Chapter 6-1

Dr. Frankenstein walked to the beach and climbed the hill as far as the wooden bench that overlooked the ocean. He was glad to have written his recollections for Matt, risky as it was to reveal so much. They needed Matt here, now, so there was no choice but to include him in the whole picture. And he was enjoying their talks, Matt’s naive enthusiasm for new learning.

In many parts of the world, life was still ok. Like here, now, sitting on this bench, looking out on color-saturated, pristine nature, and not another human in sight.

He thought about Parallel Immortality, the implications of being yourself and also able to live more than one life at a time.

He had made friends throughout the world as he did his research--not in the cloning field where he had no reputation, but secretly, with the great minds of physics and biology, especially brain science. He fantasized inviting the very best scientists in the world to a meeting at Green Gulch where he would reveal what he had done. And enlist their help in figuring out what to do about Laura. But paranoia over the secret getting out overtook his desire to have a real meeting of great minds.

Laura. She was to Victor Frankenstein’s monster what digital is to film. Laura is identical, not a copy, certainly not a lesser copy. She had no stitches to heal, no degradation from a copying process. Sweet, immaculate Laura.

After Laura left for a long walk along the cliffs, Matt returned to their room. He sat on the floor with his back against the trunk at the end of the bed with his legs straight out in front of him. No lotus position for those knees. He closed his eyes and began to watch his breath. In out in, out in out. But a hyper-awareness of the noises in the inn kept him from relaxing. The building creaked and groaned in the wind. He heard the narrow hallways and staircases complaining like his own stiff joints. From the room next door, he heard the intermittent tinkle of pee hitting porcelain. Was his hearing preternaturally acute? He seemed to hear, or rather feel, sound in the floorboards beneath him. Since he’d started taking the strudel drug colors had been brighter, thoughts clearer. The increased sensory awareness reminded him of stories of vampires.

 He gave up meditating and focused on the immediate question of what to tell Laura. And how. What twenty-three-year-old would want to know how the rest of her life turned out? And wouldn't that biographical data be confusing, since Laura was Gene only up until age twenty-three? Wouldn't the rest of her life be her own to choose? Or was there something in Gene Tierney's genetics, or in her life history to the moment when the dandruff puff was deposited on the hairbrush, that would determine Laura's future? Matt knew that Gene Tierney had ended up in a mental institution and had undergone numerous electroshock treatments. Was Laura fated to go mad? Or would the expectation of madness become a self-fulfilling prophecy, genetics aside? Maybe he could start by telling her the good news: how many successful films she had made, how even now, more than half a century later, she remained a cult heroine. Or would Laura, who could not be a movie star, envy her former self? Did Laura see Gene Tierney as a duplicate of herself? As a twin? Maybe even like a mother? Or a rival?

Matt remembered those tiresome academic nature/nurture arguments. This was different. This had to do with the future of a real person, his Laura. OK, not his.

Getting nowhere with thoughts, Matt took his laptop and went down to the Snug, which was empty. A fire crackled in the fireplace. Matt had studied so much about Gene Tierney for his biography, but there was always more on the Internet. He logged in and googled "Gene Tierney." He found a new-to-him webpage with a collage of hundreds of images.

http://fuckyeahgenetierney.tumblr.com/

He linked to another entry, a Gene Tierney webpage with this quotation: "Unquestionably the most beautiful woman in movie history.”--Darryl F. Zanuck, founder, 20th Century Fox. Matt wondered at the lack of forethought of whoever named a company with such a time-limited definition.

There she was, in the rabbit-ear hat from Laura that she was probably wearing right now on the wind-whipped shoreline trail. She told Matt that Dr. F had the hat specially made for her. That explained why she had a hat from back then, why she looked as if she had stepped off the screen when she first came into the restaurant looking like she was black-and-white. Sweet Dr. F, doing everything he could to make it all easier for her. Joe still refused to watch her movies.

