Mendel's Dwarf (40 page)

“My time will come,” he was reputed to have said. It came sure enough, but by the time it came Father Gregor, Great-great-great-uncle Gregor, was dead.

Life after Jean? It was a fragile thing. I constructed new habits out of the fragments of a past that I had almost forgotten. I’m not looking for sympathy, just stating facts. That has been my training. I found solace in my work, of course.

At the Royal Institute for Genetics the defective
FGFR3
gene has already been cloned in
E. coli
bacteria; we have already persuaded the bacterium to express the protein in culture. There is now the theoretical possibility of finding a way to inactivate the mutant gene
. In vitro
experiments are proceeding using cultured skin fibroblast cells from … the author
.
¹

I nurtured my cultures and I counted the months and I thought of her. I peered down the microscope and watched my own cells floating like galaxies in the black void, gleaming bright in their amniotic world (choose your metaphor), absorbing amino acids from the medium and constructing from them the rogue protein that had betrayed me; and I thought of her. I found a different kind of solace in the arms of one of Eve’s many sisters—Dawn, shall we say?—a creature equally as pneumatic as her crepuscular sibling, but blessed with two X chromosomes and a consequent flock of pubic hair. But I thought of Jean. Of course.

When it came, her phone call was unforeseen and unexpected. I had forgotten the peculiar softness of her voice, the weakness of her vowel sounds, the apparent passivity. They were qualities that had annoyed me once. “Ben? Is that you?”

“What do you want? I’m rather busy at the moment.”

“Ben, can you come see us? Would you, Ben? Hugo would like that.”

“And you wouldn’t?”

“Ben, please. It might be a bit suspicious if you don’t.”

“It’s part of an alibi, is it?”

“Don’t be like that.”

“What should I be like? What in God’s name
should
I be like?” For a few moments I felt the obverse of love but I obeyed her summons, accepted her invitation, however you like to put it. I went. Of course I went. Revisiting the scene of the crime, if you like.

Hugo Miller’s tone was of feigned surprise when he opened the door of number 34 Galton Avenue. His pale eyes stared in amazement. “Good Lord, it’s Ben!” he cried, as though my arrival were entirely unexpected. “Good to see you. Come on in, come on in. You know the way, don’t you?” Oh yes, I knew the way, but still he showed me. He exuded bonhomie, he exuded paternal pride, he exuded domestic smugness. “Good of you to come. Must be miles out of your usual way. Saw you on the telly the other day. Quite a thing, eh? Good of you to drop round.”

Like a proud parent entering a nursery, he showed me through into the living room. And there was Jean, standing by the coal-effect electric fire—Jean in a pink denim maternity dress, Jean blushing like a child and smiling at me and holding her swollen abdomen as though otherwise it might hit the floor.

“Hello, Ben,” she said. “It’s been a long time.”

I stood in awe before her. I stood silently before the metamorphosis that blind, molecular instinct had wrought. I marveled at the transformation. Two strings of DNA—hers and mine, united in mysterious conspiracy—had done this to her. Distorted and out of proportion, yet she was beautiful. That was the absurd thing. Beautiful. I wanted to tell her of her beauty. I wanted to make her understand. I wanted to go down on my knees in front of her. Does that sound mad? I wanted to cling to her knees and tell her of her beauty and beg her to return to me. I wanted to shout out to the red-haired, freckled fool who fussed around her
that the child was mine, that I had slavered over her body, that I had belabored her with that one part of my own body that is not stunted, that it was I who had impregnated her with my own, potent seed. But instead I just stood there and smiled at her with my carefully designed smile; the smile I use on the whole world.

Did I want to feel the nipper move, Hugo wondered.

She eased herself down into a chair. “I’m sure Ben doesn’t want …”

“How do you know what he wants? Go on, let him feel.”

She shrugged and placed her hand on the mound in her lap. “Just there.”

“Go on, have a feel,” insisted her husband.

