Kempley thought nothing of this until her senior class trip to Washington, D.C., when after a day of visiting the monuments and memorials along the Mall she realized there were no jokes and no T-shirts with David Letterman lists of top ten reasons. At the recently dedicated Vietnam Veterans Memorial, she observed men weeping as they touched the name of a friend, a brother, an uncle: Daniel Piotrowski, Tommy Lee Hawkes, Harry Smith. Who were these men who had died? she wondered as she surreptitiously studied the faces of those who had come to grieve for them. Even the little school kids were oddly silent as they stood in front of the dark wall, staring somberly at the reflections of their own faces juxtaposed over the names: Clifford Jenkins, Frank DaVila, Ollie Sands.
Watching the other tourists that day, Kempley thought of the fourteen women and five men who had been hanged in her hometown all those years before, of the mothers and wives, sisters, daughters, husbands, fathers. Of Giles Correy pressed to death by stones. And suddenly, it made no sense: Why had that tragedy become a joke?
Reason #2: Your wife has become overly attached to the broom.
Something wrenched inside Kempley then, she told Grace later, and she felt what she would later think of as her first true adult emotion—this grief that had nothing to do with her own small life. She wrote a paper about it for her AP history class, submitted it to a national essay contest, and won. “On History, Lies, and Laughter.” Six years later, it evolved into her master’s thesis, then her first book. It got people’s attention. “Would you laugh at a T-shirt with the slogan ‘What’s cooking in Auschwitz?’” she dared to ask in the first sentence. In the second edition, she added, “What about a bumper sticker that reads ‘Got bombed last night in Oklahoma City?’” She became an expert on public memorials, which was how she came to think of her books. Landscapes of remembrance. She wanted people to read her words and respond as those veterans and their families had responded to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. With reverence or silence or a sense of loss or anger. With curiosity. With tears. But not humor. She wanted people to feel history, to care about it.
Kempley told Grace about the morning when, sitting in the Essex Institute in Salem on a gorgeous Saturday in May, paging through transcripts of the trials, she came across the testimony of Joanna Childin, who on June 2, 1692, testified against her neighbor, thirty-eight-year-old Sarah Goode. Joanna claimed that Sarah’s specter had appeared to her in the night, along with Sarah’s deceased child, who claimed Sarah had murdered her.
“It made no sense,” Kempley said. “Why would Joanna, why would any woman, make such a preposterous claim against another woman, especially one who was poor, unkempt, had recently lost her child, and who wasn’t in a position of power? I kept thinking that if I could just understand Joanna, I could understand the rest of it.” She’d spent hours searching the transcripts for other references to Joanna, but found only one vague reference. “And then I realized it didn’t matter,” Kempley said. “Even if I could figure out this one woman, I still had no idea why all this had happened then, that winter of 1692 and not five years earlier or five years later. And I kept returning to two facts: one, the winter of 1691–1692 was unbearably bitter, which meant that the infant mortality rate for the tiny town would have been higher than usual, and two, at the time of Joanna’s accusation, Sarah Goode was pregnant again.”
So, Kempley wondered: Did Joanna have any children of her own, and had any of them died? And if so, was accusing another woman of murder the only way she could express her grief and rage? Because if her own child had died, Joanna would not have been allowed to grieve: this would have suggested that she was questioning God’s plan, God’s desire, and how dare she doubt God’s wisdom? It would have made sense that Joanna needed someone to blame.
Or: maybe she didn’t have children, couldn’t have children, and wanted them more than anything. In this case, seeing Sarah Goode, who was pregnant again, might have struck Joanna with pain in her chest so sharp that it doubled her over. And maybe, because it was too terrifying to accept that these feelings stemmed from her own desire and jealousy, Joanna instead decided she had been cursed, and blamed it on the woman who had caused it simply by walking by.
Maybe.
Either way, this was the history Kempley sought to understand in her second book. And because the trials began with the unexplained illness of a child, and because over half of the indictments against witches involved the sickness or deaths of children, Kempley began by studying the effect of child-loss on a community. She interviewed women whose children had died, asking them how this loss had affected their friendships, their faith, their marriages, their sense of self. She talked, as well, to the friends and family of these women and tried to understand their guilt, their helplessness, their fear. Less than a year after finishing these studies, Kempley’s twin daughters were diagnosed with mitochondrial disease, and Kempley would reflect bitterly that if she’d waited, she could have saved herself a lot of time and effort on research. Her own children were dying and in one lousy sickening car crash of a minute she knew more about how this felt than she ever wanted to, than three years of research and interviews ever could have told her. She didn’t write for six months. She felt nothing but rage, self-pity, grief, and guilt.
And then by accident, reading an unrelated biography, she, who had been studying the trials for years and who had lived in Salem all her life, discovered that Cotton Mather, one of the ministers who had interrogated and condemned the accused of Salem, had fathered fifteen children, all but two of whom died young. Kempley had been sitting in her daughters’ hospital room that day, in a strange rain-drenched city where they’d gone for tests and answers and hope, and reading that sentence, she felt as if a pane of glass had just cracked inside her. All but two. And one of the judges in the trials, Judge Sewell, had lost all but three of his fourteen children. She stared at the rain beading on the window, and she knew that the words altered everything. Why had this never been mentioned? How could it not have been? To lose one child was horrendous, but thirteen? Eleven? How could these men not have been furious, terrified, and desperate—above all desperate—to find a reason, something—or someone—to blame?
