Mendel's Dwarf (14 page)

And so it goes on. Obsession? Given a diverse twist or two by fate—a different interlacing of synapses at some part of the cerebrum, a different twist of the neck at the moment of birth—it might have become the fixation of a psychotic, the hoarder of pornography, the Peeping Tom—or nothing more than the tiresome craze of a stamp collector. Throughout each spring and summer from 1854 to 1871 (by then he had moved on to other species), the man spent hours and hours tending his plants, pollinating, scoring, labeling, harvesting, drying, putting seeds away for the next year, puzzling and pondering, counting and tallying, recording his results in leatherbound books, explaining to anyone who would listen what was going on, feeling his way into one of the greatest secrets of the natural world—that each inherited character is determined by individual, distinct particles carried by the egg and by the pollen. That, for each simple inherited character, every offspring gains one such particle from its father and one from its mother. That the particles remain distinct and identifiable even though contrasting ones might temporarily come together in an individual. That you can follow the movement of these particles down through the generations and that they are passed on to the offspring just as they were gained from the parents. That pure luck determines which of two differing characters is passed on—the choice is chance.

Almost twenty years. Visitors were in the presence of a man inspired—a Beethoven or a Goethe—and all they saw was a dumpy, self-deprecating little friar with a sense of irony, a man who taught in the local high school and had a reputation for
being reasonable and fair to his students, a man who smiled vaguely at the world through spectacles whose lenses were clouded with dust and, doubtless, pollen.

You don’t display obsession, you see, not true obsession. You learn to hide it. You recognize the expression of indifference or incomprehension that creeps into the eyes of the listener. You learn the art of self-deprecation, the art of crypsis, the art of blending, mouselike, into the background. But beneath your bland and neutral exterior, you create confections of fantasy.

“You seem unhappy, Mrs. Miller.”

She looked at me with those disparate eyes. “Please call me Jean. ‘Mrs. Miller’ seems so impersonal.”

“Jean. You seem unhappy. Jean.”

Mousy, morose, she perched on a small stool in the pub just around the corner from the Institute, and fiddled disconsolately with a half-pint of lager. I glanced at her legs and imagined, I’m afraid, floral underpants. Apart from those purely hypothetical floral underpants, she was wearing a woolen dress (gray to go with the mouse) and a paisley scarf. Miss Piercey, Miss Mousy. Miss Agouti. The agouti color in mice results from a band of yellow just below the tip of each hair. It is controlled by an autosomal dominant gene. The double recessive form is black-haired.

On her left hand she wore a wedding ring and an engagement ring. “Opal,” she said, fiddling with the engagement ring. “Brings bad luck. I told him when we chose it. Opal brings bad luck, I said. He wouldn’t listen. Fire opal signifies the fire of my love for you, that’s what he said. He said things like that, things that turn a girl’s head. I think he just wanted me for one thing, really.” I shifted awkwardly on my stool, wondering how many things I wanted her for. Perched like that, I was almost at the same level as her. I could almost imagine leaning across the table
(beaten copper) to take her hand and squeeze it comfortingly. “But you don’t want to be hearing about my troubles, Doctor Lambert.”

“For God’s sake, stop calling me Doctor Lambert. If I’m to call you Jean, you must call me Benedict.”

“Benedict.” She smiled wanly. “Seems an awful long time ago, doesn’t it? I’d only just left school, you know that. With just three O Levels. Taken on as a trainee librarian under some scheme or other. You know what I used to dream of?”

Hope and flesh rose in strange concord. “Tell me.”

“The chief librarian.” Hope dashed, flesh subsided. “He was a lovely man. That’s why I left and came to London.” Her disparate eyes glistened.

“I don’t follow.”

“Don’t you remember him?”

“I only remember you.”

She giggled, and maybe colored a little. “Oh, go on.”

“It’s true.”

“Anyway, he was the chief librarian, and he was what I dreamed of. Mr. Jacobs, he was. Gordon Jacobs.”

Dimly I recalled a ponderous, graying man who had hovered in the background while I eyed the Piercey thighs. He had seemed old; probably he was only in his forties. “And?”

“He was married, with two children.”

“Was there anything …?”

“I shouldn’t be telling you this …” Her fingers were hairless beyond the first joint. Presence or absence of hair on the middle phalanx of the fingers is under autosomal genetic control. My own fingers carry dark wisps of hair like punctuation marks on the mid-phalanx. I watched hers stroke beads of condensation from the glass of lager as she gazed into the past. “It happened once, after closing, by the fiction shelves.”

“The fiction shelves?”

She looked up. “Fiction,
F
to
H
. I remember seeing the works
of Catherine Gaskin over his shoulder. Do you know Catherine Gaskin?”

“Not personally.”

“Oh, she’s ever so good.”

“What happened? At fiction,
F
to
H
, what happened?”

She blushed and looked away. “What do you think?”

“Right there?”

She nodded. “Right there.”

“Standing up?”

A narrowing of the eyes. “Why are you so interested?”

“I’m trying to imagine it.”

“
Doctor
Lambert!” She reddened further. “You’re ever so cheeky. You’re just as cheeky as you ever were as a boy.” She took up her glass, almost knocking it over in her confusion.

