The People in the Trees: A Novel Page 2

  The ironic thing about this was that shortly before he had been arrested, Norton had in fact been planning to write his memoirs. By that time—1995—he was semiretired and no longer forced to contend with the various administrative duties and hassles of the lab. This is not to imply that he was not still the most vital and indispensable mind there—simply that he had begun to allow himself to organize his time in different ways.

  However, Norton was not to have the opportunity to record his remarkable life, at least not under the conditions I know he would have preferred. But as I have always said, his is the sort of mind that can surmount any challenge. And so in April, two months after he began serving his sentence, I asked in my daily letter to him whether he might not consider writing his memoirs anyway. Not only, I told him, would they make a great contribution to the worlds of letters and science, but he would at last have a chance to prove to anyone interested that he was not what the world had been so eager to make him. I explained that I would be honored to type and, if he might let me, lightly edit his writing, as I had done before for various papers he had submitted to journals. It would be, I wrote, a fascinating project for me, and one that might keep him entertained.

  A week later, Norton sent me a brief note:

  Although I can’t say I wish to spend what may be the final years of my life trying to convince anyone that I am not guilty of the crimes they have decided I am, I have chosen to begin, as you say, the “story of my life.” My trust [in you] is … [very] great.3

  I had the first installment a month later.

  There are a few things I suppose I should say by means of introduction before I invite the reader to learn of Norton’s extraordinary life. For it, after all, is a story with disease at its heart.

  Norton, of course, will say it all better than I, but I will here give the reader some details about the man at hand. He once remarked to me that his life did not begin in any meaningful way until he left the country for U’ivu, where he would make discoveries that would transform modern medicine and lead to his receipt of the Nobel Prize. In 1950, when he was twenty-five, he made his first trip to the then obscure Micronesian country, a trip that would change his life—and revolutionize the scientific community—forever. While in U’ivu, he lived among a “lost tribe” that would come to be called the Opa’ivu’eke people on what was then known (among U’ivuans, at least) as the “Forbidden Island” of Ivu’ivu, the largest in the country’s small formation. It was there that he discovered a condition—an undocumented condition, one never before studied—that was affecting the native population. The U’ivuans were known (and to some extent still are known) for the brevity of their lifespans. But while on Ivu’ivu, Norton encountered a group of islanders who were living far beyond a normal lifespan: twenty, fifty, even a hundred years longer. There were two other components that made this discovery even more remarkable: first, that while the affected persons did not physically age, they did mentally deteriorate; and second, that their condition was not congenital but acquired.

  Never had men gotten closer to eternal life than they did with Norton’s discovery. And yet never had such a wonderful promise slipped away so quickly: a secret found, a secret lost, all within the space of a decade.

  But Norton’s work among the Opa’ivu’eke reflected seismic shifts in fields beyond medicine: his nearly two decades spent among the tribe all but spawned a new field of modern medical anthropology, and his writings from his years there are now staples of many college curricula.

  But it was also in U’ivu4 that his troubles began. Of the many things that defined Norton’s travels through U’ivu, one was the origins of what would become his enduring love for children. Ivu’ivu, for those readers who are unfamiliar with it, is a daunting landscape, as beautiful as it is intimidating. Everything there is larger and purer and more awesome than imaginable, and in every direction lies a vista more spectacular than the last: to one side, an endless stretch of water, so motionless and intensely colored that one is unable to look at it for any significant length of time; to the other, long, deep folds of mountain, its peaks disappearing into a froth of fog. From his initial visit to Ivu’ivu, Norton hired U’ivuans to be his guides, to lead him in search of sights and objects he had never before seen. Decades later, he would—at their pleading—take back with him to Maryland their children and grandchildren and raise them as his own, offering them the sort of upbringing they would have had no means of experiencing in U’ivu. He also brought back with him many orphans, toddlers and young children living in appalling conditions with no hope of ever changing their lives.

  Before he knew it, he had accumulated a brood of over forty. Many of these children, adopted in three waves that spanned almost three decades, have returned to Micronesia, where they are now doctors, lawyers, professors, chiefs, teachers, and diplomats. Others have chosen to remain in the United States, where they have taken jobs or remain in school. And still others have, I regret to say, vanished into poverty and drugs and crime. (When one has forty-three children, one cannot expect all of them to be successes.) But now, of course, none of them are Norton’s any longer. And Norton is, by their choice, no longer theirs: their near-mass abandonment of him during his recent hardships was nothing less than shocking. This was a man, after all, who had given them shelter, language, education—all the tools they needed to one day betray him, as indeed they did. Norton’s children learned the message of the West, and America, all too well; somewhere they learned that accusations of perversity are an easy sell, accusations that not even a Nobel Prize, a respected mind, could successfully withstand. It is a great pity; I had once been fond of quite a few of them.

  The second thing I suppose I should say is that despite my obvious interest in this narrative, this is not my story. For one, I am a quiet man. For another, I am not interested in telling my story anyway—after all, there are altogether too many stories nowadays.

