Recessional: A Novel (32 page)

St. Près went on to make an interesting point: “I’d say it would have to be Raborn because of the role he played in national life, except for one factor. There are one hundred senators and it’s pretty hard to stand out in that mass. Suppose our friend President Armitage had performed some miracle that made him really stand out among the thousand college presidents. He might be the one chosen.”

Now it was Armitage’s turn to broaden the definitions: “But good old St. Près, working anonymously in one foreign country after another, is, as he intimated, a roving nobody. Except”—he slammed the table so hard that the glassware rattled—“in Zambia that time he did stand up to the rabble that wanted to burn our embassy and he did lead eleven of our people right through the middle of the mob, daring them to touch him. Anonymous no more.”

At this point Raúl Jiménez played his favorite role, that of the detached philosopher: “Gentlemen, let’s not be so parochial. We four aren’t the acme of this place. The sun doesn’t rise and set with us
alone. Let’s suppose everyone in our part of the Palms was in that plane that crashes. Some of those big planes could handle us all. Who, then, is noticed in the headlines?”

It was a good question, because the four men who constituted the tertulia had imperceptibly and justifiably come to think of themselves as the intellectual elite, but they were never arrogant about it, and Jiménez’s reminder that there might be others at the Palms who, if their plane went down, might be deemed more memorable was quickly and easily conceded. But when they tried to visualize their fellow residents and identify who among them might be newsworthy, they drew a blank. There was no one.

Then slowly St. Près, who had a remarkably solid approach to life, considering that he was from the State Department, began to think aloud: “Always bearing in mind that the
Times
would be jealous of protecting its ecumenical reputation, it occurs to me that they might find Reverend Quade our bellwether. She was one of the first women to be ordained as a full-fledged church leader. She led the fight for the true basic rights to which women were entitled, not the flashy right to enter a poolroom or a private club or a locker room where male football players take their showers. Dignity, perseverance, accomplishment, that’s a heady mix, and if I were in charge of the obituary page it might capture my attention.”

As the men thought about this Senator Raborn snapped his fingers: “I completely forgot. We’re overlooking our most prominent member.” When the others looked surprised, he said: “When I was in the Senate we were approached by a group of scientists who asked us to memorialize the Nobel Prize Committee in Sweden to consider the claims of Maxim Lewandowski in science. Yes, our propeller wizard, our rumpled beanpole whose wife cuts his hair with a bowl was judged to be our prime candidate that year, and my staff helped draft the memorandum we forwarded to the committee.”

“What came of it?”

“Obviously he didn’t get the prize and I’ve often wondered why.”

“Let’s ask him,” the pragmatic Armitage said, and next night at dinner the tertulia entertained their cohort Maxim Lewandowski as their guest.

It was easy for Senator Raborn to open what would have to be an intrusive interrogation: “Max, when I was in the Senate, if my memory does not play me false, my staff put together a memorandum in your behalf, which the full Senate forwarded to the Nobel people in
Stockholm recommending you as recipient of the prize in some branch of science, I forget which. Do I remember correctly?”

Each of the men leaned forward to watch how the gawky man would respond to this surprising probe into an affair long dead. To their surprise the old man, now eighty-six, leaned back, clapped his hands gently and smiled: “Well, now!”

“It’s true?” St. Près asked, and the scientist replied: “I believe numerous leaders, from various fields, nominated me. The Senate committee, yes, and strongly.”

“That’s right,” Raborn said. “Eight or nine leading senators signed the recommendation with me. What happened?”

Lewandowski closed his eyes and recalled the most painful moments of his life. “Genetics made me, literally and figuratively, but it also destroyed me.” To help the others understand the terrible trap into which he had fallen, he started with simple basics: “I’m sure we all know what role the many millions of genes each of us is endowed with play in human existence. They’re the incredibly small, magical units that determine how we shall look, what color hair we have, our bone and tooth structure, our resistance to disease and, some think, our intellectual capacity; even when our biological clock will begin to run down and when death will follow is probably destined at our conception in the womb.”

