by Jodi Picoult
He holds my hand. It makes me think of being a child, hanging onto my father to cross Church Street. I married Spencer when I was seventeen; he became the next adult to keep me safe. As I lay on my side with the bulk of my belly swelling over my thighs, it strikes me that I have never had the chance to grow up.
“You feeling better?” Spencer asks, and he smiles so sweetly something inside me breaks loose.
I love him. The smell of his hair and the bump of his nose that supports his glasses; the long lean muscles you would never expect to find beneath his pressed shirts and jackets. I adore the way he looks at me sometimes, as if love is a quantity he cannot measure scientifically, because it multiplies too quickly. I wish that we had met, however, on a busy street in New York City, or on a neighbor’s porch in Iowa, or even during a transatlantic crossing—any circumstance at all that would make my relationship with Spencer separate from his relationship with my father.
He puts his hand over my stomach, and I close my eyes. It is impossible to not think of Spencer’s Committee on the Human Factor, which advocates the careful selection of a mate. But I was picked because I am Harry Beaumont’s daughter, not because I am myself.
I wonder how Spencer feels, to have made such an informed decision, and to still have wound up with something defective.
“How did I get here?” I ask, many questions at once.
“You fainted at the Exposition.”
“The heat . . .”
“Rest, Cissy.”
I feel fine. I want to shout this, even though it isn’t true. There were times as a child I would climb to the roof of this very house, stand spread-eagled and yell until the whole of Comtosook heard me. It was not that I had anything important to say, but rather, that my father wanted me quiet.
I see this streak as a black curl in my blood, moving through my system and surfacing when I least expect it. Like now, with Spencer fussing over me. My smoking. This afternoon, at the fortune-teller’s tent. Or last night, when I cut myself.
Sometimes I wonder if I inherited it from my mother.
“I’ll send Ruby in to you.” Spencer kisses the crown of my head. “You’ll be fine.”
If Spencer says so, it must be true.
Ruby hovers at the door, waiting to be invited in. Our house girl is fourteen, close enough to my age for a friendship, and yet we are leagues apart. It is not just that she is French Canadian—I am so much older than she is, and not just chronologically. When she thinks no one can see, Ruby dances between the white sheets she hangs out on the line—pirouettes and the lindy hop and even a little Charleston. Me, I never forget that at any time, someone might be watching.
She comes bearing a brown-wrapped package. “Miz Pike,” she says, “look what came in the mail.”
She sets the package down beside me and makes an unsuccessful attempt to ignore the bandage on my wrist. Ruby, of course, knows what happened. She held a bowl of warm water for Spencer, as he cleaned the cut and bound it tightly to heal. She is part of the conspiracy of silence.
Ruby works the twine free and unwraps the box. Inside is a Sears, Roebuck order—a pair of half-boots just like the ones Spencer has removed from my feet. These are a size bigger, and maybe will not pinch so much, like all my shoes do now that I am so pregnant. Glancing over the edge of the bed, I stare at Ruby’s shoes. “You wear about a size six, don’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Why don’t you take them? I don’t imagine my foot’s going to get smaller again.” Ruby holds my old boots in her hand as if they are a treasure. “My sister, she used to give me hand-me-downs.”
“You have a sister?” How can I have lived with a girl for a year, and not have known this?
“Not anymore. Diphtheria.” Ruby busies herself unpacking the rest of the box. Tiny sweaters and socks and miniature undershirts in all the hues of white spill over the bedclothes, a Lilliputian bounty. These clothes seem too little to fit on a doll, much less a baby.
“Oh,” Ruby breathes, picking up a lacy cap between her thumb and forefinger. “Have you ever seen anything so fine in your life?”
Ruby wants this baby more than I do. It’s not that I am not pleased by the thought of his arrival—it is just that no one seems to understand that I will not survive this birth. Spencer taught me well; this defect is in my germ plasm. If I don’t manage to kill myself first, then the day this baby is born is the day I’m going to die.
