The move to Harvard is easy. Deb, it turns out, has no earthly attachments whatsoever and happily sells, donates, and trashes whatever possessions she and Peter can’t fit in their new on-campus apartment. Peter laughs and calls her a vicious cut-throat when she tosses a picture frame that Deb had since childhood into the garbage bin, the glass crunching satisfyingly into a hundred pieces.
The work itself, however, is less amiable.
Peter returns one day from a departmental luncheon. Deb, of course, had not been invited, though the other male research assistants accompanied the psychologists. He is buzzing, invigorated, a little drunk, with new ideas for studying behaviorism and intricate plans for rat mazes sketched in pen on the backs of napkins and in the marginalia of the lunch menu.
“What does this have anything to do with our research?” Deb asks. They’d made plans before leaving for Harvard to study personality, empathetic response, and self-psychology. Peter had been particularly excited because he would be using the Morgan-Murray Thematic Apperception Test developed by his Harvard colleague, Henry Murray (and Henry’s lover, Christiana Morgan, Deb wanted to remind Peter, but his excitement was so infectious that she didn’t say anything). Peter’s work would fold seamlessly into Harvard’s psychoanalytical climate, essentially jumpstarting his career at Harvard and perhaps—or, more accurately, hopefully—garnering additional grants and funds.
Deb was excited by the new direction of their research and the TAT test because it claimed to explore the dynamics of personality. It was a possible answer to the questions that nagged like insistent flies in the meat of her mind: why do we act the way we do? What are the consequences to those actions? Can we change the way we think? Can we make different choices?
Now, these answers are in jeopardy. For a study that already feels out of date. “Aren’t other labs doing this research?” Deb asks Peter when he explains that the rat mazes will help them study the effects of positive and negative stimuli.
“Ours would involve certain elements that haven’t been studied in depth,” Peter says cryptically.
“What elements?”
“They call it lysergic acid diethylamide. We’d be studying the effects of stimuli on rats under the influence of LSD.”
“You’ve never mentioned this before,” Deb says.
“It’s cutting-edge stuff, Deborah. LSD was only invented a few years ago. Who knows what effects it has on the human mind? It’s exciting—revolutionary!”
Looking back, if Deb studies the picture of their life together like one of the TAT cards, she can see how easy it was for Harvard to rope in a man who was desperate to advance his professional life. Peter is singularly-minded. He doesn’t let marriage or children or the million other domestic minutiae that plague men across the country stand in the way of his research. He is smart, dedicated, and obsessed with notoriety. He would do anything if it meant rubbing elbows with the psychological elite that researched and taught at Harvard. He was perfect for the job—and perfectly desperate enough to accept it, even if it meant foregoing his own interests. And Deb’s.
It explains the sudden, whip-lashing shift to the kind of research that involves long, elaborate mazes and rats that squeal so loudly that Deb wears huge, woolly earmuffs to the lab to drown out the noise.
At summer break, Deb leaves Peter behind in the lab to go visit Violet and the new baby. He is six months old and crawling all over, as if he is a windup toy and will not stop until he sputters out of energy. Deb helps Violet wrangle him until he finally crashes in his aunt’s lap, his face chubby and settled in sleep. “He’s precious,” Deb says, curling a shock of his white hair around her finger. She sniffs the top of his head—biscuit-y, warm. A doughy, moldable thing.
Not unlike the rats at work which are surprisingly sweet and cleverer than Deb cares to admit. It has become painful for Deb to sort, count, and tag every new shipment of rat pups. Their futures are written in her scrawled handwriting. Their trust in Deb is absolute. They don’t know that the hand that feeds them is the same one administering brain-melting hallucinogenics and pressing the electric shock button.
Deb hands the baby off to his mother then calls for the other children. She has brought the TAT cards with her and fans them out on the kitchen table for the children to observe. Charlotte grabs a handful and passes them out like playing cards. “We will tell a story with them,” she instructs. “A whole story, with a beginning and an end. You must use all your cards, and the story must make sense.”
Deb listens as the children make up stories about ghosts and nuns and crazy women locked in attics. “You can tell he is very angry with her, see?” Charlotte says about a picture of a man staring in the distance while a woman clings to his shoulder. “Look, this is her crying in the next picture. Her husband has left her, and now she is all alone.”
“What do the cards mean, Aunt Deb?” Sunny asks. He sounds troubled.
“They don’t mean anything. Or, they can mean anything you want them to,” Deb answers.
“Charlotte told us they predict the future.” One of his cards contains a woman shadowed by a dark, sinister specter. In another, a masked figure stands amid a ruin of gravestones. The line of his cards extends like a life sentence along the edge of the kitchen table.
“I think Charlotte is just teasing,” Deb says, giving her niece a disapproving look.
“No, I’m not,” Charlotte says. “I’m not lying. This could be the future.”
“Aunt Deb!” William says, pointing his finger at one of Sunny’s cards. It is a picture of two women in a research laboratory not unlike Peter’s. One of the women is in a lab coat, tending to a row of glass beakers while the other stands a distance away, matronly in her eyeglasses and short hair.
She can’t explain why, but the picture makes Deb feel uneasy. “These are just cards, Charlotte,” she says. “Just pictures. The cards that predict your future are called Tarot. But those don’t really work, either.” Deb gathers the TAT cards and tucks them away. Before Charlotte can throw a fit, Deb asks, “Who wants to look for snakes?” and the children run gleefully outside to tug up small boulders and knock over logs in search of slithering, hissing flashes of light.
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