Kitabı oku: «Ship Fever»

The Behavior of the Hawkweeds

For thirty years, until he retired, my husband stood each fall in front of his sophomore genetics class and passed out copies of Gregor Mendel’s famous paper on the hybridization of edible peas. This paper was a model of clarity, Richard told his students. It represented everything that science should be.

Richard paced in front of the chalkboard, speaking easily and without notes. Like the minor evolutionist Robert Chambers, he had been born hexadactylic; he was sensitive about his left hand, which was somewhat scarred from the childhood operation that had removed his extra finger. And so, although Richard gestured freely he used only his right hand and kept his left in his pocket. From the back of the room, where I sat when I came each fall to hear him lecture, I could watch the students listen to him.

After he passed out the paper, Richard told the students his first, conventional version of Gregor Mendel’s life. Mendel, he said, grew up in a tiny village in the northwestern corner of Moravia, which was then a part of the Hapsburg Empire and later became part of Czechoslovakia. When he was twenty-one, poor and desperate for further education, he entered the Augustinian monastery in the capital city of Brünn, which is now called Brno. He studied science and later taught at a local high school. In 1856, at the age of thirty-four, he began his experiments in the hybridization of the edible pea. For his laboratory he used a little strip of garden adjoining the monastery wall.

Over the next eight years Mendel performed hundreds of experiments on thousands of plants, tracing the ways in which characteristics were passed through generations. Tall and short plants, with white or violet flowers; peas that were wrinkled or smooth; pods that were arched or constricted around the seeds. He kept meticulous records of his hybridizations in order to write the paper the students now held in their hands. On a clear, cold evening in 1865, he read the first part of this paper to his fellow members of the Brünn Society for the Study of Natural Science. About forty men were present, a few professional scientists and many serious amateurs. Mendel read to them for an hour, describing his experiments and demonstrating the invariable ratios with which traits appeared in his hybrids. A month later, at the Society’s next meeting, he presented the theory he’d formulated to account for his results.

Right there, my husband said, right in that small, crowded room, the science of genetics was born. Mendel knew nothing of genes or chromosomes or DNA, but he’d discovered the principles that made the search for those things possible.

“Was there applause?” Richard always asked at this point. “Was there a great outcry of approval or even a mutter of disagreement?” A rhetorical question; the students knew better than to answer.

“There was not. The minutes of that meeting show that no questions were asked and no discussion took place. Not one person in that room understood the significance of what Mendel had presented. A year later, when the paper was published, no one noticed it.”

The students looked down at their papers and Richard finished his story quickly, describing how Mendel went back to his monastery and busied himself with other things. For a while he continued to teach and to do other experiments; he raised grapes and fruit trees and all kinds of flowers, and he kept bees. Eventually he was elected abbot of his monastery, and from that time until his death he was occupied with his administrative duties. Only in 1900 was his lost paper rediscovered and his work appreciated by a new generation of scientists.

When Richard reached this point, he would look toward the back of the room and catch my eye and smile. He knew that I knew what was in store for the students at the end of the semester. After they’d read the paper and survived the labs where fruit flies bred in tubes and displayed the principles of Mendelian inheritance, Richard would tell them the other Mendel story. The one I told him, in which Mendel is led astray by a condescending fellow scientist and the behavior of the hawkweeds. The one in which science is not just unappreciated, but bent by loneliness and longing.

I had a reason for showing up in that classroom each fall, and it was not just that I was so dutiful, so wifely. Richard was not the one who introduced Mendel into my life.

When I was a girl, during the early years of the Depression, my grandfather, Anton Vaculik, worked at a nursery in Niskayuna, not far from where Richard and I still live in Schenectady. This was not the only job my grandfather had ever had, but it was the one he liked the best. He had left Moravia in 1891 and traveled to the city of Bremen with his pregnant wife. From there he’d taken a boat to New York and then another to Albany. He’d meant to journey on to one of the large Czech settlements in Minnesota or Wisconsin, but when my mother was born six weeks early he settled his family here instead. A few other Czech families lived in the area, and one of those settlers hired my grandfather to work in a small factory that made mother-of-pearl buttons for women’s blouses.