Matt considered logging on to Netflicks and ordering the films that Gene Tierney made the year after Laura: A Bell for Adano and then the one that got her an Academy Award nomination and jump-started her career—Leave Her to Heaven. He could stream them on Netflix. They could eat popcorn and watch the films in the room on his laptop. With Joe.

He daydreamed about renting the historic Castro Theater in San Francisco and staging his own Gene Tierney retrospective. He would rent a limo for opening night. He in his tux, slender Laura in a black gown, walking arm in arm down a red carpet as the residents of the Castro area cheered. Young Gene Tierney attending her own retrospective.

Matt woke from his fantasy. He spent a few minutes scrolling through more webpages and then logged off.

CHAPTER 6-2

Back in his room, Matt wrote on a yellow pad a plan for telling Laura about Gene. In her ghost-written autobiography, Gene said she had two loves in her life. One was Oleg Cassini, twice her husband and the father of her two children, Daria and Tina. Who was the other? At first he thought Howard Hughes. But no, she must have meant Jack Kennedy. Health: stomach and eye problems, mental instability—no, more than that—serious mental illness. Fame and career. He would begin with everything prior to 1944, so that he would know what she knew, then on to the post-1944 years which would be a blank slate for her. He would try to hold that distinction for himself.

Matt decided to start with Howard Hughes--the wild aviator who went mad at the end. How did he fit into Gene’s life? He ordered the most promising books among the many biographies on his Kindle and some by mail as well.

Laura and Joe were curled up together on a blanket on the floor, reading a paperback copy of Robert Ludlam's Bourne Identity. As she finished each page, she ripped it out and handed it to Joe until it was clear that he read faster and they switched. Matt was reading on the bed.

"Wow, listen to this,” Matt said.  “This is really cute. Howard was obsessed with apple strudel."

"You're making that up," Laura said, continuing to read.

"No, listen. He's staying at the Desert Inn, eating Swanson frozen tv dinners. But he wants peach cobbler instead of the apple cobbler that comes with the dinner. Swanson won't switch, so he tries to buy the company. Doesn't work. He switches to Arby's roast beef sandwiches but gives that up when Arby's won't cut his beef exclusively with a sterilized blade."

Laura and Joe look up.

"Ok, so then, I'm reading this from the Charles Higham biography, he becomes obsessed with apple strudel. He doesn't like the Desert Inn's variety, so he sends for the strudel made by the Sands. He makes the pastry chef humiliate himself by fetching it from his rival pastry chef."

"He sure would have gone nuts with the Pelican's strudel," Joe said.

"He already was nuts," Matt said.

"He wasn't nuts when I knew him," Laura said. “Did he go crazy later? No, don’t tell me. That’s your job, dear Matt, to tell me the later part. He was a little odd when I knew him, but that was after a number of plane crashes. He hurt his head. I think he changed in 1941. That was not a good year for Howard. I want to know what happened to him, but I respect your plan, Matt, for how to tell me the post-1944 Gene story.”

As if I had a plan, Matt thought.

"You slept with him, didn't you?" Matt blurted out. He couldn't believe he had said that. Too late too late too late.

"That's none of your business." Laura continued to read.

"You did." Oh, this is so dangerous. Shut up, Matt. But he had to know.

"I took my mother with us to Mexico. She was my chaperone." Still, she hadn’t said no.

Laura liked to brag about the Hollywood life. Why would she suddenly freeze up about Howard Hughes? Matt felt his cheeks get hot. How could he be so stupid?

“Matt, lighten up,” Joe said.

“Sorry.” 

Beating himself up for his insensitivity, Matt slammed the book shut and went for a walk. Laura and Joe continued to turn and pass the pages of their page-turner.

