The Middle Kingdom (17 page)

One November afternoon, after I'd stayed up for two nights studying for a huge embryology exam, I walked into the lab late and found all twenty students at the back of the room, clustered around the specimen jars arrayed on the windowsill. Pickled fetal pigs floated in cloudy liquid, next to pale corrugated brains and bifurcated sheep uteri, but the students weren't studying those. Instead, they were staring at the series of human embryos I'd always avoided. Brian Mankowski, a student from Boston whom I'd come to dislike for his slyness and stupidity, was perched on a stool and lecturing in my place.

‘These are the results of abortions,' he said. ‘Pure and simple. These are human children that someone killed and removed on purpose, and then pickled like cucumbers, and then sold to this department for money.'

He looked up when I walked in, but he kept on talking. ‘This is an
outrage
,' he said. ‘We should refuse to work in this room. The people who bought and sold these have no respect for human life, no respect for those of us who have accepted Christ and the holy scriptures. We should refuse to tolerate this.'

One of the girls giggled nervously and a boy stabbed a pair of dissecting probes into the pockmarked black wax of a tray. ‘Brian,' I said. ‘That's enough. We have work to do.'

I knew I had never had any control over this group and that I was about to lose them for good. I tried to imagine how one of the other teaching assistants would handle the situation. They had tips and tricks and favorite students. They always seemed to know what to do.

‘Tell me why we should put up with this,' Brian said.

I searched my mind for what the department head had told us. ‘Because what you're saying isn't true,' I said. ‘Those specimens are miscarriages – spontaneous abortions. They were already dead. They came from hospitals. It's perfectly legitimate.'

I wasn't sure I believed this myself – the specimens disturbed me and I'd always avoided the back of the room where they stood. ‘They're the best way for you to understand the sequence of human development,' I said. ‘They're meant to teach you respect for human life. Not to cheapen it – look at them. You can see how early they have a shape, hands, a heart. You can see what a miracle life is.'

‘They're pickled,' Brian said. ‘Like meat. Where's the respect in that?'

On another day, I might have had an answer for him. But I was unfed, exhausted, wired from too much coffee, and when I looked at the jars again, at the gray, faded bodies with their folded knees, their shadowy faces, their eyes closed in endless sleep, I burst into tears. Brian was right; they were horrifying. Plastic models, pink and cheerful, would have served just as well.

The students moved silently toward their seats, leaving me alone with the jars. One of those embryos – fifty-six days, eight weeks – might have been the child I'd given up for Randy. A recognizable small person, with an enormous head, tiny arms and feet, a ghost of an ear, an eye. I had gone to the clinic alone, more frightened of the pain and invasion than of what I was actually doing. The doctor had been quiet, steady, slow. ‘I'm removing the products of conception,' he'd said in his soft, flat voice. ‘Breathe slowly. It won't hurt.'

It hadn't hurt much then, but it hurt now. I looked at the jar, and as I did my right side was stabbed with a pain so sharp and startling that I fell to the floor.

I woke to a ring of faces above me. Students, the department chairman, Page. Walter. ‘Grace,' Walter was saying. ‘Grace?'

‘I think it's my appendix,' I said weakly. It might have been; the pain was in the right place. But I knew it wasn't. It had to be my ovary, struggling to pass another egg through the tangled web of tissue. I would have welcomed appendicitis: let it rupture, let it burst. Dark poisons spreading through me, an operation and a stay in the hospital between cool white sheets. No classes, no tests, no labs. I fainted again.

What I got for my pains was an evening in the Emergency Department at Cooley-Dickinson, just long enough for the doctors to rule out appendicitis, a strangulated bowel, gallstones, pyelonephritis. Just long enough for the resident gynecologist to examine me and to announce gravely, in Walter's presence, that I had chronic pelvic inflammatory disease that had probably damaged me already.

‘Is that serious?' Walter said. His face was tired and drawn in the cruel hospital light. He'd left a class behind, I knew. And a grant that was due, and a ringing phone, and a thesis committee. I'd never been sick before, in all our time together, and I was surprised how much I'd frightened him. ‘I hate hospitals,' he'd muttered, as we waited in the curtained cubicle. He'd rubbed his fingers along my arm, stroking, smoothing, soothing. Soothing himself as much as me.