Later, after he learned more English, he found the nursery job that he liked so much. He worked there for thirty years; he was so skilled at propagating plants and grafting trees that his employers kept him on part-time long past the age when he should have retired. Everyone at the nursery called him Tony, which sounded appropriately American. I called him Tati, a corruption of tatínek, which is Czech for “dad” and was what my mother called him. I was named Antonia after him.

We were never hungry when I was young, we were better off than many, but our daily life was a web of small economies. My mother took in sewing, making over jackets and mending pants; when she ironed she saved the flat pieces for last, to be pressed while the iron was cooling and the electricity was off. My father’s wages had been cut at the GE plant and my older brothers tried to help by scrounging for odd jobs. I was the only idle member of the family, and so on weekends and during the summer my mother sometimes let me go with Tati. I loved it when Tati put me to work.

At the nursery there were fields full of fruit trees, peach and apple and pear, and long, low, glass houses full of seedlings. I followed Tati around and helped him as he transplanted plants or worked with his sharp, curved knife and his grafting wax. I sat next to him on a tall, wooden stool, holding his forceps or the jar of methylated spirits as he emasculated flowers. While we worked he talked, which is how I learned about his early days in America.

The only time Tati frowned and went silent was when his new boss appeared. Sheldon Hardy, the old chief horticulturalist, had been our friend; he was Tati’s age and had worked side by side with Tati for years, cutting scions and whip-grafting fruit trees. But in 1931, the year I was ten, Mr. Hardy had a heart attack and went to live with his daughter in Ithaca. Otto Leiniger descended on us shortly after that, spoiling part of our pleasure every day.

Leiniger must have been in his late fifties. He lost no time telling Tati that he had a master’s degree from a university out west, and it was clear from his white lab coat and the books in his office that he thought of himself as a scholar. In his office he sat at a big oak desk, making out lists of tasks for Tati with a fancy pen left over from better days; once he had been the director of an arboretum. He tacked the lists to the propagating benches, where they curled like shavings of wood from the damp, and when we were deep in work he’d drift into the glass house and hover over us. He didn’t complain about my presence, but he treated Tati like a common laborer. One day he caught me alone in a greenhouse filled with small begonias we’d grown from cuttings.

Tati had fitted a misting rose to a pot small enough for me to handle, and I was watering the tiny plants. It was very warm beneath the glass roof. I was wearing shorts and an old white shirt of Tati’s, with nothing beneath it but my damp skin; I was only ten. There were benches against the two side walls and another, narrower, propagating bench running down the center of the house. On one side of this narrow bench I stood on an overturned crate to increase my reach, bending to mist the plants on the far side. When I looked up Leiniger was standing across from me. His face was round and heavy, with dark pouches beneath his eyes.

“You’re a good little helper,” he said. “You help your grandpapa out.” Tati was in the greenhouse next door, examining a new crop of fuchias.

“I like it here,” I told Leiniger. The plants beneath my hands were Rex begonias, grown not for their flowers but for their showy, ruffled leaves. I had helped Tati pin the mother leaves to the moist sand and then transplant the babies that rooted from the ribs.

Leiniger pointed at the row of begonias closest to him, farthest from me. “These seem a little dry,” he said. “Over here.”

I didn’t want to walk around the bench and stand by his side. “You can reach,” he said. “Just lean over a little farther.”

I stood up on my toes and bent across the bench, stretching the watering pot to reach those farthest plants. Leiniger flushed. “That’s right,” he said thickly. “Lean towards me.”

Tati’s old white shirt gaped at the neck and fell away from my body when I bent over. I stretched out my arm and misted the begonias. When I straightened I saw that Leiniger’s face was red and that he was pressed against the wooden bench.

“Here,” he said, and he made a shaky gesture at another group of plants to the right of him. “These here, these are also very dry.”

