The Roots of the Olive Tree (19 page)

Calliope glanced over at her father and realized he was asleep. Guy was talking on and on about his grandson, who was an understudy for Lumière in the traveling production of
Beauty and the Beast
. She reached over and tapped his knee, and Guy laughed. “It’s the entertainer in me, I feel a constant need to tell stories to keep you young folks interested in us. I just keep forgetting that unless the story is about hunting or fishing, Frank will fall asleep.”

“How’s he really doing?” Calliope asked.

“He’s fine,” Guy said.

“You are wonderful with him,” Amrit said. “I never would have come up with that elephant story. How long have you two been together?”

Guy looked quickly at Calliope and then shook his head.

Amrit blushed. “I mean how long have you been here?”

“Too long,” Guy said.

They’d never spoken openly about their relationship, but Calliope observed the intimacy between them, and although she didn’t want to know more, she knew that they were not just friends. “Honestly. The staff tells me he’s doing great for a man his age, but you’ve been by his side for more than two years now. You’d see the little things, like today how his hands were shaking more than normal. Or that he looks less pale and more yellow.”

Guy’s face softened. He gazed at her for a bit, and Calliope could see that he was relieved to be able to talk openly with her. His voice, when he began to speak, was less hoarse and had more warmth in it. She felt like she’d just watched a clown take off his makeup.

“You see a lot of death in a place like this. You get so you know what it looks like when the body starts turning itself off. That’s all old age is really, a bunch of gremlins running around your body, turning stuff off, slowing down the mechanisms that have kept us going.” He paused and scratched his arm. “I came in here too young. It’ll be years before my body shuts itself down. Frank’s has started though.”

Calliope cried. “And here I am, telling him that I’m leaving.”

Amrit took her in his arms.

“He was happy for you and I have to say it is about time that you do leave,” Guy said. “I could never figure out what was keeping you in Kidron.”

“I should stay if he’s only got—”

“—got what? Two weeks? Five months, you know how this is. He hasn’t recognized anyone in such a long time. There are days when he walks right past me in the hall. I have to roll after him. Call out his name and remind him that I’m his anchor in this place.”

They sat together feeling unsure for several minutes. Amrit rubbed her back. Other patients shuffled by and Calliope listened as they spoke with their friends, with their loved ones who were visiting. When she felt strong enough, she stood up and then leaned over to hug Guy. “You’re good for him,” she said and then, “No. You’ve been good to him. Thank you.”

She shook her father’s arm until he woke up. She saw it then, how he didn’t recognize anyone around him or the place where he was. His eyes were wide with fear, but he knew he shouldn’t tell them that he didn’t know, that he couldn’t remember. She watched as he looked up at her, and she saw what came to his mind was not recognition, but familiarity, routine.

“Hey, tumbleweed,” he said. It was the nickname he’d given her as a child when they worked out in the olive groves together.

“Oh, Daddy,” Calliope said, and hugged him tight.

As she left she heard him talking with Guy. “That’s my daughter?” he asked him. And then “I have a daughter?” His voice was thin and high and she heard Guy trying to soothe him, to reorient him to the world he lived in.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Bets

T
he morning visit with her father had exhausted her. The day had started sunny, but just after lunch, clouds had swept down from Shasta and the temperature dropped ten degrees. Calliope pulled into the driveway of Hill House and thought about how her life was going to change. She wanted to talk to her mother first and alone. There were emotions she wanted to share about her father and Guy. She just wanted to say good-bye to Anna, because although she could live another couple of years, the end was nearing for her. Being with Amrit and watching Erin with her new baby had made Calliope fearful of regrets. She had regrets about her husband’s death, how it had come so swiftly and so silently and there had been no time for good-byes.

Her mother opened the door before she could reach it. “Where’s Dr. Hashmi?”

“He’ll be here soon. I took him to meet Daddy earlier this morning,” Calliope said. “You wanna go for a walk?”

She looked up at the sky and then back at Calliope. “It looks like a good time to get out of the house.” As she came down the stairs, she buttoned up the old house sweater she wore and took her plastic rain cap out of the pocket.

“It’s not going to rain,” Calliope said.

“It might,” Bets said.

They walked along the path that led from the front steps to the orchard and then took the overgrown road that would bring them to her daddy’s trees. It wasn’t any darker in the orchard, the trees barely topped out at five feet. The light, however, was different. It was absorbed and then diffracted by the leaves. The gray of the leaves was much more pronounced in the cloudy weather. The magpies warbled as they walked down the path and then their calls softened as the birds settled into their presence in the orchard.

“I sold out of the oil pressed from Daddy’s olives,” Calliope said as they reached the bench that their father had built from limbs he’d pruned. He liked to use green wood that he could wet and twist into shapes. The seat was made of an old tree that had been hit by lightning. Her daddy had sawed it himself and then oiled and sanded it.

