Nora Jane (39 page)

“He can sing,” a teacher told them. “You should train that voice.”

“Why is everybody here?” Little Freddy asked. He walked straight to his father and put his hands on his father’s knees. “What
did they do to you at the doctor’s office?”

“Gave me some bad news,” his father said. “They said I have to have a lot of shots. I have to have about two hundred shots
and the shots will make me well, but first they’ll make me so sick I’ll have to go to the hospital where Andean and Sivagamu
work—and get this, I can’t even have visitors for a while. I’ll have to talk to people on the phone and look out the window
at you. Bummer.” He smiled widely as if he had just told Little Freddy the funniest joke he knew, then took the child into
his arms. “You know what the worst thing is? The thing that’s making me sick is the part of our blood that keeps us well.
My blood is such a good fighter it has outdone itself, made itself too full of white-cell fighters and not enough good old
red cells that run around carrying oxygen to our muscles. So, what can we do? We’re all here to talk about how we’ll keep
the bookstore running and boss you kids around while I’m sick.”

“I’m going to be the boss,” Tammili said. “Because I’m the oldest.”

“No one knows you’re the oldest,” Lydia said. “It was dark in the cabin and only Dad was there. He could barely keep everyone
alive. It’s a wonder we didn’t all die and Momma isn’t sure which one of us came first, so quit saying you are the oldest.”

“She probably is the oldest,” Nora Jane put in. “I thought you said you were going back to school after lunch.”

“We are,” Lydia said. “Come on, Tammy, we need to get going.”

“We don’t need a boss,” Little Freddy said.

“I do,” Nieman put in. “I need one every day. Or else I forget to give hugs to my uncles when they are right in the room.”
Little Freddy gave his father’s cheek a kiss, then walked over to Nieman and moved into his embrace.

“Please eat lunch,” Nora Jane said. “We have to vow to all be the healthiest people in the world so we can take care of Freddy
while he fights this thing. We have to break any bad habits we have and start concentrating on the main important things in
life.”

“What are they?” Tammili couldn’t stop herself from asking.

“Physical health, concentration, meditation, love, philosophy, poetry, literature, music, living in the moment,” Freddy said.

“Breathing exercises,” Nieman added. “Knowledge, learning, geology, astrophysics, medicine, caring, thinking, sleeping, children,
anthropology, history, archaeology, history — I already said history, didn’t I?”

“We have to get going,” Tammili said. The twins kissed their parents and gathered up the small lightweight backpacks Nieman
and Stella had given them for their sixteenth birthdays and went to the garage and got into their old Mercedes station wagon
and drove off to return to school.

“Where are they going to put the shots?” Little Freddy asked.

“I don’t know,” Freddy answered. “I guess just in my arm but some people get shots in their hips, you know, and they say you
can’t even feel it if you get them there because the hips are so fat and strong.”

“Let’s go see about the hot-tub project, Little Freddy,” Nieman said. “You can tell me if you’re learning anything in kindergarten.
I still think you ought to quit that school and just go to work at the lab with Stella and me. You’re wasting too much time
at that school.”

Nieman and Little Freddy finished their tuna salad and rye bread and took their cookies and went off to look at the construction
of the new hot tub on the stone porch overlooking the bay. The wide vista out across the water and into the Pacific Ocean
was interrupted by the great red bridge and made especially beautiful today by a long string of cirrus clouds, so perfectly
designed and moving so slowly in the balmy October air they seemed painted on the sky.

Two Hispanic men were at work setting beautiful smooth stones into the walls of the tub, which was so large it could hardly
be called a hot tub anymore and should be called a hot pool. It was going to be fed by an underground spring the plumbers
had found by accident while investigating what they thought was a leak. Nora Jane had had the idea of building a hot tub on
top of the spring, which had led to a seven-month project that still was not finished.

“
Hola
,” Little Freddy said.
“Quê pasa, mis amigos?”

“Come and look,” they said in English, and Little Freddy and Nieman climbed down into the pool and inspected the stones.

“Carlito not coming today,” the older man said. “He have to take his wife to the dentist for her teeth.”

“Has to take,” Little Freddy said, seriously. “He has to take.”

