Second Glance: A Novel Read online

  Dr. DuBois is the most prominent physician in Burlington. He delivered me; he will no doubt deliver my baby. "Spencer . . ."

  "Please. I'm asking as a friend."

  "There are places, you know, in the country, where she'd be looked after. All rolling meadows and wicker rocking chairs--we're not talking Waterbury."

  "No. I can't do that to her."

  "To Cissy? Or to yourself?" Dr. DuBois shakes his head. "It's not about you this time, Spencer," he says, and then he lets himself out.

  Spencer sits down on the edge of the bed and stares at me. "I'm sorry," I manage.

  "Yes, you are," he answers, and in spite of the brutal heat in this bedroom, a shiver runs down my spine. Once again, Spencer has found me lacking.

  Q. What is meant by negative eugenics?

  A. This deals with the elimination of the dysgenic elements from society. Sterilization, immigration, legislation, laws preventing the fertile unfit from marrying, etc., come under this head.

  --American Eugenics Society,

  A Eugenics Catechism, 1926

  It is a full week before Spencer leaves me in the house alone with Ruby, and then only because his undergraduate students have returned. "You can call me, you know, any time," he says.

  I look up from the scone I am buttering. "All right."

  "Maybe we could go out for ice cream tonight. If you're feeling up to it." This is Spencer's way of telling me to be alive when he gets home. "Well, then." He is so handsome in his lightweight suit, with his hair slicked back and his bow tie as level as the scales of justice. I know he is staring at the butter knife in my hands, wondering whether it can do damage. Before his eyes I lick the dull blade clean, just to watch his reaction.

  "I'll send Ruby in," he says, and he flees.

  Ruby, who has done her best to avoid me, drags herself into the kitchen as Spencer's car mutters down the drive. "Miz Pike," she says.

  "Miss Weber."

  "If you were my friend," Ruby bursts out, "you would have told me you were going to do that." Her eyes fix on the bandages on my wrist.

  "But then, by definition, you wouldn't have let me," I answer quietly.

  I am saved from having to say any more by a commotion outside. "Coons," Ruby tells me, going for the shotgun we keep behind the pantry door for things such as this.

  "Then they're rabid. It's broad daylight." I push past Ruby, gathering bullets from the sugar bowl in the cabinet. We step out the back door and look around, but the only motion comes from two dragonflies playing tag.

  Ruby thumps the butt of the shotgun onto the ground. "Whatever it was is gone now."

  I am about to agree with her when I notice that the door to the icehouse is ajar. It is a small outbuilding left from my grandmother's years in this home, before it was passed down to me through my mother's will. Blocks of ice cut from Lake Champlain in the winter get delivered every few days, and sit packed in sawdust in the shed until we chip some off for the icebox in the kitchen. Spencer is meticulous about keeping the door shut tight. "If I want water with my scotch," he says, "I can get that from the tap."

  I pluck the shotgun from Ruby's hand. "Stay here," I say, so of course she follows. We climb onto the icehouse porch and slip inside, letting our eyes adjust to the lack of light. Only someone who has spent as much time trolling through darkness as I have would be able to sense that third body in the room. "Come out," I call, braver than I feel.

  Nothing.

  "I said come out!" By now I am imagining robbers, rapists, thieves. Because I have nothing left to lose, I raise the shotgun and fire at the closest block of ice. It explodes, and Ruby screams, and behind my left shoulder a man yells, "Goddamn!"

  Gray Wolf comes out from his hiding spot, hands up, like in the movies. His face is wreathed in a strange combination of pride and shock.

  "What are you doing here?" Now that it is over, my hands are shaking. Ruby cowers against the doorway of the shed. "It's all right," I tell her. "I know him."

  "You know him?" Ruby's mouth drops, a perfect O.

  It is possible that he has come to steal from us, or to hurt me. It would have been easy enough to follow me home after that day at the Gypsy camp. But it makes more sense to have robbed our home when we were gone, in New York City. And it doesn't account for the moccasins, which I am sure he left for me to find.

  More than anything, I do not want this moment to be the one where I turn out to be the sort of person he accused me of being the last time we met.

