“And Cliff?” Sandy asked her.
“He's struggling a little,” she said.
“Why?”
“Why do you think? He's overwhelmed, and he's distracted by lawyers and reporters, preparation for the hearings—”
“Oh, please.” Sandy cut her off. “Let's snap out of it, shall we? I am so goddamn tired of these excuses. This is exactly the time when he should be doing his best work. We should be cracking the whip so Cliff gets the job done. Show ORIS what kind of stuff his results are made of.”
“It's easy for you to say,” Marion said reprovingly. She was feeling overwhelmed herself. On the one hand, she wanted to burrow into editorial work, revising the bone tumor paper until the storm outside blew over. On the other, it was maddening to hone these minor contributions while the great thrust of the lab's efforts remained in abeyance. Cliff's new article, unpublishable until the inquiry was over, remained in escrow.
She had begun to feel like a woman with a bag of gold hidden in her house. She longed to secure her treasure in an academic journal, but she had to wait at least another month for the results of the ORIS inquiry. She'd had such plans for Cliff's work, such schemes for new experiments. She'd scarcely told Sandy the half of them, and now she despaired lest thieves carry her ideas off or, more likely, forge their own versions independently. She wondered if circumstances were distorting her perspective. The inquiry that kept her from publishing, the scrutiny that hampered all their work, the defense that took up so much of her time, only seemed to magnify the potential of R-7. Paradoxically, in her mind, Cliff's results seemed better and better the longer ORIS questioned them. She, who had always practiced diffidence, now suffered from the suspicion that she'd touched something great.
“The inquiry takes its toll,” she said quietly.
“Look, the inquiry is something we can beat. Scientifically it's irrelevant. It's pure politics; it has no merit. Have you seen the paper? We've made the point abundantly clear. Letting ORIS get to us is the big mistake. Cliff should be working harder than ever.”
“I don't think you realize—”
“I realize everything,” Sandy cut her off.
He had just that morning seen Kristen Braverman, a breast cancer patient a lifetime younger than Mary Stoughton. Kristen's children were still in grade school. Sandy was treating her aggressively. Her face was gaunt, her skin had a gray tinge, poisoned as she was from chemo and her even more virulent disease. She wasn't doing as well as he had hoped, but there were other drugs. Sandy had tried to impress this upon her.
Her eyes were pure blue, fear blue. But he never looked too long into his patients' eyes. Far safer to take their hands, and laugh, and joke. He had taken Kristen's hand firmly in his and told her, “If you think you feel bad, imagine how your tumors feel.”
She had smiled wanly at her husband, as if to say “This is what I have to put up with from my doctor.” But Mike Braverman was not yet ready to make jokes with an oncologist. He was still reeling from his wife's diagnosis, still growing accustomed to the idea that his wife could die. He was just a greenhorn searching for the words, the funds, the winter clothes for life in this new country of disease.
“What other options do we have?” Mike asked Sandy Glass continually. That morning he followed Sandy down the hall and past the nurses' station, and into the pastel lounge, and still, somehow, he pressed for a better forecast of what lay ahead.
Sandy might have paused to commiserate with Braverman; he might have let the tears fall, but he did not believe in mourning prematurely. Conversely, he might have brushed off the grieving husband and moved on to his next appointment, but he was never so overtly brusque, even when he was out of time. A few words about the spirit? A little prayer? Advice on the healing powers of meditation? Sandy left that to the chaplains. He stood, instead, with his patient's husband by the floor-to-ceiling window in the lounge, and gazed out at the city with its row houses and greening parks, its labyrinthine streets turning and feinting and doubling back upon themselves. He gazed out across the Charles to Cambridge, and he said, “We're working on what can be done.” He spoke with the scientist's version of the royal
we,
which he knew families found most comforting. “We're working on new treatments even now.”
“Why don't you stop making excuses for Cliff and send him on rounds with me?” Sandy told Marion. “That would light a fire under his—sorry, imbue him with a sense of urgency.”
