“I'm stuck working with Billie on a dead-end paper; the lab is moving ahead with Cliff's results . . .”
“Sleep with 'em and forget 'em,” Nanette said. “Move on.”
“But I have moved on.”
“I'm getting worried that—” Nanette began.
“So am I,” Robin interrupted. “I've been thinking about going over to see Uppington.”
“Your advisor?”
“Is that wrong? I've got to get some outside advice. I just don't know whether he screwed up his record keeping by mistake or on purpose. . . .”
“I'm not worried about Cliff's results; I couldn't care less about his results,” Nanette said, touching Robin's shoulder. “I'm worried about you. This place gets to people after a while. It's poisonous.”
Robin laughed shakily. “Oh, please don't tell me about the toxins at the institute. I've been listening to Billie all day.”
Nanette peered at her. “You know you can call me anytime—day or night,” she said.
“Are you putting me on a suicide watch already?” Robin asked.
“This is not a joke, young lady.”
“You should get back to your class,” Robin said.
“They're fine,” Nanette said. “Can I tell you a secret about this place? The institute is not worth diddly-squat. Can I tell you about the research that goes on here? People are saving lives every day in theory, in the future. They think their work is the most important thing in the world, and they don't have a clue about what really matters. And you know what matters? The here and now. That's all. The rest is zilch, but scientists can't see it. Their own postdocs call for help, and they don't care.”
“I'm not calling for help,” Robin said, offended.
“Yes you are,” Nanette told her.
“No, I'm pointing out problems in Cliff's data.”
“Robin, Cliff's problems don't matter,” said Nanette. “Compared to your mental health, this research really doesn't matter.”
“I disagree,” Robin said simply.
“Be careful,” Nanette warned her.
“I have been careful,” Robin said, “and it doesn't work.”
7
J
OHN
U
PPINGTON
was English, and overstretched. He had many students to support and futures to settle. When Robin finished her degree, Uppington had suggested that she go to work with Mendelssohn at the Philpott, because Mendelssohn's lab was so small. “I think you might be less neglected there,” he'd told her in his self-deprecating way. He was a short, stocky, slightly deaf advisor, close to seventy. His black hair had almost disappeared, and then sprung up again hopefully in little tufts in his ears and nose, and especially atop his eyebrows. The peak of his career long past, Uppington had settled on a medium-size eminence from which he viewed the field and pronounced upon the future of biological research. He was a member of every academy and society devoted to the national welfare and the greater good. His lab was always bustling, although, like Uppington himself, the place was not what it had been twenty years before.
As he listened to Robin in his office, Uppington was surprised by her story and, although he didn't say so, shocked by Robin's account of Marion's cool response. He had sent Robin to Marion precisely because he'd felt they had so much in common. There was a purity about them, a desire for truth as an end in itself. They were both perfectionists, exacting and patient. It distressed him to discover the two were out of sympathy. Marion, who worked with such care and concentration, should have given more time to Robin. She, of all people, should have respected Robin's opinions.
“Well, Robin,” he said when she had finished. “I don't like to interfere where it's not my business.”
She studied his desk.
“This is really a matter for Marion and Sandy to discuss together. I shouldn't like to interpose my own opinions. However . . .”
She looked up in an agony of suspense.
“The data do seem odd,” he conceded.
She breathed again. “You don't think I was wrong to point it out?”
“No, not at all,” he said. “I would certainly have pointed out the discrepancies myself, although I'm sure there's a very good reason for them. Generally, in cases like this—and they do come up—I would suggest a meeting with the principals, as it were, and one or two scientists outside the institute, for the general purpose of untangling what may be tangled, and clarifying what might be muddled. A great many difficulties can be avoided with the infusion of a little fresh air. I chaired a little committee like this just the other day at MIT, where we mediated some internal differences, and by the end, everyone was smiling, and everyone shook hands. It's really quite remarkable what a quiet conference room and a box of pastries can accomplish.”