  "Gray Wolf," I say, "this is Ruby. Ruby, Gray Wolf." I present them to each other as if we were all British nobles at a ball. I dare either of them to comment.

  "I'm going to call the professor," Ruby murmurs under her breath.

  I catch her by the elbow. "Don't." This small seed of trust slips from my palm into hers.

  But she has been living in the house of a eugenicist. And not even Ruby's French Canadian background looks quite as dark, compared to that of a Gypsy. "Miz Pike," she says, her eyes sliding to his face. "He's . . . he's . . ."

  "Hungry," I supply. "Maybe you could get us something from the kitchen?"

  She swallows whatever she is about to say, nods, and heads for the house. When we are alone, Gray Wolf lifts my arm and traces a finger down the spiral of bandage. "You've been hurt." I nod. "An accident?"

  Looking away, I shake my head.

  He continues to examine the gauze, visibly upset. "I brought you something to keep you safe. But I guess I didn't get here quick enough."

  He pulls a leather pouch from his pocket, which is attached to a long loop of rawhide. It smells faintly of summertime, and him. "Black ash, ground hemlock, yellow lady's slipper." Gray Wolf's eyes dart to my abdomen. "For both of you." He slips it over my neck and I feel myself leaning into him, feel the leather burning against my skin. "Kizi Nd'aib nidali."

  "What does that mean?"

  "'I have been there.'"

  I look into Gray Wolf's face and I believe him. This man knows what it is like to be thrown into a place that might very well kill him, if he doesn't do it himself. It is there in his eyes--black, the color that's left when all the other color in the world is swallowed whole.

  "What's the word for 'thank you?'" I ask.

  "Wliwni."

  "Wliwni, then." I touch the beading on the pouch, an intricate turtle. "How did you know where to find me?"

  That, finally, makes him smile. "Everyone in Burlington knows where your husband lives."

  "You left the moccasins on the porch for me."

  "I left them for the baby." He leans against the supporting beam of the icehouse porch. His hair spills over his shoulders.

  "You shouldn't have come," I say.

  "Why not?"

  "Spencer wouldn't like it."

  "I didn't come for him, Lia," Gray Wolf replies. "I came for you."

  I do not know what to say, which is just as well, because something catches his eye--Ruby, who has ferried a tray filled with lemonade and scones onto the porch of the house. As we walk toward the refreshments, I feel the medicine pouch sway against me. Gray Wolf and I are the only two people in the world who know it is there. I wonder how and why he has twice now called me Lia, when I have never introduced myself to him that way.

  The social life of the Old Americans sets the social tone of the community. They are the charter members of society, and the rules that they make governing social intercourse are the rules that all others would follow.

  --Elin Anderson, We Americans: A Study of Cleavage in an American City, 1937

  Forks ring against fine china, and the sound of crystal glasses singing makes me think there might be angels in the rafters. My father and Spencer and I have the best table at the Ethan Allen Club--the one uniformly agreed upon to be the choice location in the dining room for watching the sun set. Through the roses and nasturtium in the center of the table I watch my father flatter the wife of Allen Sizemore, Dean of Sciences. "So," Allen asks, smiling. "When do you expect the
big day?"

  I do not realize, at first, that he is talking about the baby. "Not soon enough, I bet," his wife says. "I remember feeling fat as a tick on a hound by the end."

  I like Mrs. Sizemore, who tells it as she sees it. She reaches across the table to pat my hand. "You hang in there, Cissy. It'll be over before you know it."

  "Over?" Allen laughs. "Just beginning, you mean. Why, Spencer will start nodding off in the middle of lectures, after changing diapers all night long. And Harry, maybe we'll engrave Grandpa on your office door just for good measure."

  "This baby will be absolutely perfect," my father promises. "He'll have his papa's brain--which means he'll be smart enough to sleep through the night. And he'll have his mama's beauty--which means if he does wake up, he'll charm his exhausted nanny."

  "Nanny?" I turn to Spencer.

  He glares at my father. "That was going to be a surprise."

  "But I don't want a nanny."

  "Darling," Spencer jokes, "she's not for you."

  Everyone at the table laughs. I look down at my lap, mortified. Hiking up my sleeve a little, I make sure the bandage is showing, and then I reach for my wineglass, my eyes on Spencer the whole time.

