World and Town (54 page)

His breathing body presses against her back.

“It was extraordinary,” she says finally.

“Wasn’t it?”

“A religious experience, in a way. An experience to which you could attach religious feelings.”

“Interesting.”

“To which your whole family attached religious feelings. That hall where you hung your father’s picture was your chapel.”

“We were like patrons in the Renaissance, you mean. Except that we hoped to attain immortality with brains instead of money.”

She nods. “Something like that.”

She can feel him nod back. “That being our web of significance. Well, perhaps you are right, or partially right. My guess is that we accrued earthly advantages from our quest as well. Stimulation such as resulted in the growth of new dendritic spines, and so on. Status. Things that could well ultimately contribute to our longevity and quality of life.”

“If it didn’t kill you, you mean.”

He is quiet a moment. “Touché. But what about you.” He props himself up on an elbow; his head moves in closer, his voice. “You’ve followed the field, haven’t you? Who knows but you’ve been reading the papers coming out of my lab all these years.”

It is her turn to be quiet.

“What a time you missed, Hattie. The explosion. Thanks to computers and fMRIs and all the rest. Do you remember how we used to record everything from the oscilloscope onto film? No one knew what neurobiology even meant, what it was. Do you remember? When it was the ‘Nerve-Muscle Program.’ Remember?”

“You went on to work on plasticity, didn’t you.”

“The generation of new synapses, yes. Can you imagine? To have built from the isolated synaptical transmissions you worked on to the whole live dynamic of synapse initiation and growth? It was extraordinary.”

“Human adaptation at the cellular level.”

“Precisely.”

“Change and growth. What learning does to the brain—how it changes.”

“How it stores new ways and new knowledge and is itself transformed.”

“How it comes to see differently, even.”

“Yes.”

“How it blinkers itself in new ways.”

He laughs. “If you want to put it that way. How it refocuses, maybe. Re-frames. Selecting in either a narrower or a broader way. Every way, of course, having some cost, and every way limited by our poor prehistoric hardware, but the plasticity itself offering some small hope for benighted mankind, don’t you think?”

Hope that even I could become a fool for life?
Lee would have said.
Hope that even I could become corny?

“Fantastic.” Hattie shakes her head a little.

“It was, it was fantastic. It was fun. A journey like none other.”

“I’m sure.” In the cool room, he warms her neck, her back; she is grateful, yes, to have him. And yet, and yet. “Do you really need to be telling me this?”

“Don’t be mad, Hattie.” He strokes her hand. “I’m just trying to understand.”

“Are you?” She slides her hand away. “It was my own fault I left, Carter. As Sophy would say, I should’ve made different choices.”

“Are you denying me my contribution?”

“I had a husband and a child and a career, Carter. I had a life.”

“You married a misanthrope. You got yourself some dogs and moved away north.”

“I moved after Joe died. And he wasn’t a misanthrope, by the way.”

“An antisocial introvert, then.”

“Carter.”

“You retreated, and worst of all, you never developed your capacities.”

“Developing one’s capacities being, of course, the point of life.”

“It’s as close to a definition of the good as we’re likely to get, Hattie. You can say this is just another web of significance that I’ve spun, but it’s a hard one to shake, don’t you think? The notion that it’s good to develop our capacities and bad to waste them. That thriving is a matter of developing those capacities. That thriving is good.”

“Doing good isn’t thriving?”

“You can argue, but you can’t tell me it wasn’t a goddamned shame for you not to have at least had a choice, Hattie.”

“And what if one person’s development comes at the expense of someone else’s? Then how much of a good is it?”

“An excellent question.” He stops. “As in our case, you mean.” He reaches for her hand again. “Listen, Hattie. I promised I would help you and then failed to, just as I failed to help Reedie—Everett, too. Sophy. And, even worse, I failed to even though I knew how vulnerable you were. Professionally and otherwise. I didn’t want to know, but I did.”

Her heart speeds up. “You knew I’d left science.”

“I did, eventually. Yes.”

“You watched me go.”

“No. I couldn’t. I couldn’t watch.”

“You knew what would happen.”

“It wasn’t a good field for women, Hattie.”

