15
In her second year of graduate school, after much discussion and debate, Greer chose Thomas as her advisor. They had already made their relationship public, an event that Greer had dreaded—anticipating scorn, distrust, even jealousy—but which, in the end, elicited little more than shrugs from her classmates. Everybody had guessed long ago.
Without question, Thomas was her top choice for advisor. His work was the most interesting in the department; his lab had access to the best equipment and the largest funds. He’d recently been awarded a grant from the American Institute of Biological Sciences, had been honored by the university at a black-tie dinner to which he’d taken Greer, and had been featured in an article inLife magazine, “The Science of Today and Tomorrow,” complete with a photograph of him standing in his lab over a two-meter core he and Greer had taken that February from the banks of the Mississippi. But the article bothered Thomas because it divided scientists into two categories—traditionalists and renegades. Thomas, who had just turned forty-three, was put in the traditionalist category, and mention was made of the phenomenon in science of great discoveries being made by the young, alluding to his own early successes: the Linnaeus Prize, the First Palynology Conference. But there was no denying the attention the article brought—the university even added his lab to the campus tour, and sometimes, from his office window, he and Greer would notice a dozen teenagers with their parents gazing up at the building. “They can’t see anything from there,” Greer would complain as she lowered and raised the blinds. “Why not show them some fossil pollen? That’s interesting.” “Because,” said Thomas, “they don’t want to see science, they want to see what they think is celebrity.” He seemed quite pleased with that label, though. Now everybody wanted to work in his lab. Even Jo, who had joined his team that semester. But Greer was conflicted.
“The only question in your mind, Greer, should be whether or not you want to spend that much time with your boyfriend. Day and night,” Jo said.
“What about workingfor him? It seems odd.”
“Well, you can work for Professor Jenks. Or dipshit Doctor Hawthorne. No matter which way you cut it, you’re working for somebody. Just pick somebody you want to work for. Somebody whose work you’re interested in.”
“Well, Thomas’s work is, really . . .”
“The hottest ticket in town?”
Greer shrugged, helpless. “It’s true.”
“It would be a hard opportunity to pass up.”
“We could be like Marie and Pierre Curie. Carl and Gerty Cori.”
“Listen. There’s no guaranteed answer here, Greer. Do what you need to do for your own work, your own development. And if that means working in Jackass in the Pulpit’s lab—”
“Jo.”
“—inThomas ’s lab, then do it. Besides, it means we’d be working together too. Side by side. Like the Bobbsey twins.”
“True.”
“And how can you pass that up?” Jo blew the bangs from her eyes.
“How can I?”
Thomas himself had no objections.
“Lily, I can’t imagine someone better to have in the lab,” he said. “You’re fast, you’re accurate. And you’re committed to the project.”
The project was researching the evolution of angiosperms: flowering plants. This included most trees, shrubs, wildflowers, edible fruits, berries, nuts, grains, and vegetables: 235,000 different species that accounted for about ninety percent of the world’s plants. And yet, the planet had once known only gymnosperms—gymnos sperma, naked seeds—the pine and cypress and fir and cedar trees. Ginkgos and the cycads, whose seeds formed on the edges of cones and waited to be carried by wind. Theirs was a primitive and passive reproduction. But with angiosperms came pistils and stamens and carpels; red and purple and white ruffled petals; nectar and perfume. Enticements. Greer thought of it as the plant kingdom hitting puberty, all the naive firs and drab pines suddenly putting on makeup and party dresses. Angiosperms brought desire into nature, they started the courtship waltz between stamen and pistil, petal and pollinator, a dance that had spread across the world and lasted millions of years. Eventually pairs of flora and fauna coupled off, coevolved, so that each flower now had its very own pollinator, each fruit a bird to eat it.
The evolutionary shift from the gymnosperm to the angiosperm fascinated Thomas, represented, for him, an advance far more significant than that of ape to man. Flowers brought fruits and nuts, producing food that had allowed the rise of large mammals, and eventually Homo sapiens. And mankind had become the flower’s greatest fan. “It was the poppy, after all, like a floral Helen of Troy, that launched a thousand opium warships.” Human migrations, trade routes, invasions, wars—they all came down to angiosperms. Tea, spices, tulips. Man had joined the dance, seduced, like all other creatures, by nature’s greatest invention—the flower.