The men asked about such things as genetic inheritance of characteristics, diseases that result from errors in the genetic inheritance and other aspects of the mystery. He handled all the questions patiently and with a marked skill for simplification and generalization. But after many minutes he waved his hands across the table as if he were clearing it and asked in quite a different tone of voice: “We’ve talked a lot about genes, several million in a human body, but we haven’t said how they exist or how they do their work. Well, the genes are on the chromosomes. Each chromosome is a threadlike filament incredibly long and incredibly thin. It’s made of DNA, one of the life-directing substances. There are twenty-two chromosomes in every human being, and since each one consists of two strands, one from the mother, one from the father, we carry with us a total of forty-four. The pairs are numbered from one, rather large, to twenty-two, quite small, and through a process of isolating, staining and magnification we can actually photograph them.”

“Where does the stuff come from that can be photographed?” St. Près asked, and Lewandowski gave an astonishing answer: “Any
body fluid. Blood, of course, but also perspiration or sputum or urine, or just about anything else.”

Lewandowski expanded further: “In addition to the twenty-two chromosome pairs, which might be called the traditional ones, there’s another pair, mysterious, outside the mainstream. It has no number but it’s all-important, because it controls human sexuality. If this special chromosome pair has one component X and a second X—and they too can be photographed—the baby turns out to be a female. But if it consists of X and Y, it’s a boy. And across the world, in all civilizations, for every one hundred girl babies born, there are around one hundred and four boy babies. Have to be, because boys are more fragile than girls. They die off easier. I forget the actual figure, but at about eight or nine, the balance is an even one hundred girls to one hundred boys, but thereafter it quickly falls into an imbalance and remains that way all our lives. There’re always more females than males.”

“I’m guessing,” said St. Près, “that somehow you messed up with this mysterious twenty-third chromosome pair.”

“Close, but not quite. You see, in a constant minority of XY cases the poor fellow has a double Y. He’s XYY, and right there my trouble began.”

“Why? What does XYY produce?” Raborn asked, and the scientist lowered his head, bringing his hands to his lips as if what he now had to say was too painful to share. Then, straightening his shoulders he coughed, looked at the members of the tertulia and said in a burst of confidence: “I did most of the original work on XYY, me and a fine researcher in France. I was first in studying a large number of men in the general American population who were conspicuous for having the XYY syndrome.”

“How would you go about testing me, to see if I had it?” President Armitage asked.

“Same routine. A photograph of even a tiny drop of any of your body fluids and the telltale extra Y will leap out at you.” He pulled from his jacket pocket a folded, rumpled sheet of paper, photocopied from a medical textbook, and smiled ruefully: “I keep this with me to study at odd moments.” When the men looked at the jumble of mixed chromosomes from a man with XY structure, they saw forty-six chromosomes, not arranged in the pair grouping under which they operated. At the bottom of the page, the twenty-two pairs had been drawn and arranged in descending order from No. 1, the largest pair,
to No. 22 for the smallest, plus an unnumbered XY, indicating that this particular sample came from a normal boy.

The complexity of these data was so awesome, and their implications so profound, that editor Jiménez asked: “You have researchers who can untangle this mess at the top? Could you, for example, arrange this man’s chromosomes in their proper pairings?”

“I can do it almost automatically,” and with the point of a pencil he indicated in the midst of the jumble the big halves that were easy both to identify and to pair up with their partners: “Surely you can spot those big differences,” and the men agreed.

“But when you work with this material, you memorize the chromosomes as if they were your pets,” and darting arbitrarily through the scattered diagrams he rattled off their numbers.

“And the X and Y?” Armitage asked, and without hesitating the scientist identified the big X, explaining: “It’s so big, makes you think maybe the female component is much more important than the male.”

“And the tricky little Y?”

Pausing for a moment, as if reluctant to identify the chromosome that had destroyed his reputation as a serious scientist, he at last pointed to a nondescript minor figure bearing almost no identifying marks: “There the little bastard is,” but none of the men could spot it in the top tangle.