I was afraid of him, and yet I also wanted to do my job and feared that any sloppiness on my part might get Tati in trouble. I leaned over once again, the watering pot in my hand. This time Leiniger reached for my forearm with his thick fingers. “Not those,” he said, steering my hand closer to the edge of the bench, which he was still pressed against. “These here, these are very dry.”

Just as the pot brushed the front of his lab coat, Tati walked in. I can imagine, now, what that scene must have looked like to him. Me bent over that narrow bench, my toes barely touching the crate and the white shirt hanging down like a sheet to the young begonias below; Leiniger red-faced, sweating, grinding into the wooden bench. And his hand, that guilty hand, forcing me towards him. I dropped the pot when I heard Tati shout my name.

Who can say what Leiniger had in mind? To Tati it must have looked as though Leiniger was dragging me across the begonias to him. But Leiniger was just a lonely old man and it seems possible to me, now, that he wanted only the view down my shirt and that one small contact with the skin of my inner arm. Had Tati not entered the greenhouse just then, nothing more might have happened.

But Tati saw the worst in what was there. He saw that fat hand on my arm and those eyes fixed on my childish chest. He had a small pruning knife in his hand. When he called my name and I dropped the pot, Leiniger clamped down on my arm. As I was tearing myself away, Tati flew over and jabbed his knife into the back of Leiniger’s hand.

“Nêmecky!” he shouted. “Prase!”

Leiniger screamed and stumbled backward. Behind him was the concrete block on which I stood to water the hanging plants, and that block caught Leiniger below the knees. He went down slowly, heavily, one hand clutching the wound on the other and a look of disbelief on his face. Tati was already reaching out to catch him when Leiniger cracked his head against a heating pipe.

But of course this is not what I told Richard. When we met, just after the war, I was working at the GE plant that had once employed my father and Richard was finishing his thesis. After my father died I had dropped out of junior college; Richard had interrupted his Ph.D. program to join the Navy, where he’d worked for three years doing research on tropical fungi. We both had a sense of urgency and a need to make up for lost time. During our brief courtship, I told Richard only the things that I thought would make him love me.

On our second date, over coffee and Italian pastries, I told Richard that my grandfather had taught me a little about plant breeding when I was young, and that I was fascinated by genetics. “Tati lived with us for a while, when I was a girl,” I said. “He used to take me for walks through the empty fields of Niskayuna and tell me about Gregor Mendel. I still know a pistil from a stamen.”

“Mendel’s my hero,” Richard said. “He’s always been my ideal of what a scientist should be. It’s not so often I meet a woman familiar with his work.”

“I know a lot about him,” I said. “What Tati told me—you’d be surprised.” I didn’t say that Tati and I had talked about Mendel because we couldn’t stand to talk about what we’d both lost.

Tati slept in my room during the months before the trial; he was released on bail on the condition that he leave his small house in Rensselaer and stay with us. I slept on the couch in the living room and Leiniger lay unconscious in the Schenectady hospital. We were quiet, Tati and I. No one seemed to want to talk to us. My brothers stayed away from the house as much as possible and my father worked long hours. My mother was around, but she was so upset by what had happened that she could hardly speak to either Tati or myself. The most she could manage to do was to take me aside, a few days after Tati’s arrival, and say, “What happened to Leiniger wasn’t your fault. It’s an old-country thing, what’s between those men.”

She made me sit with her on the porch, where she was turning mushrooms she’d gathered in the woods and laid out to dry on screens. Red, yellow, violet, buff. Some pieces were drier than others. While she spoke she moved from screen to screen, turning the delicate fragments.

“What country?” I said. “What are you talking about?”

“Tati is Czech,” my mother said. “Like me. Mr. Leiniger’s family is German, from a part of Moravia where only Germans live. Tati and Mr. Leiniger don’t like each other because of things that happened in the Czech lands a long time ago.”

“Am I Czech, then?” I said. “This happened because I am Czech?”