  "Mercy, Cecelia . . . did you hurt yourself?" As I have expected, Mrs. Sizemore has noticed right away.

  "As a matter of fact--" I begin, but Spencer interrupts.

  "She burned her arm on the stove." He stares at me with a look that brooks no argument. "She really needs to be more careful."

  "You didn't tell me," my father says, reaching for my wrist.

  "It was nothing," I pull away and in the process, knock over my wineglass. The cabernet spills, bright as my blood, across my lap.

  It seems everyone in the room summons the waiter at once. He comes out of the woodwork with a stack of snowy napkins. His face, wide and brown, reminds me of Gray Wolf's. He begins to dab at my thighs.

  "For God's sake," Spencer explodes. "Get your hands off her!"

  He takes over, mopping up the mess. "It's only a dress, Spencer," I say. And to the waiter, without thinking: "Wliwni." Thank you.

  The waiter's eyes fly to my face, as do everyone else's at the table. "Well?" I demand of the waiter, pretending he has heard me wrong. "Who do you think you are?" I turn to the table at large. "Excuse me while I visit the ladies' room." As I sweep from the sumptuous dining room I can feel the Gypsy watching. I wish I could apologize to him. I wish I could tell him I understand: the higher you raise your hopes, the farther you have to fall.

  Draft statistics showed Vermont to be almost at the top of the list of physical and mental defectives. It has been suggested that this may be due to the large number of French Canadians in the population.

  --H. F. Perkins, Project #1, ESV archive, "Projects--Old," 1926

  Somehow, Gray Wolf knows when to come. I find him on my porch when Spencer is lecturing and Ruby has gone into town to the butcher. He steps out from behind a tree when I take a walk at dusk in the woods. When he does not appear himself, I discover more gifts on the porch: a small sweetgrass basket, a miniature snowshoe, a sketch of a running horse. When we are together, I wonder where he has been all my life.

  I know better than to encourage this. He comes from the fraying edge of a society; he holds on by a thread. Me, I've grown up right at its woven center. He is dark and quiet and completely different from me, which is exactly why I should put distance between us. But it is also the reason I find him so fascinating.

  If you walk down the street in Burlington you can see all sorts of people--Irish, Italians, Gypsies, Jews--but you learn, growing up on the Hill, to wear blinders. You notice only the people who look like you--women with the same permanent waves in their hair and children with sailor collars and men who smell of bay rum. I have not asked Gray Wolf why he keeps seeking me out, but I imagine it is the same reason I wait for him--for the risk of it, for the sheer surprise of pressing one's nose to the glass and finding someone staring back on the other side.

  What would Spencer say if he knew the person I most identify with is a Gypsy, who, like me, doesn't fit into this world?

  Today I don't expect to see Gray Wolf, and I am truly disappointed. I won't be at home during the day--instead, I have come to attend the Klifa Club's monthly meeting. It is the premier women's social club in Burlington; my membership was a given, based on my social standing in the community.

  Spencer encouraged me to come to town today. Dressed in long sleeves, to cover my bandages, no one would be able to tell. "Besides," he suggested over breakfast, "a little musical entertainment might be soothing."

  So I spend two hours listening to a harpist, and another half-hour trying not to fall asleep as a botanist drones on about the gardens of Italy. I suffer through lemonade and finger sandwiches, as women discreetly pat the mound of my abdomen and tell me what I already know--that I am carrying a boy. I fan myself with the program and slip down the stairs when the ladies are discussing next month's event.

  Gray Wolf is waiting for me beneath the green awning of the bank, smoking a cigarette, as if we have agreed to meet. There is just one moment of shock that he's found me, even in town, but he only raises his dark eyebrows and offers me a cigarette too. We start walking. We don't talk, at first. We don't need to.

  "The Klifa Club," he says finally.

  "Yes."

  "What's it like?"

  "Magnificent, of course. We eat on plates made of 14-karat gold, and hold audiences with kings of small European countries. Why else would it be so exclusive?"

  He laughs. "Beats me." As we come to a street corner, he takes my elbow, and I instantly freeze. Although we have met many times now, I can count on one hand the number of occasions Gray Wolf has touched me. This friendship, this easy conversation is one thing, but there are certain lines even I cannot cross. Noticing, he lets go of me and fills the fissure between us with words. "What's a Klifa, anyway?"

