Prizes (11 page)

“That would have been great,” Adam responded. “Give him my best wishes.” And then, addressing her son in a man-to-man tone, he said, “Take good care of your mother Larry. She’s very special.”

Moments later, as he and Toni were walking down the dock, Adam remarked, “Sorry about co-opting you as a wife.”

“That’s okay, Adam. I sort of enjoyed it. I only hope all your satisfied customers aren’t that overenthusiastic.”

The rest of the month raced by like an ever-accelerating cyclotron gathering its emotional energy by millions of electron volts.

On the final weekend they reached a crucial moment.

After an early morning walk on the beach, they found themselves placing their suitcases on opposite sides of the four-poster bed in the saltbox cottage that had sheltered such happiness for the past weeks. Without even pronouncing a word, they were having a passionate dialogue.

Then suddenly Adam murmured, half to himself, “I don’t want this to end.”

She gazed at him, the ache of imminent separation on her face, and echoed, “Me either.”

Another awkward pause, then Adam said, “It doesn’t have to, Toni.”

“We’ll only be an hour’s flight away,” she offered, knowing that this thought consoled neither of them.

“No,” he insisted, “that’s not good enough. We belong together.”

There it was: the heart of the matter.

Toni gazed at him and asked, “Do you think you could live in Washington? The research facilities at NIH are as good as Harvard’s.”

“How about you? There are some very distinguished law offices in Boston.”

“Adam, for me, Washington’s a very special place. I mean, the dynamics of political power are something I can’t put into words. My career’s just taken off—and not only in government. Starting January, I’ll be giving a weekly seminar in Con Law at Georgetown—which I find extremely flattering.”

“Come on, Toni,” he urged her gently. “There are plenty of good law schools up here—not least, the fairly famous one at Harvard.”

She lowered her head and, barely in a whisper, said, “Shit, I knew it would boil down to this, but I didn’t know how much it’d hurt. I mean, this is tearing me apart.”

He was at her side now, wrapping her in his arms.

“Please, Toni,” he implored, “I love you and I need you. Will you at least think about it?”

“What do you imagine I’ve obsessed about all month, Adam?”

“Hey look,” he continued, “let’s take our time.”

She lowered her head again. “I can’t.”

He was taken aback. “You mean you’d rather end it?”

Toni looked at him, her eyes shining. “Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, I love you, I want to marry you. And if that means having to move to Boston—then I will.”

Adam was overwhelmed. First by joy and then, a moment later, by a pang of remorse at having forced her to make the sacrifice.

They kissed and made love with such spontaneous passion that Toni missed her direct flight to Washington. That meant they would now have to drive all the way to Logan Airport in Boston. There were advantages. It gave them two and a half more hours together.

Vesuvius erupted.

“No way, Coopersmith. Not unless Hell freezes over!” Thomas Hartnell bellowed, pounding his desk for emphasis. “You’re not dragging my daughter to that provincial mackerel-snapping, anemic excuse for a city.”

“Dad, calm down, for God’s sake.”

“Skipper, you get lost so I can deal with this alone.”

“No, dammit, it’s my future you’re discussing—or rather, tearing apart in a tug-of-war.”

Toni stood her ground as the two men in her life battled. It was so acrimonious that she feared it might even come to blows.

“Will you listen to reason, Mr. Hartnell?” Adam demanded.

“Nothing you say is of interest to me, Dr. Coopersmith. And before you bring it up, yes—I do owe you my life. But I
don’t
owe you my daughter—she’s even more precious.”

“I’m not taking her to Timbuktu, sir.”

“As far as I’m concerned, anything beyond the Beltway is unacceptable. I mean for Christ’s sake, Adam, I can pick up this phone and in ten seconds get you appointed to NIH at double your current salary. What’s so damn special about staying at Harvard?”

“It’s very difficult for me to explain,” Adam said quietly.
“But I suppose I can give you the answer in two words—Max Rudolph.”

“But the man’s dead. You could move all his research down here—and his wife, for that matter—lock, stock, and barrel.”

Adam hesitated for a moment and then confessed, “I know this sounds crazy, but it wouldn’t be the same. When I walk into that lab, he’s still there. When I look through the glass walls of his office from the benches, I still see him at his desk. And when I ask him a question, he sometimes answers.”

Toni was dizzy with admiration at the courage Adam displayed in standing up to her father’s steamroller tactics. She had never heard anyone speak to the Boss like this.

“God, you’re some kind of nut,” Hartnell sneered.

Yet Adam, brave as he was, still could not bring himself to reveal his deepest motive: that he wanted to tear Toni away from her father’s smothering sphere of influence.

Finally she cut the Gordian knot. “Dad, as far as I’m concerned, if Adam’s in Boston, that’s where I want to be too.”

“But what about your goddamn career? Are you going to throw it all down the tubes for this white-coated creep?”

“Please try to see my side of it,” she resisted. “I’ve had a career, but I’ve never had a relationship with a really good man—and to me that’s more important.”

“Skipper, trust me on this. You’re an easy mark. You’ve been infatuated before—”

Adam objected. “This is not—”

Hartnell turned on him with ferocity. “I’ve had quite enough of your insolence,
boy.
Now I’m giving you exactly thirty seconds to about-face and march the hell out of my house.”

“No, Dad,” Toni overruled him. “We’d need at least an hour.”

“W-What?” her father stammered furiously.

She nodded and said softly, “I’d have to pack. Because if he goes, I go with him.”

Two months later Toni and Adam were married in St. John’s Lafayette Square, the so-called “Church of the Presidents,” directly across the park from the White House. The incumbent in the Oval Office was among the guests, no doubt a gesture of respect for the man who had done so much to help put him there.