“People are the same,” her mother said. “Always looking for the easy answer, ready to believe in snake oil but they’ll tell you why it’s not snake oil.”

“It can’t hurt them,” Calliope said. “It isn’t like we know why Anna’s lived so long, or you, or Daddy.”

“False hope is a dangerous weapon,” her mother said.

“Hope is hope.” Calliope wanted to change the subject. “The vain deserve a little false hope; besides, I think I’m through with all that.” She’d had an offer on the store, and it was enough to leave the oil behind, to leave Kidron behind and move east with Amrit.

Bets grabbed her hand. “I’m glad. I didn’t want to tell you it was wrong, but it was. I was afraid someone who was truly sick would buy it. You have no idea the lengths I would have gone to if I’d thought there was a way to make you heal after your accident. And now there’s your father. I’d give the whole of this to bring his mind back.”

She told her mother about her most recent visit to Golden Sunsets, about how her father had mistaken her for his sister. She told her about Amrit and the way her father had responded to him. Her mother laughed and she looked younger. Calliope wanted to ask Bets about Frank’s relationship with Guy, how long she’d suspected that he preferred men, but she didn’t know how to start.

“They hold hands,” she said.

“Guy’s a good friend,” her mother said.

Calliope wanted to push her, to ask her about their marriage, about her brothers, but she knew that one of the talents her mother had was keeping secrets. If she pushed her today, as she had a dozen other times in her life, her mother would just get up and leave. Busy her hands with work. There was a certain catch in her mother’s voice when she brought up Guy that told Calliope what she wanted to know. Her mother wasn’t oblivious to the change in her father, and it made her wonder if it was actually a change at all. What could a man have done in the 1940s if he preferred men? It wasn’t as if there were parades, anthems, coming-out guides. It still bothered her to consider this, that there was a less than genuine feeling between her parents, that their love wasn’t real, that it was wrapped up more in practicality and convenience than in fate or romance.

“Amrit and I are in love,” Calliope said this quickly, and then without pause, she asked her mother to tell her the story of how she and her father had met.

“We always knew each other,” she said. “You know this.”

“But there must have been a moment when you looked at him and realized that he was more than someone who worked in the orchards.”

“No. That’s what there was to love about him, he’d always been there.”

“Then tell me about the day he proposed? Did he know that you loved him?”

Her mother turned and looked back at the house. “Anna’s going to be wondering where we are. We should head back.”

Calliope wanted to hear the story again from her mother, the one she’d told them growing up—how Frank had swept her up out of the orchard and carried her away on his horse like she was Guinevere and he Lancelot. How they rode to the river and he’d told her that he couldn’t live without her. Her mother always ended the story, which was unusually sentimental, by saying that the war made them all stupid. Calliope had cherished that story growing up. She’d nursed it in her head until her parents were fated to be together. She magnified moments between them, how her father always brought her mother small wildflowers he’d found in the orchards and knit them into flower crowns.

It was the sort of love she’d been looking for her whole life, desperate for during her marriage. And now she suspected that it had all been the product of her imagination, that her mother and father had been nothing more than friends who had a family together. She heard the words her mother said earlier echo in her mind.
He was always there
.

Bets stood and started to make her way back to the house. Calliope still hadn’t told her she was leaving. “Mom,” she managed and then she started to cry.

“Deb’s fine,” Bets said, stepping back to the bench and rubbing her back. “She’s just fine. Before she left I gave her money and directions to one of Uncle Wealthy’s old cabins in the Cascades. I’m sure that’s where she is, and when she’s ready, we’ll go find her.”

This revelation caused Calliope’s confidence to collapse. She’d truly believed that her mother didn’t know where her daughter was, that Deb had left on her own. The tears ran down her face and dripped down her collar. Her leg began to ache and after a while, she was forced to blow her nose on the edge of her blouse. She was finally angry enough to say what she’d come to say.

“I’m leaving.” She reached for her mother’s hand.

“But you just got here,” her mother said. “And you haven’t said hello to Anna yet.”

“No. I’m leaving Kidron. I’ve had a reasonable offer on the store, and Amrit wants me to move east with him. Back to Pittsburgh.”

“Oh.”

The silence was not a good indication. Calliope knew this, remembered from her childhood that a quiet mother meant anger with consequences that could never be seen ahead of time. When her brother Jimmy had eloped it had fallen to Calliope to tell their mother. She’d nodded at Frank and then stayed in her room for two weeks.

“I’ll come back, of course,” Calliope said, her voice an octave higher than she wished it to be.

Her mother looked at the sun sinking toward the horizon. She spoke without blinking. “You’ll come back. It’ll just be for a funeral.”

CONFIDENTIAL

2007 M
ACARTHUR
F
ELLOWS
N
OMINATION
D
OSSIER

Prepared By: Redacted

Proposed Nominee: Amrit Hashmi

Area of Research:
Genetics with specific focus on the longevity gene and a stated research goal of helping humans achieve biological immortality.

