Of Better Blood

by Moger, Susan;

  Of Better Blood

  Susan Moger

  Albert Whitman & Company

  Chicago, Illinois

  For Trudy and Charlotte

  The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit.

  —Morgan Grant, The Passing of the Great Race

  The science of improving stock…means [giving] to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable.

  —Sir Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development

  Part 1

  Unfit

  Chapter 1

  New England States Exposition,

  August 1922

  Four times a day I drop the baby.

  It’s not a real baby, but for a stunned heartbeat the audience believes it is. That’s enough to get some of them on their feet, screaming, Stupid, clumsy, gimp. The words slide into my skin and stay there.

  When I ask Mr. Ogilvie, the director, if just once I can catch the baby before it hits the stage, he frowns and puts his hands on my shoulders. I squirm away, but he holds on. “I love your sensitivity, Ruthie,” he says, showing corn-yellow teeth. “But sadly a cripple like you can’t be a hero.”

  Mr. Ogilvie isn’t the only thing I hate about the Unfit Family show. I hate the name of my character, “Ruthie,” who limps like I do but has no backbone. No one ever calls me my real name, Rowan. I hate the ragged clothes and the idiotic things Mr. Ogilvie tells me to do. And I hate the people in the audience who think they’re not only better off than we are, but better in every way.

  Today when Mr. Ogilvie calls, “Places,” I follow the script. Lie on my stomach, breathing in dust, legs toward the curtain, arms stretched out upstage. I look like what I’m supposed to be, a helpless quitter who fell and can’t reach her crutch.

  The late August afternoon sun turns the tent into an oven, baking all of us, actors and audience, in the smells of fried onions, tobacco, hair pomade, and sweat. The other actors mutter as they take their places for our opening scene. I can see their feet—Jimmy’s clodhopper farm boots, Minnie’s worn moccasins, Gar’s dirty spats over scuffed black shoes. I’m barefoot.

  The head of a nail pokes my thigh, and I shift position.

  Mr. Ogilvie’s voice sounds from the other side of the curtain, high-pitched and irritating. “Welcome to our show, The Unfit Family: A Blight on America, created by Miss Fanny Ogilvie especially for the New England States Exposition of 1922.”

  The last statement is a lie. We have performed the same show at county fairs all over Massachusetts for the past month. But these shows at the Exposition in Springfield are worse. There are four shows a day and more people in the audience for each one.

  “The actors will act out the story as I narrate it,” Mr. Ogilvie goes on. “And now allow me to introduce the Unfit Family.” The pulley squeaks as he tugs open the curtain.

  Sharp gasps from the crowd make my stomach clench.

  Mr. Ogilvie points me out first. “Lying before you where she fell is Ruthie, the crippled daughter, thirteen years old.” Like crows, the audience’s curiosity and pity land on me, peering and pecking at my leg, back, and head.

  Mr. Ogilvie didn’t just change my name; he shaved three years off my age for the good of the show. He told us, “Your job is to portray the worst family imaginable. But don’t take anything I say to heart. I’m talking about the characters, not you.” On the other hand, he tells us, “Don’t act. Just be yourselves.”

  “Over there by the table,” Mr. Ogilvie goes on, “epileptic son, Jimmy, fourteen, is in the throes of a seizure, unable to speak. In the laundry basket is Baby Polly, nine months old and already neglected. And at the stove, feebleminded Minnie, their mother, watches a pot of boiling water. Minnie’s shiftless husband, Gar, father of the children, is seated over there with a whiskey bottle, his constant companion.” Gar always gets a few nervous snickers from the men in the audience. Today someone whistles.

  The stage creaks as Mr. Ogilvie paces, drawing in the crowd with his confiding voice. “Some may find this portrayal unbelievable. I assure you it is no exaggeration. Many, many families are destined by their heredity to live like this unfit family.”

  The word “family” is my cue to get up on my knees and crawl with difficulty to my crutch. Crawling isn’t easy with my weak left leg, but I play it up to please the crowd. Once I have the crutch, I struggle upright and turn to face the audience.

