Mendel's Dwarf (5 page)

All four of the children of the two achondroplastic mothers were born by Caesarean section. If either of the two affected boys has children, the risk for each of these children being affected is a half.

That was the kind of thing I used to do in my free time, run to the public library. It was a refuge, you see, a place of quiet, a place of sympathy. One of the assistant librarians in particular befriended me. She used to put aside books she thought I might like; she used to talk to me almost as though I were normal. She was not a bad-looking woman. Woman, girl, she was on the borderline between the two, one or two acne spots still lingering on her chin, a blush still coming readily to her cheeks whenever the chief librarian addressed her. Mousy, of course. I feel that all librarians ought to be mousy. It should be a necessary (but not sufficient) qualification for the job. Mousy? Agouti? What, I wonder, is its genetic control? Perhaps it is tightly linked to the gene for tidiness. She was about eighteen, this mousy librarian: eighteen, tidy, and frightened of the chief librarian (also mousy, but fortyish and balding), and her name was Miss Piercey.

“It’s Benedict,” she used to say as I waddled in. Her tone was almost one of contentment, almost as though she were
pleased
to see me. “How are we today?”

We.

Usually she would be sitting on a stool behind the main desk. Often enough, just often enough for it to be a distinct possibility, not too often for it to be anything more than chance, her skirt would be drawn rather too high up her thighs for modesty. I used to gain an interesting perspective on her when she sat like that. It was the only occasion in the whole of my life when I have been at an advantage over normal people, eyeing Miss Piercey’s legs, longing to be able to pierce Miss Piercey. “Are we looking for anything in particular today?” she would ask. “Or are we just browsing?”

We
. For those moments we shared my paltry existence. “Browsing,” I would reply, my eyes browsing up and over the angle of her knees and into the shadows above. “Just browsing.” Sometimes things would become quite difficult. On occasion—when, for example, turning on her stool to deal with another
reader, she had to uncross her legs—I would have to excuse myself hastily and rush not to the bookshelves but to the bathroom, there to find solace and comfort at my own hands.

You are surprised? Oh yes, I’m quite
normal
that way. It’s only my bones that are deformed …

Well, you might
call
it a bone, but it isn’t one. The
os penis
or baculum, a heterotopic bone found in many insectivores and rodents and in most primates, is absent in man. It isn’t a bone, and I am anything but dwarf in that respect. Because of my shortened arms I have to bend to reach it, but it’s quite normal when I get there. Seven inches erect. I measured it on one occasion when it was thinking of Miss Piercey.

A test question: Who praised masturbation as the perfect sexual relationship, because it is the only one in which pleasure given is exactly equal to pleasure received? Answer: Jean Genet.

Once I saw Miss Piercey’s underpants. I was standing chatting with her when an old lady called her to get a book down from a high shelf. “Won’t be a mo, dear,” Miss Piercey replied. “Just coming.” And, as she slid down from her stool, her skirt, snagging some splinter in the wood, rode upward over her thighs. “Whoops!” she cried, tugging the skirt down. “You keep you eyes to yourself, young man.”

Miss Piercey hurried to the old lady’s aid; I hurried toward the bathroom. The incident was trivial and normality was soon reestablished (my desire spent into the lavatory bowl; the old lady equipped with book from upper shelf; Miss Piercey settled once more on her stool with her skirt pulled demurely down to her knees), but the memory lived on. White cotton with pink flowers, Miss Piercey’s knickers. They were etched into my mind. I saw the same design at the British Home Stores shortly afterwards, and I rushed in to spend my pocket money. “For my sister,” I explained. The assistant looked skeptical; yet surely, if it had been for any other purpose, I would have been rooting around among the black lace, the suspender belts and diaphanous
French knickers, not the plain floral underpants. One must look at the matter realistically.

Back in the safety of my bedroom, hugging the scrap of cotton to my face, I dreamt of Miss Piercey lying as white as a mouse beneath my gaze, wearing only those underpants. Sexual dimorphism is under the control of a pair of chromosomes, the X and the Y, but what is it that controls
desire?
That is a question that has defied the greatest geneticists of our time. There are those who claim that a rogue portion of the long arm of the X chromosome (section Xq28, to be exact
¹
) may be responsible for homosexual desires; but what was it that drove my body into paroxysms of lust for mouselike Miss Piercey?

I haven’t mentioned her eyes, have I? I have mentioned, by implication, other parts of her anatomy, and, specifically, her hair; but I haven’t mentioned her eyes. They were of differing color. One was blue, the other green. How do you explain that by the mathematical dance of genes …?

Miss J. Piercey. The name card on the librarians’ desk said so (I could catch a glimpse of it only if I stood far back). I didn’t even know her first name. J? I imagined “June”—June, moon, swoon; it would have been perfect. She was doing some kind of training in librarianship at the polytechnic, combined with work experience in the library. I was sixteen and was studying biology and chemistry and math, all those things that she had failed. The gulf between us was vast, being constructed of things material and things emotional, things structural and things spiritual. I suppose that had she known my feelings she’d have uttered a squeal of revulsion and accused me of being filthy-minded. But it was something approaching love.

I did very well in biology, of course; particularly well in the questions on genetics. The words
segregation, dominance, recessive, mutation
flowed from my pen. My Punnet squares were punctilious. My ratios were rational.

