Other Men's Daughters (12 page)

Merriwether told her how moths secrete an enzyme early enough so that they'll have just enough of it to dissolve the protein of the cocoon. “It's the same process in ovulation. Yours.”

“And Priscilla's. Is she on The Pill?”

Merriwether felt the slightest of hooks. “I don't know. I'd guess not.”

“She's rather pointed about old Fred.”

“You should see Fred. He's very sweet and plump. Like a doughnut center.”

“I'll bet they have a grand old time.”

“Well, if so, I trust she's on The Pill. She's certainly known about it from Year One. Dr. Rock had a summer place near us.”

“If you know Rock, does that mean you don't have to use The Pill?”

“I just meant the subject's been in the Merriwether house for a long time.”

“Why don't you give her a prescription?”

“Why don't you ask your father to prepare the divorce papers for the ancient you're sleeping with?”

“I'm going to write your children letters,” said Cynthia. “‘Dear Priscilla, Hi. You don't know me, but your name was given to me by a mutual acquaintance. He said we have much in common. We are both in college. I like college. Do you like college? Are you lonely? I am! I only have one good friend. Are you a virgin? I am not. Your loving stepmother, Cynthia Ryder.' You like it?”

Merriwether said it was very funny.

“Do you think I have a good epistolary style?”

Merriwether assured her she did. “Maybe I'll write one to your father. ‘Dear Mr. Ryder. I want to introduce myself. I am the doctor who examined Cynthia last summer and found her in good health. I am also in good health. I weigh a hundred and fifty-two pounds. Your loving son, R. T. Merriwether, Ph.D., M.D.'”

“You have a crumby style.”

“I thought it was businesslike but affectionate.”

“‘Dear Albie,'” said Cynthia. “‘Hi. Maybe Priscilla has written you about me. I am a friend of a friend. Last year I was a junior at Swarthmore. Next year I may be a junior at Radcliffe. Aren't I making good progress? I hear you are a fine person too. Though I do not favor boys your age, maybe we could be friends. Are you a virgin? I am not. Try it on some time. Your loving stepmother, Cynthia.' Now that's a letter.”

“Yes,” said Dr. Merriwether, “that is a letter.”

Under the grape arbor, with Julot growling curses at his feet, he wrote a real letter.

Dear S, P, E, G and—if there, A,

‘Spega': the Rumanian for an optimistic faucet? (Five cents for an etymology.)

The Riviera is not what the posters say. Not even what it was when I worked here five years ago. Vallauris was a smallish town. You sat in the café by the Picasso statue of the Shepherd and Lamb, drank coffee, then ate a wonderful meal for two dollars. Now Vallauris is a suburban shopping center.

It is so crowded here one doesn't dare take to the roads. Luckily, I travel a smallish back road down to the lab and the conference and can zoom back to good French bread, wine and cheese.

Heat, yes, but not bad in the hills. Lonely? A bit for my spegalians. Though you seem to be prospering; at least those who take pen in hand.

The landlady, an amiable crone named Mademoiselle Seville, is on the edge of the pepper grove below this arbor nervously waiting her chance to tell me her night's awful dream. This is my chief social pleasure, so I'd best sign off and get to it.

Love, from the loving

“Père des Spegalians,”
id est

Dad

Merriwether's conference paper examined water and salt changes during congestive cardiac failure; the changes were correlated with the release of the anti-diuretic hormone by Verney's osmoreceptor. The technical presentation took thirty minutes. Then, for twenty, Merriwether speculated about “levels of” what he called “neuro-consciousness” in the “registration or certification” of the changes. “When is thirst
thirst?
”

The conference room was an enormous red salon filled with tapestried chairs and sofas, decorated with lunettes and ceilings full of seraphim. In the room's center were a rectangular table and thirty-five tubular chairs. By each chair were earphones for simultaneous translation, note pads, pencils, glasses of water, coffee mugs, and—left from a previous conference—logarithmic slide rules and calipers.

John Brightsman sat at the long end of the rectangle. The only one near him the day of Merriwether's presentation was an Italian biologist, a thirty-five-year-old
professoressa
from Turin with red hair and a spectacular figure. She and Brightsman exchanged frequent looks during Merriwether's presentation; when Brightsman made his comment, she nodded emphasis.