“Witness Barbara McClintock.”

“Precisely.”

“I needed to be in a lab like yours.”

“You needed big allies—bigger than Amy Fist.”

“And preferably male.”

“Preferably.”

“But you let me go because El Honcho thought you were in love with me.”

“Because he knew I was in love with you, Hattie. Because he knew. And because he knew you might be in love with me, too.”

Hattie kicks off some covers, hot.

“He believed lab romances in general to be a grave and ever-present threat,” finishes Carter. “As you know.”

Annie snuffles.

“He thought it would hurt your career,” says Hattie, finally. “He thought it would wreck your advantageous marriage and distract you. Not to say energize people like Guy LaPoint.”

“Who might have only been a problem in the short run, of course, but who might have gone on to become the sort of lifelong time-and-energy sink he thought better to avoid.”

“Having so many such enemies himself.”

“Precisely.”

“And I had an outsider’s outlook to boot. I raised doubts.”

“You were too much like me. Or like one side of me, I should say.”

“Half Anderson, half Reedie as you were.”

“He thought you could tip me the wrong way.”

“And he thought I’d become a gadfly. The sort who brings disorder instead of perspective. Who dismantles but doesn’t rebuild. Who fails to understand what it takes to get the simplest thing done.”

“Yet he liked you. And thought you had real potential, early on.”

“But just as well to let me disappear.” She loosens her hand and moves away. “And you agreed.”

He lets her move. “Seeing as how I was going to flunk sooner or later,” he says.

A surprise.

“You felt on trial,” she says.

“I would have loved to have been able to work without ever hurting another, Hattie. I would love to have been a Buddhist, like Meredith. A Buddhist scientist.”

“But the world was what it was. Competitive. Backstabbing. Unsparing. Full of Guy LaPoints sharpening their sabers. Like Anderson. Like your father. You didn’t want to end up like Reedie.”

“It wouldn’t have worked out, Hattie. And yet I loved you still.”

“Despite your best efforts.”

“Some parts of the brain, it seems, are not so plastic.” The bed creaks under his shifting weight; he takes her hand again.

“And now here you are. Now that your best years are behind you.” She pushes his hand away. “Now that you have nothing to lose.”

“Hattie.”

“We’d better go to sleep.”

“Hattie.”

She does not answer.

“All right, then,” he says. “Good night.”

But a little later, he wakes and says, “You can argue for the dignity of an ordinary life, in the precincts of the everyday, Hattie. And probably you are right. A nobler person than I, in the bargain. But the higher precincts—they do make a person feel his dignity—really feel it.”

She opens her eyes and finds that, in her sleep, she has turned onto her back again. Carter is on his side, alongside her again, too, his arm across her body; and somehow he has found her hand. Meaning, she supposes, that she has bent her arm and made it available.

Self-sabotage.

“Probably we’re all driven to find some way in which we’re special,” she says, freeing herself.

“Dismaying as it is to realize that we’re not, you mean. Given the indifferent universe. Given the fact of death.”

She is waking up faster, now, she notices, as if she’s learning this, already—a new pattern. Adjusting to Carter even as she resists him, who knows how she’s changing him.

And yet still, she resists. “You’re like Ginny in a way.”

“Ginny who was so kind to Everett.”

“She put Jesus on the throne of her life and you put science on yours.”

“The throne of her life.”

“That’s how Everett put it. How he said she put it. It was a way of saying that it gave her life Meaning, capital
M
.”

“As opposed to meaning, small
m.
”

“Meaning with moderation.”

“Giving rise to vision with a small
v
, you mean. Something more Inuit-like—more oriented toward the living. Something more Confucian.”

“Maybe. Confucianism can be extreme, too. And I don’t mean to defend mediocrity.”

“Hattie, listen. I may be like Ginny in some respects, but in at least one important respect we differ. Because Ginny didn’t love Everett, did she? Whereas I loved you all along, you know.”

“All along?”

A pause. “Persistently.”

“But your work, you mean.”

“Hattie, don’t.”

She stares into the dark. Never mind that it is too dark to see—she stares anyway.

“I hope I at least get credit for honesty,” he says.

