Easter Island (31 page)

“Good God, Lily. I can’t believe Jenks said that, implied that. I’m going to phone him right now.”

“Thomas, talking to him won’t matter. I don’t want him to take it back. It’s perfectly clear what Jenks and the committee as a whole think, whether or not you muscle them into recanting.”

He had returned from his conference at Harvard, put his suitcase in the bedroom, and immediately pulled champagne from the refrigerator. “Only the best twice-fermented carbon dioxide bubbly for my wife.”

Greer took the bottle from his hand, settled into the couch, and told the story of the meeting.

Now Thomas was pacing the living room. “They obviously don’t understand what happens when two people are working with the same data. There are a limited number of paths the mind can follow.”

“Is that what happened?”

“For God’s sake, I trust you, Lily.”

“Is
that
the question?”

“I know you’d never intentionally borrow my work, or anyone’s. That’s what I want to tell Jenks.”

“That’s not what I’m asking.”

He stopped pacing. “What
are
you asking?”

“What do you think I’m asking, Thomas?” She had practiced this a thousand times. Be calm, she told herself, unaccusing. Of course he hadn’t stolen her work; but she needed some sort of explanation. The words came slowly. “You know, you did read my dissertation.”

“Jesus, Lily! You’re not even for a moment thinking . . . Talk to Bruce, look at my notebooks! We’ve been toying around with equations for over a year, well before I even looked at your paper.”

“Excellent,” said Greer. “I’ll talk to Bruce. Problem”—she raised her hands dramatically in the air—“solved!”

“Lily, let’s stay focused.”

“All right, then, focus.” She turned to him. “Were you working on dispersal equations before I told you what I was working on?”

“Lily, don’t you remember? I was the one who told
you
what to look at. I was and still am your teacher, for God’s sake. Your advisor. That was your choice. You came to me, you needed direction, and I gave it to you.”

“I didn’t
need
direction, Thomas. I turned to you, and not as my teacher or as my colleague, but as my husband, to share my work with you.”

“Your work?”
The words were pitched too high, and each one rang like a bell of disdain. “Lily, I love you dearly, you know that, but please. The Magnolia Project was and is mine. And I couldn’t be more pleased to have you in the lab, but it’s not exactly your work.”

Then why was she working longer and harder than he was, than Bruce was, to get results? “I can’t believe you.”

“Lily, I’m telling you the truth. I respect you enough to be honest with you. Do you want me to humor you? Do you want me to condescend and pretend you’ve got your own project? Your very own lab?”

She had heard him take this tone with colleagues, at conferences, but never before with her. She was stunned.

“I’m a fucking Ph.D. candidate, Thomas. I’m not supposed to have my own lab.” She hadn’t realized, until this moment, as her body shook with rage, how very badly she wanted his approval, had wanted it from the beginning. “But yes, I do have my own work. Or I would if I hadn’t spent so much goddamned time trying to make sure no one in the world finds a speck of pollen predating yours.”

“Lily.” He came toward her now, put his hand on her head.

“What?” she snapped.

“Lil, please. You have it in your mind that I don’t know how much work you’ve done, or that I don’t appreciate it, and you’re wrong. I appreciate what you’ve done. But, more important than that, than the lab and the data, I love you. You’re my wife, my family. You are the only life I have or have ever had. You can’t forget that. You know what that means to me.”

There. Finally. The words were like an incantation, an ancient chant that would always, for Greer, end even the longest trance of anger. “You’re my life too, Thomas. Which is why something like this isn’t just a professional nightmare.” She felt her posture relax. They had traveled to rage and were returning, after a long drive, to home, to kindness. “It rattles the ground beneath everything.”

“Look. This will all be all right.” He sat beside her and took her in his arms. “We’ll take care of this.” He began to rock her. “It’ll all be fine.”

“I just don’t understand how you didn’t see this coming. You read my paper.”

“It was a busy time.”