“Do you mind?”

She took a sip, and laughed with surprise. “Not really. Actually, it’s rather fun, confessing.” She drained the glass and put it down. Not quite so mousy. “I’ve never told anyone this, you know? Didn’t even tell my mum.”

“What happened?”

“With Mr. Jacobs?”

“You didn’t still call him Mr. Jacobs, did you? Not while …”

“It was the first time—”

“You were a virgin?”

“You really are
awful
. It was the first time that I called him Gordon. Up to then it had always been Mr. Jacobs. But there, at the fiction shelves, I called him Gordon.”

“I should hope so. Considering what was going on.”

“I thought it sounded rather silly, actually.”

“And what happened next?” I had a vision of Mr. Jacobs and Miss Piercey working their way round the whole Dewey Decimal System. “Did you move on to nonfiction?”

She giggled wildly. Perhaps that single glass of lager had gone to her head. “You are dreadful. No, afterwards he got cold feet.”

“You felt them?”

“It’s a metaphor,” she said reprovingly. “Gordon told me that it was all impossible, that I must get an abortion—”

“An
abortion?
You didn’t get pregnant?”

“
If
I was pregnant. He would pay, but I must keep it all quiet, that it was all a horrible mistake, that he loved his wife and children, that I should go away, find another job, all that kind of thing. He was in a right panic, I can tell you.” She put her hand to her mouth. “Here I am, laughing about it …”

“That’s what you must do,” I told her. “Laugh at it.”

“And I gave in to him, you see. That’s why I left home. I up and left and came down here, just as he wanted. And then I met Hugo Miller.”

“And married him?”

“He married me, more like. Promised me the world and gave me a weekend in Brighton, if you know what I mean.” She glanced at her watch. “Oh, Lor, I’ve got to go or I’ll be late. You scientific staff are all right. You can go in and out at all hours, but we honest workers have to keep to the clock.” She got up, pushing the table aside and almost upsetting the glasses. “See how clumsy I am? Can’t walk straight for thinking. Here, let me pay for my lunch.” She began to fumble in her handbag.

“I wouldn’t hear of it,” I said, “Doctor Lambert’s treating you.”

She looked at me with shining eyes. “Is he? Oh, how nice. I say, this is strange, isn’t it? After all these years.”

“Only seven.”

“Seven years older, seven years wiser.”

“Are you?”

“No.”

Images got in the way of coherent thought. I imagined piercing Miss Piercey in the fiction section, she with her back against the Catherine Gaskins, me standing on the top of a library stool with my face pressed against her inadequate bosom; whereas
actually we were leaving the pub and walking along the Cromwell Road and people were looking at us in that sideways manner. “That was nice, that was,” she said.

“What was? The Catherine Gaskins?”

“You don’t stop, do you? The
lunch
.” She paused, and looked down at me. “I’d expected you to be …”

“What?”

“Difficult. I don’t know. You know what they say about you?”

“No.”

“Difficult. Difficult person, but a first-rate mind. That’s what they say. You don’t mind my telling you, do you?”

“Not at all.”

“That’s the ultimate accolade, you see, first-rate mind. But a bit difficult, that’s what they say. I’d expected you to be talking about things I don’t understand.”

“You do yourself an injustice.”

“I’m only assistant librarian. I’m not anything.”

“You are to me.”

We turned in at the entrance of the Institute. “Silly,” she said.

Miss Piercey. I haven’t explained her eyes, have I?—her asymmetric, quirky, aberrant eyes: the one sky blue and the other sea green. I have described them but not explained them. They are not the stuff of inheritance, of course: they are the consequence of somatic cell mutation, or one of them is, at any rate. I’m sorry to be didactic once more, but you must imagine an early moment in the life of that amorphous cluster of cells that was destined to become the woman herself: the proto-Piercey, the embryonic mouse. No bigger than a pinhead, the little ball of cells bowls along a distant fallopian tube, wafted by the beating of cilia and entirely unperceived by the owner of the tube, who was, for the sake of the record, Mrs. Janet Piercey,
ob
. 15 January 1988. The
cells are dividing—2 … 4 … 8 … 16 …32 … 64—and, by the purest chance, by entire and complete accident—or perhaps by the subtle intervention of some unknown and unperceived chemical mutagen—a single gene on chromosome 19 in one cell of this cluster is copied imperfectly. In the impoverished alphabet of nucleic acids a single letter in a single position is read incorrectly. Previously this gene was unable to achieve its task, which was to cause a thin layer of pigment to be laid down in the middle of the iris. Thus defective, it coded for an iris of cornflower. But now, miscopied—a mere chemical error—it is returned to its original function. The cell in question lies on the left side of the embryo, and all the descendants of that cell now carry one blue-eye gene and one green-eye gene, where the cells on the other side of the cluster carry what they inherited—two blue-eye genes, one the contribution of blue-eyed Mrs. Janet Piercey, the other from blue-eyed Mr. Reginald Piercey. Thus one half of the embryonic Miss Jean Piercey develops green-eyed while the other half continues blue-eyed. Miss Piercey is a mosaic, a melding of cells with different genetic complements. She is, in her own modest manner, a monster.