A Perfect Life (15 page)

I winced. Was he extracting revenge for my refusal to go out with him? I had fixed him up with Maureen. Maybe he was only playing to his audience. That's what politicians did, didn't they? They played to their audience.

“All I can do is tell you about the people I know,” he went on. “And try to give you some idea of how much you would be changing their lives if you found a cure for this illness.” Miriam dimmed the lights and projected Paul's slides on a screen. There was the Smith family tree, and the Shaker barn in New Jerusalem, and photos of several families from whom we'd drawn blood. All this made me feel like an ambassador soliciting funds for his poverty-stricken tribe, all those pot-bellied children displayed before their huts, the thin-breasted mothers giving suck to lackadaisical infants with flies on their eyes.

Willie squeezed my shoulder. “Don't you just love home movies?” he whispered. The audience applauded with that extra show of force meant to convey more than mere politeness. Paul returned to his seat. Maureen touched his hand.

“And now,” Honey said, “I would like you to give your very warmest welcome to the very first recipient of the new Dusty Land Award, honoring, as it does, the individ
ual who has made the greatest contribution to Valentine's research.”

Vic shuffled to the podium with the bewildered expression of a beauty queen who doesn't realize how attractive she is. The microphone was low, but rather than lift it he lowered his neck and bent his knees. He thanked Honey and the institute for giving him this award. Then he pulled out a crumpled envelope.

“Let me ask each of you a question,” he started. “If this envelope contained a sheet of paper on which was written the day and manner of your death, how many of you would open it?”

This wasn't the speech I had expected, an optimistic prediction of the progress that lay ahead and a plea for more funds.

“For the first time in human history,” Vic went on, “we are developing the power to tell a healthy person when and how he will die. But who can predict what anxieties such knowledge might bring? Think of the parent who learns that a child carries a fatal gene but can't inform him and must live with the secret. Think of the young person who gains access to the information that she will never reach middle age.”

It was a setup, I thought. A trap. Why hadn't he warned me? Or maybe he had tried to warn me the night before and I hadn't let him. Now, at the benefit, Vic exhorted his listeners to consider all the tests the medical profession might develop. Would parents test a fetus to see if the child would be too ugly, or too short, or not intelligent enough? Would young men demand that their prospective spouses
submit to a battery of tests to make certain they didn't carry deleterious genes? He lifted the envelope. “I propose, ladies and gentlemen, that we organize a conference to address issues such as these and safeguard against the careless use of whatever tests we might develop down the road.”

My father sprang up. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “But don't forget that while you're debating what to do, my daughters over there could get Valentine's and die.”

I looked to Laurel, who sat with her smile rigidly fixed. No wonder she avoided such functions. The Valentine's Poster Kids, that's what we were.

Honey took the microphone. “Everyone?” she said. “I'm sure we've appreciated hearing so many different points of view.” She motioned for the waiters to bring dessert. As the guests savored the chocolate mousse (“Chocolate mouse?” Willie joked, which made me laugh), Honey and my father worked their way from table to table, trying to minimize the damage Vic had done. They kept gesturing for Laurel and me to join them.

“I'll be back in a second,” Willie said. “I want to tell your boss how much I liked his talk.”

I looked around for Maureen, but she must already have left with Paul. I wasn't about to stay on the dais by myself, but I was equally reluctant to let Willie and Vic discuss the dangers of my research when I wasn't there to defend it.

“That was a great speech,” Willie was saying. “I've been worrying about that stuff for a long time. But what do I know? You're the expert. I was hoping that if you ever do put that conference together—the one you were talking about—maybe I could wrangle an invitation?”

Vic looked at me then, anxious to convey that he hadn't meant to upset me. I wanted to tell him that he had every right to follow his conscience, but it wasn't fair to expect that the people he hurt wouldn't be upset. Why was he pushing everyone to work so hard on my experiments, believing as he did they were morally wrong?

Vic folded his leg against the wall. “Your father has a point. I suppose we need to find the gene before we decide how to use it. I get so caught up in these grand theological questions I forget how many people might die in the meantime.”

He glanced at me to see if this slip about people dying had disturbed me; I gave no indication that it had. Across the room, Laurel and her date stood beside a miniature palm. They both looked so colorful—Laurel in turquoise sequins, her date in blue silk—they reminded me of tropical fish.

Vic's wife came up and tugged his arm. “I'm sorry,” he said, “but we have to get back to our hotel room before the babysitter turns into a pumpkin.” He shook Willie's hand again before Dianne pulled him away.

“He's a great guy,” Willie said. “You're lucky to work for him.”

From the speech Vic had given, I didn't think I would be working for him much longer.

“I wouldn't worry,” Willie said. “A person can be of two opinions about something. Not everyone is as single-minded as you are.”

The pianist started to play “Over the Rainbow,” which had been my mother's favorite song. I remembered her
standing beside the sink, singing the words in a soft, off-key voice, her sponge circling a soapy plate, over and over.

“What about it?” Willie was saying. “Will you let me come?”

“Where?” I said.

“To that island.”

He wanted to come to Spinsters Island? The last thing I needed was another person trying to supervise my work, especially if that person thought what I was trying to do was morally wrong. “There's no hotel there,” I said. “The woman who owns the garage is putting us up. But she doesn't have much room.”

He could bring a sleeping bag, he said. He could camp out in her yard.

I forced myself to say no a second time.

“Your father already said I could come.”

“My father?”

Willie cracked his knuckles. “I told you, I'm thinking about making a donation. One Land Enterprises. We always check out the businesses we intend to invest in.”

