by Jodi Picoult
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 Church 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."
"What's your population?" Abigail asks.
"Nine hundred ninety-seven," Stanley says, then notices a nurse leading a girl with angry eyes up a flight of stairs, an orderly following with a small suitcase. "Nine hundred ninety-eight." The doctor gestures toward a doorway that leads into a large sunny room, one again overrun with patients. "I believe in industrial work. Idle hands breed idle minds." At tables, women sit weaving reeds into mangled baskets or assembling clothespins. They look up at me and see a rich lady i
n fashionable maternity clothing. They don't realize that I am one of them.
"We sell the crafts," Stanley says proudly. "Use the proceeds for patient entertainment."
And do they come with a stamp on the bottom? Made reluctantly, by an individual who could not cope in the real world.
The superintendent leads us further down the hall to a shut door. "Unfortunately, not all of our patients are cooperative," Dr. Stanley says. He glances at me. "I don't know if a woman in your condition should--"
"I'm fine." To prove this, I open the door myself.
And then I wish I hadn't.
Two burly men stand on opposite sides of a tub of water, their hands pressing down the shoulders of a naked woman.
Before she goes under, I notice that her lips are blue and her breasts have puckered like fruit dried on a vine. Over her head a steady stream of water runs from a tap. Beside her, another woman lies facedown on a table with a sheet covering her upper body. A nurse pumps a large bulb of water through a tube threaded into the patient's rectum. "Hydrotherapy and colonic irrigation have been quite beneficial for disruptive patients," Stanley says. "But I brought you in here to see something else. Ladies, I'm proud to present the first patient to undergo voluntary sterilization at our institution. She's right back here." He leads us to the rear of the room. "The salpingectomy was done when she came into the infirmary for treatment of an irritable bowel. She comes from one of the original ten families studied in the survey, one with a long genetic history of depression and disruptive behavior. Dr. Kastler and I provided the two necessary signatures."
We stop at another table, beside which sits an attendant in a white coat like Dr. Stanley's. A woman lies on top, shivering. "She's quite healthy now," the psychiatrist says enthusiastically. "All this fuss . . . " here he waves his arm vaguely, "has nothing to do with the procedure." The attendant wraps a cold, soaked sheet around the patient, mummifying her as her teeth chatter. "Wet packs tend to work on the difficult ones," Dr. Stanley says.
"What did she do?" I hear myself ask.
"Attempted suicide. For the third time."
I see, now, that her wrists are poking through the wet pack, and are bandaged. There but for the grace of God go I. If my father were not Harry Beaumont, if my husband were not Spencer Pike, would I be lying on that table?
"I . . . excuse me . . ." Turning past Dr. Stanley, I push out of the room and into the corridor of the hospital. I hurry past the crowded common room and the girl tied to the bench and turn the corner blindly only to collide with a patient. She is small and dark, with hair plaited in greasy braids. Her arms are scratched from shoulder to wrist. "They'll take away your baby, too," she says.
My arms cross protectively over my belly. As she reaches out to touch me, I turn my back and run as quickly as I can through this labyrinth to the entrance of the hospital. Throwing open the doors, I gasp in as much air as my lungs will hold and sit on the stone steps. After a few moments I pull up the sleeve of my blouse and unravel the bandage Spencer tied on my wrist. The cut still looks angry, a slash of a mouth across skin.
It is true what Spencer says, after all--some women are meant to be social workers, and I am not one of them. I am supposed to be the mother of his children, and I cannot even get that right.
This is how Abigail finds me fifteen minutes later. I can't meet her gaze; I am that embarrassed by my behavior. She sits down beside me. I see her notice my scar, but she does not comment. "The first time I watched therapy here," Abigail confesses, "I went back to the office and handed in my resignation, telling my boss I didn't have the heart for a career in public welfare. Do you know what he told me? That this was exactly why I had to do it. So one day there would be fewer and fewer people who had to suffer."
Put into those words, it makes sense. It is social welfare in a nutshell--do what you can today so that you can change the world tomorrow. And yet I wonder if anyone asked the patient before they strapped her down why she no longer wanted to live. I wonder if it had anything to do with the fact that she cannot have babies anymore.
Mostly I wonder why Abigail and Dr. Stanley would advocate sterilizing that patient, but not allow her to take her own life. Either act would keep her from passing her genes along to offspring. So why not give her the choice?
"You didn't quit," I comment.
Abigail shakes her head. "Neither will you," she says, not unkindly, as she pulls down my sleeve. "Tomorrow, eight A.M. Meet me at the office on Church Street."
Q. Why sterilize?
A. To rid the race of those likely to transmit the dysgenic tendencies to which they are subject. To decrease the need for charity of a certain form. To reduce taxes. To help alleviate misery and suffering. To do what Nature would do under natural conditions, but more humanely. Sterilization is not a punitive measure. It is strictly protective.
