The 19th Wife

by David Ebershoff

  “Bedtime, big guy.” I pulled Johnny out of his jeans, dumped him on the bed, and threw a blanket over him. “Now go to sleep.”

  “I’d kill for a Whopper,” he said. “Or some McNuggets.” He was stumbling into sleep, his words slowing down. He smacked his lips, let out a soft moan, and pushed out a final thought for the night: “You think they got a Snickers in the vending machine?” Then he was out. He’d sleep till dawn.

  Tom was on the edge of the other bed, stroking Joey’s ear. He had to be pissed at me for bringing this mess into his life. “I was really worried,” he said. “About both of you. What do you think got into him? Maybe he freaked out because you weren’t around?”

  “I’m afraid this wasn’t a onetime event. Johnny’s got a lot of issues.”

  Tom shrugged. “I don’t care. He can stay as long as he wants.” And then, “You too.”

  He went into the bathroom to get ready for bed. I opened his laptop and went online to that website, 19thwife.com. Under the If You Need Help tab, there was information about a place in Salt Lake called the Ann Eliza Young House. There was a picture of an old gabled house with a big stained-glass window. At the top of the page it said, We’re always here.

  Tom came out of the bathroom stripped to his sacred underwear. That’s another thing I love about the Mormons: that crazy holy underwear is actually kinda sexy. Roland calls it God’s lingerie. Which reminded me: I hadn’t talked to him in days. He still thought I was coming back for the nursery job the next day. Isn’t that how it works sometimes—the big decisions, I mean. You don’t actually make them, you just roll into them once they’ve become inevitable. Sometime between meeting Tom in the lobby of the Malibu Inn and now, I had decided to stay in Utah to see this thing through.

  “Question,” I said.

  “Shoot.”

  “Why do you still wear that?”

  “What? You don’t like it?”

  “It’s not that. I mean, don’t you have to be a Mormon to wear that underwear?”

  “Technically, but it’s not about the church anymore. It’s about me. Besides, it’s actually pretty comfortable. You know what my mom used to say when I was a kid? She used to say, wearing these was like wearing a hug. I know that’s cheesy but it’s kinda true. The only problem now is you have to have a temple recommend to buy them. But I found this site online where I can get new ones.” He sat on the bed. “What about you? Do you always sleep in your clothes?”

  I hadn’t even noticed that I had crawled into bed in my jeans. “I don’t know, I guess. Does that bother you?”

  “It makes me feel like you’re ready to bolt.”

  “Don’t think of it like that.”

  “Tomorrow I’m going to buy you some PJs.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t.”

  We pulled up the blanket, and Elektra dug under and curled up between us. Joey found a spot at the foot of the bed. The room went quiet except for the sighs of the dogs. “Jordan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can I ask you a question about your mom?”

  “OK.”

  “What was she like?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What kind of mom was she?”

  “I don’t know, pretty average, I mean considering.”

  “Did you get to spend a lot of time with her?”

  “Sure.”

  “What would you do?”

  “I don’t know, the usual stuff.”

  “Like what?”

  “We’d hang out, I guess.”

  “Did she bake you cookies and things like that?”

  “Not really.”

  “No?”

  “It was kind of hard to do any baking. The kitchen had all these rules.”

  “What else would you do?”

  “I’d hang out in her room sometimes.”

  “And talk?”

  “Yeah.”

  “About what?”

  “All sorts of stuff.”

  “Like what?”

  “God and the church and things like that, but other things, too.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Like the sun, and how different it was in the summer from the winter. And the mountains and how pretty they looked when there was snow. And Virginia.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Our old dog.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She’s still alive.”

  “You must miss her.”

  “Virginia? Yeah, sometimes.”

  “I meant your mom.”

  “Sure, I guess.”

  Tom dented his pillow and turned on his side. “Jordan?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you think’s going to happen?”

  “She’ll either get out or she won’t.”

  “When are you going to see her again?”

  “Soon, real soon.”

  In the morning I told Tom about the place in SLC. “I’m taking Johnny there.”

  “Maybe there’s someplace closer.” He was getting ready to go to the front desk, pinning his name tag to his shirt. He had a bright polished look, his cheeks shining with morning cheer.

  “There’s no place else,” I said. “I don’t want him to put you through another night like last night. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  “Wait till Saturday and I’ll go with you.”

  “This can’t wait. A lot can happen in a week.”

  “I’ll miss you.”

  “C’mon, it’s only been two days.”

  “Two days is enough.” And then, “But I guess not for you.”

  I decided to leave Elektra with Joey in Tom’s room. She didn’t like that idea and ran out to the van and tried to jump through the window. I had to drag her back inside. As I pulled out of the lot her brown snout was in the window, leaving prints on the glass. Tom was in the lobby behind the front desk, keeping his eye on my van, watching me as I drove off. He waved as I pulled out but I don’t think he saw me wave back.

  Johnny slept most of the way on the futon, still hung over from last night. Every once in a while he woke up to announce he needed to piss, but other than that he was more or less passed out. It was nearly five hours to SLC, which gave me way too much time to think.

