A Perfect Life (11 page)

For the rest of the day, everywhere I looked I saw someone with Valentine's. The residents of New Jerusalem were plagued by afflictions one rarely found in Boston—enormous goiters and growths, withered limbs and missing ears. But how could I mistake the man sitting rigid on the bench, fingers clutching the slats so tightly he seemed afraid he might otherwise float off into space? Or the woman who froze every few steps, until her rottweiler urged her on? I wondered what I would have done if I had stumbled into New Jerusalem a hundred years earlier. I wanted to believe that I would have drawn the right conclusions. But smarter scientists than I hadn't figured out how diseases
might be passed from parent to child. When I first read the paper in which Merriwether Valentine identified the syndrome that bore his name—he had written his report in 1868, thirty-two years before Mendel's work on the gene was accepted—I had had the impression of a man trying to explain how a radio works without knowing the words “electromagnetism,” “radiation,” or “electricity.”

There is some principle, some sort of
essential protoplasm,
by which the disease is transmitted. To the untutored eye, the symptoms might easily be attributed to old age, bad nutrition, the effects of venereal diseases, or drink, especially since the latter symptoms tend to run in families. It was in this way that I myself first explained the trembling and profanity of certain men and women whom I happened to encounter on my travels through certain regions of Georgia before the late war.

I found it difficult to believe that whatever had killed my mother—an attractive middle-class Jewish woman who lived in upstate New York in the middle of the twentieth century—had anything to do with those “certain men and women” Merriwether Valentine had found staggering around rural Georgia, or these descendants of the crazy Shakers I had discovered in New Jerusalem. But of course I knew it did.

“Excuse me. Dr. Weiss?”

I turned to see a bearded man on a bike.

“I'm Paul Minnow,” he said. “I assumed you would be older.” Beneath his beard, the man flushed.

Not “Minnow,” I thought.
Paul Minot,
the name so carefully signed to the mayor's letters. But the man on the bike couldn't have been older than forty. He rode a sleek ten-speed, with clips around his cuffs. He was overwhelmingly handsome—he could have been the model for those portraits of a lumberjack in the backs of magazines:
HOW WELL DO YOU DRAW?

“I can't tell you how glad I am you're here.” I supposed he meant all of us, but the remark seemed addressed to me. “You must be on your way to Dr. Burns's office. You're still early, am I right? What do you say I show you around New Jerusalem?”

He wheeled his bike beside the curb, an incongruous escort that caused people to stare at us even more. “That's the library,” the mayor said. He left his bike beside a rack. “My home away from home.”

The library, like the mayor, showed an unsettling juxtaposition of the archaic and the new. Beside a bust of Plato sat Curious George. Beneath a gilt inscription of the Ten Commandments hung a sign urging residents to pass a referendum for a waste-treatment plant. And, like the mayor, the library seemed excessively earnest. A series of posters of Peoples of the World proclaimed
ALL MEN ARE BROTHERS UNDER THE SKIN
. Another sign explained:
GIVEN THE LIBRARY'S BUDGETARY CONSTRAINTS WE HAVE BEEN FORCED TO DISCONTINUE OUR SUBSCRIPTIONS TO PERIODICALS WHOSE CONTENT HAS NO EDUCATIONAL VALUE.

The mayor told us that he had left New Jerusalem to study history at Brown. “There I was, fishing for a topic for my senior thesis, and I hit upon the idea of the New
Jerusalem Shakers. It dawned on me that no other part of the country was as rich in historical material as my own backyard. And, to make a long story short, here I am.”

Yosef and Rita looked around to see what he had returned to.

“For instance, I'll bet you didn't know New Jerusalem was a stop on the Underground Railway.” He directed this to Rita. “The basement of the Shaker laundry was the railway's last stop before Canada.”

Rita snorted and said she wondered how happy the white folks would have been if those slaves had taken it in their heads to come up from that basement and stick around.

The mayor fiddled with his beard. “Got me there,” he said. “I can't exactly claim New Jerusalem has been on the vanguard of what you might call cultural diversity. I'm afraid that your companion here, Dr.—?”

