by Dana Spiotta
“What was wrong with her?” asked the one young man in the women’s studies course. He was, Sam speculated, maybe not a “he” but a “they,” as their presence appeared deliberately nonbinary. This was indicated by their earrings, their makeup, and their jewelry, all femmy. Black fingernail polish on short, manicured nails. But their hair was a kind of shaggy boyish cut, and their clothes were not feminine: Carhartt jacket and Timberland boots. Their nonbinariness was not the androgyny Sam thought of from her own adolescence. This was something different, a deliberate, stylized confounding of gender, non-masculine and non-feminine, that made it more surprising, unsettling, unclichéd. There must be a name for it; it impressed Sam, but maybe she overthought these matters. “Do you know?” they said, because she was staring at them, distracted and not answering. They must be used to upstaging their own questions.
“Oh, well, from what we can tell, Amelia had Huntington’s disease, which is a fatal inherited genetic disorder. In early childhood she showed symptoms, and they grew severe over her short life. She used crutches, and she had seizures. Going to school eventually became impossible, so she stayed by her mother’s side and was tutored by her, even as her memory and cognition were degraded by the disease. This obsession with Amelia, both during her affliction and after Amelia died, lasted Loomis’s whole remaining life.”
One of the scared-emoji girls opened the cubby and looked in. She pulled out a doll. “That’s so creepy,” she said, and laughed. Sam wanted to smack the girl’s hand. Shouldn’t she have asked if she could touch the doll? But, but at least they were interested. She waved them into another room. “Clara’s bedroom, which was also her study.”
Half the students were looking at their phones. Sam pressed on.
“The Loomises, like many married couples of some means, each had their own bedrooms. You can see all the books and the desk instead of a dressing table in here. It became her study even though there is a library downstairs. That was her husband Henry’s domain. When her last child left for boarding school in 1895, Loomis enrolled at Syracuse University, which had been coed since its founding in 1870. In fact, the university had female undergraduates at parity with male undergraduates, which must have made it feel very modern to Loomis. She was forty-five, and she took to the classes with a profound devotion. No youthful glee clubs or other distractions for her. The middle-aged student is focused, and, as you can imagine, quite formidable.”
Could they imagine? Sam thought not, but she gave them the benefit of the doubt.
“She studied science, her passion. She graduated top of her class, even above the male students. She attended the SU medical college, one of only a handful of women matriculated. At the same time, Loomis led the local fight for women’s suffrage, and she founded the Central New York Society for Temperance. She also pioneered a kind of proto–Planned Parenthood, the League of Deliberate Population.”
A smiling, poised sixteen-year-old girl raised her hand. She was very Ally-like. Sam smiled back, but then saw the eyebrow of the girl veer up with disapproval. Also Ally-like.
“What about her letters to Elizabeth Cady Stanton? The Loomis letters?” Those goddamned letters. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was just as bad, worse maybe, but around here Stanton was a local hero, the saint of Seneca Falls, untainted by criticism.
“The letters, yes,” Sam said, frowning. “Loomis was impressive, extraordinary even, in some regards. But in other areas she was, sadly, a woman of her time, with many of the failings and blind spots of her time.” Did that really excuse her? Those stupid letters. And some of her pamphlets.
Sam had, she admitted, some historic-house envy. She thought of all the local women she could be working to promote: Amelia Jenks Bloomer, who invented—or at least popularized—women wearing pants, “bloomers.” It gave you something concrete to show people. Here, look, some blousy-ass bloomers, the closest thing to pants that any women got to wear. She could talk to the little fifth graders, and it would be very clear to them, shocking even, how unfair and ridiculous this was for women. That physical clothing oppressed them, defined them, limited them. Not complicated, and the arc of history felt like pure progress from there. Bloomer’s house was a bracketed Italianate with a multi-windowed square tower rising in the middle of the roof.
Or Adelaide Alsop Robineau, Syracuse’s Arts and Crafts ceramics genius and editor of Keramics Studio magazine. Her house, Four Winds, included her art studio and sat on a street named after her. Sam could usher this Ally-type around the shimmering but earthy glazes, she could talk about the Arts and Crafts movement, artisan culture, and it would be tactile, beautiful, and undeniably a good.
Harriet Tubman’s house was thirty miles west of Syracuse, in Auburn. That would be a good place to work. Sam wouldn’t have to overcome those skeptical looks like she had to with a more obscure, compromised figure. Austere unpainted brick with beautiful six-over-six double-sashed windows.
Or Mother Ann, the visionary Shaker who founded a settlement near Albany. A unique, woman-focused utopian leader. So much did she want to liberate women, she canceled sex. Just imagine being in that building: all the dovetailed joints and clean lines on the Shaker furnishings. None of the cacophonic style of this pillared, cluttered house.
