Mendel's Dwarf (43 page)

I flew back that afternoon. “It was wonderful to have you share your ideas with us,” Gravenstein said as she left me at the airport. “A real privilege.”

The plane was half-empty, the cabin staff uninterested in the passengers, more concerned with some kind of dispute that was going on among them, an argument over shifts and hours. They slung shrink-wrapped trays of food down as one might toss feed in front of penned animals. Through the windows, in the raging, sterile world on the surface of the wing, the sun dazzled like an explosion, like the great flash that had swept across the Nullarbor Plain almost forty years before. We crossed the new greater Germany and the Low Countries, and began the slide down from a bright universe of light, down through layers of cloud into a twilit world where car headlights glimmered in the rain and streams of tourists returning from Ibiza shivered as they waited for their luggage.

I phoned from the airport. “I’m sorry, sir,” a sterile voice told me. “We cannot divulge information about patients over the phone.”

“But I’m a close friend, for God’s sake!”

“I’m very sorry, sir.”

The telephone at 34 Galton Avenue went unanswered. I retreated to my cave and lay there, wounded. Not until next morning did my telephone ring: it was Hugo Miller on the other end.

Overweight, oedemic, short of breath, Mendel knew his fate. He had discussed it with his nephews, medical students the pair of them. He had heard his heart pounding in his ears as he lay in bed. He had struggled for breath while lying down, and felt the breathlessness drain away as he sat up. The diagnosis was not
difficult even in those days: his heart was failing and the fluid was backing up in his tissues, swelling in his legs and blocking the efforts of his kidneys and his lungs.

He had a woman from the town and a nun to look after him. They bandaged his legs and feet and helped him from bed to sofa. They changed his dressings and they brought his food and they dealt with his bedpan when he couldn’t shuffle to the bathroom. He rarely complained. He faced his last illness with a stubborn stoicism, the same stubbornness that had driven him to plant his damned peas and count them, thousands of them, year after year; the same stubbornness that had caused him to battle with the taxman to the bitter end; the same stoicism that had caused him to utter the words
Meine Zeit wird schon kommen
—my time will come—when the whole world ignored his work.

On December 20, 1883, he wrote this to Josef Liznar, one of his former pupils, now professor of meteorology at Prague:

You are now entering upon the years of most active work, whereas I must be said to be in the opposite condition. Today I have found it necessary to ask to be completely excused further meteorological observations, for since last May I have been suffering from heart trouble, which is now so severe that I can no longer take the readings of the meteorological instruments without assistance
.

Since we are not likely to meet again in this world, let me take this opportunity of wishing you farewell, and of invoking upon your head all the blessings of the meteorological deities
.

Best wishes to yourself and your wife
,

Gregor Mendel

You see? There at the end, that wry joke—no invocation of the God of the Christians; just the meteorological deities.

He died seventeen days later.

M
iller met me outside the Hewison Clinic. A grayness had come into his face. It had chased away the bright red anger that used to lie just below the surface, and left him devoid of any kind of energy. He fingered things distractedly—the lapels of his jacket, the newspaper beneath his arm, the bouquet of flowers that he held awkwardly against his chest—as though he had been struck blind and was searching for some vital message of explanation. “Good of you to come, Ben,” he muttered as I approached. “Good of you to come.”

He merely shrugged when I asked about her. “They don’t seem to know anything, that’s the problem. An embolism, they say. Amniotic fluid or something. They say they’ve done tests, they say all sorts of things. But beneath it all, they just don’t know.”

Together we went through the automatic doors into the foyer of the clinic. Subdued lighting and air-conditioning gave a constant atmosphere to the place irrespective of whether it was day or night, cloudy or fine, sweltering August or dank February outside. A fountain was playing quietly in one corner. An original Klee from the private collection of John Hewison hung on the wall, adding strange, embryonic shapes to the amniotic quality of
the place. From inside her glass tank the receptionist nodded recognition when Miller approached. “Of course,” she said when he gave his name. “Of course.” She told us the room number and bestowed on us a smile of encouragement.

A notice board advertised:

Miller rearranged the bouquet of flowers in his arms like an inexperienced father holding a baby for the first time and looked down. “Okay, Ben?” I nodded. There was an absurd camaraderie between us, an artificial thing constructed of embarrassment and dread, and a shared incomprehension. Together we set off in the direction of
Maternity
.