“You’re American,” my mother said. “American first. But Tati hates Germans. He and Leiniger would have found some way to quarrel even if you hadn’t been there.” She told me a little about the history of Moravia, enough to help me understand how long the Czechs and Germans had been quarreling. And she told me how thrilled Tati had been during the First World War, when the Czech and Slovak immigrants in America had banded together to contribute funds to help in the formation of an independent Czechoslovak state. When she was a girl, she said, Tati and her mother had argued over the donations Tati made and the meetings he attended.

But none of this seemed important to me. In the greenhouse, a policeman had asked Tati what had happened, and Tati had said, “I stuck his hand with my knife. But the rest was an accident—he tripped over that block and fell.”

“Why?” the policeman had said. “Why did you do that?”

“My granddaughter,” Tati had said. “He was…feeling her.”

The policeman had tipped my chin up with his hand and looked hard at me. “Is that right?” he’d asked. And I had nodded dumbly, feeling both very guilty and very important. Now my mother was telling me that I was of no consequence.

“Am I supposed to hate Germans?” I asked.

A few years later, when Tati was dead and I was in high school and Hitler had dismembered Czechoslovakia, my mother would become loudly anti-German. But now all she said was, “No. Mr. Leiniger shouldn’t have bothered you, but he’s only one man. It’s not right to hate everyone with a German last name.”

“Is that what Tati does?”

“Sometimes.”

I told my mother what Tati had shouted at Leiniger, repeating the foreign sounds as best as I could. My mother blushed. “Nêmecky means ‘German,’ ” she said reluctantly. “Prase means ‘pig.’ You must never tell anyone you heard your grandfather say such things.”

I did not discuss this conversation with Tati. All during that fall, but especially after Leiniger died, I’d come home from school to find Tati waiting for me on the porch, his knobby walking stick in his hands and his cap on his head. He wanted to walk, he was desperate to walk. My mother wouldn’t let him leave the house alone but she seldom found the time to go out with him; my brothers could not be bothered. And so Tati waited for me each afternoon like a restless dog.

While we walked in the fields and woods behind our house, we did not talk about what had happened in the greenhouse. Instead, Tati named the ferns and mosses and flowers we passed. He showed me the hawkweeds—Canada hawkweed, spotted hawkweed, poor-Robin’s hawkweed. Orange hawkweed, also called devil’s paintbrush, creeping into abandoned fields. The plants had long stems, rosettes of leaves at the base, small flowerheads that resembled dandelions. Once Tati opened my eyes to them I realized they were everywhere.

“Hieracium,” Tati said. “That is their real name. It comes from the Greek word for hawk. The juice from the stem is supposed to make your vision very sharp.” They were weeds, he said: extremely hardy. They grew wherever the soil was too poor to support other plants. They were related to asters and daisies and dahlias—all plants I’d seen growing at the nursery—but also to thistles and burdocks. I should remember them, he said. They were important. With his own eyes he had watched the hawkweeds ruin Gregor Mendel’s life.

Even now this seems impossible: how could I have known someone of an age to have known Mendel? And yet it was true: Tati had grown up on the outskirts of Brno, the city where Mendel spent most of his life. In 1866, when they first met, there was cholera in Brno, and Prussian soldiers were passing through after the brief and nasty war. Tati was ten then, and those things didn’t interest him. He had scaled the white walls of the Augustinian monastery of St. Thomas one afternoon, for a lark. As he’d straddled the wall he’d seen a plump, shortlegged man with glasses looking up at him.

“He looked like my mother’s uncle,” Tati said. “A little bit.”

Mendel had held out a hand and helped Tati jump down from the wall. Around him were fruit trees and wild vines; in the distance he saw a clocktower and a long, low building. Where Tati had landed, just where his feet touched ground, there were peas. Not the thousands of plants that would have been there at the height of Mendel’s investigations, but still hundreds of plants clinging to sticks and stretched strings.

