A Town Divided by Christmas Read online

  “Then you come back and the two of you live with her mother.”

  “I’m a scientist! I can’t do any science without a grant.”

  “I know what you mean. Charles Darwin is still waiting for his grant, too.”

  “But his family was rich.”

  Spunky looked at him with barely controlled exasperation.

  Elyon looked back at her for a long time. Until he realized. “Well, my family isn’t rich rich.”

  “Slightly rich will do in this case. Do you think your family could tide you over during your first few months of marriage?”

  “I wasn’t going to tell them.”

  “Because you think they wouldn’t like her?”

  “I know that they’ll hate her.”

  “I’m going to tell you why you’re wrong,” said Spunky.

  “You don’t know them. They’re complete snobs, they hate everybody below the net worth of Bill Gates.”

  “Listen to me, Elyon. I don’t have to know your parents. Because I know human parents, and your parents are of that species, aren’t they?”

  “On their good days,” said Elyon sadly.

  “Do you have any siblings?”

  “My parents never sibbled me,” said Elyon.

  “So who is their only hope on God’s green Earth to produce a grandchild for them, replicating their genes into the next generation?”

  Elyon thought a moment. “Well, me, of course, but —”

  “Do you think that at this moment, your parents actually believe that you will ever find a woman to make sweet love to you and raise your babies?”

  Judging from Elyon’s face, that hit him like a slap. But after a moment of stunned silence, he said, “Probably not.”

  “So when you announce to them that you’d like them to support you and your new bride until you can attach yourself to another grant, what will they say?”

  “They’ll ask, ‘Where did she go to college?’” said Elyon.

  “And what will you say back to them?” asked Spunky.

  “Nowhere. She still has a couple of assignments to complete before they’ll finally give her a high school diploma.”

  “Elyon, stop. Think. Do you understand that you’re an idiot when it comes to human relations, and that the better you know people, the worse you get along with them?”

  He thought for a moment. “Except Jozette. And Miz Eliza.”

  “OK, keep that knowledge right there.” Spunky tapped his forehead. “Now listen to me. When your parents ask their snobby questions, like, Who are her parents? What does her father do? How much land do they own? Where did Jozette go to college? You will give the same answer to all those questions.”

  “There’s no one thing that will answer all of them.”

  “You’re wrong, Elyon, because you’re an idiot. You will always be wrong, which is why you have to listen to me, right now. Your answer to all those questions will be, word for word, this: ‘Dad. Mom.’ Or Muzzy and Wuzzy, whatever you call them. ‘Dad and Mom, Jozette has my baby in her and I want our child to have every chance at good health and a good education.’”

  “She isn’t pregnant,” said Elyon. “We haven’t ever done that.”

  “Elyon, I didn’t tell you to tell your parents the truth. I told you how to answer them in order to get the results you want. But if lying bothers you, then make it true. There’s at least one justice of the peace in Good Shepherd, North Carolina, and I know for a fact that there are fourteen separate ministers legally capable of marrying you to Jozette and her to you.”

  Elyon sat down. “They’d kill me.”

  “They won’t kill you. They’ll take three days to get over their shock and rage and disappointment, and then your father will start to say something about how to get the baby aborted or the marriage annulled, and your mother will put on her monster face and speak in her monster voice and here’s what she’ll say: ‘That baby is my grandchild, and if you do anything to harm him or make it so he comes into this world as a bastard or an orphan you will spend the rest of your life looking for your balls, mister.”

  “My mother would never say that.”

  “I can promise you that she’ll say that or she’ll say worse. Because the minute you’re married to Jozette and she passes a pregnancy test, that baby is the most important creature on this planet, as far as your parents are concerned. Especially your mother, because she is never going to have another shot at reproduction, and that’s the biological imperative.”

  Elyon began to nod slowly, and then a very slight smile crept onto his lips. “You really are an expert at reading human nature, Spunky. I’ve seen you do it, time after time. And everybody who comes in here, they won’t stop talking about how wonderful you are and how smart you are, and if I try to correct them they just get mad and stop talking to me.”

  “I’m glad to know that at least you tried to correct them about my being wonderful and/or smart.”

  “Truth matters to me, Spunk,” he said. “If I didn’t care about truth, I wouldn’t be a scientist.”

  “What would you be? A NASCAR driver?”

  “I don’t have quick physical reflexes, Spunk. If I drove a race car, I would die.”

  “So here’s my suggestion, Elyon. Instead of packing up this equipment, which is not needed anywhere until long after Christmas, you stay here, keep entering any samples that come in, and crunch even more numbers to see whatever it is that The Professor saw that made him pull the plug.”

  “He didn’t see anything wrong with our data, it was the other populations that came up short.”

  “He’s lying, Elyon.”

  “He can’t — he doesn’t — he’s a scientist.”

  “He’s a money-spewing grant faucet, Elyon. He stopped being a scientist before he was out of graduate school.”

  “But he does science!”

