18
In May of 1968 Thomas and Greer packed up their Madison apartment, their lab, said good-bye to their friends and colleagues, and moved to Massachusetts. Harvard had given Thomas the Asa Gray Chair in the Department of Biology. But he still wanted to teach the same intro lecture he’d taught at Wisconsin, believing ardently in the need, and his own unique ability, to free students of scientific romanticism. He still sliced open the section of strangler fig in the second week of class and gave the speech Greer could recite in her sleep.(Nature isn’t always beautiful . . . ) His Magnolia Project was now known worldwide, and Harvard was paying good money for his scientific celebrity. He and Greer bought a duplex in Cambridge, walking distance to his lab, and a house in Marblehead, where they spent weekends, holidays, and summers when they could. But true vacations were rare for them. Work was too much a part of their life, so they assembled a makeshift lab in the basement of their house, with a refrigerator, centrifuge, microscope, and acids. Greer, who had been given only a research assistantship, found most of her work could be done there. She preferred this to the university’s cold halls and the endless buzz around Thomas’s new lab.Professor Farraday, I’d love to hear about the conference in ’fifty-three, what it was like to pioneer this field. Professor, I remember reading about your work when I was an undergraduate. I never dreamed I’d meet you, let alone work for you. Thomas’s celebrity generated an anxious energy in the lab, the new post-docs and grad students competing for his attention. The camaraderie of Madison had vanished, so when Thomas drove back to Cambridge, Greer often stayed in Marblehead to work.
Jo had taken a research assistantship at the University of Minnesota (It’s not Cuba,she wrote,but at least it’s far from Madison ), but Bruce Hodges had moved east with them, installed as an assistant professor and research partner in Thomas’s lab. Bruce was thrilled to be back at Harvard, where many of his old friends had settled.
Greer missed Jo, and felt, at times, a sense of abandonment in Jo’s disappearance from her life. She had few friends in the new department. There were no women, and the men primarily saw her as a conduit to Thomas, hoping she’d put in a good word. Her only pal was Constance McAllister, a marine biology post-doc whom she’d met one day in the ladies’ room. They developed a nice hallway friendship, arranging a few coffee breaks in the lounge, leaving each other jokes taped to the bathroom mirror—If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate, or:How many evolutionists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? One, but it takes six million years. Constance was from Boston, however, and spent most of her free time with her mother and the eccentric aunt for whom she’d been named. Or else she disappeared to Woods Hole for weeks at a time, allowing little opportunity to take the friendship further.
Greer was content to work primarily in Marblehead; she had her books, her pollen, her radio, and when Thomas returned from Cambridge, she had him all to herself.
Just before they left Wisconsin she’d completed her dissertation, and now had her Ph.D. The department, as promised, made no mention of the incident, and she was able, without any trouble, to change her topic to the broader field: the floral biogeography of isolated landmasses. If she wanted her degree, she had no choice. The only trouble was with Jo, who had read Thomas’s paper within hours of Greer’s committee meeting. When they had met for dinner that night outside on State Street, Jo stared at her across the red-checkered tablecloth, tapping her fork, waiting for Greer to speak.
“Look, it’s only appropriate that I let you be the first to tell me what you think,” Jo said. “But if you don’t say something soon, I’ll be forced to give you my opinion.”
Greer took a deep breath. “I don’t know what to think.”
“All right, then.” Jo set the fork down. “Do you want to know what I think? Do I have your permission to speak freely?”
“Jo, you can always speak freely.”
“Well, then, get ready, ’cause I’ve got shit to say. You understand, don’t you, that your sweet old husband, your dearest Jackass in the Pulpit, has used your work and passed it off as his own in a national journal. He’s ruined your dissertation, humiliated you in front of your colleagues, and has gotten you to do his grunt work, impeccably, for five years while he flew all over the country playing big-shot scientist.”
Greer steadied her hands on the table. “No one in his position does the grunt work. They all get lab assistants.” She knew she sounded defensive.
“They don’t all get you for a lab assistant. They don’t all get your work. Jesus, Greer. Please, tell me you’re angry, tell me you’re f*cking furious, or I’m going . . . well, I’m going to have to smack you.”
