The People in the Trees: A Novel Read online

  Even Owen. Or should I say, especially Owen. We have not, of course, had either the easiest or the most consistent of relationships, but at one time Owen and I were very close, and even when we were not, even when he was passing through one of his childishly enthusiastic phases in which he adopted and abandoned idealisms and philosophies like other boys did girls, he was amusing, and witty, and bright. He was my ambassador to the world outside my own. Not that I myself was immune to romanticism. I remember as a young man once telling Owen that he should fashion himself after me. Look at me, I told him (he rolled his eyes)—I am going to be a scientist. That is all I care about. You are too scattered, I told him. I warned him that he would become a dilettante if he did not become more disciplined. But now I almost admire Owen’s indecisiveness; it was almost as if he, to make up for my single-mindedness, was trying to be of as many minds as possible. I was impatient then, of course, but now I can recall fondly my brother’s prickliness, his fierce idealism, his quickly burning passions. I remember Owen in those days as so vital, so indefatigable, so intellectually nimble in ways I was not. For such different-minded people, we were unusually and energetically competitive, but still—there were times when we agreed too, and during those moments we could argue anyone out of anything, bend them with our ferocity and righteousness. At any rate, we could always match passions, even when our passions were not directed toward the same subjects.

  And it was with Owen that I shared my earliest, most fervent craving: that of leaving, of escape. I can’t remember ever articulating this desire specifically, but I can remember my sense, from my very early years, that life was not Indiana, and certainly not Lindon, and possibly not even America. Life was elsewhere, and it was frightening and vast and mountainous and uncomfortable. I believe Owen knew this as well, the way some children know that they want to remain close to home, and it was this mutual determination—that where we were beginning would not be where we stayed, nor where we ended—that, more than interests or predilections, both united us and encouraged us to endure the obligations of childhood until we could leave it behind and pursue life in earnest.

  Interestingly, the two years or so after my father’s funeral were to be the happiest, most harmonious time in our relationship. In those years we were quite close, and for a brief, ambitious, honeyed period, I made an effort to write to him every week, something we had not done all through college. In the late spring of 1946, we embarked upon a vacation together, to Italy. A photo from this time shows us about to board the ship, the Arcadia, in New York. Both of us are wearing linen suits and derbies. It was our first trip to Europe—our first vacation together, in fact, and unfortunately our last, although we had no way of knowing that at the time—and when we returned, three months later, I remember promising one another that we’d reprise the trip annually, to places farther and farther afield.

  I can remember only a few of the specifics from that trip—art we saw, meals we ate, conversations we had, ruins we admired, even places we stayed—but I can still recall, with a sort of odd, unpleasant clarity, that unfamiliar and inarticulable sensation I began experiencing, about halfway through the journey, whenever I gazed at Owen. I remember feeling something pressing against my chest at those times, substantial and insistent and yet not uncomfortable, not painful. After a few episodes, I deduced it was, for lack of a better word, love. Naturally, I never said anything to him (we did not have those sorts of conversations), but I remember quite clearly looking at him one evening as we stood at the prow of the ship, at his sharp nose that ended in a blobbish wodge of putty (my nose), listening to the dark waters slap against the side of the boat, and feeling almost overwhelmed. When Owen spoke to me, I was unable to answer, and had to pretend I felt ill, so I could go to bed and lie awake by myself and think about my new discovery.

  The feeling did not last, of course. It came and went throughout our trip, and then over the years. And although it was never as intense as it was that day on the water, I grew to first accept and then long for that familiar ache, even though I knew that while experiencing it I was unable to accomplish, much less contemplate, anything else.