  The wooden benches are full, and it’s standing room only in the back. Men in suits and women in Sunday-best dresses snap their paper fans back and forth, wafting sweat and rosewater into the hot air.

  I pick up the basket with Baby Polly in it. As usual, Jimmy, in the grip of a fake seizure, bumps against me. As usual, I let go of one basket handle. Baby Polly falls out.

  A gasp flutters through the audience like a gust of wind. One woman calls out, “For shame!”

  “Ruthie tries,” Mr. Ogilvie says, “but as you can see, when it comes to caring for a baby, she is unfit.”

  Ruthie isn’t “unfit” and neither am I, Rowan Collier. As the daughter of Dr. Franklin Collier, scientist, inventor, and historian of our family heritage, I grew up knowing we are the fittest of the fit. Family has always been important to us. I’m named for Father’s great-grandmother, Opportunity Rowan Collier. Father decided that Opportunity sounded too old-fashioned, so I am plain Rowan.

  Chapter 2

  Gramercy Park,

  New York City, 1914

  I was eight years old and on an important mission. It was so important that I had to disturb Father while he was working. Softly, I knocked on the open door of his study. The shutters were barely open on this hot afternoon, and it was dim inside except for the golden pool of electric light from Father’s crookneck desk lamp. Familiar smells of cherry pipe tobacco and oiled leather welcomed me. Father looked up and smiled. “Come in, Rowan. Sit down.”

  A rotating electric fan on the desk fluttered Father’s papers, so he weighed them down with his paperweight, a miniature sailing ship.

  “Julia is published again.” He handed me a folded newspaper. “The latest Betterment News has her article arguing that the best people, people like our family, need to marry and have large families for the good of our country.”

  When I was little, my older sister Julia was my chief playmate. Nanny, who lived with us and took care of us, was kind but too old and creaky to get down on the floor and play. But once Julia started working for the Betterment Society she became too busy to spend time with me. She even brought her work to the breakfast table. Just this morning after Molly, our cook, served the omelets and left the dining room, Julia said, “Molly really shouldn’t have any more children. She has eight already. She is Irish after all.” She waggled her butter knife at Father. “Please speak to her.”

  Father had taken a bite of his omelet and sighed. “I will speak to her of this with pleasure,” he said. “A perfectly made omelet is a gift fit for the gods. Molly manages perfection every time she cracks an egg.”

  Julia frowned.

  “You know, Julia.” Father cut another piece of omelet. “A wise man knows when to hold his tongue.”

  Now in his office, Father struck a safety match and held it to the bowl of his pipe as he sucked noisily on the stem. “Julia collects valuable information and writes about it,” he said. “She is a foot soldier in the Betterment cause.”

  “Are you a general then?”

  Father laughed. “Not a general. But as an engineering consultant to the U.S. Navy, you could call me a captain in the Betterment fight.”

  He pulled a typed page from under
the paperweight. “Now,” he said, “I’ve been working on our family history. Would you like me to read some of it to you?”

  I nodded yes. This was a detour from my mission, but Father’s book was important too.

  “Very well.” He read aloud in his deep voice, “‘The soundness of my own family, Dutch-English-French, through fourteen generations is unquestioned. My wife’s family made their fortune in the stony fields of New England and the gold fields of California. They married well for generations before we joined our heredities. Our daughters represent the finest qualities of both bloodlines.’”

  He looked at me. “Do you know what that means, Rowan?”

  I squirmed on the chair, my sweaty bare legs sticking to the leather. All I could think of was the question I had come here to ask. “Um,” I said and then found an answer. “Is it like the time when you said I got over the measles so fast because I’m a Collier?”

  “Exactly right.” Father beamed at me. “When we Colliers are tested by a catastrophe or an illness, we draw on the strength of our family heritage.” He sucked on his pipe. “Well done. Never forget that, my dear.”

