"They're beautiful," he said.
"I'm glad you like them," she said, genuinely pleased. "I do, too."
After a moment's silence, Jude switched on the tape recorder, pulled out his notebook, and said: "Well, time to get started."
He began with some warm-up questions. Her age: thirty (so it was the same as his). Her hometown: White Fish Bay, Wisconsin. Her parents: her father was a doctor, her mother a housewife. Her background: Berkeley, and then Minnesota for postgraduate work and three years of medical school at Duke.
She was not, she explained, a practicing doctor, but a medical researcher in biology. Research on twins studies was a recent sideline.
He jotted down her replies. The notebook was largely a prop, since the tape was recording every word. He had learned to use note taking to adjust the flow of information — he could open the spigot by scribbling enthusiastically and shut it down by tapping his ballpoint in boredom. But he quickly realized that this woman needed little encouragement to talk about her research, which aroused an enthusiasm that burned in her dark eyes.
"Do you know why scientists are so passionate about identical twins? Every year we trek to their gathering in Twinsburg, Ohio, and set up booths and hound them unmercifully to get them to participate in all kinds of studies. Do you know why?"
Jude nodded ambiguously; it could have signified yes or go on. She went on.
"Twins studies are a powerful research tool."
Jude wrote that down.
"Monozygotic twins — twins that come from a single fertilized egg that splits — are an accident of Nature. It's like a little slippage of the gears, a crack in the mirror that allows us to see through it to the other side. It provides us with two separate individuals that have the exact same genetic makeup. Their genes are, for all intents and purposes, the same."
"I see." Jude stopped taking notes.
"So here you have two identical people, the same from the point of view of what they inherit from their ancestors, different in circumstances. It's a miniature experiment, aimed at solving that age-old conundrum: what counts more, hereditary or environment? Nature or nurture?"
"I remember," said Jude. "Biology 201."
"More likely 101. The introductory course. You probably know the salient features of the studies. All those coincidences that seem to defy belief — they're part of common lore: how two identical boys or girls, raised in separate cities and with no contact or even knowledge of one another, end up leading lives that have all these spooky similarities. Scientists love to study them, newspapers love to write about them, and we all love to read about them."
She walked to her desk and rummaged through a drawer. "Here, look at this," she said, handing him a yellowed clipping. "An old article from one of your competitors."
It was a story from the New York Post, dated May 9, 1979, about identical twin boys born in Piqua, Ohio, to an unwed mother in 1939. They had been adopted by different families, raised forty-five miles apart and had met up again nearly forty years later. The article enumerated astounding similarities. It quoted one of the twins, and Jude copied it down: "When I went to meet my brother the first time, it was like looking in a mirror."
"Watch out," said Dr. Tierney. "This stuff can become habit forming. A Danish shrink, Juel-Nielsen, came up with a name for it—'monozygotic monomania. "
She smiled, sat back down, and noticed that he was still copying.
"I don't mean to say anything," she said, "but is that allowed?" Jude looked up. He saw that she was looking at his moving pen.
"Oh, you mean writing all this down from the Post. You know what they say: 'Good writers borrow, great writers steal.'
She did not seem to be amused, and so he added, "No, it's perfectly all right, as long as you attribute it."
Nodding, she continued.
"A lot of the twins-reared-apart studies were done at the University of Minnesota — the Twin Cities, naturally. There's a man there I had the honor to work with, though only briefly, Professor Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr. He founded something called the Center for Twin and Adoptive Research. He got hooked in 1979 and — you'll be happy to know — it was a newspaper story on that same set of twins you just read about that did it.
"Jim Lewis and Jim Springer. By coincidence, they had both been given the same first name. They looked almost exactly alike in every way — lanky, six feet tall, about a hundred and eighty pounds, dark hair, brown eyes. Not all monozygotic twins retain the physical resemblance to such a high degree. But the real surprise came when they started comparing the narratives of their lives: each had married a woman named Linda, then gotten a divorce, then remarried a woman named Betty. Jim Lewis had named his firstborn child James Alan, spelled A-l-a-n. Jim Springer named his first James Allen, which he spelled A-l-l-e-n. What's really intriguing is the similarity in all the little details, the fabric of their daily lives. When they were kids, they both had dogs named Toy. Their families went to the same beach in Florida for vacations. Each of them worked in law enforcement. They liked the same hobbies — blueprinting, drafting, carpentry. They even liked the same beer, Miller Lite, and smoked the same brand of cigarettes, Salem. Their results on various tests were carbon copies — so much alike that it looked as if the same person had taken them twice."
Jude was writing it all down. This was good stuff. It had been printed before — some of it going back two decades — but still, maybe he could recycle it into the body of the story.
"You don't have to take notes," she said. "I don't mean to discourage you, but most of it appeared in a magazine article just a few years ago."
Jude's heart sank. She rose, thumbed through a stack of papers on her bookshelf, and sat down with a copy of The New Yorker. He glanced over at the date and jotted it down: August 7, 1995.
"Let me find a passage about Bouchard's early work." She flipped to a page marked by a paper clip, skimmed the article, and summarized it:
"Among the first pairs he studied were two women, Daphne Goodship and Barbara Herbert. They had both been adopted and lived apart near London for thirty-nine years. They met at a railroad station in May 1979. Each of them was wearing a beige dress and brown velvet jacket. They had dozens of little similarities — both had identical crooked little fingers, for example, which had kept them both from typing or learning to play the piano. Both had weak ankles from tumbling down stairs at the same age, fifteen. At sixteen each of them had gone to a local dance, where she met the man she later married. Each had suffered miscarriages during her first pregnancies; each then had two boys followed by a girl. They had little tics and gestures in common, giggling and this habit of pushing up their noses when they laughed — which they called 'squidging.' And so on. It goes on and on, twin after twin."
Jude jumped in with a question:
"But given all the possible variables in a lifetime, all the people out there and all the twins, wouldn't you expect some crazy coincidences? I mean, if you and I compared our lives in minute detail, wouldn't we come up with some details that seemed eerie because they were the same?: we went to the same rock show in 1976, we use the same toothpaste, we have uncles with the same first names. Especially if we were looking for the similarities. And we'd naturally discard all the dissimilarities that didn't fit in."
She smiled and nodded. "I applaud your skepticism — I imagine when you're a reporter, it comes with the territory. And to be truthful, I share it to a large extent — or I did."
She crossed her legs, and Jude saw that disturbing band of white thigh again. It was hard not to look at it.