Second Glance: A Novel Read online

  That night, we served turtle soup for dinner, which made me queasy, and I had to leave the table.

  "We did what we needed to, Spencer, to get the public support necessary to pass the sterilization law. But that's done. It's time to go back to the fundamentals." My father walks over to me and takes a slice of orange, which he pops into his mouth. He waves his fingers in front of Spencer's face. "Smell that? You can't see it anymore . . . but you know it was there. You don't have to mention the charts if you don't want to, Spencer. Hell, you can burn them if it makes you feel better. But everyone in that room remembers the work we did to survey those families five years ago. Everyone is going to know what you're not saying." Then he walks out of the room.

  Spencer looks down at the chart. "What do you think?" he asks, and I nearly fall out of my chair.

  "What do I think?" I am so shocked to have been asked for my opinion that I can hardly find the words to give it. I think of the Gypsy whose son had been taken away by the welfare agencies. Of Gray Wolf, assuming I had come to ruin his life, simply because of the color of my skin.

  Reputations, once they're made, precede you.

  "I think the damage has already been done," I reply. Through the open doorway comes Spencer's name, and a volley of applause.

  Once, as a little girl, my father had taken me to a similar, smaller convocation of eugenicists in San Francisco, where I survived a small earthquake. We were told to stand in a doorway until it passed, and I tried to come to terms with the fact that something as solid as the ground beneath my feet was not quite so secure after all.

  When five hundred people clap at once, it sounds like the earth is breaking to pieces all around you. Spencer rolls the pedigree chart up, tucks it under his arm, and strides into the lecture hall on this summon of thunder. "Ladies and gentlemen," he begins, and I don't have to listen anymore to know what he is going to say.

  I stand up and walk out of the room, hurrying down the stairs into one of the exhibit halls. Children and their nannies are dwarfed by an enormous re-creation of a brontosaurus. The pin of its head is so small and distant I can barely make out the hole of its eye socket. Its brain, I believe, was no bigger than my fist. Intelligence belonged to the tyrannosaurus across the way, with its formidable jaw and fence of teeth.

  And yet both of these creatures, the so-called inferior plant-eater and the ferocious carnivore, died out because of a change in the climate, or so Spencer has told me. In the end, it didn't matter who was brighter or stronger or better or could reproduce the most efficiently. Bad weather, a circumstance beyond their control, had the upper hand.

  There is a distant rumbling, and I realize it is coming from overhead, as the audience applauds something Spencer has said.

  I turn to Ruby, who of course has only been a few steps behind me all along. "Let's take a walk," I suggest.

  Rosabelle--answer--tell--pray, answer--look--tell-- answer, answer--tell.

  --Code devised by Harry Houdini and his wife, based on an old vaudeville mind-reading routine, to prove his return as a spirit after his death.

  New York City, in the summer, cannot be so different from hell. The smell of sweat mixed with the brine from the pickle barrels of vendors, the tight press of a hundred people who look right through you, the newsboys selling tragedy for a nickel, the fumes of the taxis rising like wraiths--this is an underworld, and anyone in it can point you toward an escape hatch. In fact, it is the little girl living under an awning with her mother who rolls my dollar bill like a cigarette, tucks it behind her right ear, and leads Ruby and me to a brownstone three blocks away. A small, engraved sign hangs above the buzzer: HEDDA BARTH, SPIRITUALIST.

  The woman who opens the door is smaller even than Ruby, with long white hair that passes her shoulders. "Ladies," says Hedda Barth, Medium of the Century. "What can I do for you?"

  If she is truly psychic, then she ought to know. I am about to back down the stairs when I feel Ruby push me from behind. "We might as well go all the way," she whispers.

  Madame Hedda has been written up in the papers. She sparred with Houdini; she conjured the departed great-uncle of Mayor Walker. The chances of me being here again, and able to meet with her, are virtually nonexistent. "We were hoping to hold a seance, with your help," I say.

  "But you have no appointment."