The place was magical, Tati said. Mendel showed him the tame fox he tied up during the day but allowed to run free at night, the hedgehogs and the hamsters and the mice he kept, the beehives and the cages full of birds. The two of them, the boy and the middle-aged man, made friends. Mendel taught Tati most of his horticultural secrets and later he was responsible for getting him a scholarship to the school where he taught. But Tati said that the first year of their friendship, before the hawkweed experiments, was the best. He and Mendel, side by side, had opened pea flowers and transferred pollen with a camel-hair brush.

On the last day of 1866, Mendel wrote his first letter to Carl Nägeli of Munich, a powerful and well-known botanist known to be interested in hybridization. He sent a copy of his pea paper along with the letter, hoping Nägeli might help it find the recognition it deserved. But he also, in his letter, mentioned that he had started a few experiments with hawkweeds, which he hoped would confirm his results with peas.

Nägeli was an expert on the hawkweeds, and Tati believed that Mendel had only mentioned them to pique Nägeli’s interest in his work. Nägeli didn’t reply for several months, and when he finally wrote back he said almost nothing about the peas. But he was working on the hawkweeds himself, and he proposed that Mendel turn his experimental skills to them. Mendel, desperate for recognition, ceased to write about his peas and concentrated on the hawkweeds instead.

“Oh, that Nägeli!” Tati said. “Month after month, year after year, I watched Mendel writing his long, patient letters and getting no answer or slow answers or answers off the point. Whenever Nägeli wrote to Mendel, it was always about the hawkweeds. Later, when I learned why Mendel’s experiments with them hadn’t worked, I wanted to cry.”

The experiments that had given such tidy results with peas gave nothing but chaos with hawkweeds, which were very difficult to hybridize. Experiment after experiment failed; years of work were wasted. The inexplicable behavior of the hawkweeds destroyed Mendel’s belief that the laws of heredity he’d worked out with peas would be universally valid. By 1873, Mendel had given up completely. The hawkweeds, and Nägeli behind them, had convinced him that his work was useless.

It was bad luck, Tati said. Bad luck in choosing Nägeli to help him, and in letting Nägeli steer him toward the hawkweeds. Mendel’s experimental technique was fine, and his laws of heredity were perfectly true. He could not have known—no one knew for years—that his hawkweeds didn’t hybridize in rational ways because they frequently formed seeds without fertilization. “Parthenogenesis,” Tati told me—a huge, knobby word that I could hardly get my mouth around. Still, it sounds to me like a disease. “The plants grown from seeds formed this way are exact copies of the mother plant, just like the begonias we make from leaf cuttings.”

Mendel gave up on science and spent his last years, after he was elected abbot, struggling with the government over the taxes levied on his monastery. He quarreled with his fellow monks; he grew bitter and isolated. Some of the monks believed he had gone insane. In his quarters he smoked heavy cigars and gazed at the ceiling, which he’d had painted with scenes of saints and fruit trees, beehives and scientific equipment. When Tati came to visit him, his conversation wandered.

Mendel died in January 1884, on the night of Epiphany, confused about the value of his scientific work. That same year, long after their correspondence had ceased, Nägeli published an enormous book summarizing all his years of work. Although many of his opinions and observations seemed to echo Mendel’s work with peas, Nägeli made no mention of Mendel or his paper.

That was the story I told Richard. Torn from its context, stripped of the reasons why it was told, it became a story about the beginnings of Richard’s discipline. I knew that Richard would have paid money to hear it, but I gave it to him as a gift.

“And your grandfather saw all that?” he said. This was later on in our courtship; we were sitting on a riverbank, drinking Manhattans that Richard had mixed and enjoying the cold spiced beef and marinated vegetables and lemon tart I had brought in a basket. Richard liked my cooking quite a bit. He liked me too, but apparently not enough; I was longing for him to propose but he still hadn’t said a word. “Your grandfather saw the letters,” he said. “He watched Mendel assembling data for Nägeli. That’s remarkable. That’s extraordinary. I can’t believe the things you know.”