But how had this transition come about? Exactly when, and where? Darwin, a century earlier, had noted it as “an abominable mystery,” and since then, nobody had come up with an answer. The mystery was too ancient, the evidence buried deep in the earth. Thorough investigation would require extensive paleobotanical evidence—Thomas’s expertise.
Thomas’s project had started the year before Greer entered graduate school. He began gathering Cretaceous rocks from various sites within the United States and set a small team of Ph.D. candidates to look for fossil pollen. Their task: Find the first flower, the oldest angiosperm known on earth. Thus far, they’d come up with a likely suspect: the magnolia. In several rocks dating back to the mid-Cretaceous era, 120 million years before the present, they’d found traces of magnolia pollen. But this was just the beginning. The lab’s next and most important step was to eliminate the magnolia’s competition.
To do this, they needed to examine sedimentary rocks from all over the world. At the time Greer joined his lab, Thomas had received a new grant, and was arranging to get samples from South America and Europe. There was also talk of trying to get samples from Greenland and Australia. The lab would examine these international rocks and verify that there was no mid-Cretaceous angiosperm pollenother than magnolia.
If Thomas could definitively prove the magnolia was the first flowering plant, it meant the magnolia’s structure represented the significant evolutionary shift from gymnosperm to angiosperm, the first domino to fall in the world’s greatest ecological evolution. And it meant that Thomas Farraday would once again win the scientific gold. The first, the largest, the smallest—in any discovery, preeminence in size or age was crucial.
Greer also had to settle on a dissertation topic related to Thomas’s project and the work she would do in his lab. Finally she decided on the cross-water dispersal patterns of magnolias. If the magnolia emerged in the mid-Cretaceous period, it was after Pangaea, the landmass that had once held all seven continents, and the supercontinent of Gondwanaland had broken apart. The magnolia appeared in a world where water divided lands; therefore for angiosperms to have spread, they had to cross the ocean. While Thomas determined when the magnolia first appeared, she would track its movements.
The bulk of the lab work was the scientific equivalent of typing or filing. Thomas was a demanding advisor, and weeks passed when Greer did nothing but purify samples, walking between the centrifuge and the sink. Then she had to determine which pollen came from gymnosperms, which from angiosperms. At her microscope for hours, she counted the known and unknown grains, examining the structure of each—their bulbous forms, the lines mapped like veins along their exines, the blemishes and beauty marks. Their variety and resilience impressed her. Here was pollen blown across meadows and valleys millions of years ago, buried in the earth, perfectly fossilized, waiting to be explored. When she looked into the microscope, it felt like coming upon a hidden landscape, like glimpsing a distant, unnamed moon.
That first year, she and Thomas worked together constantly. His office was just down the hall from the lab, and he would stop by every few hours to see the team, always checking in with her. At lunchtime, she brought sandwiches to his office and they talked about the project’s status. Often, before she returned to the lab, they pulled the shade on his door and kissed. They enjoyed the temptation of working nearby, had fun sneaking small touches, lingering in the building at the end of the day after everyone had left. Thomas would be sitting in his office with his books open, and Greer would begin unbuttoning his shirt, unbuckling his belt, while he feigned trying to read. Or Thomas would find her in the quiet lab, and slowly remove her white coat while she looked in her microscope.
Often, they traveled together for sample collecting. Her first year in his lab they went to Brazil and Belize. In her second year, they took a two-week trip to Nova Scotia, then Greenland. She loved the travel—it was on these trips, watching Thomas out-of-doors, away from colleagues and admirers, shedding his classroom bravado, that Greer realized how deeply she had fallen in love with him. Watching him collect samples was like watching a boy swipe a twig across an anthill, amazement brightening his face as life emerged beneath his touch. Thomas could insist all he wanted that nature wasn’t beautiful, but he was speechless in the face of its intricacy.
