“I should have,” Sam admitted.
And would have, he knew, if he hadn’t gotten involved with Ellen. Four years Sam’s senior, presently working as a biology instructor at Smith, she’d spent the previous year in England, where she’d cut off her hair, befriended several brilliant women, and taken up feminism and eugenics. One opinion she held strongly was that exceptionally intelligent people—“Like you,” she said to Sam, during a collecting trip at Quisset, “and me”—should have children together, which would improve the world. Later, she and Sam decanted their specimens side by side, and a few nights after that, when a crowd of students got drunk on the beer two chemists had brewed, they ended up entwined in the dusty wooden attic over the supply room.
The next day, when Sam apologized for what had happened, Ellen calmly claimed it as her own idea and said Sam had only done what she wanted. At the beach, she wore a daring wool-jersey bathing suit that clung to her wiry shape and ended mid-thigh, the white trim disturbingly like underwear, and when she swam she looked to Sam, with her close-cropped hair, like one of the elegant spiraling clam worms he collected at night. He had no idea how he felt about her; he was nineteen, and she let him make love to her. Sam couldn’t imagine why.
“Because I want to have several children, starting soon,” she told him. “And you’re such a good specimen. You’re tall”—here she tapped one of Sam’s fingers—“big-boned, and bright”—tap, tap—“hardworking, sturdy, even-tempered.”
By then she was working on Sam’s second hand, having thrust the first inside her blouse. His hands on her small, pointed breasts, his mouth in the hollow of her throat, her bony feet on his back. He was completely inexperienced when they met; he was astounded. For the last two weeks of his stay at Woods Hole he was with Ellen every night. “If I’m pregnant,” she said the day they parted, “we’ll get married. If not …”
Not, as it turned out, although they met as often as they could during Sam’s last year of college, several times near Sam and twice in Massachusetts, the second time just after Duncan proved him wrong.
What kind of a person would, in utter secrecy, interrupt his own project to replicate a fellow worker’s experiments and double-check his results? Duncan published a paper noting that the preliminary results of a young student investigator — here he named Sam — presented orally and informally, had sufficiently interested him to push those experiments further. When he did, he found that in flies whose eyes had been burned, the Malpighian tubules indeed turned red, and that a small number of the offspring of those flies also had red tubules.
But he also saw something Sam had failed to see, perhaps because he’d been so absorbed with Ellen. In his early work in Morgan’s lab, Duncan had occasionally noticed — or so he wrote; Sam wondered if it wasn’t Morgan himself who saw this — fly larvae feeding on the eyes of dead adults that had fallen on the food at the bottom of the culture bottle; this had colored the intestines of the larvae red. After seeing the initial data (and this did sound like him; he could test a chain of reasoning like a crow pulling at the weak spots in a carcass), Duncan had suddenly wondered if the pigment might be carried from the larvae through the pupa stage, possibly appearing in the adults.
He crushed the eyes of some flies, mixed them with yeast and agar from a culture bottle, and added larvae; their intestines soon became filled with the red food, and a bit later the Malpighian tubules, visible through the larval walls, became deep red. The larvae pupated; adults emerged; their tubules too were red. Variations with different foods showed clearly that some component of the red pigment in the crushed eyes passed from the digestive tract of the larvae into the Malpighian tubules and remained there into the adult stage. Sam’s larvae had eaten the damaged eyes of dead flies and that — not a response to the injury itself — had colored their tubules. Sam had found not an acquired characteristic, but simply a transient response to diet. Acquired characteristics were not — could not be, Duncan said — inherited.
Sam was wrong, he’d been proven wrong, but at first that didn’t seem so serious — why would people hold his curiosity against him? He was young, he was enthusiastic; he’d seen a big question in Kammerer’s work and explored it open-mindedly, trying to follow the data rather than his own preconceptions; he’d shared his findings honestly. Leaving Woods Hole for his last year of college, he’d sensed that others saw him as a wonderfully promising student, welcome anywhere. Six months later, the recent work he’d done in Axel’s lab rendered pointless by Duncan’s paper, those same people seemed to regard him as a dubious young man who’d overreached himself. Even Axel, after reading the copy Duncan sent specially to him, a little handwritten note—I’m sorry—scrawled at the top, groaned and went for a long walk before sitting down with Sam.
“I should have seen that,” Axel said when he returned. “If you’d kept in touch with me over the summer, if we’d been talking about your experimental design … I should have seen that before Duncan did.” Sam couldn’t tell whether Axel was more angry at himself for missing it or proud of having taught Duncan so well.
In the wake of that paper, Sam knew he wouldn’t be welcome at Columbia, where everyone had assumed he’d follow Axel and Duncan to graduate school. But with Axel’s help he found a place in a small program in Wisconsin, run by a sound but middling geneticist. Not one of Morgan’s golden boys, like Bridges or Sturtevant; not even someone at the top of the second tier (which was how Axel disparagingly characterized himself), but a man who knew he was lucky to have a lab and the funding for a few graduate students.
Sam spent that last summer in Axel’s lab, maintaining the cultures and leaving everything in order for Axel’s next helper, wishing, all the time, that he could be discussing new projects with Axel. But Axel, collaborating with a friend in Texas, was seldom there, and Ellen, who might have helped him settle into his new life, instead did the reverse. If she’d gotten pregnant during his last year of college, nothing, Sam knew, could have wedged them apart — but she didn’t, and didn’t, and when summer came and she still wasn’t pregnant, they didn’t see each other for several months. In August, she backed out of her offer to drive to Wisconsin with him and went to Woods Hole instead. Before Thanksgiving, she was gone.
For a long time, Sam was able to avoid her. His luck ran out after seven years, at a big meeting in Washington where Duncan received a prestigious award. Sam was moving toward the back of the auditorium, having just heard a talk by a maize geneticist and hoping to escape before Duncan spoke. He ran into Ellen in the middle of the aisle, herding two boys and a girl, all resembling Duncan in some way, toward the special seats at the front set aside for the prizewinner’s family. She introduced the children awkwardly and asked how Sam was doing.
“Fine,” Sam said. “Just finishing my thesis.” She and Duncan had married before he’d even started that work. After which Axel, as if inspired by them, had married a mathematician he’d met in Texas, moved to a leafy street twenty minutes from the college, and promptly produced a son.
“We miss you at Woods Hole,” she said.
“Handsome boys,” he said, avoiding their eyes.
Tugging at her younger son’s collar, bending to adjust the skirt on her dark-haired little girl, Ellen said that she and Duncan went back every year, always with the children, who loved it. But nothing had ever been as wonderful as her second summer there. When, Sam knew by then, she’d already left him but he didn’t know it. When she and Duncan had both returned and Sam, in the shadow of his big failure, had been unable to join them.