The Immortality Factor (35 page)

Arthur's face clouded up like a thunderhead while the psychologist talked to me. I think up until then the realization that Julia had lost the baby hadn't really sunk in on him.

I looked in on Julia constantly, of course. She was very pale, but her pulse was good. They had given her sedatives, naturally, and she was either out completely or in a dreamy, drowsy half stupor. By late afternoon, though, the sedatives were wearing off and her eyes began to focus again.

“I'm sorry,” were the first words she said to me.

I leaned over the bed and kissed her on the lips, lightly. “It's not your fault.”

“I know,” she said in a tired whisper. “But I'm still sorry that we lost the baby.”

“Don't worry about it. We'll make another one.”

“Yes.”

I tried to grin down at her. “We'll start trying as soon as we get home.”

She made a smile for me. “Do we have to wait that long?”

I felt tremendously relieved. I know that miscarriages happen all the time and even though it can be a life-threatening situation, I had reached Julia in time and gotten her the best medical attention New York City can provide and she was never really in danger. Not really. But still I felt as if a block of cement had lifted off my shoulders. She was going to be okay. She could smile and make a joke with me. She had come through it all right. We wouldn't even need the damned psychologist.

But outside in the corridor Arthur was waiting for me, his shirtsleeve still rolled up and a Band-Aid on the puncture in his vein.

“She's going to be all right,” I said to him. I guess I was smiling pretty broadly.

Arby wasn't smiling. Far from it. “How did it happen?” he asked. Like a police investigator.

“A miscarriage. It happens.”

“But why?” he demanded. “What caused it?”

I shook my head. All of a sudden I felt enormously weary. Ma's death, the harrowing ride up to the nursing home, then Julia and the wild drive back. I hadn't slept much last night and all this stress and tension was wearing me down. And now Arby acting like the Grand Inquisitor.

“Infection can cause a miscarriage, can't it?” he snapped.

“In some cases.”

“Julia came down with a fever in Africa, didn't you tell me so?”

“Oh, Christ, Arby, that was months ago.”

“But the infection might have lingered in her system. A slow virus or a parasitical bacterial strain.”

He knew just enough about medicine to be a pain in the ass.

“Okay,” I said. “Soon as she's strong enough I'll do a complete blood workup. If there's anything hiding in her system, I'll find it. Okay?”

“This wouldn't have happened if you hadn't dragged her off to Africa with you.”

“So you're blaming me for this?” My weariness disappeared. I was blazing mad.

And so was Arby. “I
told
you not to take her with you! I
warned
you that you were putting her in danger!”

I pushed my face so close to his we were practically butting our noses together. “I don't give a shit what you said or what you think. This is our business, my wife's and mine, and you stay the fuck out of it!”

There must have been other people in the corridor, but I paid them no attention. Didn't see anybody except Arby and that goddamned crack-of-doom expression on his face that he always used whenever he wanted to lord it over me.

“You might have killed her,” he said.

“So what? She's my wife, big brother, not yours. Why don't you just roll down your sleeve, put on your coat, and get the fuck out of our lives!”

Arby's face went from red to ashy gray. His chest was heaving and I'll bet his blood pressure was popping two hundred diastolic. He clamped his mouth shut so hard I could hear his teeth click. Then he did just what I told him to. He rolled down his sleeve and, without bothering to button the cuff, grabbed his coat from the chair against the wall and strode off down the corridor like a rhinoceros charging. People scattered out of his way and I realized that half the hospital staff must have heard us screaming at one another.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I
couldn't deal with Jesse after the miscarriage. I simply could not stand even the idea of being in the same room with my brother. He had exposed Julia to disease and danger without even thinking about the risks to her. And now she had paid the price for his self-centered indifference.

It was the end between us. Momma was no longer there to hold us together. Jesse had taken Julia from me and then nearly killed her and she apparently didn't blame him at all.

