She had been raised an only child, never understanding that tone of sympathy in people's voice when they learned of it. For her it was glorious to stand at the center of her parents' love, no competitor for their affection or even their attention. She was free to sulk like a child at the age of fifteen or to pretend to maturity at twelve. When she cried at night out of fear, they would come running, both of them. She tried it sometimes just to test them, and they never failed her. They both came, but when she replayed it in her memory, it was her father's hands reaching down to her that she remembered.
They had spent their first years out west, a time she was too young to remember, and then they had bought the house in White Fish Bay. She did not remember much about where they had come from, but she remembered the day they had arrived, the excitement of the moving van, their belongings looking so peculiar packed and jammed together all in one huge truck. Her doll carriage had been placed in its own cardboard box. The other children on the block had gathered on the sidewalk and examined the contents, while she had pretended to ignore them. But within a day, they had become friends.
Her father was a doctor, and for a while his office was in an annex of their house. She loved going there, the medicinal smells, his black bag, the stethoscope, the scales, and once or twice she snuck in and hid in a closet to watch while he examined patients. Some years later, when his practice grew, he moved it to a clinic of brick buildings and clipped lawns, and they gave the office over to her for sleepovers, to be plastered with posters of the Carpenters and Abba and, later, heavy metal groups.
Her childhood was idyllic except for a period of intense nightmares that made every evening a time of incipient terror as bedtime approached. "Night terror" was, in fact, a name she heard her father use once, in a hushed conversation with her mother. It came, she heard him theorize, from a child's coming to grips with the concept of death. Her uncle had recently died, and at his funeral he had been laid out in an open casket, his jowls gray and puffy and frighteningly cold-looking. Her father said the phase would pass, and so it did, but somehow she felt it had marked her.
The uncle who had died, Ben, had been her favorite. He would blow into town in a red convertible and take her for a spin, breaking the speed limit. It was like playing hooky. If Ben was the prodigal son, though, her other uncle, Henry, was the priggish opposite. He rarely spoke to her or even seemed to notice her, and on those occasions when he did, she felt as if she were in the principal's office. And yet he was of supreme importance in their household and a powerful influence in her upbringing. When he visited, her parents seemed to wait on him and to hang on his words. She was made to feel that she must never, ever be impolite to him.
Like many only children, she was coddled and protected. Health was paramount. She was given vitamins and diet supplements; her father examined her at the least sign of illness, and her inoculations were kept up to date. The pencil marks on the wall to record her growth spurts were not frivolous — they were read as signposts of a sound body. Her father offered her a gold watch if she would reach eighteen without lighting a cigarette, and threatened to ground her for a month if she did. She won the watch.
But her adolescence turned predictably and proverbially stormy. She began fighting with her parents, mostly with her mother but even with her father, sulking and slamming doors and bursting out in tears. She threatened to leave. And one day she did leave, having saved enough money to take a bus to San Francisco. She had visions of joining the flower children, except that, of course, she got there fifteen years too late. North Beach was a wasteland of druggies and wastrels, and one night, staying in a flophouse, she was mugged by two men. The next day she called home, and her father sent her money to come home. She didn't venture far after that, until Berkeley, and when she left for there, she had the queasy sense that she was abandoning her parents.
Now that they were doing poorly, she wished that she could do something for them, offer them what they needed — the little girl to care for. But she was too big for that, so all she could do was let them know how much she cared, and follow the dictates of Uncle Henry, who, as always, knew exactly what was required.
And this time she had some tough questions for them.
The taxi drew to a slow stop in front of her house, a white New England clapboard with green shutters that still somehow looked majestic to her eyes, despite the glaring imperfections, the missing gutter and blister spots on the paint and weeds poking through the flower beds.
They did not answer the door, which was not a good sign. And after she let herself in and put down her suitcase and found them resting in the bedroom at the top of the stairs, she was shocked at how much more fragile they looked, just in the few days since she had been there, and at how white her father's hair was.
Jude and Skyler could have picked out Julian Hartman's house from the beat-up rust red pickup truck out front and the face of benign neglect it offered Johnson Street. From the wide-open front windows, the strains of The Band could be heard, halfway through "Up on Cripple Creek." The house was of a piece with his persona — a man whose mind was on higher things than a haircut.
He welcomed them graciously and introduced them to his wife, Jennifer, a biochemist, who shook hands while a child dangled from her bent left hip. Three other children in various stages of undress ran wildly through the front entrance hall. The pungent smell of a roast filled the air. Hartman thrust drinks into their hands — margaritas in stem goblets with salt on the rim, no alternative offered — and ushered them into the backyard, where six men and women sat on folding chairs on a bald spot in the lawn. The two were introduced around.
"We were just talking about your favorite subject — what else?" said Hartman. 'Bailey here" — he gestured with his head toward a thin young man in glasses—"was just getting raked over the coals for asking a silly question. He wanted to know if human clones would have souls. I explained that they would be exactly like identical twins, though not of the same age.
"Actually, they would be less identical than twins," put in a microbiologist called Ellen. Jude recognized her from the lab earlier in the afternoon.
"Identical twins have something in common that clones would not — they share the same womb. Those nine months are the first time the environment gets to weigh in, and it does it with a vengeance. Maternal diet, stimulants, hormones, the age of the mother, you name it — we're only beginning to discover how much fetal development depends on all these things. Even if the clones were born from the same mother, or surrogate mother, they would be there at different times, and so essentially occupy different wombs.
"And after birth, of course, all those other variables of time and place and culture come into play. Even if they stayed in the same family, their upbringing would be different. Birth order doesn't matter among identical twins — it's a joke to say that one is eight minutes older than the other — but if you extend that to eight years, you're talking about a whole new dynamic in sibling relationships. Imagine having a younger brother who has the same genetic makeup as you. How would you feel if he excelled, or for that matter if he failed? Imagine being the younger one — how could you possibly grow up without a huge inferiority complex?"
Skyler and Jude exchanged looks.
"I'm assuming that you two are brothers — that's why Hartman said you were interested in all this."
Jude nodded.