Second Glance: A Novel Read online

  It is a young man wearing a suit, a red-tipped carnation threaded through the lapel. His hair, neatly combed to the side, is the color of molasses. His hand rests on my elbow.

  "You look a little peaked." He smiles. "Lovelier than anything I've seen here today, but fading fast."

  Before I can answer Spencer cuts between us. "Did you have something to say to my wife?"

  The man shrugs. "I've got something to say to the whole crowd." As he steps up onto a small platform, he winks at me.

  "Maybe next year you can fight the Irishman at the boxing exhibition," my father says to Spencer.

  "I will if he keeps carrying on with Cissy." Then Spencer's voice is drowned out by the commanding baritone of the very man he is discussing.

  "Ladies and gentleman," the orator announces, "The Legend of Champlain!"

  The crowd gathers to watch the historical pageant. Musicians play Indian chords as four braves stalk about, the menacing Iroquois. They are half-dressed, in the manner of savages, with broad marks across their faces and chests. When Champlain and his Algonquin warriors arrive, a single shot from his rifle kills all of the enemies in one fell swoop. "A dark era of savage power," intones the orator, "ended in that steadfast hour. As mighty Champlain crossed the water . . . and from great chaos, brought great order."

  There is a round of applause as the actors take their bows and everyone begins to disperse. "What shall we do next?" Spencer asks. "There's an exhibition baseball game, and a motorboat race. Or the Exposition, maybe?"

  Through the weaving limbs of people I can see across to the other side of the stage, where a man is looking at me. He is as dark-skinned as the Indians hired to play in the pageant, and his eyes are so black they could only be a trap. He does not smile, or politely pretend that he is not staring. I can't seem to turn away, not even after Spencer touches my shoulder. I cannot tell what holds me more fascinated: the sense that this man might hurt me, or that he might not.

  "Cissy?"

  "The Exposition," I say, and hope this is an appropriate response.

  When I turn back toward the opposite side of the stage, he is gone.

  Freedom and Unity.

  --The Vermont State Motto

  An old lot on Shelburne Street has been converted into an exhibition arena. As we sit on the grandstand and watch Bertie Briggs's Fabulous Dancing Cats, I fan myself with the program. I lift my hair off my damp neck and try to tuck it up under my hat. The circles of perspiration beneath my arms embarrass me.

  Spencer must be feeling the heat, too. In his seersucker suit, though, he looks as cool and calm as ever. He and my father watch some of the Gypsies who have come to sell their wares--baskets and miniature snowshoes, herbal tonics. They camp along the banks of the river and lake for the summer, and many of them spend the winter in Canada. They are not real Rom, of course, only Indians--but are called Gypsies because they move around, have dark skin, and breed enormous families that routinely populate the prisons and institutions. "The Ishmaelites, resurrected," Spencer murmurs.

  These Gypsies are the people Professor Perkins studied in his survey--along with a clan plagued by insanity and a depraved brood that lived in floating shanties, nicknamed the Pirates. The difference between these families, and, say, ours, is purely genetic. A transient father breeds a transient son. A promiscuous mother passes that trait along to her daughter.

  "Three more operations were done at Brandon," my father says. "And two at the prison."

  Spencer smiles. "That's wonderful."

  "It's certainly what we hoped for. I imagine all the patients will want to volunteer, once they understand that a simple treatment will let them live as they please."

  One of Bertie Briggs's tabby cats begins to walk a high wire. Her paws tremble on the line, at least I think they are trembling--my vision seems to be going in and out. I look into my lap, taking deep breaths, trying to keep from passing out.

  The small hand that darts into my lap from the side of the grandstand might be dirty, or only dark. It leaves behind a wrinkled slip of paper, printed with a moon and stars. FREE READING--MME. SOLIAT. By the time I look up, the little boy who has left this behind has disappeared into the crowd.

  "I'm just going to find the ladies' room," I say, standing up.

  "I'll come," Spencer announces.

  "I'm perfectly capable of going by myself." In the end, he lets me go alone, but only after he's helped me navigate the grandstand stairs, and has waved me off in the right direction.

