The People in the Trees: A Novel Read online

  A few months into this paralysis, probably in March or so—a year after my disastrous dinner with Smythe, in fact—one of my instructors, a man named Adolphus Sereny,17 with whom I was completing my surgical rotation, asked me to come see him in his office at the hospital one day.

  “Well, Perina,” said Sereny. “What do you plan to do when you graduate?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” I told him.

  Sereny looked at me for a long moment and then sighed. He was a large, cushiony man, with a fringe of pale, pebble-colored hair circling the back of his head. We had never spoken before outside of rounds, or much during them.

  “Something has come up,” he said, “and you have been suggested for it.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  He sighed again; not irritatedly, I think now, but because he was fat and puffy and it was in his nature to sigh. When he moved in his chair, air gusted from him. “Well, here it is,” he began. “There’s a man named Paul Tallent. An anthropologist from Stanford—young, well regarded. He claims to have evidence of some lost tribe on an island called U’ivu. Have you heard of it?” I hadn’t. “Well, never mind. It’s somewhere in Micronesia, I understand, though you’ll have to look at an atlas to confirm exactly where. Small spot. At any rate, he has a private grant of some sort, reasonably substantial, I understand, to go there and study them—if he can find them, that is.” Another sigh, though this one intentional, I believe. Doctors in those days did not think much of anthropologists, who were considered, often rightly, not truly scientists. “His team will include him, of course, and his assistant, and a doctor, who will be responsible for drawing blood, taking samples, recording, and”—he flapped a plump hand—“so on. He has connections here, and asked if a young doctor could be convinced to go with him. You were recommended. Are you interested?”

  It may have been the first time in my life I felt giddy. “I am, sir.”

  “You understand, Perina,” said Sereny with a sort of sternness I found dramatic and therefore thrilling, “that this is at least a four-month appointment, that there probably won’t be money for you to come home during that period? And that nothing at all may come of this … expedition? That it could be many months of your life spent chasing down someone else’s imaginings? That this island you’ll be living on is, for all purposes, terra incognita? That it will almost assuredly be uncomfortable, in all likelihood intensely so? Do you understand that?”

  “Yes, I do,” I answered. He sighed once again, almost sadly, although that would have been impossible, as he neither knew me nor had any personal attachment to me. “When would I leave?”

  “I’ve been informed that he wants to depart soon, very soon—probably late June. You’d barely have time to graduate.”

  “That’s all right,” I assured him. I would have left earlier; my diploma meant nothing to me. “But sir,” I asked him, “why are you speaking to me about this? Why not Tallent’s contact?”

  “He’s out of town, but he asked me to speak with you as soon as I was able.”

  “Who is Tallent’s contact?” I asked. But I already knew the answer.

  “Gregory Smythe,” said Sereny.18 He looked at me again, and this time he seemed puzzled himself. “He spoke very highly of you.”

  The fact that Smythe had suggested me for the job bothered me at the time, and it was not until I was much older and at my own lab that I realized his reasons for recommending me for such a job, one that would take me far away from him, one in which there would be no danger of encountering me on campus and becoming embarrassed upon seeing me—he had, after all, cried in front of me, and served me that strange meal—one in which the only people I could tell about his perplexing behavior would be Stone Age natives, their noses spliced with animal bones. By the time I had determined his motivations, though, there was nothing to forgive for such a self-serving act, and I had only pity for Smythe, his misshapen life and the even sadder turn it had taken. (It will perhaps say everything you need to know about the medical college, and Smythe too, when I tell you that my being offered this assignment was seen—by the Turks and their kind, at least—as a humiliating sort of punishment, and my acceptance as a sort of professional suicide, final proof of either my idiocy or my unacceptability, or both.)