CHAPTER 6-3

As a professor of the history of film, Matt was astonished by what he read in the various Hughes biographies, which he read all at once, cross-referencing the indexes for mention of Gene. Howard seems to have slept with most of Hollywood at the time—male and female. And he kept proposing marriage, sometimes to more than one woman at a time. Some—not all by a long shot—of Howard’s conquests and discoveries: Ava Gardner, Jane Russell, Ginger Rogers (engaged to her), Katharine Hepburn, who was his live-in love for three years. Bette Davis spent the summer with him in Malibu (she was married). Yvonne DeCarlo, two-year affair. Rita Hayworth met secretly with him while she was still married to Orson Welles; she had an abortion when she found she was pregnant. There was also a deformed child born. Matt forgot which book that was in and who the mother was; he would go back and find that later.

Matt read that Howard had proposed to Gene too, in a "ritual of dominance." Realizing he was trying to buy her, Gene ran off. Oleg Cassini would make a better husband. Cassini wanted to beat Hughes up "to see if he has any red blood in him." He chased him and whacked him with a two-by-four. Then, Matt read, "Three years later, she returned to his bed." Howard’s bed. Matt was confused. What year was all this? Did she marry Oleg and then sleep with Howard? What does that mean— “return”? Where does this biographer get his information? Is he making it up? Matt didn’t dare ask Laura anything more after his big booboo.

Matt continued reading. "He was much more open and untortured than, for example, Cary Grant, who was miserable in his off-again on-again sleeping with Hughes. As if having affairs with Tierney and [Tyrone] Power, who would one day costar [with her] in The Razor's Edge, were not enough, Hughes also had a relationship at the same time with Lana Turner." Lana Turner had her sheets embroidered with HH in anticipation of marrying him and was furious when he didn’t show up the day they planned to fly to Las Vegas to get married. Left at the altar, poor Lana? I bet she was mad!

So did Laura know Howard was sleeping with Cary Grant and Tyrone Power and Lana Turner? Gene also made Son of Fury with Tyrone Power. Matt seriously regretted having blown his chance of finding out anything about this bed-hopping crowd with his blunt question.

Amazing that they didn’t all have sexually transmitted diseases. But not so fast. Matt read-- “Then came the telephone call when Lana revealed she had syphilis.”  Hughes didn’t wait to be tested. He called his doctor, Vernon Mason, for medication. What medication? He bagged all his clothes. “Deja vu.” What did that mean, deja vu? That was 1946. Did Howard have a previous syphilitic infection?

Matt stopped searching for Gene in the indexes and starting scanning for references to Howard’s health.

CHAPTER 6-4

The next day Matt, Joe and Laura continued their reading together. In a 1996  Howard Hughes  biography, Matt hit pay dirt and let out a screech that caused Laura to look up from her book. “What?” she said.

“Nothing, really,” Matt said--but it wasn’t nothing. Matt read that Howard was first treated for syphilis in 1941 when he went to his doctor with a blistering rash on the palms of his hands. He ordered four tool company employees to come and pack all his clothing and bed linens into large canvas mail bags with brass padlocks. They were then to use industrial kilns to burn everything and bring back the charred locks. One employee asked Howard if he could keep his Hell’s Angels jacket. Howard nodded, but then said: “Don’t come back to me when you catch syphilis.”

Matt looked syphilis up in the index and skipped forward. Here he learned that Howard’s doctor, Vernon Mason, and Noah Dietrich, his right hand man, had kept the secret for more than a decade but had told it to a Time-Life reporter off the record. Syphilis had recurred in 1946 after another plane crash and by 1957 it had progressed to the tertiary stage. Signs then were irritability, defective judgment, memory deterioration, delusions of grandeur, and lousy hygiene and grooming habits. At autopsy the coroner was surprised at the extent to which the brain cells had degenerated. 

Hughes Aircraft was the third-largest supplier of weapon delivery systems. The Pentagon ordered a study that concluded that Mr. Hughes was a vengeful and paranoid man “whose mind has deteriorated to the point that he is capable of both murder and suicide.”

