Other Men's Daughters by Richard Stern Page B

youngish man from the Rockefeller Institute. He’d gone to New Guinea and encountered the Foré, a neolithic people of remarkable metabolism. Their potassium-sodium balance was incredible; lactating women suffered potassium poisoning, the urine output was as little as 200 ccs, yet there was no uremia. The Foré were cannibals, they had no numbers over ten, had no conception of themselves as a tribe or group, couldn’t swim, had no boats or bridges, knew nothing of the world beyond a hill and thirty or forty other people. As for kuru, it was a virogenic, pre-senile dementia without inflammation and with a median incubation period of ten to fifteen years. After a year’s work, Hanson realized it was a variation of the Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease: it derived from the Foré’s cannibalism. (As a mark of endearment and respect, the Foré cooked, ate and ornamented themselves with the flesh of dead relatives; their “how do you do” was “I eat your buttocks.”)
    After the lecture, Merriwether joined Hanson and Fred Matthias, the department chairman, at Matthias’s house on Kirkland Place. Mrs. Matthias had furnished this jewel of Cambridge Georgian like an office. Matthias was a genial emptiness. Merriwether thought that his wife, a smart neurotic woman, had set this Naugahyde stage to advertise the vacancy.
    Hanson was hawk-faced, intense, knowledgeable about everything connected with his work, ethnography, epidemiology, genetics, medical history, even the politics and economy of the area. He had not only taught the Foré about kuru but about steel, swimming, boat-building, salt, arithmetic, and the great world outside their hills. “I felt Promethean.”
    Merriwether walked home through the Yard. What human variety there was. Was it only last night he’d been damning human sameness?
    Back home, it was George not Esmé, asleep on the bed. The reading light was on, his son’s little arm was over his eyes. On the telephone table was a note in George’s unsteady script. “Sinthea called. Two times. She will call tomorow.”
    Relief foamed in him. His darling George. The taker of this message. Please God, may it not harm him.
    The weekend went well. He told Sarah he had to stay in the lab with his rats. “I can’t tell when they’re going to pop off.” He and Cynthia stayed in Fischer’s room, watched television, played chess and read Anna Karenina to each other. Saturday night, they went to Boston, getting on the train at Central Square, sitting a few seats apart in case they met anyone he knew. A trial for both of them. Merriwether, in his tie and tweed jacket, Cynthia in her black stockings, mini-skirt and boy’s sweater smiling nervously, foolishly over three seats. He moved next to her. “It’s too silly.” Yet he was so nervous in the restaurant, she said, “Let’s just go home.” They didn’t feel at ease until they were back in Fischer’s bed.
    The next week Cynthia wrote him a letter in the love code of Kitty and Levin. “Bd,” it went
    i  d  of  l  f  y  
w  y  1)  l  w  m  or  2)  m  m
    C  o
    In the laboratory he worked it out to “Bobbie dear” or “darling” “I’m dying of love for you. Will you 1) live with me or 2) marry me.” He had to get “C o” explained on the phone.
    â€œâ€˜Check one,’” she said.
    As for “dying of love,” it was hyperbolic, but he understood the feeling in it. Love-need was a crab-grip in the intestines. But if the grip was Cynthia, why did he scarcely think of her? At times, his sense of her was more her name than anything else. Not quite the name, but the idea of Cynthia within it. It made no physiological sense. The Love-Grip. Why not the Love Goddess? What did missing her mean? Costive tension? He missed