But there was something good in Jo’s anger. With each step Jo climbed toward rage, Greer felt herself descend toward composure. “I’m upset,” she said.
“Upset?” Jo’s eyes traveled the neighboring tables in desperation. “Somebody get me some smelling salts. You,” she said, eyebrows arched, “are unconscious.”
“It’s not as simple as you think. I’ve been over this for hours in my head. It’s complicated.”
“I’m ignorant, then. I don’t see any complications.”
“Jo, Thomas and I have been working together for five years. I’ve been gathering data for him, inhis lab, for five years. I used that data for my dissertation, the same data I knew he was using. I should have realized.”
“The data doesn’t matter. It’s the analysis. The equation. That’s not shared property.”
“I know. But we talked about this stuff. Cross-water dispersal. Magnolia population thresholds, beetle populations, the time lapse. All of it.”
“So you talked with him about your dissertation.”
“It’s just that it’s hard to know what was mine and what was his. He had ideas, I had ideas, we talked about them. For God’s sake, he asked me to read his paper. How do I know who borrowed from whom?”
“Are you really asking yourself that?”
Greer suddenly felt tired. She had used up her small store of arguments and clearly could not subdue Jo’s anger. She wished now that Jo had been there for all those talks. Then she would understand why it wasn’t easy. Greer thought of asking Jo simply to leave her be, but knew she would take that as an admission. Finally, she said: “Yes, I really am asking myself that.”
“I’m sorry, but you seem to be stuck in a goddamned swamp of denial here.”
“I’m sure it looks that way to you.”
“You’re forgetting that I work in that lab, that I know Thomas’s research, and that I read your dissertation. I’ll tell you this much, you can deny what happened all you want, but I know, and I’m not going to keep quiet.”
“Jo, this is for me to deal with.”
“You’re not dealing with it.”
“You weren’t there. You weren’t there for our conversations. I know you’re trying to protect me, but you . . .” Greer looked at Jo, who was leaning toward her across the table, her eyes red. What was it in her face? Greer didn’t want to move toward something she could never retreat from, but hadn’t Jo always been waiting for Thomas to mess up? She had never liked him, she refused to. “Jo, you have your own bias here.”
“So let a committee decide. Let an objective group of outsiders evaluate the situation.”
Greer’s hands flew up at this and knocked over her water glass. “What objective group of outsiders? Professor Jenks? Is it not already completely clear to you that nobody would believe in a million years Thomas borrowed even a punctuation mark from me?” She let the glass remain on its side, water spilling across the table and dripping onto her lap. “It wasn’t for a moment a question in anyone’s mind thatI usedhis ideas.”
“That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be a question in your mind. Or a certainty. Jesus, Greer.”
The waiter appeared at that moment, slow and cautious, clearly aware his customers were engaged in a heated debate. He quietly righted Greer’s glass and swept a thick towel across the table. He asked if they had decided on their dinner.
“Lasagna,” said Greer without looking up.
“Same,” said Jo. “And a bottle of red wine.”
“We have a Chianti . . .”
“Anything,” said Greer. She unfolded her napkin and attempted to dry herself. She rubbed at her skirt, her hands happy to be occupied, and tried to avoid Jo’s stare.
“You know, we should have been celebrating tonight.” Jo’s voice sounded far away, like a voice struggling over a tangle of telephone lines. “We should have been ordering champagne. You deserve champagne, Greer. The best champagne in the world. You really do.” Greer dropped the napkin and looked up. Jo’s eyes had filled with tears and now fixed themselves on the tablecloth. “F*ck.”
“Please don’t, Jo.”
“I’m sorry.” Jo wiped roughly at her eyes with the back of her hand. “You just don’t know how much I care about you. How much this kills me.”
“I know,” said Greer. And then, tentatively, “I think I know how you feel.”
“Do you?” Jo said. “Do you really know?”
“I know, Jo. I guess I’ve always known. But . . .”
“You love a man who steals your dissertation. And here I am, ready to do anything for you, and . . . well, what a f*cking world.”
