He knocked on Sandy and Marion's office door.
“Yes,” Marion called.
“Could I show you something?” Cliff said, opening the door just enough to speak.
“All right,” Marion said. “Come in.”
“I've got something for the journal article.”
“Cliff, the article is at the copy editor,” Sandy reminded him.
“I know, but this would be easy to insert.” He gave Marion a scrap of notebook paper.
“What's this for?” she asked.
“It's an epigraph,” said Cliff.
“Why would we . . . ?”
“Let me see that,” said Sandy, and he took the paper and laughed. “‘What's your dark meaning, mouse'?
Love's Labour's Lost,
Act 5, Scene 2, line 19.”
“I thought we could use it,” Cliff said. “You know, as a quote at the beginning of the paper. As sort of a lighter touch.”
“A lighter touch?” Marion was genuinely puzzled.
Sandy snorted. “Cliff,” he said, “this is a journal article.”
“Professor Carmichael used to do it. Do you remember the epigraphs in his textbook?”
“No,” said Sandy.
“I remember Carmichael,” said Marion.
“Well, I just thought, his epigraphs were kind of . . . good. Witty.”
“We don't use epigraphs,” Marion said.
Cliff started to explain, and faltered. “Okay,” he said, “I just thought—”
“It isn't done,” she said simply.
“It's pretentious as hell,” Sandy added.
“All right,” Cliff said. Then he couldn't help himself. “Kate found it for me.”
“Who's Kate?”
“Your daughter,” Cliff told Sandy.
“She found this?” Sandy's voice softened as he picked up the lined paper.
“She thought it would speak to the fact that we're looking for meaning in mice, and the meaning is dark and elusive,” Cliff said.
Sandy smiled gently as he looked at the words Cliff had taken down.
Dark mouse.
Sweet little Kate. Then the reverie was over. “We never use epigraphs,” he said.
And Cliff backed off into the hall, embarrassed he'd even brought it up. The data in the paper were his, but his authorship did not extend to personal flourishes. He was just a journeyman, his contributions all subsidiary to Glass and Mendelssohn. Someday he would have a lab of his own; he would be the master and keep postdocs under him. He would have his own funding, equipment, lab space; he might eventually even cultivate his own quirky style. Someday he would achieve all this, and the time did not seem as far off as it had before, but he had not fully earned his independence. How he longed for some small detail just his own.
5
P
ASSOVER WAS
the only holiday Marion celebrated, but she observed it with characteristic rigor. Philomena cleaned the apartment from the tops of the kitchen cabinets to the baseboard in the hall closet. AAA Sparkling Windows came, as did the carpet cleaners. Sandy teased her about this, of course.
“You like Passover because it's hard,” he accused her one day in the office. “Because it's got protocols and you have to organize for it, and turn your house upside down for it, and eat matzo and jam, and suffer for it.”
There was some truth in this. There was a stringency about the holiday that Marion enjoyed. She liked the idea of cleansing body, house, and soul. Passover preparation appealed to her as a kind of cleaning of instruments, the periodic check and renewal of materials in order to get better results.
“You like everything to be difficult.”
“No,” Marion said with a hint of a smile. “That's not true.”
She celebrated Passover in memory of her parents. She had her mother's furniture and silver; it seemed only right to clean it as her mother did. So Philomena polished the delicate secretary and rubbed the silver until it shone. Marion had her father's silver kiddush cup, and her mother's set of pale green Noritake dishes, service for fourteen. So Marion used the cup and set out the china once a year for her seder. She had been given these things to use.
Unusual for her, the morning before the seder, Marion stopped in at the lab briefly, and then took off the rest of the day to instruct Philomena in the kitchen, to set the table, and to buy another dozen eggs for her annual sponge cake. She wrote out place cards in her small, tight handwriting and arranged the names around the table, from Jacob at the head all the way down to Kate and Aaron at the other end. They were not small enough to share the piano bench anymore, but they were still the youngest and always sat together at the foot of the table. In addition to the Glasses, there were various acquaintances and hangers-on. There was, this year, a desiccated but important chemist named Helene Kaufman, and the Nobel Prize–winning biologist Mike Kalb, now gone to seed, in Marion's opinion, as a doomsday prophet on the environment. There was a young mathematician visiting Harvard—Laslo Boulibas, whose name sounded something like a stew. And the Mendelssohns' perennial last-minute guest, an English anthropologist named Jonathan Collins, who was in town for the holiday by way of Tunisia. An eclectic bunch, but this was always the case. People just seemed to turn up. The visiting scholars, Jacob called them. These mystery guests were sometimes brilliant scientists with fascinating research programs, and sometimes neurotic misfits, and sometimes both, but it seemed to Marion essential to include them at the seder table. Where else would they go? She did not entertain merely for pleasure, but with a sense of duty. With almost superstitious generosity, she and Jacob opened up their home each year, just as they set out a cup of wine and opened their door for the possible appearance of the prophet Elijah.
