State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [115]
Marina was sitting up now. She had disengaged her hand from Easter’s though the two were fairly stuck together from where the snake’s blood had dried and sealed them into one unit. She came outside her net. “You’re telling me you’re pregnant?”
Dr. Swenson blinked. For a moment she looked more surprised than Marina. “You thought I was fat?”
“You’re seventy-three years old!”
Dr. Swenson folded her hands on top of her stomach in a universal gesture of pregnancy. It was something Marina was sure she had never seen her do. Her shirt rode up and showed the roundness of her belly. “I know you have seen women here who are my age or older and they are pregnant. I’ve heard you comment on them.”
“But they’re Lakashi.” Marina wasn’t sure if what she was saying was racist or scientific. This distortion of biology is for them, not for us. She could still hear them singing by the river, beating on drums, no doubt tenderizing the snake before they held it on sticks above the fire, or whatever one did to cook a snake in these parts.
“They are Lakashi indeed, so that is the question. We know that if they eat the bark consistently from the onset of first menses their ova appear not to deteriorate. But Americans wouldn’t feed their daughters a monthly pill from the time they’re thirteen on the off chance the child will want to wait until she’s fifty to reproduce. What we have to find out is whether or not the bark can reinvigorate the reproductive capacity of the postmenopausal woman.”
“And you’re the test case? You couldn’t find someone else to do this?”
“There are no postmenopausal Lakashi. That’s the whole point.”
“Then you get a Jinta. You don’t take it yourself.”
“How quickly we put our medical ethics aside. I developed this drug. If I believe in it, and clearly I do, then I should be willing to test it on myself.”
“Who is the father?”
Dr. Swenson looked at her with the gravest disappointment, the disappointment she reserved for first year medical students. “Really, Dr. Singh, you are not serious.”
Given the circumstances of the day, Marina would have sworn that there was nothing left to upset her, and still she felt her hands shaking. “I understand that you are conducting an extremely limited initial trial on yourself but the end result of this experiment will be a child and, with all good wishes for your longevity, you may not be around as long as you might like to look after it. If there is no father in the traditional sense, then what happens to the outcome?”
“There are plenty of children around here. Do you really think one more is going to break the tribe? I am very well regarded. Any outcome of mine, as you so warmly describe this child, would be welcomed and well cared for.”
“You’re going to leave it here? Annick Swenson’s child will be raised by the Lakashi?”
“They are a decent, well-organized people.”
“You went to Radcliffe.”
“I didn’t love it.”
Easter slept through all of it. Marina looked down on him in the bed. His shirt and arms and face were smeared with blood. Somehow in all of this she hadn’t noticed it before. She would get a cloth and wash him. She could wash him while he slept. “Imagine Dr. Rapp fathered a child down here,” she said, remembering the example of Alan Saturn in his argument with his wife and working to calm her voice. “Should the son or the daughter of the greatest mind in botany just wander around in the jungle for the rest of his or her life, not having any access to their own potential?”
“Do you think his children aren’t here? Do you honestly think such things never happened? You should ask Benoit to take you to the next vision quest or whatever you want to call it.” Dr. Swenson shook her head and then walked over to sit in the one small chair in the room. She sat on top of Marina’s second dress and her other two pair of underpants as the chair was where she kept her things. “I am very tired, Dr. Singh,