  I first saw the temple from the freeway. I guess you’d say it’s beautiful, what with all that white granite and the forest of spires and the gold angel playing his trumpet on top of that gold ball. I shook Johnny’s foot and told him to wake up. “There it is,” I said. “The mother ship.”

  Johnny stared out at the temple. “You ever been here before?” he said.

  “Nope.”

  “Me neither. It’s not really what I expected.”

  “What’d you expect?”

  “I don’t know, for some reason I thought it would look like heaven.”

  “Maybe it does.”

  “Where’s this famous lake?”

  “Out there somewhere.”

  “I don’t see it.”

  “I’m sure it’s there.”

  “So tell me, Mr. International Poster Boy for Gay Marriage, what brings us to Salt Lake?”

  “What are you talking about now?”

  “You and Tom, pretty serious, right, right?” He started whistling here comes the bride. “No, seriously, why’d we drive all the way up here?”

  “I’ve got an appointment.”

  “Is it one of our chat session ladies? I’ve been dying to meet the others.”

  “I never heard back from them. This is someone else.”

  We were off the freeway now, driving toward Temple Square along an eight-lane road pumping traffic into the city. Except there wasn’t much traffic and no one was walking around. I stopped at a red light for a tram to cross. I was the only car waiting and there wasn’t anyone on the tram.

  “I’m going to drop you somewhere and I’ll go have my meeting and then come back for you. I’ll probably be gone a little more than an hour.”


  “Whoa whoa whoa, wait a minute, you want me to do what?”

  “Just hang out somewhere.”

  “Why are you giving me the heave-ho all of a sudden?”

  “Because you look like shit and smell like pot. I can’t take you to a meeting.”

  “No way, dude, you don’t haul my ass to SLC and then leave me in the van.”

  “I won’t leave you in the van. We’ll find a park somewhere.”

  “I’m not sitting in a boiling ass park where all the repressed Mormon fags can chase me.”

  “Johnny. You know how I feel about that word.”

  He mimicked me: “You know how I feel about that word.”

  “Here. Right here.” I pulled over, cutting off the guy behind me. “Here’s a mall right here. You go in there and hang out. Give me two hours. Here’s ten dollars. Buy yourself a hot dog and go fuck yourself.”

  “Someone didn’t get laid last night and is now taking it out on me.”

  “Why are you always so nasty?”

  “Because I’m from Mesadale, you mother.”

  “That excuse is getting old.”

  “Look in the mirror, buddy.”

  “And none of your running-off shit, either. If you aren’t here in exactly two hours, I’m driving back to St. George and you can have a really nice life.”

  “You’re a total motherfucker, you know that?” Johnny popped the door and ran off, the black soles of his sneakers flashing until he was gone.

  The Ann Eliza Young House was located on East South Temple Street, a block from the LDS Temple, the Tabernacle, the Family History Library, and all the rest. It looked like a lot of the old houses around there except I recognized it by the golden beehive in a pane of stained glass. I rang the bell and a girl a few years older than me opened up. I told her I’d seen the website and wanted to know if it was true.

  “If what’s true?”

  “If you’re really here to help.”

  She laughed like I’d made a joke or something, and then she saw I was totally serious and led me inside to a back office. There were a couple of pictures of the girl on her desk, shots of her with her arms around other blond girls. One picture showed the girl in her missionary outfit, with the black-and-white name tag and the long dark skirt, standing in front of the lights of Times Square.

  “Have a seat. Our director’s out for about an hour, but you’re welcome to wait right here.”

  “I only need a little information.”

  “I’m happy to tell you about our program, get you oriented and everything, but only the director can formally admit you. If you want, I can show you the boys’ room and you can take a shower and put on some—”

  She stopped. “What’s wrong? Are you hungry? We have some veggie lasagna left over.”

  I told the girl I wasn’t hungry. I told the girl I wasn’t there for me. “I’ve got a kid. I mean, he’s not mine, he just started hanging out with me down in St. George.” I told her the whole story. Well, not the whole story, just the part about Johnny latching on to me.

  “I am so sorry,” the girl said. “I thought—”

  “I know.”

  “You look so young.”

  “I wanted to check this place out. But I don’t want to leave Johnny just anywhere.”

  “Of course not. You want to leave him someplace where he’s going to have a chance.”

  She was an attractive girl, pert, maybe twenty-four, her banged hair well conditioned and full of shine. Her features were small and precise, almost a little hard and cold, and she gave off a fresh, antibacterial soap odor. “The Ann Eliza Young House is a really special place,” she said, her voice a little formal and practiced. “There’s nothing like it in Utah, or the country, for that matter. With all this debate about polygamy and the Firsts, sometimes we lose sight of the fact that there are kids out there who need a place to sleep. Tonight. That’s why we’re here, for those kids who don’t have anywhere to go and can’t wait for the policy debates and law suits to get sorted out. You want a quick tour?”

  She led me down a hall, saying, “I don’t know how much you know about what’s going on with polygamy these days.”

  “A little.”

  “Then you know how much help these kids need. What we do is give them a place to live and begin the process of letting them be kids again. What was happening before was they’d go from a house with eight or ten wives and thirty or forty kids—”

  “Sometimes more.”