  5 The Owen to whom Norton refers is Owen C. Perina, Norton’s twin brother and one of the few significant adult relationships in his life. Unlike Norton, Owen was always interested in literature, and he is now a renowned poet and the Field-Patey Professor of Poetry at Bard College. He has also twice been awarded the National Book Award for poetry, once for The Insect’s Hand and Other Poems (1984) and again for The Pillow Book of Philip Perina (1995), as well as numerous other commendations. Owen is as famously taciturn as Norton is voluble, and I once witnessed a very amusing exchange between them when I visited Norton a few Christmases ago. There was Norton, fist full of chestnuts, spewing, chewing, gesticulating, holding forth on everything from the dying art of butterfly mounting to the strange appeal of a certain talk show, and across from him, his lumpish mirror image, grunting and murmuring his occasional assent or dissent, was Owen.

  Sadly, Norton and his brother are now at irreconcilable odds. As these pages will reveal, their estrangement was abrupt and devastating, the result of a terrible betrayal, one from which Norton will never recover.

  6 Owen Perina has written a rather lovely poem about his mother and her death; it is the first poem in his third collection, Moth and Honey (1986).

  7 One can only imagine what life would have been like for Sybil Maria Perina (1893–1945) if she had been born fifty years later. Indeed, the great medical professor and anatomist E. Isaiah Witkinson, under whom she studied while a student at Northwestern, even mentions her in a letter to a colleague in 1911:

  [A] student of many talents, as well as grace and skill. It is a great pity to the scientific community that she will not be able to pursue a career in medical research. I even urged [her] to consider moving abroad to work with Christian missionaries, which would, alas, offer her more independence and opportunity than she could acquire through any university. However, she refused, although whether out of a lingering desire to remain close to her family (a shortcoming in many female students) or from a fear of toiling in uncertain circumstances I cannot discern. Certainly she is capable of whatever she chooses, although I believe her native domestic conservatism will keep her mired in some unchallenging provincial practice. She will become bored; she will hate it. (Francis Clapp, ed., A Doctor’s Life: The Letters of E. Isaiah Witkinson [New York: Columbia University Press, 1984])

  Unfortunately, Sybil never progressed much further beyond Witkinson’s gloomy but prescient predictions for her. Her obituary in the Rochester Picayune is insultingly brief and desperately sad: “Dr. Perina was a doctor in Rochester for more than thirty years … She was never married and has no immediate survivors.” However, Sybil did leave behind a great legacy; as Norton himself has said more than once, she was responsible for introducing him to the wonders of scientific discovery and possibility. So Sybil, her thwarted dreams, can be said to live on in one of the world’s greatest medical minds: he has more than accomplished for her what she could not.

  8 I’m afraid I must disagree with Norton here. But I will let the reader be the judge. The body of the entry reads in part as follows:

  Abraham Norton Perina, b. 1924, Lindon, Indiana, USA

  Currently lives: Bethesda, Maryland, USA

  Significance: 7 [Ed. note: On a scale of one to ten. Perplexingly, Galileo is ranked a 10, as is Jonas Salk. But Copernicus is given only an 8.]

  We’re all told that nobody lives forever, but did you know that there is a group of people who actually do? It’s true! Dr. Perina, who lives in Maryland with his more than 50 adopted children, discovered in the early 1950s a race of people who never aged—all thanks to eating a rare turtle! Dr. Perina’s research won him a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1974.

  The book then goes on to give a flawed and simplistic description of Selene syndrome.

  9 Philip Tallent Perina (arrived 1969; ca. 1960–1975), an early adoptee of
Norton’s and one of his special pets. Philip was lean, childlike, and very dark-skinned. I never met him, but through various pictures Norton keeps, I imagine him as quick and spritely; in pictures, he always seems about to wiggle out of Norton’s arms and straight out of the photograph itself. Although a lively child, Philip had suffered some brain damage at an early age, and his physical development too was retarded, possibly an effect of severe malnutrition in early life. He was an orphan, and something of the village mascot when Norton brought him back from U’ivu in 1969. (His name, until Norton’s rescue, had been the equivalent of “Hey, you!”) Philip was killed by a drunk driver in 1975; he was believed to be about fifteen years old at the time.