When Howard met Gene, he was vibrant, handsome, absurdly successful with sexual conquests. He filled her apartment with gardenias and offered her expensive jewelry. But she married Oleg. Howard said she made a mistake doing that but then he paid for her daughter Daria’s medical expenses. Oleg ordered Howard to stay away from his wife. When he caught them returning from a Las Vegas trip (Matt read—so he could make love to her in the plane), he hit Howard on the butt with a two-by-four, knocking him over. A car chase ensued. “I truly could have killed the bastard,” Oleg said.

So Gene went to Las Vegas with Howard, this time no mother along as chaperone. The biographers assume she slept with him--both before and after Oleg. 

Matt had one more chore on the topic of Howard: to read, or rather read again with new eyes, what Gene wrote about him. Howard had his own chapter in her autobiography. He read this chapter with great interest now that he knew Hughes had syphilis. Howard began to change after 1941, she wrote, repeating what she had said in the room. That summer she was having severe stomach pains. Howard sent his doctor Vernon Mason, who brought with him a surgeon who suggested an appendectomy. She had the operation. Two weeks later the pain returned. “There were days when I was literally rolling on the floor from pain, the sweat pouring from me, my hair wet and tangled,” she wrote. The diagnosis: chronic nervous stomach. The pain recurred for many years, until she was out of the public eye. She thought the stomach pains were a warning of the mental illness to come.

Matt read on. Several years later, Howard performed what she called a “great kindness” when Daria was born deaf and retarded. Gene was separated from Oleg and began to date Howard again.

Matt continued to read Gene’s description of her own mental illness, her long incarcerations in mental hospitals, until he had enough. How would he ever be able to tell Laura about that?

Matt found a picture of Gene and Howard together at a costume ball in the 1950s.

Matt put all the books aside and went outside and sat in the sun, thinking. Howard Hughes was a seriously crazy man in his later years. Matt now thought of him as a sexual predator in his younger days. In addition to all the stars he slept with, he kept thirty-six women in apartments he paid for, on call for his sexual whims. He was obsessive compulsive-- and syphilitic. How much of his craziness was late-stage syphilis? Probably a lot. There was no need to tell Laura more about him. If she wanted to read about his sad ending, fine. She could do that on her own, later. Long gone were any positive thoughts Matt had felt for the dashing Howard who had filled young Gene’s apartments with gardenias. He googled briefly about syphilis and found that it was highly infectious only in the first few years and during recurrences. What a close call for Gene-- not to have caught syphilis from this whacked-out playboy daredevil. No wonder she didn’t want to talk about it.

But Matt couldn’t let it go. He continued reading and found Howard was treated with arsenic, mercury, and Salvarsan, the so-called Magic Bullet syphilis cure that Paul Erhlich discovered. Salvarsan, the beginning of chemotherapy. It helped him for awhile but ultimately proved to be unsuccessful.

In The Aviator, Martin Scorsese used a diagnosis of manic depressive disorder to explain Howard’s behavior. But he could be both—right? Manic-depressive, or bipolar as it more often referred to now, and syphilitic. Howard was clearly looney-tunes, batty at the end. Laura didn’t know Howard had syphilis. Or did she? Scorsese filmed the clothes-burning incident but didn’t mention the syphilis comment about the Hell’s Angels’ jacket. Why not? Because he didn’t dare make a Hollywood blockbuster about syphilis? Apparently so. Did Leonardo diCaprio, in playing the recluse wearing shoe boxes for shoes, peeing in lines of milk bottles, and never washing know he was masterfully portraying late stage syphilis? Did the screenwriters know? Was it all a carefully kept secret on the set? Or was it not believed? Matt believed it. How could they not?