‘It's not an emergency,' the doctor said. ‘She fainted from the pain of a cramp, and there's nothing acute going on. But these chronic inflammations are serious enough. She needs long-term antibiotic therapy, and frequent exams. But she doesn't need to stay here now.'

‘Thank you,' Walter said. He let go of my arm and stood to shake the doctor's hand.

The doctor smiled and turned to me, and Walter moved away to gather my clothes. ‘Have you ever had an abortion?' the doctor asked.

I made a face at him, trying to signal that yes I had and no, I didn't want to discuss it. The doctor read only half my face. ‘It's no crime,' he said gently.

Walter looked over his shoulder at me. ‘I had one a long time ago,' I muttered. The white paper drape in my lap was as stiff as a placemat.

‘What?' Walter said carefully. He looked from the doctor to me.

‘Before I knew you,' I said.

The doctor made some notes in a chart. ‘Have you had trouble conceiving since then?'

I answered yes again. Walter dropped into an orange plastic chair and buried his head in his hands. He was so upset that he couldn't spare a word to comfort me, and when I was discharged we drove home in silence. He put me in bed and draped a heating pad over my sore side, but he wouldn't look me in the eye. ‘I can't believe you never told me,' he said hours later.

I thought of all the other things I'd never said. ‘It wasn't your business,' I said. ‘I didn't even know you then.'

‘So?' he said. ‘So what else don't I know about you?'

‘I hate school,' I said. ‘I'm not going back.' I pressed my hand to my mouth as if I could stuff those words back in. They surprised me at least as much as they did Walter.

He didn't believe me at first. He thought I was sick, that I had a fever, that I was just run-down, and when I went to drop out he made me take a leave of absence instead. ‘Health problems,' I wrote on the withdrawal form, and Walter chose to believe that.

Perhaps I believed it in part myself. Certainly I grew pale and queasy when I thought of returning to that lab and that row of jars, and I had as much trouble as Walter facing the idea that all that had drawn us together was falling apart. When I told him embryology reminded me of medieval cosmology, all description and airy theory, he looked at me as though I'd set a flag on fire.

‘I want us to visit another doctor,' he announced, after a week of uneasy silences and bitter meals. ‘A fertility specialist.'

‘Why?' I said. ‘It's only been a year. And the doctor didn't say I
couldn't
conceive – he just asked if we'd had any trouble.'

Walter drew himself up and tucked in his chin. ‘The implication was clear,' he said. ‘You had this abortion. You had an infection. You didn't take care of yourself. We need to know what our chances are. And somebody here has to take some responsibility.'

I was in no position to argue with him. I'd left school, betrayed him, lied to him; after I'd been taking antibiotics for six weeks, I went to the new doctor as meekly as a lamb. I had test after test, each more humiliating than the last, and after the laparoscopy the doctor finally said, ‘Your left ovary's dysfunctional. But your right one doesn't seem to have been affected at all. You're producing viable eggs.'

‘So?' I said.

‘So, you've been having unprotected intercourse for – what? A year now? You should be pregnant. Let's check Walter out.'

‘Walter?' I said. ‘But Walter's fine.'

‘Just to be sure,' he said.

We had tested my urine, my blood, and my tubes; now we tested Walter's urine and blood and finally his semen. The doctor spent two weeks trying to convince Walter to submit to this indignity. A magazine full of naked women, a darkened room, a small plastic jar. A sperm sample. A week later, Walter and I returned to the doctor's office and sat in upholstered chairs pulled up to a broad teak desk.

‘Grace's infection has responded well to therapy,' the doctor said. ‘Her left ovary is scarred, but her right one is fine. There's no reason she can't conceive in time.'

Walter turned to me and touched my arm, a light tap meant to indicate his forgiveness and to erase all his silent accusations.

