Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

I should also like to say a few words about the media coverage surrounding Norton’s trial, for it seems foolish to ignore both its tenor and its scope. I will first say that given the nature of the crimes of which Norton was accused, it has not surprised me in the least that the media has wasted pages and pages on stories that embroider, elaborately and with a shocking disregard for the truth, upon the few facts of Norton’s personal life known to the public. (Admittedly, the stories did, rather begrudgingly, detail some of his considerable accomplishments, but only to throw into sharper relief his purported wickedness.)

I recall that in those days I stood vigil with Norton in his house while he awaited his trial (outside, a group of television reporters spent their days congregating on the curb at the edge of Norton’s lawn, eating and chatting in the buzzy, insect-thick summer air as if at a picnic), of the many (unfulfilled, naturally) requests we received for interviews, only one — regrettably, Playboy —invited Norton to write his own defense instead of dispatching some salivating young writer to interpret his life and alleged misdeeds for the reading public. (I had originally thought the offer a good idea, despite the forum, but Norton was worried that whatever he wrote would be manipulated and used against him as a confession. He was correct, of course, and that was the end of that idea.) But I also knew that the realization that he must not allow himself to speak in his own defense infuriated and saddened him.

The ironic thing about this was that shortly before he had been arrested, Norton had in fact been planning to write his memoirs. By that time—1995—he was semiretired and no longer forced to contend with the various administrative duties and hassles of the lab. This is not to imply that he was not still the most vital and indispensable mind there — simply that he had begun to allow himself to organize his time in different ways.

However, Norton was not to have the opportunity to record his remarkable life, at least not under the conditions I know he would have preferred. But as I have always said, his is the sort of mind that can surmount any challenge. And so in April, two months after he began serving his sentence, I asked in my daily letter to him whether he might not consider writing his memoirs anyway. Not only, I told him, would they make a great contribution to the worlds of letters and science, but he would at last have a chance to prove to anyone interested that he was not what the world had been so eager to make him. I explained that I would be honored to type and, if he might let me, lightly edit his writing, as I had done before for various papers he had submitted to journals. It would be, I wrote, a fascinating project for me, and one that might keep him entertained.

A week later, Norton sent me a brief note:

Although I can’t say I wish to spend what may be the final years of my life trying to convince anyone that I am not guilty of the crimes they have decided I am, I have chosen to begin, as you say, the “story of my life.” My trust [in you] is … [very] great . 3

I had the first installment a month later.

There are a few things I suppose I should say by means of introduction before I invite the reader to learn of Norton’s extraordinary life. For it, after all, is a story with disease at its heart.

Norton, of course, will say it all better than I, but I will here give the reader some details about the man at hand. He once remarked to me that his life did not begin in any meaningful way until he left the country for U’ivu, where he would make discoveries that would transform modern medicine and lead to his receipt of the Nobel Prize. In 1950, when he was twenty-five, he made his first trip to the then obscure Micronesian country, a trip that would change his life — and revolutionize the scientific community — forever. While in U’ivu, he lived among a “lost tribe” that would come to be called the Opa’ivu’eke people on what was then known (among U’ivuans, at least) as the “Forbidden Island” of Ivu’ivu, the largest in the country’s small formation. It was there that he discovered a condition — an undocumented condition, one never before studied — that was affecting the native population. The U’ivuans were known (and to some extent still are known) for the brevity of their lifespans. But while on Ivu’ivu, Norton encountered a group of islanders who were living far beyond a normal lifespan: twenty, fifty, even a hundred years longer. There were two other components that made this discovery even more remarkable: first, that while the affected persons did not physically age, they did mentally deteriorate; and second, that their condition was not congenital but acquired.

Never had men gotten closer to eternal life than they did with Norton’s discovery. And yet never had such a wonderful promise slipped away so quickly: a secret found, a secret lost, all within the space of a decade.

But Norton’s work among the Opa’ivu’eke reflected seismic shifts in fields beyond medicine: his nearly two decades spent among the tribe all but spawned a new field of modern medical anthropology, and his writings from his years there are now staples of many college curricula.

But it was also in U’ivu 4that his troubles began. Of the many things that defined Norton’s travels through U’ivu, one was the origins of what would become his enduring love for children. Ivu’ivu, for those readers who are unfamiliar with it, is a daunting landscape, as beautiful as it is intimidating. Everything there is larger and purer and more awesome than imaginable, and in every direction lies a vista more spectacular than the last: to one side, an endless stretch of water, so motionless and intensely colored that one is unable to look at it for any significant length of time; to the other, long, deep folds of mountain, its peaks disappearing into a froth of fog. From his initial visit to Ivu’ivu, Norton hired U’ivuans to be his guides, to lead him in search of sights and objects he had never before seen. Decades later, he would — at their pleading — take back with him to Maryland their children and grandchildren and raise them as his own, offering them the sort of upbringing they would have had no means of experiencing in U’ivu. He also brought back with him many orphans, toddlers and young children living in appalling conditions with no hope of ever changing their lives.

Before he knew it, he had accumulated a brood of over forty. Many of these children, adopted in three waves that spanned almost three decades, have returned to Micronesia, where they are now doctors, lawyers, professors, chiefs, teachers, and diplomats. Others have chosen to remain in the United States, where they have taken jobs or remain in school. And still others have, I regret to say, vanished into poverty and drugs and crime. (When one has forty-three children, one cannot expect all of them to be successes.) But now, of course, none of them are Norton’s any longer. And Norton is, by their choice, no longer theirs: their near-mass abandonment of him during his recent hardships was nothing less than shocking. This was a man, after all, who had given them shelter, language, education — all the tools they needed to one day betray him, as indeed they did. Norton’s children learned the message of the West, and America, all too well; somewhere they learned that accusations of perversity are an easy sell, accusations that not even a Nobel Prize, a respected mind, could successfully withstand. It is a great pity; I had once been fond of quite a few of them.