  When I know he isn't watching any longer, I turn the opposite way. I sneak a cigarette from my purse--Spencer doesn't think women ought to smoke--and duck into Madame Soliat's tent. It is small and black, with yellow fabric stars sewn on the curtains. The fortune-teller wears a silver turban and three silver earrings in each ear. A wolf-dog pants beside her table, his tongue pink as a wound. "So sit," she says, as if she has been kept waiting.

  She has no tea leaves or crystal ball. She doesn't reach for my palm. "Don't be afraid," she says finally, her voice as deep as a man's, when I am just about ready to get up and leave.

  "I'm not." I grind out my cigarette and lift my chin a little, to show her how brave I can be.

  She shakes her head, and lowers her gaze to the baby inside me. "About that."

  My mother died in childbirth. I am expecting to do the same. I will not know my baby, then . . . but there is every chance I will get to know my mother.

  "You will," the fortune-teller replies, as if I've spoken aloud. "What you don't know is about to come clear. But that will muddy other waters."

  She is speaking in riddles, that's what Spencer would say. Of course, Spencer would never do anything as unscientific as visiting a psychic. She tells me other things that might apply to anybody: that I am to come into a sum of money; that a stranger is going to visit. Finally, I reach into my purse for a dollar bill, only to feel her fingers lock on my wrist. I try to pull away, but she's grabbing hard enough for me to feel the beat of my pulse. "You have death on your hands," she says, and then she lets me go.

  Startled, I stumble to my feet and into the hot sun. Oh, she is right; I do, I have from the moment I was born and killed my mother in the process.

  I take turns without thinking twice; I push through faces without features. When I find myself in a crowd of young men, university students, funneling toward the entrance of a crystal palace, I try to turn against the tide. But their eagerness sweeps me forward and soon I am inside this hall of mirrors.

  Spencer has told me of the movable maze that cost $20,000 to build. From behind high partitions come the shrieks of college students, taking wrong turns. The air is as thick as custard. I cannot seem to escape myself; everywhere I turn around, there I am.

  Heat presses in at the back of my neck. I lean into one mirror, tracing a hand over the swell of my stomach where this baby nests. I touch my cheek, my jaw. Do I look this frightened to the rest of the world?

  Trailing my hand over the panes of glass, I follow my reflection from panel to panel to panel . . . and then my face turns into something else entirely. Black eyes, blacker hair, a mouth that has forgotten how to smile. We stand inches apart, close enough to touch. Me, and the man who was watching me during the pageant. Neither of us seems to be breathing.

  Oh, this heat. It is the last thing I remember thinking before it all goes black.

  It is the patriotic duty of every normal couple to have

  children in sufficient number to keep up to par

  the "good old Vermont stock."

  --Vermont Commission on Country Life, Committee on the

  Human Factor, "The People of Vermont," in Rural Vermont:

  A Program for the Future, 1931

  "Take it easy, Cissy."

  Spencer's voice floats to me down a long tunnel. As my eyes focus, I look for landmarks: the Hall of Mirrors, the grandstand, the vendor selling salted peanuts. But instead I see the antique bowl and pitcher on my dresser, the gilded foot of our bed. A cold
cloth spread over my forehead drips into my hair, onto the pillow.

  He holds my hand. It makes me think of being a child, hanging onto my father to cross Church Street. I married Spencer when I was seventeen; he became the next adult to keep me safe. As I lay on my side with the bulk of my belly swelling over my thighs, it strikes me that I have never had the chance to grow up.

  "You feeling better?" Spencer asks, and he smiles so sweetly something inside me breaks loose.

  I love him. The smell of his hair and the bump of his nose that supports his glasses; the long lean muscles you would never expect to find beneath his pressed shirts and jackets. I adore the way he looks at me sometimes, as if love is a quantity he cannot measure scientifically, because it multiplies too quickly. I wish that we had met, however, on a busy street in New York City, or on a neighbor's porch in Iowa, or even during a transatlantic crossing--any circumstance at all that would make my relationship with Spencer separate from his relationship with my father.

  He puts his hand over my stomach, and I close my eyes. It is impossible to not think of Spencer's Committee on the Human Factor, which advocates the careful selection of a mate. But I was picked because I am Harry Beaumont's daughter, not because I am myself.