Mice of the strain known as waltzers suffer from a defect in the cerebellum that makes them move around in an uncoordinated way described as waltzing. When waltzers are crossed with normal mice all the offspring are normal …

Aren’t they lucky?

Humans of the type known as achondroplastic dwarfs suffer from a lack of cartilage cells, so that bones that depend on cartilage models for development cannot grow. When dwarfs of this type are crossed with normal humans fifty percent of the offspring are normal and fifty percent are dwarf
.

Aren’t they unlucky?

Toss a coin. It is all a matter of probability and chance. Try it. Go on, take a coin out of your pocket or your purse. Toss it, call heads or tails, and there you are. Cursed or not?

The biology laboratory at school possessed five microscopes. They were gleaming, ancient things with more than a hint of brass about them, but their optics were good. Only the seniors were allowed to use them, and then only under the supervision of the dull Mr. Perkins, but there are ways and means, always. I obtained a key to the room (the cleaning lady reported the loss, but everyone just assumed she had mislaid it) and stayed behind one afternoon. The impoverished school library was available for late study on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so I spent some time reading there to establish an alibi before making my way along the corridor and up the back stairs to where the biology laboratory lay at the rear of the building, overlooking a car park and a supermarket warehouse. It was but the work of an instant to let myself in and lock the door behind me.

The microscopes were in a locked cupboard, but I knew all about that. The key lived in Mr. Perkins’s desk. In a few moments (dangerous moments, for the cupboard was within view of the glass panel in the door) the best of the microscopes (Czech optics, I remember) was in my grasp. I set the thing up in a corner, away from the door. I got a box of slides and another of cover slips. I found a beaker and a teat pipette.

I was—am—a born research worker. Single-minded, patient, prepared, determined; like Great-great-great-uncle Gregor himself. I had chosen the photograph, a particular favorite, with care. In a boudoir suffused with rose light, a honeyed girl, bedewed and as soft as angora, bent over and presented her backside to the camera and, by proxy, to my hungry eyes. She glanced behind, as though at her behind, while one hand reached back to part her buttocks and reveal the magic of golden pubescence and the mystery of moist, rubescent, pleated flesh. I told you I am a born researcher. No inhibition stands in my way. I propped the picture on a desk and fumbled with my clothing. In a few moments I felt the familiar spasm of delight and had a cupped palmful of nacreous liquid.

A million million spermatozoa
All of them alive:
Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah
Dare hope to survive
.

Author? Aldous Huxley: grandson of Thomas Huxley, the champion of Darwin against the clergy, and brother of Julian Huxley,
Sir
Julian Huxley, sometime professor of zoology at King’s College, London, sometime director-general of UNESCO, sometime leading eugenicist …

I pipetted a drop of glutinous fluid onto a slide and lowered the cover slip with consummate care; then I arranged the light and slid the slide onto the stage. Low power … medium power. I
peered, adjusted the diaphragm, turned the nosepiece to the big lens. It locked into place.

One million million spermatozoa, all of them alive. Small exclamations of blind and culpable intent! Interrogation marks asking what absurd question? A thousand periods, each bearing its potent, muddled message … They shimmered and shook, nosing toward God knows what dimly perceived ovum, and I knew, oh, I knew that of
every
thousand that I saw within that brilliant circle of light, five hundred carried the command for height, for normality, for happiness and contentment; and five hundred bore the curse.

But which?

Was that an epiphany? Was that the moment when something, someone—the bleak and austere muse of science—spoke to me? Was my future research determined then, just as my future life had been determined seventeen years before, when a sperm such as one of these had nosed its way up my mother’s fallopian tube and encountered a wandering, wondering ovum with its delicate cumulus of follicular cells? Forget about copulation. The moment of true penetration is when the lucky sperm, the poor Noah, nudges against the ovum and explodes its capsule of digestive enzymes. The tail is shed and the head enters. For a moment two sets of chromosomes, one from the egg, one from the sperm, lie alongside each other in uneasy juxtaposition. And one of them carries my curse. The chromosomes, intricate spools of nucleic acid and protein, move together into a single, fateful conjunction; and Benedict Lambert has begun. Chromosomes that were once my mother’s and my father’s are now mine. I have begun. And I am cursed.

And Gregor Mendel, was he cursed too? A moment of coupling in the massive bed in the peasant cottage at number 58, Heinzendorf, a village at the foot of the Sudety Mountains in Austrian Silesia, not far from the Polish border. It is October 22, 1821, more or less. There is a square tiled stove against one wall,
around which the family sleeps during the deep winter nights; but now it is merely autumn, a chill autumn with the larch and the silver birch and the poplars turning to gold and rust, and Anton and Rosine use the great bed. The daughter Veronika sleeps on one side, while the parents couple quietly and methodically on the other side. They get warmth from each other’s body, and, for a convulsive moment, something else—a fleeting abstraction from the pains of peasant life. Then they lie quietly in each other’s arms while a shimmering galaxy of spermatozoa begins its blind and determined journey up Rosine’s genital tract.

Did the particular sets of chromosomes that came together then bring with them Gregor Mendel’s particular future? Was that written in the genes? Can you possess genes for genius?