One day, amid the outdoor laundry lines, I pulled the white sheet to my head, a veil.
He pulled out a piece of string—industrial-strength thread stolen from the sewing room. As we stood, face to face, and pressed our left hands together, Eppitt loosely wound them with the string. He told me to put my right hand on my heart. He did the same.
“Are you my wife?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Are you my husband?”
“Yes.”
“Then we’re married?” I asked.
“We are,” he said.
We kissed. The sheet shifted in the breeze. I held it tightly, but it tugged away in the wind anyway and flew up, revealing us. When we looked around, only the sick children wheeled to the Duck Porch, out for their daily airing, were near enough to see us. Angels who didn’t speak, only gazed. Maybe their eyes grazed us—a blessing.
Eppitt gave me the small circle of string. “Keep it.”
I told him I would. Later, I pasted a piece of paper around the string and wrote “E. C. and H. W. 1913. Marriage.”
That’s how all weddings should be.
Eleanor and George’s wedding was formal. We were strapped into our fitted clothes. Suits were worn by all. Even Eleanor and her sole bridesmaid wore tailored jackets, skirts, and matching hats. The reception consisted of a few waltzes, cookies and punch, photo flashes, cigars, a few guests pelting them with rice. Hooray. It was doomed. Maybe Eleanor was unsuited for marriage. She likes short conversations; marriage is a long one. She held on to George’s arm—not for love’s sake, but like he was a buoy and she didn’t want to die alone at sea.
I promised to try to write without imagining an audience, but maybe I’ve asked too much of myself (or too little). Eleanor, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry to describe your wedding this way. And I’m sorry I let you go into that marriage and never said a word. Not that you’d have listened. I thought, What’s worse than a bad marriage? Perhaps no marriage. We learn through our failures. And I wanted you to have children, to have something that, when you clamped onto it, would clamp onto you in return. You have your girls, and they, too, have God in them.
My pact with Eppitt, that slip of string—it was the start.
GIRL GENIUS
What did I understand of the world while at the Maryland School for Feeble Minded Children? Very little.
I went out once. When gum rot exposed a nerve that made me cry out, Nurse Oonagh took me to the dentist. She had a tooth that needed looking at as well—probably the only reason I was placated. Normally, I kept the marriage pact tucked inside the small box beneath my cot, but I slipped it in my pocket—to help me not die.
We went by wagon. The roads were pitted. I saw a hedgerow, and then a house, a fenced dog, chimney smoke, shutters, a carpet being beaten on a line, baby prams, a man carrying a ladder. We were carted through the streets of Baltimore, toward the harbor. Children with mothers and fathers—they still existed! They hadn’t all been sent to asylums. They bobbed in open air!
Together, Nurse Oonagh and I had three molars pulled. Pain can be mistaken for comfort.
On the way home, her hands occasionally fluttered around her bulging cheeks. She prayed—a whine through her nose—but I cast my starving eyes out the window. With my mouth cotton-clotted, my head bundled shut—this was the way the world preferred me: mute, behind glass, passing through. I was sure of that.
Some visitors brought glimpses of the world outside too. Parents visited rarely, but they sometimes brought their other children with them. These kids moved differently, as if their bodies were built of fibers foreign to me. Sometimes a child left at the Maryland School because of destitution was picked up after a change in fortune. I watched them go until the backs of their heads were just dots, and then gone.
Eppitt’s parents weren’t coming for him. Angry bull-chested debt collectors had come round his house on Sparrows Point constantly to threaten his father. “Baltimorons,” his father called them after they were gone, his hands shaking.
His parents had dropped Eppitt at the Maryland School for Feeble Minded Children on a Sunday shortly before I met him. They’d prayed on it. The Word was clear. His mother didn’t cry.
“You’ll come back for me?” he asked.
“Yes,” his mother said. “You keep that in your heart.”
When she turned her back, Eppitt’s father looked at him and shook his head. They weren’t coming back. Eppitt appreciated his father’s honesty, and there was little to appreciate about the man.
