Authors: Ellen Gilchrist
The wedding went off without a hitch. Things went so well that Carla kept wanting to throw a pinch of salt over her left shoulder
to ward off feeling cocky and setting them all up for disaster.
DeLesseps said later he thought the affair was a triumph of specialists being too busy to get in each other’s way. Father
Donovan reached down into the two years he spent trying to be a writer and wrote a really beautiful ceremony that ended up
owing more to Shakespeare than to Saint Paul. Judge Hancock Mayes had most of the good lines and he delivered them in his
best and most lyrical voice. Nora Jane found a pianist and sang an Ave Maria by Handel. Little Freddy arranged the chairs
for the service; Carla concentrated on flower arrangements; Freddy spent a morning at May’s Wine Cellar choosing the wines;
and Mitzi did everyone’s hair, declaring that not only would it keep her from getting nervous but she couldn’t bear to see
hairdos she didn’t like. “Everyone always goes crazy doing hair for weddings,” she said. “Too much pouf, too much mousse,
too much spray. I’m doing this myself.”
Scarlett had an especially fine time, because her parents were busy talking to people and didn’t notice how many petits fours
and mints she ate and collected in the pockets of the white organdy-and-lace dress Carla had delivered to Nieman’s house on
the Friday before the wedding. “I had to have it,” Carla apologized to Stella. “Please accept it as a gift and let me have
my fun.”
“We’ll let her wear it,” Stella said. “Then we’ll have to frame it.”
S
PRING MOVED ON INTO SUMMER
. Freddy Harwood continued to grow stronger and was able to take fewer drugs and get more exercise. At the Gluuks’ house,
Little Scarlett had a new outlet for her obsessive-compulsive nature and her organizational skills. She was collecting toys
in a box in her room. She was studying catalogs of baby clothes and equipment. She was deciding where to put the cribs. Her
first choice would be her room, but she realized that wasn’t going to happen. Stella had bought her a video, Your Baby Is
on Its Way, and she loved to watch it. Every month another segment was added. She got to see the developing fetus, and she
understood that her mother had two babies growing in her womb, so, once again, she knew that she, Scarlett Jane Gluuk, was
blessed and had to work harder than other people to pay the world back for its largesse.
Stella was also working harder than she had ever worked in her life, trying to set things up so her lab would run smoothly
while she was gone. “There aren’t enough lab technicians in the world for the work we need done,” she said ten times a day,
to anyone who would listen. “We need more students, we need more scholarships. We need more money. We need high school teachers
who can teach science so it is interesting to students. We need, for God’s sake, less football and more biology. It makes
me so mad.”
“You can’t get mad,” Nieman said. “You’re incubating twice the human capacity and you can’t get mad. I’ll get mad for you
and I’ll go raise money. How much do you need?”
“Billions. Trillions. Never mind. We live in the present moment. We do the work before us. I can work at home if you do the
lab work. Aventis Pasteur wants us in on the pandemic vaccines. We have to inoculate the Asian farmers. The World Health Organization
is going to run that out of Zurich. You’ll have to go to the meetings …” Stella lay back on the sofa. Scarlett was across
the room playing with a set of small people that belonged in her dollhouse but that she kept in her pockets most of the time.
She would only wear clothes with pockets, so Stella sewed pockets onto any clothing that didn’t come with them.
“Why does she have to carry everything around with her?” Nieman asked.
“Why does everything have to be lined up? She has a rage for order.”
“We shouldn’t worry about it?”
“No. Not unless you want to do a gene transplant. Come here, you are so sexy when you worry. There’s nothing to worry about.
We just have work to do. We need to talk to the dean about more assistants. We need to do that right away, so if you want
to worry, work on that.”
“Let’s go see him then. How about tomorrow?”
“Call him. Start sucking up. Remember when he wanted you to read his film script? Tell him you’ll read it.”
“All right. I’ll call now.” Nieman leaned down and kissed his wife on the cheek, then the mouth, then the stomach, twice.
He left the room and made the call.