  The next few months passed quickly. I was not nervous; I was not anxious: I did my coursework and went home every afternoon feeling light and calm. I began packing weeks early, assembling in a canvas rucksack what were now to be the tools of my trade—a spirometer, a thermometer, a blood pressure cuff and stethoscope, a reflex hammer, and a small portable microscope. I had a cedar-wood container, a little larger than a cigar box, in which I stored various small items—buttons and screws, thumbtacks and rubber bands—and into which I now packed two dozen glass syringes, each wrapped in gauze, and an extra dozen steel needles, and a metal flask I filled with disinfectant from the labs. I had received a brief letter from Paul Tallent, welcoming me to the project and giving me my instructions: we would meet on June 20 (a day after my graduation, it turned out) in Hawaii and from there hitch a ride on a military transport plane, which would detour on its way to Australia to drop us off in the Gilbert Islands,19 from which we would continue to U’ivu. Beyond these details, however, he had provided little useful information: nothing on what to pack, nothing on what I might expect, nothing more specific about the nature of his studies, nothing even about the island itself. Months later, in U’ivu, I would spread my gear before me, marveling at how misguided I had been, how thoroughly I had miscalculated, and before my time there was over I would have left most of it—books, jackets, shoes, even my butterfly net—scattered through the jungles of U’ivu, abandoned as things no more relevant to the islanders’ lives than they would turn out to be to mine.

  In part, though, I cannot blame myself too severely, for my ignorance of the situation I was to enter was almost entirely due to the fact that the world at large was ignorant of U’ivu. Directly after leaving Sereny’s office, I went to the library to consult its atlas, and although I had the island’s coordinates, it took me a few seconds to locate it, my finger skimming over pages of blue ocean. And then I found it: three small chips of light green arranged as three points in a ragged isoceles, its topography rendered unspecific and blurry, a little less than a thousand miles east of Tahiti. Further research yielded a small collection of facts, each interesting on its own but which once combined somehow failed to illuminate one another in any helpful way. The country, I read, had never been colonized. Like the Hawaiians, its people were thought to have immigrated from Tahiti five thousand years ago on outrigger canoes. They were a hunting and fishing culture; all children, both boys and girls, were expected to kill (the encyclopedia did not specify how) a wild boar before their fourteenth birthday.20 They had a king, Tuimai’ele, who had three wives and thirty children and who lived in a wooden palace in the capital, Tavaka. It was not a wealthy country, but the soil was rich and there was always food. But once its people had been notorious for their ferocity, and tales of their love of brutality and zest for cruelty had carried across the seas—so far, in fact, that theirs was the lone country that Captain James Cook purposefully bypassed in his 1787 travels through the Pacific. (“The fierceness of the Wevooans,” he wrote in a letter to a friend the year prior, “makes the crew uneasy, and as it is difficult to sail, we shall not be anchoring there.”)

  I read this in the encyclopedia, but I could not believe all of it: the wooden palace, the king with thirty children, the wild boar killing—they all seemed somehow familiar, like something I had once read in, say, a Kipling story about some faraway, allegorical land. But although I had not enough experience in the world to prove this, I suspected even then that the strangest details were the most mundane, and that what we tell others to shock will only inure them to realizing what is truly remarkable. And in this perception I was not to be proven wrong.

  12 Hamilton College, summa cum laude, 1946; Harvard Medical School, cum
laude, 1950. Both Norton and Owen received medical deferments from the armed forces in 1944, Norton on the grounds of his flat feet and mild but recurring sciatica and Owen for his asthma and extreme astigmatism.

  13 A well-known professor might pick one, or at the most two, of his most promising medical or undergraduate students to work in his lab for anything from one to four terms. These students are usually chosen on the basis of their grades, test scores, dedication, and diligence.

  14 It is difficult to overstate Gregory Smythe’s influence and importance to the scientific community in the 1940s and ’50s. Until his theories fell out of favor, Smythe was one of the rare scientists to gain popular appeal and acclaim; Time magazine even featured a drawing of him on the cover of its April 18, 1949, issue with the headline “Harvard University’s Gregory Smythe: ‘We could see the end of cancer in our lifetime.’ ”

  15 Norton is being a little sarcastic here. Several cancers are in fact highly associated with viral infections (most notably, human papillomavirus and hepatitis B and C); what he mocks here is Smythe’s insistence that all cancers can be directly attributed to viral infections.