  And yet I would like to say a few words about the process of compiling and editing these pages. My tasks as an editor have actually been rather minimal. I should also say that each section (which I have titled myself) is in reality a series of discrete installments that I received from Norton while he was imprisoned. Each installment was also prefaced by a letter, but as those letters are mostly personal in nature, I have not seen fit to include them here. Because this text originated as installments, the reader will notice that it does at times have a spontaneous, casual quality, and that it assumes from the reader a familiarity with the author’s life and work. Since I am the person who knows Norton best (and since the book was in effect written for me, at my request), I considered it my responsibility to add footnotes where I thought such additional information might help the reader’s understanding of Norton’s story. (Occasionally I have also added my notes as a way of augmenting Norton’s chronicles. Also, I have cut—judiciously—passages that I felt did not enrich the narrative or were not otherwise of any particular relevance; such deletions will not detract from the overall portrait Norton has painted of himself here.)

  Finally, I feel it is only fair to address a question that Norton posited in the letter preceding his initial installment, which is, what do I hope for from this project? The answer is not a complicated one: I want nothing less than to restore Norton’s reputation, to remind the world that what preceded the last two years is immeasurably more important than what may or may not have happened for a few brief months. Perhaps this is naive of me. But I must try: to do anything less for a man who has given so much to the world of science and medicine would be, in short, unforgivable.

  Ronald Kubodera

  Palo Alto, California

  1 To Palo Alto, California, where I hold the John M. Torrance Chair in the Immunology Department of Stanford University Medical School.

  2 A. Norton Perina to Ronald Kubodera, M.D., April 24, 1998.

  3 A. Norton Perina to Ronald Kubodera, M.D., May 3, 1998.

  4 When speaking here of U’ivu, I mean to refer to the
country as a whole, not the individual island; as will become clear, the majority of Norton’s time there was spent on Ivu’ivu.

  The Memoirs of A. Norton Perina

  EDITED BY RONALD KUBODERA, M.D.

  PART I. THE CREEK

  I.

  I was born in 1924 near Lindon, Indiana, the sort of small, unremarkable rural town that some twenty years before my birth had begun to duplicate itself, quietly but insistently, across the Midwest. By which I mean that the town, as I remember it, was exceptional only for its very lack of distinguishing details. There were silos, and red barns (most of the residents were farmers), and general stores, and churches, and ministers and doctors and teachers and men and women and children: an outline for an American society, but one with no flourishes, no decoration, no accessories. There were a few drunks, and a resident madman, and dogs and cats, and a county fair that was held in tandem with Locust, an incorporated town a few miles to the west that no longer exists. The townspeople—there were eighteen hundred of us—were born, and went to school, and did chores, and became farmers, and married Lindonites, and began families of their own. When you saw someone in the street, you’d nod to him or, if you were a man, pull down the brim of your hat a bit. The seasons changed, the tobacco and corn grew and were harvested. That was Lindon.

  There were four of us in the family: my father, my mother, and Owen and me.5 We lived on a hundred acres of land, in a sagging house whose only notable characteristic was a massive, once-grand central staircase that long before had been transformed by generations of termites into a lacy ruin.

  About a mile behind the house ran a curvy creek, too small and slow and behaviorally inconsistent to warrant a proper name. Every March and April, after the winter thaw, it would surpass its limitations and become a proper river, swollen and aggressive with gallons of melted snow and spring rain. During those months, the creek’s very nature changed. It became merciless and purposeful, and seized from its outgrown banks tiny, starry bloodroot blossoms and wild thyme by their roots and whisked them downstream, where they were abandoned in the thicket of a dam someone unknown had built long ago. Minnows, the creek’s year-round inhabitants, fought upstream and drowned. For that one season, the creek had a voice: an outraged roar of rushing water, of power, and that narrow tributary, normally so placid and characterless, became during those months something frightening and unpredictable, and we were warned to keep away.

  But in the heat of the summer months, the creek—which didn’t originate at our property but rather at the Muellers’, who lived about five miles to the east—dried once again to a meek trickle, timorously creeping its way past our farm. The air above it would be noisy with clouds of buzzing mosquitoes and dragonflies, and leeches would suck along its soft silty bottom. We used to go fishing there, and swimming, and afterward would climb back up the low hill to our house, scratching at the mosquito welts on our arms and legs until they became furry with old skin and new blood.

  My father never ventured down to the creek, but my mother used to like to sit on the grass and watch the water lick over her ankles. When we were very young, we would call out to her—Look at us!—and she would lift her head dreamily and wave, though she was just as likely to wave at us as she was to wave at, say, a nearby oak sapling. (Our mother’s sight was fine, but she often behaved as a blind person would; she moved through the world as a sleepwalker.) By the time Owen and I were seven or eight or so (at any rate, too young to have become disenchanted with her), she had become an object of at first pity and, soon after, of fun. We’d wave at her, sitting on the bank, her arms crossed under her knees, and then, as she was waving back at us (with her whole arm rather than simply her hand, like a clump of seaweed listing underwater), we’d turn away, talk loudly to each other, pretend not to see her. Later, over dinner, when she’d ask what we’d done at the creek, we’d act astonished, perplexed. The creek? But we hadn’t been there! We were playing in the fields all day.