  "No." I raise my chin, the way I have seen my father do, in order to make her feel this was an oversight on her part, rather than mine. And sure enough, she steps aside to let us in.

  She leads us up a short staircase and holds out her hand to open the door. I wonder if I am the only one who notices that her fingers never touch it, that the knob swings open of its own accord.

  A hexagonal table waits for us in the dark. "There's the small matter of payment," Hedda says.

  "Money," I answer, "is no object."

  So Hedda instructs us to take seats and join hands. She scrutinizes my face and Ruby's. "You've both suffered a loss," she announces.

  Once I read a criticism of the spiritualist movement, in which a Parisian scientist offered free horoscope readings to passersby. Ninety-four percent of those given a reading found it personally accurate. In fact, each person had received the same horoscope, belonging to one of France's most notorious mass murderers.

  We believe what we want to believe; we hear what we want to hear. What Hedda Barth has told me anyone could have guessed; why else would Ruby and I have come?

  But suddenly the table begins to shudder and rock, lifting up on two of its legs like a rearing stallion. Hedda's eyes roll back in her head, and her mouth gapes open. I glance at Ruby, unsure of what to do, if this is normal.

  "Ma poule." The voice is higher than Hedda's, with a ribbon of lisp. My heart begins to pound on the roof of my mouth, and the baby kicks to be free.

  "Simone?" Ruby's word is just barely that, the quiet puff of shock. I recognize, now, where I have heard that cadence before--it is Ruby's own French Canadian, which creeps out when she is not careful or is tired or both.

  "Cherie, you tell your friend, there's nothing to be scared of, no. We are all here waiting on her."

  "That's my sister," Ruby says wildly. "Simone. She's the only one who ever called me that--ma poule. My little hen."

  The one who died from diphtheria. But her message, it's lost in the translation. Waiting could signify so many things. Are they attending to my mother? Or are they expecting me?

  Suddenly the baby goes limp inside me. My arms fall to my sides; my worries dissolve on my tongue. This must be how people feel the moment before their automobile crashes into a tree. This is the white light we hear talk of; this is the quiet coming.

  This is something my own mother felt.

  There are so many questions I have--Will I ever see my son, or is that asking too much? Will he remember me? Will it hurt? Will I know when it's going to happen? But right now, it is enough to have confirmation, to know that my instincts have been right.

  Madame Hedda is coming out of her trance. A line of drool curls down the left side of her mouth like a comma. I place a ten-dollar bill on the table, one I will tell Spencer that I lost. "Come back," she says, and I realize that she means from the other side.

  A comprehensive eugenics survey needs to locate, first, the inadequate in the state; second, to find out, if possible, why they exist.

  --Excerpt from a letter dated October 8, 1925, from H. H. Laughlin, Director of the Eugenics Record Office, to Harriet Abbott

  Dr. Craigh's office is on Park Avenue, and as I finish buttoning my blouse I stare out the window at this street trying to be something it is not. Those trees, they are not fooling anyone; it is still the heart of a city, a place where pavement has triumphed over grass. The obstetrician himself dries his hands on a towel, just as unwilling to make eye contact with me after the exam as I am with him. "Mrs. Pike," he says gruffly, "why don't you join us in the office when you're finished?"

  When I returned to the museum, where Spencer was still riding h
igh on the praise of his colleagues, I did not tell him where Ruby and I had been. I didn't even put up a fuss when he told me he'd made an appointment with this physician, the best in the Northeast for high-risk pregnancies. It is as simple as this: the decision has been taken out of my hands. I know what is going to happen, so there's no reason to fight it.

  My father once invited the state medical examiner to dinner when I was a child. I remember him cutting blithely into the breast of a chicken to illustrate the nature of drowning. The horror, he said, pointing between the ribs with a knife, comes the moment you feel that your lungs will burst. But then you gasp and go under and inhale water. After that, all you feel is peace.

  I have gone under for the third time. I will lie on my back on the sandy bottom, and watch the sunset through a mile of sea.

  "Mrs. Pike," the nurse says, poking her head through the doorway. "They're waiting."

