Elizabeth the First Wife (6 page)

The campus of the California Institute of Technology, known as Caltech to the world, wasn't beautiful, but it had its highlights. It was a hodgepodge of history, gravitas, and some unfortunate expansion during the '70s. A recent building-and-renovation spate had improved the balance of the campus somewhat, but very few of the three thousand–plus students, grad students, and professors really cared about the aesthetic of the institution. For them it was about the work, plain and simple. The quirky design, the jumbled labs that remained unchanged for decades, and the lecture rooms that still reverberated with the teachings of more than thirty Nobel Prize recipients, dozens of National Medal of Science honorees, and the occasional MacArthur Fellow better served the work than some picture-perfect campus.

As my mother always said, “All these Techies need is a slide rule and three meals a day, and they're happy. The rest is meaningless
to them.” I laughed thinking about my mother's assessment as I watched my father approach our table for our weekly lunch at the Athenaeum. The “Ath” was the private dining club on the Caltech campus that catered to the faculty and administration of the school, as well as a select list of community leaders from Pasadena at large. As opposed to my little office at Pasadena City College, the Athenaeum actually was Southern California meets Oxford, the building being a fine example of grand Mediterranean architecture filled with the handsomely worn appointments of a well-endowed club. It was built in 1930, with money cashed out of the stock market just before the crash, to serve as a social, ethical, and intellectual center for the city. The first event held in the club was a dinner in honor of Albert Einstein, newly arrived for a stint at Caltech. Many more illustrious dinners had been held over the decades, including, but not limited to, my sister Bumble's wedding.

My father, Dr. Richard Lancaster, fit in perfectly, thanks to my mother's refusal to allow him to descend into that scruffy academic look of short-sleeved, buttoned-down shirts and Birkenstocks favored by too many on campus. Instead, my father wore a daily uniform of a tweed jacket, white polo shirt, pressed khakis, and clean pair of Jack Purcell sneakers. He nodded in greeting to his fellow faculty members at their coveted “round tables” in the center of the large room—the engineers, the biologists, the applied mathematicians. The seating in the dining room was a neatly organized universe of hierarchical lunch buddies with some of the world's highest IQs.

Normally, my father sat with his fellow physicists to talk shop about string theory or nucleosynthesis or gravitational wave detection. But every Wednesday for the last five years, we shared a table for two and talked about movies, the news, academic politics, and tennis. Tennis was the only sport he played and the one sport he followed religiously. Now, we played and talked tennis together. I wish I could say it was something we'd done since my childhood, but honestly, it wasn't.

I had no interest in my father's life when I was growing up, except that it would occasionally take us to fantastic European destinations during summers, thanks to conferences and guest lectures. I would answer questions about him with vague statements like, “He's a science teacher” and “He works in a lab.” Unlike my older sister Sarah, herself a scientist, researcher, and doctor, I couldn't understand my father's work, and unlike Bumble, a spinner of reality, I didn't appreciate its magnitude until I was in college. When I was in real grade trouble in Physics for Non-Science Majors, I managed to pass simply by dropping my father's name.

I think I can say with complete confidence that my father had very little interest in my childhood life, which was filled with school theater productions, books about history, and long sessions in front of the mirror, wondering why Bumble got the bouncy blond hair and I got the straight brunette stuff. We never really clashed, he and I, because we had so little in common.

But over the last decade, we'd found a connection, mainly because of our shared admiration for Roger Federer and my improved backhand. Best of all, even though I was at a community college and he taught at one of the most elite schools in the world, we had become colleagues of sorts.

“Hello, Elizabeth. Am I late?” Never, but he asked every week anyway.

“No, I was early. I'm ahead of you on iced teas, so order up.”

He laughed and gestured over his shoulder. “Your mother's right behind me. She stopped at the desk to take care of reservations for some dinner months from now, that sort of thing. Probably telling the dining room what to serve that night. She'll be joining us today apparently. I'll flag down Ursula and have her move us to a bigger table.”

Perfect. My mother. Or, as I thought of her, the Community Volunteer/Dynamic Faculty Wife/Self-appointed Arbiter of All that Is Right and Good. I wasn't in the mood. An encounter with Anne
Lancaster required me to be on my A game emotionally and sartorially. I was only at about a B-minus on this particular Wednesday. The FX situation had disturbed my sleep, and I wasn't ready to go public with his offer or my decision.

Add to that my newfound Pierce DeVine relationship, which would annoy my mother to no end, because she'd been trying for a year to get me to meet with her “lovely and tasteful” decorator Chantal, a woman in her mid-sixties whose devotion to chinoiserie far outweighed any consideration of comfort, practicality, or her clients' actual design preferences. My personal style didn't exactly scream, “Yes, I need more cane and bamboo chairs and a tufted ottoman!” I thought that was obvious to even the casual observer, but not to Anne Lancaster. I'd been dodging her offers to have Chantal swing by for a consultation, but now I'd have to come clean.

Plus, I was wearing Frye boots, and I knew my mother would surely comment on them.

Ursula, a server with decades of experience, moved us quickly, resetting my iced tea. “There you are, Doctors Lancaster. I assume you'd like the lunch buffet, but if you need anything off the menu, just let me know. I'll direct Mrs. Lancaster to your table.”

“Let's go get our lunch,” my father said gruffly. “It could take your mother an hour to make her way across the dining room. She'll stop at every table.”

I knew he was right, especially when I spied the Caltech president, his impressive wife, and the mayor of Pasadena lunching together in the path of Hurricane Anne. That was twenty minutes right there, while she roped them all into one of her causes. She was chairing the Showcase House for the Arts this year, the mother of all local charities. My guess was that she'd sign up the trio to attend the opening reception, as all the proceeds went to music education—and really, who could object to music education? Well, Bumble's husband wasn't a fan of the arts, and he voted that way whenever he had the chance, but other than Congressman Ted, most citizens could agree
that music education was a worthwhile cause.

