She leans forward. “I never envied you as much as that day you rode a wave,” she says. “But that was the day you got polio.” She sits back. “I never envied you after that.”
“Not even now?”
She waves away the dessert menu, telling the waiter, “Mousse au chocolat for two, please.”
Then she looks at me. “You seem very sure of yourself. I think you’ll do as well in life as your condition allows. Father and I truly hope so.”
As well in life as your condition allows. I can almost hear Dr. Friedlander laughing about this halfhearted compliment. I wish Julia had seen me dancing on one leg before my treatment had even begun. Or climbing the lighthouse ladder. Lighting the lamp. But it’s too late—she will not, cannot change.
“I do need new clothes,” I tell her, spooning into my chocolate mousse. “You’ll be a big help with that.”
Father looks up from his newspaper when we walk into his study two days later. I go straight to his desk with the brass inlays and say, “Hello, Father.”
Julia hangs back. This is my moment.
He sucks in a ragged breath and struggles to stand up, the newspaper clutched in his hand. I read: Eugenics Group Accused of Mass Murder on Island; Bodies Uncovered in Shallow Graves; Maine Attorney General Promises “Swift Justice.”
“Rowan.” His voice is a croak. His pale face is deeply lined and his hair entirely gray, but he still has the same piercing blue eyes. “I had no idea about this Loup Island business. I hope you believe me.”
“You broke with them in 1917.” It’s not a question.
He lays the newspaper down and steps from behind the desk. “Yes, I did. I thought they were horribly misguided. I honestly believed they had dropped the nonsensical idea when the war started. To my shame, I was wrong.” His voice fades.
Julia’s skirt rustles behind me as she takes a step forward, but he shakes his head and raises his hand. “I want Rowan to know everything.” He smiles at me. “Your sister warned me about them when she heard rumors last spring. I refused to listen.”
“Oh, Father,” Julia wails. “It’s not your fault.”
“Julia,” I say, “let me talk to him alone.” The door clicks behind her.
The house, which I once longed to see again, is affecting me—odors of new plaster, old leather, and Father’s pipe tobacco. Mother’s portrait, still beautiful. Through the tall, screened windows come familiar sounds of traffic from the street, and in the lulls, even more familiar birdsong from Gramercy Park.
I sit down on a cracked leather hassock and smooth my new pleated skirt over my knees. After a few seconds, Father lowers himself back down in his chair.
“I’m going to live in Boston to study and work at Boston Children’s Hospital.”
He nods. Then, in a voice as cold and bleak as November rain, he says, “I have reviewed the chronology of your illness. I admit that when you were first diagnosed with polio, the war provided an easy escape for me. An escape I embraced without looking back. I did not, could not accept a cripple for a daughter. For that I am sorry.”
I frown as a vise tightens around my heart. “I needed you here, Father.”
He goes on as if I hadn’t spoken. “I was horrified that despite my preventive measures you were infected with polio. Quite unfairly, I blamed your illness on an inherited weakness.” His voice cracks. The first sign of emotion. “But I left Julia in charge, knowing she would carry out my wishes. I see now that was cowardly.”
That was cowardly? No, you were cowardly. “What were your ‘wishes,’ Father? To shut me away forever in that Boston Home with other people labeled ‘cripples’? To hire me out to the Unfit Family show where I almost burned to death? To have me almost killed on Loup Island?”
“No,” he roars back. “Never! Julia found the Boston Home when I was in France. She said it had a good reputation. I had heard of Dr. Pynchon so I agreed.” He draws a deep breath and shakes his head. “But I cannot blame Julia. It was all done in my name.”
“Well, I blame you both,” I say coldly. “She, on your behalf, sent me to two hells—one in Massachusetts and one in Maine.”
He looks down, avoiding my eyes. “She reported on your progress. I authorized an operation.”
“It was successful.” Stay firm, I tell myself, don’t soften your heart because he looks so broken and unhappy. “You and Julia did that one thing right. Well, that and one other. You told Dr. Pynchon that I was not to be sterilized. She wanted me to agree to it, but I refused. So your genes will survive in another generation. When the time comes.”
He lowers his head into his hands. “In some cases, sterilization is the answer.” His voice becomes a sob. “But not for you. Never for you.” He wipes his eyes with a handkerchief. “I’m sorry, Rowan.” I’m not sure whether he’s apologizing for crying or for what happened to me, or both.
This is exactly what I wanted. To tell Father what he didn’t know and force him to learn the truth about me and my five years away. Part of me wants to embrace him, feel his strong arms, accept his apology, and come home to live. Study in New York, the voice says. Be a Collier again.
I force myself to go on. “I wanted to see you, Father,” I say, opening the leather briefcase Julia bought for me, “for your approval on this.” I hand him the letter from Dr. Friedlander offering to be my guardian in Boston while I work in the polio ward as an assistant and later enter nursing school.
Father reads it and looks at me. His eyes are dry; he is back to business. “And this is what you want? You have discussed these…opportunities in Boston with the doctor?”
“I have. And I plan to earn my tuition, Father, but for a few months I will need an allowance.”
