The Man Without a Shadow (25 page)

Gravely Milton Ferris speaks, like one about to give a blessing, then reconsidering. His words can't possibly be sincere, and yet—Milton looks so very penitent, almost you might believe him.

Margot has heard rumors that Milton Ferris has had health problems; on the very eve of the Nobel announcement, he'd been scheduled for an MRI at the University Hospital. His old ebullience has subsided into a kind of benevolent glow; even his wiry white beard seems to have thinned, and his fleshy chin and raddled neck are exposed beneath. And the tremor in his hand—Margot will not see.

I loved you, you know.

I will always love you
.

Does Milton Ferris understand this? Very likely, he who has
published crucial work on meta-linguistic psychology will have no difficulty understanding Margot Sharpe.

It is time to leave—is it? Margot feels a pang of dismay.

Quickly before Milton departs, Margot congratulates him another time on the Nobel Prize—as others have, countless times. A deafening chorus. Almost there must be something terrifying in such congratulations, that sweep away all distinctions other than that of the great, grand prize; as if the scientist's other, important and influential work had never been, and the prize itself something of a posthumous acknowledgment, since for some reason known only to the Nobel science committee, Milton Ferris received the award for “original, groundbreaking research” he'd done at least thirty years before in collaboration with other scientists, now elderly.

“Well, dear Margot! One day, maybe—for your remarkable work on E.H.—
you
.”

It is a sweetly gallant wish. The quiver in both eyelids gives Milton Ferris a sly, foxy look.

At parting they are suddenly shy. (Is anyone watching? They are in a quasi-public place.) But Margot knows that if she shrinks away foolishly, she will regret it; and Milton seems to feel the same way, for he clasps one of her hands in both his hands, and leans forward to brush his surprisingly chilly lips against her cheek.

“Good-bye, dear Margot! And congratulations on—whatever this is, that has come into your life so deservedly.”

DOES HE KNOW,
of course not. Could he guess, not ever.

“E.H.”—
his
amnesiac subject!

Though Milton Ferris cannot know that Margot Sharpe is in love with Elihu Hoopes, he knows that Margot Sharpe is still in love with him.

Margot smiles, considering. She regrets nothing, for what is there to regret?
Her
life lies before her.

Sipping whiskey until her eyelids droop, and it is time to sleep.

SEXUAL NATURE OF
the Amnesiac Subject E.H.
Of myriad proposals that were made to Milton Ferris by research psychologists at rival institutions, the one that most offended Margot Sharpe was from a clinical psychologist at a distinguished Ivy League university requesting the opportunity to test and measure the brain-damaged subject's “sex-drive,” “sex-fantasies,” and “sex-potency.” When the proposal was read to the lab by a bemused Ferris, Margot Sharpe, thirty years old at the time, was particularly upset—“That would be a terrible exploitation of Elihu Hoopes! He trusts us, and his family trusts us. He is a human being, not a research animal.”

Milton Ferris had been surprised by his young colleague's vehemence, for Margot Sharpe was usually, in his presence, very quiet and unassuming. But he'd been impressed with her integrity and her passion. (As he would later tell her, in the brief interlude when they were lovers.)

At the time he'd laughed heartily at the young scientist's indignation. All of the lab had laughed.
He
wasn't going to invite a rival to examine
our amnesiac
—no fear of that.

Now that Milton Ferris has retired from the university and Margot Sharpe has become principal investigator of
Project E.H.,
and “E.H.” has become ever more famous in neuropsychological quarters, Margot is deluged with proposals as offensive as that proposal, or worse. She fears what would happen to E.H. if she were not there to protect him; she fears that his elderly aunt Lucinda, like his other Hoopes relatives, could have no idea of the intricacies and (possible) duplicities of the highly competitive world
of research science, and might unwittingly give permission to the wrong people. She is sure that, without her constant vigilance, the identity of “Elihu Hoopes” would be known to the world by now, and unwanted, unscrupulous sensation-seekers would be flocking to the Institute at Darven Park or worse yet, to the austere old English Tudor house in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania. And the amnesiac subject, with his short-term memory of less than seventy seconds, would not remember any outrage perpetrated upon him, unless he recorded it in his notebook or sketchbook.