Location:
University of Pittsburgh

Geographically, this is a strong location for us because it offers us an opportunity to diversify our award locations.

Publications and Awards:
Appended

R
ESEARCH
S
UMMARY

For the last two decades, Dr. Hashmi has worked to understand the genetic mechanisms of aging and longevity. Initially, his research interests centered on the
Turritopsis nutricula,
commonly called the immortal jellyfish. As a response to adverse conditions, the
Turritopsis
undergoes a reverse aging process and changes from a mature jellyfish to a polyp, which is the species state of infancy. In this way, the jellyfish can avoid death and just continue to repeat the cycle of growing young and then old again in indefinite cycles. This ability, which is a form of biological immortality, has not been found in any other species.

While many others in his field have continued to focus their efforts on researching and understanding the conditions of aging in lesser organisms, Dr. Hashmi is among the few who has advanced to studying the genetic makeup of specific humans. When the near completion of the human genome project was announced in 2000, Dr. Hashmi shifted his attentions entirely to finding the longevity gene(s). He claims the fastest route to stopping the aging process in humans is to understand what sets apart the small percentage who are able to live well into their tenth decade with better physical and mental health than those who are thirty or forty years younger. He launched a worldwide effort to document every living human being over the age of 110. He’s been criticized by his peers for not including anyone a century or older, but the correlation of his data suggests that superior medical care in the last twenty years has artificially inflated those numbers. His focus on supercentenarians means that fewer than 1,000 people worldwide meet his qualifications for inclusion in his studies.

Because of this low number, in the last year at the urging of the National Institution on Aging, which partially funds his research, he has focused his efforts also on the offspring of these supercentenarians. This helped Dr. Hashmi move toward identifying general biological markers that control aging in the body. Rumors in the research community purport that Dr. Hashmi is close to finding the specific sequence of genes. Last year he started working with a 112-year-old Northern California woman and her direct female descendants. One of his research assistants told us that there is some indication that each of these women has a mutation that prevents degradation during cell division. In most humans, the telomeres, which are part of the DNA that occur around the edge of chromosomes, shorten with each division. Their contention is that there is almost no shortening in these women.

R
ESEARCH
A
PPLICATION

What sets Dr. Hashmi’s study apart from others is his contention that the longevity gene does more than keep us from aging. He contends that there are many other elements at work in supercentenarians that not only extend their life, but also fight off deadly conditions like cancer, diabetes, obesity, and heart disease. In addition, these genes working in concert with other inherited traits in these genetic superagers help them to maintain physical integrity in areas where the elderly often see degradation, such as hearing, eyesight, dental care, flexibility, and other mobility issues. Dr. Hashmi thinks big and he thinks beyond his discipline. He believes his research could change the way we treat not only general wear and tear on the human body, but illness in general. He claims that the only age-related difficulties that won’t be treatable in fifty years are those caused by environmental damage. In the immediate future, identifying the specific genes will enable researchers to extend human life by an average of thirty years.

C
ONTROVERSY

To date no specific drugs or even targeted gene therapies for use in humans have resulted from any of the research on longevity. While Dr. Hashmi’s research, which focuses on the production of a specific class of proteins, shows the most promise for targeted therapy, there are still many who claim that the increased levels of these proteins in Dr. Hashmi’s superagers is nothing more than a symptom of longevity. Despite this, no other researcher in this field has even posited a cause of the slowed aging in Dr. Hashmi’s superagers. To his detractors, Dr. Hashmi points out that the children of superagers also live to be older—indicating a genetic connection to aging.

In addition to the questions of scientific accuracy, some have raised ethical and practical questions that surround extending life. Questions about overpopulation arise when considering expanding the current life span by as few as twenty years, which essentially adds an extra generation to the world’s population. However, it is important to point out that just two hundred years ago a human being’s life expectancy at birth was only forty-five years. Today, most residents of first-world countries can reasonably expect to live nearly twice that long. These advances in longevity were a direct result of scientific advances in food production, vaccination, antibiotics, and a better understanding of what keeps humans healthy. Dr. Hashmi’s research is a natural extension of those scientific frontiers. Just as humans have adapted to their new reality over the last two hundred years, the ensuing generations will alter the pattern of their lives to reflect a longer life span. Also, this may be moot, as everyone is hypothetically opposed to extending life spans until faced with the loss of a loved one or their own deteriorating health.

P
ERSONAL
A
SSESSMENT

Although born in India, Amrit Hashmi has lived in the United States since 1940, when his father was recruited to work at Oak Ridge as part of the nuclear experiments. He became a citizen in 1949 along with his parents, although he does retain his Indian citizenship and returns fairly often for visits with his extended family. His first marriage was arranged and he and his wife didn’t have any children. She died more than ten years ago.