The 19th Wife

by David Ebershoff

  I will tell you—in the years leading up to the Church’s about-face, what with the Edmunds Act in ’82 and Edmunds-Tucker five years later and all the other drum-beating out of Washington, I was convinced the federal government and the Saints would have a showdown of biblical proportions, one that would leave the Mormons destroyed. Look at Brigham—he was willing to go to jail over the issue! (That reminds me, I do not recall any talk of a letter or a diary or what have you from his time in prison, but I really wouldn’t know.) In the years leading up to 1890 I imagined a great battle of wills—the Saints fighting the U.S. Army to their deaths. But in the end, the Mormons relented. They gave up polygamy in a simple policy shift. In doing so, they chose the future. And look at them now! (I suppose I should say, look at you!) How many are you? How many millions more to come? If the Church had clung to plural marriage, it’s safe to say it would have withered into a fringe.

  Let me say, I appreciate your understanding the irony of all this. If your letter had failed to acknowledge it, I would have quickly filed it away. But, as you say, time changes our point of view. This notion has been on my mind lately. Frankly, it’s been a trying summer. I lost my wife a year ago July. About nine months after her departure I managed to back my grief into its cage, but the anniversary opened the door and let the beast out again. There has been no solace. Her name was Rosemary. Her eyes were the blue of a winter ocean. We were married forty-three years. It’s been difficult, more difficult than I could have known.

  My goodness, I have just looked back at my opening paragraphs to you. I cannot believe how far from your questions I have already strayed. First let me acknowledge that your questions are fair and they show that you are an honest historian. You might know (or you might not) I was an engineer. I invented a small but useful device used to lay macadam accurately upon the roads. My point is, I like things orderly and as they are. And so I will say directly, in response to your questions, I cannot answer them for I was not there. I have no interpretation to add, no analysis to offer, no hearsay to pass along, no old family stories to share. If I did not witness it, I am not your source.

  Except, you correctly state that I was with my mother during the period July–November 1873, while we lived in the Walker House. As you must know, she sketches this period in The 19th Wife. Of course, some of what she writes can be dismissed as grandstanding. The same can be true of the stories Brigham published about her in his periodicals. They were engaged in battle. Manipulation of the truth has always been part of the warrior’s arsenal. Neither Brigham nor my mother is more culpable, or less.

  As I wrote that last sentence, the dolphins returned. I hurried down the path to my viewing bench. Can I describe the joy of a spouting blow hole? The white blaze of sea foam is, to me at least, one of the purest expressions of life itself. Will you forgive my lack of critical reasoning when I say I see God in that frothy column of water? I know nothing about you, Professor, but I trust you have seen the ocean. If you have, then you have witnessed the divine. How barren the ground is in comparison! If I could count the hours I have spent staring out at it! And yet those hours never feel lost. I cannot imagine how else I could refill them were I given a second chance.

  As you know, on July 15, 1873, my mother and I moved into the Walker House. In Brigham’s mind, and the minds of his followers, this was her act of apostasy, not the lawsuit she filed against him ten days later or the charges she laid out in the newspapers over the next many months. The Walker House was known throughout the Territory as a Gentile den. The rumors about it included orgiastic gatherings in the parlor, a Satanic altar in a linen closet, and murderous rituals practiced in the root cellar. It’s laughable now, but such stories were told again and again in the Territory. No one questioned them. We believed every word.

  I don’t know if our lives were truly in danger that first night in the hotel. Indeed, my mother’s statements in The 19th Wife have come to seem overwrought. I can tell you this, however: She was genuinely afraid. Imagine, if you will, departing the only world you have ever known—your family, your landscape, your customs, your neighbors, your faith, even if that faith has been shaken. Ponder it: saying good-bye without knowing where you are headed. It would be something like decamping for the moon.

  I can tell you this as well about our first hours at the Walker House: I was frightened, too. At that age it is hard to know the root of one’s fear, but I gather it was because I saw my mother in distress. There is nothing more alarming to a boy than seeing a mother, or a father, buckling. It says to him that all will not be well. The boy does not know this, but he senses it, as a dog senses his master’s true state of mind.

