the Third Twin

6

STEVE PARKED IN THE LARGE STUDENT PARKING LOT IN THE southwest corner of the hundred-acre Jones Falls campus. It was a few minutes before ten o’clock, and the campus was thronged with students in light summer clothes on their way to the first lecture of the day. As he walked across the campus he looked out for the tennis player. The chances of seeing her were slender, he knew, but he could not help staring at every tall dark-haired woman to see if she had a nose ring.

The Ruth W. Acorn Psychology Building was a modern four-story structure in the same red brick as the older, more traditional college buildings. He gave his name in the lobby and was directed to the laboratory.

In the next three hours he underwent more tests than he could have imagined possible. He was weighed, measured, and fingerprinted. Scientists, technicians, and students photographed his ears, tested the strength of his grip, and assessed his startle reflex by showing him pictures of burn victims and mutilated bodies. He answered questions about his leisure-time interests, his religious beliefs, his girlfriends, and his job aspirations. He had to state if he could repair a doorbell, whether he considered himself well groomed, would he spank his children, and did certain music make him think of pictures or changing color patterns. But no one fold him why he had been selected for the study.

He was not the only subject. Also around the lab were two little girls and a middle-aged man wearing cowboy boots, blue jeans, and a western shirt. At midday they all gathered in a lounge with couches and a TV, and had pizza and Cokes for lunch. It was then Steve realized there were in fact two middle-aged men in cowboy boots: they were twins, dressed the same.

He introduced himself and learned that the cowboys were Benny and Arnold and the little girls were Sue and Elizabeth. “Do you guys always dress the same?” Steve asked the men as they ate.

They looked at each other, then Benny said: “Don’t know. We just met.”

“You’re twins, and you just met?”

“When we were babies we were both adopted—by different families.”

“And you accidentally dressed the same?” “Looks like it, don’t it?”

Arnold added: “And we’re both carpenters, and we both smoke Camel Lights, and we both have two kids, a boy and a girl.”

Benny said: “Both girls are called Caroline, but my boy is John and his is Richard.”

Arnold said: “I wanted to call my boy John, but my wife insisted on Richard.”

“Wow,” Steve said. “But you can’t have inherited a taste for Camel Lights.”

“Who knows?”

One of the little girls, Elizabeth, said to Steve: “Where’s your twin?”

“I don’t have one,” he replied. “Is that what they study here, twins?”

“Yes.” Proudly she added: “Sue and me are dizygotic.”

Steve raised his eyebrows. She looked about eleven. “I’m not sure I know that word,” he said gravely. “What does it mean?”

“We’re not identical. We’re fraternal twins. That’s why we don’t look the same.” She pointed at Benny and Arnold. “They’re monozygotic. They have the same DNA. That’s why they’re so alike.”

“You seem to know a lot about it,” Steve said. “I’m impressed.”

“We’ve been here before,” she said.

The door opened behind Steve, and Elizabeth looked up and said: “Hello, Doctor Ferrami.”

Steve turned and saw the tennis player.

Her muscular body was hidden beneath a knee-length white laboratory coat, but she moved like an athlete as she walked into the room. She still had the air of focused concentration that had been so impressive on the tennis court. He stared at her, hardly able to believe his luck.

She said hello to the little girls and introduced herself to the others. When she shook Steve’s hand she did a double take. “So you’re Steve Logan!” she said.

“You play a great game of tennis,” he said.

“I lost, though.” She sat down. Her thick, dark hair swung loosely around her shoulders, and Steve noticed, in the unforgiving light of the laboratory, that she had one or two gray hairs. Instead of the silver ring she had a plain gold stud in her nostril. She was wearing makeup today, and the mascara made her dark eyes even more hypnotic.

She thanked them all for giving up their time in the service of scientific inquiry and asked if the pizzas were good. After a few more platitudes she sent the girls and the cowboys away to begin their afternoon tests.

She sat close to Steve, and for some reason he had the feeling she was embarrassed. It was almost as if she were about to give him bad news. She said: “By now you’re wondering what this is all about.”

“I guessed I was picked because I’ve always done so well in school.”

“No,” she said. “True, you score very high on all intellectual tests. In fact, your performance at school understates your abilities. Your IQ is off the scale. You probably come top of your class without even studying hard, am I right?”

“Yes. But that’s not why I’m here?”

“No. Our project here is to ask how much of people’s makeup is predetermined by their genetic inheritance.” Her awkwardness vanished as she warmed to her subject. “Is it DNA that decides whether we’re intelligent, aggressive, romantic, athletic? Or is it our upbringing? If both have an influence, how do they interact?”

“An ancient controversy,” Steve said. He had taken a philosophy course at college, and he had been fascinated by this debate. “Am I the way I am because I was born like it? Or am I a product of my upbringing and the society I was raised in?” He recalled the catchphrase that summed up the argument: “Nature or nurture?”

