The 19th Wife
Page 52
I saw her face first through the chicken-wire glass in the door. Really, all I could see were her eyes. “There she is,” said Tom. Officer Cunningham buzzed the door open, then an eternity—as if time stopped and whoever runs the universe went out for a smoke—and finally the door swung open.
“BeckyLyn, over here!”
My mom looked at the photographer. A flash, a click, another flash, more clicks.
“St. George Register,” the photographer said. “Can you hold right there?” She wore the dusty pink prairie dress she’d been arrested in, the heavy stockings, the handmade shoes. Her steps were tentative, like she was learning to walk.
“Mom,” I said, “this is Tom.”
He couldn’t help himself: he lunged to hug her. “I’ve heard so much about you!”
“BeckyLyn,” the photographer called, “is that the son who saved you?” She took a picture with one camera, then the same picture with the next, and again the same shot with the third.
“Let’s go,” I said.
“How about a family reunion shot?”
“Time to go.”
I led my mom out to the van. The photographer walked around us, crouching and stepping backward, click click click, saying how do you feel? and happy to be free? and this is great, just great. When we were in the van, the photographer stopped taking pictures. “Good luck, BeckyLyn! Our readers love you!”
Tom was driving. He asked if she wanted the windows up or down or if she needed water. “Or if you’re hungry, we can stop now, but Jordan and I thought we’d take you back to the Malibu first.”
“I’m fine,” she said. “Really.” She was looking out the window at the red sandstone cliffs, her face ghosted in the glass.
“Mom, how does it feel to be free?”
“I’m figuring that out right now.”
“And this,” said Tom, pushing the key card into the slot, “this is your room. You’ve got a tv, cable, movie channels, a/c, the ice machine’s down the hall. And this”—he pointed to an interior door—“this door connects to our room.”
Behind the door Elektra started barking, then Joey. Tom opened the door and the second behind it. The dogs ran into Room 111, snouts pointed right at my mom. Elektra jumped on her, pushing her back onto the bed. After a lot of petting and licking, Elektra relented and my mom stood up and straightened out her dress. She was laughing and saying, “Ah, what fun,” and then her voice went serious and she sat on the edge of the bed. “This is so nice of you, but I’m not sure I’ll be needing any of this.”
“Mom. Tom and I, we want you to stay.”
“As long as you like,” said Tom. “I talked to the owner and we’ve worked it all out.”
“I appreciate it,” she said. “I really do.” And then, “But it’s probably time for me to go.”
“Go? Go where?”
“Back to Mesadale.”
“I’m not taking you back there.”
My phone rang. Roland. I don’t know why I answered. “Honey, I just read about you on the Register’s home page. You’re like a little Angela Lansbury out there. Now if only you could solve the mystery of my expanding waistline.”
“Roland, I can’t talk now.”
“All right, but I want to hear all about it, especially that cute thing you picked up, Miss Utah. Leave it to you to solve a crime and find a hubby-hub.”
“Not now, Roland.”
“Anyway, when are you coming home?”
“Later.”
“Oh no, don’t tell me you’re going all O Pioneer on me.”
I hung up. “Mom, sorry, an old friend. Like I was saying, I didn’t go through all this to take you back to Mesadale.”
The sunshine through the plate glass made her face look very round and very clean. It was a pure morning light, the kind that reveals everything for what it is. “God was right,” she said. “He said you’d come, and he was right.” She looked around. “This is such a nice place. And these clothes—I can’t believe you bought them for me, they’re so pretty. But I can’t take them.”
“Mom, you can.”
“No, Jordan, I can’t.”
Right then, before she walked out the door, I felt like I had one last chance to save her. I opened the dresser, showing her the new slacks and blouses, the shoes lined up at the door, the face cream and beauty soap laid out on the vanity. I showed her the tv remote and promised to teach her how to use the internet in the lobby. “Mom, please, I want you to stay. Here. With me.” I was trying to tell her we could pick up our lives in Rooms 111 and 112, get the second chance you almost never get. I was frantic to prove the Malibu Inn would make a nice home.
“And there’s a pool! We didn’t show you the pool! Right here, through the patio door.” I opened the glass slider.
Then I stopped. “Mom, please. I don’t want you to go. You can stay here and do what you want. We won’t get in your way.”
“Jordan, I’m sorry.”
“Mom, please.”
“Jordan, I know you understand.”
The thing was: I finally did.
“What if I need to call you?”
“You won’t.”
“What if it’s an emergency?”
“Then you’ll know what to do.”
“Will we ever see each other again?”
“I believe we will.”
My mom and I drove over to Denny’s for the breakfast special. We pushed around our eggs and searched for things to say. The truth was, we’d already said it, and twenty minutes later we were on the road to Mesadale in my van. My mom rolled down her window and the wind blew about the shrub of her hair. We passed the shot-up marker and the wasteland of scrub. I saw the stand of cottonwoods and pulled over to turn onto the road.
“I’ll get out here,” she said.
“I’m not going to leave you on the highway.”
“I want to walk the rest of the way home.”