Without rest, without reservation, they both threw themselves headlong into the project, lured by the idea of the world’s first blossom. The magnolia was a white-petaled dream they were chasing, a ghost they wanted to touch. Some nights, when she fell asleep in the lab, Greer dreamed she was floating above an ancient landscape thick with dark-needled trees, searching for one white flower. Once she even saw the bloom in the distance, winking from a shadowy forest.
When Thomas found her and roused her from her workstation, she described her dream.
“And you didn’t bother to ask what continent the bloom was on? I’ll believe in the psychic relevance of any dream that answers a question.”
“Mags doesn’t like questions,” said Greer.
“Mags?”
“With this many people pursuing her, I think she deserves a name.”
In the afternoons, they would take a break from the lab and wander through the university greenhouse, talking over the research.
“Some of the samples simply don’t date back far enough to be relevant.”
“Mags is just being coy,” said Greer. “Give her time.”
“You know, in the end, it’ll come down to examining enough rocks from enough regions. Quantity and variety, that’s all. We’ll probably never find magnolia pollen that predates mid-Cretaceous. All we can do is make sure that we don’t find any other angiosperm pollen in that era.”
“And hope that nobody else does.”
“You know, Lily, that’s precisely it.”
“Don’t worry,” said Greer. “You’ve devoted yourself to Mags. She won’t let you down.”
“I hope not,” he said.
“Just think, Thomas, we’re on the trail of the earth’s first flower.” They had waded through the tropics, the glass-enclosed sanctuary of misted ferns and guavas, and now crossed into the Orchid House. Greer looked around her at the sea of purple and red petals. “Before there was a human to smell it,” she said, “to touch it, to know it was beautiful, before a pollinator knew what to make of it, somewhere there was one spectacular flower, waiting for the world to catch up with it.”
“Ah, Lily.”
“What?”
“Well, you’re a woman, aren’t you.”
“So they tell me.”
“Just don’t let your imagination distract you from the science. Don’t search for what’s beautiful to you. Remember, search for what’s true.”
“Distract me? I’m in there, doing science longer than anyone else. I acid- wash, I count, I analyze. It’s just nice once in a while to remind myself of what it all means.”
“You’re right. I know. You work like a machine. I’m sorry. I’m just worried about this project, about all the work ahead.”
She looped her arm around his waist. “Let’s just remember to enjoy it.”
He kissed her. “My sediments exactly.”
The next two years Thomas was often gone, giving lectures at symposia in Missouri or Iowa or Ohio. Greer didn’t like these separations but learned to live with them. Several times he was invited to Harvard, to guest-lecture. News of his study kept him in the scientific spotlight but left little time for work. When he visited the lab, it was usually to collect data sheets from Greer and Jo and Bruce Hodges, a new research assistant who had just transferred from Harvard to join Thomas’s project. Bruce was a former all-American linebacker who liked nothing more than to brag about the game in which he had three sacks, two fumble recoveries, and an interception.
“But you can’t top that, so in the end I junked the pads and the helmet for a lab coat,” he would say theatrically, the epilogue of his athletic saga. But he certainly had a knack for science, even if he did lack the passion. He could rattle off pollen classifications like sports statistics.
“And here we have a Magnoliaceous dicot, a May-Juner, making a strong dash for the mid-Cretaceous! Our littleclavatipollenites is holding tight to the reticulate veins and dual cotyledons!” He would then cup his hands to his mouth, hooting and whistling, the sound of a hundred fans cheering his taxonomical victory.
Jo found him tedious, and gave him the finger when he wasn’t looking. But Greer thought he was mildly charming, and was glad for the extra company in the lab; it felt empty with Thomas gone.
Returning from his conferences, fatigued, hoarse, Thomas would sit with Greer late into the night, reviewing the data. She told him what samples should be looked at next, or where they needed to collect their next batch of sedimentary rocks. He was always sure to ask, at the end of it all, about her dissertation. His interest in her work never waned. And they would chat for several minutes about magnolia seed and pollen dispersal patterns, and he would give her research leads, sometimes suggesting biogeographical studies to read.
