Ship Fever (2 page)

“Am I Czech, then?” I said. “This happened because I am Czech?”

“You're American,” my mother said. “American first. But Tati hates Germans. He and Leiniger would have found some way to quarrel even if you hadn't been there.” She told me a little about the history of Moravia, enough to help me understand how long the Czechs and Germans had been quarreling. And she told me how thrilled Tati had been during the First World War, when the Czech and Slovak immigrants in America had banded together to contribute funds to help in the formation of
an independent Czechoslovak state. When she was a girl, she said, Tati and her mother had argued over the donations Tati made and the meetings he attended.

But none of this seemed important to me. In the greenhouse, a policeman had asked Tati what had happened, and Tati had said, “I stuck his hand with my knife. But the rest was an accident—he tripped over that block and fell.”

“Why?” the policeman had said. “Why did you do that?”

“My granddaughter,” Tati had said. “He was…feeling her.”

The policeman had tipped my chin up with his hand and looked hard at me. “Is that right?” he'd asked. And I had nodded dumbly, feeling both very guilty and very important. Now my mother was telling me that I was of no consequence.

“Am
I
supposed to hate Germans?” I asked.

A few years later, when Tati was dead and I was in high school and Hitler had dismembered Czechoslovakia, my mother would become loudly anti-German. But now all she said was, “No. Mr. Leiniger shouldn't have bothered you, but he's only one man. It's not right to hate everyone with a German last name.”

“Is that what Tati does?”

“Sometimes.”

I told my mother what Tati had shouted at Leiniger, repeating the foreign sounds as best as I could. My mother blushed. “
Nêmecky
means ‘German,' ” she said reluctantly. “
Prase
means ‘pig.' You must never tell anyone you heard your grandfather say such things.”

I did not discuss this conversation with Tati. All during that fall, but especially after Leiniger died, I'd come home from school to find Tati waiting for me on the porch, his knobby walking stick in his hands and his cap on his head. He wanted to walk, he was desperate to walk. My mother wouldn't let him leave the house alone but she seldom found the time to go out
with him; my brothers could not be bothered. And so Tati waited for me each afternoon like a restless dog.

While we walked in the fields and woods behind our house, we did not talk about what had happened in the greenhouse. Instead, Tati named the ferns and mosses and flowers we passed. He showed me the hawkweeds—Canada hawkweed, spotted hawkweed, poor-Robin's hawkweed. Orange hawkweed, also called devil's paintbrush, creeping into abandoned fields. The plants had long stems, rosettes of leaves at the base, small flowerheads that resembled dandelions. Once Tati opened my eyes to them I realized they were everywhere.

“
Hieracium
,” Tati said. “That is their real name. It comes from the Greek word for hawk. The juice from the stem is supposed to make your vision very sharp.” They were weeds, he said: extremely hardy. They grew wherever the soil was too poor to support other plants. They were related to asters and daisies and dahlias—all plants I'd seen growing at the nursery—but also to thistles and burdocks. I should remember them, he said. They were important. With his own eyes he had watched the hawkweeds ruin Gregor Mendel's life.

Even now this seems impossible: how could I have known someone of an age to have known Mendel? And yet it was true: Tati had grown up on the outskirts of Brno, the city where Mendel spent most of his life. In 1866, when they first met, there was cholera in Brno, and Prussian soldiers were passing through after the brief and nasty war. Tati was ten then, and those things didn't interest him. He had scaled the white walls of the Augustinian monastery of St. Thomas one afternoon, for a lark. As he'd straddled the wall he'd seen a plump, shortlegged man with glasses looking up at him.

“He looked like my mother's uncle,” Tati said. “A little bit.”

Mendel had held out a hand and helped Tati jump down from the wall. Around him were fruit trees and wild vines; in
the distance he saw a clocktower and a long, low building. Where Tati had landed, just where his feet touched ground, there were peas. Not the thousands of plants that would have been there at the height of Mendel's investigations, but still hundreds of plants clinging to sticks and stretched strings.