 Researching syphilis on the Internet, Matt found there to be relatively few cases in the United States now, and those mostly treated early on with penicillin. In the rest of the world, however, the World Health Organization reported 250,000 cases a year of congenital syphilis that could be avoided with an inexpensive shot of penicillin. Matt wondered what was known about syphilis when Howard had it in the 1940s. On Amazon he found and ordered something available from a small bookstore in Ohio for ten dollars--Modern Clinical Syphilology by John H. Stokes, published in 1944. It arrived wrapped in a brown paper bag. For ten dollars, Matt expected a pamphlet, so he was surprised that it was more than 1,300 pages of small type with many graphic illustrations. Feeling foolish and somewhat embarrassed about having ordered it, Matt hid it on a top shelf in the Snug with the title facing the wall. Enough about Howard Hughes.

CHAPTER 6-5

"Listen to this," Laura said, staring at the screen of the new MacBook Joe brought back to the inn and set up for her.  "If you guys don't think I'm doing well enough as Gene Redux, you could get Dr. F to whip up another copy, for, it says here, about ten bucks.

She read:

The U.S. Bureau of Chemistry and Soils invested many a hard-earned tax dollar in calculating the chemical and mineral composition of the human body, which breaks down as follows:

65% Oxygen, 18% Carbon, 10% Hydrogen, 3% Nitrogen. Smaller amounts of Calcium, Phosphorous, Potassium, Sulfur, Sodium, Chlorine, Magnesium, Iron, Iodine.

Additionally, it was discovered that our bodies contain trace quantities of fluorine, silicon, manganese, zinc, copper, aluminum, and arsenic.

“That’s me, guys. The whole package.”

CHAPTER 6-6

When Dr. Frankenstein arrived for an unexpected visit, everything at the inn seemed to pick up energy. The first night they all had dinner together. Dr. F reported that his work in the official Plum Island lab was going as usual and he reassured them that he hadn’t noticed anything suspicious to worry about. Matt was delighted when Dr. F suggested they continue their ritual afternoon tea and sugar cookies in the garden.

"Dr. F, you're a cellular biologist, right?" Matt asked.

"Among other things."

"Why do you think you've succeeded so splendidly with full adult living human replication when your colleagues can't even clone an egg-and-sperm baby?"

Frankenstein smiled. "Everyone is specialized these days. DNA mappers. String theorists. Those who look for God particles in neurophysiology. Chemists of the primal soup. Philosophers of dark energy. Computer nerds. On and on."

"And you?"

"I study everything, all disciplines. But only slivers within those disciplines that further my research."

"But how do you know what to study? The possibilities seem overwhelming."

Frankenstein looked at Matt for a long moment. He marveled at how sometimes the doctor could be lost in some other world for days, his eyes pale blue, seemingly unfocused. And then he would be back, with laser concentration, his eyes the darkest blue of the ocean. But with a twinkle, on the edge of bursting out laughing, as if he alone knew something very funny.

"That's a good question and a fair one. The answer is found in two words: strudel drug. I've perfected the drug and my response to it so that I can take in vast amounts of information effortlessly. And I can see where to go for information with a certain sixth sense."

"Like with LSD?"

"Like LSD times a thousand."

"The strudel drug certainly kicks my tired brain up a few notches. But nothing like that."

"No," Frankenstein said, looking down at the grass, frowning. "You know mine has a little additive."

"Wonder what Einstein would have done on your strudel drug."

Frankenstein burst out laughing. "What a thought! Albert on strudel! Now, wouldn't we have made a pair!"

They were silent for a bit. Matt wondered if he had asked too much. He had so many questions, but it was up to Dr. F to decide what to share with him. Did he really want to know more about Laura as science experiment? Yes! He did!

Frankenstein turned those blue eyes on Matt and stared at him for a long moment. The humorous twinkle was gone.

"I'll tell you something else. I thought I had gone as far as I could when I replicated a human body perfectly, down to the subatomic level. But I never meant to replicate life, the life force. When Laura started thrashing in that tank, I thought my heart would stop. I've never experienced fear like that. I felt as if I had been playing with something beyond science, forbidden."

Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Matt thought. Or calling up demons.

