A Perfect Life (14 page)

My father was a
macher
, a man who made things happen. And where was there, really, in a tiny town like Mule's Neck to make anything happen if not a restaurant? As cheap as he was, he liked eating dinner out: Mondays with the Lions at the Dew Drop Inn; Wednesdays with the Rotarians; Thursdays with a bunch of businessmen who played pinochle in the back of Goodie's Bar; and Saturdays with his family at King's Hong Kong Chinese, which, when I was a kid, we called the King Kong.

Back then, whenever we went out to dinner, my father would stop at all the tables. He even talked to tourists who were only passing through. “If you need anything,” he would say, “go down to my store and tell them Herb sent you.” All the while, my mother would stand beside him, smiling a smile that might have meant anything, or nothing at all. She held Laurel by the wrist to keep her from twirling across the dragons in the carpet, the sort of fidgety motion our mother couldn't bear. I stood perfectly still and listened. I needed to be prepared to say the right thing—
not the cute thing, or the sweet thing, but the truly clever answer that would make the men laugh.

By the time we reached our table, I was dying of starvation. But I tried never to complain. I didn't pile noodles on my plate and drench them with duck sauce, the way Laurel liked to do. “Stop that,” I would hiss. “You'll make yourself sick.”

“But it's good,” she would say, holding out a spoonful of noodles in orange sauce.

Every week, our father ordered the same few items. The food arrived in minutes, just long enough for the county superintendent or president of the local bank to cup my father's shoulder and ask, “Hey, Herb, how's tricks?”

The pupu platter came first, a wondrous affair with blue china dishes swirling about the flame from a dragon's mouth. My father spun the lazy Susan and grabbed spare-ribs, doughy wontons, egg rolls, and reddish strips of garlic pork. When the waiter brought the entrées, my father mounded his plate with sweet and sour chicken, leaned forward, and
scooped.
(I never saw anyone use chopsticks, not even the Kings.) Though he wolfed down his food, those dinners would last for hours. Every few minutes, one of his cronies stopped by. As my father rose to shake the man's hand, the rice from his lap would flurry to the floor. I would sit trying to follow the men's debates—should the village approve a tax increase to improve the schools, was Cuba a threat or not—while my sister amused herself by pouring sugar in her tea. “That's disgusting,” I would scold. “Sugar gives you worms. Every grain is an egg that hatches in your stomach,” at which Laurel dipped her thumb in her
cup, closed her eyes, and licked the syrup in an extravagant display of bliss.

Finally, my father spooned the last few mouthfuls of sauce from each silver dish. He pulled his napkin from his belt and offered his good-byes while Laurel and I waited by the door, tossing mints in each other's mouths and watching Mrs. King tote up that night's receipts.

I loved my father profoundly. His appetite, his very crudeness, signified a hunger for something I longed for myself. I already knew everything my teachers at school tried to teach me. From my father, I learned how to work a cash register, how to keep an account book, and how to judge the quality of fabrics, wheelbarrows, and women's hosiery. He knew
the right thing to say
: dirty jokes in Yiddish for his suppliers from New York, clean ones in English for the Reverend McCann, riddles for the children, slightly ribald stories about the husbands for their wives. If I observed him closely enough, one day I, too, would run Weiss's Supply.

When did I begin to see through his act? It must have been the evening he asked me to talk to Karl Prince about eggs. I had entered junior high and was very caught up in my first science-fair project. It was nothing original, really, just the standard “Egg to Chick: How an Embryo Grows.” The project entailed little more than asking Mr. Prince, who ran a nearby chicken farm, to donate fertilized eggs. I set these in the incubator my father helped me build, and every day after school I tweezed a window in one shell and took notes on what I saw. My mother cleared a shelf in her Frigidaire and let me keep the eggs in a set of glass dessert-bowls
she had been given for her wedding. At first, the exercise seemed pointless. I saw exactly what the textbook predicted I would see. Then I began to wonder why and how all this happened. At three days, the tiny heart lay beating in its dish. In twenty-one days, an entire living chick had grown from a single cell in a gooey yolk. How did each cell know which part of what organ it was destined to become? I was stunned to find out real scientists knew as little as I did. I decided to become whatever sort of biologist studied how an animal grew from an embryo or an egg.

