Colleen McCullough - The Prodigal Son

The trouble was that their teachers couldn’t protest that the friendship caused a drop in grades or a lack of interest in sport; Jim and Millie were straight A-plus students; Jim was a champion boxer and wrestler, and Millie a track star. They graduated at the head of their respective classes, with a virtual carte blanche in choice of a college. Harvard, Chubb, or any of the many great universities.

They went to Columbia together, enrolled in Science with a biochemistry major. Perhaps they hoped that New York City’s teeming, hugely diverse student population would grant them some peace from their perpetual torments. If so, their hopes were dashed at once. They endured four more years of persecution, but showed the world they couldn’t be crushed by graduating summa cum laude . Patrick and Nessie had tried to keep in contact, go down to see them when they wouldn’t come home, but were always rebuffed. It was as if, Patrick had thought at that time, they were growing a carapace thick enough and hard enough to render them invulnerable, and that included shutting out parents. He and Nessie had gone to their graduation, but Jim’s parents had not. Apparently they had given up the fight, just as strenuous on their side to sever their son from his white girlfriend—and who could blame them either? It takes maturity to know the pain …

The day after they graduated, Jim and Millie married in a registry office with no one there to wish them well. It was near Penn Station; they walked, carrying their suitcases, to board a crowded, smelly train to Chicago, traveling on student passes. In Chicago they changed to another crowded, smelly train that ambled on a poorly maintained railbed all the way to L.A. For most of the two and a half days they sat on the floor, but at least at Caltech they’d be warm in winter.

At the end of the two-year Master’s program Jim was starting to be known, his color beginning to be an advantage north of the Mason-Dixon Line—until people learned he had a beautiful white biochemist wife. However, the University of Chicago was willing to take Mr. and Mrs. Hunter as doctoral fellows—back to cold winters and cheerless summers.

When they received their Ph.D.s they seemed to meet a solid wall of opposition. No matter how much a school wanted Dr. Jim Hunter, it wasn’t prepared to offer employment to his wife, Dr. Millicent Hunter. He was one of the biggest whales in the vast protean ocean, whereas she was a sprat. As post-doctoral fellows or as faculty, the financial outlay for two Hunters was considered excessive. If this was complicated by the inter-racial nature of their union, no one was prepared to say.

After six years in Chicago they were poorer than ever, never having actually held a job. Their grants contained a subsistence-style living allowance, and on that they subsisted, dressing from K-mart and eating supermarket bargains. A Chinese meal to go was a luxury they indulged in once a month.

Then their luck turned.

In 1966 the President of Chubb University, Mawson MacIntosh, was actively looking for racial misfits—and also for potential Nobel Prize winners. Jim Hunter looked good on both counts; M.M. was determined that Chubb would stay in the forefront of academic integration at all levels. Without any idea that Dr. Millicent Hunter was the Holloman Medical Examiner’s daughter, M.M. sent a quiet directive to Dean Hugo Werther of Chemistry that the Doctors Hunter be given two faculty positions. They were not in the same lab, and her post involved some teaching, but they were both in the Burke Biology Tower and would be seen together. Dr. Millie pleased M.M.; biochemistry was a discipline that visibly changed while you looked at it, so teachers were rare. Whereas Dr. Jim Hunter was a breaker of new ground, his mind that of a true genius. Only his having a beautiful white highly educated wife told against him, and that could not be seen to matter. The couple had been married for years, so probably had nothing left to learn about racial discrimination.

Thus it had been that over two years ago Millie had phoned out of the blue and asked if she and Jim could beg a bed for a couple of nights. Admittedly four of the O’Donnell daughters were gone, but of spare bedrooms there were none; Carmine had come to their rescue by giving them use of his apartment in the Nutmeg Insurance building before he sold it upon his marriage.

Overjoyed though they were at the return of Millie and Jim, Patrick and Nessie discovered very quickly that whatever they could offer was too little, too late. The Doctors Hunter were armored against the world so strongly that even parents couldn’t find a weakness in the rivets. And what could they have done differently? Fear for a child leads to all sorts of hideously wrong decisions, Patrick reflected as he tramped up a set of cold stone stairs. If only Jim had looked like Harry Belafonte or at least been an ordinary brown! But he didn’t, and he wasn’t.

If the relationship between the Doctor’s Hunter and her parents was a rather distant one, it was also genuinely friendly. What Patrick and Nessie continued to fear was simple: how could a fifteen-year-old possibly own the wisdom to choose the right life’s partner? One day either Millie or Jim was going to wake up and discover that the childhood bond was gone, that a cruel world had finally managed to separate them. So far it had not happened, but it would. It would! They had no children, but that was probably deliberate. Until now, they plain couldn’t afford a family. The steel in them! It amazed Patrick, who had to wonder if his own comfortable marriage to Nessie could have taken one-tenth of the blows Millie and Jim took every day.

Over two years last September since they came to Holloman!

Carmine was in. As he came through the door, Patrick had to smile. His first cousin was napping in the extremely efficient way he had perfected over hundreds of hours waiting to be called as a trial witness. What had happened last night?

“Did you and Desdemona toast the New Year too lavishly, cuz?” he asked.

Carmine didn’t jump or twitch; he opened one clear eye. “Nope. Alex is teething and Julian is like his daddy—a very light sleeper.”

“You would have them so close together.”

“Don’t look at me. It was Desdemona’s idea.” Carmine swung his feet off the kitchen table he used as a desk and opened both eyes. “Why are you slumming, Patsy?”

“Have you heard of tetrodotoxin?”

“Vaguely. It’s been suggested in a sensational Australian case some years ago—the symptoms fit, but they couldn’t isolate a poison of any kind. The Japanese flirt with it, I found out during my years in the occupation forces as a Tokyo M.P. Blowfish, blue-ringed octopus and some other marine nasties. According to my sources, it’s fully metabolized and out of the system before autopsy can detect it,” Carmine said.

Patrick blinked. “You perpetually amaze me, cuz. I presume it has to be logged in a poisons register if it’s anywhere near the general public, but what happens if it’s nowhere around the general public, yet goes missing?”

“That depends on whether you’re ethical, or the type who covers his ass. Ethical, and you report its loss to someone . If inclined to cover your own ass, you write ‘accidentally destroyed’ or ‘out of date and discarded as per regulations’ in a register. But I presume this victim is ethical, right?”

“Right. My problem daughter, Millie. She’s been working with the stuff, had enough left over to kill ten heavyweight boxers, divided into six glass ampoules of a hundred milligrams each—yes, yes, I’ll slow down! She put the six ampoules into a beaker, stuck the skull-and-crossbones on it, then shoved it in the back of her lab refrigerator.” Patrick frowned. “She didn’t tell anyone it was gone until she came to see me. I advised her to remain silent, to tell no one further.”