He takes out a notebook. “I’ll send Dr. Friedlander a telegram with my approval. And I’ll make arrangements with the bank in Boston for your allowance.”
Free of the vise, my heart soars. I see myself flying down the marble steps and into my new life.
“Wait. I want you to have this.” Father walks over to Mother’s framed photograph of bird tracks in the sand and lifts it down. “It will fit in your briefcase,” he says. “Please.”
I open the briefcase.
“And this,” he says, handing me Mother’s camera. “I kept it for you.”
My throat closes and tears sting my eyes, but I manage to say, “Thank you, Father.”
Last of all he hands me a roll of banknotes. I thank him again and walk out. Across the hall and down the stairs. No good-bye. Out the front door and away from the house forever.
The hot, dusty afternoon clings to me like sweat. I breathe deeply the smells of coal smoke and cooking, exhaust fumes from automobiles and trucks and buses—and over all the others, the sour smell from the brewery on the East River.
I swing along on my crutch, holding my briefcase, feeling so light and strong that I could run all the way to Boston. Or at least to Pennsylvania Station where my luggage is waiting. But I need to do something first.
On the Staten Island Ferry I stand by the rail, enjoying the sea breeze on my face, the taste of salt on my tongue. Halfway across New York Harbor, I open the briefcase and pull out narrow strips of paper. They flutter in my clenched hand.
Last night in Boston, I wrote a name on each strip. Before I started, I wasn’t sure it made sense. But as soon as I wrote “Ratty,” my heart began to beat faster. I wrote “Snout” and “Elsa,” and “LollyandDolly” as one name. We don’t know what happened to them, but I want to honor them and they belong together. I wrote the names of the four boys Tom brought to the island.
The final name was the hardest to write: “Wave Rider.”
I lean over the railing. The churning green water reflects the afternoon sun.
I open my hand. As the wind catches the names, I whisper, “I’ll remember you.”
Wave Rider joins the oth
ers, fluttering, spiraling, and drifting down to the water’s surface. The tide will pull them out into the Atlantic and, after that, to all the waters of the world.
Epilogue
Boston Children’s Hospital
Friday, December 1, 1922
As I leave the children’s polio ward after my shift, Head Nurse hands me a letter—pale-blue linen stock, brown ink, Julia’s handwriting.
November 28, 1922
Dear Rowan,
I thought you’d be interested in the latest developments in the case against Cicely Van Giesen, Dr. Ritter, and the others. All charges have been dropped for lack of evidence. The prosecutor feels the explanation offered by the defendants clears them all. The flu was brought to camp by one unfortunate orphan who infected others. The affected orphans were removed to the medical tent for quarantine, and those who died were buried on the island. Doctors at the camp responded by inoculating each new batch of campers with an experimental vaccine. Some campers reacted negatively and some of those died. However, many others were spared the disease. The tragedy could not have been avoided, case closed.
However, thanks to Miss Latigue, the camp run by the New England Betterment Council will no longer be held on Loup Island.
Your loving sister,
Julia
P.S. Just as I was getting ready to mail this, the International Journal of Betterment arrived and I leafed through it. Lo and behold, in the “News” section I saw this: “American Researchers Join Faculty: Professor Vera Van Giesen and Hiram Jellicoe, MD, have joined the medical faculty at the University of Dusseldorf in Germany. Their particular research interest is diseases in twins.”
Author's Note
In 1916, when she was four years old, one of my relatives contracted polio in an epidemic that swept the northeastern United States. While most of her family was supportive and caring, her father never saw her in the same way after her illness. Years later she told me that on her tenth birthday her father said to her, “I never wanted a crippled daughter.”
At one point in her young life, my relative was wheelchair-bound. By the time she was a teenager, she could walk unassisted, though with a slight limp. She credited her transformation to the Boston doctor who operated on her leg and provided years of further treatment at Boston Children’s Hospital. The fictional Dr. Friedlander in Of Better Blood is modeled on the forward-thinking doctors who revolutionized treatment of polio victims after the 1916 polio epidemic.
Eugenics was a popular pseudoscience in the United States from the early 1900s to the late 1930s. The double aim of eugenics was (1) to keep Americans with a “strong” heredity (family background) having children, and (2) to prevent those with a “weak” heredity from having children. (The definitions of “strong” and “weak” were defined by the people who naturally counted themselves among the “strong.”)
The popular method of preventing reproduction among the unfit was to sterilize men and women. This made it impossible for them to have children. A majority of states passed laws stating that people in prisons and mental hospitals (among others) could be forced to undergo sterilization. This shocking violation of human rights resulted in sixty-five thousand people in thirty-three states suffering compulsory sterilization between 1897 and the 1970s.
In Of Better Blood, Rowan is called a “cripple,” a category of people who, in the 1920s, were believed to be happiest warehoused among their own kind. One of the boys at the Loup Island camp is labeled “incorrigible.” Hard as it is to believe, that fuzzy category was grounds for compulsory sterilization under the laws of some states in the 1920s, laws that remained on the books for decades.