  16 After his work was discredited, Smythe fell into disgrace, but it is difficult not to hold him at least partly responsible for his humiliation. Smythe had a reputation for arrogance and had many enemies within the academic world; when the tide began to turn against him, he fought back and insulted his critics instead of simply allowing himself to step into the more dignified shadows of obscurity. Because Smythe was a tenured professor, he remained at Harvard until his death in 1979 of—ironically—liver cancer, although he was less and less present and was placed on what amounted to permanent probation in 1968.

  As Norton suspected, Smythe did in fact have a family—a wife and two daughters. Interestingly, it is they, not he, who remain well known today in countercultural circles for leading a small but influential Weather Underground–like feminist group that they founded in 1967. Norton probably had dinner at Smythe’s house shortly after his wife, a poet named Alice Reeve, left him with their children to flee to Canada with her lover, a poetry professor at Radcliffe named Stella Janovic. But that is the stuff of another story.

  17 One of the great surgeons and biologists of his time, Adolphus Gustav Sereny (1896–1974) was among the more renowned scientists on the faculty at Harvard Medical School while Perina was a student there. He and Perina would go on to have a fruitful but ultimately contentious relationship, which is addressed later in this narrative.

  18 The contact was actually secondhand; one of Tallent’s colleagues at Stanford, not Tallent himself, was friendly with Smythe.

  19 Now Kiribati.

  20 This popularly accepted myth is probably a conflation of two facts: first, all U’ivuan boys are given a spear upon their fourteenth birthday; second, the first king of the islands, King Ulolo the Powerful—who unified many of the various tribes scattered among the archipelago in approximately A.D. 1645; his work was eventually completed by King Vaka I more than a century later—was said to have killed a wild boar barehanded before his fourteenth birthday. Since then the boar has occupied a central place in U’ivuan life; although it is a treasured hunting companion and a symbol of the culture’s ferocity to the outside world, killing or taming one is also considered a significant accomplishment and proof of the warrior’s strength and bravery. The fundamentally paradoxical nature of the beast’s place in society—both friend and challenge—is not a contradiction that seems ever to have troubled the U’ivuans.

  PART III. THE DREAMERS

  I.

  June was a month unlike any I had experienced, and at the end of each of its days I would go to bed early, if only so I could think for a few minutes about all that I had seen and felt. As it happened, I had skipped my graduation and departed for Hawaii two weeks before I was to meet Tallent. My last night in Cambridge (which even before I left was vanishing from my memory, as cleanly and swiftly as salt in hot water), Owen had come up from New Haven to see me. Our goodbyes had been unsatisfying—he was brusque and seemed obscurely angry with me—but he did agree to keep for me some things (books, papers, my winter coat, heavy as a corpse) that I wouldn’t need on my travels. We agreed to write to each other, but I could tell from his expression that he was as dubious about that ever happening as I was. It was only after we had shaken hands and he had left with a trunk packed with my things to catch the last train back that I thought about what my life would be like so far away from Owen; it was true that we spoke less and less as we grew older (a detachment that seemed as inevitable as it was mysterious), but he was the only one who knew me, who retained memories of me from each year of my life, because it had been half his life as well. But this regret too quickly dissipated, so eager was I to begin my new existence—it was easy then to believe that my life until this point had been only a long, tedious rehearsal, a thing to be impatiently endured and withstood: a simulacrum of a life, not a life itself.

  I had a train ticket to California, and from there I took a ship to Hawaii. In those days, Honolulu was still very much a quiet colonial outpost, with all the attendant flourishes and clichés, and as the boat pulled into harbor, you could see on the dock groups of fat, jolly musicians plucking their plinky songs on their ukuleles, and barefooted boys, half Asian and half something else, smiling and begging for the disembarking passengers to throw them pennies.

