Capitol Reflections (7 page)
Henry smiled, leaned over, and clapped Bruce Merewether on the shoulder as if the two young men were old friends, a couple of buds having a few brewskies. His ruddy complexion and dirty blond hair were just inches away from Merewether’s face. “Aren’t we Cottage men all one group, one family?” he asked rhetorically, his eyes gleaming with mock goodwill.
“A bit of a generalization,” answered Bruce. “Some people here are part of the group, as you put it, because their parents cut a few dozen extra checks every year and grease the palms of the right administrators and athletic directors. Besides, ailing Hawaiian pineapple entrepreneurs really don’t have much in common with the rest of us, wouldn’t you agree?”
The noisy conversation in the bar abated quickly as several dozen people directed their attention to the imposing Mr. Broome and his seated rival. The sharp crack of a pool cue breaking freshly racked balls sounded in the corner and then faded as silence claimed lease on the pub for several tense seconds.
“I think you owe the true gentlemen-athletes of this university an apology,” Henry said emphatically, grabbing the front of Bruce’s white polo shirt and lifting him from the chair. “The last time you competed in anything, all you succeeded in doing was tiring your horse.”
“You’re just a dumb-ass jock,” Bruce asserted smugly. “You’re an insult to Cottage. You may get away with some sneaky elbow punches on the soccer field when the refs aren’t looking, but you’re neither a gentleman nor a scholar.”
“Maybe you’re right, Mr. Merewether. In fact, maybe I’m just a janitor. I must be, because I just realized that it’s time to take out the trash.”
Henry lifted Merewether over his head and headed for the front door, already propped open by a fawning member of Broome’s Brigade.
Angling sideways, Henry carried his load into the crisp, blue New Jersey evening and walked down the alley on his left.
“Put me down, Broome!” Merewether demanded. “One more step and the honor committee is going to find out who really wrote your junior essay.”
“You have Mommy and Daddy do whatever they like,” Henry said, heaving Merewether’s body into a corroded green dumpster with a single thrust of his powerful arms. “And tell them Henry Broome sends his warm regards.”
Broome’s Brigade burst into applause and cheers.
Henry bowed ceremoniously. “
Dei sub numine viget
!” he bellowed, reciting the school motto, Under God’s name she flourishes. “Cottage rules!”
Dei sub numine viget
!” he bellowed, reciting the school motto, Under God’s name she flourishes. “Cottage rules!”
“Cottage rules!” the students echoed.
Henry walked casually toward the bar’s entrance, ready to put away a few more beers, but first he stopped and faced the dumpster.
“Didn’t think I knew Latin, did ya?” he called to the now invisible Merewether.
Laughter followed the indomitable Henry Broome back into Cottage’s leather-lined lair.
Eddie Karn was the lone bystander on the sidewalk that night. Karn was on his way back to the library to put in a last hour before closing. He stood there, transfixed at the sight of Broome’s disregard for another’s humanity. Though there was nothing he could do, he felt compelled to bear witness. Karn didn’t hang around Cottage types and wasn’t impressed by demonstrations of power. Or by Henry Broome, for that matter. He would remember the night Bruce Merewether got dumpsterized for a long time.
A very long time.
9
Jamie Robinson, hunched over the low handlebars of his bright red Schwinn ten-speed, cut through the chilly air and fallen leaves as he rode to Princeton’s Biochemistry Department, a little nub of architecture tacked onto the biology building. To enter, one had to walk past dinosaur bones and mounted animal specimens discovered by renowned biologists into a realm where test tubes and DNA were rapidly threatening to eclipse the rudimentary practices of the various biological disciplines. The biochemistry department was starting to realize that molecular biology was the wave of the future.
At one end of the campus, the old-line biochemists fiercely defended their turf and methodology in the chemistry building. At this end of the campus, however, amazing things were happening, and quickly. Destined to become world-class academics, young professors like Raju Kucherlapati and Arnie Levine were busy unlocking the secrets of how genes really worked.
Jamie couldn’t wait to get to the lab each morning, realizing that he was in the middle of a paradigm shift in scientific thinking. He couldn’t take his mind off the pace at which molecular biology was moving, especially last month’s landmark discovery by Montagu and Schell. Jamie dismounted and wheeled the Schwinn’s slim tires into the metal bars of the bike rack. He was probably the only cyclist on campus who wore a protective plastic helmet, the strap of which he now looped around the handlebars in his morning ritual while simultaneously glancing down at his shirt to verify that all seven of his colored ink pens were still neatly lined up in his pocket protector.
His roommate found Jamie’s habit of constantly checking his shirt pockets annoying in the extreme, but the biochemistry major needed to sketch molecules in his black marbleized notebook every day, and he enjoyed color-coding the various organic groups he studied. Drawing carbon rings, proteins, nucleic acids, alkaloids, terpenoids, and phenolics in black and white? Unthinkable.
Jamie was the first member of his family to go to college, having matriculated to Princeton from a family of steel workers in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Robinsons generally worked hard, stuck close to their kin, and died early. But Jamie had demonstrated an intellectual aptitude since kindergarten that amazed his parents and teachers alike. “His superior intelligence is a gift from God,” Father Ignatius had told Mr. and Mrs. Robinson when their son was in third grade, “and you are obligated to cherish that gift and develop it.” From then on, Jesuits filled Jamie’s head with as much knowledge as they thought the boy could absorb while his friends were tackling one another at recess.
The good priests of the Society of Jesus weren’t disappointed. Jamie’s appetite for learning was insatiable.