"And then, when I held her cold, perfect, limp body and raced for the bathtub to try to save her, it was as if we were both enveloped, no, filled, with some white light. I'm sure she doesn't know anything about it. She was out cold. But I knew this thing I had accomplished, this mysterious awakening that happened to Laura when I pushed that last key on the computer, was right. The profound peace that comes with the strudel drug took over and washed out all the fear. For once in my life I was truly clueless. And it was just fine."

Matt held his breath. Frankenstein's eyes had filled with tears. Could tears last in such eyes without boiling?

Matt had read about Gene’s chronic stomach pains. But he was not ready for what he found when he went up to the room and found Laura writhing on the floor in agony. At first he thought maybe she had been poisoned. He ran to her and kneeled.

“Sweetheart, what’s the matter?”

“It’s my stomach.” She paused and grimaced while a new spasm passed. “Not a new thing.” 

Matt pulled out his cell phone and dialed Joe. “Get up here. Problem with Laura. Hurry.” Then he called Dr. F who was out for a walk. Joe arrived first.

“What is it? Appendicitis?”

“No, not appendicitis.”

Dr. Frankenstein rushed in.

“Not appendicitis,” he repeated for Dr. F.  “She had hers out in the summer of 1941. She was having pain like this. Howard Hughes sent his private physician who brought with him a surgeon who suggested an appendectomy, which she had. But the pain returned after two weeks. She had it off and on for years.”

Joe looked at Matt with appreciation.

“That’s what she wrote in her autobiography,” Matt said. “That’s how I know.” He didn’t mention that she also said she thought it was a warning of mental illness to come.

Laura smiled despite the pain. “On and off for years? Hey--thanks, Matt, for telling me that.”  She added, “It began soon after Howard crashed his plane on a street in Beverly Hills and was almost killed. I visited him in the hospital.”

Matt remembered that after the accident Howard spent most of his time sitting in a white leather chair. Naked. Watching movies. Avoiding germs. Hughes had a serious germ phobia. Why did he have a serious germ phobia?

“Should we take her to the hospital? She has fake ID. Maybe no one would recognize her.” Dr. Frankenstein was concerned.

Joe said, “If we do take her to the hospital and they ask her when the pain began, be sure she says three years ago. Not in 1941.” They laughed, even Laura.

“It will pass,” Laura said. “It always does.”

Matt wondered about the diagnosis of a chronic nervous stomach. Laura seemed anything but chronically nervous now. Unless her situation, the big picture of who and where she was, or the worry about dangerous forces being after her, was making her more nervous than she let on. 

They stayed with her.  It passed.

Matt found the history of syphilis, of the disease called the “Great Imitator” of other diseases, fascinating. He went to the Snug late at night to take Stokes down from the top shelf and read more--for his enjoyment now, since he had long since finished with the predatory Mr. Hughes.  Stokes wrote:

A zest in the ferreting out of the obscure,

a positively detective zeal in the running to earth

of this most subtle master of the dissembling art,

that is the foremost asset of the clinical syphilologist.

Matt felt a certain detective zeal come to life when he read that a person with syphilis having a gastric crisis was like a woman “writhing on the floor in childbirth.”  What had Gene written? “There were days when I was literally rolling on the floor from pain, the sweat pouring from me, my hair wet and tangled.”

He thought of Laura and her episode of stomach pains.

Stokes wrote that among a study of two hundred patients with syphilis who had severe gastric crises, 87% reported that as their major complaint. He wrote often early syphilis was missed or misdiagnosed, especially in women. He gave case histories of patients who had unnecessary abdominal surgeries--one guy had nine of them.

 Gene had an unnecessary appendectomy.

 A thought shocked Matt: Was it possible that Gene--and now Laura--had syphilis?

A few thoughts swarming around came together. Howard had syphilis, which he probably got in 1941. There wasn’t much question about that. Syphilis was infectious for about two years after infection and during recurrences. Gene slept with Howard at that time. Matt now was pretty sure she did. So Gene slept with him when he was infectious. Could Gene have had syphilis and not known? Could her gastric crises have been caused by syphilis?