Eppitt told me this in the empty laundry room one evening after everyone had emptied out of the Custodial Building for Girls. I sat on the floor, relieved for a moment that I didn’t really know my parents. There was nothing untrue to keep in my heart.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Eppitt.
“It’s fine,” he said. “We’re family now. We’ll get out of here and have babies and our own house.”
But this wasn’t necessarily possible. The year was 1913. We were morons, remember, harboring the criminal element. The boys were taken care of—a mysterious problem with the penis, a sedative, an operation in the laboratory. Our deformities, even the unseen ones in our soul, had to be kept in check. (Girls too, though I’d never had the operation, perhaps because my father had told Brumus not to, or perhaps because Brumus alone chose to spare me.)
Dr. Brumus was the man with the scalpel in the operating room, instructed by a board of volunteers who sometimes walked the grounds, whispering. But he must have believed in his civic duty.
I’ve since put it in historical perspective. You see, Brissaud and Griffiths were performing vasectomies on rabbits and dogs as early as 1884. Steinach experimented on senile rats. Vasectomies were used to treat bladder stones and TB, as well as for the proper benefits of “rejuvenation.” Sigmund Freud and W. B. Yeats were said to have had vasectomies to rejuvenate themselves. In 1899, the year before my birth, Ochsner published a paper on performing vasectomies on habitual criminals. Eugenics was revved! In 1907, Indiana passed a bill “to prevent procreation of confirmed criminals, idiots, rapists and imbeciles,” in other words, sterilization. Twenty-nine states joined in. When Eppitt arrived at the Maryland School for Feeble Minded Children, Sharp had already published a piece called “Vasectomy as a Means of Preventing Procreation in Defectives” and was urging sterilization in all state institutions. (We were surely defectives.)
Enter the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics. Before Hitler’s chancellorship started, a Reich sterilization law was drafted. Those who weren’t deemed fit to marry were tried in the hereditary health courts, where the enforcement of sterilization laws led to three hundred and twenty thousand people being sterilized from 1933 to 1945. Worse crimes happened in those dozen years, but there’s a bit of history.
Eppitt knew. Held steady by a guard’s elbow, boys limped bowlegged across the field to their cottages. Girls, at some point after their first period, disappeared for an afternoon, returning wobbly, pale. Brumus was nicknamed Dr. Snip-Snip. There were rumors that a few of the older male guards had volunteered for the procedure. Even Brumus himself was said to have had it done by another doctor in town.
The girls knew what it meant: no pregnancy, no children. A few said they wanted the operation—girls from big families, like Eppitt’s, who’d been left because they cost too much to feed. They’d seen their mothers swell again and again, screaming bloody babies into the world, and then staggering through the house, slack with exhaustion. Or some tough girls wanted to be with boys and not bother with babies. Some had trysts with not only the boys but also the guards. Eppitt’s favorite, Gillup, was said to be a rounder. Spry and handsome, he had favorites, a pecking order. But even the girls who claimed to want the operation were different after it, mute when the snip-snip came up in conversation, their faces blank with a watery glint to their eyes.
I wanted to have a baby one day. There was a secret nursery at the Maryland School�
��children weren’t supposed to be accepted until age seven. But there were a few clandestine cribs; one of them had been my own. Eppitt and I deserved babies. This became my motivation for learning how to read—to get into Brumus’s files and mark that Eppitt was already sterile, operation done.
I had a facility for reading that startled the Owl. At one point, she asked Brumus if her task of teaching me to read was a joke. “Harriet can already read. She gets it as soon as I say it.”
Brumus, in disbelief, pulled a book from his desk, opened it, and pointed to a paragraph. “Read it!”
It was a bit about the heart. “I don’t know all of these words,” I said, skimming it.
“See there!” he said.
The Owl looked at me.
“I’m sorry!” I said. “I don’t know what a ‘ventricle’ is. I’ve never seen this word ‘aorta.’ And if a ‘valve’ is weakened by disease, what can anyone do about it? It’s a heart! Hearts work because of love, right? Mrs. Funk says they work because of God’s love!” I sniffled and wiped my nose, and there was a bright swatch of blood. I was an anxious bleeder as Eppitt was an anxious word blender.