While the Unfit Family show and the New England Betterment Council are fiction, “Fitter Families” exhibits and contests were real. They were a popular feature at state fairs starting in 1920 and had their origins in “Better Babies” contests at fairs in the early 1900s. The Fitter Families contests were sponsored by the American Eugenics Society as part of an education program promoting the reproduction of the “fit,” and the contests’ detailed questionnaires were used for eugenics research.
In “Eugenics Buildings” at the fairs, thousands of people voluntarily answered questions about their own and their family’s physical and mental health, educational and musical achievements, and social involvement (from churchgoing to hobbies). Those found to be “Fitter Families” were awarded medals. In each state, a variety of groups supported the Fitter Family campaign—among them women’s clubs and charitable and public health organizations.
Many white supporters of eugenics believed in their racial superiority and developed racist policies that led, directly or indirectly, to decades of systematic abuse of African Americans, including lynching, segregation, sterilization, medical experimentation, and laws banning interracial marriage.
Some African Americans also believed that it was possible and desirable to select positive genetic characteristics to improve their race. In the 1920s the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People held baby contests that have been described as working for “racial uplift.” W. E. B. DuBois, one of the founders of the NAACP, wrote eloquently and influentially about racial equality. At the same time he publicized the idea that fit and unfit individuals existed in every race.
Eugenics research was funded by the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations. Respected public figures—such as Margaret Sanger, an advocate for family planning; Alexander Graham Bell; Thomas Edison; and President Theodore Roosevelt—were advocates of eugenics and made it seem respectable. Respectability did not, however, make it science. Eugenics was subjective. It fit the prejudices of the elite and ignored the rights of those labeled “different.” Behavior such as vagrancy was called hereditary, although it is not. Imprecise labels such as “feebleminded” or “incorrigible” were used as an excuse to sterilize people. Beliefs were substituted for facts and became public policy.
American eugenics principles and laws regarding compulsory sterilization were adopted in other countries. Adolf Hitler praised American eugenics in his book Mein Kampf. In the 1930s, Nazi Germany expanded on eugenics ideas imported from the United States to carry out Hitler’s aims for a master race. In Nazi Germany, sterilization was only the beginning. Euthanasia (the government-mandated killing of those labeled undesirable) was the Nazi regime’s distortion and escalation of eugenics for political ends. The Holocaust was the final step in the Nazis’ program to identify, imprison, and kill those “unworthy of life.”
From the earliest days of eugenics in the United States, some people called for euthanasia as a way to eliminate the unfit permanently. The gist of their argument was this: why should the public pay to feed and care for the unfit when they could be eliminated? Some isolated examples of euthanasia were carried out by institutions and individuals in the name of eugenics. But in the United States, sterilization was overwhelmingly the more popular solution. In Of Better Blood, the experiment in euthanasia carried out on Loup Island on “unfit” teenage orphans is fiction.
By 1922, scientists had isolated the virus that caused the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. But there was no flu vaccine. The 1918 flu mutated to a version I’ve called “blue,” and the letter in the novel about “blue” is based on an actual letter from a doctor at Camp Devens, a military base in Massachusetts, describing the disease’s dramatic progress through the camp in the fall of 1918. But neither “blue” nor any other variant of the Spanish flu was ever successfully transmitted to a human being by injection.
I wrote Of Better Blood to emphasize the danger of policies in which people are categorized, isolated, and eliminated for political ends.
In researching and writing my book Teaching the Diary of Anne Frank, I was horrified to learn what can happen when ordinary people turn a blind eye, tell themselves they have no choice, and allow evil to take root. Out of inertia or self-interest or fear, millions of ordinary people allowed t
he Holocaust to happen. Other ordinary people showed extraordinary courage in resisting that evil and helping others.
We are the ordinary people of our time. It is up to us to be informed, to face facts, and to recognize and resist policies based on hatred and ignorance.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my family and friends—story lovers all—you are my blue water and safe harbor.
Thanks, Kate McKean, agent extraordinaire, for seeing the promise in this novel, nurturing it brilliantly, and finding it a home.
Thanks to Wendy McClure, my awesome, sure-handed editor at Albert Whitman for guiding this book to new heights and to the Albert Whitman team, Kristin Zelazko, Andrea Hall, Diane Dannenfeldt, Jordan Kost, and Kyle Letendre, for bringing it to life.
Thanks to my amazing critique group, Mary Bargteil, Jon Coile, Wendy Sand Eckel, Denny Kleppick, Terese Schlachter, Greg Gadson, Vicki Meade, and Joe Nold for never letting me settle for an imprecise word or image and doing it with humor turned up to 11. Thanks to the other wonderful writers in my life: Ben Moger Williams, Patricia Moger, Sid Reischer, Toby Ball, Mariya Hutto, Ed and Teri Sparks, Kirby Posey, Marilyn Recknor, Esther Geil, Becky Shiles, Charles Ota Heller, Ren Klein, and Penny Henderson. My writing students’ dedication and talent are a continuing inspiration to me.
I am grateful to the Maryland State Arts Council for an Individual Artist Award in Fiction, and to Susan A. Cohen, whose beautiful personal essay, “Littoral Drifter,” sparked my imagination at a crucial moment.
Finally, thanks to Ted Armour—husband, cat whisperer, lover of words—for believing in me.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
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