  "Of course." When I turn, I am wearing the smile I've pulled from my sleeve.

  She leads me down the hall. "You have that glow."

  Maybe the radiance in pregnancy does not come from the joy of motherhood. Maybe we all think we are going to die.

  Dr. Craigh's office is dark, paneled, male; a timeless cabin you might find on a clipper ship, clouded with the smoke of cigars. "Gomez pitched a shut-out last night," Craigh is saying. "Between Lefty and Ruth and Gehrig, it's a lock this year."

  Spencer, who does not like baseball, surprises me. "The Athletics are looking pretty good again, if you ask me."

  "Gehrig finished last season with 184 RBIs. You can't seriously believe--oh, Mrs. Pike. Sit down right over there." He gestures to the chair beside my husband.

  Spencer takes my hand and we both turn expectantly, like children called before the principal. "Good news," Craigh announces. "Your pregnancy is as healthy as any I've ever seen."

  Beside me, Spencer relaxes. "You see, Cissy?"

  "I completely understand your concerns, given your mother's experience in childbirth. But based on her medical records, which your husband took the liberty of mailing to me, the complications of her pregnancy were related to her slight frame and the size of the baby. You may be carrying small, Mrs. Pike--but your hips are rather built for childbearing. Luckily, you must take after your father."

  I think of my father's tall, lean, narrow body; nothing like my own. But I smile back at him.

  "Not only are you going to deliver this baby safely and without incident," Dr. Craigh continues, "but I will expect you to bring him back here to meet me."

  I wonder how much Spencer has paid him, in advance, to lie to me.

  We stand and begin the round-robin of shaking hands. Spencer helps me down the three flights of stairs. "Craigh's considered an expert," he says. "Everyone, and I mean everyone, knows his name. You say the word baby, and someone mentions Craigh. So, really, I'd be quite comforted by his diagnosis."

  He stamps a quick kiss on me. His arm slides around the thick of my waist; his other hand opens the door so that we can be swallowed by the city again. The sun is too bright; I can't see a thing. I have to bring my hand up to shield my eyes; I have to let Spencer take me where I'm going.

  We know what feeblemindedness is, and we have come to suspect all persons who are incapable of adapting themselves to their environment and living up to the conventions of society or acting sensibly of being feebleminded.

  --Henry Goddard, Feeblemindedness: Its Causes and Consequences, 1914

  In the end, I want to do it somewhere familiar. I think about it during the long train ride home. I am nearly giddy with what is to come. "I knew it," Spencer says to my father in our private train car. "I knew this trip would be good for her."

  By the time we arrive at home, it is nearly midnight. Peepers sing to us as we get out of the Packard, and the yellow eyes of a runaway cat watch me from the porch of the icehouse. When Spencer opens the door to our home, it sounds like a seal being broken.

  "Ruby, you can unpack in the morning," Spencer orders, as we climb the stairs to the second floor. "Sweetheart, you too. You ought to be in bed."

  "I need a bath," I tell him. "A few minutes to relax alone."

  At that, Ruby turns slowly. Her mouth is round with a question I do not let her ask. "You heard the professor," I say, clipped. After weeks of camaraderie, these cold, sharp words are a weapon to drive her away. She hurries up the steps to the servants' quarters, ducking her head and trying to understand what has gone wrong between us.

  In our room I gather a crisply folded nightgown and wrapper from my armoire. I wait outside the bathroom door until Spencer emerges. "I drew the bath," he says, and smiles ruefully at my belly. "Are you sure if you get in, you'll be able to get out?"

  I am committing to memory the keel of his smile, the landscape of his shoulders. All of the reasons I fell in love with Spencer swell at the base of my throat, so that I cannot say anything at all for a moment. "Don't worry about me," I answer finally, and I mean this for forever.