  “No, Elyon. He writes grants, he wins grants, and then he assigns the best graduate students and post-docs to do the science and write the papers, and he puts his name first on those papers so people like you think he’s a scientist. So whatever reason he has for pulling the plug on us here in Good Shepherd, it has everything to do with his own reputation first, and keeping the grant-granters happy second, and covering up anything that will make him look bad third. Which means his reputation is first and third, and doing good science is down there just after keeping his wife happy enough not to divorce him and right before seeing his children so they can yell at him for being a lousy father.”

  “I thought you liked him.”

  “I do,” said Spunky. “But he just pulled the plug on our study, and I don’t want to leave Good Shepherd. Not now. Not just before Christmas.”

  “Are you pregnant with Eggie’s baby?”

  Spunky closed her eyes. “First, Elyon, I’m not. Second, Elyon, he doesn’t lust after me the way you lust after Jozette, so I’m not really sure that he even wants to have a baby with me —”

  “Oh, come on,” said Elyon. “I’ve seen him kiss you. It’s like he’s ready to explode. So gentlemanly, but his hands are, like, quivering.”

  “It’s cold.”

  “He’s from around here, he’s used to it. It’s you. Why don’t you come to the courthouse and get married the same time I marry Jozette?”

  “Because first, Jozette will only marry you in a church. She’s going to wear white and walk down the aisle and everybody’s going to know she’s marrying a brilliant scientist who loves her, and you know how they’ll know that you love her? Because you’re marrying her and she isn’t even pregnant yet.”

  “A church.”

  “Do you believe in God?” Spunky asked.

  “I’m a scientist. I don’t even think about unfalsifiable hypotheses.”

  “Then you can’t be worried that God will be irritated with you for
stepping inside a church or for having the opinion that he probably doesn’t exist.”

  “But what if Jozette wants me to be a Christian?”

  “Anything against having your children baptized? Anything against having them raised as church-goers?”

  “I was, and I turned out more or less sane.”

  “Less, but still. You get my point. Why would you need to burden Jozette or anybody else by telling them your opinion that God is an unfalsifiable hypothesis?”

  “So how would my going to a church to get married not be a lie?”

  Spunky shook her head. “They don’t make you promise that you believe in God, Elyon. Unless you’re marrying a Catholic, and you’re not. All that you promise is that you’ll love, honor, and cherish her as long as you’re both alive.”

  “How can I promise that? I can’t guess the future.”

  Immediately Spunky remembered Miz Eliza’s sermon on the topic. “Elyon, a promise is not a prediction. A promise means that it is, at this moment, your intention to stay married to and care for Jozette as long as you’re alive. Will that be true, at the moment that you say it?”

  Elyon nodded. “This is serious stuff.”

  “More serious than math,” said Spunky.

  “Nothing is more serious than math,” said Elyon.

  Spunky could not let that go unchallenged. “If human beings did not produce viable offspring and keep them alive until sexual maturity, who would there be on Earth to think about math?”

  But Elyon was lost in his own brooding. “It really is going to make my parents mad. What if you’re wrong and they cut me off without a penny?”

  “Then you’ll scramble and Jozette will scramble and between you you’ll make enough to scrape by on until you get a job using that brilliant mind of yours and you come home with so much cash you can diaper your children with it.”

  So Elyon stayed behind and Spunky put an overnight bag into the van and headed out for the university. It was a long drive and she was already tired, so she stopped at a couple of oases — a Sheetz and a McDonald’s — and walked around the building a couple of times to wake herself up. No caffeine — it didn’t keep her awake, it just gave her a migraine — but the periodic walks were enough. She got to her apartment at the school, saw that her roommate had an overnight visitor, and spent the night on the couch. She didn’t wish for a bed, she didn’t wish for her pillow, she didn’t wish for anything except to wake up and find Eggie somewhere nearby. Kitchen, yard, knocking at the door. Just ... nearby.

  9

  She didn’t have an appointment with The Professor but she knew perfectly well that if he wanted to see you, he’d see you, and if he didn’t, he’d tell you to make an appointment. No dates would ever work out until he did want to see you. Heretofore Spunky had accepted this is the way a “great man” worked; now it seemed to her to be monstrously narcissistic and borderline sociopathic.

  Control yourself, Delilah, she told herself. He’s the same man whose boots you would have licked upon demand six months ago. He hasn’t changed, and he doesn’t deserve to be despised just because you have.

  The Professor saw her immediately. “I told you to come right back, but ... did you fly?”

  “I drove back.”

  “‘I’ and not ‘we’?”

  “Elyon is closing up shop. I’ll be back to help him load up the van.”

  “So this really is a flying visit. What’s the urgency?”

  “I did a lot of thinking on the drive up here, and I’m pretty sure you didn’t lie to me at all. You didn’t even conceal very much. We really are collecting way more data than the other places where you have teams gathering samples —”

  “Had. They’re already back.”

  “And you had our data, which you could rely on absolutely because, you know, Elyon.”

  “Obsessively thorough and accurate that boy is, and he chews up the numbers and spits out science.”

  “Ending this grant leaves him broke and jobless,” said Spunky.