I went into mourning. Ostensibly, it was for my mother, but actually it was for the loss of Julia, the loss of my brother. I suppose it really was for me, myself.

We held a small funeral service for Momma. Very small: only the three of us and a few distant cousins from Florida who flew up to Connecticut and spent most of their time complaining about the weather. The winter had turned gentle, I thought: temperatures in the forties and clean blue skies. Spring was on the way. The only reminder of the blizzard was the big banks of graying snow piled along the streets and highways. But the Florida contingent shivered and
moaned and made it clear they couldn't wait to get back to the warmth and their golf courses.

Jesse and Julia sat on one side of the chapel's central aisle; I sat alone on the other. I did not speak a word to Jess, nor he to me. The ceremony was brief and impersonal. The rabbi had never met my mother; he just went through the motions of a memorial and inserted Momma's name in a prepackaged little speech. I took the vase with her ashes from his hands and walked straight out to the parking lot, where the snowplows had left mini-mountains that were slowly melting under the pale sun. The lot was dotted with big puddles and streams of meltwater pooling around clogged drains.

Julia came to me as I pressed the remote control key that unlocked my car. I held the little vase with Momma's ashes in my other hand. I thought that perhaps Jesse had sent his wife over to negotiate his getting some time with Momma's remains.

But Julia never mentioned the ashes.

“How are you, Arthur?” she asked. She was wearing black, of course. It made her look pale, I thought. Or perhaps she hadn't regained her complete strength yet.

“I'm all right,” I answered. “And you? Have you recovered from . . .” For some reason I suddenly felt embarrassed.

“Oh, yes, I'm fine,” she said. “But you look as if you haven't been sleeping well. Are you certain you're all right?”

I didn't know what to say.

While I was trying to find some words, Julia said, “It's really wrong of you to blame Jesse for my miscarriage, Arthur.”

I felt the heat rising in my face.

“I made up my own mind to go to Eritrea with him,” she went on. “I knew the risks. If I hadn't wanted to go, I wouldn't have gone.”

I heard myself mutter through clenched teeth, “If Jess wanted to drive a motorcycle over a cliff you'd ride with him on the back seat.”

Julia actually laughed. “I don't think so, Arthur, dear. I really don't.”

“Well, I do.” And I opened the door to my car.

“I feel as though this separation between you is my fault,” Julia blurted.

“Isn't it?” I snapped. I ducked into the car, put the vase on the seat beside me, and slammed the door shut.

I suppose I should have taken the day off, taken the week off, perhaps, and gone sailing or taken a trip to someplace where I could be by myself and get my equilibrium back. Instead I drove straight to the lab and spent the afternoon pestering my researchers at their work. They didn't seem to mind too much having the boss look over their shoulders. But it reminded me that for years now I'd been an administrator, not a performer; an observer, not a scientist.

“Can I say something?” asked Tina Andriotti. I was standing behind her in
her little cubicle of a lab while she bent over her worktable, dissecting a rat. The smell of formaldehyde almost completely overpowered the softer fragrance of her perfume.

“Of course. What is it?” I asked her.

Tina was Vince Andriotti's daughter, barely twenty-six years old. She had come to the lab the previous summer as a student intern and quickly proven to be a first-rate biologist. I had approved her request to work with us full-time for a year; she wanted to take a break from schooling before starting her postgraduate studies.

“You're making me nervous,” she said.

“I am?” She surprised me. I had poked around her lab before and she had never complained.

She put down the scalpel she'd been using and turned around to face me. Tina bore the exotic genes of her Armenian mother very well. Almost as tall as I, she was dark of hair and eye, her complexion smooth and smoky, her figure lush. She tended to wear tight jeans and sweaters that hugged her form. Several of the younger men in the lab had tried to date her; they complained that it was unfair of her to look so tempting while her father was in the building, watching over her.

She seemed very serious. “It's not you, really. It's—Oh, never mind.” And she turned back to the dissecting table.