And Thomas Hartnell managed to smile while giving away his only daughter.

At the reception, the Attorney General proposed the toast.

11
 

Dr. and Mrs. Adam Coopersmith rented an apartment on the top floor of a Beacon Hill brownstone. Toni then dug in to cram for the Massachusetts bar exam.

Both were passionate about their careers, as well as each other. They would look back on this time as the happiest of their married life.

They worked till eleven, then joined the crowds of yuppies filling the many pubs and restaurants on Charles Street, transforming the whole area into a huge nightly block party.

When Toni began to hunt for jobs, there was no lack of Boston law firms eager to add a former Assistant Attorney General—for she had been promoted just before
she gave notice—to their roster. Osterreicher and DeVane outbid them all in salary as well as prestige.

Meanwhile, Adam was making progress on the work for which Max had so magisterially paved the way. His new director had finally taken the time to examine the official protocol for his study on idiopathic multiple miscarriages.

Cavanagh was no fool, especially when it came to sniffing out the value of a research project. And he now realized the enormous potential of Adam’s investigations.

Therefore, in a gesture of magnanimity, he restored two of the post-docs he had removed from the team.

He also made a point of reminding Adam of the revised publishing etiquette for all work emanating from what was now his lab.

“Max took a back seat,” he explained with a thin smile. “But I enjoy visibility. Since I’m chief, my name naturally precedes all others.”

It was a flagrantly unfair practice, but not uncommon. Forcing himself to be pragmatic, Adam resentfully acquiesced to what was an exploitative necessity. Yet he was just concluding the outline he had been working on with Max. Surely the Brit would never try to appropriate
this
as one of his publications? Unfortunately, the man’s ego was stronger than his conscience.

“Rules are rules, old chap, and we might as well start on the right foot. Naturally, you’ll have to put a dagger—or whatever that mark is called—before Max’s name to indicate that he’s passed on.”

Thus the paper went out to the
International Journal of Fertility
as being primarily the collaboration of an Englishman and a dead man he had never met. Did Cavanagh really think that the medical community would accept this authorship as either credible or respectful?

Keeping a low profile, Adam continued his explorations. Meanwhile, Toni executed what she lightheartedly
referred to as a “double play.” In the same week, she received positive results from the Massachusetts bar and her beta sub unit pregnancy test.

Excited by the prospect of fatherhood, Adam worked even harder, as though inspired by a subliminal creative rivalry. In the months that followed, he repeated the final experiments in Max Rudolph’s half-filled lab book, using corticosteroids to suppress the embryotoxic reaction in pregnant white mice.

After much soul-searching—weighing the possible side effects of the steroids versus the good they might do—he reluctantly began to treat women whose tests revealed that they could not possibly have a child unless the killer toxins were somehow subdued.

As much as possible, he confined his scientific research and worrying to the daylight hours, so that he would not deny Toni her share of his emotional commitment.

Her drive to excel at everything extended to pregnancy as well. By sheer force of will she did not let morning sickness curtail her activities. She never once called Adam at the lab in panic, for she had read enough to be able to recognize Braxton-Hicks contractions as false alarms.

In her thirty-ninth week, Toni went into labor, and expertly breathed her way through the birth of six pound, eight ounce Heather Elizabeth Coopersmith.

Though not the first woman, Toni was, however, the first lawyer to avail herself of the firm’s maternity leave. And then to take advantage of their excellent day-care facilities so she could return to work immediately.

Lisl, who took her job as godmother seriously, felt obliged to express her misgivings. “I know this practice is very much in vogue. But there really is no substitute for the mother in the early months of childhood,” she observed diplomatically.

Toni took this advice as graciously as she could. “What if they have to work?”

“Well yes,” Lisl conceded, “if they
have
to.”

“Good,” Toni replied pointedly, “because
I
have to.”

Afterward Toni complained to Adam about what she regarded as Lisl’s excessive interference.

“Next time you have one of your heart-to-hearts with that woman, tell her I agreed to her being a godmother, not a godmother-
in-law.
”

“She’s genuinely trying to help,” Adam protested.

“She probably is,” Toni acknowledged. “But I can’t help her compensate for not having children of her own.”

At the weekly meeting of his brown-bag staff luncheon, Adam was beaming with joy. He read the information from a computer printout and then crowed:

“We’ve smashed our own record—thanks to the steroids—seventy percent of our worst ‘repeaters’ have finally made it through their first trimester with the pregnancy intact. It’s either a miracle, or we’re geniuses.…”

Len Kutnik, a junior research fellow, grinned. “Can we vote on that, boss?”

“This lab isn’t a democracy, Doctor,” Adam rejoined. “I’ll render my absolute judgment when I see real babies.”

And he did. They then witnessed a surprising development: once these previously unsuccessful women had reached this point, almost all of them proceeded to deliver healthy children on schedule.

But what was the explanation for this happy phenomenon? Why did these patients who malfunctioned so early somehow outgrow their difficulty? The answer might provide a solution to the entire mystery.

As it was, the procedure was far from satisfactory. The pregnant mothers began to resent the side effects of taking steroids: the extra weight, swollen limbs, and
bloated faces. Not to mention the risk—in rare cases, to be sure—of glaucoma, diabetes, and functional dependency on the drug. Max Rudolph would never have approved.

Meanwhile, Adam encountered his own unexpected fertility problem. As Heather neared her third birthday he began to rhapsodize about the possibilities of a second child.

“Heather’s a handful already,” Toni countered. “I don’t honestly see how I could manage another little one and my legal practice.”

“They’re not little for long,” he commented.

“I know,” she said. “But I don’t see the need for adding to the world’s overpopulation crisis.”