I turned off the engine and helped her down from the van. The sunlight was warm on my face and cast her skin in gold. The wind kicked up the sand and the dust and I could feel my throat drying out. “So I guess this is it,” I said. “Mom, are you sure?”
She nodded. “I love you. I know you know that. That’s why I can say good-bye.”
We held each other for a while and at some point it was time to let go. She headed up the road, the dust collecting around her ankles, and the sun burned down, and we both knew it would burn hot and high on the desert until all our last days.
When I got back to Room 112, I couldn’t believe it—Johnny was asleep on the bed. The dogs were curled up around him, and Tom was sitting on the other bed, reading. “Shhhh,” he said. “They’re sleeping.”
“I can see that. What’s he doing here?” Johnny’s legs were scratched up, bug bites and a couple of bruises, but otherwise he looked all right.
“He ran away,” he whispered. “I guess he missed you.”
“What are we going to do with him?”
“Shhh, you’ll wake him,” he said. “We’ll figure something out.” And then, “Jordan—”
“Tom—”
“He can stay with us if he wants.”
“Let’s just see, all right? We have a lot going on.”
“I know, but wouldn’t it be nice if he stayed?”
“God, what a family we’d make.”
“Sounds perfect,” said Tom. “Now be quiet.”
“He might not want to stay.”
“He’ll want to.”
“I don’t know.”
“Jordan—”
“Tom—”
“What are you thinking?”
“Stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“You know what they say?”
“What’s that?”
“Endings are beginnings.”
“Is that what they say?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” said Johnny, opening one eye. “Will you two please shut the fuck up.” He cracked his s
mart-ass smile. Elektra moaned and reasserted her position on the bed. Joey swatted his plumed tail. And Tom put his arm around me. The sun was in the western sky and the room filled with its light. I began to imagine my mom walking back into town—the dust in her hair, the hope in her eyes. The road, the post office, the mountain shadow. The excitement as someone recognized her, then someone else, then someone else again. Where would she go? Would she return to her old room? I became anxious and felt a shiver on my spine. Would I wonder about her fate for the rest of my life? Could I handle the not knowing? Would I accept an ending without end? Then I saw four wives greet her, kiss her, take her inside the house. I saw three small children circling her skirt. I saw her old apron hanging on its peg. I saw her swing open the door to her room. I saw her move to the windowsill and stroke the leaf of her aloe plant. I saw my mother on her knees. And I saw myself in her prayers.
THE
19TH
WIFE
DAVID EBERSHOFF
A Reader’s Guide
A CONVERSATION WITH DAVID EBERSHOFF
Random House Readers Circle: How did you first encounter the story of Ann Eliza Young, the 19th wife of Brigham Young, and what drew you to her story?
David Ebershoff: I first heard about Ann Eliza Young several years ago while editing a book for the Modern Library. I had hired a scholar—a specialist in nineteenth-century women’s history—to write a set of end notes for a classic we were reissuing. History geek that I am, one afternoon I was gabbing with her about all sorts of nineteenth-century arcana when she mentioned the 19th wife. The 19th what? The scholar gave me a brief introduction to Ann Eliza Young. Needless to say, my writer’s ears stood up.
At the time I was working on another novel, one that I would ultimately put aside to write The 19th Wife. For a few years, while my attention was elsewhere, that nickname—the 19th wife—continued to ring in my head. The 19th wife? Who was she? What does it even mean to be a 19th wife? After a few years I started looking into that question. As I read more about Ann Eliza Young, I recognized how remarkable she was: intelligent, outspoken, declarative, contradictory, somewhat unreliable, a tad melodramatic, very beautiful (and a little bit vain)—she possessed a number of traits that can make a character in a novel unpredictable, and therefore interesting. I found myself torn between the novel I was working on and a nearly overwhelming desire to throw myself into the world of Ann Eliza and polygamy. Then one night I woke up—literally sat up in bed—and I knew I had to write this book. Just one problem: What book was I going to write? How would I tell her story? And how to make it relevant to today? It took a long, unsettling year of research and thinking before I could begin actually writing.
RHRC: This book intertwines historical narratives of Ann Eliza’s life and a contemporary narrative set on a polygamous compound in Utah. How did you research both the historical narrative and the contemporary story?
DE: The research for the historical narrative started with Ann Eliza herself. She wrote two autobiographies, Wife No. 19 (1875) and Life in Mormon Bondage (1908). Wife No. 19 was a hugely successful book in its day and helped shape the national debate about polygamy. It would also become an important part of Ann Eliza’s legacy. By the time she published her second book, she had fallen into obscurity. That book had a very small printing (fewer than one thousand copies, as far as I can tell) and received little notice—a pity, because the second book in some ways shows Ann Eliza as more thoughtful and self-aware. These books are the inevitable place to begin when thinking about Ann Eliza and her life, and I couldn’t have written my novel without them.
But Ann Eliza’s record doesn’t stop with her memoirs. In fact, it doesn’t even begin with them. After leaving her husband and apostatizing from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, she went on a national speaking tour that lasted more than a decade. She wrote a suite of three long lectures about her life as a Latter-day Saint and her experiences as a plural wife. By the time she published her first book, tens of thousands of people (including members of Congress and President Grant) had heard her story, or read about it in the newspapers, which followed her closely. From 1873 to 1875, Ann Eliza Young was national news. The beautiful, strong-willed, articulate young woman who had defied her husband and prophet fascinated Americans everywhere. Many newspapers covered her story and her divorce with tabloid interest. Some of the news stories about Ann Eliza remind me of some of the recent reporting on today’s polygamists in Utah, Arizona, and Texas.