“He didn’t plagiarize, Jo. You’ve got to understand.” Saying it felt good. It calmed her. “He didn’t plagiarize.”
Jo shook her head. “I just want to know what you’re going to say to him when he gets back. ‘Congratulations on your paper, honey?’ Yeah. Congratulations,” she spit out, “let me give you a big wet kiss.”
“Jo.”
“Let me see if I can’t give you five more years of my life and work so that you can have your name inNature. ” Jo was looking into the distance, talking to herself now.
“Stop it, Jo, I don’t—”
“Because I’ll do anything my husband asks? Because I’m just a stupid little woman?”
“Jo!” Greer nearly screamed this. People at nearby tables turned to stare at the two of them, dressed for celebration, disheveled by anger.
Jo stood. “I’m sorry, Greer. I can’t help you right now. I’m going to go.”
“You’ve got to trust me.”
“I know.”
“I’ll talk to him.”
“Good,” said Jo, folding her napkin into smaller and smaller squares and setting it neatly on the table. She straightened her fork, slid her water glass to its original position, and pushed in her chair. She then looked at the spot where she’d been sitting and nodded slowly, as though satisfied, or saddened, by how easily she’d managed to erase all traces of herself. In the blue light of the streetlamp Jo seemed paler than usual, almost ill. “You’d have been better off with Castro,” she said.
Greer couldn’t look at her. “I’d have gone to Cuba with you.” She wanted her words to be sweet, but she knew they sounded like an ending. “Jo,” she said, as if she were calling to a ship on the horizon, so far-off she only thought to whisper.
Then Jo turned and walked slowly up State Street, and Greer watched her best friend disappear into a sea of strangers.
The truth was Greer didn’t exactly believe everything she had told Jo. It wasn’t that she had tried to lie, but she had needed to play devil’s advocate and to see how well the devil fared. The committee meeting still seemed a nightmare from which she was waiting to awaken. She reread her paper, she reread Thomas’s, she wandered through the lab replaying their conversations—too many to keep straight—and in the end came up with only this: Thomas couldn’t havestolen her equation. He wouldn’t have offered to let her read his paper if he’d beenhiding anything. The whole thing was simply an awful coincidence.
“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.”
“Isthat 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. “Whatare 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 toldyou 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’tneed 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 f*cking 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: Whichspecies 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 ofyour 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.”
“Ihave 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, thereare 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?”
It was true. Her complaint, his exhaustion—they were reading an old script and they both knew its ending by heart. But this time she had a bargaining chip and was prepared to use it.
“A simple proposal, Thomas. If I do the work, and if I do more of the work, which you know I will, I want my name beside Bruce’s as coauthor. That’s all. You’re the hotshot of the department; use your influence.”
“Lily, I’ve never tried to hold you back. I’ve been your number-one champion.”
“I don’t need you to be my champion. I just want credit, on paper. Something I can use to try to get my own grants, my own work. Do we have a deal?”
“Deal,” said Thomas. “We just need to find a grain of pre-Cretaceous angiosperm pollen.”
“God, Thomas, we’re really talking needles and haystacks.”
“Not even haystacks. Pastures.”
“I just want you to know I think your work is important, no matter who in the world finds the oldest grain of flowering plant pollen. This project is just too big, too meaningful, to come down to some hairsplitting interpretation of the argon-argon dates.”
“Unfortunately, the rest of the scientific community doesn’t think that way.”
“I know.” She put her hand on his. “Listen. Don’t worry. We’ll find it.”
So her dream of Easter Island was set aside, and she returned to Cambridge for six months. Greer worked in the crowded lab ten hours a day, once again alongside Bruce Hodges, who was by that time aware she sought his position. Like a dormant giant, his football self awoke, resurrecting a rough competitiveness; he scowled, he teased, and every once in while, when he really wanted to bother her, he would say, “So how’s that old friend of yours doing? What’s her name, Jo? That’s right. You two were pretty close. . . . Did you know, Greer, that ninety percent of all angiosperms have bisexual flowers?”
“Go to hell, Bruce.”
