Second Glance: A Novel Read online

  It is a young man wearing a suit, a red-tipped carnation threaded through the lapel. His hair, neatly combed to the side, is the color of molasses. His hand rests on my elbow.

  "You look a little peaked." He smiles. "Lovelier than anything I've seen here today, but fading fast."

  Before I can answer Spencer cuts between us. "Did you have something to say to my wife?"

  The man shrugs. "I've got something to say to the whole crowd." As he steps up onto a small platform, he winks at me.

  "Maybe next year you can fight the Irishman at the boxing exhibition," my father says to Spencer.

  "I will if he keeps carrying on with Cissy." Then Spencer's voice is drowned out by the commanding baritone of the very man he is discussing.

  "Ladies and gentleman," the orator announces, "The Legend of Champlain!"

  The crowd gathers to watch the historical pageant. Musicians play Indian chords as four braves stalk about, the menacing Iroquois. They are half-dressed, in the manner of savages, with broad marks across their faces and chests. When Champlain and his Algonquin warriors arrive, a single shot from his rifle kills all of the enemies in one fell swoop. "A dark era of savage power," intones the orator, "ended in that steadfast hour. As mighty Champlain crossed the water . . . and from great chaos, brought great order."

  There is a round of applause as the actors take their bows and everyone begins to disperse. "What shall we do next?" Spencer asks. "There's an exhibition baseball game, and a motorboat race. Or the Exposition, maybe?"

  Through the weaving limbs of people I can see across to the other side of the stage, where a man is looking at me. He is as dark-skinned as the Indians hired to play in the pageant, and his eyes are so black they could only be a trap. He does not smile, or politely pretend that he is not staring. I can't seem to turn away, not even after Spencer touches my shoulder. I cannot tell what holds me more fascinated: the sense that this man might hurt me, or that he might not.

  "Cissy?"

  "The Exposition," I say, and hope this is an appropriate response.

  When I turn back toward the opposite side of the stage, he is gone.

  Freedom and Unity.

  --The Vermont State Motto

  An old lot on Shelburne Street has been converted into an exhibition arena. As we sit on the grandstand and watch Bertie Briggs's Fabulous Dancing Cats, I fan myself with the program. I lift my hair off my damp neck and try to tuck it up under my hat. The circles of perspiration beneath my arms embarrass me.

  Spencer must be feeling the heat, too. In his seersucker suit, though, he looks as cool and calm as ever. He and my father watch some of the Gypsies who have come to sell their wares--baskets and miniature snowshoes, herbal tonics. They camp along the banks of the river and lake for the summer, and many of them spend the winter in Canada. They are not real Rom, of course, only Indians--but are called Gypsies because they move around, have dark skin, and breed enormous families that routinely populate the prisons and institutions. "The Ishmaelites, resurrected," Spencer murmurs.

  These Gypsies are the people Professor Perkins studied in his survey--along with a clan plagued by insanity and a depraved brood that lived in floating shanties, nicknamed the Pirates. The difference between these families, and, say, ours, is purely genetic. A transient father breeds a transient son. A promiscuous mother passes that trait along to her daughter.

  "Three more operations were done at Brandon," my father says. "And two at the prison."

  Spencer smiles. "That's wonderful."

  "It's certainly what we hoped for. I imagine all the patients will want to volunteer, once they understand that a simple treatment will let them live as they please."

  One of Bertie Briggs's tabby cats begins to walk a high wire. Her paws tremble on the line, at least I think they are trembling--my vision seems to be going in and out. I look into my lap, taking deep breaths, trying to keep from passing out.

  The small hand that darts into my lap from the side of the grandstand might be dirty, or only dark. It leaves behind a wrinkled slip of paper, printed with a moon and stars. FREE READING--MME. SOLIAT. By the time I look up, the little boy who has left this behind has disappeared into the crowd.

  "I'm just going to find the ladies' room," I say, standing up.

  "I'll come," Spencer announces.

  "I'm perfectly capable of going by myself." In the end, he lets me go alone, but only after he's helped me navigate the grandstand stairs, and has waved me off in the right direction.

  When I know he isn't watching any longer, I turn the opposite way. I sneak a cigarette from my purse--Spencer doesn't think women ought to smoke--and duck into Madame Soliat's tent. It is small and black, with yellow fabric stars sewn on the curtains. The fortune-teller wears a silver turban and three silver earrings in each ear. A wolf-dog pants beside her table, his tongue pink as a wound. "So sit," she says, as if she has been kept waiting.

  She has no tea leaves or crystal ball. She doesn't reach for my palm. "Don't be afraid," she says finally, her voice as deep as a man's, when I am just about ready to get up and leave.

  "I'm not." I grind out my cigarette and lift my chin a little, to show her how brave I can be.

  She shakes her head, and lowers her gaze to the baby inside me. "About that."

  My mother died in childbirth. I am expecting to do the same. I will not know my baby, then . . . but there is every chance I will get to know my mother.

  "You will," the fortune-teller replies, as if I've spoken aloud. "What you don't know is about to come clear. But that will muddy other waters."

  She is speaking in riddles, that's what Spencer would say. Of course, Spencer would never do anything as unscientific as visiting a psychic. She tells me other things that might apply to anybody: that I am to come into a sum of money; that a stranger is going to visit. Finally, I reach into my purse for a dollar bill, only to feel her fingers lock on my wrist. I try to pull away, but she's grabbing hard enough for me to feel the beat of my pulse. "You have death on your hands," she says, and then she lets me go.

  Startled, I stumble to my feet and into the hot sun. Oh, she is right; I do, I have from the moment I was born and killed my mother in the process.

  I take turns without thinking twice; I push through faces without features. When I find myself in a crowd of young men, university students, funneling toward the entrance of a crystal palace, I try to turn against the tide. But their eagerness sweeps me forward and soon I am inside this hall of mirrors.

  Spencer has told me of the movable maze that cost $20,000 to build. From behind high partitions come the shrieks of college students, taking wrong turns. The air is as thick as custard. I cannot seem to escape myself; everywhere I turn around, there I am.

  Heat presses in at the back of my neck. I lean into one mirror, tracing a hand over the swell of my stomach where this baby nests. I touch my cheek, my jaw. Do I look this frightened to the rest of the world?

  Trailing my hand over the panes of glass, I follow my reflection from panel to panel to panel . . . and then my face turns into something else entirely. Black eyes, blacker hair, a mouth that has forgotten how to smile. We stand inches apart, close enough to touch. Me, and the man who was watching me during the pageant. Neither of us seems to be breathing.

  Oh, this heat. It is the last thing I remember thinking before it all goes black.

  It is the patriotic duty of every normal couple to have

  children in sufficient number to keep up to par

  the "good old Vermont stock."

  --Vermont Commission on Country Life, Committee on the

  Human Factor, "The People of Vermont," in Rural Vermont:

  A Program for the Future, 1931

  "Take it easy, Cissy."

  Spencer's voice floats to me down a long tunnel. As my eyes focus, I look for landmarks: the Hall of Mirrors, the grandstand, the vendor selling salted peanuts. But instead I see the antique bowl and pitcher on my dresser, the gilded foot of our bed. A cold