The place was magical, Tati said. Mendel showed him the tame fox he tied up during the day but allowed to run free at night, the hedgehogs and the hamsters and the mice he kept, the beehives and the cages full of birds. The two of them, the boy and the middle-aged man, made friends. Mendel taught Tati most of his horticultural secrets and later he was responsible for getting him a scholarship to the school where he taught. But Tati said that the first year of their friendship, before the hawkweed experiments, was the best. He and Mendel, side by side, had opened pea flowers and transferred pollen with a camel-hair brush.

On the last day of 1866, Mendel wrote his first letter to Carl Nägeli of Munich, a powerful and well-known botanist known to be interested in hybridization. He sent a copy of his pea paper along with the letter, hoping Nägeli might help it find the recognition it deserved. But he also, in his letter, mentioned that he had started a few experiments with hawkweeds, which he hoped would confirm his results with peas.

Nägeli was an expert on the hawkweeds, and Tati believed that Mendel had only mentioned them to pique Nägeli's interest in his work. Nägeli didn't reply for several months, and when he finally wrote back he said almost nothing about the peas. But he was working on the hawkweeds himself, and he proposed that Mendel turn his experimental skills to them. Mendel, desperate for recognition, ceased to write about his peas and concentrated on the hawkweeds instead.

“Oh, that Nägeli!” Tati said. “Month after month, year after year, I watched Mendel writing his long, patient letters and getting no answer or slow answers or answers off the point.
Whenever Nägeli wrote to Mendel, it was always about the hawkweeds. Later, when I learned why Mendel's experiments with them hadn't worked, I wanted to cry.”

The experiments that had given such tidy results with peas gave nothing but chaos with hawkweeds, which were very difficult to hybridize. Experiment after experiment failed; years of work were wasted. The inexplicable behavior of the hawkweeds destroyed Mendel's belief that the laws of heredity he'd worked out with peas would be universally valid. By 1873, Mendel had given up completely. The hawkweeds, and Nägeli behind them, had convinced him that his work was useless.

It was bad luck, Tati said. Bad luck in choosing Nägeli to help him, and in letting Nägeli steer him toward the hawkweeds. Mendel's experimental technique was fine, and his laws of heredity were perfectly true. He could not have known—no one knew for years—that his hawkweeds didn't hybridize in rational ways because they frequently formed seeds without fertilization. “Parthenogenesis,” Tati told me—a huge, knobby word that I could hardly get my mouth around. Still, it sounds to me like a disease. “The plants grown from seeds formed this way are exact copies of the mother plant, just like the begonias we make from leaf cuttings.”

Mendel gave up on science and spent his last years, after he was elected abbot, struggling with the government over the taxes levied on his monastery. He quarreled with his fellow monks; he grew bitter and isolated. Some of the monks believed he had gone insane. In his quarters he smoked heavy cigars and gazed at the ceiling, which he'd had painted with scenes of saints and fruit trees, beehives and scientific equipment. When Tati came to visit him, his conversation wandered.

Mendel died in January 1884, on the night of Epiphany, confused about the value of his scientific work. That same year, long after their correspondence had ceased, Nägeli published an enormous book summarizing all his years of work. Although
many of his opinions and observations seemed to echo Mendel's work with peas, Nägeli made no mention of Mendel or his paper.

That was the story I told Richard. Torn from its context, stripped of the reasons why it was told, it became a story about the beginnings of Richard's discipline. I knew that Richard would have paid money to hear it, but I gave it to him as a gift.

“And your grandfather saw all that?” he said. This was later on in our courtship; we were sitting on a riverbank, drinking Manhattans that Richard had mixed and enjoying the cold spiced beef and marinated vegetables and lemon tart I had brought in a basket. Richard liked my cooking quite a bit. He liked me too, but apparently not enough; I was longing for him to propose but he still hadn't said a word. “Your grandfather saw the letters,” he said. “He watched Mendel assembling data for Nägeli. That's remarkable. That's extraordinary. I can't believe the things you know.”

There was more, I hinted. What else did I have to offer him? Now it seems to me that I had almost everything: youth and health and an affectionate temperament; the desire to make a family. But then I was more impressed than I should have been by Richard's education.