“Check us out? We're not a business.”

“Right,” he said. “What I meant is, we need to make sure the money's doing some good. That it's going to help those people.”

“Do you think I want to hurt them?”

“Not on purpose. But I told you, Vic's speech . . . I've been worrying about that for a long time.”

“So you're going to come up there with me and decide if what I'm doing is wrong?”

“I wouldn't put it that way.”

“No,” I said. “But that's basically what you'll be doing. I just hope you don't plan on standing there and lecturing everybody on how they shouldn't donate blood until some committee has figured out whether I'm bent on destroying the human race.”

“You think I would do that? Like I said, some people aren't as single-minded as you are. Some of us are just a little bit confused.”

I might have apologized and said I trusted him, but I saw Laurel walking toward us. Willie seemed to hesitate, then he turned and loped off.

Laurel hugged me. “I'm sorry I missed your talk. Cruz's motorbike broke down and it took us forever to get it fixed.” Cruz, it turned out, was the lead choreographer for the Harlem Modern Dance Troupe. “You look stunning,” Laurel said. “This must be so exciting for you. Do you really think you'll find the gene? A person would have to give blood, wouldn't she? To take this test?” Laurel shuddered. “You know how much I hate needles. Why don't
you
take the test and let me know the answer.”

She wasn't kidding. No matter how many times I explained it, she continued to believe that a fifty-fifty chance of inheriting the gene meant that of any two siblings, one would get Valentine's and the other would not. I was about to tell her yet again that each sibling had a one-in-two chance of getting the disease, independent of the other sibling's chance, but I knew she would protest that she had no head for math.

“Don't look now,” she said, “but Dad's headed this way.”

He put one arm around each of us. “How are my two girls?” He kissed my cheek, then Laurel's. “No offense, Jane, but this genetics thing is horseshit. How can you explain such beautiful girls inheriting their looks from a
meeskeit
like me?” All three of us stood quietly, thinking of my mother. “She would be proud of you,” he said. He rarely called her by her name.
Glori Weiss,
I thought.
My mother, Glori Weiss.

“Dad,” Laurel said, “there's a friend of mine I'd like you to meet.” Cruz straightened his cravat, but Honey motioned from across the room with such urgency that my father said, “Sorry, kids, but I'm needed,” and off he went, visibly relieved to have this excuse to avoid meeting his daughter's “friend.”

Cruz obviously was annoyed that Laurel hadn't managed to complete the introduction. “It's late,” he said. “I told everyone we would be at the party by ten.”

“Maybe we could all go out somewhere together,” I said.

“Oh,” Laurel said. “Cruz invited me to meet his friends. They're having a party uptown.”

“I could come with you,” I said. “I do go to parties now and then.”

“Sure,” Laurel said. “If you want to.”

I could tell she didn't think I would fit in at a party where people drank and smoked pot and didn't talk about genetics. Maybe I wouldn't. Besides, I wanted to spend time with my sister, not with an entire dance troupe.

“We're not going to stay at the party very long anyway,” Laurel said. “As soon as the sun's up, we're leaving for Vermont. Cruz is helping me put together this new piece I was telling you about.”

“You drove all this way and we don't even get to have breakfast with you? Dad's going to come back here, and I'm going to have to tell him that you left?”

Laurel tossed her hair. “Do you think you're the only one who's busy? I've got a concert coming up. Half the numbers aren't choreographed. We don't have the costumes. We have a new dancer who can't pick someone up without dropping her.”

Cruz held up his long, tapered hand. I wanted to say that my sister and I had been arguing for thirty years without the need for a referee. “I know you're busy,” I said. “I can't help it if I love you.”

“I love you, too,” she said. “But I'll see you at the wedding. Honey said the renovations are going more quickly. They've set the date for the first Saturday in November. We can show Cruz the hot spots in Mule's Neck.”

I bit my lip and nodded the kind of nod that doesn't indicate assent so much as a reluctance to let the fight escalate to the point where neither side can win. I followed them to the lobby and hugged Laurel good-bye. But I couldn't bring myself to return to the banquet hall. And I certainly didn't want to go up to my room alone.

I went to use the powder room. I had just taken refuge in a stall when the outer doors banged open and two pairs of flat-heeled pumps walked in.

“I only suggested we look into it,” Miriam said. “We might as well stop by the agency, as long as we're down here.”

“I don't want to ‘look into it.'” The voice was Barbara Lewis's. “I like my life the way it is. I don't need a kid. You're enough for me.”

“You mean your horses are enough for you. Your mutts.”

Barbara Lewis said something I couldn't make out. And, the last thing I heard before the bathroom doors swung shut: “You'll just have to find someone who does.”

Hours later, after I had fallen asleep in my hotel room, I heard a knock and jumped up, dreaming I had dozed off in the powder room and Miriam Burns and Barbara Lewis were rapping at the stall. I stumbled to the door and found Laurel in the harsh light of the corridor, disheveled and pale.

“You don't mind?” she said. “I decided I don't want to spend the night with Cruz.”

I was wearing the lacy nightshirt she had brought me from Brussels—I had packed it on the crazy chance I would spend the night with Willie.

“Did I buy you that?” she said. “It's a shame there's no one but me to see it.” She took off her dress and climbed beneath the covers. I turned off the lamp and got in the other side. She smelled of cigarette smoke and the balsam shampoo she always used. She lay there, on her back, her arm across my waist. “I wish I remembered more about Mom. From before she was sick.”