Could Laura have syphilis? The idea astonished Matt so much that he sat for a long time before he dared think further. But when he did, other thoughts came flooding together.

 Frankenstein said he replicated Gene’s entire biome--including pathogens. Which would include the syphilis pathogen, the spirochete. Treponema pallidum.

 Howard went crazy from syphilis. Could Gene’s unexplained mental illness have been syphilis?

Gene had a baby who was born prematurely--deaf, blind, mentally retarded. The cause given was that Gene had contracted German measles during her pregnancy. But what if syphilis was the cause of Daria’s health problems? Howard paid $15,000 for a doctor to examine Daria. What if Howard knew he had given Gene syphilis and that was the cause of Daria’s problems? What if the high fee included discretion? Howard’s doctor said there was no hope for Daria’s recovery.

 Matt hid the Stokes book and went for a walk. He had to think about all this. It was very upsetting.

Matt woke the next morning with a major internal battle going on. The first voice told him to leave this whole thing. It was absurd to think Laura had syphilis. One giant step beyond what he could comprehend in this whole crazy replication business. Imagine the trouble you will get in if you bring this up as a possibility. Dr. F wouldn’t buy it for sure. Laura would never speak to you again. Joe sure wouldn’t.

The other voice said, yes, but what if?  What if you could get Laura treated with penicillin? What if a shot of penicillin could --dare we hope?--cure her. No more stomach aches. And avoid the onset of mental illness. Completely. She’s young. Gene was--no, be careful--would have been--newly infected then. There’s time. Or is there? How rapidly does this disease go from one system to another? When does it infect the brain?

 Matt chose to pull rank on both voices. He could not reveal this whacky hypothesis to anyone. He just didn’t dare.  But that decision didn’t keep him from researching further. It was just too, well, tantalizing. And critical if true.

Gene told the story of her pregnancy in her autobiography. A year after Daria was born, she ran into a woman who had met her at the Hollywood Canteen while she was pregnant in June 1943. The woman confessed to having escaped quarantine for German measles to meet the stars, and Gene was her favorite. Then Gene found an article linking Daria’s symptoms to the mother’s infection with measles.

Matt researched Rubella, another name for German measles, and pregnancy. The symptoms of German measles, also called rubella, are a mild rash--small pink spots that may cover the whole body -- headache, a sore throat, a fever, painful, inflamed swollen joints, and swollen lymph glands.

 The same symptoms as early syphilis.

 Matt checked Stokes who listed measles as something to consider in a differential diagnosis. The measles rash was somewhat darker than the rosy rash of syphilis. But easy for a doctor, not suspecting syphilis, to miss.

 And what about Daria? Congenital rubella syndrome: risk of premature birth, deafness, blindness, mental retardation.

 Matt checked quickly.  Congenital syphilis: risk of premature birth, deafness, blindness, mental retardation.

 So was it possible that Daria’s problems happened because Gene had contracted syphilis from Howard? If there was guilt because a child was born retarded because one innocently contracted measles, imagine the guilt if the disease is syphilis? Which was, in the 1940s, still secret and very shameful. It was improper to speak the word, let alone admit to a diagnosis.

 Matt was at a loss. All he wanted to do was get in his car and drive back to Pennsylvania. Figuring this one out was too much to ask. He wasn’t a doctor. Just an avid reader. And look at the trouble that got him into. He wished he had never heard of Howard Hughes. And, thinking of having even to suggest this hypothesis to Laura, well, how could he? He would put it off. Matt, the procrastinator. Eventually he would tell Dr. F and ask for advice.

 Of course if there was something to this syphilis idea, then waiting was not a good idea. Laura could now, in the 21st century, be treated with penicillin. Matt could bring her the cure—for the mental illness that awaited her, as well as the other physical conditions that would cause her pain.

 And yet he could not bring himself to deal with it.