Sandy rejected Uppington's idea outright. “Don't you see what she's doing?” he said to Marion. “She's sneaking around behind our backs, slandering us to anyone who'll listen.” It was a brilliant October day, and after finishing their lunches the two of them had stepped out to stroll down Oxford Street, past Harvard's brick Peabody and Semitic Museums, their stately maples green and crimson. “She's trying to undermine the integrity of the lab.”
“Possibly,” said Marion calmly.
“Do you think it's any accident that just as our new paper goes out for review, she's wangled this public interrogation?”
“Private seminar,” corrected Marion.
“You don't mind, do you?” He stopped walking for a moment and viewed her in amazement.
“Of course I mind,” she told him. “But I have confidence in our work. I have nothing to hide.”
“You know that this is all about her obsession with Cliff.”
“You mean their falling-out.”
“Of course.”
Marion thought for a moment, then said, “I think her motives are confused.”
“God, Marion, stop acting so high and mighty.”
“Stop panicking,” she said. “It serves no purpose.”
“I warned you they'd be trouble.”
“Yes, and you seemed to be looking forward to it,” she said drily.
“I don't think you understand how much she hates him.”
Marion refused to let this ruffle her. “We'll sit down together and separate her legitimate concerns from her private grievances. I think it will be a useful exercise.”
“Therapy session, you mean,” Sandy grumbled.
“And if in fact Robin has found some errors worth correcting, so much the better.”
“It's not good, Marion.”
“No, it's very good for the work,” she contradicted. “Maybe it's not good for the marketing of the work.”
Hurt, Sandy turned away. There was an inequality in their partnership, and he felt it keenly just then, the assumption that Marion was the true scientist and he only the workaday clinician.
“You always overstate your case,” she told him earnestly. “Why not accept criticism, whatever the source? Why should we always rush to dismiss any opposition to our ideas? Take the objections seriously and use them to make the work stronger.”
“So you want to reward Robin's behavior.”
“I want to engage her in a proper forum.”
“Give her ammunition.”
“No, diffuse her anger.”
“It's going to be a disaster—you know that,” he grumbled.
“No, it won't,” she said.
He shook his head at her faith in criticism and academic rigor. She was imperious, but also innocent, and he knew he must protect her.
“Sandy doesn't want to sit down with Robin,” Marion told Jacob that night at dinner.
“Really.”
“What do you mean, ‘really'?”
“Nothing,” Jacob said.
She and Aaron looked at him across the kitchen table. It was just that Jacob never spoke without meaning something by it.
“He's worried about what Robin might say, given an opening.”
“Are you worried about her?” Jacob asked.
“I'm worried for her,” Marion said.
“Ah, that's something different,” said Jacob.
“She's become very . . .”
“Depressed?” said Jacob.
“I was going to say desperate.”
“She's never struck me as the desperate type,” he said.
“How does she strike you?”
He didn't answer immediately. He was remembering the afternoon Robin came into his office. He had given her a gift that day. He'd had no idea how she would use it, but he'd given it to her anyway—a bit of knowledge; not a fact, but a piece of his own perspective. Cliff's results were too good to be true. She might have thrown away the offhand remark, small and cutting as a piece of glass. And yet he'd known she would not discard his idea. She had been prepared to hear it, and understood its significance. She'd picked up the broken shard he'd offered her and she'd begun to use it as the lens it really was. She'd begun to question Cliff's rushed data collection, to challenge the procedures, if not the results in the great R-7 paper.
In his gentler moments, Jacob felt a twinge of guilt for arming Robin in this way. He did not care about Cliff, or Sandy, but he did fear he'd opened Marion to attack. He had given Robin a dangerous gift; he had given her his own skepticism. He had not known how far she would carry his point of view. But he did know that Marion would purge herself of anything or anyone interfering with her work. Ultimately, Marion's research was far more important than R-7 or Sandy's claptrap about someday curing cancer. As far as Jacob was concerned, his wife's work was basic science. Cancer was her instrument, not her enemy. The disease was her reveal, framing and displaying the workings of the cell.
“How did Robin strike me?” Jacob mused. “I would say . . . disciplined. The opposite of Cliff.”