There was more, I hinted. What else did I have to offer him? Now it seems to me that I had almost everything: youth and health and an affectionate temperament; the desire to make a family. But then I was more impressed than I should have been by Richard’s education.

“More?” he said.

“There are some papers,” I said. “That Tati left behind.”

Of course I was not allowed in the courtroom, I was much too young. After Leiniger died, the date of the trial was moved forward. I never saw Tati sitting next to the lawyer my father had hired for him; I never saw a judge or a jury and never learned whether my testimony might have helped Tati. I never even learned whether, in that long-ago time, the court would have accepted the testimony of a child, because Tati died on the evening before the first day of the trial.

He had a stroke, my mother said. In the night she heard a loud, garbled cry and when she ran into the room that had once been mine she found Tati tipped over in bed, with his head hanging down and his face dark and swollen. Afterwards, after the funeral, when I came home from school I no longer went on walks through the woods and fields. I did my homework at the kitchen table and then I helped my mother around the house. On weekends I no longer went to the nursery.

Because there had been no trial, no one in town learned of my role in Leiniger’s death. There had been a quarrel between two old men, people thought, and then an accident. No one blamed me or my family. I was able to go through school without people pointing or whispering. I put Tati out of my mind, and with him the nursery and Leiniger, Mendel and Nägeli, and the behavior of the hawkweeds. When the war came I refused to listen to my mother’s rantings. After my father died she went to live with one of my married brothers, and I went off on my own. I loved working in the factory; I felt very independent.

Not until the war was over and I met Richard did I dredge up the hawkweed story. Richard’s family had been in America for generations and seemed to have no history; that was one of the things that drew me to him. But after our picnic on the riverbank I knew for sure that part of what drew him to me was the way I was linked so closely to other times and places. I gave Richard the yellowed sheets of paper that Tati had left in an envelope for me.

This is a draft of one of Mendel’s letters to Nägeli, Tati had written, on a note attached to the manuscript. He showed it to me once, when he was feeling sad. Later he gave it to me. I want you to have it.

Richard’s voice trembled when he read that note out loud. He turned the pages of Mendel’s letter slowly, here and there reading a line to me. The letter was an early one, or perhaps even the first. It was all about peas.

Richard said, “I can’t believe I’m holding this in my hand.”

“I could give it to you,” I said. In my mind this seemed perfectly reasonable. Mendel had given the letter to Tati, the sole friend of his last days; then Tati had passed it to me, when he was no longer around to protect me himself. Now it seemed right that I should give it to the man I wanted to marry.

“To me?” Richard said. “You would give it to me?”

“Someone who appreciates it should have it.”

Richard cherished Tati’s letter like a jewel. We married, we moved to Schenectady, Richard got a good job at the college, and we had our two daughters. During each of my pregnancies Richard worried that our children might inherit his hexadactyly, but Annie and Joan were both born with regulation fingers and toes. I stayed home with them, first in the apartment on Union Street and then later, after Richard’s promotion, in the handsome old house on campus that the college rented to us. Richard wrote papers and served on committees; I gave monthly dinners for the departmental faculty, weekly coffee hours for favored students, picnics for alumni on homecoming weekends. I managed that sort of thing rather well: it was a job, if an unpaid one, and it was expected of me.

Eventually our daughters grew up and moved away. And then, when I was nearly fifty, after Richard had been tenured and won his awards and grown almost unbearably self-satisfied, there came a time when the world went gray on me for the better part of a year.

I still can’t explain what happened to me then. My doctor said it was hormones, the beginning of my change of life. My daughters, newly involved with the women’s movement, said my years as a housewife had stifled me and that I needed a career of my own. Annie, our oldest, hemmed and hawed and finally asked me if her father and I were still sharing a bed; I said we were but didn’t have the heart to tell her that all we did was share it. Richard said I needed more exercise and prescribed daily walks in the college gardens, which were full of exotic specimen trees from every corner of the earth.