  I wonder how Spencer feels, to have made such an informed decision, and to still have wound up with something defective.

  "How did I get here?" I ask, many questions at once.

  "You fainted at the Exposition."

  "The heat . . ."

  "Rest, Cissy."

  I feel fine. I want to shout this, even though it isn't true. There were times as a child I would climb to the roof of this very house, stand spread-eagled and yell until the whole of Comtosook heard me. It was not that I had anything important to say, but rather, that my father wanted me quiet.

  I see this streak as a black curl in my blood, moving through my system and surfacing when I least expect it. Like now, with Spencer fussing over me. My smoking. This afternoon, at the fortune-teller's tent. Or last night, when I cut myself.

  Sometimes I wonder if I inherited it from my mother.

  "I'll send Ruby in to you." Spencer kisses the crown of my head. "You'll be fine."

  If Spencer says so, it must be true.

  Ruby hovers at the door, waiting to be invited in. Our house girl is fourteen, close enough to my age for a friendship, and yet we are leagues apart. It is not just that she is French Canadian--I am so much older than she is, and not just chronologically. When she thinks no one can see, Ruby dances between the white sheets she hangs out on the line--pirouettes and the lindy hop and even a little Charleston. Me, I never forget that at any time, someone might be watching.

  She comes bearing a brown-wrapped package. "Miz Pike," she says, "look what came in the mail."

  She sets the package down beside me and makes an unsuccessful attempt to ignore the bandage on my wrist. Ruby, of course, knows what happened. She held a bowl of warm water for Spencer, as he cleaned the cut and bound it tightly to heal. She is part of the conspiracy of silence.

  Ruby works the twine free and unwraps the box. Inside is a Sears, Roebuck order--a pair of half-boots just like the ones Spencer has removed from my feet. These are a size bigger, and maybe will not pinch so much, like all my shoes do now that I am so pregnant. Glancing over the edge of the bed, I stare at Ruby's shoes. "You wear about a size six, don't you?"

  "Yes, ma'am."

  "Why don't you take them? I don't imagine my foot's going to get smaller again." Ruby holds my old boots in her hand as if they are a treasure. "My sister, she used to give me hand-me-downs."

  "You have a sister?" How can I have lived with a girl for a year, and not have known this?

  "Not anymore. Diphtheria." Ruby busies herself unpacking the rest of the box. Tiny sweaters and socks and miniature undershirts in all the hues of white spill over the bedclothes, a Lilliputian bounty. These clothes seem too little to fit on a doll, much less a baby.

  "Oh," Ruby breathes, picking up a lacy cap between her thumb and forefinger. "Have you ever seen anything so fine in your life?"

  Ruby wants this baby more than I do. It's not that I am not pleased by the thought of his arrival--it is just that no one seems to understand that I will not survive this birth. Spencer taught me well; this defect is in my germ plasm. If I don't manage to kill myself first, then the day this baby is born is the day I'm going to die.

  Spencer has showed me numerous obstetrical texts to convince me otherwise; he has made me speak to the best of doctors. I nod, I smile, sometimes I even listen. Meanwhile, I plot my suicide. But then I feel the baby's small feet running the curve of my ribs, as if he knows by instinct where to find my heart, and I realize I am lost.

  "Oh, no, Miz Pike," Ruby says; until then I am not aware that I've begun to cry. "Should I get the professor?"

  "No." I use the edge of the sheet to wipe my eyes. "No, I'm fine. Just tired. Really."

  Last night, I thought that if I cut deep enough, I might be able to see all the way down past blood and bone and marrow to the place where it aches all the time. Spencer, when he bandaged my wrist, said I must think about my baby. I have two months left before I am due to give birth, after all. He does not understand that I was thinking of my son. I was trying to spare him the weight I have carried all my life: the knowledge that he was the reason for my death.

  I know that my actions don't follow logic; that harming myself puts my infant in danger too. But somehow, when it is just me and the dark and the night and a blade, reason never counts. I have tried to tell this to Spencer, many times. "But I love you," he says, as if that should be enough to keep me here.