“What’s interesting is to correlate the magnolia dispersal with pollinator dispersal.”
“Exactly,” said Greer.
“Because even if you have cross-water movement of pollen and seeds, the plant can’t colonize without pollinators.”
“I’ve been poring over the data and I think I’m coming up with some interesting numerical relationships. It involves the delay factor—the time lapse between the arrival of the flower and the beetle. I think it might turn out to be a significant equation.”
“The equation should account for the threshold. The number of plants required to permanently install a community.” Thomas would rub the sleep from his eyes, then take her hands. “I missed you.”
“You too,” she said, resting her forehead on his chest. “You’re gone a lot.”
“Work calls.”
“I know.” She listened to the beat of his heart, that soothing rhythm of life, then lifted her head. “The numbers will differ, of course, from plant to plant. Flowering period, gestation, et cetera.”
Thomas laughed. “Work calls you too.”
Greer smiled. They understood this in each other, what they were driven by.
“You know,” said Greer, “the magnolia had something no other plant had.”
“What’s that?” asked Thomas.
Greer couldn’t help but smile at the thought. “A yearning to exist.”
They were married in a small ceremony at the university’s arboretum. Bruce Hodges and Jo Banks and Professor Jenks were in attendance.
For a wedding present, Thomas gave Greer the seed of a magnolia in a Venetian apothecary jar.
“For your work,” he said. “You’ll be just like Darwin now. He tested all sorts of seeds in jars of salt water to see how long they could survive in the ocean. It’s perfect for you.”
Greer gave Thomas her father’s microscope, the one he had kept in his basement lab for years, the first microscope she had ever used.
Thomas examined the brass knobs, the thick ocular. “Thank you for trusting me with this.”
On their honeymoon in Tuscany, they spent two weeks driving through the Apennine Mountains to collect sandstones and marls. The Magnolia Project was stalled, and needed samples of greater geographical diversity. Greer and Thomas managed a few elegant dinners in Florence, a brisk walk through the main galleries of the Uffizi; they had their photograph taken on the Ponte Vecchio, but the rest of the trip was work, hunting down Cretaceous and Jurassic outcrops. They tried to make the most of it, stealing kisses between procedures, calling each other “Husband” and “Wife” as they hammered at the rocks and lugged their heavy packs from site to site. In the evenings, when they returned to their hotel room, they peeled off their soiled clothes, climbed into the bathtub, and scrubbed each other’s back and arms, shampooed mountain dust from each other’s hair. And when they were both pink-skinned from the bath, they climbed into bed and made love.
Shortly after they returned from Italy, Greer developed a bad neck cramp and had to see a chiropractor, who told her to limit microscope work to five hours a day.
“We’ll get you a nice cot so you can lie down when you start to cramp,” Thomas said in bed one night. They had just moved into an apartment on Madison’s West Side, on the edges of the arboretum. He was massaging her neck. “And one of those special neck pillows.”
“Why don’t we just get someone else to do some of the counting? Another grad student. Then I can do some unknown IDs. Or help with the analysis. You’re gone too often now. You’re overextended. Someone needs to check the results, the math.”
His hands stilled. “Listen, don’t be angry, Lily . . .”
“Uh-oh.”
“Bruce is going to help with the analysis.”
“Bruce?”
“He’s sharp.”
Greer flipped on the light and turned to face him. “So am I. Why not have him keep counting? He doesn’t have any neck problems.”
“Lily, I’m not asking you to aggravate your injury. Take a rest. I’m just saying that Bruce is going to help with the analysis.”
“What about me? Or Jo? We’ve both been in that lab longer than Bruce. Jo, the longest.She’s sharp.”
“Bruce was the top of his class at Harvard. Listen,” he sighed. “I can’t have him transfer here to work in a lab under my wife. Or under Jo. I’m sorry, Lily. It has nothing to do with my feelings. He wouldn’t stay and you know it.”
