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By Root 1290 0

or Medicine. The leading candidates were Rudyard Hill, of Cambridge, and Michael Zolodnek. Zolodnek was a resident at Pilgrim Lake, living in one of the saltboxes on the Truro side of the property. Then, in the early morning of October 8, a whooshing sound awoke Madeleine and Leonard from a sound sleep. Going to the window, they saw a helicopter landing on the beach in front of their building. Three satellite news vans were parked in the lot. They threw on clothes and raced to the conference center, where they learned, to their delight, that the Nobel had been awarded not to Michael Zolodnek but to Diane MacGregor. The seats in the amphitheater were already filled with press reporters and Pilgrim Lake staff. Standing in the back of the room, Madeleine and Leonard watched Dr. Malkiel escort MacGregor to a podium bedecked with a bouquet of microphones. MacGregor was dressed in an old raincoat and Wellies, exactly as she had been the few times Madeleine had caught sight of her on the beach, walking her black standard poodle. She’d made an attempt to arrange her white hair for the press conference. This detail, along with her diminutive size, gave her the quality of a small child, despite her age.

At the podium MacGregor smiled, twinkled, and looked besieged all at once.

The questions began:

“Dr. MacGregor, where were you when you heard the news?”

“I was asleep. Just like I am right now.”

“Could you tell us what your scientific work is about?”

“I could. But then you’d be asleep.”

“What do you plan to do with the money?”

“Spend it.”

These answers would have given Madeleine a crush on Diane MacGregor if she hadn’t had one already. Though she’d never talked to MacGregor, everything she’d learned about the seventy-three-year-old recluse had turned MacGregor into Madeleine’s favorite biologist. Unlike the other scientists at the lab, MacGregor employed no assistants. She worked entirely alone, without sophisticated equipment, analyzing the mysterious patterns of coloration in the corn she grew in a plot of land behind her house. From talking to Leonard and other people, Madeleine understood the basics of MacGregor’s work—it had to do with gene transmission, and the way traits are copied, transposed, or deleted—but what she really admired was the solitary and determined way MacGregor carried it out. (If Madeleine ever became a biologist, Diane MacGregor would be the kind of biologist she would want to be.) Other scientists at the lab ridiculed MacGregor for not having a phone or for her general eccentricity. If MacGregor was so out of it, though, why did everyone have to talk about her all the time? Madeleine guessed that MacGregor made people uneasy because of the purity of her renunciation and the simplicity of her scientific method. They didn’t want her to succeed, because that would invalidate the rationale for their research staffs and bloated budgets. MacGregor could also be opinionated and blunt. People didn’t like that in anyone, but they liked it less in a woman. She’d been languishing in the biology department at the University of Florida, in Gainesville, when Dr. Malkiel’s predecessor, recognizing her genius, had raised the money to bring her to Pilgrim Lake and set her up with a lifetime position. That was the other thing that amazed Madeleine about MacGregor. She’d been at Pilgrim Lake since 1947! For thirty-five years she’d been inspecting her corn with Mendelian patience, receiving no encouragement or feedback on her work, just showing up every day, involved in her own process of discovery, forgotten by the world and not caring. And now, finally, this, the Nobel, the vindication of her life’s work, and though she seemed pleased enough, you could see that it hadn’t been the Prize she was after at all. MacGregor’s reward had been the work itself, the daily doing of it, the achievement made of a million unremarkable days.

In her own small way, Madeleine understood what Diane MacGregor was up against at the male-dominated lab. At every dinner party she and Leonard went to, Madeleine inevitably ended up in the