The People in the Trees (7 page)

After the punch and biscuits had been served at the pastor’s house (we did not think it appropriate to invite mourners back to the scene of the death, where the long wisps of grass upon which our father’s spread-eagled body had lain were still matted down in an unsettlingly distinguishable shape), and after we had shaken the hands of the dozen or so people present, we thanked him for his help.

“It was my honor,” said the pastor, solemnly. He was a blandly handsome man with sad eyes who kept looking lasciviously at Owen when he thought Owen wasn’t watching him. He was not much older than we but already had a defeated-looking wife and two squalling blond sons. “You poor boys—you have only each other now.” (I wondered for a moment if he might have been pitying us not only for being left alone but for being in such poor company; it was clear he didn’t much like us.) To me he said, “God be with you always.”
To Owen he said, “Always watch out for your brother. You are his keeper.”

“What for?” Owen asked. At the time, Owen was very interested in Truth and Justice and was beginning, tiresomely, to dabble in Marxism; he had always been very impressionable. “I shall treat my brother as I treat any of my fellow men, no better, no worse,” he said grandly, and the pastor moved off, sighing and shaking his head.

Writing this makes me remember how much I miss Owen. I am a little surprised to see those words on paper,
¹¹
but I would be lying if I did not admit it. Despite my many complaints and annoyances, it occurs to me (and not for the first time) that my childhood, while often tedious, was certainly much simpler than my life today. This is, I suppose, as many people remember their childhoods. But back then, I do believe I was familiar with a state that was reasonably close to contentment. I was not funny-looking, I was an adequately skilled athlete, I was rich but not extravagant, I was intelligent, I had interests, I was stronger and swifter than Owen. My schoolmates left me alone: I was never beaten or teased, I never needed friends or anyone else—after all, I had Owen. Now I live a life in which I funnel great amounts of my savings to my lawyers from my barred-in quarters. I am fat and no longer stronger and swifter than Owen, and even if I had any hobbies, I would not be able to practice them. I am living a strange kind of life, a life in which I have no one. My children are gone and my colleagues are gone; everyone who has ever mattered to me has left me.

Even Owen. Or should I say, especially Owen. We have not, of course, had either the easiest or the most consistent of relationships, but at one time Owen and I were very close, and even when we were not, even when he was passing through one of his childishly enthusiastic phases in which he adopted and abandoned idealisms and philosophies like other boys did girls, he was amusing, and witty, and bright. He was my ambassador to the world outside my own. Not that I myself was immune to romanticism. I remember as a young man once telling Owen that he should fashion himself after me. Look at me, I told him (he rolled his eyes)—I am going to be a scientist. That is all I care about. You are too scattered, I told him. I warned him that he would become a dilettante if he did not become more disciplined. But now I almost admire Owen’s indecisiveness; it was almost as if he, to make up for my single-mindedness, was trying to be of as many minds as possible. I was impatient then, of course, but now I can recall fondly my brother’s prickliness, his fierce idealism, his quickly burning passions. I remember Owen in those days as so vital, so indefatigable, so intellectually nimble in ways I was not. For such different-minded people, we were unusually and energetically competitive, but still—there were times when we agreed too, and during those moments we could argue anyone out of anything, bend them with our ferocity and righteousness. At any rate, we could always match passions, even when our passions were not directed toward the same subjects.

And it was with Owen that I shared my earliest, most fervent craving: that of leaving, of escape. I can’t remember ever articulating this desire specifically, but I can remember my sense, from my very early years, that life was not Indiana, and certainly not Lindon, and possibly not even America. Life was elsewhere, and it was frightening and vast and mountainous and uncomfortable. I believe Owen knew this as well, the way some children know that they want to remain close to home, and it was this mutual determination—that where we were beginning would not be where we stayed, nor where we ended—that, more than interests or predilections, both united us and encouraged us to endure the obligations of childhood until we could leave it behind and pursue life in earnest.