Cliff did have a sense of urgency, and still he struggled. Downstairs, he scanned each cage, looking in on his pink wriggling charges. He gazed at his newly healthy mice, the latest group he'd identified as in remission. Quickly, he inspected the troops row by row. One cage caught his eye. Were some mice missing? There were supposed to be four inside.
He pulled the cage out and held it up to see. Two animals were busy. The other two were lying still and small at the back of the cage. They were alive, but barely moving. They weren't bloody; there were no signs of fighting, but even when he prodded them with his gloved finger, they didn't run about.
What was this? Were they dying? Were the tumors back? Or was there an outbreak in the colony? His heart heaved inside of him, even as he isolated the two limp animals. This wasn't good; this wasn't good. An outbreak, just when he needed his animals most. He would euthanize the afflicted ones, of course. Dissect them and try to understand. He would go to Marion. They would contact the veterinary staff immediately. He closed his eyes for a long moment even as he stood there before the cage racks. He was jumping to conclusions. Two infected mice didn't necessarily spell disaster. Still, he felt a sick foreboding.
He went to see Beth at her desk on the first floor and tried to tell her what he'd seen.
“If they begin dying now, then that's the end. I won't get a second chance.”
Her eyes crinkled with concern as she picked up the ringing phone and said, “Philpott Institute.”
He began shaking her Lucite box of paper clips, dumping the clips into his palm and then pouring them back into the box again.
“One moment,” Beth said, “and I'll connect you.” All the while her eyes were fixed on him, worrying, wondering to see him in such a state.
“I'm afraid things will start going wrong,” he confessed when Beth hung up.
“But I'm sure you'll figure out exactly what's happened.” She tried to reassure him.
He shook his head. Everything had to be perfect; this was the moment for reinforcing his earlier work. The mere premonition of a problem would fuel doubt, and inflame ORIS.
“It's just two sick mice, right?”
“No, no,” he said impatiently. “It's the others that I'm worried about.” She had no idea what he meant.
All the rest of that day he and Marion worked together. They euthanized the sick mice and the other animals in their cage and sent off all four bodies for analysis. They examined the other mice in the colony and found no evidence of illness. Marion was quick and calm.
“We won't know anything until we get the autopsy results,” she told Cliff as they took off their disposable booties.
“And what if . . . ?”
“We won't borrow trouble just now,” she said. Of course she knew exactly what he feared. Like him, she dreaded an outbreak in the colony, but to her rational mind, the risk at this point was only theoretical. Cliff, and Cliff alone, was seized with premonitions that all his mice would die. His imagination raced forward and he envisioned Marion's hard decision to exterminate his animals. He'd lose his new work, the crucial evidence for his ideas and his innocence. He tried to dwell on better possibilities, but he could only consider this terrible end.
That night he lay on his unmade bed and drifted in and out of sleep. He dreamed of his animals stiff and dead, half buried in their bedding. He dreamed of cages and cage racks, huge pieces of equipment, centrifuges, spectrometers crashing down out of the clear sky. They were beautiful colors, the deepest inky blues and blacks, so that even as they fell he couldn't help but look. The machines were upon him, crushing him, and he was reaching out to shield himself, and then reaching desperately for Robin, pulling off the thick bathrobe in which she'd wrapped herself, stroking her pale freckled shoulders, loosening her long fine hair. He wrapped his legs around her and pulled her tight on top of him, and he had never felt so warm as when he held her there in his arms, except she wouldn't let him kiss her.
He woke up hot, throbbing, and confused. He washed his face and paced his room, trying to calm himself. Still, he was horrified for dreaming of her, and wanting her, and most of all for being possessed by her like that, for sensing her inside of him. He felt in some terrible way he was becoming like her, assuming the worst. Attacking him from without, she'd found a way under his skin, so that suddenly, unexpectedly, he began to see the world through her eyes. Research, which had once been dreary, and then addictive, now seemed a tragic enterprise, one false hope yielding to another, progress shattered by bad luck, and the greatest expectations doomed to disappointment.