I bought three sheets of oak tag and a box of Magic Markers. Carefully, I stenciled the title of my project. I retrieved the windowed eggs and sketched what I saw. The markers' inky smell, their squeak against the oak tag, made me dizzy with joy. My father brought home a dozen wire hangers, which I used to frame the posters so they would stand.

The night before the science fair, our family went to King's. On our way to our table, my father stopped to talk to Karl Prince about eggs. “Hey, Karl.” He drew a drag of his Lucky Strike, which he held daintily between a circle of finger and thumb. “Those eggs you gave Jane? Seems she figured out a way to make chicks without the roosters. If you ask her nice enough, she might let you in on the secret. Won't you, doll?”

My father, I saw then, didn't consider an egg a mystery, a source of new life, but a product to be sold. An egg was a piece of merchandise. And my knowledge, my ability to make a good impression,
to say the right thing
, these were merchandise, too. So even though I knew the right thing
to say to make Mr. Prince laugh, even though I knew it involved the words “I might, if he paid me,” I couldn't bring myself to say it.

“Turning shy on me, doll? Happens to the best of them. Girls hit twelve and,
pfft,
they're useless for life.”

Useless? Because I was a girl? Because I wouldn't let my father turn what I felt about those eggs into a joke, a product? I refused to say another word that night. I would never again take pleasure in saying just the right thing to make my father's friends laugh. I got over this, eventually. I started speaking again. But only when I had something important to say. I loved my father. I knew that he was putting on this benefit to raise money for the cause that might save my life. But I hated giving speeches. I hated dressing up. Performing
.

And so, with some misgiving, I took the train to Manhattan. It dove beneath the city, and I grew more apprehensive. I caught a taxi to the hotel and checked in. As I lay soaking in the bath, and later, as I struggled to zip my dress, I tried to figure out how to act when I saw Willie.

I took the elevator to the ballroom, then stood beside the door and studied all the tall, slender, self-possessed women who, I was sure, wore fancy evening gowns and attended banquets every night. Across the room, my father looked up at me and smiled. I had begun to smile back when I realized that he didn't have the foggiest notion of who I was—he was smiling at some stranger in a slinky, revealing dress.

When he realized his mistake, he put one hand on the shoulder of the man he had been speaking to and propelled
him across the room. “This is my daughter,” he told the man, who looked me up and down approvingly. “Jane, I want you to meet someone who is going to make Valentine's chorea a household word.”

The man was president of the second-largest advertising agency in New York. His wife's family was at risk for Valentine's, and he had volunteered his services to publicize the disease. “What your organization needs is better PR. You scientists get on TV and what do you do but sling around a lot of big words. A bunch of talking heads. Like I was telling Herb here, we're going to put together a series of public-service spots. With you and your sister, we can't miss.”

I saw Willie come in. His mother introduced him to a gaunt blonde in a scarlet sheath, who kissed him. I turned back to the PR man, who was talking about the “spots” my sister and I would appear in. Willie came up to me then. “Hey,” he said, “Jane. You look great.”

I was confused. Was this the real Willie Land, or the Willie Land about whom I had been dreaming for so many weeks? I blinked and tried to make the two Willies line up. “You do, too,” I said. “That's a beautiful tux.”

He stroked the lapels. “My dad wore it the year he was nominated for an Oscar. It's been hanging in mothballs for about a century. But it's kind of classy, don't you think?” He turned so I could see the tux from all sides. It fit him perfectly, but I couldn't understand how he could stand to wear it. After my mother died, I couldn't bring myself to put on anything she had ever owned. “I didn't hear from you,” he said. “I know you've been busy. That's fantastic,
about all those sick people you turned up in Maine. But I thought . . . I sent those cards.”

I tried to remember why I hadn't written back.

Honey tapped the microphone. “Everyone?” The amplifier buzzed. “Could we each find our places?”

