Dr. Dolan had a face like a giant baby’s, the nose little and squashed upward, his cheeks round and rosy; when Bob Pharris had taken two beakers out of Dr. Dolan’s lab, he’d come into Dr. Kiel’s lab, saying, “Sorry to hear you broke both your arms, Pharris, and couldn’t wash your own equipment.”
He came into the animal room now and smiled in a way that made his eyes close into slits. Just like a cat’s. He said hello to Elena, but added to Dr. Kiel, “I thought your new girl was starting last week, Nate.”
“She arrived a week ago, but she was under the weather; you would never have let me forget it if she’d contaminated your ham sandwiches—I mean your petri dishes.”
Dr. Dolan scowled, but said to Elena, “The rumors have been flying around the building all day. Is it true you’re from Eastern Europe?”
Dolan’s voice was soft, forcing everyone to lean toward him if they wanted to hear him. Abigail had trouble understanding him, and she saw Elena did, too, but Abigail knew it would be a mistake to try to ask Dr. Dolan to speak more slowly or more loudly.
Elena’s face was sad. “Is true. I am refugee, from Czechoslovakia.”
“How’d you get here?” Dolan asked.
“Just like your ancestors did, Pat,” Dr. Kiel said. “Yours came steerage in a ship. Elena flew steerage in a plane. We lift the lamp beside the golden door for Czechs just as we did for the Irish.”
“And for the Russians?” Dolan said. “Isn’t that where your people are from, Nate?”
“The Russians would like to think so,” Kiel said. “It was Poland when my father left.”
“But you speak the lingo, don’t you?” Dolan persisted.
There was a brief silence. Abigail could see the vein in Dr. Kiel’s right temple pulsing. Dolan saw it also and gave a satisfied smirk.
He turned back to Elena. “How did you end up in Kansas? It’s a long way from Prague to here.”
“I am meeting Dr. Kiel in Bratislava,” Elena said.
“I was there in ’66, you know,” Dr. Kiel said. “Elena’s husband edited the Czech Journal of Virology and Bacteriology and the Soviets didn’t like their editorial policies—the journal decided they would only take articles written in English, French, or Czech, not in Russian.”
Bob laughed. “Audacious. That took some guts.”
Abigail was memorizing words under her breath to ask her mother over dinner: perceptive, editorial policies, audacious.
“Perhaps not so good idea. When Russian tanks coming last year, they putting husband in prison,” Elena said.
“Well, welcome aboard,” Dr. Dolan said, holding out his soft white hand to Elena.
She’d been holding her hands close to her side, but when she shook hands Abigail saw a huge bruise on the inside of her arm: green, purple, yellow, spreading in a large oval up and down from the elbow.
“They beat you before you left?” Dr. Dolan asked.
Elena’s eyes opened wide; Abigail thought she was scared. “Is me, only,” she said, “me being—not know in English.”
“What’s on today’s program?” Dr. Kiel asked Abigail abruptly, pointing at her violin.
“Bach.”
“You need to drop that old stuffed shirt. Beethoven. I keep telling you, start playing those Beethoven sonatas, they’ll bring you to life.” He ruffled her hair. “I think I saw your mother putting the cover over her typewriter when I came down.”
That meant Abigail was supposed to leave. She looked at Miss Bianca, who was hiding in the shavings at the back of her cage. It’s good you’re afraid, Abigail told her silently. Don’t let them catch you, they’ll hurt you or make you sick with a bad disease.
Rhonda Sherwood’s husband had been an account manager for a greeting card company in town. His territory was the West Coast. When he fell in love with a woman who owned a chain of gift shops in Sacramento, he left Rhonda and Abigail to start a new life in California.
It was embarrassing to have your father and mother divorced; some kids in Abigail’s fifth-grade class made fun of her. Her best friend’s mother wouldn’t let her come over to play any more, as if divorce were like one of Dr. Kiel and Dr. Dolan’s diseases, infectious, communicable.
When her husband left, Rhonda brushed up on her shorthand and typing. In May, just about the time that school ended, she was lucky enough to get a job working for Dr. Kiel up at the university. Rhonda typed all his letters and his scientific papers. Over dinner, she would make Abigail test her on the hard words she was learning: Coxiella burnetii, cytoblasts, vacuoles. Rhonda mastered the odd concepts: gram staining, centrifuging. Dr. Kiel was not a kind man in general, Rhonda knew that, but he was kind to her, a single mom. Dr. Kiel let Rhonda bring Abigail to the lab after school.
There were eight scientists in Dr. Kiel’s department. They all had graduate students, they all taught undergraduate classes at the university, but Abigail and Rhonda both knew that none of the other scientists worked as hard as Dr. Kiel. He was always traveling, too, to different scientific conventions, or overseas. Rhonda hadn’t been working for him when he went to Czechoslovakia three years ago, but she was making travel arrangements for him now. He was going to Washington, to San Francisco, and then to Israel.
Even though Dr. Kiel had an explosive temper, he had a sense of camaraderie that his colleagues lacked. He also had an intensity about his work that spilled over into the lives of his students and staff. His students and lab techs were expected to work long hours, do night shifts, attend evening seminars, but he took a personal interest in their families, their hobbies, took his male students fishing, brought his female students records or books for their birthdays. When he went to New York in August, he brought Rhonda back a scarf from the gift store in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Dr. Kiel had a wife and five lumpy, sullen children: Abigail met them when Dr. Kiel had everyone in the department out to his house for a picnic right after school started. He never seemed to think about his children the way he did about his staff and students.
It was Dr. Kiel who suggested that feeding the animals might make Abigail feel that she was part of the team. He seemed to sense her loneliness; he would quiz her on her classes, her music. He knew better than to tease a ten-year-old girl about boys, the way Dr. Dolan did.
When Rhonda worried about the diseases the animals were infected with, Dr. Kiel assured her that Abigail would not be allowed in the contamination room. “And if some Q fever germ is brave enough to come through the door and infect her, we keep tetracycline on hand.” He showed Rhonda the bottle of orange pills in one of his glass-doored cabinets. “I’ve had it, and so has Bob Pharris. Watch out for a high fever and a dry cough, with aching joints; let me know if either of you starts having symptoms.”
“High fever, dry cough,” Abigail repeated to herself. Every day when she went in to feed the animals, she checked Miss Bianca for a fever or a cough. “Do your joints ache?” she would ask the mouse, feeling her head the way Rhonda felt her own head when she was sick.
Elena Mirova’s arrival unsettled the lab. She was quiet, efficient, she did whatever was asked of her and more besides. She worked with Bob and Dr. Kiel’s other two graduate students, often giving them suggestions on different ways to set up experimental apparatus, or helping them interpret slides they were studying.