Spencer has showed me numerous obstetrical texts to convince me otherwise; he has made me speak to the best of doctors. I nod, I smile, sometimes I even listen. Meanwhile, I plot my suicide. But then I feel the baby’s small feet running the curve of my ribs, as if he knows by instinct where to find my heart, and I realize I am lost.
“Oh, no, Miz Pike,” Ruby says; until then I am not aware that I’ve begun to cry. “Should I get the professor?”
“No.” I use the edge of the sheet to wipe my eyes. “No, I’m fine. Just tired. Really.”
Last night, I thought that if I cut deep enough, I might be able to see all the way down past blood and bone and marrow to the place where it aches all the time. Spencer, when he bandaged my wrist, said I must think about my baby. I have two months left before I am due to give birth, after all. He does not understand that I was thinking of my son. I was trying to spare him the weight I have carried all my life: the knowledge that he was the reason for my death.
I know that my actions don’t follow logic; that harming myself puts my infant in danger too. But somehow, when it is just me and the dark and the night and a blade, reason never counts. I have tried to tell this to Spencer, many times. “But I love you,” he says, as if that should be enough to keep me here.
Now, with Ruby beside me, I try to find words to explain the impossible. “Did you ever walk through a room that’s packed with people, and feel so lonely you can hardly take the next step?”
She hesitates, then nods slowly. Cocking my head, I look at her, and wonder if she might not be quite as young as I’ve thought. “Miz Pike,” Ruby whispers shyly. “Maybe we could pretend to be sisters.”
Ruby, a servant girl, and me, the wife of one of greater Burlington’s most esteemed citizens. “Maybe,” I answer.
PRINCIPLES OF HEREDITY: Prof. H. F. Perkins. Lecture course with conference and report exercises covering the principles of elementary embryology, the physical basis of inheritance, principles of breeding experiments, and eugenics, the practical application of heredity to mankind. Text used: Newman’s Readings in Evolution, Genetics, and Eugenics.
—University of Vermont Bulletin, 1923–24
For years now, I have been fascinated by Harry Houdini. I’ve read every biography written since his death in 1926; I keep a scrapbook of newspaper articles about his amazing feats. It is not just the obvious—that, like him, I know of ties that bind and chains that keep one rooted to a certain place, or that, like him, I sometimes wish to disappear. No, what is more intriguing to me is Houdini’s obsession with the spirit world.
Did I mention that Houdini, too, lost his mother?
The new book I’m reading chronicles the long war between Houdini and Margery, the Boston medium. During her séances, her voice would appear from different parts of the room, a spirit bell would ring, a megaphone was wont to fly across the table—all while others held the medium’s hands. Houdini, convinced that she was a hoax, built her a fraud-preventer cabinet and challenged her to hold a séance from inside it. But during the séance, a folding ruler was found at the medium’s feet—something Margery and Houdini each claimed the other had planted. In the end, Houdini died discrediting her, and swore that if a spirit were ever to return from the other side of the veil, it would be him.
Although séances have been held on Halloween, now, for five years, he hasn’t come back.
This is what I think about Mr. Houdini: if he hadn’t been so desperate to contact his departed mother, he wouldn’t have fought so fiercely against Margery. He denounced the spir
it world because he feared it was the one space from which he could not escape.
I feel like a fool, hiding here in my bedroom closet. It’s where I’ve gone for privacy, dragging in a little card table that is jammed up against my belly. Table tipping is something else I have read of; it’s a way of contacting the spirits. I should have more people sitting here with their hands linked, but I certainly could not tell Spencer what I am doing, and I don’t know what Ruby would make of it.
The silks of my dresses brush my shoulders. I press my palms against the table, close my eyes. “Mama?” I whisper.
Suddenly, a hand touches my side. I jump, and then realize that the fingers are on the inside of my skin—it’s this baby, trying to push away for all he is worth. “Hush, now. We’re trying to talk to your grandma.”
If I can find her, if I can open a door . . . then maybe even after I die I will be able to find my way back.
I take deep breaths to concentrate. I focus all my energy on that table. “Mama, if you can hear me, let me know.”
