5
C
LIFF CAME
to the next lab meeting with his hair still damp from the shower. He wore clean jeans and a T-shirt printed with
TOSCANINI'S DARK CHOCOLATE #3.
He and Feng were going to present the new results: sixty percent of the cancer-stricken mice injected with R-7 were now in remission. The disease had run its course in the controls, but in the experimental groups the engineered virus seemed to stop cancerous cells from multiplying altogether. The tumors shrank and shrank and seemed to disappear. What might this mean in the future for cancer patients? An alternative to the poisons of chemotherapy? In more than half of the diseased mice, R-7 acted like a heat-seeking missile, entering and subverting only cancerous cells, and skipping cells that were growing normally.
This was a great moment. Even as they gathered in the conference room, Prithwish and Natalya and Aidan were placing bets on how Feng would describe the new developments. Aidan and Natalya both bet on “random luck” as Feng's designated catchphrase, while Prithwish wagered on “some new fluke.”
As it happened, Feng did not say a word to downplay the numbers in his lab book. If the work had been his alone, he might have undercut the results. However, Feng deferred to Cliff when it came time to delineate and extrapolate from the numbers of mice in remission and their near-perfect health. He gave Cliff all the glory: the discussion of molecular and genetic issues; the ongoing work to understand where and how the genes infiltrated and subverted each cancer cell.
There were only seven people in the room, but, as Aidan said later, Cliff might have been onstage in front of thousands; he had such presence. Cliff spoke with total mastery. This came of his long hours and late nights. This came of his immersion in the data. Prithwish did not doodle. Aidan did not sprawl across two chairs. Cliff was riveting.
In the silence afterward, Prithwish and Robin stole glances at Sandy and Marion, who sat together enthroned in their chrome chairs. Shrewdly, Sandy examined Marion. The very color of her eyes seemed warmer, a lighter shade of brown. Her features softened, her knitting lay forgotten in her lap. Her lips, usually tight and drawn in concentration, now parted with delight. She turned to him, and for a moment she was so beautiful that Sandy caught his breath. Strangely, he felt as though he were remembering Marion from another time, although he had never known her when she'd been truly young. He felt almost disoriented by the loveliness of the moment.
Now,
she was telling him wordlessly. Now we must collaborate. Now we need to work with Hughes at Stanford, and contact Agarwal at Cornell. We've waited to announce initial results, but now is the time. And aren't you glad?
Jacob was practicing when Marion came home that evening. He stood in the small back bedroom he used as his study and practice studio, and he was working at Bach's Partita in E minor, pouring out the notes and double-stops from his nimble, sweating hands. He had a way of tunneling into Bach that was both expressive and introverted. The theme and variations drew him down distant paths, and he had no sense of the red welt rising on his neck where the violin chafed under his jaw, or the wet patches on his ebony fingerboard. He had no thoughts of these, or bills to pay, or his large and mundane classes, the students with their yellow highlighters and confusion over problem sets.
He did not notice Marion standing in the doorway until he paused a moment and turned the page. Even then, he didn't acknowledge her until he was done.
“I think we'll get a paper out of these results,” she said.
Jacob rocked back on his heels, holding his violin in the crook of his arm, the bow swinging slightly from his index finger. “‘I think we'll get a . . .'” He echoed her words as if they'd fallen far down inside him. Then, surprised: “Oh, really?”
“Yes,” she said.
“They're that good?”
“Better than what we had before.”
“But you'll need to reproduce them.”
“Of course.”
He gazed at the music before him. Was it really time to publish? Was Marion entirely ready? Or was the timing her capitulation to Sandy? Silently he posed these questions, but all he said to Marion was “Are you hungry?”
“Well, that depends.”
“Aaron and I were thinking about heating up the pot roast.”
“I could keep you company,” she said.
He put his hand on her shoulder as he followed her into the hall. The apartment had a stillness about it, as if no wind dared enter. Marion's papers lay exactly where she'd left them, spread over the dining room table and living room sofa. The kitchen seemed empty and unfamiliar. The housekeeper, Philomena, had come and washed the dishes, and put the groceries and chessboard away. Without Jacob's violin, the only sound was the tap-tapping of Aaron typing in his room on his beloved Apple IIe.
In the kitchen Jacob took the pot roast out of the refrigerator. “Why don't you call Aaron,” he told Marion.
She felt as though she'd been away longer than a day, as if she'd been gone for weeks and journeyed to far countries. When Aaron came to the table, she thought he might have grown another inch.
“What did you do at school?” she asked him.
“We had a math test.”
“And how was it?”
He shrugged, surprised she'd ask such a banal question when so much was happening in the lab. He'd seen the change in his mother; she'd brightened visibly. Her eyes were almost merry, her step quick in the hall; even her voice was slightly different, unguarded and at times excited. “Do you think your paper will get into
Nature
?” he asked her.
“We'll see.” The question made her smile.
When he was seven or eight, Aaron used to ask Marion regularly: “Are you going to be famous?”
“We'll see,” she'd tell him.
“Are you famous already?”
“No, not yet.”
“She will be,” Jacob told their son.
“A lot, or just a little bit?”
That always amused her. “At least a little bit,” she said.
She ate quickly now; she hadn't realized her appetite. When she finished, she jumped up to clear the plates.
“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 . . .”
“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 . . .”