Perhaps she was simply going mad. Greer rubbed her face and tried to stir some memory of herself. Was she, after all, the thief? Could she have fallen so strongly under the spell of his work, his ideas, that they permeated her own?

Greer sank deeper into the sofa, into the yielding cushions; she felt she could stay there forever. “I can’t believe this happened. I can’t believe I have to walk these halls, passing people who think I’m a plagiarist.” She closed her eyes.

“Well, you don’t have to stay in these halls if you don’t want to.”

Greer looked at him wearily.

“Harvard,” he said. “They’ve offered me a chair.”

By winter of 1969, at Harvard, Thomas decided he had amassed enough evidence to formally announce a new discovery. After examining over five hundred shales, coals, and sandstones from around the world, the earliest angiosperm pollen was always a Cretaceous magnolia. The lab team assembled the seven years of data, and Thomas went public: Magnolias, he stated, were the very first flowers.

But around this time, several other scientists joined the early angiosperm search. A botanist at the University of California and a geologist at Oxford both began to research ancient magnolias, taking Thomas’s investigation one step further. They accepted Thomas’s discovery that the magnolia family had come first. But they were asking a new question: Which
species
of magnolia came first, when, and where? Two names—Gerald Beckett Lewis and Jonathan Cartwright—were mentioned in almost all the press coverage of Thomas’s announcement. If Thomas’s photo was printed, so were theirs. Because the media had generated a question of its own: Which of these men would find the first flower?

Before Thomas could formally present his paper, the hunt for the oldest sample of magnolia pollen was under way. He had always suspected there might be angiosperm pollen in early Cretaceous or perhaps pre-Cretaceous rocks, and now it needed to be found. The entire lab’s efforts were directed at this. For six months, the whole team examined even older rocks from North America, but to no avail.

And then, in November 1970, the situation worsened: Bruce Hodges returned from a trip to London with news that Jonathan Cartwright was rumored to have a pre-Cretaceous species and hoped to go public that spring. Panic seized Thomas; it seized the lab. He brought in three more Ph.D. candidates to analyze data. The last of the project’s grant money was used to send the post-docs, Lars Van Delek and Preston Brooks, to Europe to get pre-Cretaceous rock samples.

Despite the new researchers, and the fervor of their quest, the atmosphere in the lab grew oddly dull. The more people, the more samples, the less enthusiasm there was. To Greer it felt like working on an assembly line. Hours of cleaning and analyzing each sample to ask a simple yes/no question—is there angiosperm pollen here? The answer, of course, was always no. Nothing learned, no assumptions redefined. On to the next sample.

Thomas no longer stopped by to glance in her microscope. There were no walks through the greenhouse. She lunched alone, or with Constance McAllister, when she was around, because Thomas was too harried to take more than a ten-minute break.

Greer tried to step away from it all, returning to the Marblehead lab and her own research. Whether her pollen was old or the oldest made little difference. She cared how pollen moved, why it moved, how the urge to live manifested itself in nature. And since Harvard’s department offered her no room for promotion—women couldn’t advance beyond research assistantships—Greer felt it was her right to offer Harvard, and Thomas, a little less of herself.

She used Harvard’s restrictions on women to justify her retreat. After all, she couldn’t tell Thomas the project was boring her, or that the frenzy in the lab was tainting everyone, including him.

“Lil, women still aren’t even allowed to use the telescopes at Mount Wilson and Palomar,” he reminded her. “Botany is years ahead of the other sciences. You have all the equipment you need for your work. You need something, tell me and I’ll get it for you. Anything. Nobody is shutting doors on your ability to do what you love.”

People would talk, she knew. They would complain about her “special” position in the lab, but Greer no longer cared. If she’d never become a full professor, or even an assistant professor, why not be the hermetic wife of the famous Thomas Farraday? All that mattered was that she could do science.

