Jane (4 page)

“Rubbish! They were found at the same depth, and only fifteen yards away from each other. Their color and texture are identical.”

Woodley never took his eyes from the long, ropy intestines he had extracted from the cadaver and placed for examination on its still-intact chest.

“Well,” I demanded, “do you have an opinion on it?”

“Not really. I’m studying to be a physician, not a fossil hunter.”

“Certainly you have an opinion on so important a scientific question.”

“It’s important to some people.”

“Some people?”
I was incensed. “So you don’t care whether your forebearers were ape-men, or creatures that came magically out of Adam’s rib?”

Woodley was clearly unused to such a highly opinionated lady.

“The apes, I suppose,” he finally muttered.

Truly, I would have been shocked had he chosen the rib. Few educated men and women denied Darwin, but fewer still were courageous—or some said idiotic—enough to make paleoanthropology their career. In other than the scholarly crowd, such a calling was laughable. This was a contradiction that drove me mad.

“Are you coming to hear Dubois at the congress?” I asked.

“The congress?”

“The International Congress of Zoology. He’s presenting his Java man finds here, later this month. Are you coming?”

“Are you?”

“Oh, Mr. Woodley. I really hope you’re not the type who’s always answering a question with a question.”

He gave me a sharp look. “I’m trying to like you, Miss Porter. You make it very difficult.”

Aware that my impatience was getting the better of me, I resumed my dissection. “Yes, I’m going. My father and Eugène Dubois are friends. But you knew that.”

“Everyone knows that.” There was a strained silence. “Miss Porter…”

“What?”

“Be careful with the vocal folds. They’re very delicate.”

“Thank you,” I said, contrite. Perhaps Woodley was a decent sort of man after all. There were so many I would just as soon send to the bottom of the ocean. I looked up and managed a smile. “Can you tell me which tool you suggest?”

*   *   *

Unladylike though it was, I dashed across the Newnham College green clutching my valise in one hand, hat to my head with the other. The scarf ties flew out behind like wind-whipped banners, and the young women walking two by two with great decorum skewered me with the evil eye. But my father was waiting just beyond the hedge in the Packard, eager to make an end to his week’s work at the university. And I hated to keep him waiting.

As many weekends as I was able, I went home with the professor. I lived for these times, working with him in the manor laboratory and keeping company with my animals. The courses at Newnham—one of the two women’s colleges at Cambridge—were adequate, and I appreciated the extreme privilege of participating in higher education, but the restrictions imposed upon my sex irked me beyond measure. Women could attend classes at Cambridge and write examinations. But Newnham had its own library and separate laboratories, as girls were prohibited from sullying those hallowed halls in the men’s colleges. Worst of all, females could not graduate or qualify for a degree of any kind. It was maddening!

That was why my admission into the anatomy laboratory—the only one at Cambridge—had been such an unimaginable coup. Certainly it had stirred numerous debates and ruffled whole hatsful of feathers, even prompting several of the fellows to suggest my father’s termination as a lecturer.

But to hell with them! None of the other girls at Newnham had a fraction of the ambition that I did. I was going to make something of myself. Leave a mark on the world. And that was that.

It had been my great good fortune to have a champion for a father—one who so openly applauded my audacity and who, in every way within his power, was clearing the path for my success.

As I came around the high hedge, I heard the Packard running before I saw Father—Professor Archimedes Phinneaus Porter—behind the wheel of his pride and joy—the bright blue two-seater Mother had recently given him for his fiftieth birthday. I smiled whenever I thought of my father thusly. “Archie” was what he called himself, undistinguished as that might sound. He’d never forgiven his parents for saddling him with such a ridiculously antiquated name, which was why, he explained, he had given his daughter such a plain one.

I strapped my bag to the back platform and slipped in beside him. The door was barely shut before the car lurched into forward motion and we were off. I grabbed the two side scarves and tied them under my chin for the drive into the countryside south of Cambridge town.

“Will I ever get the smell of formaldehyde out of my hair?” I needed to shout to overcome the wind blown directly into our faces and the “infernal combustion engine,” as my father called the Packard. I put my wrist to my nose. “I think the stuff’s in my skin as well!”

