Prospero's Daughter by Elizabeth Nunez Page A

Christ, but regretted their decision later, with the war, after the deaths of so many of England’s most promising. After an explosion in a field in France brought their father back home a quadriplegic. By the time he and Paul left for medical school, their parents were proselytizing atheists.
    It was because of their father that he and Paul decided to become doctors. He chose research, for unlike Paul, he was happiest when he was in the library, his head buried in a pile of dusty books. He told his father that he believed it was possible to grow new arms and legs for him in the laboratory. He was sure it was only a matter of figuring out the right cells and stimulating them. Then, when they multiplied into arms and legs, he would attach them where the old limbs had been amputated.
    Voodoo medicine, Paul called it, but their father grabbed on to the hope Peter offered. “Maybe not as perfect as the ones you had before, Father, but they could grow back almost as strong.”
    Paul scoffed at him. He was the realist, the practical man. He spoke of a future of mechanical artificial limbs. Better still, robots that could respond to human command.
    “You wouldn’t have to do a thing,” Paul said to his father. “It would be like having a personal servant.”
    His father preferred the fantasies Peter spun for him.
    “All it would take is figuring out the human genome,” Peter said. “Then we would have the secret to life. We could even make a clone of you, Father.”
    Their mother, who loved Paul best anyhow, was horrified. “Dr. Frankenstein was a monster,” she said.
    Peter waved her away. “Oh, those ideas are passé,” he said. “No one is planning to use the dead.”
    “Playing God,” she said.
    “Yes, playing God,” Paul repeated after her, but even when he was ridiculing Peter envy was eating him up.
    In medical school, it was obvious that the professors admired Peter. He was the brain, the smarter of the Bidwedder men. But the students loved Paul. He was the popular one. They consulted Peter when they were faced with a difficult problem. At examination time, they stuck to him like flies to honey, but it was with Paul they went to the pub. Peter’s ardor, his focus, his single-mindedness on curing every illness he came upon, made them uneasy. His patients were not human to him. To him, they were a mass of cells, tissue, blood and bones, not people, not living, breathing men and women with feelings and desires.
    Peter became more human to them when he married. He still worked hard, but he no longer slept in the lab, as he often did when nothing mattered except the project that engaged him. His wife was beautiful: blond hair, blue eyes, a perfectly shaped oval face, and the pale alabaster skin that so many Englishmen loved. But what Peter Gardner boasted about was her virtue. He had married a virgin. So certain he was that no one could seduce her that he offered to put his head on a block to be chopped off if anyone proved him wrong. “Her virtue is nonpareil,” he said. Paul’s friends called Peter “Nonpareil” behind his back, but not only because of what he claimed for his wife, but because of what he claimed for himself. No one was smarter than he, he seemed to imply by his serious demeanor. And, indeed, all that he touched turned to gold.
    Then his wife died, three years after giving birth to a daughter, and he was his old self again.
    Except for his little girl, Virginia, Peter became, in all his human interactions, cold and distant. Inhuman, Paul accused him of being when Peter refused to lend him money after he lost his savings and three months’ salary at a gambling table. “Keep it up and you will kill someone one day.” It was a matter of time before Paul’s words proved prophetic.
    Peter had not intended to kill the woman. He had intended to cure her. He had given her one of his concoctions. Put it in her IV drip.
    It was not the first time he had given one of his patients the experimental