She nodded, and her long hair moved heavily, like the ocean. Steve wondered how it felt to the touch. “But we’re trying to resolve the question in a strictly scientific way,” she said. “You see, identical twins have the same genes—exactly the same. Fraternal twins don’t, but they are normally brought up in exactly the same environment. We study both kinds, and compare them with twins who are brought up apart, measuring how similar they are.”

Steve was wondering how this affected him. He was also wondering how old Jeannie was. Seeing her run around the tennis court yesterday, with her hair hidden in a cap, he had assumed she was his age; but now he could tell she was nearer thirty. It did not change his feelings about her, but he had never before been attracted to someone so old.

She went on: “If environment was more important, twins raised together would be very alike, and twins raised apart would be quite different, regardless of whether they were identical or fraternal. In fact we find the opposite. Identical twins resemble one another, regardless of who raised them. Indeed, identical twins raised apart are more similar than fraternal twins raised together.”

“Like Benny and Arnold?”

“Exactly. You saw how alike they are, even though they were brought up in different homes. That’s typical. This department has studied more than a hundred pairs of identical twins raised apart. Of those two hundred people, two were published poets, and they were a twin pair. Two were professionally involved with pets—one was a dog trainer and the other a breeder—and they were a twin pair. We’ve had two musicians—a piano teacher and a session guitarist—also a twin pair. But those are just the more vivid examples. As you’ve seen this morning, we do scientific measurements of personality, IQ, and various physical dimensions, and these often show the same pattern: the identical twins are highly similar, regardless of their upbringing.”

“Whereas Sue and Elizabeth seem quite different.”

“Right. Yet they have the same parents, the same home, they go to the same school, they’ve had the same diet all their lives, and so on. I expect Sue was quiet all through lunch, but Elizabeth told you her life story.”

“As a matter of fact, she explained the word ‘monozygotic’ to me.”

Dr. Ferrami laughed, showing white teeth and a flash of pink tongue, and Steve felt inordinately pleased that he had amused her.

“But you still haven’t explained my involvement,” he said.

She looked awkward again. “It’s a little difficult,” she said. “This has never happened before.”

Suddenly he realized. It was obvious, but so surprising that he had not guessed until now. “You think I have a twin that I don’t know about?” he said incredulously.

“I can’t think of any gradual way to tell you,” she said with evident chagrin. “Yes, we do.”

“Wow.” He felt dazed: it was hard to take in.

“I’m really sorry.”

“Nothing to apologize for, I guess.”

“But there is. Normally people know they’re twins before they come to us. However, I’ve pioneered a new way of recruiting subjects for this study, and you’re the first. Actually, the fact that you don’t know you have a twin is a tremendous vindication of my system. But I didn’t foresee that we might be giving people shocking news.”

“I always wanted a brother,” Steve said. He was an only child, born when his parents were in their late thirties. “Is it a brother?”

“Yes. You’re identical.”

“An identical twin brother,” Steve murmured. “But how could it happen without my knowledge?”

She looked mortified.

“Wait a minute, I can work it out,” Steve said. “I could be adopted.”

She nodded.

It was an even more shocking thought: Mom and Dad might not be his parents. “Or my twin could have been adopted.”

“Yes.”

“Or both, like Benny and Arnold.”

“Or both,” she repeated solemnly. She was gazing intently at him with those dark eyes. Despite the turmoil in his mind he could not help thinking how lovely she was. He wanted her to stare at him like this forever.

She said: “In my experience, even if a subject doesn’t know he or she is a twin, they normally know they were adopted. Even so, I should have guessed you might be different.”

Steve said painfully: “I just can’t believe Mom and Dad would have kept adoption a secret from me. It’s not their style.”

“Tell me about your parents.”

He knew she was making him talk to help him work through the shock, but that was okay. He collected his thoughts. “Mom’s kind of exceptional. You’ve heard of her, her name’s Lorraine Logan.”

“The lonelyhearts columnist?”

“Right. Syndicated in four hundred newspapers, author of six best-sellers about women’s health. Rich and famous, and she deserves it.”

“Why do you say that?”

“She really cares about the people who write to her. She answers thousands of letters. You know, they basically want her to wave a magic wand—make their unwanted pregnancies vanish, get their kids off drugs, turn their abusive men into kindly and supportive husbands. She always gives them the information they need and tells them it’s their decision what to do, trust your feelings and don’t let anyone bully you. It’s a good philosophy.”

“And your father?”

“Dad’s pretty ordinary, I guess. He’s in the military, works at the Pentagon, he’s a colonel. He does public relations, writes speeches for generals, that kind of thing.”

“A disciplinarian?”

Steve smiled. “He has a highly developed sense of duty. But he’s not a violent man. He saw some action in Asia, before I was born, but he never brought it home.”