“So what happens when a male baby has two of the little terrors?” President Armitage asked, and with the tip of his pencil, Lewandowski drew a second Y in the top diagram.

“The Frenchman and I proved at about the same time that young males cursed with the XYY pattern were apt to have a handful of clearly defined characteristics. No question about it. Bigger, heavier musculature. Abnormally aggressive. Difficult to discipline. And, in their mature life, more apt to fall afoul of the law.”

“These were discernible traits?”

“Absolutely identifiable. Except that not
every
XYY adult showed intractable behavior. A man could be a hulking XYY and still be a good citizen.”

“What are you saying, Maxim? Is he an ugly type or isn’t he?”

“That’s where I stumbled onto trouble,” the scientist said. “The truth seems to be that the XYY has a propensity toward bad behavior. You might say that he is eligible. But that doesn’t mean that he
will
be a bad apple.”

“So what happened?”

“The Frenchman and I arranged for a brilliant experiment—
study
might be the better word. He would work through a large number of French prisons. I would do the same in America. And we would blood-type every man in those jails. It was a huge task.”

“What did you find?”

“In each country the prison population contained an abnormally high proportion of XYY male inmates.”

“They did?” Armitage asked. “You mean that XYY men showed a propensity for criminal behavior?”

Lewandowski winced: “That’s exactly what a newspaperman asked me. ‘Does XYY pinpoint the criminal type?’ That’s where the horror started, with your simple question.”

“How?”

“Well, as you might expect, I pointed out to the reporter every caution an honest scientist would make: ‘Insufficient number of cases. Many possible collateral explanations. Possibly some overriding causative factor. Perhaps the fact that the XYY man was bigger and huskier made the police more watchful. Maybe the results were peculiar to French and American jails.’ I offered a dozen hedges against the easy conclusion that the extra Y chromosome produced a criminal or a potential criminal. But he didn’t listen.”

“What did he do?” Armitage asked.

“As he left me he asked one short question: ‘Dr. Lewandowski, what’s in a chromosome?’ and I answered honestly: ‘It contains the genes that control human development.’ And the next day newspapers throughout America and soon throughout the world screamed: ‘American scientist discovers the gene that makes a man a criminal.’ ” He stopped and laughed sardonically and said: “He didn’t even get it right. We hadn’t a clue which of the fifty thousand odd genes in that fatal extra Y was guilty. Only that it existed on Chromosome Y. When I challenged him about this he said airily: ‘Chromosomes are too difficult for the general public to understand. Genes are fashionable this year.’ So gene it had to be.”

“Then what?”

“The roof fell in. A French newspaper pointed out that my colleague in that country had done half the work and received none of the credit. I had stolen his material. What was worse, my French friend said accurately that he certainly had not come to the conclusion that there was a specific gene or chromosome that determined
criminal behavior, and he cited all the caveats that I had given the reporter.”

“Were you able to explain what had happened?”

“Not to this day. Newspapers, magazines, television, full-length books were so captivated by the possibility that an identifiable gene could cause criminal behavior that in the popular mind I had made a titanic discovery, and reputable biologists began to speculate on how we might be able to go into the womb of a mother about to give birth to an XYY boy and alter the gene structure so that the child would be born normal and without a propensity for being a criminal.”

“And?” Armitage persisted.

“I became the laughingstock of the scientific community. The mad scientist from Vienna. Restructuring the human race. XYY baby boys in special incubators at birth. And any chance for the Nobel Prize went down the drain.”

This confession was greeted with a long silence, during which the waitress informed the table that the yogurt machine was still on the blink. When substitute orders were placed, Senator Raborn asked: “So what’s the state of the inquiry into XYY now?” and Lewandowski explained: “Dozens, hundreds of careful investigations in prisons throughout the world have confirmed that the jail population contains a conspicuous plethora of XYY men.”

“Doesn’t that prove your original point?”

“Not at all. For as I foresaw when I gave that damned interview that condemned me, we still do not know what exactly it means. Probably ninety-five percent of XYYs lead quite satisfactory lives. Why the difference in the others?”