Greer hadn’t, in fact, heard anything from Jo, not since the postcard announcing her new job at the University of Minnesota. After their last dinner, Jo had left Thomas’s lab to work briefly for Professor Jenks. Then she had gone to Minnesota, without a good-bye. From time to time, Greer thought of writing her about the house in Marblehead and the lab, but she didn’t think Jo wanted to hear from her, and she knew Jo would be disappointed in her life with Thomas. When the new paper came out—with Greer as coauthor—then she would write. The thought made Greer smile. Jo’s faith in her, which she had for so long taken for granted, might be reinstilled.
Greer returned to counting and examining grains. Beside her microscope she kept a bottle of aspirin, a hot water bottle, and a tube of Ben-Gay, which she rubbed into her neck every two hours. Despite Bruce’s goading, despite the frenzy, a certain camaraderie eventually developed in the lab. They all spent so many hours together, performing such tedious tasks late into the night, that friendship eventually emerged from their pool of disenchantment.
Bruce was gaining weight because of the inactivity of lab life, and fatness seemed to make him friendlier—he had room, it seemed, for only one enemy at a time, and fat was now it. He then began what could be viewed only as a “project” of flirting with Greer, weaving through the lab with a mischievous smile to look at her samples. Greer found his new friendliness, though strained, at least preferable to antagonism. Then one night, when it was just the two of them left in the lab, he wandered over to her workstation.
“Hey, Greer.”
“Hodges, I’m not even going to look up. I’ve got three more samples to count before I can get out of here and I’m tired as hell.”
“You’re like a Rosie the Riveter of palynology. Greer the Grain Counter.”
“Two options: Help or shut up.”
“You know, you’ve always worked hard. Even back in Wisconsin.”
“Okay. Pass me the third test tube from the left. And put this slide in the case.”
They exchanged items, and he pulled out the lab stool beside hers and sat down. “I read your dissertation, you know.”
Greer looked up.
“The first one,” he said, a look of earnestness on his face. “And I was wondering if you thought Thomas had been influenced—”
“No, Bruce. Not at all.”
“Because it was weird.”
“It was an unusual situation. We should have been more careful, that’s all. You were there. You know how people stumble onto discoveries, how hard it is to determine the precise origin of an idea.”
“Do I?”
In March, three Ph.D. candidates returned with a dozen samples from Southeast Asia. It was like Christmas when they arrived, excitement throughout the lab, each rock unwrapped and admired. Thomas divided the samples among the assistants, and the next day everyone went to work. Greer had a pre-Cretaceous sample from the Malay Archipelago, which seemed a wonderful omen. Malaya—where Wallace, almost a century earlier, had struck upon natural selection. She dissolved, washed, centrifuged, and examined late into the night, and was usually the last to leave the lab. She found endless gymnosperm pollen—ginkgoes, cycads—she found fern spores, but nothing resembling magnolia pollen. Finally, one morning, hunched over the microscope, her neck began to spasm.
“Thomas,” she called. The hum of slides shifting and counters ticking ceased. Everyone looked over. Thomas, however, hadn’t moved. “Jesus, Thomas”—she could hear the pain in her voice, and he immediately stood—“I can’t move my neck.”
“Stay right there. Lars, get the cot from the lounge and some pillows. Okay,” he said. He was beside her now. “I’m going to rest my hand on the back of your neck . . .”
“Oh, goddamned hell.” The pain was awful, a live wire thrashing the branches of her body.
“Okay, I’m not going to touch you. Bruce, call an ambulance.”
“I’m sure it’ll be gone in a second,” she said. “It just came on so fast. Everybody go back to what you were doing. Watching me moan isn’t going to help.”
“Well, it’s helping me,” said Bruce.
“Shut up, Hodges,” she said.
“No, really, who thinks that Greer in pain is more interesting than pollen? Let’s see a show of hands.”
Greer couldn’t help laughing—but even that hurt.
“Now, I know you can’t actually see our hands, Greer, but let me tell you, it’s a landslide.”
“You dick,” said Greer.
“Pain in the neck.”
