Ship Fever. Andrea Barrett
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.
This was 1970, when the students seemed to change overnight from pleasant boys into uncouth and hairy men. Every week brought a new protest. Chants and marches and demonstrations; bedsheets hanging like banners from the dormitory windows. The boys who used to come to our house for tea dressed in blue blazers and neatly pressed pants now wore vests with dangling fringes and jeans with holes in them. And when I went to Richard’s genetics class that fall, to listen to his first Mendel lecture, I saw that the students gazed out the window while he spoke or tipped back in their chairs with their feet on the desks: openly bored, insubordinate. A girl encased in sheets of straight blond hair—there were girls in class, the college had started admitting them—interrupted Richard mid-sentence and said, “But what’s the relevance of this? Science confined to the hands of the technocracy produces nothing but destruction.”
Richard didn’t answer her, but he hurried through the rest of his lecture and left the room without looking at me. That year, he didn’t give his other Mendel lecture. The students had refused to do most of the labs; there was no reason, they said, why harmless fruit flies should be condemned to death just to prove a theory that everyone already acknowledged as true. Richard said they didn’t deserve to hear about the hawkweeds. They were so dirty, so destructive, that he feared for the safety of Mendel’s precious letter.
I was relieved, although I didn’t say that; I had no urge