Reluctantly I advanced on her. She took my squat hand in her slender one and pressed it to her swollen abdomen, just above the knot of the umbilicus. I could smell the familiar scent of her. I glanced up, and our eyes met over the mound of her belly. Was there a momentary glimpse of complicity there, or were those mismatched eyes mere globes of jelly and gristle? If you focus on the outside of a body, on the outer integument, on the skin and hair, on the strange, glassy eyes in their sleek orbits and the curiously molluscan ears, if you concentrate on all that and realize that it is mere machinery, nothing more than a confection of sinew and cartilage and bone, driven by muscle and wired and controlled by an overambitious neural network, then you can begin to dismiss the person underneath. But that’s the difficult bit, because the mask is so convincing.

“Have you got it?” Hugo demanded.

There was a lump. “There’s a lump,” I said.

“That’s a knee, I expect. The little beggar’s upside down, isn’t it?”

And then the lump moved, a deep, glutinous stirring beneath the surface, like something swimming in treacle. Abruptly I straightened up and backed away.

Jean smiled. “He always moves around at this time of day—”

“
He
, dear?”

Jean reddened, fumbling for an escape. Sweat glistened on her forehead. “I
fancy
it’s a he. It’s my dream. I want to call him Adam. If he’s a he.”

Hugo was watching her solicitously, as though searching for symptoms of something or other. “Are you all right, dear? Hot flush, is it?”

“I’m quite all right, dear.”

“Of course they can tell us the sex,” he explained, “but we didn’t want to know, did we? Of course we didn’t. Well, you’ve got to let nature take its course, haven’t you? Those people at the clinic were marvelous, but medicine’s done enough to help us, and now it’s over to Mother Nature, isn’t it, darling?”

“I suppose so.” She changed the subject, and the moment of anxiety was over. “How’s the work going? I’ve been really starved of news. Is Miss Conway still at the Institute? And what about the dangerous Olga?”

But I really couldn’t take much of Jean’s brittle chatter or her husband explaining to me the latest advances in
in vitro
fertilization and intracytoplasmic sperm injection. I had a cup of tea and left them to their marital contentment as soon as I decently could. “You know what Jean and I would like?” Miller said as he showed me to the door. “We owe you quite a bit, really, putting us onto the fertility people, that Doctor Lupron and everything. You know what we’d like, Ben?”

Jean was hovering anxiously in the background. She must have known what was coming, must have been powerless to prevent it. “What would you like?”

“We’d like you to be the nipper’s godfather,” Miller said.

We’ve got a slot free on the third day, and I was thinking
, Gravenstein mailed me.
How about giving a lecture on eugenics? Now that’d be something
.

I’m not a historian
, I wrote back.

Eugenics now
, she replied.
The
new
eugenics
. In vitro
fertilization, population screening, embryo selection, gene therapy, that kind of thing. You guys are right into that, aren’t you? I’ve got someone here at Cornell who could do it all right, but you’d be something else, Ben
.

So, in addition to the keynote speech, T
HE
N
EW
E
UGENICS
, a lecture by D
OCTOR
B
ENEDICT
L
AMBERT
, appeared on the on-line program for the Mendel Symposium, accessible through the web site of Cornell
²
and the Masaryk University, Brno.
³
I spent time in the library, with Galton and Davenport and Pearson. I learned about the Society for Racial Hygiene, and eugenic sterilization programs in Germany and the United States. I read the words of Francis Crick and Hermann Muller, Nobel laureates the pair of them, and Eysenck and Herrnstein and Jensen, professors the three of them.
That’s great, Ben
, Gravenstein assured me when I sent her my lecture outlines.
Now, when you get to Brno I’ll be there to meet you at the airport and take you to the hotel. Morgan McClintock, our chairperson, will be there too. He’s looking forward to meeting you …

So to Moravia. So to the forgotten city of Brno. While my child grew in Jean’s womb.

And life after the garden pea? Life after the disappearance of his paper into the oblivion of one hundred twenty academic libraries?
Life after the disappearance into the void of the forty copies? Life after Nägeli?