Yosef seemed unwilling to reveal his name.

“Dr. Horowitz,” I said.

“Well, Dr. Horowitz, don't be surprised if the natives around these parts don't react all that cordially to your accent.”

Yosef shot me another look.

“Your compatriots on the trawlers offshore have been overfishing their quotas. Our men often catch them poaching.”

Yosef lifted his hands. “If I want fish, I go to the supermarket and buy Bumble Bee like everybody else.”

The mayor looked at Yosef as if he couldn't comprehend that he might be making a joke. “Mind you,” the mayor
went on, “this isn't only the fault of the Soviets. Everyone is being shortsighted. That's one of my primary goals for this town—developing new ways to think about fish.” He spent the next twenty minutes telling us about his plans to build a factory that processed “seafood by-products” into an odorless, colorless paste that could be shaped to resemble lobster meat or crabmeat and shipped anywhere in the world without spoiling. “I can't tell you how eager I am to cooperate with you on your project.” He said this while directing his gaze at me. “How will this town ever be able to move forward if so many of its citizens are invalids? There's the strain on our medical resources. And the local welfare budget. Not to mention the strain on our human resources. I feel you've been sent to us by, oh, divine providence, why don't we call it.” He ran his hand along a bookcase. “If you need help untangling anyone's genealogy, it's all here on these shelves. In the meantime, we still have a few minutes before Dr. Burns expects us. If you don't mind, there's something else you ought to see.”

We followed him across the street to the town hall. After he had shown us the tax collector's office and the Department of Health, he led us to the basement. Two metal tables stood beside the flag. Another table, covered with a balloon-print tablecloth intended for a child's party, held stacks of plastic plates, Dixie cups, and forks. “Seventeen years of work,” the mayor said, and I thought he meant it had taken him seventeen years to set up for the bloodletting party, but he stretched his arms to indicate a scroll of paper tacked to one wall. “You can imagine how a man feels when he learns that his labors haven't been in vain.”

I leaned closer and saw that the chart detailed the pedigrees of New Jerusalem's inhabitants since the late 1600s. A small red
V
was inked beside many of the names. I touched
Judith Anne Howarth
, who in 1890 had married
Ebenezer
Martingale
. Eleven names descended from their union:
Josiah Martingale 1894–1943; Emeline Martingale (m. John Harbridge) 1897–1931; Stephen Wade Martingale 1899–1951
. . . Of the eleven Martingale children, six had died young. Reading the chart was like walking through a graveyard in which you expected to find your own tombstone. I thought of the way Valentine's had brought Willie and me together, and how it would keep us apart. I felt like tearing down the scroll, with all its gold-headed pins, and ripping it to pieces.

“I would be glad to point out the most interesting branches,” the mayor said.

I could see that he was hurt because I hadn't shown the proper gratitude. “Give me a few years and I'll have the whole thing memorized,” I said, to be polite. Then it struck me what he had done. Without this chart, we would have no hope of understanding the pattern by which the gene had been inherited. What had prompted this man who didn't have Valentine's to devote so many years to a task he couldn't have known would be of use?
Divine
providence,
he had said. I started crying.

“Now don't go getting all emotional on us.” Rita squeezed my arm. “You get yourself together, girl, and get through this.”

Get yourself together.
Rita was right. I needed to bring together my two selves—the Jane Weiss who had spent so
many years hoping she would never meet anyone who suffered from Valentine's disease and would therefore remind her of what her own family had suffered, what she stood to suffer herself, and the Jane Weiss who had devoted her entire professional career to finding other families who had fallen victim to the disease so she could study their blood.

The post-office clock chimed five. “We should go,” the mayor said, and I wondered if he had had enough of our company; we must have made him realize that his life was odder than it seemed to him.

We walked along Front Street, where gulls scavenged among the rotted hulls and discarded appliances on the beach. The birds snatched clams from the tide, lifted them above the pier, and let them drop—the shells smashed and burst with startling thuds—then swooped down to collect the meat. At the end of the pier, a barrel-chested man was repairing a lobster trap. It made me think of Willie and his surprise at becoming entangled in that trap at Tommie's.

