Mendel's Dwarf (32 page)

“Abortion.”

“Abortion was part of the problem, but another part is his own feelings of inadequacy. So we ought to have a baby.”

“But he’s sterile.”

“I know that, but he thinks there’s some kind of chance, however small. IVF, you know the kind of thing. He thinks something could happen …” And then she stopped fiddling, either with the tapas or with words, and looked me dead in the eye. “But I
know
I can get pregnant, don’t I?”

“Of course you do.”

And then she delivered her quiet and devastating blow: “I want a child by you, Benedict Lambert,” she said quietly. “I want your child.”

The whims of women. Like racial stereotypes, you desperately deny their existence, and yet there they are. One cannot deny them. Like the violence of men, the whims of women exist.
Jean Piercey, thirty-seven years old, almost flawless, almost beautiful, wanted my child … having just disposed of one up the orifice of a surgical vacuum cleaner. She wanted my child. Clutching my hand across the table, as though engaged in a bout of comradely arm-wrestling, she spelled it out: “I don’t want a stranger’s, Benedict. Hugo’s is no good, and I couldn’t bear to have a stranger’s sperm inside me. It’d be … like a kind of rape. You tell me that your”—she masticated the word thoughtfully—“
problem
is nothing more than a single spelling mistake or something. You said it in the lecture, didn’t you? All that AGA stuff. And at the end, didn’t you say something about a prenatal test?”

Something.

“Well, couldn’t the two of us make a normal baby? It’s the first clever idea I’ve had, Ben. In my whole life. Can’t the two of us make a normal baby? Can’t you do it for me artificially? Isn’t it possible?”

The idea stirred me. I visualized further couplings, additional planned writhings on my disordered bed, the Piercey body—newly adept, revitalized by pain—once more splayed open to receive the one part of me that is the normal size. How long could I prolong such delightful labors? But I was honest with her: “But you’d have to risk another termination—terminations, plural—if we were unlucky. The toss of a die, you see. Half the fertilizations would be … just like me.”

“That’s not quite what I meant. Couldn’t we do”—she looked embarrassed, glanced over her shoulder as though to see if anyone was listening—“do one of those test-tube-baby things? And couldn’t you choose the right embryos? Can’t you do that sort of thing these days? Couldn’t you take a single cell from an embryo and test it?”

Oh, it was clever all right. No fool, Miss Piercey. A cunning little vixen.

No fool Benedict Lambert, either. He pondered. He eyed the
woman across the table. He considered both his and hers. It was, of course, all within the bounds of possibility.

“It might be arranged. I could get you into the Hewison Clinic. They’d set up
in vitro
fertilization, and we’d do a biopsy of early embryos. But …”

“But?”

“They’ve done something similar with X-linked disorders, I believe. It’d have to go before the ethics committee, unless …”

“But we could
do
it? It is possible?”

I looked at her. Loving, loathing? The two contrary emotions seemed very close at that moment. “There’d be a price to pay,” I said.

She almost looked for her purse. “Surely that’s something we could manage, Hugo and I. I’m sure I could persuade him into giving a sperm sample.” She clenched her fists as though in anticipation. “Ben, all this came to me while you were being mobbed by those people at the end of the lecture. I’ve thought it up and it’s the first really clever idea I’ve had, and you could help me do it. I could persuade him to give a sperm sample and then we could substitute yours … and you could identify the right embryos. There wouldn’t be any problem with money—”

“That’s not the price I meant. Not a monetary one.”

She hesitated. “What, then?” Did understanding dawn a moment before I made it explicit? Did she realize? It seems reasonable, doesn’t it? More than reasonable: logical. Isn’t that how babies are made?

“You can’t really deny me, can you?” I pointed out, not unreasonably. “Not after all that’s happened.”

There was a silence.

“How could you, Ben?” Her tone was of disappointment, mainly disappointment. Perhaps there was also a note of betrayal, perhaps even a touch of outrage. But mainly disappointment. “In God’s name, how could you?”

“God’s back, then, is he?”

“It’d spoil everything.” There was an edge of desperation about her voice now. “It would spoil a special memory, Ben.”

“I don’t want a memory,” I replied. “I want the real thing. This is the one occasion in the whole of my life. Don’t you understand that? The one time I’ve ever been able to love anyone.”

Her eyes glistened in the subdued light of the wine bar. There were candles on the table. They glimmered in the sheen of tears. “Oh, Ben,” she said reproachfully. “Oh, poor, poor Benedict.”

My paper on the localization and identification of the ACH gene was published in
Nature
. The same month, to the chagrin of James Histone, CBE, I was nominated for the Mendel Medal at Villanova University. I received faxes and E-mails from all over, from the States, from France, from Germany. As always with such things, a dozen research groups leaped artfully onto the bandwagon. As always, people contacted me for pointers, for guidelines, for advice, for samples from my cell lines, for places on my team. And one Doctor Gravenstein mailed me from Cornell with a proposal for a conference. She was secretary of the Mendelian Association of America. You could hear her broad, edgy, transatlantic vowels behind the silly electronic scribble that came over the screen:
I heard about you, back last summer at Cold Spring Harbor. They were talking about this little guy hunting for his own ACH gene. They should name it after you, shouldn’t they? The Benny factor? Hey, that’s funny … Look, is this story true about you being a relative of Gregor Mendel himself? Why don’t you participate in the Mendel Symposium that we’re putting together, Ben? What do you say to a week in Moravia in return for a lecture on your current work?