“I don’t know it.”
“Lily, please, don’t be naive.”
“Fair isn’t naive.”
Thomas looked helpless. “It’s just not the way things work.”
“One year, Thomas. He’s been here one goddamned year.”
“Please. If you care about the project, and if you care about me, you’ll understand. Besides, you still have your dissertation. There’s no way for you to do a good job on that and work on my analysis.”
“There’s no way for me to do a good job on that and spend eighty hours a week here at a microscope trying to help you count pollen faster than anyone else in the world!” She could feel anger heating her face.
“I never asked you to neglect your own work.”
“But what did you think would happen? When exactly do you think I work on my research?”
“You know what I think of your abilities. I wouldn’t have you in my lab if I didn’t think you were capable.”
“Capable?”
“Lily.”
She turned out the light.
“Lily.” His hand touched her shoulder. “Please.”
“Bruce? I’m sorry, Thomas. I just can’t believe it.”
“Don’t think about Bruce. Focus on your dissertation.Your work. Think of your career. You’re going to have a great career, Lil. This is nothing in the scheme of things.”
Perhaps it was nothing. Greer wasn’t, after all, interested in fame. The spotlight in which Thomas basked held little appeal for her. The attention no longer seemed to flatter him, but had become an awkward weight he had to carry, a strain that slowly drew his attention from the work.
So Greer did focus on her dissertation. She spent less time at the microscope, and more time reading about biogeography, dispersal patterns, islands, and continents. What she liked were the patterns; over and over again, nature displayed the same urge. The story never changed. Each species was just a variation in the king’s name, or the color of the princess’s hair. The moral was always motion, and life.
She used the magnolia data she’d gotten in Thomas’s lab and applied it to her dissertation. How had the magnolia gone from a solitary bloom in the middle of nowhere to a tree that grew on all continents? Working in a small library carrel, she studied numbers, graphs, and curves. She liked her research, but missed the camaraderie of the lab. To work there, though, or to stop by while Bruce was in charge would seem like surrendering. Thomas was still traveling and lecturing, preparing his next paper. So Jo was her ambassador; Jo found Greer in the library a few times each week and let her know what was happening in the lab.
“If I have to listen to one more touchdown metaphor, I’m going to ram a football down that guy’s throat.”
“He’s that bad?”
“Worse.”
“I’m sorry, Jo. I’m sorry I haven’t been around.”
“Hey, I’m sorrier for you. . . . The lab needs you.”
“Well, I need to be working on my dissertation.”
Greer hadn’t told Jo about her discussion with Thomas. She had pretended Bruce’s new role was a joint decision, but wasn’t sure if her misrepresentation had been out of loyalty to Thomas, or to simply save face. From Jo’s expression, it was clear she knew Greer was unhappy. But Jo played along.
“And howis the opus coming?” Jo asked.
“Not to pollinate my own stigma—”
“Oh, jeez.”
“But I’m pretty happy with it,” said Greer.
“You’ll let me read it?”
“I’ll force you to.”
“I’m sure it’s brilliant.”
“Blossoms. Beetles. Something for everyone.”
Jo gave Greer’s shoulder a slight squeeze. “I can’t wait.”
By February, Greer had completed a first draft she was happy with. It focused more on theory than data, but the data had been gathered in Thomas’s lab, under Thomas’s direction, and she felt it was important to step back from his project. Her paper was thick with evolution and dispersal theory, graphs relating populations of flowers to pollinators, the time lapse between plant dispersal and pollinator dispersal. It was nontraditional, something at which she knew her committee would raise their eyebrows, but it was a risk she was willing and eager to take.
She gave a copy to Jo and a copy to Thomas, who had already removed himself from her committee. Both said the paper was wonderful, each recommending a set of revisions and adjustments, Jo, in the end, taking more time than Thomas, because Thomas was busy finishing his own paper, and was gone for weeks at a time with Bruce Hodges.