By the time my father and I returned, my mother was seated and waiting, a trio of buffet salads in front of her. Ever since my father won the Nobel, she'd used her celebrity status to entice the servers to go through the lunch buffet for her and compile “
a mélange de trois salades”
rather than wait in the five-minute line herself. It drove me crazy, as the Ath was noted for its egalitarianism, but my father pretended not to notice.

“Hello, Elizabeth dear. I thought I threw those boots out when you went to grad school,” she said, because she just couldn't help herself, and then she added with glowing eyes, “At least you're wearing shoes. Which is more than I can say for Sarah's twins.”

Here we go again
. My big sister Sarah is literally one of the finest people on the planet. She's a pediatric oncologist and researcher who works tirelessly to cure freaking cancer. She married the cute boy who sat next to her in calculus class in high school, Steven Chen, who is also a doctor. Sarah then gave birth to two wonderful daughters, Hope and Honor, names that would under most circumstances be considered highly pretentious. Except that Sarah is one of the finest people on the planet.

But in my mother's eyes, Sarah was committing an inexcusable offense by sending her kids to Redwood, the private school favored by Pasadena's moneyed artsy crowd who shunned test scores, dress codes, and mandatory footwear. The school and their child-rearing philosophy was a complete affront to All That Was Right and Good according to Anne Lancaster.

“I was at one of their pagan celebrations today. …”

“I think it's called Earth Day, Mom.”

“That's it. And none of the children were required to wear shoes. Never mind the uncombed hair and the pajamas that most of them seemed to be wearing. I just don't understand. Is proper footwear so awful? Did I ruin you girls with Stride-Rites? Richard?”

My father had stopped paying attention about the time he heard
“pagan celebrations,” so he resorted to his fallback conversational gambit. “Hmmph.”

“I would just think that as a medical doctor, Sarah would be more concerned with her children's arch support and less concerned with free-form and, frankly, awful poems about trees,” she summed up before moving on. “So, did your father tell you?”

My mother specialized in a verbal gambit I'd come to describe as the Hanging Tease. In short, it was as if every fact my mother had at her disposal was part of some gigantic galactic secret that she was the first to know.
Did you hear about the dean of admissions? Can you believe what happened at the committee meeting? I suppose you know about the new girl at my salon?
My answer to every Hanging Tease was always, “No, why would I know about that?” But what I really meant was, “No, why would I care about that?” My clear disdain never stopped her from teasing me anyway.

“No, Dad didn't have a chance to tell me much of anything yet.”

“Richard?” She looked at him with mounting excitement. Richard did not respond in kind.

“My old college roommate is now the president of Redfield College,” he admitted with some trepidation. “If you wanted to send him your resume. …”

Aha. That's why she'd shown up uninvited. To remind me once again that teaching at a community college was somehow beneath the Lancaster family. Oh, my mother believed in equal education for all, but some education is more equal than others. And clearly Lancasters should be teaching/attending/being honored by the
more
equal schools.

My mother had been the smartest girl in her class at the Eastmont School for Girls in Pasadena. She went on to graduate summa cum laude from Scripps with a degree in biology. Having never been in a classroom with boys until grad school, she was shocked to discover that women were not held in universally high regard. She met my father, then a doctoral candidate at Berkeley, when she was
completing her masters as the token female in her department. In another time and place, like if she'd been born twenty years later, she herself might have been the Nobel laureate. But the women's lib movement didn't make it into the sciences early enough to get her off the faculty-wife track and onto the faculty. She taught middle school science for several years before “succumbing to motherhood” (as she liked to say when we were in earshot) when my father's postdoc took him to Oxford. Now, she spent an inordinate amount of time on worthy community projects in the sphere of education, science, and children. But it wasn't quite the same as actually being a professor.

Hence her focus on my career.

“Thanks. I'll think about it, Dad,” I responded, turning to face him directly. There, addressed and tabled. Moving on?

No such luck. “Why would you not at least explore the possibility? Redfield is a very fine school where they appreciate Shakespeare.” Anne Lancaster would not be silenced with a “thanks, but no thanks” response.

Of course, she was right about Redfield, a small liberal arts college outside of Portland, Oregon, that had seen its ranking rocket up the charts in recent years, thanks to hefty donations from moneyed alumni in the Pacific Northwest, which allowed the school to attract high-profile professors in the math and writing departments, not to mention a very good lacrosse coach. It was now on the radar of prep-school guidance counselors and savvy East Coast parents looking for a West Coast alternative to Middlebury and Colby. A decade ago, Redfield might have been a dream school for me, but now I was too entrenched in my job and my life in Pasadena to seriously consider a move.

“My students appreciate Shakespeare, and so does the administration. I like what I do and where I do it. I have a chance to teach kids who will go onto some very fine schools themselves. They're smart kids, too.” This was my broken-record answer to her frequent queries about my “stalled academic trajectory.” “Plus, do you
know how many women with doctorates in English are wandering around looking for work? I'm lucky to have this job.”

“I know. It's just that you're always fighting to keep your classes on the schedule. You have to teach those remedial writing classes just to earn a living. The whole community college system is a mess because of all the budgets cuts. Maybe a private college would be a more stable environment. Not so much scrapping for respect.”

“I like scrapping,” I said, taking a swig of iced tea for emphasis.

“Atta girl,” my father said, clearly eager to change the subject himself. “See, Anne, I told you she wouldn't go for it.”