Interestingly, the two years or so after my father’s funeral were to be the happiest, most harmonious time in our relationship. In those
years we were quite close, and for a brief, ambitious, honeyed period, I made an effort to write to him every week, something we had not done all through college. In the late spring of 1946, we embarked upon a vacation together, to Italy. A photo from this time shows us about to board the ship, the
Arcadia
, in New York. Both of us are wearing linen suits and derbies. It was our first trip to Europe—our first vacation together, in fact, and unfortunately our last, although we had no way of knowing that at the time—and when we returned, three months later, I remember promising one another that we’d reprise the trip annually, to places farther and farther afield.

I can remember only a few of the specifics from that trip—art we saw, meals we ate, conversations we had, ruins we admired, even places we stayed—but I can still recall, with a sort of odd, unpleasant clarity, that unfamiliar and inarticulable sensation I began experiencing, about halfway through the journey, whenever I gazed at Owen. I remember feeling something pressing against my chest at those times, substantial and insistent and yet not uncomfortable, not painful. After a few episodes, I deduced it was, for lack of a better word, love. Naturally, I never said anything to him (we did not have those sorts of conversations), but I remember quite clearly looking at him one evening as we stood at the prow of the ship, at his sharp nose that ended in a blobbish wodge of putty (
my
nose), listening to the dark waters slap against the side of the boat, and feeling almost overwhelmed. When Owen spoke to me, I was unable to answer, and had to pretend I felt ill, so I could go to bed and lie awake by myself and think about my new discovery.

The feeling did not last, of course. It came and went throughout our trip, and then over the years. And although it was never as intense as it was that day on the water, I grew to first accept and then long for that familiar ache, even though I knew that while experiencing it I was unable to accomplish, much less contemplate, anything else.

⁵
The Owen to whom Norton refers is Owen C. Perina, Norton’s twin brother and one of the few significant adult relationships in his life. Unlike Norton, Owen was always interested in literature, and he is now a renowned poet and the Field-Patey Professor of Poetry at Bard College. He has also twice been awarded the National Book Award for poetry, once for
The Insect’s Hand and Other Poems
(1984) and again for
The Pillow Book of Philip Perina
(1995), as well as numerous other commendations. Owen is as famously taciturn as Norton is voluble, and I once witnessed a very amusing exchange between them when I visited Norton a few Christmases ago. There was Norton, fist full of chestnuts, spewing, chewing, gesticulating, holding forth on everything from the dying art of butterfly mounting to the strange appeal of a certain talk show, and across from him, his lumpish mirror image, grunting and murmuring his occasional assent or dissent, was Owen.
   Sadly, Norton and his brother are now at irreconcilable odds. As these pages will reveal, their estrangement was abrupt and devastating, the result of a terrible betrayal, one from which Norton will never recover.

⁶
Owen Perina has written a rather lovely poem about his mother and her death; it is the first poem in his third collection,
Moth and Honey
(1986).

⁷
One can only imagine what life would have been like for Sybil Maria Perina (1893–1945) if she had been born fifty years later. Indeed, the great medical professor and anatomist E. Isaiah Witkinson, under whom she studied while a student at Northwestern, even mentions her in a letter to a colleague in 1911:

[A] student of many talents, as well as grace and skill. It is a great pity to the scientific community that she will not be able to pursue a career in medical research. I even urged [her] to consider moving abroad to work with Christian missionaries, which would, alas, offer her more independence and opportunity than she could acquire through any university. However, she refused, although whether out of a lingering desire to remain close to her family (a shortcoming in many female students) or from a fear of toiling in uncertain circumstances I cannot discern. Certainly she is capable of whatever she chooses, although I believe her native domestic conservatism will keep her mired in some unchallenging provincial practice. She will become bored; she will hate it. (Francis Clapp, ed.,
A Doctor’s Life: The Letters of E. Isaiah Witkinson
[New York: Columbia University Press, 1984])

Unfortunately, Sybil never progressed much further beyond Witkinson’s gloomy but prescient predictions for her. Her obituary in the
Rochester Picayune
is insultingly brief and desperately sad: “Dr. Perina was a doctor in Rochester for more than thirty years … She was never married and has no immediate survivors.” However, Sybil did leave behind a great legacy; as Norton himself has said more than once, she was responsible for introducing him to the wonders of scientific discovery and possibility. So Sybil, her thwarted dreams, can be said to live on in one of the world’s greatest medical minds: he has more than accomplished for her what she could not.

