mean, especially after her one walk around the block got her groped. Once, an activities bus took her up into the Denver Mountain Parks, along with a few other residents. The breath of the ponderosas was heavenly after the smoke and smog below. But then Mary realized that she could see the higher peaks between the trees, and, beyond her control, that slow wail began to swell from her belly like the cold water from the pump in the picnic ground. Nurses had a needle in her arm in seconds and had her back in bed in an hour. After that Mary remained in the home. At most she went out to her vacant lot. That she did often, until the cold came.
Then new snow dropped on Denver like a clean diaper over a dirty one. Mary withdrew even deeper into her pupa of confusion. She sat in her spare little room, barely noticing as the other beds filled or emptied. She thought little, spoke less, failed to understand anything, especially not herself. Why couldn’t she just stand up, say “I’m all right now,” and leave? Why did her head ache so, especially where her hair was still short above her forehead? Why couldn’t she carry an idea through to conclusion? Some mornings she thought she might begin to speak with the floor nurse, and then the pill came, and the blankness.
And then Iris was transferred, the only one who had shown her any kindness, personal interest, or concern. Missing her, and hearing she was gone, Mary despaired even more. Now there was no one to talk with, even if she could.
5
James Mead had been off the bus for less than an hour, the images of possum bombs and leering lecturers fresh in his muddy mind. It was the latter that troubled him now. A couple of years earlier, as an undergraduate at New Mexico State in Las Cruces, his route had looked clear. After graduation he would take a teacher’s certificate, then spend an adequate life in the ranks of the public school pedagogues—the family tradition. But Mead showed talent in research, and at the urging of a perceptive professor he took a lucky whack at a Fulbright in the U.K. After that, larger horizons seemed in order, and (again through luck, as he saw it) he was accepted at Yale University for doctoral studies in biology. Once here, he wondered whether his own ambition had outpaced his abilities.
“I doubt I’ll be able to hack this place,” he told his coffee.
The waitress, serving her opinion with his doughnut, said, “You wouldn’t be the first,” and the dishwasher winked from the kitchen. Resolving to keep his thoughts to himself, Mead set off for whatever awaited.
He walked up Prospect Avenue toward the unequal edifices of the Yale biological establishment: Kline Biology Tower and Osborn Memorial Laboratories. Osborn, a twin-turreted pile with an arched entrance, looked like a college department should look, he thought, recalling the real thing at Cambridge. Osborn was the scene of a half century’s progress in ecology. But in the past twenty years, actual animals and plants had become passé, and the cell was the thing—or the gene, or the molecules. Kline Tower was the citadel of the cell. It brimmed with privilege and grant-borne pretension: stories upon stories of slag-brown bricks that shone in the September sun and positively repelled ivy, between black windows that never opened—all the looks and personality of a giant Tootsie Roll.
Happily for him, Mead seemed destined for Osborn. Some said ecology was already dead at Yale, but the recent environmental cyclone had blown fresh breath into that field in New Haven. That there was anything left to resuscitate was the result of the labors of certain torchbearers in Osborn who had never lost track of natural history in the swirl of change. One of these was Evelyn Hutchinson, who developed the now-universal concept of the ecological niche here in the 1920s. Another was George Winchester, whom Mead was about to meet—his first Yale professor, his likely adviser, a famous man of science. Mead shook a little in his mountain-states boots as he entered Winchester’s outer office.
The friendly smell of thousands of scientific papers in file drawers overrode an unfamiliar scent coming from down the hall. Mead wondered what was in there, a door away, but his thoughts were interrupted by a lilting “Good afternoon.” A handsome, relaxed woman of fifty or so occupied the anteroom. She removed her chained glasses and looked up from her typewriter. “May I help you?”
“Hello, I’m here to see Professor Winchester?”
She took on a guarding-the-ramparts air. “Do you have an appointment?”
“Uh, yes—I’m sorry. I’m James Mead. I believe Dr. Winchester has been assigned as my adviser, and I wrote that I would be arriving today.”
The secretary’s expression slid into a relaxed smile. “Of course—Mr. Mead. We’re expecting you. Dr. Winchester is with another student, but I’ll let him know you’re here. I’m Mrs. Pauling,” she said, offering her hand. Then she disappeared into an inner sanctum, and Mead heard muffled voices, one high, one deep. He felt just as he did in any doctor’s waiting room. Mrs. Pauling said, “The professor will be with you in a few minutes,” and handed him a copy of Discovery, the magazine of the university’s natural history museum. Well, he thought, it beats Highlights.
Under “Staff Notes” in the back of the magazine, Mead noticed that Winchester had recently returned from a summer in Colorado, where he journeyed annually for research at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. Mrs. Pauling was typing copy for what he took for specimen labels, all headed “Colo.: Gunnison Co.” He relaxed a degree; at least they would have the Rockies in common. Mead asked himself, but not out loud, why he was already blaming Yale (and everyone in it) for being superior, and himself for his background.
After a few minutes the big varnished door of the inner office opened, and a young female student emerged. She was glowing. “All right, Professor, I’ll read that paper and let you know what I think of it Monday,” she said over her tawny shoulder.
A syllable of concurrence came from within, then a spirited, “See you then, Noni. Enjoy your weekend, but do try to get another modest number of pages of your draft ready for me to read.”
The woman passed Mead, smiled, and left with a word for Mrs. Pauling and a back-glance at him. Mead noticed that her dark eyes possessed epicanthal folds. Yet she did not look entirely Asian: her long, straight hair was brown. He also noted her accent. No midwesterner she, probably straight out of the Seven Sisters, likely bound next for Harvard. His relapsing sense of inadequacy was suddenly swamped by a reddish dust devil as a large presence flew out of the inner office, halted before him, and thrust out an enormous paw. Tilting his head, grinning through his ginger beard, the professor blurted, “Welcome, Mr. Mead! Please come inside.”
Never had Mead been so rapidly rid of doubts. Dr. Winchester seemed genuinely glad to see him here at Yale. He himself had come from a small midwestern college, never venturing toward the Ivy League until he was James’s age. From his own swivel chair behind a massive desk, Winchester bade him sit. “So you’re from New Mexico—not far south of my summer haunts. I’ve reviewed your transcripts, which look good. Do you prefer the lab or the field?”
“The field, for sure.”
“Good—right answer. Do you know anything about butterflies?”
“I collected butterflies and moths when I was younger,” Mead said. “Just locally.”
“Why did you stop?”
“Same as most kids, I guess—girls, sports—embarrassed by the net, I suppose.”
“We lose a lot that way.” Winchester sighed. “It becomes socially penalizing. Well, you may have a chance to get back into it if you are still interested. Most of my own work involves Lepidoptera.” Winchester’s large head bobbed as he spoke, and the great rack of his shoulders seemed to hold up the wall of books behind him.
“Will