  I remember the hotel bed as quite high and laid out with bolsters and pillows faced in blue damask. Although it was summer I recall being cold and burying myself beneath the bedclothes in my mother’s arms. We lay very still, never falling asleep. Whenever we heard a noise downstairs or in the corridor our bodies went rigid. At one point, I remember vividly, there was the sound of a man standing outside our door. I am sure it was a butler realizing he had gone to the wrong suite. But he stood there for what seemed eternity, breathing, waiting, hovering. We held each other, my mother and I. Yes, in fact I did fear for my life at that moment. I know she did, too. My mother had said nothing to me of the possibility of assassination by the Danites, but she didn’t have to. You know how boys talk: in the schoolyard I had heard all about Brigham’s secret police. The rumor was they cut the hearts out of anyone who abandoned their faith. There were stories of apostates driven into the desert and scalped to make it look as though the Indians had murdered them. I recall the tale of a man who one morning declared to his wife he no longer believed in Brigham’s word. By afternoon he had simply disappeared. No trace, not a footprint in the sand, nor a glove fallen in the path. I don’t know why, but that always frightened me the most—a person simply disappearing, poof! These of course were schoolyard tales, which tend to be among the tallest. There is no way to verify them, not now. Even so, think of the impression they would leave on an eight-year-old whose mother has checked into a notorious Gentile refuge. And so, whether or not our lives were truly at risk, it seemed that way and our fear was as real as the white moon burning in the sky.

  The next morning a number of visitors came to the room. One brought me a warm bun topped with walnuts and honey—a distraction, I realize. It was clear something significant had taken place. I did not know what, of course, but all day people continued to visit our suite—not just the Strattons and the Hagans and Major Pond, but others, men I did not know. During these visits my mother sat in a mahogany chair with a cluster of cherries carved into the frame. Her visitor sat opposite her, asking questions and writing things down. These interviewers reminded me of the Ward Teachers. I knew these men were not Ward Teachers, but I assumed they shared some sort of purpose. I did not connect these interviews with the newspaper stories about my mother that appeared the next day.

  I am not going to recap for you how the feud between my mother and Brigham played out in the press. Suffice it to say Brigham’s papers, especially the Herald, waged a robust campaign against her. I am sure you have read the accounts in the archives. He laid upon her every accusation short of murder.

  All of this was to be expected. I recall Major Pond, whose uniform always impressed me, coming to the room and telling my mother and the others (who was it? Judge Hagan? I never cared for him, I will add) that Brigham had manipulated the Western Telegraph Office and the Associated Press’s man in Utah. False stories about her were appearing outside Utah. Major Pond was red-faced, perspiration glistening in the branches of his mustache. “I’ll fix that damn Chronicle!” he bellowed. I remember it distinctly—the way his brass buttons shook on his chest.

  Of course, I was for the most part unaware of the daily items about my mother’s apostasy. How could a little boy locked in a fourth-floor hotel room in Salt Lake know that editorial writers in San Francisco and New York took lurid interest in h
is mother? I knew that many people wanted to meet her. Often a crowd collected outside the Walker House, pointing up to our window. The hotel became another stop on the polygamy tour—the Beehive House, the infamous Lion House, and now the Walker House. Who on their way to California could resist viewing these sites? I remember I liked to peel back the shade to see them. It was clear they were not from Utah. I don’t know how I knew this, but perhaps it was their impatience or their brightly colored clothes or the way they spoke casually of Joe Smith and Brig Young—the way you and I might refer to a character from a film or a novel. There was no reverence or awe or fear. Yes, that’s what it was—that was their difference. They were indifferent to the profundity of belief. Faith was just one more hullabaloo on a long list. I remember one fellow in the lobby saying to his companion, “These people have lost their minds. Imbeciles, all of them, including Mrs. 19.”

