50 in 50

By the middle of the afternoon Dr. Livermore was very tired. He had had little sleep the previous night, and the FBI man's visit had disturbed him. Then he had to put the technicians to work clearing up the mess in the bottle room, and while they could be trusted to do a good job, he nevertheless wanted to check it out for himself when they were done. He would do that and then perhaps take a nap. He pushed the elaborate scrawled codes of the gene charts away from him and rose stiffly. He was beginning to feel his years. Perhaps it was time to consider joining his patients in the warm comfort of the geriatric levels. He smiled at the thought and started for the labs.

There was little formality among his staff, and he never thought to knock on the door of Leatha's private office when he found it closed. His thoughts were on the bottles. He pushed the door open and found her bent over the desk her face in her hands, crying.

"What's wrong?" he called out before he realized that it might have been wiser to leave quietly. He had a sudden insight as to what the trouble might be.

She raised a tear-dampened and reddened face, and he closed the door behind him.

"I'm sorry to walk in like this. I should have knocked."

"No, Dr. Livermore, that's all right." She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. 'Tm sorry you have to see me like this."

''Perfectly normal. I think I understand."

"No, it has nothing to do with bottles."

"I know. It's that girl, isn't it? I had hoped you wouldn't find out."

Leatha was too distraught to ask him how he knew but began sobbing again at this reminder. Livermore wanted to leave but could think of no way to do it gracefully. At the present moment he just could not be interested in this domestic tragedy.

"I saw her," Leatha said. "I went there, God knows why, driven, I suppose. To see just what he preferred to me was so humiliating. A blowsy thing, vulgar, the obvious kind of thing a man might like. And she's colored. How could he have done this. .?"

The sobbing began again and Livermore stopped, his hand on the knob. He had wanted to leave before he became involved himself. Now he was involved.

"I remember your talking to me about it once," he said. "Where you come from. Somewhere in the South, isn't it?"

The complete irrelevancy of the question stopped Leatha, even slowed her tears. "Yes, Mississippi. A little fishing town named, Biloxi."

"I thought so. And you grew up with a good jolt of racial bias. The worst thing you have against this girl is the fact that she is black."

"I never said that. But there are things…"

"No, there are not things, if you mean races or colors or religions or anything like that. I am shocked to hear you, a geneticist, even suggest that race can have any relevancy to your problems. Deeply shocked. Though, unhappily, I'm not surprised."

"I don't care about her. It's him — Gust — what he did to me."

"He did nothing at all. My God, woman, you want equality and equal pay and freedom from childbearing — and you have all these things. So you can't very well complain if you throw a man out of your bed and he goes to someone else."

"What do you mean?" she gasped, shocked.

"I'm sorry. It's not my place to talk like this. I became angry. You're an adult; you'll have to make your own decisions about your marriage."

"No. You can't leave it like that. You said something, and you're going to tell me exactly what you meant."

Livermore was still angry. He dropped into a chair and ordered his thoughts before he spoke again.

"I'm. an old-fashioned M.D., so perhaps I had better talk from a doctor's point of view. You're a young woman in good health in the prime of your life. If you came to me for marriage counseling I would tell you that your marriage appears to be in trouble and you are probably the cause — the original cause, that is. Though it has gone far enough now so that you both have a good deal to be responsible for. It appears that in your involvement in your work, your major interests outside your marriage, you have lost your sexuality. You have no time for it. And I am not talking about sex now but all the things that make a woman feminine. The way you dress, apply makeup, carry yourself, think about yourself. Your work has come to occupy the central portion of your life, and your husband has to take second-best. You must realize that some of the freedom women gained deprived the men of certain things. A married man now has no children or a mother for his children. He has no one who is primarily interested in him and his needs. I don't insist that all marriages must exist on a master-and-slave relationship, but there should be a deal more give-and-take in a marriage than yours appears to offer. Just ask yourself — what does your husband get out of this marriage other than sexual frustration? If it's just a sometime companion, he would be far better off with a male roommate, an engineer he could talk shop with."

The silence lengthened, and Livermore finally coughed and cleared his throat and stood.