10
S
HE THOUGHT
about him constantly, about what he'd done, and what he'd said, but above all what he'd do when he heard the inquiry's findings. She wondered how Uppington and Marion and Sandy would respond, but she thought especially of Cliff, because, secretly, she knew the inquiry's conclusion. She'd been contacted by Morgenstern, and she knew at least part of what ORIS planned to report. In just days the inquiry's conclusions would come out. Would he admit the truth at last? Or would he strike back harder? Suddenly, she was half afraid he'd hurt her in some way. She stayed up late, and sometimes left the lights on at night. Once, she heard a great boom, and jumped up terrified in bed. She crept out to the living room and saw that an overloaded bookshelf had crashed to the floor. There was no risk he'd come near her. She told herself this all the time. Still, she could not shake her fear, the guilty price she paid for her own long struggle to hurt him.
One May night she and Nanette were leaving the Harvard Square Nickelodeon. They were picking their way through the onslaught of incoming moviegoers, and caught in this stream, Robin looked up into Cliff's face. He was with Beth, and he saw her instantly. Her cheeks burned, and she felt herself blushing to the tops of her ears. With a glance he pierced her offended sense of justice and cut her to her resentful core. She turned away, repelled, humiliated. For what could she uncover in his expression? No guilt, no confusion, no fear at all. Only disdain.
All that week she felt the hard accusation in his eyes. She felt his hatred everywhere, even in Uppington's lab, where the other researchers tacitly sided with him. They were coldly civil, but spoke to her only when necessary.
There were myriad ways to fail honorably. You could fail to get a job; you could experience equipment failure, a failure of communication, a failure of nerves; you could fail to get funding. You could get scooped. Your advisor could be stolen by another university and you could be orphaned, displaced, and dispossessed. Your lab could move and your animals could die, or refuse to breed, or suffer post-traumatic stress. You could pick the wrong project in the wrong place, or the right project at the wrong time. All these were acceptable ways to fail, established ruts. Robin, however, insisted she'd failed because other people in her lab were cheating. That was unheard of. She was “the whistle-blower” in all the papers, famous as an accuser, but in Uppington's lab she was a turncoat. Uppington had taken her in, and his students accepted that, but they didn't have to approve of what she had done.
Only one postdoc spoke kindly to Robin. She was overweight and English, and she was new to the lab. She wore running shoes and black polyester pants and lumpy sweaters, and she tied her thick hair back in flyaway ponytails. Her name was Simone, and she had trained in Israel.
The first time Simone sparked a conversation, Robin assumed it was just because she was new, and the others hadn't informed her yet of Robin's status as political pariah. But Simone spoke to Robin more than once about her roommate troubles.
“I'd like to find my own flat,” she told Robin, “but the rents here are outrageous!”
They were standing in the cold room, where Robin was looking for a batch of cells. “Did you go to the housing office?” Robin asked.
“Of course. Where do you think I got those outrageous quotes?” Simone said.
Robin opened a great vat of liquid nitrogen and pulled out a long metal rack crusted with ice.
“It's ridiculous to live here,” said Simone as one of Uppington's graduate students rushed in. He was big and clumsy, and he bumped Robin hard as he squeezed by.
“Hey!” Simone barked at him.
“Oh, sorry,” he said.
Robin closed the vat. White vapors curled into the air theatrically. “Thank you,” she whispered to Simone as she escaped into the lab.
The telephone was ringing and ringing there on the wall, and Uppington's students bent over their work with amazing indifference. Robin could not help thinking they expected her, the refugee, to answer the phone for them. She waited, but the phone kept ringing. She waited, and no one budged.
“Hello,” she said at last, as she picked up the old-fashioned black receiver from the wall.
“Yes. Robin Decker, please.” It was a man's voice, high-pitched and self-assured.
She was so startled to hear her own name that she didn't respond at first. Then she said softly, “This is she.”
“Oh, hi, Robin,” said the man, as airily as if they spoke all the time. “This is Art Ginsburg.”
Ginsburg! Her eyes darted over the lab equipment and the other postdocs.
“I wanted to congratulate you,” he told her.
