Ship Fever (3 page)

This was 1970, when the students seemed to change overnight from pleasant boys into uncouth and hairy men. Every week brought a new protest. Chants and marches and demonstrations; bedsheets hanging like banners from the dormitory windows. The boys who used to come to our house for tea dressed in blue blazers and neatly pressed pants now wore vests with dangling fringes and jeans with holes in them. And when I went to Richard's genetics class that fall, to listen to his first Mendel lecture, I saw that the students gazed out the window while he spoke or tipped back in their chairs with their feet on the desks: openly bored, insubordinate. A girl encased in sheets of straight blond hair—there were girls in class, the college had started admitting them—interrupted Richard mid-sentence and said, “But what's the
relevance
of this? Science confined to the hands of the technocracy produces nothing but destruction.”

Richard didn't answer her, but he hurried through the rest of his lecture and left the room without looking at me. That year, he didn't give his other Mendel lecture. The students had refused to do most of the labs; there was no reason, they said, why harmless fruit flies should be condemned to death just to prove a theory that everyone already acknowledged as true. Richard said they didn't deserve to hear about the hawkweeds. They were so dirty, so destructive, that he feared for the safety of Mendel's precious letter.

I was relieved, although I didn't say that; I had no urge to leave my perch on the windowseat and no desire to hear Richard repeat that story again. It seemed to me then that he told it badly. He muddled the dates, compressed the years, identified himself too closely with Mendel, and painted Nägeli as too black a villain. By then I knew that he liked to think of himself as another Mendel, unappreciated and misunderstood. To me he looked more like another Nägeli. I had seen him be less than generous to younger scientists struggling to establish themselves. I had watched him pick, as each year's favored student, not the brightest or most original but the most agreeable and flattering.

That year all the students seemed to mutate, and so there was no favorite student, no obsequious well-dressed boy to join us for Sunday dinner or cocktails after the Wednesday seminars. As I lay in my windowseat, idly addressing envelopes and stuffing them with reprints of Richard's papers, I hardly noticed that the house was emptier than usual. But at night, when I couldn't sleep, I rose from Richard's side and went down to the couch in the living room, where I lay midway between dream and panic. I heard Tati's voice then, telling me about Mendel. I heard Mendel, frantic over those hawkweeds, trying out draft after draft of his letters on the ears of an attentive little boy who sat in a garden next to a fox.
Highly esteemed sir, your honor, I beg you to allow me to submit for your kind consideration the results of these experiments.
How humble Mendel had been in his address, and yet how sure of his science. How kind he had been to Tati.

Some nights I grew very confused. Mendel and Nägeli, Mendel and Tati; Tati and Leiniger, Tati and me. Pairs of men who hated each other and pairs of friends passing papers. A boy I saw pruning shrubs in the college garden turned into a childish Tati, leaping over a white wall. During a nap I dreamed of Leiniger's wife. I had seen her only once; she had come to Tati's funeral. She stood in the back of the church in a brown dress
flecked with small white leaves, and when my family left after the service she turned her face from us.

That June, after graduation, Sebastian Dunitz came to us from his lab in Frankfurt. He and Richard had been corresponding and they shared common research interests; Richard had arranged for Sebastian to visit the college for a year, working with Richard for the summer on a joint research project and then, during the fall and spring semesters, as a teaching assistant in the departmental laboratories. He stayed with us, in Annie's old bedroom, but he was little trouble. He did his own laundry and cooked his own meals except when we asked him to join us.

Richard took to Sebastian right away. He was young, bright, very well-educated; although speciation and evolutionary relationships interested him more than the classical Mendelian genetics Richard taught, his manner toward Richard was clearly deferential. Within a month of his arrival, Richard was telling me how, with a bit of luck, a permanent position might open up for his new protege. Within a month of his arrival, I was up and about, dressed in bright colors, busy cleaning the house from basement to attic and working in the garden. It was nice to have some company around.