She lifted the white damask tablecloth and checked for dust on the table's claws, which were part cat, part birds' talons, curling around mahogany balls. Here was the sleeping dragon of Marion's childhood, now dusted and entirely in order. Raindrops trickled down the freshly washed windows, but she didn't mind. In the kitchen, the soup simmered in its stockpot on the stove. The front hall smelled of Murphy's oil soap.
When the Glasses burst through the door, Marion caught a pained look on Philomena's long, carefully made-up face—the look of a librarian who has just reshelved all her books, only to be besieged by hordes of noisy patrons. There were many Glasses, and they all talked over each other, especially Sandy. Their raincoats and umbrellas filled the entryway, along with numerous pocketbooks and flowers wrapped in rattling florist paper.
Sandy planted himself in the center of the living room and introduced himself to the other guests with such volubility and handshaking that he seemed in that diminutive space like a wonder of nature come indoors, some spreading tree, extending branches everywhere. “Mike!” he exclaimed to the biologist, and he clasped Mike Kalb's hand as if he knew him well. “Helene!” he cried with equal force, since the octogenarian chemist was quite deaf. “And Laslo, of course! Don't get up. Tell me, what have you proved?”
“Absolutely nothing,” replied the twenty-six-year-old mathematician with a look of sleepy diffidence, as if, at six o'clock in the evening, he'd just got out of bed.
“Jacob. Aaron.” Sandy shook hands with each. “Who are we missing?” Marion was amused to see that Sandy forgot to introduce the extra guest he'd brought, the boyfriend, Jeff, whom Charlotte had invited along. Marion looked the boyfriend over carefully when he came in. His hair was thick and curly, and he had a tanned face and eyes startlingly confident and blue. He was a handsome boy. He wore a shirt and tie like a little lawyer. So this was the infamous Yudelstein? He didn't look so terrible.
“May I help with anything?” Ann asked.
“Oh no, there's nothing to be done.” Marion scanned the living room, counting heads. There were the scholars, and the boyfriend, and Sandy's daughters, all grown so tall, their hair long down their backs. Louisa, Charlotte, and Kate always seemed to Marion rather fanciful. Perhaps it was the blue transparency of their eyes. The girls looked thoughtful enough, but never seemed to be thinking anything in particular. The dark-eyed Mendelssohns were puzzlers and game players, scientific, mathematical in their thinking. Clearly the Glass daughters belonged to some other species.
“We're missing Jonathan Collins,” Marion told Sandy. “But he's always late.”
“Then we should start,” said Jacob, and they all gathered at the table, which extended from the dining room into the adjoining living room.
Jacob cleared his throat, and waved at Kate and Aaron far down the length of the table. There was something so fond and proud in the
gesture that they looked down at their plates and squirmed.
Jacob didn't notice; he began to read “The Story of Passover” from the thirty-year-old New Revised Reform Haggadah, a well-worn book, published in Cincinnati and written by Rabbi Isidore Mendelssohn, PhD, Jacob's late father.
“‘Our forefathers were once slaves in Egypt,'” Jacob began. “‘Now we are free. At the dawn of our existence, we knew man's inhumanity to man, and yet we transcended the bleak conditions of our experience. We progressed toward spiritual liberation. In wilderness we labored toward a new covenant based on the social ideals of truth and justice for all. What great legal system, what constitution, what social norms, have not their foundation in the Mosaic covenant of our forefathers? The Passover story is not merely the epic history of one nation, but the universal story of Western civilization.'”
No one liked the Mendelssohn Haggadah, not even Jacob. He had never cared for his father's purple prose, his dogmatic universalism, his constant literary parallels between the Passover epic and Milton's
Paradise Lost.
In Isidore Mendelssohn's commentary, Pharaoh became a tragic figure much like Milton's Satan, and Pharaoh's soldiers were the rebellious angels, falling into the sea. For years, Marion had suggested that Jacob read a different Haggadah at the table, something more—or rather less self-consciously—modern. But Jacob could not bring himself to discard his father's work. He, who understood intuitively that old science must give way to new, could not condemn his father's commentary as dated. He heard his father's voice in every sententious sentence. Every line was freighted with the PhD in English literature for which Isidore had labored. The effort showed to Jacob, because he knew that his father's father had not finished college, and he knew how his father had worked and taught at the Hebrew Union College seminary, and written his dissertation over many years at night. He heard the pathos in his father's proud and grandiose Haggadah. The self-conscious dignity of the book, its very pedantry, signified to Jacob better than anything else on Passover what it meant to be newly free.
Lacking these insights, the others at the table endured the seder as best they could. Sandy began to amuse himself by playing with his silver dessert spoon—casting it at different angles to catch the small nodding reflection of the old chemist, Helene, who wore a cameo of a lady who was herself wearing a miniature necklace with a tiny diamond on a chain. Helene's sleepy face was now drooping so that her chin nearly touched that diamond. Soon she would graze her empty soup bowl. Charlotte was having a better time. She'd slipped off her shoes and was rubbing Jeff's leg under the table, while he tried to contain his laughter. Next to Jeff, Laslo tilted back in his chair and eyed the ceiling, doubtless contemplating all those theorems that had eluded him before. Only Mike Kalb listened intently as Jacob read. There was some important comment Mike wished to make, and he kept raising his index finger, and shaking his Nobel mane, but Jacob was reading as quickly as possible, and he didn't even look up. At the bottom of the table, far in the outfield, Aaron cast a furtive glance at Kate, a look both humble and curious.