“You know, sometimes,” sighed Thomas, “I feel like a grade-school teacher.”
They tried to keep up the laughter until the ambulance came, and Greer was lifted onto a gurney. Thomas accompanied her to the hospital, where they had to wait an hour for a doctor. Thomas was irate. He was in his lab coat, hair disheveled, looking older in the glare of the exam room. “Is there an alternate meaning to the wordemergency ?”
“Doctor Farraday!” The examining doctor stared at Thomas. “Wow. I didn’t realize. We’re understaffed here, as always. Cambridge sees a surprising amount of—”
“Don’t talk. Help. My wife can’t move her neck. She has a shooting pain. Fix it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Greer was ordered to stay in bed in a neck brace for two weeks, was given two bottles of painkillers, and was instructed to avoid all microscopes for at least a month. “If you find yourself restless,” said the doctor, “we have some nifty devices that will hold a book at the proper height for reading without moving your neck. They’re very popular with our neck and back patients.”
“Ingenious,” said Greer, less than thrilled.
“You would think,” said Thomas once she was comfortably installed in the bedroom in Marblehead and he had called to check on things at the lab, “that with a husband twenty years your senior, if one of us were going to start going kaput, it would be me. And here you are, my young, beautiful wife, all laid up like an invalid.” He pulled the patchwork quilt to her chest, fastened it beneath her arms.
“Thanks for the reminder.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be your Florence Nightingale.”
“This Florence needs to shave, I think.”
“But devoted to only one patient, a prisoner in my bed.”
“Quick, get me that reading device.”
“My dear, I’ll entertain you!”
“Thomas, you seem awfully giddy. Drugged, in fact.” Greer lifted the bottle of painkillers and examined it in the light. “It frightens me to see how completely happy my incapacitation makes you. I can’t imagine the jubilance I’d see with a terminal diagnosis.”
“Cruel words.” He kissed her on the forehead, the ears, then he landed one large, manic kiss on her neck brace.
“Really, Thomas.” After months of sullenness, fatigue, and anxiety, his behavior was startling. “This isn’t like you.”
“A man can’t adore his wife?”
“Of course he can,” said Greer. “But I’ve a feeling that this man won’t be doing much adoring tonight. I expect he’ll be back in his lab by sundown.”
“In spirit I will be adoring you.”
“Of course.”
“You’re not angry?”
“No.”
“Frustrated?”
“Resigned. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.”
“Remember, I love you,” he said. “You’re the love of my life.”
“In Thomas-speak, I think that means ‘I want to go to the lab right now.’ ”
“Lil.”
“I’ll be fine. Look, I’ve got a stack of books on islands and biogeography. I won’t miss you one bit. Now go find Mags.”
Greer saw him only a few times over the next weeks. She didn’t mind his absence and didn’t mind the opportunity to catch up on reading; what she minded was her lost chance at coauthorship. She was out of commission at a crucial time—the bargain was clearly off. She followed the doctor’s instructions, stayed in bed, took her painkillers, but toward the end of the third week, when she was feeling better, decided to drive into Cambridge and get back to the lab. If she couldn’t do counting she could at least do washes and centrifuges. Maybe prepare samples for dating. With the neck brace, she had trouble seeing the rearview mirrors and drove slowly. The piles of gray snow that lined the streets for months were finally starting to melt, but a raw dampness still hung in the air.
She parked beside Thomas’s car and slowly climbed up to the third floor. The lab door was locked, so she walked down the hall to the men’s room, where Thomas kept an emergency key. The lights were on, but the lab was abandoned—beakers stood half-filled, acid jars were off the shelves, a slow drip fell from the faucet. It looked as if all work had stopped abruptly. Greer shook off her parka and draped it on a stool. She went over to Bruce’s workstation, thought about looking in his microscope, but decided not to risk the neck pain. Instead, she flipped through the last few entries in his notebook. Dull stuff, like her own. Sketches of gymnosperm pollen types, numbers, percentages, and in the margins a few doodles of footballs. The analysis of the pre-Cretaceous sample he’d been testing—not a grain of angiosperm pollen in the whole thing. He’d wasted weeks on this sample, months on this whole race. Everyone seemed to be pouring energy into a search that was leading nowhere. Greer wondered if Jonathan Cartwright had been bluffing. A brilliant joke to play on your opponent, she had to admit. Maybe Cartwright was in Oxford right now, doing real research, while Thomas and the rest of them scurried like mice through an endless maze, never realizing the grain of pollen at the end was a mirror trick.
