A Fierce Radiance (19 page)

No sentimentality, he cautioned himself. He couldn’t allow it, not in his work, nor in his personal life.
I’m sorry I had to cancel our dinner plan for Saturday night.
Saturday night was last night. He’d come to New Haven yesterday morning, fewer than twenty-four hours ago. Remarkable. He felt as if he hadn’t seen Claire in a year at least.

I’m thinking of you.
Did that sound sentimental? He knew how to deal with lust, but he had little experience with love. Only Ellen, left behind in Saranac. Did Claire sense his relative inexperience? Is this why she was so gentle in her manner with him, seeming to wait for him to take the lead? Or was she somehow afraid? If so, afraid of what? He knew that he was afraid. Afraid because Claire mattered so much to him.

He felt dazed from lack of sleep. Maybe he should go to the on-call room that had been assigned to him at the end of the hall. Lie down for an hour or two, take a shower and shave afterward. The Merck man had woken up and gone off to take a shower. Certainly Jamie would try to get some sleep before sending the letter to Claire. When he was more alert, he’d review the letter and maybe rewrite it. On the other hand, maybe he should let himself be impetuous for once and mail it now.

I miss you.
He’d said he missed her at the beginning of the letter, but it was worth repeating. He imagined himself cupping both her
breasts in his palms and gently kissing first one, and then the other, especially that place on the side, where her breast curved around, his hand underneath.
I think about you all the time.

“Dr. Stanton, would you mind taking a look at these lab results?” The chief physician, stout, bald, an arc of white hair around his lower skull, stood at the entry to the room. At least the man was in early this morning; Jamie had been taken aback when the physician went home last night. The man held a sheet of paper and looked skeptical.

Well, this must be something serious, if they were asking for his opinion. Jamie closed his notebook, its love letter hidden inside. He stood. He felt a little light-headed from lack of sleep, lack of coffee, lack of breakfast, and lack of Claire. Putting on an air of nonchalant self-assurance, he walked to the door and took the report that the chief physician held out for him.

He read the report. Its news did not surprise him. He’d read reports like this before.

“It’s astonishing, isn’t it?” the chief physician said.

Jamie absolutely couldn’t remember the man’s name. They’d been introduced yesterday afternoon, and Jamie had made a mental note of his name. It related to animals. Fox, Wolf, Hunter…no use, it was gone. During his training, he’d been able to stay up night after night and still remember every name, every diagnosis, every testing schedule. Maybe he’d bragged about this ability once too often to his colleagues, and now forgetfulness was his reward.

“I wouldn’t have believed it, if I hadn’t seen it myself,” the nameless colleague continued. The belt buckle on the man’s trousers had disappeared completely under his large abdomen. “And her fever is normal, did you know?”

“Yes.” Jamie vowed that he would never allow himself to become stout. How could he confidently present his naked self to Claire if his abdomen was four feet around? She wouldn’t be able to find the crucial parts.

“I caught that fellow from Merck on his way to the shower, and he says they’ve got enough medication stockpiled to last one patient for three weeks. He can have it up here on a day’s notice, though he says we won’t need it all.”

“You’ll need it all,” Jamie said. “Tell him to send it. Now.”

“All of it?”

“Yes, all of it.”

The woman on the bed was stirring. She called out a name. Her husband’s name. Said the name clearly, although her voice was weak. Her delirium had passed.

Anne Miller. Wife, mother, nurse. Weeks of medication, available on a day’s notice. Suddenly Jamie grasped the truth. Anne Miller was different from the other critically ill penicillin patients he’d treated. Different from Edward Reese and Sophia Metaxas. Different for one reason only: Anne Miller would survive. The first human to be rescued from death by penicillin.

R
apture.

That’s what Tia Stanton felt at midnight as she sat at her laboratory bench. She wore diamond earrings, pearls, high heels, and, under her lab coat, a low-cut midnight blue cocktail dress. Although Tia had a small apartment nearby, she hadn’t wasted time going home to change. She’d returned to the lab directly from the engagement party for her college friend Evelyn.