“More?” he said.

“There are some papers,” I said. “That Tati left behind.”

Of course I was not allowed in the courtroom, I was much too young. After Leiniger died, the date of the trial was moved forward. I never saw Tati sitting next to the lawyer my father had hired for him; I never saw a judge or a jury and never learned whether my testimony might have helped Tati. I never even learned whether, in that long-ago time, the court would have accepted the testimony of a child, because Tati died on the evening before the first day of the trial.

He had a stroke, my mother said. In the night she heard a
loud, garbled cry and when she ran into the room that had once been mine she found Tati tipped over in bed, with his head hanging down and his face dark and swollen. Afterwards, after the funeral, when I came home from school I no longer went on walks through the woods and fields. I did my homework at the kitchen table and then I helped my mother around the house. On weekends I no longer went to the nursery.

Because there had been no trial, no one in town learned of my role in Leiniger's death. There had been a quarrel between two old men, people thought, and then an accident. No one blamed me or my family. I was able to go through school without people pointing or whispering. I put Tati out of my mind, and with him the nursery and Leiniger, Mendel and Nägeli, and the behavior of the hawkweeds. When the war came I refused to listen to my mother's rantings. After my father died she went to live with one of my married brothers, and I went off on my own. I loved working in the factory; I felt very independent.

Not until the war was over and I met Richard did I dredge up the hawkweed story. Richard's family had been in America for generations and seemed to have no history; that was one of the things that drew me to him. But after our picnic on the riverbank I knew for sure that part of what drew him to me was the way I was linked so closely to other times and places. I gave Richard the yellowed sheets of paper that Tati had left in an envelope for me.

This is a draft of one of Mendel's letters to Nägeli,
Tati had written, on a note attached to the manuscript.
He showed it to me once, when he was feeling sad. Later he gave it to me. I want you to have it.

Richard's voice trembled when he read that note out loud. He turned the pages of Mendel's letter slowly, here and there reading a line to me. The letter was an early one, or perhaps even the first. It was all about peas.

Richard said, “I can't believe I'm holding this in my hand.”

“I could give it to you,” I said. In my mind this seemed perfectly reasonable. Mendel had given the letter to Tati, the sole friend of his last days; then Tati had passed it to me, when he was no longer around to protect me himself. Now it seemed right that I should give it to the man I wanted to marry.

“To me?” Richard said. “You would give it to me?”

“Someone who appreciates it should have it.”

Richard cherished Tati's letter like a jewel. We married, we moved to Schenectady, Richard got a good job at the college, and we had our two daughters. During each of my pregnancies Richard worried that our children might inherit his hexadactyly, but Annie and Joan were both born with regulation fingers and toes. I stayed home with them, first in the apartment on Union Street and then later, after Richard's promotion, in the handsome old house on campus that the college rented to us. Richard wrote papers and served on committees; I gave monthly dinners for the departmental faculty, weekly coffee hours for favored students, picnics for alumni on homecoming weekends. I managed that sort of thing rather well: it was a job, if an unpaid one, and it was expected of me.

Eventually our daughters grew up and moved away. And then, when I was nearly fifty, after Richard had been tenured and won his awards and grown almost unbearably self-satisfied, there came a time when the world went gray on me for the better part of a year.

I still can't explain what happened to me then. My doctor said it was hormones, the beginning of my change of life. My daughters, newly involved with the women's movement, said my years as a housewife had stifled me and that I needed a career of my own. Annie, our oldest, hemmed and hawed and finally asked me if her father and I were still sharing a bed; I said we were but didn't have the heart to tell her that all we did was
share it. Richard said I needed more exercise and prescribed daily walks in the college gardens, which were full of exotic specimen trees from every corner of the earth.

He was self-absorbed, but not impossible; he hated to see me suffer. And I suppose he also wanted back the wife who for years had managed his household so well. But I could no longer manage anything. All I knew was that I felt old, and that everything had lost its savor. I lay in the windowseat in our bedroom with an afghan over my legs, watching the students mass and swirl and separate in the quad in front of the library.