  “But I saw you there,” she’d say.

  No, we’d tell her in unison, shaking our heads. It must have been two other boys. Two other boys who looked just like us.

  “But—” she’d begin, and her face would seize for a moment in confusion before clearing. “It must have been,” she’d say uncertainly, and look down at her plate.

  This exchange occurred several times a month. It was a game for us, but an unsettling one. Was our mother playing along? But the look that crossed her face—of real worry, of fear that she was, as we said back then, not right, that she was unable to trust or believe her sight or memory—seemed too real, too spontaneous. We chose to believe that she was acting, for the alternative, that she was mad or, worse, genuinely moronic, was too frightening to contemplate seriously. Later, in our room, Owen and I would imitate her (“But—but—but—it was you!”) and laugh, but afterward, lying in our beds, silent, considering the game’s implications, we were troubled. We were young, but we both knew (from books, from our peers) what a mother was expected to do—to chastise, to teach, to instruct, to discipline if necessary—and furthermore, we both knew our mother was not fit for those tasks. What, we wondered, would we grow up to become under such a woman? Why was she so incapable? We treated her like most boys would treat small animals: kindly when we were feeling happy and generous, cruelly when we were not. It was intoxicating to know we had the power to make her shoulders relax, to make her lips part in an uncertain smile, and yet also to make her turn her face down, to make her rub her palm quickly against her leg, which she did when she was nervous or unhappy or confused. Despite our concerns, we never spoke of them aloud; the only discussions we had about her were tinged with derision or disgust. Worry pulled us closer to each other, made us ever bolder and more obnoxious. Surely, we thought, we would push her to a point where the real adult she’d kept cloaked so well would reveal itself. Like most children, we assumed all adults were naturally imbued with a sense of intimidation, of authority.

  Besides her lack of substance, there were fundamental ways in which my mother might be considered a failure. She was a slipshod cook (her steamed broccoli was rubbery, its florets bristling with the crunchy carcasses of minuscule unseen beetles, her roasted chicken squeaky with blood) and an only occasional housekeeper—our father had bought her a vacuum cleaner, but it sat neglected in the coat closet until Owen and I one day dissected it for its parts. Nor did she seem to have any interests. We never saw her reading or writing or painting or gardening, all pastimes that we (even then) knew were of intrinsic worth and interest. On summer afternoons, we’d sometimes find her sitting in the living room, her legs tucked under her girlishly, a silly smile on her face, staring fixedly yet vacantly at a vast constellation of dust motes made visible by a stripe of sunlight.

  Once I saw her praying. I went into the living room one afternoon after school and found her on her knees, her palms pressed together, her head lifted. Her lips were moving, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. She looked ridiculous, like an actress playing to an empty theater, and I was embarrassed for her. “What are you doing?” I asked, and she looked up, alarmed. “Nothing,” she said, startled. But I knew what she was doing and knew too that she was lying.

  What else can I say? I can say she was vague, drifty, probably even stupid. But here I must also say that she has remained an enigma to me, which is a difficult thing for any human to accomplish. And there are other things I remember of her as well: she was tall, and graceful, and although I am unable to recollect the specificities of her face, I know she was somewhat beautiful. An old, blurred sepia photograph Owen has hanging in his office confirms this. She was probably not considered as beautiful then as she would be now, for her face was ahead of her times—long, white, startled: a face that promised intelligence, mystery, depth. Today she would be called arresting. But my father must have considered her very beautiful, for I can think of no other reason that he might have married her. My father, when he spoke to women at all, enjoyed well-educated women, th
ough he did not find them in any way sexually appealing. I assume this is because intelligent women reminded him of his sister, Sybil, who was a doctor in Rochester and whom he admired enormously. So he was left with beauty. It disappointed me when I discerned as an adolescent that my father had married my mother only for her beauty, but this was before I realized that parents disappoint us in many ways and it is best not to expect anything of them at all, for chances are that they won’t be able to deliver it.

  Mostly, though, she was unknowable. I don’t even know where she came from exactly (somewhere in Nebraska, I believe), but I do know she was from a poor family, and my father, with his relative fortune and undemanding nature, had saved her. But curiously, for all her poverty, there was nothing work-worn or used about her; she did not appear to be depleted, nor hardened. Rather, she gave the impression of being one of those indulged women who floats from her father’s home to the finishing school and into her husband’s arms. (The glow that seems to surround her in Owen’s photograph, her early, quiet death, her sleepy, slow movements, all make me remember her as luminous, protected, cosseted, even though I know otherwise.) As far as I know, she had no education (reading our report cards aloud to my father, she stumbled over words: “Ex-, ex-em-pu,” she’d sound out before Owen or I would shout out the word—Exemplary—to her, smug and impatient and ashamed), and she was very young when she died.