Willie's place tag was next to mine. A waiter came with wine, and Willie laid his hand across his glass. He rested his arm across my chair, and even though I wasn't sure what this gesture meant—he might not have had anywhere else he could stretch it—I felt wonderfully at ease. I closed my eyes and inhaled the sharp scent of mothballs, then settled against his arm. We sat that way and listened as Honey expressed her wish that the newly reorganized Institute for Valentine's Research and Education wouldn't lose sight of the needs of the average man and woman, “the husband who loves his wife dearly but cannot endure another day of isolation, or the wife who banishes her husband for drinking, only to learn that he was, in reality, a victim of a dreadful disease.” I tried to connect what Honey was saying to the Valentine's victims I had met in Maine. But she was one of those people who can't speak of suffering without inflecting her speech like an actor reciting Shakespeare. The microphone's echo made it even harder to believe the suffering was real.

Vic was seated at the opposite end of the dais. The night before, in the lab, he had motioned me into his office. I assumed he was curious about what I intended to say at the benefit. Instead, he sat there toying with a candy bar and asked if I had ever stopped to think that we didn't really know what we were doing with this Valentine's thing. I
felt the tears welling in my eyes. If Vic, of all people, didn't believe my experiments would work, then maybe I was deluded to think they would.

He must have seen my distress. “I don't mean we won't find the gene. I mean, what's going to happen when we do find it?” He unwrapped the Baby Ruth and took a bite. “Dianne is pregnant again.” I couldn't tell if his tone was rueful or resigned. He finished the candy and wiped his mouth. “I took her for an ultrasound. Don't worry. It's nothing serious. Her OB is just a little worried because she hasn't been gaining weight. But Dianne and I were sitting in the waiting room, and the woman next to us announced that she was there because she wanted to find out her baby's sex while it was still early enough to do something about it. That's how she put it,
do something about it
. I asked if she already had too many girls, and she said no, she and her husband didn't have any kids at all. Having a boy was very important to her husband, and she wanted to make him happy. Then the nurse called her in, and I sat and looked around the room and tried to figure out which other couples were there to find out the gender of their babies before it was too late to ‘do something' about it.”

I should have guessed that a man who had attended a seminary might find abortion distasteful. Still, I felt betrayed. I excused myself by saying that I had to take my samples from the centrifuge. The lab was like a Laundromat; if you didn't remove your bloods the minute the drum stopped spinning, you would find your test tubes on a shelf with a nasty note informing you of what an inconsiderate douche bag you were. I left Vic without reminding him
that he, of all people, shouldn't be trying to prescribe what a scientist should or shouldn't do.

Honey stopped speaking. The audience clapped. I heard Honey introduce me but I remained sitting in my seat, stupidly hoping I might gain some advantage by this delay. I was reluctant to make too many claims for my work, for fear I couldn't keep them.

Finally, I took my place at the podium and thanked everyone for coming. I meant what I said, but the PA system gave my thanks the same tinny ring it had given Honey's. I pulled the rubber band from my notes and began to deliver the explanation of my work I had given Willie. But whenever I said words like “restriction enzymes” or “polymorphisms,” the audience squirmed. I was trying to describe how to label a probe with a radioactive tag when Laurel came in. She wore a strapless dress with turquoise sequins. Her companion was a thin, muscular black man with a clipped beard. He was, I saw, the only black person there. I wasn't sure why this upset me. The only black Americans who got the disease were those with white blood. Then it came to me that my father had neglected to invite Rita Nichols. She might not have wanted to leave her sons alone. But she ought to have been invited.

Laurel and her date slipped into two chairs along the back wall. I finished my speech and asked if anyone had any questions. No one did, so I sat back down.

Next up was Paul Minot. He walked to the podium in a ruffled blue tux that he must have rented from the shop that rented tuxes to the New Jerusalem boys who were going to their prom. We would need to excuse him, he said.
He didn't get out into society much. Where he came from, if folks heard you were paying five hundred dollars a plate to eat dinner, they would be awfully disappointed if that plate wasn't gold. Not to mention the food. The audience laughed appreciatively. “And all this talk about enzymes and polywhatsits—I can't pretend that I understood half of what the speaker before me was saying.”