Jane Read Online Free PDF Page A

fraction of the ambition that I did. I was going to make something of myself. Leave a mark on the world. And that was that.
    It had been my great good fortune to have a champion for a father—one who so openly applauded my audacity and who, in every way within his power, was clearing the path for my success.
    As I came around the high hedge, I heard the Packard running before I saw Father—Professor Archimedes Phinneaus Porter—behind the wheel of his pride and joy—the bright blue two-seater Mother had recently given him for his fiftieth birthday. I smiled whenever I thought of my father thusly. “Archie” was what he called himself, undistinguished as that might sound. He’d never forgiven his parents for saddling him with such a ridiculously antiquated name, which was why, he explained, he had given his daughter such a plain one.
    I strapped my bag to the back platform and slipped in beside him. The door was barely shut before the car lurched into forward motion and we were off. I grabbed the two side scarves and tied them under my chin for the drive into the countryside south of Cambridge town.
    “Will I ever get the smell of formaldehyde out of my hair?” I needed to shout to overcome the wind blown directly into our faces and the “infernal combustion engine,” as my father called the Packard. I put my wrist to my nose. “I think the stuff’s in my skin as well!”
    “It is!” Father called out cheerily. “Formaldehyde is organic and seeps into the skin. You’ll smell like a cadaver for the rest of the term! Perhaps longer. Every year before the summer break all the anatomy students get together on King’s Court, set a huge bonfire, and burn their odious black coats!”
    I liked the sound of that tradition and imagined the heat of the fire, the raucous shouts, and the glow of the flames on the faces of the Messrs. Woodley, Shaw, and even Cartwright. There was something wonderfully pagan about the ritual.
    Everyone knew Professor Porter’s blue Packard and waved merrily to him as we tooled along Gwydir Street and the Brewery, then passed the Mill Road Cemetery and on out of the city limits. Cambridge was a smallish town. It wasn’t long before we were driving southwest on Whimpole Road through green farm- and pasturelands.
    “Well,” Father said, “what did you find in your specimen’s throat?”
    “All the organs and structures necessary for the muscles of speech! The hyoid bone, the larynx, the tongue and pharynx. I took a good hard look at the supralaryngeal air passage. I’ve studied the voice box in theory and lecture, but it was amazing to finally see the very organ that makes our species human!”
    “Don’t let’s forget upright posture in all the excitement. You’d have quite a fight on your hands with our fellow evolutionists if you showed them a knuckle-dragging ape, even if he could sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’!”
    I carefully considered my father’s words. He was right. Sometimes my enthusiasm got the better of me. I tended to forget the obvious.
    “Remind me tomorrow,” he continued, “but I think I’ve got the larynx of a mountain gorilla in the pantry!”
    Much to Mother’s dismay, Archie Porter called the specimen closet in his home laboratory the pantry. It truly was a grotesque chamber, worse in ways than the human dissection laboratory at the university. Before Father had become a lecturer of human anatomy, he had been a morphologist—a comparative anatomist—studying and dissecting a variety of animal species. He therefore kept, in row upon row in his pantry, body parts, embryos, specimens, and skeletons of every sort of wild and domesticated animal.
    In this one instance, and possibly this one instance alone, I found myself in agreement with Mother. Even as a young girl I’d hated the sight of half a dog’s head in a jar, the rather large phallus of a stallion, a pig embryo, a skinned cat. And not because they were hideous or frightening. In fact,