The Man Without a Shadow by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online Page A

the phenomenon of the amnesiac “E.H.” is beginning to be known in scientific circles.
    An extraordinary case of total anterograde amnesia! And the subject otherwise in good health, intelligent, cooperative, sane—a rarity in brain pathology research where living patients are likely to be psychotic, moribund, or brain-rotted alcoholics.
    Articles by Milton Ferris of the University Neurological Institute at Darven Park on “E.H.” have begun to appear in the most prestigious neuroscience journals; usually these articles list Ferris’s research associates as co-authors, and Margot Sharpe is among them. Seeing her name in print, in such company, hasbeen deeply gratifying to Margot, and it has happened with surprising swiftness.
    Rich with data, graphs, statistics, and citations, the articles bear such titles as “Losses in Recent Memory Following Infectious Encephalitis”—“Retention of ‘Declarative’ and ‘Non-declarative’ Memory in Amnesia: A History of ‘E.H.’”—“Short-Term Retention of Verbal, Visual, Auditory and Olfactory Items in Amnesia”—“Encoding, Storing, and Retrieval of Information in Anterograde Amnesia.” Their preparation is a lengthy, collaborative effort of months, or even years, with Milton Ferris overseeing the process. No paper can be submitted to any journal, of course, without Ferris’s imprimatur, no matter who has actually designed and executed the experiments, and who has done most of the research and writing. Recently, Margot has been given permission by Ferris to design experiments of her own involving sensory modality, and the possibility of “non-declarative” learning and memory. In the prestigious Journal of American Experimental Psychology a paper will soon appear with just the names of Milton Ferris and Margot Sharpe as authors; this is a forty-page extract from Margot’s dissertation titled “Short-Term and Consolidated Memory in Retrograde and Anterograde Amnesia: A Brief History of ‘E.H.’” It is, Milton Ferris has told Margot, the most ambitious and thoroughly researched paper of its kind he has ever received from a female graduate student—“Or any female colleague, for that matter.”
    (Ferris’s praise is sincere. No irony is intended. It is 1969—it is not an age of gender irony in scientific circles, where few women, and virtually no feminists, have penetrated. To her shame, Margot has been thrilled to hear Milton Ferris spread the word of her to his colleagues, who’ve made a show of being impressed. Margot doesn’t want to think that her mentor’s praise is somewhatmitigated by the fact that there are only two women professors in the Psychology Department at the university, both “social psychologists” whom the experimental psychologists and neuroscientists treat with barely concealed scorn.)
    That the lengthy article has been accepted so relatively quickly after Margot submitted it to the Journal of American Experimental Psychology must have something to do with Ferris’s intervention, Margot thinks. It has not escaped her notice that one of the editors of the journal is a protégé of Ferris of the late 1940s; Ferris himself is listed among numerous names on the masthead, as an “advisory editor.”
    In any case, she has thanked Ferris.
    She has thanked Ferris more than once.
    Margot is conscious of her very, very good luck. Margot is anxious to sustain this luck.
    It isn’t enough to be brilliant, if you are a woman. You must be demonstrably more brilliant than your male rivals—your “brilliance” is your masculine attribute. And so, to balance this, you must be suitably feminine—which isn’t to say emotionally unstable, volatile, “soft” in any way, only just quiet, watchful, quick to absorb information, nonoppositional, self-effacing.
    Margot thinks— It