The table, beneath my hands, remains perfectly still. But then I hear a creak. I open my eyes in time to see the doorknob of the closet turning by itself. The brightest light appears, growing wider and wider until it silhouettes the figure of a woman.
“Miz Pike,” Ruby asks, “what on earth are you doing in here?”
My heart is pounding so hard that it takes a moment to answer. Pretending it is perfectly normal to be found sitting inside a closet, I say, “What did you need, Ruby?”
“Your lunch with the professor . . . you’re going to miss it if you don’t hurry.”
My lunch . . . I have forgotten. Spencer and I have a standing summertime date, a picnic on the university grounds after his Wednesday morning graduate school lecture. We sit beneath the oaks and speak of the things that matter: Spencer’s research, his most promising students, names for a son.
Ruby has already packed a basket with grapes and cold meats, sesame rolls, macaroni salad. “Thank you,” I say, taking one last glance inside the closet before I close the door.
Spencer walked to work today—three miles to the university— and left me the car. A Packard Twin 6 with a 12-cylinder engine, it’s his pride and joy. It has suicide doors, named so because they open backward and can rip you out of the car if unlatched during transit.
I’ve thought about it.
Spencer’s graduate lecture is being held in a small classroom that smells of linseed oil and philosophy. At the front, Spencer stands with his jacket off, his shirtsleeves rolled up in deference to the heat. Lantern slides of skulls have been projected onto a screen behind him. “Notice the difference between the dolichocephalic and the brachycephalic in the Negroid skull,” Spencer says. “The prognathous jaw, the flattened nose, the apelike similarities . . . these all are signs of a degraded race.”
A hand shoots up. “How primitive are they?” a student asks.
“Rudimentary,” Spencer explains. “Think of them as children. Like children, they’ll be fond of bright colors. Like children, they are capable of forming base friendships.” He glances at the clock on the wall, and his eyes skim over me, lighting briefly. “Next week we’ll be outlining the classification of all humanity into five distinct races,” he promises, as the class gathers their books and disperses. Smiling, Spencer walks down the aisle toward me. “To what do I owe this honor?”
“It’s Wednesday,” I remind him. “Our lunch.” As illustration, I swing the basket out from behind my back, where I have kept it hidden.
A small V forms between Spencer’s brows. “Damn, Cissy, Harry Perkins asked to meet with me this afternoon. I don’t have time for lunch.”
“I understand,” I tell Spencer.
“That’s my girl.”
“Spencer?” I call after him. “Should I wait?” But he does not hear me, or else he chooses not to. Sighing, I put down the picnic basket and walk to the front of the classroom. My boot heels click like teeth, and when I get close, my body makes a bulbous silhouette against the white screen. I hold up my hand and make a shadow puppet, a wolf. Then I send it swooping and diving along the jutting brow of a dolichocephalic specimen.
“Mrs. Pike?”
Caught in the act, I whirl around to find Abigail Alcott watching me. A wide-eyed woman in her late twenties, Abigail is a social worker currently employed by the Department of Public Welfare. She is dressed for work in a smart navy skirt and a pleated white shirt. Of late, she has been meeting with Spencer to discuss the ESV records, which she uses in her investigations. Her job involves assessing which degenerate families are turning around, versus which will benefit from the new sterilization law.
“Hello, Abigail,” I say with as much poise as I can, given that she is older than I, and has a true education, instead of two years in a finishing school.
“Is the professor here?” She checks her wristwatch. “We’re supposed to be driving out to Waterbury this afternoon.”
So I am not the only person Spencer disappoints. I wonder what they are planning to do at the State Mental Hospital. I imagine her walking beside my husband, pulling threads of scientific conversation from thin air to make a verbal bouquet she might hand him—one that by its very topic is irresistible to Spencer. In this, I have always been the outsider—I do not know as much about eugenics as my father or my husband. What would it be like to sit at the dinner table with them, to say something relevant, to watch them look at me as someone to be considered, instead of something to be dismissed?
