Other Men's Daughters (27 page)

Esmé wrapped the kitten in her sweater and kept him on the floor beside her bed. In the morning, Merriwether woke to the sound of tears, went upstairs in his pajamas and found Esmé holding the four inert inches of dead kitten in her arms. “It died when I was asleep.”

Merriwether spaded a foot of earth under a pine tree, Esmé lay the kitten in it, and they covered him with the earth, then a stone which they surrounded with pine cones and larkspur.

The last thing Esmé said to him at the airport was, “If you remember to put flowers on Figaro's grave every now and then, Dad, I'll feel better for it.”

He bequeathed this chore to Cynthia whom he picked up an hour after he kissed Esmé goodby.

The haphazard survivor. This was the anti-Darwinian notion which Professor Eigen repudiated in the great address of the Boulder Conference. Electrons got the jump on positrons, and this universe is made of matter, not anti-matter. So the linkage of nucleotides and protein cycles accelerated into the nucleic strand which survived the decomposition of other “information units.” A Paradise of Phage, but the very “mistakes” of the enzymes provided the new information which led from steady-state—and inevitable decomposition—to new information; to evolution.

Slim, beautifully articulate in English, moving rapidly from blackboard to podium, gesturing, pointing, smoothing his silver hair, Eigen's modest but accelerating power, like his own triumphant life chain, elevated the conference from a kind of factual soup to that vividness of being which marks individual triumph.

The talk had begun with a tribute to Eigen's friend Katchalsky, the Israeli neurobiologist who'd died a month before in the massacre at the Tel Aviv airport. Eigen began with Katchalsky's work on the analogy between electrical and chemical systems; he concluded with a comparison of the nucleic transcendence to the transcendence of the synaptic feedback system which gave promise of what his nineteenth century countryman would have called an
Übermensch
.

The marvelous two hours sent Merriwether up the mountain in a kind of ecstasy. He felt, without detail, without conception, that Eigen's notions would fill the void in his own book. He left Cynthia in the cabin and walked down to the stream. Pine odor saturated the air. Survivors, DNA, Eigen, the structure of truth, and yes, Merriwether felt it—himself, his children. Behind them, the contributing dead, Katchalsky, the decomposed states, the house, the family. States decay, survivors survive. The misery, the waste, the trash of the last years somehow led here to the moon-washed water in which the trees stood out with a clarity obscured by the very color of daylight. You need darkness for clarity (moonlit darkness). A jet light moved above the mountain, followed, seconds later, by a bridal train of sound. Charged by everything, Merriwether feels something there. Yes, understanding trailing event. Light and sound issue together but register separately. The depth of love after loss. The way of human beings. Self-catalytic forms, fed by errors, and so perpetuated. Love, family, Cambridge, mentality. Linkage. Transmission. Evolving.

“Are you ok?”

Out of the dark. He looks up, Cynthia calling from the road. He can make out her hair holding light.

“A-1,” he said. “I'm on my way up.”

About the Author

Richard Stern (1928–2013) was the acclaimed author of more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, including the novels
Other Men's Daughters
,
Golk
,
Stitch
, and
Natural Shocks
. Born in New York City, he attended the University of North Carolina and received his master's degree from Harvard University and his PhD from the University of Iowa. The recipient of many honors, including the Award of Merit for the Novel, given once every six years by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Stern was a longtime professor of English at the University of Chicago, where he taught alongside Saul Bellow. He counted Flannery O'Connor, Norman Mailer, Anthony Burgess, Lillian Hellman, John Cheever, John Berryman, and Philip Roth among his many other literary admirers.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1973 by Richard Stern

Cover design by Michel Vrana

ISBN: 978-1-4976-8531-4

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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EBOOKS BY RICHARD STERN

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