When at last the reading was done, and the singing of songs, and the explanation of each item on the seder plate, Philomena ladled out the chicken soup with matzo balls, and the guests came back to life. Mike Kalb could now make his point that the ten plagues could be read as metaphors for environmental catastrophe. “The water turns to blood, right? The country is overrun with frogs. We've got sickness in the cattle. Boils. It's the whole ecosystem out of whack. And yet the pharaoh ignores each new problem that comes up. The whole order of nature is upended, and the government looks the other way. That's very powerful to me.”
“I see,” said Helene, gingerly sipping her soup, “or, more accurately, I feel, that you have sterling silver spoons, Marion.”
“Yes? What is it, Helene?” Marion called back. Helene had a soft, quavery voice, difficult to hear above the others at the table.
“The sterling conducts the heat much better than plate,” Helene murmured into her bowl. She was close to ninety, and so famous for her fifty-year-old discoveries in chemical thermodynamics that she was accustomed to people craning their necks to hear her speak. Over the years her modesty had grown, so that now she was as soft-spoken as she was deaf.
“I wanted to ask you about Robin's cells,” Sandy told Marion.
“No shop talk,” Marion told him.
“Why not?”
“Because this is a religious holiday,” Marion said.
“Not to me,” he shot back impishly. “I assure you none of this means anything to me.”
“You sound like your father,” Ann murmured.
“He sounds like
my
father,” said Mike.
Sandy grinned. “No. My father was assimilationist.
I
am assimilated.”
“Bravo!” cried Jonathan Collins, the wiry, bearded, tardy English anthropologist, who had just popped up suddenly, as he so often did, walking through the unlocked door. He was carrying a bottle of wine, and wore a clean but rather wrinkled white dress shirt. “Have you finished the seder already, Jacob?” he asked, rushing in and embracing each of his hosts.
“Oh, yes,” said Jacob. “We like to start early and get through it as fast as possible.”
“I see, I see,” said Jonathan with professional interest. “Is that the assimilated tradition, as it were?”
“We don't just race to the end,” Marion protested, a little embarrassed.
“Yes we do,” said Jacob.
“I like the seder,” Marion said.
“But which is more important?” Sandy asked. “The Haggadah or the dinner afterward?”
Much debate ensued as Philomena cleared away the soup bowls. Marion maintained that the religious ritual was more important, while Sandy teased her to admit that the whole point of the exercise was the food. Meanwhile, Jonathan Collins was asking if what he'd heard about the Pasteur Institute and the new AIDS drug was true, and Jacob was saying yes, and Sandy no—even while he tried to shoo off Jeff Yudelstein, who wondered if Sandy would be interested in being interviewed for the
Crimson
about his new work. “No, no, no,” said Sandy, barely glancing Jeff's way. “No, I don't think I'll have time for that.”
“We'd love to do a short piece on you guys,” Jeff said.
Sandy shot him a look as cold as a blast of liquid nitrogen, a look that meant: Since when are you “we,” and since when am I “you guys”?
Jeff did not wither, and Mike was about to divulge a scandalous bit of information, when Helene tipped a full glass of red wine onto the tablecloth and Marion jumped up to blot the stain. Still, Jeff persisted like an insinuating mosquito, until Sandy practically shouted, “Look, you can go speak to the postdocs, all right?” and had the satisfaction of catching the disappointment in Jeff's eyes.
Now the conversation hushed. Marion was carrying out a platter laden with stuffed breast of veal. Philomena followed with new potatoes, and in procession after her, Ann, along with her three daughters, all of whom had been commandeered, carried side dishes. “Exactly like the three graces,” Jonathan quipped as Louisa, Charlotte, and Kate brought in their platters. “That is to say, the Jewish graces: Kugel, Farfel, and Tzimmes!”
“Oh, God,” Charlotte said.
“Have another glass of wine,” Louisa told her.
“I would, if it weren't so bad,” said Charlotte.
“Was that an anti-Semitic comment?” Kate whispered in Louisa's ear.
For the girls, Passover was just the same as it was every year. Marion's dark, cluttered apartment, the long white table, the Miltonian Haggadah, the cut-glass salt dishes with their miniature silver spoons, the gossip about science and the jokes about religion, the pale green dessert plates with slices of Marion's own sponge cake teetering on top of them. The cake was what the girls always waited for, even now that they were practically grown up. Marion baked a Passover sponge cake that was exceedingly tall, fine, and dry, and when she spooned compote onto each plate, the cake sponged up the syrupy fruit, and as Helene said, the reaction between the two was sublime.