  His praise gave me courage. “Father, please tell me about Mother,” I said in a rush. “I would really like to know more than I do.” I’d memorized this opening and had no idea what would happen next. Whenever I asked Julia about Mother, she said, “I loved her very much.” Which wasn’t very informative.

  While I waited for Father’s reaction, I studied the portrait of Mother hanging over the fireplace. Sir John Lavery painted her in 1891. In the portrait Mother wears a high-necked white dress. Her auburn hair is piled high, but a few strands hang down by her face. She looks straight out of the frame with a slight smile; her brown eyes gleam.

  Father cleared his throat. “That portrait captures her perfectly. That light in her eyes.” His voice shook. “I always feel her presence in this room.”

  He dabbed at his eyes.

  “Tell me one thing about her.” I lean closer to him. “Please. I won’t ask again.”

  I expected him to say, “She was a good mother,” or “Everyone loved her,” so I almost fell off the chair when he said, “She was a photographer.”

  He pulled open a desk drawer and handed me a red leather photograph album. Here were photographs of Julia as a little girl, posing with her toys and dolls and squinting at the sun. Father, in a one-piece, knee-length bathing suit, stood in the surf holding Julia on his shoulders. Julia, who hates the ocean, smiled at Mother, the photographer. All the photographs were labeled Paradise-by-the-Sea, the island community off Long Island’s south shore that has been our summer home for years.

  On page after page, Julia smiled out at me. In the last photograph in the album, she sat in a white party dress with a big white bow in her hair behind a cake blazing with candles.

  Mother wrote under the photograph in white ink, “Julia’s 10th birthday party, April 3, 1906.” Two months later I was born. Mother died the same day.

  The photographs of happy Julia made me feel lonely. “Why did Mother die?” I blurted out. “She had strong heredity. You say so in your history.” The words rang in my ears like hammer blows.

  Father cleared his throat. In his lecturing voice, he said, “Sometimes a family weakness goes unnoticed until it strikes someone in perfect health. But…” He slapped his hand on his blotter and I jumped. “You and Julia did not inherit this weakness from your mother. You both take after me, and we Colliers are strong stock.”

  He took the album back. “These are not her only photographs,” he said.

  “Where are the others?”

  “Look around.”

  The framed photographs on the walls of the study were as familiar as the smells of pipe tobacco and leather. I jumped up to look closely. Flowers and shells, the front stairs in a shaft of morning sunlight, a seagull perched on a sand dune, and my favorite, bird tracks crisscrossing in the sand. One lip curl of foam nudges the edge of the picture.

  “You always said these were Mother’s,” I said, “but I thought you meant they belonged to her.”

  “They do,” he said proudly. “She had a very special way of seeing beauty and bringing it to the attention of others.”

  That night Father brought Mother’s camera to my room. A small, black box with a knob on one side and two little windows. A silver lever that made a satisfying click when pressed down. A round eye in front and a celluloid orange circle in back. I looked up at him. “Thank you for showing it to me, Father.”

  “It belongs to you now, my dear. You have an eye for the interesting that is so like your mother’s. Julia has no visual sense at all.”

  The next week I was allowed to take the camera with me to Long Island. Father put in film and explained how to wind it. Then he helped me look through the viewfinder and press the shutter release.

  “Good luck with that old thing,” Julia said the first time I took her picture. “These days everyone prefers the latest Brownie.”

  Father had my film developed in Freeport and bought me an album of my own—blue leather with black pages. We discussed photography the way he and Julia discussed the Betterment Society. I photographed her at the table in bright sunlight surrounded by note cards. “What are you doing?” I asked as I clicked the shutter.

  “Researching ways to keep our country strong.”

  “Julia, a Patriot,” I later wrote in white ink on the black page under the slightly blurry photograph.

  “Father, an Architect,” was the label for a photograph of him standing on the beach next to his sand sculpture of the Parthenon.

  For three years that camera connected me with both Mother and Father. I felt Mother with me when I photographed the beach she loved. I learned from Father about turning film images into photographs in the darkroom. Then, like a print left too long in the developer, everything in my life went black.