Shortly after this, Brumus administered an IQ test, at the time a new phenomenon. He sat me at his desk, timing the test himself. Ever since I had talked about the ventricles and weakened valves and the love of God, he’d treated me differently. Actually, he seemed terrified of me and often spoke in hushed tones, and asked me if I was thirsty. He even offered me coffee, which wasn’t allowed. I thought it might be a trap, and I declined.
I wasn’t nervous about the test. Why would a moron be nervous during an IQ test? I knew that my answers would be wrong. Brumus graded the test while I stood by the window and he started sniffling in the middle of his grading, as if choked up.
When he stood to get water, he said, “By Jesus. Not one error. Not one so far.”
He told the Owl and news traveled. A small crowd gathered in his office and in the hall—the Owl, Mrs. Funk, three guards—for the rest of the grading.
When Brumus finished, he reared from the desk, pulled off his glasses, and rubbed the oily bridge of his nose. “Contact the newspaper,” he said. “I have discovered a genius.”
I didn’t believe him, of course. But I decided that his mistakes in grading my test would convince my parents to retrieve me. I would be the back of a head in a carriage and then gone! Could a genius with God in her also get Eppitt out? Was it possible?
I caught Eppitt’s eye from my row in the lunch line. Did he know? Had word spread? That afternoon the reporter arrived. He took my picture outside the administration building. “So, what are you going to do now?” he asked.
“I’m not a moron anymore,” I said. “So I guess I’ll just have to go home!”
After he left, Brumus pulled me aside. It was October and gusty. “I’ve talked to your father. He wants to visit. But I’m not sure how it will go.”
“My father is coming here?”
“Don’t expect the world to change in a day,” he said.
“But my world did change in a day! I’ve changed.”
“Still,” Brumus said. “I just don’t know.”
“Well, I can’t stay here,” I said.
BLOOD ANGEL
The Owl showed me the article—“Girl Genius Discovered at School for Feeble Minded!” This was where I learned that I had a bleeding condition—not hemophilia exactly, but something related to a nervous condition. The journalist noted my “occasional mutism” and “hysterical outbursts,” which, according to the article, had forced my parents, Dr. and Mrs. Wolf, to send me to the Maryland Asylum and Training School for the Feeble Minded—which at other places in the article was referred to more simply as the Maryland School for Feeble Minded Children or the Asylum—as if the name of the place didn’t actually matter.
Two days later I was sitting in the entryway of the administrative building—the spot where parents came to dispose of children, and sometimes where they came to collect them. I wasn’t being disposed of, so this meant, to me, that I was being collected. There were Oriental rugs, and the wind outside was so strong that it rattled the windows and even made the gauze curtains ripple. I thought of my veil and my young husband, Eppitt Clapp. There was no need to try to spare him the operation by going through Brumus’s files. I would bring him with me—home. That would be our new family.
Dr. Brumus appeared with my father, who was wiry and elegantly dressed. He had a cane but no limp. I hated the cane immediately. I wanted to love my father but something about the useless cane made me want to beat him with it. I didn’t understand my rage. I mistook it for nerves. I was a hysteric, after all.
My father held a box, wrapped in yellow paper, under one arm. He looked sharply around the room. I was sitting right there, but for some reason he didn’t identify me as his child. Was he expecting a baby wheeled out in a pram? Finally, his eyes fell on me. I must have looked small, my shoulders curled inward. What should a genius say? I hoped I wouldn’t suffer mutism. I tried not to bleed.
Dr. Brumus said to my father, “Fit as a fiddle! See?”
This might have been a bit of goading. My father stiffened at Brumus’s effusiveness, then looked at me, maybe searching for glimpses of my mother or himself or his mother. Eventually he seemed content that I was the right kid. He nodded, and we sat down.
“Hello,” I said. I hadn’t been told to pack my belongings, but I had arranged them neatly on my cot.
“So, you’re Harriet.”
“Harriet Wolf,” I said. This seemed to surprise him—Wolf. Did I have a right to it? “Nice to meet you.”