He returned in five minutes. “He’ll see us at four. I told him I wanted to see his script. He almost went crazy. Okay. Well,
hell, maybe I’ll rewrite it for him. I haven’t touched one in so long it might be fun. What else can I do for you today?”
He knelt beside his wife, his goddess, his angel, his dream come true, his Stella, Stella, Stella.
“I am going to shut down the mess in my laboratory,” she said. “It’s just ego. I’ve found two other cold viruses with at least
as many similar spikes. It was all just to keep me going while I waited for something to sink my teeth into. I need you to
destroy the petri dishes. Put them in the burner. The office should be sterilized and sealed for a while. I may have to use
it for the Pasteur work…don’t look like that. I know when I’ve hit a dead end. Can you do it today?”
“Of course. I’ll ask Elise to help me. We were only doing some cleanup work on the transfer sequences.”
An hour later Nieman was in full protection gear, transferring two years of Stella’s work into a container for the incinerator.
It took less than an hour to remove every trace of two years’ work. He checked to make sure all the paperwork was on a computer
disk, then called the cleanup crew in to sterilize the lab.
“Do you want it painted?” he asked Stella on his cellular phone.
“Yes. Ivory will do. Like the big labs. And the paint sealed, of course. I talked to Sister Anne Aurora. She wants to come
help with the Pasteur work. I told her she was hired.”
“The dean will be glad to hear that.”
“It’s done. He won’t complain. How many acts is his script?”
“He said two hundred and five pages.”
“I’ll hire someone else too.”
“Go home and take a nap after lunch. I’ll meet you at his office at four.”
“Love you.”
“Love you too.”
Scarlett walked around the dean’s office looking at things while the grown people talked. She was wearing a plaid skirt, navy
blue tights, and a navy blue sweater with a white collar and cuffs. She was such a perfect little four-year-old girl that
the dean hardly noticed when Stella told him she had hired an assistant from Ohio and was planning on hiring two more. “Aventis
Pasteur is going to pay the university millions, and it’s going to last for several years. So we need a lot of help. The problem
is getting anyone who will come.”
“Of course. I can find you the money for three positions, I’m sure.” The dean was waiting for Nieman to ask for the manuscript,
which he had on his desk in a black folder.
Scarlett walked toward him, looking him in the eye. “You have a nice room,” she told him. “Your room is bootiful.”
“Oh, thank you, Scarlett,” he said. “I’m delighted that you like it.”
“When can I see the manuscript?” Nieman asked. “I haven’t read one in a while. It will be a nice change.”
“It’s right here.” The dean handed it across the desk. Nieman took it. Stella stood up. “Three assistants for next semester,
or as soon as I can find them, then? Thanks, Carl, you are the best. The other thing is the outreach program for high school
seniors and the programs for high school teachers. We need to talk about that soon. It’s never been more critical.”
“Everything is critical. You wouldn’t believe, you don’t want to know, what’s happening in this university.”
“Complexity is part of life.” Stella stood up and looked at him with kindness and real sympathy. “Be strong, Carl. We’re lucky
to get to do this work.”
“I know. I forget. Don’t worry about the manuscript, Nieman. I’m honored you would read it. I appreciate it so much.”
“I’ll get to it right away. You won’t mind if I mark it up.”
“Heavens no. I hope you do. I know it’s silly to dream of writing a film, but it is the main way we influence the public now.
Books are preaching to the choir, I’m afraid.”
“Then we’ll get you a film.” As he said it Nieman decided he meant it. “I’ll be glad to help.”
* * *
So began the impetus that led to the inception that led to the rewriting and making of the Oscar-winning The Nun’s Discovery,
about a nun from Ohio who came to San Francisco to work as a secretary, then as lab assistant to a scientist who was dying
of leukemia. She not only healed the scientist with prayer but discovered the vaccine for the bird-flu virus that was killing
thousands all over Asia.
The film starred Stockard Channing as the scientist and Dakota Johnson, daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson, as the
nun, with Brad Pitt as the young researcher who falls in love with the nun and agrees to take the vaccine because the nun
can’t allow it to be tried on primates.