“Why?” she asked, and suddenly she sensed the others weren't concentrating so hard; they no longer turned entirely away from her. “What do you mean?” She held the receiver tightly to her ear.
“Good news, of course.” He was trying to be collegial, even avuncular. Immediately, she feared something had gone wrong with the report, with ORIS, with the journalist's article. She strained to hear more, but either Ginsburg did not want to betray a confidence, or he was enjoying his inside knowledge far too much. Even his congratulations were a kind of one-upmanship. He just said, “You'll see tomorrow in the
Times.
”
Grim-faced, Sandy Glass jogged the streets of Chestnut Hill. His newspaper had not yet arrived. Still, he steeled himself for what was to come. He took a turn around the lower drive of an old run-down estate. The trees were flowering now, the grass and street sprinkled with white petals. He hardly noticed. He'd lain awake thinking the night before, then drifted off in early morning and nearly overslept. He'd pushed himself out of bed and out the door.
He did not know exactly what the
Times
would print, or the extent of the damage he'd see that day, but there was no question in his mind he would overcome every obstacle and untruth ORIS threw before him. He had no doubts at all; he was entirely unafraid. He saw himself alone in battle, surrounded but undaunted, like a firefighter engulfed in flames. He gave no thought to Robin. His only concern was for the people in his lab. Getting them out safely was all that mattered to him. He was determined to carry Marion safely to the ground.
Usually so careful about pacing himself, he ran too hard and came home winded. He bent over at his own gate, cramping, gasping for air and scanning the bluestone walk for the newspaper. The lights were on and Ann was waiting for him in the kitchen with the
Times
open. He felt a prick of annoyance that she had seen the article first.
“Sandy.” She was searching for the words. “It seems as if . . . Well, you should . . .”
He snatched the front section, saw his name, and inhaled the entire article in a moment. He sucked it all in from first to last.
The New York Times
had “obtained” a copy of ORIS's draft report on the lab. The report's official release was weeks away, but here it was in black-and-white, for everyone to read. ORIS had found evidence of fraud.
“Thayer called while you were running,” Ann said.
Of course there was no question how the
Times
had obtained the copy of the ORIS report. This was Redfield's work. Redfield had lost his temper, and he'd paid for that, but then he'd got his temper back again. He'd waited for his moment and sprung the ORIS findings on an unsuspecting public, ambushing his enemy like a master predator.
Ann spoke again. “I'm so sorry,” she said, “but I'm sure—”
He didn't hear her; he was already diving for the phone.
“He left his home number,” she told Sandy, still assuming he was going to call Houghton-Smith.
“No,” he said, dialing impatiently, stretching the long telephone cord away from her, into the dining room. “I have to talk to Marion.”
The news shocked and spread through the family. The injustice of the findings, their surprising, vengeful publication—all strained belief. Louisa was on her way out the door when Charlotte phoned her.
“It's so unethical,” she said to Charlotte. “How can the press just jump on something like that—preliminary findings! They're being published as an indictment! And their so-called interview of Dad is just three lines of comments, and he says everything he told them is quoted wrong.”
“Journalists just want to be first,” Charlotte said. “It's just a race to them. They don't actually care about accuracy.”
“Where are their standards?” Louisa asked, and she flopped down on her bed with the phone in hand. “They have no interest in the truth!”
“Journalism isn't about the truth. You know that,” said Charlotte. She was calm and self-assured, quite confident in her hatred of Jeff and journalism and all journalists. It was Louisa, the older sister, who shook with disbelief. To see her father humiliated this way! To see him presented by ORIS as the willing dupe of an ambitious postdoc. She understood that there would be no quick comeback from this, no easy recovery. This was such an assault on her father's reputation that she suffered the blow herself; she trembled for him.
“What will he do?” she asked as soon as she could reach her mother. She was pacing now with the phone, up and down her apartment's narrow living room.
“Well,” her mother said, in the confident, reassuring tones Louisa hated most. “Of course, we'll be talking to our lawyer about the next step. Marion is speaking to her attorney as well. We will need to see the full text of the ORIS report, and of course we'll file an appeal.”
“When can I talk to Dad?”