A few days later I got another message:
We’d really like you to give the keynote address, Ben. Molecular genetics right there on the podium, for Christ’s sake
.

1
. The sequencing was carried out by the dideoxy chain termination method (Sanger et al., 1977) using the Pharmacia ALF automated sequencing system.

2
. Transition: a purine-to-purine or pyrimidine-to-pyrimidine point mutation. Purine to pyrimidine or vice versa is a transversion.

“N
ow watch.”

“What?” The slender figure—tight waist, bustle, an absurd little hat with a pheasant feather in it—leaned over the microscope and peered into the eyepiece. She presented one cheek, as soft as a petal, as flushed as a fuchsia, to his gaze. “What do I watch?”

“Watch. You need patience. Things happen slowly in the world of plants. Patience, patience.”

A disk of bright white, like a sun seen through mist; a pond, a pond in slanting sunlight, shining bright white; and, floating in the disk, spheres that might have been plants floating in the pond, might have been planets hanging in front of the sun.

“They are …?”

“The grains. Pollen. From the peas.”

Frau Rotwang looked up impatiently. “Nothing.”

“You must watch. It takes twenty minutes, half an hour, something like that. Just wait and watch.”

“Twenty minutes!”

“Shh.”

Silence in the close atmosphere of the greenhouse. One of her dachshunds lying on the brick floor, panting in the heat. The
priest watching, the woman watching, the atmosphere, thick with the exhalations of fuchsia and snapdragon, of sweet pea and columbine, barely stirring. A strange, opalescent light lay all around them, bathing them like amniotic fluid. In the background a gardener was potting some plants, but his presence did not intrude on their curious intimacy around the gleaming brass microscope.

And there, suddenly (you couldn’t see it happen but suddenly it was just there), one of the grains had a protuberance, a pale and translucent finger growing from it. “Yes!” she cried.

He bent his head close to hers, catching the drift of perfume from her, a different sensation altogether from the scent of greenery growing around them in the greenhouse. “That’s right. Watch.”

He pulled his head back and let her place a single, cerulean eye to the eyepiece once more. Wisps of hair escaped the confines of hat and pins and touched his face delicately as he withdrew. He wondered whether blond touched with the faintest hint of copper was the work of some factor hidden within the cells of her fragile, fragrant body.

She was watching still, unaware of his examination of her. “There are more of them now. Oh, how extraordinary, Gregor! How can this be? Aren’t plants static things that grow only? Can I see them
move?
Are they growing before my eyes?”

“Barely, but yes, it
is
possible to see them.”

“Oh, how wonderful. They are like …” and she paused, embarrassed: for it was suddenly clear exactly what they were like, those rootlike growths that extended themselves from the surface of the pollen grains, those snakelike protuberances. She didn’t pursue the simile, but instead asked a question softly, as though fearful of the reply. “And what do they do?”

“What you are seeing happens at the pistil of the flower. Of course the pollen comes from the male part. It lands on the stigma, and these tubes grow down to the ovules.”

She was silent. He could see the blush spreading on the cheek
that was presented to him, the right cheek suffused with pink. Rotwang.

“Now, if I might be allowed …”

“Of course.” She straightened, suddenly hot, suddenly uncomfortable, and watched while he fiddled with the mirror beneath the microscope and adjusted the focus somehow. His fingers, for all that they were thick and coarse (peasant fingers from a peasant background—he boasted of it), were remarkably articulate and nimble. She’d noticed that before.

“Now look again at the very tip of the thing …”

The tip. She looked again. It glistened. “Oh. It seems … an intrusion just to watch.” A snout, a snake, a … the word
penis
alighted for a moment in the forefront of her mind, and then mercifully blew away.

“Look right at the tip,” he said. “Just
inside
the tip, can you see? A small body …”

She could. A faint, opalescent, oval thing barely distinguished from the tube itself that carried it. “I can, yes, I can see it.”

“That, I believe, is … the male cell.”

“Oh, my goodness.”

“It is that which carries the factors. I feel sure they are somehow inside that oval body carried in the very tip of the pollen tube. Can you understand that? They are something material, something chemical …”

She looked up at him, trying to cling to the substance of what he said, trying not to think of her husband, trying not to think of shame and pain. “But in what way are they there? You cannot have all the characters of a plant in there.”

He nodded. “Somehow you can. You must have. That is what my work tells me. One set of factors in the ovule and one set in the pollen. And I believe they are packaged in that cell that you see. Oh, I don’t know how, exactly. I don’t understand what their chemical substance is. But they are there. And the same is true for animals.”

“And us?”

“We are animals.”

“Gregor!” She felt faintly shocked, and covered her confusion by looking again, but she must have jogged the microscope, for the view had gone just as surely as if shutters had been drawn down. Within the eyepiece there was only black.

“It’s finished, Gregor,” she said, and then, as he hurried to adjust the instrument once more, she added, quite flatly, in a matter-of-fact manner, as though it meant nothing at all, “We are leaving.”

His fingers paused in their neat and accurate movements, then continued in their work. “Just wait a moment and I’ll have it right. You must have moved the mirror.”