‘Unfortunately,' the doctor said. He cleared his throat and turned to Walter. ‘Unfortunately, your sperm count is extremely low. But there are still possibilities. We can chart Grace's ovulations carefully, to maximize the chances of successful intercourse. And there are some techniques we can explore to increase the number and motility of your sperm …'

We left the office in a gray, dazed silence. Outside, the streets seemed filled with parents and children, pregnant women, young men proudly carrying infants in canvas pouches pressed against their chests. Two boys flew by on skateboards and Walter, clipped by a set of rear wheels, stumbled and fell to the ground. He tore his trousers and skinned his knee, and when I tried to help him up he batted my hand away.

‘I'm sorry,' I said, as gently as I could. ‘It'll be all right.'

‘Just leave me alone,' he shouted. ‘Just leave me be.'

All around us people turned and stared curiously. Walter lay crumpled on the curb, dabbing at his knee with his handkerchief. I leaned over him, pale and troubled, while the leaves in the gutters moved gently with the wind.

After that fall, the balance of power in our household shifted slightly. I had betrayed biology and the academic world; I had concealed my abortion and my failure to love science. But. But. But it was Walter's body that kept us from making a child. We had come to a joint in our marriage, a sort of elbow where all that we'd wanted and been took off in a new direction, and nothing was easy between us after that.

Walter called me deceitful. I called him cold. He was hurt that I didn't want to be his assistant and student forever, and I was hurt that all he wanted of me was that, and we weren't able to make the child who might have bridged our differences. And we never talked about any of this, because Walter became famous that year. The work that made his reputation had actually been completed at the Quabbin, where the bats had driven us together. But in the two and a half years since then, Walter had published ten papers with my help, and the media people seized on him as acid rain became hot news. It turned out that Walter's sharply boned face and expressive hands looked good on TV.

I'd drawn the elegant graphs linking reproductive cycles and lake acidity. I'd translated his scribbled notes into clean, clear sentences, deciphered the cryptic instructions each journal gave for the preparation of manuscripts, typed the final drafts. When Walter practiced his talks, I'd been his audience, following his retractable pointer as he traced his way through the figures projected on our darkened living room wall. I'd been the kind of assistant every scientist dreams of – docile, diligent, cheap – and I stood aside as Walter was tenured, promoted to full professor, and placed in charge of a laboratory with six graduate students, three postdoctoral fellows, and a budget that ran into hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.

All through our marriage I'd kept Walter's house warm and welcoming, cared for his clothes, paid his bills, dealt with minor repairs. I'd shopped and cooked and cleaned and entertained his students, made feasts when scientists visited from other countries. I'd been Walter's wife before, but I hadn't been
only
his wife – although Walter's colleagues had gossiped (I was young, I was blond, I wasn't Eileen, whom most of them had known), while I was still in school they had treated me with the same fond encouragement they gave their own students, tempered with the extra respect due Walter's mate. But after I dropped out, no one seemed to know how to handle me. Walter became a power just about the time I gave up science, and his colleagues assessed the situation and adjusted their attitudes accordingly.

Oh, my social stock plummeted that year. Suddenly I was just a wife, just a second wife at that, and our guests gently condescended to me when a quirk of dinner seating or party movement forced them near me. ‘But what are you
doing?
' the bolder ones asked.

‘Resting,' I answered sometimes. ‘Recuperating. Taking a break.'

When I felt less sure of myself, I said, ‘I'm looking for a job.'

When I'd had too much to drink and felt snippy and cross, I lied and said, ‘I'm trying to get pregnant.'

That always shut people up, and as the year wore on they seemed to get used to my idleness. I painted the living room and redid the downstairs bathroom; once in a while I helped Walter prepare a manuscript. I threw elaborate dinner parties and tried recipes I'd gotten from library books: Moroccan Chicken. Moussaka. Pot au Feu. In March, Walter said, ‘You know, you only took a leave of absence. You could reapply for the fall,' and he frowned when I told him I wasn't ready yet.

‘I have a lot to think about,' I said.

‘Like what?'

‘Like what I'm going to do with the rest of my life. If we're not going to have kids …'