  “Yes, sometimes more, and then they’d get dropped into a foster family and the kids would be sent off to school, and everyone would say, OK, they’re fine. Well, they weren’t fine. These kids have some unique issues, and we’re here to help them adjust. By the way, what’s your name?”

  I told her. “And yours?”

  “Kelly. Kelly Dee.”

  She showed me around upstairs, the boys’ bunk room, the community bathroom, a lounge with a box of DVDs and a rack of worn-out paperbacks. She was leading me down the staircase when she stopped on the landing to point out the stained-glass window. The sun was hitting it, illuminating the beehive, and the pieces of glass were thick and smooth and gold and white. “Isn’t that beautiful?” she said. “That’s original to the house, from the 1870s. Stained glass was very rare at the time around here. That window’s sort of famous. Do you know who Ann Eliza Young was?”

  “No idea.”

  “She was one of Brigham’s wives. She lived here for a while, before she divorced him. She always said he put in this window so his spies could find her house, but there’s no proof that’s true, but that’s what makes it pretty well-known today. Anyway, she went on to become a crusader in the fight to end polygamy.”

  “I guess she failed.”

  “No, not at all. She played a big part in forcing the church to give it up.”

  The tour was over and we were back in her office, sitting around waiting for the director to show up. “How long have you worked here?”

  “Actually, I’m just a volunteer. I’m here full-time in the summer, and two days a week during school. I’m getting my master’s at BYU. In history. Women’s studies.” She said it with a touch of pride, or rebellion. “It’s how I got involved with this place. I’m writing my thesis on Ann Eliza Young. That’s how I first heard about what was going on with polygamy today. I had no idea—I mean, I heard the stories about places like Mesadale and everything, but I never really thought it was as bad as everyone said. At the time I was really immersed in my research. Because I’m writing about the nineteenth century, it’s all old documents and texts, you know—rummaging around the archives. I was learning a lot, but one thing I was having a hard time understanding was her rage—Ann Eliza’s, I mean. She was really mad at Brigham and the LDS Church over polygamy. Not mad like pissed off, but mad like she was waging spiritual battle. Over the years a lot of Saints, they’ve just kind of dismissed her as this angry ex-wife, but this was more than that. This was a woman on a mission, so to speak. It had become her faith, which was a really interesting idea to me, you know, to give up one faith for another, one that’s so opposite to what you used to believe.

  “Then I thought—you know, the best way to understand what Ann Eliza was feeling, to actually understand why she was so outraged, was maybe to truly comprehend what polygamy was like for her. At first I just couldn’t wrap my head around it—I mean, I’m just your average LDS girl with a mother and a father and an older brother and a younger sister and a dog named Lily. Sure I saw the world when I was on my mission—here, that’s me in New York, which I totally loved. Maybe it was my time on mission that helped me realize that the only way to understand people is to listen to them. So anyway, I decided I had to meet someone who had come from that world, someone who could help me get what she’d gone through. Eventually I found the website 19thwife.com and arranged an interview with a plural wife.”

  “You should’ve called me.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. It�
��s a joke. Not funny. You were saying—”

  “I met this woman in a coffee shop not far from here. I took my tape recorder, my notepad, and I felt, you know, almost like a detective. It was very exciting because usually historians, we only meet people through documents, never in person. Then this woman walks in and she was very thin and very frightened, and very young, younger than me by a couple of years. Her eyes were red—I’ll never forget how red they were—but she wasn’t crying. That’s when it hit me: This isn’t a research project, these are people’s lives, people’s lives ruined by this doctrine that is a by-product of my church. Of course I knew that before, but it’s one thing to know something intellectually, it’s another to meet it face-to-face. This woman, she sat opposite me in the booth and her back was very rigid and she just began to tell me about her husband and her twelve sister wives, very quietly, very methodically, as if she had practiced it over and over. Eventually she ran away, eventually she decided that if this life was what God wanted for her, then she didn’t want God, but what was killing her, the reason she wanted to talk to me in the first place, was she had to leave her kids behind, a boy and a girl. You should’ve seen her—she just kind of crumpled as she said she decided the only way to save her kids was to leave them and come back for them later, but you could just tell it was one of those terrible decisions a mother shouldn’t have to make, but she made it, and there she was. Now she wanted to get them out, but she really didn’t have any way of doing that. I mean, they talk about the disenfranchised, but this woman had nothing, not even her faith. Eventually she took my hand and said, ‘Can you help me?’ I’ll never forget how cold her hand was, like a claw of ice.

  “It was then I knew I had to do something. I couldn’t just sit in my library carrel and read through all my texts and take my seminars and write a master’s thesis that was full of ideas but empty on people. Of course, that’s what the department wanted me to do, but I couldn’t, and fortunately my adviser, Professor Sprague, she totally understood what I was talking about and sort of sponsored me. So I got an internship here and that was two years ago. And now I just try to help out women like that, and the kids. This whole experience has changed my life.”

  Kelly looked at the clock. “The director should be back soon.”