  "A mistake. It was supposed to be Klifra, which is Icelandic for climber."

  "As in 'social?'"

  "No, these women don't have to climb. They've already staked their claim at the top." I shrug. "What's in a name," I quote, before I remember that Gray Wolf would not know Shakespeare.

  "Ask Juliet," he answers dryly, fully aware of what I am thinking. "And to answer your question, a name can mean everything. Sometimes, it's all you have."

  "You call me Lia," I say. "Why?"

  He pauses. "Because you don't look like a Cissy."

  "What would my name be in your language?"

  He shakes his head. "No one uses my language anymore."

  "You do."

  "That's because I don't have anything left to lose." He glances at me, but I'm not giving up that easily. "There isn't a literal translation. You can't always take an English word and turn it into Alnobak." Gray Wolf nods at my brooch, a small clock pinned to my white blouse. "See, this is Papizwokwazik. But it doesn't mean clock. It's 'the thing that ticks.' A beaver might be called Tmakwa--a tree cutter--or abagolo-- flat tail--or awadnakwazid--the wood carrier . . . depending on how you see it."

  I love the idea that a name might change based on who you are at a given moment in time. "Awadnakwazid," I repeat, rolling the syllables on my tongue. Consonants stick to the roof of my mouth. "I wish I had a name like Gray Wolf."

  "Then give yourself one. That's what I did." He shrugs. "My birth name, it's John . . . Azo. But Gray Wolf describes me better. And I figured if the whole world saw me as an Indian, I ought to have a name that backs them up."

  We have turned onto College Street now, which is busy and crowded. I know the mother walking with her daughter and the businessman leaning on an ivory cane and the two young soldiers are all wondering what someone like me is doing with someone like Gray Wolf. I wonder who else will see us. It is part of the excitement.

  "I used to stand on the roof of my father's house and think about jumping," I say.

  "Your father's house," he repeats.

  "Well,
it's ours now, but yes. Once, I even did it. I broke my arm."

  "Why did you want to jump?"

  No one has ever asked me that question. Not my father, afterward; not the doctors at the hospital who set the bones. "Because I could." I turn to him and make the traffic flow around us. "Give me a name."

  He stares at my face for a long moment. "Sokoki," he says. "One who has broken away."

  Suddenly, behind me, I hear myself being called. "Cissy?" Spencer's voice is carried on the shoulders of passersby. "Is that you?"

  Maybe I have wanted to be discovered all along; maybe I have been expecting this. But when Spencer stands in front of Gray Wolf, my insides go to water and my legs begin to shake. I would fall, if not for Spencer catching me. "Darling?"

  "I'm just a little light-headed, after the Klifa Club meeting."

  Spencer looks dismissively at Gray Wolf. "Chief, you can move along."

  "I'm not a chief."

  With my heart in my throat I reach into my pocketbook and take out a dollar bill. "All right," I interrupt, as if Gray Wolf and I have been in the middle of a business deal, "but this is all I'm willing to pay for it."

  He plays along, but disappointment shadows his eyes. "Thank you, ma'am." He hands me a small bundle wrapped in a handkerchief, the first thing he can find in his pocket for a sham transaction. Then he vanishes into the masses walking toward the university.

  "I've told you not to talk to beggars," Spencer says, taking my arm. "Once they see you're an easy target, they'll never leave you alone."

  "It's Christian charity," I murmur.

  "What on earth did he manage to sell you, anyway?"

  I peek inside the folds of the handkerchief, and go dizzy again. "A trinket," I say, and stuff the miniature portrait into my purse before Spencer recognizes the face, a perfect twin to the one that sits on my dressing table to help me remember my mother.

  Within the ranks of the Old Americans are many individuals who transcend the group pattern, question the status quo, think creatively about community or social problems, and even consider the possibility of a different and perhaps even better Burlington. As long as they do not go too far with their questioning, the group will uphold them; and they seldom do go too far, knowing the price they would have to pay.

  --Elin Anderson, We Americans: A Study of Cleavage in an American City, 1937