“Has to take,” the man repeated.

“
Bueno
,” Little Freddy said.

Nieman and Little Freddy took a seat beside the pool and watched the men working. They never talked much when they were together.
Nieman had watched Little Freddy being born. They were deeply bonded.

In the kitchen, Nora Jane and Freddy were alone for the first time since the bad news had enveloped them like a cloud. They
looked at each other for a long minute, then Nora Jane went to him and took his hands and held them against her chest. “It’s
live or die time,” Freddy said. “I’m not going to lose my life, N.J. I don’t feel that I’m going to. It’s just going to be
a long hell of a fight and we have to make it. I’ll be out of it; you’re the one who has to be strong. You may get mad at
me for being sick. I think that’s normal. We just have to live each day and see what happens. We have today. We have, for
God’s sake, this house, these children, this tuna salad, we have Nieman Gluuk, we have doctors, medicine, miracles. Ninety-nine
percent of what we have is good and then we have this other thing with my white cells but that’s not the main thing in our
lives. It’s just the battle we have to fight this winter and maybe this spring. Maybe summer.”

Nieman came back into the kitchen. “I’ve got it,” he said. “We need to call in Henry Wilkins. I mean it. We need some meditation
updating. We can do it on Sunday nights, like we did in the seventies. I’m going to call Henry this afternoon.”

“We’re reverting to hippie bullshit?” Freddy started laughing. “We’re calling in the gurus?”

“Meditation works,” Nieman said. “It heals. It helps. We need all the help we can get.”

Before he became a biochemist, Nieman Gluuk had been a film critic for the
San Francisco Chronicle
. He had spent ten years seeing every film ever made in the world plus all the ones that were being made. His ability to read
body language was like radar, and what his radar told him now was that Nora Jane and Freddy wanted to be alone.

“I want to take Little Freddy down to the labs for an hour,” he said. “Stella will still be there. I promise not to let him
look through the electron microscope again. I’m really sorry about that. I never dreamed he’d take it so to heart.”

“He scrubbed himself to death.” Nora Jane giggled. “Then he forgot about it, I guess.” “Well, I’ll be more careful. I’ll have
him back by five. Is it all right if he goes?”

“Sure. It will be good for him to get out of here until we get used to this.”

Nieman took his leave, went to the balcony, retrieved the child, and hurried toward his automobile.

“So why were you correcting Diego’s English?” Nieman asked. “I’m not fussing. I’m just asking.”

“He told me to do it. He’s trying to get good in English so he can run his business better. He told me he’d tell me Spanish
and I could tell him if he says the wrong words.”

“So what Spanish has he taught you so far?”

“A lot. He told me a bad word to call Charlie Isaacs if he’s mean to me again. You want to hear it?”

“Sure.”

“
Sirveengweeen sa
. It means something really bad. If you say it to someone in Mexico they have to kill you for saying it.”

“I wouldn’t say it at school if I were you. A lot of those teachers are bilingual.”

“I might say it to Charlie though. If he hits me or something.”

“If he hits you, you tell me and I’ll tell his daddy. His daddy was a mean kid too. His daddy used to be mean to me.” Nieman
reached behind him and gave Little Freddy the high sign as well as he could from the front seat. “You’re the best kid I’ve
ever known, Freddy. If anyone is mean to you, you just call me up and I’ll fix it.”

“It’s okay. Are we going to that smoothie place when we get done at your office? I really liked that smoothie you and Stella
got me last time.”

“We can get anything you want this week, old buddy. This week we do anything we think up to do.” Nieman parked in the parking
lot behind his office and got out and unbuckled Freddy and hand in hand they went into the building.

In the kitchen, Nora Jane moved into Freddy’s arms and they held each other for a long time without speaking. She took one
of his hands and moved it down her dress to her hips and then she began to make love to him.

“I don’t know if this will work,” he said.

“It might,” she answered. “Let’s go to bed.”

He took her hand and led her to the fabulously beautiful bedroom they shared. They pushed all the clothes and toys off their
bed and got into the bed and took off their clothes and moved their bodies until every inch of their skin touched. “Don’t
do anything,” she said. “Just hold onto me.” She was trying not to cry. She was trying as hard as she could try.