A fake, that’s what she felt like in this getup. What was she trying to prove? She went through the list: that women could be both scientists and attractive. That she, Tia Stanton, could be both a scientist and attractive. That she could find a man to marry. That she could have children and live a “normal” life despite the drive she felt to know things, the nagging curiosity that never left her alone.

She did try to maintain what her friends considered a “normal” life. For example, she’d been invited to five engagement parties in the next two months, and she planned to attend them all. Tonight’s gathering had been hosted by her Bryn Mawr roommate, Beth, and Beth’s husband. Determined good cheer suffused the atmosphere. On the far side of the world, Bataan had fallen. More than 70,000 Allied troops had been taken prisoner, including over 10,000 Americans—the population of a small city, as if every man, woman, and child had been ordered out of their homes, businesses, and schools and marched into oblivion. How many small cities could the Allies afford to lose?

Most of the men at tonight’s party would be in uniform soon. Joe, the high school history teacher. Eric, the lawyer. Keith, the store manager. Beth’s husband, Robert, who worked at an investment company. Robert wondered if he should join up, hoping for a better posting, rather than wait for the rumored end to draft deferments for married men. Who knew what the future would bring these men, or what battlefield they’d end up on. Despite their degrees and their good jobs, they were heartrendingly vulnerable. The party had an atmosphere of frenetic desperation, a sense that everyone had to pair up fast, before fate or history or simple bad luck made pairing up impossible. Life among Tia’s friends was speeding ahead as if they were all hurtling toward death.

The urgency of her work centered her, taking the place of the peer pressure to bond before it was too late. Jamie had told her the dreadful statistics of the number of military men who died from infections. Trying to change that meant more to her than, say, enjoying another glass of champagne at an engagement celebration.

Nonetheless she was more than a little pleased when several appealing men at the party asked for her phone number. She’d given her number gladly, ever hopeful, while knowing that if they weren’t interested in the life she led, she wasn’t interested in them. By now her women friends had given up worrying about her, at least in her presence. She felt no need to defend her work. If she were a man, her dedication would be considered praiseworthy and inspiring. Even heroic.

Luckily she was developing a few romantic possibilities right here at the hospital, among men who, presumably, understood her better. Jake Lind, who assisted Jamie with the clinical trials for penicillin, had taken her to dinner. He worshipped Jamie, but although Tia adored her brother, Jake had made the conversation a little too Jamie-centric even for an admiring younger sister. She was willing, however, to give Jake another chance. Nick Catalano had been visiting the lab more often than was strictly necessary for the questions he supposedly came
to ask—although since he was working with Jamie now, he did have a lot of questions to ask, trying to catch up on ideas he’d ignored (or dismissed) before. Tia would be extremely pleased if ever Nick decided to pose his questions over dinner. She’d had a crush on him since she came to the Institute. Andrew Barnett, the security officer for Vannevar Bush, had been around a few times, checking up on everyone, apparently making certain that no one on the Institute staff was a German or Japanese sympathizer. Barnett had taken her to lunch and made her laugh with his imitations of film actors, from James Cagney to Humphrey Bogart.

Maybe it was for the best, that her brother had fallen in love with Claire Shipley and had a new job that was taking him away from the Institute. Well, obviously it was best for him: at dinner she saw how contented he was with Claire, and his job seemed inherently worthwhile. Tia had met Ellen only once or twice and could barely remember her; Tia had been caught up in high school concerns when Ellen and Jamie were engaged, and then Ellen went to Saranac. Jamie’s newfound happiness with Claire pleased Tia, of course. But she was realizing, too, that his increasing absence forced her to be on her own more.

Was she deluding herself, with her faith that against the odds she’d eventually marry and continue the work she loved? Was she naive, that she kept looking upon the world as if it were filled with possibilities? Probably she should know better by now.