  10 Although one would never have known it from his undignified death, Norton’s father left behind a substantial fortune. The exact amount was never disclosed, but it has been assumed by Norton’s biographers that it was enough to comfortably enable the purchase of his house in Bethesda and the maintenance and education of his children. Along with Owen, Norton would also have been Sybil’s primary beneficiary.

  11 I myself was surprised to read this admission. Greatly so, actually, for reasons that will become clear to the reader as Norton’s narrative progresses. I shall say only that one of Norton’s greatest fears has always been abandonment—that the people he loved and trusted would one day turn against him. (Unfortunately, it proved a prescient concern.) But as I have noted, it was not only his children’s disloyalty that proved ultimately responsible for his current predicament—it was Owen’s too.

  Interestingly, it wasn’t until four years into my relationship with Norton that I even learned of Owen’s existence. When I asked him about this many years later, he merely chuckled and said that they must have been bickering about something at the time. These long silences and petty, frequent skirmishes defined Norton’s relationship with Owen, who, as he notes, was his equal in depth and breadth of knowledge and opinions (though of course not the same knowledge and opinions). But he proved a good foil for Norton—perhaps the only person who has ever matched him in brilliance, eccentricities, and passions. I had once liked him very much.

  PART II. MICE

  I.

  After graduating from college, I began medical school12 in the fall of 1946. I have little of interest to say about medical school itself; even its dullness and the unimaginativeness of my fellow students were not too great a surprise to me. I went to medical school because it was what one did back then if one was interested in anything even tangentially related to the biology of the human body. Were I an undergraduate today, I probably would bypass it in favor of a doctoral program in virology or microbiology or some such. It is not that medical school in itself is not an interesting or even stimulating environment; it is that the people who tend to matriculate there lean toward the self-righteous and sentimental, more interested in the romantic heroism of doctoring with which the profession has allowed itself to become suffused and associated than in the challenge of scientific inquiry.

  This was perhaps even more true fifty years ago than it is today. My classmates—or at least those I came in contact with over my four years—were easily divided into two categories. Those in the first category, the less objectionable of the two, were dull and obedient and enjoyed memorization. Those in the second, more offensive group were grasping and dreamy, bewitched by their own future status in the world. But they were all ambitious, competitive, and eager for their own bit of glory.

  I was not a particularly distinguished student. Although I was probably one of the most intellectually curious and creative members of my class, or even the entire school, there were many, many others who were better, more diligent students than I: they went to every class, they took notes, they did each night’s reading. But I was occupied with other things. At the time I was an avid beetle collector, a habit and interest I had maintained since childhood; naturally, the opportunities to find unusual beetles in Boston were somewhat limited, but during the spring months, I would take sometimes days at a time and ride a train down to Connecticut, where Owen was earning a doctorate in American literature at Yale. I would leave my bag at his place and then catch another, smaller, dozier train out to the countryside, where I would spend the day in one field or another with my net and my notebook and a pickle jar containing a bloom of cotton damp with formaldehyde. When the sky grew orange, I would hitchhike back to New Haven, where I would spend the evening in Owen’s suite, eating whatever he had prepared and trying, with limited success, to engage him in conversation. Owen had grown more and more silent over the years (for which I must admit I was grateful, for his elaboration on his studies, which concerned Walt Whitman and the American imagination, sorely tested my claims of intellectual promiscuity), and watching him cut his omelet into small, fussy trapezoids, I had to stop myself thinking that he reminded me of our stolid, lumpen father.

  Naturally, my professors were not enthusiastic about my skipping so many classes, but since I always did well on my tests and papers, there was little they could do to punish me but deliver lectures on how my lack of discipline would all but ensure mediocrity in my professional life. I didn’t doubt their seriousness or their sincerity, but neither did I allow myself to worry about my own future; even then I knew that I was bound to have the sort of adventures for which I would not be best or usefully equipped by a perfect attendance record.