Thomas’s desk was filled with the same clutter she’d seen for years. Notebooks, slides, note cards, books—but it was messier than she remembered, as though he had slipped into a new level of disarray. This race was too much for him; it would be too much for anybody. She flipped through his notebook, his argon-argon data for the interbedded tuffs—an assortment of pre-Cretaceous rocks from Australia—all free of angiosperm pollen. They all would be. That was the obvious answer.
She sifted through the case that held his slide collection, through rows of pre-Cretaceous samples from Greenland and China, the samples from Australia; she decided to grab a few slides and carried them to her microscope. Just one peek, she told herself. She unfastened her neck brace and flipped on the switch. She took an unlabeled slide, placed it under the microscope, and adjusted the ocular. Carefully, she bent forward. No angiosperm pollen, of course. Only an assortment of trilete and monolete spores, gymnosperm pollen from conifers and cycads, and several fern spores with distinct exine ornamentation, heavily ridged at the equator. They looked like a family known to have appeared in the mid-Cretaceous period, but the sample had to be pre-Cretaceous. Thomas examined only pre-Cretaceous rocks. She zoomed in, poked the cover slip to roll the grains over, then pulled her face away. She grabbed one of her manuals and began flipping through the pages of fern spores, looking for an image that matched the one on the slide, when the door opened.
It was Thomas, unkempt. “Lily?”
“I couldn’t stay away any longer,” she said. “I took one peek, that’s it. I promise, my neck is much better.”
“Oh, Lily,” he said, his voice apologetic. “It’s wonderful. It’s terrific.” He rubbed his eyes. “It’sall over.”
“What is?”
“I found it,” he said. “I foundMags .”
Winter receded slowly, inching back the blankets of snow, cold winds slowing to warm breezes that carried the smell of wet earth and grass. Rooftop icicles dripped into shiny puddles. The first sprouts of spring pushed through the bald ground.
Greer watched from the house in Marblehead as the earth revived. She took long morning walks on the beach before setting herself up for the day to read on the porch. It was a comfortable routine, but Greer missed research.
Thomas was shuttling between the lab and their apartment, meeting with Bruce, sending samples out for verification, dictating his paper to the department secretary. Greer’s neck had gotten worse. The doctor scolded her for taking the brace off early, and she still had to wear it. Through all of the last-minute pollen counts and strata dating, she was unable to assist. And out of disappointment, and stubbornness, perhaps, she decided to resign from the project.
Only for the symposium in May did Greer muster the energy to attend. It was a bland hotel conference. They wore name tags, ate sandwiches and pretzels, wandered beneath the bright lights of the carpeted room, shaking hands with colleagues from distant universities. It was like the few others she’d attended with Thomas, but Greer felt some sadness, and even jealousy, that after all her efforts she was still just a spectator.
This was only the paper’s preliminary presentation—a penultimate draft before publication—but it would clock Thomas’s discovery in before Cartwright’s. Thomas was first on the program, and when everyone had been seated, and the lights dimmed, he approached the stage. Greer sat away from the lab team, in the back row, with a few half-interested stragglers. Most didn’t have name tags, and looked like guests of another convention, or a wedding, fed up with their own event, wondering what on earth a palynology symposium was all about.
Seeing Thomas behind the podium reminded Greer of sitting through his lectures so many years earlier. His voice filled the room with its old intensity. He was in a blue suit, though this one, which she’d picked out, fit him well. In the past year he’d become conscious of his appearance, picking out his clothing with greater deliberation. But the gray streaks in his hair had become more pronounced, and half-moons of darkness cradled his eyes. He had just turned fifty-two.