  Chapter 3

  New England States Exposition,

  August 1922

  Onstage, I pick up Baby Polly and put her back in the clothes basket. Jimmy, no longer in the grip of his fake seizure, piles firewood dangerously high. I struggle to sweep, holding a broom with my free hand.

  Now Minnie, her round face beaded with sweat, drops the pot overflowing with cotton batting “steam,” “scalding” herself and Jimmy. She sinks to the floor and curls into a ball while he hops from foot to foot cradling his hand.

  A murmur of concern rises from the audience.

  “Save your sympathy for the neighbors of this family,” Mr. Ogilvie says. “Like you, they are kind, upstanding folk who, time and time again, have helped Gar and Minnie. But ask yourself this question: why should they have to?”

  Gar drains the whiskey bottle (full of weak tea), drops it, and staggers to the table for another. As he passes Minnie, he pulls her to her feet and mimes a backhand slap across her face. She stumbles against the stove, a crate painted black.

  Minnie shakes her fist at Gar and then whacks a rolling pin on the table sending up a cloud of white flour. The fist, the whack, and the flour cloud bring a gust of relieved laughter from the crowd.

  Mr. Ogilvie points out our individual weaknesses like tasty menu items. “Ruthie was born with a withered left leg. Jimmy’s seizures will be lifelong. These defects were prevalent in their parents’ families. That’s why you must know your family history before you plan to marry and have children. After the show, visit our exhibit next door to learn what a fit family looks like.”

  In real life Jimmy is an epileptic. They chose him so they can blame his illness on his parents. He also makes the fake seizures look realistic. But Mr. Ogilvie lies about the rest of us. I wasn’t born crippled. I had polio when I was eleven. Minnie isn’t feebleminded; she has only a fourth-grade education and sometimes gets confused. Gar isn’t a drinker, but he admits being at loose ends since the war ended.

 
“With her intelligence, Ruthie could have a better life,” Mr. Ogilvie says in a fake concerned voice as I act out reading a newspaper to Minnie. “Yet, sadly, she is trapped in this family and in her broken body.”

  I’m also trapped with him and Aunt Fan for seven more days.

  At the end of the show, I drop my crutch and lie sprawled on the floor, arms outstretched. Jimmy twists his body in a fake seizure. Minnie stands at the stove, looking at the pot boiling over. Gar sits in the chair with a whiskey bottle.

  “As you see, nothing changes for this unfit family,” Mr. Ogilvie says in a mournful voice. “Nothing will ever change. Left to themselves, they will continue to reproduce and bring more suffering children into this world.”

  My leg is cramping so I ease it into a new position, careful to avoid the nail.

  Mr. Ogilvie ends with his worst line of all, “What farmer would allow unfit livestock to breed year after year?” The words livestock and breed make me want to gag.

  A man in the audience shouts, “These unfit folks are still God’s children, not animals.” A ripple of applause spreads through the tent.

  Mr. Ogilvie raises his voice. “It is for us, the fit, to take the necessary steps to prune the unfit from the American family tree. We have the tools. Do we have the will?”

  It’s over. I scramble up and move downstage with the others to line up in the glare of the stage lights. We bow to more applause, whistles, and foot stomps.

  Now Aunt Fan tip-taps across the stage in high-heeled pumps, a yellow linen suit, and a white hat. A scent of gardenias follows in her wake. Mr. Ogilvie bows to her. He and Aunt Fan are brother and sister. According to Dorchy, their assistant, they live together here in Springfield. Both are high school teachers the rest of the year, but they spend their summers promoting fitter families.

  Speaking to the audience, Aunt Fan sounds sweetly persuasive. “I am Fanny Ogilvie, a hygiene teacher here in Springfield and a volunteer with the New England Betterment Council. Thank you for coming. Now, please follow Mr. Ogilvie to the cottage next door to take our Fitter Families test and validate your family’s heritage.” She makes it sound like an honor. “We are a nonprofit organization, so donations are appreciated.”