  A house settles like a fat man falling asleep: first there are light twitches in the walls and floorboard, the ceiling sighs, finally there is a great rolling heave of the atmosphere, and then everything goes still. The bathroom is heavy with steam; I peel off my clothing and let the mist settle over me. My heart beats so fast I am sure that I can see it beneath the skin--but when I look, the mirror has fogged. Instead of swiping it clear, I press my hands to the glass, leaving a mark. With one finger, I scrawl a single word: H . . . E . . . L . . . P. I picture what will happen when I am found, still and white as a marble statue. I think of how everyone will say the nicest things about me; how they will look at me with nothing but regret and love.

  By one in the morning, the bathwater has gone cold. My legs are drawn up on either side of my domed stomach; my wrists are balanced on my knees.

  Spencer's straightedge sits on the lip of the tub.

  I pick it up carefully, and press a line just below the elbow. Blood wells up and I touch it with my finger; rub it on my mouth like lipstick. It tastes sticky, salty, like a penny left on the tongue. It is no surprise to find out I've gone bitter to the core.

  When that raw cut stops aching, I press the razor down again, a half-inch lower.

  Two parallel lines. My life, and my son's. They will save him from the shell of me, and it will be a better life. Otherwise, from the moment he leaves my body, he will belong to someone else--Spencer, and my father. And one day, he will look at me the way they do--like someone who cannot understand the science they create; someone naive enough to believe that a quantity as immeasurable as love might have the same combustible power as dynamite.

  And if, by some miracle, this baby turns out to be a girl, I think it will be worse. I will have failed, because Spencer is expecting a boy. Not only will I have to watch him treat her the way he has treated me . . . I will have to watch her make all the same mistakes I have: fall in love with a man who loves her because of what she is, not who she is; marry for companionship, only to see it makes her more lonely; bear a child, only to realize that she will never live up to what it deserves.

  Another line, and another. Blood swirls in the water of the tub, dreamy and pink. I have a railroad track on my arm. I am finally going somewhere, because there is nothing left for me here.

  My last cut, on the wrist, is the deepest. The pattern for this gash is already there, a blue chalked line beneath the surface.

  There will be one more knife, slicing me down the middle to save this baby. Doctors will finish the work I started here, peeling me open. They will stop and scratch their heads, stunned to discover how empty I am inside.

  A beating buzzes in my ears. It takes too much now, to keep my head erect. My body, big as it is, sinks under the water.

  The door bursts open, then, and Ruby leans into the tub, screaming in my face for me to hang on. She holds me when I cannot hold onto her. She is slick with my blood but somehow manages to heave me over the lip of the tub, so that I collapse wet and naked and bleed
ing on the bathroom floor as she shouts for Spencer. He appears in the doorway and hurries toward me. "Cissy, God, no." He wraps a towel around my wrist, and when it soaks through immediately, turns white and runs out of the room. "You stay with her, you hear?" he cries to Ruby, who is too terrified to move. In the distance I hear him yelling into the phone for the doctor.

  With the only strength I have left, I reach out for Ruby and draw her close by fisting my hand in her nightgown. "Save the baby," I beg, hoarse, but she is sobbing too hard to hear me. So I curl my good hand around her neck. I kiss her on the lips, so that she can taste my pain. "Save my baby," I whisper. "Promise!"

  Ruby nods, her eyes locked on mine. "Promise."

  "All right then," I say, and I let those waves close over my head.

  The rights of the individual cannot be fully safeguarded when he is being compelled to support in the midst of his community the lawless, the immoral, the degenerate, and the mentally defective.

  --H. F. Perkins, Lessons from a Eugenical Survey of Vermont:

  First Annual Report, 1927

  Everything is white. The ceiling, the light, the tattoos on the backs of my eyes. The bandages, which are laced so tight up my arm from shoulder to hand that I can feel my pulse under the skin, as if I need to be reminded that I am alive in spite of it all.

  The bedroom is too hot. For as long as I can remember the window has been stuck; we make do with an electric fan. But even that doesn't help, and when I kick back the bedclothes I notice them--Spencer, and Dr. DuBois, standing in front of the door. "Joseph," Spencer says, "I know this will stay within these walls."