But instead she had Loomis, with her creepy eugenics bullshit, her loquacious (and not ironic) advocacy of “controlled genetics.” The whole thing was euphemistically described in a plaque as Loomis being an “innovator in family planning,” which was not all that was covered by her suspicious-sounding League of Deliberate Population (but another group she founded was worse, Society for Horticultivation of the Species, yikes). And to be fair, Loomis did actually help women get birth control in the form of primitive diaphragms (referred to as “thimbles”), and she even performed abortions, which was remarkably brave. Sam wasn’t supposed to bring the abortion stuff up, either, but she did. No ghosts or abortions. But Sam thought it would make Loomis much more interesting (and relevant) if they owned up to who she was in her totality, not just one isolated odd issue. She was no Margaret Sanger, but she was ahead of her time in understanding how freeing sex from birth was the key to women’s liberation. (Besides, didn’t Margaret Sanger write something like “Why Poor Women Should Not Have Children”? But maybe that was Emma Goldman? One of those birth control/socialist/revolutionary women. It too had a whiff of eugenics to it.)
“She was into white supremacy, Nazi stuff about pure genetic lineages,” said the girl, who was starting to seem familiar to Sam. This city was so small. Did she go to Ally’s school?
Sam sighed. “Genetics, yes, but not tied to race or ethnicity. She hoped that diseases, like the one that killed her daughter, would be eradicated. And early on she followed some ideas about being, uh, God-struck—‘spiritual clarity’ was how she described it.”
Sam had trouble explaining it because it seemed nutty to her too.
“She did think that a talent for religious faith was heritable, and that genes were something you could prune for ideal outcomes, like in horticulture. In fact, that was the precise metaphor she used.”
“So she thought people should be mated for selected traits and those without those traits should not reproduce.”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “Pretty much.” The other kids were getting bored of their conversation, looking at their phones.
“That is some Nazi bullshit.”
“To be fair, this was pre-Nazis, so the logical end of cultivating humans was not as evil-seeming then as it is now. Sort of.”
This girl probably didn’t know some of the worst of it. How after watching her older sister die in childbirth, teenage Clara ran off to live in a nearby Perfectionist commune, the Oneida Community, as an underage acolyte of fifty-seven-year-old John Humphrey Noyes, advocate of spiritual eugenics and complex marriage. Given his spiritual superiority, his clear duty was not only to be the “first husband” of the young
women, but to father many of the planned children, while other less spiritually advanced young men were not allowed to procreate. Loomis’s first child, Margaret, was rumored to be fathered by Noyes, although Margaret was raised by Henry Loomis, another former member of Oneida, as his. They left the commune and had a conventional, no-longer-complex marriage, but apparently, judging from the letters, she had retained some of Noyes’s sketchy ideas about intentional “cultivation.”
The students filed out. Sam’s phone dinged. She looked at it, hopeful that it was a text even though it had a different sound, more ping than ding. It was an AirDrop image from someone (user name “Bra Tart”) as they left the room: a photo of Hitler with a white paintbrush dragging up the side of it. It said Decline / Accept. Sam shrugged and pressed Accept. The full image had text under it: keep on whitewashing. Sam nodded.
Even Elizabeth Cady Stanton, clay-footed, racist Stanton, with her pissy renunciation of Black men as “low” after they got the vote before women did, would be better than Clara Loomis. For one thing, she did pretty much start the whole suffrage movement. And at least her big plain Seneca Falls farmhouse would be better than Clara’s tainted, wacko reformism framed in pretentious Greek Revival.
A notification woke Sam from her reveries. Yelp alerted her to a newly posted one-star review of Loomis House.
Marlee S.
It was creepy, but the difference of the past is creepy. History is creepy. Like it is humans, but it isn’t. Photographs, ghosts, smelly old spaces. Clara Loomis was a female doctor, that’s kinda cool. She performed abortions, but eugenics is why she did it. Not cool. And she was in a sex cult. Loomis House, high-key sketch.
Sam posted right away:
Comment from Sam R., of Loomis House
Thanks for visiting. Yes, the hint of eugenics is creepy. But women’s rights, the abolition of private property, advocating for individual choice about reproduction? Can we tease these things out from the misguided stuff and salvage rather than savage?
Sam closed her laptop with an emphatic snap. That inquisitive girl? Sam now placed her in Ally’s class at school. Though not a friend of Ally’s, no doubt she’d recognized Sam as Ally’s mother.
12
“So that’s the Ally update,” Matt said. Sam had listened as he’d told her that Ally was busy studying, planning college visits, and working on her YAD start-up papers. Sam sat across from him at their kitchen table. No longer theirs, his table. It was an odd thing to go back, to be in that house. It was hard to believe that their lives went on without her.
“The college counselor is pushing her toward early decision at Carnegie Mellon. But her reach school, the one she really wants—”
“I can’t talk college admissions right now. I really can’t.”
13
Last year Matt had suggested that they hire a very expensive college counselor. He, the counselor, was all about gaming it out (“leveraging her strengths,” as he put it), which Sam felt was a mistake; it encouraged a sleazy grubbiness in their daughter, who, Sam told Matt, had a precocious and distinctive amount of dignity and gravitas that they might want to respect. They were eating takeout in their den and talking in hushed voices while Ally did homework in her room.
