“I’d like that, but I’ll have to take a rain check on it. I came to ask you about something else. We’re about to have a bay fill hassle down in Palm County.”
“What do they want to fill now?”
“Grassy Bay again.”
Willihan shook his head sadly. “Every place seems to have to make the same mistake, just as if it had never been made before. The fast buck. It’s an illusion, Wing. Can’t they come and see and understand what’s happened to St. Petersburg Beach and Clearwater? Or what’s happening to Bradenton and Sarasota? This whole coast used to be a shallow-water paradise. Spoiling it is so idiotic. A friend of mine made a very neat analogy about it. Once upon a time there was a mountain peak with a wonderful view, so that people came from all over to stand on top of the mountain and look out. The village at the foot of the mountain charged a dollar a head to all tourists. But so few of them could stand on top of the mountain at the same time, they leveled the top of the mountain to provide more room and increase the take. This seemed to work, so they kept enlarging the area on top of the mountain. Finally they had a place up there that would accommodate ten thousand people, but by then the mountain was only forty feet high, and suddenly everybody stopped coming to see the view. This convinced them people were tired of views, so in the name of Progress and a Tourist Economy, they turned the flattened mountain into a carnival area, and every night you could see the lights and hear the music for miles around. They still attracted customers, but it was the kind of people who like carnivals instead of the kind of people who like beauty.”
“There’s more people who like carnivals,” Jimmy said.
“A fact the beauty-lovers find it hard to stomach.”
“Anyhow, because of the pending battle, we want to be ready to run profiles of the key figures. I ran into some problems on one of them. She’s always in the middle of our conservation battles. Some people told me you might be able to give me the background that she won’t give. Doris Rowell.”
Willihan frowned at the wall over Jimmy’s head. He picked up a slide rule and began to toy with it. “As a newspaperman, Mr. Wing, I’d think you’d have come up against the fact that when people refuse to talk about themselves, there’s generally a reason.”
“As a newspaperman, Mr. Willihan, I resent historical blanks. I can’t leave them alone. It’s a compulsion.”
“You better leave this one alone.”
“I won’t, of course. I’ll keep digging. If you won’t talk about her, it will just take a little more time and effort. And if it’s anything discreditable, I might learn it from... a less sympathetic source than I think you are.”
“If she’s of value to the conservationists down there, Wing, and if you’re opposed to the fill, you’d just hurt your own cause by printing something which happened a long time ago.”
“It’s going to be a rough fight down there. If somebody else comes up with whatever it is you won’t tell me, I ought to be in a position to make it look better than they want it to look. She’s on the committee opposing the fill. Everybody on that committee is going to be under fire.”
Willihan swiveled his chair and looked out at the wharf. “It happened a long time ago and it seemed a lot more important then than it does now. I guess it would still seem important to a lot of people, though. She committed the ultimate academic sin, Wing, and was caught in the act and was thrown out of a world where she probably belonged. I might as well tell you about it. If you’ve traced it to me, you could discover the rest of it. It happened in 1939. I was a senior at Minnesota Polytech. She was on the faculty. She was married to Doctor Harris Rowell, but she used her maiden name for professional purposes. Dr. Doris Hegasohn. She’s Swedish. She’d done her undergraduate work at Stockholm, and gotten her master’s and doctor’s at Polytech. She and Rowell were both instructors on fellowships when they married. She was a damned interesting-looking woman, very dynamic and impatient and intellectually merciless. Rowell was a very frail, rather unearthly man, a brilliant scholar. Doris was a competent translator. By 1939 Rowell had been an invalid for four or five years. She was teaching classes, doing research, writing papers and taking care of her husband. Maybe it was too much of a strain. Maybe she was too ambitious. She was making a name for herself and fighting for a full professorship, which would have eased some of the financial strain on them. Rowell needed special treatment beyond what they could afford. That year a man from Budapest was a guest lecturer. One of his associates was engaged in the same area of research as Doris was. The papers he had published were not available in English. Hungarian was one of the languages in which she was reasonably competent as a translator of scientific documents. Once the guest lecturer got on the trail of what had happened, a special committee was appointed to investigate. They found out she had taken a really enormous amount of the Hungarian’s findings and published them as her own. They backtracked and found a long cribbed section in her doctoral thesis. By the time they were ready for a confrontation, Rowell was dying. There was a flurry in the newspapers. They rescinded her two graduate degrees, fired her out of the profession. It is the final crime in learned circles, stealing a man’s work and publishing it as your own. She made no attempt to defend herself. She immediately became a pariah. No one in university circles would care to have anything to do with the woman. Rowell died. There was insurance, and, I believe, a small income from her people. She ‘retired’ to Palm County. I saw her on the street and recognized her. It would have been strange if she had gone anywhere in the country and not have been recognized by one of us who were there at the time. It was one hell of a scandal, Wing. When I saw her she was becoming very fat, but I knew her.”
“Could she have friends in academic circles, people who would know about what she did at Minnesota, and not have it make any difference?”
“No. It’s a small, careful world. An insurance executive would not risk being friendly with a convicted arsonist. The relationship would be too open to misinterpretation. And there wasn’t any two sides to the case. She was nailed. Also, I guess you’ll have to admit she isn’t the sort of person to inspire loyal friendship. She has all the personality of a snapping turtle. But she’s got a fine mind. I used to go out there and talk to her. We got along. She was at ease with me because I knew what had happened to her, and nobody else in town did. She’s made her own kind of adjustment, Wing. It would be very nice if she could be left alone.”
“I can understand why she doesn’t talk about the past.”
“People still wonder about her. I was at a conference in Atlanta last year. When a biologist from Johns Hopkins heard where I went to school he asked me if I was there when they trapped the Hegasohn woman, and then he wondered out loud what had become of her. I didn’t tell him. You could make a story of it, Wing. It would be, in a different sense, like those reviews of famous crimes of the century. But it wouldn’t be a decent thing to do.”
“Thank you for being so cooperative, Mr. Willihan.”
“Remember one thing, please. She’s a clever woman. She’s clever enough to have been able to fake her way back into the profession with a new identity. But she didn’t. She accepted banishment. She made a moral decision to live with it. I have to respect that.”
“She’s been doing odd jobs for marine biology groups working in the area.”
Willihan frowned. “They’d be upset to find out who has been helping them. Even though it might be a perfectly straightforward relationship, if it came out it would cast a shadow on whatever they’re publishing. I know how ridiculous that sounds, Wing, but every profession has its own stupidities. Research programs are conducted with the assistance of grants from foundations and institutions. Boards of directors are too easily alarmed. They’d be dubious about backing any further work on a project where Doris Hegasohn had been involved, even if the only employment they gave her was brewing tea for the field workers. I suppose they think of her and use her as a trustworthy layman.”