Dr. Brumus was towering over us. My father looked out the window as if searching for a pigeon to shoot. Eppitt had told me that rich people shoot pigeons.
“I’ll leave you two to talk,” Brumus said. He nudged my father. “You’ve got a gift?”
“I do,” my father said, but he didn’t hand it over.
Brumus sighed and left.
Once Brumus was gone, my father seemed a little softer. “It’s not much, but I hope you like it.” He handed me the gift.
“Thank you,” I said, holding it in my lap.
“Open it!” my father said.
My fingers were too nervous to tug correctly. I felt spastic. I had opened only a few gifts in my life—an orange, new shoelaces.
“Do you need help?” Maybe he suspected that I lacked fine motor skills.
“No, I’m fine.”
“Just tear into it!” he said.
And so I did, but then immediately worried that I seemed vicious. I looked up to see if he seemed to think I was.
Instead he was impatient. “It’s a book!” he announced.
“Thank you.”
“Not just any book!” he said.
I opened the book to its middle. The pages were blank. “It’s an empty book.”
“For you to fill!” he said. “I’ve gotten you a subscription to a number of newspapers. You must know what’s going on out there! You clip the things of interest, paste them in the book, and make notations.”
“Out there?” I said.
“You don’t really need a newspaper to fill you in on what’s going on in here!” A joke. He laughed a little.
My heart, already charged, started to beat faster. “So this book and the newspapers are to help me know what goes on out there,” I said, clarifying, “while I’m in here.”
“And to organize those thoughts, yes,” he said. “Dr. Brumus says you’re very clever.”
I looked out onto the wide lawn. I wanted to crawl under the Duck Porch. “I’m a genius,” I corrected him.
“Well, yes, but you’re a girl,” he said. “I don’t know how much I trust a test like that. Plus, if it’s accurate, then it’s kind of ironic. I mean, a girl genius. What will you specialize in? Hems? Tulle?”
I closed my eyes and imagined living under the Duck Porch forever. “My mother will want to see me. How about her?”
&n
bsp; “Oh, her nerves would never withstand it. But she is so proud of you! So proud!”
“But I’m a genius. I could help her. I could help her nerves. Ask Dr. Brumus!”
“No, no,” my father told me. “This has worked out well enough. It’s best for everyone.” He jabbed the book with his index finger. “Look at the first page. I’ve started it for you!”
I opened the book, and there was a clipping—the smudgy small photograph of me in front of the administration building, holding the IQ test. The Owl hadn’t shown me the photograph. She’d chopped it from the article she’d shown me, and now I knew why. I looked austere, too gangly and small for thirteen, practically stricken by the flash, with my eyes flared and my hands gripping the test page as the wind kicked up one side of my hair. Dr. Brumus looked like a barrel, and we seemed trapped between the building’s columns. Beneath the picture, a subtitle: “Wolf, 13, is interested in ornithology.” I didn’t know what ornithology was or where the information had come from. When I saw that photograph, I wondered how Eppitt could love me. I was ugly. I was diseased. I had conditions. The test couldn’t be trusted. I was only a girl. If I was a genius, it was a waste of genius.
Brumus showed up once my father had said his quick good-bye. My nose didn’t bleed, but I still felt the light-headedness that sometimes came with it. I remember it being dusk, and the old doctor picking me up, cradling me to his chest—even though I was too old for it. He carried me to the cot in his office, and told me I could sleep there if I wanted. I didn’t have to go back to Stump Cottage. I lay down. He put on his hat and said, “You’ll stay here with us, Harriet. This is home, after all.”
I stared at the wall, and he left.
Then I got up and went through the files and found Eppitt’s. I checked a box on his main summary—sterilized, yes. Then I found my own report and took out the results of my IQ test. I ripped the page to bits and ate the paper, piece by piece. This was what a moron would do. I was a moron. It was too late to really tell me anything different. “Moron” was my first self-definition; it had burrowed in deep. In some elemental way, I will always be a moron. The pieces of paper almost melted, gummed lightly in my teeth, and went down easily.
Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders Page 8