“But she agrees with the counselor,” Matt said, as if that hadn’t been manufactured by the school culture or by the counselor or by them.
“Then I will go on the record as a contentious objector to this process.”
“Don’t you mean ‘conscientious’—” But then he stopped himself.
Sam smiled.
They finished dinner without more discussion. Sam didn’t care what college her daughter got into; it just didn’t matter. The kids and parents were gripped by a whole psychosis, a terrible desperation, a deep anxiety beyond what was rational. Everything, the whole life of your child, seemed to get reduced to this one goal. At the meeting with the counselor, Sam had wanted to scream, College? Reach schools? Do you realize how fucked our kids are, what they will witness in their lifetimes? But then Sam understood what it was all about, the unspoken agenda. It was all about getting them a place on the lifeboats. On some level, they all knew what dire things were coming. And they also knew that those spots on the lifeboats were for sale, were reserved, really, for the ones who made the cut. As chaos descended, as the coming catastrophe unfolded, to be poor or even simply middle-class was to be washed away in a horrible conflagration of floods, hurricanes, fracking fissures, earthquakes, extreme temperatures, pandemics, droughts, fires, mudslides. Everyone with money will have an environmental panic room, like a bomb shelter, or they will have an escape hatch to the few remaining habitable realms. That was what was at stake in the college admissions Hunger Games. But—much to Matt’s relief when she later told him what she really thought—Sam had not said all this to the very expensive college counselor or to Ally. She regretted that now. She’d restrained herself from speaking because she knew Ally was on a trajectory that Sam couldn’t stop. Sam wanted no part in it.
Maybe that was why she’d left—so she wouldn’t have to participate in the distasteful work of slyly encouraging hard-grabbing in their daughter.
14
“You know I don’t want to hear about college strategies,” she said.
A flash of irritation crossed Matt’s face. Uh-huh. “Whether you hear about it or not, it continues to matter to Ally. She has to decide where to apply, and although it might be convenient for you to think so, it isn’t some nefarious conspiracy of the privileged but, rather, our daughter trying to figure out the best place to spend the next four years of her life, which I think you might care about.”
“Has she mentioned me or the breakup?” Sam said.
“No,” he said. He seemed to catch himself, to soften. “I’m sorry. She hasn’t asked me anything. Have you two been in contact at all?”
Sam shook her head. “Not really. I text her, and I guess she reads them. But she doesn’t respond. I think—or I imagine—that I am slowly building my case to her.”
“Sam, has the issue ever been that you didn’t talk to her enough?” he said, which wounded her. He thought she talked things to death, and he assumed everyone must feel that way. Just like that, she felt her anger toward Matt bristle through her body. She even leaned back, away from him. She imagined Ally and Matt discussing how much Sam talked, how nice it was to have quiet at home. Without Sam, they probably had hours of silence. Silent dinners, silent breakfasts.
“What choice do I have?” Sam said. “She won’t talk to me.”
“I know, I know. That will change eventually.”
Sam nodded.
“Just let her—”
“I know, I know,” Sam said.
“How is the house? Did you put up the carbon monoxide detectors?”
“Yes,” she said. She hadn’t, not yet.
“Is it cold?”
April and May had been awful. Ugly snowmelt lingered in dirty lumps. Mud, freezing rain, vicious wind. The coldest, dampest spring in Sam’s memory, still dipping into the thirties at night.
She shrugged. “I have a cord of wood. I burn a fire every night. It’s drafty, actual outside cold air blows in at some spots, but as long as I have an open flame to huddle by, I’m good. And it’s June—it’s getting warmer.”
“That house has very little insulation,” he said. “It will be cold and then it will be hot.” He snapped his fingers. It was true. Already at the height of the midday sun, it had felt hot.
“Yep,” she said. In the heat of summer, Matt loved central air and a constant sixty-eight degrees. Like a sealed pod. She would do what people used to do: keep the windows shut against the sun during the day and open them at night. Drink ice water and not exert herself.
“Did the exterminator come?”
“Yes, it was pretty expensive. There are a lot of entry points.”
Then he reached into his interior jacket pocket and retrieved a gold Cross pen. She used to love how he looked in a suit, and rather than regret the fact that he embraced a “straight” life so completely, she found it alluring, as if he were grown-up and in the real world, and she was his connection to the left behind, young world. She used to like undoing his tie and bringing him back. When did she stop doing that? Instead of bringing him back, she somehow followed him.
Matt took out his wallet, found a folded check. He spread it on the table and filled it out. Then he handed her the check. Again he was plying her with support, and again it was working.
“Thanks,” she said. “This is more than I need.”
“Well, it’s our money. You don’t have to thank me.”
She nodded, keenly aware that he was stalling things, assuming they would reconcile. But she didn’t feel like pushing back today. She was weak. Phony poverty, fake independence. She told herself she just needed time to adjust, to get more days at work or to find a second job.