  Now, with Ruby beside me, I try to find words to explain the impossible. "Did you ever walk through a room that's packed with people, and feel so lonely you can hardly take the next step?"

  She hesitates, then nods slowly. Cocking my head, I look at her, and wonder if she might not be quite as young as I've thought. "Miz Pike," Ruby whispers shyly. "Maybe we could pretend to be sisters."

  Ruby, a servant girl, and me, the wife of one of greater Burlington's most esteemed citizens. "Maybe," I answer.

  PRINCIPLES OF HEREDITY: Prof. H. F. Perkins. Lecture course with conference and report exercises covering the principles of elementary embryology, the physical basis of inheritance, principles of breeding experiments, and eugenics, the practical application of heredity to mankind. Text used: Newman's Readings in Evolution, Genetics, and Eugenics.

  --University of Vermont Bulletin, 1923-24

  For years now, I have been fascinated by Harry Houdini. I've read every biography written since his death in 1926; I keep a scrapbook of newspaper articles about his amazing feats. It is not just the obvious--that, like him, I know of ties that bind and chains that keep one rooted to a certain place, or that, like him, I sometimes wish to disappear. No, what is more intriguing to me is Houdini's obsession with the spirit world.

  Did I mention that Houdini, too, lost his mother?

  The new book I'm reading chronicles the long war between Houdini and Margery, the Boston medium. During her seances, her voice would appear from different parts of the room, a spirit bell would ring, a megaphone was wont to fly across the table--all while others held the medium's hands. Houdini, convinced that she was a hoax, built her a fraud-preventer cabinet and challenged her to hold a seance from inside it. But during the seance, a folding ruler was found at the medium's feet--something Margery and Houdini each claimed the other had planted. In the end, Houdini died discrediting her, and swore that if a spirit were ever to return from the other side of the veil, it would be him.

  Although seances have been held on Halloween, now, for five years, he hasn't come back.

  This is what I think about Mr. Houdini: if he hadn't been so desperate to contact his departed mother, he wouldn't have fought so fiercely against Margery. He denounced the spirit world because he feared it was the one space from which he could not escape.

  I feel like a foo
l, hiding here in my bedroom closet. It's where I've gone for privacy, dragging in a little card table that is jammed up against my belly. Table tipping is something else I have read of; it's a way of contacting the spirits. I should have more people sitting here with their hands linked, but I certainly could not tell Spencer what I am doing, and I don't know what Ruby would make of it.

  The silks of my dresses brush my shoulders. I press my palms against the table, close my eyes. "Mama?" I whisper.

  Suddenly, a hand touches my side. I jump, and then realize that the fingers are on the inside of my skin--it's this baby, trying to push away for all he is worth. "Hush, now. We're trying to talk to your grandma."

  If I can find her, if I can open a door . . . then maybe even after I die I will be able to find my way back.

  I take deep breaths to concentrate. I focus all my energy on that table. "Mama, if you can hear me, let me know."

  The table, beneath my hands, remains perfectly still. But then I hear a creak. I open my eyes in time to see the doorknob of the closet turning by itself. The brightest light appears, growing wider and wider until it silhouettes the figure of a woman.

  "Miz Pike," Ruby asks, "what on earth are you doing in here?"

  My heart is pounding so hard that it takes a moment to answer. Pretending it is perfectly normal to be found sitting inside a closet, I say, "What did you need, Ruby?"

  "Your lunch with the professor . . . you're going to miss it if you don't hurry."

  My lunch . . . I have forgotten. Spencer and I have a standing summertime date, a picnic on the university grounds after his Wednesday morning graduate school lecture. We sit beneath the oaks and speak of the things that matter: Spencer's research, his most promising students, names for a son.

  Ruby has already packed a basket with grapes and cold meats, sesame rolls, macaroni salad. "Thank you," I say, taking one last glance inside the closet before I close the door.

  Spencer walked to work today--three miles to the university-- and left me the car. A Packard Twin 6 with a 12-cylinder engine, it's his pride and joy. It has suicide doors, named so because they open backward and can rip you out of the car if unlatched during transit.