Brightsman's comment was that Merriwether's speculations were perfectly acceptable after-dinner musings for high school students, but out of place at a serious conference. There was, he said, such a disparity between the “at least professional standards of the research work of the gentleman from Cambridge” and “these out-loud musings” that it amounted to “a kind of schizophrenia which might be useful to investigate in itself,” though that was, as far as he knew, not on the agenda.

The insults brought silence to the room. Merriwether felt as if he'd been pushed off a roof. The Chairman, a physiologist from Marseilles, looked around for the next comment, as if Brightsman's could be the ordinary basis for ordinary discussion. An old acquaintance of Merriwether's from Basel finally said that he was a bit surprised at “our friend Brightsman's comments, though we all know and enjoy his high spirit and wit. I suggest we focus on what to me were not ‘high school musings,' if I heard correctly, but an interesting conceptual framework.”

“Gentlemanly nonsense,” called Brightsman.

“Please,
chers collègues
,” said the Chairman.

“I see no reason trivializing time,” said Brightsman.

Merriwether replied, “I'm sorry that my little coda displeased the distinguished professor from North Dakota. However, I can't see making any reasonable response to his remarks.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Merriwether? Why don't you go back to your child whore and let the rest of us do serious work?”

Merriwether got up, moved toward Brightsman, and then with one prolonged needle stare, left the room.

Driving up the hill, swerving at curves, pulling quickly away from trucks, cars, scooters, he finally recovered enough to stop in the café in St. Vetry.

On the little terrace, among the green vines, listening to the click of the
boules
, holding sips of red wine on his tongue, letting the sights—vanilla church, post office, the green slope—blot up what was left of his fury, Merriwether worked himself into sympathy for Brightsman. Uncertainty, isolation, terror, horrible envy, what else had that fellow suffered? How long had he been nuts? And yet, the attack on his paper was basically right. Merriwether had taken off on a theoretical fling. And Brightsman, in his crazy way, had sensed it as an equivalent of Cynthia.

Brightsman stayed in a pension on the lower Corniche west of Nice. His peculiarities had been the talk of the other pensioners. They had “observed his strange hours and his bizarre arrogance.” In view of the “menace to the whole Riviera,” they decided they should keep an eye on him. “The unstable are unnaturally excited by fire,” reported one of them, an undertaker from Lyon who had—as he added to the reporter from
Nice-Matin
—“read much in psychological literature.” He suggested they follow Brightsman. One morning, three of them trailed him into the hills and watched him walk off toward a clump of shrubs.

He stooped and did something which we could not observe. We were a hundred meters distant. Seconds after he rose, there was a burst of flame. We were waiting behind our car, and when he approached, we jumped out, seized and then tied him up. He struggled like a madman. M. Pauncelot ran to extinguish the blaze and then we drove here to the Prefecture.

Above this front page story was a picture of Brightsman glaring at his three accusers.

“Fantastic,” said Merriwether. “I don't know arson types, but I wouldn't put it past him. But it's pathetic, horrible. You can't imagine what extraordinary work the fellow does.”

They followed “
l'affaire
Brightsman” in the papers every day. The Conference members discussed the situation and decided against doing anything other than offering a written statement about Brightsman's work. Merriwether thought it might be his duty to testify to the man's instability; but the fellow was in enough trouble. The
juge d'instruction
was calling in psychiatrists.

“I can understand his interest in fire,” said Merriwether. “Our lab work is small scale. There's something very exciting about tremendous changes. A sensible man, let alone a nut like Brightsman, might be tempted by all these fires to try and see what was what.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Cynthia. “Don't let anyone else hear you.” They were sitting under the grape arbor. Cynthia had her bare legs in his lap. “They can hang Ph.Ds.”

In
Le Monde
—for anti-Americanism and the anti-intellectual backlash of the years of university riot had made this a national story—Brightsman gave an interview about his “passion for all natural phenomena.”