“Did you require discipline?”

Steve laughed. “I was the naughtiest boy in class, all through school. Constantly in trouble.”

“What for?”

“Breaking the rules. Running in the hallway. Wearing red socks. Chewing gum in class. Kissing Wendy Prasker behind the biology shelf in the school library when I was thirteen.”

“Why?”

“Because she was so pretty.”

She laughed again. “I meant, why did you break all the other rules?”

He shook his head. “I just couldn’t be obedient. I did what I wanted to do. The rules seemed stupid, and I got bored. They would have thrown me out of school, but I always got good grades, and I was usually captain of one sports team or another: football, basketball, baseball, track. I don’t understand myself. Am I a weirdo?”

“Everybody’s weird in their own way.”

“I guess so. Why d’you wear the nose ring?”

She raised her dark eyebrows, as if to say “I ask the questions around here,” but she answered him just the same. “I went through a punk phase when I was about fourteen: green hair, ripped stockings, everything. The pierced nostril was part of that.”

“It would close up and heal over if you let it.”

“I know. I guess I keep it because I feel that total respectability is deadly dull.”

Steve smiled. My God, I like this woman, he thought, even if she is too old for me. Then his mind switched back to what she had told him. “What makes you so sure I have a twin?”

“I’ve developed a computer program that searches medical records and other databases for pairs. Identical twins have similar brain waves, electrocardiograms, fingerprint ridge counts, and teeth. I scanned a large database of dental x-rays held by a medical insurance company, and found someone whose teeth measurements and arch forms are the same as yours.”

“It doesn’t sound conclusive.”

“Maybe not, although he even has cavities in the same places you do.”

“So who is he?”

“His name is Dennis Pinker.”

“Where is he now?”

“Richmond, Virginia.”

“Have you met him?”

“I’m going to Richmond to see him tomorrow. I’ll do many of the same tests on him, and take a blood sample so we can compare his DNA with yours. Then we’ll know for sure.”

Steve frowned. “Do you have a particular area that you’re interested in, within the field of genetics?”

“Yes. My specialty is criminality and whether it’s inherited.”

Steve nodded. “I get it. What did he do?”

“Pardon me?”

“What did Dennis Pinker do?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You’re going to visit him, instead of asking him to come here, so obviously he’s incarcerated.”

She colored faintly, as if she had been caught out in a deception. With her cheeks flushed she looked sexier than ever. “Yes, you’re right,” she said.

“What’s he in jail for?”

She hesitated. “Murder.”

“Jesus!” He looked away from her, trying to take it in. “Not only do I have an identical twin brother, but he’s a murderer! Jesus Christ!”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve handled this badly. You’re the first subject like this I’ve ever studied.”

“Boy. I came here hoping to learn something about myself, but I’ve learned more than I wanted to know.” Jeannie did not know, and never would know, that he had almost killed a boy called Tip Hendricks.

“And you’re very important to me.”

“How so?”

“The question is whether criminality is inherited. I published a paper which said that a certain type of personality is inherited—a combination of impulsiveness, daring, aggression, and hyperactivity—but that whether or not such people become criminals depends on how their parents deal with them. To prove my theory I have to find pairs of identical twins, one of whom is a criminad and the other a law-abiding citizen. You and Dennis are my first pair, and you’re perfect: he’s in jail and you, forgive me, you’re the ideal all-American boy. To tell you the truth, I’m so excited about it I can hardly sit still.”

The thought of this woman being too excited to sit still made Steve restless too. He looked away from her, afraid his lust would show in his face. But what she had told him was painfully disturbing. He had the same DNA as a murderer. What did that make him?

The door opened behind Steve, arid she looked up. “Hi, Berry,” she said. “Steve, I’d like you to meet Professor Berrington Jones, the head of the twins study here at JFU.”

The professor was a short man in his late fifties, handsome with sleek silver hair. He wore an expensive-looking suit of gray-flecked Irish tweed and a red bow tie with white dots, and he looked as neat as if he had just come out of a bandbox. Steve had seen him on TV a few times, talking about how America was going all to hell. Steve did not like his views, but he had been brought up to be polite, so he stood up and held out his hand to shake.

Berrington Jones started as if he had seen a ghost. “Good God!” he said, and his face turned pale.

Dr. Ferrami said: “Berry! What is it?”

Steve said: “Did I do something?”

The professor said nothing for a moment. Then he seemed to collect his wits. “I’m sorry, it’s nothing,” he said, but he still seemed shaken to the core. “It’s just that I suddenly thought of something … something I’ve forgotten, a most dreadful mistake. Please excuse me.” He went to the door, still muttering: “My apologies, forgive me.” He went out.

Steve looked at Dr. Ferrami.

She shrugged and spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Beats the hell out of me,” she said.