She went back to her carrel and spent another month reworking her material. In March, Thomas concluded the final revisions on his own paper, and offered—a late concession—to let Greer read it before publication. But if he hadn’t wanted her help in the beginning, she wasn’t going to offer it now. She said she was busy. Marriage, she had decided, was more important than professional collaboration.
It was May when she finally submitted her dissertation to the committee, and after a few weeks of waiting around the house, Greer decided to distract herself with a short trip back to Mercer. She wasn’t sure why then, of all times, after six years, she wanted to see her hometown. She and Thomas had spoken of visiting; perhaps she was tired of putting it off, waiting for a break in his schedule. Thomas was once again traveling, this time presenting the paper about to be published, with Bruce Hodges coauthoring. It was a warm day, and she drove slowly through the town, looking at the familiar names on the mailboxes—Feyenbacher, Simpson, Gertz. When she finally made her way down the road to her parents’ old house, it was smaller than she remembered, but the same shade of yellow, with the same wraparound porch. She parked the car and knocked on the door. A woman appeared, her hair in a loose bun, wiping her hands on the fraying hem of a pale blue apron.
“You must be Maria Compton. I’m Lillian Greer. I grew up here.”
“Ah, yes, Miss Greer. Please, come on in now. I’ve some lemonade if you’d like. And there’s a cake in the oven. Double fudge.”
“No, thanks. I was just wondering if it would be all right if I wandered up the hill to where my parents are buried. It’s been a while.”
“Sure thing, you go right on ahead. We ain’t touched a thing. The stones are still there, and Harold trims the grass ’round them quite regular. Our girl Becky asks who’s there, ’cause she likes to sit on that hill, and we just tell her it’s nice folk.”
Greer smiled. “I won’t be long.”
“Long? Nonsense. Take your time. I got tissue if you want.”
“No, thank you.”
Greer walked up the hill and lay down between the two simple headstones, staring at the slightly overcast sky. The ground was cold and moist beneath her and soaked the back of her blouse. She let her hands wander the grass, remembering how years before she’d come up here to pluck wildflowers, carrying them back to the house in the bib of her shirt, hoping that under the microscope she would find something that would explain where her mother had gone. Greer wondered if it was really any different from what she was doing now, lying by their graves, because she believed, or wanted to believe, that life was somehow bound to matter, that spirit lodged itself in land.
She felt a spider inch across her ankle, and she sat up and let it walk onto her hand, examining it closely. Whitman’s verse came back to her:I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars / And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren / And the tree-toad is a chef-d’oeuvre for the highest . . . The spider, too, should have been equally perfect. It roamed her skin, wandering the peninsula of each finger, until she set it gently back in the grass.
But Greer worried she was losing her belief in the journey-work, that nature was becoming a speck on a glass slide in a sanitized room. Investigating to produce publishable answers—this was what had filled her days for the past six years. Was she now less moved by science? Or was she simply feeling the exhaustion of finishing her dissertation, years of work officially surrendered. She got up, brushed the dirt off her back, and walked down the hill.
“Thanks,” she called out to Maria Compton, who was just then stepping onto the porch with a cake in hand.
“Double fudge!” she sang. “That’s fudge plus fudge.”
“I want to make it back before dark.”
Greer had plenty of time, but the sight of the house depressed her. Its memories seemed out of reach.
“I have a big meeting tomorrow,” Greer said.
“Well, you stop by anytime. Hear me? Anytime. We’ll keep them stones clean.”
“Thank you,” she said, and drove down the dirt road that once seemed the longest road in the world.
The next day, Greer awoke early and dressed for her committee meeting. She had bought a black suit for the occasion and looked, as she glanced in the mirror, surprisingly professional. She fastened her hair with two tortoiseshell combs; she applied some lipstick. She fixed herself coffee, a bowl of cereal, and opened the sealed envelope Thomas had left her:
Remember. No fear, my love. You’ll be great. I miss you.
Home soon.
Your husband
She was disappointed he wasn’t there; this day was the culmination of all her work in the lab. But she knew he couldn’t get out of this conference, or at least felt he couldn’t.