I watched her for several minutes in silence. She was working for Zack O'Neill, pushing hard toward the experiment where we would try to grow a new heart in one of the lab rats.

“There's a couple of women in the lab,” Tina muttered, still bent over the remains of the rat, “who're dying to nail you on charges of sexual harassment.”

I could feel my jaw drop open. “Sexual harassment? Me?”

“They've asked all of us to let them know if you do anything actionable.”

“Of all the—” I was going to say
ungrateful bitches
, but I held my temper back. “Who are they?”

Tina shook her head, her back still to me. “It's enough that I warned you, Dr. Marshak. I'm not going to squeal on them.”

“But what makes them target me? I've never harassed anyone. I've always treated women fairly, haven't I?”

“You've always treated me fairly,” she admitted.

My mind was going over the recent past. I hadn't come on to any of the women at the lab. Never. I don't believe in mixing work and sex, it causes too much trouble. Well, there was Nancy Dubois, of course, but that was different, and besides, Nancy didn't work at the lab.

Tina straightened up again and went to the sink, peeling off her surgical gloves as she said, “Women are very sensitive about harassment, you know. It's something we've got to watch out for.”

“But I've never . . .” A new thought struck me. Was Tina merely trying to keep me off balance? Was she worried that I was about to hit on her and she used this sexual harassment ploy to stop me before I started?

“Well,” I said, “thanks for the warning. Can I look at the animal now?”

“Sure, go right ahead.” She smiled and it looked to me as if she thought she'd pulled one over on the boss. On the other hand, there was no way that a smile on a young woman as beautiful as Tina could not be inviting.

I stuck strictly to business. I went over to the table and peered at the rat's insides. Tina obligingly swiveled a magnifying lens over the cadaver. I saw the rat's regular heart and a little pink node next to it, where a new heart had started to grow. And dozens of ugly gray tumors clustering all through the thorax, crowding the lungs and blocking off the aorta.

“Zack can get a new heart started,” Tina said, all business now, “but the tumors start to spring up and choke off the natural organs.”

“The regentide isn't specific enough,” I said. “We've got to determine how to concentrate it specifically on the heart cells.”

“And then there's the problem of getting rid of the old heart once the new one kicks in.”

I said, “Let's worry about that problem after we've gotten a new heart to work without killing the animal with tumors.”

Tina shrugged. Deliciously. “Okay, you're the boss.”

I had to admire her. Tina had a really sharp mind and the special kind of dexterous hands that would allow her to be either a first-class surgeon or a first-class experimental biologist—whichever she eventually chose. But she also had this ravishing physical beauty, and she was bright enough to realize that it could be a handicap to her career. Men saw her face and figure before anything else; she had to make them see her brains and dedication, just as they would in another man or a less-beautiful woman. Maybe this sexual harassment ploy was the right way for her to go. I just hoped she wasn't really telling the truth about a cabal of women in the lab looking to make trouble.

I made a mental note to ask Phyllis about this sexual harassment business.

 

A
bout a week later we had a review meeting in my office. Zack, Darrell, Vince Andriotti, and I went through all the data we had accumulated. I was impatient with their results so far.

“What you're telling me,” I said, “is that the attempts to grow a new heart cause cancer.”

Zack nodded somberly. We were sitting at the round conference table in my office, the four of us. I had received a phone call from Johnston that morning. He wanted to know how the work was coming along.

“We'll beat the problem,” Darrell said, almost casually. Then he added, “But it's going to take time.”

“The CEO wants to see a rat with a new heart in it,” I said.

“He will,” Darrell said.

“By the end of the month?” I asked.

“Hell, no.”

Should I tell them about Johnston's approaching the Japanese? No, I told myself firmly. That's my worry, not theirs. Don't pressure them more than you have to.

Zack's boyish face had a sly look to it. “You said the CEO wants to see a rat that's grown a new heart?”