This is how day after day passed. I realize I sound bored recounting it now, and perhaps even a little dramatically fatalistic, but at the time it was interesting enough, both the work itself — for at times I truly did feel, as a good lab with a charismatic leader encourages its fellows to feel, that I, as much as anyone, perhaps more, was on the inevitable verge of a discovery of a small but important sort, something that might change science forever — and because I was learning from my days in the lab and the lives of those around me that it was not a life that I would choose. It is a funny thing, working for someone else in a lab: you are chosen because you are the best in your class or the most promising in your field or an interesting thinker, and you are put in a room full of others like yourself. In some of your colleagues you see your past, the student you once were, and in others you see your future, or at least a template for your future, although you yourself, you assume, will be better and brighter and more talented than they.
But what does it mean to be successful or talented in a lab? For your work there is not truly your own; you are chosen because of your mind and then asked, to varying degrees, to cease thinking for yourself and begin doing so for another. For some people this is easier than for others; they are the ones who remain. And so although you gain fraternity, you forsake your independence. But ambition is a difficult thing to quash completely, and so it is redirected — instead of working alone, you work in a room with others, but even as you do, you hope every day that you will be the one to make the key discovery, that you will be the one to find the answer, that you will present it, triumphant, to your director and that he will be generous and intellectually confident enough to give you your due credit. This is your hope, and it has motivated and kept alive men much more distinguished than I. But it is answered for only a very few of them, and they — the ones who one day are awarded their own labs, their own patented cell lines, their own papers — are the lucky ones. They are all of them patient, though; I, however, knew by the end of my first term with Smythe’s lab that I could never be that patient, nor that pliable.
Part of this certainty was attributable to the discomfort I felt with the culture of the lab itself. Labs at that time were not like the ones today. Not that I cared a terrible amount about my colleagues’ lives, the things they were interested in outside of the office, but there was at work a kind of conservatism, a fixation on neatness, that I found difficult and dispiriting. In those days science considered itself the realm of gentlemen. This was the era, after all, of Linus Pauling and J. Robert Oppenheimer, both of them exceptional, of course, but not exempt from having to dress a certain way, or from being able to perform at cocktail parties, or from pursuing romance. Genius was no excuse for social ineptitude, the way it is today, when a certain refusal to acquire the most basic social skills or an inability to dress properly or feed oneself is generously perceived as evidence of one’s intellectual purity and commitment to the life of the mind.
But this was not how it always was. Then, it was difficult to ignore one’s colleagues’ extraoffice activities and interests because one was expected to be appropriate in one’s own. People spoke of the Turks approvingly not only because they had done well in school and were, so it was said, quick-minded and obedient and thoughtful, but because they were so presentable. Both had wives who had gone to Radcliffe, both came from well-known East Coast families, both were handsome enough and well dressed. They were very earnest. They were convinced that what they were doing was serious and important work — and so was I — but they were the sort of men for whom humor was to be practiced only at the appropriate events (parties, dinners, etc.) and then only within a very limited range. Except to Europe with their parents (and, I suppose, with the army in wartime, which hardly counts), neither of them had traveled, and neither of them longed to. Their friends were people like themselves, and they hired people like themselves — Ulliver and Nesser compensated for their strange Scandinavian surnames with their nicknames, which were Skip and Trip — and their lives were the lab to their homes in Cambridge or Newton and then back. People like Fat Irish may never have thought beyond a life of emptying mice cages and swabbing urine from the lab floors, but in their own way the Turks were as limited, as unimaginative: they assumed they would make a great contribution to mankind, and that is a faultless goal, I suppose, but the process itself never seemed as compelling to them as the outcome was, nor as the fantasy of having their name appended to whatever it is they dreamed of inventing or solving or fixing. I had gone into science for its adventure, but to them, adventure was something to be endured, not sought, on the road to inevitable greatness.
II.
It was not until I had been working at the lab for six months that I finally had my chance to meet Smythe. I had seen him before, of course, but only in glimpses: in newspapers, in magazines, as he ran into the lab to talk with Brassard and Fitch or to grab a piece of paper or a journal from his otherwise worrisomely tidy desk before leaving again for the world outside his lab. A few of my professors would occasionally ask me about him, jealous: What did he have me doing in that lab? What was he doing? I always told the truth, and this was boring and opaque enough to stop their questions: I cut open mice; I didn’t know. Had I known what I thought about him, had I admired him and wished to protect his work, I would have lied and made my own work sound more fascinating.
One day, however, Brassard stopped by my counter as I was grating mice spleens. “Smythe left this for you,” he said, placing an envelope by my elbow. He was disapproving, but he was always disapproving. I took off my gloves and opened the envelope, a regular business-sized envelope with my name typed on the front. Inside was a letter on onionskin — also typed, so poorly I assumed Smythe had done so himself — inviting me to dinner that Friday, at 6:30 p.m. He had signed it with a black fountain pen and the ink had bled through the paper and blurred into a smudge. It’s difficult now to remember precisely what I thought of this invitation. I suppose I was flattered — although Brassard, who had somehow figured out what the letter was, made sure to inform me later that day that Smythe made a practice of inviting over each medical student who worked in his lab once (he emphasized the word) during his tenure — but oddly, I don’t recall being overly excited. Nor was I particularly worried. I had never quite understood how I had gotten the position in Smythe’s lab in the first place, and I knew for certain by then that it was not a place I would stay; lack of interest has a kind way of eliminating all potential nervousness.
On Friday I arrived for dinner at Smythe’s house, a tall, narrow brownstone on the edge of the medical school campus. In the front was a Japanese red maple, now bare (it was early March), a holly bush with glossy, sharp leaves, and a clump of veined crocuses peering through their halo of mulch. The rest of the garden was bare, just plain wood chips. There was no harmony or apparent order to the plants’ arrangement; they just were. Inside, the house was very much the same way: in one corner of the entryway sat, incongruously, a Japanese tansu of blistering, puckered camphor. In another, just as incongruously, was an old-fashioned English secretary desk, the grain of the wood patterning its surface with satiny stripes. The rugs that covered the dusty floors were old Orientals, and I saw what looked like cracker crumbs speckling their tassels. The walls were hung with black shadowbox frames backed with black felt upon which were mounted lockets, their gold dull and whitish, and little scrimshaw carvings (a gnome, his crudely carved hands slapping together in a gesture of merriment; a ship, its sails pooching out unconvincingly), and cameos showing dreamy, loose-curled girls gazing off to the side, their expressions vacant. They were deeply idiosyncratic touches, and yet there was something furtive and unspecific about the house as well — it looked like the showroom for a second-rate auction house specializing in estate sales. There was nothing there that echoed who Smythe appeared to be, with his birchbark-colored hair and his lined face and his tall, upright walk and his magazine articles. Behind the frames, the walls were painted, each a different, strange color: puce and teal and that bright light green particular to unripened fruit. I had expected beiges and browns and perhaps some unobjectionable blues, everything neat and in order, not an eccentric’s house, for Smythe was not an eccentric.