  It had been arranged that I would stay in a dormitory room at the local university, but because I had arrived earlier than anticipated, the building was fully occupied, and no bed was available until the next evening. And so that first night, after storing my luggage at the dormitory, I took a taxi to the edge of Waikiki, where I walked to Diamond Head on the sand, one beach giving way to the next. Beyond me I could sometimes hear the sounds of bars: groups of men laughing at something, the chingy-changy music. I stood periodically and listened to the dry palm fronds chattering against one another like bones, and to the ocean, its remorseless, lonely conversation with itself, a sound that—though I did not know it at the time—I would not hear again for months to come. I walked with the moon above me, which here seemed to glow whiter and rounder and brighter than it had in Boston, and when I grew tired, I lay under a tree and slept, as I had seen other shadowy forms doing as I made my slow way across the sand.

  The next day I ventured to the city’s downtown district, past its pretty colonial buildings. The grandest thing I saw, though, was not a structure, not even the humble, squat palace once occupied by the humble, squat queen, but instead the trees outside it: ancient shower trees, their leaves peachy petals that swirled about them in snowy, gentle cyclones. In Chinatown, I walked around the frayed shapes of sleeping men, the soles of their feet black and crisscrossed with channels and cuts, until I found a bar with an open door. It was not a good place, this Chinatown, with its sad saloon-shuttered buildings out of whose dark interiors poor jazz seeped like poison. But the sun was hotter than I had anticipated, and I was very thirsty.

  The bartender was so flat-faced it appeared as if someone had held each of his ears and pulled in either direction, and so sun-darkened that his skin had become glossed and smooth, like a chicken that has been broiled in butter for too long. He was Chinese, I guessed, or at least some sort of Oriental, for his eyes were hooded and narrow, although his black hair was wavy and coarse. I ordered a glass of seltzer, and he watched as I gulped it down. “Where you from?” he asked finally.

  “Boston,” I said. I noticed he was missing his left thumb, although he was able to move the stump back and forth, which he did rather expressively, like a dog would its bobbed tail.

  He was unimpressed by this information, but there was no one else in the bar for him to speak with, and when I finished my glass, he refilled it without my asking. “How long you here?” he asked.

  “Not long,” I said. Now that I had had something to drink, I was able to concentrate on the room, which was low-ceilinged and dark and lacquered, the wooden count
er sticky from years of smoke and spilled liquor and cooking grease. “I’m on my way to U’ivu.”

  To my surprise, he nodded when I mentioned U’ivu, and when I asked him what he knew, he laughed and said, “Good hunters. Boars.” He refilled my glass again. “Scary.” It was unclear whether he meant the people or the boars. Then, almost gently, “They are very violent there.” I waited for him to say more, but he had begun to hum a meandering, wistful tune, strangely moving in the ugliness of the bar, and when it became clear that he would say no more, I finished my drink and paid and walked back out into the sunshine.

  I passed a few more days like this, taking taxis to various beaches on the island, marveling at how they first appeared to be uniformly, indistinguishably lovely but eventually revealed themselves particular and distinct: one had sand so fine that even after beating out my shirt and pants, I still found myself dusting it from my clothes and shaking it from my hair the next day; another was booby-trapped with tiny, unseen pinecones dropped by the fringe of gawky, shaggy ironwood trees that edged the beachfront, so that each step contained a small, unavoidable pain; another had sand the color and texture of wet, raw sugar, making it sludgy and sticky to the touch. One afternoon I went to the library downtown, where the librarian helped me find an old, cloth-covered book on U’ivu. It turned out to be a picture book, a Hawaiian-language primer published by the Honolulu Missionary Academy in 1871, each page containing a simple woodcut and a few lines of text. Because it was in Hawaiian, I could not read it, but the pictures—a boar, its eyes beady and black, its tusks as extravagantly curled as an old-fashioned handlebar mustache; the king, smiling and fat and shirtless, clutching what looked like a long feather duster; a knobby torpedo I took to be a sweet potato—made it seem once again more, not less, fantastic, a place that indeed existed only in children’s stories.