Yet another gift is money. These days, money resides in electronic bits; Pansy has plenty of bits inherited from her Alabama grandfather. And there is, or was once, the gift of a small amount of yellowish fluid containing enzymes, acids, and lipids. Semen, not to put too fine a point on it.
The unknown bestower of the semen had been living on the edge. He’d come from Africa in a troop of lost boys — not the famous ones from Sudan but less famous, less numerous ones from elsewhere. But the situation was similar: civil war, carnage, a few boys running from their ruined villages all the way to the United States.
One particular lost boy ended up in Massachusetts, lived in a house with other lost boys, got through high school, and at the time of his gift was employed in a lab in the area. But he was poor. And so he did what many people in his situation did: sold his blood. He thought about selling his sperm too, but he considered it too valuable to be made a commodity — he was proud and he was free and he wanted freely to sire a thousand American sons. So he did not sell but gave his sperm to a bank — really a hospital roomlet provided with facilitating magazines.
II.
And then there’s a submicroscopic gift, the consequence of a genetic mutation that has passed mostly unexpressed through the millennia. It was bestowed by evolution not directly on Lyle but on a primate who was his remote ancestor. The gift was a mischievous gene, which, if it meets its twin, can affect vision.
“Primate vision unadulterated is trichromatic,” said Dr. Marcus Paul. “Tri means ‘three,’ and chroma means ‘color.’”
“Yes?” Pansy encouraged from the other side of the desk.
“Well, Mrs. Spaulding—”
“Miss.”
“Miss…”
“Or Ms., if you want to be correct.” She grinned.
“Ms., then,” the flustered man said, and took refuge in a disquisition. “You know the retina, at the back of the eye, the thing that captures light and color and ships them to the brain. The retina uses only three types of light-absorbing pigments for color vision. Trichromacy, see?”
“See,” she agreed, still grinning.
“Well, almost all nonprimate mammals are dichromatic, with just two kinds of visual pigments. A few nocturnal mammals have only one pigment. But some birds, fish, and reptiles, they have four.”
“They see more colors than we do? Damn it all.”
“They probably do. And some butterflies are even pentachromatic. Pigeons also. And there is one twig on the Homo sapiens tree whose members — a small fraction of them — are believed to be pentachromatic too: the Himba tribe. Himbas endure their usually short lives in Namibia…Lyle seems to be of mixed race.”
“Yes. I asked the sperm bank for a black donor. I believe miscegenation is an answer to the world’s ills. All people one color: tan.”
“Oh,” said the doctor, whose skin was the shade of eggplant. “Your donor was African?”
She shrugged her slender shoulders. “I didn’t ask, and they didn’t tell.”
“Well, I think Lyle’s a pentachromat. Those colors he reports.”
She nodded. She was all at once serious. “Yes. No wonder he has headaches, my poor boy.” Then she paused, partly to let this young Jamaican take a frank look at her, as he was clearly eager to do — at her inky curls, at her small straight nose that angled upward a degree more than is usual, robbing her of beauty and instead making her irresistible; physiognomy’s gift to Pansy, you might say. The doctor could see also her wide mouth, her dimples, her long neck and long hands. Her long legs were hidden from him by his desk, but he must have noticed them earlier. She hoped so. Oh, yes, and when she parted her lips, out flashed the bright white of her perfect incisors. Men often remarked on that…She continued now: “What’s it like to be a pentachromat?” Though she knew, or had an idea; Lyle had told her of the numerous dots of color he could detect on a plain manila envelope. She had taught him a new word: pointillism. “Doctor?”
What’s it like to have a face like yours? He said: “Neither we nor they have the words to describe this sort of thing. How would you describe color to someone who was color-blind? What we do know is that tetrachromats and pentachromats make distinctions between shades that seem identical to the rest of us. For example, I read about a woman in California, she’s dead now—”
“From hyperchromaticity?”
“From old age. She was a seamstress, the article said. She could look at three samples of taupe fabric cut from the same bolt and detect a gold undertone in one, a hint of green in another, a smidgen of gray in the third. She could look at a river and distinguish relative depth and amounts of silt in different areas of the water based on differences in shading that no one else was aware of…So it’s probably safe to say that tetrachromats and pentachromats have a richer visual experience of the world than the rest of us.” But my own experience has become richer in the past fifteen minutes because of this woman sitting in front of my normal, trichromatic eyes. I hope she likes my dreadlocks.
III.
Lyle had been an unfretful baby, though for a while he confused day and night. Pansy slept through the days along with him. Gave him breakfast at twilight and took him for a walk, sometimes across the river to Boston but usually around Godolphin. Lyle lay angled on a pillow in his old-fashioned perambulator, facing her or staring upward at the dark green of trees, the charcoal sky. He turned his head to notice glossy books in the window of the bookstore, always open late. There was a full-length mirror embedded in the door of the pedicure place. Sometimes, again turning his head, he stared at mother and child, and she did the same. There she was, in black leather pants and a glistening white poncho; there he was, a baby whose skin had not yet begun to darken. Her own skin had never darkened, though her southern ancestors had no doubt mingled with their slaves and then admitted the lighter progeny into the mansion. A gene for a dusky epidermis might lie embedded in each of her cells. In his early childhood Lyle went from phase to expected phase — resisted the occasional babysitter, considered the toilet fine for other people, couldn’t bear carrots. He played with blocks in a bored way. Idly he mentioned headaches. The pediatrician found no cause for them.
He continued his habit of staring at everything. He himself was odd to look at — the skinny arms, the thin beige face, the unsmiling gaze. When he took a walk with his mother, he put one hand in hers, like collateral, while his mind wandered somewhere she couldn’t follow, and she had to relinquish the treasured notion that mother and child were one.
He didn’t like picture books — all those primary colors, he wouldn’t look at them. It made her wonder.
The psychologist she took him to said no, he wasn’t on any spectrum. “He’s not interested in those little board books — so what. He’s intrigued by the wider world. Wants to wait and see what catches his fancy.”
She thanked him and stood up, a vision in her striped black-and-white sundress and her black cartwheel. She walked toward the door.
“You too,” the psychologist called. “Wait and see.”
She’d waited several years. One day irregular blurred lines appeared on the wall of her bedroom. Their interiors filled in; now they were splotches. Then they turned into continents. The plumber found the leaks that were their source, and fixed them. Pansy hired a painter and brought home a color wheel. It was a collection of about three hundred long slender cards of thick laminated paper, each with a hole at one end, allowing them all to depend from a metal ring, to be held in the hand at once, or fanned out into a circle. Each card bore seven contiguous squares of similar hues, with names, about two thousand colors in all. She dropped the device with idle grace beside Lyle, prone on the floor. He abandoned his book — he was reading adventure stories now, aping his classmates, though he frequently returned to those old trickster tales.