What was I expecting? You’re wondering, aren’t you? What was on Doctor Benedict Lambert’s mind as he walked through the corridors of the Hewison Clinic beside the cytologically cuckolded Hugo Miller? No one thing, of course. No single, succinct idea occupied the Lambert brain. The remarkable thing about the human mind is that it can hold so much at once, such simultaneous complexities of thought, such bewildering coils of sensation. So: triumph, curiosity, horror, anticipation, plain fear, I felt all those at least. Perhaps a few more. A multiple hybrid of emotion, a monster spawned by the malign hand of chance.

MATERNITY

There was a plain corridor, hushed and humming. Each door bore a mother’s name. One or two boasted a florid ribbon of blue or pink. There was a thin wail of infant on the comatose air.

MRS. JEAN MILLER
was down at the far end, behind a notice that warned
NO VISITORS PLEASE
.

A doctor, as crisp and
white
as cauliflower, came out as we were about to knock. Her expression was brisk and optimistic as she greeted Hugo. She barely registered surprise at the sight of me at his side. She would have delivered monsters, easing them out of the distended vulva with practiced hands, glancing knowingly at the obstetrician as she did so: dwarfs, spina bifida, anencephalics, mongols, clubfeet, harelips, conjoined twins, the whole gamut of mutation and mistake. She was hardened in matters of teratology.

“This is the baby’s godfather,” Hugo explained. “Ben Lambert.” The doctor seemed to find that quite reasonable, the kind of surrogate status you might expect from one such as me. “She’s quite comfortable,” she said, holding the door open for us to enter.

How, I wondered, how could the doctor
tell?
Jean lay motionless on a bed in the center of the room, like a corpse on a catafalque. Gleaming machinery obtruded pipes and wires into her inert, mouse-gray form. Beyond her was a window that looked out onto the neo-Gothic buttresses of the Royal Institute for Genetics. At the foot of her bed was a cot from which came the faint, penetrating noise of neonatal presence.

The doctor gave a bright, hopeless smile. “She has the
will
to get better, that’s the thing.” But it was plain that will didn’t come into it. Jean was not willing anything. She was lying still beneath a sheet, with wires coming from her head and her chest, with a tube draining from her nose, with an intravenous drip inserted into her arm, with all the intrusive apparatus of modern medicine keeping her just this side of the divide. Oscilloscopes traced the flashing lines of heartbeat and brainwave.

“Where shall I put the flowers?” Miller asked. There were vases of gladioli and chrysanthemums ranged around the catafalque. A nurse moved among the blooms like an acolyte performing some obscure religious rite. One expected candles burning.

“Give them to me,” the nurse said. “Aren’t they lovely? I’ll get another vase.” Were they lovely? They were hybrids, polyploids, monsters in their own right—waxy, florid, and deformed.

I went to the bedside. From where I stood, Jean’s profile appeared etched against the window—the gentle dome of her forehead, the crest of her brow breaking into the second, suave wave of her nose that itself was poised delicately to break across the purse of her lips. Oh, I had watched that profile, seen it laugh, seen it sip, eat, speak, cry, and, in the forgiving shadows, kiss. Oh, I had seen it all! “Jean?” I called softly. “Jean?” But Jean didn’t answer. It wasn’t clear whether she was even there any longer.

“And the baby?” Miller was stooping over the cot, peering down at whatever lay there.

“Oh, he’s lovely,” the nurse said. “He’s truly wonderful, Mr. Miller.”

I leaned toward Jean—was it Jean? It seemed to be Jean in the way that a sculpture seems the person it portrays, seems even to breathe as you watch it, seems on the verge of speech—and I touched my lips against one smooth, gray cheek. Was it Jean? There was the soft presence of down, the faint pubescence that I knew so well. Would a kiss from the frog prince bring the sleeping beauty back to life? But Jean stayed still, her chest rising and falling gently beneath the sheets, her breath wafting in and out through her nostrils like the faint breath of a mouse.

I turned away from the bed. A tenuous wailing came from the cot at the foot of the bed, and the nurse moved Miller aside. “It’s time for little Adam’s feed, isn’t it?” She reached down and lifted the baby out, our baby, and held it up for the proud father to see. I saw a knotted, flushed face, a crest of dark hair, tiny molluscan ears, vague eyes, miniature limbs clawing at the air. What Miller saw I have no idea.

“Isn’t he a fine little one?” the nurse asked. “Does he look like his mummy or his daddy?”

The baby turned its head, looking, or seeming to look, around
the room. Probably it was searching for its source of food. “There,” the nurse exclaimed, “Adam’s looking at you, Mr. Miller.”