Once, in a weak moment with Milton Ferris, when Margot was feeling emotional, and Ferris was feeling protective and paternal, Margot confided in the older scientist that she sometimes worried that there was something fundamentally immoral in what they were doing—experimenting upon a brain-damaged human being who could have no clear sense of what was happening to him, and whose “consent” was questionable.

“Even, at times, it worries me—it makes me anxious—about animal research. Primates have such—personalities . . . If you get to know them.”

“Dear Margot. Don't get to know them.”

Her white-bearded satyr-lover kissed her mouth, laughing somewhat crudely. If there is such a thing as a bemused and condescending kiss, that was it.

Yet, Margot recalls the kiss with a pang of happiness.

How simple life was to her then. She was Milton Ferris's brilliant and promising young colleague, and had not yet taken his place.

She is oversensitive, her colleagues tell her. And she is overprotective of E.H.

(Some of them laugh at her behind her back, she knows. Even her young colleagues, lab assistants, and dissertation advisees. Others smile to her face.)

The fact is, Professor Sharpe is fiercely principled, unyielding. As she grows older, and renowned in the rapidly-growing field of memory research, she becomes less tolerant of others' limitations. She is furious at others' ambition which is invariably “crude”—“shameless”—ambition. In the way of her mentor Milton Ferris she speaks contemptuously of “lazy science”—“bad science”—“quasi-science.” In her department she is one of three top-earning professors; she is lavished with grants, for every research foundation wants to fund memory/brain-damage research and the mysterious “E.H.” is the most famous of amnesiac subjects. Margot Sharpe publishes articles in prominent journals as frequently as Milton Ferris once did. She has become noted for her astute, fair-minded, incisive reviews, that draw upon a history of psychology; she is at once a working scientist, and a historian of neuropsychology. In a citation for an award from the American Association of Experimental Psychologists it is said of Margot Sharpe that she exhibits, in reviews as well as articles, a “breathtaking knowledge of the literature of the field, where most scientists are but dimly aware of the history of their (professions).”

She has become, in middle age, something of a legendary figure herself: perennially youthful, even girlish in appearance and manner; with glossy-black hair falling straight to her shoulders or elegantly gathered at the nape of her neck, straight-cut bangs to her eyebrows. No matter that her hair is threaded with silver, or that there are pale creases at the corners of her eyes, Margot Sharpe dresses like a schoolgirl-ballerina in tight black jersey tops and jackets, black trousers or leggings, flat black shoes. She is disarming, disingenuous. She is quick, agile, graceful on her feet—lithe as a dancer. (
Is
she a dancer? it is wondered.) At professional gatherings, she is immediately recognizable; she has heard awed whispers in her wake—
That's Margot Sharpe. God, she looks young!

In her early forties Margot has accumulated an elite circle of former students who have achieved tenure and reputations in their competitive field and who constitute a third generation of sorts, their grandparent the Nobel laureate Milton Ferris and their parent Margot Sharpe. If required, Margot is as protective of her young as any actual parent might be.

She is unfailingly protective of E.H. Just to suggest an experiment that might “upset” her subject is to risk Margot Sharpe's ire. She is credited with having said, wittily: “Eli Hoopes is the only gentleman in neuroscience.”

It is also said that, of ten proposals from colleagues to work with E.H., Margot Sharpe rejects, on the average, ten.

Notorious as Margot is for rejecting virtually all proposals from colleagues outside her department, she has been more diplomatic with her university colleagues. These proposals, from research scientists like Professor Karl Peirce, a neurophysiologist with a particular interest in the hippocampus and the amygdala, parts of the brain it has long been assumed were damaged by E.H.'s encephalitis, Margot can't reasonably reject; her strategy is to postpone making a decision, and then to postpone meeting with the researcher, and then to postpone, as long as possible, the researcher's meeting with the subject.