  I do not wish, however, to idealize what was at least partially a fit of tiresome and immature disrespect for my professors and the institution. Now, in retrospect, with my career and legacy being what they are, I suppose it is all very easy to say that I knew everything would resolve itself in my favor in the end and that my lack of ambition was genuine. Though if I am to be honest, I suppose I should acknowledge too that I was even then so eager for a certain sort of greatness, the sort that seemed both possible and yet so distant, a blurry-edged dream on the periphery of my vision, that at the time it seemed easier to pretend to all and to myself that I did not care for a spectacular future at all, lest I come to think that my time in medical school—and my successes or failures there—might become a predictor for the rest of my life, something that might determine the chances of that shimmering image coalescing into something more vivid, or not.

  But it was in my third year of medical school that things really changed for me, or rather, that I really changed things. This was the year that Gregory Smythe extended to me an invitation to work in his lab. You will now understand why this was so surprising, and indeed, for many years I was asked about my time there with some regularity.13

  I would be lying if I said I was not initially flattered. Nowadays, a mention of Gregory Smythe is greeted (if it is answered with any sort of recognition at all) with ridicule, the sort of self-assured, self-satisfied smirk that is always girded with both relief and fear, the kind of response the mention of many of today’s most highly regarded scientists’ names will no doubt provoke a generation or two from now. But back when I was in school, Smythe was considered an important mind, a visionary, the sort of doctor and scientist it was expected one wanted to become.14

  Smythe was also something of an unusual figure on the campus and in the scientific community. For one, he was involved in what was widely acknowledged as some of the more interesting medical work at the time. Today it is very easy to laugh at the sorts of misguided notions and theories that were once considered groundbreaking, but there is no denying that the 1940s were, in their way, a period of great scientific expansion. As wrong (and there is no gentler way to state it) as many of Smythe’s and his colleagues’ theories were eventually revealed to be, his generation also possessed an admirable degree of curiosity, and their thirst—motivated by any number of things, but undeniably genuine—resulted in the foundation of what we recognize today as modern science. Without them, there would have been nothing for you or I to refute, nothing for us to dispel or debunk. I sometimes think, looking back at Smythe’s work, that his most important legacy was identifyi
ng the sorts of questions that would occupy the scientific community for the next half-century, even if he was ultimately unable to provide the correct answers.

  I knew of Smythe before I had even met him. One of the most popular theories in the mid-1940s was that cancer was caused by a viral infection. This theory had been proposed decades earlier, but it had been aggressively promoted by Smythe, who had spent much of the early part of the decade trying to prove that cancer (which, for all scientists knew back then, was caused by demons or sorcery) was not only tidily explainable but also eminently treatable: if, the thinking went, you could isolate the viruses that caused cancer, you would then be able to develop a vaccine to kill it, thus eradicating cancer forever. Like all the most pleasing theories, it was inspired but disciplined, as well as neat, logical, and satisfyingly plausible. It was also accessible, and Smythe’s theory (which became known in the popular press as “Smythe’s conceit,” as if it were the Pythagorean theorem or the theory of evolution, or as if Smythe were the Aristotle-like author of some ancient, semimystical, heavily allegorical philosophy) soon made him a quite famous (and, inevitably, much envied) man in both academic and popular circles.15

  But I will return to him later, which seems fitting, as it was only after I had been working in his lab for several months that I actually met Smythe. Unsurprisingly, given my grades, my attitude, and my general unsuitability, I was rather a nonentity for almost the entire time I was there; my colleagues never spoke to me, and my tasks were the most menial. I felt no resentment, however—students such as myself were, it seemed, continually arriving and departing, there one day and vanished the next to someplace else, a presence as temporal as the monkeys we were responsible for feeding, the mice whose water bottles we changed, the dogs with terrified eyes we injected, until one day they too vanished from the lab, taking with them their sounds and smells.