Predictably, Jamie’s aspirations extended beyond the foundry and the slag heap. He was college bound, and despite becoming class valedictorian, he declared his independence at the last minute, turning down a full scholarship to Notre Dame in favor of a work-study program at Princeton. Recognized as the prodigy that he was, he managed to get the best of both worlds. His campus job was glassware cleaner in Professor Kucherlapati’s lab.
“Morning, Raju,” Jamie said, beaming upon entering his mentor’s office on the second floor of the building, nicknamed the Mobio. In the matter of academic protocol, Kucherlapati cut his students considerable slack owing to the fact that his name, following the title “professor,” had more syllables than most people could comfortably swallow. The microbiologist was a short man with a dark complexion, black hair, and unusually large, Ghandi-like probing eyes. Humming a wordless acknowledgment as he looked up from a stack of graduate term papers, he said with a slight, yet comforting, smile, “What have you got to show me this morning … as if I don’t already know?”
Jamie put a sheaf of papers on the desk.
Kucherlapati inspected them briefly, sighed in frustration, and leaned back in his leather chair, hands clasped behind his head.
“Genomics. It’s an interesting theoretical approach, blindly analyzing the entire genome. Personally, I just don’t believe it will amount to anything until we understand the basic mechanisms of how DNA works and how proteins are made. The future, Mr. Robinson, is in somatic cell hybridization. Now we can move human genes from one cell to another. Devastating human illnesses, like Tay-Sachs and sickle cell anemia are caused by a defect in a single gene. I am arrogant enough to believe that my students will contribute to the cutting-edge research that will one day control, and maybe even eradicate, these diseases.”
Jamie knew that genes were just instructions coded in the four-letter alphabet of DNA that enabled the human body to synthesize all of the proteins necessary for life. As Kucherlapati hinted, some diseases had been linked to defective instructions in that DNA and early attempts at therapy involved manufacturing and administering the gene product at enormous expense. Kucherlapati imagined the day in which missing or defective genes would simply be implanted.
His students pictured him walking onto the stage in Stockholm to accept his Nobel Prize.
Jamie had to admit that somatic cell hybridization was interesting work, and to study with Kucherlapati was an opportunity that any Biochemistry major with the correctly folded proteins in his cerebral cortex would not pass up. The brainiac from Scranton had some other ideas. Kucherlapati might be out to save the few with rare genetic disorders. Jamie was out to feed the world.
Jamie had produced some astounding results in his very own dorm room, in fact. His roommate Henry wasn’t fond of the many plants growing under high-intensity lamps, but then Henry generally ran a blood alcohol level that would fell a mere mortal, so things balanced out. Jamie conducted his research well into the night while Henry either slept off the booze or shacked up with some bimbo cheerleader behind the screen that the incorrigible Mr. Broome unfolded so he could have token privacy.
Jamie had all the folding and unfolding he could handle.
10
Henry returned to his dorm in 1901 Hall around eleven, pleasantly anesthetized but not drunk. The university was fond of Princetonian neologisms; hence, everyone on campus referred to the building as “Oughty-one.”
Henry walked into the dorm room, plopped his two-hundred-twenty-pound frame onto his bed, back against the wall, and studied his roommate.
“What the hell are you doing now?” he asked Jamie Robinson.
It seemed to Henry that every time he entered the room, there were more plants growing under the long banks of lights hanging from every available source of support: bookshelves, the ceiling, a towel rack, and Jamie’s bed frame. “I feel like I’m living in the freakin’ Amazon.” Henry punctuated his comment with an exceedingly long belch that introduced the odors of Cottage Club into the room.
Jamie laughed without looking up from his Apple II computer.
Henry still couldn’t believe that Jamie spent all of his money—literally all of it; he had nothing left for new clothes, trips home, or meals out—on a machine.
“What the bloody hell are you growing, anyway? A little grass maybe?”
“Grass?”
“Weed, kiddo. Marijuana, Mary Jane, reefer.”
“Hardly. I’m growing a variety of peas and beans, with a few herbs on the side.”
Henry laughed at his geeky roommate. “Lemme guess. You’re gonna make us a kick-ass salad for when we get the munchies.”
Even though Jamie was forever entering data into his stupid computer, Henry sort of liked the skinny nerd. Despite his squeaky-clean image, Jamie was not above doing much of Henry’s classwork. The kid was a goddamned Einstein when it came to calculus, plus he didn’t seem to mind young coeds giggling and moaning on the other side of the room when Henry’s libido kicked into overdrive, which was at least three times a week. Hell, Jamie was so absorbed in becoming the Emperor of Agriculture that Henry wasn’t sure if the kid even noticed the sweet young things that the leader of Broome’s Brigade brought up to the room and bedded behind the constantly folding and unfolding screen.
“What did you say?” asked Jamie.
“Geez,” sighed Henry, rolling his eyes. “Do you live on Jupiter? I asked if you were going to make some salad with all this shit you’re growing.”
Jamie swiveled around in his chair and faced Henry Broome squarely, his demeanor serious. “When man progressed beyond the hunter-gatherer stage approximately thirteen thousand years ago, he grew cultivated cereal grasses, mostly barley and wheat, in the fertile crescent. He always saved the biggest seeds from the stalks for both eating and planting. The result? The new plants also had bigger seeds. Without realizing it, man had produced the first genetically modified foods in history. This worked with livestock as well. Only the healthiest goats and sheep, for example, were chosen for breeding.”
Henry could barely tolerate lectures in lecture halls. Getting one in his room was like swallowing a handful of sleeping pills. His head fell onto his right shoulder, his eyes barely open.
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