing a famous face.

  Sandy was so engrossed in stargazing that he lost all sense of time. Having spotted—so he thought—Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, he suddenly realized that it was nearly nine and his dad still had not arrived. He flagged the waiter and asked for a phone.

  “I’ll bring one to the table right awa
y, sir.”

  Moments later Sandy was dialing Twentieth Century-Fox.

  One ring, two, three. Perhaps the studio was closed for the night. No, that was absurd. There was always somebody awake—even if it was only a lowly screenwriter.

  Finally, a male voice answered. Clearly at this hour calls were rerouted to Security.

  “Can you tell me if there’s anyone still working in the projection rooms?” Sandy asked.

  There was a pause. The man was no doubt buzzing the various numbers.

  “I’m afraid there’s no answer from any of them,” he announced.

  “Then, can you give me Sidney Raven’s line, please?”

  There was another pause.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” said the voice. “There’s no one of that name on our list.”

  “Are you serious? I want Sidney Raven, R-A-V-E-N. He’s been with Fox for years.”

  The man did not hesitate this time. He repeated like an automaton, “I’m sorry. There’s no extension for anyone of that name. Now you have a good evening, sir.”

  The line went dead. And Sandy went into shock. After fretting for another fifteen minutes, he was about to dial again when his father suddenly appeared. Normally dapper and fastidious, Sidney was unkempt, disheveled, his shirt open and tie dangling sloppily down his chest.

  “Christ, Dad, what’s the matter?”

  “I’m dead, sonny boy. You’re looking at a walking corpse.”

  Sandy rose quickly, put his arms around the older man and helped him to sit down. “Let me get you a drink,” he offered solicitously.

  “I think I’ve had too much already.”

  Only then did Sandy realize there was whiskey on his father’s breath.

  “Please, Dad, what happened?”

  “Are you kidding? What the hell d’you think takes place at a firing squad?”

  “Here, Dad,” Sandy responded, offering him some mineral water and trying to keep his own wits about him. “Calm down and tell me all about it.”