After spending a lot of time reading about Ann Eliza, I saw that there were three essential parts to her story: her life, her book, and her legacy. I wanted to write about her in a way that captures those three elements: to tell the story of the life she lived, to give the reader a sense of Wife No. 19’s impact on her life and the national debate, and to contemplate her legacy by rendering what she did and did not achieve. This is why I wrote a part of the novel as her “memoir”—and why there is a “book” within the book. (Forgive me; I’m usually not this meta.) This is why I start The 19th Wife with a title page similar to Ann Eliza’s actual title page, but just as you think you are settling into one kind of story, the novel cuts sharply into something else.
I wrote the contemporary narrative—“Wife #19,” or Jordan’s story—with a phone, a notebook, and a rental car. I visited the twin cities of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona. The first time there I was driving up and down the streets, looking at the unusually large houses and the vegetable patches and the horse corrals, just taking it all in, when I looked in my rearview mirror and noticed a police cruiser behind me. I turned down a side street and he turned as well. Was he following me? I turned again, and he turned again, and then again. I instinctively knew the cop wanted me to leave. He tailed me all the way back to Highway 59, and as I drove off he idled on the side of the road, making sure I was gone. I could hardly believe it: in the United States, in the twenty-first century, I had just been driven out of town.
I ended up interviewing several people who had once been part of polygamous families—women who had left their husbands, and boys and young men who had been excommunicated. Each told a variation of the same story: a dominant theology, a bounty of wives, a life of loneliness, intimidation, and fear. It was fascinating and heartbreaking, and each time I heard one of these stories I thought of Ann Eliza—how she thought she had brought an end to polygamy in the United States, but in fact had not. It’s worth noting that not all American polygamists today live in the notorious isolated compounds that we’ve seen in the news lately. I even interviewed one woman who lived in suburban Pennsylvania with her husband, her two sister wives, and their ten children. It’s also worth noting that many plural wives claim to be happy in their lives.
RHRC: How closely does Ann Eliza’s story in The 19th Wife follow what we actually know about her?
DE: There are certain chapters of her life about which we know very little. For example, her relationship with her sons. She has relatively few words concerning them in her memoirs, lectures, newspaper interviews, and other public statements. And so I fill that in, both by giving voice to her second son in Part XVI and, in the parts narrated by Ann Eliza herself, having her contemplate plural marriage and its effects on her boys.
Other aspects of her life are widely known. These tend to be about Ann Eliza’s relationship to Brigham and the Church. With these topics, The 19th Wife follows the public record fairly closely, for two reasons: one, these tend to be the most contentious parts of her story, and two, we have multiple sources on many of these events. For example, in The 19th Wife there is a scene in the Endowment House where Ann Eliza receives her Endowments in what is supposed to be a secret ceremony. This is an important moment in her life because it is the first manifestation of her spiritual doubt. Such an incident is central to any retelling of her life, which explains why the episode has become part of the public record. Even before Ann Eliza published her first memoir, she spoke about her Endowment Ceremony in her public
lectures. She writes of the rituals, and her response to them, in Wife No. 19 and again in Life in Mormon Bondage. In The Twenty-seventh Wife (1961), Irving Wallace writes about the ceremony as well. In addition to this, two other books published before Ann Eliza’s public statements reveal the inner workings of the Endowment Ceremony from the point of view of a doubting young woman: Tell It All (1874) and, to a lesser extent, Expose of Polygamy in Utah (1872), both by Mrs. T.B.H. Stenhouse. On September 28, 1879, a few years after Ann Eliza’s revelations, the Salt Lake Daily Tribune published a lengthy article about the Endowment Ceremony. These sources present a similar version of what might transpire in an Endowment Ceremony in the 1870s. And so with these in my mind, I wrote the scene in which Ann Eliza receives her Endowments and begins to wonder about her own understanding of her faith.
RHRC: Some say Ann Eliza Young was not Brigham Young’s 19th wife but actually the 27th, or possibly even the 52nd or 56th. Why the confusion?
DE: The confusion comes from the shifting definition of “wife.” Ann Eliza thought of herself as the 19th wife, and this was where she fell by Brigham’s count as well. In her day, she was widely known as the 19th wife. That’s why I call her this. But the tally of wives has always been fluid and I believe will never be settled. Some lists do not count as wives Brigham’s spouses who died before him, or those who left him (Ann Eliza was not the first). Some historians don’t count, or count separately, women Brigham married but who bore him no children. In some cases, the marriage (or sealing) ceremonies were highly secretive and there is little documentation: some women claimed to have been sealed to Brigham but he denied this, or some of his family members later denied this. I believe he had more than fifty wives, although certainly some of these were elder widows whom he married not for conjugal reasons but in order to provide them with a home, a secure place in society, and spiritual comfort.