As Greer walked slowly over to Birge Hall, she reviewed in her mind the details of her paper. They could ask about anything, try to trip her up on the smallest of details, though she had a feeling they would be less aggressive than normal. After all, she’d been to cocktail parties at all their houses, had helped their wives clear plates from the dinner table, had sat with them into the night, sipping port and brandy to the sounds of Bach. It would be difficult for them to attack her, and in a strange way, this was disappointing. Greer felt good about her work, and didn’t mind a scuffle.
It was a beautiful spring day—a loose net of cirrus clouds caught the bright sun at brief intervals—and she promised herself she would take a long walk after the meeting and try to bask in the end of this rite of passage. She was meeting Jo later, to celebrate, and thought they should have dinner outside on State Street.
She arrived at the lecture hall—the same hall where she had taken Thomas’s class years before—and sat in the front row. There was a bustle among the five members of the panel as they opened their folders and files, and then Professor Jenks, whom she’d last seen at Thomas’s birthday party, called her name. She stepped up to the podium, her folder in hand.
“Mrs. Farraday,” began Professor Jenks. He looked surprisingly tired, disheveled, almost annoyed. The green plaid bow tie he was famous for wearing daily appeared hastily tied. For a moment she was tempted to ask him if he was all right, but thought this would compromise the meeting’s decorum. His wife had been recently diagnosed with cancer; it seemed to be taking a large toll on him. She’d heard complaints that he’d been neglecting his chair responsibilities. In fact, he hadn’t met with Greer about her paper in months.
“Good morning, Professor Jenks.” She tried to lend kindness, of the professional sort, to her voice.
“Yes, yes. Please, Mrs. Farraday.” Professor Jenks stood. “You have of course placed the committee in a most uncomfortable position. And before we go any further we would like to tell you that you will, of course, have the opportunity to submit a new paper. We do not intend for this incident to ever go beyond these halls.” He returned hastily to his chair. “That is the end of it. Take whatever time you need.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Please, Mrs. Farraday. This is awkward for all of us.”
“Me, especially. What, pardon my language, in hell is going on here?”
Professor Jenks let his forehead fall into his palms. “We’ve read Thomas’s paper. Did you really think we wouldn’t?” He looked up and ran his hand through his hair. “Well, anyway, that isn’t the point here. It’s done. Done. And we don’t need to deal with that. Again, Mrs. Farraday, let me assure you, you have our word that this will never leave this hall. It’s of no advantage to any of us, as individuals, or, for that matter, as a department with a reputation to uphold. You have been working very hard in the lab, we know. It’s a tiring job. A thankless job. It can easily exhaust a person. Blur a person’s normal judgment. There is no accusation, you understand, in any of this.”
Greer’s mind was trying to sift the data: Thomas’s paper, her dissertation, no accusation.
“Of course,” Greer finally managed to say, then closed her folder. “I need to review some materials.” She gathered her purse, pens and paper clips spilling as she slung the strap over her shoulder, and hurried from the room. In the hallway, with the door sealed behind her, she took a deep breath and let the eerie silence of the corridor surround her. She walked quickly to the library, fumbling in her heels, soon breaking into a run in front of the periodical shelves. She peeled off her blazer and let it fall to the ground. The man at the circulation desk called out, “Ma’am, are you all right over there?”
She felt along the shelves until she found it:Nature. Spring 1967, Vol. III. In the index she saw the title:A Preliminary Study in the Evolution of the Magnolia Flower by Thomas Farraday, Ph.D., and Bruce Hodges.
She skimmed the first few pages: descriptions of sample collection techniques, location, data—what she would have expected—and then, at the end, a sidebar:Magnolia Dispersal: A Mathematical Theory . She read every word. In it was the same data she had used, the same analysis, and the same equation she had presented to the committee.Her equation. Greer closed the journal, set it back on the shelf. She began to walk away, her jacket abandoned.
The man at the circulation desk called out, “Ma’am, would you like some water? Or a chair?”
But Greer said nothing as she pushed open the heavy glass library door, and felt the warm air shock her lungs.