Brad lives, the nun gets laid, the vaccine works, and the labs at Berkeley made fourteen million dollars in royalties the
first year and continued to make money for the next ten.
It was July. Tammili and Lydia were in the pool house going over a study book for the SAT. Lydia had given up and started
sunbathing. “You can’t use Daddy’s illness as an excuse to quit trying,” Tammili was saying. “He is getting well. He is not
going to die.”
“You all keep saying that, but he isn’t getting well very fast or he wouldn’t have to keep going to the doctor and he wouldn’t
be so tired all the time. I hate the SAT. I’m going to acting school or to art school. I don’t want to go to Stanford. Go
to Stanford if you want to and I’ll come and visit you.”
“I’m going to Harvard, Lydia. I’m only going to Stanford if I can’t get into Harvard.”
“Then go on. I don’t care.” Lydia got into the swimming pool and swam long, slow laps. Her tears were mixing with the water
and she felt her heart beating against her bathing suit. She was tired of trying to be things she didn’t want to be.
She pulled herself up at the deep end. Tammili was squatting by the edge, waiting for her to stop. “You are almost there,
Lydia,” she said. “You had good scores on the practice tests. Just study one more hour and then we’ll quit for the day. You
don’t have to go to college but you need to get in so you can say you quit because you wanted to.”
Lydia pulled herself out of the pool and sat beside her sister. “I’m sad,” she said. “Too much is changing.”
“Life is change. Think how bored we’d be if everything stayed the same.”
“All right. Ask me questions.”
“How large is the universe?”
“We don’t know.”
“Right. What makes people happy?”
“Work and love. Money. Money makes them really happy.”
“What does money represent?”
“Power. Get in the pool. It’s July, Tammili. Those questions are not on the SAT.”
Nora Jane was spending the summer doing Pilates and yoga. She was making desserts from a fabulous Italian cookbook Carla Ozburt
had given her as a gift for having Mitzi’s wedding. She was trying not to worry about the future or Freddy’s health. She was
making lists and writing in a journal. “Ninety-nine percent of what we have is good,” she had written that morning. “And some
of it is not so good and scary. He’s probably going to be all right. Graft-versus-host disease is not going to do us in, and
if it starts there are plenty of things they can do for that. Don’t start thinking negative thoughts when we have just been
the recipients of a miracle made for sure by human hands and maybe also by love and prayer.”
To do today:
In the spirit of carpe diem and let the good times roll and trust your instincts, especially after the near death drumroll,
Freddy and Nieman were hatching a plan to spring their innocent and still trusting younger children, Scarlett and Little Freddy,
from the clutches of their mothers and their mothers’ surrogates in the private-school system of Berkeley, California. It
had begun as a plot to homeschool them, then, more realistically, turned into a plan to keep them home one day a week and
take them to learn things they would never learn in school. This latter plan was posited on the hope that Nora Jane would
not refuse Freddy anything after his scary drumroll, and Stella would have to go along or be thought a spoilsport.
“Stella was homeschooled herself,” Nieman said. “She studied in the back of a station wagon while her parents drove around
California being hippies. When it was cold they would spend whole days in libraries or art museums. She was twelve years old
before they put her in a regular school. Of course she doesn’t look on that as the boon you or I would have thought it was,
given our proscribed little lives.”
“We will start with the Palomar telescope and astronomy,” Freddy said. “Then move to the microscopes. Then move back and forth
between the infinite and the microscopic, with stops at painting and sculpture and canyons and dinosaur digs. If we take them
out on Fridays we will have entire weekends. Maybe Tammili and Lydia will come along for some outings.”
“We better not broach it until the babies come,” Nieman said, pursing his lips and starting to get nervous. He and Freddy
were at Bread and Chocolates, indulging in caffe latte and croissants and dark chocolate bars from the Netherlands. It had
been their favorite meeting place for years.
“There’s no hurry,” Freddy said. “I just want to get it in the planning stage. Francis is getting me the stats on homeschooled
children and their achievements. Nora Jane doesn’t like data as much as Stella does, but she does sometimes believe it.”