⁸
I’m afraid I must disagree with Norton here. But I will let the reader be the judge. The body of the entry reads in part as follows:

Abraham Norton Perina, b. 1924, Lindon, Indiana, USA

Currently lives: Bethesda, Maryland, USA

Significance: 7 [
Ed. note: On a scale of one to ten. Perplexingly, Galileo is ranked a 10, as is Jonas Salk. But Copernicus is given only an 8
.]

We’re all told that nobody lives forever, but did you know that there is a group of people who actually do? It’s true! Dr. Perina, who lives in Maryland with his more than 50 adopted children, discovered in the early 1950s a race of people who never aged—all thanks to eating a rare turtle! Dr. Perina’s research won him a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1974.

The book then goes on to give a flawed and simplistic description of Selene syndrome.

⁹
Philip Tallent Perina (arrived 1969; ca. 1960–1975), an early adoptee of Norton’s and one of his special pets. Philip was lean, childlike, and very dark-skinned. I never met him, but through various pictures Norton keeps, I imagine him as quick and spritely; in pictures, he always seems about to wiggle out of Norton’s arms and straight out of the photograph itself. Although a lively child, Philip had suffered some brain damage at an early age, and his physical development too was retarded, possibly an effect of severe malnutrition in early life. He was an orphan, and something of the village mascot when Norton brought him back from U’ivu in 1969. (His name, until Norton’s rescue, had been the equivalent of “Hey, you!”) Philip was killed by a drunk driver in 1975; he was believed to be about fifteen years old at the time.

¹⁰
Although one would never have known it from his undignified death, Norton’s father left behind a substantial fortune. The exact amount was never disclosed, but it has been assumed by Norton’s biographers that it was enough to comfortably enable the purchase of his house in Bethesda and the maintenance and education of his children. Along with Owen, Norton would also have been Sybil’s primary beneficiary.

¹¹
I myself was surprised to read this admission. Greatly so, actually, for reasons that will become clear to the reader as Norton’s narrative progresses. I shall say only that one of Norton’s greatest fears has always been abandonment—that the people he loved and trusted would one day turn against him. (Unfortunately, it proved a prescient concern.) But as I have noted, it was not only his children’s disloyalty that proved ultimately responsible for his current predicament—it was Owen’s too.
   Interestingly, it wasn’t until four years into my relationship with Norton that I even learned of Owen’s existence. When I asked him about this many years later, he merely chuckled and said that they must have been bickering about something at the time. These long silences and petty, frequent skirmishes defined Norton’s relationship with Owen, who, as he notes, was his equal in depth and breadth of knowledge and opinions (though of course not the same knowledge and opinions). But he proved a good foil for Norton—perhaps the only person who has ever matched him in brilliance, eccentricities, and passions. I had once liked him very much.

PART II. MICE

I
.

After graduating from college, I began medical school
¹²
in the fall of 1946. I have little of interest to say about medical school itself; even its dullness and the unimaginativeness of my fellow students were not too great a surprise to me. I went to medical school because it was what one did back then if one was interested in anything even tangentially related to the biology of the human body. Were I an undergraduate today, I probably would bypass it in favor of a doctoral program in virology or microbiology or some such. It is not that medical school in itself is not an interesting or even stimulating environment; it is that the people who tend to matriculate there lean toward the self-righteous and sentimental, more interested in the romantic heroism of doctoring with which the profession has allowed itself to become suffused and associated than in the challenge of scientific inquiry.