“Imagine Nieman bringing Henry over here,” Freddy said. “Can you just see Stella’s face when she finds out he’s going hippie
bullshit on us? No kidding, N.J., Henry’s just the tip of the iceberg. There will be Buddhist monks and those nuns in Ohio
he paid to pray for Leta when she got sick. I’d rein him in, but, Christ God, I have to go to the hospital on Monday. There
may not be time.”

“Leta got well. I saw her last week at a shop on College Avenue. She had a good-looking man carrying the bundles and she was
just exactly like she used to be. She told me she was glad she got cancer because it made her appreciate her money.”

“Don’t move away. I want all of that arm just where I had it. I love your skin so much. If you knew. If you only knew.”

“Be inside me, then,” she said. ‘And don’t worry about whether it’s going to work. It feels like it’s working to me.”

Stella had dismissed Nieman’s class early and gone back to her lab to check some messes she had going in a set of petri dishes.
It was an antiviral she’d been playing around with for two years. She never talked about it and hadn’t published any of the
data. She was taking her time, playing with it in her spare time, watching it mutate, testing it against different cold and
herpes strains.

It was her secret project, and even though several people in the department, and Nieman, knew what she was doing, they never
asked her about it. Stella was their intuitive genius and people left her alone.

She was chewing a number-two lead pencil and staring at the dishes when Nieman and Little Freddy came into the room.

“Put gloves on him,” she said when she turned around. “You too. Never mind, let’s go in the office.” She led the way out of
the lab and down the hall and into her office. There was ajar of Hershey’s candy on the desk, and Little Freddy went and stood
beside it. “Have some,” she said. “What’s going on?”

“Poppa has to have a hundred shots,” Little Freddy said. “He’s going to put them in his hips so they won’t hurt.” He opened
the top of the candy jar and took out one and then two and then three of the miniature candy bars. “Is this okay?”

Stella melted into love. She could stare at Little Freddy’s head all day. It was a braincase she recognized.

“He’s going in on Monday to begin chemotherapy,” Nieman added. “We have to find a donor. I called Rabbi Felton. I’m sure the
whole congregation will turn out. And of course they’re searching the donor banks. It’s just more likely to be someone with
French Jewish ancestors.”

“Not necessarily. You’d be surprised at how it’s dispersed. It’s genetic but it’s also hugely random. There are nine common
ancestors for eighty-seven percent of white male Europeans.”

“I sort of half believe that.”

Little Freddy had finished two of the pieces of candy and had started on the third. “I want to see the bugs on my skin again,”
he said.

“No!” Nieman and Stella both screamed. Then Stella said, “Have two more pieces of candy. You can’t see the bugs again because
they made you think your skin was dirty. It isn’t dirty. It’s inhabited by nice tiny little creatures that help keep you clean.
Besides, we have to go to our house and see Scarlett. She’s all by herself with the baby-sitter and she wants to see you.
She likes you so much. She thinks you’re the best boy in California. Get your candy and let’s go.”

Stella took off her lab coat and put on her suit jacket and Nieman took Freddy’s hand and they started out of the room.

“So have you called the nuns yet?” Stella asked.

“No.”

“Who have you called except the rabbi?”

“I called Henry. We’re going to meditate on Sunday night. I have to do something, Stella. I can’t just sit by and not do everything
I can think of to do.”

“I’m with you,” she said. “I’ll call the nuns myself. I’ll call them tonight.” She kissed her husband and took his other hand
and they marched down to the car like a brigade.

Stella knew things about Nieman that she never talked about. She knew he had mystical, intuitive capabilities beyond those
of anyone she had ever known, and she had studied with Freeman Dyson and worked for Crick at the labs in England.

She knew that some change had come over Nieman right around the time she met him that had profoundly altered his life. Everyone
knew he had given up money and fame as the leading film critic on the West Coast and gone back to Berkeley to earn doctorates
in biochemistry and physics in half the time it takes younger students. Everyone knew he had a photographic memory, but only
Stella and Freddy Harwood had ever been privileged to watch him read when he decided to read really fast.