The truth was, mold was much easier to deal with than men. Tonight she was working with soil bacteria, molds, and actinomyces (small life-forms, half-plant, half-animal). The colors of the actinomyces astonished her. Tufts of green. Squiggles of orange. Blue towers. Magenta curlicues. White tumbleweeds. They appeared delicate as they grew in the petri dishes arrayed upon the table, yet when Tia touched them with a sterilized pipette, they proved to be sturdy and strong. The life-forms didn’t look like this in the soil. Tia made them
look like this. Through trial and error, she discovered and fed them their favorite foods, provided them with their favorite climate, and allowed them to achieve their glory.

Tia had forced herself to accept the fact that the breakthrough penicillin research was passing her by. After the medication rescued Anne Miller, industry had been galvanized by penicillin’s potential. Pharmaceutical executives who’d been dragging their feet on penicillin production before Anne Miller weren’t dragging their feet now. Industry worked on a scale that Tia couldn’t match here in her small lab. As national research coordinator, Jamie was traveling constantly and dealing with questions that involved thousands, tens of thousands, of milk bottles and bedpans. The first problem was how to move beyond milk bottles and bedpans to—what? Giant vats? Huge flats? Fields of mold covered with tarpaulins?

David Hoskins had already been “seconded,” as he termed it, to the Hanover Company, to use his expertise there. On his days off, he came to the Institute to help produce penicillin for the continuing, small-scale research on skin infections. Jamie’s three original patients had finally recovered, and they’d been replaced by three more. Jake Lind supervised this project. Tia missed David, both for his humor and his expertise. And for his friendly presence, she had to admit.

Both Merck and Pfizer had approached Tia to offer her jobs—at a lot more money—but she turned them down. Despite the high salaries the companies paid, she didn’t want to be part of a commercial, profit-driven venture. Pride played into her decision, too: Tia and her colleagues from graduate school felt a patronizing resentment toward their peers who’d taken higher-paying jobs with industry. Justifying their own choices, they implied that their money-preferring peers were second-rate researchers.

In any event, Tia had a good deal of independence at the Institute, and her goal now was to concentrate on discovering a substance better than penicillin. So far, she’d tested 683 soil samples. Of these, 31
showed initial promise in fighting infectious bacteria, but none was successful in more advanced tests. She was certain that the substances were somewhere in the soil: every day strep, staph, TB, and all the rest found their way into soil, and something in the soil destroyed them. Her job was to find and harness the biological mechanism at work.

From the incubator on the counter, she brought out a rack of liquid-filled test tubes. The liquid had been cloudy when she put the test tubes into the incubator three days before. The substance used here, from soil sample number 642, had passed the first level of testing by destroying infectious bacteria in a petri dish. She held up the rack to the light. The fluid in the test tubes had a bluish tinge. It was also transparent instead of cloudy. This was surprising.

Every other time she’d done this test, the fluid had come out of the incubator the same way it went in: cloudy. The cloudiness was caused by thriving bacteria. She shook the rack to see if the cloudiness had settled at the bottom of the tubes as a sediment.

No, the tubes were still clear. She retrieved the control rack from the incubator. These test tubes had received infectious bacteria only. They had remained cloudy, which told her that the bacteria were still alive.

She placed both racks of test tubes on the table. She sat down to think this through. If the test tubes were clear, that meant the substance she’d added three days ago had killed the infectious bacteria. Closing her eyes, she reviewed the experiment in her mind, observing her actions as if watching a movie in slow motion, frame by frame. Yes…she’d done everything correctly.

All right, don’t jump ahead of yourself, she thought. Most likely she’d made a mistake somewhere along the line. She’d repeat the test, and then repeat it again. If the results remained consistent, she’d isolate and identify the substance, purify it, and concentrate it. Then, following established protocols, she’d conduct experiments on mice. First, she’d inject the substance into healthy mice to see if they suf
fered adverse reactions. This way, she could determine if the substance was toxic to mammals. If it wasn’t toxic, she’d infect mice with staph and strep, then treat half of them with number 642, and see what happened. If number 642 had antibacterial properties, the treated mice would recover and survive. The untreated mice would die, sacrificed, as the euphemism went, for the greater good.