  “That’s why I sent unmarried post-docs on this one.”

  “Even single people need to eat and it’s nice to have a warm place to sleep. But don’t worry, he’ll manage, and I agree, you don’t keep a useless project going just to have full employment for grossly underpaid post-docs.”

  “I have to say I admired the work you did for all that gross underpayment,” said The Professor.

  “I admired it too,” said Spunky. “Especially what Elyon kept finding in the GWAS.”

  “Oh? And what do you think he found?”

  “Nothing,” said Spunky.

  “Well, exactly,” said The Professor.

  “Not what lay people mean by ‘nothing,’ of course,” said Spunky. “Because he certainly did not come up with ‘no reliable data.’ Right?”

  “Oh, of course not,” said The Professor. “The data he delivered were definitely reliable.” Did he look uncomfortable now? Spunky thought so. Maybe.

  “What I saw was excellent data,” said Spunky, “delving deeply into the whole population, and so the ‘nothing’ that Elyon came up with was a complete absence of associations between any statements on the DNA and the behavioral coming-and-going traits we were hoping to correlate.”

  “A distinction without a difference.”

  “You see, Professor, that’s why I thought I detected a lie, because you have the reputation of being a scientist. Not a dilettante, not a hobbyist, and certainly not a grant-grinder. Yet a scientist does not, doesn’t ever, regard reliable data that fails to show a correlation as ‘nothing.’ In fact, that’s important evidence to show that the propensity to return to a particular home town is not a genetic trait, as was long thought to be true of migratory birds, but instead is culturally acquired.”

  “It isn’t either-or,” said The Professor.

  “It’s pretty close to either-or,” said Spunky. “So it looks to me as if Elyon’s first-rate number crunching gave us the perfectly publishable result that cultures can promote homebody behavior whether genes support it or not. Wouldn’t you say that this is at least a preliminary indication?”

  “Absence of evidence is not —”

  “But evidence isn’t absent. The evidence is present and it’s clear. There is no statistically significant association between any of the examined portions of the DNA and the homing behavior.”

  “That is not a publication that I’m going to sign my name to,” said The Professor.

  “This morning when I got up I googled my way through the major donors to the foundation that gave you this grant, and it looks to me as if your donors would be unhappy if you published a paper saying that homing is a cultural trait in humans. Because that would mean that some cultures were better than others at bringing their members home again after allowing them to stray for a while.”

  “That’s not even controversial.”

  “Because nobody’s saying it. If you say it, backed up by our excellent fieldwork in Good Shepherd, North Carolina, it’ll leave you without access to a bunch of very deep pockets that you’ve been dipping your hand in.”

  “You’re coming perilously close to —”

  “Lese majestie? Only if you’re a king. Treason? Only if you’re a country. Blasphemy? I’m pretty sure you aren’t God.”

  “After all our years of association, Spunk, I’m sorry that you can think of me like this.”

  “Professor,” said Spunky, “Elyon and I are going to finish collecting our data in our population-wide study of Good Shepherd North Carolina. Then we’re going to publish our data in a paper from which you may remove your name but to which you may not add it in any position except last.”

  “That’s not happening, young —”

  “Oh, spare me the fake parental wrath. That paper can either say nothing at all about this little glitch in our fun
ding, or it can say that because the data was not what you desired, you pulled the plug. That amounts to hiding unfavorable data, and that’s a serious sin in our line of work.”

  “My line of work,” said The Professor. “You don’t have a line of work, after this conversation.”

  “You can probably block the paper’s publication in any of the peer-reviewed journals, but it won’t change the fact that all those reviewing peers will read the truth about you and the way you deliberately skew data to meet the expectations of your donors. As a last resort, we’ll put it online and call a press conference. But wouldn’t it be better if we published it as science instead of as gossip? Wouldn’t it be better if the paper had your name on it because the grant was not interrupted, and because you’re the kind of scientist who publishes the data with a thorough analysis, no matter whether somebody’s balloon gets punctured by it?”

  The Professor sat there gazing off into space. What a shame he gave up the pipe a few years ago, or he’d look like he was posing for a J.R.R. Tolkien lookalike contest.

  “I’m sorry that this conversation had to be adversarial,” he finally said. “But that was my fault, not yours, because I was acting to cut off all conversation instead of listening to you. Your points are well taken. It’s not about appearances — not just about appearances. But my zeal to maintain my reputation for doing studies that are worth funding got in the way of my thinking and acting like a scientist. You reminded me of my duty, and I will now act accordingly.”

  Spunky tried to decide whether this capitulation was real or if she was being conned.

  “As of this moment, the funding for your GWAS is reinstated. How close are you to finishing?”

  “As Elyon told you, we’re at about ninety percent. I think it’s worth a few more weeks to get as close to a hundred as we can.”

  “Then you may have those weeks.”

  “Then I’ll head back and tell Elyon to unpack.” Spunky rose to her feet.

  “That really is what you came back for?”

  “Also, I wanted to see what small town life looks like — because I’ve learned that academia is one of the smallest small towns anywhere.”