  I’m sorry to say I don’t have the letter from my grandmother. My mother’s transcription of it in The 19th Wife will have to be accepted as true. It was the only time, I believe, my mother considered reversing her course of action. By then, of course, it was too late; and, no less important, she had surrounded herself by many whose interests lay in her pressing ahead in her defiance of the Church.

  On the second day of our confinement, my uncle Gilbert came to visit. Until that point I had had little contact with the man. He spent much of his time at South Cottonwood with his two wives and eighteen children—my first cousins, but I could spend the rest of my days trying to remember their names. I remember Gilbert’s first words when he entered the suite: “This is all my fault.” I remember the tender woe in his voice. Gilbert always stood with an awkward, gloomy bend to his spine—a manifestation, I have since come to believe, of the regret he carried in his heart.

  Of course, I did not know my uncle was on his way out of the Church at this time. He promised my mother full support. I understand Gilbert helped my mother financially in this period. It could have been he who paid our hotel bill, yet I cannot tell you for certain. If it was, most likely his funds came from the payments Brigham gave him for his help in arranging his marriage to my mother. What do the Easterners call this? Karma? I suppose I’m asking the wrong man.

  Before leaving the suite that day, Gilbert knelt down beside me. He set his thumb beneath my chin, tilting my head up so I was looking into his eye. “You’ll look after your mother?” He fished two gold coins from his pocket and thumbed them, one after the next, into my palm. I will tell you, Professor Green, I have those coins today. They are mounted in a felt display atop the desk I write you from.

  Before I continue, I feel I must say a few words about memory. It is full of holes. If you were to lay it out upon a table, it would resemble a scrap of lace. I am a lover of history, Professor Green. I can nibble my way through the sagas and biographies of the great men and the most tumultuous days. Napoleon, Jefferson, Elizabeth, Alexander! Herodotus, Thucydides, Gibbon, Carlyle! You should see my shelves. They sag under their tomes. I have the highest respect for your trade. The master historians have been my friends, never more so since Rosemary’s departure. Even so, history has one flaw. It is a subjective art, no less so than poetry or music. The true historian has two sources: the written record and the witness’s testimony. This is as it should be. Yet one is memory and the other is written, quite often, from memory. There is nothing to be done about this defect except acknowledge it for what it is. Yet this is your field’s Achilles’ heel. You say in your letter the historian writes the truth. Forgive me, I must disagree. The historian writes a truth. The memoirist writes a truth. The novelist writes a truth. And so on. My mother, we both know, wrote a truth in The 19th Wife—a truth that corresponded to her memory and desires. It is not the truth, certainly not. But a truth, yes. Your Church has exerted admirable effort in destroying her credibility. No one can deny she got many details wrong. But the elders and others responsible for dismissing her from the record have failed. Her book is a fact. It remains so, even if it is snowflaked with holes.

  I am sorry. After that I had to take a walk. I meant to return to the typewriter in a few minutes, but I went down to my bench. The dolphins did not come today. Just as glorious as their arrival is the swiftness with which they disappear. The mystery of it! If I did not record my impressions of them in my letters and shamefully spotty diary, even I would wonder if they existed at all. They are creatures of the dream. There are times when I miss her terribly. My mother, I mean. She was a brave fool. I love her for that, and so much else.

  I see no reason to recount for you the legal wrangling that took place between July and November of that year. It is all rather dull, isn’t it: the back-and-forths, the petitions, the claims, the what-have-yous, the lawyers’ verbiage as thick as sludge. When I discussed it with Rosemary I told her it was like any divorce case, only grimier by a magnitude of 1,000. One other difference, of course: although the case was about money (when are they not?), it was cloaked in the language of God. (Can I share a sacrilegious thought? When I think about such things—a husband declaring, in deposition, that his wife will be turned away from Heaven—I wish the dolphins were given the responsibility of turning our minds to God, not the clergy. Strike me down, but they have meant more to me than any man of cloth.)