“It is!” Father called out cheerily. “Formaldehyde is organic and seeps into the skin. You’ll smell like a cadaver for the rest of the term! Perhaps longer. Every year before the summer break all the anatomy students get together on King’s Court, set a huge bonfire, and burn their odious black coats!”

I liked the sound of that tradition and imagined the heat of the fire, the raucous shouts, and the glow of the flames on the faces of the Messrs. Woodley, Shaw, and even Cartwright. There was something wonderfully pagan about the ritual.

Everyone knew Professor Porter’s blue Packard and waved merrily to him as we tooled along Gwydir Street and the Brewery, then passed the Mill Road Cemetery and on out of the city limits. Cambridge was a smallish town. It wasn’t long before we were driving southwest on Whimpole Road through green farm- and pasturelands.

“Well,” Father said, “what did you find in your specimen’s throat?”

“All the organs and structures necessary for the muscles of speech! The hyoid bone, the larynx, the tongue and pharynx. I took a good hard look at the supralaryngeal air passage. I’ve studied the voice box in theory and lecture, but it was amazing to finally see the very organ that makes our species human!”

“Don’t let’s forget upright posture in all the excitement. You’d have quite a fight on your hands with our fellow evolutionists if you showed them a knuckle-dragging ape, even if he could sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’!”

I carefully considered my father’s words. He was right. Sometimes my enthusiasm got the better of me. I tended to forget the obvious.

“Remind me tomorrow,” he continued, “but I think I’ve got the larynx of a mountain gorilla in the pantry!”

Much to Mother’s dismay, Archie Porter called the specimen closet in his home laboratory the pantry. It truly was a grotesque chamber, worse in ways than the human dissection laboratory at the university. Before Father had become a lecturer of human anatomy, he had been a morphologist—a comparative anatomist—studying and dissecting a variety of animal species. He therefore kept, in row upon row in his pantry, body parts, embryos, specimens, and skeletons of every sort of wild and domesticated animal.

In this one instance, and possibly this one instance alone, I found myself in agreement with Mother. Even as a young girl I’d hated the sight of half a dog’s head in a jar, the rather large phallus of a stallion, a pig embryo, a skinned cat. And not because they were hideous or frightening. In fact, they’d fascinated me. But I adored animals (in their
living
condition) and felt nothing but pity for the poor creatures who had been so unceremoniously cut into pieces, ending up pickled in Father’s closet. It suddenly occurred to me that I’d had no such qualms that morning in the human anatomy laboratory. But then, I had more love for animals than I did most people I knew.

“While the human is fresh in your mind,” Father said, “you should have a look-see at the ape!”

“That would be brilliant!” I called out, grateful enough for the extraordinary opportunity just offered to overcome the revulsion I felt for the unfortunate simian.

Father was proud of his collection. Every summer for the past six years he had gone on expedition to Kenya, timed between that country’s two rainy seasons, in furtherance of his lifelong quest. He, like his friend and associate Eugène Dubois, had been searching for Charles Darwin’s missing link. Dubois, in 1891, had had the good fortune to find in the wilds of Indonesia the fossil remains of Java man, what my father believed was “stunning proof” of an interim species, part ape, part man. But this had, ironically, proved to be only the beginning of the poor man’s travails. The scientific establishment had, by and large, repudiated Dubois’s finding. Ever since his return to Europe with his precious bones, having nearly lost the case holding them in a shipwreck, the Limburgian paleoanthropologist had been compelled to defend his fossils against those “too dense or jealous,” as Father would say, to admit his accomplishment. And all this after years of intensive work and massive personal sacrifice—the appalling loss of an infant daughter to a tropical fever and a wife who had lost her love for the man with the death of their child.

Father’s only dispute with his friend was one of location. Eugène Dubois, on the urgings of his professor at Jena University—the esteemed Ernst Haeckel—had gone looking for the ape-human link in the jungles of Asia. Professor Porter, a more literal Darwinist, was certain the fossils would be found in equatorial Africa.