The book Kempley began writing again was a far different book from the one she’d originally intended. She understood, as perhaps no other historian of the Salem witch trials could, how losing a child so annihilates your sense of how the world should be that nothing—nothing—makes sense. There is no reason, no understanding, no rational explanation for why one child gets sick and dies and another does not, and in the absence of this fundamental logic, of this basic way of perceiving the world, the trials became understandable to Kempley. No longer was there even a pretense of objectivity in her writing. Not being objective was the whole point. It became her mantra. Nothing in history was irrelevant, she told her students, including their own.
Now, on the first day of her research seminars, she told Grace, she began by piling on her desk milk crates full of books about the trials. “This is only a fraction of what has been written,” she would begin, “about an event that occurred over three centuries ago, lasted less than a year, and as one critic aptly said, ‘had no long-term impact on the future of Puritan New England.’” She paused, reading her students’ implacable faces, wanting them to be outraged by this, wanting them to care:
At most, though, all she might see was a flicker of surprise, a raised eyebrow. Still, it was a start.
“So two questions,” she would continue: “One, why should yet another historian devote time and energy to this subject, and two, assuming you can answer that, what can you possibly add to what we know?” She didn’t wait for answers. “The most important questions you can ask yourself as a historian are: Who am I? and Why do I care?”
For many of Kempley’s students these were the most difficult questions they had ever been asked. They were used to seeking answers outside of themselves. It was why they had chosen history to begin with, turning to the past in the sa
me way that young men and women once turned to the convent or the monastery, not as an act of faith or passion but as a retreat from the painful present. Kempley told her students about her children then, about how it wasn’t until she acknowledged the truth of what their death would do to her life that it became possible to apprehend what the childrens’ illnesses in Salem might have done to their parents’ lives.
The best students were those who weren’t afraid of such truths or those whose own wounds lay close to the surface: the woman who struggled with seasonal affective disorder and who, sitting at her desk one winter afternoon, had looked outside at the low gray clouds and immediately understood how that unseasonably cold winter of 1692 had contributed to the accusations as well.
Most students didn’t like Kempley. She was too exacting, they said. Never satisfied. Their carefully researched papers came back bloodied with red ink: So what? she’d write in the margins. Or Why does this matter? Or These are just numbers. This has no heart. They joked: After a class with her, you might start believing in witches again. She knew they said this, she admitted to Grace, and was stunned at how much it still hurt despite the fact that years—sometimes decades—later, a student she could barely recall would write her a thank-you note, saying that she was the one professor who had actually taught them something of value: to pay attention to everything. Because it all matters, and because that’s how lives are lived, how history evolves: a moment, a choice at a time.
It was a truth the entire country would begin to know in the aftermath of September 11. Pausing to make a phone call, get a briefcase, taking this stairwell instead of that one, or taking a later train so you could photograph your child on his first day of school, stopping for gas, smoking a cigarette—these became the only differences between life and death. Choices that small. Everything mattered. Everything. It was an understanding borne out in the New York Times’ “Portraits of Grief,” those one or two paragraphs describing the individuals who had died in the attacks. Lives were defined by the ordinary details: the girl nicknamed Gap because she always shopped there; the man who dressed up as a dancing bear for his daughter’s third birthday; the elevator operator who studied the architecture of lighthouses in Maine; the man whose last e-mail—the one he was in the midst of writing when the plane struck—was a reminder to his friends about getting fitted for tuxes for his upcoming wedding. Ordinary details. The same thing Kempley had sought to understand about those who were executed three hundred years before in Salem. Those people were more than the role history had assigned to them. They were individuals. They had argued and laughed and fallen in love and had favorite foods and favorite colors and habits and idiosyncrasies.
It was a similar understanding that Kempley sought to impart to her children’s doctors. History and medicine were alike in this sense. Explanations of historical events overshadowed the lives of the very people who were altered by those events, just as in medicine the diagnosis often eclipsed the life of the individual being diagnosed.
The three of them, Kempley, Grace, and Anne Marie, ran into Lydia in the hotel lobby when they returned from skating, still laughing at the image of themselves doing the Hokey Pokey. “I wish you’d come with us,” Kempley said. She looked beautiful, cheeks flushed from the cold, strands of dark hair tendriled around her face. But Lydia only glanced at them coldly and walked away. Grace felt her face grow warm, ashamed suddenly of her own laughter. What had she been thinking? Lydia was right. My God, roller-skating while their children were dying.
In their hotel room, Kempley had wordlessly pulled her suitcase from the closet and opened it across the bed. Her jaw was tight though her eyes glittered with tears. “I hate that she made me feel like this, that I let her,” she said quietly. She stood, hands on her hips, for a moment. And then, “Shit, I’ve lost a child. She can judge me when she knows what that feels like.”