We reached Miriam Burns's office, a gingerbread Victorian which, according to the mayor, once belonged to the family that owned the shipyard. The sign on the right said
MIRIAM BURNS, M.D.,
and the sign on the left said
BARBARA LEWIS, VETERINARIAN
. The mantel in Miriam's waiting room was carved with ornate schooners. A man sat beside the fireplace holding a bloody handkerchief against his cheek. He read a magazine, turning the pages with one hand.

Miriam emerged from a frosted door. “Oh, hello,” she said. “I guess I got a little behind.” She motioned for the bleeding man to step inside. “Won't be a minute.”

And she wasn't. The patient came back out with his cheek neatly bandaged. “Thanks, Doc,” he said, then handed her some cash and ducked out, as sheepish as if Miriam were the madam at a brothel.

She closed her surgery and showed us up the stairs. I thanked her for letting us stay.

“I couldn't very well let you sleep at the boardinghouse,” she said.

Yes, I thought, she could have, just as she could have let someone else do the work of setting up the party.

Someone hammered at the door.

“I hope you don't mind,” Miriam said. “I invited a friend to dinner.”

Barbara Lewis, the vet, was a gangling redhead with a setter's friendly face. She dropped a paper bag on the table. The sides began to move. “Fresh off the boat.” She yanked out a lobster, which waved its claws at us languidly. “Hope you like the local specialty. Can't say anyone around here eats much of it day to day.”

Dinner turned out to be two lobsters apiece, steamed clams, and baked potatoes. Sumner paused to express the sentiment that crustaceans like these, plucked from cold waters, were sweeter than the kind caught closer to home.

“Think so?” Barbara Lewis sucked a claw. “Always thought the sweet ones were the females, no matter where they came from.”

“The females?” Sumner said. “How on earth can you tell the difference?”

Barbara reached across the table and flipped Sumner's lobster on its back. “See these fins here? Where the body
joins the tail? See how they're kind of feathery? That shows it's a female. See that coral stuff? That's the roe. The females stay tender even when you boil them. The roe gives the meat a salty-sweet taste. In the male lobsters—” She flipped her own dinner. “See, no feathers. The fins are bony. No roe. The meat's tough.”

“I didn't know that,” Sumner said, impressed that anyone knew more about anything than he did.

Over bread-and-raisin pudding, Miriam described the arrangements for the bloodletting party. The patients were scheduled to arrive at fifteen-minute intervals. Barbara and I would administer the questionnaires and keep the children occupied. Sumner would examine and classify each donor according to his or her symptoms. Yosef would label the vials of blood. The mayor would calm his constituents and serve the cake and ice cream.

“If anything doesn't suit you,” Miriam said, “just speak up. I don't mean to horn in on your parade.”

I assured her I couldn't have done better myself. And, what I didn't say: How could I ever repay this debt?

We helped clear the table, then Miriam came in with a Monopoly box and a tray of cookies. “We don't exactly have what you'd call an active night life around here,” she apologized.

Only Rita declined to play; she had to call her family. Besides, she said, losing money made her nervous, even when the money wasn't real. Barbara set up the Monopoly board while Sumner explained the rules to Yosef.

“You think I just stepped off the boat?” Yosef said. “You watch. I make more monopoly than anyone else.”

Paul volunteered to be the banker. “I always feel a bit offended when I play this game. It's as if all mayors are supposed to be portly buffoons in top hats.”

Sumner laid out his deeds in rows and kept us apprised of interesting facts about Monopoly (“The closer a property is to Free Parking, the more likely a player will land there”). He bought everything he landed on, built houses and hotels. But he spread himself too thin and was the first to go bankrupt. After that, he kept himself amused by advising the remaining players. Not that Miriam or Barbara needed advice. They shared many private jokes (“I'm not in jail, I'm just visiting,” “I'm the queen of Marvin Gardens!”) and took pleasure in exacting exorbitant rents from each other (“That's eleven hundred dollars. Pay up, Barb, right now!”). The game went on for hours. Usually, I have no patience for board games. But I didn't want that round of Monopoly to ever end.