Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

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.

8I’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.

9Philip 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.

10Although 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.

11I 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.

I.

After graduating from college, I began medical school 12in 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.

This was perhaps even more true fifty years ago than it is today. My classmates — or at least those I came in contact with over my four years — were easily divided into two categories. Those in the first category, the less objectionable of the two, were dull and obedient and enjoyed memorization. Those in the second, more offensive group were grasping and dreamy, bewitched by their own future status in the world. But they were all ambitious, competitive, and eager for their own bit of glory.

I was not a particularly distinguished student. Although I was probably one of the most intellectually curious and creative members of my class, or even the entire school, there were many, many others who were better, more diligent students than I: they went to every class, they took notes, they did each night’s reading. But I was occupied with other things. At the time I was an avid beetle collector, a habit and interest I had maintained since childhood; naturally, the opportunities to find unusual beetles in Boston were somewhat limited, but during the spring months, I would take sometimes days at a time and ride a train down to Connecticut, where Owen was earning a doctorate in American literature at Yale. I would leave my bag at his place and then catch another, smaller, dozier train out to the countryside, where I would spend the day in one field or another with my net and my notebook and a pickle jar containing a bloom of cotton damp with formaldehyde. When the sky grew orange, I would hitchhike back to New Haven, where I would spend the evening in Owen’s suite, eating whatever he had prepared and trying, with limited success, to engage him in conversation. Owen had grown more and more silent over the years (for which I must admit I was grateful, for his elaboration on his studies, which concerned Walt Whitman and the American imagination, sorely tested my claims of intellectual promiscuity), and watching him cut his omelet into small, fussy trapezoids, I had to stop myself thinking that he reminded me of our stolid, lumpen father.

Naturally, my professors were not enthusiastic about my skipping so many classes, but since I always did well on my tests and papers, there was little they could do to punish me but deliver lectures on how my lack of discipline would all but ensure mediocrity in my professional life. I didn’t doubt their seriousness or their sincerity, but neither did I allow myself to worry about my own future; even then I knew that I was bound to have the sort of adventures for which I would not be best or usefully equipped by a perfect attendance record.

I do not wish, however, to idealize what was at least partially a fit of tiresome and immature disrespect for my professors and the institution. Now, in retrospect, with my career and legacy being what they are, I suppose it is all very easy to say that I knew everything would resolve itself in my favor in the end and that my lack of ambition was genuine. Though if I am to be honest, I suppose I should acknowledge too that I was even then so eager for a certain sort of greatness, the sort that seemed both possible and yet so distant, a blurry-edged dream on the periphery of my vision, that at the time it seemed easier to pretend to all and to myself that I did not care for a spectacular future at all, lest I come to think that my time in medical school — and my successes or failures there — might become a predictor for the rest of my life, something that might determine the chances of that shimmering image coalescing into something more vivid, or not.