Thomas began with a slide presentation—the pollen, a photograph of the intact sedimentary unit, even a picture of Lars Van Delek and Preston Brooks, dust-covered and deeply tanned, extracting the samples in Australia. He spoke of the history of the magnolia, the genus that had been vying for the position of “original flower,” and the final discovery of what he had decided to nameMagnolius farradius. At the end of the talk, he thanked his coauthors, and asked them to come onstage: Bruce Hodges, Lars Van Delek, and Preston Brooks.
She had been expecting this moment, but still, Greer held her hands in her lap as applause filled the room.
“You’re not clapping” came a voice from a few seats down.
She looked over at a slight man, in his thirties. His face was long and pale, his mouth pinched. He wore no name tag and sat slouched with boredom. He had obviously picked the wrong conference to crash.
“I’m not clapping, either,” he said.
“Self-awareness is important.”
“It’s all so impressive,” he said. “All so unbelievable.”
“Palynology can be that way.”
“There aren’t any women here,” he said. “How’d you get in?”
“I said I was a man.”
“Me too,” he said. She noticed the smell of whiskey on his breath, that he was listing slightly. “Do you want to go for a walk? Or a drink? This conference is no place for a lady to spend her day.” Greer couldn’t tell if he was slurring his words or if he had an accent. “There’s a wedding on the mezzanine. They’ve got a swing band. We’ll sneak in. I’ll say you’re my wife.”
People were standing now, moving toward the podium to shake Thomas’s hand. Greer stood. People were also gathering around Bruce Hodges and Preston Brooks. Lars Van Delek had moved off to the side and was talking to a reporter.
“Come on.Swing band.”
“Please buzz off.”
“Quite right. Buzz off, Cartwright.”
Greer turned fully to look at him—his eyes roaming the room, his shirt rumpled. He looked only vaguely like his photograph. Jonathan Cartwright.
“You,” she said. “Tell me, did you really have your own pre-Cretaceous angiosperm sample?”
“You don’t want to talk about that nonsense.”
“You didn’t have one?”
He seemed forlorn. “I don’t think there is such a thing.”
So maybe it had all been false rumor.
“You realize, of course, none of this means anything,” Greer said. “This isn’t science.”
“Do you know how to dance to a swing band?”
“This is a number, this is breaking a record, but it doesn’tmean anything.”
Cartwright placed his hands on the seat in front of him and pushed himself up.
“They’ve got a whole table of those pi?a coladas. And you know what? We’ll have fun because it doesn’t matter. He’s absolutely wrong. I’veseen those sediments. From the same site. Nothing. How isthat possible?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and walked slowly, uneasily, to meet her husband.
June arrived, hot and dry, and droughts swept the country. The news showed pictures of distraught farmers, restless children. The month passed sluggishly.
Thomas was in Cambridge most of the time, commuting twice a week to Marblehead, basking in the recent attention. Greer’s neck was finally better, the brace came off, and she returned to her own work in the basement. She was happy to be researching cross-water dispersal patterns again; she had put aside her disappointment about not being coauthor on Thomas’s paper.
Occasionally, though, when she was in her lab, her mind returned to the image of the fern spores she’d seen that night in Thomas’s lab—spores that shouldn’t have been in a pre-Cretaceous sample. It was possible she’d been wrong about the species. But still, it was odd she’d heard nothing further about it—no mention of an unusual appearance. It begged analysis.
Then one afternoon, while she was working in the cellar, a telegram arrived. No sender was named. It said simply:
Finally you’ll have to face the barracuda.
Greer held the strip of paper for several hours, sitting on the porch, wondering at its contents. Jo, of course. But why now?
And then another delivery followed, this one from a popular scientific weekly. She unwrapped the brown paper. The cover read:
ACCUSATIONS OFFRAUD.DATAFALSIFIED BYTHOMASFARRADAY,PH.D.
Thomas, it explained, had been accused of contaminating his samples, of allowing angiosperm pollen from a Cretaceous sample to make its way into a pre-Cretaceous sample. It said that in attempting to beat Jonathan Cartwright, he had generated fraudulent data in his lab.
The accusation had been made by Bruce Hodges.