  Two things I recall from my child’s vantage. Brigham sent, via an agent, an offer to my mother. This was a few days after we arrived at the Walker House. He must have realized she was determined to carry out as public a divorce as possible. He offered—I believe it was—$20,000, to, as they say, disappear. In The 19th Wife my mother insists she was indignant at the offer and dismissed it at once. That is not my recollection. Tempted by the large sum, she lingered over it, consulting with her advisers. Both Judge Hagan and Major Pond told her it was not enough. “Twenty thousand dollars is enough to take care of my boys,” my mother said. She looked to me as she said this. My memory of it is as clear as if it occurred this morning. Or right now.

  Not long after this (it could have been the same afternoon), my mother and Judge Hagan had a disagreement. We were alone in the suite, and they behaved as if I were not present or did not understand them. As payment for his legal services, Judge Hagan wanted 50% of my mother’s future settlement. My mother rightly objected. “You’re robbing me,” she said. “I need every penny for James and Lorenzo.”

  They settled on 20%, but I know thereafter my mother never fully trusted Judge Hagan again. As time passed, it became clear he was more interested in his own gain and notoriety than saving my mother from Brigham’s wrath.

  By the end of July, my mother had formally filed suit against the Prophet of the Latter-day Saints. To them—the Saints, I mean—it was no less an affront than serving papers to Christ. (I once read in the newspaper of a man from West Texas who, disappointed that his patch of dirt was not an oil field, filed suit against the Lord. Bureaucracy pondered the case for eleven days.)

  On the subject of irony, Brigham responded with an unexpected legal maneuver. Via his lawyers he claimed my mother was not his legal wife for the simple reason that he was already married. At the time there was a dual justice system in Utah—Brigham’s and the American code of law. They lay atop one another in a not always natural fit. Some matters were brought before the Church, others before the courts. Brigham chose to use the federal laws for his counterattack. The courts, of course, did not (and do not) recognize polygamy. Therefore my mother was not married to Brigham, never had been his wife, and hence had no valid claims to his property. (Do you ever consider, Professor Green, how the law can be both magnificent and idiotic?) In essence, he made legal claim that he had never married my mother.

  I don’t know what my mother thought when she learned of Brigham’s tactics. I know that would provide fresh detail for your book, but I’m afraid she never spoke to me directly about it. Was she “mad as Hades”? Professor Green, are you married? If you are, then you have learned the futility of guessing a woman’s mind. And isn’t that one
of woman’s 1,001 delights? She is not predictable. The moment you believe you can anticipate her, she will prove you wrong. Rosemary was like that. She used to say, “Don’t tell me what’s on my mind.” If there is any constancy, it’s that men are fools.

  That’s where I stopped yesterday. It was afternoon. No sign of the dolphins. Have they already moved south? They do not migrate as regularly as the whales. You cannot turn your calendar by them. Although they are gone, I will not be surprised if they return tomorrow or next week. Then again, if I were not to see them for many months, that too would not surprise me. Do you know what I miss most about Rosemary? Simply knowing she was there.

  I’m afraid even your question about myself—was I ever excommunicated from the Church?—I am unable to answer. You probably have the resources to research that. In any event, whether or not through clerical error or grand scheme I am technically still a member of the Latter-day Saints matters none to me. I do not say that to offend you. I should think I would offend you more if I did not write in full honesty, especially on the subject of faith. In my adulthood I flirted with the Episcopals. Rosemary was a Catholic, although she disagreed with nearly everything they proclaimed. What do I consider myself now? A man attempting to be good. In this endeavor I have no use for church and steeple. If another man does, I only wish he finds what he needs.

  I have just now reread your letter. Did Brigham really treat my mother as she describes in The 19th Wife? Did she truly want to end polygamy or was she more interested in destroying Brigham? What was her final fate? I wish I could tell you where to turn to answer these questions, but I’m in the dark like you. On the last one—what happened to her?—I suppose in writing this letter, I am subconsciously encouraging you to dig around her story so that one day you may come to me and explain the mystery of her disappearance. How I wish I had even a clue to guide you in your search.