“He's just left for the institute,” Ann said, and then she added soothingly, maddeningly, “He's going to be fine.”
Louisa couldn't believe her mother was still using that voice on her. The “it's perfectly normal” voice their mother put on to confront puberty and other crises. Ann couldn't win, of course. She understood her daughters' fears so well, they felt they had no privacy. Sandy was never empathetic; the girls could count on that.
“Don't worry, sweetie,” said Ann.
Oh, save it for Kate, Louisa thought as she hung up.
But away at Hill, Kate had already heard from her mother. She'd crouched down next to the pay phone in the stairwell, and Ann's warm, familiar tone was sorely needed. Kate dreaded going to the Commons for breakfast all alone with this news—her father's work and good name savaged. And what of Cliff? How would he survive this report and keep on working? She felt even worse for him—and then guilty for it.
Hunger alone compelled Kate to leave her room and go to breakfast. In the Commons, she picked up her tray and walked past the table where the dining hall staff laid out newspapers for those students who subscribed. There lay stacks of
The Boston Globe
and
The Wall Street Journal,
and of course piles of
The New York Times.
She tried not to look. She turned away, and then her father's name on a loose paper caught her eye anyway. The article was boxed, below the fold. Her stomach pitched as she saw the word
Glass
and the headline “Of Mice and Men.” She took two small boxes of cereal, a bowl, a glass of milk, and a banana, and fought the impulse to turn back to her room. She had never felt so conspicuous as she forced herself inside the dining room.
“Hey, Kate,” Nick said, and Stephen pushed his own newspaper onto the floor to make room for Kate's tray.
She slipped into a chair and studiously began peeling her banana.
“Oh, God,” Monty said companionably, and yawned and stretched.
“Shall I get you some coffee?” Sylvie asked.
“Thanks,” said Kate, although she never drank it.
When Sylvie returned from the coffeemaker the Europeans frequented, Kate tried to take a sip from the cup offered her. How cold the world seemed. The bitter coffee lingered, terrible on her tongue.
The others hovered at the table, saying little. The dining room began to empty, and Kate gathered her books for Latin. “I don't really feel like going,” she confessed.
“Then go somewhere else,” said Stephen.
She looked skeptically at him.
“It's only a half day today,” Monty pointed out. They had school on Saturdays, and half days on Wednesdays.
“I'd go with you,” Stephen added carelessly.
“I can't cut class,” she said.
“Then skip out in the afternoon.”
Faintly, she remembered Charlotte's warning about Stephen. Much stronger at that moment was the fellowship she felt from her pseudofriends. Her cheeks stung as she realized the others were ministering to her in their own way, clustering around her in solidarity. They were aristocrats, and said nothing about it. However, there had been other occasions when each of them had needed lifting up. There had been the day Matthew's father was profiled in
The Wall Street Journal,
his face crosshatched in pen and ink, although the text of the article was far less delicate, with its references to “the man known as the junk-bond king.” There had been the dustup between Sylvie's mother and her art dealer, less commonly reported, but painful nonetheless. There had been Stephen's parents' divorce, and Monty's brother's expulsion. They knew a little about public humiliation in the Hill Literary Society. Kate hadn't understood that before. Now she looked at the others with surprise and gratitude, and some embarrassment. Suddenly, however briefly, she had become one of them.
Sandy would have been touched by his daughters' concern if he'd had time, but he was at the institute, taking on all comers. He'd rushed to Peter Hawking first to gauge Hawking's reaction to the news.
“Well, it isn't
good,
” Hawking told Sandy as they sat together in the director's office.
“Of course it isn't good,” Sandy said, “but it's an opportunity to take a stand.”
“I think we've taken the stand,” said Hawking drily. “We've fought our little battle here for academic freedom.”
“But it's not a little battle,” Sandy said. “It's a war, and ORIS is just one part of it. Don't you see—they're in Redfield's pocket. This isn't just about us, it's about controlling scientific research through government funding. First he slanders us, and then he'll slash our funding. Don't you see? He wants to legislate our research programs. And that's got to stop.”