No natural process is alien to me. I have rushed to the Missouri River during a flood to study its incredible force. Imagine, here is the same substance that in one's drinking glasses and faucets is so tame. In flood, this domestic pet tears oaks from the ground, turns forests into seas. So with fire. Here it is at the tip of our cigarette, jolly little thing. But there it is, the devourer of the earth. This is what I study. But I do not create the natural laboratories. I did not start the fire any more than I started the flood.

One day, Mademoiselle Seville met Merriwether and Cynthia as they drove up the path. “A journalist from Paris is here to question the Professor.” She pointed to a handsome, thirtyish woman in a mini-skirt who smiled at them from the terrace. “Jill Chambliss,” she said, coming up. “I'm from
Newsweek
.” She wanted Professor Merriwether's thoughts about the Brightsman case.

Merriwether had had no experience with the charm of good reporters. Over wine, he talked about Brightsman, first with caution, then more and more freely. Miss Chambliss—“Jill, please”—was elegant, and very pretty. Cynthia frowned, pouted, finally went inside. Merriwether told about the incident in the restaurant and “a crazy outburst” at the Conference. “Yet the man is close to being a top-notch physiologist. I haven't convinced myself that he's lost control to this extent.”

The notebook, balanced on Jill's tan knees, filled, page after page, so, a week later, Dr. Merriwether was surprised that the entire
Newsweek
story was only a half page long, and then dismayed to find a sentence about “the Harvard physiologist, Robert Merriwether,” who'd said that Brightsman had made a scene in a restaurant during which he'd insulted Merriwether and “his pretty, young assistant, Cynthia Ryder.”

eight

Cynthia had gone wild after the telegram from her father, and though she'd calmed down thinking up strategies—from moving out of the house to saying she and Merriwether were married—he couldn't guess from moment to moment how she'd be.

Not that he relished seeing the man. “Your father's not a caveman,” he'd said to her, “and we're not rabid dogs,” but he had fears about Mr. Ryder. Firstly, he had a notion that legal training emphasized sophistical distinctions which vaulted essential relationships. Lawyers dominated American life by creating divisive issues. They had a vested interest in complication and bullied clients into helplessness before it. Even lawyers he liked were often conversational bullies. Secondly, Mr. Ryder was a physical man, not like Merriwether himself, a sensible exerciser, but someone who needed activity to siphon off violent impulses. The man loved speed, he raced planes, motorcycles, boats, he was a hunter, Cynthia said there were guns all over the house. Thirdly, he was top dog in a small southern town; that gave a man a lot of moral elbow room. Merriwether had never been south of Washington, but he had his own confident notions about the South's contempt for the law its lawyers used as shields for illegitimacy and violence. God knows if Ryder wouldn't gun them down in the grape arbor and go back home for his medals. Merriwether let himself exaggerate, but it didn't help him laugh off his discomfort. After all, from Ryder's viewpoint, he probably looked like an old lecher debauching his daughter. If the vocabulary was outmoded, so—according to Cynthia—was her father.

“You're out of your depths, Daddy.”

Mr. Ryder was walking along Riverside Drive with his oldest daughter Lisa a few hours before taking the plane to Paris. New York was equatorial. The wind was out of a blast furnace; the golden filth of the Hudson shimmered. And across, the oxide red Palisades baked and steamed. Lisa, bare-shouldered, mini-skirted, short-haired, was drenched with sweat.

“I don't think French waters are that much deeper than ours, Lisa.” He was going to keep his temper. Though he could not get used to this plain (no make-up, no flirtatiousness), long-legged beauty of his telling him what she called the score.

“The Pill's changed everything, Daddy. You have to get used to it.”

Here was someone whose every atom he'd either created or subsidized, who only existed because he'd stirred out of a dream twenty-four years ago, and here she was mapping out the world for him. It was not easy to take. Not in this apoplectic heat with the old ladies and their ancient pugs staggering along the Drive with their tongues out. “I don't like to have my face rubbed in mud, Lisa, that's all. Not by my own children.”

He'd called Lisa in New York after he'd read the
Newsweek
article. Did she want to go to France with him for a few days, he trusted her judgment, maybe she could help detach her sister from whatever mess she was in.