Grace watched Kempley roll a pair of socks into a ball, then fold a sweatshirt into the suitcase. “I used to be just like Lydia,” Kempley said softly. “So sure that if I lifted my focus from the girls, from mitochondrial disease, for even a minute, something horrible would happen. It was my way to be in control. As long as I was vigilant, I could save them, and God help anyone who tried to tell me differently. People , including my husband, were always telling me I should get out more, do something nice for myself. Why didn’t I take a walk, they’d ask. Why didn’t I go to a movie?” She shook her head. “A movie. God. Doug used to tell me all the time: Nothing’s going to happen to the girls just because you enjoy myself for a little bit.” She glanced at Grace. “There was this one night when he said that for the hundredth time, and I remember looking at him—we were sitting at the kitchen table, and I can still see exactly what he was wearing, the exact mug he was drinking his coffee from—and I hated his guts, Grace. I literally felt sick looking at him. ‘He really doesn’t get it,’ I thought. Our girls are dying, and he’s so stupid, he actually thinks I can enjoy myself.” She shrugged sadly. “But he was right. Carrie died when I was right there with her. Doing everything I was supposed to be doing.” Kempley set the T-shirt she’d just folded into the suitcase, and gently smoothed the creases from it. Grace imagined she was remembering tucking Carrie into her crib. Rubbing her back.
“Beating ourselves up, refusing to let ourselves feel happiness or joy—” She shook her head, tears leaking from her eyes. “It’s not going to save them.”
“You’ve heard of it then?” Grace asked Kempley over the phone. It. Munchausen’s. Already—in less than a week—the word had become familiar.
“Heard of Munchausen’s? Of course. But do I believe in it? Hell, no.”
Grace stopped. “What do you mean? How do you not believe in it?”
“You just don’t.”
“But women have confessed, Kempley.” Irritated, Grace resumed her pacing, pausing at the foot of the stairs and listening for Jack, then returning to the kitchen where she’d been sitting with coffee. The house was quiet. Stephen was at the Y, Max was out skating, Erin and Jack were taking naps.
“Well, I’d confess too if some shrink was telling me that it was the only way to get my child back,” Kempley said. “Confess and you won’t hang. It’s what women accused of witchcraft were told. Then when they did confess, everyone said, ‘See? It must be real.’”
Grace smiled. Professor Trapman, she thought. Except the Munchausen’s accusation wasn’t some obscure academic subject. It was about her and her children, and the truth was that she could care less about similarities to the witch trials or even whether Kempley believed Munchausen’s was real. The accusation was real. That her kids could be taken from here was real. What else mattered?
“Come on, Grace, you’re an epidemiologist,” Kempley said now. “You know better than anyone all the ridiculous things people believed in the name of medicine, and every time, every time, it was a way to explain what no one understood. The Witch Trials started that way. A child was sick, and no one could figure it out. People were terrified.”
“I know, Kempley, but this isn’t 1600 or whenever it was, and Jack has a diagnosis.” Exasperation leaked into her tone. “Besides, there are thousands of sick kids where no one knows what’s wrong, and their parents haven’t been accused. But I was.”
“Exactly. So what sets you apart?”
“I don’t know. I keep thinking—” Someone must have found out about Noah. She squeezed her eyes shut against the thought, one hand on the counter, as if to balance herself. Bennett’s question from three days before fell through her like something dropped from a great height, gathering momentum and weight each time she remembered it anew. Was there anything unusual going on in your life at the time the accusation was made?
“Have you considered that maybe you’ve been accused because you know more about mitochondrial disease than half of Jack’s doctors?” Kempley’s voice was gentle.
Grace shook her head wearily. She’d forgotten how dogmatic Kempley could be. It had been helpful
at the conference where Kempley was able to elicit answers that others simply couldn’t. But the last thing Grace wanted was to turn this into an Us v. Them kind of battle. Parents v. doctors. Especially because, with the exception of Dr. Buford, Jack’s first cardiologist, and the doctor from San Diego who had responded to Grace’s letter about Jack, it contradicted her experience. She liked Jack’s doctors, his nurses, his therapists. She trusted them. She respected them.
Mother-perpetrator is unusually friendly with hospital staff.
Or at least, she had trusted them.
“Studies show that doctors tend to dislike patients whom they can’t help,” Kempley was saying. “Which makes sense, if you think about it. Kids like ours are constant reminders of everything the doctor doesn’t know.”
“So you think the doctors accuse the mothers? I don’t buy it, Kempley. And not with our doctors. Anju Mehta is like family to us.”
“I’m not saying it’s conscious. Maybe the doctors are just more inclined to believe in Munchausen’s if they already don’t like the parent to begin with. And they probably feel guilty for feeling this way. I mean, how the hell can you dislike a parent whose child is dying?”
Grace thought of Lydia and knew it was easier than most people could imagine. “I don’t know, Kempley, it seems—” she swallowed hard. “What if it’s not that complicated? What if it’s just—” She paced again to the foot of the stairs to listen for Jack or Erin, then to the front window, looking for Stephen’s car. The street was empty. She paused in a block of wintry sunlight, but couldn’t feel any warmth. “I met someone,” she said quietly. “Actually, I knew him in high school, and—God, this sounds so stupid—”
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