“Margot Sharpe doesn't own E.H., for Christ's sake! She isn't his guardian.”

Her (senior, male) colleagues murmur together. They complain of her both in jest and bitterly.

Indirectly she knows of the collective dislike of Margot Sharpe, commingled with grudging admiration for her work and for her tenacity. What do they say, in derision?
Sharpe is married to her work—she's his wife.

SO VERY TIRED!
A hole has been bored into his skull, a piece of bone has been removed like a jigsaw puzzle-piece, and the delicate dura has been pierced. Can't recall why this terrible surgery was performed on his brain but knows it is irreversible.

A man's brain has been touched by strangers. Lights have been shined into the recesses of his soul. He has been turned inside out like a rubber glove, and tossed aside.

Shuts his eyes tight. The girl's body has only just been discovered—his cousin Gretchen. (But you must never say her name again, aloud. No one must hear
.
) He'd been hiding beneath the plank porch where he'd crawled to escape their eyes. And now his father staring at him with a look of commingled shame and contempt.

You saw nothing, Eli. You've been dreaming.

Go back to bed, son. There is nothing here for you.

“Mr. Hoopes? Are you feeling strong enough to get up? If you could swing your legs around here . . .”

He is being helped to his feet. He has been strapped flat on his back inside a sleek metal coffin and now he is being helped to his feet.

His knees are weak, his head feels as if air has been pumped into it—ever more air, ever more pressure.

Don't look. You didn't see.

There is nothing to see.

MARGOT NEVER THINKS,
when she is apart from Elihu Hoopes, of how utterly lonely she is in her life, and
alone
.

It is fierce, such loneliness. A freezing wind, a very dry wind, that sucks at the marrow of the bone. Yet, enveloped in the busyness of her life, like one propelled along an endless stretch of
white-water rapids, Margot rarely realizes it. When she is interviewed she will say in her bright happy voice
The life of a scientist is a continual adventure. Continual discoveries. Even our failures are adventures.

She will say
Do I regret not having a personal life?—
laughing happily she will say
But this is my personal life! My career, my work, my science, my life.

STUBBORNLY HE CONTINUES
to believe that he is thirty-seven years old.

Though seeing in the mirror—(for how can he not?)—a much older man.

“How do you account for that, Mr. Hoopes?”

“‘Account for'—what?”

“The face in the mirror is not the face of a thirty-seven-year-old man—do you think?”

Margot Sharpe is not asking these questions. She is overseeing the interview of the amnesiac subject E.H. by one of her young colleagues. She would not phrase the questions quite so bluntly as the young man is doing but she does not interfere; it is a principle of Margot Sharpe's not to criticize her younger colleagues and associates (to their faces) quite so readily as Milton Ferris had done.

In the end, many had resented Milton Ferris.
The great man
is the one who is resented for his very
greatness.

Margot Sharpe thinks of herself as a good, perhaps a very good, but not a great scientist. Hers is the modesty of resignation: she does not compete with greatness. She has been very lucky in having inherited the “gold mine”—(to use Alvin Kaplan's expression)—E.H. Her only hope is that greatness will in some way envelop her, and protect her.

Reluctantly E.H. is peering into a mirror. It is not really a nat
ural thing to do—to scrutinize one's own face before witnesses. If done, it is likely to be in utter privacy, as a most intimate act.

Margot thinks, with sympathy—
He doesn't look at his face if he can avoid it. It is no longer “his” face.

With an air of bravado E.H. addresses the young professor: “What's the problem, Doctor? That's my ‘reflection'—not that it is exactly
me
.”

“You see your face as familiar, then—there is no surprise to you, seeing your face.”

This is very awkwardly phrased. It is neither a question nor a statement. Yet Margot does not interfere, just yet.

The young man says, “You see your reflection as
familiar,
then? Though in some way, as you say, it isn't ‘exactly you.'”

“Is your reflection ‘you,' Doctor?”

The young man is caught off guard and can't think of a ready reply. He glances at Margot Sharpe, with a small frown.

“My reflection is the reflection of—my appearance. Of course, it is not
me
.”