--American Eugenics Society,
A Eugenics Catechism, 1926
By the time I drive home the sun is low enough in the sky to meet my gaze head on and to grace the black-eyed Susans lining Otter Creek Pass with gilded crowns. I am so filled with the need for it to be tomorrow that I might burst.
I park the car and climb the steps of the porch. As I hurry to the door, my boot knocks aside something small and light. Looking down, I find a basket no bigger than a fist. Unlike the work of the patients I saw today, these sides are intricately twisted and the weaving is neat and tight.
I slip it into the pocket of my dress and enter the house. "Cissy?" Spencer's voice draws me like a magnet. I find him in the doorway of his study, holding his afternoon scotch. "Here I rush home from the university to apologize to my lovely wife for standing her up at lunchtime, and she's gone and left me."
"Only temporarily," I say, kissing his cheek.
"And what put you into such a fine mood?"
I notice Ruby, standing like furniture in the distance, listening when she should not be. "The Children's Aid Society," I lie. "I had a meeting."
Ruby's eyes slide away. I would have told her if there were a meeting; I always do. I give her my movements and my location at all times, just in case Spencer wants to know.
"Good news?" he asks.
"Everything," I say, "is looking up."
Ruby follows me to the bedroom and begins to unbutton my dress in the back, places I can no longer reach. "I know what you're thinking," I say. But she remains silent as she pulls the fabric over my head and hands me a comfortable cotton sundress to put on for dinner. She ties it loosely and begins to hang up my fancy dress. The basket falls out of its pocket.
I pick it up, set it in the drawer of my nightstand. She is curious about this too, I can see, but I pretend not to notice. I do not owe her any explanations--not about the basket, not about my earlier whereabouts. And right now, I am too excited about tomorrow to worry about what might happen when Spencer realizes what I've done today.
Then I notice that Ruby is wearing my hand-me-down shoes. She steps into the closet to hang up the dress--the closet she has cleaned up since my morning seance--and walks toward the bed. Sliding her hand beneath the pillow she hands me back the biography of Mr. Houdini that she has hidden on my behalf.
It is her way of telling me that my secret is safe from Spencer. Our eyes meet. "Thank you," I murmur.
"Do you believe it, Miz Pike?" Ruby whispers fiercely. "Do you think someone can come back from the other side?"
I squeeze her hand and nod. After all, I am living proof.
In our study of the pedigrees of families who have been an expense to the state and towns, we have found quite a number having French and Indian ancestry with sometimes a mixture of Negro.
--H. F. Perkins, "Project #1" ESV Archive, "Projects--Old," 1926
Oxbury is a tiny town on the banks of Lake Champlain that, for the purposes of protecting the innocent, has been rechris-tened Fleetville in Abigail Alcott's reports. "Tracing the pedigree of this particular family," Abigail tells me as we walk toward the Gypsy camp, "must hav
e been as all-encompassing as tracing the lineage of the frogs in the river."
After the field workers had identified the families to be studied, they'd gone through the records at Waterbury, as well as the State Prison, the Vermont Industrial School, and the State School for the Feebleminded in Brandon, to see which family members had been placed where. Interviews with teachers, ministers, neighbors and even distant relatives who'd managed to elevate themselves above the delinquent behavior of their kin, all rounded out a history of the family's ill fortune, which was compiled in a final report.
Abigail has allowed me to read her notes from several visits to the area: the Delacours are a mixture of French Canadian and Indian blood, descended from two first cousins who married in the Roman Catholic Church and produced seventeen children, ten of which were feebleminded and three who had no sense of what Abigail called "sex decency." Subsequent generations bred alcoholics, criminals, and paupers. Members of several families lived together in one small shack. During the past six years relatives had moved from Hinesburg to Cornwall to Burlington to Weybridge to Plattsburgh, but continued to return to Fleetville during the summers, where they sold the crafts they'd made during the winter and fished for a livelihood. Their main defect, as a group, was feeblemindedness, but their close association with criminality, dependency, and nomadic habits could not be overlooked.
In Abigail's papers, the Delacours are called the Moutons--the name, she tells me, of her pet poodle. It is the policy of the social workers to keep the identities of those investigated protected from the public. "You wouldn't believe how easy it is to get information," Abigail says. "Go into any town and start asking questions. Every place has a family that's an Oh, them."
It seems to me that if everyone knows these people, anyway, pseudonyms are beside the point.
As we walk down toward the lake, I remember something my father taught me--the closer a person lives to the water, the less successful they are. "Look at the River Rats," he'd say, "and then look at me." His home, that is, high on the Hill in Burlington, as far away from the lake as one could get.
As Abigail approaches, it is easy to see she's been here before. Barefoot children run to her and reach into the pockets of her skirt for hard candy. A teenage boy carving a wooden paddle gives her a shy smile. "Do they know?" I ask quietly. "Why we're here, I mean?"