She checked her lab book to review the details of number 642. Yes, she remembered now…she’d collected this sample last September, when she’d visited Swarthmore, the village outside Philadelphia where she’d lived with her grandparents after her parents died. She was attending the memorial service for her grandmother’s closest friend. After the ceremony, she’d changed her shoes and gone for a walk in the woods. The day was warm, 94 degrees according to the thermometer at the train station. The air in the woods was heavy with humidity, but Tia didn’t mind; she’d grown up with it, and it reminded her of her childhood. The leaves, ferns, and shrubs were a dense, dark green, their summer color, and they were huge and overgrown. The arching trees reflected green into the water of the creek. The air itself glowed emerald, sunlight dappling upon her. The path, narrow, hidden, haphazard, led along the creek. The Crum Creek meandered through swamps and stands of rhododendron and hanging moss.

When Tia was young, she’d walked in these woods almost every day, through every season. Then, as now, the trees were oak, hickory, beech, tulip, poplar.
Quercus palustris
.
Liriodendron tulipifera
.
Fagus grandifolia
. The rhythm of the scientific names—this was her poetry. During winter thaws, witch hazel shrubs,
Hamamelis virginiana,
bloomed. The small, yellow petals were bright against the plant’s bare branches. During the droughts of summer, the creek bed revealed its mysteries. Always Tia studied the mold and fungi that lived off both the living and the dead in perfect balance.

Why?
That was the question that was always in her mind.
Why, why, why,
and no one could answer all the whys, although her grand
father, who taught botany at the college, came closest. Eventually she realized she’d have to figure out the answers by herself.

When she’d taken this sample, in September of 1941, America hadn’t yet entered the war—although Poland, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and France had already been conquered. Russia had been invaded in June of 1941. Japan controlled much of China. England was fighting on despite the Blitz. And yet, last September, Pearl Harbor hadn’t been bombed, Hong Kong and Singapore hadn’t surrendered. Joe, Eric, Keith, and Robert weren’t discussing which branch of the military they were better off joining.

How tired she was. She rested her face in the palms of her hands. Remembering her September walk in the Crum, and the many forest walks of her childhood, she remembered her parents. Their deaths played in her mind more often than she liked to acknowledge. She wondered how often Jamie thought of their parents. She never asked him, however. For years now, they’d had a kind of silent bond, an unspoken understanding that they wouldn’t spend their adult lives dwelling on what had happened to them when they were children. Besides, they were among the lucky ones.

Suddenly, she was reliving those days. Philadelphia. Early November 1918. Near the end of the Great War. The influenza epidemic. Everyone called it the Spanish flu.

The influenza spread fast and killed fast. Within a week it closed schools, theaters, restaurants, churches. Telephones didn’t work because the switchboard operators were ill. On Thursday afternoon, her father collapsed on the street on his way to a meeting. A passerby took him to the hospital. At breakfast, he’d been healthy, holding Tia on his lap while she finished her hot chocolate and he finished his coffee. By dinnertime, he was dead.

Tia was four years old. She couldn’t remember every detail. She remembered scenes, but not the connections between them. The morning after her father died, she didn’t wake until the sunlight
filled her bedroom. Yesterday it was still dark outside, when her mother rubbed her shoulder, gently urging her awake. Tia rose in a rush, threw off her nightgown, and put on the same dress she’d worn yesterday, the blue muslin with the sailor collar. Everyone in the house had forgotten her, and she had to find out where they were.

She hurried down the wide staircase, gliding her hand along its carved, polished banister. The parlor was empty. Dust motes fell in shafts of sunlight over the Persian carpets. The house was large yet simple and somber. A Quaker house. Outside the long windows, nothing was somber. The outside was a riot of colors, the sugar maples brilliant with yellow and red, branches tapping against the glass, calling her. Tia wanted to go outside, wanted to run in the park beneath the red and yellow trees, but she wasn’t allowed to go out to the street alone. Confused, she returned upstairs. She approached her parents’ door. She knocked on the door, as she’d been taught to do. No one answered. The door was open several inches, however, and she pushed it. The hinges creaked.