“The Ship of Fools,” Strauss said. “Hieronymus Bosch. Doesn’t hold a candle to the original, of course. You’ve been to the Louvre?”
Lizzie snorted.
He laughed. “Here’s where you say, ‘If you want me to go to Paris, triple my stipend.’ ”
“Would that work?”
“God no.”
He opened the takeout containers. Steam rose, along with a rich, greasy smell that made her stomach gurgle, she hoped not loud enough for him to hear.
“You want me to run you through my proposal for the next set of tests?” she asked, flipping through her notes one oily fingerprint at a time.
“I don’t like to work while I eat. It’s called a lunch break for a reason—let’s break, shall we?”
“Oh.”
“If that’s all right with you?”
There was nothing wrong with a fellow and her adviser having lunch together in a semiprivate locale, and no reason said lunch couldn’t stray from professional to personal. Lizzie knew this. She also knew enough about academic optics to hesitate. It was one thing to be seen as a teacher’s pet; another to be seen as a teacher’s plaything. She knew what happened to those girls, the ones who let themselves notice the body attached to the mind, the unexpectedly muscular forearms, the stubble gracing sharp jawline, the fingers, thick but nimble, long, strong. It wasn’t even necessary to notice such things, it was enough for other people to assume you had. Once, in her first semester of grad school, her adviser had reached across his desk to brush a hypothetical strand of hair from her face and said, “If you act like you’re beautiful, other people will believe it.” Since then he’d been her most tireless supporter. She was never sure whether she was supposed to feel like she owed him something, or the reverse.
“Of course it’s okay,” she told Strauss. It was just lunch.
“Good. Now. Question for you. What’s the first thing you remember?”
“From what?”
“From life. First memories. A little pet project. I collect them from everyone I meet.”
He had a rascal’s smile, a crooked canine that made his face less intimidating when revealed. There was a tiny shaving scratch at the curve of his chin, a redness on the bridge of his nose where his glasses had rubbed too tight. She wanted to give him a good answer, a memory that was true.
“My mother, crying at the kitchen table. I don’t think she knew I was there.”
“Do you remember why she was crying? Or how it made you feel?”
“Scared.”
Strauss scribbled something in a narrow black journal. “Did she cry a lot?”
Lizzie answered as a scientist. “You mean, because if the episode was an outlier, it would contribute to the likelihood that this memory would imprint?”
“I mean did she cry a lot. That seems like it would have been hard.” He closed the notebook, slurped down a large mouthful of noodles, mumbled around it. “Promise me you’ll never tell my wife you saw me eat this.”
“She’s antinoodle?”
“Antisalt, anti-MSG, antiflavor. I think I’d prefer death to another lean turkey sandwich.”
“I suspect your wife might feel differently.”
“I suspect you’d be surprised.”
He stopped, like he’d said something unexpected, or maybe he was simply aping the expression on her face. “A joke,” he said. “And she’s not making me the sandwiches, incidentally. Simply shaming me into making them myself. If I really loved my daughter, et cetera.” Then, “In case you were wondering, I do. Not so incidentally.”
It was hard to picture, the great Benjamin Strauss fishing LEGOs out of the carpet, washing sippy cups, and scraping spaghetti sauce off the wall; Strauss applauding as a tutu’d little girl spun a pirouette and curtsied. Or would Strauss be the kind of father who’d forbid his daughter the froth of pink and pirouettes? More likely, Lizzie decided, the kind oblivious to its existence, because he had to work.
“You were saying,” he said. “Your mother.”
“I most definitely was not.”
“Hmm.”
“You ever consider switching to clinical? You’ve got a great Freudian hmm.”
He clapped a hand to his chest. “Slings and arrows to the heart!” But he looked delighted. She had delighted him. “You would have made an excellent Dora. Very satisfying evasions.”
“Okay, so what’s your first memory?”
“My father, in his armchair, listening to Bach. I would have been maybe four or five? Old enough to have noticed he was a bastard. Young enough not to see why.”
It was part of the Strauss mythology: father a Holocaust survivor, son dedicating his life to the problem of traumatic memory, in loving tribute to the man who’d never escaped it.
“In this memory, he was smiling,” Strauss said. He was not. “That was the extremity, if one is required. I remember hiding somewhere, low—under a table, maybe? Thinking if I moved, if I made a sound, I would ruin it. The last of his happiness gone, and it would be my fault.”
Lizzie watched his hand, felt an insane impulse to hold it, give comfort, warmth.
“The thing about memory, of course”—his fingers sanded the edge of the journal—“was I really worrying about that then, or do I only think so now? Or has the retrieval of that sliver, every time I conjure it up over the years, warped the image so much that there’s nothing left of the original? Am I simply remembering something I used to remember, a distorted copy of a distorted copy?” He shrugged off whatever mood had descended. “The only child’s burden, I guess. No one left to ask, no one left to remember with.”
She liked this version of him, shrunk down to human scale. She liked him small; she liked him vulnerable. She did not like that she liked this.
“After that day, I never saw him listening to that record without tears. Did I miss them the first time? Did I just later imagine the smile, pick the version of the past I preferred? And that’s the thing, isn’t it. No way of knowing.”
“I think about that a lot, having no one to check your memories against. Having siblings doesn’t save you from ending up alone. Everyone ends up there eventually, right? Alone with whatever memories matter most?”
“Jesus, that’s depressing.” He laughed. “I knew I liked you.” He liked her; this had not occurred to her.
Strauss checked his watch. She checked it, too, more stealthily: expensive.
“I have a meeting. Well, more of a schmoozing. Walk with me?”
They strolled, lingering along the earliest of the historical displays.
“Most people talk about the science of the past as if it was barbaric, but these were wonders, in their day.” Strauss gestured to the faces of the dead scientists, framed smugly beside the evidence of their landmark achievements. Pinel and Tuke, fathers of the modern mental asylum. James and Freud, ur-fathers of modern psychology. Charcot, father of hysteria, and beside his portrait, the spiritual daughter, Augustine, teenage hysteric draped in ethereal white, face contorted in what looked like orgiastic joy. Egas Moniz, father of the lobotomy, for which he’d received a Nobel Prize. Walter Freeman, surgeon and salesman, who’d peddled the technique across America, framed beside his winning slogan, Lobotomy Brings Them Home. “In their time, these men were all miracle workers,” Strauss said.