That sweet coil of insurrection swims in me. I am ten again, and climbing to the roof to shout down to the good people of Comtosook. “Didn’t he tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“About the meeting with Professor Perkins?” There, that much is not a lie. “Spencer was going to send you a note . . . but then he gets so preoccupied, you know . . .”
“Mrs. Pike,” Abigail interrupts. “What note?”
“The one about me going to Waterbury in his place.”
Abigail stares at me, but she is too polite to say what she is thinking: that I have never been trained in social work, that being born into a family of eugenics scholars doesn’t automatically make me one. Her eyes settle on the swell of my abdomen. “Spencer was quite sure it was safe,” I add.
That, ultimately, is what clinches it: Abigail would rather cut off her right arm than question Spencer’s judgment. Her lips set in a thin line, she assesses me, and nods. “Well, then,” she says, “let’s go.”
Vermont needs a mental survey which will locate every case of mental defect within our borders and facilities for thorough psychiatric examination of all dependent and delinquent individuals.
—Asa R. Gifford, “Report of the President,” Vermont Children’s Aid Society Second Annual Report, 1921
The Vermont State Hospital for the Insane was built in Waterbury in 1890, to ease the overcrowding at the Retreat down in Brattleboro. Dr. Stanley, the superintendent, had once come to our home for dinner when I was thirteen, after he’d testified in support of the 1927 Sterilization Bill that did not pass. I remember circles of sweat around his collar, the fact that he did not eat brussels sprouts, and the way he stood too close to me while making small talk.
“You would think that the group represented in highest concentration at Waterbury was the Huntington’s chorea family, because of the inherited mental illness,” Abigail says as we walk up the street from our parking spot. Now that she has taken it into her mind to educate me on all I’ve missed to date leading up to this meeting, she is chatty—friendly, almost. “But no, it turns out there are plenty of Pirates and Gypsies too.”
By now we have reached the front door of A Building, the new ward where many of the female patients are kept. Abigail turns to me, her eyes glowing. “What is it like to wake up beside a man who has such . . . such vision?” she asks, and then her face goes as red as the brick of the building.
A memory: I am at the Eugenics Survey Office on Chur
ch Street, come to tell Spencer that we are going to have a baby. I open the door to his office and find him with Abigail, laughing up at something Spencer has said. She sits on the edge of his desk and her hand is on his forearm. “Cissy!” he calls out, and he is smiling, and I don’t know if it is because I have arrived, or because she has been there.
Suddenly the door of the institution opens. We are sucked inside, because hell is a vacuum. Nurses wearing white hats creased like Japanese paper cranes move silently, seemingly unaware of the patient sobbing at the administration desk, or the one who dashes naked across a corridor, her wet hair streaming out behind her. A filthy girl not much older than Ruby sits on a bench, wearing a shirt that secures her arms to the wooden slats behind her. Beneath the bench is a puddle; I think it must be urine.
“Miss Alcott!” Dr. Stanley approaches in his pristine white coat. I wonder how he can keep it so clean in an environment such as this. He turns to me, too close for comfort. “I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure . . .”
“You have,” I say, extending my hand. “Cecelia Beaumont Pike.”
“Cissy? Cissy! You’re certainly grown up.” He glances at my swollen abdomen. “And out, I might add. Congratulations apparently are in order.”
“Thank you.”
“Mrs. Pike is standing in for the professor today,” Abigail explains.
Dr. Stanley hides his surprise well. “Excellent. Well, if you’ll follow me, we can speak more privately in my office.” He walks down the hall, leaving us to follow. Abigail moves in his wake immediately. I find myself rooted to the spot by the vacant stare of the woman on the bench.
“Mrs. Pike!” Abigail prompts sharply, and I force myself to turn away.
Dr. Stanley, seeing an opportunity to impress Spencer via me, decides to take the long route. There are spots where the halls are so congested with inmates that we have to walk single file. “The legislature just approved the construction of a new building for the acutely disturbed female patients. You can see how overcrowded we are here.”