She stares.

“I never forgot you,” he says.

She stares.

“I came looking for you,” he says.

She laughs. “Eventually.”

“I couldn’t not come.”

Is that squeaking?

“So, all right, I’m a decade or two late,” he says.

“Three.”

“Meredith was jealous of you, you know.”

“Was she.”

Mice.

“My father was right,” he says. “I loved you, Hattie Kong, and hoped you loved me.”

Words she has longed to hear for fifty years.
You could say my whole life
.

She is grateful for the dark, the focusing dark.

For then she replies, “You have some nerve coming back,” and turns her back on him. “With all you’ve contributed to the lives of others. You have some nerve, Carter Hatch.” She toes poor Reveille so hard that he yelps.

G
inny is coming back from her friend’s house for the funeral, says Judy Tell-All, and putting her house up for sale while she’s here. Since the kids will be in town to help clean it out, and since neither one of them wants it.

“Of course, they were weirded out by the tower,” she goes on. “And no phone. They wanted to know why he didn’t have a phone.” She stamps her patent leather boots in the cold. “I tried to tell them there were things even I didn’t know, but it wasn’t what they wanted to hear.” She looks thoughtful.

“Just think,” observes Grace, “in another couple of months he’d have had cell service.”

“I think that’s what you call irony,” says Greta.

“I think it’s what you call sad,” says Hattie.

Judy nods and, for once, says nothing.

W
here no one’s seen Bry and Bets for a while, people would love to say hello at the wake. The way they stand with Ginny in a three-pack, though, no one dares.

“Sophy!” calls Ginny. “Come meet my kids.”

But Sophy melts out of the room—taking, it seems, something of Ginny with her. Though she fluffs her hair and smooths her dress, her movements seem empty even of vanity.

Bry catches the eye of various townsfolk as he escorts his mother back toward the casket. A chubby boy turned portly man, he seems at once weighed down and buoyed up as he half smiles at Jed Jamison, his old baseball coach. Bets, too, a wiry girl with cornrows, can’t help but smile at Jill Jenkins, without whom she probably would’ve ended the world’s absolute worst speller instead of only the second or third worst. They both hesitate as they pass Hattie, too—the last person to have seen their dad alive, they seem to realize, and yet off-limits for some reason. They knit their brows in exactly the same way, giving rise to twin radishes at the tops of their noses.

Everett’s body, meanwhile, barely fits his new home. His hair pushes up into the lining; his shoes push down. And his dress uniform likewise strains, its buttons tipped hard; even his skin is too taut and too pink—blushing, it seems, at the sight of Ginny staggering up to him.
The cat crying at the mouse’s death
, Hattie’s father would have said, as she kneels beside the coffin. And yet Ginny sobs so like a widow—so like someone riven and cracked wide—that Hattie feels for her all the same. She remembers what it is to see a husband, dead, after all; the impossibility of it, the unacceptability—the sheer searing, numbing nonsense of it. If only Ginny did not rummage in her pocketbook as she stands, producing a good-sized cross! But there she goes, placing the thing in Everett’s hand; people are still shaking their heads as her children take their turns kneeling. First big Bry, his knees leaving dents in the kneeler when he stands; then thin Bets, lost in her heavy dress. Her many little braids end in shiny black beads; they clack as she weeps, her hands to her eyes.

They leave the way they came, arm in arm in arm—banding together against this evil town, though Ginny does pause as they pass Sophy again. Ginny’s face is strangely girlish; her lips part as if she is going to ask something. But then she doesn’t; for there stands a stone-faced Sophy, so solidly closed that Ginny involuntarily looks to Hattie as if for reassurance or explanation. Their eyes meet; and for a second time Hattie feels sympathy for her fellow teacher: a woman displaced, after all. A woman betrayed, a woman widowed.

And yet
all she’s contributed to the lives of others
. Hattie closes her face like Sophy and turns away.

For thine was the power and the hogwash
.

Ginny and her kids pass through the front door. There is a long pneumatic wheeze as it shuts automatically behind them; people stare at its glossy white panels. Outside, Ginny’s car motor turns over and over—a weak spark.