Richard invited Sebastian to a picnic dinner with us on the evening of the Fourth of July. This was something we'd done every year when the girls were growing up; we'd let the custom lapse but Richard thought Sebastian might enjoy it. I fried chicken in the morning, before the worst heat of the day; I dressed tomatoes with vinegar and olive oil and chopped fresh basil and I made potato salad and a chocolate cake. When dusk fell, Richard and I gathered a blanket and the picnic basket and our foreign guest and walked to the top of a rounded hill not far from the college grounds. In the distance, we could hear the band that preceded the fireworks.

“This is wonderful,” Sebastian said. “Wonderful food, a wonderful night. You have both been very kind to me.”

Richard had set a candle in a hurricane lamp in the center of our blanket, and in the dim light Sebastian's hair gleamed like a helmet. We all drank a lot of the sweet white wine that Sebastian had brought as his offering. Richard lay back on his elbows and cleared his throat, surprising me when he spoke.

“Did you know,” he said to Sebastian, “that I have an actual draft of a letter that Gregor Mendel wrote to the botanist Nägeli? My dear Antonia gave it to me.”

Sebastian looked from me to Richard and back. “Where did you get such a thing?” he asked. “How…?”

Richard began to talk, but I couldn't bear to listen to him tell that story badly one more time. “My grandfather gave it to me,” I said, interrupting Richard. “He knew Mendel when he was a little boy.” And without giving Richard a chance to say another word, without even looking at the hurt and puzzlement I knew must be on his face, I told Sebastian all about the behavior of the hawkweeds. I told the story slowly, fully, without skipping any parts. In the gathering darkness I moved my hands and did my best to make Sebastian see the wall and the clocktower and the gardens and the hives, the spectacles on Mendel's face and Tati's bare feet. And when I was done, when my words hung in the air and Sebastian murmured appreciatively, I did something I'd never done before, because Richard had never thought to ask the question Sebastian asked.

“How did your grandfather come to tell you that?” he said. “It is perhaps an unusual story to tell a little girl.”

“It gave us something to talk about,” I said. “We spent a lot of time together, the fall that I was ten. He had killed a man—accidentally, but still the man was dead. He lived with us while we were waiting for the trial.”

Overhead, the first fireworks opened into blossoms of red and gold and green. “Antonia,” Richard said, but he caught
himself. In front of Sebastian he would not admit that this was something his wife of twenty-five years had never told him before. In the light of the white cascading fountain above us I could see him staring at me, but all he said was, “An amazing story, isn't it? I used to tell it to my genetics students every year, but this fall everything was so deranged—I left it out, I knew they wouldn't appreciate it.”

“Things are different,” Sebastian said. “The world is changing.” He did not ask me how it was that my grandfather had killed a man.

The pace and intensity of the fireworks increased, until all of them seemed to be exploding at once; then there was one final crash and then silence and darkness. I had been rude, I knew. I had deprived Richard of one of his great pleasures simply for the sake of hearing that story told well once.

We gathered up our blanket and basket and walked home quietly. The house was dark and empty. In the living room I turned on a single light and then went to the kitchen to make coffee; when I came in with the tray the men were talking quietly about their work. “I believe what we have here is a
Rassenkreis
,” Sebastian said, and he turned to include me in the conversation. In his short time with us, he had always paid me the compliment of assuming I understood his and Richard's work. “A German word,” he said. “It means ‘race-circle'—it is what we call it when a species spread over a large area is broken into a chain of subspecies, each of which differs slightly from its neighbors. The neighboring subspecies can interbreed, but the subspecies at the two ends of the chain may be so different that they cannot. In the population that Richard and I are examining…”

“I am very tired,” Richard said abruptly. “If you'll excuse me, I think I'll go up to bed.”

“No coffee?” I said.

He looked at a spot just beyond my shoulder, as he always did when he was upset. “No,” he said. “Are you coming?”

“Soon,” I said.

And then, in that dim room, Sebastian came and sat in the chair right next to mine. “Is Richard well?” he said. “Is something wrong?”

“He's fine. Only tired. He's been working hard.”