Greer had become intrigued by island biogeography, a new theory presented in a 1967 monograph by Robert MacArthur and Edward Wilson. Their book’s preface stated what to Greer seemed an incontrovertible truth:
“By their very multiplicity, and variation in shape, size, degree of isolation, and ecology, islands provide the necessary replications in natural ‘experiments’ by which evolutionary hypotheses can be tested.”

Off the coast of Iceland, in 1963, a deep-sea volcanic eruption had formed the island of Surtsey. After the lava flow ceased, a preliminary expedition ventured there in ’68, and, while Greer was packing up her life in Wisconsin, and unpacking in Massachusetts, she had looked eagerly for news from Surtsey. Eventually the team issued a report, documenting mosses, lichens, and four new plant species on the island. But the flora was still young, and there was talk in the scientific community of another expedition, to which Greer paid close attention. Exploring a newborn island would be ideal. Krakatoa, after all, had been invaluable to nineteenth-century botanists. But Surtsey was difficult to reach, and research depended on a formal, organized team. She would have to wait. And then one morning, Greer saw the ad in the travel section for Lan Chile’s service to Easter Island. The match seemed perfect.

“Thomas, what do you know about Easter Island?”

“Big statues,” he said, somewhat distracted. He was rereading a journal with a paper by Jonathan Cartwright. He took a bite of toast, turned a page. “Supposedly deposited on the island by aliens. They say it might even be the lost continent of Atlantis. A hotbed of scientific theory, as you can see.”

“You can fly there now. From Santiago.”

“It’s far.”

“About twenty-five hundred miles from Santiago. But that’s what’s interesting, I think. The distance. It would make a perfect biota study.”

“It would,” he said, though his mind was clearly elsewhere. Ever since the news about Jonathan Cartwright’s pollen, Thomas had canceled most trips and symposia, spending all his time in the lab. And after one of the new grad students quit, opting for another advisor, Thomas grew even more tense. “What, he doesn’t think we’ll find it?” he ranted to Greer on the phone one evening. “You don’t just walk away from an opportunity like this. After all, I practically founded the damned field!” Most of the week, Thomas now stayed in Cambridge, and on the few nights he spent in Marblehead, if they made love it was hurried and mechanical; afterward he was quickly in his robe, back at his desk, reviewing lab data. This was the first Sunday in over a month Thomas had been at the house.

“Easter Island would be great for fieldwork,” said Greer.

“I’m sure,” he said.

“But expensive.”

Thomas set the journal down. “You’re not really thinking of going?”

“Sure I am. Island biogeography? Easter Island? It’s everything I’ve been working on with cross-water dispersal.”

It appeared he was considering her question. “Well, when would you want to go?”

“I hadn’t thought that far.”

“I think it’s a good idea. An excellent site for research. And no one is more qualified than you; no one could do a better job.” He paused. “But is right now really the best time?”

“Do you mean because of the weather this time of year? The nonexistent political unrest? Or because of your work?”

“You’re angry with me.”

“I hardly ever see you, so it’s not exactly anger. I’m frustrated, I guess. And I just want some clarification. You’re hoping I won’t go, not because you want my company, but because of
your
work, right? The magnolia. The lab. Thomas, if you need me there, or if you want me there, just say it. God, say anything so we can have a normal conversation without books open and slides in front of us.”

“I always need you there, Lily. You’re my best researcher.”

“Don’t tell Bruce.”

“I
have
told Bruce, and you know what? He didn’t like hearing it one goddamned bit. He’s angry, but let him cope with it. Lil, there
are
gray areas in life. Complexities. Is Bruce number one in the lab? Yes. Is he the best? No. Is it fair? No. Is it my fault? No. And you can’t keep holding me personally responsible for a societal system of sex discrimination.”

“I hold you responsible only for your choices.”

“Harvard’s choices. Lil, we don’t live in an ideal world, but it is getting better. Why not focus on the opportunities you have rather than those you don’t?”