Dubois had returned home from Java carrying tangible evidence of an upright anthropoid with a large brain—far larger than any ape’s, though not quite as fulsome as the Neanderthal skulls discovered in Europe. Alas, it had no neck vertebrae or any evidence of the power of speech. But Father had so far found less than that. Nothing at all but fossils of extinct flora and fauna of the Pleistocene epoch. He had also harvested quite a collection of unwanted body parts as specimens from the carcasses of apes taken down by the numerous great white hunters now making a fine living in Kenya with their wealthy clientele, out for adventure and trophies for their library floors and walls.

Certainly he was frustrated, but each year without fail he mounted a new, insanely expensive expedition, financed by my mother’s vast fortune. The money was grudgingly given, as Samantha Edlington-Porter loathed the months her husband disappeared into the “Dark Continent.” She was mortified by his theories and endeavors, which were similarly disavowed by his fellow scientists. While they might agree with Darwin’s theories in
Descent of Man,
few had any interest in finding physical proof of them. Well respected though Archie Porter might be in his professorship at Cambridge, he was merely an “enthusiastic amateur” in his paleoanthropological adventures. I always thought it to my mother’s credit that despite her dreaded misgivings and the whiff of scientific heresy that surrounded the hated safaris, she repeatedly funded them.

Father did, however, pay a price. There were the acid comments at Mother’s dinner parties and the incessant harping about the dangers of these expeditions. In one respect, at least, she did have firm ground upon which to level her assaults.

For beating in Archie Porter’s broad, manly chest was a questionable heart. It was a family thing, he liked to say, much like the Hapsburg lip. His father, two uncles, and a brother had died young from what Father referred to as “a bum ticker.” But he insisted—quite rightly, I thought—that his kin had been wholly unfit individuals, carrying before them massive bellies and jowls hanging heavily from their chins that shook like beef aspic on a platter. Father was an altogether different sort—a bona fide outdoorsman. He fished, he rode, he bicycled. He took miles-long striding constitutionals every single day that weather permitted. And I, the only one of his and Mother’s children who had survived infancy, had taken very much after my father.

Samantha cringed when anyone called her daughter a tomboy, but that was a perfectly reasonable description of me. Much as I loved reading and the study of science, I honestly preferred the out-of-doors. Never was I happier than on the back of a galloping horse, my yapping hounds running alongside. Not to brag, but I was a crack shot, too. I could outshoot Father at skeet, and my begrudging nickname on the college archery range was “Robin Hood.” Long ago, Mother had given up seeing me descend the staircase slowly and decorously, my hand pressed lightly on the rail. I had proved myself to be little more than a female ruffian.

“So were they horrible to you today, the young men in the class?” Father shouted over the wind.

“Only one true dolt!” I shouted back in answer to his question, thinking of Mr. Cartwright.

I noticed that Father’s wavy brown hair, blown backward, was growing rather longer than Mother liked, and it was always an unruly mess by the time we returned from the college. He had refused to grow the full beard that was all the rage now, especially among English academic men, choosing instead the clean-shaven American style. His wife approved of the beardless look but strenuously objected to the too-long hair. “You look like the Wild Man of Borneo,” she would complain every time he came in from a drive. And when it attained a dangerous length—as it had now—Samantha would have the barber make a special house call.

“But it makes me so angry, Cambridge segregating the men and the women!” I said. “Why haven’t they come into the new century? Look at Marie Stopes at University College London. Not only are females training side by side with male physicians, but Marie, a girl
my age,
is already a lecturer there!”

“You could have gone to University College!”

“I know I could. But then I would have had to leave you!” I looked over at my father, affection threatening to spill over as tears. “And your laboratory!”

“
Our
laboratory!” He smiled, never taking his eyes off the road. Archie Porter was nothing if not a careful man.

I was warmed to be reminded that he trusted me as his assistant in his private work at home. Depended on me more and more all the time. It was why I relished every weekend I could steal away from the university. To work at his side.

“If you test well in human dissection—you’re already top of the class in lecture—you just might open some doors for young ladies in the future!”