“Why do you say Cliff isn't disciplined?” Marion asked sharply.
“It's just my impression,” said Jacob. “Do you disagree?”
She cleared her place unhappily and took Aaron's empty plate with her.
“Hey, wait, I wasn't done. I wanted seconds,” Aaron protested, and with baffled affection Marion forgot Cliff and looked at her little boy, her chess champion, now almost six feet tall, ready to wolf down another helping of chicken.
“Here. I'll get it for you.” Jacob retrieved the plate from Marion.
His hopes for his wife were even more audacious than her own. He had a tendency to wish his own fierce brilliance upon her, and to foresee her unconditional success in his imagination. Such brilliance and success had been wished on him when he was a boy, and in his heart he knew the vanity of such wishes, but he couldn't help himself. He loved Marion selflessly, and demandingly, and not quite fairly. At times, as he had behaved with Robin, he took advantage of Marion for her own good. And yet his actions were so subtle, there was no way Marion would have guessed. He loved his wife, not merely with all his heart, but with all his mind.
Marion accepted his sacrifices for her, had come to expect them as her due, but fortunately for her, she could not read minds, not even Jacob's. She would have been frightened by the devotion to be found there.
Overruling Sandy's objections, Marion calmly marked her calendar for Uppington's meeting. Despite Cliff's shoddy record keeping, she'd bolstered her confidence in him by speaking to Feng privately.
“Feng,” she'd begun as she sat with him in the office. “I want you to know that I will hold anything you say here in the strictest confidence. But I wanted to ask you, because you have worked so closely with Cliff, whether you've sensed anything not quite . . . anything even slightly out of the ordinary in his work.”
Feng started back in alarm, and with some remorse Marion saw the position in which she'd placed him: possible informant on his colleague and friend.
“I only ask,” she said, “because I want to understand how the data got muddled and the numbers transposed. Good practices in the lab are my responsibility. If there was a lapse, I blame myself. I suspect the pressure to get our grant submitted had a great deal to do with it. Did you feel rushed? Did you feel that the experiments could have gone . . . better?”
He watched as she took up her knitting, an elaborately textured sweater of ecru wool. “They could always go better,” he said.
“Well, yes, of course, but there comes a point when the outcome is endangered,” Marion pressed him. “From your own experience with Cliff—did you ever find yourself uncomfortable with his practices?”
A great many thoughts and images flashed through Feng's mind: Cliff's tense behavior in the animal facility, his late hours, and particularly his insistence on injecting the animals himself. Feng remembered the morning he had arrived to find Cliff had already finished the injections. He had resented Cliff's proprietary behavior, although he understood it. However, he dared not confess this to Mendelssohn, even as he deigned not show Cliff his true feelings. Mendelssohn had given him an opening to air his grievances, but he was not Robin.
He had a well-earned abhorrence of this scenario—one researcher pulled out to inform on another. His father had been denounced in this way by his own colleagues, and forced to wear a dunce cap painted with his crimes. His father had been paraded up and down and forced to recapitulate the errors of his ways. At that time, Feng's mother had taught him to lie. She'd brought down the family photos and taught him to lie about each person in them. The two of them practiced until the lies were second nature. All this because they were the wrong sort of people—wealthy, intellectual, and landowning. His father's disgrace had nothing to do with science. The colleagues who had betrayed his father had been coerced themselves, and in the course of time, the betrayers were themselves betrayed. The whole charade had ended years before, but no one in Feng's family had ever been the same.
“He was pushing hard toward the end,” Mendelssohn suggested.
“He worked very hard,” Feng conceded.
“I'm afraid he may have done his work too fast,” she said.
Feng nodded but said nothing, and his silence steadied Marion. There was no one in the lab she respected more than Feng. His integrity seemed to her unimpeachable, and just now his deep involvement with Cliff's work comforted her more than she could say. With her knitting gathered in one hand, she stood to see him out, and she thanked Feng for meeting with her, which he had never known her to do before. She didn't seem herself. She was thanking him and apologizing all at once.