“That was a lovely story you told. When I was a boy, at university, our teachers did not talk about Nägeli, except to dismiss him as a Lamarkian. They would skip from Mendel's paper on the peas to its rediscovery, later. Nägeli's student, Correns, and Hugo de Vries—do you know about the evening primroses and de Vries?”

I shook my head. We sat at the dark end of the living room, near the stairs and away from the windows. Still, occasionally, came the sound of a renegade firecracker.

“No? You will like this.”

But before he could tell me his anecdote I leaned toward him and rested my hand on his forearm. His skin was as smooth as a flower. “Don't tell me any more science,” I said. “Tell me about yourself.”

There was a pause. Then Sebastian pulled his arm away abruptly and stood up. “Please,” he said. “You're an attractive woman, still. And I am flattered. But it's quite impossible, anything between us.” His accent, usually almost imperceptible, thickened with those words.

I was grateful for the darkness that hid my flush. “You misunderstood,” I said. “I didn't mean…”

“Don't be embarrassed,” he said. “I've seen the way you watch me when you think I am not looking. I appreciate it.”

A word came back to me, a word I thought I'd forgotten. “
Prase
,” I muttered.

“What?” he said. Then I heard a noise on the stairs behind me, and a hand fell on my shoulder. I reached up and felt the knob where Richard's extra finger had once been.

“Antonia,” Richard said. His voice was very gentle. “It's
so late—won't you come up to bed?” He did not say a word to Sebastian; upstairs, in our quiet room, he neither accused me of anything nor pressed me to explain the mysterious comment I'd made about my grandfather. I don't know what he said later to Sebastian, or how he arranged things with the Dean. But two days later Sebastian moved into an empty dormitory room, and before the end of the summer he was gone.

Nêmecky, prase;
secret words. I have forgotten almost all the rest of Tati's language, and both he and Leiniger have been dead for sixty years. Sebastian Dunitz is back in Frankfurt, where he has grown very famous. The students study molecules now, spinning models across their computer screens and splicing the genes of one creature into those of another. The science of genetics is utterly changed and Richard has been forgotten by everyone. Sometimes I wonder where we have misplaced our lives.

Of course Richard no longer teaches. The college retired him when he turned sixty-five, despite his protests. Now they trot him out for dedications and graduations and departmental celebrations, along with the other emeritus professors who haunt the library and the halls. Without his class, he has no audience for his treasured stories. Instead he corners people at the dim, sad ends of parties when he's had too much to drink. Young instructors, too worried about their jobs to risk being impolite, turn their ears to Richard like flowers. He keeps them in place with a knobby hand on a sleeve or knee as he talks.

When I finally told him what had happened to Tati, I didn't really tell him anything. Two old men had quarreled, I said. An immigrant and an immigrant's son, arguing over some plants. But Tati and Leiniger, Richard decided, were Mendel and Nägeli all over again; surely Tati identified with Mendel and cast Leiniger as another Nägeli? Although he still doesn't know of my role in the accident, somehow the equation he's made between
these pairs of men allows him to tell his tale with more sympathy, more balance. As he talks he looks across the room and smiles at me. I nod and smile back at him, thinking of Annie, whose first son was born with six toes on each foot.

Sebastian sent me a letter the summer after he left us, in which he finished the story I'd interrupted on that Fourth of July. The young Dutch botanist Hugo de Vries, he wrote, spent his summers searching the countryside for new species. One day, near Hilversum, he came to an abandoned potato field glowing strangely in the sun. The great evening primrose had been cultivated in a small bed in a nearby park; the plants had run wild and escaped into the field, where they formed a jungle as high as a man. From 1886 through 1888, de Vries made thousands of hybridization experiments with them, tracing the persistence of mutations. During his search for a way to explain his results, he uncovered Mendel's paper and found that Mendel had anticipated all his theories. Peas and primroses, primroses and peas, passing their traits serenely through generations.

I still have this letter, as Richard still has Mendel's. I wonder, sometimes, what Tati would have thought of all this. Not the story about Hugo de Vries, which he probably knew, but the way it came to me in a blue airmail envelope, from a scientist who meant to be kind. I think of Tati when I imagine Sebastian composing his answer to me.